SOUTHWELL, ROBERT, blessed. — Jesuit, poet, and martyr, b. at Horsham St. Faith’s (Norfolk) in 1561, d. in London on 21 February 1595.
Educated as a Catholic at Douai and Paris, he entered the Order in Rome on 18 October 1578. Ordained a priest in 1584, he was for a short time prefect of studies at the English College; but already in 1586 he departed with Fr. E. Garnet for England, where his arrival was reported by government spies from the moment of his landing. For approximately six years he exercised his ministry under the false name of Cotton, disguised in various ways and hosted by leading families, among them the countess of Arundel, wife of the blessed Philip Howard, for whom he served as chaplain. Betrayed by the apostate Anna Bellamy in 1592, he was arrested at Uxenden Hall (Harrow), atrociously tortured in the very house of the judge Topcliffe, then thrown into Newgate prison and subsequently into the prisons of the Tower of London. After approximately three years he was tried, condemned to the penalty for traitors, and hanged at the Tyburn gallows. He was beatified on 15 December 1929. Feast day: 21 February.
His prose and verse works enjoyed extraordinary popularity among his contemporaries, to such an extent that they were openly sold and passed through everyone’s hands, in manuscript or clandestinely printed on loose sheets, although their author was known; they also gave rise to forgeries. This fame was certainly aided by the vivid and powerful devotional sentiment poured into them with abundance, but also by the style, then highly appreciated, known as euphuism: highly artificial, consisting entirely of antitheses, alliterations, bold and elaborate images, midway between the Baroque and Arcadia. Yet even today there remains the fragrance of the heart and the ardour of one who lived his faith intimately amid persecution, with death lying in wait. Among his verse poems may be mentioned Mary Magdalen's Tears, and above all St. Peter's Complaint, freely imitated from Le lacrime di S. Pietro by Luigi Tansillo; and among his prose works, Triumphs over Death and Hundred meditations on the Love of God.
These works, together with other brief writings, were printed in book form for the first time in 1595, the year of his martyrdom; they were followed, in the same year, by another collection of short poems entitled Masconiae. The work A Fourfold meditations, published as his in 1606, is instead by his friend the Count of Arundel (cf. H. Thurston, Philip earl of Arundel, in The Month, 86 [1896], pp. 32-50).