Saint Ambrose Barlow

He was born Edward Barlow in 1585, at Manchester by Challoner's account and at Barlow Hall in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, near Manchester, by the Salford diocesan calendar's, into an old Catholic family. ¹³ His father, Alexander Barlow, was, in Challoner's words, "that constant confessor of Christ." ¹ The Salford calendar says his grandfather died in prison for his faith in 1584, and that his father lost two-thirds of his estate for refusing to conform. ³

At twelve he was taken from school to serve as a page to a relative. ¹³ Camm names the household as that of Sir Uryan Legh of High Legh in Cheshire, a Protestant, and thinks the household was a danger to the boy's faith. ² Camm quotes the Apostolical Life, written by a friend, which speaks of his conversion and credits it to Margaret, widow of Sir William Davenport. ²

He went abroad to Douai, where the English students attended the classes of the Jesuits at Anchin College. ¹² Challoner says he was sent on to the English College at Valladolid on August 23, 1610; Camm, from the college register, dates his admission there to September 20, 1610, under the alias Brereton, his mother's maiden name. ¹² After two years of philosophy he was sent back, Camm says, partly on account of ill health. ²

His older brother William, in religion Dom Rudesind, was already a Benedictine, and Edward followed him. ¹² Challoner says he made his novitiate near Saint-Malo and was professed at Douai in 1615. ¹ Camm gives more detail: clothed at Saint-Malo in 1614, he asked to return to Douai, was clothed again there by his brother, by then prior of St. Gregory's, and made his vows on January 5, 1615. ² He was ordained priest in 1617. ²³

He went home to Lancashire and stayed there for the rest of his life, twenty-four years by the count of Camm and the decretal letter. ²⁴ He lived chiefly at Morleys Hall in Astley, the house of the Tyldesleys, and said Mass also at Wardley Hall, the home of his cousins the Downes. ²³ The friend who wrote his Life says his custom was to spend three weeks at home and the fourth on a circuit of the Catholics further off. ²

Challoner's sources describe a plain life. He refused to live in great houses and boarded with a farmer, so that the poor could reach him at any time. ¹ He kept no servant until illness forced one on him, "never used a horse, but made his pastoral visits always on foot," wore poor clothes, carried no sword and no watch, and drank no wine. ¹ He prayed the rosary every day, kept fixed hours for mental prayer, and in his spare time painted pictures of Christ and of his Mother. ¹

He was cheerful company, and those who knew him best, Challoner says, compared him to Sir Thomas More. ¹ He "had a horror of vainglory, which he used to call the worm or moth of virtues." ¹ On the eves of the great feasts Catholics came to him from far off and spent the night in prayer while he heard confessions, and the next day he gave them dinner, served the poor himself, and ate what they left. ¹

Challoner says that in 1628 he had given the help of a priest to Edmund Arrowsmith, the Jesuit, in prison before his death. ¹ In a letter to his brother from prison in May 1641, which Challoner quotes, Barlow wrote that Arrowsmith, the night before he suffered, when Barlow had not yet heard of it, came to his bedside and told him: "I have already suffered; you shall also suffer; speak but little, for they will be upon the watch to catch you in your words." ¹

Some months before his last arrest he suffered a stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed. ¹³ His friends begged him to go about less openly. "Let them fear that have anything to lose, which they are unwilling to part with," he answered. ¹³

On Easter Day, April 25, 1641, the vicar of Leigh told his congregation that, instead of the usual service, they would do better to go and take Barlow, whom they would be sure to find among his people. ¹³ Camm names him as James Gatley. ² About four hundred of them, armed with clubs and swords, followed the parson in his surplice to Morleys Hall, where Barlow had finished Mass and was preaching to about a hundred people on patience. ¹³ The Martyrology says he was arrested while preaching on the day of the Lord's Pasch. ⁵

There were hiding places in the house, and his people wanted him to use one, but he would not leave them, and had the doors opened. ¹ The crowd took him, and let the others go once their names were taken. ¹³ He was brought before a justice of the peace and then sent to Lancaster Castle under a guard of sixty men, so weak still that he could not sit his horse without a man behind him to hold him. ¹³

In prison he refused his friends' offers to have him moved to London or banished. ¹ When the jailer took away his copy of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, he said he would turn to the great book from which Boethius had learned. ¹

He was tried on September 7 before Sir Robert Heath. ¹³ He admitted that he was a priest and had exercised his ministry in England for more than twenty years, and said he had been too ill to obey the king's proclamation ordering priests out of the realm. ¹ When the judge called him a seducer of the people, he answered, "I am no seducer, but a reducer of the people to the true and ancient religion." ¹ He was sentenced the next day, the feast of the Nativity of Mary, and thanked God and prayed aloud for everyone who had a part in his death. ¹³

On Friday, September 10, he was drawn on a hurdle to the gallows, holding a wooden cross he had made, and walked three times around it reciting the Miserere. ¹² When ministers wanted to dispute with him, he said he had something else to do. ¹ The Salford calendar says he was hanged, dismembered, quartered and boiled in oil, and his head put on a pike; Camm says boiled in tar. ²³ He was in the fifty-fifth year of his age, Challoner says. ¹

Where it happened is not quite agreed. Challoner, Camm, the Salford calendar and the decretal letter of his canonization all say Lancaster. ¹²³⁴ The current Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, places the entry at London and says he was hanged at Tyburn. ⁵ When the news reached Douai, the Salford calendar says, his brethren sang a Mass of thanksgiving and the Te Deum. ³

Camm believed that his head was rescued by his kinsman Francis Downes and kept at Wardley Hall, where a skull long kept on the staircase was in Camm's judgment "morally certain" to be his. ² Camm also lists his left hand at Stanbrook Abbey and smaller relics at Downside, his own monastery's later home, and elsewhere. ² Paul VI canonized him on October 25, 1970, and the decretal letter, translated here from Latin, says that he was of a noble family of Manchester, a student of Douai and Valladolid, a priest of the Order of Saint Benedict, that he served twenty-four years in his native county, and was killed in hatred of the faith at Lancaster on September 10, 1641. ⁴

None of the sources consulted for this page names Saint Ambrose Barlow as the patron saint of anything, so no patronage is given here. ¹²³⁴

Saint Ambrose Barlow's feast day is September 10, the day of his death. The current Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, enters him on that day. ⁵ The calendar of the Diocese of Salford keeps September 10 for him with the rank of a feast. ³

In England he is also kept with the English Martyrs on May 4, the feast the National Calendar for England gives to the men and women martyred for the Catholic faith from 1535 to 1680. ⁶

He chose a farmer's house over a great one so that the poor could get to him, and went to his people on foot. ¹ On feast days he waited on the poor at table and ate after them. ¹

His prayer was ordinary and kept up: the office, the rosary, fixed hours of mental prayer, which Challoner says he looked forward to the way others look forward to a feast. ¹

When the crowd came for him on Easter Day, he could have hidden, and opened the door instead, so that his people would not be left to face them alone. ¹

Half paralyzed, he was carried to prison held on his horse by another man. ¹³ At the gallows he carried a cross he had made himself. ¹²