POET AND MARTYR.[17]

POET AND MARTYR.[17]PART FIRST—MARTYR.“Hoist up sail while gale doth last,Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure:Seek not time when time is past,Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.After-wits are dearly bought,Let thy fore-wit guide thy thought.”“Time wears all his locks before,Take thou hold upon his forehead;When he flies, he turns no more,And behind his scalp is naked.Works adjourn’d have many stays;Long demurs breed new delays.”—Robert Southwell, 1593.[18]Concerningthe writer of these beautiful lines, the English historian, Stow, makes the following brief mention in hisChronicle: “February 20, 1594-5.—Southwell, a Jesuit, that long time had lain prisoner in the Tower of London, was arraigned at the King’s Bench bar. He was condemned, and on the next morning drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, bowelled, and quartered.” From this account we are unable to discover that the man whose judicial murder Stow thus records was put to death for any offence but that of being aJesuit, and of having “long time lain in prison in the Tower of London.” And yet, in thus stating the case, Stow tells the simple truth; for Southwell was guilty of no more serious crime than his sacerdotal character, and of suffering the imprisonment and tortures inflicted upon him in consequence thereof. For three years previous to his death he had been in prison and in the Tower, had lain in noisome and filthy dungeons, and been subjected many times to torture and the rack. From the high social position of his family, the fame of his literary accomplishments, his admirable and saintly bearing as a missionary priest in England, for six long years carrying his life in his hand while ministering to a scattered flock, obliged to move from place to place in disguise as though he were a malefactor, and finally, from the wonderful fortitude and constancy with which he was said to have suffered torture, his case was very generally known in London, and deeply commiserated even by many Protestants. So deep and widespread, indeed, was this sympathy that, when it was determined by the officers of the crown to try and condemn him on one and the same day, and execute him the next morning, they withheld from the public all announcement of his execution, meanwhile giving notice of the hanging of a famous highwayman in another place in order to draw off the concourse of spectators. But it availed not, for there were many who kept so close a watch upon the movementsat Newgate, to which prison he had been removed a few days before his trial, that, when Southwell was brought out to be drawn on a sled or hurdle to the place of execution at Tyburn, he was followed by great numbers of people, and among them many persons of distinction, who witnessed the carrying out of his dreadful sentence, which was that he should be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”That our readers may understand that our qualification of Southwell’s execution as a judicial murder is not the result of mere personal sympathy or of religious prejudice, we will here record the judgment of several Protestant authorities, who speak out concerning it in a manner not to be misunderstood. In the valuableCyclopædia of English Literature, by Chambers, we read concerning Southwell that, after having ministered secretly but zealously to the scattered adherents of his creed, “without, as far as is known, doing anything to disturb the peace of society, he was apprehended and committed to a dungeon in the Tower, so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out for examination, his clothes were covered with vermin. Upon this his father, a man of good family, presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth, begging that, if his son had committed anything for which, by the laws, he had deserved death, he might suffer death; if not, as he was a gentleman, he begged her majesty would be pleased to order him to be treated as a gentleman. Southwell after this was somewhat better lodged, but an imprisonment of three years, with ten inflictions of the rack, wore out his patience, and he entreated to be brought to trial. Cecil is said to have made the brutal remark that, ‘if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire.’ Being at the trial found guilty, upon his own confession, of being a Romish priest, he was condemned to death, and executed at Tyburn accordingly, with all the horrible circumstances dictated by the old treason laws of England. Throughout all these scenes he behaved with a mild fortitude which nothing but a highly regulated mind and satisfied conscience could have prompted.”Cleveland (Compendium of English Literature, p. 88), after stating the circumstances of Southwell’s imprisonment, trial, and execution, remarks: “The whole proceeding should cover the authors of it with everlasting infamy. It is a foul stain upon the garments of the maiden queen that she can never wipe off. There was not a particle of evidence at his trial that this pious and accomplished poet meditated any evil designs against the government. He did what he had a perfect right to do; ay, what it was his duty to do, if he conscientiously thought he was right—endeavor to make converts to his faith, so far as he could without interfering with the right of others. If there be anything to be execrated, it is persecution for opinion’s sake.”Allibone, in hisDictionary of English Literature, says that Southwell, “to the disgrace of the English government, suffered as a martyr at Tyburn, February 21, 1595, after three years’ imprisonment in the Tower, during which it is asserted he was ten times subjected to the torture. He was a good poet, a good prose writer, and a better Christian than his brutal persecutors.”Old Fuller, in hisWorthies of England, as might be expected, views Southwell with a stern English Protestant eye, and thus dismisses him: “Robert Southwell was born in this county (Norfolk), as Pitsons affirmeth, who, although often mistakenin his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born, seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many books in verse and prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the state, for which he was imprisoned and executed March the 3d, 1595” (vol. iii. p. 187).Robert Southwell was the third son of Richard Southwell, Esq., of Horsham, St. Faith’s, Norfolk. The curious in genealogy, while investigating family lines associated with the Southwell pedigree, have found connected with it, in degrees more or less near, the names of Paston, Sidney, Howard, Newton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of his early years there is but slight record, save that, when still very young, he was sent to Douai to be educated. From Douai he passed to Paris and thence to Rome, where, in 1578, before he had yet reached the age of seventeen, he was received into the order of the Society of Jesus. On completion of his novitiate and termination of the courses of philosophy and theology, he was made prefect of studies of the English College at Rome. Ordained priest in 1584, and, as appears from his letter addressed, February 20, 1585, to the general of the order, seeking the “perilous” errand wherein his future martyrdom seems rather to have been anticipated than merely referred to as a simple possibility,[19]he left Rome on the 8th of May, 1586, a missionary to his native land, or, in other words, took up his line of march for the scaffold and for heaven. We have, naturally enough, but scant record of the young priest’s journey to and arrival in England; for, as the mere landing in England by a Catholic priest was then a penal offence punishable with death, Southwell’s return to his native country was surrounded as much as possible by secrecy. Although yearning to visit his home and embrace his family, he carefully abstained from going near them—of doing that which, in his quaint phrase of the day, “maketh my presence perilous.” But he was aware that his father was in danger of losing, if he had not already lost, his faith; and these fears were almost confirmed by the facts that he had formed a marriage with a lady of the court, and that his wealth gave him entrance to court circles which were necessarily violently Protestant. Deeply solicitous for his father’s spiritual condition, he therefore addressed him a letter of admonition and advice, not less remarkable for its tone of affection than for its energy and eloquence. We cite it in another place.HUNTED DOWN.At a time when, as Mr. Grosart says, “it was a crime to be a Catholic: it was proof of high treason to be a priest: it was to invite ‘hunting’ as of a wild beast to be a Jesuit,” we cannot reasonably look for many recorded traces of Father Southwell’s presence and journeyings to and fro while in England. He could only move in disguise or under the darkness of night; he was liable to be thrown into prison anywhere on the merest suspicion of any irresponsible accuser. The few Catholics who were ready to give him shelter and hospitality did so with the halter around their necks; for confiscation and death were the penalty, as they well knew, for “harboring” a priest. It is nevertheless certain that his refuge in London was the mansion of the Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Philip Howard, Earl ofArundel, was imprisoned in the Tower, and died there, the noblest victim to the jealous and suspicious tyranny of Elizabeth,non sine veneni suspicione, as his epitaph still testifies.Hundreds of Southwell’s letters to his superiors still exist, but they are all from necessity written in such general terms and in so guarded a manner as to afford but little historical information. Here is one of them, as given by Bishop Challoner in hisMemoirs of Missionary Priests:1. “As yet we are alive and well, being unworthy, it seems, of prisons. We have oftener sent, than received, letters from your parts, tho’ they are not sent without difficulty; and some, we know, have been lost.”2. “The condition of Catholic recusants here is the same as usual, deplorable and full of fears and dangers, more especially since our adversaries have look’d for wars. As many of ours as are in chains rejoice and are comforted in their prisons; and they that are at liberty set not their heart upon it, nor expect it to be of long continuance. All by the great goodness and mercy of God arm themselves to suffer anything that can come, how hard soever it may be, as it shall please our Lord; for whose greater glory, and the salvation of their souls, they are more concerned than for any temporal losses.”3. “A little while ago, they apprehended two priests, who have suffered such cruel usages in the prison of Bridewell as can scarce be believed. What was given them to eat was so little in quantity, and, withal, so filthy and nauseous, that the very sight was enough to turn their stomachs. The labors to which they obliged them were continual and immoderate, and no less in sickness than in health; for, with hard blows and stripes, they forced them to accomplish their task how weak soever they were. Their beds were dirty straw, and their prison most filthy. Some are there hung up for whole days by the hands, in such a manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of their toes. This purgatory we are looking for every hour, in which Topcliffe and Young, the two executioners of the Catholics, exercise all kinds of torments. But come what pleaseth God, we hope we shall be able to bear all in him that strengthens us. I most humbly recommend myself to the holy sacrifices of your reverence and of all our friends. (January 15, 1590.)”PURSUIT AND ESCAPE.In a work[20]published so lately as 1871, we catch a few fugitive glances of Father Robert Southwell. Father Gerard spoke of him at the time (1585) as “excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.”A descent was made by the pursuivants upon a house in the country, where the two fathers happened to be together, and but for the devotion of the domestics the two missionaries would have been captured. They escaped, however, and journeyed away together. The peculiar danger they were then subjected to was that arising from intercourse with the gentry. Father Gerard tells of a gentleman who violently suspected him, and adds: “After a day or so he quite abandoned all mistrust, as I spoke of hunting and falconry with all the details that none but a practised person could command.” He concludes: “For many make sad blunders in attempting this, as Father Southwell, who was afterwards mycompanion in many journeys, was wont to complain. He frequently got me to instruct him in the technical terms of sport, and used to complain of his bad memory for such things; for on many occasions when he fell in with Protestant gentlemen he found it necessary to speak of these matters, which are the sole topics of their conversations, save when they talk obscenity or break out into blasphemies and abuse of the saints or the Catholic faith.”With danger of possible arrest at every house and on every road, followed by swift and barbarous execution, Father Southwell for six long years carried his life in his hand.PROTESTANT OPINION.“Granted,” says his Protestant biographer (Grosart, xlix.), “that in our Southwell’s years 1588 is included, and that the shadow of the coming of the Armada lay across England from the very moment of his arrival; granted that, in the teeth of their instructions, there were priests and members of the Society of Jesus who deemed they did God service by ‘plotting’ for the restoration of the old ‘faith and worship’ after a worldly sort; granted that politically and civilly the nation was, in a sense, in the throes of since-achieved liberties; granted thatMary, all too sadly, even tremendously, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’; granted that the very mysticism, not to say mystery, of the ‘higher’ sovereignty claimed for him who wore the tiara, acted as darkness does with sounds the most innocent; granted nearly all that Protestantism claims in its apology as defence—it must be regarded as a stigma on the statesmanship and a stain on the Christianity of the reformed Church of England, as well as a sorrow to all right-minded and right-hearted, that the ‘convictions’ of those who could not in conscience ‘change’ at the bidding of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, or James were not respected; that ‘opinion,’ or, if you will, ‘error,’ was put down (or attempted to be put down) by force, and that the headsman’s axe and hangman’s rope were the only instrumentalities thought of. The State Trials remain to bring a blush to every lover of his country for the brutal and ‘hard’ mockery of justice in the higher courts of law whenever a priest was concerned—as later with the Puritans and Nonconformists.”FALSE BRETHREN AND THE MAN-HUNTER.With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging himto meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.The letter is dated Westminster, June 22, 1592, and advises the queen: “I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster churchyard (i.e.the gatehouse). I have made him assured for starting or hurting of himself by putting upon his arms a pair of;[21]and so to keep him either from view or conference with any but Nicolas, the underkeeper of the gatehouse.... Upon this present taking of him it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly; and so to prove his answers true in haste, to the end that such as he be deeply concerned in his treachery may not have time to start, or make shift to use any means in common prisons; either to stand upon or against the wall will give warning.But if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands put as high as he can reach against the wall(like a trick at Tremshemarn), will enforce him to tell all; and the truth proven by the sequel....