HOGHTON, Richard (c.1616-78), of Hoghton Tower, Leyland, and Walton-le-Dale, Lancs.

Nothing is known about Hoghton’s upbringing and education – although it does not appear to have involved attendance at university or the inns of court. With the outbreak of civil war in 1642, his father – who had strong court connections – and two of his younger brothers became royalist officers.29Supra, ‘Sir Gilbert Hoghton’. But Hoghton sided with Parliament and was commissioned as a colonel of foot in May 1643, serving in or alongside the Cheshire-based army commanded by Sir William Brereton*.30SP28/196, f. 490; SP28/267, ff. 631, 640. Within two weeks of receiving his commission, Hoghton had raised over 400 troops – mostly, it seems, from in around the Staffordshire town of Burton-upon-Trent, which lay close to the estate of his father-in-law – the royalist earl of Chesterfield – in the Trent Valley. One of Hoghton’s officers was the leading Burton townsman and future MP Daniel Watson. In July, Hoghton and his regiment, assisted by troops from Derbyshire under the command of Nathaniel Barton* and Thomas Sanders*, defended Burton against the queen’s army on its march from Yorkshire to Oxford. Unable to hold the town against the queen’s forces, Hoghton and his officers were captured; but whereas most of them were quickly exchanged, Hoghton was held captive by the royalists for over ten months.31SP28/267, ff. 635, 637; Bodl. Add. C.132, f. 52; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/30; Certaine Informations no. 27 (17-24 July 1643), 212 (E.61.19); W. Robinsoon, Stafford-Shires Misery (1643), 4-7 (E.61.12); N. Barton, The Representation or Defence of Collonel Nathaniell Barton (1654), 11; Glover, Derbys. i. app. p. 60. He was still a prisoner when he resigned his colonelcy in March 1644.32SP28/267, f. 631.

Parliament appointed Hoghton a Lancashire deputy lieutenant in September 1644, and he was installed that same month by the Committee for Revenue* in his father’s duchy of Lancaster offices – a favour that he may have owed to the committee’s Lancashire member, William Ashhurst.33CJ iii. 621a; LJ vi. 698b; Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 257. The following year, Hoghton emerged as an active member of the Lancashire county committee.34SP28/211, ff. 667, 761; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 146, 159-61, 172, 277, 302, 340, 343, 364, 452, 460, 484, 563. His absence from the ranks of Parliament’s office-holders in Lancashire before the autumn of 1644 has been interpreted as evidence that he took sides largely out of expediency – that is, to mitigate the effects of his father’s and brothers’ delinquency.35Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 563. However, his defence of Burton in 1643, his appointment in 1646 as an elder in the sixth Lancashire Presbyterian classis, and his patronage of ejected ministers after the Restoration suggest that his wartime allegiance owed more to political and religious conviction than to family loyalty.36LJ viii. 511.

Hoghton was returned as a ‘recruiter’ for Lancashire in the spring of 1646 in place of the deceased Roger Kirkbye. His political connections as a member of the county committee and deputy lieutenant probably smoothed his passage to Westminster. But perhaps a more important electoral asset was the Hoghtons’ wealth and interest in the county. With an estate in the Blackburn-Preston area worth in excess of £2,000 a year, the Hoghtons were one of the wealthiest families in Lancashire and had a long history of representing the county at Westminster.37Supra, ‘Lancashire’; ‘Sir Gilbert Hoghton’. Hoghton, however, did little to add to that distinguished record of parliamentary service, at least in terms of his work as a committeeman. Between his admission to the House in mid-1646 and his seclusion at Pride’s Purge in December 1648 he was named to only seven committees, and most of these were relatively inconsequential.38CJ iv. 625b; v. 117b, 132b, 170b, 338a, 447b, 574a. He dutifully took the Covenant on 9 December 1646, but how far he agreed with the Scots’ agenda for closer union between the two kingdoms is impossible to say. Granted leave of absence on 11 May 1647, he was declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, suggesting that he was away from Westminster during the Presbyterian counter-revolution of July-August 1647.39CJ v. 167a, 330a. Following a report from the committee for absent Members on 20 October, the Commons ordered that the fine of £20 imposed on him for his truancy be restored.40CJ v. 337a.

