Among the many old books in the library at Parrox Hall is a little, leather-bound volume entitled ‘Receipts and Remedies.’ Written in a number of different hands and dating from the seventeenth century, it contains both recipes for the kitchen at Parrox and numerous remedies, some of them more than a little alarming, for a variety of illnesses. The remedies in the book, including one for “oyle of whelps”, which involved boiling young whelps (puppies) and was, apparently, “excellent at the first to inject into a fresh gun-shot,” have been attributed to a former Squire, Dr William Fyffe.
William Fyffe, Honorary Physician to King Charles II for the County of Lancashire, was a man of many parts. Medical practitioner, politician, holder of such public offices as high constable and justice of the peace; he was well known throughout the county. Blunt, outspoken and irascible, he was not a man to be trifled with. In 1648 Fyffe married Ellen Butler of Parrox Hall, heiress to her father Henry Butler. Their daughter Katherine married John Elletson in 1690 and their descendants still hold the house and estate, part of an unbroken line stretching back over twenty-six generations to the original lord of the manor, Geoffrey the Crossbowman, who was installed by Prince John in 1189.
Though a supporter of parliament at the beginning of the civil war, by 1660 Fyffe had become a leading advocate in Lancashire for the restoration of the monarchy and was one of the signatories of the Loyal Address by which the gentlemen of Lancashire urged the exiled Charles to return to claim his throne. Fyffe’s standing in the newly restored kingdom was high and in Lancashire he wielded considerable influence.
In 1661 he was nominated by the Corporation of the Borough of Preston to represent the town in Parliament for the coming year. The situation in Preston at that time was somewhat unusual and Fyffe’s nomination was disputed by another faction within the town, namely, the burgesses. Any man over the age of 21 resident in the borough who had not been chargeable as a pauper on any parish in the past twelve months was eligible to vote and so the burgesses, whose nominee was Dr Jeffrey Rishton, were much more numerous than the members of the Corporation.
The two factions petitioned Parliament and it was finally decided that the burgesses had the right in this particular case. Rishton duly became Member of Parliament for Preston and Fyffe never took his seat in the House of Commons.
After William Fyffe’s abortive attempt at a Parliamentary career, it was to be more than three centuries before a holder of the Parrox estate took his seat at Westminster. In 1992, 331 years after the contretemps in Preston, Harold Daniel Hope Elletson, tenth generation descendant of William Fyffe, fulfilled his ancestor’s thwarted ambition by being elected Member of Parliament for Blackpool North, a town which did not even exist at the time of William Fyffe.
Dr Fyffe died in 1671 and an anecdote about his death has survived in a memoir of the period. In October of that year, he was called to the bedside of the Rev. Nathaniel Heywood of Ormskirk, who had fallen into “a malignant fever, which… had seized the nerves and spirit and brain.”
On the thirteenth day after the fever began, “Dr Fife, a boisterous man, and justice of the peace in the Fylde country near Garstang, called for a candle and bade him open his mouth, which when he had inspected he swore a great oath, and said, ‘His tongue is as black as a coal; call the mistress of the house, let him set all things in order, and make his will, for he is a gone man.’ These words astonished his family, but his own and only surviving sister, being present, and hearing the confident expression, gathered encouragement, and thought within herself, ‘This is but a man and may be deceived, God is God, and can make his words false.’ Thus Dr Fyffe left him as hopeless, and said it was vain to give him anything. But before he (Mr Heywood) came to his own house at Hoghton Tower, a violent fever seized the doctor himself, and in a few days brought him to his end, so he never returned home alive; but from that very day, the fever abating, Mr Heywood began to amend.”
Parrox Hall is a member of the Historic Houses Association