II THE HOUR OF UNREST: OXFORD, DUBLIN: 1566-1570

THOUSANDS who were comfortably placed in life, and conscientious, too, had a great deal to suffer until things were made plain. Edmund Campion began to fret, and argue, and ponder, and pray for light in secret, for several years going about “that most ingeniose Place” (as a later lover called Oxford) with heavy thoughts. Oxford itself, despite the Ecclesiastical Commission fixed there to worry it, was more Catholic in spirit than any other city in England. Nevertheless Campion’s temptation to conform was very great. We must remember that many of his first impressions and memories were Anglican. He was brought up during his early school life on the new Liturgy, which came into[15] operation before his tenth year. He knew now, in manhood, that to change about, and forsake the State religion for the only Church which is as exacting as her Master, would be to see the ruin of his happy career. His strong point, in the beginning, was not what is called brute courage. His was the nervous, Hamlet-like temper, natural to students and recluses, which, by a fatal error, puts endless thinking into what needs only to be done.

During these years Campion read a great deal of theology, as in his position he was bound to do, according to University rules. Where everything else except his inmost heart inclined him to heresy, the Fathers drove him back upon the fulness of revealed truth. The day which he spent with St. Augustine, or St. Jerome, or St. John Chrysostom, was a day on which (to catch up the phrase of his friend and biographer, Fr. Robert Parsons, himself a Balliol man) he was ready “to pull out this thorn of conscience.” But on the morrow returned the old spirit of obstinacy and delay. Meanwhile the Anglican influence was gaining[16] for Campion’s dearest friend of many, Richard Cheyney, the Lord Bishop of Gloucester, was drawing him on towards his own ideals, which were “Catholic-minded,” if not Catholic. The learned, gentle and lovable Cheyney withstood with zest the risen Puritan party, and in his hold on sound doctrine stood apart from all his colleagues on the Episcopal Bench. He had been brought up as a Catholic, and ordained according to the full Catholic ritual, in 1534. The reminder is sometimes needed that Protestants did not shoot up full-grown, that all original Protestantism was made up of human material once Catholic. From first to last, however, Cheyney could not be forced to coerce the Church which he had abandoned. In this he stood not, as has been stated, quite alone among the Elizabethan Bishops, for Downham of Chester and Ghest of Rochester shared his honourable abstinence, though in less degree. 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. He longed to see the Catholics (against the well-thought-out and oft-repeated prohibition of their leaders, between 1562 and 1606) do a little evil to procure a great good: namely, smooth matters over, escape their terribly severe penalties, and in the end become able to leaven the lump of English error, by the mere preliminary of attendance at the service of Common Prayer according to law, in their own old parish churches. The Book of Common Prayer, as he would remind them, was expressly designed to suit persons of various and even contradictory religious views: Catholic; not-so-very Catholic; ex-Catholic; non-Catholic; anti-Catholic! Campion often rode over the hills to Gloucester to sit by the episcopal hearth-fire, book on knee, and hear such theories as this, and sympathize[18] with the lonely old man who “saw visions,” and had little else in his vexed life to content him. His strong double desire was to save by his own effort for the Church of England separated from Rome, that great body of ancient belief and practice sure otherwise to be lost in the flood of invited Calvinism; and to secure Edmund Campion himself as his intellectual coadjutor and successor, as one of high gifts likely to “drink in his thoughts and become his heir.” The two were together, not only in matters of dogma, but in all minor points. Cheyney shared with Campion dislike of politics, telling the Council that in such matters he was “a man of small experience and little observation.” He kept his old priestly ideals, and would never marry. Campion, too, chose to be a celibate. If he gave his heart to either Church, he saw even then that it must be an undivided heart. To him, with his underlying tenderness towards the ancient faith, and his dream of peacemaking through compromise, which is so English, and just in these matters so mistaken, the mission thus opened out appealed.[19] Half reluctantly, yet not realizing the disloyalty of his act (as he himself tells us), he allowed himself to receive from Cheyney’s hands Deacon’s orders in the Church of England.

His interior struggle, from this day forth, went from bad to worse. With the unaffected simplicity of his character, he talked over his difficulties not only with Cheyney, but with any one at Oxford who seemed able to help him. As a consequence, the Grocers’ Company, whose exhibition he still held, heard rumours, grew uneasy, and began to suspect him, ending in 1568 by inviting Campion up to London to save his credit by preaching at Paul’s Cross, and publicly “favouring,” as they expressed it, “the religion now authorized.” He begged for time, and that being granted, for more time. He attended a court of the Company in order to plead engagements, and to say that he was not his own man, while deep in academic duties and at the service of undergraduates: “divers worshipful men’s children,” he calls them. He was Public Orator and Proctor, in fact, by now, as well[20] as Fellow and Tutor of his College. (He never resided long enough to take his Doctor’s degree.) He exacted from the Company a written statement of the dogmas he was expected to avow; and finding it impossible to subscribe to the hot heterodoxy thus laid down, he cut his first tether by resigning his exhibition.

