Between 1604 and 1629 seven parliaments met, each of which was preceded by nationwide elections in more than 200 constituencies. These assemblies were punctuated at intervals with by-elections to replace those Members who had died, were judged incapable of serving or chose to represent another constituency. Fifty-five per cent of constituencies experienced at least one by-election during these years, with the result that between 1604 and 1629 the number of elections in some constituencies reached double figures. Maldon, Wilton, Newton (Lancs.) and the combined borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis all held eleven; at St. Albans there were no less than twelve. In total, more than two thousand elections were held between 1604 and 1629.
Unlike their modern equivalents, most elections in the early seventeenth century were uncontested. Just how many were fought over is difficult to say, because the surviving records are incomplete and because our conclusion depends on what we mean by a contest: Mark Kishlansky counts only those elections that were disputed on election-day, whereas other scholars are also inclined to include elections in which candidates withdrew ahead of voting. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that around 20% of all county elections were contested between 1604 and 1641.
For those who regularly engaged in contests, the experience could be profoundly dispiriting. ‘Of all other things’, wrote Sir John Wynn to his kinsman Sir William Thomas in April 1625, ‘I hate these elections – most troublesome, most unprofitable, and most thankless’.
Naturally enough not everyone disliked parliamentary elections. For many voters, they were as much social occasions as political events, and were to be enjoyed. Take the London livery companies, for example. In 1606 and 1625 the Mercers paid for bread, wine and cake for their members, while in 1614 the company disbursed 15s. on ‘a little dinner at the choosing of the burgesses for the Parliament’.
Like them or loathe them, parliamentary elections were a long-established feature of the political landscape. All the same, they were far from being well regulated. Although no less than seven laws prescribed how elections were to be conducted, these statutes dated from before the middle of the fifteenth century, and neither singly nor collectively were they adequate to the task. Consequently the scope for abuse was immense. More than one Member who sat during this period did so not because he had triumphed in a fair fight, but because he or his accomplices had either bent such rules as there were or had cheated.
Writs, precepts and indentures
Before the passage of the Triennial Act of 1641, the right to summon a Parliament was vested solely in the monarch who, once a decision had been reached, wrote to the lord chancellor or lord keeper to order the preparation of writs of election.
Writs issued after the start of a Parliament, either requiring the holding of a by-election or summoning Members from boroughs that the Commons had decided to re-enfranchise, were not drafted by the clerks of the Petty Bag but by the clerk of the Crown in Chancery, who recorded them in his warrant book.
During periods of prorogation or adjournment it sometimes proved difficult for the Commons to assert its sole right to authorize the issuing of writs of by-election. In September 1609, during one such interval between sessions, the Privy Council not only decided to unseat Tobie Matthew as one of the Members for St. Albans but also moved a writ of by-election on its own authority, as a result of which Sir Henry Helmes was chosen in Matthew’s stead. When the Commons’ election committee learned of this in February 1610 there was understandable dismay, and as a result a fresh writ was issued, authorized by the Speaker.
In general, all writs were addressed to the appropriate sheriff, but special arrangements existed in respect of Lancashire and Cheshire, both of which were technically palatine jurisdictions. Lancashire’s writs were directed to the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, while those for Cheshire and the city of Chester (a county borough) were sent to the hereditary chamberlain of the county palatine of Chester, the earl of Derby.
It probably took less than a week for most writs to reach their destination, but remote areas, such as the far north and parts of Wales, may have required a few more days. In 1624 Sir Richard Wynn, who had often made the journey himself, thought that election writs would take around ten days to travel from Westminster to north Wales.
Occasionally a messenger entrusted with conveying an election writ proved unwilling to surrender it to another for delivery. Writing from Clements’ Inn in February 1604, William Browne informed the sheriff of Staffordshire, Sir Walter Bagot, that he would have sent the writs for Staffordshire to Bagot by the latter’s own servant, ‘but the messenger would not deliver them but to yourself’.
Once the sheriff had custody of the writs he was required, by an Act of 1445, to issue his precept or warrant to the mayor or bailiffs of every parliamentary borough within his shrievalty.
The main purposes of the sheriff’s precept were to require an election to be held with all speed and to instruct the recipients to send the sheriff a return in the form of an indenture for his signature. The precept frequently also ordered the mayor or bailiff to ensure that those elected were granted ‘full power and sufficient authority’ to make decisions in Parliament on behalf of their constituents.
Responsibility for transmitting the precept and a copy of the writ to the parliamentary boroughs lay with the sheriff rather than Chancery. Although expected to shoulder the cost himself, the sheriff was often paid by the boroughs for his services. At New Woodstock in 1614 the town’s chamberlain gave the sheriff 3s. for his precept, and at Leicester in 1625 the corporation reimbursed John Watson 6s. 8d ‘for a pair of gloves given to Mr Sheriff when he made the warrant for choosing the burgesses’.
As most parliamentary boroughs were incorporated, it was clear in a majority of cases to whom the sheriff should direct his precept. It is true that under Elizabeth the sheriff of Buckinghamshire frequently sent his mandate for Aylesbury to the head of the Pakington family rather than the corporation, but this was exceptional and the practice had evidently ceased by 1604.
In 1624 the Commons’ committee for privileges set out the principles to be followed for unincorporated boroughs after it investigated the election held at Bletchingley. There the decision of the sheriff to send his precept to one of the town’s burgage-holders rather than to the lord of the manor’s bailiff was upheld, on the grounds that the latter was ‘not such a person as ought to have receipt of the warrant of precept ... which is for the king and commonwealth and not for the lord of the borough’. The precept, being sent to ‘one of the electors’, was ‘well delivered’, as it was clear that it had to be given to someone among the voters and it was plainly impossible for a single warrant to be handed to every elector.
In the absence of the sheriff’s precept, no borough was entitled to proceed to an election. Any election which took place before the precept had been read to the electors was, as Sir Edward Coke observed, ‘void, and of no force’.
Most elections resulted in the drafting of an indenture between the chief citizens of the borough on the one hand and the sheriff on the other. Normally a single indenture sufficed, even if the constituency was entitled to return two representatives, but in Cornish boroughs it was common for separate indentures to be drafted for each Member. Where it proved impossible to reach agreement on the outcome of an election, rival indentures might be submitted. The Lostwithiel election of April 1625 generated no less than four separate indentures as a result of two double returns. In the Cinque Ports, where there was no sheriff, the practice was different. The enfranchised boroughs simply communicated their choice to the lord warden, who then composed a single return of all the Members elected within his jurisdiction. At Berwick, where there was also no sheriff, the town drew up a declaration bearing the town’s common seal, at least until the end of James’s reign. Thereafter it drafted indentures between the mayor and bailiffs on the one hand and ‘those burgesses of the borough who were present at the election’ on the other.
Indentures were always drawn up on parchment rather than paper: the 1614 indenture on paper among the records of the University of Cambridge appears to be a copy of an original that was never returned.
Just as small defects in legal documents were not permitted to cause judgments in law to be overturned,
In theory at least, all parties to a shire election were supposed to seal the indenture,
The one signature and seal that was regarded as essential was that of the sheriff or his deputy. At county elections the sheriff or the under-sheriff was physically present and therefore able to sign and seal on the spot, but borough elections (other than those in the county boroughs) were supposed to be conducted by the mayor or bailiffs on the authority of the sheriff’s precept rather than by the sheriff. Indeed, when the Commons’ elections committee learned that the under-sheriff of Gloucestershire had presided over the Cirencester election in 1624, it condemned him for his presumption, declaring that ‘he had nothing to do in the matter’.
The copy of the indenture retained by the borough was meant to be identical with the one filed in Chancery, but differences in dating are not unknown. Three days separate the dates on the Chancery copy of the Christchurch election indenture of 1624 and the mayor’s copy.
Boroughs are unlikely to have been alone in keeping copies of election indentures. Following county elections, too, the sheriff probably retained a duplicate so that a record would be held locally. However, since these documents were the property of private individuals rather than of an undying corporation, most are now lost. A duplicate of the Yorkshire indenture of April 1606 is nevertheless to be found among the papers of Timothy Hutton, who served as sheriff of Yorkshire in 1606/7.
