of them had grown dim at home, should write to their more undecided
friends in England, doing what they could to win them to the service
of Christ in the Church Catholic. Campion sent a very long document
to this end to his venerated and now ageing friend, Bishop Cheyney:
a wonderful letter, in that live Elizabethan English, which was bold
as surgery itself, yet charged with feeling. Associating his beliefs
with Cheyney’s as the writer does, he helps us to understand his own
doctrinal position while in Oxford and in Dublin. He failed in both
places, writes Fr. Morris, for the same reason: “the position was a
false one, for it was an effort to serve two masters, and to live like
a Catholic and teach the Catholic religion outside the pale of the
Catholic Church.” “There is no end or measure,” he now tells Cheyney
from Douay, “to my thinking of you; and I never think of you without
being horribly ashamed.... So often was I with you at Gloucester, so
often in your private chamber, with no one near us, when I could
have done this business, and I did it not!” By “this business” he
means confessing Catholic truth, and urging Cheyney to return to it.
“And what is worse, I have added flames to the fever by assenting and
assisting. And although you were superior to me, in your counterfeited
dignity, in wealth, age and learning, and though I was not bound to
look after the physicking or dieting of your soul, yet, since you were
of so easy and sweet a temper as in spite of your grey hairs to admit
me, young as I was, to familiar intercourse with you, to say whatever
I chose, in all security and secrecy, while you imparted to me your
sorrows and all the calumnies of the other heretics against you; and
since like a father you exhorted me to walk straight and upright in
the royal road, to follow the steps of the Church, the Councils, and
the Fathers, and to believe that where there was a consensus of these
there could be no spot of falsehood; I am very angry with myself that
I neglected to use such a beautiful opportunity of recommending the
Faith: that through false modesty or culpable negligence, I did not
address with boldness one who was so near to the Kingdom of God. But
as I have no longer the occasion that I had of persuading you face
to face, it remains that I should send my words to you to witness my
regard, my care, my anxiety for you, known to Him to whom I make my
daily prayer for your salvation. Listen, I beseech you, listen to a
few words. You are sixty years old, more or less” (Cheyney was really
sixty-eight), “of uncertain health, of weakened body; the hatred of
heretics, the pity of Catholics, the talk of the people, the sorrow
of your friends, the joke of your enemies. Who do you think yourself
to be? What do you expect? What is your life? Wherein lies your hope?
In the heretics hating you so implacably and abusing you so roundly?
Because of all heresiarchs you are the least crazy? Because you confess
the Living Presence of Christ on the Altar, and the freedom of man’s
will? Because you persecute no Catholics in your diocese? Because
you are hospitable to your townspeople, and to good men? Because you
plunder not your palace and lands, as your brethren do? Surely these
things will avail much, if you return to the bosom of the Church, if
you suffer even the smallest persecution in common with those of the
Household of Faith, or join your prayers with theirs. But now, whilst
you are a stranger and an enemy, whilst, like a base deserter, you
fight under an alien flag, it is in vain to attempt to cover your
crimes with the cloak of virtues.... What is the use of fighting for
many articles of the Faith, and to perish for doubting of a few?... He
believes no one article of the Faith who refuses to believe any single
one. In vain do you defend the religion of Catholics, if you hug only
that which you like, and cut off all that seems not right in your
eyes. There is but one plain, known road: not enclosed by your palings
or mine, not by private judgment, but by the severe laws of humility
and obedience: when you wander from these you are lost. You must be
altogether within the house of God, within the walls of salvation, to
be sound and safe from all injury; if you wander and walk abroad ever
so little, if you carelessly thrust hand or foot out of the ship, if
you stir up ever so small a mutiny in the crew, you shall be thrust
forth: the door is shut, the ocean roars: you are undone!... Do you
remember the sober and solemn answer which you gave me when three years
ago we met in the house of Thomas Dutton at Shireburn, where we were to
dine? We were talking of St. Cyprian. I objected to you (in order to
discover your real opinions) that Synod of Carthage which erred about
the baptism of infants. You answered truly that the Holy Spirit was
not promised to one Province, but to the Church; that the Universal
Church is represented in a full Council; and that no doctrine can be
pointed out about which such a Council ever erred. Acknowledge your own
