appearance) had undergone a forced change. He and the Mayor of the town
had been reprimanded by the Council for letting Papists slip through
their nets. Moreover, there had been furnished, by a spy, a detailed
description of Cardinal Allen’s brother, who was about to pass through
Dover on his way to relatives in Lancashire; and as Gabriel Allen and
Edmund Campion looked very much alike, our jewel-merchant found himself
instantly under arrest. With an accuracy which he was not in the least
aware of, the Mayor charged him and the lay brother of being “foes to
the Queen’s religion and friends to the old Faith; with sailing under
false names, and with returning for the purpose of propagating Popery.”
Campion offered to swear that he was not Gabriel Allen, but offered
in vain. The Mayor held a hasty conference, and ordered a mounted
guard to carry both prisoners up to Sir Francis Walsingham and the
Council. All this time, Campion was praying to God for deliverance,
and earnestly begging St. John the Baptist to intercede for himself
and his companion. They were waiting near the closed door of a room.
“Suddenly,” wrote Campion himself long after, to the Father-General,
“suddenly cometh forth an old man: God give him grace for his pains!
‘Well,’ quoth he, ‘it is agreed you shall be dismissed: fare ye well.’”
After which the two Jesuits left without further notice or opposition,
and travelled as fast as ever they could to London.
Fr. Parsons had reached the city not without adventure, but without
mishap, a fortnight before. Yet as no word had been received since from
him, Campion had no idea how to proceed or whither to go; nor could
he inquire without arousing suspicion. Fortunately Parsons had given
to some watchful young Catholics a description of the jewel-merchant
and his man: Ralph Emerson was easily recognizable on account of his
extremely short stature. Thus they had hardly touched the wharf at the
Hythe before a stranger, Thomas Jay, stepped to the gangway, with a
welcoming gesture, saying: “Mr. Edmunds, give me your hand: I stay here
for you, to lead you to your friends.” Under this guidance Campion
reached London and Chancery Lane, where he was clothed and armed, and
provided with a horse. He must have been astonished to learn under
whose roof he was so safe and so comfortable: for it was none other
than that of the chief pursuivant! Here was, indeed, a case of the bird
nesting in the cannon’s mouth. St. Augustine warns us that we are not
to think that ungodly men are kept in this world for nothing, nor that
God has no good purposes of His own to fulfil through them. One cause
of the miraculous preservation of the ancient Faith under Elizabeth lay
in the fact that many an official, high and low, of that time-serving
Government, was in the pay of the Recusant gentry. A strange situation
it was, and by no means an infrequent one, when some of these, brought
before the magistrates, would be discharged on the assurance of the
bought-over official that the prisoner was “an honest gentleman”: thus
averting all suspicion from the latter for the time being.
The band of lay Catholics, some of whom Campion had known from boyhood,
like Henry Vaux and Richard Stanihurst, were acting as friends, freely
leagued together, as occasion arose, for the helping of priests,
and the furthering of religion. Their time, their thoughts, their
self-sacrifice, their purses, were at the service particularly of the
Jesuits, persons habitually being described by Sir Walter Mildmay in
the Star Chamber as “lewd runagates,” “a sort of hypocrites,” “a rabble
of vagrant friars.” The leader of them all, in his inspiring zeal,
though not highest in station, was George Gilbert, a rich young squire
owning estates (which were confiscated in the end) in Buckinghamshire
and Suffolk. He was a convert, a great rider and athlete, dear to many;
but in secret a lover of apostolic poverty, living for others: in
short, a saint. He spent himself to the last breath for the Faith as
truly as if he had perished at Tyburn Tree. In banishment, he still
served the same cause by his forethought and his generosity in the use
of such worldly goods as were left to him: for he became responsible,
at Rome, for the series of paintings of the English martyrdoms which
gave their chief historical standing to the Beatifications of 1886.
Thus Gilbert, living and dead, was Blessed Edmund Campion’s availing
friend and lover.