[22]It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly considered.”[23]The reader will here readily recognize a partial description of one of the modes of torture then most common in use throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It seems that itwas“her highness’ pleasure” to know something that was in this poor martyr’s heart, for Southwell was afterwards again repeatedly tortured. The intimate personal relations existing between the virgin queen and this man Topcliffe, whose very name was a stench in the nostrils of Protestants of respectable behavior, were maintained long after the Southwell capture, as we learn from the best authority. The cruelty of Elizabeth was only surpassed by her mendacity, as her mendacity was only exceeded by her mean parsimony, and when she travelled or made progress from one country to another it was always at the expense of her good and loyal subjects. Eventually the announcement of a visit from theirgood queen, received outwardly with such declarations as might naturally follow the promise of the call of a special envoy from heaven, was in reality looked upon as the coming of a terrible calamity. It was at that time considered at the English court—where, as we all know, all the civil and religious virtues had taken refuge—an excellent jest to so direct the course of the queen’s progress as to make her visits fall at the residences of well-known Catholic gentlemen. It is only necessary to say that the anniversary of all such events yet lives in the traditions of the descendants of such families as that of a day of horror. The royal retinue treated the house like a captured place, and it was well for the proprietor if confiscation or death, or both, were not the sole reward of his generous hospitality.Mr. Topcliffe gives us valuable information on this point. On the 30th of August, 1578, he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury: “The next good news (not in account the highest), her majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her council the two notorious papists, young Rookwood (the master of Ewston Hall, where her majesty did lie upon Sunday now a fortnight), and one Downs, a gentleman, were both committed, the one to the town prison at Norwich, the other to the county prison there, for obstinate papistry; and seven more gentlemen of worship were committed to several houses in Norwich as prisoners; two of the Lovells, another Downs, one Benings, one Parry, and two others.... Her majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his (Rookwood’s) house, Ewston, far unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the blackguard; nevertheless her excellent majesty gave to Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss; after which it was braved at. But my lord chamberlain, nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for papistry, called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the court, and yet to attend her council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed,”[24]etc. etc. In the beginning of the letter Topcliffe “joys at her majesty’s gracious favor and affiance in your lordship—next some comfort I received of her for myself that must ever lie nearest my own heart.” Tender Topcliffe! But we must have “no scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and our most delicate susceptibilities for the fair fame of the royal virgin may be quieted by the certainty that the comfort nearest the human bloodhound’s “own heart” was something substantial—a country house, an estate, or the like.Lodge says that this Topcliffe was respectably connected, but that he could only find that he was distinguished as a most implacable persecutor of Roman Catholics. In a letter of Sir Anthony Standen, in which he praises the agreeable manners of the Earl of Essex, he writes: “Contrary to ourTopcliffiancustoms, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” From another letter of the period it appears thatTopcliffzarein the quaint language of the court signified to hunt a recusant.But to return to Southwell. Transferred to a dungeon in the Tower, “so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out at the end of the month, his clothes werecovered with vermin,” his father wrote to her majesty Queen Elizabeth the letter we have already mentioned. This petition was to some extent regarded. A better lodging was allowed him, and leave accorded his father to supply him with “cloaths and other necessaries”; and amongst the rest, with books which he asked for, which were only the Holy Bible and the works of S. Bernard. “The selection of books,” says Mr. Grosart, “thebook of books, and the father of the fathers, for a poet is very noteworthy; and through all his weary imprisonment ‘spiritual things,’ not civil or earthly, were his theme when he discoursed to his sister Mary (Mrs. Bannister) or others permitted occasionally to visit him.”TRIAL AND EXECUTION.We adopt mainly the relation of Southwell’s trial and execution as it is given by Bishop Challoner, supported by a Latin MS. preserved in the archives of the English College of S. Omer’s:“After Father Southwell had been kept close prisoner for three years in the Tower, he sent an epistle to Cecil, Lord Treasurer, humbly entreating his lordship that he might either be brought upon his trial to answer for himself, or at least that his friends might have leave to come and see him. The treasurer answered that, if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire. Shortly after this orders were given that he should be removed from the Tower to Newgate, where he was put down into the dungeon calledLimbo, and there kept for three days.“On the 22d of February, without any previous warning to prepare for his trial, he was taken out of his dark lodging and hurried to Westminster, to hold up his hand there at the bar. The first news of this step towards his martyrdom filled his heart with a joy which he could not conceal. The judges before whom he was to appear were Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Justice Owen, Baron Evans, and Sergeant Daniel. As soon as Father Southwell was brought in, the lord chief-justice made a long and vehement speech against the Jesuits and seminary priests, as the authors and contrivers of all the plots and treasons which, he pretended, had been hatched during that reign. Then was read the bill of indictment against Father Southwell, drawn up by Cook, the queen’s solicitor.”THEIR FAITH WAS THEIR GUILT.It would be well to remark here that Protestants nowadays frequently contend that the missionary priests judicially murdered during the reign of Elizabeth were not executed on account of their religion, but because they were stirrers up of sedition and traitors, and were in every case so proven to be upon their respective trials. The good people who set up such pretext are sadly in ignorance of the history of that dark period. So far from asserting the slightest pretence of guilt on the part of such acts accused of as commonly constitute sedition and high treason, the statute of Elizabeth under which they were sent to the gallows only made it necessary to show that they were Englishmen and Catholic priests, and were arrested in England. The statute, in fact, enacted substantially that, “if any Jesuit, seminary priest, or deacon, or religious or ecclesiastical person whatever, born within the realm, shall come into, be, or remain in any part of this realm, every such offence shall be taken and adjudged to be high treason.” The indictment against Southwell was “drawn up byCook, the queen’s solicitor,” says the S. Omer MS. Now, “Cook, the queen’s solicitor” here referred to was no less a personage than the great Coke. Here is the indictment presented by him in Southwell’s case, from which it will be seen that the prisoner was charged only with the crimes of,first, being a priest of English birth;second, of having remained in the county of Middlesex:“The jury present, on the part of our sovereign lady the queen, that Robert Southwell, late of London, clerk, born within this kingdom of England; to wit, since the feast of S. John the Baptist, in the first year of the reign of her majesty, and before the first day of May, in the thirty-second year of the reign of our lady the queen aforesaid, made and ordained priest by authority derived and pretended from the See of Rome; not having the fear of God before his eyes, and slighting the laws and statutes of this realm of England, without any regard to the penalty therein contained, on the 20th day of June, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of our lady the queen, at Uxenden, in the county of Middlesex, traitorously, and as a false traitor to our lady the queen, was and remained, contrary to the form of the statute in such case set forth and provided, and contrary to the peace of our said lady the queen, her crown, and dignities.”The grand jury having found the bill, Father Southwell was ordered to come up to the bar. He readily obeyed, and, bowing down his head, made a low reverence to his judges; then modestly held up his hand according to custom, and, being asked whether he was guilty or not guilty, he answered, “I confess that I was born in England, a subject to the queen’s majesty, and that, by authority derived from God, I have been promoted to the sacred order of priesthood in the Roman Church, for which I return most hearty thanks to his divine Majesty. I confess, also, that I was at Uxenden, in Middlesex, at that time, when, being sent for thither by trick and deceit, I fell into your hands, as is well known; but that I never entertained any designs or plots against the queen or kingdom, I call God to witness, the revenger of perjury; neither had I any other design in returning home to my native country than to administer the sacraments according to the rite of the Catholic Church to such as desired them.”Here the judge interrupted him, and told him that he was to let all that alone, and plead directly guilty or not guilty. Upon which he said,he was not guilty of any treason whatsoever. And being asked by what he would be tried, he said, “By God and by you.” The judge told him he was to answer, “By God and his country,” which, at first, he refused, alleging that the laws of his country were disagreeable to the law of God, and that he was unwilling these poor harmless men of the jury, whom they obliged to represent the country, should have any share in their guilt, or any hand in his death. “But,” said he, “if through your iniquity it must be so, and I cannot help it, be it as you will; I am ready to be judged by God and my country.” When the twelve were to be sworn, he challenged none of them, saying that they were all equally strangers to him, and therefore charity did not allow him to except against any one of them more than another.After Coke had presented the case to the jury, they went aside to consult about the verdict, and in a short time brought him in guilty. He was asked if he had anything more to say for himself why sentence should not be pronounced against him? He said: “Nothing; but from my heart I beg of Almighty God to forgive all who have been any ways accessory to my death.” The judge havingpronounced sentence according to the usual form, Father Southwell made a very low bow, returning him most hearty thanks as for an unspeakable favor. The judge offered him the help of a minister to prepare him to die. Father Southwell desired he would not trouble him upon that head; that the grace of God would be more than sufficient for him. And so, being sent back to Newgate through the streets, lined with people, he discovered, all the way, the overflowing joy of his heart in his eyes, in his whole countenance, and in every gesture and motion of his body. He was again put down into limbo, at his return to Newgate, where he spent the following night, the last of his life, in prayer, full of the thoughts of the journey he was to take the next day, through the gate of martyrdom, into a happy eternity; to enjoy for ever the sovereign object of his love.We have seen by what device and with what ill success the officials directing the execution sought, on the next morning, to draw away the crowd from Tyburn where Father Southwell was to be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”EXECUTIONS UNDER ELIZABETH.The modern reader generally, and very naturally, supposes that this sentence, horrible as it is in its simplest form, would be carried out as stated, that is to say, that, when the condemned man was hung until dead, his body was then butchered as described. This probably was the intention of the law, and the latter two of the three incidents of the executions were intended more as indignities to the remains of a criminal supposed to be guilty of the greatest of human crimes than as any part of the means of procuring death. But under the reign of Elizabeth the cruelty and bestiality of the mode in which the horrible sentence was carried out had reached its height. As a general thing, the victim was butchered alive. According to the whim or the bloodthirstiness of the executioner, the condemned man was allowed to hang a short time, or he was scarcely swung off before he was cut down and the hangman was—as he is described in a well-known phrase—“grabbling among his entrails.” Sometimes the executioner would spring upon the body as it was swung off, and plunge his knife into the victim before they reached the ground in their fall together. When a young priest named Edward Genings was executed, in 1591, the butchery was superintended by Topcliffe, who adjured the victim to submit and recant and he should be pardoned. His reply was: “I know not in what I have offended my dear anointed princess; if I had, I would willingly ask forgiveness. If she be offended with me because I am a priest, and because I profess my faith and will not turn minister against my conscience, I shall be, I trust, excused and innocent before God. I must obey God, saith S. Peter, rather than men.” At this Topcliffe was enraged, and bade the hangman turn the ladder; scarcely giving him time to say aPater Noster. Cut down by his order before he was dead, the butchery began, and, the hangman’s hand being already on his heart, Genings was heard to say, “Sancte Gregori, ora pro me!”—which the hangman hearing, he swore, “Zounds, see, his heart is in my hand, and yet Gregory is in his mouth! O egregious papist!”[25]We return to Father Southwell,who was drawn on a hurdle or sled from Newgate to Tyburn, and resume the account of the S. Omer’s MS.: “When he was come to the place, getting up into the cart, he made the sign of the cross in the best manner that he could, his hands being pinion’d, and began to speak to the people those words of the apostle (Rom. xiv), ‘Whether we live, we live to the Lord, or whether we die, we die to the Lord; therefore, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.’ Here the sheriff would have interrupted him, but he begged leave that he might go on, assuring him that he would utter nothing that should give offence. Then he spoke as follows: ‘I am come to this place to finish my course, and to pass out of this miserable life; and I beg of my Lord Jesus Christ, in whose most precious Passion and Blood I place my hope of salvation, that he would have mercy on my soul. I confess I am a Catholic priest of the Holy Roman Church, and a religious man of the Society of Jesus; on which account I owe eternal thanks and praises to my God and Saviour.’ Here he was interrupted by a minister telling him that, if he understood what he had said in the sense of the Council of Trent, it was damnable doctrine. But the minister was silenc’d by the standers-by, and Mr. Southwell went on, saying: ‘Sir, I beg of you not to be troublesome to me for this short time that I have to live: I am a Catholic, and in whatever manner you may please to interpret my words, I hope for my salvation by the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and as to the queen, I never attempted, nor contrived, or imagined any evil against her, but have always prayed for her to Our Lord, and for this short time of my life still pray, that, in his infinite mercy, he would be pleased to give her all such gifts and graces which he sees, in his divine wisdom, to be most expedient for the welfare both of her soul and body, in this life and in the next. I recommend in like manner, to the same mercy of God, my poor country, and I implore the divine bounty to favor it with his light and the knowledge of his truth, to the greater advancement of the salvation of souls, and the eternal glory of his divine Majesty. In fine, I beg of the almighty and everlasting God, that this my death may be for my own and for my country’s good, and the comfort of the Catholics my brethren.’“Having finished these words, and looking for the cart to be immediately drove away, he again blessed himself, and, with his eyes raised to heaven, repeated with great calmness of mind and countenance, ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ with other short ejaculations, till the cart was drawn off. The unskilful hangman had not applied the noose of the rope to the proper place, so that he several times made the sign of the cross whilst he was hanging, and was some time before he was strangled, which some perceiving, drew him by the legs to put an end to his pain, and when the executioner was for cutting the rope before he was dead, the gentlemen and people that were present cried out three several times, ‘Hold, hold!’ for the behavior of the servant of God was so edifying in these his last moments, that even the Protestants who were present at the execution were much affected with the sight.” After he was dead he was cut down and the remainder of the sentence carried out. Turnbull relates that “Lord Mountjoy (Charles Blount), who happened to be present, was so struck by the martyr’s constancy that he exclaimed,‘May my soul be with this man’s!’ and he assisted in restraining those who would have cut the rope while he was still in life.”Father Southwell’s reverend and Protestant biographer declares, in concluding his relation of the execution: “I must regard our worthy as a ‘martyr’ in the deepest and grandest sense—a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. I should blush for my Protestantism if I did not hold in honor, yea reverence, his stainless and beautiful memory.‘Through this desert, day by day,Wandered not his steps astray,Treading still the royal way.’—Paradisus Animæ.“So perished Father Southwell, at thirty-three years of age, and so, unhappily, have perished many of the wise and virtuous of the earth. Conscious of suffering in the supposed best of causes, he seems to have met death without terror—to have received the crown of martyrdom not only with resignation, but with joy.”[26]It is matter of regret that there exists no authentic portrait of Southwell. His biographer is of opinion that a genuine likeness of him would have shown an intellectual, etherealized face, and fancies that he might have sat for the portrait of the Prior inThe Lady of Garaye:“Tender his words, and eloquently wise;Mild the pure fervor of his watchful eyes;Meek with serenity and constant prayer,The luminous forehead, high and broad and bare.The thin mouth, though not passionless, yet stillWith a sweet calm that speaks an angel’s will.Resolving service to his God’s behest,And ever musing how to servehimbest,Not old, nor young; with manhood’s gentlest grace,Pale to transparency the pensive face,Pale not with sickness but with studious thought,The body tasked, the fine mind overwrought;With something faint and fragile in the whole,As though ‘twere but a lamp to hold a soul.”PART SECOND.—POET.And here, first, a few words on the prose writings of Southwell. We have already referred to the remarkable letter of admonition by him addressed to his father. It is a severe test to put the prose of any cultivated language to that of comparison with the productions of the same tongue nearly three centuries later. And yet this letter will support such comparison surprisingly well both as to substance and style. The reader will bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which Southwell addressed thisLETTER TO HIS FATHER.“I am not of so unnatural a kind, of so wild an education, or so unchristian a spirit, as not to remember the root out of which I have branched, or to forget my secondary maker and author of my being. It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that has made me such a stranger to my native home, and so backward in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of these days that maketh my presence perilous, and the discharge of my duties an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwilling courtesy upon any, or by seeming officious to become offensive; deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself, and to purchase their danger, whose good-will I so highly esteem. I never doubted but what the belief, which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in a manner, hereditary, framed in them a right persuasion of my present calling, not suffering them to measure their censures of me by the ugly terms and odious epithets wherewith heresy hath sought to discredit my functions, but rather by the reverence of so worthy a sacrament and the sacred usages of all former ages. Yet, because I might easily perceive by apparent conjectures that many were more willing to hear of me than from me, and readier topraise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek.”Then, regretting that he has been barred from affording to his dearest friends that which hath been eagerly sought and beneficially attained by mere strangers, he exclaims passionately:“Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed.“Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises.... The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, andgrateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin.”The entire letter is given in both Walter and Turnbull’sMemoirs of Southwell, and has been extravagantly praised as being the composition of Sir Walter Raleigh, among whoseRemainsit is frequently reprinted. Mr. Grosart, a Protestant clergyman, says of it: “I know nothing comparable with the mingled affection and prophetlike fidelity, the wise instruction, correction, reproof, the full rich scripturalness and quaint applications, the devoutness, the insistence, the pathos of this letter.” The edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’sRemains, published in London in 1675, was the subject of an article in theRetrospective Reviewfor 1820, in which the reviewer remarks: “‘The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father’ is supposed to be a libel on Sir Walter, written by his enemies. It will be seen, however, that it bears a strong resemblance to his style, although the metaphor is more profuse and ornamental, and seems to be rather engrafted on his thoughts than to spring up with them. That this piece should be dictated by personal hostility is strange. It contains exhortations that might with the greatest propriety be directed to any man.“It is possible that it might be written by another in imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Advice to his Son’;yet if he was an enemy, he was of a most uncommon description. As the advice, however, is worth quoting forits own merit, and is written with great force and beauty, we shall give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves.”This letter is Southwell’s earliest dated prose, and was followed by a variety of treatises, epistles, and pamphlets, printed on the “private press” at his own house in London. Besides these, there remain several English and a large number of Latin prose writings still in manuscript. “Mary Magdalene’s Funerall Teares,” although prose in form, is in fact far more fervid and impassioned than the greater part of his poetry.SOUTHWELL’S POETRY.To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet’s character.Certain it is that Southwell was largely read by the generation that immediately succeeded him. Many years ago, Ellis[27]said: “The very few copies of his works which are now known to exist are the remnant of at least seventeen different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600”; and at a later period, Drake, in hisShakespeare and his Times, says:[28]“Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.”A valuable tribute of admiration to Southwell’s poetic talent is that of Ben Jonson, who said: “that Southwell was hanged; yet so he (Jonson) had written that piece of his, ‘The Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”[29]Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for giving it here, although we strongly suspect that Mr. Grosart will not approve of its modern orthography.As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear,Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed;Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats I frye,Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes;The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good,So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood:With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell’s poetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem “S. Peter’s Complaint,” consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems—“Times go by Turns,” “Content and Rich,”[30]“Life is but Loss,” “Look Home,” “Love’s servile Lot,” and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart’s estimate of them. “The hastiest reader will come on ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally), is throughout of the ‘pure well of English undefiled.’ When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, theirélan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the ‘dew of the morning.’ His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the ‘Vale of Tears’ the source of the latter’s immortal ‘Haunted House’—dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or lily, nevertheless really carrying in it the original of the mightier after-poem.”Our warmest tribute of praise can render but scant justice to the intelligence, the industry, the erudition, the keen poetic sense, and the enthusiasm which the editor of the volume before us has devoted to what has evidently been to him a labor of love. Mr. Grosart is well known in the literary world as the editor of Crashawe and of Vaughan, as also of the forthcoming editions of Marvell,Donne, and Sidney. His laboriously corrected version of our martyr-poet’s legacy has, it may be said, restored Southwell to us, so obscured had he become by mistakes, misprints, and false readings. Indeed Mr. Grosart’s somewhat jealous love of his subject betrays him into apparently harsh judgment on the efforts of others, when, for instance, he declares himself “vexed by the travesties on editing and mere carelessness of Walter earlier (1817) and Turnbull later (1856) in their so-called editions of the poems of Father Southwell,” adding: “Turnbull said contemptuously, ‘I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter’s text’—severe but not undeserved, only his own is scarcely one whit better, and in places worse.”There is one passage at the close of Mr. Grosart’s interesting preface which has a special interest for us as Americans. We mean his reference to the verdict pronounced on Father Southwell’s poetry by Prof. James Russell Lowell in his charming bookMy Study Windows. “It seems to me,” says Mr. Grosart, “harsh to brutality on the man (meet follower of him ‘the first true gentleman that ever breathed’); while on the poetry it rests on self-evidently the most superficial acquaintance and the hastiest generalization. To pronounce ‘S. Peter’s Complaint’ a ‘drawl’ of thirty pages of ‘maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a (sic) sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus,’ shows about as much knowledge—that is, ignorance—of the poem as of the schoolman, and as another remark does of S. Peter; for, with admitted tedium, S. Peter’s complaint sounds depths of penitence and remorse, and utters out emotion that flames into passion very unforgettably, while there are felicities of metaphor, daintinesses of word-painting, brilliancies of inner-portraiture, scarcely to be matched in contemporary verse. The ‘paraphrase’ of David (to wit, ‘David’s Peccavi’) is a single short piece, and the ‘punning’ conceit, ‘fears are my feres,’ is common to some of England’s finest wits, and in the meaning of ‘fere’ not at all to be pronounced against. If we on this side of the Atlantic valued less the opinion of such a unique genius as Prof. Lowell’s, if we did not take him to our innermost love, we should less grieve over such a vulgar affront offered to a venerable name as his whole paragraph to Southwell. I shall indulge the hope of our edition reaching the ‘Study,’ and persuading to a real ‘study’ of these poems, and, if so, I do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment.”ARIS WILMOTTpronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and ‘Content and Rich,’ and, ‘Dyer’s phansie turned to a Sinner’s Complaint’ warrant the great praise. But beneath the manner recalling Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him.“Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment’s reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of Dublin’s well-weighed words in his notes to hisHousehold Book of English Poetry(1868):“‘Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this (“Lewd Love is Loss”) and No. 2 (“Times go by Turns”) of this collection, poems which, as far asthey go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised more than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or excuse’ (pp. 391-392).“To Archbishop Trench’s I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George Macdonald inAntiphonas follows:“‘I proceed to call up oneWHO WAS A POET INDEED, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor and subject to the penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, could “not be induced to confess anything, not even the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was,’ etc.“I believe, then,” concludes Dr. Grosart, “I shall not appeal in vain to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his ‘Study Windows’ to a reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these sufficiently qualified critics.”

