A town existed at Coventry by the mid-eleventh century, when it belonged to the famous Godiva. Made rich by the cloth trade, in 1377 it was England’s third biggest provincial centre, with perhaps 9,000 inhabitants. Growth continued into the fifteenth century, and in 1451 it was granted the status of both city and county. Around this time, however, the market for the local broadcloth contracted, and despite the development of alternative manufactures such as caps and blue thread economic decline set in. In the severe depression of the 1520s, the population shrank to about 6,000. Recovery was slow, as there were only 6,502 inhabitants in 1586, and a major outbreak of plague in 1604 claimed 494 lives. However, in 1611 the number of communicants in the city was estimated at 6-7,000.
The economy of early seventeenth-century Coventry remained largely stagnant. In 1609 the corporation refused to raise the local subsidy assessments, complaining to the Privy Council of ‘the general and great decay of our city … since the beginning of Her late Majesty’s reign, by reason that such as formerly used to traffic at Coventry now turn all or the most part of their dealings to London’. Although in 1615 a shortage of fullers obliged the court leet to relax restrictions on strangers, there was a general drive to protect the local workforce from external competition. In 1598 and 1602 the sale of cloth anywhere but in the appropriate cloth halls was banned so as to restrict openings for country traders, while in 1610 the aldermen were ordered to report any strangers taking up residence in the city.
At the start of the seventeenth century Coventry was governed by a tripartite structure of great (or mayor’s) council, common council and court leet. By far the most important component was the great council, which consisted of the mayor, all ten aldermen and approximately ten other leading citizens. Although the election of civic officers and the enactment of by-laws remained the preserve of the ad hoc jury assembled for the bi-annual court leets, it was the great council which made policy, and indeed made up the bulk of the jury. The common council still held a key to the chest containing the city’s seal, but between 1605 and 1614 a series of court leet rulings effectively reduced it to a rubber-stamping body. In June 1623, apparently as a token protest, the common council walked out of a meeting with the great council where the seal was to be used, and deliberately left their key behind.
The 1451 city charter remained in force until 1621, even though the framework of local government had changed markedly in the interim. An attempt to obtain a new city charter in 1611-12 was abandoned, probably because of spiralling costs.
The city jealously guarded its privileges and independence. In April 1623 the great ouncil had little choice but to comply when the king and two Warwickshire-based privy councillors, Lord Brooke (Sir Fulke Greville*) and Sir Edward Conway I*, requested the post of Steward for John Verney. However, all efforts to persuade Coventry to increase the scale of its contributions towards the militia and similar levies in Warwickshire were vigorously resisted, except in 1625 when the impressment quota was exceeded in order to rid the city of some ‘loose and unthrifty persons’.
Given Coventry’s assertiveness, it is surprising that the city did not engage more fully with Parliament. In 1610 a bill to restrict the conditions under which chapmen and pedlars could sell cloth was introduced in the Commons, but it was rejected at its first reading on 24 February. While this measure reflected the interests of trading companies such as the Drapers, who wished to drive the chapmen out of business, the corporation probably donated £40 towards its costs. In the following May, the great council again set aside £40 to promote a bill ‘for the better relief of cities and corporations’, but nothing at all seems to have come of this. Possibly it was the lack of return on these investments which discouraged the Council from further efforts of this kind. In 1621, for reasons that are unclear, Coventry provided a certificate on the rising price of glass, which was produced in the Commons during a debate on 14 May about Sir Robert Mansell’s* glass-making patent.
Until 1628 the great council maintained an iron grip on the selection of Coventry’s MPs. The normal practice was apparently for the mayor and some of his colleagues to nominate candidates in the guildhall, where the Council met. The names were then submitted to the assembled freemen, roughly one-tenth of the population, for ratification. In the unlikely event of a poll, votes were gathered in the nearby churches of St. Michael and Holy Trinity. The indenture recording the 1610 by-election was signed by the two sheriffs, but those for 1604 and 1620 were sealed instead. In the latter year the sheriffs also returned the election writ, annotated with the result.
