Cornwall

Cornwall, ‘being cast out into the sea, with the shape of a horn’, was one of the most remote counties in England, sharing a land border only with Devon.1 Carew, Survey, 1v. The county’s distance from London was offset by its mineral wealth, especially in tin, and the richness of its coastal fishing grounds, notably for the pilchard trade with the Mediterranean. These encouraged the growth of the Cornish ports – including Fowey, East and West Looe, Penzance and the towns that bordered the Fal estuary, such as Truro and Penryn – and the reputation of the inhabitants as sailors, but they also made the county vulnerable to the attentions of pirates during the 1620s and 1630s.2 Coate, Cornw. 6, 8. The relative wealth of Cornwall also attracted the attentions of the crown from the middle ages, through the duchy of Cornwall, which owned 42 manors in the county and had a monopoly on the tin trade through the coinage towns and the stannary courts.3 Coate, Cornw. 6; Pounds, Parl. Surv. Duchy Cornw. i. pp. xiv-xvi. Despite this, during the 1620s, Cornwall had been surprisingly free from outside interference, as the duchy of Cornwall interest was in decline and the influence of the warden of the stannaries was limited, even though the county elections continued to be held in the duchy capital, Lostwithiel. Instead of bowing to the duchy interest, the county seats were shared among the old gentry families, such as the Grenviles, Arundells, Killigrews and Godolphins, who were joined by more controversial political figures such as William Coryton and Sir John Eliot†; and there is evidence that the usual practice was for the major players to strike a bargain before the day of election, allowing the candidates to stand unopposed.4 HP Commons 1604-1629.

During the 1630s the Cornish gentry remained more or less united. Support for puritanism was confined to a few clergymen, a handful of families such as the Bullers, Robartes, Rouses and Boscawens, and to isolated towns such as Launceston, and was prevented from becoming politically dangerous by the sympathetic attitude of the bishop of Exeter, Dr Joseph Hall.5 Coate, Cornw. 326-7. The consensual approach seems to have continued in the two elections of 1640. On 23 March Sir Richard Buller was returned, along with Francis Godolphin I of Godolphin, with the named electors including John Trefusis, Ambrose Manaton*, William Godolphin*, Edward Courtney, Francis Buller I*, Francis Bassett and George Kekewich.6 C219/42/39. The indenture for the autumn election does not survive, but the result – the election of Alexander Carew and Sir Bevill Grenvile – again suggests that the senior Cornish families had sewn up the contest. It was the divisive first 18 months of the Long Parliament that broke apart that apparent unity. As Joseph Jane* later observed, ‘at the beginning of this Parliament, Cornwall … placed much of their happiness in that assembly’, but the fate of the earl of Strafford [Sir Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl] and the attack on the established church created a rift that refused to heal.7 Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 163.

The king’s commission of array of June 1642 brought matters to a head, and the Cornish gentry divided almost equally into two factions, which struggled to implement the commission of array and the parliamentarian Militia Ordinance respectively.8 Coate, Cornw. 31-2. In the early autumn there was a stand-off between the rival local forces in the east of the county, with the parliamentarians under Sir Richard Buller and Alexander Carew, and the royalists under Sir Bevill Grenvile and others.9 New News from Cornwall (1642), 2-4 (E.124.20). The fact that three of the four knights of the shire of the two 1640 elections were in arms against each other is an indication of the rift that had quickly formed within Cornish society. In the same period Grenvile even accused Buller and Carew of plotting against the king, ‘to cut his throat if they could’.10 Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/118. By October, the parliamentarians had been forced to retreat from their base at Launceston to Plymouth, and Cornwall fell into royalist hands. After the victory at Stratton in May 1643, the Cornish forces were persuaded to march eastwards, but the bloody engagements at Lansdown and Bristol brought the deaths of key colonels (including Grenvile) and destroyed the fighting spirit of the Cornish troops.11 Coate, Cornw. 102. Support for the cause at home also dwindled, for ‘the people … though they retained their loyalty, lost much of that life that appeared in their first actions’.12 Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 165v. On the parliamentarian side, the treachery of Alexander Carew, found guilty of plotting to betray Plymouth and executed in 1644, was a significant blow. For the remainder of the war, Cornwall suffered increasing demands from the king, who sought money, men and ships from his supporters, and sequestered the estates of his opponents.13 Cornw. RO, B/35/25-7, 30, 42, 229-30; Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 163v. As Jane put it, ‘the Cornish looked on themselves as left to sustain all, and thought the burden of the war lay on them too heavy, and now in the end they were all grown hopeless’.14 Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 166. The county also experienced two invasions: by the main parliamentarian field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, in August 1644, which came to a sticky end at Lostwithiel; and by Sir Thomas Fairfax and the victorious New Model in the spring of 1646. The economic effects of the war were severe, as the financial demands of the king’s army were followed by bad harvests and a slump in the tin trade, with prices halving between 1635 and 1650.15 Coate, Cornw. 223. The parliamentarian regime was greeted with resentment rather than open opposition, and the rising at Penzance in May 1648 was aimed at the unpopular garrison of St Michael’s Mount and gained no support from the leading royalist families, despite fears that there was ‘great resort’ to leading figures by would-be insurgents.16 Coate, Cornw. 239; Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/162.

