Newcastle-under-Lyme

The borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme, situated in the north-west corner of Staffordshire, not far from that county’s border with Cheshire, secured its first royal charter in the 1170s. Under the terms of a later charter, in 1251, the Crown farmed the borough to the mayor and burgesses at 40 marks p.a., and 16 years later there came another innovation of at least equal significance. Henry III granted the farm, together with his castle and manor of Newcastle, to his younger brother, Edmund, earl of Lancaster. Initially this may have occasioned a loss of independence to the burgesses, but the connexion proved beneficial to them. Earl Edmund’s grandson, Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster, may have been responsible for the summons of representatives from the town to the Parliament of 1354, and the fee farm was reduced, albeit marginally, to £20. Nor, in the long term, did the dukes impede the development of the institutions of self-government in the town. By the late fourteenth century a mayor and two bailiffs, elected annually at Michaelmas, were assisted by 24 senior burgesses, who, divided into a senior and junior council of 12, administered the town’s guild merchant.1 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 606-7.

Although the evidence is not abundant, the borough seems to have been in decline in the late Middle Ages. Its castle, around which the town had grown up in the twelfth century, had lost its place as the administrative centre of the duchy’s extensive Staffordshire estates to the castle of Tutbury in the east of the county; and in 1438, when the mayor and burgesses successfully petitioned the Crown for the right to hold an additional annual fair, they claimed that, ‘the town is much wasted and burgesses much impoverished’.2 CChR, vi. 4. Economic decline may help to explain a very significant change in the pattern of Newcastle’s parliamentary representation. The borough’s relationship with the duchy had had no discernible impact in determining who should represent it in Parliament in the period before 1399, when its MPs were exclusively drawn from the ranks of the burgesses. After the accession of Henry IV, however, they began to surrender their right of representation to outsiders, generally lawyers or administrators, whose interest in the borough’s affairs was, at most, passing. This development accelerated in the period under review here.

This change in the pattern of representation, not surprisingly, has been interpreted in political terms of the unification of Crown and duchy. McKisack concluded that, from 1399, ‘at least one of the members was usually a nominee, and elections were controlled from the Staffordshire headquarters of the Duchy at Tutbury Castle’.3 M. McKisack, Parlty. Repn. English Bors. 115. This, as discussed below, is too simple a view, in part because it denies the interest of other potential patrons. Although there is no evidence that James Tuchet, Lord Audley, the head of a family with its main residence at the castle of Heighley, only three miles from the town, influenced the borough’s representation, the same cannot be said of a much greater lord, Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and (from 1444) duke of Buckingham, who came of age at the beginning of this period. He had considerable landholdings in the neighbourhood of the borough, and his local influence was considerable augmented in 1435 when he was appointed steward of the duchy’s honour of Tutbury.4 H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 253. Thereafter, until his death at the battle of Northampton in July 1460, local baronial and Crown influence over Newcastle’s representation were in the hands of one man. This provides one context in which the borough’s representation is to be interpreted, but it is not the only one. Although Stafford undoubtedly influenced the borough’s elections, his influence was, as shown below, only fitfully exercised, and, when it was, the initiative seems to have come at least as much from a servant seeking a seat to advance himself as it did from a lord seeking to secure the return of his own men to Parliament.

One measure of the infiltration of outsiders into Newcastle’s representation is the rising numbers of its MPs who represented other constituencies. All those elected for Newcastle between 1386 and 1399 sat only for this borough, but four of the 19 returned between 1399 and 1421 and eight of the 24 elected in the reign of Henry VI also took other seats. None of these eight resided in the borough, although all save two were natives of either Staffordshire or Cheshire. Seven of them sat for just one other constituency: William Cumberford and John Mynors sat for Staffordshire; Richard Bruyn, Stafford; Hugh Stanford and Thomas Mayne, Bridgnorth; John Needham, London; and Ralph Wolseley, the Surrey borough of Gatton. The other, William Hextall, had a remarkable parliamentary career as one of the very few MPs of the period who is known to have represented as many as four constituencies (aside from Newcastle, he sat for Stafford, Bletchingley and Kent).

