CONSTITUENCIES AND ELECTIONS
The English Counties
The 40 English counties each returned two Members, on the ancient freeholder franchise, restricted by the Forty-Shilling Freeholder Act of 1430 (8 Hen. VI, c. 7) to those in possession of freehold property valued at 40s. p.a. Further refinement in an Act of 1712 (10 Anne, c. 31), to prevent fraudulent conveyancing of freeholds for the purposes of creating voting rights, insisted that the relevant freehold be ‘assessed to the public taxes, church rates and parish duties in such proportion as other lands or tenements of 40s. p.a. within the same parish or township’.
In practice the statutory definition extended beyond land held in fee simple. After the Restoration clergymen had been admitted to vote by virtue of property attached to ecclesiastical benefices (rents, glebe, tithes, etc.), and the same applied to certain legal appointments granted under a life patent.
Copyholders should not have voted, though some corrupt or ill-informed sheriffs may have permitted them to do so. The abuse was not yet as extensive as it was to become by the mid-18th century, when it was felt necessary to reinforce copyholders’ disqualification by statute (31 Geo. II, c. 14), but there are hints that, in the political excitement engendered by party conflict, some copyholders themselves entertained ambitions of voting, or resented their exclusion. The Lancashire landowner Peter Legh† took legal advice in 1710 on this point on behalf of some his copyhold tenants, the argument being that ‘as they have burdens laid upon ’em they should have advantages’. The response was discouraging: ‘though it is reasonable … yet I believe now voters are so increased in all counties, that the increase gives some occasion for provisions people will not hear of adding numbers.’
County electorates were not of course composed exclusively of country-dwellers. It was vital to canvass as thoroughly in the market towns as in the rural hundreds, especially in more populous counties like Cheshire,
In the home counties, a significant proportion of voters might well be resident in London or its environs. Urban growth had already swallowed up villages in the eastern parts of Middlesex, although the remaining rural inhabitants still formed the overwhelming majority of voters. Surrey was also affected by creeping development, in Southwark and the parishes along the south bank of the Thames, although these metropolitan offshoots were at some distance from Guildford, where elections were held. Further afield, candidates in Essex and Hertfordshire canvassed for votes in the capital, and in the case of Essex placed notices in newspapers informing Londoners where to rendezvous if they wished to ride en masse to the poll. The accounts of electoral expenses sustained by Lords Cheyne (Hon. William*) and Fermanagh (John Verney*) as Tory candidates for Buckinghamshire in 1713 included the cost of a pre-election entertainment at ‘Leicester House’, and provision for bringing freeholders to the poll from Chelsea, Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensington, Moorfields, Mortlake, Putney, Southwark, and Spitalfields, together with ‘several freeholders in the Guards and Oxford’s horse’.
The problem of non-resident voters, or indeed voters with freehold qualifications in several counties, was not confined to London. Throughout the country there was canvassing across shire boundaries. Thus Oxfordshire freeholders were to be found in the adjacent counties of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire; Derbyshire voters were sought as far away as Leicester, Lichfield, and Nottingham;
Various attempts have been made to calculate the size of the electorate in 17th- and 18th-century England, often in relation to contemporary estimates (and historians’ deductions) of the number of adult males in the population at large, with a view to determining the extent to which the `unreformed’ Parliament was (to modern eyes) ‘representative of the people’.
The relationship of these ‘voterates’ to the notional ‘electorate’ of a county is not at all clear. Properly speaking, some voters may not have belonged to the ‘electorate’ at all, as defined in law. Defeated candidates often alleged corrupt practice, the refusal of qualified voters on their own side, and the polling of unqualified voters for their opponents. Even assuming that all voters were properly qualified, the voterate in any one election may well represent only a fraction of those eligible to vote. Close investigation and comparison of pollbooks seems to indicate a high ‘turnover’ of voters between elections, which must be attributable, at least in part, to inconsistencies of ‘turnout’. Within a short period a county voterate could be transformed. For example, only 54% of those who voted in the second general election of 1701 in Westmorland were polled again a few months later in the general election of 1702. In Cheshire the figure for the same two elections was only slightly higher, at 56%, while in Kent no more than 53% of voters in the last general election of Queen Anne’s reign appeared in the first election under the Hanoverians.
