The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (10 page)

Dorothy Wiseman of Yorkshire, that stronghold of the Faith, was an outstanding example of a Catholic wife who stayed married to a Protestant.
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She came from a pious Catholic background, her mother having been imprisoned as a recusant. However, Roger Lawson, whom Dorothy married in 1598 at the age of seventeen, was the Protestant heir to great estates. Dorothy did not let her husband’s religion deter her: she immediately set about installing a priest clandestinely within her household so as to have Mass celebrated there at least once a month. Her husband was by profession a barrister and when he was away, Dorothy allowed in numbers of priests for the night to take refuge. ‘Dexterously’ she acquired Catholic servants.

She also acquired children, giving birth to at least fifteen. One became a Jesuit, one a Benedictine monk, one a Benedictine nun, and four followed the new order of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. With such an enormous family, it is comforting to read that her sweetness of disposition remained constant and converted some to Rome whom scholars could not win over ‘by subtlety and learned argument’. Yet Roger Lawson himself converted to Catholicism only on his deathbed. This, given the devout nature of his children, was surely a last-minute release from a conformity which must have been practised for worldly reasons (including his own career as a barrister).

It is impossible to be sure of the numbers of similar marriages involved. But this counterfeit conformity – and there were other tricks – draws attention to one aspect of English Catholicism which was of crucial importance immediately after James’ accession: the unreal perception of Catholic numbers in the minds of the government. How could the government know exactly who was and who was not a Papist at heart? A forbidden religion, like an ethnic minority whose existence and language are obliterated by government decree, does not advertise its numbers. In short, all recusants were Catholics, but not
all Catholics came out into the open, or were forced out into the open, as recusants.

In contrast to the vague numbers of Catholics, the names of actual recusants appeared, by definition, in government records.
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Some five thousand names, for example, are listed as having paid fines between 1593 and 1600, thickest in Yorkshire and Lancashire but with other concentrations in the midlands and borders of Wales. When King James arrived in England, the Protestant bishops happily reported to him that, out of over 2 million Church of England communicants, there were only about 8,500 adult recusants.
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This picture of a small, depressed, declining community took of course no account of the multitude of people – Church Papists – who would go to Mass if they could, the moment that conditions were more relaxed. There were the seeds of a dangerous misunderstanding here.

The estimable – but Catholic – lifestyle of Dorothy Wiseman draws attention to another aspect of English Catholicism which affected its entire fabric and frankly baffled the authorities. This was the comparatively privileged position of recusant women under the law. Ironically enough, this privilege arose out of a woman’s absence of legal rights, based on the theory that she was inferior. The ‘weaker vessel’, as St Paul (translated in the Tyndale Bible) had memorably described the female, had no rights in common law. Any rights she might have had were assumed by her father before her marriage and her husband after it. Other categories – adult unmarried women and widows – somehow fell through the net of this theory: ‘all of them are understood either married or to be married’ (as we shall see, Catholic women of spirit took advantage of that too).
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But this lack of rights, and thus of property, meant that it was extremely difficult to impose a fine upon a recusant woman – unless of course her husband was compelled to pay it.

But in a strange way this obvious solution was not deemed quite correct by the standards of the late sixteenth century.
What then was to happen to the propertyless female? One extremely old and extremely poor Catholic woman was condemned to be put in the stocks on market day in order to be displayed as ‘a monster or an owl in daytime’. The local boys ran round her hissing ‘a Papist, a Papist’. It can hardly have been a pleasant experience, and yet the poor old ‘owl in daytime’ was spared prison and fines, both exercises being evidently pointless. At the other end of the social scale, Queen Elizabeth had a low opinion of the female sex in general, counting herself as a ‘Prince’ or what would now be described as an honorary man. As a result, she did not believe that women should be the stuff of martyrs. In the time of Elizabeth, Parliament itself grappled with the awkward problem without ever quite coming to a hard and fast decision.
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As a result, the imposition of fines, as with so much to do with recusancy, largely depended on local administration. Here local vendettas might play their part in bringing about severe fines, but also local loyalties might cause them to be suspended. The husband with the ‘costly’ recusant wife who deducted the fine from her dress allowance may have been emulated elsewhere. Other husbands, wise in their generation, may have pretended to be henpecked by recusant wives to preserve their estates, even if the truth was somewhat different.

There were wives who did do time in prison for their refusal to attend services. Certain stout-hearted Catholic ladies in Yorkshire were offered a choice of twice-weekly Calvinist sermons in their homes or prison: they chose prison.
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But even arrest was not necessarily the purgatory for women that it could have been, under the full rigour of the law. Sometimes women of quality were confined in the houses of aldermen, a form of house arrest. In other cases, a pious Catholic woman, confined in the same place as a number of Catholic priests, might find herself attending secret celebrations of the Mass with far greater ease than at home.

Home itself was not totally barred to a recusant wife during the term of her conviction. Contemporary opinion on a woman’s role in society required that wives be released for
such conjugal duties as cooking the Christmas dinner or bearing children. A husband had the right to his helpmate’s company – recusant or no recusant. The extent to which Catholic women took advantage of their alleged weakness is demonstrated by the angry exclamation of Robert Cecil’s elder brother Lord Burghley. How ‘pernicious’ the female recusants were grown, he complained angrily in 1593.
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This sense of female immunity, due to fundamental female irresponsibility, meant that the Catholic women who ran large households had a vital role to play with regard to the priesthood.
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Within these households the priests might reside concealed as innocuous but necessary male servitors such as tutors, but their ultimate safety depended on the courage and wit of the lady of the house. It was an interesting role reversal. In all matters of the soul, these submissive ladies were utterly dependent for guidance on their spiritual pastors; but, when it came to the body, it was the pastors who were often utterly dependent for protection on the submissive ladies.

