DELAVAL, Ralph (1622-91), of Seaton Delaval, Earsdon, Northumb.

Delaval was descended from a fifteenth century heiress to the well-established Northumberland gentry family of de la Val, and one John Woodman, the son of a stonemason, whose grandson changed his name to Delaval on succeeding to the estate in 1471.27Hist. Northumb. ix. 147-8, 168-9. Delaval’s father died when he was eight months old, and he spent his early childhood as the ward of his devoutly Protestant grandfather Sir Ralph Delaval.28WARD9/162, f. 417; Northumb. RO, 1DE/4/25; Hedley, Northumb. Fams. i. 152; Oxford DNB, ‘Delaval family’. He inherited an estate worth almost £2,000 a year, but one that was heavily encumbered with annuities and rents.29Hedley, Northumb. Fams. i. 152. There is no evidence that he played an active role in the civil war, although if the radical Cumberland lawyer John Musgrave can be credited, Delaval was a ‘delinquent in arms against the Parliament’.30J. Musgrave, A True and Exact Relation (1650), 11 (E.619.10). This claim is belied, however, by the fact that in October 1643 he was recommended to Parliament for appointment to the Northumberland bench; and in 1644, he was among those gentlemen nominated by the parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, as one of the county’s deputy lieutenants.31SP16/493/103, f. 192; CJ iii. 657b. It is further contradicted by Delaval’s marriage in 1646 to a daughter of the Scottish Covenanter general Alexander Leslie, 1st earl of Leven.32Hedley, Northumb. Fams. i. 152. This marriage suggests that Delaval had imbibed some of his grandfather’s godly sympathies, which in turn may help to explain his parliamentarian leanings during the civil war.

Delaval was consistently named to local parliamentary commissions from 1644 and was active on the Northumberland county committee during the later 1640s.33Bodl. Nalson, XIV, f. 118; Tanner 57, f. 29; Tanner, 59, f. 173. Despite his links with the Scots through Leven – who was confined by the council of state in Delaval’s house in 1651 – he enjoyed the trust of Sir Arthur Hesilrige* (governor of the four northern counties under the Rump) and was part of the syndicate headed by Hesilrige that purchased the castle and adjoining property in Newcastle from the trustees for the sale of crown lands in 1651.34C54/3571/14; C54/3820/43; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 16; [J. Price], Musgrave Muzl’d, or the Mouth of Iniquitie Stoped (1651), 12 (E.625.11); Musgrave, True and Exact Relation, 11. His work on the 1650 commission for propagating the gospel in the northern counties is further evidence that he was a man of godly convictions.35LPL, COMM VIII/I, pp. 393, 424, 430.

Although Delaval was not one of the most politically active of Northumberland gentlemen during the 1650s, he was certainly among the most commercially enterprising. It was probably during the protectorate that he began to expand the output of his collieries at Seaton and Hartley and made his first attempt at building a pier at Seaton for shipping coal and salt from his estate.36CTB iii. 500; Howell, Newcastle, 304; The Lives of the Norths ed. A. Jessop, i. 176-8; Oxford DNB, ‘Delaval family’. One of his aims in developing Seaton into a harbour was to break the Newcastle Hostmen’s monopoly of coal shipping, and in 1659 he was active on the Tyne sewers commission that attempted to challenge the restrictive commercial practices of Newcastle corporation.37Tyne and Wear Archives, IC.TS/1, Min. Bk. Commrs. of Sewers for the Tyne, 1659, pp. 1, 4, 7; Howell, Newcastle, 304. He was almost certainly on friendly terms with the principal campaigner against the Hostmen’s monopoly, Ralph Gardner – both men being leading figures on the Tynemouth vestry during the 1650s. However, it seems unlikely that he supported Gardner’s efforts in 1658 to have the London Independent divine Sidrach Simpson installed as parish minister.38Northumb. RO, EP 52/A/204, pp. 30, 31, 169, 172, 194, 196.

