Part 3

It was Dr. Allen’s missionary policy that all his sons, before memory of them had grown dim at home, should write to their more undecided friends in England, doing what they could to win them to the service of Christ in the Church Catholic. Campion sent a very long document to this end to his venerated and now ageing friend, Bishop Cheyney: a wonderful letter, in that live Elizabethan English, which was bold as surgery itself, yet charged with feeling. Associating his beliefs with Cheyney’s as the writer does, he helps us to understand his own doctrinal position while in Oxford and in Dublin. He failed in both places, writes Fr. Morris, for the same reason: “the position was a false one, for it was an effort to serve two masters, and to live like a Catholic and teach the Catholic religion outside the pale of the Catholic Church.” “There is no end or measure,” he now tells Cheyney from Douay, “to my thinking of you; and I never think of you without being horribly ashamed.... So often was I with you at Gloucester, so often in your private chamber, with no one near us, when I could have done this business, and I did it not!” By “this business” he means confessing Catholic truth, and urging Cheyney to return to it. “And what is worse, I have added flames to the fever by assenting and assisting. And although you were superior to me, in your counterfeited dignity, in wealth, age and learning, and though I was not bound to look after the physicking or dieting of your soul, yet, since you were of so easy and sweet a temper as in spite of your grey hairs to admit me, young as I was, to familiar intercourse with you, to say whatever I chose, in all security and secrecy, while you imparted to me your sorrows and all the calumnies of the other heretics against you; and since like a father you exhorted me to walk straight and upright in the royal road, to follow the steps of the Church, the Councils, and the Fathers, and to believe that where there was a consensus of these there could be no spot of falsehood; I am very angry with myself that I neglected to use such a beautiful opportunity of recommending the Faith: that through false modesty or culpable negligence, I did not address with boldness one who was so near to the Kingdom of God. But as I have no longer the occasion that I had of persuading you face to face, it remains that I should send my words to you to witness my regard, my care, my anxiety for you, known to Him to whom I make my daily prayer for your salvation. Listen, I beseech you, listen to a few words. You are sixty years old, more or less” (Cheyney was really sixty-eight), “of uncertain health, of weakened body; the hatred of heretics, the pity of Catholics, the talk of the people, the sorrow of your friends, the joke of your enemies. Who do you think yourself to be? What do you expect? What is your life? Wherein lies your hope? In the heretics hating you so implacably and abusing you so roundly? Because of all heresiarchs you are the least crazy? Because you confess the Living Presence of Christ on the Altar, and the freedom of man’s will? Because you persecute no Catholics in your diocese? Because you are hospitable to your townspeople, and to good men? Because you plunder not your palace and lands, as your brethren do? Surely these things will avail much, if you return to the bosom of the Church, if you suffer even the smallest persecution in common with those of the Household of Faith, or join your prayers with theirs. But now, whilst you are a stranger and an enemy, whilst, like a base deserter, you fight under an alien flag, it is in vain to attempt to cover your crimes with the cloak of virtues.... What is the use of fighting for many articles of the Faith, and to perish for doubting of a few?... He believes no one article of the Faith who refuses to believe any single one. In vain do you defend the religion of Catholics, if you hug only that which you like, and cut off all that seems not right in your eyes. There is but one plain, known road: not enclosed by your palings or mine, not by private judgment, but by the severe laws of humility and obedience: when you wander from these you are lost. You must be altogether within the house of God, within the walls of salvation, to be sound and safe from all injury; if you wander and walk abroad ever so little, if you carelessly thrust hand or foot out of the ship, if you stir up ever so small a mutiny in the crew, you shall be thrust forth: the door is shut, the ocean roars: you are undone!... Do you remember the sober and solemn answer which you gave me when three years ago we met in the house of Thomas Dutton at Shireburn, where we were to dine? We were talking of St. Cyprian. I objected to you (in order to discover your real opinions) that Synod of Carthage which erred about the baptism of infants. You answered truly that the Holy Spirit was not promised to one Province, but to the Church; that the Universal Church is represented in a full Council; and that no doctrine can be pointed out about which such a Council ever erred. Acknowledge your own weapons, which you used against the adversaries of the Mystery of the Eucharist!... Here you have the most ... apostolic men collected at Trent ... to contend for the ancient faith of the Fathers! All these, whilst you live as you are living, anathematize you, hiss you out, excommunicate you, abjure you.” Campion goes on to urge upon Cheyney an outward adherence to the Council which had discussed and resolved his own private beliefs. “Especially now you have declared war against your colleagues, why do you not make full submission, without any exceptions, to the discipline of these Fathers?... Once more, consult your own heart, my poor old friend! give me back your old beauty, and those excellent gifts which have been hitherto smothered in the mud of dishonesty. Give yourself to your Mother who begot you to Christ, nourished you, consecrated you; acknowledge how cruel and undutiful you have been: let confession be the salve of your sin.... Be merciful to your soul; spare my grief. Your ship is wrecked, your merchandise lost: nevertheless, seize the plank of penance, and come even naked into the port of the Church. Fear not but that Christ will preserve you with His hand, run to meet you, kiss you, and put on you the white garment: Saints and Angels will sing for joy! Take no thought for your life: He will take thought for you who gives the beasts their food, and feeds the young ravens that call upon Him. If you but made trial of our banishment, if you but cleared your conscience, and came to behold and consider the living examples of piety which are shown here by Bishops, priests, friars, Masters of Colleges, rulers of Provinces, lay people of every age, rank and sex, I believe that you would give up six hundred Englands for the opportunity of redeeming the residue of your time by tears and sorrow.... Pardon me, my venerated old friend, for these just reproaches, and for the heat of my love. Suffer me to hate that deadly disease; let me ward off the imminent danger of so noble a man and so dear a friend with any dose, however bitter. And now if Christ give grace and you do not refuse, my hopes of you are equal to my love: and I love you as passing excellent in nature, in learning, in gentleness, in goodness, and as doubly dear to me for your many kindnesses and courtesies. If you recover your [spiritual] health, you make me happy for ever. If you slight me, this letter is my witness. God judge between you and me: your blood be on yourself! Farewell, from him that most desires your salvation.”

