Great Marlow

Marlow was a borough by prescription, with the franchise enjoyed by the inhabitant householders, until a decision in 1680 restricted it to scot and lot payers only, and approximately halved the electorate. Many voters were bargemen, notoriously turbulent at election time. The main interests were those of the royalist Borlases and the Presbyterian Hobys. William Borlase, a colourless younger brother of the first baronet, and Peregrine Hoby, who had abstained from public life since Pride’s Purge, were elected on the restoration of the franchise in 1659, and again in 1660 and 1661, probably unopposed. On Borlase’s death, he was replaced by a court supporter, Charles Cheyne of Chesham Bois, some 16 miles from Marlow. A few years later another court supporter, Sir Humphrey Winch, acquired the manor, and with it a strong interest in the borough.1CJ, ix. 686; x. 478; VCH Bucks. iii. 71.

As Cheyne did not stand again and Hoby was a dying man, the first election of 1679 was uncontested. Borlase’s son John, an exclusionist, was returned with Winch, although according to William Jephson ‘the town would have taken almost any gentleman’ instead of the latter. Before the next election Jephson was promised the support of the Lovelace and Borlase interests, and wrote to the Hon. Thomas Wharton on 14 July that: ‘the matter lies in my opinion clear and feasible with very small charge of anything imaginable’. However, Jephson decided to stand instead for East Grinstead, and it was Hoby’s son Thomas who came forward to oppose Winch. At the election there were ‘brave doings at Marlow, breaking arms and legs and heads with stones’, and a bargeman ducked Winch ‘so under water, that all cried to save him’. Borlase and Winch were returned, but, on Hoby’s petition, the House decided on 21 Dec. 1680 that the franchise resided in those paying scot and lot only, and declared the election of Winch and Hoby void. Hoby was again defeated in the by-election, and, though the House resolved to hear his petition at the bar, Parliament was dissolved first. But he gained the seat at the general election. Borlase died soon afterwards, and in 1685 the family interest and the Whig cause were maintained by his cousin, the second baronet. Winch stood with James Etheridge, a lawyer, who had recently acquired property in Marlow by marriage. But although he spent ‘near, if not wholly £500’, he was unable to defeat Borlase. In 1686 Winch sold the manor of Great Marlow to Lord Falkland, and retired from politics. In 1688 James II’s electoral agents were unable to report on Marlow, but Sunderland recommended Captain Lewis Billingsley of the Queen’s Horse, whose interest in the borough is unknown. However, at the general election Falkland was returned unopposed with Borlase ‘by the constables and inhabitants who have the right of voting and the boroughmen’. Shortly afterwards, Borlase, the last of his family, died. Thomas Hoby was sitting for Salisbury, but his nephew John, though barely of age, was successful at the by-election. He too died before the year was out, and was replaced by Sir William Whitlock on the Lovelace interest.2Bodl. Carte 103, ff. 221-2; Ballard 22, f. 51; HMC 7th Rep. 495; CJ, ix. 637, 686, 700; Misc. Gen. et Her. (n.s.), i. 212; Duckett, Penal Laws (1883), 240.