It is difficult to know what to make of these reports. Offered in isolation, without other annual figures against which to compare them, there is little way of telling whether the Government’s 1577 findings show there to have been a significant growth in Catholic numbers, a change in Catholic behaviour (thanks to the influence of Allen’s missionaries), or simply (and most likely) an invigoration of the investigative process by which Catholics were being identified. Add to the mix a measure of Protestant paranoia and Catholic pride and it becomes still harder to get at the facts. But as the new decade dawned the widely held perception was that the number of practising—and thereby dissenting and potentially treacherous—Catholics had increased substantially. Here was a threat more specific and far closer to home than the potential invasion forces of Rome or Spain. And now, too, that threat could be personified. It had a name: a traitor and a turncoat’s name, the name of a former royal favourite and a courtier’s protégé, of the one-time ablest man in Oxford. As Privy Councillor Sir Walter Mildmay later testified in the Star Chamber, of all the ‘rabble of runagate friars’ there was ‘one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion’.32
News of Edmund Campion’s arrival spread quickly through the Catholic community, the buzz that had surrounded his name up at Oxford undiminished by his many years abroad. On 29 June at the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, just three days after his appearance in London, a huge audience assembled at the Smithfield house of Lord Norris, hired for the occasion by Lord Paget, to hear him speak.* As a precaution, gentlemen ‘of worship and honour’, members of George Gilbert’s association, were set to guard the doors of the house against intruders, but no guard could halt the whispers now rippling through the busy London streets. It was not long before those same whispers had reached the ears of the Government’s informers.33
Soon spies were at work across the capital, detailed to ‘sigh after Catholic sermons and to show great devotion and desire of the same, especially if any of the Jesuits might be heard’. When Robert Persons returned from his preliminary tour of the country in early July he found Campion ‘retired for his more safety’ to Southwark and the situation a grave one, the searches ‘so eager and frequent…and the spies so many and diligent’. Clearly for Campion to remain longer in London was courting danger.34
But first the two priests had another problem to address, for it was not just the English Government that harboured suspicions about the Jesuits’ intentions. Some of England’s Catholics, too, though desirous to hear Campion and Persons preach, were less than happy to welcome the pair home for a prolonged stay. At a secret conference held in Southwark, near St Mary Overies (now Southwark Cathedral), Persons and Campion met with a panel of leading Catholic laymen and priests. Persons opened the meeting. He declared under oath that neither he nor Campion had been forewarned of the Pope’s Irish invasion—they had learned of the expedition only at Reims. Next, he read out the instructions for their mission, emphasizing that their orders strictly prohibited them from dabbling in ‘matters of state’. But his protestations failed to convince one of the attending priests, who now argued that the Catholics to whom he had spoken feared the Jesuits’ mission could only ever be viewed as political by the English Government. For the good of the faith, therefore, the pair should leave the country at once. Persons refused. The Jesuits had been expressly called to the mission. If they turned back now it would represent a decisive propaganda victory for Elizabeth and her Council. His argument won the day, but in the decades to come this conflict would become a full-scale and enervating war of attrition between the rival Catholic factions.35
The conference broke up not a moment too soon. Government agents were closing in on the venue. Charles Sledd, a former student at Rome who had found it profitable on his return to England to turn Protestant informer, recognized a face familiar from his college days—that of law student and known Catholic, Henry Orton, Persons’ guide on his earlier tour of the country, now travelling to Southwark to take part in the secret meeting. Sledd fell into step behind him, but before Orton could reach his destination Sledd had him apprehended. When, just a short while later, Sledd spotted the elderly Marian priest Robert Johnson making the same journey to Southwark, the informer’s suspicions were aroused. Once again Campion and Persons had a lucky escape. Sledd’s constable, growing impatient of the hunt, broke cover too soon and arrested Johnson some distance short of the meeting house. The time had come for the two Jesuits to leave London for the comparative safety of the open road.36
Each equipped with a pair of horses, a servant, travelling clothes suitable for a gentleman and sixty pounds of spending money—all provided by George Gilbert, who accompanied them on the first leg of their journey—Campion and Persons headed north out of the city to Hoxton, where they spent the night, possibly at the house of Sir William Catesby, a landowner with Catholic sympathies. The following morning they were surprised by Thomas Pound, who had successfully bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison and had ridden through the night to intercept them. The prisoners had been talking among themselves, said Pound. If Campion or Persons were captured it would be an easy matter for the Government to paint them as traitors and political agitators. They must each, therefore, set down a declaration of their aims and the precise purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard for them. It seemed a sensible idea and the two Jesuits duly wrote out their statements, handing them to the waiting Pound before heading on their way. Persons sealed his paper; Campion left his open: a small character distinction that would have huge repercussions.37
Back in the Marshalsea, Pound read Campion’s document. He showed it to his fellow prisoners. Soon, copies of the text were circulating through the gaol, smuggled from cell to cell. Visitors to the prison carried transcripts away with them. The pages fanned out across London and to the countryside beyond, landing indiscriminately in the hands of friend and foe. Campion’s testimony, intended as a defence of his case only in the event of his arrest, was now blowing through England like a campaign manifesto.38
Campion addressed the Privy Council directly and in measured tones at first. His return home to his ‘dear Country’ was ‘for the glory of God and the benefit of souls’. He was ‘strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm’. He begged for a chance to defend the Catholic faith before the Privy Council and an assembly of judges and theologians, so certain was he that no one could fail to be persuaded of the rightness of his argument if they would only give him an ‘indifferent and quiet audience’. But then, in a flourish of rhetoric familiar from his Oxford days, Campion laid down a challenge that horrified his Protestant readers: ‘be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world…—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’. Even now, gathered beyond the seas, were ‘many innocent hands’, all of whom were ‘determined never to give you over, but either to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. To Catholics it was a blast of hope. To Protestants, and to Elizabeth’s Government in particular, it was a war cry. If Campion had been a wanted man before, now he had become the official spokesman of the Catholic mission and a voice to be silenced at all costs.39
The immediate aim of the Jesuits’ mission, highlighted by the awkward few hours spent by Persons on his arrival searching for a Catholic contact to aid him, was to bring order to the local efforts of Allen’s seminary missionaries. Successful the seminary priests had undoubtedly been, but their successes were isolated. What was required was a coherent, national scheme, providing a country-wide network of priests capable of administering to all England’s Catholics.