State religion. Such a circumstance, as he had claimed previously, is
in itself a plain disproof of any treason. Hopton, who hated him, sent
Campion’s own sister to him with the repeated offer of a very rich
benefice. To the cell door came one day none other than George Eliot,
saying that he would never have trapped Fr. Edmund, had he thought
that anything worse than imprisonment could be in store. He also told
the man of God whom he had wronged past reparation that he stood in
danger from the wrath of the Catholics, and feared their reprisals for
his late actions. Campion persuaded him that they would never push
revenge so far as to seek his life, but added that if Eliot were truly
repentant he should have a letter of recommendation to a Catholic Duke
in Germany, who would employ and protect him. Delahays, the keeper, in
the discharge of his office, had to stand close to the prisoner during
this interview, and what he heard sank into his mind and made him a
convert. Outside the Tower, there was a ferment of excitement over
this one of its inmates, and over the question whether the indignation
of all Europe should be braved by carrying out his sentence. The Earl
of Desmond, the accessory, and Dr. Sanders, the co-principal, of the
late revolt in western Ireland, were still hiding in woods and caves,
and weathering the hardships which were to be dismally ended for both
during the coming spring. Burghley concisely said, in the finest
Elizabethan spirit of punishing somebody—no great matter whom—when any
row was made, that “Campion and Sanders were in the same boat, and as
they could not catch Sanders, they must hang Campion instead.” The
princely visitor was still at Court, and high festival went on from
day to day. The preoccupation of the Queen with him and his affairs
was thought to be an excellent item of the programme, as it kept her
from thinking of Campion and his fate. Delay was dreaded as a means
of getting together of the great English nobles, and the foreign
ambassadors, with petitions for Campion’s release; and it was thought
that the Queen would never resist any strongly-worded request which so
corroborated her own supposed secret feeling. The Council still thought
his destruction desirable. Meanwhile, instant appeal was made to the
Duke, by the Catholics generally, to use his influence in Campion’s
behalf: he promised to intercede for him, and may have done so. At the
last moment further pressure was brought to bear. His confessor was
sent into the tennis court, where the Duke was about to begin a game,
with this message: that the royal blood of France would be disgraced
for ever, if so foul a judicial murder were not checked. The little
great personage, thus accosted, as we are told by Bombino, stroked his
face absent-mindedly with his left hand; then raised his right hand,
with the racket in it, and called to one opposite to him: “Play!” Not
another word did he answer to the tragic matter so thrust upon him.
Burghley fixed upon November 25, a Saturday, as the date for Campion’s
execution. Sherwin was appointed to die in his company, as representing
the Seminary at Rheims. They were taken together one day into the
Lieutenant’s Hall to face some endless argument or other. The opponent,
“by report of such as stood by, was never so holden up to the wall in
his life.” On the way back to their cells, under guard, they crossed
one of the Tower courts. “Ah, Father Campion!” said his young comrade,
smiling at the welcome London sun, “I shall shortly be above yon
fellow.” Even one hurried free breath of fresh air must have meant much
to Campion. To be “clapped up a close prisoner,” as he had been from
the first, meant that his windows were blocked, and their minimum of
air strained through a narrow slanted funnel, latticed at its skyward
end, and with but one tiny pane occasionally opened at the bottom. But
these things, humanly intolerable, counted for little on the threshold
of light and liberty everlasting. “Delay of our death doth somewhat
dull me,” wrote Sherwin, touchingly, to a friend. “Truth it is, I
had hoped ere this, casting off this body of death, to have kissed
the precious, glorified wounds of my sweet Saviour, sitting in the
Throne of His Father’s own glory.” There was a good deal of haggling
and hesitation on the subject. By statute law any caught priest was
hangable; but public opinion (as Simpson reminds us in a brilliant
page) did not always run with the statute law. Moreover, Camden says
expressly that the Queen (who is supposed to have supervised and
approved all he wrote) did not believe in the “treasons” charged to the
“silly priests.” It is remarkable that the first defensive pamphlet put
forth by the Government after Campion’s death, was one “in which the
plot of Rheims and Rome was prudently forgotten—the very matter of the
indictment!”
