SOURCE: Brownlow, F. W. “Southwell's Prose: The Second Stage.” In Robert Southwell, pp. 50-72. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

[In this essay, Brownlow discusses Southwell's last three prose works, which he claims are more sober in tone than earlier works despite their use of similar themes and imagery.]

THE TRIUMPHS OVER DEATH

The three works considered in this chapter, The Triumphs over Death, A Short Rule of Good Life, and An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty, all date from late 1591, when Southwell had been in England more than five years. Since the style and tone of Southwell's prose varies with the subject and the recipient, one cannot really talk confidently of a development in his prose style. Nonetheless, there is a difference of tone between these last works and their predecessors. There is a purely literary exuberance in the prose of the first pieces that Southwell owed to the luxury of inexperience. It is one thing to contemplate martyrdom in a mood of imaginative enthusiasm, another thing entirely to live with the daily threat of capture, torture, and death. Writing about hell-fire and the advisability of a good death to an aging man one has not seen for 12 or 13 years is not at all the same thing as sitting with people, and watching the play of feeling in their eyes as one talks. Southwell's last three pieces show the effect of five years' experience. Each of them is about real-world events and actions, and though in each Southwell's favorite themes and images recur, the tone is sober, practical, and subdued.

The first, The Triumphs over Death, came into existence because of a death in the Howard family. Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was the son of his father's second wife, Lady Mary Fitzalan. He had a half-sister, Margaret Howard, who was the daughter of his father's first wife, Margaret Audley. Lady Margaret Howard married Robert Sackville, the son of Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, author of Gorboduc and of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates. In August 1591, Lady Margaret died at age 29, and Southwell wrote a consolatory epistle for her brother.

The publication of this little work in 1595 under the title The Triumphs over Death sheds a little much-needed light upon the circulation, publication, and audience of Southwell's works. Like the Epistle of Robert Southwell to his Father, The Triumphs over Death circulated in both manuscript and printed form. Its text, like that of the Epistle, appears in three of the major manuscripts of Southwell's lyric poems, the Stonyhurst or Waldegrave Manuscript (Stonyhurst MS A.v.27), the Virtue and Cahill Manuscript (now deposited at the Bodleian Library), and British Library Additional Manuscript 10422. None of these manuscripts can be certainly dated, but the best of them, the Stonyhurst Manuscript, was written before 1608 or 1609 on paper made in the 1580s (Poems, xxxvii-viii). Although Nancy Pollard Brown believes that the collection of poems in these manuscripts was based upon a prior collection prepared by an associate of Southwell's at the time of his arrest (xxxv-vi), she does not hazard an opinion about their prose contents. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the manuscript circulation of both the poetry and the prose dates from the author's own lifetime. There is evidence for this proposition in Southwell's own prefatory statement to the reader of Triumphs: “I intended this comfort to him whom a lamented fortune hath left most comfortless; by him to his friends, that have equal portions in this sorrow. But I think the philosopher's rule will be here verified, that it shall be last in execution, that was first designed, and he last enjoy the effect, that was first mover of the cause.”¹ This evidently means that Southwell, having originally written the work for Arundel to read and then send to others, was unable to send it to him because of his close imprisonment, and so distributed it himself to its secondary audience.

Consequently, we find once again that Southwell has written a work for a specific recipient, but with the intention of distributing it to a larger audience. In this case, moreover, the larger audience received it before the recipient. The publication of Triumphs in a quarto edition in 1595 complicates the question of the audience even further, and raises the intriguing probability that the combination of prose and poetry in the manuscripts originated with Southwell himself.

A minor poet called John Trussell edited the little 1595 quarto. Almost nothing certain is known about him, although some probabilities coalesce about his name. He was the author of at least two poems: a translation of Thomas Watson's Amintae gaudia, published in 1594 under the title An Old Fashioned Love, and another imitative poem, The First Rape of Fair Helen, published in 1595 and related to a Latin poem by Watson on the rape of Helen that was published in 1586. In 1595, according to a poem by an anonymous “T. T.” prefixed to The First Rape of Fair Helen, Trussell was very young; “T. T.” even calls him a boy. Only one perfect copy of The First Rape of Fair Helen survives. When A. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia bought this book, he believed he was buying a very rare work with Shakespearean connections. The report of the sale in The Times Literary Supplement, 9 July 1931, prints a prefatory sonnet from the book (which Rosenbach thought might be addressed to Shakespeare), and includes an account of the Trussells, a Stratford family associated with both the Ardens and the Shakespeares. Dr. Rosenbach also suggested a link between the poet Trussell and a historian of the same name, mentioned in the Dictionary of National Biography, who lived in Winchester. A week later, S. C. Wilson wrote to the TLS (16 July 1931) to say that John Semple Smart had shown that Thomas Trussell of Billingsley, a manor in Stratford, had been involved in Thomas Arden of Wilmcote's purchase of the Snitterfield estate that came to Shakespeare's father through his wife, Mary Arden.² In fact, William Shakespeare and the Trussells of Billingsley were probably related. The question is whether John Trussell the poet was a member of that family or not.

The Trussells had held Billingsley since the reign of Henry II. In the sixteenth century, they suffered the common misfortune of losing an heir, so that an infant inherited. This was Avery Trussell, who succeeded his grandfather in 1517. He was put in ward, and during the wardship the estate was stripped and little Avery was married to the spoiler's daughter. It seems that the Trussells never recovered from this misfortune. Avery's son John succeeded him, and he in turn was succeeded by Thomas, a soldier. On 6 August 1585, Thomas committed a robbery and was attainted and condemned to death in 1588. Whether the sentence was ever carried out is unclear. The estate passed to the Crown, and with its sale to Sir Robert Lee in 1600, the long residence of Trussells in Stratford came to an end.³

In 1934, Mark Eccles announced that he would discuss the identity of John Trussell, but unfortunately he never did this.⁴ Stratford records of the period produce no John Trussell of an age suitable for the poet. An early seventeenth-century visitation of Hampshire, however, attributes a son named John to Henry Trussell, the brother of John Trussell of Billingsley, and this son of Henry would be about the right age for the poet (Pedigrees, 223). As M. A. Shaaber discovered, however, visitations contradict each other, and the birth and parentage of John Trussell the poet remain elusive.⁵

This is a pity, because the literary connections implied are interesting. Shaaber produces evidence from the text of The Rape of Fair Helen that Trussell had read Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece (417). Moreover, there are five close verbal parallels between Trussell's “To the Reader” and Shakespeare's dedications to Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. Shaaber attributes them to coincidence, but five parallels between such short texts seem too many for coincidence.⁶ If Trussell were related to Shakespeare, and sufficiently interested in his books to imitate them, then we have a hint of a literary and social milieu in which works were discussed and circulated, and in which Trussell's editing of The Triumphs over Death in the same year that he published The Rape of Fair Helen is as much the work of a young man keen to make himself known in literary circles as it is a gesture by a Catholic partisan—not that literature and Catholicism are mutually exclusive enthusiasms. Trussell was undoubtedly Catholic; it is a question of the balance of interests in his approach.

