I: George Vaux and Elizabeth Roper

Between November 1581 and early 1583, Vaux and Tresham were close prisoners in the Fleet, having refused to swear to the charge of having harboured the Jesuit proto-martyr Edmund Campion, for which they were also fined £1,000 and 500 marks respectively.^{Footnote 24} Four months into their imprisonment, in February 1582, they had further disgraced themselves by hearing mass in Vaux’s cell, an offence that carried the penalty of one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 200 marks.^{Footnote 25} However, some time in early 1583, Tresham was under house arrest at Hoxton, Shoreditch, an inadequate situation which he nonetheless found preferable to the Fleet.^{Footnote 26} Vaux had secured a similar arrangement and was renting in Hackney. On 19 April 1583, Tresham drafted a letter from Vaux to a ‘Mr. Farmer’, likely the conformist Catholic George Fermor of Easton Neston to ask for advice.^{Footnote 27} His estate under duress from fines and imprisonment, Vaux had been offered a ‘very worshipful match’ with ‘no small portion’ amounting to £3,500 for one of his sons. Henry, Vaux’s eldest son from his first marriage, declined to marry at all, discerning a religious vocation.^{Footnote 28} Vaux therefore hoped that Fermor would assist him in transferring Henry’s inheritance to the next son, George, from his second marriage, without arousing the suspicion of the family of Vaux’s late first wife — the Beaumonts of Grace Dieu, Leicestershire — who he thought would try to impede the matter to protect their family’s interests.^{Footnote 29}

Vaux’s children had spent a part of their upbringing in the Beaumont household with their dowager grandmother Elizabeth (née Hastings).^{Footnote 30} By the time Vaux came to arrange his sons’ marriages, the surviving family members included Vaux’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth, and brothers-in-law, Francis and Henry Beaumont, both lawyers.^{Footnote 31} When the requisite deed was eventually signed on 20 April 1585, Vaux’s second son George replaced Henry as heir, and the Vaux estate was thus entailed away from the Vaux-Beaumont children. Vaux had duly approached George regarding the ‘very worshipful match’, but the new heir was not to be persuaded. Instead, George married Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Sir John Roper of Lynsted, Kent, at the Vauxes’ Harrowden seat on 25 July 1585. The circumstances were inopportune: George would not reach his majority until September and his father was confined to the family house at Hackney, near London. The marriage contradicted the terms of a settlement made on 20 April of that year to protect the Vaux patrimony from the impairment of recusancy fines and confiscation, and was very much against Vaux’s wishes. In a sombre coincidence, Vaux’s son, and George’s brother, Edward, died at Hackney at around the same time.^{Footnote 32}

Within this paternalistic society, first marriages were typically arranged by the heads of the respective families, and it was not uncommon for agreements, particularly those concerning heirs, to be dictated in wills. Such was the case for Tresham: it was set down in his grandfather’s will that, as the heir presumptive, Tresham would be raised in the Throckmorton household and marry into that family.^{Footnote 33} Ideally, a bride’s family would provide a sufficiently generous marriage portion to secure a socially advantageous match, elevating their daughter and, by association, her natal kin. Despite these utilitarian preoccupations, mutual affection was generally deemed to be important. Bonds of lineage, religion, or locality were important considerations, as was the desire to consolidate and protect the family estates for future generations. Reinforcing these connections between families could ensure much-needed allies in uncertain times.^{Footnote 34} But with so much at stake, the legal and financial considerations could be highly complex, and proceedings were not always transacted in good faith. Moreover, the arrangements made prior to a marriage had import for the happiness of the union; problematic settlements and their mishandling occupied ‘much of the marital and interfamilial litigation in the central courts of Tudor and Stuart England’.^{Footnote 35}

Marriages therefore had implications beyond husband and wife, and youthful indiscretion held up a broken mirror to the parents. As the head of the family, a father’s ability to mould his children into responsible adults capable of upholding the family honour was a marker of the success of his life’s work and, therefore, his legacy. Paternal anxieties were not limited to Catholics alone: Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes demonstrated that patriarchs were often extremely cautious about the trustworthiness of their heirs in taking on the responsibilities of family leadership.Footnote ³⁶ If successful governance of the family was understood to be the healthy society in microcosm, paternal failings frayed the very fabric of society. By circumventing his father’s authority, George had undermined the Vaux name — reputational damage that he could scarcely afford. Vaux’s Star Chamber trial and related convictions for his Catholicism had made him notorious, while being under house arrest was an embarrassing state ill-befitting a nobleman. Marriage without Vaux’s permission rendered void the arrangements that had formed a protective ring around the Vaux estate. In this case, the fact that that the Ropers were also Catholics was secondary to the chief concerns of a nobleman: the protection of his honour, reputation, and estate.^{Footnote 37} The Ropers were not impoverished. Sir John Roper later claimed to have provided his daughter with a portion of £1,500 with an additional £400 in ‘jewels and apparel’, but Vaux felt keenly the loss of the earlier offer of £3,500 from another (unknown) family, a much-needed boost to the Vaux coffers.^{Footnote 38}

