This article is an investigation of the careers of known or suspected Catholics in the upper reaches of the Elizabethan Court, among those closest to the Queen in the Privy Chamber and Chamber. In this account I shall discuss several of them, one of whom, Sir Lewis Lewknor, son of the Catholic-minded but ‘occasionally conforming’ Lewknors of Selsey, Sussex, could stand alone as the subject of a further article. His career can be traced through the archives in Brussels and Spain, as well as those in England. Another, Sir George Gifford, would be an excellent subject for a lurid account of spies, counter spies and the financial rewards of serving as a double-agent.
This study does not include lower-ranking officers and servants in the Chamber (the Domus Regis Magnificentiae) and those of the Household (the Domus Regis Providentiae); it also excludes noblemen suspected of Catholicism who either frequented the Court without holding an office there (such as Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) or, rarely, held an office (such as Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse from 1601–1616). It is an amplification, and exploration, of work begun in my doctoral thesis on the Gentlemen Pensioners during the reign of Elizabeth I and in further work on the Elizabethan Privy Chamber and Chamber.Footnote 1
As one might expect, there were very few, if any, known Catholics among the men and women who staffed the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Of the men, there were only two who may have had Catholic sympathies, as well as family connections. The first of these was the obscure Henry Middlemore who served in the position of a Groom of the Privy Chamber from 1569 to his death in 1592, although he was never appointed to the office formally.Footnote 2 His wife was an open Catholic, and some of his children were to embrace their mother’s faith, but in his case there is no evidence – save for an accusation – that he was somehow complicit in his nephew William Middlemore’s role in the forwarding and distribution of clandestine correspondence between English Catholics living abroad and those in England.Footnote 3 On the other hand, the strong Protestant Sir Nicholas Throckmorton had written to the Queen on 18 November 1558, the second day of her reign, to solicit for ‘my cosyne harry mydylmore’ a groomship there, which might point away from Catholic leanings on Middlemore’s part.Footnote 4
The second was John Norris of Fifield, Berks, to whose complicated career I intend to give further attention at another time.Footnote 5 Norris held the position of Gentleman Usher daily waiter in the Chamber from c. 1536 onward. Queen Mary made him Gentleman Usher of her Privy Chamber at the beginning of her reign, and his conservative religious views emerged very clearly in his clashes with the “hot gospeller” Edward Underhill, which the latter recorded in great detail. Relegated at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to his earlier position in the Chamber, he regained within a year his position in the Privy Chamber, retaining it until his death in 1577. Norris was never charged with recusancy, and his elder son, William, was to have a successful and, under Elizabeth, ‘conforming’ Court career as a Gentleman Pensioner from 1554 to his death in 1591, but his younger son, Henry, and his wife, were reported as recusants in 1577, shortly after the father’s death.Footnote 6
There is no evidence that any of the women of the Privy Chamber had links with Catholicism, although some of them came from families in which there were fewer signs of the Protestant zeal which characterised the backgrounds of most of their companions. There is, however, one—slightly odd—case, that of Anne Bromfield who is thought to have served briefly at court as a Maid of Honour. Anne, who became a Catholic under the guidance of the Jesuit John Gerard, left England and was professed as a choir nun at St. Ursula’s Louvain on 3 May 1599. She died 16 April 1638.Footnote 7 Her widowed mother Katharine Bromfield, who served as Mother of the Maids towards the end of the reign, was a sister-in-law of the famous (or infamous) astrologer Dr. John Dee. Anne’s father, William Bromfield, who had been first in the list of graduating students when he left Cambridge as a BA of Trinity College in 1562 and who died in 1582, had been a client of the Dudleys. He had held the position of one of the Gentlemen Pensioners at Court from 1569 to 1578, and his departure from the band coincides with a spell of imprisonment which he suffered after being involved in an affray with the servants of another Gentleman Pensioner, Sir Richard Bulkeley. Bulkeley, whose family seat was at Beaumaris on the isle of Anglesey, was an open opponent of the Earl of Leicester’s attempts to build up an interest and following in North Wales.Footnote 8 In some accounts such as those in the Bulkeley papers and in Leicester’s Commonwealth, Bromfield, sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, is represented as an assassin in Leicester’s service and intrigues. In short, there are no obvious Catholic connections of any sort for Anne Bromfield. Indeed, fewer even than for the famous Fr. Gerard, whose father and older brother conformed in the 1580s, although the father returned to Catholicism before his death in 1601. Fr Gerard’s conformist older brother, Thomas, himself became a Gentleman Pensioner in 1599 and was rewarded by James I with a baronetcy in 1611 for his father’s support for the Queen of Scots. Thomas’s son and heir was a recusant and all subsequent generations of baronets have remained Catholic to the present day.