Unfortunately, the possibilities are difficult to judge objectively precisely because the figure of William Shakespeare is hovering in the background of the question. The implication that Shakespeare was moving in, or even admired in, Catholic circles seems to have been the reason for M. A. Shaaber's rather defensive approach to the question of Trussell's identity and allegiances. Yet Christopher Devlin presents a good case for Southwell's influence on Rape of Lucrece (269-73), which was composed before Southwell's poems were available in print and when they were circulating only in manuscript. John Trussell's role in the publication of Southwell's work indicates the existence of at least one channel through which Shakespeare and other interested writers could have had access to Southwell's writing. Thomas Watson, Marlowe's raffish friend, whose Amintae gaudia Trussell translated, had been resident intermittently at the English College in Douai from 1576 to 1577. He was there in the summer of 1576 and left in October, returning in May 1577 to leave again in August. His stay at the college thus overlapped with the young Southwell's, whom he would have known. His first work, a Latin translation of Antigone (1581), was dedicated to the Earl of Arundel. Arundel was not Catholic at the time, and there is no reason to believe that Watson was Catholic; but Watson evidently knew people in Catholic circles familiar with Southwell, and before his death in late 1592 could have been a conduit for distributing Southwell manuscripts among other writers. Like Southwell, Watson had lived in Italy and brought Italian influences back to England with him (Eccles, 131-44).

Trussell dedicated Triumphs to Lady Margaret's four children. In his dedicatory poem he explained that the author had made his own arrangements for the work's publication, but that his death had “orphaned” it. Trussell, therefore, is the work's “foster-sire,” and he has dedicated “this fruit of Southwell's quill” to the four young people because the lady commemorated in it is their mother and because Southwell originally wrote it for their uncle. Shaaber suggests that Trussell was the children's tutor, “or employed in some other household capacity” (Shaaber, 413), but a dedication to the subject's children would have been a natural one in any circumstances. Interestingly enough, the same publisher, Busby, issued the volume of Southwell's poems called Moeoniae, which he entered in the Stationers' Register on 17 October 1595 just a month earlier than Triumphs. In his address to “the Gentleman Readers” Busby says that unless the poems live in his readers' memories, they will otherwise “die in an obscure sacrifice.” Trussell uses a similar expression in his dedicatory poem about Triumphs, “the which till now clouded, obscure did lurk” (Triumphs, xi). If the verbal similarity, joined to the closeness in date of publication, is a sign that one author wrote the dedicatory matter for both volumes, then Trussell spoke truly when he said he was a “foster-sire,” that is, a literary executor who was responsible for the publication of both Triumphs and Moeoniae. Even the rather learned Latin title, Moeoniae (more correctly Maeoniae)—meaning “of, or pertaining to Maeonia or Lydia,” associated with Homer and lyric poetry—hints at Trussell's editorship, since he was evidently a very good Latinist. Speculation of this kind is necessarily tentative; nonetheless, if Trussell were the editor of both books, then in the light of what we know about the manuscript tradition, it is virtually certain that he owned the poetry and the prose in a single manuscript, which, as he seems to suggest, Southwell prepared.⁷

In addition to the dedicatory poem in Triumphs, Trussell provided two more. A contemporary reader encountering all three poems for the first time will have been surprised, perhaps even startled, to see Southwell's name spelled out in full in each of them. Even though the authorship of Saint Peter's Complaint must have been an open secret in 1595, neither Southwell's name nor initials appear on the title page. His initials only are on the title page of Moeoniae. Trussell, however, seems to have been determined to blazon Southwell's name upon his edition of Triumphs. The second poem is an acrostic on Robert Southewell, spelling the name out in the margin and using it in the text. The third poem, which recommends the work to all readers of good taste, includes a cheerful attack on “our late sprung sectaries,” and “Bible-bearing hypocrites” who, “To read what Southwell writ will not endure,” because of their knowledge of the author's religion. Southwell's name, therefore, appears four times in three short poems.

Trussell's most subtle declaration of his own faith and of his homage to Southwell appears in the third poem, “To the Reader,” in the form of an invitation to the readers to share his interpretation of the work before them. In the manuscripts, presumably including Trussell's own manuscript, Triumphs has no title, and so it is very likely that The Triumphs over Death, a phrase Trussell uses in the poem, is Trussell's title. It is significant that in the title Triumphs is plural, for when the phrase appears in the poem, the word is singular:

          I thought it best the same in public wise
          In Print to publish, that impartial eyes
Might, reading judge, and judging, praise the wight
The which this Triumph over Death did write.

(Triumphs, xiii)

Could anyone read those lines in London in 1595 and not reflect that Southwell had enacted as well as written a triumph over death? The next stanza explains how a work originally written for and about one person came to be for and about many, including its readers:

And though the same he did at first compose
          For one's peculiar consolation,
Yet will it be commodious unto those,
Which for some friend's loss, prove their own self-foes:
          And by extremity of exclamation,
          And their continuate lamentation
Seem to forget, that they at length must tread
The self same path which they did that are dead.

The important question is, who are they that were dead in late 1595? Of the people connected directly with the writing of this epistle, there is Lady Margaret herself, then Robert Southwell the author, and thirdly the recipient: Philip Arundel. Addressed in the piece as if he were already almost a dead man, he died in the Tower in August 1595. Finally, the invitation to the readers, both those who have suffered loss and those who have not, to accept the author and his work, widens immensely the circle of those concerned in its meaning. Only “our late sprung sectaries,” whom “no perswades suffice,” exclude themselves from the circle by their dislike of Southwell and his works.⁸ Thus the triumphs implied by Trussell's presentation are multiple, and his plural title makes sense.

In sum, Trussell encourages us to read the piece in more than one way. First, he asks us to read it as a piece addressed to the Earl of Arundel concerning his sister's death. Second, he wants us to enjoy it as evidence of the quality of the mind and work of “Our second Ciceronian, Southwell.” Third, we are to read it in the context of the deaths of both author and recipient, and, fourth, in the context of our own life and impending death. An epistle written for the earl thus becomes Southwell's premonitory statement on his own death as well as on all those other deaths.

