was examined, "whether Campion was in his house, did say Mass or preach there, who were present thereat, or such-like:" therefore, if the confession was not a forgery, Campion confessed where he said Mass and preached, and before whom, a thing which he declared on the scaffold that he had never done. The confession went down to such particulars as that he was in Tresham's house, that he lay in his house and in a certain chamber; that he had talk with Tresham, and what talk, and such-like: all which things Tresham declared that he could not remember; though he would take no oath, because it might endanger his ears, and because "it would be a great sin uncharitably to belie him, to make him and myself both guilty by my oath, who to my knowledge are most innocent. Tresham already perceived that the alleged confession was a forgery. He said, that possibly Campion might have been at his house incognito, and demanded to be confronted with him,—a request that his accusers were careful not to grant. Moreover, both Vaux and Catesby strenuously denied that Campion had been at their houses: and no one can read the account of their trial* without believing them; especially when we consider that Campion and Parsons laboured in different fields, and that these men, according to More,† were converts of F. Parsons, not of F. Campion. To enforce his confession, the letter of Campion to Pound was produced, "wherein he did take notice that by frailty he had confessed of some houses where he had been; which now he repented him, and desired Mr. Pound to beg him. pardon of the Catholics therein, saying that in this he only rejoiced that he had discovered no things of secret.” In the report of Campion's trial‡ we have another account of this letter: "The clerk of the crown read a letter sent from Campion unto one Pound, a Catholic, part of the contents whereof was this: It grieveth me much to have offended the Catholic cause so highly as to confess the names of some gentlemen and friends in whose houses I had been entertained: yet in this I greatly cherish and comfort myself that I never discovered any secrets there declared, and that I will not, come rack, come rope.' "§ It is impossible now to say which is the more authentic * See Rambler, January 1857. + Hist. S.J. Prov. Aug. lib. iii. c. 11. State Trials, vol. i. col. 1060. § A third version of this letter is to be found in Anthony Munday's "Discoverie," f iii. 2: "That he was very sorry that through his frailty he had betrayed those at whose houses he had been so friendly entertained; wherefore he asked God heartily forgiveness, and them all, whom he had so highly offended. But as for the chief matter, that is as yet unrevealed; and, come rack, come rope, never shall that be discovered." VOL. IX.-NEW SERIES. I report of this letter-that contained in the former or the latter extract both depend on Mss. in the same collection at the British Museum; both reports were made up after the respective trials, from notes taken at the time; neither, therefore, can be trusted quite implicitly, so far as to determine which phrase was used,-" that he had discovered no things of secret," or "that he never discovered any secrets there declared." Whatever the exact words were, the queen's counsel argued that they sounded very suspiciously and treason-like: "What he concealeth must be some grievous matter, and very precious, that neither the rack nor the rope can wring from him. It were well these hidden secrets were revealed, and then would appear the very face of these treasons.' To this Campion answered: "As I am by profession and calling a priest, so have I solemnly vowed to God never to disclose any secrets confessed. . By virtue of this profession I was accustomed to be privy to divers men's secrets; and those not such as concerned state or commonwealth, whereunto my authority was not extended, but such as so charged the grieved soul and conscience, whereof I had power to pray for absolution.* These were the hidden matters; these were the secrets concerning which I so greatly rejoiced, to the revealing whereof I cannot nor will not be brought, come rack, come rope." At his martyrdom, after" desiring all them to forgive him. whose names he had confessed upon the rack,-for upon the commissioners' oaths that no harm should come to them, he uttered some persons with whom he had been,” "Further, he declared the meaning of a letter sent by himself to Mr. Pound, in which he wrote that he would not disclose the secrets of some houses where he had been entertained' affirming upon his soul, that the secrets he meant in that letter were not, as it was misconstrued by the enemy, treason or conspiracy, or any matter else against her majesty or the state; but saying of Mass, hearing confessions, preaching, and such-like duties and functions of priesthood. This he protested to be true, as he would answer before God." We quite agree with Mr. Flanagan, that to deny all this evidence, or to make it all a result of the "historiographical style" of the writers, is not criticism; and we candidly own that our remarks read very much like such a denial; but we did not intend them absolutely as such. We had to harmonise contradictory facts: on one hand, Campion's public proclamation before his enemies on the 31st of August, that he had never betrayed his friends; on the other, his expression of *This expression shows how little we can trust the verbal accuracy of even friendly reporters. sorrow on the scaffold that he had confessed their names. Some theory was necessary: we supposed that the "eye-witness" might have doctored Campion's last speech; we know he did so in some points, because his first edition of it differs from his second. We have no doubt that he related the topics truly enough; but when he had to fill-in the details from memory, the historiographical habit of the time would naturally lead him to turn the speech into an apology. The same thing has been done by the reporter of Campion's trial, who, after sentence pronounced, puts into the martyr's mouth a long string of texts omitted by Howell in the State Trials, partly as nonsensical, partly as illegible. The writers of that time did doctor speeches; and when it is a question of particular words and expressions, we cannot assume the certainty of their correctness. There can be no doubt in the world about the reality of Campion's declaration that he had not betrayed any one; it is found in the report published by his enemies; it was found also in the friendly report preserved in the English College at Rome, which Bombinus used. According to the latter, one of the lords of the council, after affirming that Campion had not been tortured for religion but for treason, added, "Do you think that thing to be a secret which, though you obstinately concealed it at your examination, is yet known to the whole country and to your judges?" And Campion answers, that he was racked for no other reason than because he persevered in refusing to tell who had received him into their houses, had relieved him, had been absolved by him, or heard his Masses.