Saint Edmund Campion, S.J., (1540 – 1581) was an English Catholic Jesuit priest and martyr. While conducting an underground ministry to the persecuted Catholics of Elizabethan England, Campion was arrested by priest hunters. Convicted of high treason, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Campion was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
By : Louise Imogen Guiney (1861 - 1920)
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The Campion family seem to have been both gentlefolk and yeomen, and to have been widely scattered over the land: in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Essex, Sussex, and Devon. Nothing is definitely known, at present, as to which branch of the Campion family the Blessed Edmund belonged. Unlike many of the martyrs of Tudor and Stuart times, he was what is called a “born” Catholic: in more accurate phrase, a born heathen, as we all are! but baptized in his parents’ religion soon after his birth in London, on the Feast of St. Paul the Apostle, January 25, in the year 1540, New Style. Edmund had two brothers, and a sister, none of whom played any great part in his after life. By the time he entered the Society of Jesus his father and mother were both dead: his written expression is that he had “hopes” they died in full communion with the Church; but evidently he did not know, being abroad, how it had fared with them in those terribly stormy days for Christian souls.
Edmund Campion, senior, was a book-seller, evidently in good standing, but not well to do. Some rich London guildsmen (probably of the Grocers’ Company, for it was they who maintained him later), befriended the promising little boy at just the right moment, when his father was reluctantly going to apprentice him to a trade; and he was sent, at their joint expense, to a good Grammar School. Afterwards, under the same patrons, he entered Christ Hospital, then lately set up in Newgate Street (out of confiscated Franciscan funds and the generosity of Londoners), as the “foundation” of the sixteen-year-old king, Edward VI. Here the small Edmund, full of life and laughter, banded and belted, ran about in now extinct yellow petticoats, and one of the earliest pairs of those historic yellow stockings. He was thirteen, and quite famous already in the school-boy world of London for his learning and his attractive presence and speech, when Queen Mary Tudor, who had just succeeded to the English throne, entered her city in state. Out of many hundred eligible youngsters it was he who was chosen to stand up before her on a street platform, under the shadow of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, and shrilly welcome her in the Latin tongue. The Queen sat on a white horse, robed in gold-embroidered dark velvet, crimson or purplish, with the great sword carried before her by the boyish Earl of Surrey, with eight thousand mounted lords and gentlemen on either side, all the glittering ambassadors, and a bevy of beautifully apparelled ladies. On certain figures in that splendid and noisy pageant the child might have looked with pensive eyes, had he been able to forecast his own future; as it was, he cannot have failed to observe the Queen’s younger sister, the thin, watchful, spirited girl who was known as the Lady Elizabeth. Another was there, of high office, though not of high descent, who was all goodness, piety and generosity, and may well have been drawn to notice Edmund Campion for the first time on that sunshiny afternoon in August, 1553. This was Sir Thomas White, then Lord Mayor of London, a staunch Catholic. He was an unlearned man and childless, who became, later, co-founder of the Merchant Taylors’ School, and enricher of many towns. By 1555 he had opened his College of St. John Baptist, once a Cistercian house, at Oxford. The Grocers’ Company at once approached him to admit their Blue-coat ward as a scholar; this he did, and conceived, almost as soon, a marked attachment to him; and two years later (when Edmund was not yet eighteen!) he made him a Senior Fellow. Campion’s other early friends at the University were his first tutor, John Bavand, and Gregory Martin, a Foundation Scholar like himself. These two showed towards him a lifelong devotion.
Mary’s troubled reign had covered the five most susceptible years of his youth, and restored to the country, despite its legal excesses, a definitely Catholic tone. Things were soon to change. War by statute against the Mass was first declared in 1559. Edmund Campion had left Oxford by the time that St. John’s, deprived of President after President by the Royal Commissioners, was swept clean of all the dons who favoured, or in any degree tolerated, the jurisdiction of that Apostolic See which safeguarded the doctrine and honour of the Blessed Eucharist. But while he lived in his University world, he lived untouched. He was not looked upon as a Catholic. Nor was he such, if his heart could be fully judged by his outward actions. Buried in literature, philosophy, and pleasant tutorial work, he had become, in his cultured indifference, what St. Jerome’s accusing vision called a “Ciceronian,” and not a Christian: a skin-deep Ciceronian, however. There is only a bare possibility that, on proceeding M.A. in 1564, he escaped taking the wretched Oath of Supremacy, and thereby acknowledging the Queen as Head in spirituals as well as temporals within her realm of England. He stretched his conscience, as many were doing, thinking to help along the unity of faith, thereby defeating that unity for good and all. An almost unprecedented vogue at Oxford had served to blind him: he was so happy, so busy, so needed, so much at home there. Friends encouraged him; undergraduates flocked about him, and imitated his very gait and tone as they never have imitated any one else except Newman.
Campion was a famous Latin scholar; and he was a good Grecian and a good Hebraist: Greek and Hebrew were studies newly revived just before he was born. He spoke as well as he wrote. The flamboyant art of oratory, now almost extinct in our more quiet-coloured century, was then much studied and admired; and Campion was famous for debates and addresses and encomiums. When only twenty, he had been called upon to preach, though a layman, at the re-burial of poor Amy Robsart, Lord Dudley’s young wife, in the University church of St. Mary-the-Virgin; and this he did with great grace and animation, and with no small display of tact, for rumours of a murder with a motive had already got abroad. Such prominence may have come to Campion through Sir Thomas White’s request: Sir Thomas had his associations with Cumnor. Four years later, Edmund Campion was able to put sincere love and sincere grief into a funeral oration (this time a Latin, not an English one) for the good and dear Founder himself, whose body was solemnly interred in the Chapel of his College.
