by Susan Ronald
Of course, Elizabeth’s desire to withstand all attacks by Catholic powers through a marriage to Anjou was, to say the least, deeply unpopular with the vast majority of her people. When it was added to the perceived slackening of measures against English Catholics, law-abiding citizens became understandably uneasy. It was the devil of a situation: Elizabeth needed to reassure Anjou and France that she could moderate hostile reaction against the English Catholics, while masking her personal aversion to the godly Puritans and maintaining the full force of the Anglican settlement.
In the event, Elizabeth couldn’t hold out against the storm of popular opinion, nor are we sure she wanted to. Before the end of 1579, around the time of Cuthbert Mayne’s execution, Elizabeth wrote to Anjou breaking off their engagement. “We poor inhabitants of the barbarous isle must be careful in appearing for judgment,” Elizabeth wrote Anjou, “where such ingenious judges of our knowledge hold their seat in so high a place.”17 For the pope, it was a pyrrhic victory that left the “she-tyrant” exposed, albeit still in power.
* * *
Then, in 1580, it seemed that a turning point in the fortunes of the pope’s single-minded desire to overthrow Elizabeth finally arose. Until now, William Allen had resisted the involvement of the Jesuits in the English struggle. The execution of Cuthbert Mayne for treason, followed by two further executions, changed whatever reservations Allen seemed to have had. We shall never know for certain if it was Allen’s aversion to call upon Loyola’s men as his holy warriors or the Jesuit Society’s fourth superior general Everard Mercurian’s reluctance to become involved in the English cause. Mercurian had grown up in the Low Countries and had seen all sorts of obstacles to Jesuit missions that hinged on the successful conversion of a religious flock in conjunction with the politics of the times.
For Mercurian, English Catholicism had become so opaque in the previous twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign that fulfilling Jesuit goals seemed impossible. Jesuit priests would need to live “in secular men’s houses in secular apparel.” He fretted that they would founder “as how also their rules and orders for conservation of religious spirit might there be observed.” More damning still was that the Jesuits had far-flung operations from Argentina to Japan at the coalface of Christian conflicts with “heathen peoples,” and Mercurian feared a face-off with Protestants within Europe would damage their greater cause. Yet Mercurian finally buckled. The arrival in Rome in 1579 of the Oxford exile Robert Persons gave Allen the ally he needed to move Mercurian. Together with another priest, Edmund Campion, the two men were destined to bring Catholicism back to England.
* * *
This was the same Edmund Campion who had so impressed Elizabeth and Leicester at Oxford in 1566 and had escaped prosecution in Ireland in 1574. By 1580, Campion was a graduate of Douai and a Catholic priest. Still, his successes within the Catholic exile community were not enough for this exceptional young man, of whom Cecil lamented it was “a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country.”18 After his ordination, Campion took the final step onto the ladder to martyrdom. He walked from Douai to Rome and became a member of the Society of Jesus. It was their founder, Ignatius Loyola, who reportedly said “Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine forever.” Campion proved to be a late bloomer.
Like Campion, Persons had not always been an avowed Catholic. While at Oxford, he had dabbled with the more defined theological positions of Calvinism before switching his allegiance to Catholicism. It was his initial indecision that allowed him to obtain his first degree at Oxford by taking the Oath of Supremacy on May 31, 1568. In 1570, however, on seeing the deprivation of another Balliol College fellow and Catholic, Richard Garnet, Persons became so distressed that he “temporarily” left Oxford. Persons’s initial desire to conform, then recant, was a common story for independent thinkers of the day. His father converted to Rome much later; one of his brothers became a Protestant clergyman, the other a Catholic. His mother sheltered among the recusant underground, ending her days at the notorious Enfield home of Anne Vaux at White Webbs.19
No one knows with certainty why Persons finally resigned his fellowship at Balliol College in February 1574. Though charged by the master at Balliol with fiddling the accounts while he was the college bursar and dean, Persons most likely had already shown his own special blend of cussedness combined with a strong sense of right and wrong. Given leave to stay at the college through Lent, he was summarily expelled, as traditional stories would have us believe, by the “ringing of bells backwards, as for a fire” when he tried to enforce the Lenten fast. By 1581, he would be depicted as a screech owl by the Puritan preacher John Field in his religious tract A Caveat for Parsons Howlet.20 Through this tract, it is easy to imagine how Persons’s voice sounded to those who disagreed with him, and how his reputation as a “fierce-natured” fellow became part of his legacy.
