STANDISH, Thomas (c.1593-1642), of Duxbury Hall, Chorley, Lancs.

The Standishes of Duxbury were a cadet branch of a gentry family that had settled in Lancashire by the early thirteenth century, acquiring the manor of Duxbury, near Chorley, during the early 1400s.23Foster, Lancs. Peds.; J.P. Earwaker, Local Gleanings rel to Lancs. and Cheshire, ii. 40; VCH Lancs. vi. 208-9. Standish received a gentleman’s education at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn; and a year or so after inheriting the family estate in 1622 he was granted a pass to travel to the continent for three years.24APC 1623-5, p. 118. He was possibly the Mr Standish who served as an ensign in one of the English regiments in the Dutch army in 1624.25SP84/121, f. 277v. He had returned to England by 1625, and the following year he was elected for Liverpool to the second Caroline Parliament.26CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 162; HP Commons, 1604-29.

Although Standish had many recusant kinsfolk, he and his immediate family were evidently firm Protestants. However, there is apparently no solid basis for claims that they were also puritans.27Farington Pprs. ed. S.M. Farington (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxxix), 79; HP Commons, 1604-29; Halley, Lancs. 155; Blackwood, Lancs. 46. That Standish was not popular with some of his Catholic gentry neighbours is not, of itself, evidence that he was in any way hostile to or dissatisfied with the Church of England.28CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 161-2; 1629-31, p. 429. His relations with future Lancashire royalists – notably Sir Gilbert Hoghton* – seem to have been every bit as cordial as those with future parliamentarians.29Lancs. RO, DDX 1272/1; DP/502/1/10/2; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 290. Indeed, in 1639 the man who would emerge as the leader of the region’s royalists, James Stanley†, Lord Strange (the future 7th earl of Derby), included Standish among his ‘good friends’ in the county and requested that he join him in attending the king at York for possible military service against the Scottish Covenanters.30Farington Pprs. ed. Farington, 59, 60.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Standish was returned for Preston, taking the junior place. He probably owed his return to the strength of his standing as a Lancashire magistrate and his connections with other locally-influential gentry families. The bulk of his estate lay about ten miles south of Preston and is unlikely to have given him a strong proprietorial interest in the borough.31Supra, ‘Preston’. He received no appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. In the elections to the Long Parliament, he was returned for Preston again – and again took the junior place. Going on the number of committee appointments he received (none) and his recorded contributions to debate (also none), he cut a very insignificant figure at Westminster during the early 1640s. About the only time the House took notice of him during that period was on 9 July 1641, when he took the Protestation, and on 11 August, when he and Richard Shuckburgh were found to have resided at a lodging house on the Strand that was suspected of being infected with the plague.32CJ ii. 204a; Procs. LP vi. 352-3, 360. Shuckburgh was given leave to withdraw from the House, and Standish followed on 19 August ‘by reason his daughter [Ratcliff] died yesterday of the plague’.33Procs. LP vi. 360; CJ ii. 263b. Despite his poor showing as a Parliament-man he was apparently trusted by the House, for he and other leading Lancashire gentlemen – including the future royalists and Roger Kirkbye* – were nominated on 14 July to a commission for ecclesiastical causes (i.e. removing ‘scandalous’ ministers) for the county.34Procs. LP v. 642. However, there is no indication that this commission was ever approved by the Lords.

Standish’s only claim to fame as an MP is his possible authorship of a parliamentary diary covering the period March to April 1641 and December 1641 to March 1642.35Add. 64807. A Thomas Standish certainly owned the pocket book containing the diary and wrote his name in it several times.36Add. 64807, ff. 1, 10v, 15, 56v. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to establish whether this signature is that of the MP or a later relative. If Standish was the author of the diary he evidently attended the House regularly for months at a time and was an avid listener even if he said nothing himself. His summaries of debates are terse and do not reveal any political bias of his own – except perhaps on two occasions. He seems to have regarded the king’s insistence in January 1642 on receiving security for the arms sent from England to sustain the Protestant war effort in Ireland as a tactic ‘to delay us’.37Add. 64807, f. 25. And during a debate in February on candidates for the lord lieutenancy of Lancashire, he described the arguments of Alexander Rigby I (the godly MP for Wigan, and Standish’s commanding officer in the Lancashire trained bands) against the appointment of Lord Strange as ‘a good speech’.38Add. 64807, f. 46. These comments, and perhaps, too, the particular attention he seems to have paid to the House’s reception of petitions against episcopacy, suggest that he supported the agenda of the parliamentary leadership.

On 4 July 1642, the House nominated Standish and four men who would go on to become prominent parliamentarians – including Sir William Brereton* and Thomas Birche* – as deputy lieutenants for Lancashire.39CJ ii. 649a; LJ v. 178b. Similarly, having been removed from the Lancashire bench by the king that summer, the Commons ordered, in October, that he be restored to his place.40Lancs. RO, QSC/37-8; Wilkinson, ‘Commission of peace in Lancs.’, 43, 58; CJ ii. 821a; LJ v. 421a. Yet he was not among those MPs who pledged money or horses on the propositions for maintaining Parliament’s army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex; and, overall, there is nothing to suggest that he actively supported the parliamentarian war effort. Two of his sons – Alexander and Richard* – took up arms against the king.41Blackwood, Lancs. 95; J. M. Gratton, ‘The Parliamentarian and Royalist War Effort in Lancs. 1642-51’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 543, 555; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. On the other hand, his eldest son Thomas was a captain in the force that Lord Strange led against the parliamentarian defenders of Manchester in September 1642 and was killed in action.42Farington Pprs. ed. Farington, 79; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 46, 51, 55.

Standish survived his eldest son by only a few weeks and was buried at Chorley on 29 October 1642.43Chorley Par. Regs. ed. McKnight, Brierley, 100. In his will, he appointed Sir Gilbert Hoghton one of his overseers. His personal estate was inventoried at £454, and he was owed over £800 by his creditors.44Lancs. RO, WCW, will and inventory of T. Standish 1642. Standish’s younger son Richard represented Lancashire in the first and second protectoral Parliaments and sat for Preston in 1659 and 1660.45Supra, ‘Richard Standish’.