Ambrose Barlow

Edward Barlow was born in November 1585 at Barlow Hall in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, some three miles from Manchester, the fourth son of Sir Alexander Barlow and his wife Mary Brereton, daughter of Sir Urian Brereton of Handforth Hall. The blood of confessors already ran in the family: his paternal grandfather had died in prison in 1584 for refusing to abandon the Catholic faith, and his father saw two-thirds of the family estate stripped away in recusancy fines. Worn down at last, the Barlows conformed outwardly to the Church of England, and so the child was baptised at Didsbury Chapel on 30 November 1585, the register recording simply, "Edwarde, legal sonne of Alex' Barlowe, gent'."

At the age of twelve, in 1597, Edward was placed in the household of his Protestant kinsman Sir Urian Leigh of Adlington in Cheshire to be trained as a page. Outwardly he followed the established religion, but the old faith of his fathers worked quietly in him, and in 1607 he was reconciled to the Catholic Church. With the grace of conversion came the call to the altar. Leaving his cousin's service, he crossed to Flanders and entered the English College at Douai, and in 1610 went on to the Royal College of Saint Alban at Valladolid in Spain, returning afterwards to Douai. On a visit to England in 1613 his years abroad made him suspect, and he spent several months in prison before being released — a first taste of what his priesthood would cost.

In 1615 he returned to Douai, no longer as a secular student but as a postulant among the English Benedictines of St Gregory's, the monastery founded by the martyr John Roberts and now surviving as Downside Abbey. His elder brother was already a monk and prior of that house. Sent for his novitiate to Saint-Malo in Brittany, he received the name Ambrose in honour of the great bishop of Milan, made his solemn profession, and was ordained priest in 1617. He asked at once to be sent on the English mission, knowing perfectly well that the mere presence of a Catholic priest on English soil was treason.

He landed under a false name and made his way toward Manchester. After a stay at Barlow Hall he settled at Morleys Hall in Astley, the home of the recusant Tyldesley family; Sir Thomas Tyldesley's grandmother had left a small endowment precisely so that a priest might serve the poor Catholics of that district. There Father Ambrose laboured for twenty-four years. He said Mass daily, recited his Office and his Rosary with his people, catechised, heard confessions, and carried on his back everything needed to offer the holy Sacrifice in secret, sometimes in several houses in a single day. Almost always he went on foot, accompanied by a trusted layman. To baffle the pursuivants and their spies he devised a rhythm of four weeks travelling from village to village and five weeks hidden within the hall.

He became famous as a preacher and still more as a man of wisdom, gaiety and goodness; those who knew him compared his wit and mildness to Thomas More's. He was never seen idle: when free of priestly duty he painted images of Christ and of the Blessed Virgin. Above all he loved the poor, whom he fed and entertained in his house on the great feasts, so that his hidden parish came to look upon him as father and friend. Four times he was arrested, and four times released. During one imprisonment, in 1628, he was able to administer the sacraments to the priest Edmund Arrowsmith shortly before his martyrdom.

At the beginning of 1641 a stroke left the priest, then fifty-six, partly paralysed. On 7 March of that year King Charles I proclaimed that every Catholic priest must quit the kingdom within one month or be seized and dealt with as a traitor. His people begged him to flee, or at least to go into hiding. He would not. "Let them fear that have anything to lose which they are unwilling to part with," he answered them.

On Easter Day, 25 April 1641, while he was preaching to a congregation of about one hundred and fifty at Morleys Hall, the Vicar of Leigh came upon them with an armed following of some four hundred men. Father Ambrose gave himself up quietly, and his people were let go once their names had been taken. Too weak to sit a horse alone, he was set upon one with a man behind to hold him upright, and with a guard of sixty was brought before the Justice of the Peace at Winwick and thence to Lancaster Castle. Tradition relates that in prison the martyred Edmund Arrowsmith appeared to him in a dream, saying, "I have suffered; now it is your turn. Speak little, for they will try to cavil at every word."

On 7 September he was brought before Sir Robert Heath, professed his Catholic faith openly and defended what he had done as a priest of Christ. On 8 September, the feast of Our Lady's Nativity, he was found guilty and sentenced. Two days later, on 10 September 1641, he was drawn on a hurdle from Lancaster Castle to the place of execution, hanged, cut down, dismembered and quartered, and his remains boiled in oil; his head was set upon a pike. His cousin Francis Downes, Lord of Wardley Hall, a devout Catholic, rescued the skull and preserved it at Wardley, where it is kept to this day. When the news reached his brethren at Douai, they ordered a Mass of Thanksgiving and the singing of the Te Deum.

Other relics of the martyr are venerated: his jawbone at the Church of St Ambrose, Barlow Moor, Manchester; his left hand with the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, now at Wass in North Yorkshire; his right hand at Mount Angel Abbey in St Benedict, Oregon. His life was written down soon after his death, one account by his own brother, and another, "The Apostolical Life of Ambrose Barlow," by one of his pupils, preserved in the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

Pope Pius XI beatified him at St Peter's Basilica on 15 December 1929, and Pope Paul VI canonized him on 25 October 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Churches and schools in Manchester, Astley, Swinton, Merseyside and Birmingham bear his name, and an oblate chapter of Douai Abbey has taken him for patron.

May Saint Ambrose Barlow, who feared nothing because he had already given everything to Christ, obtain for us the courage to stay at our post today, serving the poor with cheerful and untiring charity.