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The St. Nicholas Series
Edited by the Rev. Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B.
BLESSED EDMUND CAMPION
“Go seek thy peace in war:
Who falls for love of God, shall rise a star!”
BEN JONSON
[Illustration]
Nihil Obstat.
D. BEDA CAMM
_Censor Deputatus_
Imprimatur:
[Illustration] GULIELMUS _Episcopus Arindelensis
Vicarius Generalis_
WESTMONASTERII,
_die 14 Januarii, 1908._
[Illustration: Campion reading an Address of Welcome to Queen Mary.
_p. 3._]
BLESSED EDMUND CAMPION
by
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
[Illustration]
R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd.
Paternoster Row, London
And at Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow
1914 _All rights reserved_
_Campiani Fratribus
e Provincia Angliæ Societatis Jesu Tribus
opusculum suum
grato affectu
Scriptor_
PREFATORY NOTE
THIS little book leans much, as every modern work on the subject
must do, upon Mr. Richard Simpson’s monograph: _Edmund Campion,
Jesuit Protomartyr of England_. In many points supplementing or
contradicting that splendid though biased narrative, the present
writer has gratefully taken advantage of the researches of the Rev.
John Hungerford Pollen, S.J. It may also be useful to state that the
contemporary citations, when not otherwise specified, are from two
invaluable witnesses, Parsons and Allen. The translated passages have
been compared with the originals, and sometimes newly rendered.
L. I. G.
_St. Ives, Cornwall: Epiphany, 1908._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. YOUTH: LONDON, OXFORD: 1540-1566 1
II. THE HOUR OF UNREST: OXFORD, DUBLIN: 1566-1570 14
III. STEPS FORWARD: IRELAND: 1571 27
IV. CHEYNEY AGAIN: DOUAY: 1571 40
V. THE CALL TO COME UP HIGHER: DOUAY, PRAGUE: 1571-1573 53
VI. THE WISHED-FOR DAWN: BOHEMIA: 1573-1579 64
VII. A LONG MARCH: ROME, GENEVA, RHEIMS: 1580 75
VIII. INHOSPITABLE HOME: 1580 88
IX. SKIRMISHING: THE ENGLISH COUNTIES: 1580 100
X. MANY LABOURS: AND A BOOK: 1580 112
XI. AT LYFORD GRANGE, AND AFTER: 1581 129
XII. THE THICK OF THE FRAY: 1581 141
XIII. VICTORY: DECEMBER 1, 1581 166
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CAMPION READING AN ADDRESS OF WELCOME TO QUEEN MARY _Frontispiece_
CAMPION IN HIS PROCTOR’S ROBES. GATEWAY OF ST. JOHN’S
COLLEGE, OXFORD, IN BACKGROUND _to face p._ 16
‘P[ATER] EDMUNDUS CAMPIANUS, MARTYR’ ” 80
‘WE HAVE NOT BROKEN THROUGH HERE!’ ” 128
CAMPION BEFORE QUEEN ELIZABETH ” 144
‘NOT GUILTY!’ ” 160
BLESSED
EDMUND CAMPION
I
YOUTH: LONDON, OXFORD: 1540-1566
THE Campion family seem to have been both gentlefolk and yeomen, and
to have been widely scattered over the land: in Northamptonshire,
Warwickshire, Essex, Sussex, and Devon. Nothing is definitely known,
at present, as to which branch of the Campion family the Blessed
Edmund belonged. Unlike many of the martyrs of Tudor and Stuart times,
he was what is called a “born” Catholic: in more accurate phrase, a
born heathen, as we all are! but baptized in his parents’ religion
soon after his birth in London, on the Feast of St. Paul the Apostle,
January 25, in the year 1540, New Style. Edmund had two brothers, and
a sister, none of whom played any great part in his after life. By the
time he entered the Society of Jesus his father and mother were both
dead: his written expression is that he had “hopes” they died in full
communion with the Church; but evidently he did not know, being abroad,
how it had fared with them in those terribly stormy days for Christian
souls.
