Heretic Queen (34 page)

Unlike Burghley's boring and tedious prose, Campion's reached the hearts of the downtrodden reader. He had returned home to his “dear Country” for the “glory of God and the benefit of Souls,” as he had been strictly forbidden to deal in matters of state. Since Campion knew that capture meant death, the streak of the martyr that had grown quietly within exploded to the surface in this declaration, soon to be known as
Campion's Brag
. According to Campion, the Catholic League and “all the Jesuits in the world … cheerfully … carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn.”
27

As copies of
Campion's Brag
proliferated, the two men split up. Persons traveled the highways of the Home Counties, while Campion sought the relative safety of the Catholic north for the next six months. Their letters back to Rome spoke of their mental and physical privations, with Campion complaining that “I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics … [because] the enemy have so many eyes so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts.” Persons wrote, “We never have a single day free from danger.”
28

It was Persons who described the violence he saw about him best: “Everywhere there are being dragged to prison, noblemen and those of humble birth, men, women and even children … There comes a hurried knock at the door, like that of a pursuivant—all start up and listen,—like deer when they hear the huntsmen; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God.”
29
Thus it was when Ralph Sherwin, the junior seminarian who accompanied Persons and Campion on their mission, was captured. Another seminarian, Edward Rishton, also a former Oxford undergraduate who had studied at Douai, was captured at the Red Rose Tavern in Holborn when the pursuivants raided it. The searchers had expected to find Persons there, but the Jesuit had lost his way, only arriving after Rishton's arrest.

*   *   *

For over twenty years,
Elizabeth could appear to staunchly support her laws in theory, so long as she could mitigate them in practice. The papal invasions and the seminarian priests put an end to that pretense. If Elizabeth and the realm were to remain secure, Parliament needed to act decisively. So, in early 1581, the “Act to retain her Majesty's subjects in their Due Allegiance” was passed. It was the beginning of the fight back against the external Catholic League in defense of the Elizabethan settlement. Its functional shortcoming was that it omitted to make it an offense to
convert
to Catholicism. Its result was the beginning of decades of terror for loyal subjects who happened to be born Catholic. That the bill was introduced by the member of Parliament Thomas Norton, also known as the “Rackmaster,” and passed without opposition by both houses shows that the pope, Philip II, and the seminarians had achieved what Elizabeth had failed to do: unite the English against the enemies at their gates.

 

NINETEEN

The Ungodly Witch Hunts

It is obvious enough that nowadays the whole of Christendom is split in two, and that princes and peoples are divided and in such a state of mistrust and hostility to one another on account of religion that it is impossible to make any serious arrangement between those whose religion is different.

—La Mothe Fénélon in London to Catherine de' Medici

Edmund Campion had decided that he would die in the land of his birth, a martyr to all those souls he so fervently wished to save. With the publication of
Campion's Brag
had come a government-sponsored reply, written by the Puritan divine William Charke, who had been expelled from Cambridge University for nonconformity. When it was shown to Campion, he quite rightly claimed that it was a vituperative answer to his reasoned arguments and arranged for five hundred copies of his
Decem Rationes
to be made available in early 1581 for a scholarly debate at Oxford. Printed on a clandestine printing press, Campion's “Ten Reasons” was so precisely and pithily penned that many more wavering souls made the leap back to Catholicism.

Then, on Tuesday, July 11, on his way north to Lancashire to retrieve some papers he had left at Houghton Hall, Campion sought permission from Persons to stay at Lyford Grange near Wantage in Oxfordshire with the staunchly Catholic Yate family. He had not been to Lyford Grange before, despite having received several invitations. Advised that he would not preach but merely stay the night, Persons agreed to let Campion go. The next day, Campion said his good-byes and headed north. What he hadn't realized was that his time at Lyford had caused a fervent desire to hear him preach and such dismay among the community that a rider was dispatched to find him and bring him back to Lyford Grange for that purpose. The rider caught up with Campion at an inn just outside Oxford, and the Jesuit was persuaded to return.

