diligently as ever. With Father Robert he had frequent occasion to
visit the Bellamys of Uxenden Hall near Harrow, a family under whose
roof his old friend Richard Bristow had died in the preceding autumn.
Their later adversities and annihilation were only too typical of
Catholic domestic history under Elizabeth. Going to Harrow meant going
up the Edgware Road, and in the mouth of that road, between waste lands
(facing the spot across the street where the Marble Arch now stands),
was the famous Tyburn gallows. This particular one had been put up new
for Dr. Storey’s execution, ten years before: it had three posts set
in a triangle, with connecting cross-bars at the top. Once every week,
without intermission, batches of criminals perished there. Even now,
and with far greater frequency afterwards, holy and innocent men and
women made up a large proportion of the “criminals”; and remembering
these dear souls, and conscious that there he was to follow them in
confession of the King of Martyrs, Campion would always solemnly take
off his hat and pause, in passing, to salute Tyburn Tree.
Meanwhile, in the quiet and seclusion of Dame Cecily Stonor’s park,
near Henley, and in the attics which she bravely set apart for the
purpose, the _Decem Rationes_ got itself safely printed by Stephen
Brinkley and his seven honest men. Campion, with fine bravado, dated
it from “Cosmopolis”; and the distribution of it was as audacious as
the dating. The first copies bound, about four hundred in number,
were hurriedly stabbed, instead of stitched, in time to go up for
the Oxford commemoration, June 27th of that year. The church of St.
Mary-the-Virgin was then used for all the “Acts,” for the accommodation
of which, a century later, the Sheldonian Theatre was built. When the
company entered St. Mary’s, the benches were found littered with the
“seditious” books. Their dedication was “to the studious Collegians
flourishing at Oxford and Cambridge,” and the youths in question were
just in the humour to read them; and read them they did, then and
there, instead of attending to the important annual function going
on! This rudeness bred protest, and protest bred a lively scene. To
understand it we must recall that the undergraduate element was then,
by comparison, the conservative element. Heads of Houses, Fellows and
Tutors, learned and popular men, had been removed wholesale by the
Elizabethan settlement of religion in favour of new men concisely
described as “extremists from Geneva, intellectually inferior to those
who had been displaced, and representing a different spirit, and
different traditions.” The student body looked on them with scorn.
Again, to quote another chief authority on this subject, “the young
Oxonians did not bear easily the Elizabethan drill, and felt that
if their liberty must be crushed they would fain have it crushed by
something more venerable than the mushroom authority of the Ministers
of the Queen. They were as tinder, and Campion’s book was just the
sort of spark to set them in a blaze.” The excited Government told
off relays of clergymen to courtmartial and shoot it. Aylmer, Bishop
of London, wished to commission nine Deans, seven Archdeacons, and
the two Regius Professors of Divinity to punish the tiny offender;
but the actual ammunition brought into the field was not quite so
imposing as all this. The answers were duly published, dealing in the
most unmeasured personal abuse of Campion. No attempt was made in
any instance to rival either his religious fervour or his literary
grace. His last labour with his pen made, in short, a very great and
an extremely prolonged stir. Its fate was a romantic one from start to
finish, for it was so quickly and thoroughly confiscated that not more
than a couple of copies are now known to exist. Despite the outcry, or
because of it, edition after edition was called for. There have been
nearly thirty reprints in the original Latin, and many translations
into modern languages, inclusive of three beautiful translations
into the good English common in 1606, 1632, and 1687, one of which
should be re-issued. The _Ten Reasons_, written under such immense
difficulties, had all of Campion’s zeal and pith, and was “a model of
eloquence, elegance, and good taste.” Marc Antony Muret, the greatest
Latinist of the time, called it _libellum aureum_, “a golden little
book, writ by the very finger of God.” Campion had gone, in his ardent,
sensitive, rhetorical, compendious way, over the whole ground of the
credentials of that Church which had had the allegiance of England for
more than a thousand years: Scripture, the Fathers, the Councils, the
evidence of human history, are all drawn upon, in the best spirit of
the new learning. The characteristic note of personal appeal to the
Queen is not lacking here at the end. Campion’s theme is the Church,
and he quotes from the Prophet Isaiah: “Kings shall be thy nursing
fathers, and Queens thy nursing mothers;” and he names as among the
great monarchs whose joy it was to further the Church in their day,
St. Edward the Confessor, St. Louis of France, St. Henry of Saxony,
St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia, St. Stephen of Hungary, and the rest. Then
he cries out to “Elizabeth, most mighty Queen,” to listen. “For this
Prophet is speaking unto thee, is teaching thee thy duty. I tell thee
one Heaven cannot gather in Calvin and these thine ancestors. Join
thyself therefore to them, else shalt thou stand unworthy of that name
of thine, thy genius, thy learning, thy fame before all men, and thy
fortunes. To this end do I conspire, and will conspire, against thee,
whatever betideth me, who am so often menaced with the gallows as a
conspirator hostile to thy life. (‘All hail, thou good Cross!’) The day
shall come, O Elizabeth! the day that shall make it altogether clear
which of the two did love thee best: the Company of Jesus, or the brood
of Luther!”
