God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (13 page)

His exile would not last long. On 6 October 1583, having commissioned a series of thirty-four paintings celebrating past and recent English martyrs for the College chapel, he caught a fever and died. In his last moments, the 31-year-old reportedly asked, ‘Why are you weeping? You, who have the chance of martyrdom – while I am lying on a soft bed.’
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Gilbert bequeathed the English mission a Latin memorandum entitled
A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life – based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Parsons and Fr. Edmund Campion
. It was, as its title suggests, a proselytiser’s manual for future missioners to use, as applicable, on ‘heretics’, ‘schismatics’ and ‘lukewarm Catholics’. In his practical, tactical advice and complete understanding of what conversion entailed, Gilbert showed just how closely he and his lay companions had worked with the Jesuits in England and what a debt they were owed.
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George Gilbert’s absence was keenly felt by all involved in the English mission, but for the Vauxes the loss of Edward Brooksby was more affecting. The exact date of his death is unknown, as is the cause. It deprived Eleanor Vaux of her husband, their two small children of their father and Henry Vaux of a brother-in-law, who, according to Persons, had been his ‘great admirer and follower’. Edward had been Robert Persons’ first escort in London and had also been involved in the secret Jesuit printing press at Greenstreet House, his father’s place in East Ham about six miles from London.
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The press was, perhaps, the mission’s greatest asset. Not only did it clank out devotional works that provided spiritual sustenance to the lay community, but it also enabled the Jesuits to launch a propaganda campaign that was every bit as sophisticated as that of the government. ‘They are publishing most threatening proclamations against us, as well as books, sermons, ballads, libels, fables, comedies,’ Persons groused, but once the press was up and running, the Jesuits gave as good as they got. In August 1581 Persons gloated that ‘the heretics should not be able to publish anything without its being almost immediately attacked most vigorously’.
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A sixteenth-century printing press, even a small one like the mission press that could only print half-folios, is a cumbersome contraption, not easy to hide. It was carried to Greenstreet House ‘with much charge and peril’. Printers were needed to operate it – Persons mentions ‘seven men continually at work’ – and they had to come and go without attracting attention. Once, on his way to the Brooksby house, Persons was ‘stayed by the watch’. Another time, one of his printers, ‘going about to buy paper in London’, was arrested, sent to the Tower and racked. The press was expensive to maintain and there was always the risk that ‘the noise of the machine’ would betray it.
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The chief overseer of the press was Stephen Brinkley, who had
translated and published
The Exercise of a Christian Life
back in 1579. He was forced to move it several times, which required dismantling, carriage and reassembly. From Greenstreet House, the press went to the home of Francis Browne, and later to the estate of Dame Cecily Stonor near Henley-on-Thames, where it was eventually discovered. Once printed, a work had to find an audience and here a slick, but spectacularly risky, distribution system came into play:

All the books are brought together to London without any being issued and after being distributed into the hands of priests in parcels of a hundred or fifty, are issued at exactly the same time to all parts of the kingdom. Now, on the next day, when according to their wont the officials begin to search the houses of Catholics because these books have been distributed, there are plenty of young men of birth ready to introduce these books by night into the dwellings of the heretics, into workshops as well as into palaces, to scatter them in the court also and about the streets, so that it may not be Catholics only who are accused in the matter.
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The most outrageous publicity coup, one that immediately intensified the hunt for Campion, was the dissemination of his
Rationes Decem
or
Ten Reasons
on 27 June 1581. The tract itself, concerning ten points that Campion wanted to make in debate, was provocative – ‘Listen, Elizabeth, mighty Queen, the prophet in speaking to thee is teaching thee thy duty’
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– but not especially novel. What rendered it so offensive was the illegality of its publication and the audacity of its distribution. Printed at Stonor Park, copies were found strewn across the benches of the university church of St Mary in Oxford on the morning of Commencement. Persons and Campion, both Oxford alumni, knew that the church would be full of students and dons gathering to hear the supplicants for degrees defend their theses. Campion had failed to meet this requirement in 1569. Twelve years later, he wrote in his tract, ‘it is tortures, not academic disputations, that the high-priests are making ready’.
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In fact, it was both.

Campion was taken on 17 July 1581. It is a wonder, if the more celebratory accounts of the mission are to be credited, that he had not been caught sooner. People had reportedly flocked to his sermons, even
suffering the discomfort of a night in a neighbouring barn in order to guarantee entry. There had been a number of close shaves. Once, at the home of the Worthington family in Lancashire, Campion was saved from arrest by a plucky maidservant, who disguised his priesthood by the irreverent act of pushing him into a pond.
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The authorities finally caught up with him at Lyford Grange in Berkshire, tipped off by a spy among the large crowd that had gathered at the home of the Yate family to hear him preach and celebrate Mass. In the ensuing search, Campion and two other priests were found in a concealed chamber above the stairwell. (Not until 1959, however, would electricians working on the house discover an Agnus Dei blessed by Pope Gregory XIII in a wooden box nailed to a joist under the floorboards of the attic.)

On Saturday, 22 July, Campion rode into London under armed guard. He was trussed up securely with his elbows tied behind him, his wrists in front, and his feet fastened by a strap under his horse’s belly. A sign on his hat announced to the market crowds that he was
Campion the seditious Jesuit
. He was incarcerated in the Tower of London and spent his first few days in a tiny cell known as ‘Little Ease’, where he could neither stand nor lie straight. He was interrogated
^fn4
and tortured, but refused to recant any of his writings or beliefs.

