St Ives

St Ives was a small port on the north coast of Cornwall, protected from the Atlantic by the peninsula known as Pendinas or St Ives Head.1 J.H. Matthews, Hist. of the Parishes of St Ives, Lelant, Towedrack and Zennor (1892), 1. Originally a centre for the export of tin, by the seventeenth century St Ives was dependent on fishing, and suffered greatly at the hands of North African pirates in the 1620s and 1630s.2 Matthews, St Ives, 180-1, 183; Carew, Survey, 154; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 267. In 1633 John Trewinnard petitioned for six cannons to protect the harbour from attack.3 CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 387. An additional, long-term, problem was the silting of the harbour, with ‘the sands much annoying about the port and the houses and cellars adjoining’, according to one report of 1626.4 Matthews, St Ives, 183. These factors seem to have kept the town from flourishing. In 1642 the population was fairly modest, numbering perhaps 1,500 people, and by the 1660s there were only six houses in the borough with five or more hearths.5 Cornw. Protestation Returns, 63-5, 278; Cornw. Hearth Tax, 85-6. Under the early Stuarts the right of election was restricted to the portreeve (or mayor) and 12 burgesses, and these were under the thumb of a Catholic, William Paulet, 4th marquess of Winchester, who, as lord of the important local manor of Ludgvan Lese, claimed control of at least one of the seats during the 1620s. The choice of the other Member was influenced by powerful gentry interests in the same period, with the Killigrews giving way to the Godolphins in the same decade.6 HP Commons 1604-1629. The duchy of Cornwall manor of Porthea included part of the borough, but there was no sign of crown interference in the early Stuart elections.7 Parl. Surv. Duchy Cornw. i. 105-6.

In 1639 the recorder, Sir Francis Bassett, obtained a new charter of the borough, which confirmed its ruling hierarchy, with a mayor, town clerk and corporation of 12 aldermen and 24 burgesses.8 Matthews, St Ives, 193. In 1640 Bassett gave the corporation a silver ‘loving cup’.9 Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 265; Coate, Cornw. 5-6. The MPs returned in the elections for the Short Parliament – the admiralty judge, Sir Henry Marten, and Archbishop Laud’s secretary, William Dell – were obviously court placemen, but whether this was the result of the actions of Bassett or Winchester is not known. The duchy interest can be ruled out, as their nominee, Edward Nicholas†, was ignored.10 DCO, Letters and Warrants 1639-43, f. 44v. Court interests were also at work in the autumn, when Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle (son of Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester) was returned, although his running-mate, the future parliamentarian Francis Godolphin II of Treveneage, was presumably elected on his own interest. Viscount Lisle chose to sit for Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight on 9 November, and the new writ was issued for St Ives, with the poet Edmund Waller being elected as a result.11 CJ ii. 25a. Waller, another carpet bagger, was probably elected on the Godolphin interest, as Sidney Godolphin* knew him through the Great Tew circle. By the end of 1640, therefore, both St Ives MPs were protégés of the Godolphins, suggesting that the marquess of Winchester was losing his grip on the borough.

