Campion

Campion, EDMUND, the first of the English Jesuit martyrs, nicknamed 'the pope's champion,' was born in 1540, the son of a London tradesman, and was brought up at the new Bluecoat school. Being a bright and well-spoken lad, he was in his thirteenth year selected to pronounce an harangue before Mary Tudor on her triumphant entry into London. Later on, at St John's College, Oxford (1566), he greeted Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester with a similar display of oratory. The queen complimented him on his eloquent tongue. He became the most popular man at the university, but he still hankered after the old religion, which he had first abandoned by taking the new oath of supremacy, and afterwards more publicly by receiving deacon's orders in the Church of England. In 1569 he left Oxford and betook himself to Ireland to help in re-establishing the Dublin University. But becoming suspected of leanings towards Rome, and fearing arrest, he escaped to Douai, and shortly afterwards joined the Society of Jesus in Bohemia. In 1580 he was recalled from Prague, where he was professor of Rhetoric, to accompany Parsons on the Jesuit mission into England. His career in England was brief but eventful. For twelve months he eluded the pursuivants, while no man in the country was more talked of. The audacity of his controversial manifesto known as Campion's 'Brag and challenge,' which was followed by his Decem Rationes, or 'Ten Reasons,' printed at a secret press set up in Stonor Park, greatly irritated his opponents. In July 1581 he was caught at Lyford, and sent up to London, tied on horseback, with a paper stuck on his hat inscribed 'Campion, the Seditious Jesuit.' He was tried on a charge of conspiracy of which he was undoubtedly innocent; for it is to his credit that, unlike his brethren Parsons, Holt, and others, he never meddled with political plots. The conferences held by him in the Tower and the proceedings of his trial made a considerable sensation both in England and on the Continent. He was executed with two secular priests on December 1, 1581; and, with other sufferers in the same cause, was beatified by Leo XIII. in 1886. See Simpson's Edmund Campion (1867; new ed. 1896).