It is among the Gentlemen Pensioners, alone of the men who held positions which gave them access to the Privy Lodgings, that we can find a number of Catholics. The Privy Lodgings were that section of every royal residence which was reserved for the monarch and his or her immediate entourage, and to which admission (before 1603 at least) was guarded zealously. They consisted of the Bed Chamber, the Privy Chamber, which was a kind of day room to which the monarch might admit selected courtiers or, on rare occasions, receive ambassadors or other delegates on a semi-formal basis; and which gave its name to the staff; the Presence Chamber, a reception room with a throne and cloth of estate over it; and the Privy Closet, a small private chapel.
The Gentlemen Pensioners were an elite guard corps of fifty men together with five officers, three of whom were in command positions and two serving as servants of the corps. The corps had been founded by Henry VIII at the end of 1539 to be the monarch’s ‘nearest guard’ at war, in battle and at court and, less officially, to perform at the tiltyard. They were often entrusted with military commands or with escort duties, the delivery of important or delicate messages, such as the summons of the Duke of Norfolk to Court at the outbreak of the Northern Rebellion in 1569, and, more generally, to serve as a kind of finishing school for the inculcation of loyalty and devotion to the Tudor monarchy among sons of landed gentry and nobility. The place where the Band served—or ‘waited’, to use the contemporary term—was the Presence Chamber, and there they waited ‘by quarters’, that is, in rotation, with twenty-five men on duty at any one time for a period of three months.
In the first two decades of the corps’ existence membership turnover was rapid, and it would seem that for most of the members the position was incompatible with their situation when once they had inherited their estates, or perhaps had progressed far into middle age. Under Elizabeth, however, the turnover slowed appreciably. The proportion of heirs vis-á-vis younger sons increased while a growing proportion of members retained their places even after inheriting or after promotion to other offices, some of which might draw them away from Court for considerable periods of time. Consequently, the service of many of them extended over two, three or four decades, although few came close to the fifty-four years’ service of Sir George Beeston between 1547 and 1601 or the fifty-three of Clement Paston between 1545 and 1598. In part this was due to Elizabeth’s characteristic semper eadem, a loyalty which extended even to her servants, in part to the lack of any group military service on the band’s part over the course of her reign, but mostly due to the fact that from early on in her reign (or perhaps even from Mary’s reign) gentlemen pensioners who were ‘in quarter’ for a particular three month period might arrange for a fellow-corpsman who was ‘out of quarter’ to wait on his behalf, or even, with the permission of the Captain and the agreement of the Queen, to allow a suitable ‘outsider’ to the band to do so. Such an ‘outsider’ might became eligible for a position in the band upon the death or retirement, perhaps in the latter case for a ‘consideration’, of one of its members. Of equal significance was the fact that the Privy Chamber was largely devoid of male staff—the Bed Chamber completely so. In the course of the whole reign only two men served as Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, three as its Gentlemen Ushers and fifteen as its Grooms. A place among the Pensioners became, therefore, one of the ‘highest’ court positions to which men might reasonably aspire.Footnote 9 In these circumstances, which in many ways formed a continuation (with some constriction in numbers) of those of Mary’s reign, the Gentlemen Pensioners came to function, in part, as a sort of displaced male Privy Chamber—always bearing in mind, however, that the corps was double the size of the Privy Chamber at its maximum size under Henry VIII or Edward VI.Footnote 10
Before discussing these men, we might usefully discuss briefly those whose positions allowed them a comparable degree of access to the monarch, albeit outside the Privy Chamber. I have found no evidence of Catholics among the Cupbearers, of whom there were perhaps a total of three or four in the course of the reign, nor among the Carvers, nor among the Scutellarii or Sewers—about ten in the course of the reign—who arranged the dishes and meats on the tables, served them and kept them in order. Among the ten Esquires for the Body, there are none for certain, but there is the curious case of Sir Nicholas Poyntz of Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, who served as such from the beginning of the reign until about 1567, dying in 1585. He was regarded as a firm Protestant when he obtained his office, but his will, which seems to be permeated by a sense of resentment of which he specifies neither the causes nor the objects, has religiously conservative undertones; and his wife and daughters were Catholics, and his sons regarded as suspect.Footnote 11 His attitude of