BIRKHENED, Henry (1599-1660), of Backford, Cheshire.

Birkhened (or, as he occasionally preferred to spell it, ‘Birkened’) belonged to what appears to have been a cadet branch of the Birkenheads of Wigan, Lancashire, who had figured prominently in that town’s affairs since the late fourteenth century.22Harl. 2107, f. 6v; Cheshire RO, ZMF/156; Ormerod, Cheshire, ii. pt. 2, p. 368; E.B. Goodacre, ‘Origin of the Birkenheads of Backford’, The Cheshire Sheaf, xxxii. 33. His grandfather’s cousin, Richard Birkhened†, had served as recorder of Chester between 1575 and 1601, and had represented the city in four Parliaments during the 1580s and 1590s.23Ormerod, Cheshire, ii. pt. 2, p. 368; ii. pt. 2, p. 368; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Richard Birkheved’. The Birkheneds’ main residence was the manor of Backford, in the Wirral, which Birkhened’s grandfather had purchased in 1571.24Ormerod, Cheshire, ii. pt. 2, pp. 365, 368. However, they apparently preferred living in Chester – probably either in the parish of St Peter, where one of Birkhened’s daughters was baptised in 1634, or in St Mary’s, where his father Henry Birkhened senior took the Protestation in 1642.25St Peter, Chester par. reg.; PA, Main Pprs. 1642, Protestation returns; Cheshire IPM ed. R. Stewart-Brown (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. lxxxiv), 23. It was as an inhabitant of Chester that Birkhened junior – the future MP – signed the indenture returning Sir Thomas Smithe and Francis Gamul to represent the city in the Long Parliament.26Cheshire RO, ZMF/156.

The Henry Birkhened who attended the Chester meeting of the Cheshire quarter sessions during the 1630s and early 1640s was almost certainly Birkhened senior.27Morrill, Cheshire, 9; Cheshire RO, QJB 1/5, ff. 272, 521. The future MP does not seem to have been added to the bench until 1647.28C231/6, p. 93. Similarly, analysis of the signatures of the various Henry Birkheneds who signed the Cheshire petitions of February and December 1641 in favour of episcopacy indicate that they were Birkhened’s father and members of the extended Birkhened family (probably from the Manley branch).29PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb. 1641; 20 Dec. 1641. Birkhened junior apparently signed the ‘Attestation’ to Parliament of mid-1641, in which John Crewe II* and other leading Cheshire gentlemen dissociated themselves from the excesses both of Sir Thomas Aston* and his pro-episcopacy campaign and of the county’s puritan group under Sir William Brereton*.30Add. 36913, ff. 78-80; Morrill, Cheshire, 46, 51-2. In May 1642, Birkhened junior joined many of Cheshire’s leading gentry in a petition to the king, requesting that he return to Westminster rather than go to Ireland (as he then planned) and thereby abandon England to the ‘popish faction’.31Add. 36913, ff. 60r-v; The Humble Petition of the Gentry, Ministers and Free-holders of the County Palatine of Chester (1642, 669 f.5.17); R. Cust, P. Lake, Gentry Culture, and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of the Civil War (Manchester, 2020), 327-8. Both Birkhened and his father were also among the Cheshire gentry – both future royalists and future parliamentarians – who signed the ‘neutralist’ Remonstrance that circulated in the county during the late summer, urging joint action by king and Parliament to prevent the ‘dissolution of the fabric of this blessed government’.32Harl. 2107, ff. 6r-v; Morrill, Cheshire, 58-9; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 338-41; R.N. Dore, ‘1642: the coming of civil war to Cheshire’, Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc. lxxxvii. 51.

But in August 1642, Birkhened came off the political fence, joining Brereton and Alderman William Edwardes* of Chester in their unsuccessful attempt to execute the Militia Ordinance in the city; and it was probably on this account that he was selected with Brereton, Edwardes and Robert Duckenfeild* to have his house searched for arms by authority of the king in late September.33Harl. 2125, f. 133v; Add. 36913, f. 103. Birkhened and his father were reportedly among the Cheshire gentlemen – most of them future parliamentarians – who were summoned before the king at the end of September and carried away to Shrewsbury, where they remained prisoners during the autumn.34Cheshire Civil War Tracts, 66, 74; Civil War in Cheshire, 25-6; M.D.G. Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society and Allegiance in Cheshire and Shropshire in the First Civil War’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1976), 235-6. But whereas Birkhened senior endeavoured to make his peace with the king after the outbreak of civil war, his son continued to defy royal authority.35Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 219-20. Birkhened’s decision to side with Parliament was almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions, although how he acquired them and what form they took at this stage in his career is not known.

Birkhened served as a captain in Brereton’s regiment of foot during the civil war, and as a Cheshire committeeman and sub-commissioner for sequestrations during the mid-1640s.36SP23/180, p. 794; SP28/225, ff. 17, 134; Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 323; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 255, 324; ii. 112; iii. 256, 257. Despite his close links with Brereton, his signing of a petition to Parliament from a group of Cheshire’s leading parliamentarians in April 1646 could be construed as an oblique criticism of Brereton’s over-mighty role in the county’s affairs.37PA, Main Pprs. 24 Sept. 1646, f. 113; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 148-51; Morrill, Cheshire, 155. The petitioners requested that a writ be issued for electing a knight of the shire to replace the royalist Peter Venables* on the grounds that ‘this county hath long suffered through the want of a Member in the House of Commons in the absence of his Sir William Brereton [on military duties]’. The petitioners also asked that a ‘select committee’ be set up for settling godly ministers in the county’s parish churches and chapels.