To what extent, one wonders, did Southwell intend this widened field of reference? What did it mean in the fall of 1591 to console and advise a man living under a sentence of death for the loss of a favorite sister? What did it mean to write such a book when at any moment one might be captured, tortured, and executed oneself? Since landing in 1586, Southwell had survived five years in England, but by February 1592 Garnet was writing to his superiors in Italy, “There is simply nowhere left to hide” (Devlin, 274). Janelle, reading the book with apparently no sense of its context, finds it a puzzling work, a curious mixture of stoicism, practicality, and Christian resignation. There is certainly a strong vein of stoicism in it; it could even be described as a Senecan epistle. (As Christopher Devlin noticed, Southwell evidently knew Seneca's epistle to Marcia, consoling her for the death of her son.) Not to feel sorrow, Southwell tells the earl, is brutish, but to mourn immoderately is effeminate: “This impotent softness fitteth not sober minds. We must not make a life's profession of a seven nights' duty, nor under color of kindness be unnatural to ourselves” (Triumphs, 3). Death is common to all, he writes, and “Nature did promise us a weeping life” (15). The earl, moreover, is a nobleman, and has an example to set: “Nobility is an aim for lower degrees to level at marks of higher perfection, and like stately windows in the worthiest rooms of a politic and civil building, to let in such light, and lie open to such prospects, as may afford their inferiors, both means to find and motives to follow heroical virtues. If you should determine to dwell ever in sorrow, it were a wrong to your wisdom, and countermanded by your quality” (17-18).

Underlying these characteristically Senecan passages recommending a tight-lipped, stoical reserve is the encouragement to be true to oneself. Its most startling expression appears towards the end of the work in an image of the mourner as a soldier who, his comrade having been shot at his side, wastes no time in feeling sorry for him but rescues himself:

If we will think of her death, let it be as of a warning to provide us, sith that which happeneth to one, may happen to any, yea none can escape that is common to all. It may be the blow that hit her, was meant to some of us, and this missing was but a proof to take better aim in the next stroke. If we were diligent in thinking of our own, we should have little leisure to bewail others' deaths. When the soldier in skirmish seeth his next fellow slain, he thinketh it more time to look to himself, than to stand mourning a helpless mischance, knowing that the hand that sped so near a neighbor cannot be far from his own head. But we in this behalf are much like the silly birds, that seeing one stick in the lime-bush, crying to get away, with a kind of native pity are drawn to go to it, and so mesh themselves in the same misfortune.

(28-29)

“This strangely dry-hearted and scarcely uplifting spiritual selfishness,” as Janelle describes it (236), seems to him quite uncharacteristic of Southwell and unchristian in spirit. He thought its cause lay in a doomed attempt to combine a repellent classical stoicism, “harsh, aloof, and scarcely human,” with Christian resignation based upon acceptance of original sin and trust in God.

The first and most obvious comment to make about these passages in Triumphs is that Southwell did not write them in a country vicarage with the scent of hollyhocks blowing through the window and the Sunday roast in the oven. He wrote them in conditions of terrible danger, both to him and to his friend. The soldier who loses his comrade is an image of Southwell himself, watching fellow priests being captured and killed. The stoicism of Triumphs is the mood of a man who, like a World War II fighter pilot, has to fly until he is killed himself. For the first time, we hear Southwell speaking as an aristocratic, classically educated humanist to a fellow aristocrat in the words of the great, ancient commonplaces about death: “This general tide washeth all passengers to the same shore, some sooner, some later, but all at the last” (Triumphs, 13), and his purpose is to clear the mind of useless, distracting emotion: “If sorrow cannot be shunned, let it be taken in time of need, sith otherwise being both troublesome and fruitless, it is a double misery and an open folly” (15). The second point is that Southwell's stoicism is meant to be severely practical advice on maintaining presence of mind and a sense of proportion before impending death. Imitate the merchant, he advises, who lost wife, children, and fortune in one shipwreck: he visited a lazar hospital, “where finding in a little room many examples of greater misery, he made the smart of others' sores a lenitive to his own wound” (30)—a passage that carries one into the moral world of King Lear and Edgar's announcement of a rock-bottom principle on which one might decide to continue living in the face of horrors: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (4.278-28). Triumphs is not, as Janelle seemed to think, a rhetorical exercise in the combination of classical and Christian modes. There is indeed a combination of modes, but it seems to be the fruit of experience, not of theory, as when Southwell tells the earl, “I am loth to rub the scar of a deeper wound for fear of reviving a dead discomfort; yet if you will favor your own remedies, the mastery over that grief that sprang from the root, may learn you to qualify this that buddeth from the branch” (19).

The Christian corollary to Southwell's classical stoicism is faith in the peace and joy of another life infinitely more precious than this earthly one, to which earthly life is a prelude and for which humanity was created. So, summing up a graceful evocation of Lady Margaret's life and character, Southwell returns to a favorite image of God as artist and gardener and writes, “Let him with good leave gather the grape of his own vine, and pluck the fruit of his own planting, and think so curious works ever surest in the artificer's hand, who is likeliest to love them, and best able to preserve them” (10). Moreover, we belong in the artificer's house, and in dying Lady Margaret has followed her children home who had died before her: “She sent her first fruits before her, as pledges of her own coming, and now may we say that the sparrow hath found a home, and the turtle dove a nest, where she may lay her younglings” (19).⁹

The passage most tenderly expressive of the relationship between brother and sister, the one newly dead, the other on the threshold of death, takes this image of moving back home in its most homely form, and links it in a harmony of images evoking a return to one's true place:

The more you tendered her, the more temperate should be your grief, sith seeing you upon going, she did but step before you into the next world, to which she thought you to belong more than to this, which hath already given you the last ungrateful congé. They that are upon remove, send their furniture before them; and you still standing upon your departure, what ornament could you rather wish in your future abode, than this that did ever so highly please you? God thither sendeth your adamants whither he would draw your heart, and casteth your anchors where your thoughts should lie at road; that seeing your loves taken out of the world, and your hopes disanchored from this stormy shore, you might settle your desires where God seemeth to require them.

(21)

With its plain language, gracefully managed syntax, and strong, slow-moving rhythm, this prose is as disciplined as the frame of mind it recommends. Only towards the very end of Triumphs does Southwell permit himself some of the emotional intensity of his more elaborately figurative style, as he draws his reader to contemplate God as the center and destination of life in this world: “Let God strip you to the skin, yea to the soul, so he stay with you himself. … Think him enough in this world that must be all your possession for a whole eternity” (31). The last evocation of Lady Margaret herself in that new life blends a note of almost ecstatic anticipation with a sudden and surprising homeliness: “She stood upon too low a ground to take view of her Savior's most desired countenance, and forsaking the earth with good Zaccheus, she climbed up into the tree of life, there to give her soul a full repast of his beauties” (33).

