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Robert Southwell was born in 1561 at Horsham St Faith in Norfolk, England, the son of Richard Southwell and Bridget Copley, members of a recusant Catholic gentry family. His grandfather, Sir Richard Southwell, had been a prominent Tudor courtier. In an England where the public practice of Catholicism had been outlawed under Elizabeth I, the Southwells remained attached to the old faith. As a youth of about fifteen he was sent to the Continent for a Catholic education, first to the English College at Douai and then to Paris. In 1578 he travelled to Rome and entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Sant'Andrea. He pursued philosophical and theological studies at the Roman College and for a time served as prefect of studies at the English College in Rome, which trained priests for the English mission.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1584, Southwell repeatedly petitioned his superiors to be sent to England. In the summer of 1586 he landed secretly with the Jesuit Henry Garnet and began a clandestine ministry that lasted nearly six years. He moved among recusant households, celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and offering spiritual counsel at a time when merely being a priest ordained abroad was defined as high treason. He became chaplain to Anne Dacre, Countess of Arundel, whose husband Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for his Catholic faith. From this circle Southwell produced a substantial body of prose and verse intended to console persecuted Catholics and to articulate a spirituality of suffering and hope.

His writings include the prose works An Epistle of Comfort, composed for the Countess of Arundel, Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears, and A Short Rule of Good Life, as well as the long poem Saint Peter's Complaint and a group of shorter lyrics, among them The Burning Babe, The Nativity of Christ, and New Heaven, New War. These poems, circulating in manuscript among recusants and printed after his death, combined Counter-Reformation devotion with a distinctive English lyric gift. They were read well beyond Catholic circles; Ben Jonson later remarked that he would have been willing to destroy many of his own poems could he have written The Burning Babe. Southwell's verse is often cited among the influences on later metaphysical and religious poetry in English.

In June 1592 Southwell was betrayed and arrested at Uxenden Hall near Harrow, in the house of the Bellamy family, by the priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe. He was subjected to repeated torture, held for a period in Topcliffe's custody and then in the Gatehouse Prison and the Tower of London, and spent some two and a half years in solitary confinement. Brought to trial at Westminster Hall on 20 February 1595, he was condemned under the statute that made it treason for a priest trained abroad to enter the realm. The following day, 21 February 1595, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Contemporary accounts describe his composure on the scaffold. He was about thirty-three years old.

Southwell was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a group of English martyrs, and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His feast is kept on 21 February. He is remembered both as a Jesuit missionary and martyr of the Elizabethan persecution and as one of the principal religious poets of late sixteenth-century England, whose work gave literary form to the experience of English Catholics under the penal laws.

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