John Radclyffe, the heir of his brother Alexander, was the third son of his father, and was baptized at Manchester Church on 24th February 1581. He accompanied his brother in the Irish expedition, and was knighted by Essex in Ireland on 24th September 1599, being thereby freed from wardship, in his nineteenth year. Returning to London he quickly established himself as a favourite in Court circles. The tragedy of the passing of two young people so popular as his sister and brother had touched a ringing chord of sympathy in a wide circle of hearts, and John was made welcome not only for the fame of his name but also on account of his attractive personality, his proved valour in arms, and his private virtues. His cousin, Robert, Earl of Sussex, held him in great regard and affection, the older man finding in the younger a stability of character of which his own generous but irresolute nature could lean with confident security. Despite Sir John's attachment to the Earl of Essex, his loyalty to the Queen and a strict sense of honourable duty did not permit him to join in the incredible folly of Essex's rebellion, though doubtless he grieved that so gallant a nobleman should have cast away his great fame and reputation in a mad moment of passionate despair, too recklessly impulsive to wait with patience for the legitimate achievement of his overbounding ambitions. Essex paid the last penalty on his rashness in the courtyard of the Tower of London, on 25th February 1601. Two years later, in the early hours of the morning, ere yet the grey dawn of late March lighted the windows of her Palace of Richmond, the life of the great Queen herself ebbed gently to its close. In the squabbles, the plottings, the conspiracies that marked the beginning of the reign of James the First, John Radclyffe took no part, his natural dignity and sound common sense holding him aloof from the rivalries and discontents in which so many of his associates became involved. Popular tradition in the neighbourhood of Ordsall, and the imagination of a famous novelist, have so generally ascribed to the Radclyffes a prominent part in the Gunpowder Plot that it would be appropriate, at this point, to discover what fragment of fact, if any, there is in this legend
Sir John Radclyffe, like his father before him, was a Catholic, but a convinced loyalist. He belonged to that section of his co-religionists, comprising many of the old families and the majority of the secular priests, he desired only toleration for the exercise of their faith. They had little or no sympathy with the more fanatical elements, who with the aid of indigent adventurers sought the revengeful overthrow of the whole fabric of the state and its unconditional surrender to the Papacy. Like all revolutionaries, what the members of this second party lacked in numbers, they made up for in the violence of their expressions. Anxious to divest himself of the charge of papistry levelled against him by the discontented Puritans, King James made a proclamation, banishing all Catholic missionaries and reaffirming the penal laws against recusants, who were subjected to heavy fines, mercilessly extorted, and ruinous to men of moderate means. When the Bye Plot or 'treason of the priests' failed in 1603, the more fiery spirits among the Catholics frantically sought means to deliver themselves from this oppression. Injustice and hatred together are relentless masters, which drive their victims to extraordinary devices. One of the sufferers was Robert Catesby, a member of an old Northamptonshire family, and by nature a dabbler in treason. In turn he had been a bitter denouncer of the Papists, and their zealous supporter. In 1596 he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in an attempt to poison the Queen. He took part in the rebellion of Essex and narrowly escaped that noble's fate. In 1602 he was conspiring with the Jesuits in an attempt to persuade the King of Spain to a new invasion of England. Into his scheming mind now flashed a plan so diabolical that it could have been conceived only in a madman's frenzy, the incredible treason of the Gunpowder Plot, and to its achievement he called a number of intimates, most of whom like himself had been involved in the Essex rising