One phrase in this steel web of phrases from the pen of a rhetorician with a heart, shows that Campion knew of Cheyney’s sad and now complicated position in England. The letter was written November 1, 1571. A Convocation had met in the preceding April, on the heels of the Act of Uniformity, to which Cheyney was summoned in vain. It required the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles, and enacted, under Archbishop Grindal’s leadership, many things equally hateful to Cheyney, such as displacement and defacement of Altar-stones—(a great symbol, this, and no mere act of pillage!), the abolition of Prayers for the Dead, the prohibition even of the Sign of the Cross in church. Cheyney, excommunicated for his wilful absence, afterwards sued by proxy for absolution, for the sake of averting temporal penalties: but he had nothing more to do with the hierarchy. “Now you have declared war against your colleagues,” shows that Campion had heard accurate news of all this.

The moment may have seemed to Campion exactly favourable for such a strong appeal. One of Cheyney’s successors in his See declared: “It was certain he died a Papist.” This was contradicted by a lesser authority, but yet a good one. If it were indeed “certain”, at least Edmund Campion, to whom the tidings would have been most consoling, never knew of it. It seems as if Cheyney could not have answered that bugle-call of a letter. He is said, however, to have kept it always, and to have called it his greatest treasure.

How these many cries of “the heat of my love” must have haunted his ear! It is hardly in human nature to value such a document at all (and there are passages in it more ruthless, after the manner of the time, than any we have quoted), unless for the reflex reason that it does its intended work in the heart of the receiver. To have valued it either as a piece of literary cleverness, or as a monument of misdirected concern, would have been equally cynical, and clean contrary to Cheyney’s known attitude towards his friend. He did not live to see Campion return to England. Shunning the bigots and the unprincipled men in power to the last, and sheltering the Catholics all he could, he shut himself up at Gloucester, a whole High Church party in himself, wounded and at bay: and there in 1579 he died, and was buried in the glorious Cathedral, without an epitaph. The dream of his lifetime, as well as Edmund Campion’s sonship, he had loved and lost.

V

THE CALL TO COME UP HIGHER: DOUAY, PRAGUE: 1571-1573

IN Allen’s _Apology for Seminaries_ there is a beautiful account of the ideals of Douay. “The first thought of the founders of the College had been to attract the young English exiles who were living in Flanders from their solitary and self-guided study to a more exact method and to collegiate obedience; and their next, to provide for the rising generation in England a succession of learned Catholics, especially of clergy, to take the place of those removed by old age, imprisonment, and persecution. Their design then was to draw together out of England the ‘best wits’ from the following classes; those inclined to Catholicism; those who desired a more exact education than could be then obtained at Oxford or Cambridge, ‘where no art, holy or profane, was thoroughly studied, and some not touched at all;’ those who were scrupulous about taking the Oath of the Queen’s supremacy; those who disliked to be forced, as they were in some Colleges of the English Universities, to enter the ministry; ... and those who were doubtful which religion was the true one, and were disgusted that they were forced into one without being allowed opportunity of inquiring into the other.” The spirit of Douay was not reactionary, but the best spirit of the English Renaissance. It had, besides, a character or atmosphere holy and bright, not formed by mere human culture: it was as “a garden enclosed, and a fountain sealed.” Campion found there a peace such as he had never known. He had already, at Oxford, given seven years to philosophy, and six more to Aristotle, positive theology, and the Fathers. The study of scholastic theology was dead in Oxford: Campion now first took up the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He arrived in June, and in August he bought a noble edition of the _Summa_ for his own use, in three volumes folio. This was discovered in 1887 by Canon Didiot of Lille, and it is now at the Roehampton Noviciate. Several features make it a particularly interesting relic: Campion’s signature, with the date of his purchase, on the flyleaf; various beautifully executed little drawings, underlinings, and a host of marginal notes in Latin. By far the most touching of these relates to what St. Thomas quotes from Gennadius on the baptism of blood. Blessed Edmund Campion wrote in a tall, bold hand, over against this passage, the one musing word, “Martyrdom.” Canon Didiot, with that intimate touch of French sympathy, calls it “_mot radieux et prophétique_.”

