Part 8

Chief Justice Wray presided, a Catholic at heart, and wretched ever after over this unwilling day’s work. The prosecuting officers for the Crown were the Queen’s serjeant, Edmund Anderson; Popham, afterwards Chief Justice; and Egerton, afterwards the first Lord Ellesmere. The chief witnesses were George Eliot, Anthony Munday, and two creatures named Sledd and Caddy: probably as evil a quartette as existed in contemporary England, and worthy forerunners of Oates and Bedloe. “They had nothing left to swear by,” as Campion reminded the jury: “neither religion nor honesty.” In no special order, but with much ardour and diligence, all the old tiresome trivial accusations were brought forward and pressed in, Campion being spokesman throughout for the defence, and his alert mind, despite his weakened body, meeting them all, and routing them. He was charged with having “seduced the Queen’s subjects from their allegiance” ... and “reconciled them to the Pope.” He caught up the word. “We ‘reconcile’ them to the Pope! Nay, then, what reconciliation can there be to him, since reconciliation is only due to God? This word [‘reconcile’] soundeth not to a lawyer’s usage, and therefore is wrested against us inaptly. The reconciliation that we endeavoured was only to God: as Peter saith, _reconciliamini Domino_, be ye reconciled unto the Lord.” Campion was informed: “Yourself came as Procurator from the Pope and Dr. Allen, to break these matters to the English Papists.” So he rejoined that in his homeward voyage from Rome, undertaken by his vow of obedience as a Jesuit, “the which accordingly I enterprised, being commanded thereto,” he had “dined with Dr. Allen at Rheims, with whom also after dinner I walked in his garden ... and not one jot of our talk glanced to the Crown or State of England.... As to the [Pope], he flatly with charge and commandment excused me from matters of State and regiment.” ... Followed a change of tactics. “Afterclaps make those excuses but shadows.... For what meaning had that changing of your name? Whereto belonged your disguising in apparel? What pleasure had you to royst it [in] a velvet hat and a feather, a buff leather jerkin, and velvet venetians?... Can that beseem a professed man of religion which hardly becometh a layman of gravity? No: there was a further matter intended.... Had you come hither for love of your country, you would never have wrought a hugger-mugger; had your intent been to have done well, you would never have hated the light.” To which Campion replied that St. Paul, in order “that living he might benefit the Church more than dying,” betook himself “to sundry shifts ... but that especially the changing of his name was very oft and familiar” ... and that “he sometimes thought it expedient to be hidden, lest, being discovered, persecution should ensue thereby, and the gospel be greatly forestalled.... If these shifts were then approved in Paul, why are they now reproved in me?—he an Apostle, I a Jesuit ... the same cause common to us both.... I wished earnestly the planting of the gospel; I knew a contrary religion professed; I saw if I were known I should be apprehended. I changed my name, I kept secretly: I imitated Paul. Was I therein a traitor?... The wearing of a buff jerkin, a velvet hat, and suchlike, is much forced against me.... I am not indicted upon the Statute of Apparel!... Indeed, I acknowledge an offence to Godwards for so doing, and thereof it doth grievously repent me, and [I] therefore do now penance, as you see me.” This charming rejoinder (again, how More-like!) was in allusion to his rough gown of Irish frieze, and a huge black nightcap covering half of his newly shaven face.

