RADCLYFFE, Edward (1655-1705)

Edward Radclyffe, eldest son of the wealthy landowner, Sir Francis Radclyffe was instrumental to his father’s plans for social advancement at the court of James II. His marriage to the 14 year old Mary Tudor was encouraged by James II, who, only a few months after the wedding in March 1688, created the groom’s father Viscount Radclyffe and earl of Derwentwater, whereupon Edward adopted the courtesy title of Viscount Radclyffe.

In June 1688 Radclyffe and his younger brothers were all appointed deputy-lieutenants of Northumberland. His brothers also served as officers in northern regiments of the royal army during the autumn of 1688 and Edward too, though still in London in October, was commissioned to raise troops in Yorkshire and Durham, where the Dutch invasion was expected to take place. In late November he was given a pass to attend the king at his camp in Salisbury. HMC Hodgkin, 74; CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 413.

During the reign of William III, when his Catholicism and refusal to swear the oaths excluded him from the House, he remained in London at his house in Arlington Street and seldom visited the ancestral home in Dilston. He had ambitions to be a poet and the Catholic, John Dryden, saw him as a possible patron. Dryden dedicated his Examen Poeticum (1693) to him, although he was later to admit to a friend, that as a poet Derwentwater was ‘none of the best’. R. Arnold, Northern Lights: The Story of Lord Derwentwater, 41. In December 1698 Derwentwater had a private bill introduced in the House that would allow him to pay his debts through the sale of wood from the Dilston property. The bill was reported with some slight amendments by Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, on 12 Jan. 1699 and was passed four days later; it received the royal assent on 1 February. This private act was probably in aid of the settlement Derwentwater was arranging for his eventual separation from his wife. The incompatibility of their ages and of their religion, Mary always insisting on her Protestantism, led to the breakdown of the marriage. On 6 Feb. 1700 a formal deed of separation was drawn up in which Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later earl of) Godolphin, and Sir Sidney Fox were appointed as trustees to provide Lady Derwentwater with a maintenance of £1,000 a year out of the northern estates. Meanwhile the care and the education of the four children she had borne before the separation was to be left to Derwentwater. Arnold, 44.

He remained firm in his faith and allegiance, and in an analysis of the attitudes of the peers to the succession, drawn up sometime in early 1705, Derwentwater was marked as a Roman Catholic and Jacobite. He died shortly after this list was made, in April 1705. At his death his titles passed to his eldest son James, then in France where he was being raised as the companion of the ‘Old Pretender’.