SHUTTLEWORTHE, Richard I (c.1587-1669), of Gawthorpe Hall, Whalley, Lancs.

Shuttleworthe’s family was a cadet branch of the Shuttleworths of Shuttleworth Hall, in the parish of Whalley. Their principal residence was at Gawthorpe, near Shuttleworth (and about twelve miles east of Preston), which they had acquired at some point between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries.41Whitaker, Whalley, ii. 184; Shuttleworth Accts. ed. Harland, 259-62, 266; VCH Lancs. vi. 463. Shuttleworthe’s father, Thomas, was a younger son and resided on the family’s estate at Smithills, near Bolton, where he acted as steward to his elder brother Sir Richard Shuttleworth, serjeant-at-law.42Lancs. Deeds ed. J. Parker (Chetham Soc. n.s. xci), 11; Shuttleworth Accts. ed. Harland, 271-3. Sir Richard used the proceeds of his successful legal practice to make considerable additions to his estate and, in the process, to establish the Shuttleworths among Lancashire’s leading gentry families.43Long, ‘Lancs.’, 50, 51, 136-8. The principal beneficiary of his labours was Richard – Thomas’s eldest son and the future MP – who succeeded to the entire estate after his two uncles, Sir Richard and Lawrence, had died childless.44Lancs. IPM ed. Rylands, 109.

Shuttleworthe married Fleetwood, the only child of Richard Barton, by whom he acquired Barton Hall and 2,000 acres of land and who bore him two sons.45Lancs. Deeds ed. Parker, 33; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 51. The mother of his ten other children was his ‘second wife’ – which is to say his mistress – Judith Thorpe, whose marital status (or lack of it) is conveniently glossed over in Victorian accounts of the family.46Vis. Lancs. 1664-5 ed. Raines, 271; Lancs. Deeds ed. Parker, 33; Shuttleworth Accts. ed. Harland, 272-3. In the elections to the 1628 Parliament, he stood as a candidate for Clitheroe, where he owned at least one burgage-tenement and had served as out-bailiff on four occasions.47Lancs. RO, DDFR 1/20; 4/1-8; Weeks, Clitheroe, 135. In what was a hotly contested election, he narrowly missed out on taking the first place, but received only one vote for the second place.48Weeks, Clitheroe, 227; ‘Clitheroe’, HP Commons, 1604-29.

Shuttleworthe was apparently an energetic member of Lancashire’s governing elite. Indeed, he seems to have served as sheriff of the county twice – on the second occasion, in 1636-7, collecting Lancashire’s full quota of Ship Money.49CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 457; 1637, pp. 229-30, 504, 525; M.D. Gordon, ‘The collection of ship money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS iv. 159. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, he was returned for Preston, taking the senior place, while his eldest son and namesake was elected at Clitheroe.50Supra, ‘Preston’. He probably owed his return to the strength of his standing as a Lancashire magistrate and as one of the county’s leading landowners. He had been a freeman of Preston since the 1620s, although the bulk of his estate lay about ten miles or more east of the borough.51Preston Guild Rolls ed. Abram, 77. He received no appointments in the Short Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Shuttleworthe was returned for Preston again – and again took the senior place – with Richard Shuttleworth junior securing re-election at Clitheroe. The presence of two Richard Shuttleworths in the Commons poses more of a problem for historians than it seems to have done for the clerk of the House, who either made no effort to distinguish between the two men or was generally faced with only one member of the family. Both men were present in the House on at least one occasion – 3 May 1641, when they took the Protestation.52CJ ii. 133a, b. Nevertheless, the fact that one or both of them were named to a total of 25 committees before the outbreak of civil war, and yet they were never named to the same committee, suggests that the clerk was dealing with only one Member. Whether that was Shuttleworthe I or Shuttleworth II is impossible to establish with any certainty, although the presumption must be that it was the father. It was Shuttleworthe I, for example, who pledged £100 in the summer of 1642 both for himself and his son towards the maintenance of Parliament’s army.53PJ iii. 475.