After all this mere hectoring, some pieces of “evidence” were produced. One of these was an intercepted letter which Campion himself had written from the Tower after his first and comparatively moderate racking, while it was still possible to use his hands; it was addressed to the admirable and truly holy, but fussy, Mr. Thomas Pounde, who, wild with alarm at the pretended “betrayals,” had written to remonstrate with Fr. Campion. The Queen’s Counsel now read this passage from Campion’s humble reply: “It grieveth me much to have offended the Catholic cause so highly as to confess the names of some gentlemen and friends in whose houses I had been entertained. Yet in this I greatly cherish and comfort myself: that I never discovered any secrets there declared; and that I will not, come rack, come rope!” The comment of the reader in court was an obvious one. “What can sound more suspiciously or nearer unto treason than this letter?... It must needs be some grievous matter and very pernicious, that neither rack nor rope can wring from him!” But Campion’s even more obvious answer was that there he spoke as one “by profession and calling a priest,” vowed to silence in regard to what was made known in the Confessional, and yet pressed, on the rack, to divulge secrets thus communicated to him. “These were the hidden matters ... in concealing of which I so greatly rejoiced, to the revealing whereof I cannot nor will not be brought, come rack, come rope!” Well chosen was this answer of Campion’s. It has been pointed out that if he had stated here that he had told on no one who was not already found out, he would have loosed the informers and man-hunters afresh on the whole Catholic community, until his other friends, who had not been found out, were run down. Instead of that he drew off attention by reminding the court that he could not repeat what had been sacramentally confided to him. Most of his hearers were either Catholic or had been Catholic, and acquiesced. He spoke truth, but he skipped explanations: and such is, more often than not, the highest wisdom in this complex world.

There were now read out certain papers containing oaths to be administered to persons ready to renounce their obedience to her Majesty, and to be sworn of the Papal allegiance alone. These were said to have been found in houses where “Campion had lurked, and for religion been entertained;” hence they were of his composing. He objected that the administering of oaths was repugnant to him, and exceeded his authority: “neither would I commit an offence so thwart to my profession, for all the substance and treasure in the world.” He went on to say (assuming for his purpose that the precious papers were not forged, though they really were so), that there was no proof of their connection with himself, nor was it even pretended that they were in his handwriting. Anderson replied with singular perversity or dulness: “You, a professed Papist, coming to a house and then such reliques found after your departure—how can it otherwise be implied but that you did both bring them and leave them there? So it is flat they came there by means of a Papist: _ergo_, by your means!” The logician in Campion dashed to the fore. Could it be shown that no other Papist ever visited that house but himself? If not, they were urging a conclusion before framing a minor! which is imperfect, he added, and proves nothing. Apparently Serjeant Anderson was sufficiently enraged by now. His highly judicial retort is on record. “If here, as you do in Schools, you bring in your minor and conclusion, you will prove yourself but a fool. But minor or conclusion, I will bring it to purpose anon!” Eliot then rose as witness, and gave his account of the Sunday sermon at Lyford: how Master Campion spoke of enormities in England, and of a day of change soon coming, welcome to the shaken and dispersed Catholics, but dreadful to the heretical masters of the land. “What day should that be,” broke in the Queen’s Counsel, “but that wherein the Pope, the King of Spain, and the Duke of Florence have appointed to invade this realm?” Campion turned his eyes on Eliot. “Oh, Judas, Judas!... As in all other Christian commonwealths, so in England, many vices and iniquities do abound ... whereupon, as in every pulpit every Protestant doth, I pronounced a great day, not wherein any temporal potentate should minister, but wherein the terrible Judge should reveal all men’s consciences and try every man.... Any other day than this, God He knows I meant not.” So much for the astonishing “evidence” of this most astonishing of all trials, one only, under Pontius Pilate, excepted.

[Illustration: “Not Guilty!” _p. 151._]

