Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life by Gerard Kilroy (review)

This is an outstanding book, a biography of the young Jesuit Edmund Cam-pion, who was executed for treason at Tyburn on December 1, 1581. Thomas Alfield, in his eyewitness account written for publication shortly after the events of Campion’s trial and death memorably described him as “The flower of Oxford … and an honour to our country.”

Gerard Kilroy’s intention, discussed in his introduction, is to re-imagine through the documentary evidence available Campion’s scholarly and priestly life. And he succeeds in doing so impressively and without a hint of hagiography. Kilroy’s meticulous scholarship, careful reading of a vast range of historical, literary, and visual sources—including several previously unknown, recently discovered manuscripts—his perceptive analysis and interpretation of these, bring to life on the page the boy, the scholar, the Jesuit priest, the missionary, and the martyr; the man who as a young scholar, had been earmarked for preferment by Queen Elizabeth herself and whose death scandalised the whole of Europe. His findings, however, go much further. They notably clarify, add to, and in some cases change our understanding of the Elizabethan settlement at this critical point as the Queen and her counsellors negotiated the matter of the Anjou suit and the succession within the immediate consequences of the bull, Regnans in excelsis, of Pius V and the intentions of Nicholas Sander, the King of Spain, William Allen, Sir Francis Englefield, and others in promoting rebellion in Ireland. In addition, they provide new insight into the internal politics and factionalism of the Catholic community at home and in exile.

Kilroy’s detailed re-creation of Campion’s early years provides clues to the man. The son of a radical Protestant stationer, Campion was brought up among the tight-knit print community who lived and worked in and around St. Paul’s churchyard. This upbringing, he shows, exercised a potent influence throughout his life. Campion’s intuitive understanding of the power of print characterised his scholarly and missionary work. So too, this upbringing exposed him from an early age to the culture of the spoken word: in sermons, most notably at Paul’s Cross, in dialectic, and in oratory. It nurtured in him a lifelong devotion to disputation, “a belief that intellectual argument was the only solution to the theological differences of the period” (p. 15). Campion’s inherently sweet nature, combined with his wonderfully receptive intellect, Kilroy shows, singled him out early for patronage by the city elders who ensured his education in its own schools: St Paul’s, Christ’s Hospital—and later St. John’s, Oxford.

The chapter on Campion’s Oxford career is outstanding. Kilroy’s identification and use of previously unknown material in his reconstruction of the Queen’s visit in 1566 throws new light on this event. Campion’s skills in oratory and disputation famously so impressed Elizabeth on this occasion that she instructed Leicester to offer him “preferment and patronage on an unlimited scale” (p. 43). Kilroy’s findings contextualize and clarify the anxieties, tensions, and factionalism in the regime during these days as the matter of the Queen’s marriage and the succession became the fulcrum around which a series of complex diplomatic shifts and personal manoeuvres were executed. He shows too the consequences of Leicester’s appointment as Chancellor of the university as, with the transfer of power from a Catholic majority to a Calvinist minority, large numbers of Catholic scholars swiftly migrated from Oxford to Louvain.

Campion’s formative time in Ireland, his scholarly work there, conversion, and departure for Douai in 1571 are particularly well brought out. It is not possible in a short review to do justice to Kilroy’s expert reconstruction of Campion’s career which then followed. His use of known, and previously unknown archival sources to reconstruct Campion’s pilgrim journey to Rome, entry into the Society, his novitiate in Brno, ordination and the six happy and fulfilled years spent in...