Part 2

With the summer term of 1570 his Proctorate expired. He spent the Long Vacation in tutoring the eight-years-old Harry Vaux, eldest son of Lord Vaux of Harrowden, who afterwards beautifully redeemed his childish promise. The end of Michaelmas term found Campion face to face for the last time with that life which he had so loved, and in which, with his scientific enthusiasm for letters, he had been such a wonderful inspiration to young men. There was no conscious motive in his heart deeper than a thirst for such freedom as had become difficult in a Puritanizing University, when he cut himself loose, slipped out of it for good, and took ship for Ireland.

In the new move he had the approbation of Leicester, and the companionship of a much-attached Oxford disciple, Richard Stanihurst, who is remembered by posterity only for his grotesque translation of Virgil. Campion may well have left home with the understanding that he should have a clear educational field in Dublin, but he arrived a little too late. The outlook had been very bright. Some good men then in power were eager for the revival of the extinct University of Dublin, an ancient Papal foundation, but ruined, as all the great Schools were (most of them permanently, some only temporarily), by the religious changes. The chief supporters of the plan were enthusiastic, far-sighted, and most liberally inclined towards Catholics. Fear and prejudice therefore stepped in, in the person of Elizabeth’s Irish Bishops. The Lord Chancellor, Dr. Weston, wrote privately to the Queen, deploring the popularity of the scheme, and begging her to take the unborn foundation “into her merciful, motherly care.” She followed that advice. In token thereof, in due season arose Trinity College, Dublin, as a complete checkmate to the earlier project, quite safe for evermore from Papist blight. Thus was Campion cheated of a continuance of his natural vocation, in serving upon the staff of the new University. Two of his friends who had most concern in it were James Stanihurst, father of Richard, and Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, who had proffered it lands and money. Leicester would have provided Campion with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry, his own brother-in-law. The latter’s young son, Philip, was at this time a student in Oxford, where his governor, Thomas Thornton of Christ Church, afterwards Vice-Chancellor, had been constantly in Campion’s society. Sir Henry Sidney always bore himself most kindly towards Campion. The latter lived, a more than welcome guest, under the roof of James Stanihurst, then Recorder of Dublin, and Speaker of the local House of Commons. Stanihurst was the head of an Anglo-Irish family not openly Catholic since Queen Mary’s reign. Indeed, in his public capacity, he had often sided against Catholicism, although he was as friendly as Sidney himself to those who professed it. In the midst of this temporizing household, Campion, himself a temporizer, came during the winter to be doubted by certain bigots outside. Very possibly he was too free-spoken. Campion “came to Ireland believing in practically all Catholic dogmas, even in the Eucharist, and in the authority of the Council of Trent.” The impression may have got abroad that his then unknown variety of Anglicanism differed little from the dangerous creed of times past, lately discovered to be the proper business of the police! Whatever the reason, Campion began to be a marked man. Sir Henry Sidney told Stanihurst with heat, that so long as he was Governor he would see to it that “no busy knave of them all should trouble him,” on Campion’s account. Under this unpleasant circumstance of espial, added to the disappointment he had just undergone, the sensitive exile presently fell ill, and got a most affectionate nursing from the Stanihursts, till his strength revived. He started as soon to write a treatise on a subject of which his mind, up to now, had been full: the character and aim of the ideal youth at the Universities. This _De Juvene Academico_ reminds us of a theme by another great Oxonian who was in Dublin three hundred years later, and had also to face the heartbreaking failure of an Irish University dreamed of, and not to be. Campion afterwards recast his fine little work, and under its second form it is to be found among the few _Opuscula_ published after his death. His comely face and gracious manner were quickly taken into favour in his Dublin circle. While he was gaining a contrary repute on hearsay, the few who had access to him nicknamed him “the Angel.”

Meanwhile, hating idleness, and bent on redeeming what may have looked like a foolish absence from Oxford, Campion planned the composition of a brief _History of Ireland_. Friends helped him in “inquiring out antiquities of the land.” He was what we should call a thorough “researcher,” a bird by no means common in those early days. He went here and there among musty manuscript records of the city, and from library to library in the country, happily gathering in his materials for work. He had been some three months in Ireland when on a March midnight there came a sudden warning from the faithful Lord Deputy, who was on the point of leaving for England. Campion learned thereby that Weston the Chancellor had pursuivants ready to arrest him the next morning! The Stanihursts acted at once, and hurried their friend into the care of Sir Christopher Barnewall and Dame Marion Sherry, his wife, of Turvey House, in the parish of Donabate, eight miles away. There, breathless with the sudden flight through the dark, the three devoted escorts left him in safety.