Serious practical difficulties also arise in the calculation of the size of a `voterate’ from polling figures alone, because of the nature of elections in double-Member constituencies. Even in a straightforward contest between two pairs of candidates not all freeholders would vote a ‘straight’ party ticket. Some cross-voting, or ‘split’-voting, would be inevitable, even in constituencies polarized by party interests. Pollbook analysis for the counties of Buckinghamshire and Westmorland in the years after 1701 shows an already low percentage of ‘split’ votes declining at every election but never disappearing completely.
Pollbooks do of course enable a very precise calculation of the ‘voterate’, but these are snapshots, and, in any case, only for a minority of counties, 16 in all, are there complete pollbooks covering more than one election in this period.
Three counties have not provided any useful polling figures for this period: Dorset, whose Members were always returned without opposition; Staffordshire, in which only two contests occurred, but no voting totals survive; and Devon, which went to the polls only once, at a by-election. Devon’s by-election voterate of just over 2,000 seems to have been on a very low turnout: evidence suggests that the number of qualified electors was probably closer to the `eight or nine thousand freeholders’ which the county was reported to contain in 1671.
Accepting these deficiencies in the available figures, some generalizations may be attempted, using the highest minimum ‘voterate’ recorded for each county. Naturally the biggest county voterate belonged to Yorkshire, the county with by far the largest geographical area, in which at least 7,700 freeholders were polled in 1708, out of an electorate which has been estimated at anywhere between 12,000 and 20,000.
|
under 1,000 voters: |
1 (5.4%) |
|
1,000-3,500: |
18 (45.9%) |
|
over 3,500: |
18 (48.6%) |
Subdividing the highest band (but still giving the percentage in relation to all constituencies, excluding the three for which no evidence is available) the figures are:
|
3,500-5,000 voters: |
10 (27.0%) |
|
over 5,000: |
8 (21.6%) |
A similar statistical exercise could not be undertaken for the 1660-1690 section of the History, since in as many as 18 of the counties no record of voting numbers was found for any election in that period.
|
under 1,000 voters: |
1 (2.5%) |
|
1,000-3,500: |
17 (42.5%) |
|
over 3,500: |
22 (55%) |
Subdividing the highest band (but still giving the percentage in relation to all constituencies) the figures are:
|
3,500-5,000 voters: |
11 (27.5%) |
|
over 5,000: |
11 (27.5%) |
In four of the counties for which information is available from 1660-1690, Durham, Lancashire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire, the voterate after 1690 failed to reach the numbers previously achieved. On the other hand in 17 counties the number of voters had increased (sometimes quite steeply): Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Dorset, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Leicestershire, Middlesex, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Suffolk, and Surrey. In Buckinghamshire an initial fall was followed by a sharp rise. The overall upward trend may be explained partly by a continuing devaluation in the 40s. freehold qualification, which admitted not merely substantial yeomen but some smaller farmers (despite the complacency with which constitutional pundits extolled the economic substance and social prestige of the 40s. freeholder),
Contemporary observers resorted to the most obvious and easily comprehensible explanation for this general growth in the voterate: corruption. Allegations of malpractice, which were a staple of election petitions, seem to have surfaced whenever the number of voters was abnormally high. ‘Two thousand one hundred used always to carry it for Suffolk’, wrote one Tory after the election of 1710, ‘and 600 single votes is the most that ever was known ... [The Whigs] had above 3,000; ’tis thought the county has not above 5,000 in it, and several stayed at home for fear of the smallpox.’ In Middlesex in 1705 Tories blamed their party’s defeat on the fact that ‘near 700 new voters’ had polled for their opponents. When the two Whig candidates lost the Cheshire election in 1702 they ‘declared they thought it impossible there should be so many freeholders’ in the county. But the record achieved on that occasion was itself exceeded three years later, when the Whigs recovered both seats, and it became the Tories’ turn to complain that their opponents had created ‘above 1,200 new votes’ (an accusation they repeated in 1710, even when victorious). A similar escalation occurred in Hertfordshire, where in 1705 ‘there were 450 more polled than ever was known at any former election’. Disgruntled Tories redoubled their own efforts at the 1708 election, and may have beaten the local Whigs at their own game, since the poll that year recorded an even higher number. It was not necessary to qualify new voters: in 1710 Kentish Whigs complained that some freeholders had voted repeatedly (as much as ten times) for the Tories; while in Middlesex in 1705 it was said that, by the deliberate negligence of the sheriff, ‘several hundred’ Quakers had been permitted to vote without having the oaths tendered to them.. But the more secure method, less vulnerable to challenge on petition, was to manufacture freeholds pro tem. The Hertfordshire Tories protested in 1705 against the ‘great [many] freeholders made by the opposite party by collusion on purpose to vote for this election’. There is indeed direct evidence to suggest that this was common practice. Lord Nottingham candidly reassured his son, a prospective candidate for Rutland in 1710, that in response to the creation of more than 100 new freeholders by Whig interests during the previous year, he had himself made 300 in the week prior to the election, and Lord Exeter and other friends a further 50, all of which would make the election safe.
The question as to whether voters in county elections were able to exercise their own independent judgment, or were obliged to follow the wishes of landlords or other social superiors, raises wider issues relating to the ‘deferential’ or ‘participatory’ nature of early 18th-century politics, to which some attention will be given in the sections of this survey dealing with elements common to the electoral system as a whole. However, the debate among historians has tended to focus on the behaviour of county voters, and to be conducted by means of psephological studies of individual shires. It has been relatively easy to establish that a substantial minority of voters would change sides from one election to the next, a phenomenon interpreted by some as proof of the existence of a ‘floating vote’,
In other respects, certainly, county elections were dominated by the gentry. The candidates themselves were drawn from an exclusive social group. Even before the Landed Qualification Act of 1711 (9 Anne, c.5), which insisted that eligibility for election as a knight of the shire be dependent upon the possession of an estate ‘freehold or copyhold for ... life’, yielding an annual income of £500, it was an unwritten convention that a candidate be a substantial landowner within the county in which he was standing for election. Moreover, it was assumed that the broader a man’s acres, the more suitable he was as a candidate. One observer remarked, of Oxfordshire that ‘’tis thought £6,000 per annum and £40,000 in specie will ... very powerfully recommend a resident country gentleman to freeholders’. Conversely, it was a serious disadvantage to be in any way an outsider, as Henry St. John II* discovered in 1710, when he reported that his opponent in Berkshire, Richard Neville* ‘takes all possible advantage of my absence ... He tells the freeholders that I am a stranger, not known in the country, and such sort of stuff.’
In practice, the topography of some counties restricted participation in elections to those landowners whose seats lay close to the place of election. Gentry from more marginal areas might well decide to settle for a comfortable borough and ignore the prestigious but difficult county seats. Thus the Walpoles, whose ancestral estate lay far in the west of Norfolk, generally looked to the neighbouring town of King’s Lynn and not to the county election in Norwich, except, that is, in the strained political circumstances of 1710, when Robert (II*) did stand for knight of the shire and was soundly beaten. Where the county town itself was not centrally located, the representation might well be skewed towards the gentry residing in its vicinity, as the principals in Shropshire elections tended to be drawn from the northern parts of the shire. As a result, taking the country as a whole, the pool of candidates in county elections was remarkably small (defining as candidates those who proceeded as far as a poll). Only in Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent and Somerset were more than a dozen different families involved, Kent yielding the highest number, by some distance, with 20. The average for all English counties was slightly less then ten, with Cumberland contested between no more than five families in this period, and Devon and Northamptonshire six.