Edmund Campion, senior, was a book-seller, evidently in good standing,
but not well to do. Some rich London guildsmen (probably of the
Grocers’ Company, for it was they who maintained him later), befriended
the promising little boy at just the right moment, when his father
was reluctantly going to apprentice him to a trade; and he was sent,
at their joint expense, to a good Grammar School. Afterwards, under
the same patrons, he entered Christ Hospital, then lately set up in
Newgate Street (out of confiscated Franciscan funds and the generosity
of Londoners), as the “foundation” of the sixteen-year-old king, Edward
VI. Here the small Edmund, full of life and laughter, banded and
belted, ran about in now extinct yellow petticoats, and one of the
earliest pairs of those historic yellow stockings. He was thirteen, and
quite famous already in the school-boy world of London for his learning
and his attractive presence and speech, when Queen Mary Tudor, who had
just succeeded to the English throne, entered her city in state. Out of
many hundred eligible youngsters it was he who was chosen to stand up
before her on a street platform, under the shadow of the old St. Paul’s
Cathedral, and shrilly welcome her in the Latin tongue. The Queen sat
on a white horse, robed in gold-embroidered dark velvet, crimson or
purplish, with the great sword carried before her by the boyish Earl of
Surrey, with eight thousand mounted lords and gentlemen on either side,
all the glittering ambassadors, and a bevy of beautifully apparelled
ladies. On certain figures in that splendid and noisy pageant the child
might have looked with pensive eyes, had he been able to forecast his
own future; as it was, he cannot have failed to observe the Queen’s
younger sister, the thin, watchful, spirited girl who was known as the
Lady Elizabeth. Another was there, of high office, though not of high
descent, who was all goodness, piety and generosity, and may well have
been drawn to notice Edmund Campion for the first time on that sunshiny
afternoon in August, 1553. This was Sir Thomas White, then Lord Mayor
of London, a staunch Catholic. He was an unlearned man and childless,
who became, later, co-founder of the Merchant Taylors’ School, and
enricher of many towns. By 1555 he had opened his College of St. John
Baptist, once a Cistercian house, at Oxford. The Grocers’ Company at
once approached him to admit their Blue-coat ward as a scholar; this
he did, and conceived, almost as soon, a marked attachment to him;
and two years later (when Edmund was not yet eighteen!) he made him a
Senior Fellow. Campion’s other early friends at the University were his
first tutor, John Bavand, and Gregory Martin, a Foundation Scholar like
himself. These two showed towards him a lifelong devotion.
Mary’s troubled reign had covered the five most susceptible years of
his youth, and restored to the country, despite its legal excesses,
a definitely Catholic tone. Things were soon to change. War by
statute against the Mass was first declared in 1559. Edmund Campion
had left Oxford by the time that St. John’s, deprived of President
after President by the Royal Commissioners, was swept clean of all
the dons who favoured, or in any degree tolerated, the jurisdiction
of that Apostolic See which safeguarded the doctrine and honour of
the Blessed Eucharist. But while he lived in his University world,
he lived untouched. He was not looked upon as a Catholic. Nor was
he such, if his heart could be fully judged by his outward actions.
Buried in literature, philosophy, and pleasant tutorial work, he had
become, in his cultured indifference, what St. Jerome’s accusing vision
called a “Ciceronian,” and not a Christian: a skin-deep Ciceronian,
however. There is only a bare possibility that, on proceeding M.A. in
1564, he escaped taking the wretched Oath of Supremacy, and thereby
acknowledging the Queen as Head in spirituals as well as temporals
within her realm of England. He stretched his conscience, as many were
doing, thinking to help along the unity of faith, thereby defeating
that unity for good and all. An almost unprecedented vogue at Oxford
had served to blind him: he was so happy, so busy, so needed, so much
at home there. Friends encouraged him; undergraduates flocked about
him, and imitated his very gait and tone as they never have imitated
any one else except Newman.
Campion was a famous Latin scholar; and he was a good Grecian and a
good Hebraist: Greek and Hebrew were studies newly revived just before
he was born. He spoke as well as he wrote. The flamboyant art of
oratory, now almost extinct in our more quiet-coloured century, was
then much studied and admired; and Campion was famous for debates and
addresses and encomiums. When only twenty, he had been called upon to
preach, though a layman, at the re-burial of poor Amy Robsart, Lord
Dudley’s young wife, in the University church of St. Mary-the-Virgin;
and this he did with great grace and animation, and with no small
display of tact, for rumours of a murder with a motive had already got
abroad. Such prominence may have come to Campion through Sir Thomas
White’s request: Sir Thomas had his associations with Cumnor. Four
years later, Edmund Campion was able to put sincere love and sincere
grief into a funeral oration (this time a Latin, not an English one)
for the good and dear Founder himself, whose body was solemnly interred
in the Chapel of his College.
In September, 1566, Queen Elizabeth made the first and happier of her
two visits to Oxford. In the Queen’s train was Dudley; also a quieter,
plainer, less noticed man, but one out of all comparison with him
for astute power: this was Sir William Cecil, the Prime Minister,
afterwards known far and wide as Lord Burghley. There were farces and
tragedies for the Queen at Oxford, there were musical performances,
theological disputations, and other academic sports. In front of the
vast assemblage stood forth Master Campion of St. John’s, alone in his
ruff, hood and gown. As representative of the University, he welcomed
smiling royalty, and Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the
University, and royalty’s magnificent favourite. Campion shone, as
well, in the absurd discussions in natural science which followed.