III

STEPS FORWARD: IRELAND: 1571

THE Barnewalls were in feeling both more Catholic and more Irish than the Stanihursts, and they showed Edmund Campion a no less tender hospitality. The great house was in a beautiful and remote situation. Running in and out of it was a horde of laughing children, including the eleven-year-old Janet who was to become Richard Stanihurst’s early-dying wife. Campion loved the hearty Knight, their father, and their lady mother, whom he calls “in very sooth, a most gentle and godly woman.” Though he mingled freely with the life of the family, he was considerately given the great garret to write in and hide in. Here he began his little _History_. First of all, though, he sent back a grateful missive in Latin to the men who had been so providently kind to him. To the Recorder, he says: “Was I not fortunate in such friendship and patronage as yours? How good, how generous it was of you to take in an unknown stranger, and to keep him all these months on the fat of the land! You looked after my health as carefully as after Richard’s, the son worthy of your love. You supplied me, too, with books, and made the best possible provision for my time of study: may I perish, if ever in this world, outside my room in Oxford, I had sweeter dealings with the Muses!... Up to this, I have had to thank you for conveniences; but now I must thank you for my rescue, and my very breath,—yes, breath is just the word! for they who succumb to these persecutors are wont to be thrust into dismal dungeons, where they inhale filthy fogs, and are cut off from wholesome air. But now, through you and your children’s kindness, I shall live, please God ... most happily.” The stress laid, in this affectionate letter, upon the writer’s appreciation of personal care, of the privacy dear to students, of good diet and pure air, tells its own tale of physical delicacy. Campion was slight in build, and like many another tireless and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong. He ends by asking that his St. Bernard may be sent on to him, and encloses a lively page for his friend Richard, recalling the service rendered in snatching him from danger, and conveying him to Turvey House. “Is it not hard,” Campion breaks out, “that beholden to you as I am, I have no way of showing it?... Meanwhile, if these buried relics have any flavour of the old Campion, their flavour is for you ... you and your brother Walter ... you, up that whole night through, and he, summoned to us from his wife’s side. Seriously, I owe you much. I have nothing to write about unless you have time and inclination for a laugh. Have you? Then hold your breath, and listen! The day after I came here, as I sat down to work, into the bedroom burst a poor old soul, coming on what business I wot not. She knew nothing of me, so seeing me suddenly at her left, took me for a ghost! Her hair rose on end; she went dead white; she stared aghast; her jaw fell. ‘What is the matter?’ quoth I, whereupon she almost collapsed with fright. Not a syllable could she utter, but made shift to flounce out of the room, and pour into her mistress’s ear how some sort of hideous spectre had appeared to her on the top floor! This was repeated to me at supper. They called the little old thing in, and made her relate her scare. We all nearly died with laughter; and I was established as quite alive.”

The book, put together, as was almost all Campion’s literary work, under highly disturbing conditions, is unfinished; and what there is of it is sketchy and out of proportion. One of its charms is its character-drawing, including the speeches with which, after the fashion of Livy, Campion fits the situation by putting them into the mouths of his personages. His was a dramatic mind. He knew both history and human nature: the latter knowledge crops up everywhere in all that he wrote, and spoke, and did, and supplied him with no small share of his power over others. The outstanding charm of the _History of Ireland_ is its style, crisp, arresting, bright with idiom: an idiom so noble and so much his own, that one understands the almost breathless admiration with which his generation looked up to him and listened to him. But this book, like the _View of the Present State_, written some seventeen years later by another gentle-hearted Englishman, the poet Spenser, is all wrong in its theory that to get any footing in the modern world the “mere Irishry” must be Anglicized. Campion did not know the Celts, their laws, nor their literature; he never came nearer to them than through chronicles written in scorn of them, or the daily table-talk, wide of the mark, of the English Pale. Yet, according to his opportunity, he loved the country and the people, and deplored that the descendants of a race of mediæval scholars should be cut off from education. Afterwards he felt that his rather helter-skelter pamphlet represented limited knowledge and unformed opinion; he speaks of it as “premature,” and wished, when he lost the manuscript, that it might perish rather than reach the public as it was. It bore a dedication to the Earl of Leicester, his “singular good lord,” in the hope that it might “make his travel seem neither causeless nor fruitless,” or, as he says again in plainer language: “I render you my poor book as an account of my voyage.” It was first printed, without supervision from the author, in a very muddled, unsatisfactory way, by Raphael Holinshed in 1577; then in more scholarly fashion by Sir James Ware, in his _Ancient Irish Histories_, 1633. We all remember how useful Holinshed’s pages were to Shakespeare: the twenty lines or so of the famous description of Wolsey in Act IV, Scene 2, of _Henry VIII_, is taken almost word for word from what Campion had written, and Holinshed had incorporated in his _Chronicles_.