The administration of the Vaux estate was complicated further still by the death of Vaux’s eldest son Henry in November 1587, leaving only two brothers: George and Ambrose, both from Vaux’s second marriage. George would now inherit the Vaux barony, and the younger Ambrose the family estates. When Sir John Roper went to law to guarantee his new son-in-law’s inheritance and thus safeguard his daughter’s familial and financial security in 1589, he drew Ambrose into his plans, circumventing Vaux’s authority for a second time. When Ambrose levied a fine on his father’s property, so that the land passed to George, Vaux was landed in still hotter financial water.^{Footnote 39} It is not clear why Ambrose should have cooperated in such a self-defeating scheme, all accomplished without Vaux or Tresham’s knowledge and when neither was at liberty. With the country under threat from Spanish invasion, Vaux was in archiepiscopal custody and Tresham was being held at Buckden, Lincolnshire and then at Ely. The acrimony between the three parties, with Roper and Tresham each particularly resentful of the other and Vaux apparently uninvolved, seemed insoluble, and the Privy Council had to arbitrate.^{Footnote 40}

Seemingly, it was not Vaux but Tresham who stood between Sir John Roper, his daughter Elizabeth Vaux, his new son-in-law George, and their share of the Vaux estate. But though Roper’s case rested on defaming Tresham as a meddler who was taking advantage of Vaux, Vaux himself showed no sign of resenting Tresham’s involvement. He petitioned the Privy Council to release Tresham from prison, ‘as such conueyances and assurances as abouesaid cannot be made … without the personall presence of his Brother’, and on 20 March 1590 the Council duly wrote to Tresham’s gaoler, Richard Arkinsall, to release Tresham to London until 8 July on a bond of £500.^{Footnote 41} Vaux was accustomed to involving Tresham in his affairs, and seems to have relied heavily (and willingly) on him. On 4 July Roper wrote to Lord Burghley, accusing Tresham of interference, manipulation, and slander, all contrived to control Vaux and to secure Tresham’s own liberty, ‘for the endinge of his causes: and to slaunder me’. Tresham had acted, in Roper’s words, as ‘the commaunder of him [Vaux] & all his’ so that Vaux ‘dare not more offend him, then a childe his Master havinge a rodde in his hande’.^{Footnote 42} In Roper’s account, Tresham was vindictive, intent on ensuring that George and Elizabeth were left with nothing: ‘vpon malyce to his nephew Master George Vaux for maryinge my daughter… [Tresham] did poysone the booke of conveyaunce of all my Lord Vaux his landes’. Roper argued that Tresham stood as gatekeeper to Vaux, desiring that Roper ‘must have noe end with my Lord Vaux, except suche as he will make wherby he maye still rule & reygne over my Lord & all his’.^{Footnote 43}

There were further allegations of Tresham’s scheming from Roper’s pen: that Tresham had stolen a manor from Vaux, who was so utterly deceived by him that Tresham knew of the Council’s proceedings because they had been ‘speedyly delyuered vnto him by the simple Lord Vaux’. The alternative interpretation is that Vaux sought Tresham’s counsel and updated Tresham on all developments. Roper nevertheless had the Privy Council believe that he himself was now living in fear of Tresham’s retribution, for his family’s sake: ‘for that I knowe howe muche he would malyce me, & what a revenginge course he will take agaynste hys nephew my sonne in lawe & my poor daughter; yf he should knowe that I delyuered these notes vnto you’.^{Footnote 44}

Roper’s strategy was supposed to halt all involvement by Tresham in Vaux and Roper affairs: ‘that Sir Tho. Tresam may be seuered from vs, & discharged from dealinge further therin … I knowe he is determined to rule & over rule all’.^{Footnote 45} But even if the cause and the strength of Roper’s accusations moved him to effusiveness, Tresham’s defence reminded his detractors of the many storms he and Vaux had weathered together, extolling the virtues of his friendship with Vaux:

The competing accounts of Tresham and Roper invite myriad interpretations. Roper’s expectations may have been reasonable, and Tresham may have been meddling unduly, perhaps even because he expected to benefit — or for his sister to benefit — either in the medium or long term, though his involvement in George’s marriage would have deprived his sister’s eldest son of his financial security. Alternatively, the Ropers were the rapacious party, seeing in Vaux a nobleman with a poor grasp of estates that might be more lucrative in the right hands, if only Tresham could be circumvented. The inverted relationship between Vaux and Tresham, in which Vaux, the nobleman, relied upon the talents and (considerable) efforts of his gentleman brother-in-law to manage his affairs, is a characterisation which has been reproduced by every commentator on the families, both hostile and friendly, from their own time to the present day, and is thus difficult to overcome.^{Footnote 47}

Tresham’s efforts to protect the Vaux and Tresham estates were ultimately frustrated within two generations. The Vaux barony fell into a two hundred-year abeyance after Edward, fourth Baron Vaux (the son of George Vaux and Elizabeth Roper) died without a legitimate heir, and his brother, Henry, held the title for only two years before he himself died without issue in 1663.^{Footnote 48} Harrowden Hall, the Vaux seat, was taken over by Thomas Watson, third son of Edward Watson, Lord Rockingham, in 1695, and was eventually repurchased in the late nineteenth century by the then Lord Vaux, having been substantially rebuilt.^{Footnote 49} Tresham’s seat, Rushton Hall, was sold in 1619, just fourteen years after his death, to Sir William Cockayne of the City of London in order to settle the debts of the Tresham’s impecunious son Lewis, who had been created baronet in 1611.^{Footnote 50} Neither advancement nor drastic sale could save the Tresham name and estate: Sir William, Tresham’s grandson by Lewis, died without male heirs in 1642 and the family name disappeared along with the short-lived baronetcy.^{Footnote 51}