Between them these eight represented other constituencies on 17 recorded occasions. Since the 24 MPs together mustered only 40 returns for the borough, it is striking that so much of the parliamentary experience of the MPs as a group came from sitting elsewhere. The contrast with the county’s other borough, Stafford, is stark. There the 36 known seats of Henry VI’s reign were filled by only 13 MPs, who between them had 45 recorded elections for the borough and only nine for elsewhere.

With each MP representing Newcastle on fewer than two occasions, it is not surprising that as many as 15 of the 24 MPs are recorded as representing it only once.5 The 15 included four of those – Bruyn, Cumberford, Mayne and Wolseley – who represented another constituency. Most frequently elected was John Wood who sat for the borough five times, but even his record is unimpressive when matched against the multiple returns achieved by some of the MPs for the nearby boroughs of Stafford and Bridgnorth. This highlights another curious feature of Newcastle’s representation. Those who represented it more than once did so within the space of very short parliamentary careers. Wood, for example, was elected to five of the seven Parliaments that met between 1425 and 1433; Stanford sat for the borough in four of the five Parliaments from 1420 to 1423; and Needham served Newcastle in three of the four Parliaments that met from 1442 to February 1449 (and, since the return is lost for the intervening assembly in 1445, it is possible that he sat on four successive occasions). The only reasonably extended career as a Newcastle-under-Lyme MP was that of Hextall whose three elections were divided by ten years, but since he was elected twice for Stafford within that period, he too might have had a career like that of Wood had he not, presumably, preferred to take the seat of a county town.

This seems too regular a pattern to be the product of mere coincidence. It might suggest that the MPs were often the nominee of a patron whose choice, after a short period, moved on to someone else, but it may be that the restlessness was the MP’s rather than his patron’s. Several of Newcastle’s MPs were ambitious men, who were perhaps happy to represent a modest borough as a means of advancing their careers but then moved on to better things. In this context, it is significant that, of the ten Newcastle MPs elected between 1399 and 1460 who represented other constituencies, only two began their parliamentary careers elsewhere.6 Both Mayne and Stanford sat first for Bridgnorth. Of the other eight, only Mynors (in 1422) and Hextall (in 1435) sat again for the borough after they had been elected for another constituency. In other words, although a significant proportion of the MPs were elected elsewhere, only comparatively infrequently was a seat filled by a man who had already sat for another constituency. Of the 56 known seats from 1406 (the first occasion on which someone who represented another constituency was returned), to 1455, only seven seats were so filled. It is thus clear that when men destined for successful careers represented Newcastle they did so at the beginning of those careers. Needham is the most outstanding example: after representing the borough at least three times in the 1440s, he was promoted to the rank of serjeant-at-law in 1453 and went on to have the rare distinction of serving as a justice in both the central courts of common law.

Needham’s career illustrates another related facet of the borough’s representation. Newcastle’s proximity to the border of Cheshire, a county not represented in Parliament, meant that its seats provided a natural outlet for the parliamentary ambitions of young Cheshire lawyers seeking to make their way in the world. To the example of Needham is to be added those of Bruyn and Richard Fitton* (elected in 1406). Their elections partly explain the increasing prominence of men of legal training among Newcastle’s MPs. No lawyers represented the borough between 1386 and 1402, when native burgesses still monopolized its representation; from 1402 to 1421 four of the 16 known MPs – Fitton, Thomas Lee, William Lee* and Stanford –were lawyers and filled seven of the 20 seats;7 The earlier survey notes only William Lee and Stanford as lawyers, but Fitton is identified as a lawyer by his appointment to the quorum of the peace in Dorset and Thomas Lee by his appearance as an attorney in the Exchequer. from 1422 to 1460 ten out of 24 MPs were lawyers and they filled as many as 19 of the 36 known seats.8 The ten lawyers were Bruyn, Cumberford, Everdon, Hextall, Needham, Thomas Lee, Repinghale, Stanford, Wolseley and Wood. In short, lawyers came to take the seats previously filled by native burgesses, although this is not to say that the borough’s representation became entirely divorced from its geographical position. With the exception of Nicholas Repinghale of Lincoln’s Inn, who hailed from Lincolnshire, these lawyers came from either Cheshire or Staffordshire and two – Wood, from Keele, and probably also Thomas Lee – lived within the borough’s immediate neighbourhood.