It was improper, and perhaps even unlawful, for boroughs to send ‘blank’ indentures to their patrons.
Examination of surviving indentures suggests that the use of blanks was widespread, particularly where a borough was under the thumb of its patron. Helston, for instance, appears to have routinely provided blanks to whichever patron held sway at the time, and in 1625 Sir Robert Killigrew is said by Thomas Scott of Canterbury to have brought up to London from Penryn a blank ‘in his pocket’, into which he inserted the name of Sir Edwin Sandys.
Except in Lancashire, Cheshire, Berwick and the Cinque Ports, it was the responsibility of the sheriff or his deputy rather than the mayor or bailiff to return the indentures to Chancery. Mayors and bailiffs were returning officers only in the sense that they were responsible for sending their indentures to the sheriff. When the question arose in February 1610 whether the bailiff of Bridgnorth was entitled to return his borough’s indenture to Chancery, given that the sheriff of Shropshire had died in office, the Commons resolved that the return could only be made by a new sheriff, as ‘the bailiff cannot’.
In county boroughs such as London, York and Canterbury there was not one sheriff but two. Normally both sheriffs acted in concert but every now and then they disagreed, so that rival indentures, each signed and sealed by one of the sheriffs, were sent in to Chancery. Precisely this situation arose at Coventry in 1628, when Sheriff Legge returned Richard Greene and William Purefoy, while his colleague, Sheriff Knipe, supported Isaac Walden and Thomas Potter.
Along with the writs which had prompted their creation, indentures were returned by the sheriff to the clerk of the Crown in Chancery or his deputy. This official appears not to have enjoyed the benefit of a permanent set of offices: in 1592 the deputy clerk of the Crown operated out of Holborn, but in 1626 one of his successors, to whom the Tiverton indenture was directed, was to be found ‘over the New Exchange, in the Strand’.
As it was the responsibility of the sheriff to return the indenture, it was quite common for boroughs to hand their fee to him. For instance, in 1586 the under-sheriff of Kent was paid 4s. by Maidstone ‘for putting in of the indentures’, and in 1626 the town clerk of Aldeburgh gave the same amount to the sheriff of Suffolk ‘for the indentures of the burgesses’.
Most sheriffs probably waited until all the boroughs in their shrievalty had held their elections before sending in their returns. On learning in January 1624 that the borough of Leicester was eager to proceed to an election as soon as possible, the earl of Huntingdon, who was awaiting the outcome of the county election before nominating a candidate for the town, urged delay, as the sheriff ‘will not return his indentures till within a day or two of the beginning of the Parliament’.
During the life of the Parliament, the clerk of the Crown in Chancery retained custody of the election returns ‘for, and to the use of the Commons in Parliament’. However, once the Parliament had ended the writs and indentures were transferred to the clerks of the Petty Bag for safekeeping.
Announcing an election
Prior to 1571 it had been customary for the Privy Council to issue circular letters to the magistrates of each county ahead of nationwide elections. These documents were intended to give general guidance on the conduct of the forthcoming elections but they may also have served to provide general notice to the electors. After 1571, however, this practice mysteriously ceased, and was not revived until August 1597, probably at the instigation of the new lord keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton.
Circular letters and proclamations provided voters with only general notification of an impending election; they did not, and could not, furnish the dates and times of elections, which in the case of nationwide elections were spread over many weeks. In the counties, and also in the seventeen boroughs that were counties in their own right, the law assumed that voters did not require advance notice of an election. This was because the Act of 1406 governing shire elections required the sheriff, after having received the writ, to hold his election at the next county court – a judicial assembly of the whole shire that was legally required to meet once every twenty-eight days. There was no obligation on the sheriff to advertise the election in the interval between his receipt of the writ and the holding of the county court,
To many contemporaries, the fact that the sheriff was not legally obliged to advertise the receipt of the writ in the case of county elections was indefensible. Following the Worcestershire by-election of November 1609, at which Sir Samuel Sandys was returned unopposed by only a handful of voters, the president of the Council in the Marches, Lord Eure, informed Lord Treasurer Salisbury that many of ‘the better sort of gentlemen’ of Worcestershire ‘repine and complain’ that they had no notice of the election. According to Eure, the under-sheriff had delayed revealing that he had received the writ until the day of the election itself, at the county court.
Only in urban boroughs – that is to say boroughs that were not counties in their own right – was there a legal requirement to give advance notice of an election. This was because in these constituencies parliamentary elections were not held in the county court and so were not subject to the rule that assigned them a fixed and settled time. However, the law so far as urban boroughs was concerned was far from adequate, as the 1445 statute requiring a sheriff to send his precept to the enfranchised boroughs within his shrievalty failed to specify either how quickly a borough should proceed to an election after it received the precept, or how much notice the mayor or bailiff was required to give the town’s voters. Interestingly, contemporaries were not always aware that the law was so deficient. In 1625 the corporation of Berwick needlessly instructed its town clerk to falsify on his return the time that had elapsed between the announcement of the town’s election and the election itself, so that as many days were specified ‘as the statute requires’.
Despite the vagueness of the 1445 Act, advance notice of borough elections was widely regarded as vital. ‘Sufficient warning’, declared Sir Edward Coke in the late 1620s, must be given to the inhabitants of a borough ‘that they may be present; otherwise the election is not good’.
In deciding whether adequate notice had been given, the Commons was not solely interested in establishing whether enough time had been allowed between the announcement of an election and the election itself. The nature of the warning and the number of the electors to whom it had been given were also clearly important. In 1621 the committee condemned the dean of Westminster for having given notice to only one of Westminster’s four parishes.
In urban boroughs the responsibility for alerting the electors to the precise time and venue lay with the borough officers. At Clitheroe in 1601, for instance, the bailiffs, having received the sheriff of Lancashire’s precept, wrote to the borough’s sergeant three days ahead of the election ordering him to instruct all the resident freemen to ‘appear before us ... on the 13th of this instant October by 9 of the clock being Tuesday next at the house of Jane Mercer’.
Venues and times
The 1406 Act which required county elections to be held in the county court applied to boroughs that were counties in their own right as well as to the shires proper. When Henry Sherfield expressed an interest in a place at Southampton early in 1626, he was told that the borough might be unable to wait for him to make up his mind, as the election would be held ‘on Monday next, being our county court day, which time we cannot alter’.
Where the county court was held was generally a matter of custom rather than law.
Given the size of most county electorates, it was quite common for the county court to meet out of doors. In Kent, for instance, it was traditional to assemble outside Maidstone, on Penenden Heath, while in Somerset it was customary for the county court to meet at the market cross in Taunton. In 1624 the voters of Suffolk met on a hill just outside Ipswich, but the weather was so cold that fourteen labourers had to be employed to clear the snow from the hillside the day before the election. Not surprisingly the following year’s parliamentary election was held indoors.
In Wales, and also in Monmouthshire, the question of the proper venue was complicated by the existence of the so-called contributory boroughs. By the terms of the Henrician Acts uniting England and Wales, Monmouthshire and all the Welsh shires were each granted a single borough Member, with the exception of Merioneth, which was given none at all, and Pembrokeshire, which was given two. However, aside from Haverfordwest, which had the distinction unique in Wales of being a county in itself, each of these borough Members was chosen by the inhabitants of more than one town. For instance, it was expected that the Member for Pembroke Boroughs would be chosen not merely by the electors of Pembroke, but also by the residents of Tenby, Wiston, Newport, Fishguard, Cilgerran and St. Dogmaels.
In general, Welsh borough elections tended to be held in the county town, but in Cardiganshire the question of the venue was complicated by the emergence of Aberystwyth as a rival to Cardigan. Although the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 had constituted Cardigan the county town, a private Act of 1553 had decreed that the county court should alternate between Cardigan and Aberystwyth.
The location of an election might easily determine its outcome, since those who lived closest were generally more likely to turn out in greater numbers than those who dwelt further afield.
Even when the customary town was used, there was still scope for a partisan sheriff to alter the location. At Monmouth in 1572 the sheriff wrong-footed his opponents by holding the county election at the house of one Hopkin Richard rather than at Monmouth Castle, where the hustings were usually held.