For several days, all was peaceful. A steady stream of students and local residents came to hear the inspiring words of the famous scholar. Campion, a man of tremendous wit and charm, held the people spellbound. On the morning of Sunday, July 16, unbeknown to the priest, among his listeners were George Eliot—a Catholic, convicted murderer, and rapist-turned-informant—and his friend David Jenkins. Neither man had intended to stop at Lyford, but when they spied a servant keeping watch on the roof of the house, they recognized the telltale signs of a secret Mass. It would prove fortuitous for Eliot and Jenkins, ruinous for Campion.

Eliot and Jenkins left Campion's service along with the others, thanking their hosts for allowing them the privilege of listening to the great scholar. By one o'clock in the afternoon, Eliot and Jenkins had returned with the local magistrate, Mr. Fettiplace, riding beside them. They searched the house for the rest of the day, finding nothing. Fettiplace apologized for the inconvenience but listened to Eliot and Jenkins and placed a night guard on watch. The following day, the hunt for Campion resumed. It was Jenkins who finally saw the “chink in the wall of boards” over the stairwell. Taking a crowbar to it, he tore the boards off the wall, breaking through to the cramped room beyond where Edmund Campion and two other priests were concealed.

*   *   *

Campion was immediately brought
to London for questioning. The terms of his early imprisonment are unclear, with Campion himself speaking of an interview with the queen. On August 6, 1581, Burghley wrote to Shrewsbury, Mary Queen of Scots' jailer, that Campion had been taken to Leicester. Despite the near hysteria on both sides of the religious divide and wild rumors that Campion had recanted Catholicism to become archbishop of Canterbury, at his trial the Jesuit priest made it clear that he had been merely offered his liberty if he would attend Anglican services. Whether he liked it or not, Edmund Campion had become a renowned political prisoner.
1

That August, Campion appeared at a public discussion in the chapel of the Tower of London flanked on either side by the dean of St. Paul's and the dean of Windsor. What might have been a useful debate about the lawfulness of imposing the Anglican Church on England as a whole became an emotional harangue about the Jesuit mission to breach the country's national security and commit murder. Nonetheless, with Archbishop of Canterbury Grindal still under effective house arrest, it is difficult to see how Elizabeth's rudderless church could be in a position to look at the Jesuit threat in any other way.

At this first public appearance, the obvious injuries to Campion's shoulders and arms indicated he had been put to the rack. On August 10, Burghley wrote to Walsingham, who was in France on business: “We have gotten from Campion knowledge of all his peregrination in England, as in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Denbigh, Northampton, Warwick, Bedford, Buckingham … We have sent for all his hosts in all countries [counties].”
2

On November 20, 1581, Campion's trial was convened to a packed courtroom. The Jesuit priest showed further signs of torture. Though the statute of 1581 had already been passed into law, Campion was tried under the old treason law of Edward III, presumably to avoid making him a religious martyr, which trying him under the new law of 1581 might do since the Jesuit “conspiracy” had been the motivating factor in the law's inception. The charges brought forward were “for conspiring to compass the death of the Queen and raise sedition within the realm.”
3
Implicated, though not specifically named in the indictment, were Philip II and Gregory XIII. Campion was tried along with the other Catholic priests currently in custody—Ralph Sherwin, Edward Rishton, Robert Johnson, Thomas Ford, John Collington, and William Filby. The last two of these had been mere local priests who had come to hear Campion preach at Lyford. Robert Persons and William Allen were tried in absentia.

Those who had been instrumental in Campion's undoing testified for the government. Charles Sledd, who had led the pursuivants to the Red Lion Inn hoping to capture Robert Persons, testified that while in Rome and Rheims, before he recanted Catholicism, he had learned about the invasion plans from William Allen. George Eliot, who had been instrumental in Campion's capture, told the court that the Jesuit had preached of “a great day” soon to come and that it was general knowledge amongst the prisoners that there was an invasion planned. The real drama was reserved for the soon-to-be playwright Anthony Munday, who recited from his diary about the seminarians schooled in treason. The guilty verdict had been decided long before the testimonies were complete. No sound evidence was produced to show that Campion had been part of any plot to assassinate the queen. For Burghley and Walsingham, all that mattered was the security of the realm, the queen, and the Protestant faith. Campion had been a threat to all three.

