The pursuivants were held at the gate while Campion was hidden away. Then the doors were opened and the soldiers began their search for him. In the hours that followed they discovered ‘many secret corners’ but no sign of Campion. Mr Fettiplace grew apologetic at the inconvenience he was causing his neighbours; George Eliot grew more resolute—now he and Jenkins took charge of the search. That night a guard was set about the house and next day the hunt resumed.49
It was chance that finally led to Campion’s discovery. As the despondent pursuivants made to leave after a fruitless morning’s search, by now ‘clear void of any hope’, Jenkins ‘espied a chink in the wall of boards’ over the stairwell, ‘which he quickly found to be hollow’. Seizing a crowbar he broke through to a small chamber beyond, where Campion and two other priests lay concealed.* 50
It was chance, too, that had led Eliot to Lyford in the first place. He was, he later admitted, on the trail of the seminary priest John Payne.† When he saw a servant keeping watch on the roof of Lyford he had simply decided to investigate further. With two such simple instances of chance the Jesuit mission lay in ruins.51
Campion was led up to London under armed escort. With him were Fathers Ford and Collington, the two Lyford priests discovered with him in the hiding place, nine laymen, accused of aiding and abetting him and attending his forbidden mass, and the luckless Father William Filby, who had arrived at Lyford in secret only to find the place overrun with pursuivants and the magistrates in possession. At Henley, where the party spent the first night, Robert Persons, now in hiding at nearby Stonor, was able to send a servant to see how the captives were being treated. The servant reported back that Campion appeared in good spirits and was on friendly terms with his guards. It was George Eliot who was treated with disdain by soldiers and magistrates alike. Members of the watching crowds were even bold enough to shout out ‘Judas’ at the informer as he passed by.52
As the party neared London, though, the procession took on a different aspect. At the Council’s request the prisoners were pinioned in their saddles, their arms strapped tightly behind them and their legs bound together by a rope slung beneath the belly of their mount. Campion, himself, rode at the front of the cavalcade, a sign about his head reading ‘Edmund Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. In this fashion they passed through the streets of London to the Tower.53
The trial of Edmund Campion took place on 20 November 1581, four months after his arrest and imprisonment. The charges laid against him, and those arraigned with him, were that on specific dates in Rome and in Reims the previous year, Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, William Allen, the layman Henry Orton and the entire haul of priests then in custody, including Ralph Sherwin, Edward Rishton, Robert Johnson, the Lyford priests, Thomas Ford and John Collington, and William Filby, had conspired to murder Queen Elizabeth. Further to this they had been privy to foreign invasion plans—they, themselves, were the advance party for that invasion, sent to stir up rebellion. It is unclear why the original indictment, which invoked Parliament’s new Treason Act, was dropped in favour of these accusations. Perhaps Elizabeth’s reluctance to make martyrs had something to do with it—political enemies of England deserved execution, but so many priests dying solely for their faith smacked strongly of religious persecution for its own sake. More likely, though, it was a calculated attempt by the Government to turn what might have become an intellectual argument about the lawfulness of the Anglican Church—in which Campion might have triumphed—into an emotive debate about national security. Either way, the Council dropped what would have been a legal, if unpopular, arraignment on the grounds of converting the Queen’s subjects to Catholicism, in favour of these trumped-up charges of mass conspiracy to murder.* It was entirely in keeping with the paranoia of the age.54
Also in keeping was the procession of shady characters brought out to testify against the accused. The informant Charles Sledd swore that while in Rome and in Reims he had learned of the invasion plans from William Allen and one of the prisoners, Luke Kirby. George Eliot claimed that Campion, in his Lyford sermon, had spoken of ‘a great day’ that was soon to come, and that another of the prisoners had sworn him to secrecy about the plot. And the arch-fabricator Anthony Munday was brought in to announce to a packed courtroom that the English seminary students were schooled in treason, that Henry Orton had told him at Lyons that Elizabeth was not the rightful Queen of England—Orton vehemently denied ever having set eyes on Munday before—and that Edward Rishton was a skilled maker of fireworks who was planning to burn Elizabeth in her royal barge with ‘a confection of wild fire’, an event to be followed by a general massacre of all those not in possession of the password ‘Jesus Maria’.† The verdict was a foregone conclusion.55
Campion had always believed he was coming home to England to die. The night before his departure from Prague a colleague had inscribed on the door above his cell P. Edmundus Campianus, Martyr. Earlier, another priest had painted a garland of roses and lilies on the wall above his bed—the symbol of martyrdom. On the morning of 1 December 1581 Campion was led out from the Tower, through the driving rain and the mud-choked London streets, to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the assembled crowds. With him were Father Alexander Briant, a close friend of Robert Persons, and Father Ralph Sherwin, the young seminarian who had set off from Rome with Campion and Persons in such high spirits the year before.56
In May the following year seven more priests were executed, including Thomas Ford, Luke Kirby, Robert Johnson and William Filby. Edward Rishton and the layman Henry Orton, though both found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, were not executed. They were kept prisoner in the Tower until January 1585 when they were forcibly deported to France. Father John Collington was able to find a witness to confirm he had been resident in England since July 1576 and therefore could not have been in Reims and Rome on the dates specified. Like Orton and Rishton he was exiled to France in January 1585, having spent the intervening years in the comparative comfort of the Marshalsea prison.
After Campion’s execution the lay brother Ralph Emerson escaped from England and made his way safely to Rouen. He joined in exile George Gilbert, the Jesuits’ friend, guide and self-appointed financier, whose activities had placed him in grave danger of arrest and who had been persuaded to leave England shortly before Campion’s capture. As for Robert Persons, with Campion’s arrest the Government now turned its attention wholly on him. Clearly, he could not elude the pursuivants for long and in August he made his way to France, disguised as one of a number of Catholic refugees fleeing persecution. He would never see England again.57
The savagery of Campion’s death had taken people’s breath away. It was not just that he had been tortured while in the Tower—so severe were the bouts of racking he endured that when his keeper asked him how he felt, he allegedly answered ‘Not ill, because