Great men of the Province

Edmund Campion was martyred at Tyburn in 1581 at the age of only 41. He had been a “don” or lecturer, at St John's College, Oxford, and something of a cult figure there, his pupils imitating him and calling themselves "Campionists". He was also a gifted Latin orator, and his speech of welcome when Queen Elizabeth visited the College was so impressive that she wanted him to join her service; and it seems that she never forgot him.

Robert Southwell was born into a recusant family in Norfolk. Like so many of his generation, he had to go abroad for a Catholic education; he studied first at Douai and then in Paris. While he was still only 16, he decided he wanted to join the Jesuits, but was turned down as being too young. So he walked from Paris to Rome, and entered the Society in 1578. After his two years' novitiate, and a fairly rapid course in philosophy and theology, he was ordained in 1584, and sent to be prefect of studies at the English College in Rome, where diocesan priests were being trained for the English mission. 

John Ogilvie was born in 1579 and brought up in the Calvinist tradition. He was six or seven years old when Mary Queen of Scots died on the scaffold. He grew up as a child in a Scotland which had rejected her, and with her the old faith of his fathers. At the age of twelve he crossed to the continent in pursuit of education. But travelling in Europe broadened his mind, and he decided to become a Catholic, ending up at a Jesuit college in Austria. A year later, in 1599, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, and followed the normal Jesuit programme of noviceship, philosophy, and school teaching, in Vienna, before he was ordained in Paris in 1610.

Nicholas Owen was a Jesuit brother whose skills as a mason and carpenter saved an unknown number of priests from capture as they went round Britain in the days when it was illegal to be a priest, and high treason to be a Jesuit. Clearly the seeds of what he afterwards became were sown at home, for his father was a carpenter, two of his brothers became priests, and the third brother printed Catholic books in secret.