Southwell, ROBERT

Southwell, ROBERT, poet and Jesuit martyr, was born about 1562, son of Richard Southwell of Horsham St Faith's in Norfolk, the family being ancient and now represented collaterally by Viscount Southwell. He was stolen from his cradle by a Gypsy woman, but soon recovered, and at fifteen was sent to Paris for his education. Challoner states that he studied also at Douay, but certain it is that he soon went to Rome, being received into the Society of Jesus on the festival of St Luke 1578. After a residence at Tournay he returned to Rome and distinguished himself so highly in the course of philosophy and theology as to be appointed prefect of the English college there. He was ordained priest in 1584, and three years later arrived in England in company with Father Henry Garnet, who was also to earn the martyr's crown. Southwell was first sheltered by Lord Vaux, and next became domestic chaplain to the Countess of Arundel. Six years of quiet followed in which he fearlessly followed his vocation, and wrote his Consolation for Catholics as well as most of his poems. At length in 1592 he was betrayed into the hands of the authorities, was kept some weeks and infamously tortured ten times in the house of an abandoned ruffian named Topcliffe, then transferred to the Gatehouse, and next to a noisome dungeon in the Tower. 'Though thirteen times most cruelly tortured,' writes Cecil, 'he cannot be induced to confess anything, not even the colour of the horse whereon on a certain day he rode.' After three years' close imprisonment he wrote to entreat the grace of an open trial to Cecil, who is said to have made the brutal reply that 'if he was in so much haste to be hanged he should have his desire.' He was transferred to Newgate, and, after three days of confinement in Lîmbo, carried to Westminster for trial. The inevitable sentence followed, and on the 22d February 1595 he suffered at Tyburn, the victim of a barbarous statute, with all the high courage of the primitive martyrs. His prose writings are no longer interesting, but his poems retain their value. His longest poem is Saint Peter's Complaint; his most famous, The Burning Babe, a beautiful little piece of sanctified fancy, to have written which Ben Jonson told Drummond he would have been content to burn many of his poems.