Janelle preferred the Epistle of Comfort because “It breathed an exhilarating enthusiasm in the glad acceptance of tribulation,” whereas Triumphs, despite the “concinnity” of its prose (“as melodiously balanced and as free from visible tricks of repetition as ever”), is disappointingly sober and rational (236-38).¹⁰ The answer is surely that the Epistle was in many ways a presumptuous, even naive book, for all its brilliance and power; Triumphs was the fruit of five years' experience of death's real presence. One should also add that even so carefully crafted an epistle as Triumphs has its nugget of news to impart to its readers. It leaves them in no doubt that Lady Margaret made a good death, that she died a Catholic, and that there were Catholics in attendance at her death. In 1591, that was important news.

A SHORT RULE OF GOOD LIFE

According to Henry More, Southwell wrote this little “how-to” book¹¹ for the Countess of Arundel; its exact date is not known. When Henry Garnet came to publish Short Rule, probably sometime between 1596 and 1597, he wrote in his preface that “amongst the last of his fruitful labors for the good of souls,” Southwell had himself intended to publish the book, a statement that dates the book with Triumphs and the Supplication. Once again, too, one notices that although Southwell wrote with a particular recipient in mind, he intended publication for a larger audience.¹²

Strictly speaking, Short Rule is not a literary work at all. It is a practical manual of a kind that became very popular in the sixteenth century, instructing pious lay Christians in the art of living a Christian life. Such manuals reflect the most dramatic change of the period in European Christianity, by which a church dominated by monastic Christianity became one organized more and more for worship by lay people. In Protestant countries such as England, the monasteries were simply abolished, and the laity, in effect, took over almost complete control of the church. In Catholic countries the effects of the same change were felt, even though the religious orders were not abolished. The aims of the Counter-Reformation demanded for their realization a clergy that was out in the world, teaching, preaching, and converting the laity. Of the new orders, the Jesuits were the very embodiment of the new spirit. For instance, in Robert Persons's blueprint for a reformed English Catholic Church, members of religious orders were expected to support themselves by active practical work. Persons's scheme also shows why reconciliation between Protestant and Catholic remained impossible. Although Persons was prepared, even eager, to redirect the Church's resources to the service of the laity, he was not prepared to cede any of the clergy's authority to them. Indeed, as John Bossy observes, Persons's financial proposals “implied something like a social counter-revolution, a redistribution of wealth and power back from the gentry to the clergy” (22-23).

Views of this kind would naturally be reflected in the practical manuals. In England, the Church's first attempt to satisfy lay demand for devotional material produced the pious anthologies called the Primers, published first in Latin, later in English. A Primer would include, among other things, a calendar, various prayers (on leaving the house, for instance, or taking holy water), the hours of the Virgin and similar devotions, and the penitential psalms. They are charming books, but much of the material in them was decidedly secondary to a fundamental knowledge of Christianity, and such instruction as they included was really based on monastic practice. Some Primers included an essay, “The manner to live well, devoutly and salutarily every day,” translated by Robert Copland from the French of Jean Quentin (Letters, xxxi), but its recommendation to assign such activities as meditation, prayer, examination of conscience, and reading the office to set times of day was not really very practical for a layperson. On the other hand, the Church was determined not to put primary materials, in particular the Bible, into lay hands at all.

The genius of Ignatius Loyola resolved the contradiction of aims between Church and laity when he invented his Spiritual Exercises. He took the difficult, highly specialized, professional subject of ascetic and contemplative theology and rationalized it into a set of sequential exercises that anyone could perform. The exercises were meant in the first place for the training of his Jesuits in disciplined obedience to God and the Church, but Ignatius also meant them to be useful to other interested people. Very soon Jesuit spiritual directors were giving the exercises to laymen, and clergy of other orders, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans, were adapting the Ignatian approach to devotional manuals for the laity. The work of the Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada became especially popular in England. In Jesuit hands, however, the exercises, given to the laity in retreats, solved perfectly the problem of satisfying the laity's wishes for a more developed understanding of the religious life while maintaining clerical authority. In fact, the Ignatian exercises passed on to the laity the Jesuit principle of obedience to the superior in the form of complete obedience to the confessor or spiritual guide.

Southwell's Short Rule is a book conceived on Jesuit principles. It begins, like his own Spiritual Exercises, with the laying of foundations for a good life; in this case there are five of them, which define the reader's relationship to God and the principles of life that follow upon it. These foundations place one in a dramatic and challenging situation. First, one is created, preserved, and redeemed to serve God in this world, and enjoy Him in the next. From this it follows that we are His, body and soul, and bound to serve Him more than any other creature in the world. Second, our salvation is our most important business, to which everything else should be subordinate. Third, if we serve God in this world, and prepare to enjoy Him in the next, we must be prepared for every kind of hindrance from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Fourth, the weapon of these enemies is sin, which “maketh our souls more ugly than the plague, the leprosy, or any other most filthy disease doth the body” (Letters, 25). Fifth, since we are God's creatures, made to serve Him, we are tenants only in this life and must be ready to present an account of our stewardship to our landlord. Southwell then lays down the fundamentals of our relationship to God in seven “affections” towards Him: love, fear, zeal for His honor, continual praise of Him, an intention to serve Him in every action, perfect resignation of oneself to Him, and gratitude.

Having founded his reader's relationship to God upon self-denial and abnegation, Southwell then turns to the human relationships, to superiors, to neighbors, and to oneself. The chapter on superiors is mostly about a spiritual superior and the obedience owed to him:

First, I must procure to love him as a parent or father, by which name such men in the Church of God are called, endeavoring to carry myself towards him as dutifully (not only in spiritual things but also in those temporal wherein I might justly fear any sin) as a well-nurtured child behaveth himself towards his natural father … Secondly, I must reverence and honor him as the vicegerent of God, and consider Christ in his person, and do my duty to him as if in him I did see Christ … Thirdly, I must avoid such things as may cause in me any unjust discontentments or dislike towards him … Fourthly, to obey him in all things wherein I see not any express sin, taking his words when he counseleth, commandeth, or forbiddeth me anything as the words of Christ, agreeable to the saying of our Saviour: “He that heareth you, heareth me, and he that despiseth you, despiseth me.”

(Letters, 33-34)

Curiously enough, duty to one's neighbor is confined entirely to social matters, and the instructions upon deportment can be summed up in the phrase, “Be a gentleman!” One is to be dignified and cheerful, and keep one's emotions in the range of “Modest and temperate affection” (35). Talk and laughter are to be seemly and modest, clothing to be handsome and clean, “and as much as may be, without singularity: “To conclude, the virtues necessary in conversation are modesty, decency, affability, meekness, civility, and courtesy, show of compassion to others' miseries and of joy at their welfare, and of readiness to pleasure all and unwillingness to displease any” (36-37).

