Weobley

This place returned Members to Parliament between 1295 and 1306, but then the franchise lapsed until it was restored in 1628. Located 12 miles north west of Hereford, it was a small market centre, no more than a village, which had no corporation. It consisted of one single street. Some 37 names appeared on a rent roll of Humphrey Tomkins in 1630; and in 1663, 42 men and women were rated for contributions towards the militia. The hearth tax returns of 1664 suggest a parish of 126 properties.1 Glam. Archive Service, CL/manorial box 4, Weobley rent roll ?1630; Herefs. Militia Assessments, 1663 ed. M.A. Faraday (1972), 106, 116. The franchise must have been in the ratepayers, although there is no evidence of any specific agreement as in 1691 when John Birch* and Thomas Foley† confined the poll to those paying church and poor rates.2 J. Hillaby, ‘The Parlty. Borough of Weobley, 1628-1708’, Trans. Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, xxxix. 136. In elections after 1660 the returning officers were the constables of the parish, but in the by-election of 1641 the role was performed by the high sheriff of the county.3 C219/43/1/206. Elections were held in the market-house.4 Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 290. The controlling interest in Weobley was the Garnstone estate, which throughout this period remained in the hands of the Tomkins family, the first to benefit from the re-enfranchisement. Weobley had once been an honour of Walter Devereux, 3rd Baron Ferrers of Chartley (d. 1558), and the Devereux interest remained in the honour and manor.5 SC12/8/9; Longleat House, DE/Box V/82. The owners of Garnstone, successive members of the house of Tomkins, paid a nominal annual rent of 11s 4d to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as lord of the manor, although there is no evidence for an active personal involvement by Essex himself in either the management of the property or the electoral interest.6 Glam. Archive Service, CL/manorial box 4, Weobley rent roll ?1630.

In 1640, the Tomkins family seemed set fair to perpetuate its grip on the two seats. The appearance of Arthur Jones in the second election of that year, on 24 October, superficially appears a break with the pattern.7 C219/43/1/203. His interest in a seat is likely to have arisen from opposition to the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), in Ireland, where Jones’s father, Viscount Ranelagh [I], had considerable landed and political interests. His settling on this particular constituency as a vehicle for his ambitions can be explained by family ties between the families of Boyle and Tomkins. Arthur Jones married a sister of Sir Richard Boyle*, Viscount Dungarvan (eldest son of the 1st earl of Cork [I]), and the Boyles had once been Herefordshire yeomen. By 1640, the genealogical links were wearing thin. Anne Boyle, wife of James Tomkins, who sat four times for Leominster in the 1620s, was third cousin to Dungarvan’s grandfather.8 Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 94. Tenuous the connection may have been, but it was sufficiently within the seventeenth-century conventions to count as kinship. An alternative hypothesis for Jones’s election, an active intervention by the earl of Essex, cannot be supported with any evidence. The by-election in January 1641 was uncontested, and Thomas Tomkins took the seat rendered vacant by his brother’s death. The names of 15 electors were put to the return.

Thomas Tomkins went to the royalist Oxford Parliament, and on 22 January 1644 was disabled from sitting at Westminster. Jones suffered the same fate two weeks later. From the summer of 1646, there was political manoeuvring in the expectation that writs would soon be issued for seats in Herefordshire. The focus of attention seems to have been the seats for the city of Hereford and the county, with no mention of a contest at Weobley.9 Add. 70058, loose: John Flackett to Edward Harley, 6 June 1646; Add. 70005, f. 42 (3rd foliation). With the Tomkins family interest neutralised by their royalism, and the residual claim of the earl of Essex in the hands of his executors following his death on 14 September 1646, the two seats at Weobley were open to the strongest local political grouping, that of the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and their instrument, the Herefordshire committeemen. Only the sequestration committee exercised undivided authority over Herefordshire alone; another committee was a joint body with representatives from other marcher counties and south Wales. These arrangements encouraged rivalry between the Herefordshire committeemen and their counterparts from the adjacent shires that were exacerbated when John Birch, an outsider, exploited his influence as governor of Hereford to set his own cap at a parliamentary seat. The writs for Weobley, Hereford, Leominster and Herefordshire were all moved on 11 September 1646, three days before Essex died.

One of the electors at Weobley was Miles Hill, of a family which held property in the parish. Hill, who had failed in business at Leominster, where he had been a member of the corporation, became treasurer of the county military revenues in 1645 on the authority of Edward Harley* and others.10 Add. 70106, f. 162; Add. 70005, f. 55 (2nd foliation). By the time of the recruiter elections in 1646, Hill had become an ally and agent of John Birch, fuelling the rage of the Harleys’ most devoted supporter, Dr Nathaniel Wright.11 Add. 70125, unbound: Nathaniel Wright to E. Harley, 31 Dec. 1646; Webb, Memorials, ii. 417-8. Hill was unable to exercise any influence on behalf of critics of the Harleys over the outcome of the Weobley by-election, even though he attended it as a voter.12 SP28/257, unfol. There was no report of a contest at Weobley, and both seats were taken by men who lived much of the time in London. William Crowther was a London haberdasher who had bought the estate of Wormsley Grange, in the next parish to Weobley, in 1629. He and his family had long been acquainted with the Harleys, and although Crowther had an interest in Weobley of his own, his success in the election must have been with the approval of the Brampton Bryan family and its allies. Crowther was on a list of London men with Herefordshire backgrounds that Sir Robert Harley compiled around 1645.13 Add. 70005, f. 31 (2nd foliation). Robert Andrewes was an outsider of a different kind. He had no known family connection with Herefordshire, but he was a member of the Middle Temple, the inn of court where Walter Kyrle*, Herefordshire steward of Essex’s lands, and Bennet Hoskins, victor of the by-election at Hereford five days after the Weobley one, were active. Both Kyrle and Hoskins were bound closely to Sir Robert and Edward Harley. When the Harley interest was destroyed in 1648, both Crowther and Andrewes kept their seats, although neither was an active Member.

Weobley was disenfranchised under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell*. Early in 1659, elections were held in the traditional form, and so Weobley again returned two Members.14 C219/47. Robert Andrewes retained his seat, but the Tomkins interest was reasserted with the election of Herbert Perrot, whose mother, Fortune, née Tomkins, was the aunt of William and Thomas Tomkins.15 Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 293. His standing in Herefordshire was less compromised than the reputation of his branch of the Perrots in Pembrokeshire, where he was considered by some a low-born intruder into an ancient and noble family. Perrot had played a minor part as a Herefordshire committeeman from 1645, so was well placed to represent the tentative return of the Tomkins family to politics. In the elections for the Convention of 1660, Perrot’s cousin, Thomas Tomkins, was still disabled from sitting, and Perrot lost to a local gentleman, James Pytts of Kinnersley, and a lawyer, Richard Weston. Perrot’s petition produced a judgment that the election had been void, and at the subsequent by-election (2 Aug. 1660), Tomkins and Perrot were returned to re-assert the natural order in Weobley.