RADCLYFFE, James (1689-1716)

James Radclyffe was the scion of a wealthy Catholic family in Northumberland which had received the earldom of Derwentwater in 1687 and which distinguished itself by its Jacobite opposition to the Revolution settlement. He and his brother, Francis, were sent to the Jacobite court at St Germain in 1702 at the request of the widowed Mary of Modena, in order to be companions for James Francis Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’. Derwentwater, as he had become upon the death of his father in 1705, was captured during the abortive Jacobite descent on England in 1708. He was released because of his young age and was given licence to return to England in late 1709. Gooch, 28, 38; HMC Lords, n.s. x. 247; HMC Portland, ii. 209; Add. 61495, ff. 73-74. In October 1715 Derwentwater and his brother Charles were two of the leaders of the northern English forces in the Jacobite uprising, who surrendered to royal troops at Preston on 14 November. Derwentwater and five other English and Scottish peers involved in the rebellion were impeached for high treason in the House on 9 Jan. 1716 and arraigned at the bar the following day. On 19 Jan. he submitted his answers to the charges. He pleaded guilty but argued in mitigation of his offence that he had had no foreknowledge of the intent of the mustering forces and thus had come without accoutrement of war. Furthermore, he claimed that he had acted with restraint throughout the campaign and had surrendered to the king’s forces at the first opportunity. His trial took place in Westminster Hall on 9 Feb. 1716, where his arguments for mercy were rejected and he was condemned to death. On 22 Feb. the House resolved, after some debate, to present the king with an address asking for a reprieve for Derwentwater and the five other attainted peers but this, as well as various petitions from individual peers, was rejected by the king the following day. This angered some old hands in the House such as Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, who warned Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, that ‘the little regard had to the intercession of so many peers was very ill taken, [and] that there would be a time, which he believed was not far off, when they would show their resentment’. Add. 72493, ff. 162-3. Derwentwater himself was apparently expecting a reprieve and showed himself ‘very unwilling to die’ at the time of his hurried execution on Tower Hill on 24 Feb. 1716. Verney ms mic. M636/55, J. Baker to Fermanagh, 25 Feb. 1716; Gooch, 91. His speech from the scaffold, in which he renounced his plea of guilty and affirmed his Catholic faith and the rightful succession of ‘James III’, became celebrated, and he quickly became a leading figure in Jacobite martyrology. HMC Stuart, ii. 35.

As a result of his conviction Derwentwater’s estate, estimated to be worth £6,372 p.a., was put in the hands of the commissioners for forfeited estates and the peerage was forfeited. Later in 1716 the family sued, successfully arguing that as the lands had been entailed they legally belonged to his six-year-old son, John Radclyffe, who continued to style himself the 4th earl of Derwentwater. After John’s death, unmarried and underage, in 1731, Parliament passed a series of acts to ensure the crown’s control of these lucrative estates, now estimated to be worth £9,000 p.a. These statutes also prevented the reversion of the Derwentwater estates to the 3rd earl’s younger brother, Charles Radclyffe. Radclyffe, who styled himself 5th earl of Derwentwater, had also been condemned for his part in the 1715 rising but had escaped before his own execution. An act of 1732 voided the conveyances the 3rd earl had arranged to entail his estate and further prohibited foreign-born issue of convicted traitors, such as Charles Radclyffe’s own sons, from inheriting English titles and land. 4 Geo. II c.21. A further act of 1735 allocated the income of the Derwentwater estates to the Seamen’s Hospital in Greenwich. 8 Geo, II c.29. Charles, putative 5th earl of Derwentwater, was captured during the Jacobite rising of 1745 and beheaded on 8 Dec. 1746. In 1749 his son compounded with Parliament for £30,000 to desist from making any more claims on the estate, and by the time his son, the eighth and last ‘earl of Derwentwater’, died in 1814 the family had lost upwards of £300,000 through its fruitless attachment to the Stuarts. Gooch, 108-14.