FALSE BRETHREN AND THE MAN-HUNTER.
With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging him to meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.
The letter is dated Westminster, June 22, 1592, and advises the queen: “I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster churchyard (i.e. the gatehouse). I have made him assured for starting or hurting of himself by putting upon his arms a pair of;[21] and so to keep him either from view or conference with any but Nicolas, the underkeeper of the gatehouse.... Upon this present taking of him it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly; and so to prove his answers true in haste, to the end that such as he be deeply concerned in his treachery may not have time to start, or make shift to use any means in common prisons; either to stand upon or against the wall will give warning. But if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands put as high as he can reach against the wall (like a trick at Tremshemarn), will enforce him to tell all; and the truth proven by the sequel....[22] It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly considered.”[23]
The reader will here readily recognize a partial description of one of the modes of torture then most common in use throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It seems that it was “her highness’ pleasure” to know something that was in this poor martyr’s heart, for Southwell was afterwards again repeatedly tortured. The intimate personal relations existing between the virgin queen and this man Topcliffe, whose very name was a stench in the nostrils of Protestants of respectable behavior, were maintained long after the Southwell capture, as we learn from the best authority. The cruelty of Elizabeth was only surpassed by her mendacity, as her mendacity was only exceeded by her mean parsimony, and when she travelled or made progress from one country to another it was always at the expense of her good and loyal subjects. Eventually the announcement of a visit from their good queen, received outwardly with such declarations as might naturally follow the promise of the call of a special envoy from heaven, was in reality looked upon as the coming of a terrible calamity. It was at that time considered at the English court—where, as we all know, all the civil and religious virtues had taken refuge—an excellent jest to so direct the course of the queen’s progress as to make her visits fall at the residences of well-known Catholic gentlemen. It is only necessary to say that the anniversary of all such events yet lives in the traditions of the descendants of such families as that of a day of horror. The royal retinue treated the house like a captured place, and it was well for the proprietor if confiscation or death, or both, were not the sole reward of his generous hospitality.
Mr. Topcliffe gives us valuable information on this point. On the 30th of August, 1578, he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury: “The next good news (not in account the highest), her majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her council the two notorious papists, young Rookwood (the master of Ewston Hall, where her majesty did lie upon Sunday now a fortnight), and one Downs, a gentleman, were both committed, the one to the town prison at Norwich, the other to the county prison there, for obstinate papistry; and seven more gentlemen of worship were committed to several houses in Norwich as prisoners; two of the Lovells, another Downs, one Benings, one Parry, and two others.... Her majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his (Rookwood’s) house, Ewston, far unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the blackguard; nevertheless her excellent majesty gave to Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss; after which it was braved at. But my lord chamberlain, nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for papistry, called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the court, and yet to attend her council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed,”[24] etc. etc. In the beginning of the letter Topcliffe “joys at her majesty’s gracious favor and affiance in your lordship—next some comfort I received of her for myself that must ever lie nearest my own heart.” Tender Topcliffe! But we must have “no scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and our most delicate susceptibilities for the fair fame of the royal virgin may be quieted by the certainty that the comfort nearest the human bloodhound’s “own heart” was something substantial—a country house, an estate, or the like.
Lodge says that this Topcliffe was respectably connected, but that he could only find that he was distinguished as a most implacable persecutor of Roman Catholics. In a letter of Sir Anthony Standen, in which he praises the agreeable manners of the Earl of Essex, he writes: “Contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” From another letter of the period it appears that Topcliffzare in the quaint language of the court signified to hunt a recusant.
But to return to Southwell. Transferred to a dungeon in the Tower, “so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out at the end of the month, his clothes were covered with vermin,” his father wrote to her majesty Queen Elizabeth the letter we have already mentioned. This petition was to some extent regarded. A better lodging was allowed him, and leave accorded his father to supply him with “cloaths and other necessaries”; and amongst the rest, with books which he asked for, which were only the Holy Bible and the works of S. Bernard. “The selection of books,” says Mr. Grosart, “the book of books, and the father of the fathers, for a poet is very noteworthy; and through all his weary imprisonment ‘spiritual things,’ not civil or earthly, were his theme when he discoursed to his sister Mary (Mrs. Bannister) or others permitted occasionally to visit him.”
TRIAL AND EXECUTION.
We adopt mainly the relation of Southwell’s trial and execution as it is given by Bishop Challoner, supported by a Latin MS. preserved in the archives of the English College of S. Omer’s:
“After Father Southwell had been kept close prisoner for three years in the Tower, he sent an epistle to Cecil, Lord Treasurer, humbly entreating his lordship that he might either be brought upon his trial to answer for himself, or at least that his friends might have leave to come and see him. The treasurer answered that, if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire. Shortly after this orders were given that he should be removed from the Tower to Newgate, where he was put down into the dungeon called Limbo, and there kept for three days.