In addition to these local lawyers, six other of the MPs were Staffordshire gentry. Of these, two – Egerton and Mynors – were from prominent families (although Egerton was a younger son), and four – Roger Lee, Leveson, Sonbache and Woodhouse – from minor ones. Two others are difficult to categorize, but both were very likely to have been from the county. Preston may have come from a Stafford family, and Spencer, whose geographical origins are unknown, was elected because of his place in the service of the duke of Buckingham. Between them these eight men filled nine seats. The prominence of lawyers and local gentry among the MPs left few places for the resident burgesses who had once monopolized Newcastle’s representation. Such men filled only seven of the 36 seats.9 Podmore in 1433, Colclough in 1450 and 1453, Moseley, although he hailed from nearby Stoke-on-Trent, in 1450 and 1455, and probably also Lilie in 1426 and Cudworth in 1447. The last two MPs are effectively unidentified but are more likely to have been burgesses than anything else.

None the less, although residents took few of the borough’s seats, only two seats were taken by men with no near geographical connexion with Newcastle. One was Repinghale, who was presumably elected in 1437 through connexions within the legal profession. It may be significant here that Stanford was also of Lincoln’s Inn, although he may have been dead by 1437. The other was Thomas Mayne. He had no direct link, geographical or otherwise, with the two constituencies (Bridgnorth and Newcastle-under-Lyme) he represented in three successive Parliaments in the late 1440s. He did, however, have a close connexion with the powerful Staffordshire esquire, John Hampton II*, an important member of the King’s household, for whom he was deputy constable of the royal castle at his native Colchester.

The increasing share of the borough’s seats taken by lawyers and local gentry was matched by a decline in continuity in its representation. In Richard II’s reign the level of continuity had been high. The two leading borough families of Colclough and Thickness filled 21 of the 38 known seats, and thus most of the seats were taken by experienced MPs. Indeed, of the 16 known seats between the Parliaments of 1386 and 1397 (Jan.), only one was filled by a novice MP, namely John Cook† in 1393. The situation after 1399 was very markedly different. Of the 24 known seats during the reigns of the first two Lancastrian Kings, only seven were filled by experienced MPs. In Henry VI’s reign, the level of continuity rose, with 16 of the 36 seats filled by men who had sat before, but this was well below both the level of continuity under Richard II and in that of the nearby boroughs of Stafford and Bridgnorth under Henry VI. Two experienced MPs sat together on only two occasions, namely in 1422 and 1455. In these circumstances, it is surprising to find that there were as many as seven cases of immediate re-election, a reflection of the fact that those who represented the borough more than once tended to do so in a short period of time.

The pattern of office-holding reflects the prominence of non-residents in the borough’s representation. The loss of Newcastle’s minute books for the period between 1411 and 1491 makes it impossible to specify accurately how many of the MPs held office in the borough.10 VCH Staffs. viii. 25. But, even had the records survived in their entirety, the answer would be few. Indeed, none of the MPs are known to have held such office, although Wood may have been mayor some 25 years after his last election to Parliament. Of the others, it is very likely that Colclough, Moseley and Podmore served one or more terms as either mayor or bailiff, but none of the others are probable candidates for borough office.