Birkhened apparently had little difficulty accommodating himself to the establishment of the Rump, for he continued to attend meetings of the Cheshire quarter sessions throughout the late 1640s and into the 1650s.38Cheshire RO, QJB 1/6, ff. 146, 163v, 231, 255v, 264. In August 1650, the council of state commissioned him as a lieutenant-colonel of foot in the Cheshire militia regiment commanded by his wartime colleague Colonel Robert Duckenfeild (Birkhened should not be confused with Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Birkenhead of Essex).39CSP Dom. 1650, p. 509. He probably helped Duckenfeild raise forces in Cheshire in the summer of 1651 to resist the Scottish invasion under Charles II; and in October, he joined Duckenfeild and Captain John Griffith III* on the court martial at Chester that tried and condemned to death the royalist leader James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby.40Infra, ‘Robert Duckenfeild’; The Perfect Tryall and Confession of the Earl of Derby (1651), 2 (E.643.15).

In the summer of 1653, Birkhened and Duckenfeild were selected by the council of officers to represent Cheshire in the Nominated Parliament. What precisely recommended Birkhened to the council, beyond his links with Duckenfeild, is not clear. He was named to only two committees in this Parliament – those of 9 and 20 July 1653 for managing the public treasuries and their officers.41CJ vii. 283b, 287a. Listed by an anonymous pamphleteer among those MPs who were opposed to a publicly-maintained ministry, he appears to have belonged to the more radical puritan element in the House – which is consistent with the interest he showed in Anna Trapnel, the self-styled prophetess of the Fifth Monarchy, who in September 1653 pronounced the doom of the Nominated Parliament and the Lord’s rejection of Oliver Cromwell*.42A. Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone (1654), 2 (E.730.3); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 197, 388. The Quakers would later list Birkhened among those Cheshire JPs who ‘have not persecuting spirits’.43Extracts from State Pprs. rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney, 110. Nevertheless, his appointment to the 1654 Cheshire commission for ejecting scandalous ministers, and the evident trust reposed in him by his fellow commissioners, indicates that he favoured some form of state-supported, parochial ministry.44Mins. of the Cttee. for Plundered Ministers rel. to Lancs. and Cheshire ed. Shaw, 115, 137.

Birkhened apparently had no trouble negotiating the transition from commonwealth to protectorate. In April 1655, following a series of abortive royalist uprisings against Cromwellian rule, he signed the declaration of Cheshire’s JPs against ‘that dangerous design of late transacted by the old and grand enemies to the freedom and peace of this nation’.45CHES21/4, f. 327. The following autumn, he was appointed one of the county’s commissioners to assist Major-general Charles Worsley*.46Cheshire RO, DLT/B38, p. 10; TSP iv. 251. Birkhened was one of the most active and committed members of this commission, working closely with Worsley and lamented his death in June 1656 as a sad loss to the nation.47Cheshire RO, ZAF/35/18; DSS/1/7/66/70, 71; TSP iv. 251; v. 128-9. Birkhened’s support for the regicide and republican John Bradshawe* in the fiercely contested Cheshire election to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659 may have owed more to local political rivalries than to disaffection to the protectorate.48Greater Manchester Co. RO, E17/89/26/1; Morrill, Cheshire, 296. Nevertheless, his apparent involvement in suppressing Sir George Boothe’s* Presbyterian-royalist rising in Cheshire that summer suggests that he was at least broadly aligned with the county’s republican interest. The restored Rump’s supporters in Chester certainly regarded him as politically reliable, recommending him to Parliament in September for a place on the city’s aldermanic bench.49Harl. 1929, ff. 10-11v; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 220.

Birkhened was arrested and imprisoned by order of the Lords on 11 July 1660 for his part in the trial and execution of the earl of Derby.50LJ xi. 87b, 88a, 137b. Birkhened, Duckenfeild, Griffith and several other officers who had sat on the earl’s court martial petitioned the Lords on 13 July, claiming that they had been ‘no way consenting to the death or imprisonment of that honourable person, but [had] laboured to the utmost of their powers and interests with friends to have prevented the same’.51HMC 7th Rep. 116. In fact, Birkhened had attended every day of the trial proceedings, and had voted against accepting the earl’s claim for indemnity under the articles of war.52 Stanley Pprs. ed. F. R. Raines (Chetham Soc. o.s. lxvii), pp. ccxii, cccliii, cccliv, ccclv.

Birkhened died in the summer of 1660 – probably from the ill-effects of his imprisonment in London. He was buried at St Sepulchre, Newgate on 15 July.53Ormerod, Cheshire, ii. pt. 2, p. 368. In his will, he charged his estate with the payment of debts totalling £800. His legatees included Duckenfeild and his wife, the soon-to-be ejected Chester minister Thomas Upton, the former vicar of Backford, Samuel Slater (also soon to be ejected), the Lancashire Presbyterian minister (chaplain to Brereton’s regiment of horse in the first civil war) Nathaniel Lancaster, and one ‘Mr Ecton’, which was very probably a scribal error for ‘Eaton’ – that is, the Cheshire Congregationalist minister and friend of Duckenfeild’s, Samuel Eaton. It is perhaps revealing of Birkhened’s religious affiliations that while he bequeathed £1 to Upton, Slater and Lancaster, he left double that sum to Eaton.54PROB11/298, f. 363; Calamy Revised, 178, 444, 500; A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (Woodbridge, 1990), 144-5; ‘Samuel Eaton’; ‘Nathaniel Lancaster’, Oxford DNB. Birkhened died without surviving children and was therefore the last of his line to sit in Parliament.