On this day … 7 September 1687

On 7 September 1687, Bishop John Leyburn administered confirmation to 1,153 Catholics in the domestic chapel at Tulketh Hall and later to a further 1,099 at Fernyhalgh Chapel.

This was a highly unusual event when for most of Preston’s history from the time of Henry VIII’s reformation, Catholics in the town faced heavy penalties for practising their faith and were barred from public office. Their priests risked death by venturing into the county.

But in 1687, Bishop Leyburn could visit Preston in complete safety, because this was during what Henry Foley, the historian of the Preston Jesuit mission, called the time of ‘the short sunshine of the reign of James II’.

The king was a practising Catholic and had overturned more than a century of anti-papist legislation by allowing Catholics to worship in public, and replacing Protestants with Catholics in public offices and the army. It was during Foley’s ‘short sunshine’ that Leyburn had been made bishop by Pope Innocent XI in 1685 at James’s request. He returned to England from Rome shortly afterwards as vicar apostolic.

In 1687, James had replaced the Earl of Derby with Viscount Molyneux as lord lieutenant of Lancashire. Molyneux, in turn, turfed out the deputy-lieutenants, Anglican Tories to a man, and replaced them with Catholics, including Sir Thomas Clifton of Lytham Hall. And Molyneux, who then owned the Fishwick estate, invited the Benedictines to establish a chapel there.

Local Catholics had reason to fear these changes being pushed through so recklessly, for provided they had kept their heads down they were unmolested. As the Catholic priest and historian, John Lingard, noted, many Catholics:

‘… aware that the spirit of discontent was stirring, deprecated any alteration which might afterwards provoke a reaction. They deemed it imprudent to risk the tranquillity which they enjoyed for the pursuit of a greater but uncertain benefit, and were content to submit to the privations imposed by the laws, provided they might be relieved from the penal and sanguinary statutes prohibiting the private exercise of their worship.’

The reaction was not long coming. Even Tory Anglicans, wedded to passive obedience to the wishes of their sovereign, could not stomach the changes imposed by James. The result was the invasion of William of Orange in 1688, the flight of James and what is now known as the Glorious Revolution that put William on the throne as William III.

In Preston, Catholic homes were searched for weapons and the roof pulled down at the Fishwick chapel. Catholics were all suspected of Jacobite sympathies, and towards the end of the century, several of them were brought to trial, accused of high treason in plotting the return of the Stuarts.

Among them was Sir Thomas Clifton, who had been a frequent visitor to Preston before the revolution, mixing amicably with other local gentry, as for example in 1686 when the Preston diarist Lawrence Rawstorne, his brother-in-law Edward Fleetwood of Penwortham and others spent several days at Lytham enjoying his hospitality.

Sir Thomas was eventually cleared, but died soon after.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Preston Catholics followed their seventeenth-century ancestors in keeping their heads down, choosing to ‘hide their light under the bushel’, particularly when Samuel Peploe was vicar. As the priest at the Fernyhalgh chapel, Christopher Tootell, wrote, Peploe and his fellow Whigs were ‘active and severe in their Office’.

Preston’s Anglican clergy in the nineteenth century were no friends of the town’s Catholics, as witness the public attacks on the faith by John Owen Parr, vicar for much of the century, and by the clergy he appointed to the town’s churches.

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