POET AND MARTYR.[17]PART FIRST—MARTYR.“Hoist up sail while gale doth last,Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure:Seek not time when time is past,Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.After-wits are dearly bought,Let thy fore-wit guide thy thought.”“Time wears all his locks before,Take thou hold upon his forehead;When he flies, he turns no more,And behind his scalp is naked.Works adjourn’d have many stays;Long demurs breed new delays.”—Robert Southwell, 1593.[18]Concerningthe writer of these beautiful lines, the English historian, Stow, makes the following brief mention in hisChronicle: “February 20, 1594-5.—Southwell, a Jesuit, that long time had lain prisoner in the Tower of London, was arraigned at the King’s Bench bar. He was condemned, and on the next morning drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, bowelled, and quartered.” From this account we are unable to discover that the man whose judicial murder Stow thus records was put to death for any offence but that of being aJesuit, and of having “long time lain in prison in the Tower of London.” And yet, in thus stating the case, Stow tells the simple truth; for Southwell was guilty of no more serious crime than his sacerdotal character, and of suffering the imprisonment and tortures inflicted upon him in consequence thereof. For three years previous to his death he had been in prison and in the Tower, had lain in noisome and filthy dungeons, and been subjected many times to torture and the rack. From the high social position of his family, the fame of his literary accomplishments, his admirable and saintly bearing as a missionary priest in England, for six long years carrying his life in his hand while ministering to a scattered flock, obliged to move from place to place in disguise as though he were a malefactor, and finally, from the wonderful fortitude and constancy with which he was said to have suffered torture, his case was very generally known in London, and deeply commiserated even by many Protestants. So deep and widespread, indeed, was this sympathy that, when it was determined by the officers of the crown to try and condemn him on one and the same day, and execute him the next morning, they withheld from the public all announcement of his execution, meanwhile giving notice of the hanging of a famous highwayman in another place in order to draw off the concourse of spectators. But it availed not, for there were many who kept so close a watch upon the movementsat Newgate, to which prison he had been removed a few days before his trial, that, when Southwell was brought out to be drawn on a sled or hurdle to the place of execution at Tyburn, he was followed by great numbers of people, and among them many persons of distinction, who witnessed the carrying out of his dreadful sentence, which was that he should be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”That our readers may understand that our qualification of Southwell’s execution as a judicial murder is not the result of mere personal sympathy or of religious prejudice, we will here record the judgment of several Protestant authorities, who speak out concerning it in a manner not to be misunderstood. In the valuableCyclopædia of English Literature, by Chambers, we read concerning Southwell that, after having ministered secretly but zealously to the scattered adherents of his creed, “without, as far as is known, doing anything to disturb the peace of society, he was apprehended and committed to a dungeon in the Tower, so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out for examination, his clothes were covered with vermin. Upon this his father, a man of good family, presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth, begging that, if his son had committed anything for which, by the laws, he had deserved death, he might suffer death; if not, as he was a gentleman, he begged her majesty would be pleased to order him to be treated as a gentleman. Southwell after this was somewhat better lodged, but an imprisonment of three years, with ten inflictions of the rack, wore out his patience, and he entreated to be brought to trial. Cecil is said to have made the brutal remark that, ‘if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire.’ Being at the trial found guilty, upon his own confession, of being a Romish priest, he was condemned to death, and executed at Tyburn accordingly, with all the horrible circumstances dictated by the old treason laws of England. Throughout all these scenes he behaved with a mild fortitude which nothing but a highly regulated mind and satisfied conscience could have prompted.”Cleveland (Compendium of English Literature, p. 88), after stating the circumstances of Southwell’s imprisonment, trial, and execution, remarks: “The whole proceeding should cover the authors of it with everlasting infamy. It is a foul stain upon the garments of the maiden queen that she can never wipe off. There was not a particle of evidence at his trial that this pious and accomplished poet meditated any evil designs against the government. He did what he had a perfect right to do; ay, what it was his duty to do, if he conscientiously thought he was right—endeavor to make converts to his faith, so far as he could without interfering with the right of others. If there be anything to be execrated, it is persecution for opinion’s sake.”Allibone, in hisDictionary of English Literature, says that Southwell, “to the disgrace of the English government, suffered as a martyr at Tyburn, February 21, 1595, after three years’ imprisonment in the Tower, during which it is asserted he was ten times subjected to the torture. He was a good poet, a good prose writer, and a better Christian than his brutal persecutors.”Old Fuller, in hisWorthies of England, as might be expected, views Southwell with a stern English Protestant eye, and thus dismisses him: “Robert Southwell was born in this county (Norfolk), as Pitsons affirmeth, who, although often mistakenin his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born, seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many books in verse and prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the state, for which he was imprisoned and executed March the 3d, 1595” (vol. iii. p. 187).Robert Southwell was the third son of Richard Southwell, Esq., of Horsham, St. Faith’s, Norfolk. The curious in genealogy, while investigating family lines associated with the Southwell pedigree, have found connected with it, in degrees more or less near, the names of Paston, Sidney, Howard, Newton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of his early years there is but slight record, save that, when still very young, he was sent to Douai to be educated. From Douai he passed to Paris and thence to Rome, where, in 1578, before he had yet reached the age of seventeen, he was received into the order of the Society of Jesus. On completion of his novitiate and termination of the courses of philosophy and theology, he was made prefect of studies of the English College at Rome. Ordained priest in 1584, and, as appears from his letter addressed, February 20, 1585, to the general of the order, seeking the “perilous” errand wherein his future martyrdom seems rather to have been anticipated than merely referred to as a simple possibility,[19]he left Rome on the 8th of May, 1586, a missionary to his native land, or, in other words, took up his line of march for the scaffold and for heaven. We have, naturally enough, but scant record of the young priest’s journey to and arrival in England; for, as the mere landing in England by a Catholic priest was then a penal offence punishable with death, Southwell’s return to his native country was surrounded as much as possible by secrecy. Although yearning to visit his home and embrace his family, he carefully abstained from going near them—of doing that which, in his quaint phrase of the day, “maketh my presence perilous.” But he was aware that his father was in danger of losing, if he had not already lost, his faith; and these fears were almost confirmed by the facts that he had formed a marriage with a lady of the court, and that his wealth gave him entrance to court circles which were necessarily violently Protestant. Deeply solicitous for his father’s spiritual condition, he therefore addressed him a letter of admonition and advice, not less remarkable for its tone of affection than for its energy and eloquence. We cite it in another place.HUNTED DOWN.At a time when, as Mr. Grosart says, “it was a crime to be a Catholic: it was proof of high treason to be a priest: it was to invite ‘hunting’ as of a wild beast to be a Jesuit,” we cannot reasonably look for many recorded traces of Father Southwell’s presence and journeyings to and fro while in England. He could only move in disguise or under the darkness of night; he was liable to be thrown into prison anywhere on the merest suspicion of any irresponsible accuser. The few Catholics who were ready to give him shelter and hospitality did so with the halter around their necks; for confiscation and death were the penalty, as they well knew, for “harboring” a priest. It is nevertheless certain that his refuge in London was the mansion of the Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Philip Howard, Earl ofArundel, was imprisoned in the Tower, and died there, the noblest victim to the jealous and suspicious tyranny of Elizabeth,non sine veneni suspicione, as his epitaph still testifies.Hundreds of Southwell’s letters to his superiors still exist, but they are all from necessity written in such general terms and in so guarded a manner as to afford but little historical information. Here is one of them, as given by Bishop Challoner in hisMemoirs of Missionary Priests:1. “As yet we are alive and well, being unworthy, it seems, of prisons. We have oftener sent, than received, letters from your parts, tho’ they are not sent without difficulty; and some, we know, have been lost.”2. “The condition of Catholic recusants here is the same as usual, deplorable and full of fears and dangers, more especially since our adversaries have look’d for wars. As many of ours as are in chains rejoice and are comforted in their prisons; and they that are at liberty set not their heart upon it, nor expect it to be of long continuance. All by the great goodness and mercy of God arm themselves to suffer anything that can come, how hard soever it may be, as it shall please our Lord; for whose greater glory, and the salvation of their souls, they are more concerned than for any temporal losses.”3. “A little while ago, they apprehended two priests, who have suffered such cruel usages in the prison of Bridewell as can scarce be believed. What was given them to eat was so little in quantity, and, withal, so filthy and nauseous, that the very sight was enough to turn their stomachs. The labors to which they obliged them were continual and immoderate, and no less in sickness than in health; for, with hard blows and stripes, they forced them to accomplish their task how weak soever they were. Their beds were dirty straw, and their prison most filthy. Some are there hung up for whole days by the hands, in such a manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of their toes. This purgatory we are looking for every hour, in which Topcliffe and Young, the two executioners of the Catholics, exercise all kinds of torments. But come what pleaseth God, we hope we shall be able to bear all in him that strengthens us. I most humbly recommend myself to the holy sacrifices of your reverence and of all our friends. (January 15, 1590.)”PURSUIT AND ESCAPE.In a work[20]published so lately as 1871, we catch a few fugitive glances of Father Robert Southwell. Father Gerard spoke of him at the time (1585) as “excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.”A descent was made by the pursuivants upon a house in the country, where the two fathers happened to be together, and but for the devotion of the domestics the two missionaries would have been captured. They escaped, however, and journeyed away together. The peculiar danger they were then subjected to was that arising from intercourse with the gentry. Father Gerard tells of a gentleman who violently suspected him, and adds: “After a day or so he quite abandoned all mistrust, as I spoke of hunting and falconry with all the details that none but a practised person could command.” He concludes: “For many make sad blunders in attempting this, as Father Southwell, who was afterwards mycompanion in many journeys, was wont to complain. He frequently got me to instruct him in the technical terms of sport, and used to complain of his bad memory for such things; for on many occasions when he fell in with Protestant gentlemen he found it necessary to speak of these matters, which are the sole topics of their conversations, save when they talk obscenity or break out into blasphemies and abuse of the saints or the Catholic faith.”With danger of possible arrest at every house and on every road, followed by swift and barbarous execution, Father Southwell for six long years carried his life in his hand.PROTESTANT OPINION.“Granted,” says his Protestant biographer (Grosart, xlix.), “that in our Southwell’s years 1588 is included, and that the shadow of the coming of the Armada lay across England from the very moment of his arrival; granted that, in the teeth of their instructions, there were priests and members of the Society of Jesus who deemed they did God service by ‘plotting’ for the restoration of the old ‘faith and worship’ after a worldly sort; granted that politically and civilly the nation was, in a sense, in the throes of since-achieved liberties; granted thatMary, all too sadly, even tremendously, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’; granted that the very mysticism, not to say mystery, of the ‘higher’ sovereignty claimed for him who wore the tiara, acted as darkness does with sounds the most innocent; granted nearly all that Protestantism claims in its apology as defence—it must be regarded as a stigma on the statesmanship and a stain on the Christianity of the reformed Church of England, as well as a sorrow to all right-minded and right-hearted, that the ‘convictions’ of those who could not in conscience ‘change’ at the bidding of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, or James were not respected; that ‘opinion,’ or, if you will, ‘error,’ was put down (or attempted to be put down) by force, and that the headsman’s axe and hangman’s rope were the only instrumentalities thought of. The State Trials remain to bring a blush to every lover of his country for the brutal and ‘hard’ mockery of justice in the higher courts of law whenever a priest was concerned—as later with the Puritans and Nonconformists.”FALSE BRETHREN AND THE MAN-HUNTER.With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging himto meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.The letter is dated Westminster, June 22, 1592, and advises the queen: “I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster churchyard (i.e.the gatehouse). I have made him assured for starting or hurting of himself by putting upon his arms a pair of;[21]and so to keep him either from view or conference with any but Nicolas, the underkeeper of the gatehouse.... Upon this present taking of him it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly; and so to prove his answers true in haste, to the end that such as he be deeply concerned in his treachery may not have time to start, or make shift to use any means in common prisons; either to stand upon or against the wall will give warning.But if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands put as high as he can reach against the wall(like a trick at Tremshemarn), will enforce him to tell all; and the truth proven by the sequel....[22]It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly considered.”[23]The reader will here readily recognize a partial description of one of the modes of torture then most common in use throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It seems that itwas“her highness’ pleasure” to know something that was in this poor martyr’s heart, for Southwell was afterwards again repeatedly tortured. The intimate personal relations existing between the virgin queen and this man Topcliffe, whose very name was a stench in the nostrils of Protestants of respectable behavior, were maintained long after the Southwell capture, as we learn from the best authority. The cruelty of Elizabeth was only surpassed by her mendacity, as her mendacity was only exceeded by her mean parsimony, and when she travelled or made progress from one country to another it was always at the expense of her good and loyal subjects. Eventually the announcement of a visit from theirgood queen, received outwardly with such declarations as might naturally follow the promise of the call of a special envoy from heaven, was in reality looked upon as the coming of a terrible calamity. It was at that time considered at the English court—where, as we all know, all the civil and religious virtues had taken refuge—an excellent jest to so direct the course of the queen’s progress as to make her visits fall at the residences of well-known Catholic gentlemen. It is only necessary to say that the anniversary of all such events yet lives in the traditions of the descendants of such families as that of a day of horror. The royal retinue treated the house like a captured place, and it was well for the proprietor if confiscation or death, or both, were not the sole reward of his generous hospitality.Mr. Topcliffe gives us valuable information on this point. On the 30th of August, 1578, he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury: “The next good news (not in account the highest), her majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her council the two notorious papists, young Rookwood (the master of Ewston Hall, where her majesty did lie upon Sunday now a fortnight), and one Downs, a gentleman, were both committed, the one to the town prison at Norwich, the other to the county prison there, for obstinate papistry; and seven more gentlemen of worship were committed to several houses in Norwich as prisoners; two of the Lovells, another Downs, one Benings, one Parry, and two others.... Her majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his (Rookwood’s) house, Ewston, far unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the blackguard; nevertheless her excellent majesty gave to Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss; after which it was braved at. But my lord chamberlain, nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for papistry, called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the court, and yet to attend her council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed,”[24]etc. etc. In the beginning of the letter Topcliffe “joys at her majesty’s gracious favor and affiance in your lordship—next some comfort I received of her for myself that must ever lie nearest my own heart.” Tender Topcliffe! But we must have “no scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and our most delicate susceptibilities for the fair fame of the royal virgin may be quieted by the certainty that the comfort nearest the human bloodhound’s “own heart” was something substantial—a country house, an estate, or the like.Lodge says that this Topcliffe was respectably connected, but that he could only find that he was distinguished as a most implacable persecutor of Roman Catholics. In a letter of Sir Anthony Standen, in which he praises the agreeable manners of the Earl of Essex, he writes: “Contrary to ourTopcliffiancustoms, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” From another letter of the period it appears thatTopcliffzarein the quaint language of the court signified to hunt a recusant.But to return to Southwell. Transferred to a dungeon in the Tower, “so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out at the end of the month, his clothes werecovered with vermin,” his father wrote to her majesty Queen Elizabeth the letter we have already mentioned. This petition was to some extent regarded. A better lodging was allowed him, and leave accorded his father to supply him with “cloaths and other necessaries”; and amongst the rest, with books which he asked for, which were only the Holy Bible and the works of S. Bernard. “The selection of books,” says Mr. Grosart, “thebook of books, and the father of the fathers, for a poet is very noteworthy; and through all his weary imprisonment ‘spiritual things,’ not civil or earthly, were his theme when he discoursed to his sister Mary (Mrs. Bannister) or others permitted occasionally to visit him.”TRIAL AND EXECUTION.We adopt mainly the relation of Southwell’s trial and execution as it is given by Bishop Challoner, supported by a Latin MS. preserved in the archives of the English College of S. Omer’s:“After Father Southwell had been kept close prisoner for three years in the Tower, he sent an epistle to Cecil, Lord Treasurer, humbly entreating his lordship that he might either be brought upon his trial to answer for himself, or at least that his friends might have leave to come and see him. The treasurer answered that, if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire. Shortly after this orders were given that he should be removed from the Tower to Newgate, where he was put down into the dungeon calledLimbo, and there kept for three days.