Reduce the Church to Gospel order,
By rapine, sacrilege, and murder.
Happily, fate has not ordained that we should sleep here this night; for Marple, be it remembered, has its ghost chamber—what ancient house with any pretensions to importance has not?—and if the shades of the departed can at the “silent, solemn hour, when night and morning meet,” revisit this lower world, those of the stern old Puritan colonel and the grim-visaged “Lord President” would assuredly disturb our slumber.
But let us quit the shadowy realms of legend and romance, and betake ourselves to that of sober, historic fact. After the overthrow of Harold on the fatal field of Hastings, Marple passed into the hands of Norman grantees, and in the days of the earlier Plantagenet Kings formed part of the possessions of the barons of Stockport, being held by them under the Earl of Chester on the condition of finding one forester for the Earl’s forest of Macclesfield. The lands, with those of Wyberslegh, in the same township, were, some time between the years 1209 and 1229, given by Robert de Stockport as a marriage portion to his sister Margaret on her marriage with William de Vernon, afterwards Chief Justice of Chester, a younger son of the Baron of Shipbrooke, who through his mother had acquired the lands of Haddon, in Derbyshire; and from that time Marple formed part of the patrimony of the lords of Haddon until the death of Sir George Vernon, the renowned “King of the Peak,” in 1567, a period of three centuries and a half, the estates being then divided between his two daughters, Haddon with other property in Derbyshire devolving upon Dorothy Vernon, the heroine of the romantic elopement with Sir John Manners, the ancestor of the Dukes of Rutland, whilst Marple and Wyberslegh fell to the lot of Margaret, the wife of Sir Thomas Stanley of Winwick, the second son of Edward Earl of Derby—that Earl of whom Camden says that “with his death the glory of hospitality seemed to fall asleep.” Their son, Sir Edward Stanley, of Tonge Castle, in Shropshire, having no issue, sold the manor and lands of Marple in small lots to Thomas Hibbert,[5] chaplain to Lord Keeper Bridgman, who married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Bradshaw, of Marple, and who was the grandfather of the celebrated divine, Henry Hibbert.
Some time about the year 1560 the Henry Bradshaw here named, who was a younger son of William Bradshaw, of Bradshaw Hall, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, the representative of an old Lancashire family of Saxon origin, seated at Bradshaw, near Bolton, from a time anterior to the Conquest, and which had been dispossessed and repossessed of its estates by the Norman invaders, married Dorothy, one of the daughters and co-heirs of George Bagshawe, of the Ridge, in the parish of Chapel-en-le-Frith, a family that in a later generation numbered amongst its members the eminent Nonconformist divine, William Bagshawe, better known as the “Apostle of the Peak,” and became tenant of a house in Marple called The Place, still existing, and forming part of the Marple estate. By this marriage he had a son bearing his own baptismal name, and, in addition, two daughters, Elizabeth, who became the wife of Thomas Hibbert as already stated, and Sarah, who is said by some genealogists—though on what authority is not clear—to have been the wife of John Milton, the wealthy scrivener, of Bread Street, London, and the mother of England’s great epic poet, whom John Bradshaw in his will spoke of as his “kinsman John Milton.”
In 1606, as appears by a deed among the Marple muniments, dated 7th July, 4 James, Henry Bradshaw the elder, therein styled a “yoman,” purchased from Sir Edward Stanley, for the sum of £270, certain premises in Marple and Wyberslegh, comprising a messuage and tenement, with its appurtenances, another tenement situate in Marple or Wibersley, and a close commonly called The Place, the said premises being at the time, as is stated, partly occupied by Henry Bradshaw the elder and partly by Henry Bradshaw the younger, his son and heir-apparent. The estate at that time must have been comparatively small. Two years later (30th June, 1608), as appears by the Calendar of Recognizance Rolls of the Palatinate of Chester, now deposited in the Record Office, London, Henry Bradshaw, to further secure his title, obtained an enrolment of the charter of Randal Earl of Chester, granting in free-forestry Merple and Wibreslega, as they are there called, with lands in Upton and Macclesfield, to Robert, son of Robert de Stockport; and another enrolment of the charter of Robert de Stockport, granting to William Vernon, and Margery his wife, the lands of Marple and Wybersley, from which William and Margery the property passed, as we have said, by successive descents to Sir Edward Stanley, from whom Bradshaw acquired it.
Henry Bradshaw the younger, following the example of his father, also married an heiress, thus further adding to the territorial possessions, as well as to the social status, of his house, his wife being Catherine, the younger of the two daughters and co-heirs of Ralph Winnington, the last male representative of a family seated for seven generations at Offerton Hall, a building still standing near the highroad midway between Stockport and Marple, though now shorn of much of its former dignity. The registers of Stockport show that they were married there on the 4th February, 1593. To them were born four sons and two daughters. William, the eldest, died in infancy. With Henry, born in 1600, and John, born in 1602, we are more immediately concerned, for it is round them that the interest and the associations of Marple chiefly gather.
