EDMUND
CAMPION, S.J.
1540-1581
 

 

St. EDMUND CAMPION  (1540–81), Jesuit. The son of a London bookseller, he was educated at the expense of the Grocers’ Guild at a London grammar school, Christ’s Hospital, and St John’s College, Oxford, where he became a Junior Fellow in 1557. He was distinguished by his powers of leadership and his oratorical ability; in 1566 he was chosen by the university to welcome Queen Elizabeth I to Oxford. Although already Catholic in sympathy, he was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1569, but being troubled in conscience left Oxford in 1570 for Dublin, hoping for the revival of the university. Returning to England in disguise in 1571, he joined W. Allen at Douai in the same year and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Proceeding to Rome as a pilgrim, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1573 and was ordained in 1578. After a novitiate spent in Brünn, Bohemia, he taught at Prague until in 1580 he joined R. Parsons in the first Jesuit mission to England.

The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales

He preached extensively and with considerable effect in London and Lands. In 1581 he secretly published a pamphlet entitled Decem Rationes, defending the Roman Catholic position. He was arrested later in the year, but appears to have been offered his life if he would return to the Church of England. On his refusal he was charged with conspiracy against the Crown, put on the rack and executed at Tyburn (1 Dec. 1581). He was among the Forty Martyrs canonized in 1970.

His Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, written in 1571 and pub. in 1633, ed., with introd., by A. F. Vossen (Assen, 1963). His debates with Protestant divines after his arrest in 1581, an account of his trial, and other material, ed. J. V. Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge (New York, 1999). [W. Allen], A Brief History of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests (1582; new edn. by J. H. Pollen, SJ, 1908). H. More, SJ, Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (St Omer, 1660), partly tr. into Eng. by F. Edwards, SJ, The Elizabethan Jesuits (1981), esp. pp. 41–128. R. Simpson, Edmund Campion (1867). Modern study by E. Waugh (London, 1935). E. E. Reynolds, Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Mission of 1580–1 (1980). T. M. McCoog, SJ (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodridge, Suffolk, 1996). Pre-1641 edns. of works listed in A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation, 1 (Aldershot, 1989), pp. 23–31 (nos. 130–204). Polgár, 1 (1990), pp. 420–3.

 

Polgár L. Polgár, SJ, Bibliographic sur l’Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus 1901–1980, 3: Les Personnes (3 vols., Rome, 1990).

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