“On the 22d of February, without any previous warning to prepare for his trial, he was taken out of his dark lodging and hurried to Westminster, to hold up his hand there at the bar. The first news of this step towards his martyrdom filled his heart with a joy which he could not conceal. The judges before whom he was to appear were Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Justice Owen, Baron Evans, and Sergeant Daniel. As soon as Father Southwell was brought in, the lord chief-justice made a long and vehement speech against the Jesuits and seminary priests, as the authors and contrivers of all the plots and treasons which, he pretended, had been hatched during that reign. Then was read the bill of indictment against Father Southwell, drawn up by Cook, the queen’s solicitor.”THEIR FAITH WAS THEIR GUILT.It would be well to remark here that Protestants nowadays frequently contend that the missionary priests judicially murdered during the reign of Elizabeth were not executed on account of their religion, but because they were stirrers up of sedition and traitors, and were in every case so proven to be upon their respective trials. The good people who set up such pretext are sadly in ignorance of the history of that dark period. So far from asserting the slightest pretence of guilt on the part of such acts accused of as commonly constitute sedition and high treason, the statute of Elizabeth under which they were sent to the gallows only made it necessary to show that they were Englishmen and Catholic priests, and were arrested in England. The statute, in fact, enacted substantially that, “if any Jesuit, seminary priest, or deacon, or religious or ecclesiastical person whatever, born within the realm, shall come into, be, or remain in any part of this realm, every such offence shall be taken and adjudged to be high treason.” The indictment against Southwell was “drawn up byCook, the queen’s solicitor,” says the S. Omer MS. Now, “Cook, the queen’s solicitor” here referred to was no less a personage than the great Coke. Here is the indictment presented by him in Southwell’s case, from which it will be seen that the prisoner was charged only with the crimes of,first, being a priest of English birth;second, of having remained in the county of Middlesex:“The jury present, on the part of our sovereign lady the queen, that Robert Southwell, late of London, clerk, born within this kingdom of England; to wit, since the feast of S. John the Baptist, in the first year of the reign of her majesty, and before the first day of May, in the thirty-second year of the reign of our lady the queen aforesaid, made and ordained priest by authority derived and pretended from the See of Rome; not having the fear of God before his eyes, and slighting the laws and statutes of this realm of England, without any regard to the penalty therein contained, on the 20th day of June, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of our lady the queen, at Uxenden, in the county of Middlesex, traitorously, and as a false traitor to our lady the queen, was and remained, contrary to the form of the statute in such case set forth and provided, and contrary to the peace of our said lady the queen, her crown, and dignities.”The grand jury having found the bill, Father Southwell was ordered to come up to the bar. He readily obeyed, and, bowing down his head, made a low reverence to his judges; then modestly held up his hand according to custom, and, being asked whether he was guilty or not guilty, he answered, “I confess that I was born in England, a subject to the queen’s majesty, and that, by authority derived from God, I have been promoted to the sacred order of priesthood in the Roman Church, for which I return most hearty thanks to his divine Majesty. I confess, also, that I was at Uxenden, in Middlesex, at that time, when, being sent for thither by trick and deceit, I fell into your hands, as is well known; but that I never entertained any designs or plots against the queen or kingdom, I call God to witness, the revenger of perjury; neither had I any other design in returning home to my native country than to administer the sacraments according to the rite of the Catholic Church to such as desired them.”Here the judge interrupted him, and told him that he was to let all that alone, and plead directly guilty or not guilty. Upon which he said,he was not guilty of any treason whatsoever. And being asked by what he would be tried, he said, “By God and by you.” The judge told him he was to answer, “By God and his country,” which, at first, he refused, alleging that the laws of his country were disagreeable to the law of God, and that he was unwilling these poor harmless men of the jury, whom they obliged to represent the country, should have any share in their guilt, or any hand in his death. “But,” said he, “if through your iniquity it must be so, and I cannot help it, be it as you will; I am ready to be judged by God and my country.” When the twelve were to be sworn, he challenged none of them, saying that they were all equally strangers to him, and therefore charity did not allow him to except against any one of them more than another.After Coke had presented the case to the jury, they went aside to consult about the verdict, and in a short time brought him in guilty. He was asked if he had anything more to say for himself why sentence should not be pronounced against him? He said: “Nothing; but from my heart I beg of Almighty God to forgive all who have been any ways accessory to my death.” The judge havingpronounced sentence according to the usual form, Father Southwell made a very low bow, returning him most hearty thanks as for an unspeakable favor. The judge offered him the help of a minister to prepare him to die. Father Southwell desired he would not trouble him upon that head; that the grace of God would be more than sufficient for him. And so, being sent back to Newgate through the streets, lined with people, he discovered, all the way, the overflowing joy of his heart in his eyes, in his whole countenance, and in every gesture and motion of his body. He was again put down into limbo, at his return to Newgate, where he spent the following night, the last of his life, in prayer, full of the thoughts of the journey he was to take the next day, through the gate of martyrdom, into a happy eternity; to enjoy for ever the sovereign object of his love.We have seen by what device and with what ill success the officials directing the execution sought, on the next morning, to draw away the crowd from Tyburn where Father Southwell was to be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”EXECUTIONS UNDER ELIZABETH.The modern reader generally, and very naturally, supposes that this sentence, horrible as it is in its simplest form, would be carried out as stated, that is to say, that, when the condemned man was hung until dead, his body was then butchered as described. This probably was the intention of the law, and the latter two of the three incidents of the executions were intended more as indignities to the remains of a criminal supposed to be guilty of the greatest of human crimes than as any part of the means of procuring death. But under the reign of Elizabeth the cruelty and bestiality of the mode in which the horrible sentence was carried out had reached its height. As a general thing, the victim was butchered alive. According to the whim or the bloodthirstiness of the executioner, the condemned man was allowed to hang a short time, or he was scarcely swung off before he was cut down and the hangman was—as he is described in a well-known phrase—“grabbling among his entrails.” Sometimes the executioner would spring upon the body as it was swung off, and plunge his knife into the victim before they reached the ground in their fall together. When a young priest named Edward Genings was executed, in 1591, the butchery was superintended by Topcliffe, who adjured the victim to submit and recant and he should be pardoned. His reply was: “I know not in what I have offended my dear anointed princess; if I had, I would willingly ask forgiveness. If she be offended with me because I am a priest, and because I profess my faith and will not turn minister against my conscience, I shall be, I trust, excused and innocent before God. I must obey God, saith S. Peter, rather than men.” At this Topcliffe was enraged, and bade the hangman turn the ladder; scarcely giving him time to say aPater Noster. Cut down by his order before he was dead, the butchery began, and, the hangman’s hand being already on his heart, Genings was heard to say, “Sancte Gregori, ora pro me!”—which the hangman hearing, he swore, “Zounds, see, his heart is in my hand, and yet Gregory is in his mouth! O egregious papist!”[25]We return to Father Southwell,who was drawn on a hurdle or sled from Newgate to Tyburn, and resume the account of the S. Omer’s MS.: “When he was come to the place, getting up into the cart, he made the sign of the cross in the best manner that he could, his hands being pinion’d, and began to speak to the people those words of the apostle (Rom. xiv), ‘Whether we live, we live to the Lord, or whether we die, we die to the Lord; therefore, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.’ Here the sheriff would have interrupted him, but he begged leave that he might go on, assuring him that he would utter nothing that should give offence. Then he spoke as follows: ‘I am come to this place to finish my course, and to pass out of this miserable life; and I beg of my Lord Jesus Christ, in whose most precious Passion and Blood I place my hope of salvation, that he would have mercy on my soul. I confess I am a Catholic priest of the Holy Roman Church, and a religious man of the Society of Jesus; on which account I owe eternal thanks and praises to my God and Saviour.’ Here he was interrupted by a minister telling him that, if he understood what he had said in the sense of the Council of Trent, it was damnable doctrine. But the minister was silenc’d by the standers-by, and Mr. Southwell went on, saying: ‘Sir, I beg of you not to be troublesome to me for this short time that I have to live: I am a Catholic, and in whatever manner you may please to interpret my words, I hope for my salvation by the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and as to the queen, I never attempted, nor contrived, or imagined any evil against her, but have always prayed for her to Our Lord, and for this short time of my life still pray, that, in his infinite mercy, he would be pleased to give her all such gifts and graces which he sees, in his divine wisdom, to be most expedient for the welfare both of her soul and body, in this life and in the next. I recommend in like manner, to the same mercy of God, my poor country, and I implore the divine bounty to favor it with his light and the knowledge of his truth, to the greater advancement of the salvation of souls, and the eternal glory of his divine Majesty. In fine, I beg of the almighty and everlasting God, that this my death may be for my own and for my country’s good, and the comfort of the Catholics my brethren.’“Having finished these words, and looking for the cart to be immediately drove away, he again blessed himself, and, with his eyes raised to heaven, repeated with great calmness of mind and countenance, ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ with other short ejaculations, till the cart was drawn off. The unskilful hangman had not applied the noose of the rope to the proper place, so that he several times made the sign of the cross whilst he was hanging, and was some time before he was strangled, which some perceiving, drew him by the legs to put an end to his pain, and when the executioner was for cutting the rope before he was dead, the gentlemen and people that were present cried out three several times, ‘Hold, hold!’ for the behavior of the servant of God was so edifying in these his last moments, that even the Protestants who were present at the execution were much affected with the sight.” After he was dead he was cut down and the remainder of the sentence carried out. Turnbull relates that “Lord Mountjoy (Charles Blount), who happened to be present, was so struck by the martyr’s constancy that he exclaimed,‘May my soul be with this man’s!’ and he assisted in restraining those who would have cut the rope while he was still in life.”Father Southwell’s reverend and Protestant biographer declares, in concluding his relation of the execution: “I must regard our worthy as a ‘martyr’ in the deepest and grandest sense—a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. I should blush for my Protestantism if I did not hold in honor, yea reverence, his stainless and beautiful memory.‘Through this desert, day by day,Wandered not his steps astray,Treading still the royal way.’—Paradisus Animæ.“So perished Father Southwell, at thirty-three years of age, and so, unhappily, have perished many of the wise and virtuous of the earth. Conscious of suffering in the supposed best of causes, he seems to have met death without terror—to have received the crown of martyrdom not only with resignation, but with joy.”[26]It is matter of regret that there exists no authentic portrait of Southwell. His biographer is of opinion that a genuine likeness of him would have shown an intellectual, etherealized face, and fancies that he might have sat for the portrait of the Prior inThe Lady of Garaye:“Tender his words, and eloquently wise;Mild the pure fervor of his watchful eyes;Meek with serenity and constant prayer,The luminous forehead, high and broad and bare.The thin mouth, though not passionless, yet stillWith a sweet calm that speaks an angel’s will.Resolving service to his God’s behest,And ever musing how to servehimbest,Not old, nor young; with manhood’s gentlest grace,Pale to transparency the pensive face,Pale not with sickness but with studious thought,The body tasked, the fine mind overwrought;With something faint and fragile in the whole,As though ‘twere but a lamp to hold a soul.”PART SECOND.—POET.And here, first, a few words on the prose writings of Southwell. We have already referred to the remarkable letter of admonition by him addressed to his father. It is a severe test to put the prose of any cultivated language to that of comparison with the productions of the same tongue nearly three centuries later. And yet this letter will support such comparison surprisingly well both as to substance and style. The reader will bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which Southwell addressed thisLETTER TO HIS FATHER.“I am not of so unnatural a kind, of so wild an education, or so unchristian a spirit, as not to remember the root out of which I have branched, or to forget my secondary maker and author of my being. It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that has made me such a stranger to my native home, and so backward in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of these days that maketh my presence perilous, and the discharge of my duties an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwilling courtesy upon any, or by seeming officious to become offensive; deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself, and to purchase their danger, whose good-will I so highly esteem. I never doubted but what the belief, which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in a manner, hereditary, framed in them a right persuasion of my present calling, not suffering them to measure their censures of me by the ugly terms and odious epithets wherewith heresy hath sought to discredit my functions, but rather by the reverence of so worthy a sacrament and the sacred usages of all former ages. Yet, because I might easily perceive by apparent conjectures that many were more willing to hear of me than from me, and readier topraise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek.”Then, regretting that he has been barred from affording to his dearest friends that which hath been eagerly sought and beneficially attained by mere strangers, he exclaims passionately:“Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed.“Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises.... The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, andgrateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin.”The entire letter is given in both Walter and Turnbull’sMemoirs of Southwell, and has been extravagantly praised as being the composition of Sir Walter Raleigh, among whoseRemainsit is frequently reprinted. Mr. Grosart, a Protestant clergyman, says of it: “I know nothing comparable with the mingled affection and prophetlike fidelity, the wise instruction, correction, reproof, the full rich scripturalness and quaint applications, the devoutness, the insistence, the pathos of this letter.” The edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’sRemains, published in London in 1675, was the subject of an article in theRetrospective Reviewfor 1820, in which the reviewer remarks: “‘The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father’ is supposed to be a libel on Sir Walter, written by his enemies. It will be seen, however, that it bears a strong resemblance to his style, although the metaphor is more profuse and ornamental, and seems to be rather engrafted on his thoughts than to spring up with them. That this piece should be dictated by personal hostility is strange. It contains exhortations that might with the greatest propriety be directed to any man.“It is possible that it might be written by another in imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Advice to his Son’;yet if he was an enemy, he was of a most uncommon description. As the advice, however, is worth quoting forits own merit, and is written with great force and beauty, we shall give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves.”This letter is Southwell’s earliest dated prose, and was followed by a variety of treatises, epistles, and pamphlets, printed on the “private press” at his own house in London. Besides these, there remain several English and a large number of Latin prose writings still in manuscript. “Mary Magdalene’s Funerall Teares,” although prose in form, is in fact far more fervid and impassioned than the greater part of his poetry.SOUTHWELL’S POETRY.To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet’s character.Certain it is that Southwell was largely read by the generation that immediately succeeded him. Many years ago, Ellis[27]said: “The very few copies of his works which are now known to exist are the remnant of at least seventeen different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600”; and at a later period, Drake, in hisShakespeare and his Times, says:[28]“Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.”A valuable tribute of admiration to Southwell’s poetic talent is that of Ben Jonson, who said: “that Southwell was hanged; yet so he (Jonson) had written that piece of his, ‘The Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”[29]Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for giving it here, although we strongly suspect that Mr. Grosart will not approve of its modern orthography.As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear,Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed;Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats I frye,Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes;The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good,So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood:With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell’s poetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem “S. Peter’s Complaint,” consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems—“Times go by Turns,” “Content and Rich,”[30]“Life is but Loss,” “Look Home,” “Love’s servile Lot,” and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart’s estimate of them. “The hastiest reader will come on ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally), is throughout of the ‘pure well of English undefiled.’ When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, theirélan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the ‘dew of the morning.’ His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the ‘Vale of Tears’ the source of the latter’s immortal ‘Haunted House’—dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or lily, nevertheless really carrying in it the original of the mightier after-poem.”Our warmest tribute of praise can render but scant justice to the intelligence, the industry, the erudition, the keen poetic sense, and the enthusiasm which the editor of the volume before us has devoted to what has evidently been to him a labor of love. Mr. Grosart is well known in the literary world as the editor of Crashawe and of Vaughan, as also of the forthcoming editions of Marvell,Donne, and Sidney. His laboriously corrected version of our martyr-poet’s legacy has, it may be said, restored Southwell to us, so obscured had he become by mistakes, misprints, and false readings. Indeed Mr. Grosart’s somewhat jealous love of his subject betrays him into apparently harsh judgment on the efforts of others, when, for instance, he declares himself “vexed by the travesties on editing and mere carelessness of Walter earlier (1817) and Turnbull later (1856) in their so-called editions of the poems of Father Southwell,” adding: “Turnbull said contemptuously, ‘I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter’s text’—severe but not undeserved, only his own is scarcely one whit better, and in places worse.”There is one passage at the close of Mr. Grosart’s interesting preface which has a special interest for us as Americans. We mean his reference to the verdict pronounced on Father Southwell’s poetry by Prof. James Russell Lowell in his charming bookMy Study Windows. “It seems to me,” says Mr. Grosart, “harsh to brutality on the man (meet follower of him ‘the first true gentleman that ever breathed’); while on the poetry it rests on self-evidently the most superficial acquaintance and the hastiest generalization. To pronounce ‘S. Peter’s Complaint’ a ‘drawl’ of thirty pages of ‘maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a (sic) sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus,’ shows about as much knowledge—that is, ignorance—of the poem as of the schoolman, and as another remark does of S. Peter; for, with admitted tedium, S. Peter’s complaint sounds depths of penitence and remorse, and utters out emotion that flames into passion very unforgettably, while there are felicities of metaphor, daintinesses of word-painting, brilliancies of inner-portraiture, scarcely to be matched in contemporary verse. The ‘paraphrase’ of David (to wit, ‘David’s Peccavi’) is a single short piece, and the ‘punning’ conceit, ‘fears are my feres,’ is common to some of England’s finest wits, and in the meaning of ‘fere’ not at all to be pronounced against. If we on this side of the Atlantic valued less the opinion of such a unique genius as Prof. Lowell’s, if we did not take him to our innermost love, we should less grieve over such a vulgar affront offered to a venerable name as his whole paragraph to Southwell. I shall indulge the hope of our edition reaching the ‘Study,’ and persuading to a real ‘study’ of these poems, and, if so, I do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment.”ARIS WILMOTTpronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and ‘Content and Rich,’ and, ‘Dyer’s phansie turned to a Sinner’s Complaint’ warrant the great praise. But beneath the manner recalling Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him.“Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment’s reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of Dublin’s well-weighed words in his notes to hisHousehold Book of English Poetry(1868):“‘Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this (“Lewd Love is Loss”) and No. 2 (“Times go by Turns”) of this collection, poems which, as far asthey go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised more than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or excuse’ (pp. 391-392).“To Archbishop Trench’s I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George Macdonald inAntiphonas follows:“‘I proceed to call up oneWHO WAS A POET INDEED, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor and subject to the penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, could “not be induced to confess anything, not even the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was,’ etc.“I believe, then,” concludes Dr. Grosart, “I shall not appeal in vain to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his ‘Study Windows’ to a reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these sufficiently qualified critics.”