weapons, which you used against the adversaries of the Mystery of the
Eucharist!... Here you have the most ... apostolic men collected at
Trent ... to contend for the ancient faith of the Fathers! All these,
whilst you live as you are living, anathematize you, hiss you out,
excommunicate you, abjure you.” Campion goes on to urge upon Cheyney
an outward adherence to the Council which had discussed and resolved
his own private beliefs. “Especially now you have declared war against
your colleagues, why do you not make full submission, without any
exceptions, to the discipline of these Fathers?... Once more, consult
your own heart, my poor old friend! give me back your old beauty, and
those excellent gifts which have been hitherto smothered in the mud
of dishonesty. Give yourself to your Mother who begot you to Christ,
nourished you, consecrated you; acknowledge how cruel and undutiful
you have been: let confession be the salve of your sin.... Be merciful
to your soul; spare my grief. Your ship is wrecked, your merchandise
lost: nevertheless, seize the plank of penance, and come even naked
into the port of the Church. Fear not but that Christ will preserve
you with His hand, run to meet you, kiss you, and put on you the white
garment: Saints and Angels will sing for joy! Take no thought for your
life: He will take thought for you who gives the beasts their food,
and feeds the young ravens that call upon Him. If you but made trial
of our banishment, if you but cleared your conscience, and came to
behold and consider the living examples of piety which are shown here
by Bishops, priests, friars, Masters of Colleges, rulers of Provinces,
lay people of every age, rank and sex, I believe that you would give up
six hundred Englands for the opportunity of redeeming the residue of
your time by tears and sorrow.... Pardon me, my venerated old friend,
for these just reproaches, and for the heat of my love. Suffer me to
hate that deadly disease; let me ward off the imminent danger of so
noble a man and so dear a friend with any dose, however bitter. And now
if Christ give grace and you do not refuse, my hopes of you are equal
to my love: and I love you as passing excellent in nature, in learning,
in gentleness, in goodness, and as doubly dear to me for your many
kindnesses and courtesies. If you recover your [spiritual] health, you
make me happy for ever. If you slight me, this letter is my witness.
God judge between you and me: your blood be on yourself! Farewell, from
him that most desires your salvation.”
One phrase in this steel web of phrases from the pen of a rhetorician
with a heart, shows that Campion knew of Cheyney’s sad and now
complicated position in England. The letter was written November 1,
1571. A Convocation had met in the preceding April, on the heels of the
Act of Uniformity, to which Cheyney was summoned in vain. It required
the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles, and enacted, under Archbishop
Grindal’s leadership, many things equally hateful to Cheyney, such as
displacement and defacement of Altar-stones—(a great symbol, this,
and no mere act of pillage!), the abolition of Prayers for the Dead,
the prohibition even of the Sign of the Cross in church. Cheyney,
excommunicated for his wilful absence, afterwards sued by proxy for
absolution, for the sake of averting temporal penalties: but he had
nothing more to do with the hierarchy. “Now you have declared war
against your colleagues,” shows that Campion had heard accurate news of
all this.
The moment may have seemed to Campion exactly favourable for such
a strong appeal. One of Cheyney’s successors in his See declared:
“It was certain he died a Papist.” This was contradicted by a lesser
authority, but yet a good one. If it were indeed “certain”, at least
Edmund Campion, to whom the tidings would have been most consoling,
never knew of it. It seems as if Cheyney could not have answered that
bugle-call of a letter. He is said, however, to have kept it always,
and to have called it his greatest treasure.
How these many cries of “the heat of my love” must have haunted his
ear! It is hardly in human nature to value such a document at all (and
there are passages in it more ruthless, after the manner of the time,
than any we have quoted), unless for the reflex reason that it does its
intended work in the heart of the receiver. To have valued it either
as a piece of literary cleverness, or as a monument of misdirected
concern, would have been equally cynical, and clean contrary to
Cheyney’s known attitude towards his friend. He did not live to see
Campion return to England. Shunning the bigots and the unprincipled men
in power to the last, and sheltering the Catholics all he could, he
shut himself up at Gloucester, a whole High Church party in himself,
wounded and at bay: and there in 1579 he died, and was buried in the
glorious Cathedral, without an epitaph. The dream of his lifetime, as
well as Edmund Campion’s sonship, he had loved and lost.
