[In the essay below, Batley discusses Southwell's writings concerning imprisonment and death at the scaffold.]

The sixteenth-century recusants, so called because they refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to the English sovereign (L. recusare, to refuse), or to attend the services of the Church of England, are responsible for a remarkable body of verse and prose. Little known only because the writers represent a minority voice at a time when Protestantism was the informing principle of the day, it consists of loyal Catholics, both priests and laymen, who recorded their despair and suffering in persecution, who saw a centuries-old way of life in England devastated by the boorish proponents of the new religion and who finally went to prison and even died for ‘the faith’.

But while the ‘Old Religion’ was dying in England, the new Catholicism, known as the Counter Reformation, was flourishing on the Continent. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) had swept away the ecclesiastical dust of centuries and had defined Catholicism as never before. A new Church, repentant for the excesses of the Renaissance, piously propounded a life of prayer and soberness. She was ably assisted in this by the members of the Society of Jesus (founded 1534), the milites Christi, who looked to their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, for their military spirit and to the Pope as the focus of their allegiance.

Loyola's soldiers were motivated in spirit and action by the Spiritual Exercises,² formulated by Loyola after he had undergone a powerful experience of Christ in a cave at Manresa. They were probably the most influential single factor in the growth and change of European Catholic thought. The priests who underwent these Exercises were generally fearless, enterprising and fiery. It was they who risked imprisonment, torture and a terrible death at Tyburn to bring the ‘new’ Church to England by means of the Catholic underground movement.

The Catholic Mission to England began in 1574, when the first contingent of priests from the Douai Seminary arrived.³ By the time the Jesuits appeared in 1580, there were 100 Seminary priests already propagating the faith. The history of the Mission reads like an adventure story full of daring feats, breathtaking risks and incredible escapes, many of which are described in the contemporary account by John Gerard, S.J.⁴ All Catholic priests were hated, but the Jesuits were particularly feared and loathed. Because of the Armada (1588), they became associated in the English Protestant mind with Spain and the Pope. Fear of the Jesuits was out of all proportion to their numbers, which were only a dozen by 1603; their leader in England (and organiser of the underground), Robert Persons, regarded as the epitome of the Order, was described as ‘a lurking wolf’ and ‘the arch-intriguer, the wicked Jesuit master plotter’.⁵

There is no doubt that the Jesuits contributed generously to the English revival which started in 1570. They, more than anyone, brought to England the new Catholicism which superseded the old, backward-looking faith. Gerard's autobiography provides illuminating insights into the lives of these men, their connections in prison and in the torture chamber, and their work for the salvation of souls. Always in hiding, often in the homes of the gentry, they risked certain death if caught.⁶ They never knew when a servant or a visitor would betray them, and they often hid for days in priest-holes while houses were searched endlessly and violently by the pursuivants.⁷ But, when captured, they welcomed martyrdom; it had been part of their training. The very air of Douai was alive with the concept, and Jesuits such as Campion and Southwell actively sought the ‘baptism of blood’.

The sixteenth-century English Jesuit poets were preoccupied with the Catholic prison experience and with death at the scaffold. From the 1580s to the end of the century, the years when so many of them were killed and the rest were on the run, they managed to record their experiences and their encouragement to the Catholic flock by means of private or underground presses or by begging writing materials from their gaolers. A representative selection from the works of Robert Southwell, Henry Walpole and Thomas Pounde illustrates the general tenor of this poetry.

Southwell (1561-1595), the Jesuit saint and martyr, is for many the poet extraordinaire of recusant verse. Born at Horsham St Faith, Norfolk, his early fortunes were similar to those of many English Catholic boys who at fourteen or fifteen were sent to Europe to receive a Catholic education and to avoid the bitter persecutions. Southwell initially attended the Jesuit College at Douai and finally entered the Order as a novice in 1578. His years in Europe, Italy in particular, meant that he lost the facility of his native tongue, and was probably far more au fait with Italian by the time he returned to England in 1586. When he did so, he was imbued with the concepts and ideals of the Counter Reformation and armed with all the tenets of the ‘new’ Church, the creation of the Council of Trent. He thus represents the poetic voice addressed to the recusants, if not from the outside, then from at least one remove.

His years on the English Mission were varied. Aquaviva, the Jesuit General, had appointed Garnet as Southwell's superior when they returned to their home country.⁸ Before long, Southwell had taken up residence in the London house of the Countess of Arundel, Sir Phillip Howard's wife, and there he had his own printing press. He lived the usual life of the Mission priests, ministering to Catholics, or hiding in various places, and was alternately in and out of danger. He was betrayed by Anne Bellamy, the daughter of a woman he had helped, in 1592, imprisoned and tortured by the dreaded Topcliffe,⁹ brought to trial and put to death. During his imprisonment he was kept in a cell ‘so noisome and filthy, that when he was brought out … to be examined, his clothes were quite covered with vermin’.¹⁰

