Joseph’s Amazement: Reconciling Suspense in St. Robert Southwell’s Poetry

I once wrote an essay about my experience of clerical sexual assault. I later wondered if I ever might write a follow-up, but eventually assumed that I would not. Eight years later, I am sitting to write an article about a gem from my favorite poet, but it turns out that I am writing that follow-up article after all.

When I give students an overview of the English Reformations, I try to help them imagine the disorientation of the average English person (full disclosure: I borrowed this from Brad Gregory at Notre Dame). Whether in a room full of students at a state university, a Protestant homeschool co-op, or a Catholic liberal arts college, I start by asking them to imagine themselves born in the first year of Henry VIII’s reign (in 1510 to make the math easy, after his coronation on April 22 of the previous year).

You are probably illiterate, I tell them. Maybe your father is a blacksmith, and if you are a boy, you expect to follow his footsteps one day; if you are a girl, you expect to marry a similar tradesman. You are certainly a Christian, learning the prayers that your parents have taught you to bookend the passing days, and your parish church is central to your community and social world. You go to Mass weekly and receive communion at Easter, and have learned over time to follow the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, marking the year with the festivals and processions that connect to the images in the stained glass and paintings of your church.

How old are you, I ask them, when Martin Luther purportedly nails his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517? You are seven. And you certainly hear nothing about it, I add. Who cares about a random rogue monk in Germany?

But you do know about your king, your learned young king who raises the status of England on the international stage with humanist learning that is all over your head. How old are you, I ask them, when Pope Leo X declares your king, Henry VIII, to be “Defender of the Faith in England” in 1521? You are eleven. And you are probably pretty darn proud to be English. To whatever extent your parish priest has mentioned the Lutheran heresies trickling in from abroad, he has probably instilled in you the pride of defending the one true Church against Satan’s lies.

I skip ahead on the timeline. After all, your illiterate character would not know about Tyndale’s New Testament printed abroad in 1526, or the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacking Rome in 1527, or Henry’s poorly timed request for the annulment of his marriage to Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she had been Henry’s brother’s widow.

Maybe you do not hear anything about it until your old parish priest is replaced by a young radical who explains that the invocations to the saints that you were taught are idolatrous, or that the pope has no authority over your king (of whom you should still be quite proud), or that the Bible (which you cannot read, but can certainly have read to you) should be in the language of the common person. How old are you when Henry is declared head of the Church in England in 1531, or when he marries the true queen Anne Boleyn in 1533, or when Parliament passes the Act of Supremacy in 1534? You are twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-four—the age of a college graduate. You are young and full of life, beginning a bright new future.

If you live in the north of England, how old are you when friends and family end up on different sides of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, an armed uprising of 40,000 against the radical changes in the Church? How old are you that year when Queen Anne is suddenly executed as a traitor and the new Queen Jane is crowned? You are twenty-six, settling into your married life and trade with children of your own.

If you live near a monastery, which has been a staple of your community, how old are you in 1538 when the monks are forced to leave, the monastery looted, and an aristocrat given possession of the land? You are twenty-eight, which (I tell them) counts as middle-aged. By now perhaps these changes have become a norm of your adult life.

How old are you when Henry suddenly dies in 1547 and the changes become more radical under the protectors of the boy-king Edward VI, when the liturgy does finally change to English in 1549 as you had been led to expect would happen for over a decade? You are thirty-seven, thirty-nine. Your children are growing up and learning trades and looking toward marriage. Maybe your parish church is one of the ones white-washed, and the last visual vestiges of your childhood faith have been erased.

How old are you when Edward also dies suddenly in 1553 and Queen Mary is crowned and marries the king of the richest country in Europe? How old are you when the liturgy and prayers suddenly return to the Latin of your childhood, which you had been told to denounce as an adult? You are forty-three, which is getting very old (my age, I add, to elicit a chuckle). Is that young radical parish priest from your twenties one of the ones burned at the stake for heresy? Whether or not he is, how do you feel when you learn that the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer has been burned at the stake in 1556 when you are forty-six (really getting up there!)?

