Elections
The date of every election, and the names of the Member or Members returned, in the order in which they were placed by the returning officer,
Polling figures have been derived from a variety of sources: pollbooks, petitions to Parliament and reports from the committee of privileges and elections, contemporary correspondence, and notices in the press or in newsletters. In addition, we have been able to use the notebooks of W.W. Bean, some of whose information, regarding the names of defeated candidates, and totals of votes cast, seems to have been derived from materials no longer extant. For English and Welsh constituencies, the most important and reliable evidence comes from pollbooks, especially after the passage of the Act of 1696 (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25), which required sheriffs to preserve a copy of the polling list after each county election, though not all surviving examples are complete, and where there is more than one pollbook for an election, the figures do not always agree. A Handlist of British Parliamentary Poll Books ed. Sims (Leicester Univ. Hist. Dept., Occasional Publn. no. 4, 1984), gives bibliographical details of printed pollbooks (the first of which arose from the Essex election of 1694), many of them held in the library of the University of London Institute of Historical Research. J. Gibson and C. Rogers, Poll Books c. 1696-1872: A Directory of Holdings in Great Britain (1994), includes manuscript pollbooks as well, and is more up-to-date, but still not comprehensive. It is unclear whether, in the aftermath of the Union, the Act of 1696 was taken to apply to Scotland. At any rate, there are no published pollbooks for Scottish constituencies until 1790, and in this period the only surviving lists of voters are to be found in the private papers of candidates and their principal supporters, evidently compiled to help with canvassing, as in Peeblesshire in 1712 and Edinburghshire in 1713. Compensation can be found, however, in the relative abundance of electoral court minutes, concentrated in the class of sheriff court records in the National Archives of Scotland (formerly the Scottish Record Office), and scattered in some family muniments. As far as county elections are concerned, the minutes often list the ‘barons’ present, and the votes cast. Even where they do not, it is sometimes possible to reconstruct the dimensions of the poll from the evidence of objections laid against individual voters.
Genealogy
Of the 1,982 Members for whom biographical articles have been supplied in these volumes of the History, no less than 1,017 are already served by published biographies in the 1660-90 and 1715-54 sections. Many of the remainder have also been identified (not always correctly) in the large number of works on local parliamentary representation published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by scholars like Rev. A.B. Beaven, W.W. Bean, W.D. Pink, and W.R. Williams. The most wide-ranging are Bean’s Parliamentary History of the Six Northern Counties of England (1890), and Williams’s Parliamentary History of Wales (1895). In addition, Williams compiled parliamentary histories for Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, and Worcestershire, and Pink and Beaven for Lancashire.
In most cases, further research into the family background of Members has taken as its starting point the standard genealogical sources: The Complete Peerage and Complete Baronetage, Burke’s History of the Commoners, and the various editions of the Landed Gentry and Landed Gentry of Ireland, Douglas’s Scots Peerage, and Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland. To lead us to the appropriate entries in heraldic visitations, and to relevant materials in family and local histories, and periodicals devoted to genealogy, we have followed the indications given in G.W. Marshall, The Genealogist’s Guide ... (1903); A Genealogical Guide ... comp. J.B. Whitmore (1953); and their more recent supplement, G.B. Barrow and A.J. Camp, The Genealogist’s Guide ... (1977).