Not only were the candidates drawn overwhelmingly from the larger landowning families in a county, the decision as to who should and who should not stand was often restricted to the same ‘charmed circle’ (though the circumference would vary with the size of the county, and in Yorkshire in 1708 ‘vast numbers’ were said to have been involved in persuading one individual to put up). It was imperative that a candidate enjoy the backing of some of the more substantial county gentry, as Sir St. Andrew St. John, 2nd Bt.*, sought to proclaim in December 1701, when informing the voters in Northamptonshire that he was standing at the behest of ‘several gentlemen’. In the same way, withdrawal from a contest might require approval: in Norfolk in 1702 one of the outgoing Members, Sir John Holland, 2nd Bt.*, offered to step down ‘if the gentlemen who lately did me the honour to entrust me shall think it for the advantage of the county’.
The paramount importance of gentry opinion is clear from the comment of one Leicestershire MP to a prospective candidate at the by-election of 1711, that an opponent ‘will desist when he finds the gentlemen so entirely for you’.
The greater gentry would govern elections all the more effectively if they could establish a consensus of opinion among themselves.
Where general meetings remained popular and authoritative, county elections were seldom contested. But that system only held in a small number of counties: Staffordshire, in which only two out of 13 elections were contested in this period, Herefordshire (three out of 12), Monmouthshire (three out of 12), and Warwickshire (three out of 12). More typical was the Norfolk election of November 1701, in which the Tory, Sir Jacob Astley, 1st Bt.*, chose to ignore a communal decision which did not suit him, pressed ahead with his own candidacy against the two Whigs whom the majority of the gentry had selected, succeeded in drawing some moderate Tories to his side against their own better judgment, and forced a contest. An alternative method of avoiding open conflict was to come to some permanent arrangement by which the chief landed interests, or the political parties, either divided the seats between them, or established a rotation. Both were unusual in this period: Cumberland and Durham were the only counties in which an amicable division of the spoils was achieved,
Even where the spread of party politics destroyed unanimity and corrupted the institution of the county meeting, the traditional belief in consensus and in the authoritative sense of gentry opinion remained undiminished. When the young Lord Newport decided to stand for Shropshire in 1695 against Francis Herbert*, he justified his decision in the following terms, ‘that he is persuaded by the gentlemen of the country to oppose Mr Herbert ... for knight of the shire, who would thrust himself in against the general agreement of the rest of the gentlemen’.
I was not a little surprised to see several of your circular letters, that had gone about to secure an interest, without your taking the least notice to me thereof, as if you had lain under no engagement by your promise ... that nothing should be done therein without my concurrence and [that of] the rest of the gentlemen of the county.
At the apex of local landed society were the nobility. Most expected to play some part in county elections, and a number aspired to occupy a leading role.
In only a few counties was the resident nobility so weak, or the gentry so strong, that aristocratic influence could not be felt at all. Land in the metropolitan county of Middlesex was too valuable, and gentlemen’s seats and town residences too numerous in the environs of Westminster and along the Thames, to allow for the appearance of any recognizable electoral magnate, while across the river in Surrey the shire election was dominated not by a noble house but a great gentry family, the Onslows of Clandon. In Worcestershire aristocratic proprietors were mostly absentees, with the result that their function in elections was an ancillary one: not to make recommendations of their own but to give their help to existing candidates by a public endorsement, such as the Duke of Shrewsbury afforded his fellow Whig William Walsh* in 1698. Rivalry between the Whig interests of the Duke of Bolton (Charles Powlett I*) and Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley*) in Dorset meant that each cancelled out the other, with the result that the two county seats were controlled by the predominantly Tory gentlemen. A peculiar case was Northamptonshire, which contained several powerful noble families, but where the squirearchy predominated. Party loyalty was everything, with the Tories enjoying a virtual monopoly of the representation, and the earls of Sunderland, who headed the Whig interest, reduced to impotence. On the Tory side the 6th Earl of Exeter (John Cecil*, Lord Burghley), the most important single landowner, was marginalized by the concentration of his estates in the soke of Peterborough, remote from the place of election. The position of the third potential magnate, the Earl of Peterborough, lord lieutenant of the county, seems to have been undermined by his own political inconsistency and obvious opportunism.
