Aylesbury

There was no predominant interest at Aylesbury, where the principal qualification for success was, as the 2nd Lord Egmont wrote in his electoral survey, c.1749-50, to be ‘a moneyed man’. In 1727 Philip Lloyd estimated his expenses at £900;1Lloyd to Walpole, Aug. 1727, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss. in the same election an agent of Sir William Stanhope’s spent £541, chiefly at public houses, including £173 on the election day.2Gibbs, Hist. Aylesbury, 211-12. Of 15 Members returned, 10 were local landowners, while 2 others had local connexions, so that only 3 seem to have been strangers. All were Whigs, the majority of whom were independent or usually voted with the Opposition. None of them represented Aylesbury in more than one Parliament or, except John Guise and Philip Lloyd, stood more than once. After the 1747 election, when two of the Prince of Wales’s supporters were returned unopposed, it was alleged by Richard Grenville that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Willes, had deliberately removed the summer assizes from Buckingham to Aylesbury, holding them there himself about the time of the election, in order to procure the support of a grateful electorate for his son, Edward Willes.3Parl. Hist. xiv. 222-3; Oswald, 385-8. The holding of the assizes became, therefore, a political issue, on which the Grenvilles were successful in procuring an Act of Parliament in 1748 for their removal back to Buckingham.