BRADSHAW, Edward (1606-71), of St Peter, Chester, Cheshire.

Bradshaw’s family had settled at Aspull in the parish of Wigan, Lancashire, by the mid-sixteenth century at the latest. He was apprenticed to a Chester mercer (Christopher Blease, a future mayor of Chester), and in 1631 was admitted a member of the city’s Mercers, Ironmongers, Grocers and Apothecaries Company, of which he served as an alderman from 1651 until his death.1Cheshire RO, ZG 16/6582/2, pp. 187, 310, 419, 463; ZG 16/6582/3, pp. 5, 27. Having been made a freeman of the city at some point in the early 1630s, he secured election as a common councillor in 1635.2Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. Groombridge, 187. By the early 1640s, he and his younger brother Richard were leading figures in the city’s various mercantile syndicates importing iron and exporting calfskins, cloth and other domestic commodities.3Cheshire RO, ZTCB, ff. 3, 9v, 12, 13, 16, 19v, 20, 27, 29, 32, 47. Both men, it seems, remained in Chester for several months after it was garrisoned by the king’s party in the autumn of 1642, although Edward had apparently left the city by July 1643 at the latest.4Cheshire RO, ZTCB, f. 32; ZAB/2, f. 60v; ZMAI/1/56; Z16/6582/2, p. 280; A.M. Johnson, ‘Some Aspects of the Political, Constitutional, Social and Economic History of the City of Chester 1550-1662’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1971), 316. Certainly neither man became closely involved in the city’s royalist administration – indeed, by March 1645, Richard had become quarter-master general to Parliament’s commander in Cheshire, Sir William Brereton*.5Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 90, 91; ii. 310, 324, 532.

Within a few weeks of Chester’s surrender in February 1646, the Bradshaw brothers were added to the Cheshire county committee – of which Edward was an active member until at least May 1647.6SP28/224, ff. 90, 258; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 699; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 66-8. Following parliamentary legislation in the autumn of 1646 for remodelling Chester’s government, they were both elected aldermen by the corporation (Richard went on to serve as the Rump’s and the protectorate’s diplomatic resident at Hamburg).7Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 79. Although Edward married the widow of the Presbyterian minister and conspirator Christopher Love in 1653, he evidently did not share Love’s hostility to the commonwealth, for unlike many senior municipal officeholders in Chester, he was willing to take – and, indeed, to administer – the Engagement abjuring monarchy and Lords.8Supra, ‘Chester’; Cheshire RO, ZML/3/343. He proved equally conformable to the protectorate, working with two of its most committed adherents in the north west, John Griffith III* and Major-general Tobias Bridge*.9TSP iii. 273; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 226. His appointment to the 1654 Cheshire commission for ejecting scandalous ministers also suggests that he approved of the Cromwellian religious settlement.10A. and O. ii. 969. His godly religious convictions do not seem to have embraced radical sectarianism, however, for during his second term as mayor, in 1653-4, he had the Quaker evangelist Richard Hubberthorne arrested and whipped as a vagabond.11Cheshire RO, ZML/3/375; F. Sanders, ‘The Quakers in Chester under the protectorate’, Jnl. Architectural, Archaeological and Historic Soc. Chester and N. Wales, n.s. xiv. 36-41, 73.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Bradshaw was returned for Chester, apparently without opposition.12Cheshire RO, ZMF/77/2/107. He probably owed his return largely to the backing of the corporation.13Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, ff. 87v, 92v, 98v, 108, 110; ZTAR/3/52 (entry for May 1656); Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 340. He received only five committee appointments – all between October 1656 and 1 January 1657 – in this Parliament, and made no recorded contribution to debate.14CJ vii. 444a, 446a, 470a, 470b, 477b. His appointment to the 18 December committee for examining the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor, which was charged with considering how best to suppress the ‘mischiefs and inconveniences’ of the Quakers, tends to confirm the impression that Bradshaw was no friend to the radical sects.15CJ vii. 470a.

In the elections to the third protectoral Parliament during the winter of 1658-9, he seems to have stepped aside in favour of his brother Richard, who stood on the corporation ticket in partnership with the city’s recorder John Ratcliffe*.16Supra, ‘Chester’. On election day, however, the voters chose the more radical pairing of Jonathan Ridge and John Griffith.

Where exactly Bradshaw stood on Chester’s political spectrum by 1659 is difficult to ascertain. Assuming that he was the Edward Bradshaw who wrote to the Derbyshire gentleman German Pole* in June 1659, he seems to have been broadly sympathetic to the restored Rump, and had little liking for the radical sects, the episcopalians, or the religious Presbyterians.

This Parliament would do more if they did not take so many things into cognizance. If they would do only what is proper for them to fall upon in this conjuncture, we should be happy. I hope they will act with moderation, without self-seeking, or falling upon the rock that split them before ... the Anabaptists and 5th Monarchy men push hard to destroy our government. They petition against the anti-Christian ministry, but obliquely against tithes, and to bring in the Jews (could the Jesuits have invented anything worse …?) to help them. ’Tis time among Protestants ... to leave off animosities: the one side so to cry up the common Prayer Book, as that without it there could be no church; the other their jure divino for presbytery, that without that granted there will be no peace.17Derbys. RO, D5557/2/39/4.

A few months later, there are indications that he complied with Sir George Boothe* and his royalist-Presbyterian rebel forces when they seized Chester in August.18SP23/263, ff. 113, 115, 117. Nevertheless, he seems to have retained the trust of the city’s ‘well-affected’ interest, which, in the aftermath of the rebellion, recommended that Bradshaw keep his place on the aldermanic bench.19Harl. 1929, ff. 10-11v. The restored monarchy was not so trusting, and in the months after May 1660 he was gradually omitted from all local offices, culminating in August 1662, when the corporation commissioners removed him from the Chester aldermanic bench for refusing to take the oath abjuring the Covenant.20Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 135. Evidently one of Chester’s leading Dissenters, he was arrested in 1665 at a conventicle in the house of his son-in-law, the Independent minister Thomas Harrison.21CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 461; Calamy Revised, 251. Harrison also held conventicles in Bradshaw’s country residence of Bromborough Hall.22Calamy Revised, 251.

Bradshaw died on 31 October 1671, and was buried at St Peter, Chester on 7 November.23Ormerod, Cheshire, i. 324; St Peter, Chester par. reg. In his will, he charged his estate with portions worth £3,600 for his three surviving daughters.24Cheshire RO, WS 1671, will of Edward Bradshaw. His legatees included his ‘loving cousin’ Ratcliffe, whom he made one of the supervisors of his will, six ejected ministers (unnamed), and the widows of four more ministers. None of his immediate descendants sat in Parliament.