BRADSHAIGH, Sir Roger, 3rd Bt. (c.1675-1747), of Haigh Hall, nr. Wigan, Lancs.

Bradshaigh, whose grandfather and father had represented Wigan, was returned for the borough in fourteen successive Parliaments. He had at Haigh an estate ‘reckoned one of the best situations in the north of England’, with ‘one of the finest works of coal called cannell in England, which is so much admired for its heat and brightness’.1Add. 24120 ff. 138-41. But, probably owing to the expense of keeping up an interest in Wigan, he became so impoverished that he avoided being seized for debt on the adjournment of Parliament in June 1711 only through a loan from Harley, whose Administration he supported.2HMC Portland, v. 18, see also pp. 151, 381, 387, 480. On the accession of George I he went over to the Whigs, voting with the Government in every recorded division except that on the repeal of the Conformity and Schism Acts in 1719, when he was absent. He was rewarded with army commissions and minor court places for his younger sons. Yet he shared the electoral management of Wigan with Lord Barrymore, a Jacobite, from whom he repeatedly borrowed money.3M. Cox, ’Sir Roger Bradshaigh and the electoral management of Wigan’, Bulletin of John Rylands Lib. xxxvii. 123-4, 145, and Bradshaigh to Walpole 2 Mar. 1737, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss. The alliance was uneasy at first; in 1722 he did not consent to stand jointly with Barrymore until shortly before the election; and in 1725, when Lord Malpas, Walpole’s son-in-law, was trying to establish an interest in Wigan, Barrymore accused Bradshaigh of being ‘so much Sir Robert’s humble servant that, if he had desired, you should resign next election to Lord Malpas’.412 Dec. 1725, Rylands, Crawford mss. Subsequently the partnership ran more smoothly, Barrymore apparently bearing most of the expense of nursing the constituency. In 1742 he gave up Haigh to his eldest son, thereafter seldom visiting Wigan. There was doubt as to whether he would be returned in 1747,5Geo. Winstanley to Bradshaigh, 3 Aug. 1746, Rylands, Crawford mss. but before the election came on he died, 25 Feb., leaving debts amounting to £8,000.