Donald Campbell was born in Wick, Caithness, in 1940 and established his reputation as a poet in the 1970s with volumes such as Rhymes ’n Reason (1972). He has lived mostly in Edinburgh and his poetry follows the model of Edinburgh poets such as Robert Garioch, whose contemporary use of Edinburgh urban dialect is mixed with an awareness of the traditions of Scots from the eighteenth century. Both Garioch and Campbell are particularly aware of the work of the eighteenth-century poet Robert Fergusson, whose poems use vernacular speech to display the richness and variety of the lower-class social world of urban Scotland.
Campbell’s dramatic work focuses on historical periods or geographical locations in which Scots is the normal speech of the community and where the author does not need to justify the use of Scots in purely artistic — rather than naturalistic — terms. The Widows of Clyth (1979), for instance, explores the impact on a small community of a fishing tragedy, and gets its dramatic effects from the authenticity of the characters’ speech. The Jesuit exploits effectively a modernised version of the Scots of the last age before English became the language of the ruling classes.
The historical conflict which The Jesuit explores is still a live issue in Scotland, since religion remains a matter of significant division, manifested in the country’s divided educational system, which allows children to attend non-denominational or Catholic schools. Sectarianism continues to haunt Scottish life, the often unacknowledged basis of community identity from the accepted confrontations of football supporters to the underlying religious biases of political parties.
John Ogilvie was the first Scottish cleric to be sanctified. By focusing on this character, seen in the light of his contemporary elevation to sainthood, Campbell dramatises key issues of Scottish tradition and the ways in which a past Scotland — the Scotland of pre-Reformation Catholicism — relates to a Scotland where Catholicism has played a crucial role in defining modern Scottish identity — if only by challenging the traditional conceptions of Scotland as a resolutely Calvinist country.
‘It has plesit God to cast in my hands a Jesuit, that calls himself Ogilvie … In his bulget we haif found his vestementis and other furniture for the masse with some bookis and reliques of S. Ignatius, S. Margaret, S. Katherin and other thair saints; also some writtis amongst qhiche the principal is a Catalogue of things left be Father Anderson, a Jesuit in Scotland qho semis to be furth of the countrey. Thairby your Majestie wil persaif the furniture of bookis and vestementis that haif in store against the day they looke for, and sum of thair freindschip with qhom the samin is reservit.’ Archbishop John Spottiswoode to James VI, October 1614.
‘If nothing could be found but that he was a Jesuit and had said Mass they should banish him the country and inhibit him to return without licence under pain of death. But if it should appear that he had been a practiser for the stirring up of subjects to rebellion or did maintain the Pope’s transcendent power over kings and refused to take the Oath of Allegiance they should leave him to the course of law and justice.’ King James’s reply.
‘If the King will be to me as his predecessors were to mine I will obey and acknowledge him for my King but, if he do otherwise and play the runagate from God, as he and you all do, I will not acknowledge him more than this old hat.’ Father John Ogilvie S.J., Speech at his trial, March 1615.