BRIDGEMAN, Orlando (1609-74), of Great Lever, Middleton, Lancs.

Bridgeman belonged to a family of west country extraction and may have been a descendant of John Bridgeman, MP for Exeter in the Parliament of 1523.77HP Commons 1509-58. Bridgeman’s great-grandfather had served as sheriff of Exeter in 1563.78Foster, Lancs. Peds. He himself was born in Exeter, the second but first surviving son of John Bridgeman, a rising star in the Jacobean clerical establishment, who was appointed to the richly-endowed rectory of Wigan in 1616 and consecrated bishop of Chester in 1619.79‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 1-2; ‘John Bridgeman’, Oxford DNB. As rector of Wigan, Bridgeman claimed the right to nominate one of the town’s MPs and succeeded in securing the return of his brother Edward (Orlando’s uncle) for the borough to the 1626 and 1628 Parliaments.80R.C.L. Sgroi, ‘The electoral patronage of the duchy of Lancaster, 1604-28’, PH xxvi. 321, 324, 325. Bishop Bridgeman consolidated his links with Lancashire by his purchase in 1629 of a major estate in and around Great Lever, near Bolton, which became the family’s principal residence.81VCH Lancs. v. 184; ‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 26; Quintrell, ‘Lancs. ills’, 69.

The young Orlando was schooled from an early age in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and his progress was such that he was admitted to Queens’ College Cambridge in 1619, when he was only ten, although he does not appear to have commenced his university education until January 1622. Shortly thereafter he transferred to his father’s old college of Magdalene, where he was awarded an MA in 1624 and elected a fellow at the age of just 15.82Al. Cant.; Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 282, 455. Bishop Bridgeman would not allow him to accept the fellowship, however, insisting that such places should be reserved for scholars of humbler means.83Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 282. Instead, Orlando was put to a career in the law, and having been admitted to the Inner Temple in 1624, he was called to the bar there in 1633 (not 1632 as is generally stated).84CITR ii. 204. His father’s influential position and his own evident skill as a lawyer and man-of-business – which won him the ‘good estimation’ of Archbishop William Laud and the lord keeper (Thomas Coventry†) – secured him several lucrative offices during the late 1630s, notably those of vice-chamberlain of the county palatine of Chester and Laud’s steward.85Staffs. RO, D1287/P/1010 (18/2); Works of Laud, iv. 148; Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 381, 398; ‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 2; Quintrell, ‘Lancs. ills’, 91, 95.

With the summoning of the Short Parliament late in 1639, Bridgeman put his name forward for one of the seats at Chester, where as vice-chamberlain of the county palatine and son of the bishop of Chester he was a figure of some importance. Chester corporation preferred to nominate leading office-holders, however, and therefore Bridgeman fell back upon his father’s interest at Wigan to secure himself a seat.86Supra, ‘Chester’; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 341. On 17 March 1640, he was returned for Wigan after outstripping five other candidates on a poll of the freemen. He was accorded the senior place on the election indenture, with the junior place going to Alexander Rigby I.87C219/42/2/139; Sinclair, Wigan, i. 214-15.

Bridgeman was an active member of the Short Parliament, receiving appointment to six committees, including two relating to the Commons’ investigation of Convocation and two for preventing ‘innovation in matter of religion and concerning the property of our goods and liberties and privileges of Parliament – the better to prepare us to give an answer to his Majesty touching supply’.88CJ ii. 4b, 8a, 9b, 10a, 12a, 18b. The majority of his contributions to debate involved the clarification of legal questions surrounding the office of county sheriff, the administration of wills (he was apparently involved in drafting a bill on this issue), the holding of parliamentary elections and the jurisdiction of the church courts.89Aston’s Diary, 18, 33, 111, 119, 136, 149, 151; CJ ii. 17b. He strayed into more openly political territory only, it seems, on 2 May, when he professed to have no liking for ship money, but argued that to defer granting supply until the Commons’ ‘three points’ – ‘concerning propriety of goods, the liberties of Parliament and innovations in religion’ – ‘were discussed and relieved were to put off his Majesty [receiving supply] this quarter of a year’. The granting of supply should go ‘hand in hand’ with the redress of grievances, he insisted, and the fact that the king required the money to prosecute his war against the Scottish Covenanters should have no bearing upon the Commons’ deliberations.90Aston’s Diary, 123-4; Procs. Short Parl. 191. All in all, it was not a speech calculated to endear him to the king’s leading critics in the House. Conversely, the crown had reason to be grateful to him; and his appointment in May 1640 as solicitor-general to the prince of Wales may have been partly by way of reward for his loyal utterances in the Short Parliament.91‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 2.

In the autumn of 1640, Bridgeman was re-elected for Wigan, but on this occasion he polled ten votes fewer than Rigby.92Sinclair, Wigan, ii. 3. Evidently, Bishop Bridgeman’s interest as rector and ex officio lord of the manor of Wigan was still strong in the borough. But it had not proved impervious to his association with Archbishop Laud and the court, nor to Rigby’s credentials as a godly critic of royal policy. Once again, Bridgeman was a vocal member of the House, and once again he generally found himself either at odds or cross-purposes with the king’s more determined opponents. As might be expected of the son of a Caroline bishop, he was not entirely enthusiastic about the Commons’ assault on what it perceived as the usurped authority of the Laudian episcopate. At the same time, he may have shared at least some of the Erastian sympathies of many of his fellow common lawyers. On 9 December 1640, in a debate on the new Canons, he conceded that they were in many ways ‘against law’, yet he was careful to add that ‘the oath of supremacy binds us to maintain the ecclesiastical jurisdiction united to the crown’.93Procs. LP i. 536-7, 541, 544-5; vii 195; Northcote Note Bk. 47-8. In the opinion of Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, he spoke so ‘dubiously’ to the question, ‘sometimes for them [the Canons] and sometimes against them, as it was difficult to conclude anything from what he said’.94Procs. LP i. 526.

Bridgeman came off the fence on 21 December 1640, however, over the question of what punishment to mete out to John Finch†, the lord keeper of the great seal, for supposedly having subverted the fundamental laws of the kingdom. Despite delivering what was by all accounts an eloquent speech in his own defence, Finch was deemed by his enemies in the Commons to have ‘rather aggravated than mitigated his crimes ... And therefore most concluded him guilty and wished we might go on to vote him culpable’. However, in the subsequent debate on the issue, Bridgeman diverged from the majority of speakers by moving that the House should not vote Finch guilty of high treason.95Procs. LP ii. 5-6; Northcote Note Bk. 96. He cut a much less isolated figure in the marathon debate on 8 February 1641 on the London root and branch petition (presented to the House the previous December) for the abolition of episcopacy. The debate turned on whether the petition should be referred to a committee or effectively laid aside altogether. Not surprisingly, Bridgeman joined those Members – mostly, but by no means exclusively, future royalists – who urged that the petition should not be committed.96Procs. LP ii. 391-2.

