One English Catholic Family’s Battle… To Remain Catholic In The Face Of Persecution

By JAMES MONTI

The story of how post-Reformation English Catholics managed to preserve their faith amidst wave after wave of state-run persecution is in large part a story of incredibly courageous priests who were willing to live in constant peril of capture and execution in order to bring the sacraments and spiritual counsel to England’s underground Catholic community.
Yet this remarkable saga of survival in the face of terror is also in large part a story of heroic Catholic families who were likewise willing to risk all for the “pearl beyond price” of their Catholic faith. Among the most renowned of these stout-hearted English Catholic families is that of the Towneleys of Lancashire. It was not without good reason that the Towneleys’ family motto was “Keep the truth” — these words were for them truly a way of life.
While the genealogy of the Towneleys can be traced back at least as far as the year 1200, it is a painting of the family as it was in the late sixteenth century that embodies the most decisive chapter in their history. Painted in 1601, this family portrait depicts John and Mary Towneley, married in 1557, surrounded by their fourteen grown children, their hands all folded in prayer, with the seven daughters kneeling with their mother to the right and the seven sons kneeling with their father on the left.
At the very center of the picture is a double prayer desk (a two-sided bookstand), where John and Mary kneel facing each other, with a crucifix and a prayer book between them on John’s side of the prayer desk, opened to the words from the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, “Fiat voluntas tua secut in caelo et in terra” (“Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”). The crucifix is depicted as if alive, for from each nailed hand of Christ Crucified can be seen a stream of blood flowing down.
Above the crucifix a banderole floats bearing the words, “Virtute decet non sanguine niti” (“It is fitting to rely upon virtue, not on blood”), in other words, that one must strive for virtue rather than set one’s hopes upon merely an illustrious lineage. These words are a Roman saying traceable to the ancient Latin poet Claudian (c. 370- c. 404).
The interpretive key to this symbolically rich portrait is provided by an inscription at the base of the picture, which tells the story of John Towneley’s many vicissitudes which he suffered for unflinching fidelity to the Catholic faith:
“This John about the 6th or 7th year of Her Majesty that now is [Queen Elizabeth I] for professing the Apostolical Catholic Roman faith, was imprisoned first at Chester Castle, then sent to Marshalshea, then to York Castle, then to the blockhouses in Hull, then to the gatehouse in Westminster, then to Manchester, then to Broughton in Oxfordshire, then twice to Ely in Cambridgeshire, and so now of 73 years old and blind, is bound to appear and to keep within five miles of Towneley his house, who hath since the statute of 23 [23 Elizabeth, i.e., the year 1581] paid in to the Exchequer £20 a month and doth still, yet there is paid already above five thousand: 1601.”
In a study of “English commemorative art,” the British medieval church monuments historian Sally Badham observes that this Towneley portrait was purposefully created to deliver a message to future generations of the family, that just as John Towneley as a committed Catholic husband and father was willing to suffer for the truth in imitation of Christ in His Passion, so too his descendants should be willing to do the same, to “keep the truth” by adhering to their Catholic faith no matter what persecution they might face (Sally Badham, “Kneeling in Prayer: English Commemorative Art, 1330-1670,” British Art Journal, volume 16, n. 1, summer 2015, p. 58).
Looking beyond what is recorded in the portrait inscription regarding John Towneley, we know from other sources that during the many years of anti-Catholic persecution in post-Reformation England, the home of the Towneleys was a stronghold of the underground Catholic resistance, most especially as a Catholic place of worship.
Long before the Reformation, the Towneleys in 1456 had been granted by their bishop the privilege of having a private chapel with the celebration of Mass on their estate. When at length the evils days of the “new religion” had come and English Catholics could no longer publicly practice their faith, the Towneleys’ chapel opened its doors to the entire local Catholic population, where the faithful could attend Mass and receive the sacraments in secret.
Closely connected with the presence of the chapel in the Towneleys’ home was another apostolate by which the family generously served their fellow persecuted Catholics, but which also entailed great personal danger for the Towneleys themselves, the sheltering of English Catholic priests. This heroic band of underground Catholic clergy was relentlessly hunted down by the country’s Protestant regime, and when discovered, almost invariably faced the prospect of a horrific execution by hanging, drawing and quartering. Laity who were found to be sheltering these priests stood in great danger of suffering a similar fate.
The Towneleys had good reason to think the state was keeping a watchful eye upon them. There is a famous map of Lancashire that bears annotations made by Queen Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Sir William Cecil (Lord Burghley, 1520-1598); these include the location of the Towneleys’ home, with the name of John Towneley written directly above, marked with a cross. This curious use of a cross symbol to mark twenty-eight names on the map, found on no other map associated with Sir William Cecil, but used by him elsewhere to mark every name on a certain list of Recusant Catholics he had compiled, appears to have been in many cases a designation of who the recalcitrant Catholics were and where they lived in Elizabethan Lancashire.
This certainly seems to have been the case with the cross that William Cecil had inscribed beside John Towneley’s name, “a sign that the Towneley family, for its fidelity to the Catholic faith, was to be wiped out by fines and imprisonments,” as the English Benedictine historian Dom Odo Blundell (1868-1943) observes (Old Catholic Lancashire, volume 1, London, Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1925, p. 14).
The Towneleys knew how to play this terrifying game of cat and mouse remarkably well, as revealed in a document discovered in 1793 by a descendant of the family, Charles Towneley (1737-1805), written about a century earlier by Ursula Towneley (1662-1748), detailing the network of hiding places with which the family had fitted out their home.

