DUCKENFEILD, Robert (1619-89), of Duckenfield Hall, Stockport, Cheshire.

The Duckenfields had resided at Duckenfield (or Dukinfield as it is now known), near Stockport, since at least the thirteenth century, making them one of Cheshire’s oldest gentry families.33Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 9, 18. Duckenfeild’s impressive pedigree notwithstanding, none of his line had served as an MP – he would be the first to do so – or had figured very prominently in Cheshire county affairs, and it is possible that the family estate by the early seventeenth century was worth less than the recent estimate of between £500 and £750 a year.34Nevell, Tameside, 72, 73. Duckenfeild’s father was a justice of the peace and was grand enough to own a coach and horses, but bequeathed annuities of only £6 13s 4d for each of four younger sons and jointures of £300 (raised over six years) for each of his two daughters.35C231/4, f. 207v; Cheshire RO, WS 1630, will of Robert Duckenfield of Duckenfield.

The assumption that Duckenfeild’s education was subject to ‘a strong puritan influence’ rests largely upon the stipulation in his father’s will that his wife – to whom the court of wards granted Duckenfeild’s guardianship – should be guided in this matter by (among others) their godly kinsman Sir William Brereton*, a local puritan Robert Assheton and the godly minister Alexander Horrocks.36WARD9/163, f. 22; Cheshire RO, WS 1630, will of Robert Duckenfield of Duckenfield; Richardson, Puritanism, 96, 128; Nevell, Tameside, 73-4; ‘Robert Duckenfield’, Oxford DNB. That Duckenfeild had imbibed religious principles that did not accord with the king’s own is certainly suggested by the alacrity with which he took up arms for Parliament in 1642. If, as seems likely, he was the ‘Captain Duckenfield’ or ‘Sergeant-major Duckenfield’ who raised a troop of horse for service in Ireland early in 1642, he may well have used some of his recruits to fill the hundred-strong company of foot that he mustered, ‘completely armed, on Whitsun Tuesday 1642 [i.e. 1 June] on Brinnington Moor [near Stockport] and presently after ... before Sir William Brereton’ – presumably in the latter’s capacity as a parliamentary deputy lieutenant for Cheshire.37SP28/128, pt. 10, f. 9v; SP28/128, pt. 11, f. 1v; SP28/170, pt. 2, f. 22; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 538. Duckenfeild and his men were among the parliamentarian defenders of Manchester in June, and later that summer they participated in the first serious military engagement in Cheshire.38Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society’, 225, 234. The day after Duckenfeild’s troop was taken into formal parliamentary service (25 Sept. 1642), the king issued a warrant to have his house and those of Brereton and other leading Cheshire parliamentarians searched for arms.39Add. 36913, f. 103. When Duckenfeild raised a regiment of foot for Parliament the following year, all of his officers were local men and included two of his younger brothers and the brother of the future regicide John Bradshawe*.40SP28/128, pt. 10, ff. 4, 5, 6v; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 330-1.

No Cheshire gentleman, with the exception of Brereton, threw himself more wholeheartedly into the struggle against the king than Duckenfeild, who claimed in 1645 that he ‘spent and lost £2,000’ in Parliament’s service.41SP20/10, unfol. (petition of R. Duckenfeild, 14 May 1645); Luke Letter Bks. 505. He and his regiment served in numerous engagements, including the battles at Middlewich and Nantwich and played a leading role in bringing about the surrender of Chester (Feb. 1646) and with it the end of the fighting in the county.42SP20/10 (certificate of Brereton et. al. 29 Jan. 1645); Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, f. 29; HMC Portland, i. 94; Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 13; N. Dore, The Civil Wars in Cheshire (Chester, 1966), 15, 26, 64; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 103; ‘Robert Duckenfield’, Oxford DNB. During the war, he remained more or less loyal to Brereton in the latter’s various feuds with the region’s other parliamentarian grandees, although not without a great deal of grumbling about his troops’ lack of pay and a reluctance (on occasion) to obey orders.43Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 79-80; HMC Portland, i. 279; Luke Letter Bks. 505-6; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 103, 170-1, 195-6, 404; ii. 14, 118, 156-7; iii. 133.

