Part 7

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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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.

XII

THE THICK OF THE FRAY: 1581

CAMPION, in between the working of the rollers, was asked his opinion of certain political utterances in the works of his old friends Allen and Bristow, and of Dr. Sander; also whether he considered the Queen “true and lawful,” or “pretensed and deprived.” He refused to answer. Physical anguish could be little worse than the ineffable boredom of these two never-quiet questions. He was then asked by the Governor, the Rackmaster, and others present, by whose command and counsel he had returned to England; by whom in England he had been received and befriended; in whose houses he had said Mass, heard Confessions, and reconciled persons to his Church; where his recent book was printed, and to whom copies were given; lastly, what was his opinion of the Bull of Pius V against Queen Elizabeth? A letter written at the time to Lord Shrewsbury by Lord Burghley, and still extant, shows that nothing of moment could be got out of Campion. During the next fortnight, however, there was poured into the ear of the Government information regarding the second and third items in the above category. Houses were searched; persons of mark were apprehended, tried in the Star Chamber, and sentenced. Almost every manse or town house where Campion had been harboured became known, and even the names of those Oxford Masters of Arts who had followed him to Lyford. The Government gave out that he had confessed upon the rack, and implicated his too trusting friends. The alleged facts naturally became a general scandal, and bred grief and horror among the Catholics who, no less than Protestants, were thus driven to believe them. The secrets were probably given up, under panic, by three serving-men, and by poor Gervase Pierrepoint. It was a common trick of the time, though not peculiar to it, to show a prisoner a lying list of names purporting to have been extracted from colleagues, so that he himself might be trapped into endorsing the suspicions held in regard to those names. But it is clear that Campion was brought to mention only a few who, as he was aware, were formerly known to his examiners as Catholic Recusants; and only after a solemn oath from the Commissioners that no harm could accrue to them in consequence of such supplementary mention. Even this he had every cause to regret. The gentlemen and gentlewomen on Lord Burghley’s lists were carefully informed, when arrested, that it was Campion who had betrayed them: a cruel slander which he could refute only at the foot of the scaffold. Thanks to the reports, first of his backsliding, then of his treachery, his great reputation, for the time being, was clean gone. Having thus been given forth to the public as a knave, he was now to be set before them as a fool, and shown to be one who possessed neither sort of superiority, moral or mental.

[Illustration: Campion before Queen Elizabeth. _p. 138._]

Many courtiers, having a purely artistic interest in Edmund Campion, had begged that he might obtain the chance he had often asked for, of being heard in a disputation. This request was now suddenly granted. The conference was public, and came off in the Norman Chapel of the Tower, which was crowded. Two Deans, Nowell of St. Paul’s, and Day of Windsor, were appointed to attack Campion; he was to answer all objections as he could, but was forbidden to raise any of his own. Charke, the bitter Puritan preacher of Gray’s Inn, and Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, were the notaries. The lion to be baited did not even know that there was to be a conference, until he was brought to it under a strong guard. Time for preparation had been denied him; he was allowed the use of only such authorities as his memory could furnish; pale and weary and rack-worn as he was, he was given only a low stool to sit upon. The well-fed theological worthies were ranged before him, their chairs standing on raised platforms, and their tables spread with books of reference, pens and paper.

One who was there tells us how easy and ready were his answers; how modest his mien; how that high-spirited nature so bore the scorn, the abuse, and the jests heaped upon him, as to win great admiration from the majority of those who heard him for the first time. He began by asking very pertinently whether this was a just answer to his challenge, first to rack him, then to deprive him of books, notes and pen, lastly, to call upon him to debate? and he added (wishing to be fully understood by the audience), that what he had asked for was quite another sort of hearing: a hearing under equal conditions before the Universities. During the course of this first conference he was twice most unfairly tripped up: once over a quotation, in which he was right, though he could not then and there prove it; and again over a page of the Greek Testament, in such small type that he could not read it, and had to put it by when it was handed to him: thereby drawing down upon himself the ridiculous taunt that he knew no Greek. This he took silently, and with a smile. At the end of the six hours he had more than stood his ground. The Deans complained afterwards that a number of gentlemen present, “neither unlearned nor ill-affected,” considered that Master Campion had the best of it. Some common people who thought so too, and said so in the streets, paid dearly for their boldness. One of these gentlemen favourably impressed was Philip, Earl of Arundel, then in the flush of worldly pride and pleasure. He was the real victory of the Jesuit apostle, for he received at that time and in that place the first ray of divine grace, strong enough to change gradually in him the whole motive and course of that intensity of life which never failed the Howards. As he stood leaning forward in the foreground of the daïs, in that solemn interior, tall and young, with his great ruff and embroidered doublet, and his brilliant dark eyes held by the pathetic figure of Master Campion, how little could he have foreseen his own weary term of suffering in that gloomy fortress, and his sainted death there, at the end of the years!

