BRADSHAWE, John (1602-59), of Marple Hall, Stockport, Cheshire, and the Deanery, Westminster Abbey.

Background and early career

Bradshawe belonged to a cadet branch of the Bradshaws of Bradshaw Hall – a family associated with the area around Chapel-en-le-Frith in north west Derbyshire since at least the thirteenth century (their claim to be descended from the Bradshaws of Bradshaw, near Bolton, in Lancashire, is probably spurious).75Bradshaw, God’s Battleaxe, 25-6; C. E. Bradshaw Bowles, ‘The Bradshawes of Bradshaw’, Jnl. of the Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. xxv. 15-17, 29. His grandfather, who was styled a yeoman, had purchased the manor houses of Marple Hall and Wybersley Hall, in the parish of Stockport in the extreme north east of Cheshire, in the early seventeenth century and had made Marple Hall the family’s principal residence.76Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 61-2; Bradshaw, God’s Battleaxe, 27; Andrew, ‘Bradshaw, the regicide’, 462. His achievement in establishing the family among Cheshire’s lesser gentry was apparently built upon by his son – Bradshawe’s father – Henry Bradshaw ‘gent’.77‘Obligatory knighthood temp. Charles I’ ed. Earwaker, 207. Henry certainly seems to have consolidated the Bradshaws’ ties with one of Cheshire’s greatest landowners, Sir Peter Legh† (the grandfather of Peter Legh* and Richard Legh*), whose main estate at Lyme lay very close to Marple.78Lancs. RO, DDS/322; DDX 383/1.

Bradshawe received a thorough education for the younger son of a minor north country gentleman, attending Bunbury grammar school in Cheshire, Middleton grammar school in Lancashire and (according to unsubstantiated tradition) the schools at Stockport and Macclesfield as well.79Bodl. Top. Cheshire e.7, f. 42; Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 69, 74; E. Foss, Judges of Eng. vi. 418-19; J. Ball, W. Ball, Stockport Grammar School 1487-1987 (Congleton, 1987), 25; S. Yates, An Hist. of the Ancient Town and Borough of Congleton (Congleton, 1820), 175. In 1620, he was admitted to Gray’s Inn, from where he wrote to Sir Peter in 1623 in very familiar terms, recounting an argument with his father over his legal studies and imparting foreign news and the machinations of the ‘high swollen favourite’, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.80Muddiman, ‘Bradshaw the regicide’, 320; Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 69; ‘A letter from John Bradshawe’ ed. W. Langton (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxxvii), 5-8. This letter further reveals that Bradshawe accounted among his patrons or friends one ‘Mr Damport’ – who was very probably his influential kinsman, the Gray’s Inn bencher and serjeant-at-law Humphrey Davenport.81‘John Bradshaw’, ‘Sir Humphrey Davenport’, Oxford DNB. It was doubtless through such connections that the young Bradshawe, who was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1627, built up what seems to have been a thriving legal practice in the north west. He was very probably the John Bradshawe of Gray’s Inn (there were several of that name there) who in 1630 was appointed steward of Thomas Howard†, 21st earl of Arundel’s manor of Glossop, just across the Cheshire-Derbyshire border from Marple.82Cheshire RO, DDX 69/2. His clients at law would include several prominent Cheshire gentlemen, as well as the borough of Congleton (about 15 miles south of Marple), where he took up residence during the early 1630s and where he was made a freeman and appointed steward, the town’s principal legal officer, in 1633.83Congleton Town Council, Congleton Acct. Bk. 1584-1637; CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 301-2. It was probably no coincidence that Davenport was a frequent and feted visitor to the town during the 1630s.84‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Bradshawe is easily confused with his friend and distant relation John Bradshawe of Congleton – son of Lawrence Bradshaw of Hope, Lancashire – who was admitted at Gray’s Inn in 1639 and who purchased the Cheshire manor of Millington in the mid-1650s.85PROB11/290, ff. 197-198v; C8/267/79; Cheshire RO, DDX 221; Lincs. RO, THOR/1/1/13/3-4; G. Inn Admiss. 221.

It was from Congleton that Bradshawe wrote another highly revealing letter to Sir Peter Legh, relating news of the battle of Lützen (Nov. 1632) and the death of the Protestant hero, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden: ‘more sad or heavy tidings hath not in this age been brought since Prince Harry’s [Prince Henry, Charles I’s elder brother] death to the true hearted English’.86Cheshire RO, Cheshire RO, DDX 69/3; Newton, House of Lyme, 135-6. Following Sir Peter’s death early in 1636, Bradshawe declared his readiness to do Francis Legh, Sir Peter’s heir, ‘any service ... and the house of Lyme, as there should be occasion’ and acknowledged himself ‘bound to you [Francis] for your favours’.87JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp., Letters to Francis Legh, folder 11: Bradshawe to Legh, 13 Apr. 1636; Newton, House of Lyme, 155-6. By 1637, Bradshawe had apparently acquired an even greater provincial patron than the Leghs, namely James Stanley†, Lord Strange, the future 7th earl of Derby, who would command the king’s army in the north west at the beginning of the civil war. In September 1637, Bradshawe informed Francis Legh that he was due to attend Lord Strange at Nantwich ‘upon a special business, but I hope my advice therein hath prevented my journey and saved him some labour’.88JRL, Legh of Lyme Corresp., Letters to Francis Legh, folder 11: Bradshawe to Legh, 4 Sept. 1637. Bradshawe would continue to represent the Stanley family’s interests into the 1650s.89CCC 1101, 1105. He was also the family lawyer of the influential Cheshire gentry family the Booths of Dunham Massey and helped to negotiate the match in 1639 between George Boothe* and a daughter of the godly peer Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln.90Supra, ‘George Boothe’; JRL, TW/251-6; EGR1/8/3/6.

In between advising his aristocratic clients, Bradshawe found time to serve as mayor of Congleton in 1637-8 and to perform many services for the town both in London and in the north west in his capacity as its steward.91Congleton Town Council, Congleton Acct. Bk. 1584-1637; Congleton Order Bk. 1554-1699. He was very probably the ‘Mr Bradshaw’ retained by the corporation of Stafford as their legal counsel in 1639-40; and in August 1641, the corporation of Newcastle-under Lyme, also in Staffordshire, elected him steward.92Staffs. RO, D1323/E/1, f. 243; Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 305. He strengthened his links with the Cheshire elite in 1638, when he married a daughter of one of the county’s leading gentlemen, Thomas Marbury of Marbury (father of the future Cheshire parliamentarian Thomas Marbury*).93‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Bradshawe’s practice was prospering sufficiently by 1640 for him to employ at least five servants.94Gibson, ‘Original corresp.’, 45.

Parliamentary lawyer, 1643-8

The civil war opened up new markets for Bradshawe’s legal talents, pushing him toward the centre of parliamentary politics. His decision to base himself in London rather than Cheshire during the war years was doubtless informed by professional considerations – the opportunities to be had in ‘the rapidly expanding world of state and administrative advocacy’ – but also by his political views.95‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Despite his close ties with the Stanley and Legh families, whose members and friends generally sided with the king, Bradshawe became a firm parliamentarian; and in November 1642, he contributed two horses to Parliament’s main field army.96SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 114. His political allegiance may well have been influenced by his religious sympathies, which had a strongly puritan bent.97Gibson, ‘Original corresp.’, 60. One contemporary source claimed that Bradshawe was ‘always addicted to the puritans, pleaded their cases, [and] was a great advocate for plundered ministers’ – but added that he was ‘not given to enthusiasms or prophecies’.98Add. 4460, f. 65. Some of his closest friends, notably John Milton, whom he represented in a chancery case in 1647, were accounted – and accounted themselves – among the godly.99W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography ed. G. Campbell (Oxford, 1996), 307, 540; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. During the 1650s, Bradshawe became a member of the gathered congregation at Westminster under the Independent divines William Strong and John Rowe.100‘John Rowe’, ‘William Strong’, Oxford DNB.

