The Watchers (17 page)

At the end of Campion's sermon Eliot rushed down to find Jenkins in the buttery. He told Jenkins what he had seen, and they both left the house to summon help. They found it in the person of a local justice of the peace called Master Fettiplace, to whom they showed their commission. Within a quarter of an hour Fettiplace had gathered forty or fifty armed men, who went off with speed to Lyford Grange.
It was at about one o'clock in the afternoon when they knocked at the gates. They were kept waiting for half an hour. At last there appeared Mistress Yates, five gentlemen, one gentlewoman and three nuns. The nuns were now dressed as gentlewomen, but Eliot remembered their faces. The gates were opened, and Eliot, Jenkins and the other men began to search the house, in which they found ‘many secret corners', and also in the densely planted orchards and hedges and the ditches of the Grange's moat. The searchers discovered Francis Yates's younger brother hiding in a pigeon house with two companions. But they could not find Campion and the two other priests. It was nearly evening when Eliot realized they needed more help, and so he sent messages to the high sheriff of Berkshire and another local justice of the peace. The sheriff could not be found, but the justice, Master Wiseman, came quickly with ten or twelve of his servants, and the search continued into the night.

Early on Monday morning, the 17th, further help arrived. Christopher Lydcot, a third Berkshire justice, came to Lyford Grange with a large group of his own men. At ten o'clock the priests had still not been found. But the persistence of the searchers paid off, and it was David Jenkins the pursuivant who ‘espied a certain secret place which he found to be hollow'. With a metal spike he broke a hole in the wall, ‘where then presently he perceived the said priests, lying all close together upon a bed, of purpose there, laid for them, where they had bread, meat, and drink, sufficient to have relieved them, three or four days'. In a loud voice Jenkins called out, ‘I have found the traitors.'

Campion and his fellow priests were put under heavy guard. Along with six gentlemen and two husbandmen they were taken from Lyford Grange to Abingdon on Thursday, 20 July, and to Henley upon Thames the following day. At Henley, Eliot, Jenkins, Master Lydcot and Master Wiseman received instructions from the Privy Council to stay at Colnbrook, about twenty miles west of London, on Friday night, the 21st. They entered London on Saturday, processing through the city to the gate of the Tower of London, where Campion and the others were put into the custody of its lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton. Eyewitnesses told Robert Persons, still secretly in England, that Campion was mounted upon a very tall horse with his hands tied behind his back,
and his feet strapped together under the horse's belly. An inscription was put round his head: ‘Edmund Campion, the seditious Jesuit'.

There was a rush to the printing press. One printer lost no time at all, going to the Bishop of London and the Stationers' Company for a licence to print a pamphlet called ‘Master Campion the seditious Jesuit is welcome to London'. He paid four pence for the licence, which he received on 24 July, by which time Edmund Campion had been in the Tower for barely forty-eight hours. Within days the enterprising Anthony Munday, that young man who had lived in the English College in Rome but knew nothing of Edmund Campion, rushed into print with a breathless (and as it turned out wholly inaccurate) account of Campion's capture, in which Master Jenkins the pursuivant and the sheriff of Berkshire were the heroes. We can imagine eager customers visiting William Wright's shop next to St Mildred's church in the Poultry – ‘the middle shop in the row' – to buy Munday's story fresh from the press.

To Catholic writers Campion's story was a heroic tale of martyrdom, sacrifice and persecution. William Allen called it a ‘marvellous tragedy … containing so many strong and divers acts, of examining, racking, disputing, treacheries, proditions [treasons or treacheries], subornations of false witnesses, and the like'. Allen's mission to save England from heresy and Catholics from their persecutors became the subject of sharp exchanges between Campion's friends and enemies. One of the most energetic of these writers was Anthony Munday, who, after recognizing the mistakes of his first account of Campion's capture, collaborated with George Eliot in writing and publishing the definitive account. Eliot had come to Munday's lodgings in the Barbican and had written and then signed a statement of what had really happened. In these months – between July 1581 and April 1582 – Munday busily answered Doctor Allen's powerful books and pamphlets. Munday, the spy turned writer, relished every encounter with the Catholic enemy.

