Challenge to the Privy Council

The letter is addressed to “the Lords of Her Majestie’s Privy Council” and is set out in nine articles. In it Edmund Campion says that he is a priest of the Society of Jesus, that his charge is to preach, to minister the sacraments and to confute errors, and that he is “strictly forbidden” by the superior who sent him to deal with matters of state. He asks for three hearings, before the Council, before the scholars of both universities and before the lawyers. Campion describes the paper himself in a letter to the general of his order that William Allen printed in 1582: he had written out the causes of his coming, kept one copy and left another with a friend, who let it circulate.

It is Campion’s own statement of his purpose, written before his arrest. The government’s view of that purpose is in the Execution of Justice in England. The text is here taken from a twentieth-century Jesuit editor’s printing; its spelling is partly modernised.