If you have lived this long, I tell them, the odds are you will live into your 50s or 60s. So how old are you when Mary also dies suddenly and the bastard (you thought?) Elizabeth becomes queen in 1558? How old are you when the liturgy returns again to a revised English in 1559? You are forty-eight and forty-nine, enjoying watching your grandchildren growing up but doubtless wondering about the kind of world they will inherit.

Will you live to fifty-eight, to hear your priest read in English from the official Bishop’s Bible authorized 1568? Or a year longer, when the Northern Earls rise up to depose Elizabeth? Will you live to sixty, to hear that Pope Pius V has excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and declared that her subjects (you) owe her no allegiance? Will you live to sixty-one to hear your new parish priest clarifying Christian doctrine along Protestant lines when the Thirty-Nine Articles are published in 1571? What kind of certainty do you, an average faithful Christian in England, have of the faith that you have never left?

It is an especially effective set-up if I happen to be doing it in a course in which I will be teaching the poetry of St. Robert Southwell, the Jesuit priest who would become a bestseller on the mainstream London press after his martyrdom in 1595. After all, born toward the end of 1561, Southwell was the same age as this hypothetical average English person’s grandchildren. This Reformation whiplash characterized the England he was born into.

Granted, Southwell was not born into the imagined average family that I described to my students. His grandfather Sir Richard Southwell had been knighted in 1540, after slowly rising in Henry’s government and playing a role in the falls of both Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, administering lands (including to himself) in the dissolution of monasteries, and assisting the Duke of Norfolk to suppress the armed rebellion in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Yet Sir Richard was hardly a Protestant hardliner, and would eventually be loyal to Mary during Wyatt’s rebellion against the Catholic queen in 1554 and surrender his offices upon the ascension of Elizabeth.[1]

The saint’s father, also named Richard, inherited Sir Richard’s monastic land at Horsham, and Robert probably spent his childhood in the house converted from the priory.[2] Despite his grandfather’s religious flexibility, Robert seems to have been raised firmly loyal to Rome. His father jokingly called him “Fr. Robert” as a boy, and in 1576, at the age of fourteen, the young man set out to receive his education at the English College in Douai rather than studying at Oxford or Cambridge where he would have been required to swear the Oath of Allegiance that declared the queen to be Supreme Governor of the Church in England. Southwell was what we might call a first-generation Catholic recusant.

The rest of Southwell’s life is full of adventure and intrigue that would make an excellent BBC miniseries. Moving from Douai to Paris because of religious wars in Europe. Being initially denied entry into the Jesuits in their second generation because of his youth, but eventually beginning his novitiate in Rome in 1578 (in time to meet St. Edmund Campion as the elder martyr was preparing for his mission to England) and to become ordained himself in 1584 (the same year that Elizabeth’s Jesuit’s, etc. Act specifically targeted Jesuits as high traitors).

Returning to England in secret in 1586, the year the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth was uncovered and anti-Catholic measures were heightened in response. Setting up a secret press in the home of Countess of Arundel Anne Howard, moving about secretly in London with occasional trips to celebrate sacraments with recusant families in the country, hiding behind paneling for four hours in a raid, writing a letter to Elizabeth with the radical argument that a papist could be a faithful subject of the queen, publishing a London best-seller while in hiding—all during times when national headlines included the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and the sinking of the Spanish Armada.

Finally, being caught by Elizabeth’s ruthless priest-hunter Richard Topcliff in 1592, being tortured for three years in prison, writing his heart-breaking final prose work to plead to be given trial, and eventually being convicted of high treason and hung, drawn, and quartered in 1595 at the age of thirty-three. The imagined miniseries would make much of the reported sympathy of the onlookers at his martyrdom at Tyburn, when they prevented the executioner from cutting the noose and tugged on his legs to speed his death so he would not feel the pain of being disemboweled. Seriously, if anyone from the BBC is reading this, give me a call.