By the time the day for the execution was finally set for Friday, the
first of December, a third priest had been chosen from the waiting
batch of victims, as representing the English College at Rome. This
was the Blessed Alexander Briant, who had applied from his prison
cell for admission into the Society of Jesus, a fact not known to his
persecutors. If the entry of his age in the Oxford Matriculation Lists
be correct (as is most likely), he was now only in his twenty-sixth
year. He was grave and gentle in character, full of charm, and of the
most extraordinary personal beauty. He had been carried off in the
course of a descent on Fr. Parsons’ London rooms, starved and parched
in the Marshalsea, tortured by needles, and kept in the entire darkness
of deep dungeons in the Tower. Norton, the Rackmaster, on three
occasions, proceeded (in his own phrase) to “make him a foot longer
than God made him,” yet he adds that “he stood still with express
refusal that he would tell the truth.” The “truth” meant information of
the whereabouts of Fr. Parsons, a former tutor and devoted friend, and
of the place where Parsons’ books were being printed. Briant had been
condemned the day after Campion’s trial, in Westminster Hall, where his
angelic looks, out-lasting a hell of almost unique torment, did not
pass unnoticed by the public. Here (though some accounts say it was
at the scaffold) he carried in the palm of his hand, and gazed upon
often, a little cross of rough wood which he had managed to whittle
in his cell, and on which he had traced an outline in charcoal of the
figure of the Crucified. Pedro Serrano, the secretary of the Spanish
Ambassador, saw it taken away from Briant, and heard him say: “You can
wrest it from my hand, but never from my heart.” Not long afterwards
George Gilbert died in Italy, kissing Blessed Alexander’s little cross,
which he must have taken pains to buy back.
These three, Fathers Campion, Sherwin, and Briant, were led forth on
a bitter morning, and bound to their hurdles, in the rain, outside
the Tower gates. Campion’s life for the past week had been nothing
but fasting, watching and prayer, and he was never in more gallant
spirits. “God save you all, gentlemen!” so he saluted the crowd, on
first coming out: “God bless you all, and make you all good Catholics!”
The two younger men were strapped down on one hurdle side by side,
Campion alone on the other. The mud was thick in the unpaved streets
of London, and the double span of horses, each flat hurdle being tied
to two tails, went at a great pace through Cheapside, Newgate Street,
and Holborn. There were intervals, however, when the jolted and bemired
prisoners were able to speak with their sympathizers, who surged in
upon them, and thus saved them for the moment from the incessant
annoyance of Charke and other accompanying fanatics. Some asked Fr.
Campion’s blessing; some spoke in his ear matters of conscience; one
gentleman courteously bent down and wiped the priest’s bespattered
face: “for which charity, or haply some sudden-moved affection, may God
reward him!” says one annalist who saw the kind deed done.
