Maud Green and Two of Henry VIII's Wives

Today is the anniversary of Maud Green's birth on April 6, 1492. According to the Tudor Times, she was:

the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Thomas Green of Green's Norton in Northamptonshire. She was married at around the age of 16 to Sir Thomas Parr, whilst her sister, Anne, was married to Sir Thomas Parr's step-father, Sir Nicholas Vaux.

Maud was appointed as a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Katharine of Aragon. It was unusual for a knight's wife to be a Lady-in-Waiting, as opposed to a Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber, but perhaps the two women got on well, or it may have been in recognition of the fact that Sir Thomas was third cousin to the King. In between her duties at Court, Maud gave birth to three children who survived and a further two who did not.

One of those three surviving children was Catherine Parr, whom Maud may have named after her mistress. She was widowed at age 25 and arranged the marriages of her son, William and daughters Catherine and Anne:

Maud remained in the service of Queen Katharine, but died, aged about forty on 1 st December 1531. In her Will, made in 1529 she gives donations to the orders of friars, and then requests the payments of the debts incurred for the marriages of her children. She then gives detailed instructions on bequests of jewelry to her daughters, including pictures of the King (Henry VIII) and Queen (Katharine of Aragon) to her daughter Katherine.

What a bequest!

More about the Vaux family connection here.

Image credit: This portrait originally and now identified as Catherine Parr was wrongly identified as Lady Jane Grey for decades.

RIP Henry Vaux, Poet and Priest Smuggler

Henry Vaux, the eldest son of William Vaux, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden, died on November 19, 1587. He was about 28 years old. He had renounced the family title in favor of his half-brother George (William remarried after the death of his first wife) because he had decided to devote his life to protecting the Jesuit missionary priests like St. Edmund Campion, St. Robert Southwell, John Gerard, Henry Garnet, Robert Persons, etc. His sisters Eleanor and Anne were also involved in these projects, which were of course fraught with danger because it was illegal in England to attend the Mass, to deny the governorship of the monarch over the Church, and to assist any Catholic priest, since he was a traitor. Jessie Childs told the story of the Henry's career in her study of  the Vaux family in God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England, which I've recently reviewed for a publication (more info to be announced).

Henry Vaux was tutored by Edmund Campion starting in 1568, who found Henry and his sister Eleanor to be excellent scholars with great aptitude, when Campion was still at Oxford University. He was particularly impressed with Henry, as this letter demonstrates:

From the day your Father first asked me to see you and to superintend your education I have become amazingly attached to you. For I marvelled and was almost perplexed when I saw a boy who had not yet completed his ninth year, scion of a notable family, of such pleasant demeanour and refinement; who wrote and spoke Latin so well; who was equally good at prose and verse, accurate and quick at figures, devoted to the study of letters, diligent in application, able to sketch out and arrange his whole course of study. If circumstances had permitted it I should have desired nothing better than to give my enthusiastic help to that celebrated man, your Father, and to you, a boy of such great promise. But since some unknown fate, yours and mine, has deprived you of me and me of you, your Father (by whom I am dearly loved, and whom I particularly revere) has easily persuaded me that my voice and advice should come to you. . . . (Translated by Father Godfrey Anstruther)

Vaux grew up at Grace Dieu, Leicester under the care of his maternal grandmother from 1571 to 1581. His cousins, the poet John Beaumont and playwright Francis Beaumont, were also raised there. 

As a poet, Vaux was following a family tradition, for his grandfather, Thomas Vaux, the second Baron Vaux had written poetry--and had been the friend of poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl Surrey. One of Thomas Vaux's poems, "A Quiet Mind":

When all is done and said,
In the end thus shall you find,
He most of all doth bathe in bliss
That hath a quiet mind:
And, clear from worldly cares,
To deem can be content,
The sweetest time in all his life
In thinking to be spent.

The body subject is
To fickle Fortune's power,
And to a million of mishaps
Is casual every hour;
And death in time doth change
It to a clod of clay;
Whereas the mind, which is divine,
Runs never to decay.

Companion none is like
Unto the mind alone;
For many have been harmed by speech,
Through thinking few or none.
Fear oftentimes restraineth words,
But makes not thought to cease;
And he speaks best, that hath the skill
When for to hold his peace.

Our wealth leaves us at death;
Our kinsmen at the grave;
But virtues of the mind unto
The heavens with us we have.
Wherefore, for virtue's sake,
I can be well content,
The sweetest time in all my life
To deem in thinking spent.

When his former tutor Father Edmund Campion, SJ, returned to England in 1580 with Father Robert Persons, SJ, Henry Vaux began his career as a priest smuggler which continued until his arrest on November 4, 1586 when pursuivants were looking for the Jesuit priests Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet. Imprisoned in Marshalsea, Vaux became desperately ill and was released on "medical leave" in May of 1587. His sisters Anne and Eleanor cared for him until his death.

In 2008 Timothy Christopher Hacksley submitted a thesis for his M.A. at Rhodes University which contains the texts of the Vaux's poems and it may be accessed here.

Books, Books, Books! Three in Queue

I have three great books lined up for Summer reading. I've started the first one, Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith by Carol E. Harrison from Cornell University Press:

In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amélie and Frédéric Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by a determination to live their faith in a modern world.

Rejecting both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy, the romantic Catholics advocated a middle way, in which a revitalized Catholic faith and liberty formed the basis for modern society. Harrison traces the history of nineteenth-century France and, in parallel, the life course of these individuals as they grow up, learn independence, and take on the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood. Although the shared goals of the romantic Catholics were never realized in French politics and culture, Harrison's work offers a significant corrective to the traditional understanding of the opposition between religion and the secular republican tradition in France.