The causes that most exercised Bridgeman as an MP were not those concerned with tackling the perceived abuses of the personal rule of Charles I, but rather the defence of episcopacy and the retention of the royal supremacy in the king’s hands, rather than vesting it in king-in-Parliament. Of the 20 or so committees to which he was named in the Long Parliament, less than half a dozen related to church reform or punishing ‘evil counsellors’.97CJ ii. 79b, 99a, 136b, 253b. When the vexed question of the new Canons re-surfaced in the Commons on 2 March, he spoke firmly against calls for punishing the clerics responsible for their introduction. All ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he argued, ‘is annexed to the crown and derived from it. That the late synod [Convocation] proceeded by the king’s commission’, and therefore its proceedings were entirely lawful.98Procs. LP ii. 598-9, 600-1, 604-6. On 8 March, he was named to a committee on a bill for disabling the clergy from exercising temporal or lay office, and when this piece of legislation was debated two days later (10 Mar.), he was in typically good voice on the bishops’ behalf.99CJ ii. 99a. He cannily attempted to set the tone of the debate by moving that the respected Calvinist divine Dr Ralph Brownrigg – a friend and ally of John Pym* no less – be allowed to offer some prefatory remarks on the issue. But John Selden and other MPs argued successfully that when it came to discussing the clergy’s secular employments, the House ‘needed no dispute of divines’.100Procs. LP ii. 694, 698-9; ‘Ralph Brownrigg’, Oxford DNB. Inevitably, the debate turned on the bishops’ role in Parliament – and specifically, whether they should retain their votes or indeed their seats in the Lords – and here Bridgeman joined Sir John Culpeper, Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir Edward Hyde and others in defence of the status quo. The opposing line, that ‘if the bishops were fit for their callings, they were unfit for that place [in the Lords]; and if fit for that place, unfit for their callings’, was championed by Lucius Cary*, 2nd Viscount Falkland, and George Digby, in what was clearly a controversy that cut across future divisions between royalists and parliamentarians.101Add. 4180, f. 171v; Procs. LP ii. 696-9; Clarendon, Hist. i. 310-12.

Bridgeman’s loyalist sympathies were revealed no less clearly in his stance towards Charles’s most feared and hated minister, the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†). Strafford had been a court ally of Bishop Bridgeman during the 1630s – which doubtless contributed to Orlando’s distinct lack of enthusiasm for helping the Long Parliament bring him to trial.102Quintrell, ‘Lancs. ills’, 72, 82, 86, 87-8. In fact, he was named to only one committee relating to the earl’s prosecution, and that concerned the proceedings of Sir Thomas Danbie* rather than the earl directly.103CJ ii. 79b. On 27 February 1641, he apparently suggested that Strafford was not guilty of high treason; and at a meeting of the committee for bringing in a bill of attainder against the earl, on 14 April, he insisted that ‘one kind of proof [is] sufficient to prove a crime and another to prove a treason’, and that he was not convinced that Strafford had subverted the ‘fundamental law’.104Procs. LP ii. 578; iv. 9; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 39. He returned to this theme five days later (19 Apr.), when he ‘spoke long’ – though, according to D’Ewes, ‘to little purpose’ – to the effect that the earl was innocent under existing treason laws.105Procs. LP iv. 9, 14; Verney, Notes, 56-7. He made the same point again on 20 April.106Procs. LP iv. 29. Given his obstinate refusal to treat Strafford’s proceedings in Ireland or elsewhere as treasonous, it is no surprise that he was among those MPs who voted against the earl’s attainder on 21 April.107Procs. LP iv. 42, 51.

Bridgeman’s reluctance to brand the king’s friends guilty of treason would also stretch to include the army plotters – the group of courtiers and future royalists who hatched several conspiracies in the spring of 1641 to force Strafford’s release.108Procs. LP vi. 380, 385. There was a strongly anti-Straffordian bias to the Protestation that the House introduced on 3 May in an attempt to provide the moral authority for resistance should Charles or his supporters resort to such desperate measures in order to save the earl.109Adamson, Noble Revolt, 289-90. Like the vast majority of MPs, Bridgeman took the Protestation, but when concerned Londoners petitioned the House the next day (4 May), asking that it be tendered to everyone in the kingdom, he questioned whether such a course would be lawful.110CJ ii. 133a; Procs. LP iv. 196. The majority of Members thought otherwise, however – a situation which by that point Bridgeman must have found depressingly familiar. He was a lone, or minority, voice again on 1 July, when he did his duty as the prince of Wales’s solicitor by trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent the passage of legislation for reforming the Stannaries court, which formed part of the prince’s estate.111Procs. LP v. 440, 443.

Despite Bridgeman’s ties to the court and the episcopate, his legal opinion was apparently valued by the House, for on 9 August 1641, he and several other lawyers were named to a committee and a conference management team for scrutinising the terms of the soon-to-be-passed Anglo-Scottish treaty.112CJ ii. 247b, 248a. It is hard to imagine he welcomed those aspects of the treaty that represented an encroachment upon the king’s personal authority. Nor did he support proposals for the appointment – in the king’s imminent absence in Scotland – of a custos regni with power to pass such legislation as Parliament saw fit. Instead, Bridgeman argued that any custos should be no more than a royal commissioner, with limited authority and able to pass only those bills that the king had specified in advance – which again was not what the parliamentary leadership (known as the ‘junto’) wanted to hear.113 Procs. LP vi. 250, 438, 441; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 365.

Yet Bridgeman’s legal expertise was such that the grandees were apparently prepared to overlook his tendency to stray off-message. On 16 August 1641, he was added to a committee for drawing up instructions for a high-powered parliamentary delegation to attend the king in Edinburgh.114CJ ii. 262a, 264b, 285b. Early in September, the task of transmitting legal cases relating to Ireland from Westminster to the Irish Parliament was entrusted to the legal trio of Pym, John Wylde and Bridgeman.115CJ ii. 279b, 286a. His appointment on 9 September to the Recess Committee* was further evidence of the respect in which he was held in the House.116CJ ii. 288b. Nevertheless, his appointment to this powerful body did not secure his compliance with its proceedings. On 21 October, nine days after the Commons had reconvened, he joined Sir Edward Dering in questioning the validity of the Commons’ order of 8 September against ‘superstitious innovations’ in religion, which the Recess Committee had tried to implement. Doubtless because the order lacked the assent of either the Lords or the king, Bridgeman opined that no one was obliged to enforce it or could be punished for that neglect. This was too much for D’Ewes, who angrily retorted that ‘the gentleman who spake against this order [meaning Bridgeman] being skilled in the law ... should have done well to have informed us so much when the order was in making, he being then ... in the House’.117D’Ewes (C), 19, 20.

Bridgeman and the junto were temporarily united in membership of the standing committee of both Houses that was set up on 2 November 1641 in response to news of the outbreak of the Irish rebellion.118CJ ii. 302a. But he reverted quickly to his defiance of the parliamentary leadership by speaking against its attempt to include a clause in additional instructions for Parliament’s commissioners in Scotland that unless the king removed his evil councillors the two Houses would ‘take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure our selves’.119D’Ewes (C), 99, 101, 104-5; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 423-4. Likewise, on 22 November, he joined Culpeper, Hyde, Falkland and ‘divers others’ in arguing that the Grand Remonstrance should not pass the House. Like many other opponents of the Remonstrance, he objected to proposals to have it published unilaterally by the Commons and in a manner that could be construed as addressing the people: ‘That we cannot, nor was it ever a precedent, for us to remonstrate to the subjects and not to the king ... That what is agitated in the House ought not to be published but by consent of both Houses’. In terms of the Remonstrance’s substance, he disliked the fact that it ‘touchest upon one of the choice jewels of the king’s crown – his counsels [i.e. his choice of councillors] to be approved by Parliament’.120D’Ewes (C), 185. A practiced opponent of the junto by this stage, he voted against a resolution on 16 December that the king had broken the Commons’ privileges by raising objections to a bill for pressing soldiers for service in Ireland and which was still ‘in agitation in both Houses and not agreed upon’. The king feared that troops raised by Parliament for the war in Ireland might well be used against him. It was perhaps to extract a compromising statement to this effect from the king’s supporters that Pym moved that those Members who had voted against this resolution should explain themselves, which Bridgeman and Edmund Waller were willing to do, but it was agreed that ‘no reason should be given of any man’s vote, which ought to be free’.121D’Ewes (C), 297-8.

Bridgeman’s expertise on the legal issues surrounding the royal supremacy probably explains why he was one of only a handful of future royalists included on a committee set up on 13 November 1641 to consider the plea of the 13 bishops accused of promoting the Laudian new Canons – which plea the Commons thought ‘dilatory and insufficient’.122CJ ii. 314b. Similarly, on 31 December, he was one of only two future royalists nominated to a committee for impeaching the 12 bishops who had imprudently petitioned the Lords the day before, complaining that Parliament was under duress from the threat of mob violence.123CJ ii. 364b. Although his father was not among the proscribed bishops, Bridgeman can hardly have approved of measures that would leave the junto with a voting majority in the Lords. Perhaps these appointments were the junto’s way of causing him political embarrassment while lending at least a veneer of bi-partisan respectability to its proceedings.

During the House’s brief residence in the Guildhall following the attempted arrest of the Five Members, Bridgeman was named to a high-powered committee – or sub-committee, since the Commons had adjourned to the Guildhall as a committee of the Whole House – set up on 8 January 1642 to vindicate the privileges of Parliament, liaise with the Common Council and make provision for the safety of the kingdom.124CJ iv. 458b. He was briefly at the centre of controversy himself on 11 January, when an intercepted letter, purportedly written to him on 4 January, was read in the House. ‘Sir’, the letter ran

We are your friends. These are to advise you to look to yourself and to advise others of my Lord of Strafford’s friends to take heed, lest they be involved in the common calamity. Our advice is to be gone, to pretend business, till the great hubbub be passed. Withdraw, lest you suffer among the puritans.125CJ ii. 369b; LJ iv. 504b.

Bridgeman had handed the letter in to the Commons, ‘wherein he did like an honest and good commonwealthsman and patriot’ – rare words of praise from D’Ewes. The letter was accounted ‘a mere paltry libel’ by Waller, while D’Ewes thought it the work of a papist with ‘blood on his tongue and malice in his pen’.126PJ i. 32-4; Clarendon, Hist. i. 513.

Support from godly MPs like D’Ewes, who were usually more critical of him, did not weaken Bridgeman’s resolve to take the king’s part against the junto or ‘the puritans’. When the House received reports on 14 January 1642 that armed horsemen were flocking to join the king at Windsor, Bridgeman countered that having been to Windsor that very day he had ‘never seen so small a court and he likewise saw no such number of horses’.127PJ i. 71, 75. Again, on 19 January, he spoke against a motion by William Strode I, a man with close links to the junto, to remove six recently-created peers from the Lords for having taken their seats without parliamentary consent.128PJ i. 108. The next day (20 Jan.), after objecting to the House giving thanks to petitioners from Colchester who had included the Book of Common Prayer among their grievances, he was named to a committee for drafting the House’s thanks to the king for a conciliatory letter to Parliament.129Add. 64807, f. 32v; PJ i. 123-4, 125; CJ ii. 388a. On 24 January, he took a breather from fighting the king’s corner at Westminster to draw the House’s attention to the ‘divers’ companies of unpaid troops that it was feared would start plundering the Chester area if they were not speedily shipped over to Ireland. As a result, he and several other Members were appointed to attend the 2nd earl of Leicester (Sir Robert Sidney†), the lord lieutenant of Ireland, to find out why the troops had not been paid and dispatched; and it was Bridgeman who reported the earl’s response later that same day.130PJ i. 144, 146, 151-2, 154; CJ ii. 391a, b. By 27 January, however, he had resumed his more familiar role as an apologist for the nascent king’s party, making excuses for an attempt by Charles’s Bedchamber man, James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, to secure an adjournment of the Lords for six months and thereby effectively put a stop to all parliamentary business.131Add. 64807, f. 37; PJ i. 195, 201. Similarly, on 2 February, he spoke against excluding Sir Edward Dering from the House for having publicly criticised the partisanship and lack of moderation of many of his fellow MPs.132PJ i. 265.

