To return to England, Parsons found in the early spring of 1581 that his lodging in East Ham was suspected, and he moved the press to Dame Stonor's park near Henley, where Campion came to control the printing of his _Ten Reasons_: a Latin work, not hampered by modesty, which greatly stirred the Protestant divines of the time. Gilbert, who was now under surveillance and had lost most of his property in the cause, was sent to Rome to report that 20,000 Catholics had been added to the list of the faithful in a year--a quite incredible number, as only 50,000 recusants were known to the Council in the whole of England. On 11th July the two comrades parted, for the last time; Campion was caught at Lyford in Berkshire about a week afterwards. He had imprudently returned to a house at which he had ministered, and the officers closed round it. For a day and a night Campion lay hidden in the "priest's hole," but the officers at last discovered him, and sent him to London, conspicuously labelled "Campion the seditious Jesuit." We will not linger over the racking, the thrusting of spikes between his fingers and nails, and the other horrible devices by which the Council sought to extract a betrayal of others; though we might remind those who, like Crétineau-Joly, speak of these things as the hideous inventions of Protestant hatred, that these appalling instruments were, on the contrary, already stained with Protestant blood. Campion's great courage wavered under the long and terrible strain, and he supplied a few names of Catholic houses, to the great scandal of the faithful at the time; but he expiated his momentary weakness, on 1st December, by meeting with great bravery the ghastly death of a "traitor" at Tyburn. One of the two secular priests who were condemned to die with him, Father Briant, was admitted by him to the Society the night before the execution, and died a Jesuit. Father Cottam was executed in the following May (1582).
Parsons left Henley, where his press was discovered a month later, and went into Sussex. The secular clergy were now so eager to get the Jesuits out of England that some of them threatened to betray him, and he went to France in March. Probably the feeling that he could promote his political scheme more effectively on the Continent had more to do with his flight than the fear of death or the pressure of the secular clergy. He remained at Rouen, smuggling English books from there into England and doing all that he could to press the Scottish enterprise. It was from Rouen that he sent Crichton into Scotland, and he was in constant correspondence with Mendoza and the Duke of Guise, who would help in the enterprise. Crichton presently returned to tell of the large and imprudent offers of help he had made to Lennox in Scotland, and they decided to make an effort to get armies for the rescue of Mary Stuart. Crichton was sent to Rome, and Parsons went to Madrid.