The Martyrdom of St. Edward Campion
The Lord Chief Justice answered: “you must go to the place from whence you came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open city of London upon hurdles to the place of execution, and there be hanged and let down alive, and you’re privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burned in your sight; then your head is to be cut off and your body divided into four parts, to be disposed of at her Majesty’s pleasure. And God have mercy on your soul.”
One man, however, returned from Tyburn to Grays Inn profoundly changed: Henry Walpole, Cambridge wit, minor poet, satirist, flaneur, a young man of birth, popular, intelligent, slightly romantic. … He secured a front place at Tyburn; so close that even when Campion’s entrails were torn out by the butcher and thrown into the cauldron of boiling water, a spot of blood splashed upon his coat. In that moment he was caught into a new life; he crossed the sea, became a priest, and, 13 years later, after very terrible sufferings, died the same death is Campion’s on the gallows at York.
Evelyn Waugh, St. Edmund Campion, Page 205
[a “flaneur” is a loafer, a “stroller”]
9:53 am on September 2, 2015
