Saint Edmund Campion
English Martyrs
Part II
Malcolm Brennan
When St. Edmund Campion began his missionary work in England in June 1580, the Catholic faithful generally were demoralized, desperate, frustrated, and embittered. Many of those in whom the light of the Faith had burned brightest were in exile, or in prison, or in their graves. The successes of the Church were met with progressively severer repressions and the repressions worked. Those who remained loyal to the Church did so too often out of mere nostalgia, a kind of antiquarian preference for the Latin language and the old ceremonies, or out of an aversion to the crass new breed of righteous clerics. In some cases their Catholicism was entangled in political allegiances, for many Catholics, hopeless of ever being able to practice their Faith in the present dispensation, were driven in desperation to join schemes to overthrow the Queen or promote a foreign invasion—thus lending some credibility to the government's claim that to be a Catholic was an act of sedition or treason.
Seminary priests, following the bloody footsteps of St. Cuthbert Mayne, had continued to filter into the country, and an unknown number of priests faithful since the reign of Queen Mary twenty years before, continued their perilous ministry. But so many of these were captured, and their visitations were so erratic and brief, and they had to remain in such secrecy, and recourse to them was so dangerous, and so many leading families had been ruined by confiscations and imprisonments and executions, that a mood of desolation oppressed the scattered flock.
The way in which St. Edmund announced new hope to English Catholics was clearly providential. After establishing their necessary contacts in London, and before beginning their ministry in the provinces, St. Edmund and Fr. Robert Persons, S.J., his friend and superior, were persuaded to write a brief defense of their purpose and case. The idea for this was proposed by Thomas Pounde, a Catholic gentleman imprisoned in the Marshalsea, a notoriously lax prison. He had escaped for the day or bribed his way out to caution the Fathers that when they were captured—as was inevitable sooner or later—they might be executed summarily and false evidence of treason produced against them afterwards. Why not state your cause and your defense, he argued, before the event? They agreed and spent half an hour following his advice before proceeding on their separate journeys.
Back at the Marshalsea Pounde read Campion's paper, and its effect on him was intoxicating. He showed it to other prisoners, copies were made and found their way into London and indeed across England. It electrified Catholics with new confidence, and it established Campion as the leader and spokesman for the Catholic cause.
It is addressed "To the Right Honorable Lords of Her Magestie's Privy Council" and begins:
Whereas I have come out of Germanie and Boemeland, being sent by my superiors, and adventured myself into this noble Realm, my dear Countrie, for the glorie of God and the benefit of souls, I thought it like enough that, in this busie, watchful, and suspicious world, I should either sooner or later be intercepted and stopped of my course. Wherefor, providing for all events, and uncertaine what may become of me, when God shall haply deliver my body into durance, I suppose it needful to put this writing in a readiness, desiring your good Lordships to give it your reading, for to know my cause. This doing, I trust I shall ease you of some labour. For that which otherwise you must have sought by practice of wit, I do now lay into your hands by plaine confession.
He confesses that he is a priest who has come to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments and "to crie alarme spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many my dear Countrymen are abused."
I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by my Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this Realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I do gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts.
He then states that the Catholic case is so clear and compelling that any impartial mind must acknowledge its truth, and he appeals for an opportunity to present it to the Privy Council and to the assembled Doctors and Masters of the universities. This challenge earned the letter its name, Campion's Brag.
He concludes with a brilliant peroration:
Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posteritie shall never 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 heaven, or die upon your pikes. And touching our Societie, be it known 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 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 consumed with your prisons. The expense is reconed, 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 a thousand miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almightie God, the Searcher of Hearts, who sends us His grace, to the end that we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.