Assuming that the majority of the Shuttleworths’ 25 committee appointments in 1640-2 belonged to the Preston MP, he seems to have been aligned with the majority in the Commons that was keen to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule.54CJ ii. 44b, 52b, 57a, 61b, 75a, 82a, 84b, 113b, 197b, 200a, 205b, 238b, 438a. Added on 19 December 1640 to a sub-committee of the Commons’ standing committee for religion, with a brief to receive complaints from ministers ‘oppressed’ by the Laudian church authorities, he attended at least one of its meetings.55CJ ii. 54b; Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 96, 99. His reformist credentials were recognised by the House on 14 July 1641, when he and other leading Lancashire gentlemen were nominated to a commission for ecclesiastical causes (i.e. removing ‘scandalous’ ministers) for the county.56Procs. LP v. 642. However, there is no indication that this commission was ever approved by the Lords. One or both of the Shuttleworths having returned to the House after the autumn 1641 recess, they received only four committe appointments between late November 1641 and mid-April 1642.57CJ ii. 327b, 423b, 438a, 512b.

Shuttleworthe was evidently trusted by the parliamentary leadership, for on 9 June 1642, the Commons requested that Raphe Assheton II*, Shuttleworthe, Alexander Rigby I* and John Moore* go down into Lancashire to execute the Militia Ordinance – a duty that he and his colleagues apparently performed with some hesitancy in the face of the increasing royalist activity in the county.58CJ ii. 615a, 625b; LJ v. 137a; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 21, 325-30; Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J. Brownbill (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. lxxii), 63; J.M. Gratton, ‘The Parliamentarian and Royalist War Effort in Lancs. 1642-51’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 86. One of the Shuttleworths was present in the House on 7 September, when he was among the MPs who declared their willingness to ‘live and die’ with the commander of Parliament’s army, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.59CJ ii. 755b.

Shuttleworthe supported efforts in the autumn of 1642 to negotiate a treaty of neutrality for Lancashire, but this initiative was denounced by Parliament and quickly collapsed.60Lancs. Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts ed. J. Harland (Chetham Soc. o.s. l), 282-7; Farington Pprs. ed. S.M. Farington (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxxix), 80-6; Broxap, Lancs. 56. With the king’s lord lieutenant of Lancashire, James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby, gathering more forces by the day, Shuttleworthe issued a declaration from Gawthorpe on 20 October for mustering the county’s trained bands to resist the ‘great preparation of the papists and other ill-affected persons to religion’. That same day, he declined an invitation to attend a rival muster organised by Derby, informing the earl that his own recruitment was intended only to preserve the ‘peace and quiet’ of the county and to defend it against the ‘popish party’.61Lancs. Lieutenancy ed. Harland, 294-8. Shuttleworthe emerged thereafter as one of Lancashire’s most committed and energetic parliamentarian leaders; and by November, the Lancashire royalists were referring to ‘the rebellious rout under the conduct of Richard Shuttleworth Esq. and others within this county’.62E134/16Chas2/Mich26; Lancs. Lieutenancy ed. Harland, 301-2, 304-11; Warr in Lancs. 12, 15, 23-4, 31-2, 40, 74; Farington Pprs. ed. Farington, 89; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 93, 403. Those ‘others’ included Shuttleworth II and five of his brothers, who all took up arms for Parliament.63Warr in Lancs. 15; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 425-6; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. Shuttleworthe’s allegiance probably owed much to his religious convictions, which (to judge by his public career after 1640) inclined strongly towards puritanism. In 1643, for example, he took care to inform Preston corporation of Parliament’s orders for removing popish images and other vestiges of popery from churches and public places.64P. Whittle, Hist. of the Borough of Preston (Preston, 1837), 40. It was probably his trenchant Protestantism as much as any financial considerations that prompted his investment of £450 as an Irish Adventurer.65Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 191.

