Wendover

In 1788 John Barker Church, a former bankrupt, who had made a fortune from his business activities in America during the revolutionary war, purchased Earl Verney’s property in Wendover, undeterred by the continued truculence of the mercenary element which had broken Verney’s careless hold in 1784, Unlike his predecessor, he was wealthy and assiduous enough to profit from his investment and returned himself as a Foxite Whig in 1790. According to Oldfield, there was ‘a feeble opposition’ from two candidates sponsored by the Marquess of Buckingham, but it evidently did not go to a poll.1Verney Letters of 18th Cent. ii. 292-3; Oldfield, Boroughs, i. 37. The Prince of Wales acted as intermediary to procure the other seat for his friend Hugh Seymour Conway, but it is not clear whether he dealt directly with Church. It was an application to Carlton House in March 1792 from the nabob Richard Smith, who had sat for Wendover by purchase from Verney in the 1780 Parliament, ‘for 1,500 guineas of the money’ which Seymour Conway was to have paid for the seat, that prompted the Prince to request payment. Seymour Conway himself saw no objection to meeting the demand, but his father, the Earl of Hertford, claimed that the Prince had released him from his original engagement to pay £2,000 for Hugh’s seat when it had turned out that the election had ‘unexpectedly cost nothing’, and he paid up with a bad grace.2Prince of Wales Corresp. ii. 659-61; Egerton 3260, f. 76.

The Times of 25 June 1794 reported that Church had disposed of his property in the borough to Lady Fermanagh, Verney’s niece and heir, but by 1796 it was in the possession of Pitt’s friend Robert Smith, created Lord Carrington the same year. Carrington, who transferred his allegiance to Lord Grenville on Pitt’s death, controlled both seats for the rest of the period and returned political friends and members of his family. A threat of opposition in 1812 from Andrew Cochrane Johnstone ‘turned out to be a mere gasconade’.3VCH Bucks. iii. 23, 25; Fortescue mss, Carrington to Grenville, 8 Oct. 1812.