Although the law did not specify their location, parliamentary elections were required by the Act of 1445 to be held ‘in convenient time, that is to say ... betwixt the hour of eight and the hour of eleven’. On the face of it, this statement was crystal clear, but in 1557 the printer of Rastell’s edition of the statutes, which employed Roman numerals, transposed the type and printed ‘ix’ instead of ‘xi’. This error was repeated in subsequent editions, and for half a century many Englishmen, unless they were professional lawyers, mistakenly believed that the time specified by statute was ‘between the hours of eight and nine o’clock’.
The chief problem with the statutory time allowance was its woeful inadequacy. Three hours was certainly sufficient in those constituencies where the voting population was small, or where the election was merely a formality designed to confirm the return of men who stood unopposed, but where electorates ran into thousands it was difficult to see how an election could be conducted in such a short space of time, particularly if it gave rise to a poll. Either fresh legislation was needed or a way had to be found to escape the three-hour strait-jacket imposed by the 1445 Act. The 1621 elections bill would have made a bad situation worse, since it actually sought to shorten by one hour the amount of time devoted to each election.
Since elections were not only capable of continuing beyond eleven o’clock but also of being adjourned, the date on the indenture was not necessarily an accurate statement of the time of the election. In many two-Member constituencies the voters chose one representative on one day and his partner on another, a fact disguised by the indenture, which was capable of bearing only a single date. At Harwich in 1625, for example, the town chose Christopher Herrys on 26 April and Sir Edmund Sawyer on the 27th.
Staggered elections like these were most common in Cornwall, but since the majority of Cornish boroughs customarily returned one indenture per Member, the formal record was likely to represent accurately the time of each election. There is no reason to suspect, for example, that the dates on Liskeard’s two indentures for the third Jacobean Parliament – 24 December 1620 and 16 January 1621 – tell anything other than the truth. In boroughs that returned two Members on a single indenture, however, staggered elections were capable of causing administrative problems if they were discovered. This was demonstrated with startling clarity when the return filed by Bury St. Edmunds in 1626 came to be considered. According to the indenture, both men were elected on 30 January, but in actual fact Sir Thomas Jermyn and Emmanuel Giffard were chosen on 6 January and 11 January respectively. It seems likely that the town’s authorities, not knowing what date to employ, left the task of dating the indenture to the sheriff, who presumably added the date on which he himself signed and sealed the indenture. None of this would have mattered were it not for the fact that Giffard was arrested for debt on 23 January. On the face of it, the date on the indenture meant that Giffard was precluded from claiming parliamentary privilege, whereas all Members of the Commons were entitled to such protection from the moment of their election. This situation was clearly intolerable, for as Sir Henry Poole observed, if the date on an indenture took priority over the actual date of election then it ‘may be in the power of a sheriff or other officer to defeat our privilege’. Little wonder that John Whistler declared himself opposed to ‘these straggling elections’.
Although staggered elections were capable of creating administrative difficulties, the Commons as a whole proved unwilling to condemn them. In 1624 Chippenham’s decision to adjourn the election of its second Member for two days was declared to be ‘good’.
In theory at least, a borough that chose its Members on different days held one election rather than two, even if, as in Cornwall, it made two separate returns. This was partly because elections were capable of adjournment but also because the writ authorized the holding of just a single election. Every so often, however, a borough replaced the man it had initially chosen with another before making its return. This happened at Rochester in 1614 after Sir Anthony Aucher decided to stand down, and also at New Romney in 1621, after James Thurbarne, elected in November 1620, had second thoughts. Since neither case ever came to the attention of the Commons, the House never decided whether the boroughs involved were guilty of malpractice. It was events in the borough of Westminster in December 1620 that forced the Commons to consider the legitimacy of holding two elections on the same writ. The voters had initially chosen Edmund Doubleday, but before the indenture could be returned Doubleday had died, whereupon William Man was elected in his stead. Had these occurrences taken place outside the capital, the Commons would almost certainly not have learned of them, but it was clearly impossible to conceal Man’s substitution for Doubleday in the very borough in which the Commons itself met. To the procedural expert William Hakewill, the decision to elect Man on the same writ that had been used to choose Doubleday was a clear breach of the 1445 Act, whereby ‘a man can elect but once’. However, Sir Thomas Ireland, counsel for Man, cleverly argued that Doubleday’s election had been incomplete because no return had been made to Chancery. In other words, the business of choosing a man did not, in itself, constitute a full election, but merely ‘the inception’; the process was only completed once the return had been sent to the sheriff, and he had sent it to Chancery. Led by Sir Edward Coke, the Commons found Ireland’s argument persuasive, and Man was permitted to retain his seat.
Nomination and selection
Those who wished to be elected often found it prudent not to say so in the first instance, at least not openly to those outside their immediate circle of friends or family. This was especially true with regard to county elections, as there was a strong undercurrent of opinion that it was down to the county in general rather than an individual in particular whether a man stood for election. ‘They should be chosen’, declared Sir Henry Poole in 1621, ‘whom the county chooseth of itself, not they that desire it’.
Few understood what was required more than the Yorkshire magnate Sir Thomas Wentworth, who outwardly presented a reluctance to stand that belied his true ambitions. Before openly declaring his candidacy, Wentworth habitually took soundings from his friends and allies while carefully suggesting that he expected to be advised against standing. Writing to Christopher Wandesford in April 1625, for example, Wentworth asked ‘whether it will be fit for me to stand to be knight of the shire, for this being nearer your level I expect some sober, sad advice’. Once he was sure that his candidacy was likely to prove welcome, Wentworth would then send off a flurry of letters to his friends and allies letting them know that he intended to be present at the forthcoming election, and to ask them, ‘if you hold me worthy of it’, to approach their friends on his behalf.
In borough elections an indirect approach was also often required, particularly among outsiders. As Wentworth found in Yorkshire, it was advisable to test the water, as there was little point in lobbying for a seat that had already been promised to someone else. After taking discreet soundings at Steyning in 1626 on behalf of Nicholas Jordan and ‘one Mr Garret’, Richard Gravett found ‘so little comfort’ that he decided to hand back to the would-be candidates their letters of nomination from the earl of Arundel.
Many borough seats were either controlled or heavily influenced by powerful patrons, some of them members of the aristocracy, others belonging to the local gentry. Often these patrons held nominal office in the borough as high steward or recorder, while others owned extensive property in or near the town or served as lord lieutenant. Where a patron controlled a seat, it was advisable to write to him personally for a letter of nomination rather than to the town itself. The patron might then allocate the applicant a seat or, like Lord Zouche in 1620, promise to find him a place if he was unable to get one elsewhere.
Sometimes it was desirable to approach one intermediary in order to obtain the support of a second, more powerful intercessor. When Sir John Smythe of Sutton at Hone in Kent decided to seek a seat at Rochester over the winter of 1625/6, he persuaded his wife’s uncle, the earl of Holland, to ask the duke of Buckingham, the city’s high steward, for the necessary letter of nomination.
In many boroughs the right of nomination was divided between the town itself and an external patron. At Barnstaple, for instance, the seats were usually shared between a townsman and a nominee of the borough’s recorder, the 3rd earl of Bath. In general, boroughs with this arrangement jealously guarded the right to choose the candidate for ‘their’ seat. However the increasing demand for places among the local gentry meant that many towns came under considerable pressure to relinquish control of both seats to outsiders. Canny patrons, like Edward, Lord Zouche, lord warden of the Cinque Ports, were diplomatic when demanding control of a second seat. At Hythe in December 1620, for instance, he persuaded the townsmen to let him have the place reserved ‘for the burgess of whom yourselves have the sole nomination’ on the promise that this arrangement would ‘be no prejudice to your privilege in future times’.
It was not only townsmen who were sometimes put under pressure to relinquish control of their parliamentary seats. At Bossiney in 1609 John Hender of Botreaux Castle was approached by Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, for the right to nominate the successor to the town’s recently deceased Member, George Upton. Despite having controlled the borough for the past twenty years, Hender knew better than to refuse the king’s first minister, but he apparently gave his consent only on condition that he should not be chosen sheriff of Cornwall the following year.