The origins of the acquaintance between George Vaux and the Ropers are not clear. Sir John Roper’s estates do not seem to have extended beyond Kent, and connections with the Vauxes and their kin are tenuous. A nephew of Tresham’s wife Muriel, John Throckmorton, married Agnes Wilford, who sent their daughter Margaret to be a companion to Anne, the daughter of Sir William and Margaret Roper. Margaret Roper was a second cousin of Agnes’ mother, Mary Browne, through the latter’s sister Catherine, wife of William Roper, a great-nephew of Sir John Roper’s father Christopher.Footnote ⁵²

Aunts and uncles were active in the upbringing of their siblings’ children, and approaches to correct youthful misbehaviour reflected the values held by older family members. Catholic families raising children amid persecution were perhaps especially likely to insist on preserving a family’s reputation and protective kinship circles, but these were universal preoccupations. Tresham wrote to his sister and her wayward son George to try to restore family harmony. Seven years later, he continued to remonstrate with his nephew George for the trouble his ‘braynles baynfefull matche’ had caused, trouble that exceeded even anti-Catholic persecution: ‘so hathe the lamentable sequelles therof since prooved the heviest crosses that happed me in this my twelve yeares imprisonment, and adversitie’.^{Footnote 53} This was not presumptuous interference but a response to Vaux’s request that Tresham try to influence George. Tresham’s letter focused on the burden George had placed upon his parents’ marital harmony and on the family’s already impaired local standing, ‘Deeper wedginge in my Lord your father into impleacable miserie … Bereavinge and defaceing them at their owne doores of their woonted unpriceable creditt in the countrey’, and stressed the divisions George had wrought between their two families, ‘Yowe and yours att warres with them & theirs dissolving the Autentique amitie conteynewed divers discentes betwene Harrowdon and Rushton families’.^{Footnote 54}

In a letter sent a few months later, Tresham saw no improvement in his nephew’s conduct and, having failed to appeal to George’s filial duty, focused instead on religious imperatives:

Tresham appealed again to George’s sense of familial duty as a nephew and son in a further letter shortly afterwards. He was defensive about his own role in the situation, ‘not onely ever to dyscharge a lovyng uncles dew in behovefully advycing you, but pryncypally to performe the offyce of faythfullest frende in petitioneswyse besechyng and instantly beggyng of you what in fyllyall duty you most owght’. As in previous letters, he emphasised George’s power to relieve his parents’ distress, ‘to the spedy relevyng and ryddynge yor honorable parentes forth of thes ther many yeares inspeacable myseryes’.^{Footnote 56}

Advice-giving within families was both inter- and intra- generational; Tresham counselled George’s parents while railing against him. He wrote to his sister, recommending how best to curtail her son’s recklessness and to minimise the damage incurred, and he reassured her that George’s marital kin, the Ropers, were to share the blame for having ‘perswadeth him [George] to the contrarie, and not meanlie pittieth their [the Vauxes’] lamentable plight’.^{Footnote 57} Tresham was virulent in his criticism of his nephew’s conduct, calling him an ‘arrantest Asse’ for having being tricked by his new wife’s family and their lawyer, ‘Mallorie their maligner’. If George had not in fact been thus manipulated, and had had full awareness of his actions, it would be worse still: ‘he is to be reputed a monster then a manne, yea a viper then a Vaux, that will remorceleslie rent out the bowelles of his honorable parentes’.^{Footnote 58}

Tresham chided Ambrose, too, for his part in his own and his family’s undoing: ‘Amonge Christianes yt hathe accustomablie beene saied, Denie not right unto a Deuille. Suche hathe beene your reprobate demeanure towardes your honorable lovinge parentes: And suche ys your loose, riottous & synnefull misgovernement devulged & published to the world’.^{Footnote 59} The Treshams’ further attempts to rescue the Vaux estate were laborious: Tresham wrote to Vaux’s kinsman Cheyney about a manor, to his sister Lady Vaux with more advice, and he drafted a letter and brief on Vaux’s behalf for the Lord Treasurer, including a fair copy by his steward George Levens to be sent to a scribe. Lady Tresham wrote to her niece Muriel explaining the case in May 1593.^{Footnote 60}

The marriage of George Vaux to Elizabeth Roper had repercussions for the whole Vaux family, and for the Treshams. They exemplify the sorts of problems experienced by gentry and noble families in the period, irrespective of confessional identity. In Vaux’s and Tresham’s case, anti-Catholic penalties exacerbated the situation. Roper was able to take advantage of their imprisonments, and their already precarious financial state meant that they had to seek the support of others to be able to settle. Tresham’s nephews added to his existing burdens, not least in consuming much of his time and energy. His frequent exhortations to them show him trying to remind them to reverse their abnegation of charity and kinsmanly duty. Tresham’s private defence of Elizabeth Vaux née Roper and her children, despite all that had passed before, raises doubts about the aspersions cast by Sir John Roper on Tresham’s motivations. Even after George’s premature death, the familial rifts caused by his behaviour were still being felt. Tresham wrote to Vaux in 1594 to encourage him to support George’s widow and children, lest they suffer as a result of their father’s thoughtlessness. Roper’s manipulation had, he told his wife, succeeded in ‘settinge him at implacable variaunce with his dearest friendes’, but he nevertheless continued to help them.^{Footnote 61}

