Edmund Campion

A Scholarly Life

Gerard Kilroy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351964692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life is the response, at long last, to Evelyn Waugh's call, in 1935, for a 'scholarly biography' to replace Richard Simpson's Edmund Campion (1867). Whereas early accounts of his life focused on the execution of the Jesuit priest, this new biography presents a more balanced assessment, placing equal weight on Campion's London upbringing among printers and preachers, and on his growing stature as an orator in an Oxford riven with religious divisions. Ireland, chosen by Campion as a haven from religious conflict, is shown, paradoxically, to have determined his life and his death. Gerard Kilroy here draws on newly discovered manuscript sources to reveal Campion as a charismatic and affectionate scholar who was finding fulfilment as priest and teacher in Prague when he was summoned to lead the first Jesuit mission to England. The book argues that the delays in his long journey suggest reluctant acceptance, even before he was told that Dr Nicholas Sander had brought 'holy war' to Ireland, so that Campion landed in an England that was preparing for papal invasion. The book offers fresh insights into the dramatic search for Campion, the populist nature of the disputations in the Tower, and the legal issues raised by his torture. It was the monarchical republic itself that, in pursuit of the Anjou marriage, made him the beloved 'champion' of the English Catholic community. Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life presents the most detailed and comprehensive picture to date of an historical figure whose loyalty and courage, in the trial and on the scaffold, swiftly became legendary across Europe.

Chapter 1

A Spectacle to all the Realme

Edmund Campion was born on 25 January 1540, in the north-east end of Paul’s Churchyard, next to Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit that was the ancient focal point for the City of London.¹ Edmund Campion was, therefore, like ‘the most famous martyrs of England, Thomas à Becket and Thomas More’, a Londoner.² When John Foxe, the martyrologist, who was later to plead for Campion’s life to be spared, was invited to speak from Paul’s Cross, he referred to it as ‘that renowned theatre’ (tam celebre videlicet theatrum).³ From the age of thirteen Campion was chosen to address queens and emperors in London, Oxford and Prague.⁴ Although Campion consistently chose the simple life (walking to Rome as a pilgrim, for example), he was constantly thrust forward to take the lead, as at his trial. Campion’s last words on the scaffold (in the passive voice) show that he felt he had been forced to play his part in the tragedy of English religious politics:

Spectaculum facti sumus Deo, Angeli[s], & hominibus saying, These are the wordes of S. Paule, Englished thus: We are made a spectacle, or a sight unto God, unto his Angels, and unto men: verified this day in me who am here a spectacle unto my lorde god, a spectacle unto his angels and unto you men.⁵

The very time and place of Campion’s birth propelled him towards his role as a leading orator and preacher. At Paul’s Cross, the religious divisions were publicly debated on a stone pulpit before an audience that included all the livery companies and, sometimes, so many volatile and unstable apprentices that armed guards were required.⁶ Both the date and place of his birth determined that Campion’s early years should be spent at the epicentre of the violently moving plates of religious and political conflict. The son of a radical stationer, he was surrounded by printers, publishers and booksellers; from beginning to end, he spent his life in the world of the book.

By the time he was twenty, London, where ‘the experience of Reformation had been most intense and most immediate’, had borne the brunt of four alterations of religion; parishes were instructed to smash statues and tear down altars, only to be forced, later, to restore and demolish them again in a bewildering whirligig.⁷ The Aldermen helped the young King Edward to avoid armed conflict at the end of his reign, while a calm Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas White, who became Campion’s surrogate father, enabled a city of divided loyalties to survive an armed rebellion that brought cannon fire to Charing Cross, and threatened Southwark with destruction in the first year of Mary’s reign, 1554.⁸ Campion’s other patron, Sir William Chester, is recorded in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as the Sheriff who ‘sheede tearese at the death of Christes people’.⁹

Persons and Bombino both relate the year of Campion’s birth to the suppression of the monasteries.¹⁰ Campion was to receive most of his education in the restored ruins of two religious houses. The dissolution of the monasteries, administered by Thomas Cromwell and completed in 1540, destroyed the entire educational, medical and social structure of England, and affected London badly. ‘The streates & lanes in London began to swarme with beggers & roges’.¹¹ The city’s Aldermen and rich merchants, with the help of Bishop Ridley, were able to persuade King Edward VI, in February 1552, to allow them to set up Christ’s Hospital for fatherless children.¹² The 12-year-old Campion, who had recently lost his father, appears to have been presented to the ‘hospital’, when it opened on 23 November 1552, and spent nearly five years in the restored ruins of Greyfriars, until he joined Sir Thomas White’s new foundation of St John’s in June 1557, founded in the restored ruins of St Bernard’s College, the Cistercian house of studies in Oxford. It is significant that Campion’s first sermon in English (in May 1580) focused on ‘how many goodly churches, monasteries & other monuments of piety’ the fire that had swept England ‘had devoured in an instant’.¹³

