BINDLOS, Sir Robert, 1st bt. (1625-88), of Borwick Hall, Warton, Lancs.

Bindlos was descended from a family of clothiers based in and around Kendal, Westmorland, that had moved into north Lancashire late in Elizabeth’s reign and joined the ranks of the county’s armigerous gentry. Their principal residence was the manor and hall of Borwick in the parish of Warton, about six miles north of Lancaster, which they had acquired piecemeal between 1567 and 1590.32Nicolson, Burn, Westmld. and Cumb. i. 86-7; Whitaker, Richmondshire, ii. 311; VCH Lancs. viii, 171; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 170-1. Bindlos was baptised in May 1625 – as is evident from the Warton parish registers and his father’s inquisition post mortem – and not May 1624 as nearly every authority has maintained.33C142/455/37; Warton ed. Chippindall, 42. Being still a minor when first his father died (in 1629) and then his grandfather (in 1630), his wardship was granted to his mother, who re-married the future royalist Sir John Byron†.34WARD9/163, f. 22.

With his mother’s death in 1638, Bindlos became the ward of his step-father, Byron, who evidently regarded his teenage charge as too wilful for his own good. In September 1640, he asked Lord Newburgh (Sir Edward Barrett†), chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, to ensure that Bindlos remained at Cambridge university over the winter, ‘for till he have more discretion, I believe it best for him to be where he may be most kept in awe’.35CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 93. It was apparently Byron who arranged Bindlos’s marriage in about 1640 to the heiress of a wealthy London merchant and merchant, Hugh Perry (who had died in 1634).36CCAM i. 413; Beaven, Aldermen of London, ii. 62; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 297. And it was certainly Byron who procured Charles’s grant of a baronetcy to Bindlos (with a waiver of the £1,095 creation fee) in August 1641, in what was evidently an effort to bind him more firmly to the king’s cause.37SO3/12, f. 166v; CB.

Despite his baronetcy and his appointment to the Lancashire commission of array in June 1642, Bindlos made no known contribution to the royalist war effort.38Farington Pprs. ed. Farington, 76. He seems to have spent at least some of his time during the civil war at the residence of the passive royalist Lord Newburgh, presumably on his estate at Aveley in Kent.39CCAM i. 413; ‘Edward Barrett, Lord Barrett of Newburgh’, Oxford DNB. Byron’s support for the king prompted Parliament to sequester Bindlos’s estate in 1643, and in July 1644, the court of wards, under its master, the parliamentarian grandee viscount Saye and Sele, granted Bindlos’s wardship to Lord Fitzwilliam (William Fitzwilliam*) and Raphe Assheton I*.40E126/6, ff. 247v-248; SP20/10 (petition of Bindlos to Cttee. for Sequestration); WARD9/294, unfol. Assheton was one of Lancashire’s leading parliamentarians, and it was perhaps on his recommendation that Bindlos was appointed to the county’s Northern Association commission in June 1645.

In the ‘recruiter’ election at Lancaster in January 1646, Bindlos was returned in first place, with the junior seat going to Thomas Fell.41Supra, ‘Lancaster’. Like his father, who had represented Lancaster in the 1628 Parliament, Bindlos presumably owed his return primarily to his proprietorial interest as one of the area’s leading landowners, with an estate that included the impropriate rectory of Lancaster church (reckoned in 1644 to be worth £700 a year) and most of the tithes in the parish.42SP19/95, f. 267; Lancs. and Cheshire Church Surveys ed. Fishwick, 125. In fact, Bindlos was one the county’s wealthiest gentlemen, with an extensive estate in Lancashire and west Yorkshire that brought him over £3,000 a year and the soubriquet ‘rich Sir Robert of the north’.43CCAM i. 413; Blackwood, ‘Lancs. gentry’, 57-8; John Lucas’s History of Warton ed. J.R. Ford, J.A. Fuller-Maitland (Kendal, 1931), 114.