Although Hoghton made a poor showing as a committeeman, his six tellerships between December 1647 and December 1648 indicate that he was more than merely a disengaged observer of the House’s proceedings. The first of these appointments, on 20 December, saw him partner the Independent MP Sir Peter Wentworth in opposing the preparation of an ordinance to allow Archbishop James Ussher – a Calvinist episcopalian – to preach at Lincoln’s Inn. Hoghton and Wentworth lost the division to the Independent grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Presbyterian-aligned Arthur Annesley. Here, it seems, is evidence of Hoghton’s Presbyterian or at least strongly anti-episcopalian convictions, for it is difficult to see what else could account for his hostility to Ussher’s ministry.41CJ v. 393b. It was perhaps as Presbyterians, as well as MPs for Lancashire, that Hoghton and Raphe Assheton II were selected by the Commons, on 31 January 1648 to inform perhaps the county’s most prominent Presbyterian divine, Charles Herle, of his appointment to accompany Ashhurst and other members of a parliamentary delegation to Scotland.42CJ v. 450b. On 17 March, Hoghton was a majority teller with the Presbyterian doyen Francis Rous against giving the Westminster Assembly’s articles defining religious orthodoxy the rather doctrinaire title of ‘a confession of faith’.43CJ v. 502a. The opposing tellers, Sir Walter Erle and Colonel Edward Leigh, were also staunch Presbyterians, which suggests that this was a falling out over tactics among confessional friends.

With the Presbyterian star on the rise at Westminster during the spring of 1648, it was probably no coincidence that the two Houses passed an ordinance in April for the payment of Hoghton’s arrears of pay as a colonel during the first civil war – although whether he ever received this money is another matter.44CJ v. 526a; vi. 191a; LJ x. 195a. On 24 April, he was declared absent and excused at the call of the House and seems to have spent most of the summer in Lancashire, where he was involved in raising forces for the county’s defence during the second civil war.45CJ v. 543b; vi. 34a; Add. 5494, f. 307; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 171; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 254; G.C. Miller, Hoghton Tower (Preston, 1948), 106.

Hoghton’s only appointments during the last few months of his career in the Long Parliament were tellerships. On 20 October and 9 November, he was a teller in a series of divisions concerning the punishment of royalist delinquents under the terms of the peace propositions offered to the king at the treaty of Newport.46CJ vi. 57b, 72b. Hoghton’s line in these divisions seems to have varied, alternately opposing and supporting motions that favoured the rigorous punishment of the king’s leading adherents. The army, determined to stop the treaty taking effect, moved menacingly towards London late in November, prompting the Commons to prepare a letter to Sir Thomas Fairfax*, requesting that the army halt its advance.47CJ vi. 92b; Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7 (1-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc2 (E.476.2). When the army ignored this order and marched to Hyde Park, the Commons sat into the night, debating the letter’s contents, and eventually divided on the question of whether to include the obviously confrontational phrase ‘derogatory to the freedom of Parliament’.48CJ vi. 92b. The tellers for the yeas were the Presbyterian stalwarts Sir Walter Erle and George Boothe, ‘but such was the cowardice of some and the uncessant [sic] bawling of those brethren that ... side with the army ... that it was voted in the negative’.49Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7, sigs. Ccc2-Ccc2v. The majority tellers for the noes were Hoghton and Robert Reynolds.

In 1660 Hoghton would figure on a list published by William Prynne* of those secluded or ‘refusing to sit’ at Pride’s Purge. However, he was not included on the lists compiled in December 1648 and January 1649, directly after the army’s intervention on 6 December. On balance, therefore, it seems likely that he was not in fact secluded.50A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), irregular pagination (E.539.5); A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660), 56 (E.1013.22). Hoghton appears to have withdrawn from public life under the Rump and was removed or omitted from all county commissions.51CSP Dom. 1650, p. 34. Information received in October 1653 by the Committee for Advance of Money* that he had sent a trooper to assist the royalist invasion of England in 1651 was either false or unverifiable.52CCAM 1473.

