Edmund Campion

Life and Ministry

Edmund Campion was born in 1540 in London to a Catholic bookseller's family and was the brightest student of his generation at St John's College Oxford, elected to a fellowship at seventeen and singled out by Queen Elizabeth herself when she visited the university in 1566. He took Anglican deacon's orders and was for several years the most promising young scholar of the Elizabethan establishment. Conscience drove him to Douai in the Spanish Netherlands in 1569; at Rome he entered the Society of Jesus in 1573, was ordained a priest in 1578, and was sent back to England in 1580 with Robert Persons as the leaders of the first Jesuit mission to a country in which the Catholic Mass had been illegal for twenty-one years.

Circumstances of Death

Campion ministered in disguise across central and northern England for thirteen months — riding by night, celebrating Mass at recusant manor houses by day, writing the Decem Rationes (Ten Reasons against the Anglican settlement) which he had four hundred copies printed and slipped into the pews of St Mary's Oxford during the 1581 commencement service. He was betrayed at Lyford Grange in Berkshire on July 16, 1581, hidden in a priest-hole in the wall, found after a two-day search. Taken to the Tower he was racked three times in the attempt to extract the names of his hosts. He named no one. He was tried at Westminster Hall on November 20 on a charge of treason — fabricated, since he had committed no treasonable act, but the only legal mechanism to execute a priest in Elizabeth's England — and sentenced to death. On December 1, 1581, he was drawn through the streets of London to Tyburn on a hurdle, hanged, cut down alive, drawn (his bowels removed), and quartered.

Legacy

Campion became the model of the English Catholic missionary priest under Elizabeth — Robert Persons abroad, Henry Garnet at home, and the long line of seminary priests who followed all consciously took him as their pattern. His Decem Rationes remained in print for two centuries as a standard recusant apologia. His death-day speech from the scaffold, preserved by an eyewitness Catholic gentleman, ended with the words "I am a Catholic man and a priest. In that faith have I lived, and in that faith do I intend to die." The Tyburn Convent at the corner of Hyde Park was founded in 1903 in memory of the 105 Catholic martyrs who died at the same spot under Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I.