Secret Chambers

Four of these were “priest holes” of various sizes into which a visiting cleric could quickly disappear whenever there was word of an imminent raid by government agents. Two secret chambers were used to hide altar furnishings for the chapel, and two others held secret stashes of books. It must have been in one of these secret chambers that the Towneleys managed to preserve a precious set of embroidered vestments that had originally been made in the mid-fifteenth century for the abbot of a monastery connected with them, Whalley Abbey. Rescued from destruction by the family’s sixteenth-century patriarch John Towneley, this set of vestments, consisting of a chasuble, two dalmatics and a maniple, is one of only two medieval English vestment sets that have survived to the present day.
That the descendants of John Towneley did indeed “keep the truth” even when it cost them dearly is amply attested. John’s grandson Richard Towneley (1628-1707) was to raise a house full of children who would devote themselves to the service of the Church. One son became a priest, two others became monks, and three became nuns. Richard himself was an acclaimed scientist who pioneered the practice of keeping meteorological rainfall records.
But over the course of his life he was to pay a heavy price for his Catholic faith. During the rise to power and reign of the Puritan fanatic and despot Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Richard Towneley was subjected to the “sequestration” of his property, the governmental confiscation of two-thirds of his estates as a punishment for being Catholic.
By 1716, the formerly prodigious wealth of the Towneleys had been so reduced by punitive fines that in a letter written by another Richard Towneley (1689-1735 — grandson of the previous Richard) on February 12, 1716, he begged a lawyer to save from confiscation what remained: “Thomas Hilton came this day along with an attorney and two bailiffs and took forcible possession…they threaten to sell the small goods I have procured for my poor children and throw them out of doors within a few days” (quoted in Blundell, p. 21).
Richard was married to a daughter of another stalwart Catholic family, the Widdringtons; following the death of Richard’s father-in-law William, the state made its move to rob the Widdrington family of virtually everything they owned to punish them for their Catholic faith, as attested in a letter penned by the Sheriff of Lincoln in 1729:
“. . . In obedience to your Honours’ precept I made enquiry . . . after the Widdringtons to receive their goods at Blankney House, and all has been sold except these few…the only item is a large table in the hall, supposed to be an heirloom. The family of the late Lord Widdrington are to receive nothing out of his immense estates, because their father was a Catholic” (quoted in Blundell, pp. 21-22).
The sheriff added that the only way this decision would be rescinded was if the family would agree to have every one of their children “educated in the Protestant religion” (ibid., p. 22). In other words, the family could only escape total destitution if they agreed to let the state spiritually steal their children from them and make them disciples of its own ideology.
The Towneley family subsequently managed to stage a remarkable comeback, achieving considerable prosperity again by the nineteenth century.

America’s Potentates

To American Catholics reading the story of England’s Towneley family seventy years ago, back in the 1950s, it must have seemed that what the Towneleys had suffered for their faith “could never happen here.” Living now in 2022, we know better, as America’s potentates become ever more aggressive in their efforts to force Catholics to conform to secular society’s culture of death and hedonism.
Yet there are Catholic families, and I would dare say quite a few, who stand ready to make the same sorts of sacrifices and face the same sorts of dangers that the Towneleys did to “keep the truth.”