Duckenfeild’s parliamentarian zeal was doubtless inspired in part by his puritan piety. At some point in about 1643-4, he put his chapel at Duckenfield Hall at the disposal of a gathered congregation under the Independent divine Samuel Eaton.44S. Eaton, T. Taylor, A Just Apologie for the Church of Duckenfield (1647), 16-18; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 293; ‘Samuel Eaton’, Oxford DNB; J.R. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics in Lancs. and Cheshire during the Reign of Charles I, 1625-49 (Sheffield Univ. PhD thesis, 2014), 249-50. The Presbyterian heresiographer Thomas Edwards claimed that this congregation was actually established in 1640 (which seems unlikely) and was ‘the first Independent church visible and framed that was set up in England’.45T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 165 (E.368.5); A. Gordon, Historical Acct. of Dukinfield Chapel (Manchester, 1896), 11. To the outrage of Edwards and other ‘orthodox’ puritans, the congregation framed a petition in 1646 against a Presbyterian church settlement, and in 1647 it allowed the future Quaker leader George Fox to preach in the chapel.46Edwards, Third Part of Gangraena, 166-7; Gordon, Dukinfield Chapel, 16-18.

Duckenfeild raised a foot regiment in Cheshire in 1647 for service against the Irish rebels, only to see it redeployed by early 1648 for the defence of Chester.47Nevell, Tameside, 133. His appointment as governor of Chester – which probably occurred in the summer of 1647 – may well have been Brereton’s doing, who was keen to bring the city firmly under the county’s military authorities.48Infra, ‘William Edwardes’; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke ms LXVII, f. 134; Chester RO, ZML/2/309, 320. As well as Chester, Duckenfeild had command (if not necessarily formal governorship) by early 1648 of the parliamentarian garrisons of Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Liverpool and Lancaster.49Nevell, Tameside, 133. Again, it was probably Brereton who secured his appointment to the commission for trying Charles I in January 1649 – although neither man had any hand in the trial proceedings – and as sheriff of Cheshire the following month in place of Brereton’s opponent Roger Wilbraham.50A. and O.; List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 18. Duckenfeild’s appointment in February 1651 to the somewhat select company of the commission for propagating the gospel in Wales further suggests that he was closely associated with the Congregationalist interest in the Welsh border region.51A. and O. Having raised troops in Cheshire to resist the Scottish invasion under Charles II in the summer of 1651, Duckenfeild sat on the court martial at Chester in September that tried and condemned to death the royalist leader James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby.52CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 302, 306, 307, 473; The Perfect Tryall and Confession of the Earl of Derby (1651), 2 (E.643.15); Dore, Civil Wars in Cheshire, 76. Later that month, Duckenfeild commanded the force that captured the Isle of Man from the countess of Derby, and he was subsequently appointed parliamentary governor of the island.53CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 472, 479-80; 1651-2, pp. 59, 66; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 483.

In the summer of 1653, Duckenfeild and his friend and regimental second-in-command Henry Birkhened were selected by the council of officers to represent Cheshire in the Nominated Parliament. It is likely that he was selected largely on the basis of his prominent military career and his cordial relations with the self-styled ‘Saints’ in Cheshire.54Supra, ‘Cheshire’. However, the fact that his brother-in-law was Charles Fleetwood*, commander-in-chief in Ireland, may also have helped. Duckenfeild was named to only one committee in the Nominated Parliament – that set up on 20 July to consider public debts and to receive allegations of financial malpractice – before being granted leave of absence for a month on 6 August, after which he made no further impression on the House’s proceedings.55CJ vii. 287a, 296a. A contemporary listing grouped him with those MPs who supported a godly learned ministry – an assessment that is borne out by his appointment to and activity on the Cromwellian commission for ejecting scandalous ministers in Cheshire.56CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 321-2; Mins. of the Cttee. for Plundered Ministers rel. to Lancs. and Cheshire ed. Shaw, 115; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 416. Moreover, he allegedly dealt unsympathetically with those Quakers who appeared before him as a magistrate, suggesting that he was not well-disposed towards the radical sects.57Extracts from State Pprs. rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 110.

Duckenfeild had become disillusioned with the protectorate, and with Oliver Cromwell* in particular, by early 1655. In a letter to the protector in March of that year, he expressed misgivings at what he perceived as the increasingly worldly and autocratic nature of Cromwellian rule

the extremes that the levelling party do run furiously on, doth, as I humbly conceive, drive your Highness upon direct contrary extremes, and I desire ... not to seek a confederacy with those who limit God to their passions and against whom God hath an evident controversy ... I firmly believe that the root and tree of piety is alive in your lordship, though the leaves thereof, through abundance of temptations and flatteries, seem to me to be withered much of late.58TSP iii. 294.

