CAMPION, in between the working of the rollers, was asked his opinion of certain political utterances in the works of his old friends Allen and Bristow, and of Dr. Sander; also whether he considered the Queen “true and lawful,” or “pretensed and deprived.” He refused to answer. Physical anguish could be little worse than the ineffable boredom of these two never-quiet questions. He was then asked by the Governor, the Rackmaster, and others present, by whose command and counsel he had returned to England; by whom in England he had been received and befriended; in whose houses he had said Mass, heard Confessions, and reconciled persons to his Church; where his recent book was printed, and to whom copies were[142] given; lastly, what was his opinion of the Bull of Pius V against Queen Elizabeth? A letter written at the time to Lord Shrewsbury by Lord Burghley, and still extant, shows that nothing of moment could be got out of Campion. During the next fortnight, however, there was poured into the ear of the Government information regarding the second and third items in the above category. Houses were searched; persons of mark were apprehended, tried in the Star Chamber, and sentenced. Almost every manse or town house where Campion had been harboured became known, and even the names of those Oxford Masters of Arts who had followed him to Lyford. The Government gave out that he had confessed upon the rack, and implicated his too trusting friends. The alleged facts naturally became a general scandal, and bred grief and horror among the Catholics who, no less than Protestants, were thus driven to believe them. The secrets were probably given up, under panic, by three serving-men, and by poor Gervase Pierrepoint. It was a common trick of the time,[143] though not peculiar to it, to show a prisoner a lying list of names purporting to have been extracted from colleagues, so that he himself might be trapped into endorsing the suspicions held in regard to those names. But it is clear that Campion was brought to mention only a few who, as he was aware, were formerly known to his examiners as Catholic Recusants; and only after a solemn oath from the Commissioners that no harm could accrue to them in consequence of such supplementary mention. Even this he had every cause to regret. The gentlemen and gentlewomen on Lord Burghley’s lists were carefully informed, when arrested, that it was Campion who had betrayed them: a cruel slander which he could refute only at the foot of the scaffold. Thanks to the reports, first of his backsliding, then of his treachery, his great reputation, for the time being, was clean gone. Having thus been given forth to the public as a knave, he was now to be set before them as a fool, and shown to be one who possessed neither sort of superiority, moral or mental.
Many courtiers, having a purely artistic interest in Edmund Campion, had begged that he might obtain the chance he had often asked for, of being heard in a disputation. This request was now suddenly granted. The conference was public, and came off in the Norman Chapel of the Tower, which was crowded. Two Deans, Nowell of St. Paul’s, and Day of Windsor, were appointed to attack Campion; he was to answer all objections as he could, but was forbidden to raise any of his own. Charke, the bitter Puritan preacher of Gray’s Inn, and Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, were the notaries. The lion to be baited did not even know that there was to be a conference, until he was brought to it under a strong guard. Time for preparation had been denied him; he was allowed the use of only such authorities as his memory could furnish; pale and weary and rack-worn as he was, he was given only a low stool to sit upon. The well-fed theological worthies were ranged before him, their chairs standing on raised platforms, and their tables[145] spread with books of reference, pens and paper.
One who was there tells us how easy and ready were his answers; how modest his mien; how that high-spirited nature so bore the scorn, the abuse, and the jests heaped upon him, as to win great admiration from the majority of those who heard him for the first time. He began by asking very pertinently whether this was a just answer to his challenge, first to rack him, then to deprive him of books, notes and pen, lastly, to call upon him to debate? and he added (wishing to be fully understood by the audience), that what he had asked for was quite another sort of hearing: a hearing under equal conditions before the Universities. During the course of this first conference he was twice most unfairly tripped up: once over a quotation, in which he was right, though he could not then and there prove it; and again over a page of the Greek Testament, in such small type that he could not read it, and had to put it by when it was handed to him: thereby drawing down upon himself the ridiculous taunt that[146] he knew no Greek. This he took silently, and with a smile. At the end of the six hours he had more than stood his ground. The Deans complained afterwards that a number of gentlemen present, “neither unlearned nor ill-affected,” considered that Master Campion had the best of it. Some common people who thought so too, and said so in the streets, paid dearly for their boldness. One of these gentlemen favourably impressed was Philip, Earl of Arundel, then in the flush of worldly pride and pleasure. He was the real victory of the Jesuit apostle, for he received at that time and in that place the first ray of divine grace, strong enough to change gradually in him the whole motive and course of that intensity of life which never failed the Howards. As he stood leaning forward in the foreground of the da?s, in that solemn interior, tall and young, with his great ruff and embroidered doublet, and his brilliant dark eyes held by the pathetic figure of Master Campion, how little could he have foreseen his own weary term of suffering in that gloomy fortress, and his[147] sainted death there, at the end of the years!
There were three other conferences under like conditions, but in other quarters, with four fresh adversaries. Campion was again “appointed only to answer, never to oppose”; that is, to answer miscellaneous and disjointed objections against the Catholic Church, without ever being allowed “to build up any harmonious apology for his own system.” The last conference was notable for its browbeating and threatening of a too successful adversary. The Bishop of London privately came to the conclusion that the verbal tournament was doing no good whatever to the sacred cause of Protestantism. The Council agreed, and ended it.