Despite his pleas for clemency in her widowhood, the enmity between Elizabeth Vaux and Tresham deepened.Footnote ⁶² In 1599, some fourteen years after the Roper-Vaux marriage and after Vaux’s death, Tresham held Elizabeth responsible for leading her brother-in-law Ambrose to pursue Tresham in the courts. She had done so, Tresham believed, in order to further injure Tresham and his sister, Mary, Vaux’s widow, by trying to diminish the inheritance Mary received from her husband and to prevent her from making her own will. For Tresham, Ambrose’s part in this could be minimised as foolishness, but he had been led astray by the malice of Elizabeth Vaux: ‘ane vntowarde, and gyddy hedded yonge man, evermore sterned to his bayne, and in reprobatness to his honorable parentes, by his syster in law the wydow Vawx’.^{Footnote 63} In fact, Tresham connected all the trials that had passed between him and the Vaux children since 1585 to Elizabeth’s influence. His criticisms of her and of his nephews took self-evidently gendered form: she was the manipulative temptress, and Ambrose and George the wrong-headed knaves.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, in a long letter written in the summer of 1599 from close imprisonment in the Fleet to a Catholic kinsman — likely his cousin and namesake, Thomas Tresham of Newton — Tresham scarcely referred to Elizabeth by name, preferring to call her ‘the wydowe’.^{Footnote 65}

Elizabeth’s perfidy was manifest not only in her hatred of Tresham, but in her disregard for legal process and truth. Elizabeth’s unnamed ‘pryncipall servant, and spetiallest agentt in this sute’, a Catholic, ‘scandalussly comytted open periurye’.^{Footnote 66} Elizabeth also targeted Vaux’s widow Mary, trying to induce Ambrose to ‘tak[e] away _^^a great parte of his mothers smale portion of goods, notwithstandyng her wyll, manifested to them, and published in cowrte, and notwithstandynge so fraudulently gott by them’.^{Footnote 67} This is likely a reference to a failed attempt by Ambrose to overturn his father’s last wishes: a sentence confirming the will and codicil, dated 21 June 1599, shows that he had initiated a case against his father’s executors (his mother among them), but that he had failed to convince the judge.^{Footnote 68} Under the apparent influence of Elizabeth and her agent, Ambrose used recusancy to prevent his mother from making a will and to disempower Tresham. He ‘sovght to have dysabled the Lady Vaux to have made any wyll … And in selfe same sorte caused excommunication for recusancye to bee in open courte vsed agaynst me (I then presentt).^{Footnote 69}

As will be seen later, this was not the only occasion on which Catholic kin used non-conformist identity against a coreligionist. Not only were some Catholics prepared to overlook religious ties in pursuit of legal victory and financial stability, but they were also capable of using Catholicism to discredit their opponents, however hypocritically. This casts doubt on several interconnected assumptions about English Catholics: that Catholic kin should be defined solely by their Catholicism, that faith transcended earthly concerns, and that Catholic kinship circles should be understood chiefly as systems of mutual support.

II: Anne Vaux

Kinship ties and shared religion sometimes failed to protect Catholic families from acrimony. Anne Vaux’s pursuit of Tresham in Chancery brings into view several prominent historiographical themes outside the sphere of Catholic scholarship: single women, female litigants, and family disharmony. The following analysis not only evinces Heal and Holmes’ observation that legal records show the gentry at their least endearing, but also supports an argument for considering Catholic elites using the same categories as for their Protestant counterparts, rather than casting them as a different species.

On 20 August 1593, Vaux made a will. He named Tresham and Sir Lewis Mordant his executors, his wife Mary his supervisor, and he remembered in his bequests the surviving children of his second marriage: Muriel, George, and Ambrose, and their heirs in the male line. Other familial bequests privileged Vaux’s natal kin.Footnote ⁷⁰ His niece, the orphaned Frances Burrowe, who was being brought up by Vaux’s widowed daughter Eleanor, would receive £100, and her siblings the same amount shared between them.^{Footnote 71} The children of Vaux’s first marriage were, according to custom, absent from this will, but it may still have rankled.^{Footnote 72} They were likely provided for by their late mother, but with no extant will we cannot be certain of the precise arrangements. Anne was left an annuity of four marks per annum for the rest of her life by her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Beaumont, who also named her ‘full executrice’, and left her ‘all the rest of my goodes vnbequeathed moveable or vnmoveable whatsoeuer’.^{Footnote 73}

Why Vaux should have made this will when he did is not clear — we may venture that poor health played a part — but the will is essential context for the action that followed, even if no case for causation is made. Vaux’s health was in decline and he may already have succumbed to what Tresham referred to as his ‘present sicknes’ and the deafness that was hampering communication by July 1594.^{Footnote 74} He would die the following year, in August 1595. Though Tresham had been permitted to return to his Northamptonshire home in early 1593 following twelve years of imprisonment and house arrest, he was nearer London, probably at Hoxton, in early February 1594, and was shortly afterwards committed close prisoner in the Fleet until late July. The precise cause of this imprisonment is not clear, but the government questioned him about seeking prominence among a community of Catholics.^{Footnote 75}