Chapter 5, “Of my Duty towards Myself,” conveys the same air of reason and moderation. One must lead an orderly, planned life, keeping “due times of rising, meals, and going to bed,” and having decided upon an order, one must keep to it: “I must not flit from one exercise to another, from one ghostly father to another, from one form of behavior to another” (39). Gentlemanly urbanity does not have the last word, however: “As I must take heed of pampering my body too much and ought to take some ordinary corporal punishment of fasting, discipline, haircloth, or the like, so on the other side I must have care of my health, and temper all my spiritual exercises and bodily afflictions with discretion” (40). The remainder of the book gives detailed instructions for the arrangement of one's day, the supervision of servants and children, behavior in sickness, and concludes with extended passages on coping with temptation and on “Considerations to Settle the Mind in the Course of Virtue.”

As these selections show, Short Rule is in many ways a courtesy book. Southwell wrote it for wealthy readers with households to run, business to attend to, and social responsibilities to meet. His social advice on running a household, bringing up children, looking after servants, and spending time wisely probably reflects his own tastes and upbringing; it also places him in the company of contemporaries like the Calvinist William Perkins. Short Rule, like Perkins's Government of the Tongue, is a founding document of English social and domestic life in the modern world, inculcating the standards of decency, moderation, and, above all, respectability that used to be taken for granted in most upper- and middle-class households. It was a popular book, being printed eight times in the 60 years after Southwell's death (Janelle, 252), and it is not surprising that, like Robert Persons's Book of Resolution, Short Rule circulated in versions edited for Protestant use.

Southwell's householder is a dignified, cheerful, and urbane man of the world. He runs a genial establishment, treats his servants kindly but firmly, but brings up his children rather severely. He keeps a pleasant table, at which he suits his conversation to the company, being sure “to direct mine attention to talk either for dispatch of necessary business, if there be any, or for maintaining mutual love and charity, if it be merry or ordinary talk” (36). He sounds more like a figure from the eighteenth than the sixteenth century, and he seems to be a different person from the submissive penitent who treats his confessor's instructions as the word of God, and who, in the privacy of his own room wears a hair shirt and flagellates himself.

In Triumphs Southwell's ardor for sacrifice found itself tempered by the reality of death and suffering among decent, charming, lovable, and, above all, innocent people of his own kind and class. In this little book, the whole well-learned ecclesiastical structure of submission and mortification encounters the facts and realities of the social lives of the people he was writing for. The Catholic gentry were no more ready than their Protestant brethren to submit to clerical supervision. “Members of the lay aristocracy,” writes John Bossy, “who claimed the right to live as Catholics, did not do so because they hankered after the status ante quo, still less after the revived clericalism of the continental counter-Reformation”: “Titles to church property, repugnance to prelatical government, moved them as deeply as anyone else, and they came to see how decisively their status was enhanced where plurality of religion became a way of life. All in all, they were better off controlling the destinies of a minority sect in a country dominated by their Protestant counterparts, than playing second fiddle in a uniform society of the Catholic clergy's devising. Upon this rock nobody was going to build a church” (32). The hair shirt and the whip hardly belong in the houses of people like that.

Short Rule is a pastoral book, and in it Southwell has tried, with his customary clarity and elegance, to link the interests of his people and of his superiors. The division in the book between sacred and secular priorities may be owing to the possibility that, as Janelle thought, it was never really finished. There are passages of great eloquence in the sections devoted to ascetic theology:

He that entereth into the way of life must remember that he is not come to a play, pastime, or pleasure, but to a continual rough battle and fight against most implacable and spiteful enemies. And let him resolve himself never in this world to look for quiet and peace, no, not so much as for any truce for a time, but arm himself for a perpetual combat … Let him see and peruse the pattern of his Captain's course, who from his birth to his death was in a restless battle, persecuted in his swaddling clouts by Herod, annoyed the rest of his infancy by banishment, wandering, and need; in the flower of his age slandered, hated, pursued, whipped, crucified, and most barbarously misused.

(61)

Nonetheless, this writing belongs to a different world from the sections on social advice, where there is little suggestion at all of “continual rough battle.” Garnet's claim in his preface that Short Rule would prepare its readers for martyrdom cannot be based on disinterested criticism. The unknown redactor of the Folger manuscript assessed the book more accurately when, with very few changes, he turned it into an Anglican document. The dissonance in Southwell's book is testimony to his own truth as a writer, hinting at a prophecy uttered as if by instinct of the failure of the triumphalist mission to England and of the marginalizing of the clergy's call for lay submission.

AN HUMBLE SUPPLICATION TO HER MAJESTY

The problem of power in Southwell's prose comes into sharper focus, if not to a definite resolution, in his masterpiece, An Humble Supplication, written in December 1591. In October 1591 a proclamation drawn up, under the queen's name, declaring “great troubles pretended against the realm by a number of seminary priests and Jesuits, sent, and very secretly dispersed in the same, to work great treasons under a false pretence of religion.” The occasion for the proclamation was the landing of a Spanish force in Normandy, which the proclamation interpreted as part of a stratagem for invading England concocted by the king of Spain and his “Milanois vassal,” the pope. The role of the priests and Jesuits in such an invasion was to spread disaffection among the people. As political commentary, those were at least debatable propositions, but in other respects the proclamation was an affront to any decent standard of discourse. It described the priests as “a multitude of dissolute young men, who have partly for lack of living, partly for crimes committed, become fugitives, rebels, and traitors.” In Rome and Spain and other places, the proclamation claimed, they gathered in “certain receptacles” to be instructed in “school points of sedition” before being smuggled into England, where they hoped, after a Spanish invasion, to be enriched with their fellow-subjects' property. Moreover, it added, such people and their supporters in England were punished under the laws against such treasons “and not for any points of religion,” as they liked to claim. After all, “a number of men of wealth in our realm professing contrary religion are known not to be impeached for the same, either in their lives, lands, or goods, or in their liberties, but only by payment of a pecuniary sum as a penalty for the time they do refuse to come to church.” After an attack on the characters of Robert Persons and Cardinal Allen, described as “seditious heads, being unnatural subjects of our kingdom (but yet very base of birth),” the proclamation then provided instructions for improving security, but without moderating its vituperative tone: “They do come into the [realm] by secret creeks, and landing places, disguised, both in their names and persons. Some in apparel, as soldiers, mariners, or merchants … And so generally all, or the most part, as soon as they are crept in, are clothed like gentlemen in apparel, and many as gallants, yea in all colors, and with feathers, and such like disguising themselves, and many of them in their behavior as ruffians, far off to be thought, or suspected to be friars, priests, Jesuits, or Popish scholars.”¹³

The peculiarity of the proclamation, as Geoffrey Hill pointed out, was that it mingled downright lies and insult with “well-timed cynical gestures of mock reasonableness and tolerance.” The claim that recusants were not impeached for religion except for “payment of a pecuniary sum,” writes Hill, considered on its own terms, “without reference to executions and incarcerations,” is “the most wilful and monstrous cant,” and “far more numbing than the most savage vituperation” (Hill, 24). The Catholic writers living in exile responded quickly with pamphlets as violent and insulting in their way as the proclamation itself, which only provoked the government further (Supplication, x-xi). At home in England, among those actually affected by the proclamation, Southwell, no doubt after consultation with Garnet, prepared an entirely different kind of response, working very rapidly. The proclamation seems to have been issued in late November, and Southwell's reply was finished by the end of December (Supplication, 11).