Hardly was the last of the original imprints bound and distributed,
when the pursuivants in search of what was roughly, but significantly
enough, called “Massing-stuff,” pounced upon Stonor Park, and caught
red-handed there, and carried off, the two gentlemen, John Stonor
and Stephen Brinkley, and four of the printers, one of whom, a poor
frightened fellow, conformed, and was let off at once. William Hartley,
ordained the year before, who had in person strewn the _Ten Reasons_
over the benches of the University Church, and made special gifts of
copies in various Colleges, was arrested a little later. His fate was
not exceptional, like that of his comrades just mentioned, who were
eventually released on bail. He suffered at Tyburn; and his mother,
heroic as the mother of the Macchabees, stood by his young body in its
butchering, and thanked God aloud for her privilege in so giving back
to Him such a son.
Campion spent St. John’s Day (marking the first anniversary of his
return to England) at Lady Babington’s, at Twyford in Buckinghamshire,
a house not many miles from Stonor, on the other bank of the Thames. He
stayed a little while at Bledlow also, and at Wynge, with the Dormers,
his whole heart bent, every moment of the time, upon his Father’s
business. But his free days were almost done.
The outcry redoubled, now that he had again succeeded in catching
public attention. Fresh and monstrously cruel measures were therefore
taken against all Papists. “Naught is lacking,” wrote to Acquaviva
the tender soul who too well knew himself to be the cause of many
sorrows, “but that to our books written with ink should succeed others
daily published, and written in blood.” Fr. Parsons prudently ordered
him back to the North. The two heard each other’s confessions and
renewal of vows at Stonor, and said good-bye, exchanging hats as a
parting gift, after the friendly fashion of their time. Campion was
to ride straightway into Lancashire to get his manuscript and notes,
left behind, his former companion Ralph Emerson going with him; and
he was then to betake himself to the fresh mission field in Norfolk.
As it fell out, he soon spurred back after Parsons to tell him of
a letter that moment received. It was from a gentleman named Yate,
then a prisoner for his religion, earnestly begging Campion to visit
Lyford Grange in Berkshire, the gentleman’s own estate, hard by,
where his wife and mother still were, together with Edward Yate, and
part of a proscribed community of English Brigittine nuns, driven
back into England by troubles in the Low Countries. Fr. Parsons,
knowing the house to be a conspicuous one, and already supplied with
chaplains, was unwilling to grant the permission. But eventually he
gave in, warning the two others not to tarry beyond one night or one
day, and as a precaution, putting Campion under the lay brother’s
care and obedience. Parsons parted from him not without a rueful and
affectionate word. “You are too easy-going by far,” he said to his
friend and fellow-soldier, purposely giving its least heroic name to
that intentionally prodigal zeal for souls. “I know you, Father Edmund;
if they once get you there, you will never break away!”
[Illustration: “We have not broken through here!” [P. 134]
XI
AT LYFORD GRANGE, AND AFTER: 1581
ON the morning of July 12, Father Edmund and Brother Ralph, faithful
to agreement, were in their saddles again, leaving the pious household
refreshed, but lamenting. Of the two priests who formed part of it,
one, Fr. Collington, or Colleton, escorted them some distance on their
way. Campion had already been waylaid, at an inn near Oxford, by many
friendly tutors and undergraduates, when up galloped the other chaplain
of Lyford, Fr. Forde. He was a Trinity College man, who had entered
Douay just after Campion’s arrival there, and was to follow him closely
to martyrdom. Forde brought news that a large party of Catholics had
come over to Lyford to visit the nuns, and, distressed at missing Fr.
