RIGBY, Alexander II (1620-94), of Middleton Hall in Goosnargh, Kirkham, Lancs.

Rigby received a thoroughly godly education under the tutelage of the future Presbyterian divine William Rathband and then at Cambridge’s most puritan college, Emmanuel.21HMC Kenyon, 40-1, 47; Calamy Revised, 404; Richardson, Puritanism, 67. By the summer of 1640, his father, the godly Lancashire squire Alexander Rigby I*, had put him to study law at Gray’s Inn, although there is no record that Rigby junior was formally admitted to the inn.22HMC Kenyon, 58. At the outbreak of the civil war, Rigby senior emerged as one of the most radical and committed MPs in the Long Parliament; and having raised a regiment of foot in Lancashire in the summer of 1643, he commissioned Rigby junior as his lieutenant-colonel.23Supra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’; Warr in Lancs. 42-3; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 553. It seems likely that Rigby II succeeded his father as commander of the regiment following the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance in the spring of 1645 – but if he did so, he was not promoted to the rank of colonel.24Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 487; ii. 147; Gratton, Lancs. 195. Given that Rigby senior seems to have spent most of the later 1640s at Westminster, it is also likely that it was the son rather than the father who active on the Lancashire county committee.25Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 146, 159, 161, 172, 183, 364; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 341.

Rigby II served as lieutenant-colonel of horse in the forces raised in Lancashire during the second civil war to resist the Hamiltonian Scots and their English royalist allies.26Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 41; Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 252; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 317; HMC 7th Rep. 28; Palatine Note-Bk. iii. 282; Gratton, ‘War Effort in Lancs.’, 553. However, he evidently opposed the events of the winter of 1648-9, for he was omitted from all commissions under the Rump. In March 1650, the council of state dismissed ‘Mr. Rigby junior’ and several other leading Lancashire parliamentarians from ‘their employment in settling the militia’ in the county, but there is nothing to indicate that he had been active in local government since the summer of 1648.27CSP Dom. 1650, p. 34. His addition to the Lancashire bench in April 1650 was almost certainly as a courtesy to his father, who had recently been appointed a baron of the exchequer and, as such, presided over the Lancaster assizes in September 1649. Rigby senior died in August 1650, and Rigby junior was duly omitted from the next commission of peace.28Supra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’; Lancs. RO, QSC/52-3. There is no basis for the claim that he involved in the prosecution and execution of the royalist leader James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby in the autumn of 1651.29Palatine Note-Bk. iii. 168. And he would remain merely a spectator of local affairs after the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653.

Rigby’s withdrawal from public life between the late 1640s and 1659 has been attributed to the influence of Presbyterian scruples on his part.30‘Alexander Rigby’, HP Commons, 1660-90. Yet plausible though this assumption is, there is no firm evidence that he was a Presbyterian – at least in terms of his religious convictions. It was almost certainly Rigby I rather than Rigby II who had been appointed an elder in 1646 for the seventh Lancashire Presbyterian classis (covering the Preston-Goosnargh area).31LJ viii. 511.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Rigby and Sir George Boothe were returned for Lancashire, with Rigby almost certainly taking the junior place. He probably owed his return to the strength of his interest as the owner of a sizeable estate in the Preston area and as a parliamentarian gentleman who was yet untainted by association with the revolutionary regimes that followed Pride’s Purge. His only appointment in this Parliament occurred on 13 April, when he was named to committee concerning Lancashire’s militia forces.32CJ vii. 638a. He made a greater impact upon the floor of the House, and particularly in the long debates as to how the Commons should transact business with the Cromwellian Other House. In his first recorded speech, on 4 March, he claimed that it had been his intention to have remained silent in debate, having never before sat in Parliament. Less credibly, he declared that ‘there are none in this [House] more in love with this government than I am’.33Burton’s Diary, iv. 9. However, he then went on to raise serious objections to the prospect of transacting with the Other House before it had been ‘bounded’ – that is, had constitutional limitations imposed upon its proceedings.

I look upon this House [the Commons] as the representative of the free people of the nation ... If I should give [in to] this [a motion to transact with the Other House], I call all the blood that been split under my command upon myself. This question gives all away at once. I would have them first bounded. I would not have us, as the phrase is, by a side-wind part with all.34Burton’s Diary, iv. 9-10.

He expanded upon this point three days later (7 March), declaring that

Salus populi [suprema lex – the people’s safety is the supreme law] sways with me and is my principle. I shall not be against the judges or the officers sitting there [in the Other House], but not to give all things away at a lump. After you have passed this vote you cannot then bound them.35Burton’s Diary, iv. 47.

Whether Rigby was being entirely sincere in claiming to have no objections to the composition of the Other House is questionable. Certainly Boothe and most other Presbyterian MPs not associated with the court party would have no truck with the swordsmen and Cromwellian placemen who made up the Other House. Nevertheless, for reasons perhaps more tactical than ideological, Rigby chose to frame his opposition largely in terms of a commitment to uphold the sovereignty of the Commons – the line generally adopted by the doctrinaire republicans at Westminster – rather than distrust of the Other House’s membership.36Supra, ‘George Boothe’; Burton’s Diary, iv. 9-10, 47, 210-11. Similarly, he followed the republicans’ lead on 21 March, when he questioned whether the Scottish and Irish MPs in the House – whom the republicans regarded as Cromwellian stooges – were legally entitled to take their seats.37Burton’s Diary, iv. 210. In his last recorded speech, on 21 April, he expressed the hope that ‘the soldiery about town will not meddle in your affairs’ – but the very next day the army forced Richard Cromwell* to dissolve Parliament, whereupon the protectorate collapsed.38Burton’s Diary, iv. 475. The restored Rump trusted Rigby sufficiently to place him at the head of Lancashire’s militia forces in the campaign that summer to suppress Boothe’s royalist-Presbyterian rebellion.39Bodl. Rawl. C.179, p. 287.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Rigby was returned for Preston, where he owned a house of 15 hearths – the largest in the town.40Fishwick, Preston, 433. He and his electoral partner Richard Standish were marked by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as likely supporters of a Presbyterian church settlement.41G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 337. On 20 June, however, their election was declared void on the grounds that the mayor of Preston had refused a poll.42‘Preston’, HP Commons 1660-90. Rigby does not appear to have stood as a candidate in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament the following year. Indeed, he seems to have lived quietly on his estate for most of the Restoration period. The Alexander Rigby who served as sheriff of Lancashire in 1676-8 and who contested the February 1679 election at Wigan was not – as one authority has stated – Rigby II but his royalist kinsman, Alexander Rigby of Layton and Burgh.43Lancs. RO, QSJ/8/10/103; List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 73; HP Commons 1660-90; HP Commons 1690-1715; Sinclair, Wigan, ii. 63, 175-6. Rigby II, together with his brother Edward Rigby†, was arrested during Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, but it is not clear whether he was also imprisoned. He probably welcomed the Glorious Revolution and was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Lancashire in 1689.44SP44/165, p. 286; H. Fishwick, Hist. of the Parochial Chapelry of Goosnargh (Manchester, 1871), 149; ‘Alexander Rigby’, ‘Edward Rigby’, HP Commons 1660-90.

Rigby died early in 1694 and was buried in his wife’s family chapel at Hoghton Tower in the parish of Preston (not at Goosnargh as one authority has stated) on 4 March.45Preston par. reg.; Fishwick, Goosnargh, 141; HP Commons 1660-90. No will is recorded. None of his immediate descendants sat in Parliament.