Orford

From 1754 to 1766 Orford was a safe Treasury borough: the number of freemen was deliberately restricted, and the majority of the corporation were absentee placemen. (In 1764 only six out of 21 were resident in Orford, and 18 held places under Government.) Its expenses were paid from secret service funds: £200 a year for the rent of houses which the Crown sub-let to voters, and £100 a year for ‘repairs, taxes, and the expenses of the mayor’s feast’. All the Members from 1754 to 1768 were Treasury nominees.

In 1753 Lord Hertford bought the manor of Orford and a considerable estate around the town from the executors of Price Devereux, 10th Viscount Hereford, whose family had controlled the borough in the earlier part of the century. Hertford now claimed that he had been encouraged by Henry Pelham to buy the estate with a view to the borough, and pressed Newcastle to intercede with the King to yield the Treasury interest. Newcastle wrote to Hertford on 11 Aug. 1758:

I laid before his Majesty the state of the borough of Orford, and your Lordship’s request relating to it. The King ... made no sort of objection to your Lordship’s having it, if anybody had it but himself; but his Majesty said, as I told your Lordship I was apprehensive he would, that he could not part with his boroughs to anybody.

Under George III Orford continued to obey the commands of successive first lords of the Treasury. ‘The gentlemen of Orford’, wrote John Roberts, its late manager, to Newcastle in February 1763, ‘will, no doubt, behave like most other gentlemen nowadays ... they will bow before the new first lord of the Treasury, rather than part with their employments.’ Hertford had not abandoned his designs on the borough, and when his friends the Rockinghams came into power renewed his solicitations. Newcastle was now sympathetic, but Rockingham, first lord of the Treasury, refused to agree to this diminution of the Crown’s parliamentary interest.

The advent of the Chatham Administration in July 1766 gave Hertford his opportunity. His brother Conway, leader of the House of Commons, had much more influence than under Rockingham; Grafton, the new first lord of the Treasury, was Hertford’s nephew by marriage; while Chatham himself disliked election business and was indifferent about maintaining the Treasury interest at Orford. George III gave his consent to transferring it to Hertford, and for the remainder of this period Orford was a complete pocket borough of the Seymour-Conway family.