CAMPION passed four months of pleasant weather in hard and happy work, moving about Northamptonshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire. Some lovely little spiritual adventure starred his path, and the paths of others, wherever he went. He must have seen more than once, from some hilly road afar off, even if he never entered it,

“The towery City, branchy between towers,”

which was so dear to him to the last. In October of this year, 1580, he was bidden towards London as far as Uxbridge: farther he could hardly come, without the gravest peril, as the Privy Council were just issuing their third warrant for the capture of Jesuits. There he was joined by Fr. Parsons and several other missionaries. A[113] conference was held: it was represented that Norfolk and Lancashire were eager to claim Fr. Campion’s ministrations, and it was decided that he was to go to Lancashire, preferable as being not only farther from London and also “more affected to the Catholic religion,” but as having better private libraries. For they were now urging Campion to write again: this time something on the burning questions of the day, aimed particularly at the Universities (where his Challenge was still the staple of daily talk), and therefore to be written in Latin. We are not so sure, now-a-days, that controversy does much good, but one reason for that may be that we have few Campions to carry it on. It is well to remember that people then read nothing else, except poetry! Campion’s work was his famous Decem Rationes Proposit? in Causa Fidei, or, as the title is given in its only modern translation (1827), Ten Reasons for Renouncing the Protestant, and Embracing the Catholic Religion. At first the author was for calling his thesis Heresy in Despair: De H?resi Desperata. His[114] counsellors agreed, amid laughter, that it would be odd indeed to nail such a title as that to the mast, when heresy was so powerful and flourishing; but, according to Campion’s own philosophy, there was no life in an argument whose only premisses, as he once said, are “curses, starvation, and the rack.” Here we come back at once to his root principle, which modern research so fully justifies, in regard to the England of his own day. A “gentleman saint” who uttered many an ironic, but never a contemptuous word, Campion could not be persuaded that “the received religion” was a genuine thing. He believed that temporal interest alone led people to conform to the new alterations and restrictions; that the lay statesmen who were pushing things through were concerned not with doctrine, but only with negations of doctrine, and that on the other side, nothing was so promising, nothing so gloriously fruitful, as persecutions and martyrdoms. First and last, he had a strong dash of optimism. In this spirit he began his last treatise, writing it as best he could, depending on his[115] memory, and on such books as country squires might have in their houses, and putting it together in among the almost incessant journeys, duties, fatigues and alarms of the next few weeks.

The two Jesuit friends parted at Uxbridge, “with the tenderness of heart which in such a case and so dangerous a time may be imagined.” Gervase Pierrepoint conveyed Campion into Nottinghamshire to spend Christmas at Thoresby, his home; thence into Derbyshire, where one of the young Tempests succeeded as guide; and the gentleman who directed the Yorkshire part of the journey reached in safety the house of his own brother-in-law, Mr. William Harrington of Mount St. John, near Thirsk, where the Father was received with open arms. Here he settled down for less than a fortnight at his desk, among his note-books, at peace. But to have him in the house at all was to risk the contagion of the things of God. The eldest of the large family, a wild boy, his father’s namesake, was quick to feel the spell of this most attractive guest. “Not only his eloquence[116] and fire,” says Fr. Henry More of Campion, “but a certain hidden infused power, made his words strike home.” Some of these simple words of every day “struck home” to the young William Harrington, so that fourteen years afterwards he found the palm-branch of martyrdom growing green and fair for him on the public execution ground. At this very time of Campion’s visit, the Lent of 1581, there was another lad of fourteen or fifteen, John Pibush, running about the streets of Thirsk, his native village, who may have gone to Confession to the strange priest at the Manor, and wondered at him, unknowing that he, too, was sealed as a future holocaust in the same immortal cause.

From Mount St. John, where he must have tasted much natural happiness, Campion travelled into Lancashire, under the protection of a former pupil and his wife. There he was affectionately welcomed and cared for in each of eight great houses, where himself and his spiritual conferences were still a glowing tradition, sixty or seventy years afterwards. He had to live,[117] think, write, in a crowd. The local gentry drove from great distances and slept in barns, only to hear and see him once. At Blainscough Hall, the seat of the Worthingtons, the pursuivants would have discovered him, where he was walking in the open air, had it not been for the cleverness and splendid presence of mind of a faithful maidservant, standing hard by. She ran up against him, in a pretended fit of temper, and shoved him into a shallow pond! The pursuivants, sent out by the terrible Huntingdon, President of the North, to apprehend a distinguished cleric and scholar, naturally never gave that mud-covered yokel a second glance.

Fr. Campion would have learned by now the fate of most of the enthusiastic band who had travelled in his company, from Rome or Rheims to England, during the preceding summer: five priests, including the lovable gay-hearted Sherwin, were languishing in cells and on the rack; Fr. Parsons, though hunted, was free. Following a suggestion of Campion’s, he set up a private printing press, in order that the Ten Reasons and[118] other Catholic works of defensive controversy might be issued as they were needed. Publishing, like every other major industry open to the Catholics, was outlawed; devotional and doctrinal books had to be brought out in this hole-and-corner fashion, if at all. Another of those lay associates of the mission, whose devotion and usefulness had been proved at every point, came forward to bear the brunt of the new enterprise. The young Stephen Brinkley, Bachelor of Civil Law, called by Parsons “a gentleman of high attainments both in literature and in virtue,” volunteered to become manager and head compositor, and amid many dramatic and exciting interruptions, carried his task through. Machinery, types, paper, and the rest were bought with money supplied by the ever-helpful George Gilbert. Brinkley himself, to avert suspicion, had to buy horses for his workmen, and attire them like persons of quality whenever they went abroad. He quite knew what he was risking. After him, still another knight of letters in a far less perilous field, offered himself in the person[119] of Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, then newly married (long afterwards a priest, and Rector of the English College in Rome). His not undelightful duty was to verify the mass of references and authorities quoted in the margins of Campion’s manuscript: this he did in a scholarly way, satisfactory to the scholarly author, who believed in research, and liked nothing at second-hand. Lastly, Parsons, as Campion’s Superior, recalled him to London in April or May to see the little volume through the press, and cautioned him to put up only at inns on the way, where happily he might pass as “the gentleman in the parlour.”

Thirty miles or so north of the great city, Campion had one of his ever-recurring narrow escapes. A spy, hungry for reward, had dogged his steps on his way from York. At a certain town not named, a little boy who knew Campion by sight overheard this man describing the Father to a magistrate, and calling him “Jesuit,” a word the child had never heard. He ran straight to the tavern where the “Jesuit”[120] had put up and succeeded in finding him and warning him! so the bird was safely on the wing before the fowlers were in sight.

Campion came to Westminster and Whitefriars, and set to work, diligently as ever. With Father Robert he had frequent occasion to visit the Bellamys of Uxenden Hall near Harrow, a family under whose roof his old friend Richard Bristow had died in the preceding autumn. Their later adversities and annihilation were only too typical of Catholic domestic history under Elizabeth. Going to Harrow meant going up the Edgware Road, and in the mouth of that road, between waste lands (facing the spot across the............