The elder Bradshaw, the founder of the Marple line, died in 1619–20, when Henry, his son, who had then been a widower sixteen years, succeeded to the family estates. No records of his private life have been preserved, but it may not be unreasonably assumed that, after the death of his wife, and as he did not remarry, he lived in comparative retirement, leading the life of an unostentatious country gentleman, improving his estate, and supervising the education of his children. Two years after he had entered upon the possession of his inheritance, that important functionary the Herald made his official visitation of Cheshire, when the gentlemen and esquires of the county were called upon to register their descents and show their claim to the arms they severally bore; and it is worthy of note, as indicating his indifference to, or disdain of, the “noble science,” that though, as we have seen, of ancient and honourable lineage and entitled to bear arms, Henry Bradshaw did not obey the Herald’s summons,[6] probably “feeling assured,” as Macaulay said of the old Puritan, “that if his name was not found in the Registers of Heralds, it was recorded in the Book of Life; and hence originated his contempt for territorial distinctions, accomplishments, and dignities.”
Surrounded by home affections, Bradshaw appears to have taken little interest in public affairs; though, as a strict Calvinist and stern moralist, he could not but have looked with disfavour on the republication of the “Book of Sports,” and the revival of the Sunday wakes and festivals, in which religion and pleasure were so strangely blended; nor, as an Englishman, could he have been an indifferent spectator of the breach which was gradually widening between the King and his people.
A cloud was then gathering which presaged a great religious and political tempest. The year in which Bradshaw lost his wife was that which closed the long and brilliant reign of the last of the Tudor sovereigns. James of Scotland succeeded—a King who reigned like a woman after a woman who had reigned like a man. The Puritans in Elizabeth’s time were comparatively insignificant in numbers, but the strictness of the Queen’s ecclesiastical rule acted upon their stubborn nature, and those who were averse to Episcopacy, and impatient of uniformity in rites and ceremonies and the decorous adjuncts of a National Church, grew formidable under James, and turbulent and aggressive after the accession of Charles. The policy of Elizabeth gave a political standing ground to Puritanism, and Puritanism gave to the political war in which the nation became involved a relentless character that was all its own. In 1634 was issued the writ for the levying of Ship-money—“that word of lasting sound in the memory of this kingdom,” as Clarendon calls it—a word which lit the torch of revolution, and for a period of eleven years kept the country in almost uninterrupted strife. The occasion was eagerly availed of by the discontented; pulpits were perverted by religious fanatics, and violent appeals made to the passions of the populace, who were preached into rebellion; while more thoughtful, yet brave and strong-minded men, impressed with a stern, unflinching love of justice, and a determination to maintain those liberties they held to be their birthright, contended to the death against “imposts” and “levies” and “compositions,” and against the worse mockery of “loans” which no man was free to refuse, as well as the despotism that more than threatened their common country. It was a fatal time for England. Dignified by some high virtues, possessing many excellent endowments both of head and heart, Charles yet lacked sincerity, forethought, and decision, and the capacity required for the wise conduct of affairs. The blame for the strifes and contentions which arose does not, however, attach wholly to the sovereign, nor yet to his subjects. The absolutism of the Tudors was, in a measure, the cause of the sins of the Stuarts, and the sins of the Stuarts brought about the miseries of the Rebellion, just as in turn the despotic rule and grinding social tyranny of the Commonwealth period led to the excesses of the Restoration. Charles was born out of season, and lived too much in a world of his own ideas to comprehend the significance of events that were passing around him. The twining of the Red and White Roses upon the ensanguined field of Bosworth was followed by the break-up of the feudal system, and the effacement of many of the old landmarks of English society; a new class of landowners had sprung into existence, eager for the acquirement of political freedom, and the king was unable or unwilling to recognise the changed condition of things. He inherited from his father inordinate notions of kingly power, and he resolutely shut his eyes to the fact that he had to deal with an entirely different state of public opinion. The power of the sovereign had waned, but that of the people had increased; Parliament, while bent upon abridging the ancient constitutional prerogative of the Crown, was equally resolute in the extension of its own. The King persisted in his determination to reign and govern by “divine right”—he refused to yield anything—and in the fierce struggle which he provoked he fell. Moderation was no longer thought of; the time for compromise was past; the seeds of strife were sown and nurtured both by King and Parliament, who, distrusting and wearied of each other, no longer cared for peace. At length the storm burst. At Manchester, on the 15th July, 1642—a month before the unfurling of the Royal standard at Nottingham—very nearly upon the spot where now stands the statue of Cromwell, the first shot was fired and the first blood shed in that great conflict which drenched the country in civil slaughter.