Shuttleworthe remained in Lancashire for much of the civil war and was a prominent member of the county committee.66E112/563; SP28/211, ff. 718, 741; Add. 59661, ff. 14, 16, 17; Bodl. Tanner 60, f. 111v; Belvoir, QZ.25, f. 12; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 460-1, 465-6; ii. 328, 340, 343, 459-60, 484; Gratton, Lancs. 86, 87, 115, 117. Poor health seems to have prevented him from pursuing a more active military career, and it is likely that his sons had assumed charge of his regiment by the time the Self-Denying Ordinance came into effect in the spring of 1645. In terms of local politics, he seems to have aligned with Thomas Birche* and the more militant wing of the Lancashire parliamentary interest.67Supra, ‘Thomas Birche’; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 96, 183, 210; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 624, 745; Gratton, Lancs. 95, 297-8; ‘War effort in Lancs.’, 310, 339, 340, 341, 558-9. One of the Shuttleworth MPs was present in the Commons on 12 June 1643 to take the vow and covenant and in late September to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant.68CJ iii. 125b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 480. But this constitutes the only firm evidence that either man attended the House between October 1642 and May 1646. A Commons’ order of 3 May 1645 granting one of them leave to go into the country for his ‘health and occasions’ may simply have formalised a long-standing state of informal absence.69CJ iv. 130b.

One of the Shuttleworths had returned to the Commons by the spring of 1646, and on 27 May he took the Solemn League and Covenant.70CJ iv. 556a. Over the next two years either the Preston MP or the Clitheroe MP, or both, were named to a total of 15 committees, but again it is hard to disentangle father and son because of the clerk’s haphazard efforts to distinguish between them. He occasionally applied the terms senior and junior, and sometimes referred to Colonel Shuttleworth (which was almost certainly Shuttleworthe I), but his usual formula was simply ‘Mr Richard Shuttleworth’. Assuming, again, that Shuttleworthe I was the more active of the two MPs, he was named to committees for dispatching godly preachers to Oxford University (1 July 1646); for the sale of delinquents’ and papists’ estates (10 July); to investigate the publication of the ‘scandalous’ proto-Leveller pamphlet A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (11 July); to consider the maintenance of the ministry in London’s eleventh classis (4 August); and for sustaining the war in Ireland (11 Aug.).71CJ iv. 595b, 613a, 616a, 632a, 641b.

At least one of the Shuttleworths was among those Members who remained at Westminster following the Presbyterian counter-revolution late in July 1647, securing nomination to committees on 2 August for discovering who had instigated the ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July and for empowering the Presbyterians’ main executive body, the ‘committee of safety’, to secure any persons deemed ‘disaffected to the present safety and defence of the Parliament and City’.72CJ v. 265a, b. Shuttleworth II was granted leave of absence on 26 August ‘for the recovery of his health’, and it therefore seems reasonable to assume that Shuttleworthe I was the MP appointed to committees that autumn and winter for purging borough corporations of delinquents, to redress the people’s grievances and on an additional ordinance for the stricter observance of the sabbath.73CJ v. 284a, 320a, 417a, 471a. On 23 March 1648, Shuttleworthe I was granted leave of absence – he was again in poor health – and was declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 24 April and 26 September.74CJ v. 511b, 543b; vi. 34a; Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 10.

Shuttleworthe remained loyal to Parliament during the second civil war and, with Richard Holland*, was instrumental in persuading one of his fellow Lancashire Presbyterians not to appear for the king.75Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 171; CCSP i. 439. However, two of his younger sons were among a group of diehard Presbyterian officers in Lancashire who declared, in effect, their refusal to join the forces being raised by Assheton and Rigby to resist the invading Scots.76Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 248-51; J.R. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics in Lancs. and Cheshire during the Reign of Charles I, 1625-49 (Sheffield Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2014), 272-3. Shuttleworthe seems to have been in Lancashire at the time of Pride’s Purge in December 1648, and although he was not included on several contemporary lists of the secluded Members, both he and Shuttleworth II were named by William Prynne* in 1660 among those who had been secluded or had refused to sit.77SP23/117, f. 308; JRL, Eng. ms 213, Lancs. and Cheshire lttrs. no. 45; A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.62); [W. Prynne], A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), irreg. pag. (E.539.5); A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660), 57 (E.1013.22). Whether secluded or not, Shuttleworthe did not sit in the Rump.

