VIII INHOSPITABLE HOME: 1580

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM had a wonderfully well-organized spy-system: far superior, as Simpson remarks, to the attempts of the Spaniards in the same line. Therefore each of the missionaries was cautioned to travel under a name other than his own. Campion fell back upon his beloved alias of “Mr. Patrick,” as he had done for the brief visit to Geneva. His friends made him drop it, as they neared the Channel; being Irish, it was doubly dangerous, since here at Rheims the home-goers got their first tardy news of the so-called Geraldine insurrection in Ireland, acted upon in July, 1579, and crushed almost as soon by the massacre at Smerwick in Kerry. It had been nursed by European feeling against Elizabeth’s policy in Flanders, and her piracies on the high seas; and the great[89] religious grudge found it a convenient opening. Dr. Nicholas Sander, who was not a Papal Legate, but stood none the less for the Pope’s active good-will in the matter, joined the expedition with James Fitzmaurice, Spanish soldiers, Roman officers, ships and supplies. That expedition did not, as we know, dislodge Jezebel from her throne, but it gave sufficient heartbreak to our messengers of the Gospel of Peace, who were now sure to be mixed up with it in the popular mind. The situation was certainly an awkward one. It gave unique plausibility to Walsingham’s claim that (to quote Fr. Pollen) “the preaching of the old Faith was only a political propaganda.” Father Robert Parsons faced the future, on behalf of the rest, in the spirit of a brave man. “Seeing that it lay not in our hands to remedy the matter, our consciences being clear, we resolved ourselves, with the Apostle, ‘through evil report and good report’ to go forward only with the spiritual action we had in hand. And if God had appointed that any of us should suffer in England under a wrong title, as Himself[90] did upon the case of a malefactor, we should lose nothing thereby, but rather gain with Him who knew the truth, and Whom only in this enterprise we desired to please.”

Danger was a spur and not a bridle to Campion’s devoted will. But he began to foresee little fruit from labours on his native ground, with so much fierce misunderstanding against him; and to fear that he had not done well in so gladly laying down what was, after all, steady and successful work in Bohemia. With this buzzing scruple he went to the President for advice. 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. It gave him a pathetic pleasure to be complimented upon his ready English, of which he had spoken little in private, and not a word in public, for eight[91] years. His text is reported to have been Luke xii. 49: “I am come to send fire upon the earth; and what will I but that it shall be kindled?” and at one point he cried out in so earnest a manner: “Fire, fire, fire, fire!” that those outside the Chapel ran for the water-buckets! But a careful reading of what was then spoken suggests quite a different passage of Holy Scripture as present in Campion’s mind. His theme was the ruin wrought by the conflagration of heresy, now attacking a third generation of Christian souls, and to be put out, he says, by “water of Catholic doctrine, milk of sweet and holy conversation, blood of potent martyrdom.” Isaiah lxiv. 11, runs: “Our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised Thee, is burned up with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.” This very passage had been alluded to in one of Campion’s former exhortations, and may have been a favourite with him. The whole trend, indeed, and every part of this Rheims sermon bear out the thoughts not of the Apostle’s page, but of the Prophet’s.

