England's merry martyr

Abstract

[Extract] John Henry Newman once described Richard Simpson, the nineteenth-century English Catholic intellectual, as "always flicking his whip at Bishops, cutting them in tender places, throwing stones at Sacred Congregations, and ... discharging pea-shooters at Cardinals who happen by bad luck to look out of the window". Moreover, to the "despair of his friends", he had a "talent for seeing the comic side of serious problems". It is therefore no surprise that when Simpson undertook a biography of the Elizabethan Catholic martyr Edmund Campion SJ, the authorities of Campion's day received a drubbing. Campion (now Saint Edmund) along with Father Robert Persons (or Parsons) SJ, began the Jesuit mission to England in 1580. Hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor in 1581 after only one brief year of underground ministry and sensational clandestine publishing, Campion remains today, not only a Catholic saint and martyr, but a nonchalantly brave, wonderfully eloquent, merrily witty man, widely acknowledged to be, in the words of the secular historian J.B. Black, "a great Elizabethan".