Although Shuttleworthe was either prevented from taking his seat in the Rump or showed no interest in doing so, he was willing to serve in local government after Pride’s Purge – indeed, he reportedly helped to secure Lancashire against the threat of royalist insurrection early in 1649.78SP28/211, f. 690; The Moderate Intelligencer no. 203 (1-8 Feb. 1649), sig. Ttttttttt (E.541.27); Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J.H. Stanning (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxxvi), 134; Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Brownbill (lxxii), 47; (xcv), 142, 145, 185, 188; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 353, 354; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 71. In March 1650, however, the council of state dismissed him and several other leading Lancashire parliamentarians from ‘their employment in settling the militia’ in the county, and he was omitted from the Lancashire bench that same year.79CSP Dom. 1650, p. 34; A. Craven, ‘‘For the better uniting of this nation’’, HR lxxxviii. 88. Whether these dismissals followed from any refusal on his part to take the Engagement abjuring monarchy and Lords, or were linked to the arrest of his two of his sons ‘for corresponding with the enemy’ (probably a reference to the royalists under the earl of Derby), is not clear.80CSP Dom. 1650, p. 523; 1651, p. 522; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 122; ‘Oath of Engagement’, 88. His removal from the bench seems to have curtailed his activities as a member of the 1650 Lancashire commission for the maintenance of a godly ministry.81Lancs. and Cheshire Church Surveys ed. Fishwick, 118, 125, 132, 144, 149, 152. The Rump appears to have revised its view of Shuttleworthe following his readiness to appear in arms against the Lancashire royalists in the summer of 1651; and by the end of that year he had been restored to the bench and was active on the county’s militia commission.82Lancs. RO, QSO/2/24; A. J. Hawkes, ‘Wigan’s part in the civil war, 1639-51’, Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc. xlvii. 131; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 39; ‘Oath of Engagement’, 88. In 1652, he regained his place as a Lancashire assessment commissioner.83A. and O. ii. 666; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 29.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Shuttleworthe was returned once again for Preston. He was named to nine committees in this Parliament, most of which related to private petitions or northern affairs, and he made no recorded contribution to debate.84CJ vii. 366b, 380a, 381a, 381b, 387a, 387b, 395a, 401a, 407b. Re-elected for Preston to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, he was approved by the protectoral council and allowed to take his seat. He was named to 13 committees, including those for managing the excise, legal reform and the better observation of the sabbath.85CJ vii. 443a, 445b, 446a, 447a, 493b, 528a. But once again he was silent in debate. And none of his committee appointments had any bearing on the key political issue in this Parliament – the introduction of a new protectoral constitution in 1657 and its offer of the crown to Oliver Cromwell*. Returned for Preston yet again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, taking the senior place, Shuttleworthe made no recorded impression on the proceedings of the House whatsoever.86Supra, ‘Preston’.

After the Restoration, Shuttleworthe seems to have resided quietly on his estate. In the mid-1660s, the attorney general prosecuted him in the court of exchequer for his proceedings as the Blackburn area’s chief sequestrator and receiver of public money during the civil war.87E134/16Chas2/East10; E134/16Chas2/Mich26. But the outcome of this case is not clear. Shuttleworthe died in the summer of 1669 and was buried at Padiham on 30 June.88Padiham par. reg. In his will, he left the bulk of his personal estate to his seven surviving ‘natural’ offspring with Judith Thorpe.89Borthwick, Prob. Reg. 51, ff. 39-40. His great-grandson and namesake represented Lancashire as a tory from 1705 to 1749.90HP Commons, 1690-1715.