Quite apart from any distress Southwell felt over the proclamation's lies about his own priestly function, he interpreted its harassment of the already helpless and miserable Catholics as a misuse of the royal power, one liable moreover, because of its gross language, to bring the Crown into disrepute at home and abroad. In the England of Elizabeth, a subject suffering hardship under the misuse of power or from the applications of the law could, in theory at least, seek redress by direct petition to the Crown, on the legal principle that the Crown itself could do no wrong, and that as part of its prerogative it embodied a general principle of justice under the name of equity. Equity in principle and procedure, again in theory at least, was the basis of the prerogative courts, of Star Chamber, of Ecclesiastical High Commission, and of Chancery. In practice, however, Robert Southwell no more had access to the Crown's equity through its courts than by direct petition,¹⁴ and so he did the only thing he could do, which was to transform a petition on grounds of equity into a literary address to the Crown—a courageous and momentous step.

He began with an address to the queen. “Most mighty and most merciful, most feared and best beloved Princess,” he wrote, and proceeded to assume that the queen herself was not responsible for the proclamation, which could only be the work of people who had arrogated the royal power to themselves for their own purposes. He assumed further that the queen must be ignorant of the true character of her Catholic subjects and of the conditions under which they were living. Southwell's queen, therefore, to whom he addressed his Supplication, was not so much the historical Elizabeth Tudor as she was that mysterious entity the Queen of England, embodying in her sacred person the realm and its people, its deepest, most enduring character, and its best hopes for its future condition. Southwell wrote as the subject of that realm to its ruler and embodiment, and the essential theme of his book is that the realm has lost itself in lies, violence, and lawlessness. He had said something similar in 1588 when he wrote to Aquaviva a letter describing the appalling violence against the Catholics in the wake of the Spanish Armada. He began that letter by saying that he was reluctant to describe events in England because he feared that the behavior of the persecutors “should bring more hatred on the English name than the constancy of our Martyrs would win for it praise,” and he ended by begging Aquaviva not to judge his country by its violence: “Your Paternity should regard the situation in this light. The constancy of the Catholics is such as is always admired in a people naturally inclined to piety, but the fury and cruelty of the enemy is not to be regarded as a disgrace on the nation, but as the outcome of the pestilent heresy, which does violence not only to religion, but to the laws and restraints of nature” (Pollen 1908, 325, 328).

Southwell's assumptions about the separateness of the queen from the realm had momentous consequences for his understanding of the present state of his country and for his prose. Southwell's England is a place where, as in Shakespeare's histories, appearances and realities have diverged, and truth is hidden. Southwell's perception that truth is now hidden produces its most dramatic effect in a long section of the Supplication devoted to an explanation of the Babington Plot against Elizabeth as a “sting” operation, “to draw into the net such green wits as … might easily be overwrought by Master Secretary's subtle and sifting wit” (Supplication, 18).¹⁵ Southwell's primary intention in this passage was to clear Catholics in general of any complicity in the plot, and to argue that Babington and his associates, whatever else they were, were Secretary Walsingham's dupes as well. In the course of making his case, Southwell mentions several characters in Walsingham's employment who, in encouraging others to act treasonably, must have acted treasonably themselves, and yet were never prosecuted for it. The further implication is that Master Secretary Walsingham himself acted treasonably in the same way, both by inciting others to treason, and by using the authority and credit of the Crown to further the aims of his own faction. In other words, in Southwell's version of the Babington Plot, elements of the government were themselves guilty of treason. A Shakespearean parallel to the historical moment revealed by Southwell appears in King John, 4.3.142-47, when the Bastard, Falconbridge, decodes for the audience the visual image of Hubert with the body of Prince Arthur, the rightful heir to the throne, in his arms:

How easy dost thou take all England up!
From forth this morsel of dead royalty
The life, the right and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scamble, and to part by th'teeth
The unow'd interest of proud-swelling state.

In the play and in the Supplication, the realm, emptied of life, right, and truth by illegitimate government, is no longer itself, its royalty hidden or lost, and subverted.¹⁶ Similarly, the queen whom Southwell addresses no longer inhabits the proscribed and buried England for which he speaks. As he tells her, if the “day of general resurrection” were to happen in her time, millions of returning prelates, pastors, and religious people would be “amazed to see their relics burned, their memories defaced.” The queen's “predecessors and fathers, with the peers and people of the realm” would be equally amazed to find themselves made felons under her laws, “for erecting bishoprics, endowing churches, founding colleges … yea and for giving their ghostly fathers in way of relief but a cup of cold water, though it were at the very point of death” (29-30).

Southwell's conviction that in England truth is hidden and must be brought to light animates the whole of the Supplication. As R. C. Bald noticed (Supplication, xvii), in answering the proclamation Southwell used the standard controversial method of the period, which was to refute his opponent “phrase by phrase and section by section.” Nonetheless, despite this intrinsically dull method, “the Supplication possesses continuity and unity in an unusual degree” (Supplication, xvii). The reason for this is not only that the book “is animated by the orator's passion,” as Bald puts it, but that in every point he makes, Southwell is exposing the same kind of untruth that aroused his passions in the first place. Detail by detail, he accumulates his picture of a realm separated from its own truth, religious, political, and social, and in so doing he becomes the spokesman, not just for the Catholics and their priests, but for the whole realm, tainted and violated by the government's behavior:

We verily presume, that none of your Majesty's honorable Council would either show so little acquaintance with the prince's style, as to deliver in your name, a discourse so full farced with contumelious terms, as better suited a clamorous tongue than your highness' pen; or be so slightly affected to the regard of your honor, as to defile it with the touch of so many false assertions … And though the injury offered to your Majesty, and nearly concerning all your realm, might in equity challenge all men's pens to warn you of so perilous courses: yet sith priests and Catholics are the marks chiefly shot at; we ask humbly leave of your Majesty and Council, to shew, how choleric the humor was towards us, that cared not though the arrow hit your Majesty's honor in the way, so the head thereof might enter into our hearts.