In September, 1566, Queen Elizabeth made the first and happier of her two visits to Oxford. In the Queen’s train was Dudley; also a quieter, plainer, less noticed man, but one out of all comparison with him for astute power: this was Sir William Cecil, the Prime Minister, afterwards known far and wide as Lord Burghley. There were farces and tragedies for the Queen at Oxford, there were musical performances, theological disputations, and other academic sports. In front of the vast assemblage stood forth Master Campion of St. John’s, alone in his ruff, hood and gown. As representative of the University, he welcomed smiling royalty, and Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University, and royalty’s magnificent favourite. Campion shone, as well, in the absurd discussions in natural science which followed. The Queen and Dudley marked him, as they could not fail to do; for nothing could exceed the courtliness with which he had performed his task. The Chancellor sent for him in private, and expressed the Queen’s good-will, whereby Campion might bid, through him, for whatever preferment he chose. But Campion, always truly modest and full of ironic humour as well, would ask of his patron nothing, he said, but his continued regard. The young bookman had a real liking for the vicious worldling, liked by several sensitively good men, then and since. Sir William Cecil also took instinctive interest in Campion and his eager dialectics. Altogether, there was no more popular man in Oxford or elsewhere. Campion was on the hilltop of professional and personal success.
In all this beautiful fountain-play of “the things which are seen,” he was running the very gravest risk of spiritual ruin. Perhaps he could not know, in his leaf-hung hermitage, what a tremendous muster of souls was going on, now that the ancient Church and a new statecraft were to fight it out in England. Queen Elizabeth’s quarrel with the Pope was hardly more doctrinal than her royal father’s had been: she, too, would have been quite content to live all her days as a Catholic, provided that Catholicism would prove her slave. The battle was not between two known religions. On one side was conservative England with a belief; on the other the strong spirit of secularism, plus a few fanatics formed not by the English, but the Continental Reformation. Religion in itself troubled the Court party as little as anything could possibly do. It was because the spirit of Catholicism seemed to them to threaten their particular kind of national pride, and to interfere with their particular kind of worldly prosperity, that Cromwell in one great Tudor reign, Burghley in the other, tried to put it down. They wished to get good citizenship acknowledged not as an ideal, but as the supreme ideal, and they cared not how much else was shovelled out of the way. Their only use for religion was to bring it well under the authority of the law and the supremacy of the Crown. They had no objection to high respectability, but a most violent objection to the supernatural life, because that gives to those who practise it a dangerous independence. Elizabeth wanted unity and peace. Her subjects were to be forced by statute to pray less and to pray all alike; and to be thereby trained, somehow, to put Sacraments and Saints and the Papacy out of their heads. English humankind were to forsake their happy wild life, as it were, in the Church Universal, and all become, as if by magic, one large tame pet lying in a ribboned collar on the royal hearth. This is a vision which has appealed to many another head of a commonwealth as desirable, though unaccountably difficult! Some worthy persons have brought themselves to believe that nothing to speak of happened at the Reformation. But at the time, everybody understood in the clearest fashion that an old moral system which would not come to terms had been dropped, and a more satisfactory one created. It was a working theory of that age, all over Europe, that a governor had the right to fix the belief of subjects. What was wanted in England was made to order, out of the rags of ruined doctrine and discipline. Foreign Protestants raged over its externals, as having too much of the old thing, but the bullying State, riding roughshod over Convocation and the laity, was perfectly at ease, knowing that there was more than enough of the new thing to colour the whole, and to colour it once and for ever. There was no affection for “continuity” in those days except among the “Romans.” The attitude of their persecutors was that of men in a fury that any Englishman should dare to connect himself either with the world at large, or with his country’s own disclaimed yesterday. The State Trials, for instance, bear this out in a score of places. Many an official answer resembles the one made to that interesting character Blessed Ralph Sherwin, when he said truly that his coming back to his own land was to persuade the people to Catholic Unity. “You well know,” so the Counsel reproved him in Westminster Hall, “that it was not lawful for you to persuade the Queen’s subjects to any other religion than by her Highness’s instructions is already professed.” The “received religion,” or, as it was quite as often called, the “Queen’s religion,” was simply the new idea of nationalism torn away from relationship to the arch-idea of nations, which is the law of God. It was, in practice, no adoring angel at the Altar, but a capable parish beadle at the door. Now this was never the Catholic conception of what religion has been, or is meant to be. Happily, many thoroughly patriotic Englishmen felt that no least jot of Christian revelation, however much it stood in the way of Cæsar, could, with their consent, be put by; and to keep it free they were willing to make themselves very disagreeable indeed to their revered sovereign, and to their more easy-going countrymen. With that rude definiteness which is ever their chief family trait, the better Catholics threw their full force against the Oaths of Supremacy and Acts of Uniformity, as soon as they understood their meaning. The centuries passed since then prove that they succeeded in holding asunder what the Queen would join together. Was it unreasonable that she punished the men who tried to spoil her dream? And almost the chief of these men Edmund Campion was destined to be, though years were to pass before he lent his whole heart to the work God willed him to do.
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