For the rest, the MPs’ office-holding reflects their wide-ranging interests as a group. Since, in respect of the most successful men who sat for the borough, their elections came early in their careers, most of their appointments came to them after they had represented Newcastle. Some, however, held office at the time of their elections. Bruyn and Cumberford were both filacers in the common pleas; Mynors was a duchy of Lancaster feodary and bailiff; and Mayne, as mentioned above, was deputy constable of Colchester castle. In respect of the ordinary offices of county administration, Hextall was under sheriff of Staffordshire when elected in 1435 (and was appointed escheator during the Parliament); and Needham was on the quorum of the Staffordshire bench. Stanford differs from the others in being elected as an experienced office-holder: by the time of his first recorded election for Newcastle in 1420, he had served two terms as escheator and one as under sheriff of Staffordshire, and was again under sheriff when returned for the borough to the Parliaments of 1421 (Dec.) and 1422.11 As under sheriff, he delivered into Chancery the county’s electoral return for the Parl. of 1421 (Dec.): C219/12/6.

In terms of known appointments to formal office in the administration of baronial or ecclesiastical estates, the same pattern prevails. Of the six MPs known to have held such office, only Stanford, receiver of the Staffordshire estates of the Staffords since the late 1390s, had significant experience before he represented the borough. Everdon may already have been steward of the Worcestershire lands of the Wiltshire priory of Maiden Bradley when MP in the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.), but none of the others are known to have had such office before election. This, of course can only be a partial picture, for in the nature of the surviving evidence any list of such officers must be very incomplete. Further, the fact that an MP did not hold office in the administration of a particular magnate does not mean that his links with that magnate were irrelevant in his return to Parliament. In the case of Hextall and probably also Bruyn, both of whom later held senior posts in the administration of the Stafford estates, their elections for Newcastle were related to their connexion with Earl Humphrey of Stafford. None the less, the point remains that the MPs for Newcastle had most of their careers ahead of them when they represented the borough.

The known landholdings of Newcastle’s MPs, counting only the property they are known to have held when they sat for the borough, reflects their lack of homogeneity as a group. Nothing is certainly known of the holdings of eight of them – Cudworth, Egerton (who was a younger son), the two Lees, Lilie, Preston, Spencer and Wodehouse – and four others (Colclough, Moseley, Podmore and Wood) had holdings confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the borough. Of the others two were elected as men of significant landed means. Everdon had an inheritance in Staffordshire and Worcestershire worth about £40 p.a., and Bruyn held in right of his wife property in Kent, Essex, Surrey and London sufficient to justify his distraint to take up knighthood in 1457. Wolseley was heir to an inheritance of similar value, extending into Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Others also had lands outside as well as within Staffordshire. Like Bruyn, Hextall held lands in Kent; Stanford purchased property in Shropshire; Leveson held, for the life of his wife, lands in Cheshire; and Mynors had holdings in Derbyshire. Three others are not known to have had either lands or expectations in Staffordshire: Needham inherited in Cheshire (although not until shortly before his last election for the borough) and leased a manor in Shropshire; Repinghale was heir to a gentry inheritance in Lincolnshire; and Mayne’s interests lay in distant Essex.

Mayne’s elections in the late 1440s show unequivocally that, on at least one occasion, an election at Newcastle was determined by the wishes of a patron, in this case Hampton. Other cases, almost equally unequivocally, fall into this category. Everdon’s election may also have been due to a close association with Hampton, whose brother was married to his sister. Unlike Mayne, he was a comparatively wealthy man with influence enough to secure the seat for himself, but it is surely more than coincidental that his only election should have been to the Parliament immediately preceding that to which Mayne was elected. It appears that Hampton, himself returned for Staffordshire to both Parliaments of 1449, troubled to influence the Newcastle elections in that year.

Similarly, it is difficult to explain the election of Spencer to the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455 other than in terms of his association with the duke of Buckingham, for no more is known of him than that he was the duke’s servant. Nor is Spencer the only MP who was employed by the duke, and, at least at first sight, it appears that after coming of age in the early 1420s Humphrey Stafford frequently intervened in the borough’s election to secure the return of one of his servants. Yet all may not be as it seems. A distinction is to be made between those, like Spencer, whose connexion with the Staffords can be the only reasonable explanation for their election, and those who had other recommendations beyond their place in the service of that great family. Further, it is probably mistaken to view that family’s influence in the borough and its elections as something imposed from above. It is at least equally likely that individuals sought the borough’s seats as a means of either recommending themselves to the service of the Staffords or of securing promotion within that retinue.

