Campion’s death, last and best of his wonderful missionary labours, bore the most astonishing fruit. The long storm of persecution raged at its full fierceness after 1581, and it burst over the heads not only of a far more numerous, but a far more heroic body. Edmund Campion’s spirit had been built in good time, as it were, into the unsteady wall.
Robert Parsons had an intense feeling for his first comrade-in-arms. “I understand of the advancement and exaltation of my dear brother Mr. Campion, and his fellows. Our Lord be blessed for it! it is the joyfullest news in one respect that ever came to my heart.” This same feeling breaks out with powerful irony, addressing the “Geneva-coloured” clerics, who so long harassed the martyr-group of 1581. “Their blood will, I doubt not, fight against your errors and impiety many hundred years after you are passed from the world altogether. . . . They are well bestowed upon you: you have used them to the best.”
And Allen, in a private letter, says on his part: “Ten thousand sermons would not have published our apostolic faith and religion so winningly as the fragrance of these victims, most sweet both to God and to men.”
No remote mystic was Edmund Campion, but a man of his age, with much endearing human circumstance about him and in him. Caring for nothing but the things of the soul, he had yet caught the ear and the eye of the nation. The tidings of his end meant much to many of the great Elizabethans: not least personal was it, perhaps, to the lad Shakespeare, whose father had been settled as a stout Recusant by the Warwickshire ministrations of Parsons.
An aged priest, Gregory Gunne, came up before the Council in 1585, his thoughts and tongue too busy in Campion’s praise. The day would come, he said, when a religious house would stand as a votive offering on the spot where “the only man in England” had perished. There was still no sign of such a thing when Mr. Richard Simpson’s great monograph was first published, and that was twenty years before Pope Leo XIII beatified the Blessed Edmund Campion on December 9, 1886. But now there is a Convent with Perpetual Adoration in its little chapel, and two bright English flags ever leaning against the altar, on that ground of the London Tyburn: and is it wonderful that the vision of a worthier memorial haunts the imagination of those who go there to pray for their country?
Blessed Edmund Campion was “a religious genius,” with a creative spirituality given to few, even among the canonized children of the Fold. But in his kinship with his place and time, his peculiar gentleness, his scholarship lightly worn, his magic influence, his fearless deed and flawless word, he was a great Elizabethan too. He had sacrificed his fame and changed his career. He had spent himself for a cause the world can never love, and by so doing he has courted the ill-will of what passed for history, up to our own day. But no serious student now mistakes the reason why his own England found no use for her “diamond” other than the one strange use to which she put him. He is sure at last of justice. In the Church, that name of his will have a never-dying beauty, though it is not quite where it might have been on the secular roll-call. To understand this is also to rejoice in it: for why should we look to find there at all, those who are “hidden with Christ in God”?
THE END
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BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
The St. Nicholas Series
