ENTWISLE, John (1784-1837), of Foxholes, Rochdale, Lancs. and 35 York Terrace, Regent’s Park, London, Mdx.

A ‘thorough-going Tory’,1Manchester Times and Gazette, 23 June 1832. Entwisle was ‘a man of quiet and reticent manner, an amiable man’, who ‘was proud of his descent from the old Entwisles, of Entwisle, in the parish of Bolton’.2Manchester Times, 25 Nov. 1882. In 1807, he erected a marble monument in Rochdale parish church to Sir Bertine Entwisle, who fought at Agincourt and was killed at the first battle of St. Alban’s (1455), although a later family history revealed that he was not actually a direct descendant.3Manchester Times, 25 Nov. 1882; B. Grimshaw, The Entwisle family (1924), 71. Entwisle’s grandfather, John Markland, was a Manchester merchant and cotton manufacturer, who also traded in Leeds, where Entwisle’s father, also John Markland, was mayor in 1786.4R.G. Wilson, Gentlemen merchants. The merchant community in Leeds 1700-1830 (1971), 246; S.D. Chapman, ‘Fixed capital formation in the British cotton industry, 1770-1815’, Economic History Review, 23:2 (1970), 259. His father succeeded to the estates of his kinsman, Robert Entwisle of Foxholes, near Rochdale, in 1787, assuming the surname Entwisle in lieu of Markland by royal licence.5Burke’s Landed Gentry (1937), i. 704. In 1789, the partnership of John Markland [senior] & Sons was dissolved, leaving Entwisle’s uncles to carry on in business, while his father concentrated on his estates (which contained some coal deposits), rebuilding the hall at Foxholes in 1793, and becoming High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1798, a position which Entwisle held in 1824.6R.W. Dickson, General view on the agriculture of Lancashire: with observations on the means of its improvement (1815), 48; London Gazette, 27 Jan. 1789; F. Gatrell & F.R. Raines, ‘Notitia cestriensis, or historical notices of the diocese of Chester’, Chetham Society Remains Historical and Literary connected with the palatine counties of Lancaster and Chester, xix (1849), 127n.-128n. Entwisle’s wife had inherited Castleton Hall on the death of her father, Thomas Smith, one of Rochdale’s largest woollen manufacturers, who left £180,000 in 1806, and Entwisle succeeded to his own father’s estates in 1817.7Gatrell & Raines, ‘Notitia cestriensis’, 127n.; R. Taylor, Rochdale retrospect (1956), 87, 91. As a Lancashire magistrate, he was among those who issued a proclamation warning against attendance at the meeting at St. Peter’s Fields in August 1819.8An impartial narrative of the late melancholy occurrences in Manchester (1819), 12. Entwisle was sufficiently removed from his family’s manufacturing background that the Manchester Times and Gazette in 1836 could bemoan the fact that industrial Rochdale was represented by ‘a tory squire, who does not perhaps know a blanket from a fustian!’9Manchester Times and Gazette, 13 Aug. 1836. He did, however, have a good reputation as a landlord: ‘his generosity to his tenants was carried almost to a fault’.10Manchester Times and Gazette, 8 Apr. 1837. He donated £50 towards an Anglican Sunday school in Rochdale, together with the necessary land, and was a Governor of Chetham’s Hospital school and Manchester Grammar School.11The Times, 22 Dec. 1837; Panorama of Manchester and railway companion (1834), 136; J. Wheeler, Manchester, its political, social and commercial history, ancient and modern (1836), 398. He was reportedly a member of the Orange Lodge.12PP 1835 (605), xvii. 188.

Entwisle first sought election in 1830, standing at Knaresborough in opposition to the duke of Devonshire’s nominee, Lord Waterpark. He declared for ‘economy and retrenchment’, but remained silent on the question of Reform.13The Times, 4 Dec. 1830. He won the show of hands, but after Waterpark and Entwisle objected to each other’s voters, the returning officer declared Waterpark elected. Entwisle petitioned against this decision, but the matter lapsed with the dissolution.14HP Commons, 1820-32. He canvassed the constituency again in 1831, but did not proceed to a contest, declaring that as the system of election prevailing at Knaresborough was likely to end with the Reform Bill, there was no point in ‘going through the ceremony of a second mock election’.15The Times, 9 May 1831. In 1831, he was rumoured as a possible candidate for Lancashire at the first post-Reform contest, but instead chose to contest Rochdale.16Preston Chronicle, 21 May 1831.

Entwisle’s defeat at Rochdale in 1832 by the Whig John Fenton (with the Radical James Taylor withdrawing at the close of the first day’s poll) was blamed on his opposition to the Reform Act.17Manchester Times and Gazette, 13 Aug. 1836. At a meeting of the Newton Conservative Club, he had toasted ‘the glorious majority of forty-one’ who rejected the Reform Bill in the Lords.18Manchester Times and Gazette, 17 Jan. 1835. He was criticised for his statement – published after the declaration – that ‘I have found who are my friends’, thought to imply that he would withdraw custom and patronage.19Leeds Mercury, 19 Jan. 1833. While his supporters explained his failure to subscribe his usual three pounds to Rochdale Benevolent Society by noting that he was subscribing instead to Rochdale Dispensary (which he helped to found in 1832)20http://www.link4life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c.showPage&pageID=135., his detractors suggested that this was done in a fit of pique, because ‘he felt so disgusted at the way in which he had been treated by the town’.21Leeds Mercury, 26 Jan. 1833, 2 Feb. 1833.