Anne, Vaux’s youngest daughter from his first marriage, began proceedings in Chancery to sue Tresham for her marriage portion of £500 in the Hilary Term of 1594.^{Footnote 76} The following term, Tresham was preparing notes for his lawyers to answer Anne’s bill of complaint.^{Footnote 77} The case would proceed for almost a whole calendar year, from 25 January until 26 November. Tresham repeatedly delayed proceedings by insisting that he needed to consult documents held at his Northamptonshire seat, but the judge eventually found in Anne’s favour and Tresham paid her the full amount in the form of £300 and a choice of bonds due to him that year for the rest.^{Footnote 78}

Our evidence for the case comes from two sources and is skewed towards Tresham’s perspective. On the official side, there are eleven brief entries recording the proceedings in the entry books of decrees and orders.^{Footnote 79} Neither the bill of complaint nor the final judgement survive. Tresham’s notes for his counsel in response to the bill are extant in his private papers, together with the letters he wrote to his wife about Anne and the case. Both provide ample detail about Tresham’s responses to the case against him, the impact on family relations, and how the outcome of the case played out, but we lack equivalent documentary evidence for Anne.

It will be helpful to spend some time analysing the proceedings of the case in detail here before offering any conclusions. At the core of the disagreement was the interpretation of an arrangement between Vaux and Tresham pertaining to the marriage portions of Vaux’s three daughters from his first marriage: Anne, Eleanor, and Elizabeth.^{Footnote 80} Both parties agreed that Vaux had intended that each of his three daughters should have £500 ‘towardes theyr marryage’.^{Footnote 81} Eleanor had been widowed just four years into her marriage in 1581, and in March 1582 Elizabeth had, like her step-brothers Edward and Ambrose, travelled to the continent, where she would enter a convent. Her step-brothers visited a seminary as part of their travels before returning home.^{Footnote 82}

Anne remained unmarried by design. In November 1594, Tresham wrote that ‘Yt is well knowne that she hath preferred to lyue ane vnmarryed life’, an elliptical reference to Anne’s vocation. Her ‘vnmarryed life’ was certainly a remarkable one.^{Footnote 83} She had kept house with her widowed sister Eleanor Brooksby since the early 1580s.Footnote ⁸⁴ The nature of this unusual household is already familiar to students of the missions of Jesuit and seminary priests in England, having been vividly evoked in the autobiographies of the Jesuits John Gerard and William Weston and in subsequent scholarly work.^{Footnote 85} Anne and Eleanor had been sheltering the Jesuit Superior Henry Garnet together and other priests and lay brothers, including hosting meetings of the Jesuits, since 1586. They conceived of their stewardship of this wing of the English mission as a religious vocation, and they continued to serve in this way until their deaths.^{Footnote 86} The dangerous practice of sheltering no less a figure than the Superior of the Jesuits necessitated frequent relocation to avoid detection. The household had already been subject to an unsuccessful government raid in October 1591, colourfully retold by John Gerard in his autobiography as a tale of wit, cunning, and steadfastness on Anne’s part. In 1593 Garnet referred to them as ‘the two sisters the widow and the virgin, illustrious by birth, fidelity, and holiness of life, whom I sometimes in my thoughts liken to the two women who used to lodge Our Lord’. A decade later, Anne would travel with Garnet, even assuming the alias ‘Mrs Perkins’ to his ‘Mr. Perkins’ — a predictable cause of scandal which was seized upon by the government — and was held and questioned in the Tower of London following his arrest in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot.^{Footnote 87} Anstruther considered her to be ‘to all intents and purposes a nun’ and believed that she had ‘taken the vows of religion privately’.^{Footnote 88} At the time of Anne’s suit, then, she was not anticipating courtship or marriage, but she was demonstrably in financial need.