IX
SKIRMISHING: THE ENGLISH COUNTIES: 1580
THE devoted George Gilbert, his fellowship of young men, and those whom
they gathered together, met on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, June
29, to hear, for the first time, Fr. Campion preach. It was no easy
task to find a safe and suitable auditorium; but Lord Paget, one of
their own number, was daring enough to hire from Lord Norreys the hall
of a great house in the neighbourhood of Smithfield. All the servants
and porters were turned out for the occasion, and gentlemen took their
places. Within a few days, however, rumours about Campion’s sermon and
about Campion were flying over the city. There were a number of spies
about, instructed by the Council, pretending to be lapsed Catholics or
unsettled Protestants, and trying hard to bag such new and shining
birds as the Jesuits; but Campion had a friend at court who warned
him, and therefore held only private conferences in friendly houses
with those whom he knew. The missionaries were sent to strengthen the
wills of the wavering Catholics, and not primarily to make converts.
Personal dealings with would-be converts were never attempted except
as supplementary to the action of the lay helpers, who took all the
soundings, and gave any needful catechizing. When Parsons, who had been
away in the country, got back to town, Mr. Henry Orton and Fr. Robert
Johnson had been tracked and imprisoned, through Sledd, the apostate
informer; and it became plain to the rest of the little band gathered
about Parsons and Campion that, for reasons immediate and remote, both
Fathers must be spirited away. Each went mounted, with a companion,
Gervase Pierrepoint being Campion’s guide; and at Hoxton, in July, the
priests parted for their separate fields of action.
Just before that, however, there arrived as a deputy to them, Mr.
Thomas Pounde of Belmont, the best-known, perhaps, of all English
prisoners for the Faith: he was committed to gaol sixteen times and
passed thirty years in durance. Pounde had managed to bribe the
gaoler of the Marshalsea to let him out for this short journey. Most
anxious for the good repute of the Fathers, he rode post-haste to tell
them that enemies in London were spreading the report that they had
come over for political purposes, and that if in the midst of their
apostolic work in the shires they should be taken and executed, the
Government would be sure to issue pamphlets, as was its habit, defaming
their motives, and slandering the Catholic body. Therefore he begged
both Jesuits to write “a vindication of their presence and purpose in
England,” which, signed and sealed, might be given to the public, if
things came to the worst. The certain accusation and its answer had
been debated before, in council, by many clergy, who had contented
themselves with agreeing to swear, when called upon, that they had no
business whatever in hand but that of religion. But Campion now drew
up his own document then and there at a table, while the others were
talking. In it, he declares that “my charge is of free cost to preach
the Gospel ... to cry alarm spiritual;” that “matters of state are
things which appertain not to my vocation,” and are “straitly forbid”:
things “from which I do gladly estrange and sequester my thoughts.” And
never thinking of himself, but fired with confidence in his cause, he
goes on to beg leave for a public presentment of the Faith. He says,
in the course of this splendid little philippic: “I should be loath to
speak anything that might sound of an insolent brag or challenge ... in
this noble realm, my dear country.” It shows completely the partisan
temper of the time that his statement got exactly that name, and no
other, fastened upon it. It was called everywhere “Campion’s Brag and
Challenge,” and its modest author was contemned and ridiculed for the
implication that his own powers were so very superior that he must of
course get the better of others in any argument!
