God’s Traitors

The year is 1606. A woman wakes in a prison cell. She has been on the run, changing her lodging every few days but the authorities have tracked her down and taken her to the Tower of London. She is placed in solitary confinement and interrogated for her role in the Gunpowder Plot. The woman is Anne Vaux - one of several ardent, extraordinary, brave and, at times, utterly exasperating members of the Vaux family. In this history, Jessie Childs explores the Catholic predicament in Elizabethan England through the eyes of a Catholic aristocratic family: the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.