Furthermore, the idea that these ladies could – if absolutely necessary – defy their own husbands in the cause of religion was an extraordinarily subversive one. Conventional Catholic devotions of the time continued to hammer home the familiar theme of woman’s weakness, suggesting – rather against the facts – that women were especially prone to heresy. But Catholic devotional writing and Catholic reality, in time of danger, were two different things. Father Henry Garnet, in
A Treatise of Christian Renunciation,
preached a very different message concerning recusant wives in dispute with Protestant husbands. It was in effect a revolutionary doctrine: ‘your husbands over your souls have no authority, and over your bodies but a limited power’, he wrote. The
Treatise
provided many helpful examples of families, in the days of the early Christian Church, broken asunder by religious differences.
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It was a point that the canny King James himself summed up. He pointed out that, where most women were concerned, their vows were ‘ever subject to the controlment of their husbands’. Catholic women were however potentially different:
‘their consciences must ever be commanded and overruled by their Romish God as it pleases him’.
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To use a modern term, recusant women were empowered by the perils that all Catholics faced. (Just as women have throughout history been empowered in times of war when their services are seen to be vital to survival, only to lose it all when the national danger has passed.)

It was true that there were women, as there were men, who died for their Faith: three laywomen and fifty-eight laymen were put to death before 1603. In 1586 Margaret Clitheroe
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endured the vile torment known as
peine forte et dure.
This (legal) punishment entailed being stripped before being, literally, pressed to death with weights to the value of seven or eight hundredweight because she would not plead either guilty or not guilty: ‘Having made no offence, I need no trial.’ Margaret Clitheroe may well have taken this extreme course in order to avoid betraying the whereabouts of priests, but by refusing to opt for trial by jury she also spared her servants and children the need to testify, which would have led to their own arrest (or to perjury). Her estates were not forfeit, since she had not been condemned for treason.
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But, for the vast majority of Catholic women, their role was both crucial and courageous – if not quite as testing as that of martyrdom. It was the women who taught the Catholic catechism to their servants and their children: mundane but crucial tasks which preserved the Faith. And as the zealous Jesuit missionaries began to come from abroad in the 1580s – to the horror of the government, which denounced them all as Spanish spies and responded with a special Act against them – the role of the female as nurturer and protector became all-important.

Two women stand out among the many who defied the government in defence of their priests. Both played a
prominent part in the events surrounding the Powder Treason (as the Gunpowder Plot was known to contemporaries). Eliza Vaux was the sole head of a large Catholic household, Harrowden Hall, in Northamptonshire, near Wellingborough. She fell into one of those categories which allowed for a certain independence of action on the part of women, for Eliza was a widow, with a large family to organise and an estate to guard for her eldest son, Edward. Her husband George Vaux, heir to Lord Vaux of Harrowden, died in 1594 when she was about thirty. But even before her marriage, as Eliza Roper, daughter of Sir John Roper, she had demonstrated her spirit.
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The marriage had not pleased George’s father Lord Vaux. Above all, it did not please that great Catholic patriarch Sir Thomas Tresham, a man who attempted to dominate everyone within his far-reaching family circle. He certainly dominated poor Lord Vaux, his close friend and brother-in-law.

Sir Thomas, despite his noble sufferings for the Catholic Faith, was an intemperate man where inferiors including women were concerned. He was disgusted to find that his nephew George Vaux was about to make the classic mistake (in late-sixteenth-century terms) of marrying for love. Sir Thomas was determined to rip aside ‘the guileful mask of blinded fleshly affection’ and put to an end what he called ‘a brainless match’ to ‘a creditless girl’.
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Avuncular wrath lost out to fleshly affection. George married his Eliza. It was, of course, as such hotly contested matches often are, an extremely happy union, with six children born in nine years, before George Vaux’s premature death.

Thereafter Eliza Vaux fell into an abyss of grief. She kept to her room for a year, and for the rest of her life would not visit the chamber in which her husband had actually died. It was hardly surprising that she swore a vow against remarriage: ‘As she could not give God her virginity, she would offer him a chaste life.’ She also underwent a radical change of purpose. Pursuing the interests of her eldest son and her other children
was not to be enough for her, as it was for many women. She felt a call to protect and nurture the Catholic priesthood. As Father John Gerard wrote in his autobiography: ‘I could see she was resolved, to fulfil as nearly as she could the role of Martha, and of other holy women who followed Christ and ministered to Him and His Apostles.’
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Eliza Vaux did not, however, lose her independence, still less her spirit. (After all, there is no reason to suppose that the Martha of the Bible was particularly submissive, given her outspoken complaint about her contemplative sister Mary.) With her large family in mind, and no doubt the interests of the hidden priests as well, Eliza successfully campaigned to get her ageing father-in-law to move to a smaller Vaux property for the last year of his life, leaving her with magnificent Harrowden. In no way did this successful petticoat dominance commend itself to Sir Thomas at neighbouring Rushton. In a postscript to a business letter, he made a bitter astrological joke, blaming Eliza for his old friend’s failure to visit him: ‘Commend me to the captive lord that dare not while the sign is in the dominating Virago to look upon poor Rushton.’
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It was a great advantage to Eliza’s plans that extensive rebuilding at Harrowden, in the name of young Edward, who succeeded his grandfather as Lord Vaux in 1595, took place about this time.
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A woman of ‘talents of a high order’, as Father Gerard described her, Eliza was able to have a kind of custom-built refuge constructed, since it was infinitely easier to conceal hiding-places at this point rather than insert them afterwards. So Eliza Vaux as the ‘Dowager of Harrowden’
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was able to maintain what has been described as ‘a Jesuit college in the heart of England’.
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