XI AT LYFORD GRANGE, AND AFTER: 1581

ON the morning of July 12, Father Edmund and Brother Ralph, faithful to agreement, were in their saddles again, leaving the pious household refreshed, but lamenting. Of the two priests who formed part of it, one, Fr. Collington, or Colleton, escorted them some distance on their way. Campion had already been waylaid, at an inn near Oxford, by many friendly tutors and undergraduates, when up galloped the other chaplain of Lyford, Fr. Forde. He was a Trinity College man, who had entered Douay just after Campion’s arrival there, and was to follow him closely to martyrdom. Forde brought news that a large party of Catholics had come over to Lyford to visit the nuns, and, distressed at missing Fr. Campion, were clamouring for his return. The Oxford group had been[130] begging their old champion to preach to them, which he would not do in so public a place; they now added their entreaties to those of the deputy of the strangers, and offered to join these at Lyford. Surely, he who had given a whole day to a few godly nuns, who needed him but little, could not refuse a Saturday and Sunday to so many soiled souls of every stripe and colour, “thirsting for the waters of life”? The suit was insistent; Campion was inclined to give in, but referred his admirers to Brother Emerson, as his provisional Superior. He, in turn, was overborne. It seemed much safer, after all, for the precious Father to be among friends, while he, Ralph, went on alone to fetch the books from Mr. Richard Houghton’s in Lancashire. So back to Lyford Campion went, to the poor little lay brother’s everlasting regret.

On the following Sunday morning, the ninth after Pentecost, Campion preached at the Grange on the gospel of the day, the peculiarly touching gospel of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, the changed and faithless city which stoned the prophets, and knew[131] not, in her day, the things that were to her peace. No one present ever forgot that heart-shaking sermon, laden as it was with pathos and presentiment. There was an audience of sixty, including the Oxonians. Unfortunately it included also George Eliot, a man of the most evil personal repute, an apostate and a Government spy, armed with plenary powers. He was then under a charge of murder, and was anxious to whitewash himself in the eyes of the Council by some conspicuous public service. He had once been a servant of the Ropers at Canterbury; and Mrs. Yate’s honest cook, who had known Eliot there in his decent days, let him in without question, whispering what a treat was in store for him in the preaching of none other than Father Campion! Though the warrant for the apprehension of the Jesuit was in Eliot’s pocket, he little thought to capture him so easily and so soon. A pursuivant had accompanied him to the gate; Eliot went back to this person, nominally to dismiss him, as a heretic, really to speed him to a magistrate at Abingdon for a force of an hundred men[132] to arrest Campion in the Queen’s name. Then he went piously up-stairs to Mass, Edmund Campion’s last Mass, so far as we know. That, and the sermon, passed by in peace, and Eliot himself left. Immediately after dinner an alarm was given by a watchman posted in a turret, who saw the enemy far off. Campion sprang up, and started to leave at once, and alone, saying that his chances of escape might be fair, and that his remaining would only involve the household in discomfort and danger. But they all clung to him, assuring him that Lyford was full of cunning secret passages and hiding-holes; and into one of these, in the wall above the gateway, he was forthwith hurried by Forde and Collington, who laid themselves down by his side, and crossed their hands over their breasts.

Back came Eliot with the magistrate, a civil squire, and the neighbourly Berkshire yeomen who loathed the work. He made them turn the whole house topsy-turvy, nor desist till evenfall; then, finding nothing, they withdrew. However, they returned almost in the same breath, egged on by[133] Eliot, who now would have the walls sounded. The Abingdon magistrate apologized to Mrs. Yate, not for the Queen’s warrant, but for his associate, “the mad-man,” as he called him, who was carrying it out. The lady was an invalid; thinking not altogether of herself, she railed and wept. The magistrate kindly soothed her fears, and allowed her to sleep where she pleased, undisturbed by his men and their din. She chose to have a bed made up close to the hiding-place. She was conducted thither with the honours of war, and a sentinel was posted at the room door. The tapping and smashing went merrily on elsewhere until late at night, when, by her orders, the sheriff’s baffled underlings made a fine supper, and being worn out, fell asleep over their cups, even as they were expected to do. Poor Mrs. Yate was either by nature the silliest of women, or else her nerves were upset by illness and trying circumstance, for she sent for Fr. Campion, as well as for all her other guests who were in that part of the house, and requested him, as he stood by her bedside—of all possible things—to[134] preach to them just once more! One could not in courtesy refuse a hostess, however unreasonable, who was risking so much for him; nor would it have been like him to refuse. Allen tells us that it was his invariable habit to preach “once a day at the least, often twice, and sometimes thrice, whereby through God’s goodness he converted sundry in most shires of this realm of most wisdom and worship, besides young gentlemen students, and others of all sorts.”

Fr. Campion discharged his task. As the little congregation broke up, some one stumbled in the dark, and several fell; the snoring sentinel awoke; searchers, with lanterns and axes, swarmed up from below. There was nothing to be seen: Lyford was not honeycombed in vain with hidden passages. The men-at-arms had been fooled too often, and were angry with Eliot. Yet that functionary knew that something was still really afoot, that the alarm was not a false one. On going down the stairs again he struck his hand upon the wall over it. “We have not broken through here!” he said. A loyal servant of the Yates, who was at his side,[135] and who knew it was just there the refugees lay, muttered that enough wall had been ruined already, and then went deadly pale while Eliot’s eye was still on him. The latter called, in triumph, for a smith’s hammer, and banged it into the thin timber partition, and into the narrow cell. And thus was Father Edmund Campion taken at Lyford Grange, at dawn of Monday, July 17th, in the year 1581.

