X MANY LABOURS: AND A BOOK: 1580

CAMPION passed four months of pleasant weather in hard and happy work, moving about Northamptonshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire. Some lovely little spiritual adventure starred his path, and the paths of others, wherever he went. He must have seen more than once, from some hilly road afar off, even if he never entered it,

“The towery City, branchy between towers,”

which was so dear to him to the last. In October of this year, 1580, he was bidden towards London as far as Uxbridge: farther he could hardly come, without the gravest peril, as the Privy Council were just issuing their third warrant for the capture of Jesuits. There he was joined by Fr. Parsons and several other missionaries. A[113] conference was held: it was represented that Norfolk and Lancashire were eager to claim Fr. Campion’s ministrations, and it was decided that he was to go to Lancashire, preferable as being not only farther from London and also “more affected to the Catholic religion,” but as having better private libraries. For they were now urging Campion to write again: this time something on the burning questions of the day, aimed particularly at the Universities (where his Challenge was still the staple of daily talk), and therefore to be written in Latin. We are not so sure, now-a-days, that controversy does much good, but one reason for that may be that we have few Campions to carry it on. It is well to remember that people then read nothing else, except poetry! Campion’s work was his famous Decem Rationes Proposit? in Causa Fidei, or, as the title is given in its only modern translation (1827), Ten Reasons for Renouncing the Protestant, and Embracing the Catholic Religion. At first the author was for calling his thesis Heresy in Despair: De H?resi Desperata. His[114] counsellors agreed, amid laughter, that it would be odd indeed to nail such a title as that to the mast, when heresy was so powerful and flourishing; but, according to Campion’s own philosophy, there was no life in an argument whose only premisses, as he once said, are “curses, starvation, and the rack.” Here we come back at once to his root principle, which modern research so fully justifies, in regard to the England of his own day. A “gentleman saint” who uttered many an ironic, but never a contemptuous word, Campion could not be persuaded that “the received religion” was a genuine thing. He believed that temporal interest alone led people to conform to the new alterations and restrictions; that the lay statesmen who were pushing things through were concerned not with doctrine, but only with negations of doctrine, and that on the other side, nothing was so promising, nothing so gloriously fruitful, as persecutions and martyrdoms. First and last, he had a strong dash of optimism. In this spirit he began his last treatise, writing it as best he could, depending on his[115] memory, and on such books as country squires might have in their houses, and putting it together in among the almost incessant journeys, duties, fatigues and alarms of the next few weeks.

The two Jesuit friends parted at Uxbridge, “with the tenderness of heart which in such a case and so dangerous a time may be imagined.” Gervase Pierrepoint conveyed Campion into Nottinghamshire to spend Christmas at Thoresby, his home; thence into Derbyshire, where one of the young Tempests succeeded as guide; and the gentleman who directed the Yorkshire part of the journey reached in safety the house of his own brother-in-law, Mr. William Harrington of Mount St. John, near Thirsk, where the Father was received with open arms. Here he settled down for less than a fortnight at his desk, among his note-books, at peace. But to have him in the house at all was to risk the contagion of the things of God. The eldest of the large family, a wild boy, his father’s namesake, was quick to feel the spell of this most attractive guest. “Not only his eloquence[116] and fire,” says Fr. Henry More of Campion, “but a certain hidden infused power, made his words strike home.” Some of these simple words of every day “struck home” to the young William Harrington, so that fourteen years afterwards he found the palm-branch of martyrdom growing green and fair for him on the public execution ground. At this very time of Campion’s visit, the Lent of 1581, there was another lad of fourteen or fifteen, John Pibush, running about the streets of Thirsk, his native village, who may have gone to Confession to the strange priest at the Manor, and wondered at him, unknowing that he, too, was sealed as a future holocaust in the same immortal cause.

From Mount St. 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. At Blainscough Hall, the seat of the Worthingtons, the pursuivants would have discovered him, where he was walking in the open air, had it not been for the cleverness and splendid presence of mind of a faithful maidservant, standing hard by. She ran up against him, in a pretended fit of temper, and shoved him into a shallow pond! The pursuivants, sent out by the terrible Huntingdon, President of the North, to apprehend a distinguished cleric and scholar, naturally never gave that mud-covered yokel a second glance.