Campion, were clamouring for his return. The Oxford group had been
begging their old champion to preach to them, which he would not do
in so public a place; they now added their entreaties to those of the
deputy of the strangers, and offered to join these at Lyford. Surely,
he who had given a whole day to a few godly nuns, who needed him but
little, could not refuse a Saturday and Sunday to so many soiled souls
of every stripe and colour, “thirsting for the waters of life”? The
suit was insistent; Campion was inclined to give in, but referred his
admirers to Brother Emerson, as his provisional Superior. He, in turn,
was overborne. It seemed much safer, after all, for the precious Father
to be among friends, while he, Ralph, went on alone to fetch the books
from Mr. Richard Houghton’s in Lancashire. So back to Lyford Campion
went, to the poor little lay brother’s everlasting regret.
On the following Sunday morning, the ninth after Pentecost, Campion
preached at the Grange on the gospel of the day, the peculiarly
touching gospel of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, the changed and
faithless city which stoned the prophets, and knew not, in her day,
the things that were to her peace. No one present ever forgot that
heart-shaking sermon, laden as it was with pathos and presentiment.
There was an audience of sixty, including the Oxonians. Unfortunately
it included also George Eliot, a man of the most evil personal repute,
an apostate and a Government spy, armed with plenary powers. He was
then under a charge of murder, and was anxious to whitewash himself
in the eyes of the Council by some conspicuous public service. He
had once been a servant of the Ropers at Canterbury; and Mrs. Yate’s
honest cook, who had known Eliot there in his decent days, let him in
without question, whispering what a treat was in store for him in the
preaching of none other than Father Campion! Though the warrant for the
apprehension of the Jesuit was in Eliot’s pocket, he little thought to
capture him so easily and so soon. A pursuivant had accompanied him to
the gate; Eliot went back to this person, nominally to dismiss him,
as a heretic, really to speed him to a magistrate at Abingdon for a
force of an hundred men to arrest Campion in the Queen’s name. Then he
went piously up-stairs to Mass, Edmund Campion’s last Mass, so far as
we know. That, and the sermon, passed by in peace, and Eliot himself
left. Immediately after dinner an alarm was given by a watchman posted
in a turret, who saw the enemy far off. Campion sprang up, and started
to leave at once, and alone, saying that his chances of escape might
be fair, and that his remaining would only involve the household in
discomfort and danger. But they all clung to him, assuring him that
Lyford was full of cunning secret passages and hiding-holes; and into
one of these, in the wall above the gateway, he was forthwith hurried
by Forde and Collington, who laid themselves down by his side, and
crossed their hands over their breasts.
Back came Eliot with the magistrate, a civil squire, and the
neighbourly Berkshire yeomen who loathed the work. He made them turn
the whole house topsy-turvy, nor desist till evenfall; then, finding
nothing, they withdrew. However, they returned almost in the same
breath, egged on by Eliot, who now would have the walls sounded.
The Abingdon magistrate apologized to Mrs. Yate, not for the Queen’s
warrant, but for his associate, “the mad-man,” as he called him, who
was carrying it out. The lady was an invalid; thinking not altogether
of herself, she railed and wept. The magistrate kindly soothed her
fears, and allowed her to sleep where she pleased, undisturbed by
his men and their din. She chose to have a bed made up close to the
hiding-place. She was conducted thither with the honours of war, and
a sentinel was posted at the room door. The tapping and smashing went
merrily on elsewhere until late at night, when, by her orders, the
sheriff’s baffled underlings made a fine supper, and being worn out,
fell asleep over their cups, even as they were expected to do. Poor
Mrs. Yate was either by nature the silliest of women, or else her
nerves were upset by illness and trying circumstance, for she sent
for Fr. Campion, as well as for all her other guests who were in that
part of the house, and requested him, as he stood by her bedside—of
all possible things—to preach to them just once more! One could not
in courtesy refuse a hostess, however unreasonable, who was risking so
much for him; nor would it have been like him to refuse. Allen tells us
that it was his invariable habit to preach “once a day at the least,
often twice, and sometimes thrice, whereby through God’s goodness
he converted sundry in most shires of this realm of most wisdom and
worship, besides young gentlemen students, and others of all sorts.”
