STANHOPE, Ferdinando (1615-?44), of Shelford, Notts.

The foundations of the Stanhope family fortunes lay in the purchase by Michael Stanhope† in 1537 of the monastic estate of Shelford in Nottinghamshire. Two years later, the manor of Shelford, four rectories and manors in 20 Nottinghamshire locations were added. The source of the family’s advancement was Anne Stanhope, Michael’s half-sister, who married Edward Seymour, 1st duke of Somerset and lord protector of England during the minority of Edward VI, 1547-9. Michael Stanhope was executed in the cause of his brother-in-law, but the family at Shelford survived the attainder. Various members of the family held government office under Elizabeth, and Sir Thomas Stanhope†, Ferdinando Stanhope’s great-grandfather, augmented the estate at Shelford.8Thoroton, Notts. i. 290. Philip Stanhope, Ferdinando’s father, was well placed to become a legatee of several generations of service to the monarchy. Knighted in 1605, created Baron Stanhope of Shelford in 1616, and earl of Chesterfield in 1628, he contracted marriages with two important midlands families. His first wife, Ferdinando’s mother, was the daughter of Francis Hastings, Lord Hastings. After her death in 1636, Chesterfield married Anne, the widow of Sir Humphrey Ferrers of Tamworth castle and the daughter of John Pakington† of Westwood, Worcestershire.9CP.

Ferdinando Stanhope was given his unusual forename in honour of his 1st cousin, Ferdinando Hastings†, later 6th earl of Huntingdon. This symbolic closeness to his Hastings relatives was maintained in his parents’ educational choice for him. Stanhope was educated at Repton school, along with his brothers Charles and Philip. Repton had been founded by George Hastings, 4th earl of Huntingdon, Stanhope’s great-grandfather, and the Hastings family subsequently provided hereditary governors. After Repton, Stanhope attended Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, and graduated MA in 1636. The subsequent award of the degree of DCL at Oxford must be taken as an honorific award to the son of a peer.10Al. Ox.; Al. Cant.

His election to the Long Parliament, on 12 October 1640 for Tamworth, reveals the workings of the Ferrers family interest in that borough. One of the two borough seats had long been controlled by the Tamworth castle family, into which the earl of Chesterfield had married after the death of Stanhope’s mother, in 1636. Chesterfield had re-married, to Anne, widow of Sir Humphrey Ferrers, and the alliance between the Stanhopes and the Ferrers was strengthened further when Ferdinando himself married Ferrers’ daughter, Lettice, in 1641. By this time, Stanhope was his father’s eldest living son; with a marriage portion of £1,500 from the Ferrers estate, Ferdinando had settled on him by his father two Nottinghamshire manors, Ratcliffe-on-Trent, and East Stoke.11Add. Ch. 58525; Vis. Notts 1662-64 (Harl. Soc. n.s. v,), 14. His contribution to the Long Parliament was minimal. It is thus highly likely that he was completely out of sympathy with the aims of Parliament’s leaders from the beginning, and did not even share the dislike of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) that was evident across a spectrum of parliamentary opinion. He was never named to any committees, and although he signed the Protestation on 3 May 1641, this was no prelude to a more active involvement in the work of the assembly.12CJ ii. 133b. His only further recorded contribution was on 20 August 1641, when he and Sir John Hotham brought to the House petitions from cashiered officers of the king's army, the ‘reformadoes’, asking the House to consider ways of relieving their financial plight.13Harl. 164, f. 46v. Against the background of unrest in the army, the army plot, and attempts by Parliament to secure the loyalty of the forces that had served in the north, Stanhope’s intervention seems less than helpful to the cause of the reformers in the House of Commons. Indeed, his fellow Member for Tamworth, Henry Wilmot, was facing a protracted and well-advertised interrogation over his own involvement in the army plot, and Stanhope may well have been supporting his colleague’s position by bringing to the floor of the House military discontents. There is no evidence, however, that Stanhope himself ever held a commission in the army before the outbreak of civil war.

