proved in London 16 Dec. 1659 (printed by Earwaker), Bradshaw bequeathed most of his property, which consisted of estates in Berkshire, Southampton, Wiltshire, Somerset, and Middlesex, to his wife, if she survived him, for her life, with reversion to Henry (d. 1698), his brother Henry's son. He also made charitable bequests for establishing a free school at Marple, his birthplace; for increasing the schoolmasters' stipends at Bunbury and Middleton, where he had been educated; and for maintaining good ministers at Feltham and Hatch (Wiltshire), where he had been granted property by parliament. By one codicil he left his houses and lodgings at Westminster to the governors of the school and almshouses there, and added a legacy of 10l. to John Milton, the poet. After the Restoration, however, all Bradshaw's property was confiscated to the crown under the act of attainder.
Two engraved portraits of Bradshaw are mentioned by Granger (ii. 397, iii. 71)—one in his iron hat by Vandergucht, for Clarendon's 'History,' and another in 4to, 'partly scraped and partly stippled.'
Henry Bradshaw, the president's elder brother, signed a petition for the establishment of the presbyterian religion in Cheshire on 6 July 1646; acted as magistrate under the Commonwealth; held a commission of sergeant-major under Fairfax, and subsequently one of lieutenant-colonel in Colonel Ashton's regiment of foot; commanded the militia of the Macclesfield hundred at the battle of Worcester (1651), where he was wounded; sat on the court-martial which tried the Earl of Derby and other loyalists at Chester in 1652; was charged with this offence at the Restoration; was imprisoned by order of parliament from 17 July to 14 Aug. 1660; was pardoned on 23 Feb. 1660-1; and, dying at Marple, was buried at Stockport on 15 March 1660-1 (Earwaker's East Cheshire, ii. 62-9; Ormerod, Cheshire, pp. 408-11).
[Noble's Lives of the Regicides, i. 47-66; Foss's Judges, vi. 418 et seq.; Earwaker's East Cheshire, ii. 69-77; Ormerod's Cheshire, iii. 408-9; Brayley and Britton's Beauties of England, ii. 264-8; Clarendon's Rebellion; Whitelocke's Memorials; Ludlow's Memoirs; Thurloe's State Papers; Cal. State Papers (Dom.), 1649-1658; Carlyle's Cromwell; Commons' Journal, vi. vii. viii.; State Trials, iii. iv. v. Many attacks on Bradshaw were published after his death. The chief of them, besides those mentioned above, are The Arraignment of the Divel for stealing away President Bradshaw, 7 Nov. 1659 (fol. sh.); The President of Presidents, or an Elogie on the death of John Bradshaw, 1659; Bradshaw's Ultimum Vale, being the last words that were ever intended to be spoke of him, as they were delivered in a sermon Preach'd at his Interment by J. O. D. D., Time-Server General of England, Oxf. 1660; The Lamentations of a Sinner; or, Bradshaw's Horrid Farewell, together with his last will and testament, Lond. 1659. Marchmont Needham published, 6 Feb. 1660-1, a speech 'intended to have been spoken' at his execution at Tyburn, but 'for very weightie reasons omitted.' The Impudent Babbler Baffled; or, the Falsity of that assertion uttered by Bradshaw in Cromwell's new-erected Slaughter-House, a bitter attack on Bradshaw's judicial conduct, appeared in 1705.]
BRADSHAW, JOHN (fl. 1679), political writer, son of Alban Bradshaw, an attorney, of Maidstone, Kent, was born in that town in 1659. He was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1674, and was expelled from that society in 1677 for robbing and attempting to murder one of the senior fellows. He was tried and condemned to death, but after a year's imprisonment was released. Wood says that Bradshaw, 'who was a perfect atheist and a debauchee ad omnia, retir'd afterwards to his own country, taught a petty school, turn'd quaker, was a preacher among them, and wrote and published "The Jesuits Countermin'd; or, an Account of a new Plot, &c.," London, 1679, 4to.' When James II came to the throne, Bradshaw 'turned papist.'
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (Bliss), iv. 619.]
BRADSHAW, RICHARD (fl. 1650), diplomatist, and a merchant of Chester, appears in December 1642 as one of the collectors of the contribution raised for the defence of that city (Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Rep. p. 365). During the civil war he served as quartermaster-general of the horse under the command of Sir William Brereton [q. v.] (Petition in Commons Journals, 23 Jan. 1651). In the year 1649 he was mayor of Chester, and in January 1650 was appointed by parliament resident at Hamburg. In November 1652 he was for a short time employed as envoy to the king of Denmark, and in April 1657 was sent on a similar mission to Russia. He returned to England in 1659, and was in January 1660 one of the commissioners of the navy (Mercurius Politicus, 28 Jan. 1660). He is said by Heath to have been the kinsman of President Bradshaw; and from the tone of his letters, and his attendance at Bradshaw's funeral, this appears to have been the case. Mr. Horwood states that he was the nephew of John Bradshaw; but the pedigree of the latter's family given in Earwaker's 'History of Cheshire' does not confirm this statement.
