Philip Caraman SJ, A Study in Friendship: Saint Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet

This character study attempts to enter into the mind and heart of a brilliant, attractive, and astonishingly brave Elizabethan Jesuit, Robert Southwell, who was also a poet, a master of prose, and a martyr. He had a remarkable capacity for friendship, a subject on which he dwelt in his verse, his prose works, his meditations, and his letters. Among his dearest friends was Henry Garnet, a fellow Jesuit. Together they shared mortal dangers and a common ideal of religious commitment, both often described and expressed in their letters. Southwell’s poems form a considerable part of this book, and they are often set in the framework of Garnet’s letters, many of which were written to Claudio Acquaviva, superior general of the Jesuits and also a friend of them both. Robert Southwell’s mother had been a playmate of Queen Elizabeth I; Sir Robert Cecil was his cousin. Yet as an English Jesuit priest he suffered torture for three years and in 1595 was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. A few years later, in 1606, in St Paul’s Churchyard in London, Garnet suffered the same death for the same commitment.

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