Towards the end of October Campion was racked for the third time, and with the utmost severity, so that he thought they meant, this time, to kill him; but his fortitude was unshaken. A rough and honest first cousin to the Queen, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, growled that it were easier to pluck the heart out of Campion’s breast[148] than to wrest from him one word against his conscience. His arms and legs went quite numb after this final torture. The keeper, who was won over by his endearing prisoner, and was always as gentle with him as he dared to be, inquired next day how they felt. “Not ill,” said Father Edmund, with all of his old brave brightness, “not ill, because not at all!”
Never once until now had he been accused of any conspiracy. But he was a troublesome person: he must be silenced somehow. With a tardy inspiration, the Council bent all their strength to get out of Campion some acknowledgment that he had been mixed up with the Spanish-Roman expedition, and the Irish rising of the preceding year. Not a shadow of proof could, of course, be produced for such a charge. Then, as a final and sure means of indicting him on some other count than that of religion, and of urging his execution upon the Queen, Walsingham, with Burghley’s connivance, hatched a treasonable plot out of his own inventive head, and got false witnesses to accuse Edmund[149] Campion of it, and swear his life away. The “Plot of Rheims and Rome” was described as an attempt to raise a sedition, and dethrone and kill the Queen. It had an imaginary but recent date: 1580. Everybody or anybody, when found convenient, could be accused of so elastic a plot. It was first charged against some twenty priests and laymen in this year 1581; but it was brought up against the Earl of Arundel four years afterwards, despite the fact that the supposed interests of the Church were the last things likely to win his attention at the time assigned.
On All Saints’ Day arrived in England a suitor for the hand of Queen Elizabeth: Francis, Duke of Alen?on, King of the Netherlands, the short-lived heir to the throne of King Henry the Third of France. With that King, while Duke of Anjou, and with Alen?on for nine years past (as for three yet to come), Elizabeth had carried on negotiations which ended in smoke; but she now announced that she “would marry at last.” Little Froggy, as she endearingly called him, was ugly to a degree, and[150] many years younger than her Majesty; he was brother-in-law to the Queen of Scots, who was her Majesty’s prisoner at Sheffield. The dominant, ultra-bigoted party took extreme alarm at the near prospect of toleration for Catholics which such a royal match suggested to them. To reassure them, it might just now be most useful, thought the Council, to hang a Jesuit or two.
On the 14th of the month Campion and eight others were arraigned before the grand jury in Westminster Hall. For “treasonable intents” of the Queen’s deprivation and murder, these “secret and privy practices of sinister devices,” befitting one “led astray by the devil,” had “Edmund Campion, clerk,” made his re-entry into England, the Pope, meanwhile, being not only aware of his act, but its “author and onsetter”! He was commanded, as were all those lumped with him in a common accusation, to plead Guilty or Not Guilty. Up went all the right arms of these “devotaries, and dead men to this world, who travelled only for souls,” as Campion himself called them: all but his, so disabled by the rack that he[151] could not stir it from the furred cuff in which it lay. But a quick-witted comrade turned and took off the cuff, “humbly kissing the sacred hands so wrung for the confession of Christ,” and lifted it high to cry its own mute Not Guilty with the rest. The Spanish Ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, standing close by with his secretary, saw, with a pang of pity, that all the finger-nails were gone from Campion’s swollen hands. The trial proper began on the 20th, before “such a presence of people of the more honourable, wise, learned, and best sort as was never seen or heard of in that court in ours or our fathers’ memories before us . . . so wonderful an expectation there was to see the end of this marvellous tragedy . . . [of] such as they knew in conscience to be innocent.” They all heard Ralph Sherwin say, in a loud clear voice: “The plain ground of our standing here is religion, and not treason.”
Chief Justice Wray presided, a Catholic at heart, and wretched ever after over this unwilling day’s work. The prosecuting officers for the Crown were the Queen’s serjeant, Edmund Anderson; Popham,[152] afterwards Chief Justice; and Egerton, afterwards the first Lord Ellesmere. The chief witnesses were George Eliot, Anthony Munday, and two creatures named Sledd and Caddy: probably as evil a quartette as existed in contemporary England, and worthy forerunners of Oates and Bedloe. “They had nothing left to swear by,” as Campion reminded the jury: “neither religion nor honesty.” In no special order, but with much ardour and diligence, all the old tiresome trivial accusations were brought forward and pressed in, Campion being spokesman throughout for the defence, and his alert mind, despite his weakened body, meeting them all, and routing them. He was charged with having “seduced the Queen’s subjects from their allegiance” . . . and “reconciled them to the Pope.” He caught up the word. “We ‘reconcile’ them to the Pope! Nay, then, what reconciliation can there be to him, since reconciliation is only due to God? This word [‘reconcile’] soundeth not to a lawyer’s usage, and therefore is wrested against us inaptly. The reconciliation that[153] we endeavoured was only to God: as Peter saith, reconciliamini Domino, be ye reconciled unto the Lord.” Campion was informed: “Yourself came as Procurator from the Pope and Dr. Allen, to break these matters to the English Papists.” So he rejoined that in his homeward voyage from Rome, un............