SHIRBURNS of Stoneyhurst.pdf - Ingilby History

decline and eventual extinction of a great noble house. A generation later, these very same motifs –
of a doomed family, of the mysteries and semi-magical properties of Roman Catholicism in its
English context, and of the continued wildness of the Lancastrian countryside - would resurface
powerfully in one of Mrs. Gaskell’s bleakest short stories 2 . Yet this brooding sense of ill-ease and
decay only manifested itself in the final years of the dynasty, and would have been entirely out of
place during the period from 1660-1702 when successive Shireburne lords of Stonyhurst grew in
self-confidence and fashioned durable networks of kinship, power, and patronage from their
Northern stronghold.
Having dominated the landscape and local politics of North-Eastern Lancashire for more
than a century - through their lavish building projects and increasingly uncompromising adherence
to Roman Catholicism - the direct male bloodline of the Shireburne family had failed dramatically
in 1702, while the death of the last direct female heir in 1754 had witnessed the final eclipse of the
dynasty and the break-up its their lands and properties 3 . Though the failure of Roman Catholic
families, among the gentry in eastern Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, to reproduce
themselves was not uncommon during this period: the blow struck to the Shireburnes was
particularly severe and has served to effectively excise the memory of their influence, on both a
regional and national level, from the work of successive generations of political and religious
historians 4 . This is all the more surprising since, in late seventeenth century Lancashire, the
Its past history and life in the present, (London, 1901), pp.56-7; A. Hewitson, Stonyhurst College, Present and Past
(Preston, 1878), pp.34-35.
2
Mrs. Gaskell (E.C. Stevenson), “The Poor Clare” in The Manchester Marriage, (Gloucester, 1985), p.178.
3
Lancashire Record Office, Preston, PR3031/1/1-4, Great Mitton Registers, 1700-39, Burials: 15 June 1702.
Arundel Castle Archive, T 70 - T 71.
C.D. Sherborn, A History of the Family of Sherborn, (London, 1901), pp.48-52.
F.W. Steer, Arundel Castle Archives, (Chichester, 1968), Vol.I p.21.
4
H. Aveling, “The Recusants of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1558-1790”, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and
Literary Society, Vol.X Part vi (Sept. 1963), p.261; G. Brenan & E.P. Statham, The House of Howard, 2 vols. (London,