But for the purposes of my classes in English literature, the most fascinating part of the story is Southwell’s afterlife, specifically among Protestant readers. Only weeks after his highly publicized execution, various collections of his poetry started anonymously appearing from mainstream London printing houses. In the same year of his 1595 martyrdom, there would be five editions of two different sets of poems in an age when few works ever went to a second run.

Nor was this popularity short-lived; his poetry would go through eighteen editions over the next four decades, and four prose works were also published on London presses, one of them becoming almost as frequently printed as his poetry. Southwell’s posthumous popularity was on the rise in the age of William Shakespeare, as later devotional poets like John Donne and George Herbert were learning their craft. What made the poetry of this Catholic traitor so appealing to his Protestant readers, I invite my students to ask. Was it a historical fluke or a strategic success?

To suggest at least a partial answer to that question, I love focusing on Southwell’s poem “Joseph’s Amazement.”[3] The poem has not received frequent scholarly attention. Anne Sweeney once conceptualized it in the context of Reformation debates around angelology,[4] but that was not enough to raise it above Louis Martz’s throw-away dismissal of it as “incredibly bad.”[5] As much as I respect Martz’s pioneering work that brought Southwell to the spotlight, I am glad that that moniker has mostly stayed in the obscurity of the poem itself.

Indeed, for Martz’s study on the significance of Ignatian meditation for the later development of English devotional poetry, “Joseph’s Amazement” was hardly Southwell’s masterpiece. I on the other hand, who started training after Alison Shell had made Southwell’s centrality to the development of English literary culture commonplace,[6] who studied under Martz’s student R. V. Young (my confirmation sponsor when I entered the Catholic Church) after he reframed the discussion of devotional poetry in terms of common meditational inheritance rather than confessional disputes,[7] had freedom to pursue other questions. Eventually, as I focused my questions more on the Petrarchan complaint poetry of Southwell’s contemporaries in the sixteenth century than on his later inheritance in the devotional lyric of the seventeenth,[8] “Joseph’s Amazement” became a goldmine.

Southwell depicts the betrothed husband of Mary and the eventual foster-father of Jesus as a betrayed Petrarchan lover. The entire eighty-four-line poem takes place in the transition between two verses of Matthew 1, after Jesus’s “mother Mary was espoused to Joseph” and “before they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost.” Southwell’s Joseph may be “a just man,” but at this point he is hardly “minded to put her away privately,” and as yet might end up “willing publicly to expose her.”[9] Southwell uses the extremes of human passion characteristic of Petrarchan complaint to help his reader imagine the turmoil that Joseph might have gone through in the dramatic irony before the angel brings resolution.

Southwell’s Joseph is “stranger yet to God’s intent” (3), and as such is “sore oppressed” by “doubts of jealous thoughts” (4) and is “wrought with diverse fits of fear and love” (5). Though he had initially been able to dismiss his suspicions in his “blind” love (9), “think[ing] rather sense deceived than her with child” (10), eventually “proofs so pregnant were” (11) that he had to admit the truth of her pregnancy. Not yet at the resolution to put her away privately, he is “daunted with a deadly wound” (14) and prepares to leave her, “But still ere he can frame his feet to go, / Love winneth time till all conclude in no” (23–24). With no decision yet made, it is not his will but rather his love that holds him in place; “She whom he flies doth win him home again” (30).

The rest of the poem is Joseph’s internal battle in the first-person, a war in which “every wound upon the giver lights” (36). He asks if his love was “so lightly prized” (37) and whether “such a spouse be stained with such a spot?” (40) and even at one point identifies Mary’s mortal peril if guilty of “Such crimes for which the law condemns to die” (54). Nevertheless, he is determined that “Joseph’s word shall never work her woe: / I wish her leave to live, not doom to die” (55–56). He declares that “Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe” (57), and while he assumes that Mary has defiled herself, he insists that “She to herself less loving is than I” (58). Rather than putting her away, this Joseph describes himself as an exile, separated from his own heart which his seemingly false beloved still possesses.