London’s distinguished merchants and Lord Mayors played a central role in Campion’s life. For the first 30 years of his life Edmundus Campianus Anglus Londinensis, as he later styled himself, benefited from their determined action.¹⁴ His entire education at St Paul’s School, founded by John Colet, and at the two new foundations of Christ’s Hospital and St John’s College, Oxford, was funded by the Aldermen and livery companies whose civic responsibility and private benevolence lay behind the foundation of three hospitals and the incorporation of a fourth (St Bartholomew’s) between 1552 and 1557. This was a network of Hospitals: St Thomas’s Hospital for ‘Sore and sicke persons’, Bridewell for ‘ydell vagabondes’ and Christ’s Hospital for ‘ffatherless children’.¹⁵ The Mercers’ Company funded and governed St paul’s, while Sir William Chester, Lord Mayor and Draper, Anthony Hussey, Governor of the Merchant Adventurers and of the Russia Company, and Sir Thomas White, Lord Mayor and Merchant Taylor, all helped personally to fund Campion’s education; the Grocers’ Company, at the request of Sir William Chester, gave Campion a scholarship in 1566, which he kept for two years.¹⁶ The city and livery companies were justly proud of their schools: the ‘men-chyleryn of the hospetall, and after the chylderne of sant Antonys and then all the chltheryn of powlles and all ther masters and husshers’, attended in their colourful uniforms the series of Easter sermons at St Mary’s Spital, and took part in processions, coronations and all major civic occasions.¹⁷

Campion was, in this sense, a child of the City of London, supported by its funding, paraded in its ceremonies and rewarded in its competitions. In a city that was at the heart of the Reformation struggle, the most continuous and stable element in Campion’s life was his love of learning. Supported by the leading merchants and livery companies, Campion rapidly emerged as the leading schoolboy orator in London, winning at least two public competitions, and he was chosen to address the new Queen in 1553.¹⁸ Campion’s aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of classical authors must have been sharpened by their comparative stability in a world of volatile political and religious change.

The turbulence of this period is epitomized by a sequence of events that occurred in the year Campion was born. In February 1540, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, launched an attack on three radical reformers, Dr Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garrett.¹⁹ This began what Barnes himself called the ‘Cockfight’.²⁰ When Barnes replied, Gardiner went to the King to complain how ‘he being a bishop and a Prelate of the realme, was handled and reviled at Paules crosse’.²¹ From the same pulpit, William Jerome also replied with a seditious sermon on 7 March. By April, all three preachers were in the Tower. On 28 July 1540, the day the King married his fifth wife, he also executed Thomas Cromwell, the man whom he had recently made Earl of Essex as a reward for overseeing the dissolution of all religious houses and the transfer of their wealth to the Crown. Two days later, on 30 July 1540, the King had Dr Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome burned, ostensibly for their views on transubstantiation; their radical political demands may have been more offensive, since Dr Barnes asked that

where hys grace hath received into his hands all the goods and substance of the Abbeys … Would it to God that it might please his grace to bestow the sayd goods to the comforte of hys poore subjects who surely have great need of them.²²

On the same day, in an ostentatious display of what Susan Brigden calls ‘scrupulous equity’, the King had three Catholic priests hanged, drawn and quartered for their denial of the Royal supremacy.²³ Stow glosses the event in the margin: Sixe Priestes, three brent, three hanged.²⁴ The death of Dr Barnes was immortalized by Foxe.²⁵ It became a landmark long remembered by contemporaries, which unleashed a frenzy of printed ballads.²⁶ Forty-one years later, a similar ballad war was to break out after Campion’s death, but it was to develop into a war in print that raged in several languages across Europe, since a scholar of European renown had been executed on a manifestly false indictment.²⁷

1° Vocor Edmundus Campianus, Anglus Londinensis, Annos natus 34 / 2° Ex legitimo Matrimonio, & Parentibus ab antiquo Christianis, & in Catholica fide, ut speratur, defunctis. Pater vocabatur Edmundus, Mater N. conditione cives & bibliopolae, mediocri fortuna.

[1st: My name is Edmund Campion. I am English and a Londoner, now in my thirty-fourth year / 2nd: I was born from parents who were legitimately married, had long been Christian, and who have now died (it is to be hoped) in the Catholic faith. My father was called Edmond, my mother N., and they were free citizens and stationers of modest means.]²⁸

Edmund Campion’s written answers to the ‘Examen’ on 26 August 1573, when he entered the Society of Jesus in Prague, confirm the importance of his London background, the date of his birth and suggest that his mother, Alice, took over the business when his father died, sometime before November 1552.²⁹ His guarded statement that his parents ‘had long been Christian’, but had died, he hoped, in the Catholic faith, tells us a great deal that can now be corroborated from other sources. He was clearly not present when they died, but the statement conceals the pain of a son divided by religion from both his patria (London) and his parents, able only to hope (and not to know) that his parents had died in the Catholic faith. Robert Persons, apparently unaware of Campion’s reservation, later asserted that his parents were ‘very honest & catholick’.³⁰

The father who ‘was called Edmond Campion’ and whose house seems to have been only feet from Paul’s Cross, was a stationer (bibliopola) the profession involved in publishing, printing and selling books, which was undergoing a radical transformation during Campion’s lifetime. We now know exactly where in London his parents lived. Edmund Campion senior is registered in the Subsidy Roll of 1541 as living in St Faith’s parish, and his wealth is assessed at £40: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A Spectacle to all the Realme
• 2 Among the Ruins
• 3 Pilgrim to Rome
• 4 Et in Arcadia Ego
• 5 All this Travail
• 6 An Immense Harvest
• 7 Captive Good
• 8 On the Rack
• 9 Upon the Publike Stage
• 10 The Lawes of England
• 11 We are Made a Spectacle
• 12 The Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index