History in Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion
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Newsletter_42.1 EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 42, No. 1 Spring 2011 1066 And All That? History in Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion [1] by Donat Gallagher James Cook University Reviewing the American Edition of Edmund Campion for the New Yorker in 1946, Edmund Wilson, the eminent novelist and critic, wrote:“Waugh’s version of history is in its main lines more or less in the vein of 1066 And All That. Catholicism was a Good Thing and Protestantism was a Bad Thing, and that is all that needs to be said about it.”[2] Strangely, Wilson went on to accuse Edmund Campion of making “no attempt to create historical atmosphere”; and this of a biography that offends, where it offends, by locating its central biographical narrative within a boldly tendentious—and atmospheric— version of Elizabethan history. Despite this opening, which seems to promise a discussion of Waugh’s history in the broad, the following modest essay will concern itself mainly with slips and blunders, primarily because one noted Campion scholar virtually defines Waugh's Edmund Campion by its“irritating historical errors.”[3] But it is fair to ask how numerous, and how significant, such errors really are, and why they have been given such notoriety. Is Waugh’s history really “in the vein of 1066 And All That”? At the outset it must be said that Waugh went to extraordinary lengths to disclaim any pretensions to scholarship for his “short, popular life.” He emphasized his heavy dependence on Richard Simpson’s biography of Campion,[4] and in the Preface to the Second [British] Edition declares: “All I have done is select the incidents which struck a novelist as important, and relate them in a single narrative.” But Waugh was being modest, for close reading shows that he drew extensively on the scholarly works listed in his bibliography and that he used a collection of “notes and documents” made available to him by Father Leo Hicks, S.J., an historian of note. Waugh writes like a student of his subject, and he cannot, and should not, be excused for making mistakes on the ground that he has merely written “a short, popular life.” To the best of this writer’s knowledge, the core account of Campion’s life in the biography is widely accepted to be reliable. Excellent recent studies, such as J. V. Holleran’s A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581,[5] Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription[6] and Father Thomas McCoog’s collection of essays, The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits: Essays in celebration of the first centenary of Campion Hall,[7] greatly expand knowledge of Campion’s activities and writings, and of the environments in which he operated. But these newer studies do not call into question Waugh’s basic narrative. On the other hand, as indicated earlier, Waugh surrounds the biographical narrative with a highly controversial “Bellocian” or “revisionist” historical framework. In the early1930s, Catholics on one side and most conventionally educated Britons on the other were still deeply divided about Tudor religious history. No one then imagined the flood of objective studies of the transition from a Catholic to a Protestant England (and even re-evaluations of Bloody Mary) that would be respectfully reviewed in the press around the turn of the century.[8] Drawing on historical research reaching back to Dr. John Lingard (1771-1851), Catholic scholars argued, with varying modulations of stridency, that the true history of the period (in the words of Waugh’s mentor, Father Hicks) lay“buried deep in many layers of falsehood.”[9] Catholic historians rejected the popular belief that the Reformation was a spontaneous revolt by a “free people” against a tyrannous Papacy (the “Whore of Babylon”).They argued, and some mainstream historians agreed, that the Reformation in England was an “act of State.”[10] The more combative Catholics, some of whom strongly influenced Waugh, went further. They described the Reformation as a “revolution” purposefully directed by William Cecil (Lord Burlegh), Sir Francis Walsingham and others (who they believed duped the Queen) to advance Protestantism and keep in power the “gang” of rich men who had profited from confiscated Church property.[11] Waugh’s mentors ridiculed the widely credited notion—recently re-stated by Gerard Kilroy—that “the persecution [of Catholics under Elizabeth] was less a religious persecution than the response of a state which feared subversion from within and invasion from without.”[12] They believed that that the intention to extirpate Catholicism existed “from the beginning” of Elizabeth’s reign.