Fr. 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; devotional and doctrinal books had to be brought out in this hole-and-corner fashion, if at all. Another of those lay associates of the mission, whose devotion and usefulness had been proved at every point, came forward to bear the brunt of the new enterprise. The young Stephen Brinkley, Bachelor of Civil Law, called by Parsons “a gentleman of high attainments both in literature and in virtue,” volunteered to become manager and head compositor, and amid many dramatic and exciting interruptions, carried his task through. Machinery, types, paper, and the rest were bought with money supplied by the ever-helpful George Gilbert. Brinkley himself, to avert suspicion, had to buy horses for his workmen, and attire them like persons of quality whenever they went abroad. He quite knew what he was risking. After him, still another knight of letters in a far less perilous field, offered himself in the person[119] of Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, then newly married (long afterwards a priest, and Rector of the English College in Rome). His not undelightful duty was to verify the mass of references and authorities quoted in the margins of Campion’s manuscript: this he did in a scholarly way, satisfactory to the scholarly author, who believed in research, and liked nothing at second-hand. Lastly, Parsons, as Campion’s Superior, recalled him to London in April or May to see the little volume through the press, and cautioned him to put up only at inns on the way, where happily he might pass as “the gentleman in the parlour.”

Thirty miles or so north of the great city, Campion had one of his ever-recurring narrow escapes. A spy, hungry for reward, had dogged his steps on his way from York. At a certain town not named, a little boy who knew Campion by sight overheard this man describing the Father to a magistrate, and calling him “Jesuit,” a word the child had never heard. He ran straight to the tavern where the “Jesuit”[120] had put up and succeeded in finding him and warning him! so the bird was safely on the wing before the fowlers were in sight.

Campion came to Westminster and Whitefriars, and set to work, diligently as ever. With Father Robert he had frequent occasion to visit the Bellamys of Uxenden Hall near Harrow, a family under whose roof his old friend Richard Bristow had died in the preceding autumn. Their later adversities and annihilation were only too typical of Catholic domestic history under Elizabeth. Going to Harrow meant going up the Edgware Road, and in the mouth of that road, between waste lands (facing the spot across the street where the Marble Arch now stands), was the famous Tyburn gallows. This particular one had been put up new for Dr. Storey’s execution, ten years before: it had three posts set in a triangle, with connecting cross-bars at the top. Once every week, without intermission, batches of criminals perished there. Even now, and with far greater frequency afterwards, holy and innocent men and[121] women made up a large proportion of the “criminals”; and remembering these dear souls, and conscious that there he was to follow them in confession of the King of Martyrs, Campion would always solemnly take off his hat and pause, in passing, to salute Tyburn Tree.

