INHOSPITABLE HOME: 1580 SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM had a wonderfully well-organized spy-system: far superior, as Simpson remarks, to the attempts of the Spaniards in the same line. Therefore each of the missionaries was cautioned to travel under a name other than his own. Campion fell back upon his beloved alias of “Mr. Patrick,” as he had done for the brief visit to Geneva. His friends made him drop it, as they neared the Channel; being Irish, it was doubly dangerous, since here at Rheims the home-goers got their first tardy news of the so-called Geraldine insurrection in Ireland, acted upon in July, 1579, and crushed almost as soon by the massacre at Smerwick in Kerry. It had been nursed by European feeling against Elizabeth’s policy in Flanders, and her piracies on the high seas; and the great religious grudge found it a convenient opening. Dr. Nicholas Sander, who was not a Papal Legate, but stood none the less for the Pope’s active good-will in the matter, joined the expedition with James Fitzmaurice, Spanish soldiers, Roman officers, ships and supplies. That expedition did not, as we know, dislodge Jezebel from her throne, but it gave sufficient heartbreak to our messengers of the Gospel of Peace, who were now sure to be mixed up with it in the popular mind. The situation was certainly an awkward one. It gave unique plausibility to Walsingham’s claim that (to quote Fr. Pollen) “the preaching of the old Faith was only a political propaganda.” Father Robert Parsons faced the future, on behalf of the rest, in the spirit of a brave man. “Seeing that it lay not in our hands to remedy the matter, our consciences being clear, we resolved ourselves, with the Apostle, ‘through evil report and good report’ to go forward only with the spiritual action we had in hand. And if God had appointed that any of us should suffer in England under a wrong title, as Himself did upon the case of a malefactor, we should lose nothing thereby, but rather gain with Him who knew the truth, and Whom only in this enterprise we desired to please.” Danger was a spur and not a bridle to Campion’s devoted will. But he began to foresee little fruit from labours on his native ground, with so much fierce misunderstanding against him; and to fear that he had not done well in so gladly laying down what was, after all, steady and successful work in Bohemia. With this buzzing scruple he went to the President for advice. Allen replied that the work in “Boemeland,” excellent at all points as it had been, yet could be done by any equally qualified person, or “at least by two or three” such persons, whereas in his own necessitous England Campion would be given strength and grace to supply for many men.