[13] Moreover, they questioned the Gloriana mythology and adopted a sour view of England’s widely lauded achievements in empire and commerce. The Lytton Strachey-like description of the last days of Queen Elizabeth which opens Edmund Campion flamboyantly announces that this book will debunk the “received” or conventional version of Tudor history which then dominated textbooks and popular opinion; that it will place its hero within the political and religious world envisioned by the more file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/March%2014%20additions/Newsletter_42_1.html[26/03/2014 10:54:35] Newsletter_42.1 colourful Catholic “revisionists” previously outlined. It is a simple fact that, as Peter Quennell put it, “The Catholic point of view underlies every paragraph.”[14] But that is not to agree with Charles Rolo and others of his mind who maintain that Waugh’s “biography of … Edmund Campion … is marred by a partisanship which flagrantly distorts Elizabethan history.”[15] The point must be made that Waugh’s history of the Elizabethan period, while consciously, even provocatively, “partisan,” does not mistakenly “distort” that history. Rather it reflects an arguable conspectus of the period put forward by mainly Catholic historians who, although outside mainstream opinion, were, to some extent at least, groundbreaking scholars determined to bring to light long ignored, or suppressed, documentary evidence. Inevitably Edmund Campion aroused criticism, almost all of it directed at its history. A few critics denounced its “Catholic” historical conspectus; many were less direct, using allegations of incompetence and bias as proxies for wider disagreements; some corrected detail. An essay in Connotations(20.1) discusses several of the substantive criticisms launched against the history enshrined in Edmund Campion.[16] I shall very briefly touch on two of the matters discussed there, because readers should understand that Waugh’s history, despite much criticism, is in fact generally sound; that the slips and blunders are not evidence of a general “1066 And All That” malaise, but blemishes in an otherwise competent (albeit controversial) sketch of the Elizabethan period. When Edmund Campionwas favourably reviewed on the BBC in 1935, the United Protestant Council of Great Britain protested to the Director that recently discovered evidence proved Edmund Campion guilty of conspiracy to take the life of the Queen and to bring in foreign armies, and that he had, therefore, been justly executed. They demanded that the reviewer, who in their mind had proved incompetent by praising a flawed work of history, should never be allowed to review an historical work on the BBC again. Because many responsible people still believe that Campion was justly convicted of treason (the sophisticated version of the argument is that a broad-minded Elizabeth charged priests with treason only when they were guilty of treason, whereas her bigoted sister Mary convicted Protestants on points of conscience), a word of explanation is needed. In the first place it is essential to give due weight to fact that there were many Catholic conspiracies at the time, English and European, directed at Elizabeth. On the other hand, the prosecution of Campion for conspiracy was “as unfair . as any perhaps that can be found in our books.”[17] The English Government could have prosecuted Campion under its penal legislation against Catholicism which, inter alia, made it treason to say Mass or to reconcile an English subject to Catholicism. Any conviction under those penal laws would have been plausible. Instead, as documentary evidence demonstrates, the Government dishonestly chose to arraign Campion and about fourteen others (the number kept changing), most of whom had never met, on charges of conspiring to kill the Queen and to bring in foreign armies. The hope was to avoid the odium of persecuting religion and to incite hatred against Catholicism and the priests. Arnold Meyer, the Lutheran authority on the religious history, writes: “the injustice of the charge is now [as distinct from earlier eras] universally admitted … the endeavour to prove the plot failed completely, and was bound to fail because there was no plot.” Meyer labels many executions of priests“judicial murders.”[18] The article in Connotations referred to above cites five modern historians, all non-Catholic specialists in the Elizabethan period, who declare Campion not guilty as charged and innocent of any political activity. That is Waugh’s point. But while individual missionaries might be innocent of politics, the enterprise in which they are engaged could have a political motive. In the climate of competition between Catholic and Protestant power blocs,no large-scale religious activity —such as the English Catholic “mission to England” of which Campion was part—could be without political significance. The motivation of the missionaries was purely religious, and their instructions were to confine their attention to existing Catholics, but sending wave after wave of young prieststo a Protestant country was open to political interpretation, even if the priests had to give witness through their patience under torture and martyrdom, By far the most influential criticism of Edmund Campion comes from Rose Macaulay, the noted English critic, in a famous article in Horizon.[19] Because Macaulay’s criticisms have been endorsed by authorities as diverse as Hugh Trevor Roper and Malcolm Bradbury, it is necessary to examine them.