A ninth cousin to the 6th earl of Sussex (Sir Edward Radcliffe*), George Radcliffe’s family were seated at Todmorden, near Huddersfield, from the fourteenth century. His own inheritance of 400 acres near Wakefield was modest, his mother purchasing his wardship for a mere £12 after his father’s death in 1599.
Despite his close links to Wentworth, Radcliffe demonstrated little interest in politics until 1627, when he refused to pay the Forced Loan. Nor, being dependent on his professional income, did he sit in the Commons before 1628, although Wentworth could doubtless have found him a seat had he wished. His only recorded comment on Parliament before 1627 was made to his wife, who clearly regretted his long absences in London: ‘many good laws were made [in 1624]; but Michaelmas term is not shortened, which bill might have had your voice, I dare say’.
though I will not willingly give way to what I disapprove of in my judgment, yet when my opposition appears that it can do no good, I resolve not to stand out longer than is fit, nor thereby hazard mine own undoing. My answer, therefore, whensoever I am called, shall not be so peremptory but that I shall leave way to myself to come off when I see cause.
Throughout the summer, Radcliffe avoided confronting his wife with the unpleasant reality that his resistance to the Loan was likely to cost him his liberty for months, or even years, a fact that was almost certainly clear to him from the outset. His letters to his wife made light of his incarceration, and pointed out that those who had retracted their refusal were treated with derision. He also assured her that his prison lodgings cost very little, and insisted that ‘I had rather leave him [my son] a small estate than more with an hereditary stain or disgrace’. Nothing the Privy Council could threaten Radcliffe with can have equalled the entreaties of an anxious wife, and he constantly sought to reassure her that they would not be kept apart for long.
Radcliffe’s resistance to the Loan was at the very least encouraged by, or perhaps even originated with Wentworth. The pair probably agreed that Radcliffe should make a stand against the Loan before the final deadline for payment expired, thus permitting Wentworth, then laying low in Yorkshire, to assess the impact a refusal would have at the Court and in the country, before committing himself to a definitive decision to pay or refuse.
As he had predicted back in May, Radcliffe was released shortly after Christmas. He does not appear to have sought election to the Parliament called a few weeks later, although he doubtless assisted Wentworth in the latter’s successful bid for the county seats. However, he was later returned for Callington, Cornwall on the interest of Wentworth’s ally William Coryton* after Sir William Constable, another of the Yorkshire Loan refusers, created a vacancy there by choosing to sit for Scarborough. The election indenture does not survive, but the writ was dated 11 Apr. 1628, and the return had reached Westminster by 17 May, when he was named to the committee appointed to scrutinize the Muscovy Company’s claim to a monopoly of the English whaling trade at Spitzbergen.
Although the Members of the 1628 Parliament included a namesake, alderman John Ratcliffe of Chester, the two men had very different interests. It was clearly the Yorkshireman who played a key role in the debates on the whaling trade: his reports from the committee on 26 May and 25 June robustly backed the claims of the Hull whalers to a share in the trade, and attacked the Muscovy Company’s patent over the clause granting an illegal right to imprison interlopers; the patent was duly condemned in the final days of the session.
Like most of Wentworth’s associates, Radcliffe took little part in the 1629 parliamentary session: as a lawyer, he was probably the ‘Mr. Ratcliffe’ named to the committee appointed to examine the Exchequer’s official justification of the decision to detain merchants’ goods for non-payment of Tunnage and Poundage (14 Feb.); while he was doubtless the man appointed to another committee to examine a complaint against the administration of the northern recusancy commission by Wentworth’s adversary Sir John Savile* (16 February).
After Wentworth made his peace with the Court in July 1628, Radcliffe aspired to a little preferment of his own, lobbying for the recorderships of Doncaster and Pontefract. His hopes were frustrated, but he busied himself scrutinizing ‘a patent or two to be made ready for the king to sign for a friend of mine’, almost certainly those for Wentworth’s peerage and appointment as president of the North. By the beginning of December he had been promised the post of attorney-general at York: the incumbent, Sir William Dalton, was induced to resign by the offer of a judgeship at York, while James Howell*, secretary to the outgoing lord president Sunderland, sold his reversion for cash.
As one of Wentworth’s intimates, it was natural that Radcliffe should go to Ireland with the new lord deputy in 1633. However, unlike his colleagues Christopher Wandesford* and Philip Mainwaring*, he acquired no official post in the Irish administration. The earl of Cork recomended him as master of the Rolls in 1632, and he was once rumoured to be in contention for the mastership of the Wards; his skills would certainly have equipped him for a judgeship or the offices of attorney- or solicitor-general. However, his lack of formal preferment can hardly be interpreted as a snub: he was knighted and made a privy councillor within months of his arrival, and Wentworth used him in the role of trouble-shooter, advising at least two of his English correspondents that:
there is no minister on this side that knows anything I either write or intend, excepting the master of the Rolls [Wandesford] and Sir George Radcliffe, for whose assistance in this government, and comfort to myself amidst this generation I am not able sufficiently to pour forth my humble acknowledgements to His Majesty. Sure I were the most solitary man without them, that ever served a king in such a place.
Shaw, ii. 202; Strafforde Letters, i. 99-100, 114-15, 134, 194, 217; Kearney, 35-6.
Radcliffe often acted as a supernumerary law officer: he presented a case to the Privy Council within months of his arrival in Dublin, and was occasionally joined with the Irish judges to rule on contentious legal issues, while he played an active part in the commissions for concealed lands and for plantation of Connaught.
Radcliffe’s sojourn in Ireland made his fortune. He was allowed to appoint a deputy at York, and awarded an annuity of £500 to compensate for the loss of his English legal practice, a lucrative bonus given that he had probably been retained by few clients apart from Wentworth, Lady Leicester and the Holles family since 1627.
Radcliffe’s role as Wentworth’s confidant acquired fresh significance after the outbreak of rebellion in Scotland, when the lord deputy depended upon informed messengers able to justify his policies to the king. Radcliffe’s private conversations with Charles about the earl of Antrim’s plans to invade the Western Isles in the spring of 1639 allowed him to alert Wentworth to some of the dangers of the venture. He also maintained contacts with his master’s friends and allies in and around the Court, and did what he could to prevent Irish petitioners from poisoning the king’s mind against the absent lord deputy.
Strafford, now in poor health, took Radcliffe to England with him in June 1640, but the latter returned to Dublin in October, charged to secure the passage of the bill to confirm the plantation of Connaught. Instead, he was recalled to London to answer the same charges of treason already brought against Strafford by the Long Parliament, largely to ensure that he was unable to testify on his friend’s behalf.
Radcliffe spent most of the Civil War at Oxford. At the end of 1645 the king intended him to convey the duke of York to Ireland, but following the rapid collapse of the royalist cause he delivered the duke to lord admiral Northumberland (Algernon Percy*) at London, and went into exile in France.