In other counties the nobility suffered decisive blows to their influence during this period. What happened in Hertfordshire was in some respects typical: the body of the greater gentry, who were identified with one political party (in this case the Tories), effectively excluded a handful of aristocratic families who were of an opposing persuasion (in this case the Whigs). The root cause was dynastic collapse and a failure of aristocratic leadership. After the death in 1696 of Lord Capell (Sir Henry*), the task of leading the Hertfordshire Whigs passed first to the ineffectual lord lieutenant, the Earl of Essex, and eventually to the newly ennobled Lord Cowper (William*), who until 1710 enjoyed privileged access to government influence, as Lord Chancellor, but whose proprietorial influence was no greater than that of an ordinary squire. Leicestershire also witnessed the overthrow of the ascendancy of its Whig grandees, the Earls of Rutland and Stamford, by the combined force of the Tory gentlemen. Until 1701-2 Whiggery and aristocracy had prevailed, but thereafter the Tory gentry succeeded in emancipating themselves through the exploitation of anti-Dissenter prejudice and popular resentment at aristocratic dictation. In Norfolk, however, the process seems to have run in reverse. When the period opened, the great families who had dominated politics in the Restoration period were in eclipse or decline: Lord Yarmouth (Hon. William Paston†) had refused the oaths and was sinking under his debts; the Townshends were represented by a minor until Queen Anne’s reign; and the 7th Duke of Norfolk had only a residual interest in the county, made no figure in its politics, and was in any case succeeded by a Catholic. The principals in elections came from the ranks of the county gentry: the Astleys, Cooks, Hobarts, Hollands, and later on the Walpoles and Windhams. Eventually the 2nd Viscount Townshend came of age and began to retrieve his father’s authority in county affairs. In 1708 he even seemed to have established a primacy when his brother Roger was elected knight of the shire alongside Sir John Holland. ’Lord Townshend flourisheth much among us’, wrote Humphrey Prideaux, the dean of Norwich, ’for the whole county is absolutely at his beck, and he has got such an ascendant here by his courteous carriage that he may do anything among us what he will.’ But this was an illusion. Townshend served as figurehead rather than leader of the Norfolk Whigs, and his ‘ascendancy’ lasted no further than the next general election.
Even where aristocratic influence did flourish, it was not necessarily dominant. That Leviathan of the Welsh borders, the 2nd Duke of Beaufort, had to compete in Monmouthshire on the same level as the major gentry interests: Morgan of Tredegar and Williams of Llangibby. In other counties, like Staffordshire and Suffolk, the aristocracy were barely distinguishable from other great landed proprietors. In Essex a combination of Whig peers, Lords Fitzwalter, Grey, Manchester, Rivers, and Walden - again set against a Tory squirearchy—enjoyed a partial success, to the extent of being able to guarantee one seat for their party. Kent was similarly over-endowed with resident noblemen, including the Earls of Dorset, Leicester, Romney, Westmorland, and Winchilsea, and Lord Rockingham, in this case representing both sides of the party-political divide. All were active in elections, though no one peer had estates large enough to overawe his neighbours. The Kentish peerage usually became involved in elections in support of candidates nominated by the gentry. Certainly the electoral strength of individual peers could be impressive: in 1710 Lord Winchilsea was said to have arrived at the poll with some 1,000 freeholders. But the limitations of aristocratic influence were shown by the events of the 1713 election, when the two Whig candidates, Hon. Edward Watson and Hon. Mildmay Fane, offspring of Lords Rockingham and Westmorland respectively, were defeated by more than 650 votes. The situation was similar in Nottinghamshire. Although several peers were active in the politics of the county, including the Dukes of Newcastle (John Holles†) and Kingston (Evelyn Pierrepont*) on the Whig side, and Lords Lexington and Middleton (Sir Thomas Willoughby, 2nd Bt.