Loyola University Maryland - Evergreen / Green and Gray Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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Edmund Campion reading to Queen Elizabeth he extended his arms in a gesture, his audience was horrified to see that the fingers had been torn from his hands by the rack. Finally, after a framed trial, he was hanged, drawn and quartered on Tyburn Hill. One of Campion s contemporaries, who worked with him, was Robert Parsons. The year 1594 was a notable date in Parson s life. In that year he published, on the death of Elizabeth, his renowned “Conference about the next succession to the crown of England, wherein he upheld popular sovereignty and repudiated the divine right of kings. This treatise had a direct influence on both Milton s and Hobbes politi- cal theories. It was he, who along with Bellarmine, introduced scholastic politics into English Whig thought, which was later to reach fruition in the British Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. Also in 1594, Parsons founded the English College at Saint Omer s, which, after persecution had subsided in England, was transferred to Stonyhurst, the leading Jesuit college in England at the present time. Among the graduates of Stonyhurst 24

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him a wealth oj written material on mathematics and physics. Today Father Theodor Wulfs name is known to physicists, Erich Wasmann, the biologist, is still living. Co-Patron of Poland, Stanislaus Kostka, the Polish prince in his teens trudged a 1,000 miles, escaping a brother anxious to harden him and was received by Peter Canisius into the Order. Stanislaus has been for centuries a saint everybody loves along with John Berchmans and Aloysius Gonzaga. The bones of another Polish saint. Saint Andrew Bobola, were recently brought out of Russia to Rome by living Jesuits then on a relief expedition to the land of Communism. T Jl hi , he scaffold is the symbol of English Jesu- its. Tyburn Hill welcomed them. Let’s select Edmund Campion, the Oxford youth, who read a poetical address to Queen Elizabeth. No man, except Newman, The scaffold m England, the symbol of the Jes- was aped so assiduously by the Oxford undergraduates as was this future Hopki Jesuit. Even though constantly importuned by Elizabeth and Dudley to share the government’s favors, he joined the Society of Jesus at Rome and, when the English Mission was conceived by Father Robert Parsons, he returned to England and there, working mostly under cover and in disguise, he helped keep thriving the hard-driven faith of his co-religionists. At last, when apprehended by government agents, he was thrown into the Tower and tortured. After being severely racked, he requested a public disputation. This was granted him by the Queen, and before Elizabeth and all the great Protes- tant divines, for four days, he literally stood without chair, table, or time to prepare, undefeated by the arguments bombarding him from all sides. Once, when Campion martyred on Tyburn Hill 23

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have been John Carroll and Leonard Neale, the first two bishops of Baltimore, in- numerable other bishops, archbishops and cardinals, a half-dozen generals and an admiral, many English bassadors, a president of the naturalist, members of ical leaders, and more re- the Punch” cartoonist, reate of England, Charles er John Gerard, scientific philosophers , Fathers Maher. Astronomers from tory have been sent by the British government all over the world. Stephen Perry’s name is preeminent. Laboring with Campion and Parsons was another English Jesuit named Robert Southwell, destined to join the ranks of the eminent British poets. It was he who endeavored to give Elizabethan poetry a religious turn by such works as ’‘Triumphs over Death,” ‘‘Hundred Meditations on the Love of God,” ‘‘Short Rule of Good Life,” and ‘‘Saint Peter’s Complaint.” He was arrested in 1592, examined thirteen times under torture by members of the Council and was thrown into a dungeon for three years. It was there he wrote most of his best work and it rings with the sincerity engendered by his suffering. He was hanged, drawn and quartered on Tyburn Hill. The Cambridge History of English Literature maintains that Shakespeare read and imitated Southwell, and Ben Jonson exclaimed once that if ‘‘. . . . he had written .... the Burning Babe (of Southwell), he would have been content to destroy many of hi s own pieces.” In the 19th Century, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins attended Priest’s Hole in an English Manor governor s, justices and am- Peru, Charles Waterton, Parliament and Irish polit- cently, Bernard Partridge, Alfred Austin, poet lau- Laughton, the actor, Fath- and historical writer, the Rickaby, Thurston and the Stonyhurst observa- 25