A scholar turned missionary
Edmund Campion was born in London in 1540 and became one of the brightest young scholars at Oxford, where he impressed Queen Elizabeth I on her visit in 1566. Increasingly drawn to Catholicism, he left England, was received into the Catholic Church, joined the Jesuits and was ordained priest. In 1580 he returned secretly to England, where Catholic priests were outlawed, and moved from house to house among Catholic families, preaching and saying Mass. His open letter to the Privy Council, known as ‘Campion’s Brag’, made him the most wanted priest in the country.
The arrest at Lyford
Lyford Grange, in the small parish of Lyford north of Wantage, belonged to Francis Yate, a Catholic then in prison for his faith. His household sheltered a group of Bridgettine nuns from Syon Abbey. In July 1581 Campion called there briefly, and was then persuaded to come back to preach and say Mass for local Catholics and Oxford students.
On Sunday 16 July about sixty people attended his Mass and sermon. Among them was George Eliot, a former servant of Catholic households turned government informer, who had come with a warrant and gained entry by pretending to be a Catholic. He slipped away and returned with the local magistrate and a large search party. After hours of searching the house, on Monday 17 July they found Campion and two other priests hidden in a narrow space in the wall above the gateway.
Campion was taken to London with a paper fixed to his hat calling him ‘Campion, the seditious Jesuit’. He was imprisoned in the Tower, racked, and put on trial for treason with other priests. Found guilty, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. He was beatified in 1886 and canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
What to see locally
- Lyford Grange survives as a moated sixteenth-century house. It is a private home and not open to visitors, but an annual Mass in Campion’s memory has been held there in July.
- St Mary’s Church, Lyford, and the Lyford almshouses in the same small village.