V
THE CALL TO COME UP HIGHER: DOUAY, PRAGUE: 1571-1573
IN Allen’s _Apology for Seminaries_ there is a beautiful account of the
ideals of Douay. “The first thought of the founders of the College had
been to attract the young English exiles who were living in Flanders
from their solitary and self-guided study to a more exact method and
to collegiate obedience; and their next, to provide for the rising
generation in England a succession of learned Catholics, especially of
clergy, to take the place of those removed by old age, imprisonment,
and persecution. Their design then was to draw together out of
England the ‘best wits’ from the following classes; those inclined to
Catholicism; those who desired a more exact education than could be
then obtained at Oxford or Cambridge, ‘where no art, holy or profane,
was thoroughly studied, and some not touched at all;’ those who were
scrupulous about taking the Oath of the Queen’s supremacy; those who
disliked to be forced, as they were in some Colleges of the English
Universities, to enter the ministry; ... and those who were doubtful
which religion was the true one, and were disgusted that they were
forced into one without being allowed opportunity of inquiring into the
other.” The spirit of Douay was not reactionary, but the best spirit
of the English Renaissance. It had, besides, a character or atmosphere
holy and bright, not formed by mere human culture: it was as “a garden
enclosed, and a fountain sealed.” Campion found there a peace such
as he had never known. He had already, at Oxford, given seven years
to philosophy, and six more to Aristotle, positive theology, and the
Fathers. The study of scholastic theology was dead in Oxford: Campion
now first took up the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He arrived in
June, and in August he bought a noble edition of the _Summa_ for his
own use, in three volumes folio. This was discovered in 1887 by Canon
Didiot of Lille, and it is now at the Roehampton Noviciate. Several
features make it a particularly interesting relic: Campion’s signature,
with the date of his purchase, on the flyleaf; various beautifully
executed little drawings, underlinings, and a host of marginal notes
in Latin. By far the most touching of these relates to what St. Thomas
quotes from Gennadius on the baptism of blood. Blessed Edmund Campion
wrote in a tall, bold hand, over against this passage, the one musing
word, “Martyrdom.” Canon Didiot, with that intimate touch of French
sympathy, calls it “_mot radieux et prophétique_.”
For nearly two years Campion followed the course of scholastic
theology, taking his degree of Bachelor in January, 1573. He then
received Minor Orders, and was ordained Sub-deacon. All went happily
for him at Douay. He was again at his old work, and, as ever, he won
the highest opinions from those among whom he moved. In his Oxford
days he had always held lofty standards before his pupils: “never
to deliquesce into sloth, nor to dance away your time, nor to live
for rioting and pleasure ... but to give yourselves up to virtue and
learning, and to reckon this the one, great, glorious and royal road.”
But the feeling in the exhortations of his later life is tenfold
deeper, and strikes a far more haunting note of duty towards England,
and towards the Church. This is a passage from the revised _De Juvene
Academico_, which had first been sketched out years before in Dublin.
“Listen to our Heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury!...
Behold, by the wickedness of the wicked the house of God is devoted
to flames and to destruction; numberless souls are being deceived,
are being shaken, are being lost, any one of which is worth more than
the empire of the whole world.... Sleep not while the Enemy watches;
play not while he devours his prey; sink not into idleness and folly
while his fangs are wet with your brothers’ blood. It is not wealth nor
liberty nor station, but the eternal inheritance of each of us, the
very life-blood of our souls, our spirits, and our lives, that suffers.
See, then, my dearest young scholars and friends, that we lose none of
this precious time, but carry hence a plentiful and rich crop, enough
to supply the public want, and to gain for ourselves the reward of
dutiful sons.” One of those who listened to these words was destined to
become the proto-martyr of the English Continental Seminaries: Cuthbert
Mayne, a dear pupil of Campion’s, who as a Devon lad had come up to
Oxford and St. John’s, had first conformed to the new regulations,
and served as College Chaplain, then awakened from his delusion, and
fled over seas for conscience’ sake, “not to escape danger, but to be
prepared for it,” in response to one of Campion’s burning letters. This
letter was intercepted, but its purport had reached him, and decided
him.
In the spring of 1573, Campion found himself driven to a course he
had not contemplated on coming to Douay. As he slowly saw his way, he
followed it, to horizon beyond horizon. He had many steps to take,
because in his thirst for perfection he had far to travel. He told
Dr. Allen he wished to leave his present life, go on pilgrimage, in
the spirit of penance, to the Tomb of the Apostles at Rome, and there
seek admission into the Society of Jesus. The mediæval Orders would
have less attraction for Campion: he was an intensely “modern” man.
Now this was a severe blow to Allen: hardly less so to others of
Campion’s circle. Campion, the pride, the example, the hope of the
Seminary, to quit it for good, and to quit it in order to join the
most recent of religious communities—one which as yet had few English
members! It was inexplicable. But Allen, like the great-hearted and
broad-minded commander-in-chief he was, let him go without protest. He
little foresaw that far from losing his most promising champion, he was
but lending him to better masters of the interior life than himself,
and would receive his trained strength again in the English Mission’s
spiritual day of battle.
