Lancashire

‘Bounded on the east with the counties of York and part of Derby, on south with the River Mersey – which severeth it from Cheshire – on the west with the Irish Sea and on the north with the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland’, Lancashire, like most of the adjacent counties, was regarded by the godly as one of the ‘dark corners of the land’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 132; C. Hill, ‘Puritans and ‘the dark corners of the land’’, TRHS xiii. 88-91. According to the Ship-Money valuations of the 1630s, it was also, after Cumberland, the poorest county in England. Blackwood, Lancs. 3. Like Cheshire to the south, Lancashire was a semi-autonomous palatinate, with its own courts and officers. Its day-to-day administration was dominated by two authorities – the Stanleys, earls of Derby (who were ‘de facto hereditary lords lieutenant’ of Lancashire and Cheshire), and the duchy of Lancaster, based at Westminster, which appointed sheriffs, assize judges and justices of the peace. J.K. Walton, Lancs.: a Social Hist. 1558-1939 (Manchester, 1986), 12-13; R. Somerville, ‘The duchy and county palatine of Lancaster’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, ciii. 66; B. Coward, ‘The social and political position of the earls of Derby’ in Seventeenth-Century Lancs. ed. J.I. Kermode, C.B. Phillips, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxxii. 128; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 162-3.

With its eastern half dominated by the Pennines – ‘full of stony, craggy and barren hills’ – and large parts of its western coastal plain consisting of marshland and ‘“mosses”, like Irish bogs’, Lancashire was ‘for the generality ... of an unfertile soil’. Blome, Britannia, 132. Consequently, the county’s economy was based predominantly upon the rearing of cattle – although between the eastern and western pastoral regions was a mixed farming area in which roughly half to two thirds of the cultivated land was put to arable. Blackwood, Lancs. 1; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 73-6. Large-scale manufacturing was mostly confined to the area around Bolton, Manchester and Wigan in the south of the county. The Wigan coalfield sustained a thriving metal industry in the town, which was notable by the mid-seventeenth century for pewter production, braziery (brassmaking) and panmaking. Infra, ‘Wigan’. Bolton and Manchester were centres for the manufacture of woollen cloth, linen and the ‘new draperies’, including fustians. Manchester was also important as an entrepôt in the textile trade, linking the cloth producing areas of Lancashire (and possibly Cheshire, too) with the cloth markets of London.

Manchester’s close trading links with the capital probably account in part for the exceptional strength of godly Protestantism in the south-east of Lancashire. Infra, ‘Manchester’; Richardson, Puritanism, 9-13, 77; Walton, Lancs. 49; G. Timmins, Made in Lancs.: A Hist. of Regional Industrialisation (Manchester, 1998), 12-19, 21, 24-5. But if the godly were well-represented in and around the deanery of Manchester, they were merely an embattled minority in the county as a whole, which had been notorious since Elizabethan times as a bastion of Roman Catholicism. Catholic recusancy was strongest in the southern and western hundreds of West Derby, Leyland and Amounderness. In much of south-west Lancashire, ‘the recusancy returns probably conceal and almost universal adhesion to, or at least strong sympathy for, the Catholic faith’. J.A. Hilton, Catholic Lancs. from Reformation to Renewal (Chichester, 1994), 16, 18, 31; Walton, Lancs. 45-6. In January 1641, one of the county’s MPs in the Long Parliament, Roger Kirkbye, informed the Commons that in Amounderness alone, ‘being not the largest hundred’ in Lancashire, there had been 15,000 people indicted as recusants at the quarter sessions – ‘with the report of which great number the House itself was much startled’. Procs. LP ii. 291. The population of Lancashire rose from about 100-120,00 in 1600 to around 150,000 by the 1660s. Blackwood, Lancs. 3, 5; Lancs. and Cheshire from AD 1540 ed. C.B. Phillips, J.H. Smith (1994), 7. Unfortunately, there are no reliable figures for the number of voters in this period; in the 1670s, they amounted to over 6,500. HP Commons 1660-90.

