Saint Robert Southwell

He was born in 1561 at Horsham St. Faith, in Norfolk, the youngest of eight children in a family with Catholic sympathies. ¹³ His grandfather, Sir Richard Southwell, had been a wealthy courtier under Henry VIII, and in 1547 it was Sir Richard who brought the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the block. ¹ Thurston, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia, points out the turn the families took a generation later: the grandsons of the two men, Robert Southwell and Philip, Earl of Arundel, became devoted friends and fellow prisoners for the faith. ¹

He was raised a Catholic and sent abroad to be educated. ¹³ The Jesuit curia dates his enrollment at the English College in Douai to May 1576; Thurston adds that he studied philosophy there under Leonard Lessius, a Jesuit of extraordinary austerity. ¹² He went on to Paris, where he met the Jesuit Thomas Darbyshire, and asked to join the Society of Jesus. ¹²

He was turned down. The curia says he was thought too young, and that the novitiate was closed because of fighting nearby. ² Thurston says the disappointment drew from the seventeen-year-old some passionate laments, the first of his verses on record. ¹ He then walked to Rome, and was admitted there on October 17, 1578, at the novitiate of Sant'Andrea. ¹²³ Thurston says he made his simple vows in 1580, part of his novitiate having been spent at Tournai. ¹

He studied philosophy and theology at the Roman College and was ordained a priest in 1584. ¹²³ He then served as prefect of studies at the English College in Rome, which was preparing men to be priests for England. ¹²

The Irish Jesuits note what that meant. In the same year, a law of Queen Elizabeth forbade any English-born subject ordained a Catholic priest since her accession to remain in England more than forty days, on pain of death. ³ He was assigned to the mission all the same, and on May 8, 1586, he left Rome with Father Henry Garnet. ¹² The two Jesuits landed on a secluded stretch of coast to avoid the ports, and in England Southwell went by the name of Cotton. ¹²³

He found his first refuge with Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and then became chaplain to the Countess of Arundel, whose husband Philip was a prisoner in the Tower of London for his Catholic faith. ¹² Thurston dates the chaplaincy to two years after his arrival; the Irish Jesuits give 1589. ¹³ Through her he came to know the imprisoned earl and the earl's half-sister, Lady Margaret Sackville. ¹ When she died young he wrote the prose elegy "Triumphs over Death" to console her brother, and his "Hundred Meditations on the Love of God" were first written for her use. ¹ Letters he had sent to Philip in prison, revised, became "An Epistle of Comfort". ²

His work, the curia says, included visiting the dozen or so prisons in the city and helping priests who had just entered the country. ² He also helped direct the printing of catechisms and devotional books on a secret press that Garnet set up, the only source of religious literature English Catholics had. ² For his protection, Thurston says, he took up the interests of a country gentleman, and metaphors from hawking run through his writing, though his clothes stayed sober and his tastes simple. ¹ Thurston describes his character as singularly gentle and says he was never accused of any part in political intrigue. ¹

He was taken in 1592, and the sources tell it three ways. ¹²³ Thurston says he was arrested at Uxendon Hall, at Harrow, through the treachery of Anne Bellamy, the daughter of the house. ¹ The curia gives her story more fully: imprisoned for refusing Protestant services, she was made pregnant by the priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe, who promised to marry her and win pardon for her family if she drew Southwell into a trap; she wrote asking him to come to her parents' home, and he came thinking she wanted the sacraments. ² He hid in a concealed room, the curia says, and then gave himself up rather than betray the family. ² The Irish Jesuits say he was arrested while celebrating Mass, after the daughter had been arrested and tortured into naming him. ³

Topcliffe wrote exultantly to the queen: "I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly used". ¹ He was taken in chains to a torture chamber Topcliffe kept in his own house beside the Gatehouse prison. ² Thurston says he was examined thirteen times under torture by members of the Council; the curia, that thirteen sessions failed to make him give up the name of a single Catholic or priest. ¹² The Martyrology records that he was tortured with great cruelty by order of the queen herself. ⁴

Here the accounts of his prison part again. Thurston speaks of a dungeon swarming with vermin. ¹ The curia says he was thrown among the paupers to suffer cold, hunger and thirst, until his father saw him, was horrified, and petitioned the queen to treat him as a gentleman: release him or condemn him. ² She had him moved to the Tower, where he was better cared for but allowed no visitors. ² The Irish Jesuits say he was held there in solitary confinement and kept writing. ³

Thurston gives nearly three years in prison before his trial; the curia counts two and a half years in the Tower, after which Southwell petitioned Lord Burghley to release him, allow him visitors, or bring him to trial. ¹² He was given the trial, at Westminster Hall on February 20, 1595, where he readily admitted being a Catholic priest and denied any part in plots against the queen. ² He was found guilty of high treason. ²³

He was executed the next day, February 21, at Tyburn. ¹² He was tied to a hurdle and dragged through the streets, a journey of three hours. ² The Irish Jesuits say he read a passage from the Bible and spoke to the crowd, and made the sign of the cross as he died. ³ The noose had been badly placed, the curia says, and he did not die at once when the cart was pulled away, so the hangman took pity and hung on his feet to end it. ² He was thirty-four. His body was then beheaded and quartered. ²

His prose and verse were extremely popular with his contemporaries, Thurston says, and the religious pieces were sold openly by the booksellers although everyone knew who had written them. ¹ Ben Jonson said that to have written "The Burning Babe" he would gladly have given up many of his own poems. ¹ "Mary Magdalene's Tears", his earliest work, was licensed in 1591; his longest poem, "Saint Peter's Complaint", runs to 132 six-line stanzas and is loosely modeled on the Italian of Luigi Tansillo. ¹ It was printed in 1595, the year of his death, and another volume of short poems, "Maeoniae", followed later that year. ¹ The curia says the poems were written in prison. ²

Thurston is careful about one attribution. "A Foure-fold Meditation", printed as Southwell's in 1606, is not his, he says, but the work of his friend the Earl of Arundel. ¹ He closes the article with his strongest claim: that while Southwell had probably read Shakespeare, it is practically certain that Shakespeare had read Southwell and imitated him. ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Robert Southwell, so none is given here. ¹²³⁴ He was beatified in 1929 and canonized in 1970, and is counted among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. ³

The Roman Martyrology enters Saint Robert Southwell on February 21, the day of his death at Tyburn, as a priest of the Society of Jesus and a martyr who served for many years in London and the country around it. ⁴ Days on which the martyrs of England and Wales are kept together are not printed by the sources consulted here, so none is given.

He went back to England knowing the law that waited for him there, and the Irish Jesuits put it plainly: he traveled home knowing full well what was likely in store. ³ What he spent the six years on was ordinary priestly work done at great risk: prisons visited, new priests helped, letters to a frightened friend, books printed in secret for people with nothing else to read. ²

His writing is part of the same work. He wrote "Triumphs over Death" for a grieving brother and meditations for a young woman who would not live long, and turned letters to a prisoner into a book of comfort. ¹² Thurston calls him gentle, and says he took no part either in political intrigue or in quarrels among Catholics. ¹

Nobody can tidy his arrest into a lesson. A young woman held in prison, made pregnant there by the priest-hunter who wanted Southwell, sent the letter that brought him to the house, by the curia's account, and he gave himself up there rather than betray the family. ² Thirteen sessions of torture followed, and he named no one. ¹²

At his trial he said what he was, a priest, and denied what he was not, a plotter against the queen. ² It is a narrow line to hold, and he held it to the end.