Bradshawe’s godly convictions and legal skills recommended him to the London Common Council when a vacancy occurred on the bench of the City’s sheriff’s court in 1643. His nomination enjoyed the backing of Lord Mayor Isaac Penington* – or so it was alleged after the Restoration – although most of the aldermen preferred one Richard Proctor for the post.101LMA, COL/CC/01/01/40, f. 74v; COL/CC/01/01/41, ff. 131v-134v; COL/CA/01/01/060, ff. 206, 246v; HMC 7th Rep. 152; Pearl, London, 247; Foss, Judges of Eng. vi. 419; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Bradshawe’s certainly had the support of the City sheriff, Alderman John Langham*, who, like Penington, was an ally of the war-party grandees Viscount Saye and Sele and John Pym*.102Infra, ‘John Langham’; LMA, COL/CA/01/01/060, ff. 194, 206; Mercurius Aulicus no. 29 (16-22 July 1643), 385 (E.63.2). The Common Council, claiming the right of election to the judge’s place, chose Bradshawe on 21 September in preference to Proctor and to Bradshawe’s fellow Cheshireman, William Steele*.103Pearl, London, 247; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB.

Bradshawe was at the centre of another civic dispute early in 1644 – this time over control of the City’s military resources. Speaking for the Salters’ Hall subcommittee to raise volunteer forces in the City, Bradshawe had been critical of the way the London militia committee – and, by implication, municipal leaders generally – had managed the City’s military affairs. On 5 February, a high-powered City delegation attended the Commons to complain about ‘the carriage and artifice’ of ‘one Mr Bradshaw ... [who] had done much hurt by his practices in that subcommittee, to the great discouragement and discontent of the whole City’. Bradshawe’s association with Salters’ Hall is revealing, for it was a meeting place for separatists and political radicals, while the subcommittee itself was apparently dominated by such militants, among them the future Leveller leader William Walwyn.104Harl. 166, f. 8; Add. 18779, f. 62; Add. 31116, p. 227; CJ iii. 388b; K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 312-14; The Writings of William Walwyn ed. J. R. McMichael, B. Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), 20-1, 177.

Bradshawe’s run-in with the City leadership in 1644 apparently did him no harm at Westminster. In October, the Commons added him to the legal team for prosecuting the Irish rebels Lord Maguire and Hugh Macmahon.105CJ iii. 648b, 651a, 674a. In March 1645, he was assigned by the Lords to be of counsel for one of the most celebrated victims of Laudian authoritarianism, Peter Smart.106LJ vii. 284b. But his most high-profile legal client during the war years was another future Leveller leader, John Lilburne. On 13 August 1645, the Commons ordered Bradshawe and the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Gabriel Becke* – a client of the Independent grandee Viscount Saye and Sele – to examine and ‘manage the proofs’ against Lilburne, who had been imprisoned in what seems to have been an attempt to prevent him testifying as to covert dealings between leading Presbyterians and the royalists. It has been argued that Bradshawe’s and Becke’s appointment was procured by the Independents in order to protect Lilburne as part of their factional quarrel with the Presbyterians. Certainly not everyone in the Commons was happy with the two men’s appointment, for on 26 August the House discharged them and appointed two less politically well-connected lawyers in their place.107Supra, ‘Gabriel Becke’; CJ iv. 239b, 253b; J. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ xliii. 630-2.

When John Lilburne landed in further trouble with the Presbyterians during the winter of 1645-6, he chose Bradshawe and another future regicide, John Cooke, to represent him at his trial in the Lords, where, according to Lilburne, Bradshawe put the case for the defence ‘excellently’.108J. Lilburne, The Iust Mans Iustification (1647), 26 (E.407.26); The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (1649), 12 (E.584.9); Lilburne, T. Prince, R. Overton, The Picture of the Councel of State (1649), 12 (E.550.14). Again, Lilburne’s protectors at Westminster were Saye and Sele and other leading Independents, supported in print by a man who would become one of Bradshawe’s closest friends, Marchamont Nedham.109LJ viii. 139b; Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 634-5. But Bradshawe’s loyalties in this case were probably aligned firmly with his parliamentary masters rather than with Lilburne. In June 1647, for example, the Commons appointed him to the powerful legal team, headed by Oliver St John*, for prosecuting the royalist judge and polemicist David Jenkins, whose ideas and friendship did much to strengthen Lilburne’s understanding of English law and its potential uses against his erstwhile Independent allies.110CJ v. 220a; Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 641; ‘John Lilburne’, Oxford DNB. Moreover, when the Independents moved to attack Lilburne themselves early in 1648, it was Bradshawe and Becke who headed the prosecution against him in king’s bench.111CJ iv. 452a; Peacey, ‘John Lilburne’, 644. Bradshawe would be among Lilburne’s most ‘potent enemies’ under the Rump, heading council of state committees for suppressing the Levellers and reportedly declaring that ‘the state can never expect an hour of security till he [Lilburne] be cut off and the rest of his faction [the Levellers] quell’d’.112CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 154; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 25 (9-16 Oct. 1649), sig. Bb4v (E.575.20).

The bulk of Bradshawe’s case-load during the 1640s derived not from the Commons or Lords directly, however, but from his engagement as retained counsel (with a salary of £150 a year) for the Committee for Sequestrations*, where he had taken over from William Ellys* and Henry Pelham* as the committee’s chief solicitor by the spring of 1645.113Supra, ‘Committee for Sequestrations’; SP20/1, ff. 201, 267v, 348, 360, 364, 559; LJ viii. 696b; ix. 88a, 89a, 603b; x. 429a, 496a; Bradshaw, God’s Battleaxe, 176; C.L. Young, ‘‘The Gentry are Sequestered All’: a Study of English Civil War Sequestration’ (Royal Holloway, London Univ. thesis, 2018), chap. 3 and passim. A correspondent of Ralph Verney*, writing from London early in 1647, thought that Bradshawe was, ‘as it were, attorney general’ of the committee and that he and another noted Commons’ lawyer, Samuel Browne, ‘are great men here’.114BL, Verney MSS: W. Denton to Verney, 14 Jan. 1647 (M636/8). A few years later, it was alleged that Solicitor General Oliver St John had made Bradshaw his ‘deputy attorney general to aggravate the compositions of all loyal subjects’.115Vox Veritatis (1650), 16 (E.616.6). On 7 July 1646, the Commons voted to agree with a report from the Committee for Sequestrations that Bradshawe had ‘done very great service to the Parliament’ and should receive an ‘allowance’ of the £200 a year out of the sequestrations revenue ‘for his great pains and labour therein’.116CJ iv. 606a. His nomination early in October as one of three commissioners in an ordinance drawn up by the Commons for the custody of the great seal further suggests that he had high-ranking friends at Westminster.117CJ iv. 688a. However, the ordinance was rejected by the Lords – though, not it seems, because of any animus against Bradshawe.118LJ viii. 533a, 541a-542b. In November 1647, he was assigned as counsel to the parliamentary committee to reform the University of Oxford, clashing with the university’s MP John Selden in his determination to refute its contention that the king was their only proper visitor.119Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford (1786), ii. 537, 540, 541.