The duchy of Lancaster played an important role in the administration of Lancashire elections, for the county received its election writs from the chancellor of the duchy and then returned the completed indentures to him for submission to chancery. Although chancellors had at one time or other nominated MPs to all of Lancashire’s six boroughs and regularly secured at least one seat at Clitheroe, Lancaster, Liverpool and Preston in the early Stuart period, there is no evidence that the duchy interest was significant in county elections. HP Commons 1604-29; R.C.L. Sgroi, ‘The electoral patronage of the duchy of Lancaster, 1604-28’, PH xxvi. 310-27. The county’s most powerful electoral patrons had traditionally been the earls of Derby. However, the 6th earl, who succeeded to the title in 1594 and who did not die until 1642, was a man of ‘reclusive tendencies’ and showed little interest in either national or local politics. HP Commons 1509-58; HP Commons 1558-1604; ‘William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby’, Oxford DNB. In consequence, the selection of knights of the shire since Elizabethan times had devolved upon a ‘close circle of old gentry families’ and in particular upon the Molyneux of Sefton, the Hoghtons of Hoghton Tower and the Radcliffes of Ordsall. HP Commons 1604-29.

Broadly speaking, this pattern still prevailed in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, although there are strong signs that the earl of Derby’s son and fellow lord lieutenant of Lancashire, James Stanley†, Lord Strange, may have exerted some influence upon proceedings. The county elections, which were held at Lancaster on 23 March, saw the return of Sir Gilbert Hoghton and William Farington. The indenture listed only seven gentlemen, besides the sheriff, as parties to the election, and every one of these seven were future royalists, among them Roger Kirkbye*. Even more intriguingly, two were leading Lancashire Catholics – Charles Towneley and Thomas Tyldesley – while a third, Richard Shireburn, had a Catholic wife. Blackwood, Lancs. 11, 57, 64. As to the MPs themselves, Hoghton was one of the wealthiest gentlemen in the county and, through his father, had good connections at court. However, he owed at least some of his local prominence to his appointment by the Stanleys as one of their deputy lieutenants for Lancashire. Admittedly, Lord Strange had brought a law suit against Hoghton in the early 1630s over money matters, but it is clear from the case that the two families were close. Moreover, Hoghton’s subsequent conduct as a deputy lieutenant suggests that he remained loyal to Lord Strange even at the risk of damaging his own standing in the county. Infra, ‘Sir Gilbert Hoghton’; DL5/31, ff. 442-4; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 166-8. Farington, too, was a deputy lieutenant and, like his father and grandfather, was intimately associated with the Stanleys. Infra, ‘William Farington’; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 163. In addition, several of the gentlemen who signed the indenture – notably Kirkbye, Shireburn, Tyldesley and Alexander Rigby of Burgh – were also among Lord Strange’s friends and appointees in the county or belonged to families with longstanding ties to the Stanleys. Infra, ‘Roger Kirkbye’; Blackwood, Lancs. 18; Farington Pprs. ed. S.M. Farington (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxxix), 60; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 164.

If the Stanleys’ electoral interest did indeed enjoy something of a revival in the spring of 1640, it may well have suffered that summer and early autumn as a result of Lord Strange’s efforts to raise ‘many and great taxes’ upon Lancashire for the king’s doomed and controversial attempt to mobilise another army against his rebellious Scottish subjects. As late as 7 September, Lord Strange and several of his deputy lieutenants, including Hoghton and Farington, were attempting to impose a levy of £3,000 upon Lancashire for the king’s service. According to the future parliamentarian John Holcrofte*, Lord Strange and his ‘agents’ justified their proceedings ‘by virtue of his Majesty’s prerogative and a commission granted from his Majesty to tax and levy any and what sums of money he pleased and as often and upon whom he pleased, without giving an accompt to any how he disposed of the same’. PA, Main Pprs. 14 Sept. 1642 (depositions of Sir T. Stanley, J. Holcrofte); Lancs. RO, DDN/1/64, f. 176v; Coward, ‘Earls of Derby’, 131. Against a likely background of resentment in the county at Lord Strange’s levies, it is perhaps not surprising that in the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Hoghton and Farington either chose not to stand or were rejected by the voters and in their place were returned Roger Kirkbye and Raphe Assheton II, possibly in that order. The indenture, unfortunately, has not survived.

