Fr. Campion discharged his task. As the little congregation broke up, some one stumbled in the dark, and several fell; the snoring sentinel awoke; searchers, with lanterns and axes, swarmed up from below. There was nothing to be seen: Lyford was not honeycombed in vain with hidden passages. The men-at-arms had been fooled too often, and were angry with Eliot. Yet that functionary knew that something was still really afoot, that the alarm was not a false one. On going down the stairs again he struck his hand upon the wall over it. “We have not broken through here!” he said. A loyal servant of the Yates, who was at his side, and who knew it was just there the refugees lay, muttered that enough wall had been ruined already, and then went deadly pale while Eliot’s eye was still on him. The latter called, in triumph, for a smith’s hammer, and banged it into the thin timber partition, and into the narrow cell. And thus was Father Edmund Campion taken at Lyford Grange, at dawn of Monday, July 17th, in the year 1581.
He was quite calm, quite cheerful. With him were apprehended the two priests, seven gentlemen, and two yeomen. Forster, the Sheriff of Berkshire, hitherto absent, arrived. As he was an Oxonian, and almost a Catholic, and kindly disposed towards Campion, he waited to hear from the Council what was to be done. On the fourth day orders came to send the chief prisoners up to London, under a strong guard. Leaving the old moated house and its many occupants, now distracted with grief, Campion took horse at the door, and rode slowly off, Eliot prancing in triumph at the head of the company, though the common people saluted him as “Judas,” all along the way. The first halt was at Abingdon; sympathetic Oxford scholars had come down to see the last of the great light of the University under such black eclipse. Eliot accosted his victim at table: “Mr. Campion, I know well you are wroth with me for this work!” He drew out a beautiful answer, sincere, composed, half-playful: a saint’s answer. “Nay, I forgive thee; and in token thereof, I drink to thee. Yea, and if thou wilt repent, and come to Confession, I will absolve thee: but large penance thou must have!” At Henley, Campion saw in the crowd Fr. Parsons’ servant, and greeted him as he could, without betraying him: Fr. Parsons was near at hand, but was wisely kept indoors. A young priest, “Mr. Filby the younger,” as he was called, a native of Oxford, is said to have here attempted to speak to Campion; he was at once seized upon as a traitorous “comforter of Jesuits,” and added to the cavalcade. At Colebrook, less than a dozen miles from London, came fresh instructions from the Council. Sheriff Forster had treated his prisoners most honourably: they were now to be made a public show. Their elbows were tied from behind, their wrists roped together in front, and their feet fastened under the horses; their leader was decorated with a paper pinned to his hat—Fr. Parsons’ hat of late—on which in large lettering was inscribed: “Campion, the Seditious Jesuit.” And in this guise he was paraded through the chief streets of the great city on market-day. The mob roared with delight; “but the wiser sort,” says Holinshed, “lamented to see the land fallen to such barbarism as to abuse in this manner a gentleman famous throughout Europe for his scholarship and his innocency of life, and this before any trial, or any proof against him, his case being prejudged, and he punished as if already condemned.” Stephen Brinkley somehow obtained, as a souvenir of a fellow-prisoner, that thick dark felt hat, which had been so ignominiously labelled in the cause of Christ. Years afterwards, when in Belgium, he put it into a reliquary, “out of love and veneration towards that most holy martyr of God, his father and patron.” A piece of it is at Roehampton, in the Jesuit Noviciate.
On reaching the Tower the Lyford captives were given up to the Governor, Sir Owen Hopton. Taking his cue, he had Campion thrust at once into Little Ease, the famous Tower hole not high enough for a man to stand upright in, nor long enough for him to lie down in. After four days of this misery he was suddenly taken out, put in a boat at the Traitors’ Gate steps, and rowed to the town house of the Earl of Leicester. This nobleman and Edmund Campion, who had seen so much of each other for several years, had been placed by events in silent conflict. There stood the Earl of Bedford, with two Secretaries of State; there stood Campion’s host, who, for one reason or another, had never hounded Catholics with the fixed fury of Walsingham and Burghley, and thereby did not displease his irresolute royal mistress; there (a theatrical circumstance!) was that royal mistress herself, a gleaming stately vision in a great chair, head and front of a not unfriendly little inquisition. To the questions heaped upon him Campion gave frank answers. On the matter of “allegiance” he seemed to satisfy the company, who told him there was no fault in him save that he was a Papist. “That,” he modestly interrupted, “is my greatest glory.” The Queen smiled upon him, and offered him liberty and honours, but under conditions which his conscience forbade him to accept.
