Radclyffe belonged to a junior branch of a family that had been established in the Manchester area since the fourteenth century. By the Elizabethan period, the Radcliffes had taken up residence in a moated house known as Radcliffe Hall – later called Pool Fold – near Market Stead Lane, Manchester (the modern Cross Street). Radclyffe’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather all figured prominently in the town’s affairs as burgage-holders and officers of the manorial court leet, and all were styled ‘gentleman’ in the court’s records.

Radclyffe, too, emerged as one of Manchester’s most prominent inhabitants; and such was his ‘quality’ that he was able to secure a match with a daughter of the Derbyshire knight Sir John Gell. Gell was a trenchant Calvinist and a patron of godly ministers, and Radclyffe’s marriage into the family strongly suggests that he was also a man of godly convictions. His parliamentarian allegiance during the civil war also points in this direction. In a letter to Gell of early July 1642, he saw the threat by Lancashire’s royalist lord lieutenant, James Stanley, Lord Strange to attack Manchester as ‘merely digitus dei [the finger of God], to move men’s hearts to stand to so good a cause, protesting to spend the last drop of blood before the town should suffer or my lord take away their goods’.