Robert Southwell (Jesuit) - Works and Legacy

Works and Legacy

Southwell addressed his Epistle of Comfort to Philip, Earl of Arundel. This and other of his religious tracts, A Short Rule of Good Life, Triumphs over Death, and a Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth, circulated in manuscript. Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears was openly published in 1591. It proved to be very popular, going through ten editions by 1636. Thomas Nashe's imitation of Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears in Christ's Tears over Jerusalem proves that the works received recognition outside of Catholic circles.

Soon after Southwell's death, St Peter's Complaint with other poems appeared, printed by John Windet for John Wolfe, but without the author's name. A second edition, including eight more poems, appeared almost immediately. Then on 5 April, John Cawood, the publisher of Mary Magdalen's funeral tears, who probably owned the copyright all along, entered the book in the Stationers' Register, and brought out a third edition. Saint Peter's Complaint proved even more popular than Mary Magdalen's Funeral tears; it went into fourteen editions by 1636. Later that same year, another publisher, John Busby, having acquired a manuscript of Southwell's collection of lyric poems, brought out a little book containing a further twenty-two poems, under the title Maeoniae. When in 1602 Cawood added another eight poems to his book, the English publication of Southwell's works came to an end. Southwell's Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, unpublishable in England, appeared in a broadsheet published at Douai in 1606. A Foure fould Meditation of the foure last things, formerly attributed to Southwell, is by Philip Earl of Arundel. Similarly, the prose A Hundred Meditations of the Love of God, once thought to be Southwell's, is a translation of Fray Diego de Estella's Meditaciones devotisimas del amor de Dios.

A memoir of Southwell was drawn up soon after his death. Much of the material was incorporated by Richard Challoner in his Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741), and the manuscript is now in the Public Record Office in Brussels. See also Alexis Possoz, Vie du Pre R. Southwell (1866); and a life in Henry Foley's Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus: historic facts illustrative of the labours and sufferings of its members in the 16th and 17th centuries, 1877 (i. 301387). Foley's narrative includes copies of documents connected with his trial, and gives information on the original sources. The standard modern life, however, is Christopher Devlin's The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr, London, 1956.

As the prefatory letter to his poems, "The Author to his Loving Cousin" implies, Southwell seems to have composed with musical setting in mind. One such contemporary setting survives, Thomas Morley's provision of music for stanzas from "Mary Magdalen’s Complaint at Christ’s Death" in his First book of ayres (1600). Elizabeth Grymeston, in a book published for her son (1604), described how she sang stanzas from Saint Peter's Complaint as part of her daily prayer.The best known modern setting of Southwell's words is Benjamin Britten's use of stanzas from "New Heaven, New War," and "New Prince, New Pomp" two of the pieces in his Ceremony of Carols (1942).

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Southwell and his companion and associate Henry Garnet were noted for their allegiance to the Doctrine of mental reservation, a controversial ethical concept of the period.

Under Southwell's Latinized name, Sotvellus, and in his memory, the English Jesuit Nathaniel Bacon, Secretary of the Society of Jesus, published the updated third edition of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Iesu (Rome, 1676). This Jesuit bibliography containing more than 8000 authors made "Sotvel" a common reference.

Southwell was beatified in 1929 and canonised by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales on 25 October 1970.

Southwell is also the patron saint of Southwell House, a house in the London Oratory School in Fulham, London.