The New Gate spanned the street where the prison named after it stood
until yesterday; and in a niche of the New Gate was still a statue of
Our Lady: this Fr. Campion reverenced, raising his head and his bound
body, as best he could, as he passed under. The three martyrs were
seen to be smiling, nay, laughing, and the people commented with wonder
on their light-heartedness. A mile or so of sheer country at the end
of the road, and Tyburn was at hand, stark against a cloudy sky, with
a vast crowd waiting to see the sacrifice: “more than three thousand
horse,” says Serrano, in the contemporary letter already quoted, “and
an infinite number of souls.” And he goes on, in the truest Catholic
temper, speaking for himself, the Ambassador, and their little circle,
to say, “there was no one of us who had not envy of their death.” Just
as the hurdles halted, the sudden sun shone out and lit up the gallows
with its hanging halters. Fr. Campion was set upon his feet, put into
the hangman’s cart, driven under the triangular beams, and told to put
his head into the noose. This the first martyr of the English Jesuits
did with all meekness. Then, “with grave countenance and sweet voice,”
he began to speak, as he supposed he was to be allowed to do, according
to custom. He took the text of St. Paul: “We are made a spectacle
unto the world, and to angels, and to men: we are fools for Christ’s
sake.” Sir Francis Knowles and other officials promptly interrupted
him, and reminded him to confess his treason. So once more he must
needs say: “I desire you all to bear witness with me that I am thereof
altogether innocent.... I am a Catholic man and a priest: in that faith
have I lived, and in that faith do I intend to die. If you esteem my
religion treason, then am I guilty. As for other treason, I never
committed any: God is my judge.” He spoke of the names which he had
been hoodwinked into confessing, and protested that all the “secrets”
held back were spiritual confidences, and that there were no “secrets”
of another nature between his hosts and him; he also put in a plea for
one Richardson, imprisoned on account of the _Decem Rationes_, whereas
he knew nothing whatever of that book. He then tried to pray. But a
school-master with lungs, named Hearne, hastily stepped forward and
read a novel proclamation, first and last of its kind, declaring in
the Queen’s name that these men about to be executed were perishing
not for religion but for treason. Diligent reassertion, in those days,
seems to have established anything as a fact!
The lords and sheriffs present reverted to “the bloody question”:
what did Master Campion think of the Bull of Pius Quintus and the
excommunication of the Queen? and would he renounce the Pope of Rome?
He answered wearily that he was a Catholic. One voice shouted: “In
your Catholicism all treason is contained!” A minister came forward
to bid the martyr pray with him, but with marked gentleness was
denied his will. “You and I are not one in religion: wherefore, I
pray you, content yourself. I bar none of prayer, but I only desire
them of the Household of Faith to pray with me, and in mine agony to
say one Creed.” The Creed was chosen “to signify that he died for the
confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith.” He endeavoured again
to pray, probably using aloud the words of some of the Vulgate Psalms
or ritual hymns, when a spectator called out angrily to him to pursue
his devotions in English. “I will pray unto God,” answered Campion,
with all himself in the answer, “in a language which we both well
understand!” He was again interrupted, and ordered to ask forgiveness
of the Queen, and to pray for her. But his sweetness and patience held
out till the last. “Wherein have I offended her? In this am I innocent:
this is my last speech: in this give me credit. I have and do pray for
her.” “Pray you for Queen—Elizabeth?” was the insinuating query, made
often, and answered often, as here. Campion said: “Yea, for Elizabeth,
your Queen and my Queen, unto whom I wish a long, quiet reign, with all
prosperity.” He had barely finished this emphatic sentence when the
cart was drawn away. The multitude with one accord swayed and groaned.
Somebody in authority (one account names the Chamberlain of the Royal
Household, Lord Howard of Effingham) mercifully forbade the hangman
to cut the rope until he was quite dead. That other rope with which
Campion was bound Parsons managed to buy, and he had it laid about his
own neck when he came to die, in 1610. It is now at Stonyhurst: a
thin, frayed old cord some twelve feet long.
Close to the quartering-block stood a spectator, a young gallant of
twenty-three, eldest son of a Norfolk house, who had great gifts of
mind, and was given to writing verses: his name was Henry Walpole. He
was a Catholic, though, it would seem, a worldly one. His generous
instincts of humanity, however, had led him to befriend hunted priests;
and a love of Campion, in particular, was already kindled in him
through this association. As the executioner threw the severed limbs of
a blessed soul into the great smoking cauldron, to parboil them before
they were stuck on spikes, according to sentence, a few drops were
splashed out upon Henry Walpole’s doublet. The incident roused his mind
and pierced his heart, and was to him the instant cry of his vocation.
Like many another spiritual son of Blessed Edmund Campion (and nearer
to him than they, because he entered the Society), he was granted the
glory of following him, through faults of his own, through innumerable
hardships, and through martyrdom at York, in April, 1595, into the
peace of Paradise.
