Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England > Status Update

‘The strength of official feeling against the mission was made very clear the following month when a royal proclamation was issued from Richmond, lambasting all Jesuits and seminarians as ‘seedmen of treason’. These ‘fugitives, rebels and traitors’, it pronounced, had trained abroad ‘in school points of sedition’ and returned ‘by stealth’ to incite rebellion.’

‘Elizabeth I disliked the Bond. She would never have survived her sister’s reign had such a provision existed and, quite apart from the dubious ethics of slaying a potential innocent, she baulked (as she had in 1563) at Burghley’s additional efforts to force through radical constitutional measures that would have interfered with her right to determine the succession.’

‘It should not be forgotten that Campion the saint (canonised in 1970), or Campion the traitor, was also Campion the scholar, poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist and, for the Vaux children, the schoolmaster. He was a capable as any man of human frailty and as susceptible as any prisoner to torture.’

‘Specifically, the Vauxes were ‘recusants’. They refused to go to church every Sunday (the word stems from the Latin recusare: to refuse). Not for them the awkward compromises, the crossed fingers and blocked ears at official service, the hasty confession and secret Mass at home afterwards. Once the men in Rome decreed that it was not good enough to be a ‘church papist’... the Vauxes stayed at home.’