Edmund Campion - Evelyn Waugh

Waugh, one of our better-known Catholic converts in his day, wrote this, his only biography, in 1935, to mark the relocation of Campion Hall, the Jesuit college in Oxford.  Whilst Campion was executed in 1581, it is a measure of the suppression of Catholicism in England that the Hall was only founded in 1896 and only renamed in memory of Campion in 1918.

At that time Campion was not yet a saint - that didn't happen until 1970 - and interestingly Waugh makes no claim for canonization.  For him Campion was a leading English martyr for the faith and a very real person, to be noted as much for his scholarship as his sacrifice.  Indeed, for me the last of the four parts (scholar, priest, hero, martyr) is the weakest.  The other three I found masterful, even thrilling.

Waugh himself was only a recent convert (1930) and he writes about absolute faith with the intellect of the Enlightenment.  Catholicism gave him emotional comfort but he struggles to blind himself to the flaws of Rome.  The popes and cardinals do not do well in his account.  For Waugh, and for me, the heroes are those who chose to leave their English comforts, especially those who chose to return and succour the faithful.  This last is important - Waugh's point is that these men were never traitors, despite suffering the traitor's death; their mission was purely to provide comfort to the oppressed.  It was clearly ridiculous to claim, as Burghley did, that merely celebrating Mass was an attempt on the Queen's life and state.

Campion is well characterised - an eminent scholar and rising star of academia who, even at the very end, the authorities were prepared to welcome home provided only that he abandoned Rome.  This is the Campion who emerges in his notorious Brag, included as an appendix here.  He, too, was a master of English prose.  In the Brag he could not declare more clearly:

I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I do gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts.

I am a big fan of Waugh.  It is a measure of his achievement that even when I disagree with his views or have no interest in his subject-matter he stills holds me enthralled.  I don't disagree with him here, and I am interested in his subject, so I absolutely adored this book.  My only regret is that his skill as a novelist ("All I have done is select the incidents which struck as novelist as important, and relate them as a single narrative.") does not allow him to include foot- or end-notes.  I would dearly have loved to find out what became of Campion's colleague and co-leader of the Mission Robert Persons.  According to Wikipedia he lived another thirty years and died in Rome.  Waugh, I'm sure, could have told it better.