IX SKIRMISHING: THE ENGLISH COUNTIES: 1580

THE devoted George Gilbert, his fellowship of young men, and those whom they gathered together, met on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, June 29, to hear, for the first time, Fr. Campion preach. It was no easy task to find a safe and suitable auditorium; but Lord Paget, one of their own number, was daring enough to hire from Lord Norreys the hall of a great house in the neighbourhood of Smithfield. All the servants and porters were turned out for the occasion, and gentlemen took their places. Within a few days, however, rumours about Campion’s sermon and about Campion were flying over the city. There were a number of spies about, instructed by the Council, pretending to be lapsed Catholics or unsettled[101] Protestants, and trying hard to bag such new and shining birds as the Jesuits; but Campion had a friend at court who warned him, and therefore held only private conferences in friendly houses with those whom he knew. The missionaries were sent to strengthen the wills of the wavering Catholics, and not primarily to make converts. Personal dealings with would-be converts were never attempted except as supplementary to the action of the lay helpers, who took all the soundings, and gave any needful catechizing. When Parsons, who had been away in the country, got back to town, Mr. Henry Orton and Fr. Robert Johnson had been tracked and imprisoned, through Sledd, the apostate informer; and it became plain to the rest of the little band gathered about Parsons and Campion that, for reasons immediate and remote, both Fathers must be spirited away. Each went mounted, with a companion, Gervase Pierrepoint being Campion’s guide; and at Hoxton, in July, the priests parted for their separate fields of action.

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Just before that, however, there arrived as a deputy to them, Mr. Thomas Pounde of Belmont, the best-known, perhaps, of all English prisoners for the Faith: he was committed to gaol sixteen times and passed thirty years in durance. Pounde had managed to bribe the gaoler of the Marshalsea to let him out for this short journey. Most anxious for the good repute of the Fathers, he rode post-haste to tell them that enemies in London were spreading the report that they had come over for political purposes, and that if in the midst of their apostolic work in the shires they should be taken and executed, the Government would be sure to issue pamphlets, as was its habit, defaming their motives, and slandering the Catholic body. Therefore he begged both Jesuits to write “a vindication of their presence and purpose in England,” which, signed and sealed, might be given to the public, if things came to the worst. The certain accusation and its answer had been debated before, in council, by many clergy, who had contented themselves with agreeing to swear, when called upon, that they[103] had no business whatever in hand but that of religion. But Campion now drew up his own document then and there at a table, while the others were talking. In it, he declares that “my charge is of free cost to preach the Gospel . . . to cry alarm spiritual;” that “matters of state are things which appertain not to my vocation,” and are “straitly forbid”: things “from which I do gladly estrange and sequester my thoughts.” And never thinking of himself, but fired with confidence in his cause, he goes on to beg leave for a public presentment of the Faith. He says, in the course of this splendid little philippic: “I should be loath to speak anything that might sound of an insolent brag or challenge . . . in this noble realm, my dear country.” It shows completely the partisan temper of the time that his statement got exactly that name, and no other, fastened upon it. It was called everywhere “Campion’s Brag and Challenge,” and its modest author was contemned and ridiculed for the implication that his own powers were so very superior that he must of[104] course get the better of others in any argument!

Pounde took his copy, which Campion forgot to seal, back to London, read it in raptures, let it be seen, admired, talked about, and transcribed: this was his curious way of keeping a secret. The result was that what was meant to meet a particular crisis, and serve for a last will and testament, became as common property, beforehand, as any ballad sold in the streets. Lively measures were at once taken by the Bishop of Winchester; and the State, hypocritically urging “conspiracy,” pounced upon a host of Catholic lords and gentlemen. Yet Campion’s little composition, which bred all this fury, only asks for “three sorts of indifferent and quiet audience”: one hearing before the Lords in Council, on the relation of the Church to the English Government; the next before the Heads of Houses of both Universities, on the proofs of the truth of the Catholic religion; the last before the courts spiritual and temporal, “wherein I will justify the said Faith by the common wisdom of the[105] laws standing.” Then he pleads in deferent and almost affectionate words, for a special audience of “her noble Grace” the Queen. In his candour and fearless simplicity he believed that opponents had only to hear to be convinced, thus crediting them with that earnestness in religious matters which he possessed himself, and which only a very few of the best Protestants of that day shared with him. Campion closes his appeal with a wonderfully beautiful reference to the vowed Seminarian priests, and in a lofty music of good English, worthy to stand by any passage of like length in the great prose classics. “Hearken to those which spend the best blood in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up unto Heaven for you, daily and hourly, by those English students whose posterity shall not 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 to Heaven or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have made a[106] league (all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England!) cheerfully to carry the cross that 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 to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned; 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 thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say, but recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts: Who send us of His grace, and set us at accord before the Day of Payment, to the intent we may at last be friends in Heaven, where all injuries shall be forgotten.”