The Queen and Dudley marked him, as they could not fail to do; for
nothing could exceed the courtliness with which he had performed
his task. The Chancellor sent for him in private, and expressed the
Queen’s good-will, whereby Campion might bid, through him, for whatever
preferment he chose. But Campion, always truly modest and full of
ironic humour as well, would ask of his patron nothing, he said, but
his continued regard. The young bookman had a real liking for the
vicious worldling, liked by several sensitively good men, then and
since. Sir William Cecil also took instinctive interest in Campion and
his eager dialectics. Altogether, there was no more popular man in
Oxford or elsewhere. Campion was on the hilltop of professional and
personal success.
In all this beautiful fountain-play of “the things which are seen,” he
was running the very gravest risk of spiritual ruin. Perhaps he could
not know, in his leaf-hung hermitage, what a tremendous muster of souls
was going on, now that the ancient Church and a new statecraft were to
fight it out in England. Queen Elizabeth’s quarrel with the Pope was
hardly more doctrinal than her royal father’s had been: she, too, would
have been quite content to live all her days as a Catholic, provided
that Catholicism would prove her slave. The battle was not between two
known religions. On one side was conservative England with a belief;
on the other the strong spirit of secularism, plus a few fanatics
formed not by the English, but the Continental Reformation. Religion in
itself troubled the Court party as little as anything could possibly
do. It was because the spirit of Catholicism seemed to them to threaten
their particular kind of national pride, and to interfere with their
particular kind of worldly prosperity, that Cromwell in one great Tudor
reign, Burghley in the other, tried to put it down. They wished to
get good citizenship acknowledged not as an ideal, but as the supreme
ideal, and they cared not how much else was shovelled out of the way.
Their only use for religion was to bring it well under the authority of
the law and the supremacy of the Crown. They had no objection to high
respectability, but a most violent objection to the supernatural life,
because that gives to those who practise it a dangerous independence.
Elizabeth wanted unity and peace. Her subjects were to be forced by
statute to pray less and to pray all alike; and to be thereby trained,
somehow, to put Sacraments and Saints and the Papacy out of their
heads. English humankind were to forsake their happy wild life, as it
were, in the Church Universal, and all become, as if by magic, one
large tame pet lying in a ribboned collar on the royal hearth. This is
a vision which has appealed to many another head of a commonwealth as
desirable, though unaccountably difficult! Some worthy persons have
brought themselves to believe that nothing to speak of happened at
the Reformation. But at the time, everybody understood in the clearest
fashion that an old moral system which would not come to terms had been
dropped, and a more satisfactory one created. It was a working theory
of that age, all over Europe, that a governor had the right to fix the
belief of subjects. What was wanted in England was made to order, out
of the rags of ruined doctrine and discipline. Foreign Protestants
raged over its externals, as having too much of the old thing, but
the bullying State, riding roughshod over Convocation and the laity,
was perfectly at ease, knowing that there was more than enough of the
new thing to colour the whole, and to colour it once and for ever.
There was no affection for “continuity” in those days except among
the “Romans.” The attitude of their persecutors was that of men in a
fury that any Englishman should dare to connect himself either with
the world at large, or with his country’s own disclaimed yesterday.
The State Trials, for instance, bear this out in a score of places.
Many an official answer resembles the one made to that interesting
character Blessed Ralph Sherwin, when he said truly that his coming
back to his own land was to persuade the people to Catholic Unity. “You
well know,” so the Counsel reproved him in Westminster Hall, “that it
was not lawful for you to persuade the Queen’s subjects to any other
religion than by her Highness’s instructions is already professed.”
The “received religion,” or, as it was quite as often called, the
“Queen’s religion,” was simply the new idea of nationalism torn away
from relationship to the arch-idea of nations, which is the law of
God. It was, in practice, no adoring angel at the Altar, but a capable
parish beadle at the door. Now this was never the Catholic conception
of what religion has been, or is meant to be. Happily, many thoroughly
patriotic Englishmen felt that no least jot of Christian revelation,
however much it stood in the way of Cæsar, could, with their consent,
be put by; and to keep it free they were willing to make themselves
very disagreeable indeed to their revered sovereign, and to their more
easy-going countrymen. With that rude definiteness which is ever
their chief family trait, the better Catholics threw their full force
against the Oaths of Supremacy and Acts of Uniformity, as soon as they
understood their meaning. The centuries passed since then prove that
they succeeded in holding asunder what the Queen would join together.
Was it unreasonable that she punished the men who tried to spoil her
dream? And almost the chief of these men Edmund Campion was destined
to be, though years were to pass before he lent his whole heart to the
work God willed him to do.