Nowhere in this little book, begun and broken off at Turvey House, and purposely non-committal in its religious expressions, is there any sign that its author had already, as some have thought, returned to the Church. For Parsons, his earliest biographer, whose facts concerning these years were supplied by Richard Stanihurst, says of Campion that his purity and devoutness in Ireland were marked, although he was not in the Church. Fr. Pollen, summing up the evidence of these written pages, considers Campion “near to the Church, but distinctly avoiding a confession of faith.”

Chancellor Weston, a zealot of the most pronounced Protestant type, made a livelier pursuit after having been baffled by Campion’s escape from Dublin. The latter found himself quite unable to lead any sort of orderly life, thanks to the restless hue and cry after him; and one day he recognized with a shock of horror the penalties to which he was exposing the generous friends, so far unmolested, who were giving him shelter. His conscience would not allow him to come out with a flat denial of Catholic tenets or sympathies. His only alternative, after a half-year in Ireland, was flight homeward. Here once more he was aided (though they were in great sorrow at his decision) by his Anglo-Irish friends, those “dear friends which ever after he loved most entirely, and they him.”

Richard Stanihurst, as private tutor to the children of the Earl of Kildare, had acquaintance with the Earl’s steward, Melchior Hussey. This man (a character by no means admirable) was about to embark at Drogheda for a visit to England, and it was arranged that Campion should be disguised to pass as his Irish servant. Thus, in the month of May, putting himself under the special patronage of the national Saint, and adopting his name, Campion boarded the ship as “Mr. Patrick.” Officers of the law promptly appeared on the track of the quasi-Papist, delaying the weighing of the anchor, annoying the crew, upsetting the cargo, and questioning every passenger on deck except the harmless-looking person who stood “in a lackey’s weed” behind Hussey. Edmund Campion was a born actor. He put on and kept up a highly stupid expression, while he was praying with might and main for St. Patrick’s intercession in his great danger! He had cause to thank his new patron in Heaven, although the party of searchers swooped upon his bags below deck, and carried off with them the rough draft of his precious manuscript, that _History of Ireland_ which he was to see no more for many a year.

The early summer of 1571 was ill-starred. Various startling events had conjoined like tidal waves to lift the misbehaving English Government up to its highest pitch of alarm. Chief of these was the Bull of Deposition against Queen Elizabeth, issued by the Holy See after consultation with many temperate English advisers. John Felton, a gentleman of Southwark, posted a copy of it upon the palace gates of the Bishop of London, on the morning of May 25, the Feast of Corpus Christi: by August he was to pay for the bold act with his life. The Queen of Scots had newly arrived in England. London, by the time Campion reached it, was in a ferment. “Nothing was to be found there but fears, suspicions, arrestings, condemnations, tortures, executions.... The Queen and Council were so troubled that they could not tell whom to trust, and so fell to rigorous proceedings against all, but especially against Catholics, whom they most feared; so that Campion could not tell where to rest in England, all men being in fear and jealousy one of another.”

Campion had not broken his old bonds, yet nothing interested him so powerfully as the things of religion. The love of God was lying in wait for him, and forced his hand. Of all possible places in London where he might have gone on the 26th or 27th of May, he chose Westminster Hall, in order to attend the trial of Dr. John Storey, former Principal of Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College) in Oxford, and that University’s first Regius Professor of Civil Law. Dr. Storey was very feeble for his years, which were sixty-seven. By a wretched breach of international law he had been trapped at Antwerp, carried away from his wife and family to England, and arraigned for having “feloniously and traitorously comforted Richard Norton,” his own friend, the old hero of the Pilgrimage of Grace. But the real cause of his arrest and execution was a much larger matter. He was a troublesomely consistent person. He had spoken out in the House of Commons against the new Liturgy in the first Parliament of Edward VI, and against the Supremacy Bill in the first Parliament of Queen Elizabeth. He had been an Ecclesiastical Commissioner under Queen Mary. Foxe, in the famous _Book of Martyrs_, lies in the most reckless way about Storey’s part in those sordid bygone persecutions, and Holinshed and Strype and many another historian repeat Foxe.

