Among Sir Everard's younger friends was Lord Vaux of Harrowden, a cousin
of Catesby's. One reason of the intimacy is thus described by Father
Gerard.[109] "Sir Everard had many serious occasions to come to my Lord
Vaux's; and then in particular, as I have learned since, being come from
his [Digby's] ancient house and chief living, which lay in Rutlandshire,
from whence he could not go unto the house where his wife and family lay
[Gothurst], but he must pass the door of Lord Vaux, his house, which
also made him there an ordinary guest." To harbour priests, and to
defend the Catholic cause was no new thing in the family of Vaux, for,
some twenty or thirty years earlier, Lord Vaux's grandfather had been
imprisoned and fined for sheltering Father Campian in his house.[110]
His grandmother had been a daughter of John Tresham of Rushton, and of
his cousin, Francis Tresham, we shall hear something presently. His
mother and his aunts, Anne and Elizabeth, were most pious Catholics, but
the religious atmosphere in which he was brought up does not seem to
have led him to perfection; for, although as a young man he suffered
imprisonment for his faith,[111] he afterwards had two sons, who bore
the name of Vaux, by Lady Banbury during her husband's lifetime;[112]
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.
[109] _Narrative of the G. P._, p. 138.
[110] _Records S.J._, Series i. p. 329.
[111] _Life of Father Gerard_, p. clxxxv.
[112] _Burke's Peerage_, 1872.
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]
[113] _Narrative of the G. P._, p. 137.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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