In his romantic novel of Guy Fawkes, which many people have accepted as authentic history, Harrison Ainsworth introduces us to one Viviana Radclyffe, the sole representative of her family at Ordsall during the absence of her father, Sir William Radclyffe, who is away attending a meeting of Catholic gentry at Holt in Cheshire. Viviana is represented as a fair maiden of eighteen, whom Catesby comes in secrecy to woo, and at Ordsall encounters Guy Fawkes, who has come to secure the support of the Radclyffes in the Plot. When the hall is raided by pursuivants, come to arrest the Roman Catholic priest in hiding at the Hall, Viviana, Catesby, Fawkes, and the priest are all rescued by the timely intervention of Humphrey Chetham, who conducts them by a secret passage running beneath the moat to a summer house in the grounds, and thence through Old Trafford to Chat Moss. Humphrey Chetham is portrayed as in love with Viviana, but differences of religious faith make their marriage impossible, and the story closes with Humphrey left solitary, his life 'tinged by the blighting of his early affection ... true to his love, he died unmarried'
Records fail to reveal that the Radclyffes had even the most remote association with the Gunpowder Treason. Ordsall in 1605 was in possession of Sir John, the last Sir William, his grandfather, having died in 1568. There was never any female of the house named Viviana and only the surviving sister of Sir John was Jane, then thirty years of age, and married to Sir Ralph Constable. It is a fact that Humphrey Chetham was a friend of the family, and in later years advanced them money on a mortgage when their fortunes fell on evil days, though whether he had cherished any romantic attachment to a daughter of the Radclyffes, possibly Anne, who died in 1601, has not been recorded in the story of his life. Picturesque though Ainsworth's story is, and glamorous the atmosphere of romance it spreads about the ancient hall of Ordsall, it must be dismissed as purely the figment of the author's imaginative mind, though indeed the Radclyffes as much as any family had cause for bitterness in the heavy penalties inflicted upon them for their alleged recusancy. But this never tempted Sir John Radclyffe to depart one whit from his loyalty and patriotic service
His choice of wife rested on Mistress Alice Byron, daughter of Sir John Byron of Newstead Priory in Nottingham and lord of the manor of Clayton in Lancashire. The mother of Alice was Anne, the eldest daughter of Sir Richard Molyneaux of Sefton, another family related to the Radclyffes. In 1606 Sir John Radclyffe sold the Asshawe lands in Flixton to Peter Egerton, younger son of Sir Ralph Egerton of Ridley, who had married Elizabeth, daughter of Leonard Asshawe of Shaw Hall in Flixton. The recusancy fines continued to be a heavy drain on the estate, and in 1613 Sir John conveyed to Adam Byrom of Salford, a leading merchant of the town, certain lands in Eccles and Salford for the term of thirteen years and eight months for the consideration of four hundred and four-score pounds. One of the witnesses to this deed is 'Samuel Bordeman, Cl.,' the family tutor of the Radclyffe family, who accompanied Sir Alexander on the visit to Lathom in August 1590. In the Parliament of 1621 Sir John Radclyffe sat as Knight of the Shire, and again in the Parliament called in February of 1624. The following year King James died, and Charles the First began his troubled reign
Sir John was unhappy in his domestic life. He suspected Dame Alice, his wife, of a guilty passion for his friend, Sir Edmund Prestwich of Hulme, a neighbouring manor across the river from Ordsall. In consequence of this quarrel Sir John separated from his wife and betook himself to London, there to seek service in arms overseas. He again represented Lancashire as a Knight of the Shire in the first Parliament of the new reign. When Buckingham, in 1627, aiming to checkmate Richelieu's plan of the Franco-Spanish invasion, set sail with a fleet to the relief of La Rochelle, Sir John Radclyffe was one of his company. During the engagement on the disasterous Isle of Rhe, Sir John was in the thick of the fighting and suffered the loss of both his legs. He died of his wounds on the 29th October 1627. The esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries is reflected in the laudatory ode Ben Johnson composed in his honour:
For a time Gell was a vigorous supporter of the King's Cause, but he subsequently became an active commander on the parliamentary side, capturing many of the fortified houses of the Royalists. In 1649 he was arrainged on a charge of conspiring against Cromwell on behalf of Charles the Second, and was condemned to perpetual imprisonment with the forfeiture of his estates. He was released at the Restoration of Charles the Second and the forfeiture reversed. Sir John died at his house in St. Martin's Lane, London, in 1671, in his eightieth year and was buried at Wirksworth. In the 'Memoirs of Col. Hutchinson,' the parliamentary governor of Nottingham Castle, Gell is described as a man of grave moral reputation, 'so unjust that, without any remorse, he suffered his men to plunder both honest men and cavaliers.'