Fruit of Adversity

Extract

Last year the 24th of August fell on a Sunday. A plaintive convert coming away from High Mass that morning was heard to wonder whether the Church commemorated any saint on November 5th. He was told that in the English Calendar the day, occurring in the octave of All Saints, is appointed for the honouring of such relics as any parish church might possess: elsewhere it is sometimes observed as the Feast of the seventh-century Abbess of Chelles and sometimes as that of St Zachary. These facts were of course not what the enquirer really sought. His had been an oblique request for information about the Catholic retrospect on Gunpowder Plot. A full, probably an exhaustive answer to this demand has been given by Father Anstruther in his monograph The Voux of Harrowden.

Beginning with the fifteenth-century Northamptonshire lawyers, father and six sons who all married money, Father Anstruther follows the history of the Vaux family and their collaterals the Treshams, through prosperity to affluence; through knighthood to baronage; through recusancy to ruin; through martyrdom to 1829 and the re-establishment of their title in 1835.

That the family survived the Armageddon of the Popish plot is, says Father Anstruther, partly due to the fact that in Northamptonshire there remained scarcely any Catholics to persecute.