ASSHETON, Raphe I (c.1606-80), of Whalley and Downham, Lancs.

The Asshetons of Whalley were a cadet branch of the Asshetons of Middleton, who had settled at Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester, by the early twelfth century.28VCH Lancs. iv. 341; v. 184; Whitaker, Whalley, ii. 2, 145; Foster, Lancs. Peds.; Halley, Puritanism, i. 158-9; W.M. Bowman, England in Ashton-under-Lyne (Altrincham, 1960), 97-8. A sizeable part of the family’s estate had been acquired in the mid-sixteenth century by Richard Assheton – the brother of Raphe Assheton I’s great-great-grandfather – who had used his office as receiver of the revenues of the court of augmentations in the northern counties to purchase property in and around the manor and dissolved abbey of Whalley, near Clitheroe. Richard Assheton† had represented Carlisle in 1558 and 1563 and the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough in 1559.29VCH Lancs. vi. 382, 554; HP Commons 1558 -1603.

Although Assheton’s father had inherited the Whalley estate and the lucrative office of Lancashire receiver for the duchy of Lancaster, he and Assheton had somehow contrived to run up debts of over £13,000 by the late 1620s, leaving them no option but to sell a ‘great part’ of their ‘ancient patrimony’, including their manor of Great Lever, which was purchased by John Bridgeman, bishop of Chester (father of Orlando Bridgeman*) for £7,350.30Infra, ‘Orlando Bridgeman’; VCH Lancs. v. 184; Blackwood, ‘Economic state of the Lancs. gentry’, 78; Long, ‘Lancs.’, 147-8. The family’s mountainous debts did not prevent Sir Raphe playing a major role in Lancashire’s affairs as a magistrate and deputy lieutenant.31Lancs. RO, DDN/1/64; B.W. Quintrell, ‘Government in perspective’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxxi. 51; D.J. Wilkinson, ‘Performance and motivation amongst the justices of the peace in early Stuart Lancs.’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxxviii. 46, 48. Moreover, he retained his principal estate in and around Whalley, which gave him a strong enough electoral interest in the nearby borough of Clitheroe to secure Assheton I’s return for the town to the first and second Caroline Parliaments.32HP Commons 1604-29.

The family’s financial situation worsened still further in 1635, when the king and Archbishop William Laud commanded Bishop Bridgeman to sequester the tithes of the rectory and chapelries of Whalley – which Sir Raphe leased from Laud – for suffering ‘the house of God to be profaned ... and some of the chancels of the said chapels to go to decay rather than he [Sir Raphe] will spare any competency out of God’s own portion for their support’.33Bridgeman, Wigan, 382, 383. Laud offered the Asshetons a new lease for a mere 21 years – rather than for lives as they had previously enjoyed (although Laud agreed to change it back to lives at the entreaty of Orlando Bridgeman) – and with an entry fine of £1,600. When Assheton and his father objected to this offer, with Assheton confronting Laud in person about it, the archbishop had Sir Raphe summoned before the court of high commission on a charge of incest and adultery (to which, claimed Laud, he confessed) and fined £300 towards the repair of St Paul’s cathedral. Besides this £300, the Asshetons agreed to the £1,600 entry fine (although a substantial proportion of it was never paid) and incurred legal costs of £600.34Greater Manchester Co. RO, E7/27/2/10-12; CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 500-1; Works of Laud, iv. 147-8; HMC Lords n.s. xi. 397.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Assheton was returned for the junior place at Clitheroe.35Supra, ‘Clitheroe’. Sir Raphe having settled the bulk of the family estate on him by this date, it is likely that Assheton was elected as much on his own interest in the borough as that of his father.36Greater Manchester Co. RO, E7/27/1/8, 11, 12; Bridgeman, Wigan, ii. 384. He received no appointments in the Short Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. Re-elected for Clitheroe to the Long Parliament, he may on this occasion have taken the senior place.37Supra, ‘Clitheroe’. It is clear from the parliamentary diaries that he rarely contributed to debate on the floor of the House. Unfortunately, because of the clerk of the Commons’ failure to distinguish between Assheton and his kinsman Raphe Assheton II of Middleton, who sat for Lancashire – referring to both men as ‘Mr Ashton’ – it is much harder to assess his tally of appointments in the early years of the Long Parliament and, therefore, to gain anything like an accurate picture of his activities and profile at Westminster. Both men were present in the House on at least one occasion – 3 May 1641, when they took the Protestation.38CJ ii. 133a, b. Nevertheless, the fact that one or both of them were named to 19 committees before the outbreak of civil war and yet never to the same one, suggests that the clerk was dealing with only one MP – and the likelihood is that it was the Member for Lancashire. Although this was Raphe Assheton II’s first time at Westminster, his standing in Lancashire was higher, as was his profile among the county’s godly community. It was Assheton II, for example, who presented the Lancashire petition against episcopacy and who played a leading role in the efforts of the county’s MPs to implement parliamentary initiatives for the suppression of popery.39Supra, ‘Raphe Assheton II’.

