Abstract
On 17 July 1581, Edmund Campion, one of the founding fathers of the Jesuit Mission to England, was found hidden in a priest-hole at Lyford Grange, in Berkshire. Anthony Munday’s account of the apprehension provides details of the search, but devotes most energy to an elaborate character-sketch of Campion. He examines Campion’s upbringing, education, flight abroad, entry into the Society of Jesus, return to England, and opposition to the Queen, and discovers therein the genealogy of a traitor. This genealogy, however, amounts to more than a parental or pedagogical failure: it reveals a tale of travel, of flight, return and concealment. ‘Neither remembering his dutie to God, loyaltie to his Prince, nor loove to his countrey: but hardening his hart more and more in that divellish obscuritie of life’ (A2v–A3),1 Campion leaves England for the Continent and then returns home in order to ‘seduce the hartes of her [the Queen’s] looving Subiectes’ with his ‘perverse perswasions … till God at length made knowen this wicked and abhominable’ course (A4v). Munday’s account of Campion’s ‘course’ discloses an England infested by hidden traitors, by subjects who have deviated from the truth of a Protestant England towards Rome.
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Notes
All references will be to Anthony Munday, A Breefe Discourse of the taking of Edmund Campion, the Seditious Jesuit, and divers other Papistes, in Barkeshire… (London, 1581).
My use the words, ‘topography’, or ‘geography’, does not refer directly to the local or regional studies of post-Reformation Catholicism such as Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire 1558–1790 ( London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966 )
John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 ( London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975 )
and Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 ). While I have found these accounts of local Catholic practice invaluable, they tend to treat the landscape as a pre-given terrain which had to be crossed by both priest and pursuivant alike.
Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden (Newport: R. H. Johns Ltd., 1953), xiii.
Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 83–98, discusses the political, doctrinal and everyday complexities of the practice of recusancy in sixteenth-century England.
Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London and New York: Longman, 1989 ), 73.
Thomas Bell, The Hunting of the Romish Foxe (London, 1598), A3v.
Francis Bacon, Certain Observations Made Upon a Libel Published this Present Year, 1592, in James Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890 ), 178.
John Baxter, A Toile for Two-legged Foxes (London, 1600), 109–10.
Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. 2 (London: Burns and Oates, 1878 ), 355–6.
Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 8.
Anthony Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe, ed. Philip J. Ayres, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), xxx.
Thomas Bell, The Anatomie of Popish Tyrannie (London, 1603), 5.
Sir Lewis Lewkenor, The Estate of the English Fugitives under the Kinge of Spaine and his Ministers ( London, 1596 ), K1’.
Lewis Owen, The State of the English Colledges in Forraine Parts (1626; facsimile edn, Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1968), B1 r-v.
Anthony Munday, A Discoverie of Edmund Campian and his Confederates, their most horrible and traiterous practises, against her Majestic’s most royall person, and the Realme ( London, 1582 ), Civ.
Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr ( Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982 ), 38.
Father Richard Holtby, ‘On Persecution in the North’, in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, ed. John Morris, vol. 3 ( London: Burns and Oates, 1877 ), 120–1.
John Gerard, A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871 ), 182–4.
The most sophisticated of these stairwell hides has been identified at Sawston Hall, in Cambridgeshire (Michael Hodgetts, Secret Hiding-Places [Dublin: Veritas, 1989], 58).
John Gerard, Autobiography of A Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (New York: Pellegrini and Cudhay, 1952 ), 58–71.
Katherine Eisman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995 ), 23.
William Allen, The Martyrdom of Father Campion and His Companions (London, 1582).
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Yates, J. (1999). Parasitic Geographies: Manifesting Catholic Identity in Early Modern England. In: Marotti, A.F. (eds) Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374881_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374881_3
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