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Edmund Arrowsmith was born in 1585 at Haydock in Lancashire, in the north of England, during the later years of Elizabeth I, when the public practice of Catholicism was illegal and penalized by fines, imprisonment, and, for missionary priests, the charge of high treason. He was baptized Brian and later took the name Edmund in religion. His father, Robert Arrowsmith, a yeoman of Haydock, was imprisoned for recusancy, and his mother, Margery Gerard, belonged to the recusant Gerard family associated with Bryn in Lancashire. He was raised in a household that refused conformity to the Church of England and in a county that remained one of the strongest centres of recusancy. In 1605 he left England for the Spanish Netherlands and entered the English College at Douai, the principal seminary training clergy for the English mission.

He was ordained priest in 1612 and sent back to England in 1613. For about a decade he worked mainly in Lancashire, moving among Catholic gentry and yeoman families, celebrating Mass in hidden settings, hearing confessions, and encouraging recusants under the constant risk of discovery. Under the statute of 1585, a priest ordained abroad who returned to England committed high treason by that fact alone. In 1622 he was arrested and confined in Lancaster Castle, then released and able to resume his ministry. In the mid-1620s he was admitted to the Society of Jesus while remaining on the mission, an arrangement used for priests already labouring in England rather than withdrawing for a conventional novitiate on the Continent.

In 1628 he was denounced, arrested again, and tried at the Lancaster assizes before Sir Henry Yelverton on the charge of priesthood. He acknowledged that he was a Catholic priest and would not take the Oath of Allegiance in the form then required of recusants. Condemned as a traitor, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Lancaster on 28 August 1628. Contemporary reports present him as meeting execution with composure. After the quartering, portions of his body were displayed; Catholics recovered his right hand, which was preserved as a relic later known as the Holy Hand and kept at St Oswald’s Church, Ashton-in-Makerfield, where it became the focus of local devotion.

Arrowsmith was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation period. On 25 October 1970 Pope Paul VI canonized him as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a representative group of Catholics put to death between the 1530s and the late seventeenth century. His individual feast is kept on 28 August, the date of his execution, and he is also commemorated with the Forty Martyrs. He is remembered as a locally born seminary priest and Jesuit who returned to recusant Lancashire and was executed under the penal laws solely for his priesthood.

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