There were no restrictions placed on the number of seats a man could stand for at one time. Since many candidates were anxious to guarantee themselves a place, it was not unusual for a man to seek election in more than one constituency. In 1624 Sir John Suckling not only stood for Middlesex, but also applied for burgess-ships at Lichfield, Hull and Camelford. Sir Edward Coke had himself returned for both Norfolk and Coventry in 1625, having first sent off a speculative letter to Scarborough. However, those who got themselves returned for more than one constituency were obliged on entering the Commons to declare which seat they would represent. Once this was done, the Speaker would order the issuing of fresh writs of election to those constituencies whose Members had opted to serve elsewhere.
Most candidates who put themselves up for election preferred to stand unopposed. This was partly for reasons of cost and the preservation of social harmony, but it was also because a lack of competitors enhanced a man’s prestige.
Though pre-elections meetings were common, the practice was not sanctioned by Parliament and may even have been illegal, since it undermined the statutory requirement for free and open elections. After several members of the Cornish gentry described their holding of a pre-election meeting in 1628 as a ‘laudable custom of the country’, the Commons declared that there was ‘no such custom’ in Cornwall, and that even if there had been the assembly was ‘unlawful’.
The most common forum for pre-election meetings, or ‘selections’ as they are sometimes known, was the quarter sessions or the local assizes, but more impromptu arrangements were not unheard of. At Anglesey in January 1621, Owen Wynn was advised by his cousin Richard Bulkeley to attend the funeral of David Owen of Penmynydd, ‘where most of the gentlemen would meet’, to discuss whether to back John Mostyn for the knighthood of the shire.
Selection of Members ahead of the formal election was as widespread in the boroughs as it was in the counties, but often the choice was made by a single patron rather than a group of gentlemen. Very often those chosen were strangers to the electors. After Lady Hatton arranged for Sir John Hobart to be returned for Corfe Castle in 1604, the townsmen wrote to Hobart describing themselves as ‘your worship’s unknown yet kind poor friends’.
In several large boroughs the corporation rather than a particular patron controlled the selection process. The freemen, even if they were entitled to vote, were given either a limited choice of candidates or no choice at all. At London, Exeter and Coventry, for example, the corporation regularly presented one candidate per seat to the freemen, who were expected merely to ratify the choice of their superiors. However, during the 1620s the power enjoyed by many corporations over elections crumbled, as the Commons ruled in one case after another that the ordinary freemen were being unfairly excluded from voting. Those corporations that attempted to retain their grip on the selection process were either defeated or, like Exeter in February 1628, forced to give ground by conceding to the commonalty a limited degree of choice.
In some boroughs the process of selection was extraordinarily arcane. At York between 1581 and 1597, the selection of candidates was in the hands of a group of forty or fifty freemen, who nominated four men, from whom the corporation chose two to represent the city in Parliament.
Although selection of Members before an election was widespread, this did not mean that the outcome of elections was always a foregone conclusion. In some areas, such as Cambridgeshire in 1614 and 1624, longstanding agreements broke down, while in others, such as Chippenham in 1604, the wishes of the selectors were set aside by the voters, who refused to accept that they were, in Richard Cust’s phrase, merely ‘voting fodder for the leading gentry’.
The search for votes
In English county elections, where two seats were available at any one time, it was common at the outset for a candidate to seek a partner with whom to stand in order to increase his own share of the vote. Since every voter in a two-Member constituency had, in effect, two votes, it made sense to enter into an arrangement whereby each ally agreed to provide the other with the votes of his own supporters. Sometimes the candidates themselves brokered these electoral deals, but in other instances they were the result of mediation. On learning in early April 1625 that there was soon to be a Parliament, Sir Edward Boys forged an electoral pact for the Kent county seats between his kinsman Edward Scott and Sir Edwin Sandys, who told Scott ‘that all that he can prevail with shall be for you’.
According to the Act of 1406, parliamentary elections were to be held ‘freely and indifferently, notwithstanding any request or commandment to the contrary’.
Many believed, at least publicly, that there was something demeaning and dishonourable in asking others for their vote. In 1604, for example, William Wiseman sanctimoniously (and hypocritically) wrote to the borough of Maldon that anyone who stooped to ‘labour for a burgess-ship ... most commonly least deserveth it’.
Despite the formal prohibition, many in authority saw nothing wrong with canvassing, and gave their servants explicit instructions to solicit votes. ‘May it please your good lordship to be advertised’, wrote three of the servants of the earl of Shrewsbury in 1604, ‘that according to your honourable letters we have laboured so many freeholders as possibly we could’ on behalf of Francis Clifford to be senior knight of the shire for Yorkshire.
Even if a candidate was confident that he had sufficient support to justify standing, it was often thought desirable to win over the uncommitted or even convert the supporters of an opponent to one’s cause. ‘It will not, in my opinion, be amiss to solicit those who are either neuters or inclining to the adverse side’, wrote Thomas Powell to Sir Roger Mostyn in November 1620, ‘for that will take away their excuse of not being requested’.
It was often not enough for a gentleman who stood for the knighthood of the shire to employ his own relatives and servants to canvass for him; he also needed powerful allies who could command the loyalty of others. In 1625 Sir Thomas Wentworth, having decided to stand for the senior knighthood of the shire for Yorkshire, solicited the support of Lord Clifford, who wrote to his servant Richard Hughes at Skipton to move the freeholders at Craven to vote for him.
Many candidates, in association with their aristocratic backers, relied upon election agents to do much of the hard work of canvassing for them. In the 1604 Worcestershire election campaign Sir William Ligon employed his servant William Addis as his principal agent, and in 1624 Philip Spurling, servant to the countess of Devonshire, ran the campaign on behalf of Sir Edward Wortley at East Retford.
Some of the most vigorous canvassing during this period was carried out by members of the clergy who, for reasons of kinship, friendship or economic dependence were often to be found in the thick of an election campaign. However, whereas election agents paid house calls and accosted voters in the streets, clerics were more likely to appeal to the electors from their pulpits. In 1620 the bishop of Bangor enthusiastically threw his weight behind Sir Richard Wynn for the Caernarvonshire seat, and exhorted ‘all his parishioners and tenants after sermon to pass their voices’ for Wynn, whom ‘he exalted ... higher than the skies by far’.
Clergymen were sometimes aggressive in their support of their chosen candidates. One of the chief supporters of James Price in the 1620 Radnorshire campaign was Price’s son-in-law, Dr William Vaughan, the vicar of Nantmell. On one occasion, during divine service, Vaughan allegedly ejected his curate from the pulpit to harangue the freeholders on behalf of Price. When some members of the congregation objected that Price was unfit to serve as knight of the shire, an angry Vaughan came down into the chancel ‘and, spreading forth his arms and hands ... exclaimed with a loud voice in very passionate and threatening manner that he did not think that any man in that parish would presume to give his voice’ without his knowledge.
The Commons disapproved of clergymen participating in parliamentary elections, since the clergy had their own representative assembly in the form of Convocation.
Campaigning was often intensive, with the result that voters might find themselves approached more than once by the agents of both sides. At the Chester election of 1628 the freemen were canvassed so heavily that ‘many were laboured four or five times over’.
Smear tactics were employed in several hard-fought campaigns. Questioning the religious sympathies of an opponent was a favoured tactic, especially during the 1620s, when fear of Catholicism was at its height. Prior to the 1624 Canterbury election, a yeoman named Simon Penny, employed to canvass on behalf of the puritans Thomas Scott and Thomas Denne, was arraigned before the mayor at the insistence of Sir William Lovelace for spreading the story that Lovelace ‘did cross himself before the French or Spanish ambassador’, and for publicly implying that Lovelace had a pope ‘in his belly’. In Yorkshire in 1625, Sir John Savile employed his chaplain James Nutter to savage the reputation of William Mallory by circulating ‘scandalous and seditious letters’ accusing Mallory of Catholic sympathies. Mallory’s electoral partner, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was outraged, and protested to Lord President Scrope that Mallory had no means of redress, ‘for at the day of elections shouts, not reasons, must be heard’.
