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[28] 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.[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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 medi?val 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[32] 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[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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[38] 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[39] 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.