II
THE HOUR OF UNREST: OXFORD, DUBLIN: 1566-1570
THOUSANDS who were comfortably placed in life, and conscientious, too,
had a great deal to suffer until things were made plain. Edmund Campion
began to fret, and argue, and ponder, and pray for light in secret,
for several years going about “that most ingeniose Place” (as a later
lover called Oxford) with heavy thoughts. Oxford itself, despite the
Ecclesiastical Commission fixed there to worry it, was more Catholic
in spirit than any other city in England. Nevertheless Campion’s
temptation to conform was very great. We must remember that many of his
first impressions and memories were Anglican. He was brought up during
his early school life on the new Liturgy, which came into operation
before his tenth year. He knew now, in manhood, that to change about,
and forsake the State religion for the only Church which is as exacting
as her Master, would be to see the ruin of his happy career. His strong
point, in the beginning, was not what is called brute courage. His was
the nervous, Hamlet-like temper, natural to students and recluses,
which, by a fatal error, puts endless thinking into what needs only to
be done.
[Illustration: Bld. Edmund Campion in Proctor’s robes.
(Gateway of St. John’s College, Oxford, in background)]
During these years Campion read a great deal of theology, as in his
position he was bound to do, according to University rules. Where
everything else except his inmost heart inclined him to heresy,
the Fathers drove him back upon the fulness of revealed truth. The
day which he spent with St. Augustine, or St. Jerome, or St. John
Chrysostom, was a day on which (to catch up the phrase of his friend
and biographer, Fr. Robert Parsons, himself a Balliol man) he was ready
“to pull out this thorn of conscience.” But on the morrow returned the
old spirit of obstinacy and delay. Meanwhile the Anglican influence
was gaining for Campion’s dearest friend of many, Richard Cheyney,
the Lord Bishop of Gloucester, was drawing him on towards his own
ideals, which were “Catholic-minded,” if not Catholic. The learned,
gentle and lovable Cheyney withstood with zest the risen Puritan party,
and in his hold on sound doctrine stood apart from all his colleagues
on the Episcopal Bench. He had been brought up as a Catholic, and
ordained according to the full Catholic ritual, in 1534. The reminder
is sometimes needed that Protestants did not shoot up full-grown,
that all original Protestantism was made up of human material once
Catholic. From first to last, however, Cheyney could not be forced to
coerce the Church which he had abandoned. In this he stood not, as has
been stated, quite alone among the Elizabethan Bishops, for Downham of
Chester and Ghest of Rochester shared his honourable abstinence, though
in less degree. The moment Cheyney was out of the way, the Catholics on
his diocesan ground, hitherto safe, were mercilessly harried. He had
been made a Bishop against his will, displacing the true occupant
of the See, when his friend Edmund Campion was two-and-twenty. In most
matters Cheyney followed Luther; Cranmer’s more heretical doctrines,
which prevailed on all sides in England, he thoroughly hated. He
longed always for a reconciliation which was never to be, and never
can be. He longed to see the Catholics (against the well-thought-out
and oft-repeated prohibition of their leaders, between 1562 and 1606)
do a little evil to procure a great good: namely, smooth matters
over, escape their terribly severe penalties, and in the end become
able to leaven the lump of English error, by the mere preliminary
of attendance at the service of Common Prayer according to law, in
their own old parish churches. The Book of Common Prayer, as he would
remind them, was expressly designed to suit persons of various and
even contradictory religious views: Catholic; not-so-very Catholic;
ex-Catholic; non-Catholic; anti-Catholic! Campion often rode over
the hills to Gloucester to sit by the episcopal hearth-fire, book on
knee, and hear such theories as this, and sympathize with the lonely
old man who “saw visions,” and had little else in his vexed life to
content him. His strong double desire was to save by his own effort for
the Church of England separated from Rome, that great body of ancient
belief and practice sure otherwise to be lost in the flood of invited
Calvinism; and to secure Edmund Campion himself as his intellectual
coadjutor and successor, as one of high gifts likely to “drink in
his thoughts and become his heir.” The two were together, not only
in matters of dogma, but in all minor points. Cheyney shared with
Campion dislike of politics, telling the Council that in such matters
he was “a man of small experience and little observation.” He kept
his old priestly ideals, and would never marry. Campion, too, chose
to be a celibate. If he gave his heart to either Church, he saw even
then that it must be an undivided heart. To him, with his underlying
tenderness towards the ancient faith, and his dream of peacemaking
through compromise, which is so English, and just in these matters so
mistaken, the mission thus opened out appealed. Half reluctantly, yet
not realizing the disloyalty of his act (as he himself tells us), he
allowed himself to receive from Cheyney’s hands Deacon’s orders in the
Church of England.
His interior struggle, from this day forth, went from bad to worse.
With the unaffected simplicity of his character, he talked over his
difficulties not only with Cheyney, but with any one at Oxford who
seemed able to help him. As a consequence, the Grocers’ Company, whose
exhibition he still held, heard rumours, grew uneasy, and began to
suspect him, ending in 1568 by inviting Campion up to London to save
his credit by preaching at Paul’s Cross, and publicly “favouring,”
as they expressed it, “the religion now authorized.” He begged for
time, and that being granted, for more time. He attended a court of
the Company in order to plead engagements, and to say that he was
not his own man, while deep in academic duties and at the service of
undergraduates: “divers worshipful men’s children,” he calls them. He
was Public Orator and Proctor, in fact, by now, as well as Fellow
and Tutor of his College. (He never resided long enough to take his
Doctor’s degree.) He exacted from the Company a written statement
of the dogmas he was expected to avow; and finding it impossible to
subscribe to the hot heterodoxy thus laid down, he cut his first tether
by resigning his exhibition.
