Saint Robert Southwell

Saint Robert Southwell was an English Jesuit, priest, and poet. For six years he ministered in secret to Catholics in and around London, and in 1595 he suffered martyrdom at Tyburn. He is one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on February 21, the day of his death.

He was born around 1561 at Horsham St Faith in the county of Norfolk, into a well-to-do family of the gentry. He was brought up in the Catholic faith, which could not be freely practiced in the England of Queen Elizabeth I. For this reason he was sent as a boy to study on the Continent, first to the English College at Douai and then to Paris.

In Paris he asked to be admitted to the Society of Jesus. At first he was refused because of his youth, but in 1578 he was received into the order in Rome. In 1584 he was ordained a priest, and afterward he served as prefect of studies at the English College in Rome.

In 1586 he set out with Father Henry Garnet on the mission to England. The law there at that time punished with death, as a traitor, any subject of the queen who had received Catholic priestly ordination and remained in the country. Southwell worked under the assumed name of Cotton. He moved from one Catholic house to another, administered the sacraments, visited prisoners, and helped newly arrived priests. He found shelter in the house of the Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Saint Philip Howard, was held in the Tower.

In hiding he wrote a great deal to strengthen the persecuted. With the imprisoned Philip Howard in mind he composed An Epistle of Comfort, addressed to priests and lay people imprisoned for the faith. Most of his religious poems date from the years of his ministry in London. The best known are the Christmas poem The Burning Babe and the long poem Saint Peter’s Complaint, on the apostle’s sorrow after denying Jesus. His works were widely read in his own lifetime and are valued to this day.

In 1592 he was captured at Uxendon near Harrow, in the house of the Catholic Bellamy family, where he had come to minister. He was betrayed by the daughter of the house, who had herself been imprisoned earlier and put under pressure by the priest hunter Richard Topcliffe. Southwell was tortured many times, but he named no one. He spent nearly three years in prison, most of that time in the Tower of London. On February 20, 1595, he stood trial at Westminster and was sentenced to death for high treason. The next day he was dragged to Tyburn. At the gallows he declared that he was a Catholic priest and a Jesuit, and denied that he had ever intended any harm to the queen. He was hanged, and the bystanders did not allow him to be cut down while still alive.

Pope Pius XI beatified him on December 15, 1929, and Paul VI canonized him on October 25, 1970, together with thirty-nine other martyrs of England and Wales.