resentment emerged clearly in a letter which he wrote to his sister, the wife of Elizabeth’s Treasurer of the Chamber, Thomas Heneage, in 1575. In it he wrote that he was ‘deseaved in her that nowe dothe govern’ and complained how the Queen’s ‘forgettfulness, thoughe hitt disgraced me before the world and diminished my portion, hath benefited my sowle, I dowt not’; and, in reply to his sister’s surprise that he had not come to court ‘being so near it’, he wrote ‘how willingly, tell me, wold you go into hell, to salute the devils there, though you weare standing on the brink thereof’. Poyntz was himself imprisoned on suspicion of Catholicism in 1580 and James Fenn, once Poyntz’s steward, went on to be ordained at Rheims in 1580 and to be executed at Tyburn in 1584.Footnote 12 So he may have turned to Catholicism or, alternatively have suffered for his wife’s and children’s religion, and chafed at his predicament. I have come across no accusations or evidence of Catholicism among those officials of the Chamber under Elizabeth I whose positions were of lower rank than those already mentioned, such as the twelve men who were Gentlemen Ushers daily waiters, the approximately forty who were Gentlemen Ushers quarter waiters, and the approximately twenty who were Gentlemen Waiters (whose office appears to have been a purely honorific one which did not require its holders to be at court except when summoned).
Our four Catholic Gentlemen Pensioners, in their chronological order, are: Edmund Powell, of Sandford, Oxfordshire, who served from about 1563 to 1571 or 1572; William Tresham, a younger son of the Treshams of Rushton, Northamptonshire, who served from January 1578 to January or February 1582; Charles Tylney, the heir of the Tylneys of Shelley Hall, Co. Suffolk, who served from June 24, 1583 to his execution on 21 September 1586; and Lewis Lewknor, the heir of the family of that name (one of a number of branches) settled at Tangmere and Selsey, Co. Sussex, who served from late 1598 until his appointment to the newly-created office of Master of the Ceremonies in November 1605. We might term them: the self-exposed friend of the Scottish queen, the forlorn fugitive, the traitor, and the prodigal, but repentant, apostate. The fifth, whose Catholicism was, if not more dubious then more enigmatic, is George Gifford of Weston-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, who served as a Gentleman Pensioner from 1578 until his death in 1613. Gifford’s mother was a recusant, as were two of his three brothers. One brother became a Benedictine monk, ending his life in 1629 as Archbishop of Rheims. But George was a double-dealing agent provocateur who tainted the lives or reputations of those who had dealings with him. Perhaps then we might term him the dissembling desperado.
Edmund Powell
Edmund Powell’s grandfather was a Welsh yeoman from Cardiganshire who lived in Norfolk and London before settling in Oxfordshire. His father, also named Edmund, was connected by friendship and property management with the Henrician courtiers Henry Norris and Sir Francis Bryan, as well as with the Brydges family. His wife was a kinswoman of the Oxfordshire magnate Sir John Williams (later Lord Williams of Thame). He was an Oxfordshire JP and in Mary’s reign sat three times in the House of Commons, once for Oxfordshire, before dying in 1559. Perhaps it was these connections—especially those with the Norris family, whose Catholic branch was in high favor under Mary, just as was the Protestant branch under Elizabeth—that secured our man’s admission to the Gentlemen Pensioners in 1561 or 1562. For eight years his service appears to have proceeded tranquilly, and apart from securing a twenty-one-year lease of some crown lands in 1567 his name is absent from all the records that I have searched. This seeming tranquility was abruptly shattered when the Ridolphi Plot broke open in September 1571. Powell had not been involved in the plot itself, but in the course of the investigations and interrogations that ensued it emerged that in the spring of that year, while parliament was sitting, Powell had been a party to discussions among servants of the Earl of Arundel and of the earl’s son-in-law Lord Lumley, together with the Bishop of Ross (Mary Stuart’s factor at the English Court), about ways to get the Scots’ Queen out of prison and out of England. On behalf of his friends, Powell had approached Sir Thomas Stanley, who had been in trouble a year previously for a similar attempt, and Sir Henry Percy, the future earl and brother of the sainted rebel, who himself was to die in the Tower under mysterious circumstances in 1585. Both men were interested in the project, but when Percy withdrew in the hope (which proved successful) that he might be able to obtain his attainted brother’s earldom from the Crown by a show of conformity, the discussions fizzled out. When the plot broke open, Powell was put in the Tower of London and, on May 14, 1572, convicted and condemned for high treason. Instead of being executed, he was returned to the Tower, where he remained, until in June 1573 he was released into private custody, which came to an end in May 1574.