Yet if Assheton I was probably less active at Westminster than Assheton II in the period 1640-2, he seems to have shared the latter’s reformist sympathies, for he joined Wigan’s godly MP Alexander Rigby I on 10 January 1642 in trying (unsuccessfully) to forestall the nomination of the future royalist leader James Stanley†, Lord Strange as lord lieutenant of Cheshire in favour of the future parliamentarian Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.40Newton, House of Lyme, 167. Assheton may have sided with Rigby again a month later, when the Wigan MP tried and this time succeeded in having Strange replaced by Wharton as the nominee for lord lieutenant of Lancashire.41Infra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’. Assheton seems to have remained at Westminster during the first half of 1642 and pledged to provide two horses on the propositions introduced in June for the defence of Parliament.42PJ iii. 472.

The first unambiguous reference to Assheton I in the Commons Journal after 3 May 1641 occurs on 4 July 1642, when he was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Lancashire.43CJ ii. 649a; LJ v. 178b. On 6 July, the House authorised him to convey ten muskets to his house at Downham, and a few days later his father was omitted from a new commission of peace for Lancashire – almost certainly because he and his son were identified at court with the nascent parliamentarian interest in the county.44CJ ii. 656a, 821a; Lancs. RO, QSC/36-7. Assheton II may have remained in Lancashire for several months after the House sent him down to the county in mid-June to enforce the Militia Ordinance, and it may therefore have been Assheton II who was named to committees in July and August for monitoring the activities of the commissioners of array and to receive contributions for the distressed Protestants of Ireland.45CJ ii. 689b, 713a. When Sir William Brereton* was soliciting Parliament to send military support to the north west in mid-1642, one of the men he wrote to at Westminster was his ‘very much respected friend Mr Raph Ashton of Whalley’.46Bodl. Nalson II, ff. 107-8; HMC Portland, i. 51-3. It was probably Assheton II who joined other MPs on 25 August in pledging their lives and fortunes in support of Parliament’s commander-in-chief the earl of Essex.47CJ ii. 741b. And that autumn, he was named to committees for raising troops in Lancashire and (on 28 Oct.) to a receive dispatches from MPs employed on parliamentary service in the provinces.48CJ ii. 787b, 825a; LJ v. 393b. Why he decided to side with Parliament – aside from his family’s resentment towards Laud and presumably, by extension, the king – is not known, although his later career indicates that he was a man of puritan sympathies.

