A martyr’s memorial in verse
David Crane
EDMUND CAMPION: MEMORY AND TRANSCRIPTION by Gerard Kilroy Ashgate, £45, pp. 261, ISBN 0754652556 On 1 December 1581 — not a good day in English judicial history — a Jesuit priest and poet of European renown was dragged on a hurdle through the London mud and savagely butchered at Tyburn. Alongside him on the scaffold were two other priests who suffered the same death, but, now as then, their names and reputations are eclipsed by that of the man who for both persecuted Catholic England and its state oppressors most vividly embodied the religious struggles of the Elizabethan age. ‘Yee thought perhaps, when learned Campion dyes,’ one eyewitness at Tyburn, the ‘wit, minor poet, satirist and flaneur’, Henry Walpole, taunted the authorities,
His pen must cease, his sugred tounge be still.
But yow forget how lowd his death yt cryes, How farre beyond the sounde of tounge or quill.
Yow did not know how rare and great a good Yt was to write those precious guiftes in bloode.
No one could have borne more eloquent testimony to the truth of this than Walpole himself, who, spattered by Campion’s blood and inspired by his example, also died a martyr, but it is a more oblique kind of witness that is the subject of Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription. In the aftermath of Campion’s death the government mobilised all its resources to blacken his reputation and block Walpole’s poem, but, as Kilroy makes clear, they might hack off the ears of the man who printed it and even kill the author but what they could never completely erase were the memories of Campion that the written word preserved.
And the emphasis here is on written, because when the resources of printing were as ruthlessly controlled and manipulated as they were, it was largely in manuscript that the testimonies of Walpole or the prison letters of other priests were preserved among a belea guered Catholic community. There is no attempt in Kilroy’s book to underestimate the success of government censorship, but his argument is that these manuscripts took on themselves a kind of ‘relic’ status, hidden and often encrypted memorials that are today as much as then the only available witness to a ‘truth’ that a national, Protestant mythology has suppressed. ‘How differently the period looks if one recovers the voices of these silent witnesses,’ he writes:
the Tresham Papers, [buried within a wall until 1828, still a year, as Kilroy points out, before Catholic Emancipation], the Brudenell manuscript, Harington’s transcription of Campion’s poem, Harington’s transcription of Walpole’s poem, and Harington’s autograph epigrams. Hidden in these handwritten documents, sometimes beneath the surface in their watermarks, is the buried truth.
At the centre of Kilroy’s case are two key figures, Sir Thomas Tresham, the creator of the ‘Triangular Lodge’, and Sir John Harington, godson of the queen and author of a collection of ‘ydle Epigrams’ dedicated to the young Prince Henry. On the face of it there could scarcely be two less representative figures than Tresham or Harington to carry an argument about recusancy, but ‘the face of it’ is the aspect of Elizabethan history that Kilroy challenges and it is their very singularity that fleshes out his claims for an ‘underground’ that was libertarian rather than religious in nature and ‘cross-party’ rather than narrowly Catholic in its constituency.
It is a compelling picture, but then there is so much that is fascinating in this book — it is worth having for the transcriptions of Harington’s epigrams, Walpole’s ‘Paper, Ynke and Pen’ and Campion’s Virgilian epic on the early church alone — that it seems a pity that it is not more ambitious in its scope. In his opening chapter Kilroy tries to distance himself from the charge of Catholic bias that he knows is coming, but there are still moments when his view seems as inwardlooking as his sources, his critical focus as narrow, his scholarship — in the debate over Campion’s prison ‘confessions’ for instance — as much at the service of his sympathies as it is in any of the rival historical texts he examines.
He is also endlessly repetitive, but the problem there is one of form rather than content, because this is not really a book, but a collection of highly specialised papers previously printed elsewhere. In her study of Shakespeare, Shadowplay, published last year, Clare Asquith showed that it is possible to engage a wider audience with the arguments of recusant scholarship, and it seems a waste that the meticulous readings and historical inwardness that distinguish this book are spent reworking material that an academic audience will already know and with which the general reader is never going to engage. This is not just a case of wanting a different book than that which the author has written. It is more a case of wanting the book that seems crying to get out. Gerard Kilroy’s argument deserves a wider currency than contemporary academia’s answer to the ‘usual suspects’ a Walsingham might have rounded up.
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