*) among the Tories, neither party was overshadowed by its noble patrons. In contrast, the geographically smaller and less populous county of Huntingdonshire contained only two resident peers, and both of them among the grander members of the species, the earls of Manchester and Sandwich. Yet the gentry and freeholders were always sufficiently independent to prevent either magnate from turning social superiority into political control. Indeed, the earls of Sandwich seem to have participated as principals in county elections only intermittently, because of the mental incapacity of the 3rd Earl and the rivalry for control of the estate between his Tory Countess and his Whig trustees. But even when Sandwich’s heir came of age, and sought to exercise his family’s influence more directly by standing as a candidate himself, he made embarrassingly little headway. Manchester, lord lieutenant of the county throughout the period, was a more formidable presence and was often able to secure one seat for his nominee, though prolonged absences abroad reduced his effectiveness. Such resistance as there was to Manchester’s influence did not take the form of opposition to aristocratic interference, nor were partisan enmities in Huntingdonshire especially strong. Instead, what happened was a collective assertion of gentry opinion in favour of agreed candidates, one of the characteristics of elections in the county being the avoidance of conflict, with contests kept to a minimum. In other cases there can be no doubting aristocratic predominance. Sometimes the nobility appeared as leaders of local party political groupings: the earls of Bradford, for example, for the Whigs in Shropshire (against a Tory interest headed by a gentry family, the Kynastons); Lord Poulett for the Tories in Somerset. In Oxfordshire, a bastion of High Churchmanship, the earls of Abingdon saw themselves as the local standard-bearers of Toryism, manipulating county elections in a partnership by which they themselves nominated one Member, and the body of the gentry the other. The active leadership of the Russells, earls (later dukes) of Bedford was vital to the Whig interest in Bedfordshire, which rose with the power of the Bedfords, and declined sharply when the dukedom passed into a minority in 1712. Conversely, the electoral health of the Tories in the county remained poor until a revival in the fortunes of the Bruces, earls of Ailesbury. The Jacobite exile of the 2nd Earl (Thomas Bruce†) had disabled the family in local politics, and it was only when his son and heir, Charles, Lord Bruce*, took over management of the estate in 1705 that not only the Ailesbury interest but Toryism in Bedfordshire began to recover strength. In neighbouring Cambridgeshire the Russells again represented Whiggism, this time in the person of Edward Russell*, grandson of the 5th Earl of Bedford, who from 1695 onwards held the lord lieutenancy and in 1697 became Earl of Orford in his own right. In due course opposition to Orford’s hegemony arose among the Tory gentry, but this too was helped by the re-emergence of an aristocratic interest, belonging to Lord North and Grey, who replaced Orford as lord lieutenant in 1711.
It is not easy to differentiate between those peers who appeared to exercise a dominant influence over county elections in a party-political capacity, through the leadership of a local faction, and those whose ascendancy was more personal in nature. Lord Nottingham led the Tories in Rutland to take both seats in the 1713 general election, but interpreted the victory as his own. ‘It is manifest’, he wrote, in the most preening fashion, ‘that my interest in this little county is much the greatest, except my son’s who by his behaviour has gained their affections and is their darling.’ Similar examples would include Lord Wharton (Hon. Thomas*) in Buckinghamshire, of whom a Tory observed in 1708, ‘it is a melancholy story but a true one that now the Lord Wharton names both the knights of our county’, and successive Dukes of Bolton in Hampshire, despite the embarrassing rejection by the voters of the heir apparent to the title in the elections of 1698 and 1710.
Resistance to aristocratic influence was not uncommon, however. Sometimes it took a party-political form, the bulk of the gentry adhering to one party, the nobility to another, in which case the scenario was likely to possess a Trollopian predictability: the grandees Whig, the squirearchy Tory. Such was the division between the parties in Essex and Hertfordshire; in Cambridgeshire, where the Tory newswriter Dyer claimed that in 1710 ‘the body of the gentry appeared almost unanimously for the Tories’; and in Suffolk, whose Tory activists in 1705 made great play with the fact that ‘the body of all the chief gentry and most reputable yeomanry of the county’ attended the Tory candidates to the poll, while a ‘scoundrel medley’ accompanied their opponents, ‘not ... three gentlemen to head that herd’, the three in question being the Duke of Grafton, Lord Cornwallis, and the newly ennobled Lord Hervey (John*).
