Robert Southwell, SJ

Robert Southwell, SJ
Saint Robert Southwell (c. 1561 – 21 February 1595) was an English Jesuit priest and poet. He was hanged at Tyburn, and became a Catholic martyr. He was born at Horsham St. Faith in Norfolk, England. Southwell, the youngest of eight children, was brought up in a family of Catholic gentry and educated at Douai. Thence he moved to Paris, where he was placed under a Jesuit priest, Thomas Darbyshire. In 1580 he joined the Society of Jesus after a two-year novitiate passed mostly at Tournai. In spite of his youth, he was made prefect of studies in the Venerable English College at Rome and was ordained priest in 1584. It was in that year that an act was passed forbidding any English-born subject of Queen Elizabeth, who had entered into priests' orders in the Roman Catholic Church since her accession, to remain in England longer than forty days on pain of death. But Southwell, at his own request, was sent to England in 1586 as a Jesuit missionary with Henry Garnett. He went from one Catholic family to another, administering the rites of his Church, and in 1589 became domestic chaplain to Ann Howard, whose husband, the first earl of Arundel, was in prison convicted of treason. It was to him that Southwell addressed his Epistle of Comfort. This and other of his religious tracts, A Short Rule of Good Life, Triumphs over Death, Mary Magdalen's Tears and a Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth, were widely circulated in manuscript. That they found favor outside Catholic circles is proved by Thomas Nash's imitation of Mary Magdalen's Tears in Christ's Tears over Jerusalem.