Marple Hall and John Bradshaw: The History of a Lost House

John Bradshaw and the family at Marple Hall

The family made this part of Cheshire their base before John became a national figure. His grandfather, Henry Bradshaw, bought property at Marple and Wybersley from Sir Edward Stanley in 1606. An older house already stood at Marple; the familiar seventeenth-century hall developed from it.

John was born in 1602 at nearby Wibersley, also written Wybersley or Wyberslegh, and baptised at St Mary’s in Stockport on 10 December. His father was another Henry Bradshaw. His elder brother was Henry too. The repeated name is a small nuisance when trying to follow the building works, but the distinction matters: the Henry associated with the hall’s mid-seventeenth-century enlargement was John’s brother, a Parliamentary soldier.

By January 1649, this Cheshire lawyer had been appointed president of an extraordinary court. That office, and the arguments he made while holding it, are the firm ground on which to judge his part in the king’s death.

The dates and places clear up one of the easy mistakes to make on a visit. The hall belongs to Bradshaw’s family history. His own story begins at Wibersley and in the parish record at Stockport.

Why Charles I was brought to trial

The trial followed years of civil war and unsuccessful attempts to agree a settlement with the king. After his defeat, Charles continued to seek ways of recovering power. Royalist risings and a Scottish invasion brought a second civil war in 1648. To leading officers in the Parliamentary army, further negotiation now looked like an invitation to further bloodshed.

There was no united Parliament calmly deciding what should happen next. On 6 December 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride’s soldiers arrested or excluded MPs considered unlikely to support punishing the king. The reduced Commons became known as the Rump. In January, it established the High Court of Justice despite the Lords’ rejection of the proposal.

Charles was brought before the court in Westminster Hall on 20 January 1649. He was charged with tyranny and treason. He repeatedly challenged the judges’ right to try him and refused to enter a plea. The dispute went beyond whether the allegations were true: who could lawfully judge a reigning king, and from whom did that power come?

The question I keep coming back to in the record is the one Charles kept asking about the court’s authority. After Pride’s Purge, the men claiming to speak for the country had already excluded a considerable part of the Commons. You can see why the court and the king were arguing about the right to hold the trial as much as they were about the charges.

Bradshaw’s signature on the death warrant

Bradshaw presided over the proceedings and maintained the court’s authority in its exchanges with Charles. Parliament’s account records that he wore a bullet-proof hat for protection. It is a revealing practical detail: the men conducting this public trial had reason to worry about their own safety.

The death sentence was pronounced on 27 January. Bradshaw’s signature heads the death warrant, a document bearing the names of 59 commissioners and dated 29 January. It instructed army officers to arrange the execution at Whitehall the following day. Charles was beheaded outside the Banqueting House on 30 January 1649.

The sequence matters. The court passed sentence; commissioners signed the warrant; the officers addressed in it were ordered to see the sentence carried out. Bradshaw bore a leading responsibility through his presidency and signature. Calling him the man who personally ordered everything conceals the other participants and the machinery they had assembled.

Read the warrant for the names as well as Bradshaw’s signature. I found it easier to understand the weight of his role when I could see how many other people the decision involved.

In the months that followed, the monarchy and House of Lords were abolished and England was declared a Commonwealth. Bradshaw’s signature belonged to a change in the organisation of government, as well as to a death sentence. That is why his role remained so politically charged after the monarchy returned.

What the Restoration did to Bradshaw’s remains

Bradshaw died on 31 October 1659 and was buried in Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey. He therefore did not live to face the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Death did not protect his remains.

On 30 January 1661, the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, the exhumed bodies of Bradshaw, Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton were taken to Tyburn and hanged. Their heads were subsequently displayed on Westminster Hall. The site of the king’s trial became a place for exhibiting the punishment of those associated with his death.

Someone chose the anniversary of the king’s death for that public punishment. The timing mattered to people who could still remember the execution, and it gives the Restoration a particular cruelty when you read the two dates together.

The house Henry Bradshaw enlarged

Marple Hall had an older timber-framed core, but substantial seventeenth-century work changed its appearance. The north entrance bore the date 1658. Later work included stables with stepped gables and a clock tower, dated 1669. The finished ensemble represented investment across generations.

Descriptions and photographs show a house with gables, long mullioned windows and a central tower on the south front. These details are useful because the bare site gives little sense of the elevation. I would take an old photograph along: it supplies the height and domestic scale that a surviving foundation cannot.

During the eighteenth century, the estate passed into the related Isherwood family through the Bradshaw line. The later surname Bradshaw-Isherwood preserved the connection. I like that reminder that a country house’s continuity often depended on inheritance through women and changes of family name, even when later accounts make ownership sound like a straight procession of fathers and sons.

The 1658 stone is the first thing I’d look for at the old site. Set it beside a photograph of the north entrance and you begin to recover the proportions of what once stood there.

Mary Ellen Isherwood and the later household

A useful glimpse of the nineteenth-century family survives in an unexpected place: the visitors’ book at Chatsworth. A Mr and Mrs Isherwood of Marple Hall signed it on 1 July 1842. Chatsworth’s archivists identify them as Thomas Bradshaw-Isherwood IV, who had inherited the hall in 1839, and his wife Mary Ellen.

The archive account also records that Mary Ellen took over running their estates in 1847 after Thomas’s health deteriorated. I give that responsibility some weight. Maintaining an estate required decisions and work; the person doing it deserves more than a passing mention as somebody’s wife.

A more dramatic story attaches to her. During the unrest of 1842, she is said to have confronted a crowd from a balcony and saved Marple Hall. Chatsworth presents this as a reported story, and it should remain one. It adds something to her local reputation, but the balcony scene is less secure evidence than her documented responsibility for the estates.

The family’s twentieth-century connection with literature is firmer. The novelist Christopher Isherwood inherited Marple Hall in 1940 while living in California and relinquished his interest in 1941. His younger brother Richard became responsible for it. By then, retaining a family name and possessing an old house were very different things from being able to maintain it.

The Chatsworth visitors’ book is the trace I like most of this later family. Two people went to see a house in Derbyshire and signed their names. That small act gives us somewhere firm to begin with Mary Ellen.

How Marple Hall was lost

The decline was already under way before the final owners had to decide what to do. Much of the furniture and contents was sold in 1929. The caretakers left in 1953, after which the empty house suffered theft and vandalism.

A Manchester Guardian report of April 1954 described smashed oak panelling and the removal of stained glass. The account, reproduced in local historian Allan Russell’s history of the hall, is specific about the damage. These were fittings being broken or taken from a building that had recently been occupied, rather than the slow weathering of a remote ruin.

Richard Isherwood offered the hall to the council in 1954, but the cost of restoration stood in the way. The remaining building was demolished in the late 1950s; Marple’s heritage assessment gives 1959. Housing and the school subsequently occupied much of the former estate.

The old photographs make the loss painfully easy to see. The hall also had a long period in which people were trying to decide who could afford to keep it. The sale of the contents, the departure of its caretakers and the damage reported in the 1950s all narrowed the choices.

The Marple Hall sundial that survived

The sundial in Marple Memorial Park provides a more substantial object to examine. The listing dates it to the mid-seventeenth century and describes a stone column on a three-step base, topped by a copper dial with Roman numerals. The column has a slight swelling, known as entasis, a small piece of architectural refinement in an object with an everyday job.

Take a close look at the shaft of the sundial. It swells very slightly, the kind of refinement you can easily pass without seeing. The warrant tells us how John Bradshaw wanted the king dealt with. The sundial is a chance to give another part of the family’s life a little attention.