The Watchers (18 page)

Richard Verstegan's view of Elizabethan persecution: the rack and other tortures in the Tower of London.

The disputations ended in September, but Campion's torture continued into October. By now the crown's law officers were involved in the interrogations upon the rack, a sure sign that his trial was approaching. There was a cluster of prosecutions in Star Chamber in Westminster Palace of gentlemen who had sheltered and harboured Campion in his secret work throughout England. The record of the trial of six men – one baron, two knights, two gentlemen and a gentlewoman, the elite of Elizabethan society – stated that ‘to
accomplish his wicked and lewd devices', Edmund Campion had come into the realm and used aliases and disguises ‘in a very ruffian-like sort'. They were sent to the Fleet prison to be kept in close confinement ‘until they shall conform themselves in obedience and duty towards Her Majesty', each also to be heavily fined.

All of this was preparatory to the main event: the trial of Edmund Campion and other Catholic priests in Westminster Hall in November 1581. Once again, Elizabeth's government was plainly nervous. Campion had to be tried in the correct way, shown publicly to be a traitor, not the victim of religious persecution. This explains why close to the trial the law officers and Privy Council changed their minds about how to indict him. A first indictment stated that Campion ‘did traitorously pretend to have power' to absolve Elizabeth's subjects from their obedience to the queen and ‘to move the same … to promise obedience' to the Pope. The law used here was the one Robert Beale had alluded to in the first of the Campion disputations. To reconcile a subject to Rome by whatever means was high treason by the statute of 1581. But would that suggest, as Campion had argued throughout, that he was on trial for his religious faith, for his pastoral work as a priest? Certainly it might have done – inside the courtroom and outside it, in gossip on the streets of London, in the fierce Catholic pamphlets printed abroad and smuggled into England.

So the indictment was changed. The law officers dispensed entirely with Tudor statutes. They went instead back to the fourteenth century, to a law passed by a parliament of King Edward III in 1352. This act made it treason to compass the king's death, to levy war against him or to adhere to his enemies. But to try Campion under this statute was likewise a risk. True, it had nothing to do with faith, Church or religion. But there would have to be sound and convincing evidence that Campion and the other priests tried with him had indeed plotted abroad. The revised indictment stated that the priests had at various times in Rome, Rheims ‘and divers other places in parts beyond the seas' conspired to ‘deprive, cast down and disinherit' Elizabeth; ‘to bring and put the same Queen to death and final destruction'; to cause a miserable slaughter in England; to set up insurrection and rebellion in the kingdom; and to induce foreigners to make war against the queen. Their crime, simply, was treason.

William Allen's account of Edmund Campion in
A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholicques
, 1584.

So how could these charges be proved? Where was the evidence? Out the shadows stepped three men who could offer eyewitness testimony. They were Anthony Munday, once a student of the English College in Rome; Charles Sledd, formerly servant and courier to the priests and exiles; and George Eliot, yeoman of Her Majesty's chamber, who had helped to capture Edmund Campion at Lyford Grange.

William Allen, hardly surprisingly, called the trial of Campion and the other priests of the Tower of London ‘The most pitiful practice that ever was heard of to shed innocent blood by the face of justice'. At the same trial Allen was found guilty of high treason in his absence and outlawed. To Elizabeth's government the conviction of Campion and
the others was a vindication of its integrity as a kingdom founded upon law. State and Church had to be protected against political enemies. Justice was done. Lord Burghley later wrote bluntly of Campion that he was discovered disguised as a roister (a bully or ruffian) and suffered for his treasons. To counter the image of Campion as a Catholic martyr, Elizabeth's government described him as a crude and common rebel.

The arguments of the trial followed predictable paths. The prosecuting lawyers put to Campion the evidence of Catholic treasons. They set out the efforts of the Pope to remove Elizabeth from her throne. They spoke of rebellion and conspiracy. Campion said he refused to see how these points were relevant to him and the others on trial. ‘Let not other men's offences be laid to our charge', was how Anthony Munday remembered Campion's words. The prosecution claimed that the books of Nicholas Sander and Richard Bristow, which had been used by interrogators in the Tower to examine the priests' loyalty to the queen, were set texts in the English seminaries of Rheims and Rome. The men on trial for their lives denied that any such thing was the case. And then Campion deployed the most important and powerful of all the arguments in his defence. His mission, he said, was pastoral and not political. The court could not determine matters of conscience. As priest, he stated, he would never reveal matters of conscience, ‘come rack, come rope'.

The crown had to prove its case. And so for the first time in public view the spies and pursuers of priests came face to face with the men they had lived and travelled with and whose loyalty, for reasons of faith or politics or self-interest, they had betrayed. Already their names and reputations were well known to English Catholics: Sledd the priest-hunter, Munday the writer clashing in print with William Allen, Eliot the enemy of Campion. The moment must have been electric. Munday, only two years before this a young scholar in Rome, testified to the conspiracies he had heard talked about in the city. Eliot gave evidence that Robert Johnson, who was on trial with Campion, had fallen into acquaintance with John Payne, the priest who knew of the plot to murder Elizabeth and her senior ministers. In Westminster Hall Johnson denied Eliot's accusation. Luke Kirby, another of the priests on trial, likewise disputed Sledd's evidence that Kirby had
attended a treasonable sermon given by William Allen. Kirby, the young Yorkshireman, faced two accusers: the formidable Sledd and Munday, whose friend he had been.

