Westbury

Westbury, a centre of the north-west Wiltshire clothing industry since the later fifteenth century, was by 1600 home to several substantial clothier families, including the Whitakers, Phippses, Adlams and Benetts, who also accumulated property in the surrounding area. The borough had first sent representatives to Parliament in 1448, but it had never received a charter of incorporation. The parish, which was co-terminous with the hundred, contained about ten manors, all with burgage tenements. The holders of these seem to have been the ‘burgesses’ referred to in election returns along with the mayor, who first appeared in 1571. The number of these burgages and the usual number of voters is unclear, although there were 61 of the former in 1715 and 22 of the latter in 1678.1 VCH Wilts. viii. 139, 168, 185-6; Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, 3; HP Commons 1660-1690.

In the early seventeenth century the lord of the capital manor, James Ley, created earl of Marlborough, held a majority of the other manors and exercised a dominating influence in favour both of family members and of outsiders.2 HP Commons 1604-1629. But the death in 1638 of the second earl and the sale of some properties allowed a variety of others to exert themselves. Indeed, in the spring of 1640 there may have been something of a vacuum. The recently-installed new lord of the manor, Henry Danvers, 1st earl of Danby, had other elections to divert him, although his power may have been partly limited by the life interest held in the estate by the dowager countess of Marlborough. William Wheler* the Westminster-based exchequer officeholder who in the late 1630s had bought Westbury Leigh and leased Westbury Priory from the precentor of Salisbury cathedral probably had not had time to gather support.3 VCH Wilts. viii. 150-8.

The cloth trade depression of the 1620s and the deeply-resented government commission of enquiry of the 1630s almost certainly contributed to the preference of voters on 2 April 1640 for John Ashe*. A prominent opponent of the policies of the personal rule of Charles I, by introducing new draperies he had done much to reverse unemployment in Wiltshire and his native Somerset. Mayor John Greenhill made the return in the presence of only two witnesses, but it seems likely that representatives of the clothier oligarchy – for example the Phippses, who held the manor of Westbury Mauduits – played a key part.4 C219/42, pt. ii, no. 67; VCH Wilts. viii. 155, 168; Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, 41. The circumstances behind the election with Ashe of Sir Thomas Penyston*, a former sheriff of Oxfordshire with a record of some obstruction to the collection of Ship Money, are obscure, though there may have been undetected ties with the Danvers family. Unlike Ashe he played little visible part in the Parliament.

The indenture for the autumn election is no longer legible.5 C219/43/3, no. 23. This time Ashe was returned with William Wheler. At least one of the voters, ‘being present and setting his hand as a witness’ and thus ‘well knowing that he is a Member’, appeared to have had second thoughts. On 24 December the Commons ordered that John Gawen of Westbury, tanner, should be summoned ‘to answer his contempt in serving or causing a subpoena to be served on’ Wheler in defiance of parliamentary privilege.6 CJ ii. 58b. Gawen was bailed on 19 January 1641, after which the dispute disappears from view.7 CJ ii. 70a. Wheler was secure and, until he was excluded at Pride’s Purge, proved as assiduous an MP as Ashe (also excluded), although with much less involvement in Wiltshire affairs. While the latter was prominent on the parliamentarian county committee and on the Committee of the West at Westminster, the former was evidently only nominally involved in these and only occasionally engaged in other activity related to his constituency and its environs.

In Philip Hunton, instituted as vicar of Westbury in 1641, the MPs had a potential ally through the 1640s. Like them, the political theorist combined staunch Presbyterianism and commitment to making the parliamentary cause work with a readiness to negotiate peace.8 ‘Philip Hunton’, Oxford DNB. However, while less directly affected by the vicissitudes of the civil war than neighbouring towns like Malmesbury or Devizes, Westbury none the less experienced the problems caused by disruption to trade, and these continued divisions between local groups which had already been apparent in the 1630s.9 VCH Wilts. viii. 168; Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 126. On 20 July 1647 the quarter sessions at nearby Warminster received a petition from 33 inhabitants of Westbury who complained, ‘out of the deep sense of our present and ensuing misery’, that justices of the peace had ignored their plight.

Many of your worships being corn masters, you have contrary to our former just petition granted licence (by underhand mediating of subtle caterpillars) to such as have great means and other trades to live to make malt, by reason whereof we are constrained to certify ... you have (as we fear for your own ends) rather aggravated than exgenuated our miseries.

Their particular request was that Thomas Bennet, magistrate, clothier and at this point holder of the rectory, would ‘bind over the mayor, constables of the hundred, the ministers and the rest of the most sufficient’ to appear for examination. A number of signatories then hastened to repudiate their involvement, apologising for the ‘calumnies’ perpetrated, but unrest persisted.10 Recs. Wilts. 180-3; Wilts RO, A1/160/1, ff. 47 seq.; VCH Wilts. viii. 153, 168. At the same sessions local weavers sought a solution to the evasion of apprenticeships by former soldiers, who put journeymen out of work, while in February 1648 mayor Thomas Hancocke and others petitioned General Sir Thomas Fairfax* that, although they were ‘willing to undergo their proportionable tax of the general burden of this kingdom’, free quartering had far exceeded any obligation: ‘whereas the rumour of soldiers paying for their quarters may appear to the world to be something, yet we find it in effect nothing’.11 Recs. Wilts. 189-90; The Pythouse Papers ed. W.A. Day (1879), 30-1.

As evident in a petition from 250 inhabitants in 1662, economic hardship was still an issue after the Restoration, but the 1650s appear to have ushered in a period of relative calm.12 VCH Wilts. viii. 168. Hunton and the former MPs all served the interregnum regime, while manor and hundred courts proceeded as normal under the authority of lord of the manor Sir John Danvers*, implausible regicide and friend of royalists, who also conformed outwardly. The cloth industry adapted to changing circumstances and in 1658 there was even a local petition seeking the lifting of apprenticeship regulations in the case of ‘burling’ or specialized cloth-dressing’.13 Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, 125; VCH Wilts. viii. 168.

Like most other Wiltshire boroughs, Westbury was not represented again in Parliament until 1659. At the election, probably on 4 December 1658, mayor Henry Bolton and at least seven others returned the new lord of the manor, Sir John’s son-in-law Robert Danvers alias Villiers*, and William Eyre II*, a member of a notable county family who had experience in Parliament and local administration, and backing from central government.14 C219/48. Danvers was to argue, in an otherwise slippery speech, that John Ashe (elected at Heytesbury) ‘was my competitor’ and it is also possible that William Wheler, who gained a Scottish seat, was a disappointed candidate at Westbury.15 Burton’s Diary, iii. 243. When Villiers was exposed to the Commons as a former royalist and papist, and worse, as a liar, Wheler was a teller for the minority who tried to have him committed to the Tower of London.16 CJ vii. 603a. Expelled from the House, Danvers never gained the hold over his estates enjoyed by his predecessors. By 1661, when Wheler again (unsuccessfully) sought election as a Member for Westbury, it was Sir James Thynne* to whom he applied for support as a person of influence in the area.17 Longleat, Thynne pprs. x. f. 69 (IHR microfilm).