With both Grenvile and Carew dead, in September 1646 Parliament issued a warrant for fresh elections for knights of the shire, and on 21 December two Presbyterians, Hugh Boscawen and Nicholas Trefusis, were returned.17 CJ iv. 672a. Boscawen was a close ally of the Rolle family, and Trefusis was the protégé of the leading Cornish Presbyterian, Thomas Gewen. The indenture was signed by around 40 electors, including John Seyntaubyn*, John Moyle I*, Thomas Arundell*, Francis Godolphin II* of Treveneage, Richard Erisey*, John Penrose*, Richard Carter*, John Lampen* and Nicholas Leach*.18 C219/43/5. These were key parliamentarians, but with a few exceptions they were not major landowners; and even these men were to be pushed to the periphery within the next two years. The purge of the Commons in December 1648 and the execution of the king in January 1649 led to an exodus of Cornish MPs from Westminster. Boscawen was absent from the House at the purge, Trefusis was secluded as an enemy of the army, and neither sat during the commonwealth, despite moves by John Moyle I* and others to bring them back.19 FSL, X.d.483(44). The reluctance of MPs to sit was matched by an unwillingness of local officials to serve. Moyle complained to the new power in Cornish politics, Colonel Robert Bennett*, in September 1649 that the commissions were left with barely ‘two or three gentlemen in a shire to be made pack horses for all the rest, and laughed at for their pains’, and there were still problems persuading some to serve as justices of the peace – and also as sheriff – several years later.20 FSL, X.d.483(44); Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/1/72. With the moderate gentry unwilling to be involved, the political arena was open to more radical elements. When the Members of the Nominated Assembly were selected in 1653, Cornwall was allocated four places. Only one of these was from an old Cornish family: Anthony Rous. His fellow MPs were the dominant political figure in the county during the commonwealth, Robert Bennett, and two radicals, John Bawden and Francis Langdon, who were probably sponsored by John Carew, who himself sat for Devon.

The dominance of the radicals was not to last. The protectorate, created in December 1653, promised to be a more moderate government, and one eager to broaden its support in the localities. This encouraged former Presbyterians to re-enter the local administration as the decade continued. It is telling that the most active magistrates in mid-1650s included former Presbyterians like Antony Nicoll and Thomas Gewen as well as Robert Bennett and his ally Richard Lobb* and the Cromwellian governor of Pendennis Castle, Captain John Fox*.21 G. Fox, West Answering to the North (1657), 40, 43, 50, 56 (E.900.3). This mixture can be seen in religion as well as politics. Although the Baptists continued to enjoy the patronage of Bennett, and were a strong presence in East Looe and Liskeard, and there was a small group of Fifth Monarchists who remained loyal to John Carew, there were in truth very few religious radicals in the county, and the vast majority favoured the conservative Presbyterianism provided by many clergy, and supported by the Cornish classis established in the 1650s.22 Coate, Cornw. 339-40, 349; FSL, X.d.483(135, 175-6). The visit of the visionary Anna Trapnel in 1654, may have been welcomed by men like Bennett, but it was greeted with horror by other gentry, who arraigned her before the Truro quarter session.23 A. Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654), 1, 9-11, 25-6. From the mid-1650s the Cornish justices of the peace were also notorious for their harsh treatment of Quakers, including George Fox, who was imprisoned at Launceston in 1656.24 Coate, Cornw. 344-5, 347. The Quaker threat served to bring men of different beliefs closer together. As one correspondent of Robert Bennett makes clear, the Baptist congregations also felt threatened by the Quakers, as their members were vulnerable to ‘the present spreading delusion’ and ‘Quaker zeal’, with Bennett saying in 1656 that they were ‘one with the dissolute Ranters’.25 FSL, X.d.483(174-5). There were limits to this cooperation, however, and when it came to the elections for the protectorate Parliaments, the Presbyterians and pro-Cromwellians were the dominant forces in Cornwall.