Most devastating of all was the secret dossier Charles Sledd had written for Sir Francis Walsingham, portions of which were read out at the trial. More extraordinary still, there is some evidence that Sledd's file was doctored to fit the circumstances. It takes a keen eye to spot the adjustments: they are small, but their implications are profound. At one point in the manuscript the name of a spy in Paris – a gentleman ‘appertaining to Sir Francis Walsingham' – was heavily inked out. There are a couple of other minor alterations. The most significant adjustment of all is easily missed but critical given the fact that Sledd had never set eyes upon Campion till perhaps that very day, or at least after Campion's capture at Lyford Grange. Sledd knew all but one of the men standing in the dock in Westminster Hall: he had served them in Rome and he had walked with them on the long roads through Italy and France to Paris and Rheims. He could describe them, so well in fact that they had been picked up and arrested on the streets of London. He did not know, and certainly had not met in Rome, Edmund Campion. And yet Campion's name was added to Sledd's catalogue of priests who had set out in 1579 and 1580 from Rome to Rheims and England. Just above the name of Robert Persons in the manuscript are the words ‘Edmund Campion, priest Jesuit'. His is the only entry without either a concise biography or a physical description.

The truth of all of this has been lost to time. It may be that Sledd, a stickler for detail, added Campion's name to his dossier when he found out about Campion's mission to England. Perhaps it was later added for the sake of completeness. Or it may have been a plain fabrication, by Sledd or by one of Walsingham's men, the purpose of which was to prove Campion's associations with priests in Italy and France Sledd had heard plot treason. The circumstances of the trial, which was a critical and symbolic one for Elizabeth's government, suggest that no effort was spared to bring about success. The priests would always deny the evidence of the spies. It could be said that together Sledd and Munday proved nothing: they merely said the same thing without any firm evidence. And so what were one or two alterations to a document read out in evidence when after all those
alterations merely supported the plain facts and truth of what had happened? Campion and his fellow priests were traitors: that had been clear to Elizabeth's government from the beginning. In November and December 1581 there was never any serious doubt that Edmund Campion and his fellow priests would not be found guilty of high treason. That could have been predicted, indeed, from the moment David Jenkins the pursuivant broke through into the priest-hole at Lyford Grange.

Richard Verstegan's view of Elizabethan persecution: priests are drawn on hurdles to the gallows to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Predictably the Catholic presses of Rheims savaged the spies for their false witness against the martyr priests. Anthony Munday was ‘cogging [cheating, deceiving] Munday', the failed and erring apprentice. Charles Sledd was a lowly servant and betrayer. George Eliot was ‘Judas Eliot' or ‘Eliot Iscariot'. For the Catholic polemicists, the spies' false testimony and moral bankruptcy put their characters into very sharp relief. Anthony Munday was even at the gallows at Tyburn to see Campion die. The young writer felt a flush of satisfaction at seeing justice done. Answering the pamphlet of a Catholic priest who had
been there also, Munday stamped on any suggestion of Campion's glorious martyrdom. Campion was smooth, facile, subtle and dangerous. Wickedness, Munday wrote, had been planted in him by the Devil.

On 1 December 1581, a Friday, Campion was tied to a wicker hurdle that was dragged by horses along the roads near St Paul's Cathedral, through Holborn and close to Newgate prison, along Oxford Street and to the place of execution. This was the customary journey from prison to the gallows. At Tyburn he and two other priests, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant, were hanged till each was almost dead and then cut down from the gallows. While each man was still just alive he was cut open and his genitals and bowels, removed by the public hangman, were burned before him. To those who saw it or read about it, this terrible evisceration was the definitive mark of either treason to queen and country or martyrdom for the true faith of Christ. Munday saw it thus:

Her Majesty to be depriv'd of life,

A foreign power to enter in our land:

Secret rebellion must at home be rife,

Seducing priests, receiv'd that charge in hand

All this was cloaked with religious show

But justice tried, and found it was not so.

A Catholic priest who saw Campion die wrote:

Religion there was treason to the Queen,

preaching of penance war against the land,

priests were such dangerous men as have not been,

prayers and beads were fight and force of hand,

cases of conscience bane unto the state,

so blind is error, so false a witness is hate.

Whatever the truth, it was a grim victory for both sides: for Elizabeth's government security, for Catholic polemicists propaganda.

On the day of Campion's execution John Hart, the priest who had preached on the subject of martyrdom when Charles Sledd was in Rheims, wrote a long letter from the Tower to Sir Francis Walsingham. Hart thanked Walsingham for his special favour and gave the
queen's secretary ‘such undoubted hope of my life if my conformity shall be agreeable thereunto'. Hart composed and corrected his letter quickly, given fluency by urgency and anxiety. Already convicted of high treason yet so far spared the gallows, Hart wrote for his life.

He made his loyalty to Elizabeth plain from the beginning. He knew from everything that had been said to him in the Tower that ‘some great matter' was intended against the realm. He understood that Walsingham knew this also, flattering Sir Francis: ‘forasmuch as whiles conspiracies be but yet thought upon, your honour for your singular wisdom doth forecast how to prevent [them] before they take place'. Confirming what Elizabeth's government knew already, Hart wrote that it was William Allen who ‘of all others whom I knew beyond the seas must be made privy' to any plot. He offered himself as a spy able to get close to Allen, to know ‘the very secrets of his whole heart'.