Bradshawe’s services were also engaged by a variety of individual Parliament-men and officers during the civil war, including the governor of Liverpool, and future regicide, Colonel John Moore*, for whom Bradshawe solicited business with the lord admiral, the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†) and the navy commissioners.120Belvoir, QZ.5, f. 1; QZ.24, f. 81; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 74. On at least one occasion, ‘Famous Mr Bradshaw’ was hired by friends of the Westminster Presbyterians – to draft an ordinance for securing arrears of army pay.121Luke Letter Bks. 497. But his main patron at Westminster was the Independent MP and commander of Parliament’s forces in the north west, Sir William Brereton, who had been his contemporary at Gray’s Inn.122Infra, ‘Sir William Brereton’. Bradshawe, in turn, was described by one opponent as a ‘creature’ of Brereton’s, and certainly he played a prominent part in receiving and disbursing the sums that Parliament voted for the supply of Brereton’s command – in which role he would have worked closely with William Ashhurst* and John Swynfen*.123Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; infra, ‘John Swynfen’; SP28/22, p. 143; Cheshire RO, CR63/2/702, f. 29; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 68, 100, 158, 295; ii. 78, 109-10, 240, 244, 265, 307; CJ iii. 496a; LJ vi. 573b; vii. 336a, 608a, 710a; viii. 71a. Bradshawe also supplied Brereton with valuable information on the progress of business in the two Houses, particularly in relation to the establishment of the New Model army and the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance.124Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 12. His correspondence with Brereton reveals that he was on familiar terms with the Independent grandees and a firm supporter of their handiwork in new-modelling Parliament’s armies: ‘reducing three armies to one doth and will occasion discontents, yet wise men here [at Westminster] would not have the work to do again and hope well of this new way we are in, notwithstanding all the muttering and murmuring against it and the throwing up of commissions’.125Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 68, 229.

Brereton attempted to secure Bradshawe’s return as a ‘recruiter’ MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme in the autumn of 1645, but the election was (in Brereton’s words) ‘carried by the meaner sort of people’ for Samuel Terricke. Terricke prevailed largely, it seems, because his local connections as a native of the town and the son of a popular man in the borough were stronger than those of Bradshawe, whose failure to travel north to canvass in person probably did his cause no favours.126Supra, ‘Newcastle-under-Lyme’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 216-17. Over the next few months, Brereton entertained hopes of securing Bradshawe’s return for Staffordshire – and, alternately, for Cheshire or Chester – but Bradshawe’s unwillingness or inability to leave his work in London and court the voters meant that he was never seriously in contention for a seat in any of these places.127Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 378, 440, 458, 557. Brereton was probably involved in Bradshawe’s nomination early in 1647 for the office of chief justice of Chester, Flintshire, Denbighshire and Montgomeryshire.128CJ v. 93a. But although this appointment was first mooted and voted on in the Commons, it was the Lords that prepared the necessary ordinance, which passed the Upper House on 12 March and the Lower on 16 March.129CJ v. 113b; LJ ix. 55a, 69b, 75b. Bradshawe’s close working relationship with Brereton and the Independent grandees during the mid-1640s makes a nonsense of claims made by several authorities that he was altogether ignorant of high politics.130Muddiman, Trial, 64-5; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 22.

Bradshawe’s activities during the second civil war confirm his place among the vanguard of the Independent interest both in the north-west and in London. One royalist newsbook alleged in June 1648 that he had used his position as chief justice of Chester to deliver a ‘three hours invective charge against the king’ at the Nantwich assizes, where he had accused ‘this man who calls himself king’ of being ‘more cruel than Nero’.131Mercurius Elencticus no. 31 (21-8 June 1648), 244 (E.450.2). In August, this same newsbook referred to Bradshawe as ‘an old enemy of the king’s’ and claimed that he and Steele had ‘very boldly’ advised the London Common Council to desist in its efforts to raise troops in defiance of Parliament and the army.132Mercurius Elencticus no. 38 (9-16 Aug. 1648), 290 [recte 308] (E.459.8). The source of Bradshawe’s enmity towards Charles is not known precisely, but – as with his friend John Moore – the threat to Cheshire and the north west of Scottish invasion and royalist uprisings brought on by the king’s 1647 Engagement with the Scots is likely to have been one.133Infra, ‘John Moore’ It appears that Bradshawe was accustomed to thinking of Charles as a tyrant well before he came to sentence him in person on that very charge. Moreover, his hostility to the king suggests that by the summer of 1648 he may have been moving away from the Independent grandees, who were looking for ways to negotiate Charles’s restoration, if only as a puppet monarch. Bradshawe’s somewhat impolitic tirade at the Nantwich assizes did not preclude his appointment by Parliament as one of 20 new serjeants-at-law in October 1648, despite the fact that he was first required to take the oath of allegiance.134CJ vi. 50b; LJ x. 551a; Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (6-13 Feb. 1649), sigs. Nv-N2 (E.542.13). His sponsors for this office were Cheshire’s two knights of the shire – Brereton and the man whose marriage Bradshawe had helped to arrange in 1639, the Presbyterian grandee George Boothe.135Baker, Serjeants at Law, 441.

Judging the king

Brereton may well have been consulted about the selection of Bradshawe for the most important and sensitive role of his – indeed, perhaps of any – legal career, that of lord president of the high court of justice set up on 6 January 1649 to try the king.136Muddiman, Trial, 72; Morrill, Cheshire, 183. Bradshawe had been appointed a commissioner to try the king in the first, draft ordinance for a high court of justice (which the Lords rejected on 2 January) and again in the 6 January ordinance and was clearly seen as a man likely to favour bringing Charles to justice.137Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1380; Muddiman, Trial, 194. At the second meeting of the trial commissioners, on 10 January, Bradshawe was nominated presiding judge of the court – which office he accepted on 12 January, after the usual demurrers for form’s sake.138Muddiman, Trial, 66-7, 199. That he was selected for this position rather than one of the other senior lawyers on the trial commission has been ascribed in part to the strength of his connections with the radical faction that seized control of London’s municipal government in the winter of 1648-9.139S. Kelsey, ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (2001), 79, 80; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB.

Bradshawe played the part of what Sir Edward Hyde* called ‘the greatest magistrate in England’ almost to perfection – helped considerably by the determination of the trial organisers to invest his office and the court’s proceedings generally with the pomp and solemnity suitable to the first judicial ruling of the sovereign House of Commons.140Clarendon, Hist. iv. 474-5; Muddiman, Trial, 72, 75, 200, 204; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB; Kelsey, ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, 79, 81, 85. Having been instructed to act as spokesman for his fellow judges (i.e. the commissioners) and to deal directly with the king, Bradshawe was also instrumental in determining the ‘form and method’ of the trial, held in Westminster Hall during late January.141Muddiman, Trial, 200, 208. His greatest challenge during the four-day trial lay not so much in handling Charles – indeed, as one recent authority has argued, he undoubtedly ‘skewered’ the king in some of their most important exchanges – but the divisions and competing agendas as to the trial’s outcome among the commissioners.142Muddiman, Trial, 208; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB; Kelsey, ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, 72-3.