For nearly two years Campion followed the course of scholastic theology, taking his degree of Bachelor in January, 1573. He then received Minor Orders, and was ordained Sub-deacon. All went happily for him at Douay. He was again at his old work, and, as ever, he won the highest opinions from those among whom he moved. In his Oxford days he had always held lofty standards before his pupils: “never to deliquesce into sloth, nor to dance away your time, nor to live for rioting and pleasure ... but to give yourselves up to virtue and learning, and to reckon this the one, great, glorious and royal road.” But the feeling in the exhortations of his later life is tenfold deeper, and strikes a far more haunting note of duty towards England, and towards the Church. This is a passage from the revised _De Juvene Academico_, which had first been sketched out years before in Dublin. “Listen to our Heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury!... Behold, by the wickedness of the wicked the house of God is devoted to flames and to destruction; numberless souls are being deceived, are being shaken, are being lost, any one of which is worth more than the empire of the whole world.... Sleep not while the Enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; sink not into idleness and folly while his fangs are wet with your brothers’ blood. It is not wealth nor liberty nor station, but the eternal inheritance of each of us, the very life-blood of our souls, our spirits, and our lives, that suffers. See, then, my dearest young scholars and friends, that we lose none of this precious time, but carry hence a plentiful and rich crop, enough to supply the public want, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.” One of those who listened to these words was destined to become the proto-martyr of the English Continental Seminaries: Cuthbert Mayne, a dear pupil of Campion’s, who as a Devon lad had come up to Oxford and St. John’s, had first conformed to the new regulations, and served as College Chaplain, then awakened from his delusion, and fled over seas for conscience’ sake, “not to escape danger, but to be prepared for it,” in response to one of Campion’s burning letters. This letter was intercepted, but its purport had reached him, and decided him.

In the spring of 1573, Campion found himself driven to a course he had not contemplated on coming to Douay. As he slowly saw his way, he followed it, to horizon beyond horizon. He had many steps to take, because in his thirst for perfection he had far to travel. He told Dr. Allen he wished to leave his present life, go on pilgrimage, in the spirit of penance, to the Tomb of the Apostles at Rome, and there seek admission into the Society of Jesus. The mediæval Orders would have less attraction for Campion: he was an intensely “modern” man. Now this was a severe blow to Allen: hardly less so to others of Campion’s circle. Campion, the pride, the example, the hope of the Seminary, to quit it for good, and to quit it in order to join the most recent of religious communities—one which as yet had few English members! It was inexplicable. But Allen, like the great-hearted and broad-minded commander-in-chief he was, let him go without protest. He little foresaw that far from losing his most promising champion, he was but lending him to better masters of the interior life than himself, and would receive his trained strength again in the English Mission’s spiritual day of battle.

Campion set out on foot across the Continent for Rome, along that road “trodden by many a Saxon king and English saint, to the Apostles’ shrine.” His companions walked with him all the first day; but the next morning he sent them back, and pushed on alone. Solitude was henceforth his choice, whenever duty permitted. He must have had many strange adventures during that spring journey. We know of one of them, though not from him. At some point of the route, probably on the northern Italian border, he came face to face with an old friend, an Oxonian, and a Protestant. The horseman first rode past the poor mendicant on the highway, and then was prompted by some dim sense of recognition to return and speak to him. On realizing that it was really Edmund Campion whom he used to know “in great pomp of prosperity,” he showed much concern, proffered his good-will and his purse, and begged to hear how Campion had fallen into that ill plight. But the pilgrim refused aid; and the other traveller heard something then and there of the “contempt of this world, and the eminent dignity of serving Christ in poverty,” which greatly moved him: and “us also,” adds Robert Parsons of Balliol, “that remained yet in Oxford, when the report came to our ears.” A strange tale it must have seemed to those who knew their Master of Arts and all his old fastidiousness! He was by now a saint in the making, and they were fast losing touch with him. Personal holiness is, so to speak, a mining country: its progress and its wealth are underground, unguessed-at by the careless passer-by. A saint is a mystery because he walks so closely in the shadow of God, who is the Great Mystery.

