Derbyshire

During the greater part of the period Derbyshire had no resident Privy Councillor who was not a peer, while of the leading noblemen with lands there the 4th and 5th Earls of Shrewsbury were often at court or in the North and the 2nd Earl of Huntingdon, lord lieutenant from 1552 to 1560, wielded no discernible influence on elections in the county. The knighthood of the shire seems generally to have been shared among men of local wealth and standing, but with official connexions playing some part in the choice. Of the 16 known Members between 1509 and 1558 a majority came of old-established county families; two of the five who did not (Sir Roger Mynors and William Coffin) belonged to the royal household and three (Vincent Mundy, John Porte and Thomas Powtrell) had legal or other useful connexions. Only three of the 16 appear not to have been substantial landowners when first elected, and of these Godfrey Foljambe and Porte were soon to become such, while the lawyer Richard Blackwell, who between his two elections married a wealthy Derbyshire widow, may have already inherited property in the county before the first of them. At least six of the men elected had seen service in the French or Scottish wars, three of them having been knighted by the Earl of Hertford in Scotland in 1544, and Mundy was surveyor of victuals for Calais and Boulogne during Henry VIII’s last war. Only Francis Curzon, Godfrey Foljambe and John Zouche appear to have been purely local in standing. Re-election for the shire was unusual, although several of its knights were elected elsewhere: four of the five men who sat twice for Derbyshire (and no one did so more often) were those having legal connexions, and the fifth (Sir Humphrey Bradbourne) was re-elected in his 18th year on the bench. The rarity of re-election is the more striking in view of the relative youthfulness of knights for Derbyshire, half of whom were under 32 at their first return.4This survey rests on C. J. Black, ‘Admin. and parlty. rep. Notts. and Derbys. 1529-58’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1966).

The elections were held at the shire hall in Derby and the indentures, which survive for all the Parliaments from 1542 to 1555 except that of November 1554, are in the usual form between the sheriff and from five to over 30 named electors, many of them yeomen. Under an Act of 1532 (23 Hen. VIII, c.2), renewed repeatedly during the period, provision was made for the building of a new gaol in the county.5C219/18B/21, 18C/28, 19/27, 20/39, 21/37, 22/16, 24/39.