During the early Stuart period, as under Elizabeth,
Predicting the outcome of an election on the basis of such evidence was nevertheless a hit and miss affair. Voters might change their minds on the day of the election, or a partisan sheriff might discount their votes altogether. Some might fail to put in an appearance, while others who were technically ineligible to vote might affect the outcome. The limitation of poll-lists as accurate predictors was demonstrated with great clarity in the events leading up to the Caernarvonshire election of 1620. Sir John Wynn went to inordinate trouble to discover the degree of support that existed for his eldest son, Sir Richard, dispatching his younger son Owen, his servant Edward Lloyd and his cousin William Wynn to canvass among the freeholders of the Conway valley, the Creuddyn peninsula, Llysvaen and the lowlands along the Menai Straits. Based upon their findings, Sir William Thomas produced detailed figures that appeared to promise success to the Wynns. In the event, however, victory proved elusive. This was partly because the sheriff supported the Wynns’ rival, John Griffith, and partly because Griffith created a large number of new voters loyal to himself.
Most candidates relied upon kinship, friendship and (in county elections) the loyalty of their tenants to provide them with the backing needed to win. Before 1628, when a candidate’s attitude towards the Forced Loan may have made the difference between victory and defeat, it was unusual for those standing for election to place before the voters what today would be described as a political manifesto. In general, those desirous of election, or their patrons, tended to offer only vague promises of help if elected. Writing to the freeholders of Bure in November 1620, Sir Robert Crane announced that, if returned as knight for Suffolk, he would ‘omit no opportunity’ to express his thanks to those who had supported him.
It was nevertheless not unknown for candidates to make specific pledges while campaigning for election. In 1604 John Jones promised the voters of Gloucester that, if elected, he would introduce legislation to ensure, among other things, ‘that no person should make malt within the said city which had any other trade’ and that peas should only be grown in the gardens of the city rather than in the surrounding cornfields.
Candidates with their eyes on the ball were also sensitive to the voters’ growing hostility towards the Court and its dependants. During the sixteenth century, outsiders with Court connections were often seen as attractive by many boroughs on the grounds that they were well placed to obtain favours from the Crown, but by 1614 courtiers were increasingly viewed with suspicion, as it was thought that they would put the interests of the king before those of their constituents.
As well as posing as ‘Country’ figures, many candidates, either through their friends or patrons, often also found it necessary to demonstrate to the voters that they were sound in matters of religion. Writing to the father of Sir Thomas Wentworth in February 1604, Lord President Sheffield recommended for election as knights for Yorkshire Francis Clifford, son of the earl of Cumberland, and Sir John Savile of Howley, ‘both persons against whom no exceptions can be made neither are themselves, their wives or friends any way affected to popery or heady courses in religion’.
Although most parliamentary candidates seem to have never made firm political promises to the electors, some certainly offered inducements of another kind. It has sometimes been argued that bribery was seldom practised during this period, and that where it was the sums of money involved were ‘minimal’, but the abuse was sufficiently widespread for it to merit inclusion in the 1628 elections bill, which threatened to unseat any Member who promised money, meat or drink to the electors.
Of course, those who gave bribes were not guaranteed a return on their investment. Sir John Franklin ended up with nothing to show for his outlay in 1625. Neither did Sir Henry Wotton, who ‘spent almost fifty pound in good drink upon his followers’ at Canterbury that same year.
Some candidates or their agents stopped short of offering bribes, but only just. During the Worcestershire election of 1604, Sir William Ligon’s chief election agent, William Addis, promised to pay the travel expenses of those who turned out to vote for his master and to compensate them for the loss of a day’s work.
Many boroughs, if not open to financial bribes, were certainly amenable to other forms of inducement. In the mid 1620s the town of Rye was desperate to secure the services of a competent curate, as their vicar, Brian Twyne, spent most of his time at Oxford. The right of presentation, however, was controlled by Edward Sackville, 4th earl of Dorset, who nominated his kinsman Capt. John Sackville for one of the Rye seats in 1625. The townsmen agreed to Dorset’s request, but only, it would seem, provided that Dorset supplied them with a suitable replacement for Twyne.
Those voters who could not be persuaded by fair means or foul to lend their support were sometimes subjected to intimidation instead. For all the talk of free elections, landlords exercised considerable power over their tenants and often blithely assumed that they were entitled to promise their votes to whichever candidates they chose. During the bitterly contested Chester election of 1628, ‘many were threatened [that] unless they gave their voices to Sir Randle [Mainwaring] and Sir Thomas [Smith] they should lose their houses’.
Landlords were by no means alone in employing bullyboy tactics. At Canterbury in 1626 the city’s aldermen were thrown into a panic on learning that Sir John Wilde and Thomas Scott had entered into an electoral alliance against the corporation’s own candidates. According to Scott, they laboured until nearly midnight, ‘entreating, persuading, threatening’ anyone suspected of supporting Scott and Wilde. Richard White was summoned to the White Hart and told that, had it not been for the aldermen, he would have been pressed for military service, ‘and they may again do you the like friendship’.
The electorate
As is well known, the franchise in county elections was limited by a statute of 1430 to those freeholders or owners of tenements with a net income of at least forty shillings a year over and above all charges.
In the boroughs there was no universal form of franchise. In some cases the right to vote was limited to members of the corporation, while in others it was open to the freemen, the ratepayers, or the inhabitants in general. At York, where all the freemen were in theory entitled to vote, the electors were actually selected by the mayor in advance. Prior to each election the city’s sheriffs were instructed to summon only ‘a competent number of citizens and freeholders’ to the hustings, and to allow the mayor ‘sight of the same before they be summoned’.
Although county electorates were undoubtedly expanding throughout this period, the number of voters in some boroughs was clearly shrinking. Towns that had fallen on hard times certainly saw their electorates dwindle. At Rye, for instance, a borough in terminal economic decline, there were 103 inhabitant freemen (and therefore eligible voters) in 1562 but only fifty by 1604.
... the general liberty of the realm ... favoureth all means tending to make the election of burgesses to be with the most indifferency; which by common presumption, is when the same are [sic] made by the greatest number of voices that reasonably may be had, whereby there will less danger of packing, or indirect proceedings.
This fear of packing had first surfaced in 1614 with the discovery that a privy councillor, Sir Thomas Parry, had exercised undue influence in the Stockbridge election of that year. Many Members of the Addled Parliament had concluded that the king was trying to pack the Commons with his own creatures in order to make it more amenable to the royal will, and that if this were not prevented the independence and representative nature of the Commons would be undermined.
How many voters there were at any one time cannot now be known, for in the early seventeenth century there was no such thing as an electoral register, and where figures exist they tend to be for the number of votes cast rather than the number entitled to vote. To complicate matters, in many boroughs the precise nature of the franchise, which tended to vary from borough to borough, is uncertain. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that on the eve of the Civil War between twenty-seven and forty per cent of all adult males were entitled to vote, considerably more than the ten per cent estimated by the contemporary observer Sir Henry Spelman.
In county elections men had to decide for themselves whether or not they were qualified to vote. The opportunities for abuse that this created were considerable, and therefore the Act of 1430 empowered the sheriff to administer an oath to any would-be voter to determine whether he met the franchise requirement. Anyone who failed this test could legitimately be excluded.
Another shortcoming of the Act was that it said nothing about churchmen, who might own freehold worth forty shillings or more in their official capacity but not as private individuals. Were they entitled to vote? Before 1624 the answer to this question appears to have been unclear, but after the matter arose in respect of the Cambridgeshire election of that year the Commons ruled that any clergymen who owned no lay freehold other than their parsonage, vicarage or benefice ‘shall not nor ought to have any voice in election of any burgess of Parliament’. The Commons based its decision on the fact that the clergy were already entitled to vote in elections to Convocation, and that their livings were not held by the Common Law.