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As a result, toward the end of 1579, the final conversion of Superior General Mercurian to the English cause seems to have been due to a combined onslaught of Persons’s reasoned arguments and Allen’s reassurances that they could succeed in a truly Jesuit mission to reconvert England to Catholicism.
While they planned the final details of the mission in Rome, an earthquake hit London on April 6, 1580. Stones rained down from St. Paul’s Cathedral; an apprentice was crushed by falling masonry at Newgate; the great clock bell at the Palace of Westminster struck against itself repeatedly, “shaking the earth”; the seas foamed; ships tottered, and a portion of the White Cliffs of Dover tumbled into the sea. For a people who believed that natural phenomena were “nothing but the very finger of God working his creatures” it was a portent of some unseen calamity to come. Some astrologers like Dr. John Dee sought to calm jangled nerves by claiming that the movement of the earth and celestial bodies was predictable by astrology and science rather than at the pulpit, but they were soon silenced by Puritans and Anglicans alike.21 When ghostly castles or ships, the haunting cries of invisible hounds, “skulls of dead men,” or other such terrifying visions appeared in the skies, it is little wonder that many feared God’s retribution for the execution of the priest Cuthbert Mayne.
Mayne’s execution for treason also moved Mercurian to take somewhat unusual measures. His orders to Persons and Campion stipulated that they were to avoid heretics at all costs. In fact, Mercurian went a step further. They were to “behave that all may see that the only gain they covet is that of souls” and not to entangle themselves in the affairs of the heretic English state. As Edmund Campion made his way back to Rome from his rhetoric teaching post in Prague to join Robert Persons for their joint mission, Mercurian stressed that neither man was to have about his person anything of a forbidden nature in English law: no papal bulls, no Agnus Dei.
Theirs would be a mission solely to reconvert the lapsed English to Catholicism. Unlike Judaism, which had over centuries adapted itself successfully into the home for its survival, English Catholicism, so the argument ran, needed a priest officiating to ensure correct adherence to the Word. Persons, though the younger of the two, was appointed leader of the mission; Campion his lieutenant. As they left Rome in April 1580, traveling on foot and using aliases to escape detection, a letter was sent from a well-wishing seminarian who witnessed their departure, describing what he felt was assuredly a turning point in history. That letter was intercepted by an English spy and its contents forwarded to Sir Francis Walsingham. The “secret” mission was awaited eagerly in England, long before the pair had crossed the Alps into France.
One of the great mysteries of their mission to England was whether Persons and Campion had recognized the political dimension instigated by the pope and Spain to overthrow Elizabeth the “she-tyrant.” Given the pressures on English Catholic exiles and the pair’s experiences and presence in Rome over several months, as well as the failed attempts to invade Ireland, both men would have needed to be the “least informed Englishmen in Europe” to remain unaware of the bigger
picture.22
Having withstood three “invasions” with equanimity, in June 1580 Elizabeth became alarmed when she learned that Persons and Campion had crossed into England under assumed names. Burghley immediately issued a proclamation in the queen’s name, which unfortunately ran to two folios. This was no punchy piece of propaganda. While it held some stirring messages about the pope and the king of Spain seeking to “dispose of the Crown” and the queen striving to “maintain her honour and glory by retaining her people in the true profession of the Gospel and free from the bondage of Roman tyranny,” its sheer tediousness was enough to anesthetize the most well-wishing reader.23 As a result, the plan to segregate recusants from the general population went nearly unnoticed by many as a key part of the proclamation.