Campion set out on foot across the Continent for Rome, along that road
“trodden by many a Saxon king and English saint, to the Apostles’
shrine.” His companions walked with him all the first day; but the next
morning he sent them back, and pushed on alone. Solitude was henceforth
his choice, whenever duty permitted. He must have had many strange
adventures during that spring journey. We know of one of them, though
not from him. At some point of the route, probably on the northern
Italian border, he came face to face with an old friend, an Oxonian,
and a Protestant. The horseman first rode past the poor mendicant on
the highway, and then was prompted by some dim sense of recognition
to return and speak to him. On realizing that it was really Edmund
Campion whom he used to know “in great pomp of prosperity,” he showed
much concern, proffered his good-will and his purse, and begged to hear
how Campion had fallen into that ill plight. But the pilgrim refused
aid; and the other traveller heard something then and there of the
“contempt of this world, and the eminent dignity of serving Christ in
poverty,” which greatly moved him: and “us also,” adds Robert Parsons
of Balliol, “that remained yet in Oxford, when the report came to our
ears.” A strange tale it must have seemed to those who knew their
Master of Arts and all his old fastidiousness! He was by now a saint
in the making, and they were fast losing touch with him. Personal
holiness is, so to speak, a mining country: its progress and its wealth
are underground, unguessed-at by the careless passer-by. A saint is a
mystery because he walks so closely in the shadow of God, who is the
Great Mystery.
When Campion reached Rome, and had paid his devotions to the holy
places, he went to call upon Cardinal Gesualdi, who, as he stated
afterwards, “having some liking of me, would have been the means to
prefer me ... but I, resolved what course to take, answered that I
meant not to serve any man, but to enter into the Society of Jesus,
thereof to vow and to be professed.” With this intention, Campion
sought out the newly-elected head of that Society, Father Everard of
Liège, whose surname was generally Latinized into Mercurianus, from
Mercœur, his native village. He was fourth in his office, having
succeeded that great personality St. Francis Borgia, on St. George’s
Day, April 23, 1573. Biographers have represented that Campion had a
half-year’s delay in Rome before he was able to apply for admission to
the Society; but such was not the case. He promptly presented himself,
and was received as Mercœur’s first recruit, and received not as a
postulant, but as a novice. As Anthony Wood tells us, “he was esteemed
by the General of that Order to be a person every way complete.” Four
years later, Campion most affectionately thanked his own old tutor,
John Bavand, for unasked “introductions, help and money,” which had
been supplied since he came to Rome. He speaks of himself as “one whom
you knew never could repay you, but who was at the point, so to speak,
of death.... You were munificent to me when I was going to enter the
sepulchral rest of religion.” The aid he would not accept for himself
on his journey from one friend, he had accepted in the city (and spent,
no doubt, in almsgiving) from another. Perhaps Bavand was abroad,
and heard of that incident which came to pass on the road: certainly,
he was one from whom Campion could not in chivalry refuse whatever he
chose to share with him.
The Society of Jesus had been founded only six years before Campion
was born. It had as yet no English “Province,” that is, no members
living under the English flag with a domestic government of their
own. But Edmund Campion was already well known to the Provincials on
the Continent, who had a warm contest over him, every one of them
wishing to add such a promising soldier to his own wing of the army
of the Lord. As it fell out, Bohemia won. Campion was sent as one
of a company to Vienna, and then from Vienna to Prague, where the
Noviciate was, with Father Avellanedo, Confessor to the Empress, a man
of wide experience. He was so deeply edified by his companion that,
he told Fr. Parsons long after, it had kept him all his life “much
affectioned” towards England and Englishmen. Prague was in a miserable,
godless state: the Catholics were poor and few: the great University
had perished: and all this was due to the ruin, moral and material,
produced by the preaching, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, of
John Hus. That Hus got his Socialistic ideas from Wyclif was a fact
never out of Campion’s mind while in Bohemia: for he thought that
England owed some reparation to a country which she had helped to
spoil, and he was more than willing to pay his part of that debt.
