Poet, martyr, and Saint: On the remarkable talent and inspiring faith of Robert Southwell

Every martyr’s death is different.

When Bishop John Fisher of Rochester was brought to Tower Hill to be executed for treason against King Henry VIII, he was so sick that he had to be carried in a chair. Thomas More, former Lord Chancellor of England, on the other hand, managed to make a joke with his executioner before he was martyred. Jesuit priest Edmund Campion, though seriously injured by torture, managed to salute a statue of the Blessed Mother as he was being dragged to his execution.

Saint Robert Southwell (1561-1595) had to have known the gruesome stories of these and other English martyrs long before he walked his own Via Dolorosa from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Hill. The question is why such a sensitive, gifted young man didn’t choose to spend his life in comfort, writing poetry on his father’s estate in eastern England, instead of dying as a convicted traitor.

Robert Southwell’s family initially remained faithful Catholics after Henry VIII made himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534 through an Act of Parliament. But the king made himself very wealthy when he confiscated the property of English monasteries, and he bestowed that wealth on upper-class families. The Southwells profited handsomely from King Henry’s power grab, which is perhaps why the Southwells subsequently became members of the Church of England.

Robert Southwell, his two older brothers, and his five younger sisters all grew up attending Anglican services in their village of Horsham St. Faith. But when Robert was a teenager, he was sent to live with some relatives. His aunt and uncle, he soon discovered, were recusants—Catholics who refused to become Anglicans. Through the encouragement of his tutor and the other Catholic boys he befriended, Robert decided to become a Catholic.

Robert and his teenage friends formed their own secret society and promised one another to endure terrible tortures rather than give up their Catholic faith. However, Robert was now sixteen years old, old enough to realize that if he remained in England, his family would send him to be educated at a respectable—and anti-Catholic—college. So, aided and abetted by his aunt and uncle, he ran away from his family and country. He apparently never saw his parents again.

Robert traveled to Douai, France, and entered the English College. He and other students were briefly sent to Paris because of violence between France and Spain, but he was able to return to Douai and continue his studies.

At that point, Robert was certain that he wanted to become a Jesuit, and he traveled to Rome to request permission to enter the order. The Jesuits initially said no, probably because of the political instability of the times, but Robert was later admitted as a novice. He completed his novitiate, was ordained, and served as secretary to the college’s rector. When he was twenty-three years old and living in Rome, he learned that Queen Elizabeth had passed a new act. The act forbade any English-born Catholic who had become a priest since her accession to the throne to remain in England for more than forty days. The penalty was death.

Catholics had experienced waves of persecution—all of them deadly, but some worse than others—for five decades. Only during Queen Mary’s five-year reign had they experienced a respite. Once again, Catholics were forced to keep their faith secret and hope that priests would choose to risk their lives to bring them the sacraments.

The colleges in Europe ordaining English priests were fully aware that they were sending many of these men to their deaths. That’s why they prepared men to explain the Catholic faith to others, but also encouraged them to practice physical mortifications that would prepare them for lives of sacrifice.

When clandestine Catholic priests did manage to arrive safely in England, they tended to travel first to London. Robert did. It was easier to get lost in the crowds of London, and it was also possible to find prisons where Catholic priests were imprisoned, bribe the guards, and learn the names and locations of underground Catholics. For the next few years, Robert Southwell pretended to be Robert Cotton and traveled from one large Catholic estate to another, returning often to London.

Three years after he returned to England, Robert secretly became a chaplain to Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel. Her husband, Philip Howard, was in prison for his Catholic faith. The authorities lied to Anne, claiming that Philip had been unfaithful to her with prostitutes and that he had abandoned his faith. The latter was an obvious and stupid lie, since if Philip had capitulated on remaining Catholic, they would have released him. Philip died after ten years in prison, probably from poisoning, and is now considered a martyr. Robert served as a spiritual guide to faithful gentry like Anne Howard, as well as many ordinary Catholics, for six years.

One of Queen Elizabeth’s most odious agents was a man named Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe was a landowner and Member of Parliament as well as the queen’s chief priest hunter and torturer. Topcliffe imprisoned and raped the daughter of a Catholic gentleman, and under duress, she gave him information about Robert Southwell.

In 1592, Robert was captured, tortured, starved, and abandoned in a cell, yet he did not disclose the names or locations of other Catholics. When he was brought into court to be tried for treason three years later, Robert admitted that he was a priest but denied that he had been involved in any plots against the queen. Although there was no evidence that he was a traitor, the jury condemned him to death.

The next day, the authorities apparently tried to discourage people from showing up for Robert’s execution by scheduling the execution of a notorious criminal at another gallows in London. It didn’t work, and a large and somewhat sympathetic crowd showed up at Tyburn Hill. The sheriff tried to prevent Robert from speaking, but Robert gave a lengthy speech anyway, acknowledged that he was a Catholic priest, and prayed for the salvation of his country and the queen. While he was being hanged, Robert attempted to bless the crowd with his hand, and friendly onlookers made sure he was dead before he was cut down, and the practices of drawing and quartering were begun. No one cheered (contrary to the typical custom of the time) when his head was shown to the crowd.

Between 1535 and 1681, three hundred English men and women died as martyrs and have since been canonized or beatified. Robert was just one of them. But his legacy is not limited to his priestly example, heroic faithfulness, and martyrdom.

Robert Southwell was also a gifted poet, and scholars have pointed out his strong influence on several great English writers, including John Donne, George Herbert, and William Shakespeare. The Burning Babe and Marie Magdalen’s Complaint at Christ’s Death are two of Southwell’s most famous poems.

The following poem, however, reminds us why Southwell was willing to spend years as a wanted criminal in the first place. The man who spent his final days reading the Bible and writing poetry between torture sessions had his eyes fixed on another, more beautiful world.

Seek Flowers of Heaven¹

Soar up my soul unto thy rest,
Cast off this loathsome load;
Long is the date of thy exile,
Too long thy strait abode.

Graze not on worldly withered weed,
It fitteth not thy taste,
The flowers of everlasting spring
Do grow for thy repast.

Their leaves are stained in beauty’s dye,
And blazed with their beams,
Their stalks enameled with delight,
And limbed with glorious gleams.

Live giving juice of living love
Their sugared veins doth fill,
And water with eternal showers,
They nectared drops distill.

These flowers do spring from fertile soil,
Though from unmanured field,
Most glittering gold in lieu of glebe
These fragrant flowers doth yield;

Whose sovereign scent surpassing sense
So ravisheth the mind,
That worldly weeds needs must he loathe,
That can these flowers find.

• Related at CWR: “The Jesuit martyr who inspired Shakespeare” (February 21, 2021) by Joseph Pearce

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