2 The Man and the Mission
Thus much for the inspiration and general significance of Campion’s work considered as a whole. It will also repay a much more minute study, and to appreciate it we must enter into further details.
As to the man himself, suffice it to say that he was a Londoner; his father a publisher; his first school Christ’s Hospital; that he was afterwards a Fellow of St. John’s, Oxford, and held at the same time an exhibition from the Grocer’s Company. At Oxford he accepted to some extent the Elizabethan Settlement of religion, but not sufficiently to satisfy the Company of Grocers, who eventually withdrew their exhibition. This was a sign for further inquisitorial proceedings, which made him leave the University, and retire to Dublin; but he was driven also thence by the zealots for Protestantism. Eventually he went over to the English College at Douay, whence he migrated to Rome, entered the Society of Jesus, and after eight years’ training had returned, a priest, to his native country, forty years old. His strong point was undoubtedly a singularly lovable character, and he possessed the gift of eloquence in no ordinary degree. For the rest, his natural qualities and acquired accomplishments were above the ordinary level, without reaching an extraordinary height. He was a man who never ceased working, and whose temper was always angelic, though he sometimes suffered from severe depression. He was adored by his pupils both at Oxford and in Bohemia. His memory was always bright, and his conversation always sparkled with fresh thoughts and poetical ideas. He composed with extraordinary facility in Latin prose and verse; but the extant fragments of these literary exercises do not strike us as being of unusual excellence, though genuinely admired in their day. He was certainly an ideal missioner: saintly, inspired, eloquent, untireable, patient, consumed with the desire for the success of his undertaking, and unfaltering in his faith that success would follow by the providential action of God, despite the obvious fact that all appearances were against him.
Campion landed at Dover late in June, 1580, and reached London at the end of the month. There was an immediate rush to hear him, and Lord Paget was persuaded to lend his great hall at Paget House in Smithfield to accommodate a congregation for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The sermon was delivered on the text from the Gospel of the day, Tu es Christus, Filius Dei vivi. The hall was filled, and the impression caused by the sermon was profound; but the number of hearers had been imprudently large. Though no arrests followed, the persecutors took the alarm, and increased their activity to such an extent that large gatherings had for ever to be abandoned; and after a couple of weeks both Campion and Persons left London to escape the notice of the pursuivants, whose raids and inquisitorial searches were making the lot of Catholics in town unbearable, whereas in the country the pursuit was far less active, and could be much more easily avoided. The two Fathers met for the last time at Hoxton, then a village outside London, to concert their plans for the next couple of months, and were on the point of starting, each for his own destination, when a Catholic of some note rode up from London. This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for religion. Mr. Pounde’s message in effect was this. “You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure that whatever then comes through to the outer world will come out poisoned and perverted. Let me therefore urge you to write now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to have published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about during your incarceration, rumours which you will then not be able to answer or to repudiate.” Father Persons seems to have agreed at once. Campion at first raised objections, but soon, with his ever obliging temper, sat down at the end of the table and wrote off in half an hour an open letter To the Lords of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, afterwards so well known as Campion’s Challenge.