In a work[20] published so lately as 1871, we catch a few fugitive glances of Father Robert Southwell. Father Gerard spoke of him at the time (1585) as “excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.”
A descent was made by the pursuivants upon a house in the country, where the two fathers happened to be together, and but for the devotion of the domestics the two missionaries would have been captured. They escaped, however, and journeyed away together. The peculiar danger they were then subjected to was that arising from intercourse with the gentry. Father Gerard tells of a gentleman who violently suspected him, and adds: “After a day or so he quite abandoned all mistrust, as I spoke of hunting and falconry with all the details that none but a practised person could command.” He concludes: “For many make sad blunders in attempting this, as Father Southwell, who was afterwards my companion in many journeys, was wont to complain. He frequently got me to instruct him in the technical terms of sport, and used to complain of his bad memory for such things; for on many occasions when he fell in with Protestant gentlemen he found it necessary to speak of these matters, which are the sole topics of their conversations, save when they talk obscenity or break out into blasphemies and abuse of the saints or the Catholic faith.”
With danger of possible arrest at every house and on every road, followed by swift and barbarous execution, Father Southwell for six long years carried his life in his hand.
“Granted,” says his Protestant biographer (Grosart, xlix.), “that in our Southwell’s years 1588 is included, and that the shadow of the coming of the Armada lay across England from the very moment of his arrival; granted that, in the teeth of their instructions, there were priests and members of the Society of Jesus who deemed they did God service by ‘plotting’ for the restoration of the old ‘faith and worship’ after a worldly sort; granted that politically and civilly the nation was, in a sense, in the throes of since-achieved liberties; granted that _Mary_, all too sadly, even tremendously, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’; granted that the very mysticism, not to say mystery, of the ‘higher’ sovereignty claimed for him who wore the tiara, acted as darkness does with sounds the most innocent; granted nearly all that Protestantism claims in its apology as defence—it must be regarded as a stigma on the statesmanship and a stain on the Christianity of the reformed Church of England, as well as a sorrow to all right-minded and right-hearted, that the ‘convictions’ of those who could not in conscience ‘change’ at the bidding of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, or James were not respected; that ‘opinion,’ or, if you will, ‘error,’ was put down (or attempted to be put down) by force, and that the headsman’s axe and hangman’s rope were the only instrumentalities thought of. The State Trials remain to bring a blush to every lover of his country for the brutal and ‘hard’ mockery of justice in the higher courts of law whenever a priest was concerned—as later with the Puritans and Nonconformists.”