XIII VICTORY: DECEMBER 1, 1581

EVEN thus late, fresh proffers were made to buy Campion over to the State religion. Such a circumstance, as he had claimed previously, is in itself a plain disproof of any treason. Hopton, who hated him, sent Campion’s own sister to him with the repeated offer of a very rich benefice. To the cell door came one day none other than George Eliot, saying that he would never have trapped Fr. Edmund, had he thought that anything worse than imprisonment could be in store. He also told the man of God whom he had wronged past reparation that he stood in danger from the wrath of the Catholics, and feared their reprisals for his late actions. Campion persuaded him that they would never push revenge so far as to seek his life, but added that if Eliot were truly repentant he should[167] have a letter of recommendation to a Catholic Duke in Germany, who would employ and protect him. Delahays, the keeper, in the discharge of his office, had to stand close to the prisoner during this interview, and what he heard sank into his mind and made him a convert. Outside the Tower, there was a ferment of excitement over this one of its inmates, and over the question whether the indignation of all Europe should be braved by carrying out his sentence. The Earl of Desmond, the accessory, and Dr. Sanders, the co-principal, of the late revolt in western Ireland, were still hiding in woods and caves, and weathering the hardships which were to be dismally ended for both during the coming spring. Burghley concisely said, in the finest Elizabethan spirit of punishing somebody—no great matter whom—when any row was made, that “Campion and Sanders were in the same boat, and as they could not catch Sanders, they must hang Campion instead.” The princely visitor was still at Court, and high festival went on from day to day. The preoccupation of the Queen with him and[168] his affairs was thought to be an excellent item of the programme, as it kept her from thinking of Campion and his fate. Delay was dreaded as a means of getting together of the great English nobles, and the foreign ambassadors, with petitions for Campion’s release; and it was thought that the Queen would never resist any strongly-worded request which so corroborated her own supposed secret feeling. The Council still thought his destruction desirable. Meanwhile, instant appeal was made to the Duke, by the Catholics generally, to use his influence in Campion’s behalf: he promised to intercede for him, and may have done so. At the last moment further pressure was brought to bear. His confessor was sent into the tennis court, where the Duke was about to begin a game, with this message: that the royal blood of France would be disgraced for ever, if so foul a judicial murder were not checked. The little great personage, thus accosted, as we are told by Bombino, stroked his face absent-mindedly with his left hand; then raised his right hand, with the racket in it, and called to one[169] opposite to him: “Play!” Not another word did he answer to the tragic matter so thrust upon him.

Burghley fixed upon November 25, a Saturday, as the date for Campion’s execution. Sherwin was appointed to die in his company, as representing the Seminary at Rheims. They were taken together one day into the Lieutenant’s Hall to face some endless argument or other. The opponent, “by report of such as stood by, was never so holden up to the wall in his life.” On the way back to their cells, under guard, they crossed one of the Tower courts. “Ah, Father Campion!” said his young comrade, smiling at the welcome London sun, “I shall shortly be above yon fellow.” Even one hurried free breath of fresh air must have meant much to Campion. To be “clapped up a close prisoner,” as he had been from the first, meant that his windows were blocked, and their minimum of air strained through a narrow slanted funnel, latticed at its skyward end, and with but one tiny pane occasionally opened at the bottom. But these things, humanly intolerable, counted for little on[170] the threshold of light and liberty everlasting. “Delay of our death doth somewhat dull me,” wrote Sherwin, touchingly, to a friend. “Truth it is, I had hoped ere this, casting off this body of death, to have kissed the precious, glorified wounds of my sweet Saviour, sitting in the Throne of His Father’s own glory.” There was a good deal of haggling and hesitation on the subject. By statute law any caught priest was hangable; but public opinion (as Simpson reminds us in a brilliant page) did not always run with the statute law. Moreover, Camden says expressly that the Queen (who is supposed to have supervised and approved all he wrote) did not believe in the “treasons” charged to the “silly priests.” It is remarkable that the first defensive pamphlet put forth by the Government after Campion’s death, was one “in which the plot of Rheims and Rome was prudently forgotten—the very matter of the indictment!”

By the time the day for the execution was finally set for Friday, the first of December, a third priest had been chosen from the waiting batch of victims, as representing[171] the English College at Rome. This was the Blessed Alexander Briant, who had applied from his prison cell for admission into the Society of Jesus, a fact not known to his persecutors. If the entry of his age in the Oxford Matriculation Lists be correct (as is most likely), he was now only in his twenty-sixth year. He was grave and gentle in character, full of charm, and of the most extraordinary personal beauty. He had been carried off in the course of a descent on Fr. Parsons’ London rooms, starved and parched in the Marshalsea, tortured by needles, and kept in the entire darkness of deep dungeons in the Tower. Norton, the Rackmaster, on three occasions, proceeded (in his own phrase) to “make him a foot longer than God made him,” yet he adds that “he stood still with express refusal that he would tell the truth.” The “truth” meant information of the whereabouts of Fr. Parsons, a former tutor and devoted friend, and of the place where Parsons’ books were being printed. Briant had been condemned the day after Campion’s trial, in Westminster Hall, where his angelic looks, out-lasting[172] a hell of almost unique torment, did not pass unnoticed by the public. Here (though some accounts say it was at the scaffold) he carried in the palm of his hand, and gazed upon often, a little cross of rough wood which he had managed to whittle in his cell, and on which he had traced an outline in charcoal of the figure of the Crucified. Pedro Serrano, the secretary of the Spanish Ambassador, saw it taken away from Briant, and heard him say: “You can wrest it from my hand, but never from my heart.” Not long afterwards George Gilbert died in Italy, kissing Blessed Alexander’s little cross, which he must have taken pains to buy back.

