It is often the case that what are taken to be the best known and even, in some historical circles, celebrated events, people and ideas are also the most problematic. The English Jesuit Edmund Campion, his return to the English political arena and the implications of what he did in the early 1580s fall into exactly this category. I remember that when I was starting postgraduate research in the sub-field of early modern English Catholicism I really could not make head or tail of the Jesuit intervention or “mission” of 1580-1581. If it was as its contemporary exponents and supporters described, why was it so fatally disruptive and controversial? So many scholars were adamant that Catholicism was all but extinct politically – a mere cultural leftover – that the regime, for all its reforming credentials, surely would not be particularly bothered by a former university teacher doing what Campion did – which he claimed was all (and only) about religion. There was, admittedly, the problem of recusancy – the tendency of some Catholics to separate from the national Church – but apparently most of them did not and, again, most scholars seemed certain that recusancy was of little real significance. So why all the fuss? Yes, there was a rebellion going on in Ireland when Campion arrived in England. But there was always some sort of rebellion in Ireland – civil disturbance rarely seemed to amount to much there, at least for people other than the Irish for whom, with a wearisome inevitability, it never seemed to end well.

It was, I thought, all extremely confusing. Campion is one of the few Catholics of the late Tudor period whose name has been anything like a household one. But to some extent he remained an enigma. There seemed to be little evidence that he and his companions were plotting conspiracy and rebellion – part of the Jesuit “black legend”. Still, if this was true, how did that fit with the modern-day “mainstream” accounts of the mid-Elizabethan regime being staffed by principled and sophisticated good servants of the queen, men such as Lord Burghley, who were as conscientious as any Catholic and were concerned merely to give the queen good counsel and to protect her from dastardly threats to her person and to the nation? In recent years the various plots against Elizabeth have been taken much more seriously in the scholarly literature. Yet how could Campion, a former insider and Oxford man, have been part of that danger to the queen’s person and realm?

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that most narratives of the period have steered clear of this topic, and indeed of many other high-profile Catholics whose principled stand and refusal to conform on certain issues in religion brought them into conflict with royal authority. But it is in some ways equally surprising that, in the context of the uncertainties of mid-Elizabethan politics, the question of as major a public event as the papally sponsored Catholic clerical call to reform and renewal led by Campion and his friends should have received so little attention. To be fair, Thomas McCoog’s trail-blazing monographs on the function and purposes of the Society of Jesus in the British Isles have established a new framework for thinking about these things. But, even so, there was a good case for revisiting the life and career of Edmund Campion despite the well-known work of Richard Simpson and Evelyn Waugh.

This is what Gerard Kilroy has done – in a project of extraordinary scholarly dimensions and the product of many years of interdisciplinary study across a very wide range of archives – the sort of undertaking which is possible only for someone with a literary training as well as a historical one and, one might add, for someone not mired in the current madness of university departments’ attempts to comply with time-wasting initiatives from central government and pendant quangos. This study, in my view, changes fundamentally our understanding of the way that Elizabethans saw the relationship between Church and State and it takes us as close to comprehending what Campion thought he was doing as we are ever likely to get. In a review of this length it is really not possible to do anything other than sketch out how far Dr Kilroy has altered our interpretative framework. His line is that first and foremost Campion was a scholar who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. That could well be right though there is probably no absolutely certain answer to how much he knew and anticipated about the reaction to his arrival in mid-Elizabethan England and English politics.

Kilroy’s avowed purpose is not only to narrate that brief section of Campion’s life but also to restore (not before time) some balance to the account by recovering everything possible of Campion’s CV before June 1580. The chapter on London, recreating the educational and religious culture out of which the future Jesuit came, demonstrates how far Campion was wired into what one might call metropolitan life. It shows that, despite his years spent abroad, he had the credentials and incentive to return in 1580 when it appeared that the religious culture of the national Church might be about to change. Dr Kilroy stresses also that he came from a culturally and ideologically diverse background – for example, his father was a printer of anti-Romish pamphlets. Kilroy reassembles the way in which Campion witnessed at first hand the debates over reform as London swung this way and that between change and reaction. The chapter on the queen’s visit to Oxford, a version of which appeared in British Catholic History, is a tour de force of historical reconstruction and completely altered my understanding of that episode. At the same time, it gives a new meaning to the mid-1560s struggles over everything from the Catholic Louvainist reaction to the quarrels in parliament over the succession and the looming threat of Mary Stuart. Again, the chapter on Campion’s time in Prague convincingly makes the point (and I am sure this had never even occurred to me) that he witnessed there an aggressive Jesuit presence and mission but in the context of a relatively ecumenical or at least mixed confessional environment – and this is what he anticipated and/or tried to recreate when he arrived in England in 1580. This is central and crucial to Kilroy’s account of what Campion (thought he) was doing. In other words, the evidence is that his concerns and mental world were completely different from those of Nicholas Sander and William Allen who, it seems, may well have anticipated a real and violent destabilisation of the Elizabethan polity whereas Campion imagined something much more like what he was familiar with on the Continent.

