The moment may have seemed to Campion exactly favourable for such a strong appeal. One of Cheyney’s successors in his See declared: “It was certain he died a Papist.” This was contradicted by a lesser authority, but yet a good one. If it were indeed “certain”, at least Edmund Campion, to whom the tidings would have been most consoling, never knew of it. It seems as if Cheyney could not have answered that bugle-call of a letter. He is said, however, to have kept it always, and to have called it his greatest treasure. How these many cries of “the heat of my love” must have haunted his ear! It is hardly in human nature to value such a document at all (and there are passages in it more ruthless, after the manner of the time, than any we have quoted), unless for the reflex reason that it does its intended work in the heart of the receiver. To have valued it either as a piece of literary cleverness, or as a monument of misdirected concern, would have been equally cynical, and clean contrary to Cheyney’s known attitude towards his friend. He did not live to see Campion return to England. Shunning the bigots and the unprincipled men in power to the last, and sheltering the Catholics all he could, he shut himself up at Gloucester, a whole High Church party in himself, wounded and at bay: and there in 1579 he died, and was buried in the glorious Cathedral, without an epitaph. The dream of his lifetime, as well as Edmund Campion’s sonship, he had loved and lost. V THE CALL TO COME UP HIGHER: DOUAY, PRAGUE: 1571-1573