Farnworth was born in the north of England, and appears to have been a labouring man. In 1651 he attended the Quaker yearly meeting at Balby in Yorkshire, where he resided, when he was convinced by the preaching of George Fox. Joining the Society of Friends, became a minister. For some time he seems to have attached himself to Fox, with whom he visited Swarthmore in 1652. During this year he interrupted a congregation at a church in or near Wakefield, but was permitted to leave without molestation.
In 1655 Farnworth was put out of a church in Worcester for asking a question of Richard Baxter, who was preaching, and in the same year was imprisoned at Banbury for not raising his hat to the mayor. He was offered his release if he would pay the gaoler's fees, which he refused to do on the ground that his imprisonment was illegal, when he was offered the oath of abjuration, and on his declining to take it was committed to prison for six months. The latter part of his life was spent in ministerial journeys.
Farnworth died in the parish of St. Thomas Apostle, London, on 29 June 1666, of fever. One of the more successful of the early Quaker ministers, he was praised by the Quaker historian William Sewel as "a man of notable gifts".

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