He was quite calm, quite cheerful. With him were apprehended the two priests, seven gentlemen, and two yeomen. Forster, the Sheriff of Berkshire, hitherto absent, arrived. As he was an Oxonian, and almost a Catholic, and kindly disposed towards Campion, he waited to hear from the Council what was to be done. On the fourth day orders came to send the chief prisoners up to London, under a strong guard. Leaving the old moated house and its many occupants, now distracted with grief, Campion took horse at the door, and rode slowly off, Eliot prancing in triumph at the head of the company, though the common people saluted him as “Judas,” all along the way.[136] The first halt was at Abingdon; sympathetic Oxford scholars had come down to see the last of the great light of the University under such black eclipse. Eliot accosted his victim at table: “Mr. Campion, I know well you are wroth with me for this work!” He drew out a beautiful answer, sincere, composed, half-playful: a saint’s answer. “Nay, I forgive thee; and in token thereof, I drink to thee. Yea, and if thou wilt repent, and come to Confession, I will absolve thee: but large penance thou must have!” At Henley, Campion saw in the crowd Fr. Parsons’ servant, and greeted him as he could, without betraying him: Fr. Parsons was near at hand, but was wisely kept indoors. A young priest, “Mr. Filby the younger,” as he was called, a native of Oxford, is said to have here attempted to speak to Campion; he was at once seized upon as a traitorous “comforter of Jesuits,” and added to the cavalcade. At Colebrook, less than a dozen miles from London, came fresh instructions from the Council. Sheriff Forster had treated his prisoners most honourably: they were now to be made[137] a public show. Their elbows were tied from behind, their wrists roped together in front, and their feet fastened under the horses; their leader was decorated with a paper pinned to his hat—Fr. Parsons’ hat of late—on which in large lettering was inscribed: “Campion, the Seditious Jesuit.” And in this guise he was paraded through the chief streets of the great city on market-day. The mob roared with delight; “but the wiser sort,” says Holinshed, “lamented to see the land fallen to such barbarism as to abuse in this manner a gentleman famous throughout Europe for his scholarship and his innocency of life, and this before any trial, or any proof against him, his case being prejudged, and he punished as if already condemned.” Stephen Brinkley somehow obtained, as a souvenir of a fellow-prisoner, that thick dark felt hat, which had been so ignominiously labelled in the cause of Christ. Years afterwards, when in Belgium, he put it into a reliquary, “out of love and veneration towards that most holy martyr of God, his father and patron.” A piece of it is at Roehampton, in the Jesuit Noviciate.

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On reaching the Tower the Lyford captives were given up to the Governor, Sir Owen Hopton. Taking his cue, he had Campion thrust at once into Little Ease, the famous Tower hole not high enough for a man to stand upright in, nor long enough for him to lie down in. After four days of this misery he was suddenly taken out, put in a boat at the Traitors’ Gate steps, and rowed to the town house of the Earl of Leicester. This nobleman and Edmund Campion, who had seen so much of each other for several years, had been placed by events in silent conflict. There stood the Earl of Bedford, with two Secretaries of State; there stood Campion’s host, who, for one reason or another, had never hounded Catholics with the fixed fury of Walsingham and Burghley, and thereby did not displease his irresolute royal mistress; there (a theatrical circumstance!) was that royal mistress herself, a gleaming stately vision in a great chair, head and front of a not unfriendly little inquisition. To the questions heaped upon him Campion gave frank answers. On the matter of “allegiance” he seemed to satisfy[139] the company, who told him there was no fault in him save that he was a Papist. “That,” he modestly interrupted, “is my greatest glory.” The Queen smiled upon him, and offered him liberty and honours, but under conditions which his conscience forbade him to accept.

When he was courteously dismissed, Leicester, probably with a kind motive, sent a message to Hopton to keep up the flatteries of the new policy. Hopton put on an almost affectionate consideration for his important prisoner; and so fast as he was prompted, by artful degrees, he suggested to him a pension, a high place at Court, and even the promise eventually of the mitre and revenues of the primatial See of Canterbury! Well did the Council know, all along, the value of these stubborn and unpurchasable confessors of Christ. To cap the matter, in Campion’s case, it was publicly announced, both by Hopton and by Walsingham (who knew the untruth of their announcement), that the Jesuit was at the point of recantation and Protestant orthodoxy, and in full sight of the future Archbishopric, “to the[140] great content of the Queen.” It flew all over London that he would presently preach at Paul’s Cross, and there burn the Decem Rationes with his own hand. Eventually Hopton returned to first principles indoors, and inquired point-blank of Campion whether he would give up his religion, and conform. The reply is easily imagined. A continued course of wheedling was wasteful business. So thought the Council; and three days after his strange and sudden sight of the Queen’s Grace at Leicester House, Edmund Campion, first kneeling down at the door and invoking the Holy Name for steadying of his manhood, was stripped and fastened to the rollers of the Tower rack. Blandishments had failed to move him; they would try mortal pain, and see what that could do. Torture, nevertheless, was as much against the laws of England then (though not against the laws of some less humane countries), as it is now.