In keeping with what seems to have been most of the commissioners’ wish to use the trial as a last ditch attempt to reach some kind of accommodation with Charles, Bradshawe repeatedly gave the king an opportunity to plead to the charges against him and thereby to recognise the authority of the court and (implicitly) the ‘supreme authority of the Commons assembled in Parliament’ and the legitimacy of any post-trial settlement.143S. Kelsey, ‘The trial of Charles I’, EHR cxviii. 586-8, 591-4, 600, 615; ‘Politics and procedure in the trial of Charles I’, Law and Hist. Rev. xxii. 17. However, on the third day of the trial, 23 January 1649, Bradshawe was wrong-footed by the divisions among the judges when he initiated moves to declare the king contumacious and proceed to sentence – in accordance with the instructions he had received the previous day – only to be overruled by his colleagues after the session had ended.144Muddiman, Trial, 100, 209-10, 211; Kesley, ‘The trial of Charles I’, 605-6, 609; ‘Politics and procedure’, 18-19; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. On the final day of the trial, 27 January, he was again instructed to give the king yet another opportunity to plead to the charges, or if Charles should offer ‘anything else worth the court’s consideration’ to give order for an adjournment to discuss the matter.145Muddiman, Trial, 225; Kesley, ‘The trial of Charles I’, 610. Charles duly asked to put his case before the Commons and Lords in the Painted Chamber, which Bradshawe construed as a further denial of the court’s jurisdiction, but was reminded of his instructions and adjourned the court.146Muddiman, Trial, 108-10; Kesley, ‘The trial of Charles I’, 610-11; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. When it reconvened, Bradshawe informed the king that the commissioners had declined his proposal – had they done otherwise it would have repudiated the constitutional revolution that had brought them to power.147Kesley, ‘The trial of Charles I’, 611, 614, 616. Nevertheless, and again clearly on the instructions of the commissioners, he gave the king several further opportunities to give a ‘positive answer’ to the charges, but to no avail, whereupon he proceeded to pass sentence.148Muddiman, Trial, 112-14; Kesley, ‘The trial of Charles I’, 611; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB.

In the lengthy oration with which he prefaced the sentence of death, Bradshawe mingled arguments based upon the law of nature – i.e. that Charles had broken ‘the contract and bargain made betwixt the king and his people’ – and examples drawn from European history (both ancient and modern) to the effect that monarchy was essentially elective and that sovereignty resided in the people, with appeals to English historical precedent and the king’s violation of the known laws.149Muddiman, Trial, 114-29; D. A Orr, ‘The juristic foundation of regicide’, in The Regicides ed. Peacey, 129-32. His sources were equally eclectic, ranging from classical authors to the thirteenth century jurist Bracton to a 1595 pamphlet by the Jesuits William Allen and Robert Persons, which the radical preacher and journalist Henry Walker had published in an edited form in 1648 under the title Severall Speeches delivered at a Conference Concerning the Power of Parliament to Proeeed [sic] against their King for Misgovernment.150Muddiman, Trial, 115-22; Orr, ‘The juristic foundation of regicide’ 129-32; ‘Henry Walker’, Oxford DNB. Bradshawe was apparently the first to sign the king’s death warrant, or at least his signature headed those of the 59 commissioners who officially sealed Charles’s fate.151Muddiman, Trial, 227.

Serving the Rump, 1649-53

Bradshawe’s work as England’s ‘greatest magistrate’ did not cease with the sentencing of Charles I. He also presided over the high court of justice that during February and March 1649 tried and condemned James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, and several other leading royalists captured during the second civil war.152[C. Walker*], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 131-2 (E.570.4); Hist. of Independency the Fourth and Last Part (1660), 2 (E.1052.4). In mid-February, Bradshawe was one of 41 peers, MPs, lawyers and army officers nominated to the first council of state – possibly with a view to his future appointment as its presiding officer.153CJ vi. 141a; S. Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, PH xxii. 236. Shortly after his nomination, Bradshawe feasted the Dutch ambassadors – a mark of the important position he now occupied within the re-constituted English state.154Bodl. Carte 23, f. 489; Original Letters and Pprs. ed. T. Carte (1739), i. 225; Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 236. His newly-acquired eminence was re-confirmed in emphatic fashion on 10 March (the day after Hamilton and his co-defendants were executed), when the council overturned a ruling of the Commons by appointing him its chairman or ‘lord president’.155Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 233.

Bradshawe performed his office as a councillor of state with unrivalled diligence, attending 1,269 of the council’s 1,314 meetings between February 1649 and April 1653.156Aylmer, State’s Servants, 352; Worden, Rump Parl. 182. As lord president, he was authorised (among other things) to sign warrants concerning admiralty and navy business, and for arresting the authors and printers of seditious literature, when the council was not in session.157CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 43, 145; Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 237. His office also came with important ceremonial functions and a great deal of prestige. A warship was named after him, town corporations solicited his help with their business at Whitehall, eulogies were written about him and books dedicated to him.158Berwick RO, B9/1, ff. 29, 35; Cheshire RO, Mayor of Chester letters 1651-73, ZM/L/3/330; S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic (Manchester, 1997), 128; B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), 45, 195-6. He used his office to promote a variety of reformist measures, including a scheme proposed by Samuel Hartlib’s circle to bring the transatlantic colonies more closely under the commonwealth’s authority. One of Hartlib’s correspondents praised Bradshawe as ‘a man of life and action and of a very public spirit ... and he seemed not to doubt but the authority of the council of state would, by the power which they have in those matters, carry our desires to some effect’.159Hartlib Pprs. Online, 1/2/9A, 11A, 12B, 14A.

Bradshawe made perhaps his greatest impact as lord president in engaging writers in the state’s service and promoting publications he deemed in the public interest – particularly those that recounted the evils of monarchical tyranny and ‘the inherent superiority of republics’. Similarly, having been given control over the press in March 1649, he was closely involved in the Rump’s efforts to suppress the writing and publication of material intended ‘to seduce and debauch the people of the commonwealth from their duty and proper interest’.160Add. 19399, f. 75; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 131-2; Kelsey, ‘Constructing the council of state’, 238; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 158, 187, 227; J. McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), 137; B. Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), 290-1. It was probably in this capacity that he emerged as the ‘capital enemy’ of the anti-trinitarian writer John Biddle.161Ath. Ox. iii. 598. Bradshawe was regarded as the state’s foremost ‘bloodhound’ both by the royalist and Leveller polemicists he hunted and by the council itself, which on 12 May 1649 ordered him to bring in an act to prevent the printing of ‘invective and scandalous pamphlets against the commonwealth’.162Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 49 (3-10 Apr. 1649), sig. Nnn4 (E.550.13); Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II), no. 2 (24 Apr.-1 May 1649), sig. B (E.552.15); no. 18 (14-21 Aug. 1649), sig. S2v (E5.71.8); no. 35 (25 Dec. 1649-1 Jan. 1650), sig. Mmv (E.587.8); Lilburne, Prince, Overton, Picture of the Councel of State, 2, 4, 11, 32, 35, 51; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 43, 137, 260, 340, 385, 401; J. Peacey, ‘Reporting a revolution: a failed propaganda campaign’, in The Regicides ed. Peacey, 175; McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 145-6, 152, 166-7, 170-2, 176-8, 180.

Bradshawe may well have played a leading role in ‘turning’ the royalist newsbook writer Marchamont Nedham, after the latter’s arrest in June 1649. In November of that year, after agreeing to write for the commonwealth, Nedham informed a friend that Bradshawe’s ‘favour hath once more turned the wheel of my fortune; who, upon my single letter, hath been pleased to indulge me my liberty’.163SP46/95, f. 190; Oxinden Letters ed. Gardiner, 161; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 195, 283. Nedham subsequently became one of Bradshawe’s closest friends, praising in print the lord president’s ‘indefatigable industry’ in the public interest. Bradshawe may also have used his influence to advance another of his friends, John Milton, to the post of Latin secretary to the council of state. Milton’s Defensio Secunda of 1654 (but probably written under the Rump) contains a fulsome eulogy to Bradshawe: that ‘friend of my own, of all others the most deserving of my reverence … a name which liberty herself, wherever she is respected, has commended for celebration to everlasting memory’.164Parker, Milton ed. Campbell, 442; Worden, Literature and Politics, 45-7, 158, 196.