St Ives played little part in the early years of the first civil war, and the focus of the town remained very local. In the autumn of 1642, when the Cornish posse comitatus was raised by the sheriff, it was reported that ‘all the west part came out except St Ives (who petitioned for themselves for fear of Ireland)’.12 New News from Cornwall (1642), 3 (E.124.20). This did not mean that the inhabitants were united in opposition to the king. The parliamentarian Ceely family may have had some influence, but this may have been balanced by residual loyalty to the Winchesters and the presence of a small number of active royalists, including Sir Chichester Wray, whose house at Trebigh was just outside the town.13 Coate, Cornw. 194; CCC 1928, 2739, 2888. It was only with the westward retreat of the king’s forces after the defeats of Naseby and Langport that the town found itself of any strategic importance. In September 1645 Sir Edward Hyde* wrote to the governor of St Ives ordering that any soldiers taking refuge there should be sent back to the forces of the prince of Wales.14 CCSP i. 275. This round-up may have provoked the subsequent occupation of Longstone Downs, led by one Captain Robert Arundell, which was ‘very seasonably suppressed’ by Sir Richard Grenvile.15 Clarendon, Hist. iv. 80; Coate, Cornw. 194; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 267. Later in the same month, Grenvile told the prince that he suspected this was part of a wider plot to bring the parliamentarian forces into western Cornwall by sea, and had responded by sending troops there, and disarming the townspeople. He had also hanged three of the ringleaders at St Ives, Helston and Truro, which he considered ‘the three most rotten towns in the west’.16 CCSP i. 277. A particular target of Grenvile was the mayor, Edward Hammond, who had been ordered to provide a bond to appear as a suspect, and when he narrowly missed the meeting was imprisoned and badly treated – in what Hyde saw as an example of Grenvile’s unnecessary brutality.17 Clarendon, Hist. iv. 134.

Parliament’s victory appears to have had little impact on St Ives. On 9 February 1647 the Commons ordered that a writ be issued for a new election at the borough to replace Edmund Waller, who had been disabled as a royalist in 1643.18 CJ v. 79b. The writ was issued in March, and before April 1648 the borough elected John Fielder, who probably owed his return to the interest of Francis Godolphin II, although the two men were to differ politically in 1648-9, as Godolphin did not return to the Commons after Pride’s Purge, while Fielder continued to sit during the Rump Parliament.19 C231/6, p. 85. During the interregnum, St Ives continued to be controlled by moderates and Presbyterians. The Winchester interest was finally extinguished in September 1649, when the manor of Ludgvan Lese, among other properties, was granted to Robert Wallop*.20 SC6/Chas.I/382. The duchy manor of Portea was sold to John Hele*, who passed it to John, 2nd Baron Robartes in 1655.21 Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 261. Within the borough, the Presbyterian interest was led by Major Peter Ceely, who was a native of the town and, by the mid-1650s, one of its most prominent merchants.22 CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 85. Ceely was supported by the minister, Leonard Welstead, who was in post by 1650, became a commissioner for scandalous ministers in 1654, and was paid an additional £50 a year by order of the protectoral council in June 1656.23 Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 259; A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 336, 371. The town’s reaction to the visit of the Quaker leader, George Fox, earlier in 1656, indicates that Ceely and Welstead were well supported by the inhabitants. According to Fox, he had not even reached St Ives when he was arrested and taken to Ceely’s house, ‘where a great company of people were gathered, and with them one Welstead, the priest of that town, before whom P. Ceely made sport of them’.24 G. Fox, The West Answering to the North (1657), 2-4 (E.900.3). The protectorate brought some improvement in the economic fortunes of St Ives, as shown in the surviving letters sent to one of its mariners, now resident in London, Captain John Pearce, from the town between 1654-6. Pearce’s correspondents, including Ceely, were benefiting from a very good pilchard harvest, and asked for luxuries to be sent from the capital, and debts to be paid.25 CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 367, 404, 413; 1655, pp. 20-1, 163; 1655-6, p. 304.

St Ives had lost its right to return MPs under the Instrument of Government of 1653, but with the return of the old franchise under the Humble Petition and Advice, the borough was allowed to elect two Members for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament. The surviving indentures, dated 31 December 1658, were signed by the mayor, Thomas Sprigge, and nine of the 12 ‘capital burgesses’, and elected Peter Ceely and another local Presbyterian, John Seyntaubyn of Clowance.26 C219/46/24-5. Seyntaubyn was again elected for St Ives in the election for the Convention in April 1660, and after the Restoration the borough remained controlled by local gentry interests, particularly the Nosworthys and the Praeds, and the Winchester interest did not regain its pre-war dominance.27 HP Commons 1660-1690.