Hoghton’s stock rose again after the establishment of the protectorate late in December 1653. In August 1654, he was appointed one of the ejectors for Lancashire – further evidence of his godly convictions – and he was named to the county’s militia commission the following March.53A. and O. ii. 972; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 78. By the spring of 1656, he was expressing a willingness to serve as a magistrate for Lancashire – having been restored to the bench in 1653. That he was thought well of by the major-general for the north-western counties, the zealous Cromwellian Charles Worsley*, is sure evidence of his conformity to the protectoral regime.54TSP iv. 746.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Hoghton headed the slate of four candidates returned for Lancashire.55Supra, ‘Lancashire’. But although he was not among those MPs secluded as opponents of the protectorate, he received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate, and it seems very likely that he failed to take his seat – perhaps by way of protest at the government’s purging of the House. He was evidently in bad odour at Whitehall by December 1658, when he was pricked as sheriff of Lancashire only a few weeks prior to the elections for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament.56Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 257. The council of state received several reports in September 1659 that Hoghton had actively supported Sir George Boothe’s Presbyterian-royalist rebellion the previous month, leading to suggestions that he be replaced as sheriff by a ‘person of fidelity’.57CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 171. But again, these allegations came to nothing. A more serious threat to Hoghton’s fortunes came in the form of a writ of outlawry issued against him in March 1660 for what appear to have debts amounting to many thousands of pounds.58Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 19.

Hoghton’s candidacy for Lancashire in the elections to the 1660 Convention was perhaps prompted in part by a desire to avoid his creditors – but despite ‘great striving’ to represent his county for a third time, he was defeated.59JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp. Lttrs. to Richard Legh: R. Standish to Legh, 15 Mar. 1660; ‘Lancashire’, HP Commons 1660-90. Having publicly protested his loyalty to the king in June 1660 and received a royal pardon, he was appointed a gentleman of the privy chamber, extraordinary, in May 1661.60Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 254, 258. But no amount of royal favour could prevent the writ of outlawry being executed against his estate in September 1661, which resulted in its seizure and the sequestration of a large part of his rents for over two years.61Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 19-20.

Hoghton’s financial situation was only one of several question marks hanging over him during the early 1660s. Proceedings were begun at some point in 1660 to have him removed from the Lancashire bench as someone of ‘doubtful allegiance’, but apparently to no effect.62CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 457. The county’s lord lieutenant, Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, thought better of Hoghton’s loyalty, appointing him one of his deputy lieutenants and militia captains in October 1660.63Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 258. Besides, he had been advised that appointing Hoghton would be a means to ensure that he was ‘reclaimed’ to the royal interest.64SP29/61/85, p. 151v. Nevertheless, when the earl’s commission was renewed in 1662 and he submitted his list of deputies for royal approval, the king apparently refused to ratify Hoghton’s appointment, although the nature of the crown’s objections to him is not clear.65SP29/61/85, ff 151-3; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 524.

One likely source of loyalist suspicion of Hoghton was his patronage of nonconformist ministers. Although he regularly attended Anglican church services and received communion according to the rites of the Church of England, he and his wife were major patrons of dissenting ministers.66S. Bushell, The Believer’s Groan for Heaven (1678), 27. Hoghton’s domestic chaplains included the Congregationalist Josiah Holdsworth, while another ejected minister, Adam Martindale, tutored his children. In addition, Hoghton’s residences of Hoghton Tower and Walton Hall were centres of preaching and praying, attracting many ‘eminent’ divines from across the region.67Calamy Revised, 272, 303; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 68, 131-2, 149, 194, 217.

Hoghton died on 3 February 1678 and was buried at Preston on 14 February.68Preston par. reg.; CB.; Baines, Lancs. iv. 184. Although he had intimations of his approaching death, he made no will – or at least none that was entered in probate.69Bushell, Believer’s Groan, 27. A grant of administration, inventory of his personal estate and ‘accounts’ were still extant in the late nineteenth century, but have since been mislaid.70Wills and Inventories at Chester ed. Earwaker, 142. Despite Hoghton’s debts – he mortgaged Walton Hall in 1674 for £3,000 – he made provision before his death for his five daughters’ portions amounting to around £5,000.71Hoghton Deeds ed. Lumby, 192, 250, 251-2. He was succeeded by his son Sir Charles Houghton†, 4th bt., who represented Lancashire in the Parliaments of 1679, 1681 and 1689.72HP Commons 1660-90.