Townshend was a cousin of the Norfolk family, and his father had been a justice of the Council in the Marches, which counted in his favour when his own preferment was considered in 1576. However, he owed much of his local influence to his first father-in-law, the London alderman Sir Rowland Hayward, who owned a large estate in the Marches including the manor of Cound, Shropshire, which Townshend made his main residence.
Townshend’s career juddered to a halt in 1599, when lord president Pembroke refused to recommend him for the chief justiceship of Chester, where he had served as puisne justice for 20 years. The post was first put in commission, then granted to Sir Richard Lewknor†, on the strength of Pembroke’s warning that Townshend was ‘neither just nor honest, and therefore unworthy’.
In 1601, a few months after Pembroke’s death, it was mistakenly reported that Townshend was to be knighted, an honour he finally received three years later after lord president Zouche lobbied in his favour at Court. Townshend slowly rebuilt his relationship with Cecil, advising over procedure during the year in which the presidency at Ludlow lay vacant, and persistently pressing for a rise in his own fees. In 1603 he provided precedents for the validity of entails on Crown lands, thereby allowing the king to overturn Queen Elizabeth’s sales of duchy of Cornwall assessionable lands.
Townshend is not known to have stood for election to Parliament in 1604, but, probably at Lewknor’s behest, he seems to have recommended Samuel Lewknor* and William Twyneho* for Bishop’s Castle in 1604, and he definitely endorsed the unsuccessful candidacy of his brother-in-law Sir George Hayward at the Bridgnorth by-election of February 1610. His own return for Ludlow in 1614 was almost certainly promoted by Lord President [Ralph] Eure†, whose attempt to nominate an outsider in 1609 had been sharply rebuffed by a corporation resolution to elect MPs only from among their own number. While a member of the Council in the Marches, Townshend was also borough recorder, and his return probably represented an attempt to reconcile the rival interests, although the corporation fulfilled the letter of its earlier injunction by making him a common councillor.
An old man at the start of James’s reign, Townshend had speculated that he might be retired as early as 1607, and when Sir Richard Lewknor died in 1616 one newsletter writer assumed that it was Townshend who had expired. By then far too old to be considered for promotion, he nevertheless remained in office. He signed the 1619 report upholding the Shrewsbury Drapers’ monopoly of the Welsh cloth trade, and was still sitting on the Ludlow bench five days before his own death on 8 Dec. 1621.