His most brilliant colleague at St. John’s, Gregory Martin, who had protested in vain against Campion’s diaconate (which was to cause the recipient extreme remorse for a long time), had become a convert to Catholicism, and sacrificed all his secular prospects. He wrote to his dear friend to warn him against ambition, and to urge on him escape from moral bondage. “Come!” the fervent letter cried; “if we two can but live together, we can live on nothing. If this be too little, I have money; and if this also fails, one thing is left: ‘they that sow in tears shall reap in joy!’” Such earnest words, though seeming wasted, had their share in shaking Edmund Campion’s rest.

With the summer term of 1570 his Proctorate expired. He spent the Long Vacation[21] in tutoring the eight-years-old Harry Vaux, eldest son of Lord Vaux of Harrowden, who afterwards beautifully redeemed his childish promise. The end of Michaelmas term found Campion face to face for the last time with that life which he had so loved, and in which, with his scientific enthusiasm for letters, he had been such a wonderful inspiration to young men. There was no conscious motive in his heart deeper than a thirst for such freedom as had become difficult in a Puritanizing University, when he cut himself loose, slipped out of it for good, and took ship for Ireland.

In the new move he had the approbation of Leicester, and the companionship of a much-attached Oxford disciple, Richard Stanihurst, who is remembered by posterity only for his grotesque translation of Virgil. Campion may well have left home with the understanding that he should have a clear educational field in Dublin, but he arrived a little too late. The outlook had been very bright. Some good men then in power were eager for the revival of the extinct University of Dublin, an ancient Papal foundation,[22] but ruined, as all the great Schools were (most of them permanently, some only temporarily), by the religious changes. The chief supporters of the plan were enthusiastic, far-sighted, and most liberally inclined towards Catholics. Fear and prejudice therefore stepped in, in the person of Elizabeth’s Irish Bishops. The Lord Chancellor, Dr. Weston, wrote privately to the Queen, deploring the popularity of the scheme, and begging her to take the unborn foundation “into her merciful, motherly care.” She followed that advice. In token thereof, in due season arose Trinity College, Dublin, as a complete checkmate to the earlier project, quite safe for evermore from Papist blight. Thus was Campion cheated of a continuance of his natural vocation, in serving upon the staff of the new University. Two of his friends who had most concern in it were James Stanihurst, father of Richard, and Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, who had proffered it lands and money. Leicester would have provided Campion with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry, his own brother-in-law. The latter’s[23] young son, Philip, was at this time a student in Oxford, where his governor, Thomas Thornton of Christ Church, afterwards Vice-Chancellor, had been constantly in Campion’s society. Sir Henry Sidney always bore himself most kindly towards Campion. The latter lived, a more than welcome guest, under the roof of James Stanihurst, then Recorder of Dublin, and Speaker of the local House of Commons. Stanihurst was the head of an Anglo-Irish family not openly Catholic since Queen Mary’s reign. Indeed, in his public capacity, he had often sided against Catholicism, although he was as friendly as Sidney himself to those who professed it. In the midst of this temporizing household, Campion, himself a temporizer, came during the winter to be doubted by certain bigots outside. Very possibly he was too free-spoken. Campion “came to Ireland believing in practically all Catholic dogmas, even in the Eucharist, and in the authority of the Council of Trent.” The impression may have got abroad that his then unknown variety of Anglicanism differed little from the dangerous creed of times past, lately[24] discovered to be the proper business of the police! Whatever the reason, Campion began to be a marked man. Sir Henry Sidney told Stanihurst with heat, that so long as he was Governor he would see to it that “no busy knave of them all should trouble him,” on Campion’s account. Under this unpleasant circumstance of espial, added to the disappointment he had just undergone, the sensitive exile presently fell ill, and got a most affectionate nursing from the Stanihursts, till his strength revived. He started as soon to write a treatise on a subject of which his mind, up to now, had been full: the character and aim of the ideal youth at the Universities. This De Juvene Academico reminds us of a theme by another great Oxonian who was in Dublin three hundred years later, and had also to face the heartbreaking failure of an Irish University dreamed of, and not to be. Campion afterwards recast his fine little work, and under its second form it is to be found among the few Opuscula published after his death. His comely face and gracious manner were quickly taken into favour in his Dublin[25] circle. While he was gaining a contrary repute on hearsay, the few who had access to him nicknamed him “the Angel.”

Meanwhile, hating idleness, and bent on redeeming what may have looked like a foolish absence from Oxford, Campion planned the composition of a brief History of Ireland. Friends helped him in “inquiring out antiquities of the land.” He was what we should call a thorough “researcher,” a bird by no means common in those early days. He went here and there among musty manuscript records of the city, and from library to library in the country, happily gathering in his materials for work. He had been some three months in Ireland when on a March midnight there came a sudden warning from the faithful Lord Deputy, who was on the point of leaving for England. Campion learned thereby that Weston the Chancellor had pursuivants ready to arrest him the next morning! The Stanihursts acted at once, and hurried their friend into the care of Sir Christopher Barnewall and Dame Marion Sherry, his[26] wife, of Turvey House, in the parish of Donabate, eight miles away. There, breathless with the sudden flight through the dark, the three devoted escorts left him in safety.