Book Review

Secret codes of spiritual survival

Edmund Campion: memory and transcription

We are not keen on hagiographies these days. We seem far more comfortable with accounts that debunk well-worn legends and bring otherwise inaccessible heroes down to a level we can identify with. The Elizabethan Jesuit Edmund Campion has not escaped this trend. A martyr he certainly was, but were his motives really all that pure? Did he not in fact actively court martyrdom by lingering around Oxford after slipping copies of the Decem Rationes, his famous attack on Protestant theology, on to the benches of the University Church just in time for the graduation ceremony in 1581? Worse still, did he not break down under torture and disloyally betray many of those in whose houses he had stayed?

Gerard Kilroy does not set out to disprove these claims. His aim is to allow an array of hitherto untapped documentation to speak for itself. The result is a gripping exercise in historical reconstruction that subtly transforms our understanding of this enigmatic episode in English history.

The hinge of the book is provided by the recent discovery of a long poem written by Campion in the late 1560s, when he was at the height of his fame in Oxford as an outstanding scholar and rhetorician. Campion dedicated the poem to Anthony Browne, the Viscount Montague, famous among other things for a courageous speech in the House of Lords against the Oath of Supremacy in 1562: "a thing unjust and repugnant to the natural liberty of men's understanding". In the poem, a Virgilian epic in Latin hexameters, Campion set out to recount the history of the early Church by setting the classical past in due perspective when contrasted with the "true Rome" - the imperium sine fine. It was a theme that remained close to his heart, and was memorably echoed in a letter he wrote to Gregory Martin from Prague in 1577, urging him to "make the most of Rome". "What in this life can be glorious if such wealth, such beauty, has come to nothing? But what men have stood firm in these miserable changes, what things? The relics of the Saints and the chair of the Fisherman."

What the poem will do for Campion's reputation as a renaissance Latin poet will be for specialists to debate. The rest of us can be grateful to Kilroy for providing a meticulous transcription that ably conflates the two surviving manuscripts and is accompanied by a full translation. But in the process Kilroy has also unearthed a panoply of further documentation in which a largely hidden but intellectually fertile cultural world can be discerned. Already in 1577, Sir Thomas Tresham had built a beautiful relief sculpture of the Crucifixion in his private oratory at Rushton Hall. The sculpture hides an inscription containing a damning critique of Roman power that bears all the signs of a close acquaintance with Campion's poem. Tresham would subsequently spend over 15 years in prison for refusing to swear in his trial before the Star Chamber that he had not sheltered Campion.

During these long years, Tresham laboriously developed a coded language that would eventually find expression in the buildings of his last 10 years - the Triangular Lodge at Rushton and the unfinished Lyveden New Bield. In these extraordinary buildings, Kilroy writes, "a sacred space is enfolded in an encrypted architecture ... where polyglot writing combined with mystical emblems to transform an enclosed space from a prison to a place of freedom". Kilroy has made extensive use of Tresham's writings (discovered behind a wall in Rushton Hall in 1828 and now filling 11 volumes at the British Library) to reveal an intimate connection between the structure and symbolism of the buildings and Tresham's devotion to the Eucharist. Tresham's fascination with the significance of number, drawing on Scripture, St Augustine and St John Chrysostom, also provides key markers in his development of endless symbolic references in which recurring subtle links between the methods of Elizabeth's Government and the Roman persecution of St Paul hark back unmistakably to memories of Campion.

Interestingly, Tresham was developing his emblematic language just at the time that Sir John Harrington, the gregarious courtier and wit who also happened to be Elizabeth's godson, had begun to turn his own satires on the corruption of Elizabethan society into an emblem. The beautiful manuscript collection that Harrington presented to King James has hitherto made quite enigmatic reading, but Kilroy argues persuasively that its arrangement in decades, enclosed within a meditation of the Rosary, points to a contemplative structure: the group of 40 poems - also meticulously transcribed by Kilroy - are in fact four sorrowful mysteries, deftly deployed by Harrington to influence first King James, and then Prince Henry, to a more moderate treatment of Catholics.

The secret language used by these two men, so loyally dedicated to the memory of Elizabethan England's most illustrious martyr, extended well beyond their coded buildings and texts. It reached a much wider circle that included, among many others, Sir Philip Sidney, and which cannot therefore be exclusively associated with recusancy. Harrington himself preferred to be called a "protesting Catholic Puritan", a description that calls seriously into question the common perception of early modern English Catholicism as a stronghold of priests catering to sporting gentry and uncultivated aristocrats. As Clare Asquith has so eloquently demonstrated in Shadowplay, the same coded language seems to have permeated the totality of Shakespeare's prodigious output. Indeed, in this book Kilroy seems to have heeded Shakespeare's carefully coded advice to those he addressed as having ears to see: "O learn to read what silent love hath writ/ To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit" (Sonnet 23).

To such initiates, Campion's distribution of the Decem Rationes in 1581 could never have appeared as a self-centred attempt to court martyrdom. On the contrary: it was a bold and heroic statement rooted in the conviction that matters of religion should, as Kilroy puts it, "be debated in the intellectual stage of Oxford and not in the theatre of state cruelties". But they would also have been only too aware that Campion's heroic virtue had now been made practically impossible by the increasingly sophisticated methods of repression developed by the Elizabethan state. Thus Campion's martyrdom was a pivotal point in English history: after it, official accounts became antithetical to private truths; memory, coded transcription, equivocation, "paper ynke and pen" - and stone, became the only means of spiritual survival.

Those still left wanting a more debunked image may draw some comfort from the knowledge that, in the final words before his execution, Campion apologised, "desiring all of them to forgive him whom he had confessed upon the rack". Fortunately, the manuscript evidence that Kilroy has so ably reconstructed leaves us in little doubt that, whatever these alleged confessions may have recalled, they are extremely unlikely to have involved any form of disloyalty or betrayal.

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