Sir Robert Southwell (c. 1506[1] in Windham Manor, Norfolk – 1559 in Mereworth) was an English civil servant during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I.
According to D. M. Loades, "Sir Robert Southwell and Lord Abergavenny were almost the only significant gentlemen in the country whose loyalty was never in doubt.
[7] He settled on a career in law, became a reader at the Middle Temple and served at the Court of Augmentations, making a fortune through speculation in former monastery lands.
According to James Anthony Froude, he was a vocal opponent of the proposed Spanish marriage of Mary and Philip II.
[16] This made him and his faithful in-law Henry Neville, Lord Abergavenny, valuable potential assets to Thomas Wyatt the younger and his conspiracy circle.
On 26 January Wyatt declared Southwell and Abergavenny "traitors to God, the Crown and the Commonwealth" for "stirring up the Queen's most loyal subjects of the realm.
[23] According to D. M. Loades, Southwell and Abergavenny with six hundred men blocked the road from Tonbridge to Rochester to prevent consolidation of the rebels.
This time, Southwell was compelled to fight, and managed to defeat Isley's company at Wrotham, taking around sixty prisoners.
[26] Wyatt marched to London himself with around three thousand men,[27] but lost the initiative; Southwell and Thomas Cheney managed to raise another loyalist company in his rear.
Southwell was dispatched to mop up the rebels remaining in Kent and on 10 February set up his headquarters in Wyatt's Allington Castle.
[30] His men, supported by Earl of Pembroke's cavalry, tracked the rebels and soon filled the local jails to the point "that serious disruption was threatened to the life of the county".
She died 25 December 1575, and was buried in the Church of St Giles at Wyddial, Hertfordshire, where she is commemorated by a memorial brass.