Meanwhile, in the quiet and seclusion of Dame Cecily Stonor’s park, near Henley, and in the attics which she bravely set apart for the purpose, the Decem Rationes got itself safely printed by Stephen Brinkley and his seven honest men. Campion, with fine bravado, dated it from “Cosmopolis”; and the distribution of it was as audacious as the dating. The first copies bound, about four hundred in number, were hurriedly stabbed, instead of stitched, in time to go up for the Oxford commemoration, June 27th of that year. The church of St. Mary-the-Virgin was then used for all the “Acts,” for the accommodation of which, a century later, the Sheldonian Theatre was built. When the company entered St. Mary’s, the benches were found littered with the “seditious” books. Their[122] dedication was “to the studious Collegians flourishing at Oxford and Cambridge,” and the youths in question were just in the humour to read them; and read them they did, then and there, instead of attending to the important annual function going on! This rudeness bred protest, and protest bred a lively scene. To understand it we must recall that the undergraduate element was then, by comparison, the conservative element. Heads of Houses, Fellows and Tutors, learned and popular men, had been removed wholesale by the Elizabethan settlement of religion in favour of new men concisely described as “extremists from Geneva, intellectually inferior to those who had been displaced, and representing a different spirit, and different traditions.” The student body looked on them with scorn. Again, to quote another chief authority on this subject, “the young Oxonians did not bear easily the Elizabethan drill, and felt that if their liberty must be crushed they would fain have it crushed by something more venerable than the mushroom authority of the Ministers of[123] the Queen. They were as tinder, and Campion’s book was just the sort of spark to set them in a blaze.” The excited Government told off relays of clergymen to courtmartial and shoot it. Aylmer, Bishop of London, wished to commission nine Deans, seven Archdeacons, and the two Regius Professors of Divinity to punish the tiny offender; but the actual ammunition brought into the field was not quite so imposing as all this. The answers were duly published, dealing in the most unmeasured personal abuse of Campion. No attempt was made in any instance to rival either his religious fervour or his literary grace. His last labour with his pen made, in short, a very great and an extremely prolonged stir. Its fate was a romantic one from start to finish, for it was so quickly and thoroughly confiscated that not more than a couple of copies are now known to exist. Despite the outcry, or because of it, edition after edition was called for. There have been nearly thirty reprints in the original Latin, and many translations into modern languages, inclusive of three beautiful translations into[124] the good English common in 1606, 1632, and 1687, one of which should be re-issued. The Ten Reasons, written under such immense difficulties, had all of Campion’s zeal and pith, and was “a model of eloquence, elegance, and good taste.” Marc Antony Muret, the greatest Latinist of the time, called it libellum aureum, “a golden little book, writ by the very finger of God.” 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;” and he names as among the great monarchs whose joy it was to further the Church in their day, St. Edward the Confessor, St. Louis of France,[125] St. Henry of Saxony, St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia, St. Stephen of Hungary, and the rest. Then he cries out to “Elizabeth, most mighty Queen,” to listen. “For this Prophet is speaking unto thee, is teaching thee thy duty. I tell thee one Heaven cannot gather in Calvin and these thine ancestors. Join thyself therefore to them, else shalt thou stand unworthy of that name of thine, thy genius, thy learning, thy fame before all men, and thy fortunes. To this end do I conspire, and will conspire, against thee, whatever betideth me, who am so often menaced with the gallows as a conspirator hostile to thy life. (‘All hail, thou good Cross!’) The day shall come, O Elizabeth! the day that shall make it altogether clear which of the two did love thee best: the Company of Jesus, or the brood of Luther!”

Hardly was the last of the original imprints bound and distributed, when the pursuivants in search of what was roughly, but significantly enough, called “Massing-stuff,” pounced upon Stonor Park, and caught red-handed there, and carried off,[126] the two gentlemen, John Stonor and Stephen Brinkley, and four of the printers, one of whom, a poor frightened fellow, conformed, and was let off at once. William Hartley, ordained the year before, who had in person strewn the Ten Reasons over the benches of the University Church, and made special gifts of copies in various Colleges, was arrested a little later. His fate was not exceptional, like that of his comrades just mentioned, who were eventually released on bail. He suffered at Tyburn; and his mother, heroic as the mother of the Macchabees, stood by his young body in its butchering, and thanked God aloud for her privilege in so giving back to Him such a son.

Campion spent St. John’s Day (marking the first anniversary of his return to England) at Lady Babington’s, at Twyford in Buckinghamshire, a house not many miles from Stonor, on the other bank of the Thames. He stayed a little while at Bledlow also, and at Wynge, with the Dormers, his whole heart bent, every moment of the time, upon his Father’s business. But his free days were almost done.

[127]

The outcry redoubled, now that he had again succeeded in catching public attention. Fresh and monstrously cruel measures were therefore taken against all Papists. “Naught is lacking,” wrote to Acquaviva the tender soul who too well knew himself to be the cause of many sorrows, “but that to our books written with ink should succeed others daily published, and written in blood.” Fr. Parsons prudently ordered him back to the North. The two heard each other’s confessions and renewal of vows at Stonor, and said good-bye, exchanging hats as a parting gift, after the friendly fashion of their time. Campion was to ride straightway into Lancashire to get his manuscript and notes, left behind, his former companion Ralph Emerson going with him; and he was then to betake himself to the fresh mission field in Norfolk. 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. 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!”