I can’t but observe ... that though we have now twice together carried it in this county for the Church by a very great majority ... yet all our temporal peers, except Thanet and Sussex (for Winchilsea does not concern himself with the public) and the very great majority of our richest gentlemen are Whigs: in so much that, at a general rendezvous of both parties at last assizes, when both sides was to nominate their candidates, there were at least 60 noblemen and gentlemen on the Whiggish side, very few more than 30 on ours.
Bodl. Ballard 15, f. 107.
At other times the point at issue was the very involvement of the peerage in elections, a complaint which would certainly be given a sharper edge by party animosities, but was enough by itself to provoke indignation on the part of gentlemen and freeholders who objected to attempts at aristocratic dictation. The Bedfordshire election of 1710, for example, although a clear contest between Whig and Tory, also raised more general issues of constitutional propriety because of the involvement of the Bedfords and of the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Kent, on behalf of the Whig candidates. To much the same purpose, the Tory gentry of Essex, faced with a formidable phalanx of Whig peers in the 1705 election, were at pains to emphasize that their own preferred candidates, the High Churchmen Sir Charles Barrington, 5th Bt.*, and Sir Richard Child, 3rd Bt.*, were ‘the persons set up by the gentlemen of the county’. Another confrontation arose in Lancashire, after the succession in 1702 of the Whiggishly-inclined James Stanley as Earl of Derby. The once all-powerful Stanley interest now came increasingly into conflict with the wishes of the predominantly Tory gentry (aided by their own noble champion, the Duke of Hamilton, who had acquired some interest in Lancashire through marrying the niece of Lord Macclesfield). Derby lost control of one seat in 1705, as a consequence of what was described as his ‘haughty treatment of all the gentlemen’. By 1713 he had been entirely outfaced. At the August assizes that year
There was a mighty appearance of gentry ... who designed to set up Mr Farrington in conjunction with Mr Shuttleworth; there were many against Mr Stanley, which alarmed the Earl his brother who was here with a very small attendance of gentlemen. The country in respect of their harvest did interpose and so the contest is over, my Lord not concerning himself over other elections.
Stanley then to withdrew, and at the election two Tories were returned unopposed.
Sometimes the objection to noble dictation was made openly. In the first general election of 1701 the Duke of Rutland’s interest in Leicestershire was temporarily overturned when his heir, Lord Roos, pondering very publicly whether he would stand for Leicestershire or the neighbouring county of Derbyshire, gave the impression to the Leicestershire gentry that ‘he either slights or commands us’.
Events in Cumberland and Westmorland surrounding the first general election of 1701 show a similar strain of gentry opinion. After the death the previous summer of one of the sitting Members for Cumberland, Lord Carlisle (Charles Howard*), who was himself a Whig, sought to predetermine the succession in favour of his own nominee, Gilfrid Lawson. Invoking conventional pieties, he arranged for a meeting of sympathetic gentry to give their public backing to Lawson and to send out circular letters, the phraseology of which was appropriately consensual.
An even more striking example of the defiance of noble power occurred in Sussex in 1705, when the Whig candidates, John Morley Trevor* and Sir Henry Peachey* brought two dukes with them to the poll, only to see both unceremoniously sidelined. Following several notorious incidents (mainly concerning aristocratic interference in boroughs), the Commons had resolved in February 1701 that for any peer to concern himself in elections to the Lower House was ‘a high infringement of the liberties and privileges of the Commons’.