The chief count against the defendant was the old, old one of the Bull of Deposition, and the denied authority of the Queen in spirituals: that wretched family skeleton trotted out once more! “You refused to swear to the Supremacy, a notorious token of an evil willer to the Crown.” Campion, who was surely what Antony Wood quaintly calls him, “a sweete Disposition, and a well-polish’d Man,” stated his position once more, lucidly, and with perfect temper. He began by referring to what passed at the Earl of Leicester’s London house. “Not long since it pleased her Majesty to demand of me whether I did acknowledge her to be my Queen or no. I answered that I did acknowledge her Highness not only as my Queen, but also as my most lawful governess. And being further required by her Majesty whether I thought the Pope might lawfully excommunicate her or no, I answered: ‘I confess myself an insufficient umpire between her Majesty and the Pope for so high a controversy, whereof neither the certainty is yet known, nor the best divines in Christendom stand fully resolved!... I acknowledge her Highness as my governor and sovereign; I acknowledge her Majesty both in fact and by right to be Queen; I confess an obedience due to the Crown as to my temporal head and primate.’ This I said then; so I say now. If then I failed in aught, I am now ready to supply it. What would you more? I will willingly pay to her Majesty what is hers; yet I must pay to God what is His. Then as for excommunicating her Majesty, it was exacted of me (admitting that excommunication were of effect, and that the Pope had sufficient authority so to do), whether then I thought myself discharged of my allegiance or no? I said that this was a dangerous question, and that they that demanded this demanded my blood. Admitting (why admitting?) I would admit his authority, and then he should excommunicate her, I would then do as God should give me grace: but I never admitted any such matter, neither ought I to be wrested with any such suppositions.” To all this no rejoinder was made. It was the identical position taken up by many another harassed martyr. The prosecution next turned to the remaining prisoners, using the same weak, wrong, skirmishing tactics,—Campion often putting in a word to hearten one, to defend another, to guide a third. At a certain point he exclaimed: “So great are the treasons that I and the others have wrought, that the gaoler who has us in charge told me at night that would we but go to the Anglican services they would pardon us straightway!” Serrano, who reports this, adds: “They answered things in general.” At the close of the proceedings, their issue being prearranged, Campion was allowed to make a speech to the jurors. He eloquently begged them to seek for certainties, and to remember the character of the “evidence” brought before them. Alas! he was appealing to bought men, who dared not be true.

The pleadings had taken three hours; the jury deliberated, or seemed to do so, for an hour or more. Public opinion in the Hall, as at the Tower conferences, was overwhelmingly in favour of Campion. But “the poor twelve,” as Allen calls them, came back, fearful to be found “no friend of Cæsar,” bringing in a verdict against the whole company as “guilty of the said treasons and conspiracies.” The Lord Chief Justice spoke: “Campion, and the rest, what can you say why you should not die?” Then Campion broke out into a brief appeal to the future and the past, a lyric strain such as was not often heard beneath those ancient rafters, so sadly used to the spectacle of noble hearts in jeopardy. “It was not our death that ever we feared! But we knew that we were not lords of our own lives, and therefore for want of answer would not be guilty of our own deaths. The only thing that we have now to say is, that if our religion do make us traitors we are worthy to be condemned; but otherwise we are and have been as true subjects as ever the Queen had. In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors, all the ancient priests, Bishops and Kings: all that was once the glory of England, the Island of Saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter. For what have we taught (however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason), that they did not uniformly teach? To be condemned with these old lights, not of England only, but of the world, by their degenerate descendants, is both gladness and glory to us! God lives. Posterity will live. Their judgment is not so liable to corruption as that of those who are now going to sentence us to death.” After which the Lord Chief Justice pronounced the formula in use for all prisoners condemned to capital punishment. “Ye must go to the place whence ye came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open city of London upon hurdles to the place of execution, and there be hanged and let down alive ... and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight; then your heads to be cut off, and your bodies to be divided in four parts, to be disposed of at her Majesty’s pleasure. And may God have mercy on your souls!” Some of the company raised a storm of protest, but Campion’s voice rose above theirs, crying: “We praise Thee, O God!” Sherwin seconded him with the shouted anthem of Eastertide: “This is the day that the Lord hath made: let us rejoice and be glad therein!” Like expressions of triumph were presently taken up, to the amazement of bystanders. Then the doomed men were parted, and were all taken away, Edmund Campion being put in a barge on the Thames, and rowed back to the Tower, where he was heavily shackled with irons, and left alone.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.