EVEN thus late, fresh proffers were made to buy Campion over to the State religion. Such a circumstance, as he had claimed previously, is in itself a plain disproof of any treason. Hopton, who hated him, sent Campion’s own sister to him with the repeated offer of a very rich benefice. To the cell door came one day none other than George Eliot, saying that he would never have trapped Fr. Edmund, had he thought that anything worse than imprisonment could be in store. He also told the man of God whom he had wronged past reparation that he stood in danger from the wrath of the Catholics, and feared their reprisals for his late actions. Campion persuaded him that they would never push revenge so far as to seek his life, but added that if Eliot were truly repentant he should[167] have a letter of recommendation to a Catholic Duke in Germany, who would employ and protect him. Delahays, the keeper, in the discharge of his office, had to stand close to the prisoner during this interview, and what he heard sank into his mind and made him a convert. Outside the Tower, there was a ferment of excitement over this one of its inmates, and over the question whether the indignation of all Europe should be braved by carrying out his sentence. The Earl of Desmond, the accessory, and Dr. Sanders, the co-principal, of the late revolt in western Ireland, were still hiding in woods and caves, and weathering the hardships which were to be dismally ended for both during the coming spring. Burghley concisely said, in the finest Elizabethan spirit of punishing somebody—no great matter whom—when any row was made, that “Campion and Sanders were in the same boat, and as they could not catch Sanders, they must hang Campion instead.” The princely visitor was still at Court, and high festival went on from day to day. The preoccupation of the Queen with him and[168] his affairs was thought to be an excellent item of the programme, as it kept her from thinking of Campion and his fate. Delay was dreaded as a means of getting together of the great English nobles, and the foreign ambassadors, with petitions for Campion’s release; and it was thought that the Queen would never resist any strongly-worded request which so corroborated her own supposed secret feeling. The Council still thought his destruction desirable. Meanwhile, instant appeal was made to the Duke, by the Catholics generally, to use his influence in Campion’s behalf: he promised to intercede for him, and may have done so. At the last moment further pressure was brought to bear. His confessor was sent into the tennis court, where the Duke was about to begin a game, with this message: that the royal blood of France would be disgraced for ever, if so foul a judicial murder were not checked. The little great personage, thus accosted, as we are told by Bombino, stroked his face absent-mindedly with his left hand; then raised his right hand, with the racket in it, and called to one[169] opposite to him: “Play!” Not another word did he answer to the tragic matter so thrust upon him.

Burghley fixed upon November 25, a Saturday, as the date for Campion’s execution. Sherwin was appointed to die in his company, as representing the Seminary at Rheims. They were taken together one day into the Lieutenant’s Hall to face some endless argument or other. The opponent, “by report of such as stood by, was never so holden up to the wall in his life.” On the way back to their cells, under guard, they crossed one of the Tower courts. “Ah, Father Campion!” said his young comrade, smiling at the welcome London sun, “I shall shortly be above yon fellow.” Even one hurried free breath of fresh air must have meant much to Campion. To be “clapped up a close prisoner,” as he had been from the first, meant that his windows were blocked, and their minimum of air strained through a narrow slanted funnel, latticed at its skyward end, and with but one tiny pane occasionally opened at the bottom. But these things, humanly intolerable, counted for little on[170] the threshold of light and liberty everlasting. “Delay of our death doth somewhat dull me,” wrote Sherwin, touchingly, to a friend. “Truth it is, I had hoped ere this, casting off this body of death, to have kissed the precious, glorified wounds of my sweet Saviour, sitting in the Throne of His Father’s own glory.” There was a good deal of haggling and hesitation on the subject. By statute law any caught priest was hangable; but public opinion (as Simpson reminds us in a brilliant page) did not always run with the statute law. Moreover, Camden says expressly that the Queen (who is supposed to have supervised and approved all he wrote) did not believe in the “treasons” charged to the “silly priests.” It is remarkable that the first defensive pamphlet put forth by the Government after Campion’s death, was one “in which the plot of Rheims and Rome was prudently forgotten—the very matter of the indictment!”

By the time the day for the execution was finally set for Friday, the first of December, a third priest had been chosen from the waiting batch of victims, as representing[171] the English College at Rome. This was the Blessed Alexander Briant, who had applied from his prison cell for admission into the Society of Jesus, a fact not known to his persecutors. If the entry of his age in the Oxford Matriculation Lists be correct (as is most likely), he was now only in his twenty-sixth year. He was grave and gentle in character, full of charm, and of the most extraordinary personal beauty. He had been carried off in the course of a descent on Fr. Parsons’ London rooms, starved and parched in the Marshalsea, tortured by needles, and kept in the entire darkness of deep dungeons in the Tower. Norton, the Rackmaster, on three occasions, proceeded (in his own phrase) to “make him a foot longer than God made him,” yet he adds that “he stood still with express refusal that he would tell the truth.” The “truth” meant information of the whereabouts of Fr. Parsons, a former tutor and devoted friend, and of the place where Parsons’ books were being printed. Briant had been condemned the day after Campion’s trial, in Westminster Hall, where his angelic looks, out-lasting[172] a hell of almost unique torment, did not pass unnoticed by the public. Here (though some accounts say it was at the scaffold) he carried in the palm of his hand, and gazed upon often, a little cross of rough wood which he had managed to whittle in his cell, and on which he had traced an outline in charcoal of the figure of the Crucified. Pedro Serrano, the secretary of the Spanish Ambassador, saw it taken away from Briant, and heard him say: “You can wrest it from my hand, but never from my heart.” Not long afterwards George Gilbert died in Italy, kissing Blessed Alexander’s little cross, which he must have taken pains to buy back.

These three, Fathers Campion, Sherwin, and Briant, were led forth on a bitter morning, and bound to their hurdles, in the rain, outside the Tower gates. Campion’s life for the past week had been nothing but fasting, watching and prayer, and he was never in more gallant spirits. “God save you all, gentlemen!” so he saluted the crowd, on first coming out: “God bless you all, and make you all good Catholics!” The two[173] younger men were strapped down on one hurdle side by side, Campion alone on the other. The mud was thick in the unpaved streets of London, and the double span of horses, each flat hurdle being tied to two tails, went at a great pace through Cheapside, Newgate Street, and Holborn. There were intervals, however, when the jolted and bemired prisoners were able to speak with their sympathizers, who surged in upon them, and thus saved them for the moment from the incessant annoyance of Charke and other accompanying fanatics. Some asked Fr. Campion’s blessing; some spoke in his ear matters of conscience; one gentleman courteously bent down and wiped the priest’s bespattered face: “for which charity, or haply some sudden-moved affection, may God reward him!” says one annalist who saw the kind deed done.

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[174] 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 han............