And, of course, the human lessons needs not to be stressed. Tower, baited before his judges, hauled on the filthy hurdle at the tail of a horse to Tyburn Hill. Unquestionably Edmund Campion was unjustly done to death, as many before him, in all ages and of various persuasions had been done to death, and after him many more were still to be. At his trial a great show of disputation of doctrine was made, but all this, according to

He was charged with treason he had not committed treason.īut he had given heart to the English of his faith by surreptitious preaching and surreptitious administrations of the sacraments. He was charged with sedition he had incited no rebellion. Doubtless it is true, as Evelyn Waugh adduces documentary evidence to show, that Campion was falsely convicted. From that moment on his days might fittingly be described as a progress toward the cross. Would be forfeit, Campion, ten years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, landed once again on English soil. Though he knew that sooner or later his life Then Rome ordered him to England to give what mental and religious sustenance he could to the persecuted brethren. If England could have been made Catholic,Īs Mary desired, the country would have been subordinate to its two powerful neighbors, France and Spain.Įlizabeth, therefore, in sending Campion and others to the gallows was fighting less for what is called Protestantism than she was fighting for an independent, self-sufficient and powerful England.įor several years Campion, of the Jesuit order and ordained priest, had been on the Continent.

It is only possible today to see that both sets of martyrs were but pawns in a vast game of empire. Went to their death under Elizabeth the Catholics had their turn at martyrdom. His political allegiance to could give whole-heartedly his religious llegianceĪt this distance of time it is possible, as earlier it was not, to see in the great religious wars of the fifteenth to seventeenth century to what degree they were religious and to what degree economic and political. But he was of the opposite faith from the queen. In every fiber of body and mind he was an Englishman. It was evident to all that he would go far. Intellectually he was brilliant in the extreme. Velyn Waugh is a novelist rather than a historian, and 'Edmund Campion' is done with the verve and the dramatic fervorĬampion, a young man of 26 and an Oxonian, was at Oxford when Queen Elizabeth arrived there in 1566 for a great pageant and the conferring of honorary degrees. JanuEvelyn Waugh's Life of Edmund Campion By PERCY HUTCHISON

Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh