STANHOPE, John (1608-75), of Low Hall, Horsforth, Guiseley, Yorks.

The Yorkshire Stanhopes are thought to have descended from a cadet branch of the Nottinghamshire family from which the earls of Chesterfield were derived, although there is no firm evidence for this connection.36Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, 168; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 5. Having moved from Eccleshill to nearby Horsforth (a few miles north west of Leeds) in the late sixteenth century, the Stanhopes had quickly built up a sizeable estate in the area.37W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/11/66/56, 57, 60-1, 94; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 5-6. Stanhope himself acquired property in several local parishes through his first marriage, in 1627, which was to the only daughter of a local gentleman, Francis Rawdon, the father of George Rawdon*.38W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/11/100/2. Stanhope’s own father was an extremely active and influential man in local affairs.39Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 12-13, 15; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/11/5/3/1-4. During the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, his support was canvassed by at least one of the candidates for knight of the shire, Sir William Savile*, who was running against Henry Belasyse* and Sir Ferdinando Fairfax* (the successful candidates).40W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/11/5/3/4. For all their prominence in the Leeds area, however, the Stanhopes did not possess a coat of arms and were only accounted minor gentry. Indeed, for many years Stanhope’s father was referred to as a yeoman.41W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/11/66/94, 130. Stanhope would be the first of his line to serve as a magistrate or to enter Parliament.

Following the death of his first wife in May 1638, Stanhope left Yorkshire for Ireland, having been granted the office of steward to Edward 1st Viscount Conway’s manors at Killultagh and Derryvolgie in counties Down and Antrim.42W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/4/1; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 28. Stanhope owed this appointment to his brother-in-law George Rawdon, who was Viscount Conway’s private secretary and land agent.43Supra, ‘George Rawdon’. The prospect of settling permanently in Ireland evidently appealed to Stanhope, for by the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in October 1641 he had acquired an estate at Lisnagarvy in county Antrim and had re-married.44W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/6/1/8; SpSt/10/5/1-2; SpSt/6/1/8. However, the Irish Rebellion brought his new life in Ireland to a peremptory and disastrous conclusion. His lands in Lisnagarvy were among the first to be overrun by the rebels, and, on 30 October 1641, just days after the outbreak of the rebellion, he was writing to his father for help in returning to Yorkshire. His wife and their young daughter had both died of smallpox in Ireland, but he had managed to escape with his two daughters by his first marriage and his sister-in-law and her three children. He would not have taken £1,000 for his estate in Ireland, he informed his father, but all he and his family were now left with were the clothes on their backs. Had he remained in Lisnegarvy, apparently, the rebels would have shown no mercy, ‘because there was an old grudge betwixt some that is risen up and myself’.45W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/6/1/8; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 28-30. This ill-feeling towards him probably derived from his estate-building activities in the area. He later claimed that he had lost lands (including a lease from Viscount Conway worth £40 a year), houses, livestock, personal goods and rents in Ireland amounting to £577.46W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/10/5/1; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 30.

Stanhope, although certainly no royalist, was apparently less committed to the parliamentarian cause than were his father and brothers. In July 1643, the commander of the king’s army in the north, the earl of Newcastle, ordered the arrest of Stanhope’s father, his two younger brothers (Walter and Richard) and his brother-in-law for having ‘taken up arms and offices in the present rebellion’.47W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/10/3/5; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 17-19. But no mention was made of Stanhope himself. Both of Stanhope’s younger brothers were captains in the northern army under Sir Ferdinando (now 2nd Lord) Fairfax, who appointed one of them (Walter) governor of Cawood Castle in the spring of 1644.48SC6/CHAS1/1190, unfol.; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/12/1; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 19. Stanhope’s own contribution to the parliamentary cause was somewhat less impressive. At the beginning of 1644, Stanhope, his uncle Francis Allanson and his soon-to-be father-in-law Robert Mitchell were authorised by Sir Thomas Fairfax* to raise money in the Leeds area for the maintenance of the northern army.49E113/7, pt. 1; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/6/5/11. After three months, however, Stanhope refused to collect any more contributions (or so he claimed after the Restoration), ‘perceiving that the [parliamentarian] committees at York would have the estates of such as were the king’s friends sequestered without any mercy’.50E113/7, pt. 1. He had apparently overcome such scruples by June 1647, however, when he was named to the West Riding sub-committee of accounts, of which he was an active member.51SP28/267, f. 654; W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), SH:3/L/17; ‘A dyurnall...Adam Eyre’ ed. Morehouse, 96. His legal training at Gray’s Inn and his experience as steward to Viscount Conway brought him more remunerative employment during the interregnum as steward of the manorial courts of several major landowners in Yorkshire, including Sir William Savile’s eldest son Sir George Savile†(the future 1st marquess of Halifax) and the civil-war royalist heroine, Charlotte, countess of Derby.52W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/5/6/14/1; SpSt/11/1/3; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 34.

Appointed to the West Riding bench late in November 1648, Stanhope attended quarter sessions meetings regularly during 1649 as part of a circle of magistrates that included Henry Tempest*, Henry Arthington* and John Hewley* (Stanhope’s duties as a j.p. did not prevent him from making a brief trip to Ireland in 1649 – probably to see if there was anything salvageable from his Irish estate).53C231/6, p. 128; W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/2, pp. 247, 285-7, 299; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/10/3/12; Depositions from York Castle ed. J. Raine (Surt. Soc. xl), 31, 38; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 33; F. Barber, ‘On the book of rates for the W. Riding of the county of York’, YAJ i. 154-5; T. W. Hanson, ‘Halifax par. church library’, Trans. Halifax Antiquarian Soc. (1951), 41. He was also active under the Rump on local commissions for charitable uses, alongside Arthington, Tempest and Jeremiah Bentley*.54C93/21/29; W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, ff. 2, 4-6. But although he did not withdraw from local government after the regicide, as did many Presbyterians, he seems to have been on good terms with leading figures in the West Riding Presbyterian interest during the early 1650s. In January 1650, he joined Robert Todd – the Presbyterian minister of Leeds – Arthington and the civil-war royalist Sir George Wentworth II*, in purchasing the site for erecting a chapel-of-ease at Bramhope, just north of Horsforth.55W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/4/11/18/1. More significantly, perhaps, Stanhope was a trusted kinsman of the Leeds alderman Francis Allanson (whose daughter had married one of Stanhope’s younger brothers), who would emerge as one of the West Riding’s leading opponents of army rule and of the Yorkshire republican interest headed by Captain Adam Baynes* and his patron Major-general John Lambert*.56Supra, ‘Leeds’; ‘Adam Baynes’; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/5/8/23; Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 24; D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, EHR cviii. 868-94. Stanhope was also friendly with several members of Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax’s circle in the West Riding, which overlapped to some extent with that of Allanson and the ‘high-kirk gang’ at Leeds. In February 1652, Stanhope and Arthington (Fairfax’s brother-in-law) were appointed to arbitrate in a dispute between Henry Tempest and his stepfather Henry Fairfax (Fairfax’s uncle).57Infra, ‘Henry Tempest’; W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/7b/2, 5. And in May 1654, Stanhope, Arthington, Sir Thomas Widdrington* (another of Fairfax’s brothers-in-law) and Sir Henry Cholmley* were parties to a deed confirming Tempest’s title to his estate at Tong.58W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/248. Two years later, Tempest would assign a portion of his property to the same four men to hold in trust for his children.59W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/3/253.

In the weeks preceding the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, one of Baynes’s correspondents informed him that Allanson and two other prominent Leeds Presbyterians had been ‘tampering with Col. [George] Gill and Mr. Stanhope’ to stand against Baynes as the newly-enfranchised borough’s first MP.60Add. 21426, f. 97. However (he went on), ‘when they did consider the improbability of electing either of them before you, they would have matriculated one of their own brethren, Mr. Allanson, yet this they saw ... would not take ...’. In the event, Baynes was returned for the town. Yet although the 1654 elections had exposed Stanhope’s close association with the West Riding Presbyterians, the Leeds clothiers, who generally supported Baynes against Allanson and his allies, consulted Stanhope and Tempest that August on whether to petition Parliament for a corporate trading charter and were given ‘good encouragement to proceed’.61Supra, ‘Leeds’; Add. 21422, f. 388.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Stanhope was returned for the West Riding, apparently taking the fourth of the six places, behind Lambert, Francis Thorpe and Tempest.62Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Although a prominent West Riding landowner and magistrate, Stanhope may well have owed his election, in part at least, to his association with the hugely influential Lord Fairfax. But while Lambert and another of the successful candidates, Edward Gill, were allowed to take their seats, Stanhope, Arthington, Tempest and Thorpe were among the 100 or so MPs who were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the protectorate.63Supra, ‘Yorkshire’; CJ vii. 425b. Government suspicions that members of Fairfax’s circle had been approached by the cavaliers before the 1655 rebellions, or were themselves crypto-royalists, may have contributed to their exclusion.64Add. 21424, f. 65; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 362; C. S. Egloff, ‘The search for a Cromwellian settlement: exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, PH xvii. 315. But the main reason in the case of Stanhope, Arthington and Tempest was almost certainly their alignment with the Presbyterian and anti-army opponents of Lambert’s interest in the West Riding.

In October 1656, when the excluded West Riding Members arrived back in Yorkshire, Baynes was informed that ‘the return of these Members is not so much resented by the country as we expected, except by some very rigid ones, and the common body of people look upon them not with a good eye, as disobliging the present power’.65Add. 21424, f. 85v. This alleged ill-feeling towards the excluded Members was not shared by the Presbyterian alderman at Leeds, who looked to Stanhope, Tempest, Widdrington and another Presbyterian gentleman, Sir Edward Rodes* (among others), to foil efforts by Baynes and his adherents to remodel the town’s government – a design eventually defeated by Fairfax’s intervention at Whitehall.66Supra, ‘Leeds’; Add. 21424, ff. 132, 165. In January 1658, two prominent members of Leeds’s Presbyterian faction wrote to Stanhope, Arthington and Tempest, urging them to return to Westminster, where the balance of power had shifted away from the army and its supporters

It’s true, and cannot be denied, the last time you came up to serve your country, you met with discouragements. There is not any question but now you will find it contrary. Experience will tell you it every day in case you were at Westminster...the way not only to be accounted, but really to be a friend, is now to appear and take your places.67W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), Tong/2/14.

There is no evidence that the three men followed this advice. Despite his exclusion from Parliament in 1656, Stanhope continued to serve the protectorate at local level.68W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/3, pp. 7, 387.

Like Arthington and other members of the Fairfax circle, Stanhope retained his place on the bench and other local commissions after the Restoration.69W. Yorks. Archives (Wakefield), QS 10/4, ff. 4, 10, 29, 80, 163. He also took on more legal work, being appointed steward of the Leeds manor of Kirkgate cum Holbeck in 1666 and of the manor of Tong, by Henry Tempest’s heir, in 1668.70Owen, Four N. Country Fams. 34. ‘Infirm in body’ during his last years, Stanhope died on 8 June 1675 and was buried at Guiseley two days later.71W. Yorks. Archives (Bradford), SpSt/6/6/3/41; Par. Regs. of Guiseley ed. Preston, Rowe, 188. In his will, he left his estate to his three surviving children, whom he made his executors.72Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 51, f. 106. None of his immediate descendents sat in Parliament.