Laurence Vaux

Laurence Vaux (Vose) (1519–1585) was an English canon regular. He is a Catholic martyr.

Vaux was born in Blackrod, Lancashire. Educated at Manchester and the University of Oxford, he was ordained in 1542, and took the degree of B. D. at Oxford in 1556. He was first a fellow, and then, 1558, warden of Manchester College, a parish church which had been endowed as a collegiate by Thomas, 5th Baron la Warr, in 1421, and re-established by Mary I of England, in 1557.

In 1559 Elizabeth I's ecclesiastical commissioners held a visitation in Manchester College, and summoned the warden and fellows before them. However, knowing what to expect, Vaux had removed himself and the college deeds and church plate (precious vessels used in worship) to a place of safe hiding. He was now a marked man, and after a time he took refuge in Louvain, 1561. Here he seems to have kept a school for the children of the English exiles, then comparatively numerous, for whom in fact he compiled a catechism.

Meanwhile, in England there was considerable uncertainty among the faithful as to how far it was lawful to conform outwardly with the State religion. Pius V commissioned two of the exiles at Louvain, Doctors Sanders and Harding, to publish his decision, informing the Catholics that to frequent the Established services was a mortal sin. Vaux was in Rome in 1566; in a private audience the pope instructed him more fully as to the scope of his decision, and finally the task of making known the papal sentence in England was delegated to him. He returned therefore and conducted a vigorous and successful campaign against the schismatical practice, especially in his native Lancashire. This activity drew down the anger of the Government on his head, and in February 1568, a queen's writ was issued for his arrest; this document mentions also Cardinal Allen, though he was not in the country at the time. Vaux again escaped and returned to Louvain.

Here, now at the age of fifty-four, he sought and obtained admission among the canons regular in the Priory of St. Martin's. He was clothed in the habit on St. Lawrence's Day, 10 August 1572, and made his profession the following May. Before taking the vows he drew up a legal document to provide for the safe custody of the deeds and valuables which he had saved from the commissioners at Manchester, "until such time as the college should be restored to the Catholic Faith, or until Catholics should live in it". Shortly after his profession he was appointed sub-prior; and when the prior resigned in 1577, to pass over to the Carthusians, there was a strong movement to elect Vaux in his stead. Some, however, apparently feared that he would use his position to introduce a large number of his fellow-countrymen with a view to training them for the English Mission; a marginal note in the "Priory Chronicle" records, "Caenobium nostrum in seminarium pene erectum Anglorum."

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