Bradshawe’s range of influence extended well beyond his office as lord president. He chaired the Rump’s court for relief on articles of war – one of his most politically sensitive roles under the commonwealth – and the council’s standing committee ‘for taking examinations and informations’, which was responsible for hearing secret evidence against suspects and interrogating detainees.165Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 201; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 21; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. His legal sphere of influence grew in July 1649, when the Rump appointed him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. This appointment would be renewed until the office was put in commission in the autumn of 1653, with Bradshawe and the attorney general of the duchy, Thomas Fell*, as joint commissioners.166CJ vi. 271a; vii. 319b, 320a. Bradshawe had served as counsel in the duchy court on many occasions in the decades before his appointment as chancellor and could scarcely have hoped to secure this plum office but for the contingencies of the civil war.167PRO30/26/21, p. 13; Congleton Town Council, Congleton Acct. Bk. 1584-1637. Given custody of the duchy seals and allowed use of the chamber in Westminster where duchy business was traditionally conducted, he does not appear to have been prevented from enjoying the full fruits and powers of the chancellorship, as one recent authority has suggested was the case.168PRO30/26/21, pp. 30, 34; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. He certainly wielded sufficient authority as chancellor to exert pressure for payment of money owed to the duchy for the use of the commonwealth and to ensure that all duchy officials took the Engagement abjuring monarchy and Lords.169PRO30/26/21, pp. 31-6. The proceedings of the duchy court during his tenure exhibited ‘great regularity’, the enrolments were made with considerable care and the court’s records and entries were more than usually ‘orderly and formal’.170PRO30/26/21, p. 56.

In recognition of Bradshawe’s new-found eminence and his ‘great merits’, the Rump voted on 19 June 1649 to augment his landed estate and to grant him £1,000 ‘toward his charges expended in the service of the state’.171CJ vi. 237a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 397. On 15 August, an Act was duly passed for settling lands worth £2,000 a year upon him – mostly forfeited estates of Francis 1st Baron Cottington† and the marquess of Clanricarde.172CJ vi. 279a; CCC 146. So powerful was Bradshawe’s interest by the spring of 1650, that he went head to head with none other than Oliver Cromwell* for the office of chancellor of Oxford University – although in the event, he was not able to prevail against the commonwealth’s foremost soldier.173Whitelocke, Diary, 254; Worden, Literature and Politics, 197.

Not everyone was as pleased about Bradshawe’s lofty new status as he evidently was. A vote on 16 July 1649 on whether to pass an Act appointing him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster on a permanent basis (or at the House’s pleasure) was defeated by 25 votes to 21.174CJ vi. 262a. Even one of those in favour of his permanent appointment, his fellow lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke, was not overly impressed with his performance as lord president, remarking that he seemed ‘not much versed’ in how to chair meetings and that he wasted much of the council’s time ‘in urging his own long arguments’, to the ‘great hindrance ... [of] business’. As far as Whitelocke was concerned, Bradshawe’s role was merely ‘to gather the sense of the council and to state the question, not to deliver his own opinions’.175Whitelocke, Diary, 234; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 552, 558. Henry Marten*, for one, evidently thought that Bradshawe had grown too big for his boots, and in February 1651 he tried to replace him (at least temporarily) as chairman of the committee for examinations.176Original Letters and Pprs. ed. Carte, i. 443-4; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 129, 147. But sniping at his authority at Whitehall was as nothing to what some of the London crowd wanted to do to him. Whitelocke recounted how, at the public funeral of one of the City aldermen in March 1650, Bradshawe was threatened by some of the ‘rabble’, who rounded on him as ‘the rogue that judged the king’ and threatened to ‘tear him in pieces’.177Add. 37345, f. 54; Whitelocke, Diary, 255.

Bradshawe’s most powerful opponent in the Rump, or at least the man who needed most convincing as to his worth, was probably Cromwell. Although Bradshawe seems to have had friends among Cromwell’s staff and political circle, the two men corresponded relatively little on a personal basis.178Mercurius Politicus no. 19 (10-17 Oct. 1650), 319-20 (E.614.12); Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 39-40, 51, 65; Original Letters Illustrative of English History ed. H. Ellis (1827), ser. 2, iii. 356-7; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 375; Worden, Literature and Politics, 197. During the winter of 1650-1, when there were moves afoot to unseat Bradshawe as lord president, it is revealing that his friend, the future Quaker and member of Thomas Scot I’s* intelligence gathering team, George Bishop, went out of his way to commend him to the lord general.179Worden, Literature and Politics, 197-8.

It is here very much very much whisper’d that there shall be another president, and some forbear not to say that your lordship does not favour him that is now in that place ... what representations may be made I know not ... but this I presume I may say safely, that he [Bradshawe] hath a plain and upright heart, full of courage and nobleness for justice and the commonwealth and is so elaborate [sic] that whoever succeeds him the commonwealth will find a great miss of him.180Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 50.

In February 1651, Bradshawe wrote in very respectful but somewhat strained tones to Cromwell (who was on campaign in Scotland at the time), thanking him for his ‘fair interpretation of my past and ... well meant actions’ – possibly a reference to their contest for the chancellorship of Oxford University. He concluded by remarking on his recent re-election to the council of state, claiming, somewhat implausibly, that he had asked to resign the presidency, ‘but I could not obtain that favour, and I dare not but submit where it is clear to me that God gives the call’.181Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 65. Cromwell wrote an equally respectful letter in reply, acknowledging Bradshawe’s ‘high favour’ towards him.182Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 400. Yet inasmuch as Bradshawe was a leading figure in the Rump’s political establishment, Cromwell would almost certainly have come to regard him with suspicion, if not something worse. The tension in the two men’s relationship by 1651-2 has been seen as part of a deeper division among the Rump’s grandees between those like Bradshawe who were committed Commons supremacists and those like Cromwell who favoured a more monarchical settlement that would accommodate political interests beyond that of civilian republicans.183Worden, Literature and Politics, 196-7.

Bradshawe did not have to wait much longer to be relieved of his supposedly onerous duties as lord president. In the elections to the fourth council of state, in November 1651, he came a respectable ninth; but two days later (26 Nov.), the House voted that no councillor should serve as president for longer than a month at a time – in other words, Bradshawe’s office was to be put in rotation. It must have come as small consolation to him that he was chosen the first monthly president.184CJ vii. 42a, 43b. The council elections overall, and Bradshawe’s loss of the presidency in particular, reflected a shift in political balance in the Rump that has been linked to the impact of Cromwell’s return to Westminster after his victory at Worcester that autumn. The power that Bradshawe had accrued as lord president was probably seen by the officers as symptomatic of the Rump’s degeneration into corrupt and worldly ways.185Worden, Literature and Politics, 200. Although he would retain the title of Lord Bradshawe for the remainder of his political career, his role in the Rump’s counsels had been curtailed.

Yet despite losing his office as lord president, Bradshawe remained an influential figure at Whitehall. He was among the clique of councillors that dominated the council’s committee for foreign affairs during the last year of the Rump and its slide into war with the Dutch.186SP25/131-3, passim. And his connections and experience in the highest echelons of central politics continued to attract the attention of patronage-hungry outside interests. In the spring of 1652, for example, Hull corporation solicited his help with the council in having the Presbyterian minister Henry Hibbert (who was Bradshawe’s kinsman) installed as the town’s minister – which Bradshawe duly effected, or at least facilitated (and was sent a barrel of Hull ale by the corporation by way of thanks).187Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/L517, 519, 522-4, 527-8; C BRB/4, p. 84; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 456; J. Croston, Nooks and Corners of Lancs. and Cheshire (1882), 25. Hibbert would emerge during the 1650s as a clerical opponent of the Independent divine John Canne.188‘Henry Hibbert’, Oxford DNB. Bradshawe came eleventh in the elections to the fifth council of state in November 1652 and served once more as president in January 1653.189CJ vii. 220a; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 128; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB.

Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 dealt a much more serious blow to Bradshawe and his career prospects. According to one source, Cromwell and other army leaders confronted the members of the council of state on 20 April and told them that Parliament had been dissolved and the council with it – to which Bradshawe reportedly replied ‘you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved, for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves, therefore take you notice of that’.190Ludlow, Mems. i. 357. However, there are strong grounds for questioning the veracity of this account, which may be a much embellished version of Bradshawe’s outburst a few days after the dissolution, in the court for relief on articles of war, ‘that the Parliament was not dissolv’d, though under force’ and ‘possibly might meet again’.191Staffs. RO, D593/P/8/2/2, 30 Apr. 1653; Clarke Pprs. iii. 3; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Soon after the fall of the Rump it was reported that he would be ejected from his lodgings at Whitehall and called to account for having ‘more of the public revenue in his possession then was allowed him’ (Bradshawe still had at least £900 of the king’s goods in mid-1656).192SP18/128/90I, f. 242; Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 437v; CCSP ii. 212. But having reportedly made a humble submission to the army officers, and in light of his useful services as chairman of the court for relief on articles of war, he was allowed to remain chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and to retain his Whitehall lodgings (until September, at any rate), ‘which he rejoiceth at in the hope it may give him admission again into the public business’.193PRO30/26/21, p. 58; Bodl. Clarendon 45, ff. 381, 486v; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 61, 157; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 169; ‘John Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB.

Defying the protectorate, 1654-9

Bradshawe’s stock fell still further with the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653. Although he was allowed to retain his offices as chief justice of Chester and commissioner for relief on articles of war, he was omitted from the commission for the great seal of the duchy of Lancaster (as renewed in February 1654) and was effectively replaced by Fell following their joint appointment in June as commissioners and judges for the duchy.194SP28/224, f. 336; PRO30/26/21, pp. 59-63; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 53; Bradshaw, God’s Battleaxe, 342, 353. Bradshawe’s chance to regain some of his lost prestige came in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, when he was returned both for Stafford and (in first place) for his native Cheshire.195Supra, ‘Cheshire’; ‘Stafford’. He may have owned a country residence at Greenway Hall in north Staffordshire, about six miles south of Congleton – although this property is mentioned nowhere in his papers and correspondence. But his primary appeal for the voters at Stafford was probably his connections in London and among his fellow Parliament-men.196Supra, ‘Stafford’; J. Ward, The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent (1843), 106, 531. Once at Westminster, he doubtless opted to sit for Cheshire and to waive his election for Stafford, although there is no record to this effect in the Journal.

One newsbook account of the opening of the first protectoral Parliament claimed that Bradshawe was a candidate for Speaker.197Faithful Scout no. 195 (1-8 Sept. 1654), 1554 (E.233.24). In the event, he emerged as a leading figure in the House only in terms of his opposition to Cromwell and the protectoral settlement. As soon as the House assembled the Members began to debate the Instrument of Government and the powers of the ‘single person’ in relation to Parliament.198Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 83-4. According to Edmund Ludlowe II*, the commonwealthsmen, and ‘especially the Lord President Bradshaw, were very instrumental in opening the eyes of many young Members who had never before heard their interest so clearly stated and asserted’.199Ludlow, Mems. i. 391; Nicholas Pprs. ii. 83. ‘Upon the grand question of the supreme legislative’, claimed the New England radical Roger Williams, ‘the Lord Bradshawe spake openly that if a Parliament were not supreme, then he was a murtherer [murderer] of King Charles’.200Corresp. of Roger Williams ed. G. W. LaFantasie (Hanover, NH, 1988), ii. 434. Having been named to committees on 4 and 5 September, Bradshawe served as a majority teller on 7 September in favour of debating the settling of government in committee of the whole House.201CJ vii. 366a, 366b, 367a. The opposing, minority tellers were the Cromwellian grandees Sir Charles Wolseley and Walter Strickland, who would have preferred that this issue be debated, if at all, within the confines of a select committee. By 11 September, the House was preparing to vote on whether the protector should be ‘limited and restrained as the Parliament should think fit’, whereupon Cromwell, on the 12th, had the doors of the Commons chamber locked and demanded that the Members subscribe a ‘Recognition’, whereby they engaged not to alter the government.202Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 84-5. Prominent among the 80 or so Members who refused to subscribe were Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Bradshawe, Thomas Scot I and other commonwealthsmen, who were duly excluded from the House and took no further part in its proceedings.203Add. 78196, f. 17; CUL, Buxton pprs. 59/100; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 86.

Secretary John Thurloe* received intelligence during the mid-1650s – some of it very detailed – that Bradshawe was a leading figure in various republican conspiracies against the protectorate, but no action was taken against him.204TSP iii. 147-8, 185; v. 197; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 204. His attendance at meetings of the governors of Westminster school during the mid-1650s certainly ensured that he kept in touch with many of his former colleagues in the Rump, among them Ludlowe, Scot and Thomas Chaloner.205SP28/292, unfol. Despite a report in June 1655 that Bradshawe had by this time been removed from all public employments, in fact he seems to have retained his office as chief justice of Chester – and in the autumn of 1655, he was named to the Cheshire commission for assisting Major-general Charles Worsley*.206SP28/224, f. 336; Cheshire RO, DLT/B38, p. 10; TSP v. 22; Clarke Pprs. iii. 45. That he was still seen as a man of influence is clear from the assiduous way he was courted by the friends of the Cheshire gentleman Somerford Oldfield, who faced prosecution for treason in 1656 after being implicated in an abortive rising in Lancashire against the protectorate. Bradshawe (with Thomas Marbury* and Peter Brooke*) promised to ‘befriend’ Oldfield ‘to the utmost of his power’ and was said to have had a ‘great interest’ in one of the Cromwellian masters of requests Nathaniel Bacon*.207Cheshire RO, DSS/1/7/66/33, 41, 61, 63, 70, 71.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Bradshawe was among the four candidates selected by Cheshire’s ‘gentleman confederates’ – the informal caucus that met to decide the county’s electoral slate. His nomination is perhaps best explained as a pragmatic recognition of his standing as chief justice of Chester and his popularity among the freeholders and particularly the Quakers – whom he treated leniently as chief justice. However, it may also have reflected the strength of his ties among the Cheshire gentry, notably with the Boothes, Brookes, Leghs and Marburys. But regardless, or perhaps because of, the ‘great party’ he enjoyed in Cheshire, the government would not countenance the return of such an ardent enemy of the protectorate, and after pressure from Worsley’s successor – Major-general Tobias Bridge* – and ‘much debate and arguing’, the gentlemen confederates agreed to nominate Sir George Boothe in his place. Undaunted, Bradshawe stood as an independent candidate, although his supporters tried to persuade Sir William Brereton that the two men should join forces against the four nominated candidates. On election day, 20 August, many of the voters raised a shout for Bradshawe, while some also declared in favour of Brereton, and both sets of supporters demanded a poll. But sharp practice by the sheriff ensured the return of the four nominated candidates – reportedly to the discontent of ‘the generality of freeholders’. Some of the gentlemen confederates tried to justify these proceedings by claiming that while they sympathised with Bradshawe, electing him might have proved detrimental to his interests.208Supra, ‘Cheshire’; CHES21/4, f. 326; P. J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 396-8, 404-7, 410, 414, 416-19; Morrill, Cheshire, 288-93.