The election of Cumberford in 1442, when he was already a filacer of the common pleas, provides an example. No doubt he was known to the earl before his election, but it was not until immediately after the Parliament that the earl retained him as his legal counsel. Soon afterwards he was appointed as the duchy of Lancaster attorney in the court of common pleas and to the quorum of the Staffordshire bench, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was personally advanced by his parliamentary service. Other elections, such as those of two other lawyers connected with the Staffords, Bruyn and Hextall, can be interpreted in the same way. Hextall’s elections are particularly interesting. There is no evidence to connect him definitively with the Staffords before his first election in 1425, and it may be that he owed his election to the local influence of his stepfather, Stanford, a servant of the Staffords since the 1390s and MP for the borough in four of the five preceding Parliaments. Perhaps, unwilling himself to sit again, the older man had recommended his stepson to both the electors of the borough and the family he had so long served. In short, although five of the borough’s MPs (Stanford, Hextall, Bruyn, Cumberford and Spencer) filling nine of the borough’s seats between 1422 and 1455, can be identified as Stafford servants, this does not mean that Humphrey Stafford exercised anything more than a very intermittent interest in the borough’s representation.12 Needham and Sonbache were retained by Stafford, but not until after they had represented the borough. Most of these elections had more to do with the personal ambition of the elected and personal connexions, albeit perhaps forged within the Stafford retinue, than they did with the electoral patronage of the Stafford family.

The same scepticism is to be applied to the influence of the duchy of Lancaster in the borough’s elections. Of the 24 MPs, only Mynors held duchy office at the time of his election, and if the Crown did exercise an influence on the borough’s representation it probably did so more effectively through Hampton than it did through the duchy administration. It is, however, probably wrong to view even Mynors’s election in terms of the Crown’s influence. In securing his own election in 1422 and that of his neighbour Sonbache in 1423, Mynors was acting in his own interest rather than that of the Crown, just as Hampton was in 1449 when Everdon and Mayne were returned. At least one other of the borough’s elections is to be explained in terms of personal connexions rather than the influence of Crown and nobility. In 1429 William Egerton’s election was determined by the interests of his elder brother, Ralph*, head of an important gentry family resident at Wrinehill, a few miles from the borough. Ralph, anxious to defend himself against the charge that he had conspired to deprive the Crown of a valuable wardship, was returned to represent the county in the same Parliament, and it seems likely that William sought election to the same end, or his brother did so on his behalf.

The returns for Newcastle-under-Lyme are unrevealing about the electoral process in the borough. As in respect of the county’s other parliamentary borough, Stafford, the names of the MPs were communicated to Chancery in a return that principally concerned the shire election. There are no separate borough indentures for any Parliament before 1472, and no separate list of borough attestors in any county return before 1467. The names of the MPs before 1467 were given on the endorsement of the electoral writ and, on occasion, also in the county indenture. Here, for both boroughs in Staffordshire, there was a change in diplomatic in the indenture of 1431. Before that date only for the Parliament of 1407 were the names of the Newcastle-under-Lyme MPs given in the county indenture, but from 1431 until 1442 their names invariably appear there. The earlier practice was resumed in the indentures for the three Parliaments of the late 1440s, but all the county and borough MPs are named together in respect of the three surviving indentures of the 1450s. These combined indentures imply that the MPs for both Staffordshire boroughs were elected at the same time and by the same electors who returned the knights of the shire, but it is certain that this was not so. The compiler of the indenture occasionally gives a hint that more than one electoral body was involved. In the first indenture, of 1407, the mayor of Newcastle, Thomas Thickness†, was named among the 13 attestors. In the returns of 1426 and 1450, the names of the borough’s MPs have been added in blanks left in initial drafts, implying that their identity was not known to the sheriff even after the county election had been held.13 C219/10/4; 13/4; 16/1.