In fact the characters of Munday and his fellow intelligencers, Charles Sledd and George Eliot, were very much tied up with the story of Edmund Campion's capture. Reputations were at stake; the truth was contested. Both sides in this battle – Allen in Rheims, in London Munday, with Sledd and Eliot forced out of the shadows –
fought to establish the facts as they saw them. Everything they wrote crackled with the powerful electricity of belief and emotion, blurring fact and fiction. There were, for example, two published accounts of what Campion had said to George Eliot in the days of the journey from Lyford Grange to the Tower of London. Eliot's version hinted strongly at a threat to his own life:

Campion when he first saw me after his apprehension, said unto me, that my service done in the taking of him would be unfortunate to me. And in our journey towards the Tower, he advised me to get me out of England for the safety of my body.

Was it then a coincidence that Eliot had fallen sick at his lodgings in Southwark? The goodwife of the house in which he was staying knew nothing about her lodger till a Catholic widow told her that it was Eliot who had arrested Campion. He wrote that ‘the papists take great care for me, but whether it be for my weal or woe … let the world judge'. Eliot believed that he was a marked man.

Allen's account of what Edmund Campion said and how he behaved was very different to Eliot's recollection. Already he was making Campion a model of Catholic patience and forgiveness in the face of terrible persecution. Allen would have had very little idea of what really passed between Eliot and Campion on the journey from Lyford Grange to London. His words were meant instead as an inspiration for Catholics:

Eliot said unto him, ‘Master Campion, you look cheerfully upon every body but me; I know you are angry with me in your heart for this work.'

‘God forgive thee Eliot', said he, ‘for so judging of me: I forgive thee, and in token thereof I drink to thee, yea, and if thou wilt repent and come to confession I will absolve thee: but large penance thou must have.'

Three other priests were taken with Edmund Campion from Lyford Grange to the Tower of London. One of them, John Collerton, carved a record of his imprisonment in the wall of the Beauchamp Tower: ‘John Colle[r]ton, Pri[e]st, 1581, July 22'. Another, Thomas Ford, a Devonshire man ordained at Brussels in 1573, had been working secretly in England since 1576. William Filby, the third of Campion's companions, had dreamed at Henley upon Thames of his execution. Waking the house with ‘a very great cry and noise' in his sleep, he told Justice Lydcot that ‘he verily thought one to be ripping down his body and taking out his bowels'. It was for Filby an accurate premonition.

On 26 July Campion was taken to York House in Westminster, the residence of the lord chancellor, where he was examined by a group of privy councillors. Like other priests under questioning he chose silence over confession. Within days, the Council appointed four commissioners to interrogate him thoroughly. They were Sir Owen Hopton and Robert Beale (a clerk of the Privy Council) as well as two lawyers, John Hammond and Thomas Norton (the same Norton who later wrote the government's official defence of torture). The Council's instructions to the commissioners were clear. They were to examine Campion under oath on his loyalty to the queen. To save time and trouble he would be allowed to swear upon a copy of the Catholic Vulgate Bible. If he refused to answer their questions, the commissioners were to put him on the rack.

The examinations began on Tuesday, 1 August. The commissioners went straight to the heart of the matter. Wanting Campion to speak plainly about his loyalty to Elizabeth, they put to him a number of passages from the books of two English Catholic exiles, Richard
Bristow and Nicholas Sander. One of the texts had to do with Pope Pius V's bull of excommunication of 1570, another the so-called Catholic martyrs of the Northern Rising. A third passage, taken from Bristow, suggested that the crown's subjects were not obliged to obey the authority of wicked, apostate and heretical princes. The commissioners wanted to know if Campion believed Queen Elizabeth to be a true and lawful monarch or a ‘pretensed queen and deprived'. Campion refused to commit himself to an answer, saying that ‘he meddleth neither to nor fro'.