As the junto tightened its grip on the two Houses during the spring of 1642, Bridgeman very prudently pulled in his horns. He now spoke very little, if at all, on the floor of the House and received only five committee appointments between mid-February and mid-May, some of which suggest that he was trying to keep on the right side of the parliamentary leadership. Thus he was named to committees for clearing and vindicating the Five Members (16 Feb.), for prosecuting the war in Ireland (10 Mar.) and for managing the evidence at the trial of the ship-money judge Sir Robert Berkeley (13 May).133CJ ii. 436a, 470a, 474a, 571a, 572b. It is unlikely that he contributed significantly to the work of any of these committees. Indeed, on 16 March, he was granted leave of absence to attend his duties as vice-chamberlain of the county palatine of Chester, and he does not appear to returned to Westminster until mid-May.134CJ ii. 479b; PJ ii. 45. His last appointment in the Commons was to a committee set up on 16 May to provide ammunition for Parliament in its ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king.135CJ ii. 572b. Exactly a month later (16 June), he was declared absent without leave at the call of the House, by which time he was either in or on his way to Cheshire, there to lend his support to the emerging king’s party in the north-west.136CJ ii. 626.

In the late summer, Bridgeman wrote to his tenants in Lancashire, urging them to rally to the king’s standard at Nottingham, while he himself raised 14 men to serve under the royalist commander in the north-west, James Stanley†, Lord Strange (soon to become the 7th earl of Derby).137Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J. H. Stanning (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxxvi), 223. For this, and for urging the people of Chester to support the king’s cause, Bridgeman was disabled from sitting by the Commons on 29 August.138CJ ii. 742b. At some point in the autumn of 1642, Lord Strange, Bridgeman and their allies among the Cheshire royalist elite took control of Chester, assisted by Francis Gamul*, Robert Brerewood* and others of the city’s ‘malignant party’. Bridgeman reportedly assumed the role of the town’s governor, on Lord Strange’s authority, but there is no evidence that he was ever commissioned as such.139Add. 21506, f. 80; Add. 36913, f. 123v; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 469-70; Cheshire Civil War Tracts, 90; ‘The Ottley pprs. rel. to the civil war’ ed. W. Phillips, Trans. Shropshire Arch. Nat. Hist. Soc. ser. 2, vi. 49, 59, 60-2, 64-5, 72; ser. 2, vii. 288-9, 291-2, 293-4. According to Sir Thomas Aston* and his friends, Lord Strange’s and Bridgeman’s obsession with holding Chester, and their policy of trying ‘to fetch in the adverse party by treaty’ – which saw Bridgeman involved in negotiating a treaty of pacification with leading Cheshire neutralists and (in some cases) future parliamentarians late in 1642 – undermined the royalist war effort in the county.

After Aston’s defeat by Sir William Brereton* in 1643, Bridgeman’s royalist enemies drafted numerous articles against him in which they accused him (among other things) of military and financial mismanagement, of lacking ‘solidity of judgement or design’ and, perhaps most damningly of all, of being a stranger to the county.140Add. 36913, ff. 122-125v; Cheshire Civil War Tracts, 75-88; Morrill, Cheshire, 66-7, 132; ‘Sir Thomas Aston’, Oxford DNB. These charges were never presented, however, or if they were, they failed to do any damage. Bridgeman simply had many too many friends among the royalist elite, notably James Butler, 1st marquess of Ormond (the king’s commander in Ireland), William Seymour, 1st marquess of Hertford, and Charles’s Bedchamber confidante John Ashburnham*. Ormond believed that Bridgeman was trusted by the king and a useful contact in the tricky business of shipping troops from Ireland to serve in the royalist forces in the north west.141Bodl. Carte 8, ff. 212, 319; T. Carte, Life of Ormonde (Oxford, 1851), iii. 180-1, 182, 198, 211-13, 232-3; Nicholas Pprs. i. 317; Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 352; R. Hutton, Royalist War Effort (1982), 124. But there is little to suggest that Bridgeman was a figure of any great influence at court. His roles were those of a dedicated regional administrator and, at Oxford, a skilled legal adviser and bureaucrat. According to Archbishop John Williams, Bridgeman was effectively master of the court of wards at Oxford by late 1643 (he had been appointed attorney of the court in November), ‘the lord treasurer [Francis Lord Cottington] only bearing the name’.142Bodl. Carte 8, f. 135; Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 369-70.