(Supplication, 2)

As Geoffrey Hill insists, the term “in equity” is crucial in the shaping of Southwell's argument and the making of his prose. Equity in practice is redress, balance, satisfaction. “In equity,” as Southwell writes, an injury as universal as that inflicted by the proclamation challenges a universal response, even if only one man steps forward to make it. In the courts of equity, clamor, contumely, and rage must encounter reason, quiet, and gentleness; the lie must be exposed to the truth. Like Piers Plowman, who “put forth his head,” or like G. K. Chesterton writing, “For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet,”¹⁷ Southwell puts himself forward, impelled by the necessity of the moment to speak for the unheard people. His prose, a plain periodic style, measured, cadenced, balanced, and shorn of any but the most vigorously functional figures of speech, is the perfect medium for his purpose. It can refute the proclamation's sillier lies with urbane contempt, as when it responds to the accusation that the Catholic priests are of “base birth”: “This only we may say in answer of our objected baseness; that in the small number of the Catholic priests of our nation (which reacheth not to the tenth of the Protestant ministry) there are very near as many, yea happily more gentleman, than in all the other clergy of the whole realm” (Supplication, 7). In rebutting the accusation that the priests have come over to be enriched by a Spanish invasion, it can rise to a kind of tragic wittiness: “For to say we do it upon hope to be enriched with those possessions that others now enjoy hath but very small semblance of probability, considering how much likelier we are to inherit your racks and possess your places of execution, than to survive the present incumbents of spiritual livings, or live to see any dignities at the king of Spain's disposition” (14). And it rises effortlessly above the vulgarities that pass for analysis in the proclamation:

Yet it hath been objected sometimes against priests, that they should pretend to kill your sacred person, a thing so contrary to their calling, so far from their thoughts, so void from all policy, that whosoever will afford reason her right, cannot with reason think them so foolish to wish, much less to work such a thing, every way so odious, no way beneficial. We come to shed our own, not to seek the effusion of others' blood. The weapons of our warfare are spiritual, not offensive. We carry our desires so high lifted above so savage purposes, that we rather hope to make our own martyrdoms our steps to a glorious eternity, than others' deaths our purchase of eternal dishonor.

(32)

The climax and focus of the Supplication, however, is in the concluding pages indicting the government of savage cruelty in its treatment of prisoners and Catholics, rich and poor. There can be no doubt that in Southwell's description of Elizabethan methods of torture and imprisonment we read the results not only of information received and digested, but of his contemplative mastery of his own certain fate. “Mental representation of the place,” the imagining of the place one is meditating upon, recommended in the Jesuits' Spiritual Exercises, is a phrase sometimes lightly used in literary criticism with little sense of what it really entails. Southwell's account of Elizabeth's jails is a mental representation of many places, and all of them are uninhabitable to most imaginations: “Divers have been thrown into unsavory and dark dungeons, and brought so near starving, that some for famine have licked the very moisture off the walls. … Some with instruments have been rolled up together like a ball, and so crushed, that the blood sprouted out at divers parts of their bodies” (34). What distinguishes Southwell from virtually all his contemporaries in these contemplations of horror is that he shows no sign of interest or pleasure in the subject; there is no hint of an emotional or writerly collusion with the torturers and persecutors. The entire passage is an indictment made out of compassion and humanity. The same is true of the succeeding pages on the sufferings of the Catholic laity, “made the common theme of every railing declaimer; abused without means or hope of remedy, by every wretch, with most infamous names” (40). Here Southwell takes on the big lie upon which all the other, smaller lies of the proclamation were founded, namely, that “We suffer nothing for religion.” On the contrary, he writes, we suffer everything for religion, and nothing else but religion; and once again he is almost unique in his treatment of the theme, this time in focusing on the sufferings of poor Catholics under the fines exacted for recusancy:

Yea, and this law hath been so violently executed, that where poor farmers and husbandmen had but one cow for themselves and many children to live upon, that for their recusancy hath been taken from them. And where both kine and cattle were wanting, they have taken their coverlets, sheets, and blankets from their beds, their victual and poor provision from their houses, not sparing so much as the very glass of their windows when they found nothing else to serve their turns withal.

(43)

A reader of the Supplication would be able to infer easily enough that its author was a priest. A reader familiar with Southwell's other prose, however, will notice that the claim to specifically priestly authority has gone. When he wrote to his father, he claimed to be “the vicegerent of God” (Letters, 19). Now the queen “[supplies] the place and [resembles] the person of almighty God” (Supplication, 1), and Southwell speaks to her in the language of equity and justice as the representative of the powerless. The effect is a powerful rebuke to the queen as she is, in the name of the queen she is not. Southwell's voice in the Supplication is the source of its authority, and one suspects that only someone who had disciplined himself to accept whatever might be done to him could have written so courageous a book. His interposition of himself between people and Crown at the point where absolute power meets complete powerlessness is a literary prefiguring of the constellation of forces at his execution. The implied shift in his understanding of power, moreover, seems to have been genuine, not merely the consequence of a rhetorical strategy, as his comments on the so-called “bloody question” reveal.

At the heart of the political problem posed by the proclamation, as by all the English anti-Catholic legislation, was the question of Catholic loyalty, ultimately formulated in the notorious “bloody question”: “If the Pope do by his Bull or sentence pronounce her Majesty to be deprived, and no lawful Queen, and her subjects to be discharged of their allegiance and obedience unto her; and after, the pope or any other by his appointment and authority, do invade this realm; which part would you take, or which part ought a good subject of England to take?” (Hughes, 3:357-62). This was the “captious question” that people were forced to answer under torture, and to which Southwell gives a plain, though carefully worded reply. We Catholics, he writes, are as ready “to defend your realm, as the Catholic subjects of your majesty's ancestors, or any other prince were, are, or ever shall be … we do assure your majesty, that what army soever should come against you, we will rather yield our breasts to be broached by our country swords, than use our swords to th'effusion of our country's blood” (Supplication, 35). The second part of that statement could mean that rather than aid an invader, Catholics would choose to be killed as noncombatants by their fellow countrymen. It might also mean that Catholics would rather be killed by their fellow countrymen on suspicion of disloyalty than join an invader. Taken with the first part, however, the whole statement quite definitely says that in Southwell's judgment Catholics would always defend the realm, and that they would rather be massacred than aid an invader. It follows from this position that Southwell accepts completely the authority of the Crown in civil affairs.¹⁸

