Early in his biography of Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh wonders why his subject spurned the smooth path that lay before him – accommodation with the nascent Anglican establishment, with all the comfort it afforded – and sought, instead, the way of the Cross. We like to imagine our saints facing starkly clear choices. But that wasn’t the case with the Oxford tutor who would go on to become the great Jesuit martyr; Campion had to find Calvary through a glass darkly.
It wasn’t Campion’s fault, after all, that the Tudors had cut off England from “historic Christianity”. Plenty of “decent” people had made their peace with the changes. The rupture was “regrettable”, but the Anglicans’ newfangled rites weren’t that bad. “The ancient cathedrals were still standing,” doctrinal similarities between Anglicanism and Catholicism outnumbered the differences, and there were plenty of honours that a scholar of Campion’s caliber could attain.