Given that Assheton I seems to have spent most of 1643 and 1644 serving as a colonel of foot in Lancashire and that the clerk of the Commons was usually scrupulous in recognising MPs’ military rank, it seems very likely that the great majority of the references to ‘Mr Ashton’ in the Journals during this period relate to Assheton II.49Supra, ‘Raphe Assheton II’; Harl. 165, ff. 114, 122v. Moreover, Assheton II would later affirm that from ‘the beginning of the [civil] wars he was ... 11 years at London and never came down into the country’.50E134/16 Chas2/Mich26. To judge by his appointments and activities in the House during 1643, he lent his support to parliamentary initiatives to sequester the estates of delinquents, to raise men and money for the parliamentarian forces under Brereton and Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), and generally to advance the war-effort in Lancashire and adjacent counties. He was also charged with the task of drafting an ordinance for seizing the estates of Lancashire’s royalists and Catholics.51CJ ii. 938b, 957b, 965b, 994a, 994b; iii. 86a, 159a, 174b, 223a, 314a, 320a. Having taken the vow and covenant on 6 June, he was named to committees on 23 August and 21 September to consider how to punish those MPs who were deemed to have violated this oath and for sequestering the estates of MPs who were absent ‘and do disservice to the Parliament’.52CJ iii. 118b, 216b, 250a. He agreed that autumn to serve as a receiver of duchy of Lancaster revenues to the newly-established Committee for Revenue*, and it was probably his experience in handling large sums of money that ensured his appointment to a standing committee of Lancashire Members, set up on 18 October, with wide powers to examine the accounts of the county’s parliamentary officers and officials and to investigate ‘any offence or misdemeanour prejudicial to this House or to the peace and safety of the county’.53CJ iii. 253a, 264b, 281a, 283b, 336b; SP19/82, ff. 19, 21; SP 28/255, f. 9.

With his parliamentary career apparently gaining momentum, Assheton incurred the Commons’ displeasure early in 1644 for repeatedly trying to evade orders for paying £1,500 in duchy of Lancaster revenues to William White* for the use of Lord Fairfax’s army in Yorkshire. On 9 February, the House ordered that Assheton be sent for to explain himself, and the best he could come up with was that ‘he understood, out of the county [Lancashire], that seven or eight hundred pounds ... would be ready, and further he could not answer’, whereupon he was sent to the Tower for his contempt in disregarding the orders of the House.54CJ iii. 369a, 386a, 394a, 394b; Add. 31116, pp. 199, 229. Whether he had been negligent in collecting the money, it was simply not available, or (more likely) he objected to cash leaving Lancashire in order to pay for troops in Yorkshire, is not clear. On the motion of his fellow Lancashire MP William Ashhurst, his petition to the House, in which he promised to pay the £1,500 within a few days, was read on 20 February, and order was duly given for his release.55CJ iii. 403b; Harl. 166, f. 15.

Perhaps resentful of his treatment in February 1644, Assheton was named to only two committees that year. Nevertheless, he worked with Ashhurst as a receiver of money and ammunition for the Lancashire forces and in the creation of a new duchy of Lancaster seal, which he presented to the House on 30 December.56CJ iii. 418b, 448b, 501b, 514a, 602b, 636a; iv. 4b, 25a; Belvoir, PZ.2, f. 23. With the death of his father in October 1644, he had succeeded as second baronet and, as such, becomes readily distinguishable from Assheton I. He continued his collaboration with Ashhurst into the spring of 1645 with appointment to a three-man committee (himself, Ashhurst and Alexander Rigby I) to collect excise money for the Lancashire forces and to a committee for sending money to Brereton’s army – a task specially entrusted to Assheton, Ashhurst and Sir John Curzon. Like Ashhurst, Assheton acted as a parliamentary correspondent and (occasional) man of business for Brereton.57CJ iv. 99b, 109a, 110a; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 204, 292; ii. 295, 416; iii. 18, 132.