His most brilliant colleague at St. John’s, Gregory Martin, who had
protested in vain against Campion’s diaconate (which was to cause the
recipient extreme remorse for a long time), had become a convert to
Catholicism, and sacrificed all his secular prospects. He wrote to his
dear friend to warn him against ambition, and to urge on him escape
from moral bondage. “Come!” the fervent letter cried; “if we two can
but live together, we can live on nothing. If this be too little, I
have money; and if this also fails, one thing is left: ‘they that
sow in tears shall reap in joy!’” Such earnest words, though seeming
wasted, had their share in shaking Edmund Campion’s rest.
With the summer term of 1570 his Proctorate expired. He spent the
Long Vacation in tutoring the eight-years-old Harry Vaux, eldest son
of Lord Vaux of Harrowden, who afterwards beautifully redeemed his
childish promise. The end of Michaelmas term found Campion face to
face for the last time with that life which he had so loved, and in
which, with his scientific enthusiasm for letters, he had been such a
wonderful inspiration to young men. There was no conscious motive in
his heart deeper than a thirst for such freedom as had become difficult
in a Puritanizing University, when he cut himself loose, slipped out of
it for good, and took ship for Ireland.
In the new move he had the approbation of Leicester, and the
companionship of a much-attached Oxford disciple, Richard Stanihurst,
who is remembered by posterity only for his grotesque translation of
Virgil. Campion may well have left home with the understanding that
he should have a clear educational field in Dublin, but he arrived
a little too late. The outlook had been very bright. Some good men
then in power were eager for the revival of the extinct University of
Dublin, an ancient Papal foundation, but ruined, as all the great
Schools were (most of them permanently, some only temporarily), by the
religious changes. The chief supporters of the plan were enthusiastic,
far-sighted, and most liberally inclined towards Catholics. Fear and
prejudice therefore stepped in, in the person of Elizabeth’s Irish
Bishops. The Lord Chancellor, Dr. Weston, wrote privately to the
Queen, deploring the popularity of the scheme, and begging her to
take the unborn foundation “into her merciful, motherly care.” She
followed that advice. In token thereof, in due season arose Trinity
College, Dublin, as a complete checkmate to the earlier project, quite
safe for evermore from Papist blight. Thus was Campion cheated of a
continuance of his natural vocation, in serving upon the staff of the
new University. Two of his friends who had most concern in it were
James Stanihurst, father of Richard, and Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord
Deputy of Ireland, who had proffered it lands and money. Leicester
would have provided Campion with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry,
his own brother-in-law. The latter’s young son, Philip, was at this
time a student in Oxford, where his governor, Thomas Thornton of Christ
Church, afterwards Vice-Chancellor, had been constantly in Campion’s
society. Sir Henry Sidney always bore himself most kindly towards
Campion. The latter lived, a more than welcome guest, under the roof
of James Stanihurst, then Recorder of Dublin, and Speaker of the local
House of Commons. Stanihurst was the head of an Anglo-Irish family
not openly Catholic since Queen Mary’s reign. Indeed, in his public
capacity, he had often sided against Catholicism, although he was as
friendly as Sidney himself to those who professed it. In the midst of
this temporizing household, Campion, himself a temporizer, came during
the winter to be doubted by certain bigots outside. Very possibly he
was too free-spoken. Campion “came to Ireland believing in practically
all Catholic dogmas, even in the Eucharist, and in the authority of
the Council of Trent.” The impression may have got abroad that his
then unknown variety of Anglicanism differed little from the dangerous
creed of times past, lately discovered to be the proper business of
the police! Whatever the reason, Campion began to be a marked man. Sir
Henry Sidney told Stanihurst with heat, that so long as he was Governor
he would see to it that “no busy knave of them all should trouble him,”
on Campion’s account. Under this unpleasant circumstance of espial,
added to the disappointment he had just undergone, the sensitive exile
presently fell ill, and got a most affectionate nursing from the
Stanihursts, till his strength revived. He started as soon to write
a treatise on a subject of which his mind, up to now, had been full:
the character and aim of the ideal youth at the Universities. This
_De Juvene Academico_ reminds us of a theme by another great Oxonian
who was in Dublin three hundred years later, and had also to face the
heartbreaking failure of an Irish University dreamed of, and not to be.
Campion afterwards recast his fine little work, and under its second
form it is to be found among the few _Opuscula_ published after his
death. His comely face and gracious manner were quickly taken into
favour in his Dublin circle. While he was gaining a contrary repute on
hearsay, the few who had access to him nicknamed him “the Angel.”
