by DEREK WILSON
God’s Traitor: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs (Bodley Head, 443p, £25)
Elizabeth I embraced an important truth that had evaded her father and her siblings: no ruler can dictate his/her subject’s beliefs. What she could, and did, demand was their loyalty. However, as Richard Hooker pointed out, since the Kingdom of England and the Church of England were the same thing viewed from different angles, politics and religion could not be conveniently compartmentalised. Thus, convinced Catholics and Puritans found themselves at odds with the Elizabethan Settlement. Quite what this might mean for successive generations of a single family is the subject of Jessie Childs’ latest book.
Her chosen clan is the extended East Midlands family of Vaux, the descendants of Nicholas, first Baron Vaux of Harrowden (d.1528). Like some of Elizabeth’s subjects, they maintained their allegiance to the old faith. However, unlike most, they could afford to be discreetly disloyal. The government, ever averse to making martyrs (and concerned not to be likened to the persecuting regimens of Spain and France), demanded attendance at Anglican worship and imposed fines on defiant recusants. Such financial constraints had their effect and papal fifth-columnists, sent to restore heretic Elizabeth and her people to their Roman allegiance, found few English households that could afford the risk of giving them succour. This was why affluent families were so important – indeed vital – to the survival of a vestigious English Catholicism.
Those familiar with Childs’ earlier biography of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Henry VIII’s Last Victim (2006), will find the same thorough research coupled to a vigorous, readable style. However, God’s Traitors is a more complex book with a large dramatis personae and deals with the intricacies of familial relationships among the Catholic minor nobility. The dramatic tale of itinerant Jesuit missionaries dodging government posses, devout country squires holding clandestine masses and priests concealed in ingenious hiding places has been oft told (e.g., John Robinson, Recusant Yeomen in the Counties of York and Lancaster, 2003; Ethan Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant’ Nation, 2005) but this concentration on one family sharply focuses the narrative and the principal contenders emerge as well-rounded characters.
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