God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs
| God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs | |
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| Category: History | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: An examination of religious discrimination against and persecution of Roman Catholics in Elizabethan England, with particular emphasis on the Vaux family of Harrowden Hall | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 443 | Date: March 2015 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781784700058 | |
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It goes almost without saying that sixteenth-century England, at the height of religious persecution, was a pretty perilous age. Queen Mary was notorious for the number of Protestants who were burnt at the stake for their beliefs during her five-year reign. A belief widely held by many (depending on your religion, as likely as not) was that during the forty-five years that ‘Good Queen Bess’ reigned, greater toleration held sway. This has recently been disproved beyond doubt by several historians, and this book likewise helps to underline the savagery towards Catholics that was endemic under her rule.
After her accession, there appears to have been a honeymoon of sorts. Despite strong advice from those around her, she ascended the throne with the best of intentions, and was prepared to show magnanimity to both religions. But in 1570 Pope Pius V, at the behest of Queen Mary’s widower Philip, King of Spain, issued a bull condemning her as a heretic and a usurper of the throne, and proclaimed that any Catholics who dared to obey her would be placing themselves under a curse. People could no longer be subjects to the Queen and to the Pope; the choice of one or other was theirs. It was almost a call to arms. As plots against Elizabeth’s throne and her life took root, so did the oppression of those belonging to the ‘wrong’ faith gather pace, culminating in the execution of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots.
Meanwhile many Roman Catholic priests went in danger of their lives. At the same time recusants, or those who refused to conform and attend Anglican churches on Sunday, were deprived of the chance to participate in public life, and were viewed as second-class citizens at best. Higher-class recusants might be condemned to long spells of imprisonment, punctuated by routine interrogation and torture, while the more lowly were put to death by the most barbaric of means. Many men and women were roasted alive, while a butcher’s wife from York, convicted of helping outlawed priests, was stripped, ordered to lie down, had a stone placed under her back and weights piled on her until her ribs shattered and ‘burst forth of the skin’. Admittedly the death toll under Queen Elizabeth was not so great, but the total of nearly two hundred people executed for their faith was still nearly two hundred too many.
Jessie Childs paints a savage picture of this dark age in English history, when religious differences and the lack of toleration was all too rife. It is a story of incredible courage and all too often incredible cruelty. At the centre of her narrative is the aristocratic Vaux family of Harrowden Hall, near Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, namely William, the 2nd Baron, his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham, his eldest son, Henry; and his daughters Anne, Eleanor and Elizabeth. For the most part they walked a fine line trying to hold fast to their religious convictions while still remaining loyal to the crown, appealing to Her Majesty not to ‘stand in more peril for exercising the Catholic religion (and that most secretly) than do the Catholic subjects to the Turk most publicly, than do the perverse and blasphemous Jews haunting their synagogue under sundry Christian kings openly, and than do the Protestants enjoying their public assemblies under diverse Catholic kings and princes quietly’.
It was a forlorn hope, especially in the months leading up to the Armada when it was apparent that Spain was plotting an invasion, and enlisting several of the great Catholic families to come to their aid. Baron Vaux was heavily fined, sentenced to periods of imprisonment, and suffered raids on his houses. Two of his daughters, who smuggled Catholic priests into their houses for the purpose of receiving communion and spiritual instruction, were condemned to death for treason.
The story does not end with the death of Queen Elizabeth. In 1603 King James VI of Scotland succeeded her on the English throne, proclaiming as he did so that he would ‘neither persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law’. Two years later came the ‘near-miss’ of the Gunpowder Plot. The author speculates on who might have betrayed Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, but this is one mystery evidently destined not to be solved.
By focusing mainly on the more well-to-do, and in particular the ebb and flow of the fortunes of one family, part of the picture is omitted or at least not covered in detail. The fate of the middle and working classes, by and large, is not really touched upon. Nevertheless the author follows the thread well. She presents a very compelling if chilling account of the shadow side of later Tudor and early Stuart England, enlivened with scrupulous detail, an era which became all too synonymous with oppression, fanaticism, intrigue and the threat of invasion. Any reader keenly interested in the Elizabethan age will relish this book.
For a biography of Queen Elizabeth I, may we recommend Elizabeth's Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen by Tracy Borman; for a more general overview of the age, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer; or for a broader picture of the Tudor dynasty, Tudor: The Family Story by Leanda de Lisle
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