Townshend was a nephew of Sir Henry Townshend*, and more distantly related to the head of the family, Sir John Townshend† of Raynton, Norfolk, who was killed in a duel in August 1603. His grandfather Sir Robert, a justice of the Council in the Marches from 1545-57, secured a lease of the Austin Friars at Ludlow, worth £70 a year. This passed to his second son Robert after his death, who acquired additional lands in Radnor and leases of Ludlow town lands.
Sir John Townshend, who was knighted in London just before the Bye Plot, may have intended to join the petitioners, but unlike his father he was clearly a conformist, having been appointed a Radnor magistrate in 1602. He was returned to the Commons in 1604, not for Ludlow, where the corporation chose two of its own members, but for Chipping Wycombe, where his patron was presumably the borough’s high steward, the Catholic Henry, 5th Lord Windsor, who had nominated both MPs in 1601. On 23 Mar. 1604 Townshend was included on the committee to discuss Sir Edward Montagu’s* proposals for radical ecclesiastical reforms, an unlikely nomination given his religious background. He was later named to attend conferences with the Lords about composition for wardship (26 Mar. 1604), the enforcement of the recusancy laws (3 Feb. 1606) and the Instrument of Union (24 Nov. 1606), while on 20 July 1610 he was appointed to the delegation ordered to present the Commons’ grievances to the king. He played little further part in proceedings. In his only recorded contribution to debate, on 8 May 1607, he opposed the bill for confirmation of lands to All Souls’ college, Oxford and Sir William Smith* ‘with length of speech’; despite his objections the bill passed into law. He took the oath of Supremacy with the rest of the Commons on 5 June 1610, but as his wife was a Catholic it is noteworthy that he was included on the committee to consider amending the clause of the 1610 recusancy bill which proposed to fine the husbands of married women who refused to take the oath of Allegiance (23 July).
In 1609-10 Townshend was granted two patents, one for collection of Crown debts due from 1547-92, the other for forfeitures arising from the depopulation commissions of 1607-8. Both proved to be lucrative: Townshend exchanged some of the depopulation fines for lands in 1610, and from 1613 he invested thousands of pounds in acquiring the manors of Winforton and Huntington, Herefordshire.
Townshend’s actions while in Suffolk’s service were unsavoury but not illegal, and consequently he escaped prosecution. However, his prospects were gloomy in the wake of Suffolk’s fall, and he was threatened by his creditors, particularly Sir Nicholas Salter, one of the customs farmers, who seized some of his goods in 1620. This presumably explains Townshend’s willingness to oblige the customers when he was sued for restitution of the Oswestry mortgage deed, which had come into his possession as steward of the lordship. In the course of this suit Townshend confirmed the customers’ claim that Suffolk had borrowed almost twice the amount guaranteed by this mortgage, an allegation which was irrelevant to the case in hand but put the customers in a strong position to wrest the Oswestry estate from the earl’s grasp, either by forfeiture or by discounted purchase.
Townshend was one of the few patentees to be ruined by the attacks on monopolies which occupied the Commons for a large proportion of the 1621 and 1624 sessions. With his patron, Suffolk, long since disgraced, he provided an easy target, and on 19 Feb. 1621 his patents for concealments and market tolls were among the first to be attacked, by William Noye*. Three days later solicitor-general (Sir) Robert Heath agreed to an investigation, and over the following month Townshend’s activities were scrutinized by the Commons’ grievances committee. MPs from across the nation lamented the imminent demise of ancient charitable foundations, and corporations complained of quo warranto proceedings over market tolls, but the substantive case against Townshend’s patents was that the grants were made in contravention of the king’s own 1608 book of bounty, and that charitable foundations such as hospitals were exempted from the chantries’ Act by a judicial ruling of 24 Elizabeth. Both patents were condemned as grievances on 26 Mar. 1621, and were suspended pending a final decision by the king, who revoked them by Proclamation on 10 July.
As soon as Townshend’s patents were struck down Tryon, who had contracted to buy £5,000 of the concealed hospital lands, began clamouring for compensation. Townshend eventually agreed to sell Tryon his manor of Huntington for £7,040, which would cover Tryon’s claim of £2,400, a further £2,600 Townshend owed to William Smethe, (another of the partners in the concealed lands patent) and other sums owed to minor creditors. Furthermore, Salter’s seizure of Townshend’s estates would be lifted. Negotiations faltered when a survey revealed that the manor was worth nowhere near the £440 a year Townshend claimed, but after considerable litigation other lands were added to the bargain, and Townshend agreed to make up any shortfall in the projected revenue from his main estate, the neighbouring manor of Winforton. The catalyst for the final agreement was a new patent of July 1623 which granted Doncaster (now earl of Carlisle) the forfeitures of all the hospitals against which proceedings had been laid before the earlier concealments patent was quashed in 1621.
Townshend may have hoped to pre-empt Parliament’s objections to the new patent with a clause permitting the refoundation of hospitals forfeited as concealments, but this stipulation was merely advisory, allowing those deprived no say in the matter. The Commons condemned the new patent on 15 Mar. 1624, and included it in their grievance petition at the end of the session. In 1625 King Charles endorsed this condemnation, and undertook to pass any bill the Commons cared to pass to invalidate all such concealment proceedings.
Townshend’s main Winforton estate technically lay under extent from 1620, but the bewildering complexity of the claims upon his lands prevented any single creditor from gaining complete control of his fortunes, while the royal protections he was granted from 1624-8 allowed him to remain in residence until the end of his life. In his final years he served Carlisle, investigating another concealment project concerning encroachments upon the foreshore of the Thames. After Townshend’s death in February 1632 his creditors resumed hostilities over the remains of his estate, and it seems that Winforton was eventually alienated to pay his debts. The only property which remained in the family was the Austin Friars at Ludlow, which Townshend had assigned to two of his brothers at the start of his financial troubles, and which later reverted to his son and grandson. Many of Townshend’s descendants were Catholics, and consequently none sat in Parliament.