Robert Southwell (priest)
Robert Southwell, SJ (c. 1561 – 21 February 1595), also Saint Robert Southwell, was an English Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order. He was also an author of Christian poetry in Elizabethan English, and a clandestine missionary in Elizabethan England.
After being arrested and imprisoned in 1592, and intermittently tortured and questioned by priest hunter Sir Richard Topcliffe, Southwell was eventually tried and convicted of high treason against Queen Elizabeth I, but in reality for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, renounce his belief in the independence of the English Church from control by the State, and similarly repudiate the authority of the Holy See. On 21 February 1595, Southwell was hanged at Tyburn. In 1970, he was canonised by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
In the Martyrology
- February 21 Saint Robert Southwell, Jesuit priest and martyr of England