On these questions of loyalty, which in the coming years would be refined and put to other Catholic priests, it was impossible for Campion and his fellow prisoners to answer adequately. Any response to these interrogatories was dangerous. If the priests defended Sander and Bristow they were drawn into matters of politics, practically confessing to treason. If they tried to deflect the questions – common responses were that they did not know the answers, could not tell, or asked not to be pressed – they seemed equally to acknowledge their guilt, using their skills of guile and dissimulation to avoid speaking the truth, or so their interrogators said.

Thus Campion refused to be drawn on questions of loyalty: he would not so easily fall into a charge of high treason. But he began to give the commissioners other information on where he had stayed in England, where he had left his books and which Catholic families had sheltered him. He seems to have revealed the existence of Stephen Brinkley's secret printing press in Oxfordshire, for the press was discovered on 8 August. Brinkley and his four assistants were sent to the Tower. John Payne, the priest alleged by George Eliot to have masterminded the plan for the queen's assassination, was tortured on the rack. The four interrogators in the Tower were busy men. The Privy Council wrote to them on 14 August to thank them for their ‘pains', an Elizabethan phrasing that to modern ears is pricked with a bleak irony.

Private confessions were not enough for Elizabeth's government. Any malefactor, from the humblest offender to someone as symbolic as Edmund Campion, had to recant, to be seen to recognize his error and then to repent of it. The most public place of all was the pulpit of Paul's Cross in the shadow of the cathedral, at the heart of London.
Given the restrictions of Campion's close imprisonment in the Tower, his profound opposition to Elizabeth's Church and her government's obvious nervousness at the prospect of any publicity it could not control, such a spectacle was impossible. Instead Campion was taken to St Peter ad Vincula, the parish church of the Tower, where, before his fellow prisoners, he was invited to take part in a formal disputation with theologians of the English Church. On 31 August he faced in rigorous debate the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral and the Dean of Westminster Abbey. The two clergy, recognizing that they had been given time to prepare for a disputation and Campion had not, explained to him that they would question him only upon his ‘brag', the letter he had written to the Privy Council.

Strange as it may seem today, this formal scholarly disputation – the kind Campion and his opponents had practised hundreds of times in their university and seminary studies – went hand in glove with Campion's torture on the rack. Both, in very different ways, sought to expose truth and to encourage an admission of error. Indeed, the careful exchange of scholarly points on topics of academic detail had a curious intensity because the debate was held not so far away from the Tower's torture chamber. But this first disputation was not a courteous irrevelance. Anticipating his trial, Campion said that he was being punished for his religious beliefs. He stated that he had been put twice upon the rack, something more terrible to him, he explained, than hanging. Robert Beale, one of Campion's interrogators, pounced on this point. While on the rack had the prisoner been asked about any point of faith? Campion replied that he had not: but he had been asked his whereabouts in England and to divulge the names of his hosts and protectors. Beale's response revealed the danger of Campion's position. This information was required of Campion, Beale said, because priests had reconciled a number of Elizabeth's subjects to the Catholic Church, so withdrawing them from their true allegiance to the queen. This offence, as both men knew, was high treason under a statute of 1581. The government's case against Campion – that in his secret work as a priest he had committed acts of treason – and his defence – that his was a pastoral not a political mission – were clear even in the first disputation.

Elizabeth's advisers were nervous of the publicity caused by three
further disputations with Campion in September. News of them leaked out into London. Gossip, especially on a matter as charged and sensitive as the treason of Campion and his fellow priests, was dangerous. Thomas Norton the commissioner, plainly irritated, wrote to Lord Burghley in late September that they had kept a careful written record of each and every objection and response in the debates. Norton felt that the government had been put on the back foot, fighting a swirl of Catholic rumours: ‘our cause,' he wrote, ‘is not so subject to false reports of his [Campion's] favourers'.