Southwell's ‘Decease, Release: Dum Morior Orior’ (no date) is generally accepted as a eulogistic composition on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Many believed at the time that Mary had died a martyr's death, and Southwell appears to hold this opinion, if we can go by the poem. However, the view he expresses is entirely personal. Mary Stuart is neither a declared saint nor a martyr of the Church, even though her cause might seem to entitle her to one of these designations. The Catholic Church has always distinguished between religious and political death as far as martyrdom is concerned. ‘Dum Morior Orior’ is far superior to other poems on the same event. While the latter are unashamedly and sentimentally sectarian, Southwell's composition is distinguished by its spiritual concerns and poetic dexterity. It is a Counter-Reformation lesson on the value of martyrdom addressed to a people who, under severe persecution, have come to regard such an end as admirable. Spiritual refinement elevates the poem above the level of politics and national conflict. It is both a eulogy to the Queen and an instruction to the faithful. The tenet that suffering is of spiritual value is basic to the Christian life. For Catholics under persecution it had become an immediate experience rather than a theory or proposition. With this familiarity in mind, Southwell uses the voice of Mary Stuart in his poem to explain the basic principle applying to spiritual suffering and martyrdom:

The pounded spise both tast and sent doth please
In fadinge smoke the force doth incense showe
The perisht kernell springeth with increase
The lopped tree doth best and soonest growe
Gods spice I was and poundinge was my due
In fadinge breath my incense favoured best
Death was my meane my kernell to renewe
By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest. …

(11. 1-8)

In the use of both exotic and natural images, Southwell shows that crushing, lopping or actual death result in renewed life. The reminder of Mary's severed head in the image of the lopped tree loses some of its violence in the poetic expression.

Southwell's open conviction that Mary is entitled to the designation of Saint or Martyr shows that he views her death as not entirely political. He emphasises her stoicism and spiritual fidelity in the face of prolonged suffering, and uses her persona as an example par excéllence of the correct Christian approach to persecution:

Alive a Queene now dead I am a Saint
Once Mary cald my name now Martyr is
ffrom earthly raigne debarred by restrainte
In liew wherof I raigne in heavenly blis
My life, my griefe; my death, hath wrought my joye
My freendes, my foyle, my foes, my weale procurd
My speedie death hath scorned longe annoye
And losse of life an endles life assurd. …

(11. 13-20)

There are constant references throughout the poem to the afterlife and the ultimate rewards for suffering, by means of which Southwell hopes to encourage the recusants in fortitude, but his idealisation of Mary's awful death must result exclusively from his Jesuit training and a personal longing for such an end. The scaffold, block, and vivid details of the execution are reduced to a less horrifying level by Mary's attaining Heaven:

My scaffolde was the bedd where ease I fownde
The blocke a pillowe of eternall rest
My headman cast mee in in blesfull sownde
His axe cutt of my cares from combred brest. …

(11. 21-24)

It is evident in Southwell's poem that he enjoys a detachment from the limiting effects of the persecution. He sympathises with Mary, yet is free from the acrimonious politics of the situation. This allows him to eulogise what he sees as her finer qualities, instead of reducing his poem with the more popular arguments on royal lineage. Of course the English Establishment would have been angered by the suggestion that Mary was a martyr, so Southwell's poem would have been seen as controversial anyway.

Notes

1. I wish to acknowledge the University of South Africa, which owns the copyright on my doctoral thesis, ‘The Poetry of Persecution: English Recusant Verse 1540-1640’.

2. Exercises in spirituality abounded at the time, but Loyola's were the most influential. They took place over four weeks, and dealt with the examination of conscience, the nature of sin, and events in the life of Christ. Their later influence on writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce is considerable. All references to Loyola's Spiritual Exercises are to The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, translated by Thomas Corbishley, S.J. (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1973).

3. The Douai Seminary was founded by the enigmatic William Allen (1532-94), initially to provide traditional academic training for emigrés; it became the European centre of the ‘cloak-and-dagger’ activities of the Catholic underground during the 1570s and 1580s. Allen's later political and academic activities were all directed at restoring the faith in England. The change of emphasis appears to have followed the introduction of the Spiritual Exercises at the Seminary.

4. John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, translated from Latin by Philip Caraman (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951). The letters S.J. following a name stand for Society of Jesus, the official name of the Jesuit Order.

5. Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press, p. 163).

6. Many Catholic prisoners were tortured, but priests were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered while still alive, and their hearts and entrails displayed.

7. Employed by the Protestant secret service led by Sir Francis Walsingham, they ruthlessly searched out priests in hiding. Gerard, p. 42, refers to them as ‘ruffians’ and ‘leopards’.

8. Henry Garnet S.J. was executed after the Gunpowder Plot (1606), having survived for years in the underground. The Porter's comments on equivocation in Macbeth, Act II, Scene 3, are a direct reference to his trial, at which he gave a detailed and lucid exposition on the art of equivocation. The practice had developed on the Continent and was used for the protection of Mission priests in the event of capture.

9. Topcliffe was regarded by Catholics as the worst of the pursuivants. Gerard, p. 68, describes him as ‘old and hoary and a veteran in evil’. He tortured Southwell privately many times. His name gave rise to at least two examples of current usage. ‘Topcliffian customs’ was a synonym for barbarity, and ‘topcliffizare’ meant to hunt a man to death, according to A. O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Elizabeth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1967, p. 183).

10. C. M. Hood (ed.), The Book of Robert Southwell, Priest, Poet, Prisoner (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, p. 51).