Pounde took his copy, which Campion forgot to seal, back to London,
read it in raptures, let it be seen, admired, talked about, and
transcribed: this was his curious way of keeping a secret. The result
was that what was meant to meet a particular crisis, and serve for a
last will and testament, became as common property, beforehand, as
any ballad sold in the streets. Lively measures were at once taken
by the Bishop of Winchester; and the State, hypocritically urging
“conspiracy,” pounced upon a host of Catholic lords and gentlemen. Yet
Campion’s little composition, which bred all this fury, only asks for
“three sorts of indifferent and quiet audience”: one hearing before
the Lords in Council, on the relation of the Church to the English
Government; the next before the Heads of Houses of both Universities,
on the proofs of the truth of the Catholic religion; the last before
the courts spiritual and temporal, “wherein I will justify the said
Faith by the common wisdom of the laws standing.” Then he pleads in
deferent and almost affectionate words, for a special audience of
“her noble Grace” the Queen. In his candour and fearless simplicity
he believed that opponents had only to hear to be convinced, thus
crediting them with that earnestness in religious matters which he
possessed himself, and which only a very few of the best Protestants of
that day shared with him. Campion closes his appeal with a wonderfully
beautiful reference to the vowed Seminarian priests, and in a lofty
music of good English, worthy to stand by any passage of like length in
the great prose classics. “Hearken to those which spend the best blood
in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up
unto Heaven for you, daily and hourly, by those English students whose
posterity shall not die, which, beyond the seas, gathering virtue and
sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you
over, but either to win you to Heaven or to die upon your pikes. And
touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have made a league
(all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must
overreach all the practices of England!) cheerfully to carry the cross
that you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery while
we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your
torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned;
the enterprise is begun; it is of God: it cannot be withstood. So
the Faith was planted. So it must be restored. If these my offers
be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run
thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I
have no more to say, but recommend your case and mine to Almighty God,
the Searcher of Hearts: Who send us of His grace, and set us at accord
before the Day of Payment, to the intent we may at last be friends in
Heaven, where all injuries shall be forgotten.”
Parsons’ work lay in Gloucester, Hereford, Worcestershire, Warwickshire
and Derbyshire; Campion’s in the more southerly Midlands. The wandering
Levite with his attendant gentleman would approach at evening, and
with caution, the friendly roof, either Catholic or, though Protestant,
containing Catholics, and be received at the door as strangers,
then conducted to an inner room, where all who seek the priest’s
ministrations kneel and ask for his blessing. That night all is got
ready, and confessions are heard, instructions given, reconciliations
effected; at dawn there is Mass, preaching, and Holy Communion; and
the travellers depart for the next household station. Most edifying
accounts are given of the devotion of good married Confessors, who
were scattered all over the land. The Jesuits met with many seculars,
“whom we find in every place, whereby both the people is well served,
and we much eased in our charge.” These were the old Marian priests,
active in obscurity. The “harvest is wonderful great”: so many show
“a conscience pure, a courage invincible, zeal incredible, a work so
worthy; the number innumerable, of high degree, of mean calling ...
of every age and sex.” “The solaces that are ever intermingled with
the miseries are so great that they do not only countervail the fear
of what punishment temporal soever, but by infinite sweetness make all
worldly pains, be they never so great, seem nothing,” for the sake of
“this good people which had lived before, so many ages, in one only
Faith.” Day by day, running in and out of all the busy heroic toil, is
the fiery thread of danger and alarm. “We are sitting merrily at table,
conversing familiarly on matters of faith and devotion (for our talk is
generally of such things) when comes a hurried knock at the door.... We
all start up and listen, like deer when they hear the huntsman.... If
it is nothing, we laugh at our fright.” Then there was calumny, a far
more difficult thing to accept in the same gay spirit. “They tear and
sting us with their venomous tongues, calling us seditious, hypocrites;
yea, heretics, too! which is much laughed at. The people hereupon is
ours.” And again: “The house where I am is sad: no other talk but of
the death, flight, prison, or spoil of their friends; nevertheless,
they proceed with courage. Very many, even at this present, being
restored to the Church, new soldiers give in their names, while the old
offer up their blood, by which holy hosts and oblations God will be
pleased. And we shall—no question!—by Him overcome.” These are extracts
from Campion’s letters, and give a clear idea of his life during his
visitations of 1580-1.
There were then many more Manor-houses, kept up as such, than there
are now; most of those which Campion visited had their hiding-place
or “priests’ hole,” to which he could always fly when safety demanded
it. He settled a host of weak Catholics in their religion, and also
received a great many conspicuous converts. It will be noted that the
little Jesuit mission was directed to the gentry. This was not through
accident, or partiality, or snobbery. The gentry had most personal
weight; they were better able to protect a hunted man; and they were
naturally supposed to have stricter notions of honour: this last was
a point on which everything depended. Moreover, the old spirit of
feudalism was not so dead but that through them all workmen on their
estates, or connected by interest with them in the towns, could be
reached and influenced. In a hurried campaign, every consideration
of prudence and forethought would choose them, so to speak, as the
outworks of the citadel.