But beyond Assheton’s commitment to winning the war in, and settling the affairs of, the north west, his 25 committee appointments during 1645 and 1646 offer no certain guide as to his political interests and alignment at Westminster.58CJ iv. 230b, 429a, 512a, 574b. Several of these committees related loosely to aspects of Parliament’s Presbyterian religious settlement, and one – to prepare a declaration denouncing the abuses committed by the Scots army in northern England (20 Mar. 1646) – was part of the Independents’ campaign to end Scottish intervention in English affairs.59CJ iv. 276a, 280a, 481b, 632a; v. 35a. On 10 July 1646, he was named to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.60CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 162. Little can be deduced from his five committee appointments during the first seven months of 1647 or from the fact that he socialised regularly at this time with the parliamentary diarist John Harington, who was a distant kinsman of Assheton’s second wife, a sister of the groom of the bedchamber (and future republican theorist) James Harington.61CJ v. 119b, 125b, 167a, 170b, 238a; Harington’s Diary, 52, 58, 60.

Assheton made his boldest political statement during the mid-1640s by doing nothing – that is, by remaining at Westminster after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July 1647, when most of the Independents in the House took refuge with the army.62[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 42 (E.463.19). He underlined his Presbyterian sympathies on 9 August, when he was a teller with Thomas Gewen against annulling all the votes and legislation passed by the Commons during the ‘force’ upon the Houses between 26 July and the New Model army’s march into London in early August. The Independent grandees Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire won this division by the narrowest of margins.63CJ v. 270a. On 21 August, Assheton was among a group of mostly Presbyterian MPs who were granted leave of absence. Yet he was back in the House by 2 September at the latest, and on 9 October and again on 23 November, he was named to committees for harrying Presbyterian Members who had absented themselves without leave or who had participated in the forcing of the Houses on 26 July – and in particular, Gewen.64CJ v. 281a, 289b, 329a, 366b.

Like the majority of Lancashire Presbyterians, Assheton seems to have regarded the Scottish Engagers and their English allies as crypto-royalists and enemies of a godly church settlement. He referred to the royalist tumults in London of early April 1648 as a ‘notorious insurrection’ and expressed fears as to the City’s loyalty to Parliament.65Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 3v. With a second civil war clearly in the offing, he was appointed a messenger to the Lords on 21 April to carry up an ordinance for securing and disarming delinquents. He served as a messenger again on 6 July, at the height of the war, this time to carry up an ordinance for supplying Assheton I’s troops in their campaign against the English vanguard of the Scottish Engager army. In the aftermath of Parliament’s victory at the battle of Preston, he was named to a committee for disposing of Scottish prisoners, and he was tasked on 23 August with writing a letter to Assheton I thanking him for his ‘good service against the Scots forces’.66CJ v. 539b, 556a, 581b, 597b, 620b, 680b, 692a; LJ x. 365a. The following month, he was instrumental, or so he claimed, in securing a commission for Assheton I as major-general of Parliament’s forces in Lancashire forces, which he hoped would ‘settle some contests and disputes among the great ones’ in the county.67Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 19v. Although one of his correspondents expressed the hope that Parliament’s victory in the second civil war would allow ‘the Church of England’ – that is, the Presbyterian national church – to ‘flourish in doctrine and discipline’, Assheton himself was by no means a doctrinaire Presbyterian. Indeed, that September, he praised the Calvinist episcopalian divine James Ussher, who at that time was preaching in Lincoln’s Inn chapel, as ‘so rare a man in his profession that I think his fellow is scarce to be met with in all Christendom, so that I have a great desire to be one of his constant auditors’.68Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, ff. 16v-17; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 256.