Returning Bradshawe to the second protectoral Parliament would certainly have proved detrimental to the Cheshire gentry’s interests, if not his own, for on 1 August 1656, he had been summoned before Cromwell and the protectoral council, charged with using his office as chief justice of Chester to sow ‘disaffection to the present government’ and had been warned that he would be removed unless he agreed to receive a new patent under the protectoral seal. In reply, he had made a long-winded speech, claiming that in his charges on circuit he had always impressed upon the people the duty of ‘peaceable submission to the powers which by God’s providence were set over them’ and that they had cause to bless God for the ‘acting of the present powers for suppression of sin and profaneness, [and] encouragement of men in virtuous and godly living’. He had insisted to the council that he held his office ‘by act and power of Parliament – the undoubted supreme authority of this commonwealth’ – that ‘the Instrument of Government itself confirmed all such ordinances and dispositions by Parliament’ and that to accept a new patent would ‘tend to the diminution of such public assurances’.209Ludlow, Mems. ii. 10; Clarke Pprs. iii. 68, 69; P. J. Pinckney, ‘Bradshaw and Cromwell in 1656’, HLQ xxx. 233-40. A few weeks later, he advanced the same arguments to Henry Cromwell*, in a letter that suggests he enjoyed better relations with the son than he did with the father. Although deprived of his office, Bradshawe defied the government and issued out warrants for holding the autumn assizes; and late in September, the council backed down and allowed him go on circuit, which was effectively to re-instate him as chief justice.210TSP v. 314, 317; CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 50, 117; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 16; Gibson, ‘Original corresp.’, 66-7, 68-9.

The ‘distaste’ between Bradshawe and Cromwell seems to have grown still further in 1657, ending only with the latter’s death in September 1658.211Whitelocke, Diary, 480. Protector Richard Cromwell* apparently took a more favourable view of Bradshawe, or at least regarded him as biddable, for in December 1658 he was re-appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.212Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. Somerville, 2. In January 1659, Bradshawe stood as a candidate for Cheshire in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament, although by that time he was suffering so badly from malaria-like symptoms that he was barely fit even to dictate letters.213Newton, House of Lyme, 199; Clarke Pprs. iv. 281. As in 1654 and 1656, the gentlemen confederates met prior to the election to select candidates, who were apparently Richard Legh and Peter Brooke. But Bradshawe once again defied this gentlemanly consortium, and this time he had a great advantage over his rivals in that the county sheriff was his friend, not theirs. Moreover, his popularity with the freeholders does not appear to have diminished, and in the county’s Quakers he had a solid and organised block of electoral support.

Nevertheless, the Cheshire election for Richard Cromwell’s Parliament would be no straightforward contest between the forces of radicalism and conservatism in the county. Brooke’s and Legh’s leading supporters certainly included several of Cheshire’s most prominent civil-war royalists, as well as a group of ‘alienated’ parliamentarian gentry of mostly ancient descent and political Presbyterian sympathies. Yet Bradshawe, too, had the backing of at least one prominent former royalist, the Catholic peer John Savage†, 2nd earl Rivers, not to mention that of the Presbyterian John Crewe II*. However, Bradshawe clearly appealed to political constituencies that Legh and Brooke did not – most notably, the county’s leading military men and radical gentry, including Henry Birkhened* and Robert Duckenfeild*. On the first day of the election, ‘the most part of the ancient gentry’ appeared for Legh, who duly secured the senior place. But a contest then developed between Bradshawe and Brooke for the second place; and on this occasion, sharp practice by the sheriff ensured that it was Bradshawe who prevailed.214Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Morrill, Cheshire, 293-7. Although ‘weak and sickly’, Bradshawe delivered a victory speech to the voters in which he called Legh ‘a child’ and Brooke something even less complimentary (probably a bastard) and declared ‘it was not for the honour of the county to choose such’.215Harl. 1929, f. 20; Newton, House of Lyme, 202. His later claim that he had played a ‘purely passive’ part in the election was disingenuous, although it is likely that most of the necessary dirty work had been performed not by him but by his elder brother Henry, who had acted in this and the previous county election as his electoral manager.216JRL, Legh of Lyme Corresp., Letters to Richard Legh, misc. corresp. 1636-87: Bradshawe to Mr Jackson of Nantwich, 22 Jan. 1659.

The contest between Bradshawe and Brooke generated a huge amount of bitterness and friction among the Cheshire gentry. Not long after the election, Bradshawe – back in his ‘sick chamber’ at Westminster – wrote a lengthy and revealing letter in answer to complaints addressed to him from a member of Brooke’s faction. Although he began with the usual platitudes about how elections ought to be ‘unprejudiced and free’, he seems to have regarded the franchise as rather more open than did some of his contemporaries. The term ‘freeholders’, he insisted, ‘comprehends all the degrees of the county who have votes, for you will not say you have an upper and lower House, Lords and Commons, there’. What he failed to say, but almost certainly believed, was that the franchise should not comprehend Catholics and delinquents. However, he did include a defence of the Quakers’ right to vote

if they were freeholders and acted as the law prescribes, why should any be so arbitrary as to exclude them, or so simple as to be offended at them; this privilege is a high part of their birthright? ... I have but one rule for them, and for all that come before me as judge, and that is the equal, just and impartial law of the land, which directs and commands like justice in like cases to all sorts of persons, and therein Quakers have their share as well as others. And this I am certain complies with God’s own will declared in scripture, who forbids respect of persons in judgement.217JRL, Legh of Lyme Corresp., Letters to Richard Legh, misc. corresp. 1636-87: Bradshawe to Jackson, 22 Jan. 1659; Newton, House of Lyme, 199-200; Morrill, Cheshire, 297-8.

Brooke’s faction sent an address to the protector against Bradshawe’s return, which was reportedly well received, but was not printed in the government mouthpiece Mercurius Politicus because the editor was of course Bradshawe’s friend, Marchamont Nedham. Brooke’s party also petitioned Parliament against Bradshawe’s return, with Richard Legh promising to help secure a prompt hearing of the case before the committee of privileges. Bradshawe’s party used the occasion of the Cheshire quarter sessions late in January to draw up their own address to the protector, in the name of the sheriff, justices and jurors of the county.218Greater Manchester County RO, E17/89/26/1, 2; Newton, House of Lyme, 200.

As a result of the contested nature of his return, Bradshawe did not take his seat in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament – the House ‘having made an order that in case of a double return neither of the competitors should sit till the matter should be heard and decided’.219Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51. Yet even though Bradshawe was not present in the House, several commentators believed that he was among the guiding lights of the ‘commonwealth party’ at Westminster, along with Hesilrige, Scot I and Sir Henry Vane II.220CCSP iv. 146; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 120-1. When the Cheshire election dispute was debated in the committee of privileges on 14 April 1659, its members voted by 17 to ten in favour of confirming Bradshawe’s return. However, the parliamentary diarist Thomas Burton felt that ‘upon the whole, the opinion was that the whole election was void’ and that when the committee’s resolution was reported to the House ‘it will abide debate [i.e. stand a good chance of being overturned]’.221Burton’s Diary, iv. 430. Although there is no record that the committee ever made its report, one of Sir Edward Hyde’s correspondents claimed on 22 April that Bradshawe was now sitting in the House, but was ‘very quiet’.222CCSP iv. 186. If he did take his seat he would have had little opportunity to make any impact, for on 21-2 April the army dissolved Parliament and brought down the protectorate.