One of Holcrofte’s kinsmen and political collaborators later alleged that during the shire election to the Long Parliament, Lord Strange

came into Lancaster Castle on horseback ... where, by riding violently amongst the people, overthrowing some, hurting others, by reviling and threatening those that stood to be chosen against his liking, by procuring the sheriff to deny the poll when it was demanded, whereby the truth of the election might appear, and to make an undue return of such as were not legally chosen, the freedom of that election was clearly overthrown. PA, Main Pprs. 26 Feb. 1642, f. 97b; Coward, ‘Earls of Derby’, 131.

Yet if Lord Strange had indeed acted in this intimidatory manner and secured the return of men to ‘his liking’ then it is strange that Hoghton and Farington were not re-elected. In fact, Roger Kirkbye, for one, has very much the look of a compromise candidate, who was returned because he was acceptable to Lord Strange as well as to the majority of the voters. Although Kirkbye was not among Lancashire’s greatest landowners, his standing had not been undermined by involvement in Lord Strange’s tax-raising activities during the summer and early autumn. At the same time, as a captain of horse in the militia and the son of a former deputy lieutenant he was presumably regarded favourably by Lord Strange, who may have backed him as an acceptable alternative (for the voters) to the likes of Hoghton and Farington. Kirkbye’s strongly anti-Catholic views may also have recommended him to the county’s Protestant voters. Infra, ‘Roger Kirkbye’. Raphe Assheton, on the other hand, was a puritan and future parliamentarian, whose estate and connections tied him to the godly communities of the Manchester area rather than to Lord Strange and his circle. Infra, ‘Raphe Assheton II’. If Lord Strange did indeed use intimidation in the elections for knight of the shire it was apparently not very effective.

Kirkbye sided with Lord Strange and the king in the contest for Lancashire’s military resources during the summer of 1642 and was duly disabled from sitting as an MP that August. Assheton, by contrast, played an important part in defeating Lord Strange’s forces in 1643 and securing Lancashire, bar a few isolated royalist garrisons, for Parliament. Infra, ‘Raphe Assheton II’; ‘Roger Kirkbye’. On 30 December 1645, the House ordered that a writ be issued for holding an election to replace Kirkbye, and on 6 April 1646 the county returned Sir Gilbert Hoghton’s son Richard Hoghton. CJ iv. 392a. Again, seven gentlemen were parties to and signed the indenture, among them Thomas Birche*, Robert Cunliffe* and Richard Shuttleworthe I*. C219/43/2/11. Unlike his father, who had remained loyal to Lord Strange, Richard Hoghton had taken Parliament’s side in the war, consolidating his position as one of the county’s wealthiest gentlemen. Infra, ‘Richard Hoghton’. Assheton and Hoghton were either secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648 or withdrew from the House, leaving Lancashire without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Raphe Assheton II’; ‘Richard Hoghton’; Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 28; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 175.

Lancashire was assigned three seats in the Nominated Parliament of 1653, where it was represented by Robert Cunliffe, John Sawrey and William West. Cunliffe and Sawrey were both sequestrations commissioners for Lancashire and had served the Rump loyally. However, in terms of wealth and standing they were a far cry from the kind of men who had represented the county in the Short and Long Parliaments. Besides their diligence in serving the state, it is likely that their only recommendation in the eyes of the council of officers was their commitment to godly reformation. Cunliffe was a member of the gathered congregation of the ‘orthodox’ Independent divine Thomas Jollie, while Sawrey – although allegedly inimical to a learned and publicly-maintained ministry – was a keen defender of Lancashire’s church establishment against the Quakers. Infra, ‘Robert Cunliffe’; ‘John Sawrey’. William West was a more substantial figure. A provincial attorney, an officer in Lancashire’s regular and militia forces and a defender of Quaker evangelists, notably George Fox, he was probably well known to Oliver Cromwell* and his circle by the early 1650s. His writ to attend the Parliament was signed by Cromwell on 6 June 1653 – which is when the lord general signed the majority of such writs – and consequently West was not among those who were nominated at a later stage than the main body of Members, as one authority has speculated. Infra, ‘William West’; Lancs. RO, DP 522/4/1, unpag.; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 136, 139.