In each Parliament between 1604 and 1626, at least one of Coventry’s representatives belonged to the great council. Henry Breres in 1604 and Henry Sewall in 1621 both enjoyed the prestige of being its senior member, while John Rogerson (1604), Hopkins, Henry Harwell (1624-6) and Isaac Walden (1626-8) all achieved at least the rank of deputy alderman. However, seats were also distributed to other important officers or associates of the city. Sir Edward Coke secured a place for his son, Sir Robert, upon becoming recorder in 1614, and was himself elected in 1624 and 1625, although on the latter occasion he plumped for Norfolk instead, creating a vacancy that was apparently left unfilled. Similarly, when Rogerson became too infirm in 1610 to attend the Commons, the city replaced him with Sir John Harington, son of the then recorder.
In 1628 the great council’s control was finally broken. On election day, the mayor’s nomination of two of its members, Isaac Walden and Thomas Potter, met with a challenge from two rival candidates, Richard Greene and William Purefoy, the former a gentleman living at Wyken in the county of Coventry, the latter a Warwickshire squire based around eight miles away at Caldecote. As neither of these outsiders was a resident or freeman of the city of Coventry, they were not strictly eligible to stand. However, notwithstanding subsequent claims that Walden and Potter easily secured majority support inside the guildhall, the mayor was twice forced to concede a full poll, and amid chaotic scenes Greene and Purefoy emerged as convincing winners. The details of Purefoy’s victory have not survived, but Green overwhelmed Walden by 367 votes to 29. One of the city’s sheriffs, Richard Knipe, refused to accept these results because neither man was resident, and therefore returned Walden and Potter as properly elected. The other sheriff, Godfrey Legge, had no such qualms, and made out a rival indenture for Greene and Purefoy. The dispute was then passed to Parliament for a final decision.
Several explanations have been proposed for these tumultuous events. The letter-writer Joseph Mead attributed the outcome to the political fall-out from the previous year’s Forced Loan. Writing on 1 Mar. 1628 to Sir Martin Stuteville, he observed: ‘at Coventry they have … admitted two gentleman recusants [ie. Loan refusers] in the county to be of their corporation [ie. freemen], that they might choose them and pass by, against their custom, all their own [citizens], as being not that way qualified’.
Another possibility is that the election dispute was a product of long-standing resentment among Coventry’s poorer residents against the corporation, and in particular the way in which the great council managed the city’s common lands. Certainly this issue was a source of local friction. One consequence of the neutering of the common council was a steady increase in the great council’s control over the issuing of leases. This encouraged fears that the ordinary residents would lose their grazing rights, and the late 1620s saw rioting against enclosures erected on the commons.
It is important to understand precisely what Walden and Potter represented to the average Coventry voter in 1628. In addition to serving on the great council, they were also leading figures within their companies, the Drapers and the Dyers respectively. As such they were prime movers in a trade dispute which polarised opinion within the city in the latter part of the decade. Walden was closely involved with the implementation of the 1608 toleration for local cloth manufacture, and at least until 1622 seems to have kept possession of the grant himself. The government’s intention had clearly been to boost local employment by permitting surplus production for export, but the Drapers had utilised this concession primarily to boost their own profits. Walden in particular was an active partner in a consortium which brought in unfinished cloth from other areas such as Gloucestershire, so that it could be finished and sold on as Coventry cloth, ostensibly within the terms of the toleration. This operation resulted in heavy financial losses and unemployment among the city’s weavers and clothiers, and when it finally emerged in 1622 that the toleration had been granted, somewhat imprecisely, to Coventry’s ‘clothiers’, as opposed to the Drapers’ Company, the Weavers appealed to the Privy Council for redress.
The election dispute caused considerable consternation in the Commons. Discussed by the committee for privileges on 20 Mar., the case was presented to the House on the following day, and the dilemma at its core was immediately apparent. Greene and Purefoy had a clear popular mandate, but if the statutes governing elections were applied strictly neither man was eligible to sit, since they were not resident freemen of Coventry. This was by no means the first time that this issue had been debated, and consequently Richard Taylor was able to cite the 1621 Leicestershire dispute to support his argument that the residence requirement was merely a guideline. Even Sir Richard Shelton, the solicitor-general, gave his backing to the majority verdict. However, Henry Sherfield warned that if the Commons upheld the election of Greene and Purefoy an important precedent would be set, and he successfully moved for the debate to be adjourned until the House was fuller.
in the freemen
Number of voters: c. 600 in 1628