Bindlos took the Covenant on 25 March 1646 and three days later, on 28 March, was granted leave of absence. He would receive more orders and resolutions granting him leave (four) than he did committee appointments (three) and clearly spent most of the period between his election and Pride’s Purge away from the House.44CJ iv. 489a, 493b, 574b, 579a; v. 15a, 52a, 150a, 228a; vi. Declared absent at the call of the House on 26 September 1648, he was among 16 or so MPs who were not excused, on the grounds that the Commons suspected they were ‘doing ill services’ in the north. But having satisfied the House as to the reasons for his absence, his £20 fine was remitted.45Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms CXIV, f. 88; CJ vi. 34a, 57b.

Several authorities have included Bindlos among those MPs who were secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648. His name was in a listing of secluded Members dated 26 December, but not in another of January 1649.46Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 368; Gratton, Lancs. 125; A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); [W. Prynne], A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), irreg. pag. (E.539.5). He figured in a list of those secluded or ‘refusing to sit’ that Prynne published in 1660.47Prynne, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660), 57 (E.1013.22). The fact that the Commons passed an order on 14 December, granting him leave ‘for six months to go into France for recovery of his health and that he have leave to transport two horses, custom and impost free’, strongly suggests that he should be numbered among those who declined to sit in the Rump rather than among those who had been barred from doing so.48CJ vi. 97a.

Omitted from the Lancashire bench in April 1650, Bindlos played no part in local government until he was pricked as sheriff in 1657. His political sympathies during the 1650s seem to have run in a decidedly royalist-Prayer Book direction. Indeed, it was claimed that Charles II stayed at Borwick Hall during the 1651 Worcester campaign – although if that were true, it does not seem to have come to the attention of the commonwealth authorities.49John Lucas’s Hist. of Warton ed. Ford, Fuller-Maitland, 123. In 1652, Bindlos engaged the ejected divine Richard Sherlock as his chaplain, who held services in the chapel at Borwick based upon the Book of Common Prayer. Bindlos’s ‘uncommon concern for the interest of the suffering Church [of England]’ was partly by way of atonement – or so it was said – for his excessive love of company and ‘promiscuous hospitality’.50R. Sherlock, The Practical Christian (1713), iv-v; Whitaker, Richmondshire, ii. 312-13; ‘Richard Sherlock’, Oxford DNB. His ‘excessive’ entertaining may also explain his decision to sell part of his estate in Yorkshire and to borrow £1,500 by statute staple during the late 1640s and early 1650s. His creditors included the eminent lawyer Sir John Bramston and the prominent royalist Sir Orlando Bridgeman*.51LC4/202, f. 351v; LC4/203, ff. 106, 107; Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/MD335/2/1/1/2/2-5.

Returned for Lancashire in the elections to the 1660 Convention, he was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, somewhat optimistically, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.52G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 337. Again, Bindlos made very little impression as a Parliament-man.53HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Robert Bindloss’. He undoubtedly welcomed the Restoration and signed several loyal addresses to the king from the Lancashire and Cheshire gentry.54SP29/1/34, f. 65; SP29/1/35, f. 68. His loyalty to king and church was rewarded with appointment as a gentleman of the privy chamber.55Carlisle, Privy Chamber, 164. Having been restored to the Lancashire bench in March 1660, he was commissioned as a deputy lieutenant for the county that summer and was active in suppressing ‘dangerous fanatics’ and particularly the Quakers.56Manchester Central Lib. L1/48/6/1; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 585; 1663-4, p. 431; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 415; ii. 105.

When the lord lieutenant of Lancashire sounded Bindlos out in 1687 about the king’s intentions in a future Parliament to repeal of the Test Act and Penal Laws, he ‘writ a very loyal and gentle letter to my lord, most freely consenting’.57HMC Le Fleming, 205. Nevertheless, it was reported that Bindlos lamented the fact that ‘the king’s pleasure and the laws should differ’. Removed from the Lancashire bench in April 1688, he was restored again that October as James II tried to win back support in advance of a Dutch invasion.58Lancs. RO, QSC/99-101; HMC Le Fleming, 206.

Bindlos died in the autumn of 1688 and was buried at Warton on 15 November.59Warton ed. Chippindall, 307. No will is recorded. He died without sons and his estate passed to his daughter, who had married a leading Lancashire Catholic.60HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Robert Bindloss’; Eng. Catholic Nonjurors ed. E. E. Estcourt, J. O. Payne (Farnborough, 1969), 143. Bindlos was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.