Fr. Campion discharged his task. As the little congregation broke up,
some one stumbled in the dark, and several fell; the snoring sentinel
awoke; searchers, with lanterns and axes, swarmed up from below. There
was nothing to be seen: Lyford was not honeycombed in vain with hidden
passages. The men-at-arms had been fooled too often, and were angry
with Eliot. Yet that functionary knew that something was still really
afoot, that the alarm was not a false one. On going down the stairs
again he struck his hand upon the wall over it. “We have not broken
through here!” he said. A loyal servant of the Yates, who was at his
side, and who knew it was just there the refugees lay, muttered that
enough wall had been ruined already, and then went deadly pale while
Eliot’s eye was still on him. The latter called, in triumph, for a
smith’s hammer, and banged it into the thin timber partition, and into
the narrow cell. And thus was Father Edmund Campion taken at Lyford
Grange, at dawn of Monday, July 17th, in the year 1581.
He was quite calm, quite cheerful. With him were apprehended the two
priests, seven gentlemen, and two yeomen. Forster, the Sheriff of
Berkshire, hitherto absent, arrived. As he was an Oxonian, and almost a
Catholic, and kindly disposed towards Campion, he waited to hear from
the Council what was to be done. On the fourth day orders came to send
the chief prisoners up to London, under a strong guard. Leaving the
old moated house and its many occupants, now distracted with grief,
Campion took horse at the door, and rode slowly off, Eliot prancing in
triumph at the head of the company, though the common people saluted
him as “Judas,” all along the way. The first halt was at Abingdon;
sympathetic Oxford scholars had come down to see the last of the great
light of the University under such black eclipse. Eliot accosted his
victim at table: “Mr. Campion, I know well you are wroth with me
for this work!” He drew out a beautiful answer, sincere, composed,
half-playful: a saint’s answer. “Nay, I forgive thee; and in token
thereof, I drink to thee. Yea, and if thou wilt repent, and come to
Confession, I will absolve thee: but large penance thou must have!” At
Henley, Campion saw in the crowd Fr. Parsons’ servant, and greeted him
as he could, without betraying him: Fr. Parsons was near at hand, but
was wisely kept indoors. A young priest, “Mr. Filby the younger,” as he
was called, a native of Oxford, is said to have here attempted to speak
to Campion; he was at once seized upon as a traitorous “comforter of
Jesuits,” and added to the cavalcade. At Colebrook, less than a dozen
miles from London, came fresh instructions from the Council. Sheriff
Forster had treated his prisoners most honourably: they were now to be
made a public show. Their elbows were tied from behind, their wrists
roped together in front, and their feet fastened under the horses;
their leader was decorated with a paper pinned to his hat—Fr. Parsons’
hat of late—on which in large lettering was inscribed: “Campion,
the Seditious Jesuit.” And in this guise he was paraded through the
chief streets of the great city on market-day. The mob roared with
delight; “but the wiser sort,” says Holinshed, “lamented to see the
land fallen to such barbarism as to abuse in this manner a gentleman
famous throughout Europe for his scholarship and his innocency of life,
and this before any trial, or any proof against him, his case being
prejudged, and he punished as if already condemned.” Stephen Brinkley
somehow obtained, as a souvenir of a fellow-prisoner, that thick dark
felt hat, which had been so ignominiously labelled in the cause of
Christ. Years afterwards, when in Belgium, he put it into a reliquary,
“out of love and veneration towards that most holy martyr of God, his
father and patron.” A piece of it is at Roehampton, in the Jesuit
Noviciate.
On reaching the Tower the Lyford captives were given up to the
Governor, Sir Owen Hopton. Taking his cue, he had Campion thrust at
once into Little Ease, the famous Tower hole not high enough for a man
to stand upright in, nor long enough for him to lie down in. After
four days of this misery he was suddenly taken out, put in a boat at
the Traitors’ Gate steps, and rowed to the town house of the Earl of
Leicester. This nobleman and Edmund Campion, who had seen so much of
each other for several years, had been placed by events in silent
conflict. There stood the Earl of Bedford, with two Secretaries of
State; there stood Campion’s host, who, for one reason or another, had
never hounded Catholics with the fixed fury of Walsingham and Burghley,
and thereby did not displease his irresolute royal mistress; there (a
theatrical circumstance!) was that royal mistress herself, a gleaming
stately vision in a great chair, head and front of a not unfriendly
little inquisition. To the questions heaped upon him Campion gave
frank answers. On the matter of “allegiance” he seemed to satisfy the
company, who told him there was no fault in him save that he was a
Papist. “That,” he modestly interrupted, “is my greatest glory.” The
Queen smiled upon him, and offered him liberty and honours, but under
conditions which his conscience forbade him to accept.