There is no evidence that Delaval had ambitions to serve his county at Westminster until his return as a knight of the shire for Northumberland in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, taking the junior seat to Sir William Fenwicke.39Supra, ‘Northumberland’. He probably owed his return to his interest as one of Northumberland’s leading landowners. He received just one committee appointment in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.40CJ vii. 595a. On 21 March 1659, following a division on the question of whether Scottish MPs should be allowed to sit in the House, the parliamentary diarist Thomas Burton* noted that Delaval and several other Members had been ‘against the question’.41Burton’s Diary, iv. 219. This has been taken to mean that he was against having MPs from Scottish constituencies in the House at all and was thus in agreement with the commonwealthsmen, who regarded them as Cromwellian placemen.42Bolton, ‘Yorks.’, 178. Another interpretation, however, is that Delaval, rather than having voted in the negative to this question had been opposed to the question being put in the first place. On the other hand, support for the republican interest’s wrecking tactics against the protectoral settlement would be consistent with the royalists’ view of Delaval by April 1659 as a ‘forward man’ in their cause.43CCSP iv. 177.

By the spring of 1659, Delaval was the organiser in Northumberland of a royalist network known as ‘The Great Trust’, whose leader, Alan Broderick, described him to Sir Edward Hyde* on 6 May 1659 as ‘a marvellous honest gentleman’ and a great friend of the northern Cromwellian grandee Charles Howard*.44CCSP iv. 198; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 244-5. To this, Hyde replied that ‘Delaval by many is thought unsteady, but if he move Charles Howard, the service will be great’.45CCSP iv. 202. Unless he could engage Howard for the king, the royalist high command deemed Delaval ‘not influential’ – and so he apparently proved, for Howard took no known part in Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian rebellion that summer (although he was imprisoned on suspicion of complicity with the insurgents).46Infra, ‘Charles Howard’; CCSP iv. 226. Delaval himself contributed little, if anything, to the restoration of monarchy, but profited from the king’s desire to court the Presbyterian interest by being created a baronet in June 1660.47CB.

Delaval was returned for Northumberland to the 1660 Convention and was marked by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.48G.F.T. Jones, ‘The Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 327, 339; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Ralph Delaval’. Delaval evidently conformed to the Act of Uniformity, for he remained an active member of the Tynemouth vestry after the Restoration and was instrumental in securing an ‘able, pious, orthodox [i.e. Anglican] minister’ for the parish (Thomas Dockwray) in 1667.49Northumb. RO, EP 52/A/204, p. 140. Nevertheless, he employed as his private chaplain the ejected Presbyterian minister William Henderson, who dedicated his ‘Discourse against Conformity’ to his patron.50Calamy Revised, 257; Hist. Northumb. viii. 372-3. It was alleged by an informer in 1664 that Delaval had been involved in the abortive northern rising of 1663, but apparently no evidence was found to support this.51CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 615. He certainly retained his place on the Northumberland bench throughout this period, and by the mid-1660s he was serving as a vice-admiral.52Durham UL, Mickleton and Spearman ms 31, ff. 49, 51. He was returned for Northumberland again at a by-election in 1677 and appeared on both government and opposition lists as a court supporter. He was returned to all three Exclusion Parliaments and, as the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*) predicted, voted against the exclusion bill.53A. Browning, Danby, iii. 117; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Ralph Delaval’. An opponent of James II’s policies, he was removed from the bench in 1686 and may also have lost his place as a deputy lieutenant in 1688.54PC2/7, p. 371; Browning, Danby, iii. 161; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Ralph Delaval’. He does not seem to have been restored to either office before his death late in the summer of 1691. He was buried at Seaton Delaval chapel on 1 September.55Hist. Northumb. ix. 171. No will is recorded. His youngest son, the third baronet, sat for Morpeth and Northumberland in the early eighteenth century.56HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Sir John Delaval’.