He never regained his court position. Perhaps he never sought it, for by 1577 he and his whole family were outright recusants, never coming to church and suspected of harboring priests in their house at Sandford, a former priory of the Knights Hospitallers. ‘Rememberinge the sudden changes and chances that dayly doe happen amonge men nowe a dayes’ (an apt reflection upon his own career) he made his will on August 23, 1591 and was buried in Sandford church on March 31, 1592. His descendants continued at Sandford until the eighteenth century, when the male line expired in two Franciscan friars.Footnote 13
William Tresham
William Tresham was a younger brother of the famous, or notorious, recusant Sir Thomas Tresham (1543-1605) of Rushton who strove throughout Elizabeth’s reign, with surprising success, to combine the dual obligations of allegiance and conscience and was even knighted by the Queen in 1575. Their father had died in 1546, while their grandfather, who as a widower took a vow of celibacy in Queen Mary’s reign and had been made Prior of the restored Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers, died in March 1559, as the bill dissolving the restored religious orders was making its way through Parliament. Sir Thomas may have been helped to his knighthood by his Northamptonshire neighbor, Christopher Hatton, who had himself begun his court career as a Gentleman Pensioner in 1564, adding to it the position of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1571 and Captain of the Guard in 1572. Hatton had come from a religiously-conservative family and, although a conformist, was notorious among ‘the godly’ for his lack of zeal and for his opposition to ‘further reformation’ in the Church. What is sure is that when Hatton became Vice-chamberlain in late 1577 and gave up his position in the Pensioners he procured William Tresham’s entry into his vacated place. Sir Thomas Tresham claimed as much in a letter to Hatton four years later.Footnote 14 And in a letter dated 28 December 1578 written to an unidentified lady at court to thank her for her kindness towards his brother he referred to the latter as one who ‘of himself is unable to wade through the thwarts and storms at Court’ but whose fortune, under her patronage, will now permit him happily to continue what he has begun.Footnote 15 He was not to hold the place for very long.
On September 21, 1581 William Tresham was called before the Privy Council to be questioned about his presence at his brother’s house at Rushton when ‘Campion the Jesuite’ hand confessed to being there, and swore on oath on the Bible that never to his knowledge had he spoken with Campion, and that if he had been in company with Campion he had not known him to be a Jesuit.Footnote 16 Four months later, William bolted from the court and fled to Paris. He wrote letters to his brother, to Hatton and to the Earl of Sussex, Captain of the Pensioners, to explain his sudden departure, and in each of them he explained the cause of his flight. He wrote to Sussex on January 27 that he would not have fled ‘if I had seene any meanes lefte of securyte to have served myself from the iniust persecution of the erle of Leicester’ whose favor he claimed to have lost ‘without any my desert’ and for recovery of which he claimed to have used such humility as never had been used in times past, even to princes, but all in vain, as he claimed that he had also explained in his letter to the queen. He went on to assure Sussex that he had not been involved in any act or practice, but the cause of his flight had been ‘onely extreame feare I had of the crueltye of the erle of Leicester, whose [word missing] I was not in any sort longer to withstand, my frend in court having fayled mee, whome I had by much perfect faythe and inteare good will assuredly to be myne’.Footnote 17
On 20 February Thomas Tresham wrote to Hatton, from prison, to censure his brother’s inconsiderate behavior to ‘his dear good friend…that of a thrall prisoner delivered him a freed subject, that of a countryman procured him a settled courtier, that of a person disgraced restored him into her Majesty’s good favour, yea, that bestowed on him forth of your own coffers your own office of a pensioner’s room.’Footnote 18 Five days later Sir Thomas wrote to Lord Burghley, to much the same effect, but this letter amplified his previous letter in stating that his brother had labored under Leicester’s displeasure for some years, and had been able neither to learn the cause of the earl’s displeasure nor to gain his good opinion.Footnote 19 By October 1583 he was seeking to return to England, approaching the English ambassador in Paris, a fellow Gentleman Pensioner, Sir Edward Stafford, for assistance. Stafford promptly wrote to Leicester a jittery letter in which he repeatedly expressed his unwillingness to deal on behalf of anyone that had offended the earl, but ended by suggesting that Leicester might heap coals on his enemies’ heads by returning good for evil.Footnote 20 Nothing came of this, and Tresham soon took service with the Spanish in the Netherlands, where he was reported to be of that faction of the exiles which had no great desire for a Spanish conquest of England and looked rather to James VI of Scotland for a better day—although by 1594 he had become a member of the Council of State for England in the Spanish Netherlands.
