Search

Edmund Campion arrived in Dublin on August 25, 1570, on a travelling fellowship from St. John’s College, Oxford. This five-year leave of absence enabled him to postpone ordination in the Elizabethan church. Campion was invited to stay with the Recorder of Dublin, James Stanihurst, whose library was to satisfy his academic needs, and who was hoping that Campion might help with the university that formed a key part of the program of reform in Ireland. Campion had ignored calls from friends already at the English college in Douai to join them. Dublin was meant to be a quiet pause, allowing Campion to stay quietly within the establishment. It was not to be like that. This article argues that Ireland was the beginning and, thanks to the disastrous invasion in July 1579 by Nicholas Sander, the end of Campion’s troubles; that the rebellion stirred by Sander in Munster created such fear of an invasion in England that the Jesuit missionaries were doomed from the moment they landed at Dover one year later; that the radical arguments in favor of papal power to depose monarchs expressed in De visibili monarchia (1571), not the theological arguments for the Catholic and apostolic church in Rationes decem (1581), were at the center of Campion’s interrogations on the rack; and that the parallel lives of Campion and Sander reveal two completely contrasting views of the papacy, and of Rome.

Edmund Campion's detailed negotiations with the Grocers' Company, still extant in beautifully neat minutes, reveal a close triangular relationship between the city companies, Paul's Cross, and the university of Oxford. On 12 April, only seven days earlier, Campion would have been in Christ's Hospital itself, which was only three hundred feet from Smithfield, where Thomas Loseby, Henry Ramsey, Thomas Thyrtell, Margaret Hyde and Agnes Stanley were burned as a group; the noise, smell and smoke must all have enveloped the consciousness of the boys and their teachers. The participation of Christ's Hospital in the Spital sermons is a reminder that the sermon culture was itself a part of a larger culture of disputation that began with inter-school competitions. It was a culture that rapidly spread across the entire system of grammar schools in England, and indeed throughout Europe. Keywords: Edmund Campion; England; Europe; Grocers' Company; Paul's Cross; sermon culture; university of Oxford