Storey was an honourable and even merciful man, but a man of his time. People were much of a piece in the sixteenth century when it came to holding to the grindstone the nose of the unwilling! There is this to be said, however: that the Marian courts dealt out death to heretics and malcontents, and candidly stopped there, and were not inspired to any cruelty more subtle; whereas Good Queen Bess not only dealt out death very much more liberally, but invented a poison for all the springs of life. Her statutes, terribly oppressive from the first, ended in what Burke calls the most hateful code framed since the world began: Penal Laws which, especially from 1585 on, struck without mercy at Catholics in their rights of worship, property, inheritance, education, travel, professions, public service and private liberties of every kind. Another point to be noted in passing is that Queen Mary persecuted her subjects for changing their religion. Her more ingenious sister persecuted them for not changing it! Historians have not dwelt much upon the difference, but to a reader with some philosophy in him it will have no little weight.

Dr. Storey was executed five days after his trial, under even more horrible circumstances than were usual. Edmund Campion had then left England, after an exceedingly short stay. His standing watch in Westminster Hall had done more for him than many arguments and exhortations: it kindled a spark in him which made him, in Lord Falkland’s phrase, “ready for the utmost hazard of war.” There was a cause to which he could run home; there was a vocation to which he could climb: these opened out before him as he stood in the surging indoor crowd. “He was animated by that blessed man’s example,” says Parsons, “to any danger and peril for the same faith for which the Doctor died.” Edmund Campion lost no time. There had been enough of that sad old game, and he was thirty-one years old, with three quarters of his too brief life behind him. Now he was awake, and had touched, in the dark, his heart’s long-patient Master. He set out at once for the nearest stronghold of apostolic souls, the English Seminary at Douay in Belgium.

IV

CHEYNEY AGAIN: DOUAY: 1571

INTERRUPTED sea-voyages were his fate. This time, half-way across the Channel, his ship was hailed by a Government frigate, _The Hare_, which demanded to be shown the ship’s sailing papers, and the passports of her passengers. Campion had none. Moreover, as his religion was suspected, the dutiful Protestant frigate, homeward bound, promptly swallowed him, bag and baggage. His generous friends in Ireland had forced upon him money for his needs, and the captain who now kidnapped him found it convenient to keep the money, but kind-heartedly let his prisoner lose himself in the streets of Dover. Other friends quickly made the losses good. On Campion’s second attempt to reach Calais all went well. He did not lack his secular epitaph, so to speak, at Court. It was not then a legal crime, though it soon became so, for a Catholic Englishman to leave the country fast being made into a hell for him. The mighty Cecil treated this expatriation as quite voluntary. “And it is a very great pity,” he chose to say, looking into Richard Stanihurst’s gratified eyes, “for Master Campion was one of the diamonds of England.”

The date of Campion’s reconciliation to the Church is unknown. It seems unlikely to have taken place in Ireland. He may have been absolved from his schism in London, or else as soon as he had reached Douay. There was a busy trade in wool still flourishing at that time between Flanders and England, and in the thrifty, kindly towns of the exporting country refugees formed a considerable part of the population. Douay, properly speaking, Douai, was called “Doway” by its foster-children. The creation of its English Seminary was a master-stroke of Dr. William Allen, Canon of York, afterwards Cardinal, once of Oriel College, Oxford, and Principal of St. Mary Hall. Indeed, “Oxford may be said to have founded Douay.” Allen was aided by many men of mark, notably by his old tutor, Morgan Phillipps, and by the latter’s bequeathed funds; also by the Flemish Abbots and layfolk. Campion seems to have been the eighteenth arrival in the newly established house of young, prayerful, enthusiastic men. He found there as Professor of Hebrew, his beloved Gregory Martin, and a learned colleague, Richard Bristow, late Fellow of Exeter College, the first of the Seminarian priests to be ordained: two props and pillars of the foundation. There also was Thomas Stapleton, late Fellow of New College, the most able Catholic controversialist of the age. Five of the twenty English students enrolled in 1571, joined the Society of Jesus. The College, destined to speedy and splendid development, was affiliated to the Douay University, established some eight years before it by Spanish munificence and a Papal Bull. Here, then, Edmund Campion came into his soul’s haven, “out of the swing of the sea.”