Blessed Edmund Campion

onder, and pray for light in secret, for several years going about "that most ingeniose Place" (as a later lover called Oxford) with heavy thoughts. Oxford itself, despite th

knew now, in manhood, that to change about, and forsake the State religion for the only Church which is as exacting as her Master, would be to see the ruin of his happy career. His strong point, in the

ot, as has been stated, quite alone among the Elizabethan Bishops, for Downham of Chester and Ghest of Rochester shared his honourable abstinence, though in less degree. The moment Cheyney was out of the way, the Catholics on his diocesan ground, hitherto safe, were mercilessly harried. He had been made a Bishop against his will, displacing[17] the true occupant of the See, when his friend Edmund Campion was two-and-twenty. In most matters Cheyney followed Luther; Cranmer's more heretical doctrines, which prevailed on all sides in England, he thoroughly hated. He longed always for a reconciliation which was never to be, and never can be. He longed to see the Catholics (against the well-thought-out and oft-repeated prohibition of their leaders, between 1562 and 1606) do a little evil to procure a great good: namely, smooth matters over, escape their terribly severe penalties, and in the end become able to leaven the lump of English error, by the mere preliminary of attendance at the service of Common Prayer according to law, in their own old parish churches. The Book of Common Prayer, as he would remind them, was expressly designed to suit persons of various and even contradictory religious views: Catholic; not-so-very Catholic; ex-Catholic; non-Catholic; anti-Catholic! Campion often rode over the hills to Gloucester to sit by the episc

ondon to save his credit by preaching at Paul's Cross, and publicly "favouring," as they expressed it, "the religion now authorized." He begged for time, and that being granted, for more time. He attended a court of the Company in order to plead engagements, and to say that he was not his own man, while deep in academic duties and at the service of undergraduates: "divers worshipful men's chil

acrificed all his secular prospects. He wrote to his dear friend to warn him against ambition, and to urge on him escape from moral bondage. "Come!" the fervent letter cried; "if we two can but live together, we can live on

e. The end of Michaelmas term found Campion face to face for the last time with that life which he had so loved, and in which, with his scientific enthusiasm for letters, he had been such a wonderful inspiration to young

y. Two of his friends who had most concern in it were James Stanihurst, father of Richard, and Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, who had proffered it lands and money. Leicester would have provided Campion with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry, his own brother-in-law. The latter's[23] young son, Philip, was at this time a student in Oxford, where his governor, Thomas Thornton of Christ Church, afterwards Vice-Chancellor, had been constantly in Campion's society. Sir Henry Sidney always bore himself most kindly towards Campion. The latter lived, a more than welcome guest, under the roof of James Stanihurst, then Recorder of Dublin, and Speaker of the local House of Commons. Stanihurst was the head of an Anglo-Irish family not openly Catholic since Queen Mary's reign. Indeed, in his public capacity, he had often sided against Catholicism, although he was as friendly as Sidney himself to those who professed it. In the midst of this temporizing household, Campion, himself a temporizer, came during the winter to be doubted by certain bigots outside. Very possibly he was too free-spoken. Campion "came to Ireland believing in practically all Catholic dogmas, even in the Eucharist, and in the authority of the Council of Trent." The impression may have got abroad that his then un

among musty manuscript records of the city, and from library to library in the country, happily gathering in his materials for work. He had been some three months in Ireland when on a March midnight there came a sudden warning from the faithful Lord Deputy, who was on the point of leaving for England. Campion learned thereby that Weston the Chancellor h

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