Parsons’ work lay in Gloucester, Hereford, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Derbyshire; Campion’s in the more southerly Midlands. The wandering Levite[107] with his attendant gentleman would approach at evening, and with caution, the friendly roof, either Catholic or, though Protestant, containing Catholics, and be received at the door as strangers, then conducted to an inner room, where all who seek the priest’s ministrations kneel and ask for his blessing. That night all is got ready, and confessions are heard, instructions given, reconciliations effected; at dawn there is Mass, preaching, and Holy Communion; and the travellers depart for the next household station. Most edifying accounts are given of the devotion of good married Confessors, who were scattered all over the land. The Jesuits met with many seculars, “whom we find in every place, whereby both the people is well served, and we much eased in our charge.” These were the old Marian priests, active in obscurity. The “harvest is wonderful great”: so many show “a conscience pure, a courage invincible, zeal incredible, a work so worthy; the number innumerable, of high degree, of mean calling . . . of every age and sex.” “The solaces that are ever[108] intermingled with the miseries are so great that they do not only countervail the fear of what punishment temporal soever, but by infinite sweetness make all worldly pains, be they never so great, seem nothing,” for the sake of “this good people which had lived before, so many ages, in one only Faith.” Day by day, running in and out of all the busy heroic toil, is the fiery thread of danger and alarm. “We are sitting merrily at table, conversing familiarly on matters of faith and devotion (for our talk is generally of such things) when comes a hurried knock at the door. . . . We all start up and listen, like deer when they hear the huntsman. . . . If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright.” Then there was calumny, a far more difficult thing to accept in the same gay spirit. “They tear and sting us with their venomous tongues, calling us seditious, hypocrites; yea, heretics, too! which is much laughed at. The people hereupon is ours.” And again: “The house where I am is sad: no other talk but of the death, flight, prison, or spoil of their friends; nevertheless, they[109] proceed with courage. Very many, even at this present, being restored to the Church, new soldiers give in their names, while the old offer up their blood, by which holy hosts and oblations God will be pleased. And we shall—no question!—by Him overcome.” These are extracts from Campion’s letters, and give a clear idea of his life during his visitations of 1580-1.

There were then many more Manor-houses, kept up as such, than there are now; most of those which Campion visited had their hiding-place or “priests’ hole,” to which he could always fly when safety demanded it. He settled a host of weak Catholics in their religion, and also received a great many conspicuous converts. It will be noted that the little Jesuit mission was directed to the gentry. This was not through accident, or partiality, or snobbery. The gentry had most personal weight; they were better able to protect a hunted man; and they were naturally supposed to have stricter notions of honour: this last was a point on which everything depended. Moreover, the old spirit of feudalism was[110] not so dead but that through them all workmen on their estates, or connected by interest with them in the towns, could be reached and influenced. In a hurried campaign, every consideration of prudence and forethought would choose them, so to speak, as the outworks of the citadel.

The country districts north and south were all still favourable to Catholicism. London, the University of Cambridge, and some larger towns and seaports, especially in the West, were half Puritan or Calvinistic, half irreligious and indifferent. The ancient Faith, as was well said by Sir Cuthbert Sharpe, for the most part “still lay like lees at the bottom of men’s hearts; and if the vessel were ever so little stirred, came to the top.” A thoughtful living writer sums it up as his conclusion that England would have resumed the Faith with a sigh of relief, had it not been for the resentments bred by the Catholic “plotters.” Considering the frightful circumstances of the body to which these men belonged, it is putting too great a strain, perhaps, upon human nature to expect smooth behaviour[111] from every individual in it. The genuine “plotters” were few. Against them stands the passionate loyalty of our persecuted minority, both all along, and in the one great crisis. When the deliverer loomed up in the shape of Philip’s Armada, blessed and indulgenced like a crusade of old, where were they, supposed to be so sick of Queen and country? Hand in impoverished pocket, strengthening the national defences; cutlass on thigh, manning the English fleet.