Swansong and death, 1659

Bradshawe undoubtedly welcomed the fall of the protectorate and the restoration, in May 1659, of the Rump. On 13 May, the Rump voted him onto its newly reconstituted council of state, and on 4 June, it appointed him one of the commissioners of the great seal.223CJ vii. 652b, 671b. He was also re-appointed to the committee of ‘examination and secrecy’, to which were entrusted ‘great powers’ for investigating the enemies of the commonwealth.224Ludlow, Mems. ii. 85. On 7 June, however, he wrote to Speaker William Lenthall from his Wiltshire property of Fonthill Gifford (formerly part of Cottington’s estate) to say that he was too ill to attend the House, having suffered from an ‘aguish distemper of above eight months’ continuance, for removing whereof (after much physic in vain) ... I have betaken myself to the fresh air and hope (though my fits have not yet left me) to receive benefit and advantage thereby’. He hoped that the Members would excuse his absence and that ‘God would bless all their counsels and consultations ... for the happy settling and establishing of this lately languishing and now revived commonwealth upon sure and lasting foundations’.225CJ vii. 677a; Clarke Pprs. iv. 280-1. It was not until mid-July that was he well enough to attend the House and the council of state and to take his oath as a commissioner of the great seal.226Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 199, 209; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/82; CJ vii. 728b.

Bradshawe was active on the council and the committee for examinations during August and September 1659 in gathering evidence against those involved in Sir George Boothe’s failed rebellion in Cheshire and Lancashire.227Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 268, 402; CCSP iv. 317, 324, 333, 337, 346, 368, 370, 378, 381; Rugg Diurnal, 4-5. The grievances that sparked this rebellion appear to have been greatly exacerbated by the electoral contest between Bradshawe and Brooke at the beginning of the year. As both chief justice of Chester and as a parliamentary candidate, Bradshawe had demonstrated little respect for the authority of the county’s ‘natural rulers’. Indeed, it has been suggested that Bradshawe’s espousal of the freeholders’ ‘birthright’ to exercise their political will independently of gentry control and regardless of their rank or (in the case of the Quakers at least) religious views so alarmed some of the region’s gentlemen that they felt compelled to take up arms to preserve their political hegemony.228Morrill, Cheshire, 230, 231-2, 245, 298. Bradshawe felt similarly aggrieved following the army’s dissolution of the Rump in mid-October and establishment of a governing committee of safety. At a meeting of the council of state, he reportedly called the leader of the dissident army faction, Major-general John Lambert*, a ‘rebel and a traitor’.229CCSP iv. 417. When Colonel William Sydenham* attempted to justify the army’s proceedings, claiming that the soldiers were ‘necessitated to make use of this last remedy by a particular call of the divine providence’, Bradshawe

tho’ by long sickness very weak and much extenuated ... stood up and interrupted him, declaring his abhorrence of that detestable action and telling the council that being now going to his God he had not patience to sit there to hear His great name so openly blasphemed; and thereupon departed to his lodgings and withdrew himself from public employment.230Ludlow, Mems. ii. 141.

Bradshawe died at his London residence – the Deanery, Westminster Abbey – on 31 October ‘after a year’s lingering under a fierce and most tedious quartan ague’.231Mercurius Politicus no. 592 (27 Oct.-3 Nov. 1659), 842-3 (E.771.31); Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 368; Works of Robert Boyle ed. Birch, vi. 131. This disease, which was probably malaria, would not have proved fatal in the opinion of Marchamont Nedham if Bradshawe had not ‘wasted himself with extraordinary labours’ as a result of his ‘indefatigable affection toward the public affairs’. Speaking from ‘ten year’s observation’ of his ‘noblest friend’, Nedham pronounced Bradshawe

a man of most exemplary piety ... a great patron of ministers in his own house and abroad that were ministers indeed [i.e. ordained]... For a sound head and heart in things religious, a rare acute judgement in the state of things civil, a wise conduct in the administration of state affairs, an eloquent tongue to inform a friend or convince an adversary, [and] a most equal heart and hand in distributing justice to both ... this nation ... hath seldom seen the like.232Mercurius Politicus no. 592 (27 Oct.-3 Nov. 1659); Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 71-2.

But perhaps more satisfying to Bradshawe than this eulogy from a friend would have been the comments of his sometime critic, Bulstrode Whitelocke, who described him as ‘a man stout and just and learned in his profession. He was courteous and friendly to Whitelocke. He was no friend of monarchy’.233Whitelocke, Diary, 539. One eighteenth century authority relates a story (probably apocryphal) that during Bradshawe’s final hours, being ‘advised by a gentleman to examine himself about the matter of the king’s death, he answered that if it were to do again he would be the first man that should do it and so died without the least signs of remorse or repentance’.234L. Echard, Hist. of England (1718), ii. 871.

Bradshawe was buried in Westminster Abbey (where his wife had been interred) on 22 November 1659 after a funeral attended by ‘divers’ members of the committee of safety, many serjeants-at-law, army officers, former Rumpers and ‘eminent citizens of London, besides a numerous train of other gentlemen and persons of quality’. The pall-bearers and chief mourners included his fellow lawyers William Ellys, William Steele, Francis Thorpe* and John Wylde*. The funeral sermon was delivered by the pastor of his congregation, John Rowe.235Mercurius Politicus no. 595 (17-24 Nov. 1659), 907 (E.773.13); Westminster Abbey Regs. 522; Rugg Diurnal, 13. In his will, drawn up in March 1654, Bradshawe charged his estate with annuities of about £550 and legacies of approximately £5,000, including £1,000 he was owed in arrears of pay for his various public offices and £1,700 to purchase annuities for establishing a grammar school at Marple and augmenting the salaries of the masters of Bunbury and Middleton schools, where he had received part of his education. He bequeathed the tithes of the vicarage of Feltham, Middlesex, towards the maintenance of a ‘godly minister to preach the gospel to the people’, an annuity of £24 a year to his chaplain (the Lancashire Independent minister John Parr) and a legacy of £20 to the deceased Independent divine William Strong – the founder of Rowe’s congregation. However, these last two bequests were revoked in a codicil of 1655, in which he left £10 to Marchamont Nedham and £10 to John Milton. Bradshawe died childless, leaving the bulk of his estate to his wife and, in reversion, to his nephew Henry Bradshawe.236PROB11/296, ff. 302-304v; Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 73-7; ‘John Parr’, ‘William Strong’, Oxford DNB.

The Restoration rendered the provisions of Bradshawe’s will all but irrelevant. Although dead, he was attainted of high treason by the 1660 Convention, and most of his estates were confiscated and his goods (at least those in London) sequestered.237CJ viii. 88; On 10 December, Parliament ordered that ‘the carcasses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton*, John Bradshawe, Thomas Pride*, whether buried in Westminster Abbey, or elsewhere, be ... taken up and drawn upon a hurdle to Tyburn and there hanged up in their coffins for some time; and after that buried under the said gallows’.238CJ viii. 202b; LJ xi. 205a. The bodies were disinterred on 28 January 1661; and on 30 January (the twelfth anniversary of the regicide), the parliamentary order of 10 December was carried out, but with one final indignity – Cromwell’s, Ireton’s and Bradshawe’s heads were removed and placed on spikes atop Westminster Hall, with Bradshawe’s head in the middle, ‘over the place where the high court of justice sat’.239Rugg Diurnal, 142-3, 145, 146; Bradshaw, God’s Battleaxe, 380-1.