[PART ONE] Penal Times: The Early Life and Arrest of St Edmund Campion

From ‘Venite Prandete’ on Facebook

Edmund Campion was the son of “very honest and Catholic” parents. He was born on the feast of St Paul, 25 January 1540, in Paternoster Row, London, “in the thirtieth year of the reign of Henry VIII”, a year described by his biographer, Richard Simpson, as, “marked by the suppression of the great religious houses in England, the inauguration of a persecution of which, forty years later, Campion was to be a victim – and the solemn Papal approval of the Society of Jesus, of which he was to be an ornament.”

A brilliant scholar, Campion was chosen at age 13 to make the complimentary speech to Queen Mary on her coronation procession in 1553.

After the Catholic reign of Mary Tudor, the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne saw the…