Beginning in 1599, and continuing for over three years, Tresham began a determined attempt to procure a pardon and return home to live like a ‘loyall Catholike faythfull & obedient subject’,Footnote 21 writing letters to Essex, Cecil, Henry Howard and even a fairly humble courtier like Cecil’s client Henry Lok asking them to support his plea, and in the meantime left the Spanish Netherlands to take up residence in Boulogne. He reminded Cecil of his father’s favours and ‘espetially in that it pleased his honor of his great good nature and proness to protect the wronged, seeinge my innocence redy to be suppressed by the over great authoritye of a powrous personage in that Court, who because he is forth of humane conversation I will not revive, vouchsafed to contenaunce me and the equity of my cause’.Footnote 22 He asked Lord Henry Howard to intercede on his behalf due to their ancient friendship.Footnote 23 In England, Treshman’s brother and Edward, Lord Zouch wrote to Cecil on his behalf, but in vain; word got back to Tresham from Cecil by November 1600 that the time was not yet ripe. Tresham went on to offer to serve against the Spanish in Ireland, but by August 1602 he was writing to Cecil to protest the latter’s refusal to meddle any further any further with his suit.Footnote 24 He was allowed to return to England after the queen’s death, but this was not the end of his troubles. His older brother, Sir Thomas, died on September 11, 1605, and the heir, Sir Thomas’s eldest son Francis, was an actor—if a marginal and equivocal one—in the Gunpowder Plot and died in the Tower in its aftermath on December 23, 1605. He had also been one of Essex’s followers in his rebellion in February 1601, and his father bought his freedom at a great price. It would appear that William Tresham was not involved in the plot—although he was in London in November 1605—but that he was imprisoned for some time in the Fleet afterwards.Footnote 25 This information is contained in a letter from Sir Charles Cornwallis, the English ambassador in Spain, to Salisbury (Cecil) on November 16, 1606, begun before, and finished after, an interview between Cornwallis and William Tresham. In a strange parallel with his earlier behavior, he had seemingly been released from the Fleet after undertaking to take the oath of allegiance required of recusants, but instead had fled to Spain, without leave, because he was not well-resolved in conscience whether he might take the oath. ‘I protest unto your Lordshippe, the consideracion of what he hath ben, his years and lamentable complaints doe much affect mee’, Cornwallis concluded.Footnote 26 Eventually he returned to England and settled in Mile End, Stepney, Co. Middlesex. I have been unable to find anything about his last years, but when he made his will on 31 May 1620 he mentioned various Tresham kinsfolk and reckoned the debts owing to him at 745 pounds and his own debts at nineteen pounds, so he appears not to have died in poverty.Footnote 27
Charles Tynley
Charles Tylney was born, as the family’s fifteenth-century Book of Hours, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, records, on 23 September 1561, the only son of Philip Tylney of Shelley Hall, Suffolk.Footnote 28 Philip Tylney was not a recusant, but he came rarely to church and most of his friends and associates were ‘church papists’ or crypto-Catholics. The family’s only connection with the court was through a distant cousin, Edmund Tylney, who served as Master of the Revels from 1579 to his death in 1610, before that he had been a servant or associate of the Howards of Effingham. In the absence of any other plausible link, Tylney probably owed his introduction to Court to this cousin. While serving as a Gentleman Pensioner Tylney underwent a conversion to militant Catholicism and became involved in the Babington Plot to assassinate the Queen. Indeed, his court position made him a key figure among the six who planned to burst into the Privy Chamber and to surprise and slay the queen. He was tried and convicted of treason, and sentenced to death on 15 September 1586 and executed on 20 or 21 September. He died, ‘verie obstinatelie’ professing his Catholicism, with more than the customary horror at such scences, for ‘after he was turned of the ladder the roppe brake or slipte, for he hanged never a whitte’.Footnote 29 The record of his birth in the family’s book of hours must have been written after his execution, for it concludes ‘Sic transit Gloria mundi. Vivens autem deo’ (so passes the glory of the world, yet he lives with God), which, whatever it signifies, does not seem to be a censure of his actions, and may even, in its bland assurance of his presence with God, betoken approbation.
