Top The mysterious Gilbert in the 1657 case
For many years I assumed that Gilbert, the last son born to anyone in Standish of Duxbury Family A, must have died rather young. The only record he left locally was his baptism on 8 July 1631 by the vicar of Standish, and he never appears in the family papers. Even his father Thomas the M.P. did not mention him in his will in October 1642 – he was just lumped together with “my other children”, after naming son Colonel Alexander as his heir. An early death for Gilbert was the most sensible explanation, as if he had been alive in 1647 when his brother Colonel Alexander died, he would automatically have been the next heir. In this year Gilbert was only 16, so under normal circumstances the escheator would have conducted an inquisition post mortem, and Gilbert would have been made a ward until he came of age and into his inheritance. This would have been aged 21 in 1652. But none of this happened. Colonel Richard took over the main estates of Family A from widow Margaret in 1647, inherited his own family’s estates from his uncle Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander in 1648, moved into Duxbury Hall, married Elizabeth Legh of Adlington and started his second family. Young Gilbert was nowhere in sight.
Then, while re-reading Farrer’s section on Heath Charnock, lo and behold - there was Gilbert still alive in 1657! That he was one and the same as Thomas the M.P.’s youngest son is proved by the history of the very lands he claimed, which differ in important details from those claimed by “Alexander gent” in 1655. The history of the descent of the manor of Heath Charnock is given very clearly by Farrer (VCH, vol. 6, pp. 213-217), which includes the purchase of one moiety in 1577 by Thomas Standish of Duxbury, the other half having been bought three years earlier by Robert Charnock. Before this it had exchanged hands regularly among many others, but the manor had never before belonged to any Standish of Duxbury. Obviously, in 1657 the two moieties were still in the hands of the same two families as in 1577, and could only be claimed by someone in direct descent or whose ancestors had made them their heirs, and not by a complete stranger.
Already this proves that “Alexander gent” in 1655 and Gilbert in 1657, although obviously both Standishes of Duxbury, did not have the same ancestry or the same rights to the same lands, or one or the other of them would have been entitled to the whole lot. And the one with the most recent and strongest claim was certainly Gilbert. So where had he been all this time? And why did he wait so long to make his claim? And when he did, why did he claim so little and not the whole lot?
We can be fairly confident of certain facts. In 1647 Gilbert did not assert his claim, nor did he call on anyone else to do so. Some time after the case of 1655, he approached Edward May and hired him to present his case, and won, after which he disappeared from Duxbury forever. The only sibling still alive in 1647 was his sister Katherine, who married Ellis Heyes at Chorley on 24 October 1656. She also appears very clearly on the Visitation Pedigree of the Heye(s) family, presented on 11 March 1664. She was married to Ellis Heye(s) of Chorlton Hall and had three children still living in this year, a son and heir John, aged 2, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Anne. At the very least this proves that Katherine stayed locally after the death of her father Thomas the M.P. in 1642 and her two brothers in 1642 (Captain Thomas, shot at the siege of Manchester) and 1647 (Colonel Alexander), or returned to the area some time before her marriage. The only knowledge about her mother is that she was Anne, who did not survive her husband Thomas the M.P. (she is not named in his will of 4 October 1642).
Could a possible explanation be that young Gilbert and Katherine were brought up by relatives away from Duxbury? There are a few hints that this might have been in Manchester. The first is that Katherine’s future husband was from nearby Chorlton; the second is that Manchester had recently been rendered secure as a Parliamentary stronghold; the third is that their father Thomas the M.P. had been a “zealous Parliamentarian”; and the fourth is that Colonel Richard was living in Manchester at the time and apparently helped the family at Duxbury Hall. We know Richard was in Manchester because he swore the Protestation Oath there in the spring of 1642. Gilbert does not appear in the lists because the oath was required from those aged 16 and above, and in 1642 he was still only 11. We know Richard helped the family because of the 1647 document, when widow Margaret stated this explicitly