Periods of anti-Catholic agitation before and after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, saw him fined and imprisoned, culminating in accusations of involvement in the 1694 Lancashire Plot, an alleged attempt to restore the exiled James II.

[3] His eldest brother, also called Richard, was captured at Preston during the 1715 Rising but a jury acquitted him of treason in May 1716,[10] although the trial involved the family in heavy expenses.

[12] The English Catholic gentry formed a small, tight-knit group, including the Stricklands, a family based in Westmoreland and Catterick, North Yorkshire.

The poem had been turned into German verse in 1737, and in 1755 Jacques Fleury published the first canto in French prose, offering to issue the remainder if the public wished for it.

The English original was given on parallel pages, with William Hogarth's engravings reproduced, Towneley wrote a preface, while Needham appended explanatory notes.

The translation has been praised by Horace Walpole, and Henry Hart Milman, but others such as Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, in the Biographie Universelle, though acknowledging its fidelity, called the diction poor and the verses unpoetical, "the work of a foreigner familiar with French but unable to write it with elegance".

[15] John Goldworth Alger, the author of Towneley's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that "it certainly lacks the swing and the burlesque rhymes of the original".

[1] A second edition of his translation, with the English text revised by Sir John Byerley and the French spelling modernised, was printed by Firmin Didot at Paris in 1819.