A further weakness of the 1430 Act was that it said nothing about the length of time a man had to own freehold land of the appropriate value before he was qualified to vote. For a candidate with deep pockets who feared that his side was outnumbered, the Act’s silence in this regard provided a strong temptation to create large numbers of bogus freeholders to supplement the ranks of genuine voters. The most outrageous instance of freeholder creation during the midst of an election campaign occurred at Caernarvonshire in November and December 1620. John Griffith, determined to overwhelm his adversaries, the Wynns of Gwydir, sold freeholds to poor men in order to qualify them to vote, allegedly doubling the number of his enfranchised supporters. Moreover, he included within the deed of sale a power of revocation, so that the land conveyed would automatically return to him after the election. News of this astonishing behaviour soon became the talk of London, and Sir Richard Wynn sought legal advice in the hope that Parliament, when it met, might deem Griffith to have acted improperly. However, the Wynns decided to take no chances, particularly after they were assured that Parliament might well allow the practice, and instead of resolving to complain to the Commons they set about creating a raft of bogus freeholders of their own.
The Caernarvonshire election of 1620 provides a clear refutation of J. H. Plumb’s proposition that, since inflation created plenty of new voters, ‘there was no need to create them by other means’.
Neither the 1430 Act, nor indeed any of the other fifteenth century statutes governing elections, prohibited the participation of women. During the sixteenth century two boroughs – Aylesbury and Gatton – were for a time controlled by women, and at Knaresborough in 1626 Margery Batty and Mary Wakefield signed the borough’s election indenture.
Often, the presence of large numbers of people who were not qualified to vote was designed to swell the ranks of one side or another in the hope of influencing the returning officer. However, except where they were conducted behind closed doors, elections naturally attracted large crowds, with the result that bystanders might easily be confused with the voters. At the 1625 Kent election, for instance, many of Maidstone’s townsmen who turned out to see the Kent county election on nearby Penenden Heath stood so close to the supporters of Lord Burghersh and Sir Albertus Morton that their presence allegedly influenced the outcome of the election.
Turning out the voters
There was no law requiring the voters to be summoned to the hustings on the day of the election, but in many boroughs it was customary to do so and the practice certainly met with the approval of the Commons’ elections committee.
Where an election was unlikely to be contested, there was no need for the vast majority of voters to turn out. Indeed, in view of the costs involved, many freeholders were keen to avoid doing so. After recommending Sir Francis Barrington and Sir Thomas Cheke to the bailiffs of Colchester in April 1625, Viscount Colchester announced that he was ‘labouring ... to stay the going of the freeholders if there be no contradiction ... because I would save the travel of the county if it may be’.
Where none of the rival candidates were prepared to back down ahead of an election, it was common for the opposing sides to mobilize their respective supporters en masse. This was easier said than done, as arranging for everyone to arrive in good time was a complex business that required almost military-style planning. Those living closest to the hustings had to be instructed to delay their journey until the last moment, whereas those dwelling in more distant areas of the county needed to set out sooner.
Consideration too had to be given to the time of the year. Sir Thomas Wentworth was so concerned that the Yorkshire election of 1620 would be held on Christmas Day that he wrote round to all his principal supporters promising them dinner at York if they turned out.
Not all freeholders were eager to vote, so to ensure that they turned out it sometimes proved necessary to escort them to the hustings. In 1625 Christopher Keightley, the estate steward of the 2nd earl of Salisbury, not only instructed one of the earl’s bailiffs to canvass all the eligible freeholders in his area on behalf of Sir John Boteler and his son John, but also to ‘get them together and go down with them, and take a note of every man’s name that goes and send it to me’. Perhaps unconsciously, Keightley was emulating the arrangements then being made throughout the country for ensuring that men pressed for military service reached their muster points, but he was also attempting to avoid the mistakes of the past: in 1624 he had, somewhat naïvely, simply required the bailiffs under his command to tell the freeholders to be sure to turn up.
Once the voters had reached their destination it was important to keep them there, particularly if it proved necessary to hold a poll, a process which might take many hours, or even days, in constituencies with large electorates. Contemplating the prospect of a lengthy poll in July 1625 at the forthcoming Yorkshire election, Sir Thomas Wentworth suggested to Sir Thomas Fairfax that ‘it were very fit, in my opinion, that two hogsheads of wine and half a score of beer were laid in within the castle for the freeholders, who will be forced to stay long to refresh themselves with this hot season’.
Although many voters could be expected to turn up on the day of the election, those who travelled a considerable distance or were reluctant to set out early in the morning would need to be fed and lodged over night. Ensuring that there were enough places for them to stay, and that they had sufficient food and drink, required careful planning. Here the poll-lists compiled by canvassers could prove useful, as they not only helped gauge the level of support for a candidate but also served as a guide to the number of his supporters who would need to be accommodated and fed. The candidates themselves rarely seem to have taken charge of making the necessary arrangements. In the second Cambridgeshire election of 1624, Sir John Cutts and Sir John Cage entrusted the innkeeper of the Rose and Crown, Philip Wolf, with the task of hiring inns and hostelries in Cambridge capable of housing more than 1,000 of their supporters.
It was not enough to provide food and lodgings for one’s own supporters; accommodation had also to be denied to one’s opponents. ‘Disappoint your adversaries by all means of any places ... for their companies’, urged Sir Edward Phelips on writing to his son Sir Robert shortly before the Somerset election of 1614.
In theory voting was compulsory: by a statute of 1382, those absent without reasonable excuse were liable to be fined or otherwise punished.
The exclusion of absentees also extended to those who, having turned out, drifted away before the proceedings were ended. In constituencies with large electorates, where it sometimes proved necessary to poll the voters individually, some voters inevitably decided that they could not stand around for hours, or even days at a time, waiting to be called. Their exclusion might seem harsh, but as the Commons’ elections committee explained in 1624, ‘if the going away of a few freeholders, of their own accord, might make void an election, then it should lie always in the power of those with the fewest number of voices, by their departure before the poll finished, to turn any election into a nullity at their pleasure’. Such a situation, it added, with commendable understatement, would be ‘most inconvenient’.
Absenteeism had no effect on the legitimacy of an election, since the law assumed that those who did not attend had consented to the choice made by those who had.
Grosvenor’s complaint that the prosperity enjoyed early in James’s reign had served to erode voter turnout sits uncomfortably alongside Derek Hirst’s claim that the 1620s were electorally decisive because ‘more people were actually voting’.
A decline in interest in voting during the later 1620s is also detectable at Newcastle-under-Lyme. Before 1624 the corporation had monopolized the franchise, but in April of that year the Commons restored the right to vote to the freemen. No less than 155 voters participated in the ensuing by-election, but in the general election of 1626 turnout fell to 116, and in 1628 it dropped to only ninety-two.
Evidence from other enfranchised communities nevertheless suggests that in some areas there was an increase in voter participation during the 1620s. The borough of Hastings is a case in point. In 1614 and 1620 turnout remained steady, at thirty and thirty-one voters respectively. In 1624, however, thirty-five voters took part, and in 1625 the number stood at thirty-four. The next two general elections saw a further increase: thirty-nine men voted in 1626 and thirty-eight in 1628. Turnout fell sharply at the 1626 by-election – to just twenty-five – but by-elections were perhaps always less likely to excite interest than general elections.
Low turnout was not necessarily evidence of voter disenchantment with parliaments. As has already been observed, few men were willing to put in an appearance at an election in which there was only one candidate. This was particularly true of by-elections, such as that held to return Sir Valentine Browne for Lincolnshire in 1610, at which only a dozen or so voters turned up.
The returning officer
The pivotal figure in county elections was the sheriff: as the presiding officer it was for him to decide which candidate had been elected, and without his seal and signature no indenture was valid. In 1624 the sheriff of Cambridgeshire, being also sheriff of Huntingdonshire, entrusted the performance of his electoral duties in Cambridgeshire to a deputy, an action that Sir Christopher Hildyard, at least, considered improper, on the grounds that ‘the under-sheriff hath no power to make the election’, but his view was evidently not shared by the Commons as a whole.
The sheriff was not a neutral official, standing aloof from county politics, but a member of the local gentry, whose term of office lasted just one year. Faced with the likelihood of a contest, sheriffs were inclined to back their friends and relations rather than act in an even-handed fashion. On being urged to stand as knight for Merioneth in January 1624 by his kinsman Sir Richard Wynn, Henry Wynn was assured that he would have all the help the Herbert family could give ‘and the sheriff shall do what you please’.