Meanwhile the hangman had seized the second victim, saying: “Come,
Sherwin! take thou also thy wages.” That manly man looked upon the bare
bloody arm of the other, and eager to show some public veneration of
his sainted leader, first bent forward and kissed it; then he leaped
into the cart. Young Briant presently endured death for the Faith
with an even calmer courage. The populace, much wrought up over all
three, went home, through the winter mists, in tears. Most of them who
had prejudices against the Church lost them for good; and very many
straightway entered her communion.
The Government sent forth publication after publication in lame
defence of its action. Soon France, Austria, Italy, were inundated
with accounts of the event; these everywhere produced the deepest
impression. At home, a great tidal wave of conversion to the old Church
swept in.
Campion’s death, last and best of his wonderful missionary labours,
bore the most astonishing fruit. The long storm of persecution raged
at its full fierceness after 1581, and it burst over the heads not only
of a far more numerous, but a far more heroic body. Edmund Campion’s
spirit had been built in good time, as it were, into the unsteady wall.
Robert Parsons had an intense feeling for his first comrade-in-arms.
“I understand of the advancement and exaltation of my dear brother
Mr. Campion, and his fellows. Our Lord be blessed for it! it is
the joyfullest news in one respect that ever came to my heart.”
This same feeling breaks out with powerful irony, addressing the
“Geneva-coloured” clerics, who so long harassed the martyr-group
of 1581. “Their blood will, I doubt not, fight against your errors
and impiety many hundred years after you are passed from the world
altogether.... They are well bestowed upon you: you have used them to
the best.”
And Allen, in a private letter, says on his part: “Ten thousand sermons
would not have published our apostolic faith and religion so winningly
as the fragrance of these victims, most sweet both to God and to men.”
No remote mystic was Edmund Campion, but a man of his age, with
much endearing human circumstance about him and in him. Caring for
nothing but the things of the soul, he had yet caught the ear and the
eye of the nation. The tidings of his end meant much to many of the
great Elizabethans: not least personal was it, perhaps, to the lad
Shakespeare, whose father had been settled as a stout Recusant by the
Warwickshire ministrations of Parsons.
An aged priest, Gregory Gunne, came up before the Council in 1585, his
thoughts and tongue too busy in Campion’s praise. The day would come,
he said, when a religious house would stand as a votive offering on
the spot where “the only man in England” had perished. There was still
no sign of such a thing when Mr. Richard Simpson’s great monograph
was first published, and that was twenty years before Pope Leo XIII
beatified the Blessed Edmund Campion on December 9, 1886. But now
there is a Convent with Perpetual Adoration in its little chapel, and
two bright English flags ever leaning against the altar, on that ground
of the London Tyburn: and is it wonderful that the vision of a worthier
memorial haunts the imagination of those who go there to pray for their
country?
Blessed Edmund Campion was “a religious genius,” with a creative
spirituality given to few, even among the canonized children of
the Fold. But in his kinship with his place and time, his peculiar
gentleness, his scholarship lightly worn, his magic influence, his
fearless deed and flawless word, he was a great Elizabethan too. He had
sacrificed his fame and changed his career. He had spent himself for
a cause the world can never love, and by so doing he has courted the
ill-will of what passed for history, up to our own day. But no serious
student now mistakes the reason why his own England found no use for
her “diamond” other than the one strange use to which she put him. He
is sure at last of justice. In the Church, that name of his will have
a never-dying beauty, though it is not quite where it might have been
on the secular roll-call. To understand this is also to rejoice in it:
for why should we look to find there at all, those who are “hidden with
Christ in God”?
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
The St. Nicholas Series
EDITED BY THE REV. DOM BEDE CAMM, O.S.B.
LIST OF VOLUMES
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JEANNE D’ARC: THE MAID OF FRANCE. By C. M. ANTONY.
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GABRIEL GARCIA MORENO. By the HON. MRS. MAXWELL-SCOTT.
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BLESSED EDMUND CAMPION. By LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
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THE STORY OF THE ENGLISH POPE. By F. M. STEELE.
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Transcriber’s note:
Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
Page 77, “Fowers” changed to “Flowers” (Little Flowers of Martyrdom)