SOUTHWELL, ROBERT (c. 1561-1595), English Jesuit and poet, son of Richard Southwell of Horsham St. Faith's, Nor folk, was born in 156o/61. He was educated at Douai and at Paris, joining the Society of Jesus. In 1584, an act was passed, forbidding any English-born subject of the Queen who had taken priest's orders in the Roman Catholic Church since her ac cession to remain in England longer than forty days on pain of death. But Southwell at his own request was sent to England in 1586 as a Jesuit missionary with Henry Garnett. He went from one Catholic family to another, administering the rites of his Church, and in 1589 became domestic chaplain to Ann Howard, whose husband, the first earl of Arundel, was in prison convicted of treason. It was to him that Southwell addressed his Epistle of Comfort. This and other of his religious tracts, A Short Rule of Good Life, Triumphs over Death, Mary Magdalen's Tears and a Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth, were widely circulated in manuscript. That they found favour outside Catholic circles is proved by Thomas Nashe's imitation of Mary Magdalen's Tears in Christ's Tears over Jerusalem.
After six years of successful labour Southwell was arrested (1592). He was imprisoned at first in Richard Topcliffe's house, where he was repeatedly put to the torture in the vain hope of extracting evidence about other priests. Transferred to the gate house at Westminster, he was so abominably treated that his father petitioned Elizabeth that he might either be brought to trial and put to death, if found guilty, or removed in any case from "that filthy hole." Southwell was then lodged in the Tower,
but he was not brought to trial until Feb. 1595. Much of his poetry. none of which was published during his lifetime, was probably written in prison. On Feb. 20, 1 59 5 , he was tried before the court of King's Bench on the charge of treason, and was hanged at Tyburn on the 21st. In 1929 he was beatified.
St. Peter's Complaint with other Poems, published anonymously in 1595, was reprinted thirteen times during the next forty years. A supplementary volume entitled Maeoniae appeared later in 1595, and A Foure fould Meditation of the foure last things in 1606. This, which is not included in Grosart's reprint (1872) in the Fuller Worthies Library, was published by Mr. Charles Ed monds in his Isham Reprints (1895). A Hundred Meditations of the Love of God, in prose, was first printed from a ms. at Stony. hurst College in 1873.
See Sidney Lee's account in the Dict. Nat. Biog.; Alexis Possoz, Vie du Pere R. Southwell (1866) ; and a life in Henry Foley's Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1877, i. Foley's narrative includes copies of the most important documents connected with his trial, and gives full information of the sources.