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

His proofe layd downe, reprooved out of hand.

So that the simplest present there could say,

That Campions cause did beare the shame away. (46-48)

Though either side could (and did) claim victory in the contest, when Munday must change the facts of the case in order to insist on the government's triumph, he reveals the weaknesses of his claim.

More subtly, Munday's main rhetorical tactic in this response poem also suggests the vulnerability of his position. For here Munday simply--and crudely--reverses the images of the original poem in an attempt to recharacterize Campion as villain rather than hero. For example, the first poet's opening statement of linguistic inadequacy in the face of Campion's glory becomes Munday's reticence to repeat the horror of Campion's treason (25-30). Munday also denies claims made by the first poet for the final expressiveness of Campion's death and martyrdom by repeating the original words with just enough changes to reverse the meaning: "The streets, the stones, the steps they hauled him by," instead of proclaiming "the cause for which these martyrs die" now "Pronounst these Traitours woorthy for to die":

The Tower sayeth he Treason did defend;

The Barre beares witnesse of his guilty minde;

Tiborne dooth tell he made a Traitours ende;

On every gate example we may finde.

In vaine they work to laude him with such fame,

For heaven & earth beares witnes of his shame. (169-74)

Munday reads the death of Campion as the Elizabethan government meant it to be read, but in several ways the relationship between these two poems elucidates the central conceptual problem facing the Elizabethan authorities in their quest to restrict the expression of Catholic belief. Just as Hanmer reprinted Campion's challenge in the course of refuting it, just as Burghley restated the Catholic claim that Jesuits were being executed for religion not treason as he attempted to contradict it, so Munday's attempt to reinterpret Campion's death cites the Catholic position--and in the process inevitably indicates the centrality of disagreement and debate to social political and religious meaning. Repeating the words of the opponents both underscores the censorship to which they have been subjected, and also gives the lie to the claim (made, for example, by Hanmer) that debate on theological issues was closed. By attempting to impose an official reading on Campion's death, Munday also inevitably demonstrates that his is only one of a number of different readings. In this way these dueling ballads rehearse linguistically what Peter Lake and Michael Questier have argued about the executions of the seminary priests: that the failure of the government to control the meaning of these spectacles was not the result of "administrative weakness" but was inevitable given the "essentially theatrical way of dispatching the felon and embodying the power of the state."(49) Not only does Munday's poem inevitably broadcast the Catholic case in the act of refuting it, but the language that makes the government's case is, like the bodies of Jesuits at the site of execution, always vulnerable to a range of interpretations.