* "No one was ever racked," says Norton, "unless he obstinately said, and persisted in saying, that he would not tell truth though the queen commanded him."† It is clear that, up to a time posterior to the committal of Vaux, Tresham, Catesby, and the others (who in the beginning of November complain that they have been many months in prison), Campion had made no confession, except perhaps confirming the confessions of others. And all his biographers agree in this; the "eye-witness," who in one place reports that on the rack he had confessed the names of some at whose houses he had been, in another place declares that the only things he had told were, that he had sent his book to Pound and Richardson. Bombinus and F. More omit all mention of the report; Bartoli mentions it only to deny it: "The Protestant accounts of Campion," he says, 66 are a mosaic of * Bombinus, cap. xlvii. pp. 226, 227, ed. Mantua, lies. . . . Holinshed makes him confess to Pound that the pain of the rack had conquered his resolution, and been too much for his weakness, and had compelled him to reveal and betray his friends and Catholic benefactors, naming them one by one; for which he was immensely sorry, and in his person begged pardon of all the Catholics.' But the truth was exactly the reverse; for Baron Hunsdon, who assisted at his racking, after having put a quantity of questions, and having received no answers, exclaimed, 'He will sooner let his heart be racked out of his body than a word out of his mouth, when he thinks it a duty of charity to be silent, or makes a scruple of speaking.' And this was true.' 66 "'* If, therefore, we were totally to deny the authenticity of all the evidence we have quoted for Campion's confession, our criticism" would be only that of Bombinus, More, Bartoli, and, let us add, of the "eye-witness" himself. But we by no means go so far; we only contend that the biographers of the sixteenth century were so much more apologetical than truthful, that one can never be sure of an expression: for instance, one reporter makes Campion in his letter deny that he had revealed the secrets declared in Catholic houses; another, that he had revealed any thing of secret. Which expression is the real one? They differ toto cælo from each other, and yet only one of them can be true. We attribute, then, the contradiction partly to the inaccuracy of the reporters, partly to Campion's own humility. We said that, though he had disclosed nothing of secret, nothing which was not abundantly manifest without his confession, "Yet when Poundes, who had heard, and partly believed the reports of his weakness, wrote to him to know if he had really acted the traitor, his tender conscience reproached him even for this entirely indifferent act. He begged pardon for having simply confessed the names of his entertainers, who were otherwise well known by their own confession; he protested that he had told nothing of secret, and declared that, 'come rack, come rope,' his persecutors should not extract another word out of him that they could make use of." But why, it will be said, did he not clear his character on the scaffold, instead of begging pardon for having confessed these names? There are two reasons, each abundantly sufficient to account for the fact, which together serve to make our position much stronger. First, the persecutors were in possession of a list of Campion's entertainers, confessed by themselves and confirmed by Campion: this was not a perfect list, because (so far as it was not a forgery) it contained only those names which could be discovered independently * Inghilterra, lib. iii. cap. iii. p. 173, fol. ed. of Campion. Now suppose on the scaffold he had triumphantly proclaimed that they had got nothing out of him; that they only knew those few names which chance had offered to them, but that he had obstinately suppressed all the others; who does not see what a furious persecution might have arisen,—how all the suspected neighbours of those who were known to have received him would have been imprisoned and tortured and fined; whereas by allowing government to proclaim the fiction that they knew all Campion's entertainers, no occasion for this persecution was given. Campion was bound in charity to act as he did. Secondly, Campion was not the man to strive and cry out in the streets to restore his good name; he was quite enough of a saint willingly to submit to opprobrium, and even to court it. Sensitive as he was to the honour of God and of the Church, he even sought opportunities to diminish the honour which was given to himself, so far as he could do it consistently with his utility to the Church. A notable instance of this occurred in his first conference in the Tower. We will quote the account of the “ witness:" eye "In order to show more clearly Campion's wonderful modesty, and the impudence of his adversaries, I will relate one or two examples. In the discussion a text of Scripture was cited corruptly: Campion objected. A Greek Testament was produced, but an edition of no correctness; Campion therefore refused to read the text from it. They, in their rash judgment, immediately concluded he did not know Greek; and so, to laugh at him, and make him appear ridiculous, they cried out, Græcum est, non legitur. But he, thinking this disgrace had nothing to do with the cause on hand, bore it untroubled, and rested at the matter as a man unable to read or understand Greek. But at a later period of the dispute, a passage of St. Basil was produced, and the book handed to Campion, who was invited to read it, if he could. He took the book, read the passage, and translated it; and then added, 'You can bear me witness that I can read Greek.'"* Nowell and Day give their account of the matter thus: "We offered the Greek Testament first, and afterwards Nazianzen in Greek, to Campion to read: . . . but he refused to read in the Greek Testament altogether; and when St. Basil and Nazianzen in Greek were offered to him to read, he said once or twice, 'I know, I know it is as ye have alleged ;'_ which we took to be a shift to avoid the reading of it himself. But when he was urged, and Master Stollard, who stood by, took the book and held it to him, he read; but so softly, as it were to himself, that we may with good conscience protest before God that we heard not one * Bridgewater, p. 59. |