The money for the Vaux daughters’ portions was supposed to have come from the ‘rentes and profyttes of the Landes and Tenementes of the yeerely valewe of £100 att the leste which were assumed by [Vaux] for 15 yeeres to begin on the 12^th yeere of her Majesty’s raigne [1569/70]’.^{Footnote 89} According to Tresham’s instructions to his counsel, the agreement had been made in 13 Elizabeth (1570/71) as part of the settlement of the Vaux barony ‘for the behoofe of other his Lordships children which he had by his first wife’.^{Footnote 90} The deed also gave the children’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Beaumont, custody of them for a period of ten years. The children’s maternal uncles, Henry and Francis Beaumont — both lawyers — were ‘speciall actors’ for Vaux’s son and heir Henry.^{Footnote 91} A conveyance limited £100 per annum to Tresham for a period of 15 years so that a sum of £1500 could be divided equally between the three daughters. In Tresham’s telling, ‘relyeing vppon the vndoubted validitie of that assuraunce’, he had then become bound with his brother-in-law Sir William Catesby to Beaumont ‘& others’ to pay £500 to each daughter ‘at suche daies, and tymes, and vppon suche sondrie Contingentes as particularlye appeareth in the defezaunce of the saied Statute’, that is to say, at their marriage or their father’s death. Tresham alleged that Beaumont had arranged for another deed, ‘which Master Sergeant Beawmont & others had procured the Lord Vaux to make’, to be ‘delyuered in and cancelled’ following Vaux’s marriage to Mary Tresham and without her or Tresham’s knowledge. It is implied that there was some sleight of hand here on Beaumont’s part.^{Footnote 92} On the advice of his ‘uncle’ Justice Weston, a ‘prinicpall partie to the great assuraunce’, Tresham requested that Beaumont deliver the deed, and though Beaumont ‘never denied to delyuer it’ was ‘from tyme to tyme’ so delayed that he never did so, with the result that Tresham ‘grewe gellous that some daungerous defect had secretlie escaped in the said tripartite assuraunce’.Footnote ⁹³ On perusing the books of assurance, Tresham found that the tripartite assurance was indeed ‘vtterlie made voyde by not dewe executing of a Prouiso brought in on the behalf of his Lordships Children by his first wife’.^{Footnote 94} The fifteen-year lease granted to Tresham was thereby void, he argued, so that if Vaux had died, Tresham would have had to pay the £1500 to Vaux’s daughters without any warrant, security, or receipt of ‘anie farthinge therof again’. While Vaux lived, Tresham could only receive £100 per annum out of Vaux’s courtesy.^{Footnote 95}

Anne’s lawyers argued that Tresham had received the money, had levied the profits of certain lands intended for Anne’s use ‘by force of a covenaunte’, and had reneged on his promise made ‘longe synce’ to her uncle Francis Beaumont that the money would be paid to her. Despite this, Tresham had sworn an oath that he could not answer Anne’s bill of complaint ‘for wante of evidences which he supposed to be in the countrey’.^{Footnote 96} In each hearing, the respective parties’ lawyers debated the same points: Tresham said that he had never received the money, and even if he had done so Anne was not entitled to it because she was not promised to any prospective husband and her father was still alive. Echoing Sir John Roper’s complaints about Tresham’s involvement in Vaux affairs, the Beaumonts countered that Tresham had used the money for his own fraudulent purposes: ‘that the defendant hath levyed the whole porcion or might have levyed yt before this tyme owt of certeyne Landes and Tenementes of the said Lord Vaux which were conveyed or Leassed to the defendant in truste’ for the marriage portions.^{Footnote 97}

Moreover, they argued, Anne

The court had ordered that Tresham bring the portion to the usher of the court as early as 13 May, the final day of the Easter Term. Tresham’s counsel had successfully delayed matters seven times over the course of the following five months. On each occasion, the court attempted to execute an order of 19 June for Tresham to pay Anne the sum of £500. Tresham’s counsel were granted several stays of execution while they tried, in vain, to show sufficient cause why Tresham should not hand over the money: ‘the assuraunce made for the Levyinge of the sayd money ys not good in Lawe’; ‘the said £500 ys not payable to the plaintiff vntill she be marryed’, and that if Anne died before marriage the money was to be returned to her father. Anne’s counsel argued that Vaux ‘ys well pleased that the said £500 shalbe payed to the plaintiff’.^{Footnote 99} They subsequently argued that Anne was entitled to the money ‘notwithstandinge she ys not yet marryed and notwithstandinge also that the same money was appoynted to be payed at her maryage’ because this was superseded by Tresham’s alleged financial impropriety.^{Footnote 100}

Language matters, and in litigation the wording of legal documents carries immense weight. Tresham’s insistence that Anne’s portion ‘[wa]s assigned her for her preferment in marriage, and not for her maynteynaunce’ failed to convince the court, which finally found in Anne’s favour on 6 November.^{Footnote 101} She was to be given the money, but it was to be held ‘with such good secuertyes as this cowrt shall allowe’, in accordance with the order of 19 June, so that the sum could be repaid if Anne should die unmarried.^{Footnote 102} Measures were also put in place to address Tresham’s claims. On receipt of the money, Anne was to enter into a bond with Francis Beaumont and Robert Brooksby (her sister Eleanor’s father-in-law).^{Footnote 103} Beaumont was to bring the original statute in which Tresham and Catesby stood bound to him to pay Anne’s portion, and then to demonstrate why that statute should not be delivered to Tresham; Tresham was then to ‘haue the ayd of this cowrt for the recovery of all such rentes out of the Bayliefes & tenantes handes and owt of the handes of any other person or persons yf anye suche leas should haue gone towardes the payment of the said porcion and are yet deteyned’.^{Footnote 104} The court accepted Tresham’s motion that Anne should demonstrate in writing her father’s consent for her to receive her portion.