VI
THE WISHED-FOR DAWN: BOHEMIA: 1573-1579
CAMPION stayed but two months at Prague, as the small Noviciate was
removed to Brünn in Moravia, where the inhabitants were most hostile
to Catholicism. The Bishop of Olmütz begged the Jesuits to help him
so far as their Rule permitted. Novices were sent out among the
neighbouring villages, to catechize and instruct the poorer Catholics;
and no one had so instant a success in this little enterprise as “God’s
Englishman.” At the year’s end his Novice Master, John Paul Campanus,
became Rector of the College in Prague, and took Edmund Campion back
with him. The latter left a good deal of his heart within the gray and
austere walls of Brünn, as two of his charming letters show. In the old
garden, under a mulberry tree, he had had a wonderful vision: Our Lady
stood there, smiling at him, and offering him a purple robe. He knew
the portent of martyrdom, but for long hid it in his heart. At Prague
Campion continued and increased his Douay employments. He opened the
October term with what was called a “glorious peroration”. As Professor
of Rhetoric, he wrote, in 1574, a beautiful little treatise on that
subject so familiar to him. His duty was to be first in the house to
rise and last to go to bed; he spent his recreation-time catechizing
children, receiving converts, visiting the prison and the hospital,
or helping the cook in the kitchen! In January, 1575, he set up at
his College a branch Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, or
Sodality of Our Lady, of which he became president. About the same
time he made his first vows. He was continually called upon for great
College occasions, and to pronounce public panegyrics. “Whatever had
to be done,” says his pompous but sympathetic biographer Bombino, “was
laid upon him.” On getting a fresh task he would ask his Superior,
in a spirit of perfect humility and confidence, if he was thought
strong enough to add that to the rest? and if the answer were Yes, he
shouldered the new duty at once, much to the wonder of others. “I am
in a continual bloom of health,” he writes gallantly to his “dearest
Parsons,” who had just entered the Society; “I have no time whatever
to be ill in!” Two sacred plays (six hours did it take to perform each
of them!) came from Campion’s truly dramatic pen in 1577. One was on
the Sacrifice of Abraham; one on the melancholy career of King Saul. It
is a matter of much regret that these are lost. He seems also to have
composed dialogues and scenes for his own scholars, and to have put
together at this same time his spirited account of the origin of the
English schism, in a narrative (in Latin) of _The Divorce of King Henry
VIII from his Wife and from the Church_. It was printed by Harpesfield,
long after Campion’s death.
Meanwhile Rudolph II had succeeded to the imperial throne; and the
“magnificently provided” Envoy who was sent to Prague, bearing the
congratulations of Queen Elizabeth, was none other than Sir Philip
Sidney. Sidney’s mind was set upon seeing his old friend Campion,
and talking with him; but he managed only with difficulty to carry
out his wishes. He went officially in the Emperor’s train to hear
his friend (not yet in priest’s orders) preach, and on his return
to England unguardedly spoke with delight of the sermon. Whenever
Sidney visited the Continent he was supposed to become tainted with a
hankering after Catholicism, though in all his public actions he was
conspicuously Protestant. Campion, who knew him from boyhood and was
not given to misjudgment, believed that he had almost won over the
star of English chivalry: “this young man so wonderfully beloved and
admired,” he calls him in 1576; a testimony doubly interesting, when
we remember that Philip Sidney was then but three-and-twenty, to the
effect which his short life made upon all his contemporaries. “He had
much conversation with me,” Campion’s letter goes on, “and I hope not
in vain, for to all appearances he was most keen about it. I commend
him to your remembrances at Mass, since he asked the prayers of all
good men, and at the same time put into my hands alms to be distributed
to the poor for him; this trust I have discharged.” He ends by hoping
that some of the missionaries then going back to England from Douay
will have “opportunity of watering this plant ... poor wavering soul!”
Fr. Parsons in his _Life of Campion_ tells us that Sidney “professed
himself convinced, but said that it was necessary for him to hold on
the course which he had hitherto followed.” Such was the sad answer of
Felix to St. Paul.
Campion’s thoughts had turned often of late to another friend, Gregory
Martin, who had left overcrowded Douay for the Seminary newly founded
in the heart of Rome, in the ancient English hospice for pilgrims.
Campion longed to turn his fellow-priest into a Jesuit, for he loved
his own Society in the extreme; but that was not to be. A letter to
Martin, glowing with that interior fire which was shed out from Edmund
Campion upon everything he touched, ends most tenderly. “Since for so
many years we two had in common our College, our meals, our studies,
our friends and our enemies, let us for the rest of our lives make
a more close and binding union, that we may have the fruit of our
friendship in heaven. For there also I will, if I can, sit at your
feet.”
After years filled with literary and academic labour in two Colleges,
and blessed with marked growth in holiness, Edmund Campion was ordained
priest by the Archbishop of Prague. His first Mass was said on the
Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, September 8, 1578. Following his
General’s express command, he dismissed the old unhappy scruple
about his Oxford diaconate, and it troubled him no more. He was made
Professor of Philosophy. “You are to know,” he pleasantly says, “that
I am foolishly held to be an accomplished sophist!” During the course
of this year 1578, he wrote his last and most famous drama, now lost,
on St. Ambrose and the Emperor Theodosius, which, when acted, made
a tremendous stir. He became ever more and more noted as a preacher,
a “sower of eternity” in the popular heart, as well as the favourite
orator when grandees died and were buried in state. But all this time
his mind and heart were far away.