Meanwhile, hating idleness, and bent on redeeming what may have looked
like a foolish absence from Oxford, Campion planned the composition
of a brief _History of Ireland_. Friends helped him in “inquiring
out antiquities of the land.” He was what we should call a thorough
“researcher,” a bird by no means common in those early days. He went
here and there among musty manuscript records of the city, and from
library to library in the country, happily gathering in his materials
for work. He had been some three months in Ireland when on a March
midnight there came a sudden warning from the faithful Lord Deputy,
who was on the point of leaving for England. Campion learned thereby
that Weston the Chancellor had pursuivants ready to arrest him the next
morning! The Stanihursts acted at once, and hurried their friend into
the care of Sir Christopher Barnewall and Dame Marion Sherry, his
wife, of Turvey House, in the parish of Donabate, eight miles away.
There, breathless with the sudden flight through the dark, the three
devoted escorts left him in safety.
III
STEPS FORWARD: IRELAND: 1571
THE Barnewalls were in feeling both more Catholic and more Irish than
the Stanihursts, and they showed Edmund Campion a no less tender
hospitality. The great house was in a beautiful and remote situation.
Running in and out of it was a horde of laughing children, including
the eleven-year-old Janet who was to become Richard Stanihurst’s
early-dying wife. Campion loved the hearty Knight, their father, and
their lady mother, whom he calls “in very sooth, a most gentle and
godly woman.” Though he mingled freely with the life of the family,
he was considerately given the great garret to write in and hide in.
Here he began his little _History_. First of all, though, he sent back
a grateful missive in Latin to the men who had been so providently
kind to him. To the Recorder, he says: “Was I not fortunate in such
friendship and patronage as yours? How good, how generous it was of
you to take in an unknown stranger, and to keep him all these months
on the fat of the land! You looked after my health as carefully as
after Richard’s, the son worthy of your love. You supplied me, too,
with books, and made the best possible provision for my time of study:
may I perish, if ever in this world, outside my room in Oxford, I had
sweeter dealings with the Muses!... Up to this, I have had to thank
you for conveniences; but now I must thank you for my rescue, and my
very breath,—yes, breath is just the word! for they who succumb to
these persecutors are wont to be thrust into dismal dungeons, where
they inhale filthy fogs, and are cut off from wholesome air. But now,
through you and your children’s kindness, I shall live, please God
... most happily.” The stress laid, in this affectionate letter, upon
the writer’s appreciation of personal care, of the privacy dear to
students, of good diet and pure air, tells its own tale of physical
delicacy. Campion was slight in build, and like many another tireless
and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong. He
ends by asking that his St. Bernard may be sent on to him, and encloses
a lively page for his friend Richard, recalling the service rendered in
snatching him from danger, and conveying him to Turvey House. “Is it
not hard,” Campion breaks out, “that beholden to you as I am, I have
no way of showing it?... Meanwhile, if these buried relics have any
flavour of the old Campion, their flavour is for you ... you and your
brother Walter ... you, up that whole night through, and he, summoned
to us from his wife’s side. Seriously, I owe you much. I have nothing
to write about unless you have time and inclination for a laugh. Have
you? Then hold your breath, and listen! The day after I came here, as
I sat down to work, into the bedroom burst a poor old soul, coming on
what business I wot not. She knew nothing of me, so seeing me suddenly
at her left, took me for a ghost! Her hair rose on end; she went dead
white; she stared aghast; her jaw fell. ‘What is the matter?’ quoth I,
whereupon she almost collapsed with fright. Not a syllable could she
utter, but made shift to flounce out of the room, and pour into her
mistress’s ear how some sort of hideous spectre had appeared to her
on the top floor! This was repeated to me at supper. They called the
little old thing in, and made her relate her scare. We all nearly died
with laughter; and I was established as quite alive.”
