The Elizabethan Age underwent a continuing crisis of religion that was marked by a deepening polarization of thought between the supporters of the recently established Protestant Church and the larger number of adherents to the Roman Catholic faith. Of these latter, Edmund Campion may be taken as the archetype. Well known as an Englishman who fled to the Continent for conscience’s sake, he returned to England as a Jesuit priest, was executed by the English government in 1581 and was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1970.
It has been observed that the author of the Shakespeare plays displays a considerable sympathy and familiarity with the practices and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. i The intent here is to show a link between this English Catholic leader and the writer of the drama, Twelfth Night, as revealed by allusions to Edmund Campion in Act IV, scene ii of that play.
A Brief Outline of Campion’s Life Though Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a scholar at Oxford University under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I’s court favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Campion’s studies of theology, church history, and the church fathers led him away from the positions taken by the Church of England. From Campion’s point of view, to satisfy the new orthodoxy of the Church of England, a reconstructionist interpretation of church history was being set forth, one chat he found difficult to reconcile with what he actually found in the writings of those fathers [2].
Had the veil been swept away? Were St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom really Anglicans rather than Roman Catholics? Or were the church authorities trimming their sails to the exigencies of temporal policy? Questions such as these dogged Campion, and eventually his position at Oxford became untenable since he could not make the appropriate gestures of adherence to the established church [3].
Instead, Campion retreated from Oxford to Dublin in 1569, where he drew less attention and enjoyed the protection of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy for Ireland, and the patronage of Sir James Stanihurst, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who planned to have Campion participate in the founding of what was to become Trinity College in Dublin [4]. During this period a number of significant events took place. In 1568, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, was driven from her realm into England, where she came under the protection and custody of the English Crown.
Immediately after came the rebellion of the northern Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland in the winter of 1569, who sought to place Mary on the English throne. Then, in the spring of 1570, Pope Pius V issued a hull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from their obligation of obedience to her.
After the death of Pius V, an inquiry to Rome regarding this bull elicited the response that “as long as the Queen [Elizabeth] remained de facto ruler, it was lawful for Catholics to obey her in civil matters and cooperate in all just things… at it was unlawful for any private person, not wearing uniform and authorized to do so as an act of war, to slay any tyrant whatsoever, unless the tyrant, for example, had invaded his country in arms” (Waugh, p. 94-95)
In short, English Catholics were rejoined to follow the path of Sir Thomas More, being the Crown’s loyal servant in all matters save religion. However, as Waugh concedes, “It was possible to deduce from this decision that the [English] Catholics were a body of potential rebels,who only waited for foreign invasion to declare themselves.
This was the sense in which [William] Cecil [Lord Treasurer and the Queen’s most trusted councillor] read it, for he was reluctant to admit the possibility of anyone being both a patriotic Englishman and an opponent of his regime (Waugh p. 95). The English government then enacted laws more restrictive to English Catholics. In 1570, the year of the Papal Bull, it was made an act of high treason, punishable by death, to bring into the country “any bull, writing, or instrument obtained from the Bishop of Rome” or “to absolve or reconcile” any of the Queen’s subjects to the Bishop of Rome (Waugh p. 7).
In this atmosphere even Dublin became dangerous for Campion. He fled Ireland for Belgium in June of 1572, arriving at the English College founded by exiled English Catholics in Douai. The next year he went on to Rome to join the Society of Jesus. After training in Vienna, he became Professor of Rhetoric at the new Jesuit University in Prague, where he was ordained a priest in the Society of Jesus in 1578 (Waugh p. 81-84). It was in Prague in 1580 that he received the call to return to England to minister to English Catholics (More p. 72-73).
During his ministry, which lasted from the summer of 1580 to the summer of 1581, Campion traveled from town to town in disguise, passing via an underground network of English Catholics, offering the Mass and other Church sacraments to Catholics. He was arrested in the town of Lyford by English authorities, with the assistance of a paid informant, in July 1581, and conveyed to the Tower of London [5]. Since his ministry had attracted a great deal of public attention, the government initially made an effort to persuade Campion to abandon his faith.
Failing that, it made a second effort to discredit him. Four times in September, Campion was brought from his dungeon in the Tower for public “conferences,” at which scholars and clergymen representing the Crown and the Church of England disputed with him in an effort to best him intellectually. William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and First Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, Burghley’s spymaster, also sought to taint Campion with the brush of treason by maintaining that the primary goal of his mission was to incite the English to rebel against Queen Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.
While Campion’s ministry was in itself, by English law, sufficient for the death penalty (in that he offered Mass and heard confessions), the government preferred to show that his ministry also involved stirring English Catholics to rebellion. Finally, on November 20th, a trial was held in which Campion and seven other Catholics taken with him were charged with treason. Suitable witnesses endeavored to make the label of traitor stick; the trial ended in a guilty verdict, and Campion was executed by hanging at Tyburn on December 1, 1581 [6] [7] .
Twelfth Night and Edmund Campion The allusions to Campion are found in a single scene –Act four, Scene two in which Feste the Clown disguises himself as “Sir Topas the Curate” to harangue the unfortunate Malvolio, who has been shut up in a cellar as a lunatic as the result of pranks engineered by Feste, Sir Toby Belch and Maria. In the following speech by Feste to Maria and Sir Toby, the Campion allusions are highlighted in boldface.
Clown: Bonos dies, Sir Toby: for, as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That that is is” ; so I, being master Parson, am master Parson; for,what is “that” but “that”; and “is” but “is”? (IV. ii. 15-19) [8] In this speech of less than 50 words, which appears to resemble nothing but clownish nonsense, there are no less than five phrases which refer directly to Edmund Campion and his 158O-81 mission to England.
The old hermit of Prague: Prague was Campion’s last assignment before his mission to England; indeed, nearly six of his less than nine years on the Continent were spent in Prague. He may be thought of as a hermit in either of two ways in that hermits were holy men who sought solitude in their quest for holiness, or that Campion’s stay in Prague was considered to be an exile not only from England but from Englishmen.
Waugh notes that, while at Prague, “the only Englishmen with whom he appears to have had any contact (besides Father Ware, who was at the college with him), is Philip Sidney [son of the former Lord Deputy for Ireland], who arrived in 1576 as English Ambassador to congratulate the Emperor Rudolph on his succession” (Waugh p. 81-82).