The reader of course knows that Joseph is wrong about Mary. But until the angel eventually appears outside the drama of the poem, Joseph cannot know that. The reader may feel sorry for him, and might (as Sweeney describes) be looking forward to the appearance of the angel, but in the meantime the reader must want Joseph to endure the tension rather than to abandon the pregnant Mary and the fetal Jesus.

Furthermore, to bring this back to the set-up I give to my students, Southwell’s English readers of the sixteenth century faced their own tensions which connect to the poem. The average English person’s theological certainty almost certainly did not match that of Reformation polemic. While no one doubted Mary’s virginity, explicit as it is in scripture, related questions of devotion to the saints were hotly debated. Furthermore, her traditional role as Mother of the Church becomes especially relevant to the poem in an age where the ecclesial structures were sharply questioned, and some might see “proofs” every bit as “pregnant” as Joseph sees to accuse the structural Church of grave sin.

To that reader, the poem’s ending is particularly poignant as Joseph’s love forces him to endure the suspense before it can be resolved. Joseph realizes that love makes it impossible to run away, even if he tried, as he asks rhetorically, “But who can fly from that his heart doth feel? / What change of place can change implanted pain?” (73–74). This helplessness leaves him to the final, heart-wrenching stanza.

Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both (79–84).

Love leaves him in his “amazement,” his “maze of doubtful end.” He is left in the Petrarchan paradoxes of going and coming, being drawn and driven away, wounded and healed, marred and mended, seeking and shunning, departing and staying, loving and loathing. Until the later deus ex machina that Southwell’s reader knows will come but his Joseph never sees, the reader must be content to leave Joseph in the “suspense” that can only “hang between them both.”

Admittedly, my audience for this reading of Southwell is as much myself as it is my students. For sure, twenty-first-century undergraduates have plenty of their own uncertainties, some stereotypical of their stage of life and some new ones in an ever-changing world. I hope they can be encouraged by Southwell’s Joseph to endure the tension and to hold to the love at the heart of the poem: the love of the vehicle through whom the unseen Christ is entering the world (Mary, the Church), the love of Christ himself.

Furthermore, sixteen years after my own entry into the Catholic Church, I know that Southwell’s Joseph challenges me to the same stubborn love (Southwell uses the term “crazy love” in another poem, but that means something different in the sixteenth century than the Van Morrison hit). After all, by the time I had finished my twenties, my own theological framework had gone through more radical changes than that of Southwell’s English reader, and the tensions did not subside with my decision to enter the Church. Especially around Marian theology, I continued to struggle with certain dogmas like the Immaculate Conception long after I affirmed them to be true at my confirmation, occasionally finding deeper appreciation through the struggle (Renee D. Roden’s framing as “a dogma of consent” was a breakthrough).

On a level both broader and more personal, my own experience of clerical sexual assault in my thirties deepened the tension I felt with the Church, whom I still loved. Daniel Philpott and Thomas Berg have both written about the work of restorative justice that I have been honored to share in the aftermath, a desperate attempt to follow Southwell’s Joseph in enduring the tension in the wounds of love. I am sure that I will never write fully of the ripple effects of costs I have paid for that determination to stay.

Southwell invites his sixteenth-century English reader, along with me and my students, not to flee the tension of the suspense and “amazement” in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, as Southwell’s reader knows that Joseph will eventually understand the centrality of his role in salvation history, he invites us to see that first kind of confused “amazement” as one that will eventually lead to the future amazement in “the glory to be revealed to us,” a glory that will make the present sufferings not worthy to be compared (Rom 8:18). With that hope of redemption, along with the faith that brought me here and the love that holds me in place, I find myself in good company.

Sts. Joseph and Robert Southwell, pray for us. All of us.

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