Accounts of ‘sheriffs’ tricks’ are legion. Aside from those already alluded to – such as switching the election venue at the last moment or withholding the writ – they included ignoring demands for a poll and, as in the 1620 Yorkshire election, posting armed guards on the door of the hall or castle where the voting took place to keep out the supporters of one side or another.
In borough elections the key figure was normally the mayor or bailiff rather than the sheriff. This was probably the case even in the county boroughs, where the sheriffs often took their marching orders from the municipal authorities. Only in a handful of cases, such as the election for Cardigan Boroughs held at Aberystwyth in 1604, did mayors take a backseat to the sheriff.
There was nothing new about the improper conduct of returning officers. As early as 1406 Parliament acknowledged that knights of the shire were sometimes chosen out of the ‘affection of sheriffs’, and in 1410 it was enacted that any sheriff guilty of electoral misconduct would be fined £100 and imprisoned for a year. In 1445 these punishments were extended to mayors and bailiffs.
Partisan behaviour by the returning officer often delivered victory to those who might otherwise have been defeated. At the very least it ensured that a challenger stood little chance of success. The electoral good fortune of James Price, who represented Radnorshire in every Parliament between 1593 and 1621, is a prime example, as Price was the kinsman of successive sheriffs or their deputies.
Price was extraordinarily fortunate that his kinsmen were in office whenever he sought election, since the choice of sheriff was a matter determined by the Crown rather than the local community. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, members of the gentry were never given the opportunity to influence the selection of the returning officer because the Crown, perhaps by accident but probably by design, avoided summoning a Parliament towards the end of the shrieval year (which occurred at the beginning of November). Only once did the king come close to breaking this unwritten rule. On 6 November 1620, a few days after selecting new sheriffs, James announced a fresh Parliament. Had his proclamation been published before the new sheriffs were chosen, many of the ensuing county elections would undoubtedly have had different outcomes. In Caernarvonshire, William Wynn would not have used his influence at Court to prevent the selection of his kinsman Sir John Bodvel as Caernarvonshire’s sheriff, as he himself later admitted. With Bodvel as sheriff, the Wynns’ enemy John Griffith would not have triumphed at the hustings. Indeed, Bodvel’s avoidance of the shrievalty was so decisive that Sir John Wynn deemed it to have been ‘the mere cause of the loss of the election’.
Preliminary proceedings on election day
Since elections for the county seats were held in the county court, it was customary, before proceedings began, for the assembled magistrates to hear a few cases first. Once this was done, the sheriff, sitting with the justices on the bench, had his clerk read aloud the election writ.
In many elections the writ was not the only document to be publicly recited. In 1597 the Council’s letter requiring that no ‘unmeet’ Members be chosen was read to the voters.
After reading the writ and any other documents relating to the conduct of the election, the presiding officer normally presented the candidates to the electors. At the same time he might also read out any letters of nomination received on their behalf, or recommend to the assembly the candidates whom he and those seated on the bench behind him thought most suitable. Thus at Great Yarmouth in April 1625, after the sheriff’s precept and king’s writ had been read, ‘certain letters addressed unto Mr Bailiffs from diverse knights …entreating for them to be chosen burgesses of the Parliament for this borough were … publicly read, whereupon Mr Bailiffs declared what they know or had heard in commendations [sic] of every of them’.
It seems to have been unusual for the presiding officer to deliver long addresses to the voters. A notable exception, however, was that of the sheriff of Cheshire, Sir Richard Grosvenor, in 1624. In a lengthy oration, Grosvenor, a parliamentary veteran himself, set out the qualities needed in Members of the Commons in general, and in Members for Cheshire in particular, before going on to explain the nature of a Parliament and to attack papists. After expressing the hope that the Commons would enact much of the legislation which had failed to reach the statute book in 1621, Grosvenor then presented to the freeholders the candidates whom he, and the assembled justices seated on the platform behind him, had unanimously decided were best suited to represent their county in Parliament.
In borough elections it may have been common for the town’s senior legal officer – either the recorder or town clerk – to be on hand to provide legal advice regarding the drafting of indentures. In 1621 Christopher Pepper, the recorder of Richmond, complained bitterly to his friend Sir Henry Savile that the corporation had not waited ‘for my presence and advice in the election’ but had proceeded without him, despite knowing that he was due to return the following day.
Many gentlemen in search of borough seats lived at a considerable distance from the town they wished to represent, and for this reason they were often unable or unwilling to undertake the long journey to their chosen constituency. Anyone who expected to be elected in his absence could therefore not be sworn in as a freeman on the day of his election. More than one borough found this reluctance to attend among gentry applicants irksome. In March 1614 Hythe’s corporation informed its newly elected Members, Sir Lionel Cranfield and Sir Thomas Smythe, that it would delay sealing the return until both men had come down to take their oaths.
The early stages of an election represented the last opportunity for a side that sensed defeat to beat a hasty retreat. Sometimes a candidate decided simply not to proceed but, where one side or another had committed itself publicly to a contest, the only way to avoid personal humiliation was to substitute the previously intended candidate with another of less stature. On the morning of the Caernarvonshire election of December 1620, Sir John Wynn and his leading supporters held an impromptu council of war at which it was resolved to put up Griffith Jones of Castellmarch rather than Wynn’s eldest son Sir Richard, as had originally been intended.
Methods of voting
In theory at least, the side that won an election was the one that garnered the most votes. Among the upper echelons of English and Welsh society, however, the principle of one man, one vote was only reluctantly accepted. Members of the gentry often felt instinctively that their votes ought to count for more than those cast by the meaner sort.
In the early seventeenth century it was more important to decide who had won an election rather than the precise number that had voted for one side or another. Establishing precise numbers was only necessary when it was uncertain which candidates had the majority.
In an uncontested election, the assent of the voting community was given by general acclamation. Where seats were contested, the sheriff, mayor or bailiff would ask the voters to signify their wishes by means of the ‘cry’. This entailed the supporters of each side taking it in turns to shout out the name of their candidate as loudly as possible. The side that made the greatest noise would, if fair play were observed, be deemed the more numerous by the sheriff. During these proceedings, it was common for the supporters of each side to yell out the surname of their preferred candidate. At Gloucester in 1604, for instance, the supporters of John Jones reportedly exclaimed, ‘Jones, Jones for a burgess!’
As a method of resolving elections, the cry was not without its problems. Chanting often started before the presiding officer formally began proceedings, making it difficult for the sheriff, mayor or bailiff to make himself heard above the din. At Winchester in 1614 the sheriff of Hampshire tried to read the election writ promptly at eight o’clock, but for the next hour was unable to make himself heard above the incessant chanting of ‘Wallop, Wallop, Wallop’ coming from the supporters of Sir Henry Wallop.
Where the cry was plainly insufficient to determine the result, the presiding officer would try to settle matters by means of ‘the view’. In some places, such as Southwark, this was achieved by a show of hands, but elsewhere it was common for the voters to be physically divided into two or more opposing camps.
Like the cry, the view was an unsatisfactory method of resolving a contested election, not least because those entrusted with the task of deciding which was the larger size often failed to agree amongst themselves. In January 1624 the under-sheriff of Cambridgeshire, ‘assisted by some of the principal freeholders of both sides’, carried out two views of county’s voters, but ‘it was controverted and doubtful, upon either view, which troop had the greater number’.
In view of the insufficiency of both the cry and the view for determining the number and credentials of those voting, many members of the Commons’ election committee came to regard polling as indispensable. In 1624 the chairman of the committee, John Glanville, declared that it was ‘the only certain means rightly to decide the difference in case of opposition, especially when others are present besides the electors’, and in 1625 several members of the committee opined that a poll was ‘so necessary as no election in a case of competition could be without [it]’.
Where the returning officer decided to hold a poll, he was entitled to conduct it in any manner he saw fit, as there were few statutory procedures or official guidelines for him to follow. In two-Member constituencies, in which each voter had the right to cast two votes, the manner in which the poll was held might prove crucial in determining the outcome of an election. Should there be two polls, for instance, one for the first seat and another for the second, or should there be only a single poll, with the two highest scoring candidates securing victory?