It was the oratory of Edmund Campion that awakened them. At St. Mary Overie (Southwark Cathedral today) Persons and Campion swore publicly that they had been ignorant of the pope’s Irish invasion plans and even read out Mercurian’s orders forbidding them from dabbling in “matters of state.” Some were persuaded; others feared government retribution against England’s Catholics. In one church, on one day, the two opposing English Catholic worldviews were laid bare. It was Campion’s oratory that swayed those who had conformed, claiming that if they were to worship in an Anglican service, it would be a final victory for the Elizabethan settlement.24 He won the day. Just.
The meeting broke up shortly before a former student from Rome—now a government informer, Charles Sledd—led an official searcher to St. Mary Overie. Persons and Campion were already on the Great North Road, heading for the relative safety of Hoxton (Hackney in London today), where they spent the night.25 The following morning they were surprised by the arrival of Thomas Pound, a recusant prisoner who had bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison. As a loyal follower of theirs, Pound had been deputized by his fellow recusants to ride through the night to talk to Persons and Campion. His mission was to persuade the priests into writing a declaration of the purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard in prison and only publish in the event of their capture. It would, at the very least, protect them from the malice of a propaganda coup by the government branding them as political agitators. Both men agreed and duly wrote out their declarations. Persons sealed his; Campion left his open for anyone to read.
Having returned to the Marshalsea with his mission accomplished, Pound couldn’t resist reading Campion’s statement. He was so moved that he showed it to his fellow recusant prisoners. Addressed to “Her Majesty’s Privy Council,” one of the most stirring paragraphs still echoes through time: “Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes.”26 In no time at all, copies were circulated throughout the jail, then on to the prisoners’ visitors and out into London and beyond. What had been intended as a document to be read only in the event of capture had become a political manifesto to defend the liberties of English Catholics.
Unlike Burghley’s boring and tedious prose, Campion’s reached the hearts of the downtrodden reader. He had returned home to his “dear Country” for the “glory of God and the benefit of Souls,” as he had been strictly forbidden to deal in matters of state. Since Campion knew that capture meant death, the streak of the martyr that had grown quietly within exploded to the surface in this declaration, soon to be known as Campion’s Brag. According to Campion, the Catholic League and “all the Jesuits in the world … cheerfully … carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn.”27
As copies of Campion’s Brag proliferated, the two men split up. Persons traveled the highways of the Home Counties, while Campion sought the relative safety of the Catholic north for the next six months. Their letters back to Rome spoke of their mental and physical privations, with Campion complaining that “I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics … [because] the enemy have so many eyes so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts.” Persons wrote, “We never have a single day free from danger.”28
It was Persons who described the violence he saw about him best: “Everywhere there are being dragged to prison, noblemen and those of humble birth, men, women and even children … There comes a hurried knock at the door, like that of a pursuivant—all start up and listen,—like deer when they hear the huntsmen; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God.”29 Thus it was when Ralph Sherwin, the junior seminarian who accompanied Persons and Campion on their mission, was captured. Another seminarian, Edward Rishton, also a former Oxford undergraduate who had studied at Douai, was captured at the Red Rose Tavern in Holborn when the pursuivants raided it. The searchers had expected to find Persons there, but the Jesuit had lost his way, only arriving after Rishton’s arrest.
* * *
For over twenty years, Elizabeth could appear to staunchly support her laws in theory, so long as she could mitigate them in practice. The papal invasions and the seminarian priests put an end to that pretense. If Elizabeth and the realm were to remain secure, Parliament needed to act decisively. So, in early 1581, the “Act to retain her Majesty’s subjects in their Due Allegiance” was passed. It was the beginning of the fight back against the external Catholic League in defense of the Elizabethan settlement. Its functional shortcoming was that it omitted to make it an offense to convert to Catholicism. Its result was the beginning of decades of terror for loyal subjects who happened to be born Catholic. That the bill was introduced by the member of Parliament Thomas Norton, also known as the “Rackmaster,” and passed without opposition by both houses shows that the pope, Philip II, and the seminarians had achieved what Elizabeth had failed to do: unite the English against the enemies at their gates.