As far as practicable, efforts have been made to take account of such primary genealogical sources as funerary monuments, wills, parish registers, and allegations for marriage licences. Many monumental inscriptions are already transcribed by local and family historians; where possible, others have been scrutinized in situ. In general, we have confined our examination of unpublished wills to those proved in the prerogative court of Canterbury (PCC), which are available at the Public Record Office, though other church court records have also been used, notably those of the archdiocese of York (at the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research), and the dioceses of London (at the Essex RO), and Norwich (at the Norfolk and Norwich RO). Many Irish wills, together with other classes of public records, were destroyed in the fire at the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922, but those deposited in the registry of deeds (after 1708), have been calendared in P.B. Eustace, Registry of Deeds Dublin, Abstracts of Wills (Irish mss Comm. 1954-6). Parish registers have been consulted as and where appropriate: we have made use of published registers for London and Middlesex, and for such English counties as Lancashire and Shropshire;
Education
Editions of admissions registers have been published for most of the great English public schools, and for some grammar schools. Particular use has been made of the following: for Charterhouse, Alumni Carthusiani ed. B. Marsh and F.A. Crisp (1913); for Eton, the Eton College Register, the volume covering 1441-1698 edited by Sir W. Sterry (1943), and for 1698-1753 edited by R.A. Austen-Leigh (1927); for Merchant Taylors’, Mrs E.P. Hart’s edition of the Merchant Taylors’ School Register 1561-1934 (1936); for Rugby, the first volume of the Rugby School Register, revised by G.A. Solly (1933); for St. Paul’s, Sir M. McDonnell, Registers of St. Paul’s School, 1509-1748 (1977); for Westminster, J. Welch, Alumni Westmonasterienses (1852), and G.F. Russell Barker and A.H. Stenning, The Record of Old Westminsters (1928); for Shrewsbury the school’s unpublished records; and for the grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds, the Bury St. Edmunds Grammar School List 1550-1900 (Suffolk Green Bks. xiii. 1908). In most cases, attendance at a Dissenting academy can be documented only from private papers, or from other biographical sources relating to particular individuals. An exception to this rule is the school run by Thomas Triplett at Hayes in Middlesex, a number of whose pupils were listed in Triplett’s will (PCC 105 Penn). The locations of the academies themselves have been identified in I. Parker, Dissenting Academies in England ... (1914), pp. 137-42. In Ireland, the only school with an accessible register of admissions is Kilkenny: an edition was published by T.U. Sadleir, in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, liv. (1924), pp. 55-67, 152-69, with a supplement by W.E.J. Dobbs in ibid. lxxvi. (1946), pp. 133-42.
Details of education at Cambridge and Oxford universities has been taken from J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 1, to 1751 (1922-7), and J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses 1500-1714 (1892), supplemented, where possible, by the published records of individual colleges. For Trinity, Dublin, we have relied on G.D. Burtchaell and T.U. Sadleir, Alumni Dublinenses (1935); for Aberdeen, Fasti Aberdonenses (Spalding Club, 1854), and P.J. Anderson’s later editions of the registers of King’s and Marischal Colleges, Officers and Graduates of ... King’s College (New Spalding Club, 1893), and Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis (New Spalding Club, 1889); and for Glasgow, Records of Glasgow University 1450-1727 ed. C. Innes (Maitland Club, lxxii. 1854). The many Scots, and less numerous Englishmen, who spent time at Dutch universities have been identified from the following published lists: for Franeker, the first volume of Album Studiorum Academiae Franekerensis (1585-1811, 1816-44) ed. S.J. Fockema Andreae and Th.J. Meijer, ‘Naamlijst der Studenten’ (1968); for Leiden, Album Studiosorum Academiae Lugduno-Batavae MDLXXV-MDCCLXXV (n.d.), supplemented by E. Pearce, Index to English Speaking Students ... at Leyden University (1883), and R.W. Innes Smith, English-Speaking Students of Medicine at the University of Leyden (1932); and for Utrecht, Album Studiosorum Academiae Rheno-Trajectinae 1636-1886 (1886). The presence of English and Scottish students at the University of Padua is recorded in H.F. Brown, ‘Inglesi e Scozzesi all’ Universita di Padova, 1618-1765’, in Monografie Storiche sullo Studio di Padova (1922), pp. 137-213.
With the exception of the Inner Temple (from whose unpublished records we have been furnished with dates of admission), each of the inns of court has published its registers: J. Foster, Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn (1889); Records of Lincoln’s Inn: Admissions (1896); and H.A.C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the ... Middle Temple (1949). The further progress of a Member’s legal education, including the date of any call to the bar, and details of office-holding within an inn, can be traced in Records of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books ... ed. W.P. Baildon (1894-1968); F. A. Inderwick, A Calendar of the Inner Temple Records (1896-1936); and C.H. Hopwood, Middle Temple Records (1903-5). Of the several inns of chancery only the register of Barnard’s Inn has been published: The Admissions Registers of Barnard’s Inn 1620-1869 ed. C.W. Brooks (Selden Soc., 1995). Calls to the Irish bar, as represented by entry to King’s Inns in Dublin, are recorded in E. Keane and P.B. Eustace, Kings’ Inns Admission Papers 1607-1867 (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1982), while admissions to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh have been taken from Sir F.J. Grant, The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland 1532-1943 (Scottish Rec. Soc. lxxvi. 1944). Details of medical education, which would be relevant to only a handful of Members, are conveniently gathered in P.J. and R.V. Wallis, Eighteenth Century Medics (1988).
