Edmund Campion

A biography of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion (1540–81) has long been necessary. For supporters and enemies alike, Campion’s trial and the reactions to it did much to establish the nature of confessional conflict in the British Isles well into the seventeenth century. Gerard Kilroy’s life is a masterful work: always based on a careful examination of the evidence, it is thoughtfully conceived and written. The author has discovered a wealth of new archival sources, most importantly a number of Latin manuscripts in Prague, where Campion spent what were probably his happiest years, which enables him to fill out Campion’s life in impressive detail. Our understanding of Campion as an eloquent, gentle, courteous and superhumanly brave man is not substantially different from the established popular understanding of him, but we now have much more evidence on which to base such a judgement. Campion was always a man of principle. He saw the earl of Leicester as the most brutal of vice-chancellors while at Oxford, placing his own creatures in positions of power, and complained bitterly that no one dared to contradict Elizabeth’s favourite and that he left the arts ‘unkempt and almost drowned in sorrow’ (p. 45). Oxford was a thriving, largely Catholic university in 1566 when Campion was chosen to address the monarch, but a ghost of its former self when he returned in 1581, as so many major scholars had gone into exile. Kilroy writes especially well on the vigorous and often vicious confessional debates of the 1560s, showing how Campion tried to use his influence to protect Catholics, such as Robert Persons, from taking the Oath of Supremacy. Eventually, things became too difficult and, under the guise of a licence to travel for five years, Campion decamped to Rome via Ireland, where he stayed with the Stanihursts and wrote his History of Ireland, before the impact of Pius V’s Regnans in Excelsis, which fatally divided English religious life. Finding pleasant refuge under the regime of Rudolf II, Campion flourished in a tranquil refuge characterised by ‘religious toleration and academic competition’ (p. 102). Here he developed his understanding that religion and politics should be kept as separate as possible, and he would try to persuade the English to return to the true church. If there is a villain in the story it is probably Cardinal William Allen, who ‘pulled the thread that would tug Campion back from his scholarly explorations of Aristotle into the murderous whirlpool of English politics’ (p. 130). Campion’s is a British story too: Nicholas Sander’s under-resourced invasion of Ireland scuppered Campion’s mission before it started: ‘Campion had to pay the cost of Sander’s crimes’ (p. 333)

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