The route lay through Siena, Florence, Bologna. In the latter city there was a week’s delay, due to an injury to Fr. Parsons’ leg. The band of twelve was entertained by the Cardinal Archbishop of that See, who was the historian of the Council of Trent: Gabriel Paleotto. Like Avellanedo, like many another Italian, Paleotto loved the English. “Were he a born Englishman, he could not love them more,” wrote Agazzario to Allen, at that time when the national temperament was much more expressive and responsive than it is now. At Milan, in the early part of May, the future confessors and martyrs were to find another and a greater, also “much affectioned” towards them, who received them most hospitably, and even asked the English College for other relays of guests in the future. This was the great Archbishop, St. Charles Borromeo. Bishop Goldwell, who had passed through Milan days before the walkers reached it, had been, in 1563, Vicar-General to St. Charles, and would have bespoken his interest in the little party. The reverend host complimented Ralph Sherwin by asking him to deliver a sermon before him, and as for Campion, he was required to discourse daily after dinner. St. Charles himself, all the while, whether vocal or silent, was acting upon the pilgrims as a Sursum corda. “Without saying a word, he preached to us sufficiently,” says the ever-appreciative Parsons, “and so we departed from him greatly edified and exceedingly animated.” How charming is the forgotten use of the last word, meaning “souled,” or, as we still say, “heartened,” “inspirited!” Such indeed is the true function of the saints.
From Turin the little company made for Mount Cenis, and young, middle-aged and old lustily climbed it; and then among the torrents and boulders of that glorious scenery, they came down into Savoy. At St. Jean Maurienne they found the roads blocked by the Spanish soldiery, and at Aiguebelle ran across other disturbances, caused by the wars of religion raging in the Dauphiné. As there was nothing to do but abandon the direct route, they turned aside and entered Geneva, the hotbed of Calvinism, and the home of Theodore Beza, the learned apostate who had succeeded to Calvin’s leadership. There was a close community of spirit between Geneva and the English Reformation. However, Switzerland, then as now, had liberal laws, and any traveller, Catholic or Protestant, was free to pass, unmolested though not unquestioned, three days in the city. It looks decidedly like an alloy of mischief on the part of five of the English that they went to call in a body on Beza! They were admitted as far as the court by Claudine, his stolen wife, whom they had all heard of, and were not ill-pleased to see. When the famous greybeard came out they managed, after passing their compliments, to worry him with some telling controversial shots. Campion knew not how to be rude: but Sherwin found amusement, ever afterwards, in remembering how that honest fellow “Patrick” stood and looked and talked, cap in hand, “facing out” (such is Sherwin’s shockingly boyish language in a private letter), “the old doting heretical fool.” The celebrity so described behaved rather vaguely, and, in the course of nature, could not have been sorry to see the last of his besiegers, and of their wits, sharpened with life in the open air. He bowed them out with less abruptness than might have been expected—indeed, with a certain show of civility; and went back to his books. Later, Sherwin and two other youngsters, in a midnight discussion with some English Protestant students, actually challenged Beza and all Calvindom to a trial of theologies, with the drastic proviso that the defeated party should be burnt in the marketplace! Meanwhile Campion, in the rôle of “Patrick,” did his share of “facing out” other worthies in Geneva, besides finding an old University friend there, who “used him lovingly,” but reported that an alarm had been raised, and encouraged the departure of the paladins. These, halting on a spur of the Jura before nightfall, with Lake Leman spread beneath them, said Te Deum together, that they were safely out of the city. There seems to have been a good deal of curiosity or bravado mingled with their polemical zeal, and Campion’s always tender conscience would have readily accepted, if it did not suggest, a suitable penance for the raid. So off they trudged nine steep, contrite, extra miles (“extreme troublesome,” we are told they were) to the nearest shrine, that of St. Claude, over the French border.
They entered Rheims the last day of May, 1580, for in Rheims was the soul, if not the body, of the College now driven, partly for convenience, partly by force of trouble, out of Douay. That College was never re-formed: but the scholar-exiles lived close together, up and down the street still called Rue des Anglais. The travellers were rapturously welcomed by all, especially by the great Englishman whom the old narrative quaintly calls “Mr. Dr. Allen, the President.” Here at Rheims the venerable Bishop of St. Asaph fell ill of a fever. He was never again to cross the Channel. By the time he had fairly recovered, rumours of his movements had naturally got abroad, and the Pope was unwilling to imperil so important and precious a person. While still a convalescent at Rheims, Goldwell wrote to his Holiness in person, begging him to listen to no objections, but to anoint at once three or four new Bishops to shepherd their own needy Church; and he very touchingly assures the Holy Father, knowing that the question of a fitting maintenance for them would arise, that God had so inclined the minds of all the English priests whom he knew to put up with their penniless and hunted daily lives, and the vision of the gallows always before them, that any of these, once consecrated, would be entirely contented to go on as poorly as he had gone heretofore, like a Bishop of the Early Church. The application failed. “Etiquette and routine prevailed,” says Simpson, in summing up this incident.
