RADCLYFFE, Richard (1607-57), of Radcliffe Hall, Manchester, Lancs.

Radclyffe belonged to a junior branch of a family that had been established in the Manchester area since the fourteenth century.14Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker (Manchester 1885), ii. p. 155. By the Elizabethan period, the Radcliffes had taken up residence in a moated house known as Radcliffe Hall – later called Pool Fold – near Market Stead Lane, Manchester (the modern Cross Street).15Continuation of Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. J. Harland (Chetham Soc. o.s. lxv), 4. Radclyffe’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather all figured prominently in the town’s affairs as burgage-holders and officers of the manorial court leet, and all were styled ‘gentleman’ in the court’s records.16Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Harland (Chetham Soc. o.s. lxiii), 171-2; Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, ii. pp. 6, 155, 232, 318 328; iii. pp. 183, 349; Willan, Elizabethan Manchester, 24.

Radclyffe, too, emerged as one of Manchester’s most prominent inhabitants; and such was his ‘quality’ that he was able to secure a match with a daughter of the Derbyshire knight Sir John Gell.17Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, iii. pp. 198, 244, 290, 300, 301, 335, 348; iv. pp. 94, 174, 187, 191; Carsington par. reg. Gell was a trenchant Calvinist and a patron of godly ministers, and Radclyffe’s marriage into the family strongly suggests that he was also a man of godly convictions.18Supra, ‘John Gell’; ‘Sir John Gell’, Oxford DNB. His parliamentarian allegiance during the civil war also points in this direction. In a letter to Gell of early July 1642, he saw the threat by Lancashire’s royalist lord lieutenant, James Stanley, Lord Strange to attack Manchester as ‘merely digitus dei [the finger of God], to move men’s hearts to stand to so good a cause, protesting to spend the last drop of blood before the town should suffer or my lord take away their goods’. Radclyffe dismissed any talk of peace negotiations, ‘thinking them to be a breach of our Protestation if consented unto and a dissenting of our cause, which we intend by God’s assistance to stand or perish rather then prove treacherous to the king and Parliament’.19Derbys. RO, D258/34/69. True to the sentiments expressed in this letter, he was one of the first gentlemen in Lancashire to take up arms against the king, ‘cheerfully and courageously’ commanding his fellow Mancunians in their successful resistance of Lord Strange’s assault upon the town in September – in which action he fought alongside Robert Duckenfeild*.20Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 46, 51, 333; Broxap, Lancs. 43. The following month, Radclyffe joined Richard Holland*, Thomas Birche* and other leading Lancashire parliamentarians in a series of letters to Richard Shuttleworthe I*, urging action against the royalists: ‘the time is upon us to put the most zealous resolutions in present execution’.21Lancs. RO, DDKS/30/19, 21; Lancs. Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts ed. J. Harland (Chetham Soc. o.s. l), 301-2.

Radclyffe became involved in the bitter dispute among Lancashire’s parliamentarian leaders in the mid-1640s that pitted the defenders of Manchester in 1642 against one of their own confederates in resisting Lord Strange – Colonel Thomas Birche*. Their falling out seems to have originated with Birche’s opposition to an assessment levied by John Holcrofte* and other Lancashire deputy lieutenants in the spring of 1644 for the maintenance of the troops besieging the Stanley’s residence of Lathom House. In May 1645, Birche publicly denounced the order authorising this assessment as illegal and urged the county to disobey it. At the root of his objections, it seems, was the fact that the assessment had been imposed without express authority from Parliament. His attack stung a group of Lancashire parliamentarian officers, including Radclyffe, into petitioning the county committee in June, alleging that Birche was intent on frustrating the siege of Lathom and causing havoc among the soldiery, ‘to the utter ruin and overthrow of this county’. The petitioners concluded by urging the committee to imprison Birche until his case could be investigated by Parliament.22Supra, ‘Thomas Birche’; SP16/507/115, f. 166; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 568-9; Gratton, Lancs. 92-3. Determined to ensure supply for their troops besieging Lathom, Holcrofte and his allies on the county committee duly had Birche imprisoned in Lancaster gaol. No permanent factions developed among the Lancashire parliamentarians as result of this feud. Nevertheless, it seems to have reflected deeper tensions than simply disagreement over the management of the siege of Lathom. Birche was apparently less mindful of local priorities than were his enemies, who resented his willingness to send troops out of the county – to the detriment of the siege of Lathom – in order to assist Sir William Brereton* in prosecuting the wider war effort.23Supra, ‘Thomas Birche’.

In the second civil war, as in the first, Radclyffe helped organise Manchester’s defences and in raising money for the local parliamentarian forces.24Manchester Central Lib. M91/M1/8/16; Manchester Constables’ Accts. ed. Earwaker, ii. pp. 103, 105, 114, 172. But in May 1648, he was among a group of diehard Presbyterian officers in Lancashire who declared, in effect, their refusal to join the forces being raised by the county’s MPs Raphe Assheton II and Alexander Rigby I to resist the invading Scots. The officers professed their abhorrence not only of royalists but also of sectaries – and, by implication, of the New Model army – and their adherence ‘to the Solemn League and Covenant of the three kingdoms in every branch of it, and ... that we love, desire and should much rejoice in the regal and regular government of his Majesty that now is’.25Lancs. 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. In June 1650, Radclyffe was included on a list of Lancashire officers, mostly Presbyterians, who had been ordered by the Rump authorities to deliver in their arms.26SP28/211, f. 608v.

From the late 1640s, Radclyffe assumed a leading role in Manchester’s manorial government, serving as boroughreeve in 1651-2 and as one of a committee appointed in April and October 1656 to oversee the affairs of the town.27Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, iv. pp. 4, 56, 152, 173. In 1656, he supported the appointment of the strongly Presbyterian – and possibly pro-Scottish Covenanter – divine James Bradshaw as the town’s minister, but the townspeople preferred more moderate candidates.28Autobiog. of Henry Newcome ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. xxvi), 62; ‘James Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Radclyffe was returned for Manchester, which had been enfranchised under the Instrument of Government.29Manchester Central Lib. M91/M1/28/5; Manchester Ct. Leet Recs. ed. Earwaker, iv. pp. 159-60. He was named on one of the lists of Members excluded by the protectoral council as an opponent of the government, which is consistent with the fact that he made no recorded impression on the proceedings of this Parliament.30Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 89, 305. Certainly his Presbyterian sympathies would not have endeared him to the army, and the same would have been true of his links with the Gells, whose quarrel with the army and the Independents stretched back to the mid-1640s. Indeed, his brother-in-law, John Gell, was also among the MPs excluded in 1656.31Supra, ‘John Gell’.

Radclyffe died in the summer of 1657 and was buried in Manchester Collegiate Church on 3 July. 32Manchester Collegiate Church par. reg. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.