Under the Instrument of Government, Cornwall was allowed to return eight MPs, and this allowed different interests to be represented, apparently by prior agreement. In 1654 this meant the election of local administrators like James Launce, Thomas Ceely, Richard Carter and Anthony Rous alongside Nicoll and Gewen, who at this stage were staunch critics of the protectorate. The remaining two seats went to relatives of men who refused to countenance the new regime: Walter Moyle, son of John Moyle I, and Charles Boscawen, brother of Hugh. The indenture, signed on 12 July, named only a handful of minor gentlemen as electors, suggesting that this was a deal between the different interests, rather than an election that received the support of the leading Cornish families.26 C219/44, unfol.

In 1656 there was an attempt to manage the elections by the major-generals across the country, but John Disbrowe*, who oversaw Cornwall, was less zealous than most of his colleagues, and the county representation remained very similar to that in 1654. No indenture survives, but from other sources it is apparent that five of the 1654 MPs were returned in 1656: Carter, Ceely, Nicoll, Moyle and Anthony Rous. Four of these five were acceptable to the state: Nicoll was now a supporter of the protectorate, Carter would become a kingling, Ceely and Rous were local office holders. Only Moyle was to be excluded from sitting by the council of state. The new MPs were two active local supporters of the regime, William Braddon and John Seyntaubyn, and the veteran MP and former speaker, Francis Rous, who was also a member of the protectoral council. The elections for the third protectorate Parliament of January 1659, under Richard Cromwell’s* protectorate, reverted to their traditional form, without the option of the council excluding those of whom it disapproved, and the two knights of the shire returned were the former county MP Hugh Boscawen and Francis Buller II*, son of Francis Buller I*. The choice reflected not only the need for members of established families to represent the county, but also the dominance of the Presbyterian interest.

The collapse of the protectorate saw the re-emergence of commonwealthsmen like Bennett and Lobb, but locally, at least, they were content to push for traditional policies, with both men using their influence at Westminster to remove the tax on pilchards and the new customs on the tinners, as well as the settlement of the stannaries, during the summer of 1659.27 FSL, X.d.483(124, 127-9). The Presbyterian gentry bided their time until late December, when they met at Truro, and issued a declaration in favour of a ‘free Parliament’. Attending that meeting were six former county MPs: Hugh Boscawen, Anthony Rous, Walter Moyle, Ceely, Seyntaubyn and Braddon.28 Publick Intelligencer no. 210 (2-9 Jan. 1660), 997-9 (E.773.41). This was the last hurrah for the Presbyterian cause in Cornwall. After the Restoration the Cornish seats again became the sole preserve of the major gentry families, led by the only resident noble family, the Robartes of Lanhydrock. The re-establishment of the traditional pattern was obvious as early as April 1660, when Lord Robartes insisted that his son Robert† should sit instead of Hugh Boscawen, with the other seat going to Sir John Carew. Thereafter, the knights of the shire tended to be drawn from the Robartes, Grenvile, Edgcumbe and Trelawny families, who had either supported the king in the 1640s or (like Robartes) discovered in 1660 that they had been royalists all along.29 HP Commons 1660-1690.