NINETEEN
The Ungodly Witch Hunts
It is obvious enough that nowadays the whole of Christendom is split in two, and that princes and peoples are divided and in such a state of mistrust and hostility to one another on account of religion that it is impossible to make any serious arrangement between those whose religion is different.
—La Mothe Fénélon in London to Catherine de’ Medici
Edmund Campion had decided that he would die in the land of his birth, a martyr to all those souls he so fervently wished to save. With the publication of Campion’s Brag had come a government-sponsored reply, written by the Puritan divine William Charke, who had been expelled from Cambridge University for nonconformity. When it was shown to Campion, he quite rightly claimed that it was a vituperative answer to his reasoned arguments and arranged for five hundred copies of his Decem Rationes to be made available in early 1581 for a scholarly debate at Oxford. Printed on a clandestine printing press, Campion’s “Ten Reasons” was so precisely and pithily penned that many more wavering souls made the leap back to Catholicism.
Then, on Tuesday, July 11, on his way north to Lancashire to retrieve some papers he had left at Houghton Hall, Campion sought permission from Persons to stay at Lyford Grange near Wantage in Oxfordshire with the staunchly Catholic Yate family. He had not been to Lyford Grange before, despite having received several invitations. Advised that he would not preach but merely stay the night, Persons agreed to let Campion go. The next day, Campion said his good-byes and headed north. What he hadn’t realized was that his time at Lyford had caused a fervent desire to hear him preach and such dismay among the community that a rider was dispatched to find him and bring him back to Lyford Grange for that purpose. The rider caught up with Campion at an inn just outside Oxford, and the Jesuit was persuaded to return.
For several days, all was peaceful. A steady stream of students and local residents came to hear the inspiring words of the famous scholar. Campion, a man of tremendous wit and charm, held the people spellbound. On the morning of Sunday, July 16, unbeknown to the priest, among his listener
s were George Eliot—a Catholic, convicted murderer, and rapist-turned-informant—and his friend David Jenkins. Neither man had intended to stop at Lyford, but when they spied a servant keeping watch on the roof of the house, they recognized the telltale signs of a secret Mass. It would prove fortuitous for Eliot and Jenkins, ruinous for Campion.
Eliot and Jenkins left Campion’s service along with the others, thanking their hosts for allowing them the privilege of listening to the great scholar. By one o’clock in the afternoon, Eliot and Jenkins had returned with the local magistrate, Mr. Fettiplace, riding beside them. They searched the house for the rest of the day, finding nothing. Fettiplace apologized for the inconvenience but listened to Eliot and Jenkins and placed a night guard on watch. The following day, the hunt for Campion resumed. It was Jenkins who finally saw the “chink in the wall of boards” over the stairwell. Taking a crowbar to it, he tore the boards off the wall, breaking through to the cramped room beyond where Edmund Campion and two other priests were concealed.
* * *
Campion was immediately brought to London for questioning. The terms of his early imprisonment are unclear, with Campion himself speaking of an interview with the queen. On August 6, 1581, Burghley wrote to Shrewsbury, Mary Queen of Scots’ jailer, that Campion had been taken to Leicester. Despite the near hysteria on both sides of the religious divide and wild rumors that Campion had recanted Catholicism to become archbishop of Canterbury, at his trial the Jesuit priest made it clear that he had been merely offered his liberty if he would attend Anglican services. Whether he liked it or not, Edmund Campion had become a renowned political prisoner.1
That August, Campion appeared at a public discussion in the chapel of the Tower of London flanked on either side by the dean of St. Paul’s and the dean of Windsor. What might have been a useful debate about the lawfulness of imposing the Anglican Church on England as a whole became an emotional harangue about the Jesuit mission to breach the country’s national security and commit murder. Nonetheless, with Archbishop of Canterbury Grindal still under effective house arrest, it is difficult to see how Elizabeth’s rudderless church could be in a position to look at the Jesuit threat in any other way.