Clearly then the later returns (which in the case of the 1467 election have a distinct list of borough attestors included within the county indenture, and in the returns of 1472 and 1478 separate borough indentures), are innovations in diplomatic rather than practice. Further, the separate indentures, drawn up between the sheriff of Staffordshire on one part and the mayor and attestors on the other, demonstrate that the Newcastle election was, at least on occasion, held on a different day from that for the county. In 1472 it was convened on Friday 25 Sept., the day after the county election. Taken together with the evidence of the delayed borough elections of 1426 and 1450, this makes it difficult to accept literally the returns for the next Parliament. The three Staffordshire indentures, one for the county and two for the boroughs, are all dated to Thursday 11 Dec., the day of the county court.14 C219/17/3.

The three lists of borough attestors are too few to provide much evidence as to the borough electorate. The 1467 list names seven attestors, headed by the mayor, Nicholas Brette; 13, headed by Richard Colclough as mayor, are named in 1472; and although 13 are also named in 1478 none of them are described as mayor. Each of the lists implies that only those named participated in the election. In total, only 24 individuals appear as attestors with only one, John Coke, common to all three lists and a further seven common to two. It would thus seem that, as in most other boroughs, the electorate, at least as it is accurately reflected in the indentures, was a small group of the leading burgesses. A quarter of the 24 were drawn from just two families, with three Brettes and three Colcloughs appearing as attestors, and this suggests that the borough elite was small. What cannot be known is whether the effective franchise extended beyond this elite to all the burgesses. In an election dispute of 1624 it was asserted that in the reign of Edward IV the right of election had vested, not in the capital burgesses, but the burgesses as a whole.15 T. Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme in Tudor and Early Stuart Times, 132. For what the evidence of the three fifteenth-century lists is worth, it suggests that this was not the case.

Of the MPs, only Thomas Colclough appears among the known Newcastle-under-Lyme attestors, attesting the election of 1467. He also attested a Staffordshire election (in 1450), and another five of the MPs also appear in that role. Only two of them, however, are recorded as attesting more than one of the county’s elections. Mynors witnessed at least five, and perhaps as many as eight, a consequence perhaps of his long service as the duchy bailiff in the county; and Stanford appeared at six elections between 1419 and 1431.16 Bruyn, Hextall and Sonbache all appear once as attestors in Staffs. The wide-ranging interests of the MPs as a group is reflected in their occasional appearances as attestors in other constituencies, but only Mynors is known to have done so before he represented the borough. In contravention of the electoral statutes, he attested the elections in both Staffordshire and Derbyshire to the Parliament of 1421 (May).17 In addition, it is possible that Podmore is to be identified with the man who attested two Salop elections in the late 1420s.

Henry VI’s reign seems to mark the near-completion of a transition in the borough’s representation begun with the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399. The monopoly of resident burgesses, so apparent before 1399, gave way to their near total exclusion, as the borough’s seats came to be taken by lawyers, administrators and gentry drawn from Staffordshire and Cheshire. It is possible that part of the explanation lies in economic decline which diminished the ranks of the burgesses and made them reluctant to assume parliamentary service. But, if this explains why few of its burgesses were ready to stand, it does not explain how their replacements were found. That explanation lies in more general factors acting upon the representation of small boroughs, namely a new ambition on the part of lawyers and bureaucrats to win seats, and a new enthusiasm on the part of electoral patrons to place their men in the Commons. Clearly these factors operated together, but, in the case of Newcastle, the change in the pattern of its representation seems to have been begun by the first and accelerated by the second. For most of the outsiders elected for Newcastle under Henry VI, it is difficult to identify a patron, but later the evidence of patronage is stronger. The elections of William Paston† in 1472 and Reynold Bray† in 1478 imply the exertion of the Stafford influence to secure the election of men whose geographical interests were remote from the borough.