Campion before Queen Elizabeth.
Many courtiers, having a purely artistic interest in Edmund Campion, had begged that he might obtain the chance he had often asked for, of being heard in a disputation. This request was now suddenly granted. The conference was public, and came off in the Norman Chapel of the Tower, which was crowded. Two Deans, Nowell of St. Paul’s, and Day of Windsor, were appointed to attack Campion; he was to answer all objections as he could, but was forbidden to raise any of his own. Charke, the bitter Puritan preacher of Gray’s Inn, and Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, were the notaries. The lion to be baited did not even know that there was to be a conference, until he was brought to it under a strong guard. Time for preparation had been denied him; he was allowed the use of only such authorities as his memory could furnish; pale and weary and rack-worn as he was, he was given only a low stool to sit upon. The well-fed theological worthies were ranged before him, their chairs standing on raised platforms, and their tables spread with books of reference, pens and paper.
One who was there tells us how easy and ready were his answers; how modest his mien; how that high-spirited nature so bore the scorn, the abuse, and the jests heaped upon him, as to win great admiration from the majority of those who heard him for the first time. He began by asking very pertinently whether this was a just answer to his challenge, first to rack him, then to deprive him of books, notes and pen, lastly, to call upon him to debate? and he added (wishing to be fully understood by the audience), that what he had asked for was quite another sort of hearing: a hearing under equal conditions before the Universities. During the course of this first conference he was twice most unfairly tripped up: once over a quotation, in which he was right, though he could not then and there prove it; and again over a page of the Greek Testament, in such small type that he could not read it, and had to put it by when it was handed to him: thereby drawing down upon himself the ridiculous taunt that he knew no Greek. This he took silently, and with a smile. At the end of the six hours he had more than stood his ground. The Deans complained afterwards that a number of gentlemen present, “neither unlearned nor ill-affected,” considered that Master Campion had the best of it. Some common people who thought so too, and said so in the streets, paid dearly for their boldness. One of these gentlemen favourably impressed was Philip, Earl of Arundel, then in the flush of worldly pride and pleasure. He was the real victory of the Jesuit apostle, for he received at that time and in that place the first ray of divine grace, strong enough to change gradually in him the whole motive and course of that intensity of life which never failed the Howards. As he stood leaning forward in the foreground of the daïs, in that solemn interior, tall and young, with his great ruff and embroidered doublet, and his brilliant dark eyes held by the pathetic figure of Master Campion, how little could he have foreseen his own weary term of suffering in that gloomy fortress, and his sainted death there, at the end of the years!
There were three other conferences under like conditions, but in other quarters, with four fresh adversaries. Campion was again “appointed only to answer, never to oppose”; that is, to answer miscellaneous and disjointed objections against the Catholic Church, without ever being allowed “to build up any harmonious apology for his own system.” The last conference was notable for its browbeating and threatening of a too successful adversary. The Bishop of London privately came to the conclusion that the verbal tournament was doing no good whatever to the sacred cause of Protestantism. The Council agreed, and ended it.
Towards the end of October Campion was racked for the third time, and with the utmost severity, so that he thought they meant, this time, to kill him; but his fortitude was unshaken. A rough and honest first cousin to the Queen, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, growled that it were easier to pluck the heart out of Campion’s breast than to wrest from him one word against his conscience. His arms and legs went quite numb after this final torture. The keeper, who was won over by his endearing prisoner, and was always as gentle with him as he dared to be, inquired next day how they felt. “Not ill,” said Father Edmund, with all of his old brave brightness, “not ill, because not at all!”
Never once until now had he been accused of any conspiracy. But he was a troublesome person: he must be silenced somehow. With a tardy inspiration, the Council bent all their strength to get out of Campion some acknowledgment that he had been mixed up with the Spanish-Roman expedition, and the Irish rising of the preceding year. Not a shadow of proof could, of course, be produced for such a charge. Then, as a final and sure means of indicting him on some other count than that of religion, and of urging his execution upon the Queen, Walsingham, with Burghley’s connivance, hatched a treasonable plot out of his own inventive head, and got false witnesses to accuse Edmund Campion of it, and swear his life away. The “Plot of Rheims and Rome” was described as an attempt to raise a sedition, and dethrone and kill the Queen. It had an imaginary but recent date: 1580. Everybody or anybody, when found convenient, could be accused of so elastic a plot. It was first charged against some twenty priests and laymen in this year 1581; but it was brought up against the Earl of Arundel four years afterwards, despite the fact that the supposed interests of the Church were the last things likely to win his attention at the time assigned.
On All Saints’ Day arrived in England a suitor for the hand of Queen Elizabeth: Francis, Duke of Alençon, King of the Netherlands, the short-lived heir to the throne of King Henry the Third of France. With that King, while Duke of Anjou, and with Alençon for nine years past (as for three yet to come), Elizabeth had carried on negotiations which ended in smoke; but she now announced that she “would marry at last.” Little Froggy, as she endearingly called him, was ugly to a degree, and many years younger than her Majesty; he was brother-in-law to the Queen of Scots, who was her Majesty’s prisoner at Sheffield. The dominant, ultra-bigoted party took extreme alarm at the near prospect of toleration for Catholics which such a royal match suggested to them. To reassure them, it might just now be most useful, thought the Council, to hang a Jesuit or two.
On the 14th of the month Campion and eight others were arraigned before the grand jury in Westminster Hall. For “treasonable intents” of the Queen’s deprivation and murder, these “secret and privy practices of sinister devices,” befitting one “led astray by the devil,” had “Edmund Campion, clerk,” made his re-entry into England, the Pope, meanwhile, being not only aware of his act, but its “author and onsetter”! He was commanded, as were all those lumped with him in a common accusation, to plead Guilty or Not Guilty. Up went all the right arms of these “devotaries, and dead men to this world, who travelled only for souls,” as Campion himself called them: all but his, so disabled by the rack that he could not stir it from the furred cuff in which it lay. But a quick-witted comrade turned and took off the cuff, “humbly kissing the sacred hands so wrung for the confession of Christ,” and lifted it high to cry its own mute Not Guilty with the rest. The Spanish Ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, standing close by with his secretary, saw, with a pang of pity, that all the finger-nails were gone from Campion’s swollen hands. The trial proper began on the 20th, before “such a presence of people of the more honourable, wise, learned, and best sort as was never seen or heard of in that court in ours or our fathers’ memories before us . . . so wonderful an expectation there was to see the end of this marvellous tragedy . . . [of] such as they knew in conscience to be innocent.” They all heard Ralph Sherwin say, in a loud clear voice: “The plain ground of our standing here is religion, and not treason.”