THE Campion family seem to have been both gentlefolk and yeomen, and to have been widely scattered over the land: in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Essex, Sussex, and Devon. Nothing is definitely known, at present, as to which branch of the Campion family the Blessed Edmund belonged. Unlike many of the martyrs of Tudor and Stuart times, he was what is called a “born” Catholic: in more accurate phrase, a born heathen, as we all are! but baptized in his parents’ religion soon after his birth in London, on the Feast of St. Paul the Apostle, January 25, in the year 1540, New Style. Edmund had two brothers, and a[2] sister, none of whom played any great part in his after life. By the time he entered the Society of Jesus his father and mother were both dead: his written expression is that he had “hopes” they died in full communion with the Church; but evidently he did not know, being abroad, how it had fared with them in those terribly stormy days for Christian souls.

Edmund Campion, senior, was a book-seller, evidently in good standing, but not well to do. Some rich London guildsmen (probably of the Grocers’ Company, for it was they who maintained him later), befriended the promising little boy at just the right moment, when his father was reluctantly going to apprentice him to a trade; and he was sent, at their joint expense, to a good Grammar School. Afterwards, under the same patrons, he entered Christ Hospital, then lately set up in Newgate Street (out of confiscated Franciscan funds and the generosity of Londoners), as the “foundation” of the sixteen-year-old king, Edward VI. Here the small Edmund, full of life and laughter, banded and belted,[3] ran about in now extinct yellow petticoats, and one of the earliest pairs of those historic yellow stockings.

He was thirteen, and quite famous already in the school-boy world of London for his learning and his attractive presence and speech, when Queen Mary Tudor, who had just succeeded to the English throne, entered her city in state. Out of many hundred eligible youngsters it was he who was chosen to stand up before her on a street platform, under the shadow of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, and shrilly welcome her in the Latin tongue. The Queen sat on a white horse, robed in gold-embroidered dark velvet, crimson or purplish, with the great sword carried before her by the boyish Earl of Surrey, with eight thousand mounted lords and gentlemen on either side, all the glittering ambassadors, and a bevy of beautifully apparelled ladies.

On certain figures in that splendid and noisy pageant the child might have looked with pensive eyes, had he been able to forecast his own future; as it was, he cannot have failed to observe the Queen’s younger sister, the thin, watchful,[4] spirited girl who was known as the Lady Elizabeth. Another was there, of high office, though not of high descent, who was all goodness, piety and generosity, and may well have been drawn to notice Edmund Campion for the first time on that sunshiny afternoon in August, 1553. This was Sir Thomas White, then Lord Mayor of London, a staunch Catholic. He was an unlearned man and childless, who became, later, co-founder of the Merchant Taylors’ School, and enricher of many towns. By 1555 he had opened his College of St. John Baptist, once a Cistercian house, at Oxford. The Grocers’ Company at once approached him to admit their Blue-coat ward as a scholar; this he did, and conceived, almost as soon, a marked attachment to him; and two years later (when Edmund was not yet eighteen!) he made him a Senior Fellow. Campion’s other early friends at the University were his first tutor, John Bavand, and Gregory Martin, a Foundation Scholar like himself. These two showed towards him a lifelong devotion.