[Footnote 14: When I studied at Louvain University in 1893, I found the struggle just as it had been three hundred years before. The Jesuits still sought in vain to capture the university, and were detested as cordially as ever.] CHAPTER VI THE EARLY JESUITS IN ENGLAND The first attempts of the Jesuits to carry their war against Protestantism into the British Isles have been noticed, at their various dates, in previous chapters. We remember the brave and futile journey of Brouet and Salmeron in 1541; the labours of David Woulfe, of unhappy memory, in Ireland in 1560; the fruitless adventures of Gouda among the Scottish Calvinists in 1562; and the obscure apostolate of Father King in England in 1564. Three years after the last date, Father Edmund Hay had made an equally unprofitable expedition to Scotland. He and Thomas Darbyshire, a nephew of Bishop Bonner, had been directed to accompany a Nuncio on a fresh attempt to advise and confirm Queen Mary. The Nuncio had prudently remained in Paris, and sent Father Hay, an adventurous young Scot who loved disguises and the inspiring chances of politics, to explore the kingdom. He spent two months in hiding at Edinburgh in the early part of 1567, and returned to say that there was no hope of success. At last, in 1580, a very able and remarkable English Jesuit, Father Robert Parsons, opened that stirring chapter of Jesuit history which closes with the Gunpowder Plot. Since the beginning of the Reformation in England a number of Catholic students had gone abroad, and many of them had entered the Jesuit novitiate in Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Father More has preserved in his _Historia missionis Anglicanæ_ (1660) the names of about thirty Englishmen who figure in the chronicles of one or other province down to the year 1580. Of these the most important were Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion, who opened the mission of 1580. Parson, a Somersetshire man of the yeoman class, had been a fellow of Balliol, where he had attracted some attention by his ability, his religious vacillations, and his disagreeable temper. He was compelled to resign and go abroad in 1573. Some (Camden and others) say that he was expelled for dishonest conduct, others that he was a martyr to religious conviction; but Father Taunton concludes, in his excellent study of Parsons, that he left "on account of perpetual disagreements with his fellows."[15] At Louvain he met Father William Good, who induced him to go through the exercises, and he entered the Society at Rome in 1575. He was ordained priest, and made English confessor at St. Peter's in 1578. Edmund Campion, who was the son of a London bookseller and a brilliant Fellow of St. John's (Oxford), had meantime joined the Society and was at Prague. He had known Parsons at Oxford, and they corresponded when they both became Jesuits.