Edmund Campion: A Life – Evelyn Waugh, 1935 ★★½

A Saint in Shackles

Evelyn Waugh doesn’t exactly exude humble piety. His fiction sneers with acid contempt at the foibles of his fellow man. So a serious, earnest, ever-so-respectful biography from this famous cynic about a saint martyred over 350 years before is a bit of a detour.

Waugh was Catholic; it is part of his legend. But mostly his faith is a matter of being against things: modern architecture, sex outside marriage, loud parties, and so on. Edmund Campion: A Life is a rare occasion for seeing Waugh putting forward faith as positive action.

As a book, it is minor Waugh. But as a glimpse at what made Waugh tick, Edmund Campion engages and reveals between its lulls.

Born in 1540, Edmund Campion seemed destined for a bright future among the learned class of Elizabethan England. Alas, his orthodoxy was at odds with Great Britain’s break with Rome, and Queen Elizabeth’s subsequent excommunication. At Oxford he stood out for his skill at public speaking and debate; now he found himself avoiding attention by ducking off to Ireland to write a history.

It was no use, Waugh writes: [H]e was born into the wrong age for these gentle ambitions; he must be either much more, or much less.

Edmund Campion, as depicted in a woodcut with a knife's blade in his chest. The actual means for relieving him of his mortal coil was not so quick and easy.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Campion 

So he snuck across the English Channel to Douai in northern France, a haven for British Catholics, and became a Jesuit. Eventually he returned to England, where preaching Catholicism was a crime, to pray for and offer counsel to a stubborn minority that remained loyal to Rome.

He knew what lay in store, but Waugh presents Campion as a man who embraced his fate – like a kamikaze pilot of another age.

“As for myself, all is over,” he told a friend in France before journeying back home to his doom. “I have made a free oblation of myself to His Divine Majesty, both for life and death, and I hope He will give me grace and force to perform; and this is all I desire.”

Waugh handles this material with great reverence, too much so, in fact. The first chapter, explaining Campion’s days as an Oxford scholar and his effort to fit in under an increasingly powerful and intolerant Protestant regime, is a struggle to read as Waugh talks up that august institution of his own not-then-distant past, referencing names and traditions in a dry, affected manner that put me off.

He awkwardly attempts a narrative by beginning it at Queen Elizabeth’s deathbed, where she angrily tells off the Anglican clergy assembled to offer prayers, calling them “hedge-priests,” before drifting off into a sullen incoherence. Waugh suggests she might have been preoccupied with thoughts of Campion, though how one might think so is unclear.

A portrait of Elizabeth I in old age, Father Time at one elbow and Death at the other. "What was in Elizabeth’s mind as she lay there through the silent hours, sane and despairing?" writes Waugh. "The thought of another England that it had been in her hands to make?"
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth-I-Allegorical-Po.jpg 

A major strike against the book is the absence of material Waugh had to work from. For Waugh to present Campion in the same shape and color as his fictional characters, imaginative construction was required. But because he is writing about a figure of debate, Waugh couldn’t just invent stuff. He had to stick to the record, sketchy as it was.

What Waugh does do in Edmund Campion which gives it real vitality and connects it to his more famous fiction, is present Campion as a critique against surrendering one’s conscience to popular opinion.

It was common in Waugh’s time to regard Elizabethan England as an island of tolerance amid the sectarian violence of the European continent. Waugh pushes hard against the thesis of Good Queen Bess. He describes her as a ruthless profiteer and exploiter of her people, particularly Catholics, who as political outsiders were more exposed to her rapacity and those of her cronies:

English galleys, laden with human cargo, plied regularly between America and West Africa, and on their return journeys, as often as not, stopped to sack a Spanish outpost or board a treasure ship.

Evelyn Waugh as a young man. In 1935, he was at the early apex of his literary career, having published four successful novels, the most recent being A Handful Of Dust. The overt Catholicism of his biography on Campion surprised many British readers.
Image from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/587767/evelyn-waugh-facts

Against such disregard for humanity Waugh presents a peaceful disciple who only wanted to offer witness to a loving God, and without bloodshed or unrest restore a Catholic presence to the land of his birth. What Campion struggled against, Waugh explains, was not so much a united front of committed Anglican believers (Waugh suggests there were none, then or later) as of amoral go-alongs, priest-hunters who collected bounties catching “Papists” for a bloodthirsty and totalitarian regime and a London throng all too eager for the diversion of a gory public execution.

While still at Oxford, Campion asked fast-rising Anglican divinity scholar Tobie Matthew about how Matthew came to believe in the Anglican texts on his desk. Waugh continues: “If I believed them as well as read them,” Matthew replied, “you would have good reason to ask.”