Lewis Lewknor
Lewis Lewknor was born around 1560, judging by his admission to the Middle Temple from Lyons Inn in October 1579. His family was of conservative religious views, and whether as recusants or church papists were thorns in the side of successive Elizabethan bishops of Chichester. Lewknor went abroad in 1580 and entered the Spanish army in the Netherlands, where he married, and was also maimed in the arm. In 1587 and 1588 he petitioned the Duke of Parma for relief and by 1590 he was receiving thirty crowns a month as opposed to William Tresham’s forty.Footnote 30 However, by 1590 he had decided to seek to return home to England. He achieved this by producing a prospectus for an intended book in which he stated,
I will laye the tyrannous and most detestable intencions of the Spaniardes [before all loyal subjects], which I doe in parte presume to knowe, because I have long lived with them bothe in Courte and Campe, in fielde and garrison, in their Cavallerie & infantrie. I lived in good reputacion among them and had conference with the best, I understande and speake their language, and therefore, especially conferring dayly with them, am not ignorant of their humours and condicions.Footnote 31
The book appeared in 1595, first in a pirated version and then in an authorized version, the latter entitled The Estate of the English Fugitives.Footnote 32 A further, corrected, version was published in 1596. An early, shorter draft survives in manuscript form, annotated by Lord Burghley. In this draft, Lewknor assumed the role of a disillusioned Catholic writing from the Low Countries to an English kinsman, also a Catholic, attempting to dissuade the latter from going abroad to serve the Spaniards. However, in the published versions he renounced his Catholicism as well as his service with the Spaniards.Footnote 33 Perhaps the shape of Lewknor’s original draft was not simply a writer’s conceit, as his youngest brother or half-brother, Samuel, himself went abroad to serve the Spanish in 1591 or 1592.Footnote 34 Over the next few years several works which Lewknor translated from Italian or Spanish were published in England: Olivier de la Marche’s The Resolved Gentleman in 1594, Gasparo Contarini’s The Government and Commonwealth of Venice in 1599—both dedicated to the Countess of Warwick, Anne Russell Dudley, one of the queen’s Privy Chamber ladiesFootnote 35 —and a work of natural philosophy and divinity by Antonio de Torquemada, of which the English title, published in 1600, was The Spanish Mandevile of Miracles. Or the garden of curious flowers. Lewknor appears to have had some sensitivity about his writing style, for towards the end of his dedicatory epistle to the Countess of Warwick in The Resolved Gentleman (a work originally written in 1483, but widely disseminated in the form of a Spanish verse translation made for the Emperor Charles V in 1555) he abruptly turned to address his readers, urging ‘new fangled & fickle conceyted heads, that whensover they reade any thing, never go farther then the rynde, mysliking of every thing, how virtuous matter soever it conteyne, that thundreth not into their cares with a lofty tempest of words’ to forbear to censure his style.Footnote 36
By 1598 Lewknor had begun to attend Court as a gentleman pensioner extraordinary and around September 1599 entered into ordinary service in the band. His language skills contributed to his rapid advance, and by 1600 he was on occasion employed to look after the needs of foreign dignitaries visiting England. After the accession of James I he was knighted, and in May 1603 he was appointed to the new office of Master of the Ceremonies, whose duties were concerned with the reception, ordering and protocol of foreign ambassadors. When Lewknor was granted this office for life in November 1605 he left the band. His later career was marked by increasing pro-Spanish sympathies. For example, by July 1603 he was in receipt of a Spanish pension and a younger son, William, whom he seems to have regarded as his heir, entered the Spanish service in Antwerp in 1616; and then on 22 April 1618 he was secretly received back into the Catholic Church at the Spanish embassy. His last years were marked by his clashes with John Finet, his assistant and eventual successor as Master of the Ceremonies. By the time of his death on March 11, 1627 his only surviving child was his eldest son, Thomas, a Jesuit priest.
