Part 9

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 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 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 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. “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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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Transcriber’s note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

Page 77, “Fowers” changed to “Flowers” (Little Flowers of Martyrdom)