On this day … 14 November 1813

The Rev William Towne, curate at the Parish Church, began his series of evening ‘Lectures against Popery’. That first lecture attracted an audience of 3,000, according to the Preston historian Peter Whittle, himself a Catholic. This was in a town that had been known as the capital of Catholic Lancashire, and where the number of Catholics was to grow considerably as Irish migrants began to arrive during the course of the century, especially in the years following the Potato Famine in Ireland.

Anglican clergy had been attacking Catholics since the time of Henry VIII’s Reformation. The hostility to Catholics and even threats to their lives were magnified at times of national crisis. Just a few days after the execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth attended a service where the preacher urged her next to turn her attention to the ‘cold parts’ of northern England where her subjects were ‘frozen in their dregs’ of popery.

Elizabeth and her ministers would have seen Preston as one of those ‘cold parts’.

Of course, it wasn’t just Anglican clergy such as the Rev Towne preaching sermons against papists from their pulpits, fulminating at public meetings in the town and, increasingly as the nineteenth century progressed, filling the columns of the local newspapers with their anti-Catholic tirades. A few years after the Rev Towne’s lectures, the Presbyterians demonstrated their hostility to the town’s Catholics, as in 1821, when Peter Whittle recorded: ‘February.—During this month Lectures commenced against Popery, at Grimshaw-street chapel, through the united efforts of Calvinist ministers, from various towns in Lancashire’.

The difference was that the Anglican clergy were members of the Established Church, and as such had power over people’s lives. For a long time, they led the only form of worship allowed; all deviations from the Anglican faith were illegal: Catholic or Protestant.

A trawl through the nineteenth-century histories of Preston demonstrates the hostility which the town’s Catholics faced from the Anglican clergy, particularly at times of crisis, such as during Elizabeth’s reign. When the Stuarts occupied the throne in the seventeenth century, there were several such crises, culminating in the widespread fear of Catholic dominance in the final years of the reign of James II.

The eighteenth century brought the two Jacobite Rebellions, the first of which in 1715 caused the vicar of Preston at the time, the Rev Samuel Peploe, to alert the authorities to the large number of ‘disloyal’ Catholics in his parish. Later in the century came the infamous Preston election of 1768 when a Catholic priest had to flee for his life from a ‘No Popery’ mob incited by the Whig party, of which the then vicar, the Rev Randall Andrews, was a prominent supporter.

Going back to Elizabethan times, Henry Fishwick in his History of Preston describes how the vicar of Preston attempted to rid his parish of the ‘dregs’ of popery, which included the organ in the parish church, an instrument frowned on by the more puritan of the clergy.

The response to that removal demonstrates the extent to which Catholics abroad had their eyes on Preston, and had hopes that it could be a centre for the restoration of Catholicism in England: a Counter-Reformation at the heart of Lancashire. Fishwick has this:

‘… in the year 1580, Cardinal Allen, anticipating a revival of Roman Catholicism, deposited in the hands of Thomas Houghton, £100, “to bye a paire of organs” for Preston church, “when the time should serve”—that time did not arrive and the money went to the English College at Rheims.’

Cardinal Allen later established the English College at Rome where Jesuit missionaries, including Edmund Campion, were trained before being sent to England. The Hoghtons of Hoghton Tower were then still Catholics; in the next century they turned fervently Presbyterian, becoming the scourge of local Catholics when they became the rectors of the parish church with the power to choose as the town’s vicars, clergy who shared their anti-papist sentiments.

It was probably during Elizabeth’s reign that Preston’s parish church dedicated to St Wilfrid, a Catholic saint, was rededicated to St John, as more fitting for an Anglican congregation.

Peter Whittle left a description of the parish church in 1821 which leaves no doubt as the anti-Catholic sentiments of the clergy, for on entering the church, ‘you perceive the following books chained fast to the pillars of the great archway leading to the baptistery, and resting upon desks for public reading’ that besides the bible included Fox’s Book of Martyrs and a Synopsis Papism.

Fox’s martyrs were all Protestants. His book was first published in English in 1563 and was followed by several editions, the last published in 1838. The second book was by Andrew Willet and was published in 1592, with several subsequent editions. Its full title perhaps gives a clue to its contents:

‘Synopsis papismi, that is, A generall viewe of papistry wherein the whole mysterie of iniquitie, and summe of antichristian doctrine is set downe, which is maintained this day by the Synagogue of Rome, against the Church of Christ, together with an antithesis of the true Christian faith, and an antidotum or counterpoyson out of the Scriptures, against the whore of Babylons filthy cuppe of abominations: deuided into three bookes or centuries, that is, so many hundreds of popish heresies and errors. Collected by Andrew Willet Bachelor of Diuinity.’

---

Sources:
Whittle’s History of Preston
Fishwick’s History of Preston
Devil-Land England Under Siege, 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson: an excellent read and available as an ebook to anyone with a Lancashire County Library card.