The enigma: George Gifford
George Gifford was the eldest of the four sons of John Gifford of Weston, Gloucestershire, who died in 1563, a month after his son’s tenth birthday. The family was a cadet branch of the Giffords of Chillington, Staffordshire, a family of recusants who in Elizabeth’s reign produced the Catholic priest and spy in the pay of the English, Gilbert Gifford. Gilbert provided invaluable information to the Elizabethan regime about English exiles in France and their dealings with the Spanish and the Duke of Guise. His career came to an end only with his arrest in a Paris brothel in 1588 and subsequent death in prison. Our subject, George, a distant cousin of Gilbert Gifford, had six sisters and three younger brothers. His mother Elizabeth Throckmorton, was a recusant, or at least had become one by 1593, when she was committed to his custody.Footnote 37 Two of his younger brothers were living abroad as recusants by 1580. One of them, Richard, was obscurely involved with the conveyance of correspondence between recusants living abroad and their friends and kinsfolk in England, and may also have been a double agent. The other, Dr. William Gifford, a theologian and Benedictine monk, became a client of the Guise family and in 1618, in the absence of a suitable member of the Guises for the position (which they had monopolized for some decades), was appointed archbishop-coadjutor of Rheims and died as archbishop in 1629; in his younger days he had been active in recusant politics. How George entered the queen’s service and obtained his position in the Gentlemen Pensioners in 1578 is unknown, although it is possible that he had already come to the attention of Walsingham or Burghley (or both) as a man willing to keep company with his supposed fellow-Catholics in the religious underworld, inciting them on to desperate deeds, and then betraying them. He moved freely among crypto-Catholic circles at court, and his behavior suggests that he was a loud-mouthed swashbuckling spendthrift. In March 1583 he seems to have arranged for the escape of one Nix, a robber jailed in the White Lion in Croydon awaiting either trial or execution, and to have paid the fees to which the jailer was liable for the escape. In the examinations that followed the suggestion was bruited that the Gifford had had a part in disposing of Nix’s ill-gotten goods.Footnote 38 As an apparent result of the Nix affair, Gifford left England for the low Countries. In May 1583 he met the Duke of Guise with whom he discussed the possibility of assassinating Queen Elizabeth in exchange for a large sum of money.Footnote 39 By midsummer he was back at court on duty in the Band of Pensioners. He was arrested in connection with the Babington Plot, and one of the plotters, John Savage, confessed that Gifford had boasted of having received 800 crowns or pounds, he couldn’t remember which, from the Duke of Guise to kill the queen.Footnote 40 As Savage’s account goes on, though, it appears that he might have been referring to Gifford’s involvement with the Duke of Guise in 1583, since, repeating what he claimed to have heard from Gilbert Gifford, he added that the Duke had later promised to kill George Gifford if he ever came into his hands, as the latter had taken his money and done nothing; and he also claimed that Gilbert Gifford had disclosed that George’s two exile brothers, William and Richard, had urged him to conclude the agreement with Guise. In another document relating to the plot, one Richard Young, after accusing Gifford of arranging robberies, receiving stolen goods, assisting and harboring burglars and attempting to counterfeit foreign money, mentioned as an aside that Ballard (another Babington Plotter) had confessed to delivering to Gifford letters from his brother William in which he had asked George to leave court and come to France. George is reported by Young to have said after reading them, ‘Nay, sith that I have consumed and spent my selfe in the Courte I will take an other course’. That course, it is implied, referred to his involvement with the plotters.Footnote 41
Gilbert who, after his double-dealing was exposed and imprisoned in Guisard Paris, confessed at some point before his death in 1590 to having had contact with George only once. However, far from trying to persuade him on Guise’s behalf to kill the queen his only purpose had been to pass on a message from one of George’s brothers that he should hasten his intended voyage to Constantinople. The Privy Council’s intervention in February 1591 confirms this. A very complex lawsuit arose from Gifford’s having committed himself under penalty in May 1590 to make a mercantile voyage to Constantinople, and then abandoning it, or seeking to abandon it. In any event, at some point between 1586 and 1590 Gifford was confined to the Tower of London long enough to carve his name and arms on the wall of his cell. Not long after his release from the Tower, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor of London to ask him to grant bail to Gifford, whom the mayor