When Campion reached Rome, and had paid his devotions to the holy places, he went to call upon Cardinal Gesualdi, who, as he stated afterwards, “having some liking of me, would have been the means to prefer me ... but I, resolved what course to take, answered that I meant not to serve any man, but to enter into the Society of Jesus, thereof to vow and to be professed.” With this intention, Campion sought out the newly-elected head of that Society, Father Everard of Liège, whose surname was generally Latinized into Mercurianus, from Mercœur, his native village. He was fourth in his office, having succeeded that great personality St. Francis Borgia, on St. George’s Day, April 23, 1573. Biographers have represented that Campion had a half-year’s delay in Rome before he was able to apply for admission to the Society; but such was not the case. He promptly presented himself, and was received as Mercœur’s first recruit, and received not as a postulant, but as a novice. As Anthony Wood tells us, “he was esteemed by the General of that Order to be a person every way complete.” Four years later, Campion most affectionately thanked his own old tutor, John Bavand, for unasked “introductions, help and money,” which had been supplied since he came to Rome. He speaks of himself as “one whom you knew never could repay you, but who was at the point, so to speak, of death.... You were munificent to me when I was going to enter the sepulchral rest of religion.” The aid he would not accept for himself on his journey from one friend, he had accepted in the city (and spent, no doubt, in almsgiving) from another. Perhaps Bavand was abroad, and heard of that incident which came to pass on the road: certainly, he was one from whom Campion could not in chivalry refuse whatever he chose to share with him.

The Society of Jesus had been founded only six years before Campion was born. It had as yet no English “Province,” that is, no members living under the English flag with a domestic government of their own. But Edmund Campion was already well known to the Provincials on the Continent, who had a warm contest over him, every one of them wishing to add such a promising soldier to his own wing of the army of the Lord. As it fell out, Bohemia won. Campion was sent as one of a company to Vienna, and then from Vienna to Prague, where the Noviciate was, with Father Avellanedo, Confessor to the Empress, a man of wide experience. He was so deeply edified by his companion that, he told Fr. Parsons long after, it had kept him all his life “much affectioned” towards England and Englishmen. Prague was in a miserable, godless state: the Catholics were poor and few: the great University had perished: and all this was due to the ruin, moral and material, produced by the preaching, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, of John Hus. That Hus got his Socialistic ideas from Wyclif was a fact never out of Campion’s mind while in Bohemia: for he thought that England owed some reparation to a country which she had helped to spoil, and he was more than willing to pay his part of that debt.

VI

THE WISHED-FOR DAWN: BOHEMIA: 1573-1579

CAMPION stayed but two months at Prague, as the small Noviciate was removed to Brünn in Moravia, where the inhabitants were most hostile to Catholicism. The Bishop of Olmütz begged the Jesuits to help him so far as their Rule permitted. Novices were sent out among the neighbouring villages, to catechize and instruct the poorer Catholics; and no one had so instant a success in this little enterprise as “God’s Englishman.” At the year’s end his Novice Master, John Paul Campanus, became Rector of the College in Prague, and took Edmund Campion back with him. The latter left a good deal of his heart within the gray and austere walls of Brünn, as two of his charming letters show. In the old garden, under a mulberry tree, he had had a wonderful vision: Our Lady stood there, smiling at him, and offering him a purple robe. He knew the portent of martyrdom, but for long hid it in his heart. At Prague Campion continued and increased his Douay employments. He opened the October term with what was called a “glorious peroration”. As Professor of Rhetoric, he wrote, in 1574, a beautiful little treatise on that subject so familiar to him. His duty was to be first in the house to rise and last to go to bed; he spent his recreation-time catechizing children, receiving converts, visiting the prison and the hospital, or helping the cook in the kitchen! In January, 1575, he set up at his College a branch Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, or Sodality of Our Lady, of which he became president. About the same time he made his first vows. He was continually called upon for great College occasions, and to pronounce public panegyrics. “Whatever had to be done,” says his pompous but sympathetic biographer Bombino, “was laid upon him.” On getting a fresh task he would ask his Superior, in a spirit of perfect humility and confidence, if he was thought strong enough to add that to the rest? and if the answer were Yes, he shouldered the new duty at once, much to the wonder of others. “I am in a continual bloom of health,” he writes gallantly to his “dearest Parsons,” who had just entered the Society; “I have no time whatever to be ill in!” Two sacred plays (six hours did it take to perform each of them!) came from Campion’s truly dramatic pen in 1577. One was on the Sacrifice of Abraham; one on the melancholy career of King Saul. It is a matter of much regret that these are lost. He seems also to have composed dialogues and scenes for his own scholars, and to have put together at this same time his spirited account of the origin of the English schism, in a narrative (in Latin) of _The Divorce of King Henry VIII from his Wife and from the Church_. It was printed by Harpesfield, long after Campion’s death.