Although he apparently favoured something very like the decimation tax as a means of keeping the royalists in check, he refused to act as one of the Cheshire commissioners to assist Major-general Charles Worsley*.59Cheshire RO, DLT/B38, p. 10; TSP iv. 485. As far as electoral politics were concerned, he seems to have confined his activities under the protectorate to supporting John Bradshawe’s successful bid for one of the Cheshire county seats in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659.60Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Bodl. Top. Cheshire e.3, f. 22v; Morrill, Cheshire, 296. In the summer of 1659, Duckenfeild raised a troop of horse in Cheshire to oppose the Presbyterian-royalist rebellion under Sir George Boothe*.61CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 102. However, he should not be confused (as he frequently has been) with his younger brother Lieutenant-colonel John Duckenfield*, who played a leading role in suppressing Boothe’s rebellion and in helping Major-general John Lambert* to bring down the restored Rump that October.62Supra, ‘John Duckenfield’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 103.

Having purchased a large amount of former crown property in north Wales, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Huntingdonshire during the 1650s, Duckenfeild had more cause than most leading parliamentarians to be apprehensive about the Restoration.63I. Gentles, ‘The Debentures Market and Military Purchases of Crown Land, 1649-60’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1969), 276. And sure enough, he lost all his offices and crown lands during the course of 1660, and he was arrested and (briefly) imprisoned in July on the orders of the Lords for his part in the trial and execution of the earl of Derby.64LJ xi. 87b, 88a, 137b. Duckenfeild, Birkhened, John Griffith III* and several other officers who had sat on the earl’s court martial petitioned the Lords on 13 July, claiming that they had been ‘no way consenting to the death or imprisonment of that honourable person, but [had] laboured to the utmost of their powers and interests with friends to have prevented the same’.65HMC 7th Rep. 116. There are signs that Duckenfeild had been unhappy at some aspects of the trial proceedings against the earl, but nonetheless he had voted against accepting the accused’s claim for indemnity under the articles of war.66Stanley Pprs. ed. Raines, pp. ccxii, cccliii, cccliv, ccclv.

By the spring of 1661, Duckenfeild was determined to ‘do what I well can towards meriting the king’s favour, which I doubt not of effecting, and to assure many others to do the like’.67Add. 18979, f. 281. Such sentiments would not have impressed Attorney General Sir Geoffrey Palmer*, who dismissed Duckenfeild’s answers to a bill requiring him to account for any public money he had received since 1642 as ‘very untrue, uncertain and insufficient’.68E113/4. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to disprove Duckenfeild’s central claim that the only such money he had received had been for his pay as an army officer. His past caught up with him again in October 1663, when he was arrested for his alleged complicity in the Kaber Rigg Plot, although there is good reason to believe that he was falsely implicated on the testimony of informers.69CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 287, 298; E. Price, Eye-Salve for England, or the Grand Trappan Detected (1667), 2. He was released by royal order in May 1664, only to be arrested again in August 1665 and imprisoned for three years – in the Tower, Chester Castle and in various other places – until his final release in 1668.70Cheshire RO, DSS/1/1/5; DLT/B/11, pp. 154-5; CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 534; 1665-6, p. 8; 1666-7, pp. 161, 185, 212, 235; 1668-9, p. 128. During his imprisonment his son and heir Robert, a Presbyterian, had been created a baronet.71CB. For the next ten years or so, Duckenfeild lived quietly on his estate, giving little encouragement to local dissenters and with his chapel closed to public worship. In the early 1680s, however, he and Sir Robert extended their patronage to the Nonconformist minister Samuel Angier and his congregation at Duckenfield.72Gordon, Dukinfield Chapel, 28-9; Calamy Revised, 12-13; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 211.

Duckenfeild died on 18 September 1689 and was buried at Denton Chapel, Manchester – the local dissenters’ preferred place of interment – on 21 September.73Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 20; ‘Robert Duckenfield’, Oxford DNB. No will is recorded. His brother John had represented Carrickfergus and Belfast in 1659, but no other Duckenfield sat at Westminster thereafter.