Assheton welcomed the prospect of peace negotiations with the king but was apparently not involved in the House’s proceedings relating to the treaty of Newport.69Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 18. Named to only three committees in the autumn of 1648, he was a peripheral figure at Westminster – that is, until 20 November, when he was among a small knot of Members who spoke out against the army’s Remonstrance and (in his case) implied that it had been written in collaboration with some then present in the House.70CJ v. 10a, 47a, 87a; Mercurius Elencticus no. 53 (22-29 Nov. 1648), 514 (E.473.39). He made his opposition to the army even clearer on 5 December, when he was a teller with Charles Cecil, Viscount Cranborne in favour of accepting the king’s answers at Newport as ‘a ground for the House to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom’.71CJ vi. 93b. In winning this vote, Assheton and Cranborne precipitated Pride’s Purge the next day (6 Dec.), which saw both men secluded from the House.72[W. Prynne*], A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), irreg. pag. (E.539.5); Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 28. Assheton feared that he would be imprisoned by the army if he ‘ran into their jaws, as some [MPs] have done, though I think staying at home, as I do ... is no great security ... I rely more on God’s preserving me in my innocency and [on] good men’s prayers’.73Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 25. In his letters to his steward in Lancashire, he denounced the trial of the king as ‘the height of madness’; by 23 January 1649, at the latest, he was predicting Charles’s imminent execution.74Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, ff. 29, 29v. The only Lancashire MP who was dropped from the first commission of peace issued for the county after the regicide, he would be omitted from all local commissions between 1649 and early 1660 and seems to have withdrawn from public life during this period.75Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 33. His home life afforded him little consolation in this political wilderness, for, as he admitted in 1660, ‘he had been a stranger to his wife and children now near 12 years and never had any comfort from them in all that time’.76HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Ralph Assheton II’.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Assheton was re-elected for Clitheroe and was listed by Lord Wharton as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.77G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 337. Apparently still smarting at the triumph of the army and Independents in 1648-9, he spoke in favour of excepting Bulstrode Whitelocke* from pardon, accused the radical Lancashire army officer Thomas Birche* of corrupt practices and provided damaging evidence against Sir Henry Vane II*. Returned for Clitheroe (where he was serving as out-bailiff at the time) again to the Cavalier Parliament, he asked to be excused from taking Anglican communion on grounds of conscience and was given ‘the tacit dispensation of this House’.78HP Commons 1660-90; Whitelocke, Diary, 590. His sharp practice as an out-bailiff, and perhaps also his puritanism, rendered his election vulnerable however, and he was replaced as Clitheroe’s MP in 1662 by one of his royalist rivals.79HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Clitheroe’.

Although Assheton seems to have attended divine service, it is likely that his domestic chaplain (whose identity is not known) favoured the Directory over the Book of Common Prayer.80J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (2002), 207. Assheton’s Presbyterian loyalties rendered him suspect in the eyes of the crown, and he was omitted from the Lancashire bench in 1666 (having been restored in March 1660). He regained his seat at Clitheroe in the elections to the first Exclusion Parliament in 1679, where he sided with those crying up the popish plot and promoting the exclusion bill. Returned for Clitheroe for the eighth (and last) time in the elections to the second Exclusion Parliament, he died before he could take his seat and was buried at Downham on 3 March 1680.81Greater Manchester County RO, E7/17/8/35; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Ralph Assheton II’; CB; Whitaker, Whalley, ii. 2, 145. The Lancashire Nonconformist minister Thomas Jolly bemoaned his death as ‘a great loss to the country [i.e. county] and an affliction to me’.82Jolly Note Bk. ed. H. Fishwick (Chetham Soc. n.s. xxxiii), 40.

In his will, Assheton bequeathed £70 to provide an annuity of £4 ‘towards gratifying two able, orthodox ministers [to preach sermons] ...other than the present incumbents then in being at Whalley and Downham ... for the better occasioning a fuller congregation; people being willing for the most part to hear strangers rather than their own [ministers]’. Having died without surviving children, he left the bulk of his estate, both real and personal, to his ‘most dear and well-beloved wife’ (there had evidently been a reconciliation since 1660) and to his brother Edmund (or his heirs), who succeeded to the baronetcy. In an undated codicil, after referring to the great pains he had taken in transcribing three folio volumes of ‘divinity notes out of several books and authors’, Assheton desired that a diligent scholar be employed to discover whether they contained anything worth publishing and to burn any ‘light or scurrilous’ material in these volumes or in Assheton’s ‘manuscript books or loose papers of morality or any other subject ... for which the good Lord in his mercy forgive me for entertaining such idle and sinful things into my library’.83PROB11/362, ff. 423v-425.