CHAPTER XIV

BLESSED EDMUND CAMPION

We have seen in the case of Henri de La Rochejaquelin,dear fellow" and "hard hitter,"-Louise Guiney's ardent sympathy with swift adventurous action, and her delight in the exploits of that spirited young leader, whose choice of a reward, had he lived to see the restoration of the Monarchy, was to have been the Colonelcy of a regiment of Hussars; because Hussars, he remarked, could be "always on the gallop."

To understand Miss Guiney aright, it is necessary to see not only how the temperamentally-dauntless "Henri" affected her, but also how deeply she could feel and enter into the career of a delicate fastidious scholar, “slight in build, and, like many another tireless and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong"; a man of a nervous Hamlet-like temper, natural to students and recluses, which, by a fatal error, puts endless thinking into what needs only to be done."

Her biographical study of Campion, based in part on Simpson's monograph,1 reveals (as all interpretations of history must do) something of the character of the writer as well as of the subject.

"It is well to make it plain now and then," she wrote elsewhere," "that the Saints, our brethren, can never be to us Catholics absent or dead. They are too

1"Edmund Campion, Jesuit Protomartyr of England," by Richard Simpson.

21

"A Notable Collection of Relics from Oxford," Ecclesiastical Review, October 1907.

much tangled up, root and fibre, with the perfection which is our own ideal, and with the fragrance of the nearness of God."

Ardour tempered by reticence, uncompromising firmness as to her faith and principles; courtesy and patience towards those who did not share her beliefs; such was her character. But with all her gentleness, she would touch (as a duellist might, with perfect politeness but remarkable dexterity) the weak points in an adversary's argument. In the case of Campion she handled difficult situations with a depth of feeling and an absence of rhetoric which ought to make this biographical study of interest not only to the Catholic reader but to almost anyone who cares to see to what heights a fragile and sensitive mortal can reach when impelled by the urge of his own conscience and a slow but abiding conviction that there could be but one way for him, ' come rack, come rope.'

As to the vexed question of religious persecution, Louise Guiney remarks, pungently enough,

"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 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." 1

This life-drama of Campion reached a second edition, and -unlike Miss Guiney's other work,-is still accessible; so a swift survey here should suffice. There is comparatively little controversy in the book. Considering how tangled it might have been in mazes of polemics, it is written with a remarkable self-possession, which certainly does far more to endear the subject to the British mind than if the scenes and events were painted in flaring colours or interspersed with dogmatic theological invective.

One of the first rules of biography is that the writer's style should harmonise with the nature and circumstances of the central figure the biographer who would write in the precisely same manner about Julius Cæsar and D. G. Rossetti, the Iron Duke of Wellington and S. T. Coleridge, would be distressingly incompetent; but one of the many merits of Louise Guiney was based on her power to live mentally within the careers of those-often very different one from another-whose lives or deaths appealed to her many-faceted sympathies.

Reticence and frankness, gentleness and suavity of manner, a human charm difficult to analyse but easy to feel, are among the characteristics of Campion's most authentic utterances; and all these reappear in the biography.

He is introduced first to us in his childhood at Christ's Hospital, "small Edmund, full of life and laughter," running about in "petticoats, and one of the earliest pairs of those historic yellow stockings"; and we are made to feel the presence of a bright, sensitive, scholarly boy, with that keen mental vitality which so often accompanies a rather fragile bodily constitution.

One episode of these early days stands out prominently:

"He was thirteen and quite famous already in the schoolboy world of London for his learning and his attractive presence and speech, when Queen Mary

1 " Blessed Edmund Campion," pp. 37-38. Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 2nd edition.

Tudor, who had just succeeded to the English throne, entered her City in state. Out of the many hundred eligible youngsters it was he who was chosen to stand up before her on a street platform, under the shadow of the old St. Paul's Cathedral, and shrilly welcome her in the Latin tongue. The Queen sat on a white horse, robed in gold-embroidered dark velvet, crimson purplish, with the great sword carried before her by the boyish Earl of Surrey, with eight thousand mounted lords and gentlemen on either side, all the glittering ambassadors, and a bevy of beautifully apparelled ladies.

On certain figures in that splendid and noisy pageant the child might have looked with pensive eyes, had he been able to forecast his own future; as it was, he cannot have failed to observe the Queen's younger sister, the thin, watchful, spirited girl who was known as the Lady Elizabeth."

Thus he first looked upon one who was destined to play a dominant and sinister part in the outer events of a career which from first to last was never dull or commonplace. The promising boy developed into

a famous Latin scholar"; he was also " a good Grecian and a good Hebraist. Greek and Hebrew were studies newly revived just before he was born. He spoke as well as he wrote. The flamboyant art of oratory, now almost extinct in our more quiet-coloured century, was then much studied and admired; and Campion was famous for debates and addresses and encomiums. When only twenty, he had been called upon to preach, though a layman, at the re-burial of poor Amy Robsart, ... in the University Church of St. Mary-the-Virgin ; and this he did with grace and animation.”

The process by which-while a student at Douay-he discovered his Catholic vocation, and decided to seek admission to the Society of Jesus, is sympathetically and tersely indicated; and it is remarked upon, as denoting the practical bent of his mind, that he felt drawn not towards

any of the mediaeval Orders, but to the most recent foundation, through which that vigorous and distinguished Spanish nobleman, Ignatius Loyola, had laboured to re-introduce into the service of the Catholic Church those qualities of unquestioning obedience, eager promptitude, and absolute fearlessness of death, which as an efficient officer he had manifested in earthly and visible conflicts. To the sensitive scholar, the ideal of the soldier had an irresistible attraction. Promptly and with buoyant faith, Campion set out on foot across the Continent on a pilgrimage to Rome.

"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 realising that it was really Edmund Campion whom he used to know in great pomp of prosperity,' he showed much concern, proffered his goodwill 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."

As a member of the Society of Jesus, some years later,