At the 1835 contest, the positions were reversed, with Entwisle defeating Fenton. Described by The Times as ‘very popular… much respected by the working class’, Entwisle’s opponents ascribed his victory to ‘Tory corruption, intimidation, and cunning’, particularly in plying Rochdale’s inhabitants with drink.22The Times, 17 Dec. 1834; Leeds Mercury, 10 Jan. 1835. Entwisle’s influence as a senior magistrate was said to explain why the majority of Rochdale’s publicans and beersellers voted for him. Forty-five public houses were allegedly kept open during the election, when one of Entwisle’s servants was among six men who died from the effects of intoxication.23Leeds Mercury, 10 Jan. 1835, 17 Jan. 1835. However, Fenton’s support for the new poor law and Conservative registration gains also aided Entwisle’s return.24D.W. Bebbington, Congregational Members of Parliament in the nineteenth century (2007), 40; Leeds Mercury, 10 Jan. 1835. Entwisle was condemned by William Fitton, a radical from neighbouring Oldham who later described Entwisle as ‘puny-minded’, for his ‘malignant and unfeeling’ polling day attack on his former opponent, James Taylor, who now supported Fenton. His criticism of Taylor as an ‘uncertificated bankrupt’ was felt to be bad form, given that his brother had once been in the same position.25Manchester Times and Gazette, 17 Jan. 1835. For Fitton’s later criticism of Entwisle, see Manchester Times and Gazette, 14 Jan. 1837.

Entwisle played a leading part in Conservative party organisation in Lancashire. He was fêted by Lord Delamere at a Conservative dinner in Cheshire in 1835 as ‘the founder of the largest and most consequential Conservative association in the kingdom’, the South Lancashire Conservative Association, of which he was first president (1833-4). Entwisle advised the Cheshire Conservatives to field two candidates in each division, which had proved successful in South Lancashire.26The Times, 12 Oct. 1835; Hull Packet, 30 Aug. 1833, 12 Sept. 1834. He was also an honoured guest at Conservative dinners in Liverpool and Halifax, although he was not a man for lengthy speeches.27The Examiner, 23 Oct. 1836; The Times, 3 Nov. 1836. At the nomination in 1835, little of his speech was heard due to the weakness of his voice and the noise of the crowd, although he did pledge to oppose the abolition of church rates.28Manchester Times and Gazette, 10 Jan. 1835; Leeds Mercury, 10 Jan. 1835.

In the House Entwisle was a silent member, who is not known to have served on any select committees. He divided for Sir Charles Manners Sutton as speaker, 19 Feb. 1835, and against Morpeth’s amendment to the address, 26 Feb. 1835. His subsequent votes on questions such as the Irish church and the Irish municipal corporations bill also followed party lines. He voted against the repeal of the malt tax, 10 Mar. 1835. At Rochdale’s annual Conservative dinner in 1837 he declared that he would oppose the new poor law as long as he lived, but when the poor law commissioner visited Rochdale that year, he ‘did not even dare to ask the commissioner a single question, but immediately slunk out of the room’.29Manchester Times and Gazette, 7 Jan. 1837, 21 Jan. 1837.

Entwisle’s brief parliamentary tenure was dogged by rumours of impending retirement. In May 1835 it was said that another local Conservative, Clement Royds, was to be brought forward in his place.30Morning Chronicle, 27 May 1835. More rumours in July 1836 were countered by a report that Entwisle was ‘in excellent health and spirits, and neither weary nor fagged with the arduous duty he had undergone’.31Preston Chronicle, 16 July 1836. However, the ‘excitement and cares’ of parliamentary life, to which ‘his habits of disposition were wholly opposed’, were felt to have contributed to his early death the following year at the age of 52, at Hastings, where he had gone to recover his health, the immediate cause of death being a ‘bilious fever’.32Manchester Times and Gazette, 8 Apr. 1837. He was buried at Marylebone parish church.33http://www.entwistlefamily.org.uk/TTMarch08.pdf. He was succeeded by his only son, John Smith Entwisle, who was ‘for many years the leader of the Conservative party in Rochdale’, and followed family tradition to become High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1849, although he did not seek parliamentary honours.34Manchester Times, 27 June 1868. However, Entwisle’s son-in-law, Alexander Ramsay, contested Rochdale in 1837 and 1852, and was Conservative MP from 1857-9. Although it was reported that William Entwisle (MP South Lancashire 1844-7), was his nephew, there was in fact no family connection.35Liverpool Mercury, 17 May 1844. For William Entwisle’s lineage, see J. Finch Smith, The admission register of the Manchester School (1868), ii. 77. Estate papers relating to the Entwisle family are held at Greater Manchester County Record Office.