Ballads and brags: free speech and recusant culture in Elizabethan England

And Campion immediately began to fulfill these fears when one of his first acts upon arrival in England was to pen a challenge to disputation analogous to Jewell's challenge of 1560. Upon encouragement by one of his London hosts, both Campion and Parsons agreed to write down, against the possibility of their future arrest, "a brief declaration of the true causes of [their] coming."(29) Campion's manuscript incidentally responds to official Elizabethan policy by making the claim that the purpose of his mission to England is spiritual, not political, but primarily the "Letter to the Lords of the Council," popularly known as Campion's "Challenge" or "Brag," is a plea for the Elizabethan government to allow an open theological debate. Campion requests that he be allowed to dispute before the Council itself, "before the Doctors and Masters and chosen men of both Universities," and "before the lawyers, spiritual and temporal"--that is, in the political, scholarly, and legal argumentative arenas.(30) He wants only, he claims, to have the "questions of religion opened faithfully."(31) There is plenty in the tone of the letter to offend the Elizabethan authorities, but its primary source of irritation is the way in which it challenges the government's policy of censorship.

Soon copies of Campion's Challenge were circulating through Catholic channels in England: in a November letter William Allen comments that the declarations of both Campion and Parsons "pass from hand to hand everywhere among people in England and are a source of strength to many."(32) Both William Charke and Meredith Hanmer produced books confuting Campion, Hanmer's book further publicizing the Brag by reprinting it in its entirety.(33) The difficulties into which Campion's Challenge put the government were clearly articulated in Robert Parsons's early contribution to the dispute, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church, published under the pseudonym John Howlet. Here, Parsons makes an impassioned plea that an "indifferent triall" of Catholicism and Protestantism, "by publique disputation or otherwise," be permitted in the name of "Gods cause, and the love of his truth."(34) Parsons explicitly connects the recent petition of Campion (and, he claims, "sundry" others) to Jewell's challenge, which he claims was never allowed to be answered openly. Catholics have repeatedly submitted "most humble petitions that, seeing those men, which first challenged at Poule's Crosse, all the learned of our side that might be found, either to writing, or disputing: afterward procured your Majesties prohibition by proclamation, that no books should be written or read of that part in England: their petition was (I say) that at the least, there might some public disputation be admitted, whereby men's doubts might be resolved." Not only does Parsons imply that a theological disputation would be in the service of discovering "God's truth," but he articulates the impression being created by the refusal of the Elizabethan authorities to let the Catholic side be heard: "If our adversaries refuse this offer, they shall show too much distrust in their own cause."