had caused to be imprisoned on suspicion of felony.Footnote 42 There then followed a lacuna of some six years during which he kept his position at Court, broken in 1593 by the confirmation of the transfer to his custody by the Privy Council of his aged and sick recusant mother. He was knighted by the Earl of Essex at Cadiz in 1596 along with many others. On August 10, 1597 he was wounded during an ‘affray’ in London in which a boy was killed. This incident, to judge from Gifford’s ensuring letters to Sir Robert Cecil, aroused the queen’s indignation and led to his banishment from Court; however, he kept his position in the Gentlemen Pensioners and continued to receive its stipend.Footnote 43 He may have been serving as a captain of a band of troops in Connaught in 1597 and in January 1599 he was certainly dispatched on Crown business to and from Devon and two months later was summoned to Court.Footnote 44 In the immediate aftermath of Essex’s rebellion, or rather failed coup attempt, in February 1601, when Essex’s devoted servant Captain Thomas Lea made his harebrained attempt to break into the Privy Chamber to force the Queen to sign a warrant for the earl’s release, it emerged that the previous day Lea had named Gifford as one of six ‘men of the resolution’ who, if they made the attempt together, could bring to a successful conclusion what he was to attempt on his own the following day.Footnote 45 This does not indicate Giffard’s complicity in the plot, but it does give added support to his swashbuckling reputation.
He retained his place among the Gentlemen Pensioners in May 1603, when nearly half of the old members retired, but in the last decade of his life he had to struggle against mounting debts. He wrote desperately to Salisbury in March 1611 to seek aid in dealing with his creditors, as some reward to ensure that he not ‘sinke and perish after thirty nyne yeares searvis without having the least gifte or reward to coumfard and hould me up…’.Footnote 46 Two years later, on 10 June 1613, John Chamberlain reported his death in one of his letters to Sir Dudley Carleton: his loss he concluded, ‘had been less both for himself and his posterity if he had gone thirty years ago’.Footnote 47
How did these men enter the Gentlemen Pensioners? While the monarch in theory and in law appointed members of the Band, it was clear after the Restoration in 1660, and particularly as a result of disputes between its successive captains and various members of the corps from the late 1660s to the early 1680s, that the Captain of the Band had the sole right to nominate suitable individuals for membership. By this late date such prospective members had to agree to pay to the Captain on their appointment a pre-arranged fee; and it rested with the Captain to approve a Gentleman Pensioner’s desire to vacate his position in favor of an aspiring member, and to take his ‘cut’ from what was effectively the purchase price.Footnote 48 The few fragments of evidence that survive from Elizabeth’s reign make it clear that the Captain nominated members to the queen. Herbert Croft, for example, was to complain in 1596 that the queen on several occasions had refused to have him in the corps after Lord Hunsdon, the Captain, had nominated him.Footnote 49 But while there are a number of episodes that suggest a traffic in these office throughout Elizabeth’s reign, there is no hard evidence. None of the men discussed in this article seem to have had any personal links to Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, Captain from Mary’s reign until his death in June 1583, or to Henry, Lord Hunsdon, Captain from June 1583 until his death in July 1596, or to George, Lord Hunsdon, Captain from November 1596 to May 1603. So it would seem in these cases that the Captains must have been acting to gratify other courtiers or magnates. Of these five cases, it may well be that the Catholic sympathies of Powell and Tylney were unknown or discounted, while Lewknor had renounced his faith, and written against it. William Tresham’s is a harder case, but is appears that Sir Thomas Tresham did not move to total recusancy until 1579 or 1580. As late as 1578 he was having his children baptized in the parish church that he rarely attended, but he ceased to do so after that year.Footnote 50 It is, therefore, possible that William might have been presented as a conformist. Gifford remains an enigma, but he may have owed his position to his known willingness to act in clandestine affairs beyond the boundaries of the law and his ability to make himself more attractive to his supposed fellow-consiprators and their paymasters as a man with ‘connections’ and access to the inner reaches of the court. In the same way, Tilney was the key man in making it appear plausible that those involved in the Babington Conspiracy might be able to kill the queen. Their careers all bear witness to the considerable fluidity of religious identity which, for the elite at least, gradually narrowed over the course of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