When he was courteously dismissed, Leicester, probably with a kind motive, sent a message to Hopton to keep up the flatteries of the new policy. Hopton put on an almost affectionate consideration for his important prisoner; and so fast as he was prompted, by artful degrees, he suggested to him a pension, a high place at Court, and even the promise eventually of the mitre and revenues of the primatial See of Canterbury! Well did the Council know, all along, the value of these stubborn and unpurchasable confessors of Christ. To cap the matter, in Campion’s case, it was publicly announced, both by Hopton and by Walsingham (who knew the untruth of their announcement), that the Jesuit was at the point of recantation and Protestant orthodoxy, and in full sight of the future Archbishopric, “to the great content of the Queen.” It flew all over London that he would presently preach at Paul’s Cross, and there burn the Decem Rationes with his own hand. Eventually Hopton returned to first principles indoors, and inquired point-blank of Campion whether he would give up his religion, and conform. The reply is easily imagined. A continued course of wheedling was wasteful business. So thought the Council; and three days after his strange and sudden sight of the Queen’s Grace at Leicester House, Edmund Campion, first kneeling down at the door and invoking the Holy Name for steadying of his manhood, was stripped and fastened to the rollers of the Tower rack. Blandishments had failed to move him; they would try mortal pain, and see what that could do. Torture, nevertheless, was as much against the laws of England then (though not against the laws of some less humane countries), as it is now.
XII
THE THICK OF THE FRAY: 1581
CAMPION, in between the working of the rollers, was asked his opinion of certain political utterances in the works of his old friends Allen and Bristow, and of Dr. Sander; also whether he considered the Queen “true and lawful,” or “pretensed and deprived.” He refused to answer. Physical anguish could be little worse than the ineffable boredom of these two never-quiet questions. He was then asked by the Governor, the Rackmaster, and others present, by whose command and counsel he had returned to England; by whom in England he had been received and befriended; in whose houses he had said Mass, heard Confessions, and reconciled persons to his Church; where his recent book was printed, and to whom copies were given; lastly, what was his opinion of the Bull of Pius V against Queen Elizabeth? A letter written at the time to Lord Shrewsbury by Lord Burghley, and still extant, shows that nothing of moment could be got out of Campion. During the next fortnight, however, there was poured into the ear of the Government information regarding the second and third items in the above category. Houses were searched; persons of mark were apprehended, tried in the Star Chamber, and sentenced. Almost every manse or town house where Campion had been harboured became known, and even the names of those Oxford Masters of Arts who had followed him to Lyford. The Government gave out that he had confessed upon the rack, and implicated his too trusting friends. The alleged facts naturally became a general scandal, and bred grief and horror among the Catholics who, no less than Protestants, were thus driven to believe them. The secrets were probably given up, under panic, by three serving-men, and by poor Gervase Pierrepoint. It was a common trick of the time, though not peculiar to it, to show a prisoner a lying list of names purporting to have been extracted from colleagues, so that he himself might be trapped into endorsing the suspicions held in regard to those names. But it is clear that Campion was brought to mention only a few who, as he was aware, were formerly known to his examiners as Catholic Recusants; and only after a solemn oath from the Commissioners that no harm could accrue to them in consequence of such supplementary mention. Even this he had every cause to regret. The gentlemen and gentlewomen on Lord Burghley’s lists were carefully informed, when arrested, that it was Campion who had betrayed them: a cruel slander which he could refute only at the foot of the scaffold. Thanks to the reports, first of his backsliding, then of his treachery, his great reputation, for the time being, was clean gone. Having thus been given forth to the public as a knave, he was now to be set before them as a fool, and shown to be one who possessed neither sort of superiority, moral or mental.