Robert Southwell

Life and Ministry

Robert Southwell was born at Horsham St Faith in Norfolk in AD 1561 into a gentry family with both Catholic and Protestant branches, educated at Douai and Paris, entered the Society of Jesus at Tournai in AD 1578, and was ordained priest in Rome in AD 1584. He returned to England as a Jesuit missionary in AD 1586 with Henry Garnet, serving the recusant Catholic gentry from a circuit of safe houses in London and the home counties, particularly under the patronage of Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel. During the eight years of his clandestine ministry he produced a body of devotional poetry and prose — An Epistle of Comfort, Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears, Saint Peter's Complaint, The Burning Babe — that made him the most accomplished English Catholic literary voice of the late sixteenth century and a recognized influence on Donne, Shakespeare, and Crashaw.

Circumstances of Death

Southwell was arrested at a safe house at Uxbridge on 25 June AD 1592 through the betrayal of Anne Bellamy, a Catholic young woman tortured into informing by the pursuivant Richard Topcliffe. He was held in the Gatehouse and then in the Tower of London for nearly three years, subjected by Topcliffe to a series of tortures including the manacles (hanging by the wrists for hours at a stretch), exceeding by the contemporary count of the Catholic chroniclers anything inflicted on Edmund Campion or Margaret Ward. He never gave the names of the householders who had sheltered him. Tried at Westminster Hall on 21 February AD 1595 for the felony of being a Catholic priest within the realm, he was convicted and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn the same day.

Legacy

Southwell was canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His Saint Peter's Complaint is one of the great Counter-Reformation poems of penitence in English; his Burning Babe is the most frequently anthologized English Christmas poem before the seventeenth century. His witness combines two strands: the priestly mission that refused to renounce its sacramental work under any pain, and the Christian artist who used the time of waiting in the Tower to write devotion for the next generation. Topcliffe broke his body; he did not break his memory. The verses he sent out from prison are still read in chapels and lecture halls four centuries later — the words outlived the executioner's name by far.