Campion and Parsons came to England in disguise in the summer of 1580. Their mission was not a success. It only served to show how much more securely Elizabeth was seated on her throne than in the earlier years of her reign. In his letters to Rome, Campion boasts of the welcome he met with everywhere, the crowds that attended his preaching, the ardour of the Catholics, and the disrepute into which Protestantism was falling. He had evidently worked himself up to such a state of ecstasy that he was living in a world of his own imagination, and was no competent witness of facts. He crept about England in various disguises, and when he was in districts where the nobles and gentry favoured the old religion, he preached with a publicity which seems extraordinary to us in these days when the laws are executed with prompt uniformity by means of railways, telegraphs, and a well-organised police. In the sixteenth century England had nothing that can be called an organised machinery for the prevention and detection of crime. If an outbreak occurred the Government collected militia, and trampled it out with an energy that took no account of law and feared no consequences. But in ordinary times it had to depend on the local justices of the peace and parish constables, and if they were remiss the laws were a dead letter. There were no newspapers. The high-roads were few and bad. One parish did not know what was going on in the next. Campion could be passed on from one gentleman’s house to another on horses quite as good as any officer of the Government rode, and could travel all over England without ever using a high-road or showing his face in a town. If he preached to a hundred people in some Lancashire village, Lord Derby did not want to know it, and before the news reached Burghley or Walsingham he would be in another county, or perhaps back in London--then, as now, the safest of all hiding-places. Thus, though a warrant was issued for his arrest as soon as he arrived in England, it was not till July in the next year (1581) that he was taken, after an unusually public and protracted appearance in the neighbourhood of Oxford.