This document expresses the spirit of the whole missionary effort. The seminary priests and Jesuits, in the words of Evelyn Waugh,
. . . came with gaiety among people where hope was dead. The past held only regret, and the future apprehension; they brought with them, besides their priestly dignity and the ancient and indestructable creed, an entirely new spirit of which Campion is the type: the chivalry of Lepanto and the poetry of La Mancha, light, tender, generous and ardent. After him there still were apostates. . .conspirators. . .bitter old reactionaries; these survived, sterile and lonely, for theirs was not the temper of Campion's generation who—not the fine flower only, but the root and stem of English Catholicism—surrendered themselves to their destiny without calculation or reserve; for whom the honorable pleasures and occupations of an earlier age were forbidden; whose choice lay between the ordered respectable life of their ancestors and the faith which had sanctified it; who followed holiness, though it led them through bitter ways to poverty, disgrace, exile, imprisonment and death; who followed it gaily.
Quite unaware of the great commotion which his Brag would cause, Campion separated from Fr. Persons and proceeded on his mission. Like the other missionaries, he would typically travel by day, often disguised in expensive finery ("I am in apparel to myself very ridiculous") and arrive at the estate of a Catholic gentlemen or nobleman in the evening. (Sometimes he would stop at the large household of a Protestant and minister to the Catholic servants and family members quite unknown to the head of the house.) He would refresh himself and then preach to the assembled household and neighbors. They liked their sermons long in those days, and Campion had lost none of the oratorical skill which had moved Oxford and the Court.
After dinner, by which time more neighbors had likely gathered, he would hear confessions and counsel troubled consciences. One by one they would come to him with their sins and their complicated situations—and the solutions to their problems required considerably more knowledge than the few thumb rules of canon law which had sufficed for an earlier generation of priests. On into the early hours the penitents would come so that sometimes confessions lasted right up to the time for the pre-dawn Mass. After Mass, with its long sermon, the neighbors would quietly disperse, and Father Campion would prepare to resume his journey.
For week after grueling week the pace would continue, for there were always more homes anxious to receive him and more souls hungry for the Sacraments. At times he would stay longer than one night, at times the danger of daylight travel would enforce a welcomed day of rest, for the pursuivants, the priest-hunters, were becoming more active and more wiley.
St. Edmund's Brag produced refutations from the government, and within a week Fr. Persons had launched a counter-blast. With the ingenuity and daring resourcefulness for which he became famous, he had managed to acquire a printing press—no small feat when even the purchase of paper could lead to his death.
St. Edmund and Fr. Persons recognized the importance of pamphleteering, but they judged that the time had come for a more substantial publication. Campion therefore set to work and composed the Rationes Decem (Ten Reasons, for the confidence with which Edmund Campion offered his adversaries to dispute on behalf of the Faith, set before the famous men of our Universities). The Brag had been called a piece of irresponsible insolence, but the Ten Reasons could not be dismissed by intelligent men so airily. It was a substantial, documented, forthright defense of the Church and refutation of the reformers, directed to learned men, based upon Scripture and the academic disciplines which they professed, and phrased in dignified and felicitous Latin.
The audacity of the project was epitomized by the manner of its presentation to the world: when the scholars of Oxford repaired to the Church of St. Mary for commencement exercises on Tuesday, June 27, 1581, they found copies of the slender volume waiting for them on the benches. The fine orations of the day went largely ignored.
Saint Edmund Campion was a naturally open and communicative man and it may be because of this, and the familiarity of constant danger, that he became lax after a year of disguises, hidings out, impersonations, close calls, and furtive journeys. He was captured at Lyford Grange, a Catholic house, by George Eliot. Eliot had been a servant in two Catholic households, and when he was jailed for rape and homicide, he won his freedom by informing on the religious practices of his former employees. The government often employed such trash as priest-hunters. Through servants he knew at Lyford, he got himself invited to Fr. Campion's Mass and listened to his sermon on a text of the day, "And Christ wept for Jerusalem," which the saint applied to the present state of England. The recusants remembered this sermon as the prelude to St. Edmund's own passion.
Eliot left as soon as he unobtrusively could and with the nearest magistrate surrounded the house with armed men. The search lasted almost twenty-four hours, when Campion was finally found hidden in the dead space of a stairwell. He was paraded publicly to London and placed in Little Ease, a cell in the Tower without light and too small for standing or for lying down. Four days later he was taken without warning up the Thames to Leicester House, where Queen Elizabeth was visiting the Earl. After a brief interview, they came to the point: splendid appointments in the Anglican Church were awaiting him if he would adjure his Faith publicly. He declined.