Finally, the court made some attempt to disperse the tension between the two families, by asking Anne to ‘repayre to the defendant and in such frendly sort as shalbe convenyent for a gentlewoman of her degree and byrth desure his good will and move the said Lord Vaux her father in any such reasonable request as the defendant would haue her move him vnto’.^{Footnote 105} On 22 October, Tresham was ordered to deliver £500 in full by All Soul’s day, but this was modified on 6 November so that he could pay it in three instalments: £200 by 26 November at the Chapel of the Rolls in Chancery Lane; £100 or more by 10 February 1595, and the remaining £200 by Ascension Day.^{Footnote 106} According to a letter to his wife, Tresham paid Anne in full on 24 November 1594: the sum of £300, together with a choice of two bonds out of three, each worth £100 and from esteemed and reliable men, ‘the meanest of them of muche more creditt then himselfe’. He noted balefully that he was thereby paying her fully and ahead of time.^{Footnote 107}

A number of features of this case are interesting. The legal foundation — an unmarried woman suing for custody of her marriage portion — was unusual. Marriage portions and jointures were the subject of 52% of cases in Chancery by the mid-sixteenth century, but women were not supposed to have custody of their own portions, which were to be paid directly to their husbands by their fathers or male guardians.^{Footnote 108} The number of female litigants increased in the second half of the sixteenth century, and as a femme sole Anne was entitled to a greater degree of legal independence, but suits in Chancery were nonetheless initiated by women in just 17% of cases.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ That the case would prove complex was a feature of marriage settlement litigation.^{Footnote 110} As will be seen in examples below, Tresham’s letters to his wife evinced profound sadness and equally potent anger, a characteristic of family law.Footnote ¹¹¹

Tresham’s letters to his wife from the month of November 1594 give a full account, through his eyes, of the meetings that took place between him and his niece in order to try to resolve things. He condemned Anne above all for eschewing charity, the pervasive social and religious impulse that had been, since the Church’s inception and lately reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, ‘as the love that bound man to God and to his neighbours within the mystical body of Christ that was the church’.^{Footnote 112} Despite her own Catholicism, and her avowed support for the English mission, Anne’s lawyers used her natal sister Elizabeth’s vocation against Tresham in court, playing on anti-Catholic tropes to ensure that Tresham did not win the court’s sympathy. It was not within the remit of the entry books of decrees and orders to minute the kinds of slights exchanged between parties, but in a letter of 16 October Tresham told his wife that Anne’s lawyers had accused him of having ‘procured the Second Sister to be a Nonne and thereby deceyued her of Three hundred poundes: Vnder colour of religion abused her to gayne her portion to his owne vse’.^{Footnote 113} According to Tresham, the lawyers had defamed him as ‘a Scandale to the Cath[olic] religion, and to all Catholikes; and should also speedelie bee, skowred vpp for yt by them, that had aucthoritie to doe yt; and should doe ytt’.^{Footnote 114} We cannot know whether the lawyers did in fact use this highly-charged religious language in court, and how much Tresham’s ire had given him occasion to exaggerate, but the indications for a rapprochement between uncle and niece were nonetheless dire. The hypocrisy of one Catholic accusing another of Catholicism in court was not lost on Tresham, whose bitterness was yet unabated in 1599, when he referred to Anne with caustic sarcasm: ‘Behold the charytable proecdyng of thes vertuus _^^and catholique zealus catholike mayden.’^{Footnote 115}

Fractures between family members sent seismic waves beyond the original dispute. Seven years after Tresham’s death, in 1612, Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby brought a debt case against his widow (as administratrix) in the Common Pleas in their capacity as administratrices of their brother Henry. They were seeking payment of £600, allegedly promised by Tresham to Henry in 1583. Several other debts were mentioned — to John Brudenell, John Moore, Anne Offeley, and John Ireland — but neither Anne’s marriage portion, nor those of her sisters, is mentioned.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Seemingly, the matter of Anne’s marriage portion was closed, but the bonds between her, her siblings from Vaux’s first marriage, and the older Treshams had been irreperably severed. The wider links between the families, however, were sufficiently well-established to survive. Susan Cogan has demonstrated that Tresham and Vaux cousins sustained a friendly relationship beyond the inter-generational fracture, and the widowed Mary Vaux and her children likewise remained in close contact with the Tresham parents.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Unfortunately, however, one of Mary Vaux’s children, Muriel, was at the heart of yet another episode of Vaux-Tresham acrimony.

III: Muriel Vaux and George Fulshurst

The legal wrangling and importunate match-making that had pitted Tresham and his Vaux nieces and nephews against each other outlived both Vaux parents. A year after the conclusion of Anne’s suit, her father lay dying. In his final days, Vaux made further changes to his will: a codicil annexed on 18 August 1595, following George Vaux’s death, indicated some disagreement in the interpretation of the original will.^{Footnote 118} Vaux therefore commanded his executors to ‘receaue’ the original sum of £400 from the executors of George’s will.^{Footnote 119} The remainder of the codicil made provision for Vaux’s wife Mary and for their sons George and Ambrose and their children. Money owed by Sir Thomas Cecil from Vaux’s lands was to be recovered and used to give 100 marks to Ambrose. Further grants of a lease and lands were made to Vaux’s wife Mary for use during her lifetime and to her executors until 31 October following her death. After that point, they were to be put to the use determined by articles between Vaux, his son George, and George’s father-in-law Sir John Roper, or to George’s legitimate male heir if he was not yet twenty-one.^{Footnote 120} Similar arrangements were to be used to the benefit of George’s younger children during his heir’s minority. In the event that one of Vaux’s executors refused to act or died within three months of Vaux’s death, his wife Mary was to be his sole executrix.^{Footnote 121} Mary died in September 1597, and was buried beside her husband.