PART FIRST—MARTYR.

“Hoist up sail while gale doth last,Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure:Seek not time when time is past,Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.After-wits are dearly bought,Let thy fore-wit guide thy thought.”“Time wears all his locks before,Take thou hold upon his forehead;When he flies, he turns no more,And behind his scalp is naked.Works adjourn’d have many stays;Long demurs breed new delays.”

“Hoist up sail while gale doth last,Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure:

Seek not time when time is past,Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.

After-wits are dearly bought,Let thy fore-wit guide thy thought.”

“Time wears all his locks before,Take thou hold upon his forehead;

When he flies, he turns no more,And behind his scalp is naked.

Works adjourn’d have many stays;Long demurs breed new delays.”

—Robert Southwell, 1593.[18]

Concerningthe writer of these beautiful lines, the English historian, Stow, makes the following brief mention in hisChronicle: “February 20, 1594-5.—Southwell, a Jesuit, that long time had lain prisoner in the Tower of London, was arraigned at the King’s Bench bar. He was condemned, and on the next morning drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, bowelled, and quartered.” From this account we are unable to discover that the man whose judicial murder Stow thus records was put to death for any offence but that of being aJesuit, and of having “long time lain in prison in the Tower of London.” And yet, in thus stating the case, Stow tells the simple truth; for Southwell was guilty of no more serious crime than his sacerdotal character, and of suffering the imprisonment and tortures inflicted upon him in consequence thereof. For three years previous to his death he had been in prison and in the Tower, had lain in noisome and filthy dungeons, and been subjected many times to torture and the rack. From the high social position of his family, the fame of his literary accomplishments, his admirable and saintly bearing as a missionary priest in England, for six long years carrying his life in his hand while ministering to a scattered flock, obliged to move from place to place in disguise as though he were a malefactor, and finally, from the wonderful fortitude and constancy with which he was said to have suffered torture, his case was very generally known in London, and deeply commiserated even by many Protestants. So deep and widespread, indeed, was this sympathy that, when it was determined by the officers of the crown to try and condemn him on one and the same day, and execute him the next morning, they withheld from the public all announcement of his execution, meanwhile giving notice of the hanging of a famous highwayman in another place in order to draw off the concourse of spectators. But it availed not, for there were many who kept so close a watch upon the movementsat Newgate, to which prison he had been removed a few days before his trial, that, when Southwell was brought out to be drawn on a sled or hurdle to the place of execution at Tyburn, he was followed by great numbers of people, and among them many persons of distinction, who witnessed the carrying out of his dreadful sentence, which was that he should be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”

That our readers may understand that our qualification of Southwell’s execution as a judicial murder is not the result of mere personal sympathy or of religious prejudice, we will here record the judgment of several Protestant authorities, who speak out concerning it in a manner not to be misunderstood. In the valuableCyclopædia of English Literature, by Chambers, we read concerning Southwell that, after having ministered secretly but zealously to the scattered adherents of his creed, “without, as far as is known, doing anything to disturb the peace of society, he was apprehended and committed to a dungeon in the Tower, so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out for examination, his clothes were covered with vermin. Upon this his father, a man of good family, presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth, begging that, if his son had committed anything for which, by the laws, he had deserved death, he might suffer death; if not, as he was a gentleman, he begged her majesty would be pleased to order him to be treated as a gentleman. Southwell after this was somewhat better lodged, but an imprisonment of three years, with ten inflictions of the rack, wore out his patience, and he entreated to be brought to trial. Cecil is said to have made the brutal remark that, ‘if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire.’ Being at the trial found guilty, upon his own confession, of being a Romish priest, he was condemned to death, and executed at Tyburn accordingly, with all the horrible circumstances dictated by the old treason laws of England. Throughout all these scenes he behaved with a mild fortitude which nothing but a highly regulated mind and satisfied conscience could have prompted.”

Cleveland (Compendium of English Literature, p. 88), after stating the circumstances of Southwell’s imprisonment, trial, and execution, remarks: “The whole proceeding should cover the authors of it with everlasting infamy. It is a foul stain upon the garments of the maiden queen that she can never wipe off. There was not a particle of evidence at his trial that this pious and accomplished poet meditated any evil designs against the government. He did what he had a perfect right to do; ay, what it was his duty to do, if he conscientiously thought he was right—endeavor to make converts to his faith, so far as he could without interfering with the right of others. If there be anything to be execrated, it is persecution for opinion’s sake.”

Allibone, in hisDictionary of English Literature, says that Southwell, “to the disgrace of the English government, suffered as a martyr at Tyburn, February 21, 1595, after three years’ imprisonment in the Tower, during which it is asserted he was ten times subjected to the torture. He was a good poet, a good prose writer, and a better Christian than his brutal persecutors.”

Old Fuller, in hisWorthies of England, as might be expected, views Southwell with a stern English Protestant eye, and thus dismisses him: “Robert Southwell was born in this county (Norfolk), as Pitsons affirmeth, who, although often mistakenin his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born, seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many books in verse and prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the state, for which he was imprisoned and executed March the 3d, 1595” (vol. iii. p. 187).

Robert Southwell was the third son of Richard Southwell, Esq., of Horsham, St. Faith’s, Norfolk. The curious in genealogy, while investigating family lines associated with the Southwell pedigree, have found connected with it, in degrees more or less near, the names of Paston, Sidney, Howard, Newton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of his early years there is but slight record, save that, when still very young, he was sent to Douai to be educated. From Douai he passed to Paris and thence to Rome, where, in 1578, before he had yet reached the age of seventeen, he was received into the order of the Society of Jesus. On completion of his novitiate and termination of the courses of philosophy and theology, he was made prefect of studies of the English College at Rome. Ordained priest in 1584, and, as appears from his letter addressed, February 20, 1585, to the general of the order, seeking the “perilous” errand wherein his future martyrdom seems rather to have been anticipated than merely referred to as a simple possibility,[19]he left Rome on the 8th of May, 1586, a missionary to his native land, or, in other words, took up his line of march for the scaffold and for heaven. We have, naturally enough, but scant record of the young priest’s journey to and arrival in England; for, as the mere landing in England by a Catholic priest was then a penal offence punishable with death, Southwell’s return to his native country was surrounded as much as possible by secrecy. Although yearning to visit his home and embrace his family, he carefully abstained from going near them—of doing that which, in his quaint phrase of the day, “maketh my presence perilous.” But he was aware that his father was in danger of losing, if he had not already lost, his faith; and these fears were almost confirmed by the facts that he had formed a marriage with a lady of the court, and that his wealth gave him entrance to court circles which were necessarily violently Protestant. Deeply solicitous for his father’s spiritual condition, he therefore addressed him a letter of admonition and advice, not less remarkable for its tone of affection than for its energy and eloquence. We cite it in another place.

HUNTED DOWN.

At a time when, as Mr. Grosart says, “it was a crime to be a Catholic: it was proof of high treason to be a priest: it was to invite ‘hunting’ as of a wild beast to be a Jesuit,” we cannot reasonably look for many recorded traces of Father Southwell’s presence and journeyings to and fro while in England. He could only move in disguise or under the darkness of night; he was liable to be thrown into prison anywhere on the merest suspicion of any irresponsible accuser. The few Catholics who were ready to give him shelter and hospitality did so with the halter around their necks; for confiscation and death were the penalty, as they well knew, for “harboring” a priest. It is nevertheless certain that his refuge in London was the mansion of the Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Philip Howard, Earl ofArundel, was imprisoned in the Tower, and died there, the noblest victim to the jealous and suspicious tyranny of Elizabeth,non sine veneni suspicione, as his epitaph still testifies.

Hundreds of Southwell’s letters to his superiors still exist, but they are all from necessity written in such general terms and in so guarded a manner as to afford but little historical information. Here is one of them, as given by Bishop Challoner in hisMemoirs of Missionary Priests:

1. “As yet we are alive and well, being unworthy, it seems, of prisons. We have oftener sent, than received, letters from your parts, tho’ they are not sent without difficulty; and some, we know, have been lost.”

2. “The condition of Catholic recusants here is the same as usual, deplorable and full of fears and dangers, more especially since our adversaries have look’d for wars. As many of ours as are in chains rejoice and are comforted in their prisons; and they that are at liberty set not their heart upon it, nor expect it to be of long continuance. All by the great goodness and mercy of God arm themselves to suffer anything that can come, how hard soever it may be, as it shall please our Lord; for whose greater glory, and the salvation of their souls, they are more concerned than for any temporal losses.”

3. “A little while ago, they apprehended two priests, who have suffered such cruel usages in the prison of Bridewell as can scarce be believed. What was given them to eat was so little in quantity, and, withal, so filthy and nauseous, that the very sight was enough to turn their stomachs. The labors to which they obliged them were continual and immoderate, and no less in sickness than in health; for, with hard blows and stripes, they forced them to accomplish their task how weak soever they were. Their beds were dirty straw, and their prison most filthy. Some are there hung up for whole days by the hands, in such a manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of their toes. This purgatory we are looking for every hour, in which Topcliffe and Young, the two executioners of the Catholics, exercise all kinds of torments. But come what pleaseth God, we hope we shall be able to bear all in him that strengthens us. I most humbly recommend myself to the holy sacrifices of your reverence and of all our friends. (January 15, 1590.)”

