[8] Oliver Edge, to whom Lord Derby surrendered, resided at Birch Hall Houses, in Rusholme. To his credit it should be said that, whilst strictly faithful to his oath, he treated his illustrious captive with the respect due to fallen greatness when conducting him and his friends as prisoners to Chester. In one of his letters to his Countess, the Earl speaks of Captain Edge as “one that was so civil to me that I, and all that love me, are beholden to him.”
[9] If so, this must have been in 1640, when the Earl, who was at that time Chamberlain, gave the appointment (27 July, 14 Car. I.) to Orlando Bridgeman, son of the Bishop of Chester, in succession to Roger Downes, of Wardley Hall, near Manchester.
[10] vii.—27.
[11] This extraordinary outrage, perpetrated in the name of freedom and justice, has ever since been familiarly known as “Pride’s Purge.”
[12] Though now closed in by humbler dwellings, the house must have been in Bradshaw’s time far away from any other building of equal size and pretensions. There is a common belief in the neighbourhood that an underground passage led from it to Ashley Park, where Cromwell, it is said, at that time resided.
[13] Sir Thomas Armstrong, who had taken part in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, was executed on the judgment of the notorious Jefferies, as an outlaw without trial, though his year had not expired.
[14] At Bradshaw Hall, in Chapel-en-le-Frith, the ancient patrimonial seat of the stock from which the Marple Bradshaws sprang, there is on the landing of one of the staircases a similar inscription:—
Love God and not gould.
He that loves not mercy
Of mercy shall miss;