Five days later the Earl of Leicester, his former patron, authorized Campion's torture. From July through November he was put to the rack three times. The rack was a rectangular frame in which the prisoner was laid. His wrists and ankles were fastened at either end, and then he was stretched by means of a winch so that his body was suspended in air. The effect was to pull his arms and legs out of joint, wound the wrists and ankles, and make respiration difficult. The pain was excruciating; strong men fainted at the sight of the machine. Campion confided to someone that during his third bout on the rack he thought they had decided to execute him by means of it. Their purpose was to get from him sensational tales of Spanish gold to foment rebellion and audacious plots to murder the Queen. Nothing of the sort was forthcoming, of course, and although they managed to piece together some bits of his itinerary of the past year, it was clear that he never broke down, never blurted out what they wanted to hear, never lost his old inflexible constancy.
Besides the tortures, he was subjected to four "conferences." These were debates ordered by the Privy Council, whose apparent purpose was to refute the Brag and the Ten Reasons. On the one side in their box would be an array of divines and officials, including the rack master, with books and papers spread before them, and on the other side Campion, seated on a stool, flanked by soldiers, haggard, filthy, crippled from his tortures, befuddled, "his memory destroyed and his force of mind almost extinguished," as one witness reported. Still, their triumphs over him were trifles like catching him out in the wrong tense of a Greek verb. The later debates became just silly. For example, Campion was allowed to submit statements only in written form, yet he was refused the use of paper and ink. While he was able to deny success to his adversaries, he was too broken a man to turn the debates into triumphs for himself and the Faith. He had fulfilled that part of his calling already; now his vocation was to suffer.
St. Edmund's trial and execution were similarly pathetic rather than spectacular. He was tried, with several other priests then in custody, on a variety of charges that amounted to treason and conspiracy to promote insurrection. Once when the prisoners were required to raise their right hands to take an oath, Campion was unable to lift his hand from a tuck in his gown where it rested; a fellow prisoner took his crippled arm, kissed his hand, and raised it for him. The trial was a farce, because in fact the finding and the sentence had already been decided, not there in the court but in the Queen's Privy Council. Nevertheless, the authorities went through all the motions, perhaps because of the huge crowds which had gathered, and the prisoners, with Campion as their spokesman, seriously defended themselves, denying the government's charges, objecting to irregular evidence, refuting the testimony of paid witnesses. For true martyrs are scrupulous not to presume they are worthy of martyrdom nor in any way to provoke their own deaths. "It was not our death that ever we feared," Campion told the court after sentence was passed. "But we knew that we were not lords of our own lives, and therefore for want of answer would not be guilty of our deaths."
On December 1, 1581, St. Edmund Campion was tied to a hurdle and dragged through mud from the Tower to Tyburn. For several days before he had fasted and spent whole nights in prayer. Of the sixteen tried together, Campion was to be executed with St. Ralph Sherwin and St. Alexander Briant (of whom the rack-master Norton had boasted of having made a foot longer than God had made him).
St. Edmund had a speech ready to deliver from the gallows, for he was troubled about what might have slipped out during the tortures and he was anxious to beg forgiveness of those he might have injured, also to offer forgiveness to those guilty of his death, and, missionary to the end, to make clear the cause of Christ and His holy Church. But the authorities, and the mobs too, handled him roughly in their day of glory, interrupted him frequently with insults and curses, and drove away the cart in mid-prayer. He may have been already dead when they cut him down, stripped his body, emasculated, eviscerated, decapitated, and quartered it.
He had fulfilled the promise he made in prison—to remain steadfast "come rack, come rope." And he had contributed to the fulfillment of an earlier prediction:
There will never want in England men that will have care of their own salvation, nor such as shall advance other men's; neither shall this Church here ever fail so long as priests and pastors shall be found for their sheep, rage man nor devil never so much.
Dr. Brennan is Professor of English at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
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