Lancashire was awarded four parliamentary seats under the Instrument of Government, and in the summer of 1654 the county returned Gilbert Irelande, William Ashhurst, Richard Holland and Richard Standish – probably in that order. Perfect List of the Members Returned (1654, 669 f.19.8). Irelande was one of Lancashire’s leading landowners, with an estate worth well in excess of £1,000 a year. He probably benefited, too, from his high profile in the region’s affairs since the mid-1640s and his support for a godly and ‘orthodox’ ministry – an attribute that probably earned him the approval of the county’s formidable Presbyterian interest (Lancashire was one of the very few counties where a classical system of Presbyterianism was in operation, though it seems to have run at something approaching full strength only in the old heartland of puritanism in and around Manchester). Infra, ‘Gilbert Irelande’; A. Craven, ‘Contrary to the Directorie’: Presbyterians and people in Lancs. 1646-53’, in Discipline and Diversity ed. K. Cooper, J. Gregory (Woodbridge, 2007), 331-41. Ashhurst had represented Newton in the Long Parliament and had been one of the county’s most active men at Westminster before Pride’s Purge, when he had withdrawn from the House. However, his popularity with the voters probably rested largely on his high-profile support for Presbyterianism both locally and nationally. In the event, he made no recorded impression upon the proceedings of this Parliament, and it is not certain that he ever took his seat. Infra, ‘William Ashhurst’. Holland and Standish had both served as officers in the Lancashire parliamentarian forces during the civil war, were men of substantial estates from well-established county families and were both accounted supporters of Presbyterianism. Infra, ‘Richard Holland’; ‘Richard Standish’.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament, Lancashire returned Sir Richard Hoghton (who had succeeded his father as second baronet in May 1646), Irelande, Holland and Standish on 3 September 1656. Again, the indenture seems to have been witnessed by seven or eight men, this time including West and Shuttleworthe. C219/45, unfol. There is no evidence that Major-general Tobias Bridge* exercised any significant influence upon the county’s choice of MPs. Nevertheless, none of the four men returned for Lancashire were among the 100 or so Members who were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the government. However, Hoghton received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no contribution to debate, and it seems very likely that he failed to take his seat – perhaps by way of protest at the government’s purging of the House. Infra, ‘Richard Hoghton’. Holland received only one committee appointment. Infra, ‘Richard Holland’. And Standish was among 29 MPs who voted against a motion on 22 September 1656 that the excluded Members apply to the council for ‘approbation’ to sit – which was interpreted as support for ‘the bringing in of the excluded Members into the House’ and was comprehensively defeated. Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166; CJ vii. 426b. Most of these 29 MPs have been accounted Presbyterians. M.J. Tibbetts, ‘Parliamentary Parties under Oliver Cromwell’ (Bryn Mawr Univ. PhD thesis, 1944), 127-9. Standish was named to only three, minor, committees in this Parliament and was apparently among those Presbyterian MPs who scrupled at the compromises over kingship and the protectoral church settlement that surrounded the introduction of the new protectoral constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice. Infra, ‘Richard Standish’. Of all the MPs who sat for Lancashire constituencies, Irelande was the only one who would later be listed among the ‘kinglings’ in the House. Infra, ‘Gilbert Irelande’; [G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 23 (E.935.5).

Lancashire reverted to its customary two seats in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, which saw the return of Sir George Boothe and Alexander Rigby II – quite possibly on 12 January, the same day that Lancaster held its election. Infra, ‘Lancaster’. Although Boothe’s main residence was in northern Cheshire, as the owner of a considerable estate in the Warrington area he enjoyed a strong proprietorial interest in southern Lancashire, and it is likely, too, that he attracted support from the strong Presbyterian constituency in that area. Infra, ‘Sir George Boothe’. Rigby was the son of one of Lancashire’s leading MPs in the Long Parliament and had inherited a sizeable estate in the Preston area. It may also have worked to his advantage that he was untainted by association with the revolutionary regimes that had followed Pride’s Purge. Infra, ‘Alexander Rigby II’.

Following the collapse of the protectorate in April 1659, Lancashire county was bereft of formal representation until the 1660 Convention, to which it sent Sir Robert Bindlos* and Roger Bradshaigh I. Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby later claimed that it was his interest that had secured Bradshaigh his seat – and indeed, in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, the earl’s brother was returned as senior knight of the shire. HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Lancashire’.