The Tudors (85 page)

At this point Essex fell into a trap that may or may not have been of his own making. In the wake of the disaster of Yellow Ford, where half the English army had been left dead on the field, Tyrone and his rebels controlled nearly all of Ireland. Unless England decided to give up the fight—but that was unthinkable—
somebody
was going to have to take a new and bigger army across the Irish Sea. There could hardly have been a more dangerous assignment—Ireland was a notorious graveyard for English reputations and fortunes, those of Essex’s own father included—and Essex knew that his departure would leave Cecil in control of almost everything, including access to the queen.

But he was England’s leading living soldier, or regarded himself as such and was so regarded by many others, and no one in the kingdom had a stronger sense of noblesse oblige. If his queen needed him, he could not do other than serve. Hardly foolish enough to want the job, in effect he talked himself into it by finding every other candidate unacceptable. Whether Cecil and the earl’s other rivals were nudging him on, and were doing so for the purpose of destroying him, it is impossible to say. By early spring 1599 thousands of troops had been sent to Ireland, but they still had no commander. What was perhaps inevitable happened on April 12: Essex was commissioned to depart for Ireland, not as a mere lord deputy but with the grander title of lord lieutenant, and there take command.

His fate was sealed.

EARLY ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN JULY 1581 A MAN NAMED George Eliot, who had once gone to prison for rape and homicide but was released by the queen’s government to take up a commission as hunter of priests, arrived on horseback at the gates of a country house called Lyford Grange some miles south of Oxford. It was a casual visit, a sort of fishing expedition prompted by the fact that Lyford Grange was locally notorious as a center of underground Catholic activity, its owner currently in a London prison for refusing to repudiate the bishop of Rome. Eliot, earlier in his life, had been employed in Catholic households, even that of Thomas More’s son-in-law. He had become adept at pretending to be Catholic himself, acquiring a knowledge of papist practice and a network of Catholic acquaintances that was proving useful in his new career. Happening to pass through the neighborhood on this Sabbath day, he had thought it worthwhile to stop at Lyford Grange on the off chance of snagging a fugitive priest.

Immediately upon arriving, Eliot began to suspect that something unusual might be afoot: a guard was on duty atop the house’s watchtower, and the gates leading to its courtyard were barred. He was received warily at first, but when he called up that he had come to see the cook and asked for him by name, the guard left his post to fetch him. The cook, who had once worked with Eliot and believed him to be Catholic, welcomed him warmly and ushered him inside. Eliot and his assistant were given ale and invited to stay for a meal. With the assistant remaining behind in the kitchen, Eliot was led through several rooms to a large chamber where—no doubt to his delight—he found a mass in process before a congregation of several dozen men and women, among them two nuns in the habits of their order. When the service was concluded, a second priest went to the altar and began another mass. Eliot remained for it, and for what must have seemed to him an interminable sermon on the
subject of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets.” As soon as the mass was over, Eliot collected his assistant, gave thanks for the hospitality, said that he was now too late to remain to eat, and hurriedly departed. By early afternoon he was back with a force of armed and mounted men.

The house was searched all that day and into the night, and though many incriminating discoveries were made (rosaries and other forbidden religious objects, the habits out of which the nuns had changed upon learning of Eliot’s return, even the wanted brother of Lyford Grange’s owner), priests were not among them. The search resumed the following morning, but even stripping away paneling in a number of rooms failed to turn up anything more. The searchers, who had been reinforced the preceding night and now numbered about sixty (Lyford, obviously, was a sprawling and complicated structure), finally concluded that the priests must have been alarmed by Eliot’s swift departure and made their escape before his return. Just as they were preparing to leave, however, Eliot’s assistant noticed a tiny sliver of sunlight in a crack above a stairwell. Using a crowbar to pry an opening, he found not one or two but
three
priests lying side by side in a tight space along with a supply of food and drink. For Eliot it was a triumph, a bonanza. All the more so when it was established that among the three was the most notorious papist in all of England, a member of that alien and sinister new brotherhood known as the Jesuits, the infamous turncoat Edmund Campion. The following Saturday, his hands tied in front of him and his elbows behind and his feet bound under the belly of his horse, a sign bearing the words “
CAMPION THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT
” pinned to his hat, Eliot’s prize was put on display in the crowded marketplaces of London. Then he was taken to the Tower and locked in the space known as the Little Ease, where there was no window and not enough room to stand erect or lie down at full length.

His capture was a coup for the government even more than for Eliot. Campion had been in England only a little more than a year, and during that time he had been only one of the dozens of priests moving in secret from one place to another. But his activities had made him an improbably prominent public figure, the most wanted man in the kingdom, an intolerable embarrassment for the government and its church. Not even Catholics could challenge the fact that, according to the statutes as they
stood in the 1580s, Campion was guilty of high treason. Now that he was in custody, neither he nor anyone else could be in doubt about his fate: he was a doomed man. As for what exactly he and his fellow priests and the people who harbored them were guilty of, what kind of threat they actually posed—understanding that requires an examination not only of Campion’s activities during the year before his capture and his conduct afterward, but of his life before he became an outlaw.

