BIDDULPH, Michael (c.1581-1658), of Elmhurst, and Market Street, Lichfield, Staffs.

The Biddulphs claimed descent from the ‘ancient family of that name, of Biddulph’, in northern Staffordshire.26Shaw, Staffs. i. 350. The Lichfield branch of the family rose to prominence with the MP’s great-grandfather, Simon Biddulph, a mercer, who served as bailiff of the city four times in the mid-sixteenth century.27VCH Staffs. xiv. 231. It was apparently Simon who acquired what became the family’s principal residence at Elmhurst, just north of Lichfield. Biddulph’s father, another Simon, was also four times bailiff of Lichfield, and by the time of his death in 1632 he accounted the town clerk Michael Noble* his ‘good friend’ and himself a gentleman.28PROB11/163, ff. 39, 39v; VCH Staffs. xiv. 231. However, the family did not acquire formal gentry status until 1635, when Michael Biddulph was granted arms.29Vis. Staffs. ed. Grazebrook, 42. Michael was a trustee of the Lichfield conduit lands by 1634, but otherwise made little discernible impact upon civic or county affairs before 1640 – even though he had come of age during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.30Laithwaite, Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust, 79. His circle of friends and relations during the 1630s included the future parliamentarians Sir William Brereton* and Sir Richard Skeffington*.31Staffs. RO, K003/2/6.

Despite the fact that he was over 60 by the outbreak of civil war, it was almost certainly Michael rather than his heir and namesake who was appointed to and active on the Staffordshire county committee and other local parliamentary commissions during the civil war.32Staffs. RO, D260/M/F/1/6/13; Staffs. Co. Cttee. 350. Michael Biddulph† the younger was apparently a ‘captain in Ireland’ in 1640 and had been on the point of joining a royalist regiment in Wiltshire in 1642, ‘but for the most part his friends were of the puritan party and suddenly called him back’.33Shaw, Staffs. i. 350; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Michael Biddulph I’. Assuming that it was indeed the elder Biddulph who was the Staffordshire committeeman, he was returned as a ‘recruiter’ for Lichfield in December 1646. He probably owed his election primarily to the strength of his interest as one of Lichfield’s leading inhabitants.34Supra, ‘Lichfield’.

Biddulph’s career in the Long Parliament was apparently brief and inglorious. He took the Covenant on 1 February 1647 and was named to just one committee – to consider a petition concerning the recruiter election at Newcastle (6 Apr.) – before being granted leave of absence the next day (7 Apr.) and thereafter disappearing from the Commons Journal.35CJ v. 69a, 134a, 135b. He was listed among those Members secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648.36W. Prynne, A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), 29 [recte 33] (E.539.5). But exactly how he had offended against the New Model army is not clear. Perhaps his association with the Presbyterian Devereux interest ran deeper than the extant evidence suggests. He seems to have withdrawn from public life after Pride’s Purge; he certainly received no further local appointments after 1648.

Biddulph died on 28 January 1658 and was buried at St Chad’s, Lichfield, on 1 February.37St Chad, Lichfield par. reg. In his will, he referred to his ‘house lately builded in Sadler Street’, Lichfield, and a tenement in Dam Street.38PROB11/275, f. 83v. The contents of his town house in Lichfield – probably the one in Sadler Street – and those of his house at Elmhurst were valued at £789, and he was owed debts of £75.39Staffs. RO, B/C/11, inventory of Michael Biddulph, 1658. Among his legatees was the Presbyterian minister of St Chad’s, Thomas Miles, to whom he bequeathed the occupancy of the house in which Miles and wife lived, at the nominal rent of 6d a year.40PROB11/275, f. 84. Following his ejection from the church in 1662, Miles established a Presbyterian congregation at Curborough.41VCH Staffs. xiv. 158; Calamy Revised, 350. Biddulph’s eldest son Michael sat for Lichfield in the 1660 Convention, and one of his younger sons, Theophilus*, a Cheapside merchant, represented London in 1656 and 1659 and Lichfield in the Cavalier Parliament.42HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Theophilus Biddulph’.