These three, Fathers Campion, Sherwin, and Briant, were led forth on a bitter morning, and bound to their hurdles, in the rain, outside the Tower gates. Campion’s life for the past week had been nothing but fasting, watching and prayer, and he was never in more gallant spirits. “God save you all, gentlemen!” so he saluted the crowd, on first coming out: “God bless you all, and make you all good Catholics!” The two[173] younger men were strapped down on one hurdle side by side, Campion alone on the other. The mud was thick in the unpaved streets of London, and the double span of horses, each flat hurdle being tied to two tails, went at a great pace through Cheapside, Newgate Street, and Holborn. There were intervals, however, when the jolted and bemired prisoners were able to speak with their sympathizers, who surged in upon them, and thus saved them for the moment from the incessant annoyance of Charke and other accompanying fanatics. Some asked Fr. Campion’s blessing; some spoke in his ear matters of conscience; one gentleman courteously bent down and wiped the priest’s bespattered face: “for which charity, or haply some sudden-moved affection, may God reward him!” says one annalist who saw the kind deed done.

The New Gate spanned the street where the prison named after it stood until yesterday; and in a niche of the New Gate was still a statue of Our Lady: this Fr. Campion reverenced, raising his head and his bound body, as best he could, as he passed[174] under. The three martyrs were seen to be smiling, nay, laughing, and the people commented with wonder on their light-heartedness. A mile or so of sheer country at the end of the road, and Tyburn was at hand, stark against a cloudy sky, with a vast crowd waiting to see the sacrifice: “more than three thousand horse,” says Serrano, in the contemporary letter already quoted, “and an infinite number of souls.” And he goes on, in the truest Catholic temper, speaking for himself, the Ambassador, and their little circle, to say, “there was no one of us who had not envy of their death.” Just as the hurdles halted, the sudden sun shone out and lit up the gallows with its hanging halters. Fr. Campion was set upon his feet, put into the hangman’s cart, driven under the triangular beams, and told to put his head into the noose. This the first martyr of the English Jesuits did with all meekness. Then, “with grave countenance and sweet voice,” he began to speak, as he supposed he was to be allowed to do, according to custom. He took the text of St. Paul: “We are made a spectacle unto[175] the world, and to angels, and to men: we are fools for Christ’s sake.” Sir Francis Knowles and other officials promptly interrupted him, and reminded him to confess his treason. So once more he must needs say: “I desire you all to bear witness with me that I am thereof altogether innocent. . . . I am a Catholic man and a priest: in that faith have I lived, and in that faith do I intend to die. If you esteem my religion treason, then am I guilty. As for other treason, I never committed any: God is my judge.” He spoke of the names which he had been hoodwinked into confessing, and protested that all the “secrets” held back were spiritual confidences, and that there were no “secrets” of another nature between his hosts and him; he also put in a plea for one Richardson, imprisoned on account of the Decem Rationes, whereas he knew nothing whatever of that book. He then tried to pray. But a school-master with lungs, named Hearne, hastily stepped forward and read a novel proclamation, first and last of its kind, declaring in the Queen’s name that[176] these men about to be executed were perishing not for religion but for treason. Diligent reassertion, in those days, seems to have established anything as a fact!

The lords and sheriffs present reverted to “the bloody question”: what did Master Campion think of the Bull of Pius Quintus and the excommunication of the Queen? and would he renounce the Pope of Rome? He answered wearily that he was a Catholic. One voice shouted: “In your Catholicism all treason is contained!” A minister came forward to bid the martyr pray with him, but with marked gentleness was denied his will. “You and I are not one in religion: wherefore, I pray you, content yourself. I bar none of prayer, but I only desire them of the Household of Faith to pray with me, and in mine agony to say one Creed.” The Creed was chosen “to signify that he died for the confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith.” He endeavoured again to pray, probably using aloud the words of some of the Vulgate Psalms or ritual hymns, when a spectator called out angrily to him to pursue his devotions in English.[177] “I will pray unto God,” answered Campion, with all himself in the answer, “in a language which we both well understand!” He was again interrupted, and ordered to ask forgiveness of the Queen, and to pray for her. But his sweetness and patience held out till the last. “Wherein have I offended her? In this am I innocent: this is my last speech: in this give me credit. I have and do pray for her.” “Pray you for Queen—Elizabeth?” was the insinuating query, made often, and answered often, as here. Campion said: “Yea, for Elizabeth, your Queen and my Queen, unto whom I wish a long, quiet reign, with all prosperity.” He had barely finished this emphatic sentence when the cart was drawn away. The multitude with one accord swayed and groaned. Somebody in authority (one account names the Chamberlain of the Royal Household, Lord Howard of Effingham) mercifully forbade the hangman to cut the rope until he was quite dead. That other rope with which Campion was bound Parsons managed to buy, and he had it laid about his own neck when he came to[178] die, in 1610. It is now at Stonyhurst: a thin, frayed old cord some twelve feet long.

