ect was
this. "You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and
if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of
misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your
answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure
that whatever then comes through to the outer world will come
out poisoned and perverted. Let me therefore urge you to write
now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to have
published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about
during your incarceration, rumours which you will then not be
able to answer or to repudiate." Father Persons seems to have
agreed at once. Campion at first raised objections, but soon,
with his ever obliging temper, sat down at the end of the table
and wrote off in half an hour an open letter _To the Lords of
Her Majesty's Privy Council_, afterwards so well known as
_Campion's Challenge._

3. THE CHALLENGE.

Campion, after finishing his letter and taking copy for himself,
had consigned the other copy to Pounde. Persons had done the
same; but whereas the latter took the precaution to seal his
letter, Campion had handed over his unfastened. Then the company
broke up. Persons made a wide circle from Northampton round to
Gloucester, while Campion made a smaller circle from Oxfordshire
up to Northampton. When they got back to town in September, they
found all the world discussing "the Challenge." What had happened
was that proceedings had been taken by the Ecclesiastical
Commission against Pounde, and he had been committed to solitary
confinement in the ruinous castle of Bishop's Stortford. Before
he left London he began to communicate the letter to others, lest
it should be altogether lost, and as soon as it was thus
published it attracted everyone's attention, and his adversaries
had ironically christened it _the challenge_. The word was indeed
one which Campion had used, but he had employed it precisely in
order to avoid any charge that might have arisen, of being
combative and presumptuous.

Thus in the course of three months Campion, as it were in spite
of himself, had filled England with his name and with the message
he had come to announce, and he had reduced his adversaries to a
very ridiculous position. They had been dared to meet him in
disputation, and this they feared to do. In effect, they in their
thousands were hiding their heads in the sand, while their
constables and pursuivants were raiding the