An Humble Supplication to her Maiestie

This 1953 text presents the story of an appeal made by priest and poet Robert Southwell, who dared to address himself in writing to Queen Elizabeth I, to plead with her how unfair her proclamation of October 1591 against the Roman Catholics was. Southwell had spent 10 years at Douay and Rome preparing himself to be a member of the Jesuit mission in England. Five years into this, the Queen’s proclamation of 1591 was issued, and Southwell’s Humble Supplication was immediately written. He intended, it seems, to print it - ‘hoping that among so many as shall peruse this short and true relation of our troubles, God will touch some merciful heart to let your Highness understand the extremity of them’. But he was captured in June 1592, and all that remained for him then, as he must have known, was imprisonment, torture and the scaffold.