The country districts north and south were all still favourable to
Catholicism. London, the University of Cambridge, and some larger towns
and seaports, especially in the West, were half Puritan or Calvinistic,
half irreligious and indifferent. The ancient Faith, as was well
said by Sir Cuthbert Sharpe, for the most part “still lay like lees
at the bottom of men’s hearts; and if the vessel were ever so little
stirred, came to the top.” A thoughtful living writer sums it up as
his conclusion that England would have resumed the Faith with a sigh
of relief, had it not been for the resentments bred by the Catholic
“plotters.” Considering the frightful circumstances of the body to
which these men belonged, it is putting too great a strain, perhaps,
upon human nature to expect smooth behaviour from every individual in
it. The genuine “plotters” were few. Against them stands the passionate
loyalty of our persecuted minority, both all along, and in the one
great crisis. When the deliverer loomed up in the shape of Philip’s
Armada, blessed and indulgenced like a crusade of old, where were they,
supposed to be so sick of Queen and country? Hand in impoverished
pocket, strengthening the national defences; cutlass on thigh, manning
the English fleet.
X
MANY LABOURS: AND A BOOK: 1580
CAMPION passed four months of pleasant weather in hard and happy work,
moving about Northamptonshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire. Some lovely
little spiritual adventure starred his path, and the paths of others,
wherever he went. He must have seen more than once, from some hilly
road afar off, even if he never entered it,
“The towery City, branchy between towers,”
which was so dear to him to the last. In October of this year, 1580,
he was bidden towards London as far as Uxbridge: farther he could
hardly come, without the gravest peril, as the Privy Council were just
issuing their third warrant for the capture of Jesuits. There he was
joined by Fr. Parsons and several other missionaries. A conference
was held: it was represented that Norfolk and Lancashire were eager
to claim Fr. Campion’s ministrations, and it was decided that he was
to go to Lancashire, preferable as being not only farther from London
and also “more affected to the Catholic religion,” but as having
better private libraries. For they were now urging Campion to write
again: this time something on the burning questions of the day, aimed
particularly at the Universities (where his Challenge was still the
staple of daily talk), and therefore to be written in Latin. We are not
so sure, now-a-days, that controversy does much good, but one reason
for that may be that we have few Campions to carry it on. It is well to
remember that people then read nothing else, except poetry! Campion’s
work was his famous _Decem Rationes Propositæ in Causa Fidei_, or, as
the title is given in its only modern translation (1827), _Ten Reasons
for Renouncing the Protestant, and Embracing the Catholic Religion_.
At first the author was for calling his thesis _Heresy in Despair: De
Hæresi Desperata_. His counsellors agreed, amid laughter, that it
would be odd indeed to nail such a title as that to the mast, when
heresy was so powerful and flourishing; but, according to Campion’s
own philosophy, there was no life in an argument whose only premisses,
as he once said, are “curses, starvation, and the rack.” Here we come
back at once to his root principle, which modern research so fully
justifies, in regard to the England of his own day. A “gentleman saint”
who uttered many an ironic, but never a contemptuous word, Campion
could not be persuaded that “the received religion” was a genuine
thing. He believed that temporal interest alone led people to conform
to the new alterations and restrictions; that the lay statesmen who
were pushing things through were concerned not with doctrine, but
only with negations of doctrine, and that on the other side, nothing
was so promising, nothing so gloriously fruitful, as persecutions
and martyrdoms. First and last, he had a strong dash of optimism. In
this spirit he began his last treatise, writing it as best he could,
depending on his memory, and on such books as country squires might
have in their houses, and putting it together in among the almost
incessant journeys, duties, fatigues and alarms of the next few weeks.
The two Jesuit friends parted at Uxbridge, “with the tenderness of
heart which in such a case and so dangerous a time may be imagined.”