There was little chance that without apostasy he would be allowed to live. Everything that followed – the disputation that he was finally granted (though with no time to prepare, no say in the choice of topics and no books apart from the Bible
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), the rumours, the tracts and the public performances – contested the reason for his death. For Campion, who had embraced martyrdom the moment he had accepted his mission, it was quite simple: he died for faith. ‘I am a Catholic man and a priest,’ he announced from the scaffold at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. ‘In that faith have I lived and in that faith do I intend to die; and if you esteem my religion treason, then am I guilty. As for any other treason, I never committed, God is my judge.’
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For Burghley and the Council it was no less straightforward.
Campion was a traitor, tried and convicted, along with six other priests and a layman, under Edward III’s treason statute for conspiring ‘both at Rome and at Rheims and in divers other places in parts beyond the seas’, to foment rebellion in England, procure a foreign invasion and kill the Queen.
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The prosecution would have been on firmer ground – and less reliant on dubious testimony – had it stuck to the original plan of charging Campion according to the 1581 ‘Act of Persuasions’, which clearly defined his activities as traitorous. The application of ‘the ancient temporal laws of the realm’ revealed the government’s determination to condemn Campion for his politics rather than his priesthood.

The debate over whether Campion had returned to England, plough in hand, for ‘the harvest of souls’ or the ‘tillage of sedition’ glowed with white heat in England and throughout Europe for many years after his death. The chief protagonists, Lord Burghley (denouncing a political traitor) and William Allen (championing a religious martyr), both claimed victory and conceded nothing. Each wrote with perfect conviction. Burghley ended
The Execution of Justice in England
with the biblical line ‘Great is truth, and she overcometh’ (I Esdras 4:41). Allen began
A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholiques that Suffer for their Faith
with ‘Thy mouth hath abounded in malice, and thy tongue hath cunningly framed lies’ (Psalm 49:19).
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There was no middle ground.

For those without a passion for absolutes, the issue was more complex. There was no hard evidence to suggest that Campion had conspired to kill the Queen or encouraged her subjects to revolt. The 1351 statute under which he was charged was not clearly applicable to his activities. Campion had always been combative about the mission. He had set out from Rome ‘to my warfare in England’, but his weapons were faith and force of argument. He wanted to provide counsel and sacramental grace to England’s Catholics and reconcile others by evangelical proselytising. ‘We only travelled for souls,’ he protested at his trial, ‘we touched neither state nor policy, we had no such commission.’
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And yet he returned to his homeland knowing that, by law, there was treason inherent in his mission.

Whether by accident or design, Campion and Persons did engage in matters of state. Indeed, they actively pushed for a free and public debate with the Elizabethan regime. Once denied, they
utilised illicit media to promote their arguments. They forbade Catholics to go to church and justified disobedience by attempting to redefine the boundaries between the temporal and spiritual realms. Arguably this impugned the royal supremacy and challenged the authority, and even the legitimacy, of the Elizabethan regime.
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It was not treason in the conventional sense, but it was inescapably political. Considering the Jesuits’ co-religionists at the Synod of Southwark had queried their motives from the outset, it is hardly surprising that, a year and a half later, Protestants regarded them with suspicion.

For many folk, however, the religio-political wrangling was irrelevant. The issue was not so much what Campion did, but what he was: a Jesuit priest and avowed servant of the Pope. No matter what delaying tactics he was currently employing, the Pope was no friend to the Queen. The papacy had been involved in the northern uprising of 1569, the Ridolfi Plot of 1571 and the recent insurrection in Ireland. It had also been instrumental, in 1576, in a plot to send Don John of Austria into England with an army that would put Mary Stuart on the throne. Spanish setbacks in the Netherlands meant that the plan was not implemented, but it had been drawn up in some detail. A lengthy memorial of advice had been prepared by William Allen, the founder of the English Mission, the leader of the Catholic exile community and Edmund Campion’s great defender. At a time when fears for national security were great and real, Campion’s guilt by association was enough to secure his conviction.

In a subsequent, highly partisan account of Campion’s trial written by Thomas Fitzherbert (later a Jesuit priest), the author recounted a conversation that he had had at the time with a student of Lincoln’s Inn. The man, ‘a familiar friend of mine (though an earnest Protestant)’, had witnessed Campion’s trial and had reportedly been surprised by the verdict because the evidence was ‘so weak’. Fitzherbert had asked him how anyone of conscience could have condemned Campion. ‘Content yourself,’ his friend had reputedly replied, ‘it was necessary for the state.’
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On 1 December 1581, Edmund Campion was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn and executed with two other priests: Alexander Briant, once known as ‘the handsome boy of Oxford’, who had been ministering in England since 1579, and Ralph Sherwin, a graduate of the
English College at Rome, who had journeyed to England with Campion and Persons. It was reported (by a Catholic eyewitness at Tyburn) that when pressed by Sir Francis Knollys to acknowledge his guilt, Sherwin replied, ‘If to be a Catholic, if to be a perfect Catholic, be to be a traitor, then am I a traitor.’
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As was the custom, each man was hanged on the gibbet, then cut down and eviscerated in front of the assembled crowd. Their quartered body parts were ‘disposed of at her Majesty’s pleasure’, though one relic hunter managed to steal away with one of Campion’s fingers. Another reportedly rescued his arm from the gate upon which it was nailed. Within five years, ‘certain pieces of Father Campion’s body’, his girdle and one of Briant’s bones had found their way into the Vaux household – a clear sign to where the family stood in the martyr–traitor debate.
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In May 1582 seven more priests were executed.

Robert Persons had been Campion’s superior on the mission and was grievously affected by his death. He fled to France soon after Campion’s arrest and carried with him all the emotions of the survivor.
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He left behind his elderly mother, Christina, who later joined the household of Eleanor and Anne Vaux. He would never return to his homeland, but he soon became embroiled in other, more militant schemes for its conversion. Indeed he would become the overtly seditious Jesuit that his subordinate had never been. Campion had sacrificed his life for the English mission, Persons would endanger his soul.