Edmund Arrowsmith

Life and Ministry

Edmund Arrowsmith was born at Haydock in Lancashire in AD 1585 into a recusant family that had already suffered confiscation for refusing to attend Church of England services. He was educated at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, ordained Catholic priest in AD 1612, sent on the English mission, captured and exiled in AD 1622, returned to Lancashire to minister to the recusant gentry of the county, and was admitted to the Society of Jesus while on the mission in AD 1624. He worked principally in the Lancashire countryside out of a circuit of safe houses, traveling in disguise, hearing confessions, saying Mass in barns and attics.

Circumstances of Death

Arrowsmith was betrayed in the summer of AD 1628 by a young man named Holden whose marriage Arrowsmith had refused to bless on canonical grounds (the bride and groom were within prohibited degrees of consanguinity). Holden brought the constables to a house where Arrowsmith was hiding. Arrested and brought before Lord Henry Mountague at Lancaster Assizes, he refused to disavow his priesthood or to accept the royal supremacy, and was convicted of the capital felony of being a Catholic priest within the realm of England under the law of Elizabeth I (still in force under Charles I). He was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Lancaster on 28 August AD 1628.

Legacy

Arrowsmith's severed hand, recovered by a faithful Catholic at his execution and preserved as a relic at St Oswald's church at Ashton-in-Makerfield, became a celebrated medieval-style healing relic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lancashire and is still venerated today — the most accessible relic of any English Catholic martyr. He was canonized in AD 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His witness is the witness of the recusant priesthood: that the Catholic faith would not be uprooted from Lancashire by laws, fines, or scaffolds; that the Mass would continue to be said in attics and barns as long as one priest could be found to say it; and that even in the seventeenth century — three generations after Henry's break — the English mission cost lives.