On 20 June, Southwell rode over to Uxenden with Thomas Bellamy—some say in hopes of ministering to Anne, who herself had written for him—and fell directly into Topeliffe's snare. "I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly used," wrote that officer to the Queen; and the sinister meaning of his words was soon apparent. The young priest was brutally tortured in his captor's own house; then sent to West-minster, under the care of the scoundrel who had now become Anne Bellamy's husband. In September a new entry appeared in the records of the grim Tower of London, that of "Robert Southwell, alias Cotton, a Jesuit and infamous traitor"; and the old gruesome story was repeated. His fortitude during these ordeals coerced the admiration of Cecil himself. "There is," the latter wrote, "at present confined one Southwell, a Jesuit, who, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, cannot be induced to confess anything, not even the colour of a horse whereon on a certain day he rode, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in what company of Catholics, he that day was."
Persecution makes of some men misanthropes; of others, saints; of Father Southwell it made a poet. Broken by torture, imprisoned in the darkness and filthiness of the dungeon, he still worked for his beloved people—and, unable to speak, he sang. His spirit was like that pure frankincense of which Lyly tells us that it "smelleth most sweet when it is in the fire." Dr. Grosart opines that the entire body of his poetical work was produced in prison, and this, being true, adds enormously to its interest and its pathos. The Government, no doubt in hopes of forcing some revelation, kept him awaiting trial over three years. During most of this time he was confined in a dungeon so
