and, although he married her after Lord Banbury’s death, she never had another child. Worse still, he left Harrowden and the other family estates to his illegitimate children, instead of to his brother, who succeeded him in the title, although his wife, on her side, claimed for her son that, as he was born during her first husband’s lifetime, he had a legal right to the title of Banbury. Accordingly, this son changed his surname to Knollys, and once actually sat, as Lord Banbury, in the House of Lords. As is well known, his descendants went on claiming and disputing the title until the year 1813, when their right to it was finally disallowed.
But what specially concerns my story is that Sir Everard Digby was endeavouring to bring about a marriage for this (then) very young Lord Vaux, with the “Lord Chamberlain his daughter,”[113] as Father Gerard writes; and, in a footnote, is added “Earl of Suffolk. Erased in Orig.”If this footnote is right, Sir Everard was probably trying to make a match for the youth with the very girl whom he eventually married, as Lady Banbury had been Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of Lord Suffolk. Suffolk was Lord Chamberlain,[114] and curiously enough (when we consider that he seems to have had negotiations with Sir Everard Digby with respect to a match between his daughter and Lord Vaux), in his capacity of Lord Chamberlain, he suspected and led to the discovery of the gunpowder laid in the cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament.[115]
Sir Everard visited a good deal at the house of Lord Vaux’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux. This was a house in Buckinghamshire at Stoke Poges, that had been built by Sir Christopher Hatton,[116] the Lord Chancellor, who had died childless. It was let for a term of years to Mrs. Vaux, and she not only established Father Gerard in it as her chaplain, but had hiding-places and other arrangements made, so that he could receive priests and Catholic laymen, as he might think well, for the good of the cause of religion. Here Sir Everard was probably thrown a good deal with Catesby and Tresham, as they were both related to his young host. Lord Vaux’s two aunts, Miss Anne Vaux and Eleanor, the wife of Edward Brooksby, lived with him and his mother, and Miss Anne was one of those who had serious misgivings as to the mysterious conduct of her cousin, Robert Catesby.[117] “Seeing at Winter’s and Grant’s”—Grant was a popular Warwickshire squire, a Catholic, and celebrated for his undaunted courage—“their fine horses in the stable, she told Mr. Garnet that she feared these wild heads had something in hand, and prayed him to talk to Mr. Catesby and to hinder anything that possibly he might, for if they should attempt any foolish thing, it would redound to his discredit. Whereupon he said he would talk to Mr. Catesby.”
Another account of what was probably the same interview was given by Father Garnet himself, in his examination of March 12th, 1605.
[118]“He sayth that Mrs. Vaux came to him, eyther to Harrowden or to Sir Everard Digby’s at Gothurst, and tould this examt. that she feared that some trouble or disorder was towards [them], that some of the gentlewomen had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst[119] was past in the beginning of the Parliament. And this examt. asking her who tould her so, she said that she durst not tell who tould her so: she was [choked] with sorrow.”
An attempt was made, later, to represent the name of Vaux to be the same as that of Fawkes:—[120] “Mrs. Anne Vaux, or Fawkes, probably a relative of the conspirator;”for which there seems to be no foundation, and certainly there is none for the base imputation, in the same paragraph, of immorality between Anne Vaux and Father Garnet. Even the Protestant historian, Jardine, repudiates this calumny at considerable length.[121]
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