Edmund Campion was led from the Tower through a driving rain to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the time-honored tradition for traitors. Father Ralph Sherwin and Father Alexander Briant also met their traitors' deaths that day. Seven other priests followed within the year.

As for Persons, he eluded capture, escaping to the Continent with a wave of Catholic refugees fleeing the new persecution. He would never see England again, but would devote his life to “the Enterprise” so dear to the pope's and Philip's hearts.

*   *   *

Elizabeth could not know
that Campion's execution had imperiled the Jesuit mission to England. On the contrary, fear of a coup d'état loomed large in the government's mind, and further steps were deemed necessary for the security of the realm. Diplomacy and international trade had long formed a primary strand for England's financial security; “adventuring” with the likes of Drake—newly returned from his voyage of circumnavigation with enough looted treasure to keep the government in funds for years—was another. “Planting,” or colonization, in North America by Sir Humphrey Gilbert represented a bold, if tentative, strike against Spain, declaring that England intended to be a world power. Elizabeth rebelled against Philip's or the pope's authority to rule the world as it had done for the previous one hundred years.

The political landscape was changing rapidly, however, and all England's efforts to ensure its security were mere pinpricks in the sides of her enemies. Philip II had successfully invaded Portugal in 1580, after the death of King Sebastian at Alcazar in Morocco, and was now king of both countries, uniting their empires. Gregory XIII remained determined to demonstrate papal supremacy over England and pushed once more for Philip to consider his “Enterprise of England.”

Political Catholicism was growing daily. Mary Stuart's cousin Henry of Guise was gaining strength once more against the increasingly unpopular Henry III. The French king was seen to be weak and effeminate, mocked by contemporaries for his fastidiousness and his young male favorites, called
mignons.
Henry viewed both the Duke of Guise and his heir Anjou as potential enemies of the crown.

Meanwhile, the French people were literally starving by the interruption to farming and hyperinflation from decades of war. Shipping had been interrupted by English, Dutch, and Huguenot corsairs. Anarchy was prevalent, with local nobles acting like regional warlords. Guise and his brand of ultraorthodox Catholicism offered a downtrodden people hope.

In Scotland, Walsingham remained exercised by the sudden appearance of the French claimant to the defunct title of the Earl of Lennox. The handsome, dashing, and violently Catholic Esmé Stuart, Count or Seigneur d'Aubigny, was escorted personally by Henry of Guise to Dieppe to see him off on his adventure to Scotland and the court of his cousin James VI. On May 3, 1580, Walsingham wrote to the English representative in Scotland, Robert Bowes, that he feared “some great and hidden treason not yet discovered.”
4
Naturally, d'Aubigny had been sent by Guise at Mary Stuart's behest to reconvert her sixteen-year-old son, James, to Catholicism and send intelligence back to Guise for a planned invasion. Their scheme was only uncovered and foiled by Walsingham's newly set up network of informants in 1582–83 as part of the unraveling of what became known as the Throckmorton Plot.

As for Spain, Philip remained deeply committed to his recovery of the Netherlands. Worse for Elizabeth, he made no secret of his desire to turn his eye to England once his rebellious Dutch provinces had been brought to heel. Something, Walsingham and Burghley agreed with the queen, needed to be done. So once again, Elizabeth pulled out her ancient, dog-eared marriage card and dealt it to Anjou in the autumn of 1578. Henry III and Catherine de' Medici were delighted as it helped them maintain a balance of power against Spain that a weakened France desperately needed. What they hadn't realized was that Elizabeth's true motive was to assist Anjou—newly acclaimed by the Dutch rebels as their “Duke of Brabant”—to rule the rebellious Dutch provinces for himself. No wonder Henry III had branded his brother a “common criminal.”
5
Anjou's leadership of the Dutch rebels only served to anger Philip, who retaliated against France by supporting the designs of Henry of Guise.