var s_account="msnportalencartaau"; ninemsn Home Hotmail My ninemsn Sign in ... More Additional Reference Thesaurus Bilingual Dictionaries Sidebar Primary Resources Homework Resources Foreign Language Help Times Archive Literature Guides ... Project Starters Support Encarta Products Encarta Answers Encarta Worldwide Help Encarta Search Search Encarta about Southwell, Robert Southwell, Robert Encyclopedia Article Find in this article View printer-friendly page E-mail Southwell, Robert (1561-1595), Jesuit martyr and Elizabethan poet. Southwell was born in Horsham near the city of Norwich, on the site of St Faith monastery, whose monks had been dispossessed by his grandfather, Sir Richard Southwell. He was the youngest son of Richard Southwell in this old East Anglian family. His mother was Bridget Copley, daughter of a wealthy Sussex landowner. He grew up during the first part of the reign of Elizabeth I , when pressure upon English Catholics to conform to the newly established Church of England was being steadily increased. In 1576 he was secretly sent abroad to be educated at the Jesuit college of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. He also studied at Paris. Having decided to enter the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), he travelled to Rome and was received into the Jesuit noviceship in 1578 and was ordained a priest in 1584. Southwell returned in 1586 to an England where persecution of Catholics had been intensified; a law of 1585 had made it high treason for any priest ordained abroad to enter England. Southwell spent six years in London and the neighbouring counties, eluding pursuit by taking shelter in the houses of supportive Catholics, including the Countess of Arundel. During this time he composed several works both in prose and verse, which enjoyed a wide but secret circulation. It is more than likely that he was known and read by the playwright | |
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