Gervase Pierrepoint conveyed Campion into Nottinghamshire to spend
Christmas at Thoresby, his home; thence into Derbyshire, where one of
the young Tempests succeeded as guide; and the gentleman who directed
the Yorkshire part of the journey reached in safety the house of his
own brother-in-law, Mr. William Harrington of Mount St. John, near
Thirsk, where the Father was received with open arms. Here he settled
down for less than a fortnight at his desk, among his note-books, at
peace. But to have him in the house at all was to risk the contagion
of the things of God. The eldest of the large family, a wild boy, his
father’s namesake, was quick to feel the spell of this most attractive
guest. “Not only his eloquence and fire,” says Fr. Henry More of
Campion, “but a certain hidden infused power, made his words strike
home.” Some of these simple words of every day “struck home” to the
young William Harrington, so that fourteen years afterwards he found
the palm-branch of martyrdom growing green and fair for him on the
public execution ground. At this very time of Campion’s visit, the Lent
of 1581, there was another lad of fourteen or fifteen, John Pibush,
running about the streets of Thirsk, his native village, who may have
gone to Confession to the strange priest at the Manor, and wondered at
him, unknowing that he, too, was sealed as a future holocaust in the
same immortal cause.
From Mount St. John, where he must have tasted much natural happiness,
Campion travelled into Lancashire, under the protection of a former
pupil and his wife. There he was affectionately welcomed and cared
for in each of eight great houses, where himself and his spiritual
conferences were still a glowing tradition, sixty or seventy years
afterwards. He had to live, think, write, in a crowd. The local
gentry drove from great distances and slept in barns, only to hear and
see him once. At Blainscough Hall, the seat of the Worthingtons, the
pursuivants would have discovered him, where he was walking in the
open air, had it not been for the cleverness and splendid presence of
mind of a faithful maidservant, standing hard by. She ran up against
him, in a pretended fit of temper, and shoved him into a shallow pond!
The pursuivants, sent out by the terrible Huntingdon, President of the
North, to apprehend a distinguished cleric and scholar, naturally never
gave that mud-covered yokel a second glance.
Fr. Campion would have learned by now the fate of most of the
enthusiastic band who had travelled in his company, from Rome or Rheims
to England, during the preceding summer: five priests, including the
lovable gay-hearted Sherwin, were languishing in cells and on the
rack; Fr. Parsons, though hunted, was free. Following a suggestion of
Campion’s, he set up a private printing press, in order that the _Ten
Reasons_ and other Catholic works of defensive controversy might be
issued as they were needed. Publishing, like every other major industry
open to the Catholics, was outlawed; devotional and doctrinal books had
to be brought out in this hole-and-corner fashion, if at all. Another
of those lay associates of the mission, whose devotion and usefulness
had been proved at every point, came forward to bear the brunt of the
new enterprise. The young Stephen Brinkley, Bachelor of Civil Law,
called by Parsons “a gentleman of high attainments both in literature
and in virtue,” volunteered to become manager and head compositor,
and amid many dramatic and exciting interruptions, carried his task
through. Machinery, types, paper, and the rest were bought with money
supplied by the ever-helpful George Gilbert. Brinkley himself, to avert
suspicion, had to buy horses for his workmen, and attire them like
persons of quality whenever they went abroad. He quite knew what he
was risking. After him, still another knight of letters in a far less
perilous field, offered himself in the person of Thomas Fitzherbert of
Swynnerton, then newly married (long afterwards a priest, and Rector
of the English College in Rome). His not undelightful duty was to
verify the mass of references and authorities quoted in the margins of
Campion’s manuscript: this he did in a scholarly way, satisfactory to
the scholarly author, who believed in research, and liked nothing at
second-hand. Lastly, Parsons, as Campion’s Superior, recalled him to
London in April or May to see the little volume through the press, and
cautioned him to put up only at inns on the way, where happily he might
pass as “the gentleman in the parlour.”
Thirty miles or so north of the great city, Campion had one of his
ever-recurring narrow escapes. A spy, hungry for reward, had dogged
his steps on his way from York. At a certain town not named, a little
boy who knew Campion by sight overheard this man describing the Father
to a magistrate, and calling him “Jesuit,” a word the child had never
heard. He ran straight to the tavern where the “Jesuit” had put up and
succeeded in finding him and warning him! so the bird was safely on the
wing before the fowlers were in sight.