SHAKESPEARE’S COUSIN, ROBERT SOUTHWELL; ONE OF THE FORTY MARTYRS 25th OCTOBER
SHAKESPEARE’S COUSIN
ROBERT SOUTHWELL
ONE OF THE FORTY MARTYRS
25th OCTOBER
Robert Southwell was born in 1561 in Protestant England. He was a cousin of William Shakespeare through Shakespeare’s mother’s family, the Ardens – a recusant family who were active in the underground Catholic resistance during the reign of Elizabeth I; Edward Arden, cousin of Shakespeare’s mother, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in December 1583 for harbouring a Catholic priest. Arden’s head was set up on London Bridge beside the head of the Earl of Desmond.
Though his family was Catholic, Southwell’s family fortune came from a monastery seized by Henry VIII, and Robert's father and grandfather both wavered between Catholicism and Protestantism. Robert, however, was catechised in the Catholic faith and was sent to Europe for a Catholic education when he was 15.*
There, after matriculation, he petitioned the Jesuits to accept him. When this was denied, he walked to Rome to petition. His request was approved and he was ordained at the age of 23. He then requested of his superiors to send him to England, “a country already running red with the blood of priests. In the footsteps of St. Edmund Campion, he set off for England as his superior shook his head, murmuring, "Lambs sent to the slaughter."*
“For the next three years, Southwell moved from house to house reconciling sinners and celebrating Mass. He was then installed at the home of St. Philip Howard, in prison for his faith and later to be martyred. Fr. Southwell became the chaplain to Howard's wife, the countess of Arundel, while frequently leaving the relative safety of her house to minister throughout England.”
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was distantly related to Shakespeare through the Arden family and seems to have been a patron of William Shakespeare. Southampton himself was part of the Catholic circle of aristocratic recusants. In 1582, Lord Burghley, (William Cecil), the tactician behind Elizabeth’s power base, commanded Southampton to marry his (Burghley’s), granddaughter. Southampton asked for time, conferred with a priest and then refused. It brought him the “huge fine of 5,000 pounds sterling. Years later it was discovered by Elizabeth’s inquisitor, Richard Topcliffe, that Southampton’s confessor and spiritual adviser had been his cousin, the charismatic Jesuit priest, Robert Southwell, who had, at one time, sheltered in the earl’s mother’s Holborn House.”
Michael Wood, “The Search for Shakespeare” , 2003, at pp. 149, 151.
It was observed on the Catholic Education Resource Centre website:
“Like every hidden priest in England, Southwell knew that his primary duty was to offer the Sacraments to the faithful. But he had a particular gift that the Church needed desperately. The purpose of the priests in England wasn't just to minister to the souls who were still there but to maintain a Catholic Church in England. The hope was that one day the persecutions would subside and the Catholic Church could emerge as something authentically English, not something foreign introduced from without. In order for the Church to survive, she needed not only Sacraments but an intellectual life and a culture. These Southwell could give. Set up with a printing press, the man some believe was a cousin of William Shakespeare began to write and to publish both poetry and prose. His work flew to the farthest reaches of the kingdom, giving hope and joy to recusant Catholics (those who had refused to abandon their faith) who'd been approaching despair."
His was a “more practical response to a darkening future-the cultivation of austere and heroic personal virtue.”
Clare Asquith, *“Shadowplay”, at p. 65.
“Southwell wrote many poems…some startling in their fantastic and original imagery. Most famous was “The Burning Babe”, which Ben Jonson particularly admired, and which Shakespeare used in Macbeth. Printed in 1595, his poems went through thirteen editions in a generation and were counted among the most successful of the age – alongside Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Together they represent the twin poles of Elizabethan devotional poetry, the one to God, the other to love.”
Michael Wood, ibid., at p. 152.
THE BURNING BABE
By Robert Southwell.
“As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d 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 fry,
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 scorns;
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 wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.’
Famously, Southwell wrote a letter addressed to his “loving and good cousin,” (and with the initials “W.S” on a copy that was brought out after Shakespeare’s death in 1616), where he exhorted his cousin who was, he asserted, a “far superior poet”, to undertake more spiritual works in his poetry.
Wood, ibid., at p. 153.
Clare Asquith’s examination of Shakespeare’s nuanced use of language was prompted by her experiences in the repressive culture of cold war Russia, where public performance was accompanied by subtle and eminently deniable references to political and social issues of the time.* The passage referencing the poem by Southwell, placed in the mouth of Macbeth, superficially addressing the moral issue of the murder of a good ruler, is a reference that is nuanced on every level when considered within the context of the times:
"If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,-
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed: then as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off;
And pity like a naked new born babe
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind. – I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’er-leaps itself,
And falls on the other.”
“His whole life, Southwell had been a remarkably handsome man, described as almost feminine in his beauty. Faced with a delicately beautiful poet, his captors were not expecting to find steel beneath his soft exterior. But Topcliffe, Elizabeth's expert torturer, tormented him at least 13 times [with the notorious torture implement "the Scavenger's Daughter"] and each time was met only with the information that he was a Jesuit priest who had come to England to preach the Catholic faith and was willing to die for it. Southwell then spent two and a half years in solitary confinement in the Tower of London, after which he was finally given a trial of sorts and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
Michael Wood describes the procedure as follows:
“Another kind of theatre in Elizabethan England, public executions, were highly ritualised events intended to terrify and intimidate. After the dragging on a hurdle through the streets, the last-minute remonstrations, the calls for recantation and declarations of faith and loyalty, came the dreadful sequence of torture and butchery, which began with the victim only partly hanged and therefore still alive.”
Ibid., at p. 163.
An execution of a notorious highwayman had been scheduled for the same time at a different place, in order to draw the, (obviously sympathetic), crowd away. Nevertheless a large crowd came to witness Southwell’s death. “Having been dragged through the streets on a sled, he stood in the cart behind the gibbet and made the sign of the cross with his pinioned hands before reciting a ..passage from Romans 14. The sheriff made to interrupt him; but he was allowed to address the people at some length, confessing he was a Jesuit priest and praying for the salvation of Queen and country. As the cart was drawn away, he commended his soul to God with the words of the Psalm ‘in manus tuas’. He hung in the noose for a brief time, making the sign of the cross as best he could. As the executioner made to cut him down, in preparation for disembowelling him while still alive, Lord Mountjoy and some other onlookers tugged at his legs to hasten his death.” They thus, in an act of mercy and bravery, subverted the torture of disembowelling him while alive.
“His lifeless body was then disembowelled and quartered. As his severed head was displayed to the crowd, no one shouted the traditional ‘Traitor!’”
Wikipedia. org
*“Shadowplay, The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare”, Public Affairs, New York, 2005.
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