With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging him to meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.