Huntingdon

Oldfield wrote about Huntingdon in 1792:1Boroughs, ii. 143.

The interest of the Earl of Sandwich is so powerful as always to return two Members; and this he effects, not by weight of property, for his Lordship has but one house in the whole town, but by his popularity, and the obligations which he was enabled to confer upon some of his principal friends during his connexion with Lord North’s Administration.

The accuracy of this statement is borne out by the mass of patronage correspondence in the Sandwich and Abergavenny mss, and by the lists of burgesses carefully kept by Sandwich.2Trans. Cambs. Hunts. Arch. Soc. v. 201-44. There are eight such lists, the first for 1765, and the last for 1787; and what they show is that the resident burgesses were mostly artisans or tradesmen, and even the non-resident were not strangers of the honorary freeman type, but genuine Huntingdon burgesses, with a growing number among them established in Government service. The list of 1782 alone shows a small majority of non-resident burgesses: 82 to 80; among these 82 are at least 20 placed in the Post Office, Greenwich Hospital, dockyards, etc.

Every single Member for Huntingdon 1754-90 was a Sandwich nominee: relatives (Edward Montagu, Henry Seymour, William Augustus Montagu); paying guests of the merchant class (Robert Jones, George Wombwell, Sir Walter Rawlinson);3On the form that their payments took see WOMBWELL, George. naval officers (Lord Mulgrave, Sir Hugh Palliser, John Willett Payne). Lancelot Brown, son of ‘Capability’ Brown, alone fits into none of these categories.