By Canon Tom Dakin

Do you know of any building, which once housed three saints at the same time? Is it possible that Lancaster Castle qualifies? St John Southworth was imprisoned and condemned to death at Lancaster in 1627. We next hear of him imprisoned in The Clink, London, where, with fifteen other priests he was to be delivered to the French Ambassador for transport abroad, April 1630. Edmund Arrowsmith was martyred at Lancaster on Aug. 28th, 1628. We know that John Southworth's father attended this execution - giving substance to the report that John Southworth and Edmund Arrowsmith had made contact within the prison and had arranged that when Edmund was being taken out to face death, Southworth would be positioned to give him absolution. Can we place Ambrose Barlow in Lancaster Castle at the same time? He was there in 1628. This would not have been just at the time of Arrowsmith's death because of a dream or vision he had. Edmund Arrowsmith appeared to him 'the night after he suffered, whereas I knew nothing of his death'. It is true that Edmund had been arrested not long before the summer assizes at which he was condemned, but this does still leave a possibility that Lancaster Castle may have been, for a short time, in the early summer of 1628, the 'home' of three saints.

The organiser of Catholic resistance to the Elizabethan settlement was William Allen, whose family lived at Rossall, near Fleetwood. He founded two colleges abroad, at Douai, near Lille, and at Rome, where Englishmen might study to be ordained priests and return to work in England, secretly, because the government had decreed that a man ordained a priest abroad and found in England would be considered guilty of treason and would incur the penalty for traitors - to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

When you visit Lancaster Castle, on the north wall of the keep you may still read an inscription: 'When Elizabeth was Queen and Richard Assheton was sheriff, in the year 1585, this tower was restored'. Why did the government rebuild and strengthen a fortification at that time practically in ruins? They were expecting the Spanish Armada. But where would it land? Sheriff Asheton received a letter. 'Between Mylford Haven in Wales and Carlisle on the borders of Scotland there is not one good haven for great ships to land or ride in but one which is in the furthest part of Lancashire called the Pylle of ffloder'. The reference is to Piel Island, off Barrow, in Morecambe Bay. The letter goes on: 'What the Spaniards mean to do the Lord knows, but all that country being known to Dr Alien, it is not unlike but his direction will be used for some landing there'. Indirectly, then, we may say that the Catholics of Lancashire preserved Lancaster Castle.
In the Cathedral you may pick up a pamphlet: 'The Martyrs of Lancaster. A Guided Religious Walk'. A map shows clearly the way the martyrs were taken from the castle to the place of execution on the moor, now a green area off Quernmore Road before the entrance to Williamson's Park. The route, down Church Street and up Moor Lane, is not so obvious when set within the modern street plan. Maps of 1610 and 1684 show the inevitability of Moor Lane as the only road leading east over the moor. Just past the Duke's Theatre you will find The Golden Lion, 1612, where some of our martyrs would have been offered a last drink. The back of the moor is terraced. There is the simple stone inscribed to the memory of those who died for their faith. We number eleven priests and four laymen.