Edmund Campion was a notable English Oxford scholar that left England to join the Jesuits. When he returned to England, he was arrested, tortured, crippled, required to defend his religious faith in debate and subsequently hung, drawn and quartered for treason.

From the preface:

Since the day of his death, The Blessed Edmund Campion has been held in devotion throughout the English-speaking Catholic world, but when I undertook this work there was no life of him generally available. . . . There is a great need for a complete scholar's book on the subject. This is not it. All I have sought to do is to select the incidents which strike a novelist as important and put them into a narrative which I hope may prove readable.