When he was courteously dismissed, Leicester, probably with a kind
motive, sent a message to Hopton to keep up the flatteries of the new
policy. Hopton put on an almost affectionate consideration for his
important prisoner; and so fast as he was prompted, by artful degrees,
he suggested to him a pension, a high place at Court, and even the
promise eventually of the mitre and revenues of the primatial See of
Canterbury! Well did the Council know, all along, the value of these
stubborn and unpurchasable confessors of Christ. To cap the matter,
in Campion’s case, it was publicly announced, both by Hopton and by
Walsingham (who knew the untruth of their announcement), that the
Jesuit was at the point of recantation and Protestant orthodoxy, and
in full sight of the future Archbishopric, “to the great content of
the Queen.” It flew all over London that he would presently preach at
Paul’s Cross, and there burn the _Decem Rationes_ with his own hand.
Eventually Hopton returned to first principles indoors, and inquired
point-blank of Campion whether he would give up his religion, and
conform. The reply is easily imagined. A continued course of wheedling
was wasteful business. So thought the Council; and three days after
his strange and sudden sight of the Queen’s Grace at Leicester House,
Edmund Campion, first kneeling down at the door and invoking the
Holy Name for steadying of his manhood, was stripped and fastened
to the rollers of the Tower rack. Blandishments had failed to move
him; they would try mortal pain, and see what that could do. Torture,
nevertheless, was as much against the laws of England then (though not
against the laws of some less humane countries), as it is now.
XII
THE THICK OF THE FRAY: 1581
CAMPION, in between the working of the rollers, was asked his opinion
of certain political utterances in the works of his old friends Allen
and Bristow, and of Dr. Sander; also whether he considered the Queen
“true and lawful,” or “pretensed and deprived.” He refused to answer.
Physical anguish could be little worse than the ineffable boredom of
these two never-quiet questions. He was then asked by the Governor,
the Rackmaster, and others present, by whose command and counsel he
had returned to England; by whom in England he had been received and
befriended; in whose houses he had said Mass, heard Confessions, and
reconciled persons to his Church; where his recent book was printed,
and to whom copies were given; lastly, what was his opinion of the
Bull of Pius V against Queen Elizabeth? A letter written at the time to
Lord Shrewsbury by Lord Burghley, and still extant, shows that nothing
of moment could be got out of Campion. During the next fortnight,
however, there was poured into the ear of the Government information
regarding the second and third items in the above category. Houses were
searched; persons of mark were apprehended, tried in the Star Chamber,
and sentenced. Almost every manse or town house where Campion had been
harboured became known, and even the names of those Oxford Masters of
Arts who had followed him to Lyford. The Government gave out that he
had confessed upon the rack, and implicated his too trusting friends.
The alleged facts naturally became a general scandal, and bred grief
and horror among the Catholics who, no less than Protestants, were
thus driven to believe them. The secrets were probably given up, under
panic, by three serving-men, and by poor Gervase Pierrepoint. It was
a common trick of the time, though not peculiar to it, to show a
prisoner a lying list of names purporting to have been extracted from
colleagues, so that he himself might be trapped into endorsing the
suspicions held in regard to those names. But it is clear that Campion
was brought to mention only a few who, as he was aware, were formerly
known to his examiners as Catholic Recusants; and only after a solemn
oath from the Commissioners that no harm could accrue to them in
consequence of such supplementary mention. Even this he had every cause
to regret. The gentlemen and gentlewomen on Lord Burghley’s lists were
carefully informed, when arrested, that it was Campion who had betrayed
them: a cruel slander which he could refute only at the foot of the
scaffold. Thanks to the reports, first of his backsliding, then of his
treachery, his great reputation, for the time being, was clean gone.
Having thus been given forth to the public as a knave, he was now to be
set before them as a fool, and shown to be one who possessed neither
sort of superiority, moral or mental.
[Illustration: Campion before Queen Elizabeth. _p. 138._]