Historians
Many are the writers on Cheshire history whose names should be recorded—men who have loved their county and desired to tell of its beauties and historical associations. We can only mention a tithe of those worthy sons who have done honour to their shire, and accomplished work which has been often little understood or appreciated by their fellows.
The first of these is a name honoured by all historians, Henry Bradshaw, a native of Chester and a monk of St. Werburgh’s Abbey, who lived in the latter part of the fourteenth century. He was one of the earliest chroniclers of Cheshire, and wrote his works in the cloistered shade of his monastic house. His works consist of a treatise, De Antiquitate et Magnificentiâ Urbis Cestriæ, and a translation of “The Holy Lyfe and History of Saint Werburge, very frutefull for all Christen people to rede.” The first work is believed to have been lost, unless it is incorporated in the latter treatise, as Dr. Gower suggested. Perhaps we should have included Henry Bradshaw amongst our poets, in whose company he well deserves a high and important niche. His body lies near the shrine of the saint of whose virtues he loved to sing.
John Booth of Twamlowe, a contemporary of Sir William Brereton, was a distinguished Cheshire genealogist who occupies a foremost place amongst the antiquaries of the county. His works have been most useful to subsequent writers.
John Speed, born at Farndon in 1552, is a writer of whom any county may be proud. An account of this learned historian has already appeared in this volume.
The disputes of the learned often cause amusement, and the controversy between the rival baronets, Sir Peter Leicester and Sir Thomas Maynwaring of Over Peover, aroused much merriment in 1673–75. Sir Peter published a learned work in two volumes on the historical antiquities of Great Britain and more particularly of Cheshire, in which he asserted that Amicia, daughter of Hugh Keveliock, fifth Earl of Chester, a descendant of Hugh Lupus, was illegitimate. This aroused Sir Thomas Maynwaring, whose ancestor had married the said Amicia. He published a defence of the injured lady. Then Peter wrote an answer to Sir Thomas’s book, who retaliated with another book. So the controversy went on, each disputant waxing more wroth, until at last a law-suit ensued, the result being in favour of the champion of Amicia.
One of the earliest historians of Cheshire was Daniel King, the author of The Vale Royal of England, or History of Cheshire. He was more skilled in engraving than in writing, and his work was adorned with plates by Hollar. He was greatly aided by William Smith, Rouge Dragon, William Webb, clerk of the Mayor’s court at Chester, and William Aldersey, Mayor of Chester. Webb had some pretensions to be accounted a poet, and wrote “a Discourse on English poetry” in 1586. King’s Vale Royal was not a great book, but it has served its purpose in preserving a record of many things which might have been forgotten, and its engravings and illustrations will always be valuable. An abridged and revised edition was subsequently published by Thomas Hughes.
An account of the Randle Holmes—father, son, and grandson—a noted family of antiquaries, appears in another chapter. Mr. T. Worthington Barlow, F.L.S., barrister of Gray’s Inn, wrote much on the county; and we are greatly indebted to his Historical and Literary Associations of Cheshire for much valuable information which has been useful in the compiling of this record of Cheshire worthies. Nor must we forget the interesting diary of the Rev. Edward Burghall, the Puritanical vicar of Aston, who records with much perspicuity the events of the Civil War in Cheshire with many “moral reflections.” His animadversions on the Quakers, who troubled him sorely, are rather amusing reading.
Amongst Cheshire worthies must not be forgotten Sir Richard Sutton, co-founder with Bishop William Smyth of Lincoln, of Brazenose College, Oxford, “for the study of Philosophy and Sacred Theology, to the Praise and Honour of Almighty God,” in 1509. He was born at Prestbury, near Macclesfield, and was a lawyer, Governor of the Inner Temple, and Steward of the Monastery of Syon, afterward Sion College. He was the author of a work entitled Orcharde of Syon, but his chief fame rests on his completion of the foundation of the Oxford College which had been commenced by the bishop.
Such, then, are some of the worthies of Cheshire. Many others might be included, but the roll of honour of the county is already lengthy. We might mention the names of several of the illustrious families of the shire whose scions still continue to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers, and have conferred credit on their houses and on their native county. Some of the great and good men of Cheshire have but recently passed away, whose names are household words in the Cestrian land. They need no mention, no memorial, save that which their lives and good deeds have afforded. The love of the men of Cheshire for their shire has inspired many an act of daring, much toil, much devotion; may it continue so to do in the Vale Royal of England.
There is one name more that must be mentioned. He has been denounced as a “viper of hell,” a “monster of men,” whose bones were dragged from his tomb in Westminster Abbey and buried beneath the Tyburn gallows tree. Shall a regicide be mentioned among the worthies? Such was John Bradshaw, the judge of the Martyr King. He came of a good Cheshire family, and spent his life in studying law, rising high in his profession. This is not the place to judge his motives. He was no time-server, nor was he a universal favourite with his political colleagues. It is enough for us to note that he was born in Cheshire. A facsimile of the register of his baptism is shown with the additional word “traitor” added by a later hand, marking the writer’s detestation of the man who was called upon to play so prominent a part in the tragedy of the murder of a king, the chief instrument in the travesty of justice that ended on the scaffold at Whitehall.