R. C. Bald interprets Southwell's answer to the “bloody question” as evidence that when he wrote the Supplication he no longer held the intransigent Jesuit view that the Pope was supreme in matters spiritual and temporal, and that Elizabeth was an excommunicated heretic whom it was a Catholic duty to remove. Five years of life as a Catholic in England gave Southwell experience of the English Catholic dilemma: how could one simultaneously be a good Catholic and a good English subject? His answer, Bald believes, implies the development of a national concept of the Catholic Church in England akin to the Gallicanism of the French church (xxi-xxii). Although Bald's view has not met with general approval, it corresponds to contemporary interpretations of the Supplication. When the quarrel between Jesuits and seculars broke out in England in the later 1590s, Jesuit intransigence on the question of the papal supremacy in England was a subject of disagreement. In 1600, with the connivance of Bishop Bancroft (who was using the quarrel as a means of dividing the English Catholics), the secular party published the Supplication secretly under the date 1595 in order to embarrass the Jesuits. Unfortunately, the publication proved even more embarrassing to the government, who suppressed the book and hanged those responsible for distributing it). So it came about, as Bald observes, that what is to a modern reader the “noblest element” in the Supplication, Southwell's understanding of the need to reconcile loyalty to church and state, proved an embarrassment to the Jesuits and his former superior, Garnet. That is why the Jesuits tried to suppress the Supplication, and why their opponents printed it (xxii).

Southwell's prose reveals a development of spirit, rather than of style, which one can summarize by saying that in the Supplication, the claims of love, in this case love of his country and its people, took priority over the homage owed to civil, perhaps even ecclesiastical, power. In its statement of the rights of conscience, of what Southwell calls “soul rights” (28), against the power of the Crown, the Supplication can claim a distinguished place in the history of English civil liberties as well as in the history of English prose.

Notes

1. Triumphs, xv. No sound edition of Triumphs is available. William Trotman in (The Triumphs Over Death [London: Manresa Press, 1914]) took his text from BL Additional MS 10422, a text related to that underlying the quarto edition printed by John Busby in 1595, and paragraphed it ruthlessly. The quarto text is so bad that to cite it would be misleading and sometimes incomprehensible. Therefore, for convenience I have referred to Trotman's text, but quotations are from the Stonyhurst manuscript.

2. John Semple Smart, Shakespeare, Truth and Tradition (London: Edward Arnold, 1928), 64.

3. Victoria County History of Warwickshire, 3:60; The Visitation of the County of Warwick in the Year 1619 (London: Publications of the Harleian Society, 1877), 12:93; Pedigrees from the Visitation of Hampshire (London: Publications of the Harleian Society, 1913), 64:223; hereafter cited in text as Pedigrees.

4. Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 170; hereafter cited in text.

5. M. A. Shaaber, “The First Rape of Faire Hellen by John Trussell,” Shakespeare Quarterly 8 (1957): 411-12; hereafter cited in text.

6. The fifth, in some ways most impressive, parallel is between Shakespeare's “I … vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honored you with some graver labor” (Venus and Adonis) and Trussell's “Many months shall not pass, before I pleasure you with some more pleasing Poetry.” Shaaber (415-16) says that this is a commonplace and quotes examples from Lodge, Spenser, Chettle, Barnes, Drayton, and others. On Shaaber's evidence, however, it looks as though Shakespeare took the idea from Spenser and Trussell took it from Shakespeare.

7. Trussell's text is related to the text of Triumphs contained in BL MS Additional 10422, and, according to Nancy Pollard Brown, the text of the poems in Moeoniae is similarly related to Additional 10422 (Poems, xlv). One concludes that Trussell's manuscript was an earlier exemplar of the same textual tradition.

8. “Late-sprung sectaries” are not necessarily only the extreme Protestants. In 1595 a Catholic writer could so describe all Protestants, including members of the Church of England.

9. The reference is to Psalm 83.4.

10. Janelle is quite wrong, however, to blame Southwell for chopping Triumphs into paragraphs, thus losing “one of the chief beauties of classical prose, the adaptation of its noble sweep to a long train of thought.” The editor, Trotman, paragraphed the work.

11. The text quoted is Brown's, Letters, 23-73. The title is that of the first edition, printed by Henry Garnet from Southwell's own version. Brown's title, Short Rules of a Good Life, is from the Folger manuscript and has no authority.

12. The text in William Barrett's edition of 1620 (STC 22965) includes a dedicatory epistle to “M. D. S., Gentleman.” It is a forgery. See Letters, liii, 98.

13. Robert Southwell, An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty, ed. R. C. Bald (Cambridge: University Press, 1953), 60-64; hereafter cited in text as Supplication.

14. The last Catholic petitioner, Southwell's kinsman Richard Shelley, had been imprisoned, and he died without trial (Devlin, 253).

15. The Babington Plot is still not completely understood. The plot attributed to Anthony Babington (a wealthy young Catholic gentleman) and his associates was the assassination of Elizabeth and the release of Mary Queen of Scots, timed to accompany a foreign invasion. The problem is that the term “Babington Plot” covers a wide range of actions and people, and no one knows just how deeply implicated in it the government itself was. Walshingham's spies were all over it. The standard accounts are by John Hungerford Pollen, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for Scottish Historical Society, 1922), and Conyers Read, Sir Francis Walsingham, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). Southwell, incidentally, was well-informed about the plot. A sentence in his first letter to Aquaviva after arriving in England, 25 July 1586, mentions “a matter in hand, which if it prove successful, bodes extremity of suffering to us; if unsuccessful, all will be right” (Pollen 1908, 308); Pollen believes this to be a reference to the plot before it was news. See John Hungerford Pollen, “Father Robert Southwell and the Babington Plot,” The Month 119 (1911): 302-4, and Devlin, 248.

16. For this reading of the significance of King John, see F. W. Brownlow, Two Shakespearean Sequences (London: Macmillan Press, 1977), 78-94.

17. G. K. Chesterton, “The Secret People,” in Collected Poems (London: Cecil Palmer, 1927), 157-60.

18. Southwell was reported as saying during a discussion of a possible Spanish invasion “that though the invaders might, yet would they not spare one Catholic in England, more than a Protestant (Supplication, xxi).

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

An Humble Supplication to Her Majestie. Edited by R. C. Bald. Cambridge: University Press, 1953.

The Poems of Robert Southwell. Edited by James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

The Triumphs over Death. Edited by J. W. Trotman. London: Manresa Press, 1914.

Two Letters and Short Rules of a Good Life. Edited by Nancy Pollard Brown. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1973.

Secondary Sources

Brown, Nancy Pollard. “The Structure of Southwell's Saint Peter's Complaint.” Modern Language Review 61 (1966): 3-11.

Devlin, Christopher. The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1956.

Janelle, Pierre. Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935.