SOURCE: Batley, Karen E. “Martyrdom in Sixteenth-Century English Jesuit Verse.¹” Unisa English Studies 26, no. 2 (September 1988): 1-6.

In the essay below, Batley discusses Southwell's writings concerning imprisonment and death at the scaffold.

The sixteenth-century recusants, so called because they refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to the English sovereign (L. recusare, to refuse), or to attend the services of the Church of England, are responsible for a remarkable body of verse and prose. Little known only because the writers represent a minority voice at a time when Protestantism was the informing principle of the day, it consists of loyal Catholics, both priests and laymen, who recorded their despair and suffering in persecution, who saw a centuries-old way of life in England devastated by the boorish proponents of the new religion and who finally went to prison and even died for ‘the faith’.

But while the ‘Old Religion’ was...