Close to the quartering-block stood a spectator, a young gallant of twenty-three, eldest son of a Norfolk house, who had great gifts of mind, and was given to writing verses: his name was Henry Walpole. He was a Catholic, though, it would seem, a worldly one. His generous instincts of humanity, however, had led him to befriend hunted priests; and a love of Campion, in particular, was already kindled in him through this association. As the executioner threw the severed limbs of a blessed soul into the great smoking cauldron, to parboil them before they were stuck on spikes, according to sentence, a few drops were splashed out upon Henry Walpole’s doublet. The incident roused his mind and pierced his heart, and was to him the instant cry of his vocation. Like many another spiritual son of Blessed Edmund Campion (and nearer to him than they, because he entered the Society), he was granted the glory of following him, through faults of his own, through innumerable hardships,[179] and through martyrdom at York, in April, 1595, into the peace of Paradise.

Meanwhile the hangman had seized the second victim, saying: “Come, Sherwin! take thou also thy wages.” That manly man looked upon the bare bloody arm of the other, and eager to show some public veneration of his sainted leader, first bent forward and kissed it; then he leaped into the cart. Young Briant presently endured death for the Faith with an even calmer courage. The populace, much wrought up over all three, went home, through the winter mists, in tears. Most of them who had prejudices against the Church lost them for good; and very many straightway entered her communion.

The Government sent forth publication after publication in lame defence of its action. Soon France, Austria, Italy, were inundated with accounts of the event; these everywhere produced the deepest impression. At home, a great tidal wave of conversion to the old Church swept in.

Campion’s death, last and best of his wonderful missionary labours, bore the[180] most astonishing fruit. The long storm of persecution raged at its full fierceness after 1581, and it burst over the heads not only of a far more numerous, but a far more heroic body. Edmund Campion’s spirit had been built in good time, as it were, into the unsteady wall.

Robert Parsons had an intense feeling for his first comrade-in-arms. “I understand of the advancement and exaltation of my dear brother Mr. Campion, and his fellows. Our Lord be blessed for it! it is the joyfullest news in one respect that ever came to my heart.” This same feeling breaks out with powerful irony, addressing the “Geneva-coloured” clerics, who so long harassed the martyr-group of 1581. “Their blood will, I doubt not, fight against your errors and impiety many hundred years after you are passed from the world altogether. . . . They are well bestowed upon you: you have used them to the best.”

And Allen, in a private letter, says on his part: “Ten thousand sermons would not have published our apostolic faith and[181] religion so winningly as the fragrance of these victims, most sweet both to God and to men.”

No remote mystic was Edmund Campion, but a man of his age, with much endearing human circumstance about him and in him. Caring for nothing but the things of the soul, he had yet caught the ear and the eye of the nation. The tidings of his end meant much to many of the great Elizabethans: not least personal was it, perhaps, to the lad Shakespeare, whose father had been settled as a stout Recusant by the Warwickshire ministrations of Parsons.

An aged priest, Gregory Gunne, came up before the Council in 1585, his thoughts and tongue too busy in Campion’s praise. The day would come, he said, when a religious house would stand as a votive offering on the spot where “the only man in England” had perished. There was still no sign of such a thing when Mr. Richard Simpson’s great monograph was first published, and that was twenty years before Pope Leo XIII beatified the Blessed Edmund[182] Campion on December 9, 1886. But now there is a Convent with Perpetual Adoration in its little chapel, and two bright English flags ever leaning against the altar, on that ground of the London Tyburn: and is it wonderful that the vision of a worthier memorial haunts the imagination of those who go there to pray for their country?

Blessed Edmund Campion was “a religious genius,” with a creative spirituality given to few, even among the canonized children of the Fold. But in his kinship with his place and time, his peculiar gentleness, his scholarship lightly worn, his magic influence, his fearless deed and flawless word, he was a great Elizabethan too. He had sacrificed his fame and changed his career. He had spent himself for a cause the world can never love, and by so doing he has courted the ill-will of what passed for history, up to our own day. But no serious student now mistakes the reason why his own England found no use for her “diamond” other than the one strange use to which she put him. He is sure at last of justice. In the Church, that name of his[183] will have a never-dying beauty, though it is not quite where it might have been on the secular roll-call. To understand this is also to rejoice in it: for why should we look to find there at all, those who are “hidden with Christ in God”?

The End