He was born into very ordinary circumstances, one of several children of a London bookseller, but his talents set him apart from an early age. He became a scholarship boy, his education financed by London’s Worshipful Company of Grocers, and was still in his early teens when selected to deliver a Latin oration to Mary Tudor as she entered London for her coronation. He was sent to Oxford at age seventeen, rose with unusual speed to positions of prominence, and was a fellow and proctor when, at twenty-six, he was chosen to deliver a formal address before Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the university in 1566. The queen not only noticed Campion but singled him out for praise. Her church being in need of distinguished young candidates for advancement in the aftermath of the purging of the Marian hierarchy, this royal attention led to Campion’s being offered the patronage of both William Cecil and Robert Dudley. He became Dudley’s protégé—Dudley was chancellor of Oxford at the time—and was called upon to deliver orations on occasions of state and at events including Amy Robsart’s funeral (which must have been an excruciatingly delicate affair for everyone involved). As part of his preparation for the great things that clearly lay ahead, Campion took holy orders as a deacon in the Anglican church in 1568. He must have been suspected of leaning in the direction of Rome, however, because as part of the government’s reaction to the revolt of the northern earls and the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth he came under pressure to demonstrate his willingness to conform. Upon declining to do so he was repudiated by the Grocers Company and departed for Ireland, where he found influential patrons including the queen’s deputy Sir Henry Sidney and his son Philip and hoped to become involved in the refounding of Dublin University. The stern measures enacted in England in response to the queen’s excommunication—it was made high treason to “absolve or reconcile” anyone in accordance with the Roman rite, or to be absolved or reconciled—were soon extended to the parts of Ireland
that England controlled. The authorities were ordered to arrest anyone suspected of being Catholic. Campion, though not yet a professed Catholic, once again came under suspicion and found it advisable to move on. He quietly returned to England for a time, then crossed the Channel. He traveled to Douai, where he was received into the Catholic Church and entered the college that William Allen had established three years earlier for the education of English refugees seeking to become priests. Lord Burghley, upon learning of Campion’s conversion, lamented the loss of “one of the diamonds of England.”

There followed a decade of study and teaching. In three years at Douai—where the discussion of current politics, incidentally, was absolutely forbidden—Campion taught rhetoric while adding a degree in theology to his two Oxford diplomas. He then proceeded to Rome, where he requested and was granted admission to the young, phenomenally fast-growing Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. The order naturally not having a presence in England, he was assigned to its Austrian province. After another six years of preparation in Moravia, Vienna, and Prague, he was ordained a priest, and in 1580 he was called back to Rome to join the faculty of the English seminary recently established there. It happened that at just this time the Jesuits were being asked to send priests into England, to join those who year after year were crossing the Channel after graduating from Allen’s seminaries and one after another were being captured and killed. The Dutchman who was then general of the Jesuits hesitated before agreeing. He feared (with good reason, as time would prove) that even English members of a religious order about which England’s people knew nothing except its evil reputation among Protestants would be all too easily depicted as aliens, subversives, and traitors. That they would, having joined an order founded by the Spaniard ignatius Loyola, be entering an England whose government was relentless in depicting Spain not only as the nation’s arch-enemy but as the principal agent of the Antichrist. And that they were therefore certain to be accused of having come on a political mission. Campion is said to have shared these concerns, and at no point in his career had he shown the smallest interest in anything more than a life of quiet scholarship. Nevertheless, when it was finally decided that Jesuits would be going to England—the general’s agreement was probably inevitable, it having been part of Loyola’s vision that his men should go wherever they
were most needed—Campion along with another product of Oxford, the thirty-four-year-old Robert Persons, was chosen to be the first.

Campion and Persons were given highly specific instructions. Their purpose, the “preservation and augmentation of the faith of Catholics in England,” was to be accomplished through the delivery of the sacraments exclusively. They were not to attempt to convert Protestants or engage in disputation. As with Allen’s seminary priests, they were forbidden to give attention to political questions, to send reports on the English political situation back to the continent, or to permit anything to be said against Elizabeth in their presence. Their experience was harrowing from the start. The government was on the lookout for Campion even before his arrival, its agents on the continent having learned of his assignment, and upon landing at Dover he was detained and taken to the mayor for questioning. At first the mayor seemed inclined to disbelieve his claim to be a traveling merchant and to send him to London in custody, but in the end, somehow, Campion was let go. He reconnected with Persons, was taken into the care of the Catholic underground, and was never again out of danger.

Campion was a brilliant rhetorician, a master of Latin and English composition. It was his writing that made him the most talked-about man in England and the living symbol of the old church, the hero of his cause and a monstrously seductive liar to the enemies of that cause. The first thing that he wrote after reaching England, a short piece dashed off in half an hour, was a message to the Privy Council. Campion and Persons both wrote such messages. They did so at the request of a lay member of the underground, solely for the purpose of leaving behind, as they moved out of London and began their travels, a statement of their purpose in England that could be made public if they were captured and had no opportunity to explain themselves before being killed. In his statement, Campion defends his adherence to the old faith and asserts that he and his fellow missionaries seek only to preach the gospel and deliver the sacraments to England’s Catholics. He asks to be given a hearing before the masters of the universities (to consider his theology), the kingdom’s high judges (where the subject would be the legality of his actions), and the Privy Council (for a defense of his loyalty to the queen). The man to whom Campion entrusted the message, instead of holding it for use in case of capture as instructed, made copies and sent them to
others. Soon it was being reproduced and circulated everywhere. To its Catholic readers, long without leadership and treated as criminals, it was an inspiration. To the government it was a tissue of lies woven as a cover for conspiracy. Wherever copies were found they were destroyed. It became known by the name given by those who scorned it: “Campion’s Brag.”

Later, while traveling in the heavily Catholic north, Campion produced a longer statement in response to the Protestant pamphleteers who were, under government auspices, flooding England with condemnations of the church of Rome. He titled it
Decem Rationes
, because it sketched out ten reasons why he believed as he did. It was printed by Persons at a secret press in the Thames valley and given wide distribution: dignitaries arriving for Oxford University’s commencement exercises in June 1581 were shocked to find copies on their chairs. The resulting hubbub made Campion the personification of Catholicism in England, his elimination a matter of urgency for the Burghley administration.