As I read the introduction I thought how nineteenth century Catholics in both England and France had to rebuild their churches--the English after centuries of penal laws and martyrdom; the French after the Revolution, the Terror, and the revolutionary campaign of De-Christianization that led to destruction of churches, suppression of monasteries, and the martyrdom of priests and nuns. The difference for the French, as Harrison is explaining to me, is that as the Catholic laity worked to influence their society--re-evangelize it!--they also had to consider the Church's relationship with the monarchy and whether it was good for the Church or not. Harrison notes in the introduction that nineteenth century Catholics in France were for a time at least solidly ultramontane, ascribing the weakness of the Church in France during the Ancien Regime partially to its Cisalpine stance of loyalty to the Bourbons instead of the Papacy. More on Romantic Catholics after I've read it!

Then I have The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930, edited by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles from Cambridge:

The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos – what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.

My husband gave me both of these books for Mother's Day!

And finally, thanks to the Queen Anne Boleyn blog and Beth von Staats who introduced us in a way, I have received a review copy of God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, from the author herself, Jessie Childs!

The Catholics of Elizabethan England did not witness a golden age. Their Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed, their faith was criminalised. In an age of assassination and Armada, those Catholics who clung to their faith were increasingly seen as the enemy within. In this superb history, award-winning author Jessie Childs explores the Catholic predicament in Elizabethan England through the eyes of one remarkable family: the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.

God’s Traitors is a tale of dawn raids and daring escapes, stately homes and torture chambers, ciphers, secrets and lies. From clandestine chapels and side-street inns to exile communities and the corridors of power, it exposes the tensions and insecurities masked by the cult of Gloriana. Above all, it is a timely story of courage and frailty, repression and reaction and the terrible consequences when religion and politics collide.

I may have to bump God's Traitors up in the queue after Romantic Catholics!

What are you reading, readers? Or planning to read?

"Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England"

This book will not be coming out in the USA until April, but it looks fascinating:

The Catholics of Elizabethan England did not witness a golden age. Their Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed, their faith was criminalised. In an age of assassination and Armada, those Catholics who clung to their faith were increasingly seen as the enemy within. In this superb history, award-winning author Jessie Childs explores the Catholic predicament in Elizabethan England through the eyes of one remarkable family: the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.

God’s Traitors is a tale of dawn raids and daring escapes, stately homes and torture chambers, ciphers, secrets and lies. From clandestine chapels and side-street inns to exile communities and the corridors of power, it exposes the tensions and insecurities masked by the cult of Gloriana. Above all, it is a timely story of courage and frailty, repression and reaction and the terrible consequences when religion and politics collide.

Amazon.com has a different blurb:

Elizabeth I criminalised Catholicism in England. For refusing to attend Anglican services her subjects faced crippling fines and imprisonment. For giving refuge to outlawed priests -- the essential conduits to God's grace -- they risked death. Almost two hundred Catholics were executed in Elizabeth's reign and hundreds more wasted away in prison. They were beleaguered on the one hand by a Papacy that branded Elizabeth a heretic and sanctioned her deposition and on the other by a government that saw itself fighting a war on terror and deployed every weapon in its arsenal, including torture, to combat the threat. With every invasion scare and attempt on Elizabeth's life, the danger for England's Catholics grew.

God's Traitors explores this agonising conflict of loyalty from the perspective of one Catholic family, the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall. To follow the Vaux story -- from staunch loyalty to passive resistance to increasing activism -- is to see, in microcosm, the pressures and painful choices that confronted the Catholic community of Reformation England. Theirs in an enthralling tale of plots, priest-holes and persecution plated out in a world of shadows people by spies and agents provocateurs. They lived in a state of siege, under constant surveillance. The petty squabbles, unsuitable marriages, love and laughter of family life were punctuated by dawn raids, sudden arrests and clandestine meetings. Above all, this is a timeless and timely story of human courage and frailty, repression and reaction and the power of faith against the sternest of odds.

Father Godfrey Anstruther, OP, wrote about the family in his 1953 study, Vaux of Harrowden : a Recusant Family, reviewed in The Tablet at the time:

There are many sides to the picture he presents ; the impact of the Reformation on England ; the fabulous adventures of the missionary priests ; the surge of excitement that greeted the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. But above all this is the history of one family, a family of great wealth and position, who lived in the very heart of England, and whose house, for that among other reasons, became, after the Reformation, one of the nerve-centres of the Catholic resistance. At one time or another nearly every missionary priest must have come to Harrowden ; Father Gerard, S.J., was, in fact, for several years the chaplain there ; and through the eyes of the Vaux family we can see the reaction of the laity in England to almost all the problems that perplexed the members of the proscribed religion. The behaviour of the Vauxes of Harrowden is particularly interesting because, of all the members of the upper class, they had the most reason to cling to the fortunes of the Tudors. The Wars of the Roses had left them virtually penniless and it was only the triumph of Henry VII at Bosworth Field that restored them to power. From then on, prosperity was assured, and Sir Nicholas Vaux was able to play an increasingly prominent part in all. the more spectacular pageants of the age, a form of entertainment of which he appears to have been inordinately fond. The triumph of his life came when he was chosen to arrange the details of that fantastic event that history knows as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The cost of the whole spectacle was prodigious, but Sir Nicholas at least would have been among those who must have felt that it had been well worth every penny. "I see, I see an Age truly Golden arising," wrote Erasmus in 1519, and without doubt the Vauxes would have been in full agreement with him. Fifteen years later, the first Catholic martyrs were executed at Tyburn. In such a short space of time so much had happened.

It looks like both books would be necessary!