PURSUIT AND ESCAPE.

In a work[20]published so lately as 1871, we catch a few fugitive glances of Father Robert Southwell. Father Gerard spoke of him at the time (1585) as “excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.”

A descent was made by the pursuivants upon a house in the country, where the two fathers happened to be together, and but for the devotion of the domestics the two missionaries would have been captured. They escaped, however, and journeyed away together. The peculiar danger they were then subjected to was that arising from intercourse with the gentry. Father Gerard tells of a gentleman who violently suspected him, and adds: “After a day or so he quite abandoned all mistrust, as I spoke of hunting and falconry with all the details that none but a practised person could command.” He concludes: “For many make sad blunders in attempting this, as Father Southwell, who was afterwards mycompanion in many journeys, was wont to complain. He frequently got me to instruct him in the technical terms of sport, and used to complain of his bad memory for such things; for on many occasions when he fell in with Protestant gentlemen he found it necessary to speak of these matters, which are the sole topics of their conversations, save when they talk obscenity or break out into blasphemies and abuse of the saints or the Catholic faith.”

With danger of possible arrest at every house and on every road, followed by swift and barbarous execution, Father Southwell for six long years carried his life in his hand.

PROTESTANT OPINION.

“Granted,” says his Protestant biographer (Grosart, xlix.), “that in our Southwell’s years 1588 is included, and that the shadow of the coming of the Armada lay across England from the very moment of his arrival; granted that, in the teeth of their instructions, there were priests and members of the Society of Jesus who deemed they did God service by ‘plotting’ for the restoration of the old ‘faith and worship’ after a worldly sort; granted that politically and civilly the nation was, in a sense, in the throes of since-achieved liberties; granted thatMary, all too sadly, even tremendously, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’; granted that the very mysticism, not to say mystery, of the ‘higher’ sovereignty claimed for him who wore the tiara, acted as darkness does with sounds the most innocent; granted nearly all that Protestantism claims in its apology as defence—it must be regarded as a stigma on the statesmanship and a stain on the Christianity of the reformed Church of England, as well as a sorrow to all right-minded and right-hearted, that the ‘convictions’ of those who could not in conscience ‘change’ at the bidding of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, or James were not respected; that ‘opinion,’ or, if you will, ‘error,’ was put down (or attempted to be put down) by force, and that the headsman’s axe and hangman’s rope were the only instrumentalities thought of. The State Trials remain to bring a blush to every lover of his country for the brutal and ‘hard’ mockery of justice in the higher courts of law whenever a priest was concerned—as later with the Puritans and Nonconformists.”

FALSE BRETHREN AND THE MAN-HUNTER.

With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging himto meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.

The letter is dated Westminster, June 22, 1592, and advises the queen: “I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster churchyard (i.e.the gatehouse). I have made him assured for starting or hurting of himself by putting upon his arms a pair of;[21]and so to keep him either from view or conference with any but Nicolas, the underkeeper of the gatehouse.... Upon this present taking of him it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly; and so to prove his answers true in haste, to the end that such as he be deeply concerned in his treachery may not have time to start, or make shift to use any means in common prisons; either to stand upon or against the wall will give warning.But if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands put as high as he can reach against the wall(like a trick at Tremshemarn), will enforce him to tell all; and the truth proven by the sequel....[22]It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly considered.”[23]

The reader will here readily recognize a partial description of one of the modes of torture then most common in use throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It seems that itwas“her highness’ pleasure” to know something that was in this poor martyr’s heart, for Southwell was afterwards again repeatedly tortured. The intimate personal relations existing between the virgin queen and this man Topcliffe, whose very name was a stench in the nostrils of Protestants of respectable behavior, were maintained long after the Southwell capture, as we learn from the best authority. The cruelty of Elizabeth was only surpassed by her mendacity, as her mendacity was only exceeded by her mean parsimony, and when she travelled or made progress from one country to another it was always at the expense of her good and loyal subjects. Eventually the announcement of a visit from theirgood queen, received outwardly with such declarations as might naturally follow the promise of the call of a special envoy from heaven, was in reality looked upon as the coming of a terrible calamity. It was at that time considered at the English court—where, as we all know, all the civil and religious virtues had taken refuge—an excellent jest to so direct the course of the queen’s progress as to make her visits fall at the residences of well-known Catholic gentlemen. It is only necessary to say that the anniversary of all such events yet lives in the traditions of the descendants of such families as that of a day of horror. The royal retinue treated the house like a captured place, and it was well for the proprietor if confiscation or death, or both, were not the sole reward of his generous hospitality.

Mr. Topcliffe gives us valuable information on this point. On the 30th of August, 1578, he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury: “The next good news (not in account the highest), her majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her council the two notorious papists, young Rookwood (the master of Ewston Hall, where her majesty did lie upon Sunday now a fortnight), and one Downs, a gentleman, were both committed, the one to the town prison at Norwich, the other to the county prison there, for obstinate papistry; and seven more gentlemen of worship were committed to several houses in Norwich as prisoners; two of the Lovells, another Downs, one Benings, one Parry, and two others.... Her majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his (Rookwood’s) house, Ewston, far unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the blackguard; nevertheless her excellent majesty gave to Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss; after which it was braved at. But my lord chamberlain, nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for papistry, called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the court, and yet to attend her council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed,”[24]etc. etc. In the beginning of the letter Topcliffe “joys at her majesty’s gracious favor and affiance in your lordship—next some comfort I received of her for myself that must ever lie nearest my own heart.” Tender Topcliffe! But we must have “no scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and our most delicate susceptibilities for the fair fame of the royal virgin may be quieted by the certainty that the comfort nearest the human bloodhound’s “own heart” was something substantial—a country house, an estate, or the like.

Lodge says that this Topcliffe was respectably connected, but that he could only find that he was distinguished as a most implacable persecutor of Roman Catholics. In a letter of Sir Anthony Standen, in which he praises the agreeable manners of the Earl of Essex, he writes: “Contrary to ourTopcliffiancustoms, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” From another letter of the period it appears thatTopcliffzarein the quaint language of the court signified to hunt a recusant.

But to return to Southwell. Transferred to a dungeon in the Tower, “so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out at the end of the month, his clothes werecovered with vermin,” his father wrote to her majesty Queen Elizabeth the letter we have already mentioned. This petition was to some extent regarded. A better lodging was allowed him, and leave accorded his father to supply him with “cloaths and other necessaries”; and amongst the rest, with books which he asked for, which were only the Holy Bible and the works of S. Bernard. “The selection of books,” says Mr. Grosart, “thebook of books, and the father of the fathers, for a poet is very noteworthy; and through all his weary imprisonment ‘spiritual things,’ not civil or earthly, were his theme when he discoursed to his sister Mary (Mrs. Bannister) or others permitted occasionally to visit him.”

TRIAL AND EXECUTION.

We adopt mainly the relation of Southwell’s trial and execution as it is given by Bishop Challoner, supported by a Latin MS. preserved in the archives of the English College of S. Omer’s:

“After Father Southwell had been kept close prisoner for three years in the Tower, he sent an epistle to Cecil, Lord Treasurer, humbly entreating his lordship that he might either be brought upon his trial to answer for himself, or at least that his friends might have leave to come and see him. The treasurer answered that, if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire. Shortly after this orders were given that he should be removed from the Tower to Newgate, where he was put down into the dungeon calledLimbo, and there kept for three days.

“On the 22d of February, without any previous warning to prepare for his trial, he was taken out of his dark lodging and hurried to Westminster, to hold up his hand there at the bar. The first news of this step towards his martyrdom filled his heart with a joy which he could not conceal. The judges before whom he was to appear were Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Justice Owen, Baron Evans, and Sergeant Daniel. As soon as Father Southwell was brought in, the lord chief-justice made a long and vehement speech against the Jesuits and seminary priests, as the authors and contrivers of all the plots and treasons which, he pretended, had been hatched during that reign. Then was read the bill of indictment against Father Southwell, drawn up by Cook, the queen’s solicitor.”

THEIR FAITH WAS THEIR GUILT.

It would be well to remark here that Protestants nowadays frequently contend that the missionary priests judicially murdered during the reign of Elizabeth were not executed on account of their religion, but because they were stirrers up of sedition and traitors, and were in every case so proven to be upon their respective trials. The good people who set up such pretext are sadly in ignorance of the history of that dark period. So far from asserting the slightest pretence of guilt on the part of such acts accused of as commonly constitute sedition and high treason, the statute of Elizabeth under which they were sent to the gallows only made it necessary to show that they were Englishmen and Catholic priests, and were arrested in England. The statute, in fact, enacted substantially that, “if any Jesuit, seminary priest, or deacon, or religious or ecclesiastical person whatever, born within the realm, shall come into, be, or remain in any part of this realm, every such offence shall be taken and adjudged to be high treason.” The indictment against Southwell was “drawn up byCook, the queen’s solicitor,” says the S. Omer MS. Now, “Cook, the queen’s solicitor” here referred to was no less a personage than the great Coke. Here is the indictment presented by him in Southwell’s case, from which it will be seen that the prisoner was charged only with the crimes of,first, being a priest of English birth;second, of having remained in the county of Middlesex:

“The jury present, on the part of our sovereign lady the queen, that Robert Southwell, late of London, clerk, born within this kingdom of England; to wit, since the feast of S. John the Baptist, in the first year of the reign of her majesty, and before the first day of May, in the thirty-second year of the reign of our lady the queen aforesaid, made and ordained priest by authority derived and pretended from the See of Rome; not having the fear of God before his eyes, and slighting the laws and statutes of this realm of England, without any regard to the penalty therein contained, on the 20th day of June, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of our lady the queen, at Uxenden, in the county of Middlesex, traitorously, and as a false traitor to our lady the queen, was and remained, contrary to the form of the statute in such case set forth and provided, and contrary to the peace of our said lady the queen, her crown, and dignities.”

The grand jury having found the bill, Father Southwell was ordered to come up to the bar. He readily obeyed, and, bowing down his head, made a low reverence to his judges; then modestly held up his hand according to custom, and, being asked whether he was guilty or not guilty, he answered, “I confess that I was born in England, a subject to the queen’s majesty, and that, by authority derived from God, I have been promoted to the sacred order of priesthood in the Roman Church, for which I return most hearty thanks to his divine Majesty. I confess, also, that I was at Uxenden, in Middlesex, at that time, when, being sent for thither by trick and deceit, I fell into your hands, as is well known; but that I never entertained any designs or plots against the queen or kingdom, I call God to witness, the revenger of perjury; neither had I any other design in returning home to my native country than to administer the sacraments according to the rite of the Catholic Church to such as desired them.”

Here the judge interrupted him, and told him that he was to let all that alone, and plead directly guilty or not guilty. Upon which he said,he was not guilty of any treason whatsoever. And being asked by what he would be tried, he said, “By God and by you.” The judge told him he was to answer, “By God and his country,” which, at first, he refused, alleging that the laws of his country were disagreeable to the law of God, and that he was unwilling these poor harmless men of the jury, whom they obliged to represent the country, should have any share in their guilt, or any hand in his death. “But,” said he, “if through your iniquity it must be so, and I cannot help it, be it as you will; I am ready to be judged by God and my country.” When the twelve were to be sworn, he challenged none of them, saying that they were all equally strangers to him, and therefore charity did not allow him to except against any one of them more than another.

After Coke had presented the case to the jury, they went aside to consult about the verdict, and in a short time brought him in guilty. He was asked if he had anything more to say for himself why sentence should not be pronounced against him? He said: “Nothing; but from my heart I beg of Almighty God to forgive all who have been any ways accessory to my death.” The judge havingpronounced sentence according to the usual form, Father Southwell made a very low bow, returning him most hearty thanks as for an unspeakable favor. The judge offered him the help of a minister to prepare him to die. Father Southwell desired he would not trouble him upon that head; that the grace of God would be more than sufficient for him. And so, being sent back to Newgate through the streets, lined with people, he discovered, all the way, the overflowing joy of his heart in his eyes, in his whole countenance, and in every gesture and motion of his body. He was again put down into limbo, at his return to Newgate, where he spent the following night, the last of his life, in prayer, full of the thoughts of the journey he was to take the next day, through the gate of martyrdom, into a happy eternity; to enjoy for ever the sovereign object of his love.

We have seen by what device and with what ill success the officials directing the execution sought, on the next morning, to draw away the crowd from Tyburn where Father Southwell was to be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”

EXECUTIONS UNDER ELIZABETH.