With the passing of the elder Vaux generation, Tresham’s nieces and nephews landed further blows against family unity. Vaux’s youngest daughter Muriel married George Fulshurst, a Tresham servant, instead of her intended, the wealthy Catholic Master Lovell, just before the death of her mother; Tresham believed that the strain had hastened his sister’s last illness. Muriel shared her aunt Tresham’s somewhat unusual name, which makes it likely that she was her goddaughter.Footnote ¹²² The scandalous match between godchild and servant became subsumed into both the preceding episodes discussed in this article: Tresham withheld the final part of Muriel’s marriage portion, and was imprisoned in the Fleet in the summer of 1599, his final internment.

For Tresham, the three episodes were linked by the involvement of Elizabeth Vaux née Roper, whose influence he blamed for his young relations’ abnegation of charity. Like Ambrose, Muriel, ‘the vnfortunate wyfe to fullciss’, emerged as a pawn in the action against Tresham over her marriage portion, and she too was subject to the will of Elizabeth ‘and her confederates’, who ‘had _^^synisterly complotted to have defeated my sayd neece [Muriel] of the ^{^wholl} -700-li’.^{Footnote 123} While Muriel’s case against Tresham was financially-motivated, and exacerbated by his former servant’s infamous betrayal, it also had roots in the conflict between the children of Vaux’s respective marriages. Tresham implied that Muriel’s generous marriage portion, enlarged from £500 to some £1700 at his urging, had provoked the envy of her half-sisters and the widow of her half-brother. But like her half-siblings, Muriel met Tresham’s ‘moore then kynsemanly care, in thus frendyng and advancinge her’ with ‘_^^{a most} monstruus malice’.^{Footnote 124} Tresham responded to Muriel’s wayward marriage with his servant Fulshurst — ‘that arrantt verlett of myne’ — by refusing to acknowledge the match or to ‘shake handes with her’ but, more injuriously, withheld the final £750 of her marriage portion. He did so, he claimed, to protect her, the sum having been ‘spetially lefft in my custodye, by her, by fullcis [Fulshurst], and by her mother consentt to bee reserued for her, and her children, in respect fullciss hade not of his owne wherwith els to mayntayne her, shold he dye, or shold he abandon her, and marry ane other wyf’.^{Footnote 125} Tresham believed in the likelihood of such a distressing outcome, ‘as he [Fulshurst] legully may doo by way of that aforementioned formall precontracte with master Lovell: as in regarde of his vntruystyness: they having allreddy wasted and misspentt the sayd -1200-li so by them receued’.^{Footnote 126}

The celebrated friendship between Vaux and Tresham was to be the final episode in a tradition of close kinship that had had begun in the mid-fifteenth century. Yet by 1599, Tresham was writing of other Vauxes in wholly different terms: ‘colde I marvell, then mervell might I, how catholikk chrystian earres cane bee inclinably open to trecherers, arrantest trecherers to mee. qui semel malus semper presumitur malus in eodem genere mali [someone who is once evil is presumed to be always evil]’.^{Footnote 127} Tresham understood the eruption of family politics into the law courts as a grievance that had arisen following the marriage of George Vaux and Elizabeth Roper and had then drawn in other members of the rising generation, Anne, Eleanor, and their half-siblings Ambrose and Muriel: ‘whence came thes sutes so attempted agaynst mee? All onely forth of that howse, which ys most beholden to mee of any whosoever. My meanyng ys, forth of the Lord Vaux his house: prosecuted by -2- of his daughters, and by his sonn_^^s wyfe the now wydow vaux’.^{Footnote 128}

This article has chronicled three unedifying episodes in the lives of two prominent Catholic families. In each case, temporal concerns came to supersede religious imperatives; family priorities eclipsed religio-political context. This should not be surprising: of course individuals should have looked first to their immediate circumstances, their families and their friends, before considering bigger questions. Squabbles between a younger generation and an overbearing uncle can seem historically insignificant, and yet, the case studies explored here have demonstrated something important: that the steadfastness and piety of prominent English Catholics who sacrificed so much for their consciences did not eclipse mundane preoccupations. Catholic kin relied on each other to sustain a sense of community amid persecution, but they were still susceptible to the causes of unhappiness that affected families across the confessional spectrum. While it could not intervene in an individual’s relationship with God, a preoccupation with lineage and stewardship of the family and its estate — itself a religious impulse — could cause irreperable damage to relationships between believers, even within a persecuted minority.

Tresham wrote that the weight of anti-Catholic legislation was less onerous than the eschewal of charity by his Vaux kin. Though we lack similar private testimony from Elizabeth, Ambrose, George, Muriel, and Anne Vaux, we can still take seriously these fractures. We are accustomed to reading about internicene battles among Catholic clergy, but did these debates loom as large for the Catholic laity in England as they did for polemicists? The experience of the Vaux and Tresham families suggests that they did not. The Vaux family was intimately connected to the English mission, and Tresham was known to the government as a vocal opponent of anti-Catholic measures. But we have seen in Anne Vaux’s suit against Tresham that her connections to missionary priests seem to have been far less influential than the myriad benefits of having Francis Beaumont, a judge of the Common Pleas, for an uncle. The efforts of both Vaux and Tresham patriarchs to preserve their family names and estates were frustrated within two generations by the combined efforts of their heirs, not their persecutors.