Finally, evidence for foreign travel has been derived from a variety of sources, often from the personal or family archives. In a minority of cases, of whom William Brockman,
Office-Holding
Two contemporary reference-works, ancestors of the almanacs more familiar from the later 18th century, provide handy lists of the office-holders in central government, some of the more important places in local government, and the governing personnel of major charitable corporations and chartered companies: Guy Miège’s The New State of England ... (edns. in 1691, 1701, and 1702), continued as The Present State of Great Britain ... (1707); and Edward Chamberlayne’s Angliae Notitia: or, the Present State of England ... (edns. in 1692, 1694, 1700), continued after his death by his son John (edns. in 1704 and 1707), and, following the Anglo-Scottish Union, with a change of name to Magnae Britanniae Notitia: or the Present State of Great-Britain ... (edns. in 1708 and 1710). ‘Black lists’ of ‘placemen’ and pensioners were also an important feature of political propaganda in this period. Two such printed lists have survived, from 1698 and 1705, and several manuscript lists from the years 1692-4. In addition, Richard Chandler’s edition of parliamentary debates, published in 1742-4, includes lists of placemen from 1713 and 1715.
There are general listings of office-holders under the crown in standard reference works such as Beatson’s Political Index (1806) and Haydn’s Book of Dignities (1894). Far more detailed and reliable, however, are the volumes in the series Office-Holders in Modern Britain, compiled for the Institute of Historical Research by Sir J. Sainty and others (12 vols. so far, 1972-), which cover the Treasury (Volume 1), Board of Trade (2), the office of the Secretaries of State (3), Admiralty (4), Navy Board (7) and Royal Household (11-12). Sainty has also listed Exchequer officials in Officers of the Exchequer (List and Index Soc. sp. ser. xviii. 1983), judges in The Judges of England 1272-1990 (Selden Soc., supp. ser. x. 1993), and other law officers in A List of English Law Officers and King’s Counsel … (Selden Soc. supp. ser. vii. 1987). In addition, we have taken information on accredited diplomatic representatives from Gary M. Bell, A Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives 1509-1688 (R. Hist. Soc. 1990), and D.B. Horn (ed.), British Diplomatic Representatives (Camden 3rd ser. xlvi. 1932); on army commissions from the compilations of Sir Charles Dalton;
Commissions under the great seal of Scotland are conveniently listed in a typescript index available in the National Archives of Scotland, and biographical information on the lords of session in particular is given in G. Brunton and D. Haig, An Historical Account of the Senators of the College of Justice ... (1832). Irish patents were recorded in R. Lascelles, Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniae ... (1824), an index to which was published in 1960.
Offices in local government have been recorded only sparingly. For county sheriffs for England and Wales we have relied on the list originally published by the Public Record Office in 1898 (Lists and Indexes, ix). Service on the commission of the peace and other instruments of county government has been omitted from the preliminary paragraphs of the biographies, though particular appointments and dismissals that have a political significance are discussed in the text. For English and Welsh j.p.s we have drawn heavily on the published work of Dr L.K.J. Glassey, notably his Politics and the Appointment of Justices of the Peace 1675-1720 (1979). In addition, Dr Glassey deposited with the History detailed manuscript notes on Members of Parliament added to or removed from the commission in 1696-7, 1700-1, and 1710-14, and Professor Norma J. Landau provided lists of j.p.s for Kent.
Among other public corporations, the commissioners for the Royal Hospital at Greenwich are listed in J. Cooke and J. Maule, An Historical Account of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (1789); elder brethren of Trinity House in The Corporation of Trinity House ... comp. W.R. Chaplin ([1951]); the commissioners for Queen Anne’s bounty in A. Savidge, The Foundation and Early Years of Queen Anne’s Bounty ... (1955); the commissioners for the 50 new churches in London, established in 1711, in the catalogue of commissioners’ papers made by E.G.W. Bill and the calendar of minute-books from 1711 to 1727 edited by M.H. Port;
In identifying the members of chartered trading companies we have benefited enormously from the generosity of various scholars, who have communicated information drawn from their own researches, in company and other records. For the East India trade, we have also made use of various manuscript lists of governors and committee-men of the Old Company, directors of the New, and managers for the united trade,
Parliamentary Career
The Commons Journals (volumes x-xvii of which cover this period) have settled by 1690 into their common 18th-century form; that is to say, they no longer include speeches, or the proceedings in committee, preserving only the order of business, votes taken and decisions made by the House, and papers presented. As far as the individual Member is concerned, the Journals record, inter alia, involvement in the presentation of petitions and the making of reports; tellerships (except for divisions in committee); and appointments to committees. This evidence should not be assumed to be utterly reliable. Occasional discrepancies can be found between the Journals and accounts set down by contemporary observers, in such matters as timetabling, or the total numbers voting on either side in divisions.