In truth, it was not that good-will was lacking. Nobody on the Catholic side believed that the new sad order of things in England was going to last, and consequently, waiting and postponing in a matter of this sort, could not seem the disastrous mistake which it really was. The upshot, in any case, was that the good Bishop was recalled to Rome, and there died; and that for thirty weary years the poor flock struggled on without any qualified prelate to supply their crying spiritual wants and hold them together. Then the first provisional leader, known as the Archpriest, was appointed, and later came Vicars Apostolic. When finally the longed-for mitres were seen again in the land, they had been absent too long. The nominal link snapped; the great native tradition was broken; the titles of the ancient Sees, given up, as if in sleep, by their lineal heirs, were never reclaimed. So far as surface connection goes,—and it goes far indeed with people in general, who neither reason nor read, but get all their ideas from what they see and hear, this was the most tragic loss which could possibly have befallen the post-Reformation Church. (The English Benedictines kept the thread of their own dynasty in their hands: but this did not affect the Catholic body, and the lay interest.) The stranger who could not destroy the life and blessing of the firstborn has had possession, for three centuries and a half, by royal grant, of his home and of his very name.
VIII
INHOSPITABLE HOME: 1580
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM had a wonderfully well-organized spy-system: far superior, as Simpson remarks, to the attempts of the Spaniards in the same line. Therefore each of the missionaries was cautioned to travel under a name other than his own. Campion fell back upon his beloved alias of “Mr. Patrick,” as he had done for the brief visit to Geneva. His friends made him drop it, as they neared the Channel; being Irish, it was doubly dangerous, since here at Rheims the home-goers got their first tardy news of the so-called Geraldine insurrection in Ireland, acted upon in July, 1579, and crushed almost as soon by the massacre at Smerwick in Kerry. It had been nursed by European feeling against Elizabeth’s policy in Flanders, and her piracies on the high seas; and the great religious grudge found it a convenient opening. Dr. Nicholas Sander, who was not a Papal Legate, but stood none the less for the Pope’s active good-will in the matter, joined the expedition with James Fitzmaurice, Spanish soldiers, Roman officers, ships and supplies. That expedition did not, as we know, dislodge Jezebel from her throne, but it gave sufficient heartbreak to our messengers of the Gospel of Peace, who were now sure to be mixed up with it in the popular mind. The situation was certainly an awkward one. It gave unique plausibility to Walsingham’s claim that (to quote Fr. Pollen) “the preaching of the old Faith was only a political propaganda.” Father Robert Parsons faced the future, on behalf of the rest, in the spirit of a brave man. “Seeing that it lay not in our hands to remedy the matter, our consciences being clear, we resolved ourselves, with the Apostle, ‘through evil report and good report’ to go forward only with the spiritual action we had in hand. And if God had appointed that any of us should suffer in England under a wrong title, as Himself did upon the case of a malefactor, we should lose nothing thereby, but rather gain with Him who knew the truth, and Whom only in this enterprise we desired to please.”
Danger was a spur and not a bridle to Campion’s devoted will. But he began to foresee little fruit from labours on his native ground, with so much fierce misunderstanding against him; and to fear that he had not done well in so gladly laying down what was, after all, steady and successful work in Bohemia. With this buzzing scruple he went to the President for advice. Allen replied that the work in “Boemeland,” excellent at all points as it had been, yet could be done by any equally qualified person, or “at least by two or three” such persons, whereas in his own necessitous England Campion would be given strength and grace to supply for many men.
At Rheims, during his waiting-time, Campion preached one of his famous sermons to the students. It gave him a pathetic pleasure to be complimented upon his ready English, of which he had spoken little in private, and not a word in public, for eight years. His text is reported to have been Luke xii. 49: “I am come to send fire upon the earth; and what will I but that it shall be kindled?” and at one point he cried out in so earnest a manner: “Fire, fire, fire, fire!” that those outside the Chapel ran for the water-buckets! But a careful reading of what was then spoken suggests quite a different passage of Holy Scripture as present in Campion’s mind. His theme was the ruin wrought by the conflagration of heresy, now attacking a third generation of Christian souls, and to be put out, he says, by “water of Catholic doctrine, milk of sweet and holy conversation, blood of potent martyrdom.” Isaiah lxiv. 11, runs: “Our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised Thee, is burned up with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.” This very passage had been alluded to in one of Campion’s former exhortations, and may have been a favourite with him. The whole trend, indeed, and every part of this Rheims sermon bear out the thoughts not of the Apostle’s page, but of the Prophet’s.