Here we explore if this legend could, in fact, have been the true ... Whether the belief that Guy Fawkes hatched the Gunpowder Plot at Ordsall Hall is based upon fact or not, Harrison Ainsworth's Novel (1861) has cast the halo of romance around the Hall. Passing through the rooms of the Hall, especially through the Star Chamber, it is easy to believe those moving scenes in which the great novelist has shown us the conspirator hiding from the troopers of King James, or brooding over the details of the plot that was to free the Roman Catholics from persecution
Here, too, Guy Fawkes is said to have fallen in love with the daughter of the house, the beautiful Viviana Radclyffe, whose torture for refusing to disclose her knowledge of the conspiracy, and her death in the old Fleet Prison, are so graphically and pathetically described in the novel
Another tradition gives it that when Guy Fawkes was so hardly beset by the troopers at Ordsall Hall he took to the subterranean passages which led from the Hall to the 'Seven Stars' in Withy Grove, Manchester, which was the oldest licenced house in England, dating back as far as the year 1356. Signs of this passage were found at the Hall but the entrance had been blocked up. There were signs also of an underground passage at the Seven Stars but this was believed to have been connected with Trafford Hall
(extract from: Lancashire Stories Volume 2, Frank Hird, 1913)
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, who desired only toleration for the excercise 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 Putitans, 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 heen 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 adbence 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