ABSTRACT
The opening lines of Henry Walpole’s poem on the death of Edmund Campion on 1 December 1581 might stand as an epitome of the dependence on manuscript circulation of the Catholic community over the next twenty-five years. Printing was so heavily controlled for both Catholics and puritan nonconformists that the choice of ‘ynke and pen’ serves to represent the protest of an oppressed community against a regime which denied expression to the deepest beliefs of its subjects. In the bitter pamphlet war that followed Campion’s death, the Privy Council succeeded in taking control of print. In December 1583, Lord Burghley had The Execution o f Justice in England published in English, Latin, Italian and French.1 This prompted a swift reply from Cardinal Allen in which he reversed Burghley’s central charge of ‘pretence’ in a devastating analysis of the power of unjust regimes to control the flow of information:
For Princes and communities in disorder have a thousand pretences, excuses, and coulors, of their unjust actions: they have the name of authoritie, the shadowe of lawes, the pennes and tongues of infinite at their commaundement: they may print or publish what they like, suppresse what they list: wherof private men, be they never so wicked or good, have not so great commoditie.2