On this crucial question of how much Campion knew about other Catholics’ projects for altering the Elizabethan settlement, and whether he was in any sense in sympathy with his co-religionist hard men, Kilroy comes down firmly in the negative – in disagreement therefore with the line with which I, for one, seem to be associated. I still think it is possible to argue that even without the Irish rebellion, what Persons and Campion were doing was likely to trigger a brutal reaction from those who reckoned that the queen was only partly on message and whom they had recently humiliated, in effect, over the question of the Anjou marriage negotiations even if, undoubtedly, the Irish business made all this a lot worse. It is possible that Campion was a religious pluralist with a version of religious tolerance which was ahead of its time. On the other hand, one still has to say that the language of the “brag” is not politically quiescent – what with its claims about the unstoppable force of the Society of Jesus. On the other hand, this is a valid question for historical argument and it goes to the heart both of mid-Elizabethan Catholicism and of Dr Kilroy’s research project.

The later chapters provide an exemplary account of the whirlwind of Campion’s and Persons’s evangelising and publishing activities – this is, I think, the first time that I have ever seen this episode really clearly explained – with all the events being put, as far as it is possible, into the right order. The same is true of the unpicking of the way that Campion was finally arrested and put on trial, and also of the legacy of Campion’s mission. Only shortage of space here prevents me from describing how valuable an achievement this has been on Dr Kilroy’s part – that is, to clarify exactly what the Jesuit-led mission was doing and the way in which it was received and viewed by a variety of interest groups and, of course, the regime.

At some level Campion was simply extraordinary, as this study of him amply demonstrates. Whether he deliberately put himself in harm’s way or whether events unravelled beyond his and his friends’ control, we will perhaps never really be able to say. But, whatever the chain of causation which brought him to trial and martyrdom, his was not the typical experience of Catholic seminary clergy and religious in England after the Reformation – nor for that matter was that of, say, Robert Southwell or Henry Walpole. On the other hand, what Campion and his associates did was part of a much larger project directly involving in the end hundreds and indeed thousands of their contemporaries. Or, rather, the recovery in this kind of often micro-historical detail of the crucial years 1580-1581 allows us to glimpse the Catholic issue in three dimensions as opposed to the one- or two-dimensional approach adopted in most books on the period. Of course, this is in part because of the survival of a range of sources which are not available for other Catholics of the time – one thinks here of the life of Campion penned by Paolo Bombino of which Kilroy makes spectacular use. But the suggestion must be that this recovery of the Campion-Persons mission alters our understanding of mid-Elizabethan politics and, in turn, of what we often refer to as the later English Reformation even if, in so many scholarly accounts of these things, there has been a habitual exclusion of precisely this sort of material.

The arguments about Campion will almost certainly persist. (I am sure that some commentators will remark that Campion was engaged in special pleading – and it is true that many of the people in the early modern period who made the most convincing case for tolerance were the ones who were not, at the point that they made their case, being tolerated.) Still, this is an extremely well written study – and likely to become a modern classic, completely displacing e.g. Simpson and Waugh. There have, it is true, been a number of major texts in recent years on English Catholicism – one thinks here of, among others, Thomas McCoog’s volumes on the Society of Jesus and Anne Dillon’s on martyrdom. But this book is an exceptionally important intervention in the field of Reformation studies. The cumulative effect of recent work of this kind, surely by now reaching some sort of escape velocity, will be that the platitudes about the inclusion of Catholicism as a topic in the larger field of the English Reformation will start to drop away and the actual material will begin to be incorporated in (whatever we take to be) mainstream accounts of the period.