The book, put together, as was almost all Campion’s literary work,
under highly disturbing conditions, is unfinished; and what there
is of it is sketchy and out of proportion. One of its charms is its
character-drawing, including the speeches with which, after the fashion
of Livy, Campion fits the situation by putting them into the mouths
of his personages. His was a dramatic mind. He knew both history and
human nature: the latter knowledge crops up everywhere in all that
he wrote, and spoke, and did, and supplied him with no small share
of his power over others. The outstanding charm of the _History of
Ireland_ is its style, crisp, arresting, bright with idiom: an idiom so
noble and so much his own, that one understands the almost breathless
admiration with which his generation looked up to him and listened to
him. But this book, like the _View of the Present State_, written some
seventeen years later by another gentle-hearted Englishman, the poet
Spenser, is all wrong in its theory that to get any footing in the
modern world the “mere Irishry” must be Anglicized. Campion did not
know the Celts, their laws, nor their literature; he never came nearer
to them than through chronicles written in scorn of them, or the daily
table-talk, wide of the mark, of the English Pale. Yet, according to
his opportunity, he loved the country and the people, and deplored that
the descendants of a race of mediæval scholars should be cut off from
education. Afterwards he felt that his rather helter-skelter pamphlet
represented limited knowledge and unformed opinion; he speaks of it as
“premature,” and wished, when he lost the manuscript, that it might
perish rather than reach the public as it was. It bore a dedication
to the Earl of Leicester, his “singular good lord,” in the hope that
it might “make his travel seem neither causeless nor fruitless,” or,
as he says again in plainer language: “I render you my poor book as
an account of my voyage.” It was first printed, without supervision
from the author, in a very muddled, unsatisfactory way, by Raphael
Holinshed in 1577; then in more scholarly fashion by Sir James Ware,
in his _Ancient Irish Histories_, 1633. We all remember how useful
Holinshed’s pages were to Shakespeare: the twenty lines or so of the
famous description of Wolsey in Act IV, Scene 2, of _Henry VIII_, is
taken almost word for word from what Campion had written, and Holinshed
had incorporated in his _Chronicles_.
Nowhere in this little book, begun and broken off at Turvey House, and
purposely non-committal in its religious expressions, is there any sign
that its author had already, as some have thought, returned to the
Church. For Parsons, his earliest biographer, whose facts concerning
these years were supplied by Richard Stanihurst, says of Campion that
his purity and devoutness in Ireland were marked, although he was not
in the Church. Fr. Pollen, summing up the evidence of these written
pages, considers Campion “near to the Church, but distinctly avoiding a
confession of faith.”
Chancellor Weston, a zealot of the most pronounced Protestant type,
made a livelier pursuit after having been baffled by Campion’s escape
from Dublin. The latter found himself quite unable to lead any sort of
orderly life, thanks to the restless hue and cry after him; and one
day he recognized with a shock of horror the penalties to which he was
exposing the generous friends, so far unmolested, who were giving him
shelter. His conscience would not allow him to come out with a flat
denial of Catholic tenets or sympathies. His only alternative, after a
half-year in Ireland, was flight homeward. Here once more he was aided
(though they were in great sorrow at his decision) by his Anglo-Irish
friends, those “dear friends which ever after he loved most entirely,
and they him.”
Richard Stanihurst, as private tutor to the children of the Earl of
Kildare, had acquaintance with the Earl’s steward, Melchior Hussey.
This man (a character by no means admirable) was about to embark at
Drogheda for a visit to England, and it was arranged that Campion
should be disguised to pass as his Irish servant. Thus, in the month
of May, putting himself under the special patronage of the national
Saint, and adopting his name, Campion boarded the ship as “Mr.
Patrick.” Officers of the law promptly appeared on the track of the
quasi-Papist, delaying the weighing of the anchor, annoying the crew,
upsetting the cargo, and questioning every passenger on deck except the
harmless-looking person who stood “in a lackey’s weed” behind Hussey.
Edmund Campion was a born actor. He put on and kept up a highly stupid
expression, while he was praying with might and main for St. Patrick’s
intercession in his great danger! He had cause to thank his new patron
in Heaven, although the party of searchers swooped upon his bags
below deck, and carried off with them the rough draft of his precious
manuscript, that _History of Ireland_ which he was to see no more for
many a year.
The early summer of 1571 was ill-starred. Various startling events
had conjoined like tidal waves to lift the misbehaving English
Government up to its highest pitch of alarm. Chief of these was the
Bull of Deposition against Queen Elizabeth, issued by the Holy See
after consultation with many temperate English advisers. John Felton,
a gentleman of Southwark, posted a copy of it upon the palace gates
of the Bishop of London, on the morning of May 25, the Feast of
Corpus Christi: by August he was to pay for the bold act with his
life. The Queen of Scots had newly arrived in England. London, by the
time Campion reached it, was in a ferment. “Nothing was to be found
there but fears, suspicions, arrestings, condemnations, tortures,
executions.... The Queen and Council were so troubled that they could
not tell whom to trust, and so fell to rigorous proceedings against
all, but especially against Catholics, whom they most feared; so that
Campion could not tell where to rest in England, all men being in fear
and jealousy one of another.”
Campion had not broken his old bonds, yet nothing interested him so
powerfully as the things of religion. The love of God was lying in wait
for him, and forced his hand. Of all possible places in London where
he might have gone on the 26th or 27th of May, he chose Westminster
Hall, in order to attend the trial of Dr. John Storey, former
Principal of Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College) in Oxford, and that
University’s first Regius Professor of Civil Law. Dr. Storey was very
feeble for his years, which were sixty-seven. By a wretched breach of
international law he had been trapped at Antwerp, carried away from
his wife and family to England, and arraigned for having “feloniously
and traitorously comforted Richard Norton,” his own friend, the old
hero of the Pilgrimage of Grace. But the real cause of his arrest and
execution was a much larger matter. He was a troublesomely consistent
person. He had spoken out in the House of Commons against the new
Liturgy in the first Parliament of Edward VI, and against the Supremacy
Bill in the first Parliament of Queen Elizabeth. He had been an
Ecclesiastical Commissioner under Queen Mary. Foxe, in the famous _Book
of Martyrs_, lies in the most reckless way about Storey’s part in those
sordid bygone persecutions, and Holinshed and Strype and many another
historian repeat Foxe.
