On 1 December 1581 — not a good day in English judicial history — a Jesuit priest and poet of European renown was dragged on a hurdle through the London mud and savagely butchered at Tyburn. Alongside him on the scaffold were two other priests who suffered the same death, but, now as then, their names and reputations are eclipsed by that of the man who for both persecuted Catholic England and its state oppressors most vividly embodied the religious struggles of the Elizabethan age. ‘Yee thought perhaps, when learned Campion dyes,’ one eyewitness at Tyburn, the ‘wit, minor poet, satirist and flaneur’, Henry Walpole, taunted the authorities,
His pen must cease, his sugred tounge be
still.
But yow forget how lowd his death yt cryes,
How farre beyond the sounde of tounge or
quill.
Yow did not know how rare and great
a good
Yt was to write those precious guiftes
in bloode.
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