Despite the lack of detailed guidance, certain characteristics seem to have been common to most polls. It was quite usual, for instance, for the sheriff to call for assistance. In 1625 Sir Thomas Hammon appointed no less than eight clerks to help him take the poll at the Kent county election, and in 1626 the sheriff of Dorset employed the services of both his under-sheriff and the clerk of the peace.
Except in constituencies with only a handful of voters, most formal headcounts were recorded in a poll book. This register, compiled by the sheriff and his assistants, was sometimes assembled with the help of schedules of voters that had previously been prepared by the candidates themselves.
The advantage of a poll was that it enabled the returning officer to determine with some accuracy the strength of the opposing sides, which neither the cry nor the view could do. Its chief drawback, however, was that, in the absence of a secret ballot, it undermined the principle of a free election, since it created a record of a man’s voting behaviour that could be used against him by his superiors. While many were perfectly willing to express their support for a particular candidate as part of a crowd, they might be rather less forthcoming when required to identify themselves individually. During the 1626 election campaign in Canterbury, Richard White told Thomas Scott that ‘many that gave a softly voice for us, so the aldermen did not perceive them’, would not have dared oppose the aldermen’s preferred candidates had they been required to vote openly at a poll, ‘though they had formerly whispered, as it were, a Scott’.
Faced with such intimidation, some voters declined to give their names when polled. However, this appeared to open the way for men to vote more than once in the same election, and for this reason the sheriff of Yorkshire threatened in 1628 to disqualify anyone who refused to state his name at the poll. Surprisingly, perhaps, the sheriff’s decision was condemned by the Commons. Determined to protect voters from the intimidation of their landlords or the misconduct of the sheriff, the House ruled that an elector need not give his name provided he swore that he owned freehold worth at least forty shillings a year, was resident in the county on the day the writ was issued and had not previously been polled. It brushed aside the sheriff’s objection that anonymous voting would result in fraud, asserting that a sheriff would naturally know who the voters were and whether they had already voted; if he did not he had bailiffs who could inform him. This was astonishing, for while a returning officer might reasonably be expected to know on sight all the electors in a small constituency, he could hardly hope to be acquainted with everyone in large constituencies such as Yorkshire, where there were around 7,000 voters in 1597. By seeking to protect the voters from intimidation, the Commons had unwittingly made it impossible for the sheriff to create a credible poll book.
Perhaps the only constituency in which the voter’s anonymity may have been preserved during polling was the University of Cambridge, which was enfranchised in 1604. Each voter was required ‘to give their suffrages in writing’ to the official known as the registary, who took ‘a perfect note of the numbers severally under his hand’.
Many polls – perhaps even a majority – were terminated prematurely.
The appeals process
Not every rejected candidate took defeat lying down. Where a candidate believed he had been wronged, three avenues were open to him. The first was to send an indenture of his own to Chancery. The second was to petition the House of Commons for redress. The third was to turn to the law courts.
Of these three possible courses of action, the third was the most well established. By an Act of 1445 aggrieved parties were entitled to sue the returning officer for damages plus their costs. Sheriffs were liable to pay £100, while mayors and bailiffs were subject to a penalty of £40, in addition to fines of equivalent value payable to the king.
Star Chamber maintained its popularity as a means of resolving election disputes right up until the death of Elizabeth. Thereafter, however, the resort to this court virtually ceased. Under James only five election cases appeared before Star Chamber, and between 1625 and 1629 there were none apart from a single lawsuit that had more to do with the behaviour of one of the candidates and his supporters than with the outcome of the election.
Perhaps the main reason that Star Chamber fell largely into disuse was that it no longer had jurisdiction in election cases. As a result of James’s ruling in respect of the 1604 Buckinghamshire election, the Commons established for itself the sole right to determine the validity of election returns. In so doing, it not only inflicted a defeat on Chancery but also called into question the role previously played by Star Chamber. The first to notice publicly the implications for Star Chamber of the 1604 ruling was Sir William Beecher. In 1614 Beecher complained to the Commons that Sir Henry Wallop had appealed to Star Chamber rather than the House for redress against the sheriff of Hampshire.
Since most aggrieved candidates no longer felt able to turn to Star Chamber for redress, they had either to submit indentures of their own to Chancery or appeal to the Commons. Either way might prove more satisfactory than legal action, for whereas Star Chamber was capable only of imposing fines on malefactors, the Commons could unseat those whom it had considered as having been falsely returned.
The principal advantage of sending in a second return was that, in general, the House automatically withheld membership from those named on rival indentures until it had been established which return was valid.
Petitions regarding disputed elections were heard by the Commons’ election committee, the committee for privileges and returns, which reported its findings to the House. Unless the Commons ruled otherwise, the committee dealt with each petition in the order in which it was received.
From at least 1624 the House set the time allowed for challenging returns to about two weeks.
There was no guarantee that the privileges committee would ever consider a petition even if it was submitted in good time, and often many of those that it discussed were left unresolved when the Parliament ended. Thus while the Commons settled five election disputes in 1626 it left at least four others undecided at the dissolution.
Perhaps the main reason for the committee’s poor track record is that other business tended to take priority. Even though most election petitions were still pending when the Commons reassembled at Oxford in August 1625, the House instructed that they be put on hold, presumably to enable Members to discuss war supply and the duke of Buckingham.
Whenever the committee reported to the House its chairman was expected to provide a detailed summary of its recommendations. On reporting the findings of the election committee in the case of the 1624 Norfolk election ‘in general terms, without relating the case particularly’, John Glanville was criticized by Sir Edward Coke and Sir Edward Wardour, who declared ‘that the House must not be carried with an implicit faith’. When Glanville explained that ‘he was so commanded by the committee’, Sir Thomas Hoby retorted that ‘this is the first case wherein particulars are forbidden to be recited’.
In theory the Commons’ election committee took a balanced and impartial view of each case before it. However, according to Sir Roger Twysden, who represented Winchelsea in 1625 and 1626 and Kent during the Short Parliament, the committee acquired the nickname ‘the committee of affections’. Indeed, Twysden himself had heard some of his fellow Members ‘excuse some partiality used in that place’ on the grounds that it was the only place in the House that ‘one friend could do another pleasure in’.
It seems to have been normal for the committee to defer to the House if it wished to summon witnesses.
Evidence provided by witnesses had to be given in person. In 1624 the privileges committee rejected more than sixty written witness statements in the form of affidavits sworn before masters in Chancery following the disputed Cambridgeshire election. This was partly because such documents were not the unvarnished testimony of witnesses but the product of careful drafting by counsel acting for each side. It was also because written evidence was not capable of cross-examination, unlike oral testimony, which afforded the committee the opportunity to watch the witness closely for those ‘words, actions, gestures’ which ‘discover much’.
Although the committee was reluctant to accept written sworn statements, many petitioners seem to have been keen to provide it with lists of voters who were willing to swear on oath if need be that their voices had been ignored. Following the 1625 Kent election, for example, at least two such certificates were prepared by the defeated candidates, Sir Edwin Sandys and Edward Scott.
The extent to which the Commons’ election committee provided a satisfactory means of redress for those who had been cheated of victory by unscrupulous sheriffs or ruthless rivals is unclear. What is certain is that the committee’s activities took up much valuable parliamentary time. In addition to the three afternoons a week its members were kept from the chamber, the committee’s reports to the House were often long and time-consuming. On the first full day of Commons’ business in 1610, at least one Member expressed frustration at the fact that the House was debating Sir George More’s report on elections rather than devoting its time to more important matters: ‘not to spend time, but to enter into the business for which His Majesty hath called [us and] the country hath sent us’.
Given the unwillingness of the Commons to surrender its rights to Chancery, the only way to reduce the amount of time spent on disputed elections was to ensure, by means of fresh legislation, that such quarrels arose less often. Among those who clearly grasped this point was Edward Alford. In May 1621 Alford called for the House to draft an elections bill in order to ‘free and ease us of these infinite examinations and causes of that nature every Parliament’.