Bridgeman attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644, signing its letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, on 27 January, requesting that he arrange a peace treaty.143Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. In the parliamentary debates at Oxford he joined his fellow common lawyers Sir Robert Holborne and Sir Geoffrey Palmer in refuting the argument advanced by Culpeper and Falkland in the Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642) that the monarchy was one of the three parliamentary estates.144F. Philipps, The Established Government of England, Vindicated (1687), p. 666. Bridgeman seems to have remained at Oxford from early 1644, and in January the following year he was appointed one of the king’s commissioners at the Uxbridge treaty, in which he and other crown lawyers made a strong case that, by law, the militia was vested solely in the king.145LJ vii. 150a; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 486. Bridgeman’s inflexible position on control of the militia contrasts with his willingness to make ‘condescensions’ to Presbyterianism – much to the dismay of Charles I, who had thought that as the son of a bishop, Bridgeman would never waver in his loyalty to the Church of England. Bridgeman’s fellow commissioner at the Uxbridge treaty, Sir Edward Hyde*, had been ‘very much surprised with the first discovery of that temper in that gentleman [Bridgeman], which he had never before suspected’. Although Hyde continued to regard Bridgeman as a man of ‘excellent parts and honestly inclined’, he feared that if he was ‘so much given to find out expedients to satisfy unreasonable men ... he would at last be drawn to yield to anything he should be powerfully pressed to do’.146Clarendon, Life, i. 184-5.

Following the surrender of Oxford in the summer of 1646, Bridgeman petitioned to compound upon the Oxford Articles, and his fine was set at £2,246 – that is, one tenth of the capital value of his estate – but was subsequently reduced on petition to £586. In 1650, he had to pay out another £250 for leases in Kent which he had been granted in reversion by Archbishop Laud before the civil war and for which he had not compounded in 1646.147CCC 1430-1; ‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 14-16, 19-20. Between 1646 and 1660, he seems to have divided most of his time between his first wife’s property of Morton Hall, Shropshire, his house at Teddington, Middlesex, and pursuing a successful legal practice in London as a conveyancer and chamber counsel (as a royalist he was not permitted to appear at the bar). As legal adviser to the marchioness of Hertford, he became involved with John Selden* and others in estate business relating to the inheritance of the marchioness’s deceased brother, the earl of Essex.148Sloane 1519, f. 172; C6/149/70; Longleat, Seymour pprs. 7, ff. 21, 283; box 16, no. 70; box 17, no. 77; HMC 7th Rep. 138, 142; Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 456-7; ‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 8-9; ‘Orlando Bridgeman’, Oxford DNB.

Although Bridgeman was allegedly implicated in the 1655 royalist uprisings and was named for Cheshire by the royalist exile Roger Whitley† on his 1658 list of potential leaders of a projected rebellion in England, there is no evidence that he was involved in cavalier conspiracies during the 1650s.149Bodl. Eng. hist. e.309, p. 19; TSP iii. 428, 537. At the height of Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian rising in the north west in the summer of 1659, the council of state ‘thought fit ... that he remove out of Cheshire to avoid all cause of suspicion’, but he was evidently not regarded as an active opponent of the regime.150Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 269, 270. Nevertheless, both Hyde and Edmund Ludlowe II* claimed that he had served as an intelligencer and legal adviser to Charles II in exile; and it was also reported that he was a patron and protector of ‘persecuted’ Anglican clergymen. His domestic chaplains after the Restoration certainly included a number of men who had suffered for their religion ‘in the late bad times’.151Ludlow, Voyce, 201; A. Farindon, Forty Sermons Preached at the Parish-Church of St Mary Magdalene Milk-Street (1663), sig. A3; ‘Orlando Bridgeman’, ‘Hezekiah Burton’, ‘Richard Cumberland’, ‘Robert Frampton’, ‘Thomas Traherne’, Oxford DNB.