Bishop Goldwell and Dr. Morton, the[92] highest in office of the missionary party, remained at Rheims. Three Englishmen, a lay Professor of Law, and two priests, joined in, to fill up the gap, then another Jesuit, who had been labouring in Poland: this was Fr. Thomas Cottam, ordered home to restore his health, but destined, as were so many of his comrades, for martyrdom. The little band of fifteen divided, and sailed from different ports: 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. They had come on foot nearly nine hundred miles, and were not likely to give up the object of their journey. But they took precautions. It was decided that[93] 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. “Father Robert sailed from Calais after midnight. . . . They got him up like a soldier: such a peacock! such a swaggerer! . . . such duds, such a glance, such a strut! A man must have a sharp eye indeed,” he adds, “to catch any glimpse of the holiness and modesty that lurk there underneath it all.” He goes on to explain how he is laying out money to buy numerous and silly clothes “to dress up myself and Ralph,” whereby “to cheat the madness of this world.” Fr. Parsons, like Campion himself in lesser r?les, must have[94] been a dramatic genius, for arriving at Dover on the 12th of June, and falling into the hands of the searcher, he so won him over, by the mere swagger and strut aforementioned, as not only to be passed without inquiry, but to be helped to a horse to carry him to Gravesend. Thereupon the Captain was quick to bespeak the interest of so unexpectedly polite a functionary in his friend “Mr. Edmunds,” described as a jewel-merchant lying at St. Omers; and he gave the searcher a letter recommending London as a good market, to be forwarded post-haste to that gentleman, and to be shown to the searcher again by “Mr. Edmunds” himself when he came over. And by the reception of that letter Campion learned that Fr. Parsons was scot-free, and speeded on his way.

On the Feast of his old College patron, St. John the Baptist, “Mr. Edmunds,” followed by Brother Ralph, his supposed servant, boarded the vessel bound for Dover. At daybreak they stepped ashore under the white cliffs, and there kneeling a moment in the shadow of a rock, Campion renewed his[95] offering of himself, without reserve or condition, to the God of Hosts, for the dark “warfare” which lay before him.

Meanwhile, the dispositions of the searcher (who evidently put in no appearance) had undergone a forced change. 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; with sailing under false names, and with returning for the purpose of propagating Popery.” 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! ‘Well,’ quoth he, ‘it is agreed you shall be dismissed: fare ye well.’” After which the two Jesuits left without further notice or opposition, and travelled as fast as ever they could to London.

Fr. Parsons had reached the city not without adventure, but without mishap, a fortnight before. Yet as no word had been received since from him, Campion had no idea how to proceed or whither to go; nor could he inquire without arousing suspicion. Fortunately Parsons had given to some watchful young Catholics a description of the jewel-merchant and his man: Ralph Emerson was easily recognizable on account of his extremely short stature. Thus they had hardly touched the wharf at the Hythe[97] before a stranger, Thomas Jay, stepped to the gangway, with a welcoming gesture, saying: “Mr. Edmunds, give me your hand: I stay here for you, to lead you to your friends.” Under this guidance Campion reached London and Chancery Lane, where he was clothed and armed, and provided with a horse. He must have been astonished to learn under whose roof he was so safe and so comfortable: for it was none other than that of the chief pursuivant! Here was, indeed, a case of the bird nesting in the cannon’s mouth. St. Augustine warns us that we are not to think that ungodly men are kept in this world for nothing, nor that God has no good purposes of His own to fulfil through them. One cause of the miraculous preservation of the ancient Faith under Elizabeth lay in the fact that many an official, high and low, of that time-serving Government, was in the pay of the Recusant gentry. A strange situation it was, and by no means an infrequent one, when some of these, brought before the magistrates, would be discharged on the assurance of the bought-over official that the[98] prisoner was “an honest gentleman”: thus averting all suspicion from the latter for the time being.

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. Their time, their thoughts, their self-sacrifice, their purses, were at the service particularly of the Jesuits, persons habitually being described by Sir Walter Mildmay in the Star Chamber as “lewd runagates,” “a sort of hypocrites,” “a rabble of vagrant friars.” The leader of them all, in his inspiring zeal, though not highest in station, was George Gilbert, a rich young squire owning estates (which were confiscated in the end) in Buckinghamshire and Suffolk. He was a convert, a great rider and athlete, dear to many; but in secret a lover of apostolic poverty, living for others: in short, a saint. He spent himself to the last breath for the Faith as truly as if he had perished at Tyburn Tree. In banishment, he still[99] served the same cause by his forethought and his generosity in the use of such worldly goods as were left to him: for he became responsible, at Rome, for the series of paintings of the English martyrdoms which gave their chief historical standing to the Beatifications of 1886. Thus Gilbert, living and dead, was Blessed Edmund Campion’s availing friend and lover.