Yet as the weeks went by, and his first resentment cooled, Mr. Buxton’s arguments more and more sank home, for they had touched the very point where Anthony had reckoned that his own strength lay. He had never before heard Nationalism and Catholicism placed in such flat antithesis. In fact, he had never before really heard the statement of the Catholic position; and his fierce contempt gradually melted into respect. Both theories had a concrete air of reality about them; his own imaged itself under the symbols of England’s power; the National Church appealed to him so far as it represented the spiritual side of the English people; and Mr. Buxton’s conception appealed to him from its very audacity. This great spiritual kingdom, striding on its way, trampling down the barriers of temperament and nationality, disregarding all earthly limitations and artificial restraints, imperiously dominating the world in spite of the world’s struggles and resentment—this, after all, as he thought over it, was—well—was a new aspect of affairs. The coming of the Jesuits, too, emphasised the appeal: here were two men, as the world itself confessed, of exceptional ability—for Campion had been a famous Oxford orator, and Persons a Fellow of Balliol—choosing, under a free-will obedience, first a life of exile, and then one of daily peril and apprehension, the very thought of which burdened the imagination with horror; hunted like vermin, sleeping and faring hard, their very names detested by the majority of their countrymen, with the shadow of the gallows moving with them, and the reek of the hangman’s cauldron continually in their nostrils—and for what? For Mr. Buxton’s spiritual kingdom! Well, Anthony thought to himself as the weeks went by and his new thoughts sank deeper, if it is all a superstitious dream, at least it is a noble one!
What, too, was the answer, he asked himself, that England gave to Father Campion’s challenge, and the defence that the Government was preparing against the spiritual weapons of the Jesuits? New prisons at Framingham and Battersea; new penalties enacted by Parliament; and, above all, the unanswerable argument of the rack, and the gallows finally to close the discussion. And what of the army that was being set in array against the priests, and that was even now beginning to scour the country round Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and London? Anthony had to confess to himself that they were queer allies for the servants of Christ; for traitors, liars, and informers were among the most trusted Government agents.
In short, as the spring drew on, Anthony was not wholly happy. Again and again in his own room he studied a little manuscript translation of Father Campion’s “Ten Reasons,” that had been taken from a popish prisoner, and that a friend had given him; and as he read its exultant rhetoric, he wondered whether the writer was indeed as insincere and treacherous as Mr. Scot declared. There seemed in the paper a reckless outspokenness, calculated rather to irritate than deceive.
“I turn to the Sacraments,” he read, “none, none, not two, not one, O holy Christ, have they left. Their very bread is poison. Their baptism, though it be true, yet in their judgment is nothing. It is not the saving water! It is not the channel of Grace! It brings not Christ’s merits to us! It is but a sign of salvation!” And again the writer cried to Elizabeth to return to the ancient Religion, and to be in truth what she was in name, the Defender of the Faith.
“‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers,’ thus Isaiah sang, ‘and Queens thy nursing mothers.’ Listen, Elizabeth, most Mighty Queen! To thee the great Prophet sings! He teaches thee thy part. Join then thyself to these princes!... O Elizabeth, a day, a day shall come that shall show thee clearly which have loved thee the better, the Society of Jesus or Luther’s brood!”
What arrogance, thought Anthony to himself, and what assurance too!
Meanwhile in the outer world things were not reassuring to the friends of the Government: it was true that half a dozen priests had been captured and examined by torture, and that Sir George Peckham himself, who was known to have harboured Campion, had been committed to the Marshalsea; but yet the Jesuits’ influence was steadily on the increase. More and more severe penalties had been lately enacted; it was now declared to be high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Church of Rome; overwhelming losses in fortune as well as liberty were threatened against all who said or heard Mass or refused to attend the services of the Establishment; but, as was discovered from papers that fell from time to time into the hands of the Government agents, the only answer of the priests was to inveigh more strenuously against even occasional conformity, declaring it to be the mortal sin of schism, if not of apostasy, to put in an appearance under any circumstances, except those of actual physical compulsion, at the worship in the parish churches. Worse than all, too, was the fact that this severe gospel began to prevail; recusancy was reported to be on the increase in all parts of the country; and many of the old aristocracy began to return to the faith of their fathers: Lords Arundel, Oxford, Vaux, Henry Howard, and Sir Francis Southwell were all beginning to fall under the suspicion of the shrewdest Government spies.
The excitement at Lambeth ran higher day by day as the summer drew on; the net was being gradually contracted in the home counties; spies were reported to be everywhere, in inns, in the servants’ quarters of gentlemen’s houses, lounging at cross roads and on village greens. Campion’s name was in every mouth. Now they were on his footsteps, it was said; now he was taken; now he was gone back to France; now he was in London; now in Lancashire; and each rumour in turn corrected its predecessor.
Anthony shared to the full in the excitement; the figure of the quarry, after which so many hawks were abroad, appealed to his imagination. He dreamed of him at night, once as a crafty-looking man with narrow eyes and stooping shoulders, that skulked and ran from shadow to shadow across a moonlit country; once as a ruddy-faced middle-aged gentleman riding down a crowded street; and several times as a kind of double of Mr. Stewart, whom he had never forgotten, since he had watched him in the little room of Maxwell Hall, gallant and alert among his enemies.
At last one day in July, as it drew on towards evening, and as Anthony was looking over the stable-accounts in his little office beyond the Presence Chamber, a buzz of talk and footsteps broke out in the court below; and a moment later the Archbishop’s body-servant ran in to say that his Grace wished to see Mr. Norris at once in the gallery that opened out of the guard-room.