Edmund Campion

“ 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 [173] younger men were strapped down on one hurdle side by side, Campion alone on the other. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The chief point to remember is that the Decem Rationes was the last and most deliberate free utterance of Campion's ever-memorable mission. During the few months that mission lasted he succeeded in staying the full tide of victorious Protestantism, which had hitherto been irresistible. The ancient Church had gone down before the new religion, at Elizabeth's accession twenty years before, with an apparently final fall, and since then the Elizabethan Settlement had triumphed in every church, in every school and court. The new generation had been moulded by it ”

“ Nor, if he knows anything of the controversial methods of the sixteenth century, will he be surprised at the vehemence of the language. Compared with his opponents, Luther for example, Edmund Campion is mere milk and honey. His book made a great stir: it is what a successful book must be, instinct with the spirit of the age in which and for which it was written.
The Protestant answer to the Ten Reasons was not given in the Divinity School at Oxford. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ The Ten Reasons represent the ten theses, which Edmund Campion would fain have maintained in the Divinity School at Oxford against all comers, sharing, as he did to the full, the passion which his age felt and seems entirely to have lost, for such intellectual tournaments, as the natural means to bring out the truth and compose religious differences. The reader, then, must not be surprised to find in this little work quite as much of rhetoric as of logic; if he is unfriendly, he may say considerably more. ”

“ His standing watch in Westminster Hall had done more for him than many arguments and exhortations: it kindled a spark in him which made him, in Lord Falkland’s phrase, “ready for the utmost hazard of war.” There was a cause to which he could run [39] home; there was a vocation to which he could climb: these opened out before him as he stood in the surging indoor crowd. “He was animated by that blessed man’s example,” says Parsons, “to any danger and peril for the same faith for which the Doctor died.” Edmund Campion lost no time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [117] think, write, in a crowd. The local gentry drove from great distances and slept in barns, only to hear and see him once. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [96] 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! ”

“ Parsons should go first, in military attire, accompanied from the Low Countries by a good youth who passed as his man George; and that if Parsons got safely to Dover, he was to send for Campion and the faithful little soul Ralph Emerson. An English gentleman “living over seas for his conscience,” brought Fr. Parsons his fine disguise: nothing less than a Captain’s uniform of buff leather, with gold lace, big boots, sword, hat, plume, and all. Campion, when he had gone, sat down to write to the General of the Society about him, with his inevitably pictorial touch. ”

“ The first little Jesuit group of three was commanded by Fr. Robert Parsons, a born organizer, a man of splendid resources, afterwards [79] celebrated, and much loved and hated. For convenience, as for safety, they all put on secular dress. Campion, however, would buy no new clothes, but arrayed himself in an old buckram suit, with a shabby cloak. When rallied on his highly inelegant appearance, he remarked with the gay spirit so like that of another “blissful martyr,” Sir Thomas More, that a man going forth to be hanged need trouble himself little about the fashion! ”

“ 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 [132] 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. ”

“ YOUTH: LONDON, OXFORD: 1540-1566 THE Campion family seem to have been both gentlefolk and yeomen, and to have been widely scattered over the land: in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Essex, Sussex, and Devon. Nothing is definitely known, at present, as to which branch of the Campion family the Blessed Edmund belonged. Unlike many of the martyrs of Tudor and Stuart times, he was what is called a “born” Catholic: in more accurate phrase, a born heathen, as we all are! but baptized in his parents’ religion soon after his birth in London, on the Feast of St. ”

“ Allen replied that the work in “Boemeland,” excellent at all points as it had been, yet could be done by any equally qualified person, or “at least by two or three” such persons, whereas in his own necessitous England Campion would be given strength and grace to supply for many men.
At Rheims, during his waiting-time, Campion preached one of his famous sermons to the students. ”

“ 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 [56] held lofty standards before his pupils: “never to deliquesce into sloth, nor to dance away your time, nor to live for rioting and pleasure . ”

“ 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 [170] the threshold of light and liberty everlasting. “Delay of our death doth somewhat dull me,” wrote Sherwin, touchingly, to a friend. ”

“ The moment Cheyney was out of the way, the Catholics on his diocesan ground, hitherto safe, were mercilessly harried. He had been made a Bishop against his will, displacing [17] the true occupant of the See, when his friend Edmund Campion was two-and-twenty. In most matters Cheyney followed Luther; Cranmer’s more heretical doctrines, which prevailed on all sides in England, he thoroughly hated. He longed always for a reconciliation which was never to be, and never can be. ”

“ 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 [118] 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [130] begging their old champion to preach to them, which he would not do in so public a place ”

“ 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 [128] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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;” ”

“ The reconciliation that [153] we endeavoured was only to God: as Peter saith, reconciliamini Domino, be ye reconciled unto the Lord.” Campion was informed: “Yourself came as Procurator from the Pope and Dr. Allen, to break these matters to the English Papists.” So he rejoined that in his homeward voyage from Rome, undertaken by his vow of obedience as a Jesuit, “the which accordingly I enterprised, being commanded thereto,” he had “dined with Dr. Allen at Rheims, with whom also after dinner I walked in his garden . . . and not one jot of our talk glanced to the Crown or State of England. . . . ”

“ Campion, with Parsons and one lay brother, Ralph Emerson, headed for Calais as their point of departure, going by way of St. Omers, “not a little encouraged to think that the first mission of St. Augustine and his fellows into [our] island was by that city.” Here there was another Jesuit College. The Flemish Fathers croaked friendly warnings in their ears, for it was common rumour in St. Omers that the Queen’s Council had full information of the appearance, dress and movements of the exiles, and had officers posted to waylay them on arrival. ”