An Epistle of Comfort

The 21st of February this year will mark 528 years since the martyrdom of St. Robert Southwell upon the scaffold a Tyburn upon charges of treason, though his only crime was in ministering and providing spiritual comfort to a small number of Catholics, then persecuted by Royal decree, in underground Elizabethan England.

On the morning of Friday, 21 February 1595 by Julian reckoning, Southwell was drawn by a cart from Newgate to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as his fellow Jesuit Edmund Campion ...