The modern reader generally, and very naturally, supposes that this sentence, horrible as it is in its simplest form, would be carried out as stated, that is to say, that, when the condemned man was hung until dead, his body was then butchered as described. This probably was the intention of the law, and the latter two of the three incidents of the executions were intended more as indignities to the remains of a criminal supposed to be guilty of the greatest of human crimes than as any part of the means of procuring death. But under the reign of Elizabeth the cruelty and bestiality of the mode in which the horrible sentence was carried out had reached its height. As a general thing, the victim was butchered alive. According to the whim or the bloodthirstiness of the executioner, the condemned man was allowed to hang a short time, or he was scarcely swung off before he was cut down and the hangman was—as he is described in a well-known phrase—“grabbling among his entrails.” Sometimes the executioner would spring upon the body as it was swung off, and plunge his knife into the victim before they reached the ground in their fall together. When a young priest named Edward Genings was executed, in 1591, the butchery was superintended by Topcliffe, who adjured the victim to submit and recant and he should be pardoned. His reply was: “I know not in what I have offended my dear anointed princess; if I had, I would willingly ask forgiveness. If she be offended with me because I am a priest, and because I profess my faith and will not turn minister against my conscience, I shall be, I trust, excused and innocent before God. I must obey God, saith S. Peter, rather than men.” At this Topcliffe was enraged, and bade the hangman turn the ladder; scarcely giving him time to say aPater Noster. Cut down by his order before he was dead, the butchery began, and, the hangman’s hand being already on his heart, Genings was heard to say, “Sancte Gregori, ora pro me!”—which the hangman hearing, he swore, “Zounds, see, his heart is in my hand, and yet Gregory is in his mouth! O egregious papist!”[25]

We return to Father Southwell,who was drawn on a hurdle or sled from Newgate to Tyburn, and resume the account of the S. Omer’s MS.: “When he was come to the place, getting up into the cart, he made the sign of the cross in the best manner that he could, his hands being pinion’d, and began to speak to the people those words of the apostle (Rom. xiv), ‘Whether we live, we live to the Lord, or whether we die, we die to the Lord; therefore, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.’ Here the sheriff would have interrupted him, but he begged leave that he might go on, assuring him that he would utter nothing that should give offence. Then he spoke as follows: ‘I am come to this place to finish my course, and to pass out of this miserable life; and I beg of my Lord Jesus Christ, in whose most precious Passion and Blood I place my hope of salvation, that he would have mercy on my soul. I confess I am a Catholic priest of the Holy Roman Church, and a religious man of the Society of Jesus; on which account I owe eternal thanks and praises to my God and Saviour.’ Here he was interrupted by a minister telling him that, if he understood what he had said in the sense of the Council of Trent, it was damnable doctrine. But the minister was silenc’d by the standers-by, and Mr. Southwell went on, saying: ‘Sir, I beg of you not to be troublesome to me for this short time that I have to live: I am a Catholic, and in whatever manner you may please to interpret my words, I hope for my salvation by the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and as to the queen, I never attempted, nor contrived, or imagined any evil against her, but have always prayed for her to Our Lord, and for this short time of my life still pray, that, in his infinite mercy, he would be pleased to give her all such gifts and graces which he sees, in his divine wisdom, to be most expedient for the welfare both of her soul and body, in this life and in the next. I recommend in like manner, to the same mercy of God, my poor country, and I implore the divine bounty to favor it with his light and the knowledge of his truth, to the greater advancement of the salvation of souls, and the eternal glory of his divine Majesty. In fine, I beg of the almighty and everlasting God, that this my death may be for my own and for my country’s good, and the comfort of the Catholics my brethren.’

“Having finished these words, and looking for the cart to be immediately drove away, he again blessed himself, and, with his eyes raised to heaven, repeated with great calmness of mind and countenance, ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ with other short ejaculations, till the cart was drawn off. The unskilful hangman had not applied the noose of the rope to the proper place, so that he several times made the sign of the cross whilst he was hanging, and was some time before he was strangled, which some perceiving, drew him by the legs to put an end to his pain, and when the executioner was for cutting the rope before he was dead, the gentlemen and people that were present cried out three several times, ‘Hold, hold!’ for the behavior of the servant of God was so edifying in these his last moments, that even the Protestants who were present at the execution were much affected with the sight.” After he was dead he was cut down and the remainder of the sentence carried out. Turnbull relates that “Lord Mountjoy (Charles Blount), who happened to be present, was so struck by the martyr’s constancy that he exclaimed,‘May my soul be with this man’s!’ and he assisted in restraining those who would have cut the rope while he was still in life.”

Father Southwell’s reverend and Protestant biographer declares, in concluding his relation of the execution: “I must regard our worthy as a ‘martyr’ in the deepest and grandest sense—a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. I should blush for my Protestantism if I did not hold in honor, yea reverence, his stainless and beautiful memory.

‘Through this desert, day by day,Wandered not his steps astray,Treading still the royal way.’

—Paradisus Animæ.

“So perished Father Southwell, at thirty-three years of age, and so, unhappily, have perished many of the wise and virtuous of the earth. Conscious of suffering in the supposed best of causes, he seems to have met death without terror—to have received the crown of martyrdom not only with resignation, but with joy.”[26]

It is matter of regret that there exists no authentic portrait of Southwell. His biographer is of opinion that a genuine likeness of him would have shown an intellectual, etherealized face, and fancies that he might have sat for the portrait of the Prior inThe Lady of Garaye:

“Tender his words, and eloquently wise;Mild the pure fervor of his watchful eyes;Meek with serenity and constant prayer,The luminous forehead, high and broad and bare.The thin mouth, though not passionless, yet stillWith a sweet calm that speaks an angel’s will.Resolving service to his God’s behest,And ever musing how to servehimbest,Not old, nor young; with manhood’s gentlest grace,Pale to transparency the pensive face,Pale not with sickness but with studious thought,The body tasked, the fine mind overwrought;With something faint and fragile in the whole,As though ‘twere but a lamp to hold a soul.”

PART SECOND.—POET.

And here, first, a few words on the prose writings of Southwell. We have already referred to the remarkable letter of admonition by him addressed to his father. It is a severe test to put the prose of any cultivated language to that of comparison with the productions of the same tongue nearly three centuries later. And yet this letter will support such comparison surprisingly well both as to substance and style. The reader will bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which Southwell addressed this

LETTER TO HIS FATHER.

“I am not of so unnatural a kind, of so wild an education, or so unchristian a spirit, as not to remember the root out of which I have branched, or to forget my secondary maker and author of my being. It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that has made me such a stranger to my native home, and so backward in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of these days that maketh my presence perilous, and the discharge of my duties an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwilling courtesy upon any, or by seeming officious to become offensive; deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself, and to purchase their danger, whose good-will I so highly esteem. I never doubted but what the belief, which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in a manner, hereditary, framed in them a right persuasion of my present calling, not suffering them to measure their censures of me by the ugly terms and odious epithets wherewith heresy hath sought to discredit my functions, but rather by the reverence of so worthy a sacrament and the sacred usages of all former ages. Yet, because I might easily perceive by apparent conjectures that many were more willing to hear of me than from me, and readier topraise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek.”

Then, regretting that he has been barred from affording to his dearest friends that which hath been eagerly sought and beneficially attained by mere strangers, he exclaims passionately:

“Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed.“Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises.... The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, andgrateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin.”

“Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed.

“Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises.... The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, andgrateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin.”

The entire letter is given in both Walter and Turnbull’sMemoirs of Southwell, and has been extravagantly praised as being the composition of Sir Walter Raleigh, among whoseRemainsit is frequently reprinted. Mr. Grosart, a Protestant clergyman, says of it: “I know nothing comparable with the mingled affection and prophetlike fidelity, the wise instruction, correction, reproof, the full rich scripturalness and quaint applications, the devoutness, the insistence, the pathos of this letter.” The edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’sRemains, published in London in 1675, was the subject of an article in theRetrospective Reviewfor 1820, in which the reviewer remarks: “‘The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father’ is supposed to be a libel on Sir Walter, written by his enemies. It will be seen, however, that it bears a strong resemblance to his style, although the metaphor is more profuse and ornamental, and seems to be rather engrafted on his thoughts than to spring up with them. That this piece should be dictated by personal hostility is strange. It contains exhortations that might with the greatest propriety be directed to any man.

“It is possible that it might be written by another in imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Advice to his Son’;yet if he was an enemy, he was of a most uncommon description. As the advice, however, is worth quoting forits own merit, and is written with great force and beauty, we shall give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves.”

This letter is Southwell’s earliest dated prose, and was followed by a variety of treatises, epistles, and pamphlets, printed on the “private press” at his own house in London. Besides these, there remain several English and a large number of Latin prose writings still in manuscript. “Mary Magdalene’s Funerall Teares,” although prose in form, is in fact far more fervid and impassioned than the greater part of his poetry.

SOUTHWELL’S POETRY.

To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet’s character.

Certain it is that Southwell was largely read by the generation that immediately succeeded him. Many years ago, Ellis[27]said: “The very few copies of his works which are now known to exist are the remnant of at least seventeen different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600”; and at a later period, Drake, in hisShakespeare and his Times, says:[28]“Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.”

A valuable tribute of admiration to Southwell’s poetic talent is that of Ben Jonson, who said: “that Southwell was hanged; yet so he (Jonson) had written that piece of his, ‘The Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”[29]Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for giving it here, although we strongly suspect that Mr. Grosart will not approve of its modern orthography.

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear,Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed;Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats I frye,Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes;The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good,So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood:With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell’s poetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem “S. Peter’s Complaint,” consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems—“Times go by Turns,” “Content and Rich,”[30]“Life is but Loss,” “Look Home,” “Love’s servile Lot,” and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart’s estimate of them. “The hastiest reader will come on ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally), is throughout of the ‘pure well of English undefiled.’ When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, theirélan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the ‘dew of the morning.’ His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the ‘Vale of Tears’ the source of the latter’s immortal ‘Haunted House’—dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or lily, nevertheless really carrying in it the original of the mightier after-poem.”

Our warmest tribute of praise can render but scant justice to the intelligence, the industry, the erudition, the keen poetic sense, and the enthusiasm which the editor of the volume before us has devoted to what has evidently been to him a labor of love. Mr. Grosart is well known in the literary world as the editor of Crashawe and of Vaughan, as also of the forthcoming editions of Marvell,Donne, and Sidney. His laboriously corrected version of our martyr-poet’s legacy has, it may be said, restored Southwell to us, so obscured had he become by mistakes, misprints, and false readings. Indeed Mr. Grosart’s somewhat jealous love of his subject betrays him into apparently harsh judgment on the efforts of others, when, for instance, he declares himself “vexed by the travesties on editing and mere carelessness of Walter earlier (1817) and Turnbull later (1856) in their so-called editions of the poems of Father Southwell,” adding: “Turnbull said contemptuously, ‘I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter’s text’—severe but not undeserved, only his own is scarcely one whit better, and in places worse.”

There is one passage at the close of Mr. Grosart’s interesting preface which has a special interest for us as Americans. We mean his reference to the verdict pronounced on Father Southwell’s poetry by Prof. James Russell Lowell in his charming bookMy Study Windows. “It seems to me,” says Mr. Grosart, “harsh to brutality on the man (meet follower of him ‘the first true gentleman that ever breathed’); while on the poetry it rests on self-evidently the most superficial acquaintance and the hastiest generalization. To pronounce ‘S. Peter’s Complaint’ a ‘drawl’ of thirty pages of ‘maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a (sic) sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus,’ shows about as much knowledge—that is, ignorance—of the poem as of the schoolman, and as another remark does of S. Peter; for, with admitted tedium, S. Peter’s complaint sounds depths of penitence and remorse, and utters out emotion that flames into passion very unforgettably, while there are felicities of metaphor, daintinesses of word-painting, brilliancies of inner-portraiture, scarcely to be matched in contemporary verse. The ‘paraphrase’ of David (to wit, ‘David’s Peccavi’) is a single short piece, and the ‘punning’ conceit, ‘fears are my feres,’ is common to some of England’s finest wits, and in the meaning of ‘fere’ not at all to be pronounced against. If we on this side of the Atlantic valued less the opinion of such a unique genius as Prof. Lowell’s, if we did not take him to our innermost love, we should less grieve over such a vulgar affront offered to a venerable name as his whole paragraph to Southwell. I shall indulge the hope of our edition reaching the ‘Study,’ and persuading to a real ‘study’ of these poems, and, if so, I do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment.”

ARIS WILMOTT

pronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and ‘Content and Rich,’ and, ‘Dyer’s phansie turned to a Sinner’s Complaint’ warrant the great praise. But beneath the manner recalling Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him.

“Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment’s reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of Dublin’s well-weighed words in his notes to hisHousehold Book of English Poetry(1868):

“‘Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this (“Lewd Love is Loss”) and No. 2 (“Times go by Turns”) of this collection, poems which, as far asthey go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised more than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or excuse’ (pp. 391-392).

“To Archbishop Trench’s I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George Macdonald inAntiphonas follows:

“‘I proceed to call up oneWHO WAS A POET INDEED, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor and subject to the penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, could “not be induced to confess anything, not even the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was,’ etc.

“I believe, then,” concludes Dr. Grosart, “I shall not appeal in vain to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his ‘Study Windows’ to a reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these sufficiently qualified critics.”

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