It was no longer a question of theology, but of morals.

What you get here is something very akin to A Man For All Seasons, but with more overt tubthumbing for the Church as an institution under attack, likening the situation in Great Britain then to the 1930s prosecution of Catholicism in socialist countries like Spain and Mexico.

A "priest-hole" in Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, where English Catholics hid away visiting priests in case the Queen's officers showed up. Campion was captured hiding in a hidden room above stairs at Lyford Grange in Berkshire.
Photo by Jim Barton from https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/02/priest-holes-secret-chambers-that-hid.html

In his 1946 Preface to the Second Edition, Waugh adds Eastern Europe to his list: “The haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion’s voice sounds to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our elbow.”

Waugh addressed the situation again directly four years later in Robbery Under Law, reporting on Mexico. There his tone is strident and off-putting; here he is cooler and more descriptive, presenting Campion’s case sympathetically with the help of some beautiful prose:

It needs little fancy to reconstruct the scene; the audience hushed and intent, every member of whom was risking liberty and fortune, perhaps his life, by attendance. The dusk lightened and the candles paled on the improvised altar, the tree tops outside the windows took fire, as Campion spoke.

The second half of the book is where it gets going, as Waugh details Campion’s brief time back in England, journeying in secret to Catholic homes under false names and creating a commotion by publishing short works advocating his cause.

Rationes Decem, or Ten Reasons, was written by Campion on the run and published in secret. Anglicans were upset. "Because he carrieth no sword he would be thought to carry no weapon," one official wrote in reply. "But is not the trumpet worse than many swords?"
Image from http://jesuitinstitute.org/Pages/Campion.htm

These were not violent or antagonistic writings, but as they challenged the queen’s authority over religion in her country, they were enough:

“Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posteritie shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes.”

Waugh is at pains to note there was no attempt at fomenting revolt or treason. It would be claimed Campion was out to raise an army or attempt domestic terrorism in the manner of a later Catholic, Guy Fawkes. But Waugh notes no evidence ever surfaced to these ends.

Rather, Waugh claims, the only blood Campion sought to spill was his own. That came to pass on December 1, 1581. First came a trial.

The trial of Campion, and several other Catholic priests, is Waugh’s best chance to give his book real excitement within the confines of known historical truth. Here, Waugh had recourse to notes and transcripts made of the proceedings, and even materials written in Campion’s hand. Briefly Campion was summoned to meet with Queen Elizabeth; Waugh suggests an offer of clemency was given if he renounced his faith.

A piece of fabric, believed to be from a cloak worn by Campion when he travelled England incognito, and preserved as a saintly relic today.
Image from https://www.jesuitcollections.org.uk/collection/st-edmund-campion-sj

Campion’s refusal surprised his captors: From earliest youth, among those nearest them, they had been used to the spectacle of men who would risk their lives for power, but to die deliberately, without hope of release, for an idea, was something beyond their comprehension.

The resulting trial was a pig circus, as Bob Dylan might have put it. Punishment had already begun. Campion was dragged to prison on a hurdle. The Christ allusions Waugh offers are many and obvious. At one point, a man in the crowd wipes Campion’s muddy face clean. At another, his clothes are stolen by his jailers. Then of course there is the extensive corporeal punishment, as Campion is tortured to confess plots against the Crown.

Campion did give up information, not about murder plots but Catholics with whom he had stayed and conferred. Waugh explains this should not be held against him. More significant was Campion’s bearing in court, where unable to lift his arms from his time on the rack, he nevertheless stood his ground and scored points against prosecutors and judges alike.

Campion depicted being racked for information at the Tower of London, while two other priests await their turn. These torture sessions were fit in between Campion's appearances in court. "No opportunity was given to Campion to prepare himself; he was roused without warning, unfettered and led from his cell," Waugh writes.
Image from https://www.jesuitcollections.org.uk/collection/st-edmund-campion-sj

A regular theme of Campion’s was that his faith was the same as that of Great Britain’s founders. “In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors,” he said at his sentencing. After describing Campion’s execution in brutal detail – after being hung, he was drawn and quartered – Waugh reveals that one of the observers splattered by Campion’s blood, Henry Walpole, was so transformed by the experience that he joined the Church himself and eventually met the same fate.

Waugh’s book couldn’t help but move me – Campion’s ordeal and faith are subjects of gravity and pathos that cut through the centuries – but somehow Campion’s persecutors with their base motives and haughty pretenses interested me more than he did. I wondered more at how the rest of their lives turned out than what experience Campion might have enjoyed after his earthly torments were through. Waugh often excelled more at dwelling on the negative; it seemed true to me here, too.