Storey was an honourable and even merciful man, but a man of his time.
People were much of a piece in the sixteenth century when it came to
holding to the grindstone the nose of the unwilling! There is this to
be said, however: that the Marian courts dealt out death to heretics
and malcontents, and candidly stopped there, and were not inspired
to any cruelty more subtle; whereas Good Queen Bess not only dealt
out death very much more liberally, but invented a poison for all the
springs of life. Her statutes, terribly oppressive from the first,
ended in what Burke calls the most hateful code framed since the world
began: Penal Laws which, especially from 1585 on, struck without
mercy at Catholics in their rights of worship, property, inheritance,
education, travel, professions, public service and private liberties
of every kind. Another point to be noted in passing is that Queen Mary
persecuted her subjects for changing their religion. Her more ingenious
sister persecuted them for not changing it! Historians have not dwelt
much upon the difference, but to a reader with some philosophy in him
it will have no little weight.
Dr. Storey was executed five days after his trial, under even more
horrible circumstances than were usual. Edmund Campion had then
left England, after an exceedingly short stay. His standing watch
in Westminster Hall had done more for him than many arguments and
exhortations: it kindled a spark in him which made him, in Lord
Falkland’s phrase, “ready for the utmost hazard of war.” There was a
cause to which he could run home; there was a vocation to which he
could climb: these opened out before him as he stood in the surging
indoor crowd. “He was animated by that blessed man’s example,” says
Parsons, “to any danger and peril for the same faith for which the
Doctor died.” Edmund Campion lost no time. There had been enough of
that sad old game, and he was thirty-one years old, with three quarters
of his too brief life behind him. Now he was awake, and had touched, in
the dark, his heart’s long-patient Master. He set out at once for the
nearest stronghold of apostolic souls, the English Seminary at Douay in
Belgium.
IV
CHEYNEY AGAIN: DOUAY: 1571
INTERRUPTED sea-voyages were his fate. This time, half-way across the
Channel, his ship was hailed by a Government frigate, _The Hare_, which
demanded to be shown the ship’s sailing papers, and the passports
of her passengers. Campion had none. Moreover, as his religion was
suspected, the dutiful Protestant frigate, homeward bound, promptly
swallowed him, bag and baggage. His generous friends in Ireland had
forced upon him money for his needs, and the captain who now kidnapped
him found it convenient to keep the money, but kind-heartedly let his
prisoner lose himself in the streets of Dover. Other friends quickly
made the losses good. On Campion’s second attempt to reach Calais
all went well. He did not lack his secular epitaph, so to speak,
at Court. It was not then a legal crime, though it soon became so,
for a Catholic Englishman to leave the country fast being made into
a hell for him. The mighty Cecil treated this expatriation as quite
voluntary. “And it is a very great pity,” he chose to say, looking into
Richard Stanihurst’s gratified eyes, “for Master Campion was one of the
diamonds of England.”
The date of Campion’s reconciliation to the Church is unknown. It seems
unlikely to have taken place in Ireland. He may have been absolved
from his schism in London, or else as soon as he had reached Douay.
There was a busy trade in wool still flourishing at that time between
Flanders and England, and in the thrifty, kindly towns of the exporting
country refugees formed a considerable part of the population. Douay,
properly speaking, Douai, was called “Doway” by its foster-children.
The creation of its English Seminary was a master-stroke of Dr. William
Allen, Canon of York, afterwards Cardinal, once of Oriel College,
Oxford, and Principal of St. Mary Hall. Indeed, “Oxford may be said
to have founded Douay.” Allen was aided by many men of mark, notably
by his old tutor, Morgan Phillipps, and by the latter’s bequeathed
funds; also by the Flemish Abbots and layfolk. Campion seems to have
been the eighteenth arrival in the newly established house of young,
prayerful, enthusiastic men. He found there as Professor of Hebrew,
his beloved Gregory Martin, and a learned colleague, Richard Bristow,
late Fellow of Exeter College, the first of the Seminarian priests
to be ordained: two props and pillars of the foundation. There also
was Thomas Stapleton, late Fellow of New College, the most able
Catholic controversialist of the age. Five of the twenty English
students enrolled in 1571, joined the Society of Jesus. The College,
destined to speedy and splendid development, was affiliated to the
Douay University, established some eight years before it by Spanish
munificence and a Papal Bull. Here, then, Edmund Campion came into his
soul’s haven, “out of the swing of the sea.”