There were three other conferences under like conditions, but in other quarters, with four fresh adversaries. Campion was again “appointed only to answer, never to oppose”; that is, to answer miscellaneous and disjointed objections against the Catholic Church, without ever being allowed “to build up any harmonious apology for his own system.” The last conference was notable for its browbeating and threatening of a too successful adversary. The Bishop of London privately came to the conclusion that the verbal tournament was doing no good whatever to the sacred cause of Protestantism. The Council agreed, and ended it.

Towards the end of October Campion was racked for the third time, and with the utmost severity, so that he thought they meant, this time, to kill him; but his fortitude was unshaken. A rough and honest first cousin to the Queen, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, growled that it were easier to pluck the heart out of Campion’s breast than to wrest from him one word against his conscience. His arms and legs went quite numb after this final torture. The keeper, who was won over by his endearing prisoner, and was always as gentle with him as he dared to be, inquired next day how they felt. “Not ill,” said Father Edmund, with all of his old brave brightness, “not ill, because not at all!”

Never once until now had he been accused of any conspiracy. But he was a troublesome person: he must be silenced somehow. With a tardy inspiration, the Council bent all their strength to get out of Campion some acknowledgment that he had been mixed up with the Spanish-Roman expedition, and the Irish rising of the preceding year. Not a shadow of proof could, of course, be produced for such a charge. Then, as a final and sure means of indicting him on some other count than that of religion, and of urging his execution upon the Queen, Walsingham, with Burghley’s connivance, hatched a treasonable plot out of his own inventive head, and got false witnesses to accuse Edmund Campion of it, and swear his life away. The “Plot of Rheims and Rome” was described as an attempt to raise a sedition, and dethrone and kill the Queen. It had an imaginary but recent date: 1580. Everybody or anybody, when found convenient, could be accused of so elastic a plot. It was first charged against some twenty priests and laymen in this year 1581; but it was brought up against the Earl of Arundel four years afterwards, despite the fact that the supposed interests of the Church were the last things likely to win his attention at the time assigned.

On All Saints’ Day arrived in England a suitor for the hand of Queen Elizabeth: Francis, Duke of Alençon, King of the Netherlands, the short-lived heir to the throne of King Henry the Third of France. With that King, while Duke of Anjou, and with Alençon for nine years past (as for three yet to come), Elizabeth had carried on negotiations which ended in smoke; but she now announced that she “would marry at last.” Little Froggy, as she endearingly called him, was ugly to a degree, and many years younger than her Majesty; he was brother-in-law to the Queen of Scots, who was her Majesty’s prisoner at Sheffield. The dominant, ultra-bigoted party took extreme alarm at the near prospect of toleration for Catholics which such a royal match suggested to them. To reassure them, it might just now be most useful, thought the Council, to hang a Jesuit or two.

On the 14th of the month Campion and eight others were arraigned before the grand jury in Westminster Hall. For “treasonable intents” of the Queen’s deprivation and murder, these “secret and privy practices of sinister devices,” befitting one “led astray by the devil,” had “Edmund Campion, clerk,” made his re-entry into England, the Pope, meanwhile, being not only aware of his act, but its “author and onsetter”! He was commanded, as were all those lumped with him in a common accusation, to plead Guilty or Not Guilty. Up went all the right arms of these “devotaries, and dead men to this world, who travelled only for souls,” as Campion himself called them: all but his, so disabled by the rack that he could not stir it from the furred cuff in which it lay. But a quick-witted comrade turned and took off the cuff, “humbly kissing the sacred hands so wrung for the confession of Christ,” and lifted it high to cry its own mute Not Guilty with the rest. The Spanish Ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, standing close by with his secretary, saw, with a pang of pity, that all the finger-nails were gone from Campion’s swollen hands. The trial proper began on the 20th, before “such a presence of people of the more honourable, wise, learned, and best sort as was never seen or heard of in that court in ours or our fathers’ memories before us ... so wonderful an expectation there was to see the end of this marvellous tragedy ... [of] such as they knew in conscience to be innocent.” They all heard Ralph Sherwin say, in a loud clear voice: “The plain ground of our standing here is religion, and not treason.”