Other records of the ‘business’ of the House are to be found in private archives, in particular those belonging to Members of an active disposition, like William Brockman (MP Hythe 1690-5), the former Speaker Sir William Williams, 1st Bt. (MP Beaumaris 1695-8), and especially Robert Harley (MP New Radnor 1690-1711), whose parliamentary papers include notes, drafts of bills and speeches, copies of official documents laid before the House, and even committee lists.
There are only eight full division-lists for this period, that is to say lists which purport to give a comprehensive list of both sides of a division: those on fixing the price of guineas, and on the attainder of Sir John Fenwick+, in 1696; the Abjuration in 1703; the ‘Tack’ of the conformity bill to the land tax bill in 1704; the choice of a Speaker in 1705; the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell in 1710; the commerce bill in 1713; and the expulsion of Richard Steele* in 1714.
A further ten lists give only one side of a division, or the voting record of one element among the Commons Membership, placemen for example, or Scottish Members: the lists on the disbanding bill in 1699; the motion in 1702 to vindicate the proceedings of the Commons on the impeachments; the ‘place clause’ of the regency bill, and two votes in committee on the Bewdley election in 1706; the general naturalization bill of 1709; the ‘No Peace without Spain’ amendment to the Address in 1711; the Scottish toleration bill of 1712; the French wines duty bill of 1713, and the schism bill in 1714. Of these, only the lists on the disbanding bill, the impeachments, and the regency bill, were circulated as ‘black lists’. In addition, a manuscript list dating from February 1701 has tentatively been identified as a division list on the motion to agree with the committee of supply in continuing the ‘Great Mortgage’.
Except for those specific instances (admittedly few and far between) in which the evidence of a list is directly contradicted by other sources, the accuracy of division-lists is impossible to gauge. As a rule published lists are less reliable than those prepared for private consumption, because of the temptation implicit in the very motives of their compilers. But in fact we know little of the processes involved in drawing up lists, and cannot easily estimate the risk of error. Members themselves should have been the only persons involved in noting names, since the rules of the House insisted that the chamber and lobby be cleared before telling began. (An exception here would be divisions in the committee of privileges, which seem to have been attended by large numbers of ‘strangers’.
We all know it is impossible for any man, though a Member of the House, to be able to give an exact list. This or that Member, or several together, concerting and recollecting, may have a great many, but I appeal to the world, whether any man in England, nay, though he were one of them appointed for telling noses, could charge his memory with 134 names at one view, and be able to be positive of his men.
Fortunately, there are other kinds of parliamentary lists, a majority indeed of those surviving from this period, for whose reliability a stronger case may be made: the so-called ‘management lists’, comprising forecasts, ‘lobbying lists’, calculations of support made by or for parliamentary managers, and assessments of the political complexion of the House, often constructed in the aftermath of a general election. Specific divisions for which we have forecasts include the council of trade in 1696, the disbanding bill in 1698/9, the ‘Scotch Plot’ in 1703, and the ‘Tack’ in 1704. The advantage of these ‘management ’lists is that they usually reflect the general disposition of Members, as perceived by their parliamentary colleagues, rather than a vote on a specific issue. Some may have been compiled by a single hand; others, as has been shown conclusively in the forecasts of the voting intentions over the council of trade and the ‘Tack’, represent the work of a team of observers (and possibly lobbyists), guided in both instances by Robert Harley.
In contrast to the abundance of parliamentary lists (55 in all, excluding lists of office-holders and pensioners), the period 1690-1715 is poorly served with sources for parliamentary debates.
The outstanding parliamentary diarist after the Revolution was the inveterate annalist and compiler Narcissus Luttrell (MP Saltash 1691-5), whose `abstracts’ of the parliamentary sessions of 1691-3 may originally have been part of a much longer project, the remaining volumes of which are now lost.