In the spring of 1660, Bridgeman joined many royalist nobility and gentry ‘now residing in and about the city of London’, in a declaration thanking General George Monck* for his courage in asserting ‘the public liberty’. The signatories also renounced any intention to take revenge upon their parliamentarian enemies and declared their loyalty ‘to the present power, as it now resides in the council of state’.152A Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry that Adhered to the Late King (1660, 669 f.24.69); Baker, Chronicle, 701. In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Bridgeman was involved in a double return at Wigan, but the House declared in favour of his rivals.153HP Commons, 1660-90. At the Restoration, he was trusted sufficiently by Hyde (created earl of Clarendon in 1660) to play a central role in the royalists’ negotiations with the leaders of the English Presbyterian interest.154Warwick, Mems. Charles I (1701), 428; ‘Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon’, Oxford DNB. The king, too, evidently thought highly of him, or at least of his legal abilities, appointing him a serjeant-at-law on 31 May 1660 and lord chief baron of the exchequer a few days later.155Baker, Serjeants at Law, 192; Bryson, Equity Side of the Exchequer, 177. On 7 June, he was created a baronet.156CB.

It was Bridgeman who was given the politically-charged task of presiding over the trial of the regicides in October 1660. He was scrupulous in conducting proceedings strictly according to the known laws, but some of his pronouncements were more controversial, in particular his assertion ‘that no authority, no single person, or community of men, not the people collectively or representatively had any coercive power over the king of England’. The trial ended with all the accused found guilty and sentenced to death. By way of reward for his efficient handling of the trial, Bridgeman was appointed chief justice of the court of common pleas.157Ludlow, Mems. ii. 303, 321; ‘Orlando Bridgeman’, Oxford DNB; Foss, Judges of Eng. vii. 62. His duties during the 1660s also included those of Speaker of the House of Lords during the absence or indisposition of Lord Chancellor Clarendon. On Clarendon’s fall from power in 1667, the great seal was given to Bridgeman as lord keeper.158HMC 7th Rep. 100, 142, 166, 167, 177.

Despite a reputation for being too ‘timorous’ and anxious to please all parties, Bridgeman was courageous enough to support attempts during the late 1660s to frame a bill of comprehension that would allow Presbyterians and other ‘sober’ dissenters to rejoin the church. Similarly, when he perceived that Charles’s 1672 Declaration of Indulgence would extend limited toleration to Catholics as well as dissenters, he refused to affix the great seal to it – which hastened his removal as lord keeper in October of that year. The king justified his actions with reference to Bridgeman’s ‘great indisposition of body’ – he suffered badly from gout – and awarded him a generous pension of £2,000 a year.159Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 457-8; ‘Bridgeman sequestration pprs.’ ed. Bridgeman, 9-10; ‘Orlando Bridgeman’, ‘Richard Baxter’, Oxford DNB.

Bridgeman died on 25 June 1674 and was buried on 3 July in the church of St Mary, Teddington, where a plaque was later erected to his memory.160St Mary, Teddington par. reg.; Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 458; ‘Orlando Bridgeman’, Oxford DNB. In his will, he asked to be buried ‘without pomp and without any solemnity but such as is absolutely necessary’. He charged his estate with annuities in excess of £600 a year and bequests of about £9,300. Since none of his sons had shown an interest in pursuing a legal career, he left all his manuscripts and ‘one set of all other my law books’ to his eldest son, ‘hoping that some one of his sons [i.e. Bridgeman’s grandsons] will betake himself to that honorable profession’.161PROB11/345, ff. 239-42. His second son Orlando was returned for the Sussex borough of Horsham in 1669, and two of his grandsons, also named Orlando, sat for Wigan and five other constituencies between 1698 and 1738.162HP Commons, 1660-90; HP Commons, 1690-1715.