Stanhope was sergeant-major in the regiment of Endymion Porter*, a courtier associated with the army plot.14Peacock, Army Lists, 14. Porter was never active as a commander, and as the earl of Chesterfield commanded a regiment of dragoons for the king from the outset of the war, his son probably held a commission under him quite soon after hostilities began. More is known about Chesterfield than about Stanhope from this point, but in December 1642 both fled the family residence of Bretby House, on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border, leaving it to be sacked by soldiers of Sir John Gell.15Oxford DNB, ‘Philip Stanhope, 1st earl of Chesterfield’. They were both reported by a parliamentarian source to have been captured at Lichfield in Staffordshire in early March 1643.16J. Vicars, God in the Mount (1643), 273 (E.73.4). At the battle of Hopton Heath, on 19 March, when the 2nd earl of Northampton (Spencer Compton†) was killed, the same source recorded either Ferdinando Stanhope, or Spencer Lucy, son of Sir Thomas Lucy* as mortally wounded. Another Stanhope son was supposedly captured.17Vicars, God in the Mount, 287. It is unlikely that Stanhope was dead, although another reporter mentioned an injury to ‘Colonel’ Stanhope.18The Battaile on Hopton-Heath in Staffs. (1643), 5 (E.99.18). This may well have been Ferdinando, but is possibly a reference to his younger brother, Philip, killed later in the war. Yet another reporter recorded the capture of Chesterfield and all his soldiers at Lichfield.19The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 12 (14-21 Mar. 1643), 90 (E.84.29). On 27 March, Stanhope was disabled from sitting in Parliament, and it may be inferred from the date that this was in consequence of the fighting in Staffordshire, at Lichfield and Hopton Heath.20CJ iii. 20b. More certainly, by 25 May 1643, Chesterfield was indeed in captivity, and the Lords determined that he should not be exchanged until he had restored goods he had seized at Lichfield the previous February.21LJ vi. 63a. In June 1643, he was reported captured at Tamworth, when the castle there, and 100 horse troops, fell into the hands of the Warwickshire parliamentarian force under the command of William Purefoy I*. By this time, Stanhope held the rank of colonel.22Bodl. Rawl. D.101, p. 116; C.F. Palmer, The Hist. of Town and Castle of Tamworth (Tamworth, 1845), 129.

Even greater uncertainty surrounds Stanhope’s death. That it occurred in the suburbs of Nottingham seems clear enough, but the date and circumstances seem subject to confusion. One authority gives the date as 1644.23Old DNB, ‘Philip Stanhope, 1st earl of Chesterfield’. A family memoir prefers 1643.24Warws. RO, CR 2131/18, f. 4. Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir of her husband describes, without dating it, a sortie from Nottingham garrison encountering the troops of ‘Colonel Stanhope’ of Shelford and capturing the royalist colonel and other officers. An unconvincing attempt has been made to link this incident with Stanhope’s death.25Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 151. There were many such forays from Nottingham garrison, described by various commentators: April 1645 and October of that year are two incidents in which Bridgford, supposedly the place of Stanhope’s death, are mentioned.26Lttr. Bks. of Sir Samuel Luke, 508; A.C. Wood, Notts.in the Civil War (Oxford, 1937), 90, 97. Thoroton provides the only detail; that Stanhope died in Bridgford, not in a skirmish or fight, but ‘doing a charitable office, in commanding assistance for the quenching a house there on fire by accident, by a Parliament soldier, some while before’.27Thoroton, Notts. i. 290. This reference to fire chimes at least partly with a report from John Hutchinson*, the parliamentarian governor of Nottingham, in which he mentions an unsuccessful royalist raid on Nottingham involving the firing of houses, and the death afterwards by exposure of many ‘cavaliers’. This occurred in January 1644, and seems the most plausible date for Stanhope’s demise. The dating of the new year on 25 March would account for contemporary references to the date as 1643.28J. Vicars, God’s Ark overtopping the Waves (1645), 135-6 (E.312.3); Warws. RO, CR 2131/18, f. 4. On 28 July 1644, an assessment of £1,500 was made against Stanhope by the Committee for Advance of Money, but was suspended, which may or may not indicate that news of his death had reached Parliament. Although he was reported to have sat in the Oxford Parliament, there seems no contemporary evidence of it, but in any case he was certainly dead by 25 September 1645, when a writ for the election of an MP for Tamworth was issued to replace Stanhope, ‘disabled and afterwards deceased’.29CCAM 436; Wood, Fasti, ii. 42; CJ iv. 287a. His death must have therefore occurred before the storming of Shelford garrison by Sydenham Poyntz on 2 November 1645, when Chesterfield’s younger son was killed.30Vicars, Burning Bush, 314. Stanhope was buried at Shelford.31Thoroton, Notts. i. 291.

Stanhope’s widow seems never to have remarried, and suffered the half-hearted attentions of the compounding commissioners in 1651. She lived until the 1680s on their estate in Nottinghamshire. When she died, the property passed to Charles Stanhope, son and heir of Arthur, the 1st earl of Chesterfield’s fourth son. Chesterfield himself died in 1656, apparently in custody, and his stepmother lived until 1667.32Warws. RO, CR 2131/18, ff. 4, 11.