Whatever the manner of presentation, each of these diarists clearly based his work on notes taken in the House (in Grey’s case, at least, on notes he had not always taken himself
Individual speeches were preserved by the authors themselves, and sometimes by their listeners. Cocks and the Yorkshire baronet Sir Arthur Kaye, 3rd Bt. (again both new Members) were two parliamentary diarists who began by simply recording their own speeches (including, in Cocks’s case, speeches which the House had been prevented, by ill fortune or the malice of his enemies, from actually hearing), Cocks eventually showed rather more interest than Kaye in extending the benefit of immortality to his parliamentary colleagues. Harley’s papers also contain copies of many of his own contributions, though these were probably drafts. A number of individual speeches appeared in print, or circulated in manuscript. Versions of (Sir) Simon Harcourt’s I* oration in his own defence at the bar of the House in 1709, over the Abingdon election, may be found in various archives; and the same is true of Sir John Pakington’s (4th Bt.*) tirade in 1703 against occasional conformists. Pakington, a man keenly aware of the effect of printed propaganda (which he employed in his local electoral feud with Bishop Lloyd of Worcester) may well have been responsible for securing the publication of the more important or inflammatory of his own speeches;
In a few cases contemporary pamphlets gave lengthy accounts of parliamentary proceedings, including speeches by individual Members. The most substantial were the debates on the inquiries into corruption in 1694-5;
Unlike pamphleteers, who could publish their work anonymously, and thus afford themselves some protection from the wrath of the Commons, newspaper journalists and proprietors were effectively deterred from committing any breach of parliamentary privilege. The writers of newsletters were a little bolder—though not everyone was as brave as the irrepressible Tory John Dyer—and did make some mention of Commons proceedings.
Finally, we can turn to individual letter-writers. The various diplomatic representatives present in England during this period naturally returned parliamentary information in their reports. The most consistently valuable are those of the Prussian residents, Friedrich and Louis-Frederic Bonet,
Secondary Works
The historiography of late 17th- and early-18th-century Britain was transformed in 1967 by the publication of three books: J.H. Plumb’s Ford Lectures, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725; P.G.M. Dickson’s magisterial account of The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756; and above all Geoffrey Holmes’s monumental study, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rightly described by the late J.P. Kenyon ‘an instant classic’ and ‘one of the most significant products of post-war historical scholarship’.
Plumb’s lectures not only popularized a concept—the subsiding of the violence and instability which had marked 17th-century politics and the rise of the ‘adamantine’ oligarchy commonly associated with Walpolean management—which continues to stimulate debate among historians;
It was necessary in 1967 to re-affirm the significance in early 18th-century English politics of the Whig and Tory parties because of the publication 11 years previously of Professor R.R. Walcott’s ultra-revisionist English Politics in the Early 18th Century, which had attempted to apply to the Parliaments of 1701-14 not only the prosopographical techniques employed, but also the conclusions reached, by Sir Lewis Namier in his studies of the House of Commons in the 1760s. Hitherto, historians like G.M. Trevelyan and Sir Keith Feiling had followed their sources in writing of a political system dominated by a great conflict of parties.
Criticisms of Walcott’s thesis had already appeared before 1967, but had been restricted to articles and unpublished theses.
Holmes’s work continues to occupy pride of place as the standard account of the English (and Welsh) political system in the reign of Queen Anne. Some scholars have attempted to modify elements of his analysis, in relation to the composition and influence of Country ideology,
In contrast to the virtual consensus which has prevailed among historians as to the working of the party system after 1701, the politics of the preceding reign have been the subject of vigorous debate.
All the above are, of course, works of political history, treating Parliament first and foremost as an arena of political combination and conflict. Much less has been written on the House of Commons as an institution. O.C. Williams, The Clerical Organization of the House of Commons 1661-1850 (1954) still offers the only extensive treatment of the administrative history of the House, and the only detailed study of procedural changes, by Kathryn Ellis, remains unpublished.
In British Politics in the Age of Anne Holmes deliberately allotted less of his time to parliamentary elections, and indeed to local politics in general, than to events at the centre, referring his readers instead to ‘the invaluable work of W.A. Speck on the constituencies in Anne’s reign’.
Understanding of the evolution of political ideology after 1689 has also advanced considerably in the past three decades, largely (though not exclusively) because of the efforts of three scholars: J.G.A. Pocock, in tracing the changes in ‘civic humanist’ discourse, as ‘old Whiggism’ came to terms with the new world of commerce ushered in by the Glorious Revolution;
The wider social and economic context of politics is dominated by the consequences of the great continental wars of 1689-97 and 1702-13, which imposed intolerable strains on the economies of the British Isles, and spawned new interest-groups—in public finance and public administration—whose obvious prosperity and power brought them into conflict with the traditional landed élite. Nothing has surpassed P.G.M. Dickson’s account of the ‘revolution’ in public credit that followed the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, and the adoption of a system of deficit financing,
Full biographies are available of many of the major personalities of the period, though these vary in quality. The most comprehensive life of King William III is by S.B. Baxter, while Edward Gregg’s Queen Anne is unlikely to be bettered.