What added, if not to the interest of the two latter Trevor and Peachey], yet to the splendour of their party was that the Dukes of Somerset and Richmond appeared at their head, and, such a sight having been seldom seen at Lewes, it was thought by all the inhabitants it must of necessity carry the election, but multa cadunt etc., for before they began to poll the high sheriff produced the resolves of the House of Commons against lords of Parliament appearing at elections and told their graces they should go off the bench before one man should be polled. The Duke of Richmond swore he would not go off; the other began to debate and told the sheriff the resolve of the House was no law. The sheriff replied [that] whatever was done by the Commons in Parliament he would always abide by as his representatives, even to the last drop of his blood, ‘and if you do not go immediately off the bench, I’ll adjourn the court’. ‘Mr Sheriff’, quoth the Duke of Somerset, ‘you had acted more like a gentleman had you told us of this before we came here’. ‘My lords, till I came here I had nothing to do to tell you, neither could I believe you would come where you knew you had nothing to do, and I would have you to know I am as good a gentleman as yourself and know as well how to behave myself’. He ordered the under-sheriff to make way and he himself went off with them, and our Dukes immediately with the stars disappeared, which brought all their party under a cloud.
Occasionally we see the reverse of the coin: a peer whose self-importance was dented when the country gentlemen took him for granted, and failed to pay the deference that social status demanded. One example of wounded dignity can be found in the person of the 1st Earl of Cholmondeley, who withdrew his co-operation from fellow Tories in Cheshire in 1705 when he was not consulted before the nomination of candidates. He was particularly vexed at the behaviour of his old friend Sir George Warburton, 3rd Bt.*, whom Cholmondeley had previously promised to support provided that Warburton did not take as his partner the Tacker Sir Roger Mostyn, 3rd Bt.*. So when Warburton not only joined Mostyn, but without consulting the Earl, Cholmondeley took umbrage in large measure and instructed his steward that he himself would take no further part in the election, and neither should ‘any of my tenants’.
In some cases it was as much the ambition to dominate as the involvement of the aristocracy that provoked resentment. The Duke of Beaufort used it as an argument against ‘Mr Morgan of Tredegar and his friends’ in Monmouthshire that they were ‘not for admitting anyone but whom they please to be chosen, not only in the county but town, also engrossing to themselves the power over all the gentlemen besides’. Sir Richard Onslow’s pre-eminence in Surrey politics likewise gave rise to jealousy, and prevented him from extending his influence over the county representation into a permanent monopoly. The decisive moment came in 1698, when long-festering resentment against the presumption of the Onslows in taking both county seats (for Sir Richard himself and his uncle Denzil) finally erupted. Despite strenuous canvassing, it was clear as the election approached that among the gentlemen and freeholders ‘tis pretty generally the opinion not to choose both the knights of the shire ... out of the same family’. Possibilities of an accommodation were ruined by the outcome of the Guildford borough election (which preceded the poll for the county), in which Sir Richard’s brother, Foot Onslow*, defeated the Tory John Weston* thanks to the blatant partisanship of the returning officer. Disgust at the overbearing behaviour of the Onslow family was compounded by the news that Denzil intended to stand for re-election to the county in partnership with his nephew. On the day of the poll, however, Denzil withdrew, and Sir Richard was joined in the Commons by a revengeful Weston. Although Sir Richard held his own seat until 1710 (and regained it in 1713 after a temporary exclusion), he could no longer hope to capture both places in Parliament for his family, nor even for his party.
Campaigns to preserve the ‘independence’ of the county electorate were usually waged on behalf of ‘the gentlemen’. Their own oligarchy, when expressed in collective decisions at county meetings or in the establishment of an informal consensus, was guaranteed an easier acceptance by the freeholders at large than was aristocratic dictation. Nevertheless, there were a few episodes in which the power of the ‘gentlemen’, the inner circle of greater landowners who expected to govern county affairs, faced a challenge from below. In part such independent-mindedness on the part of ordinary voters might derive from a collective tendency to pique (one shared with their social superiors) at the thought of being taken for granted. Richard Neville’s assumption that the Berkshire freeholders would vote for him cost him support in 1705 and briefly threatened his hold on the county seat. When William Fleming made a private agreement at the Westmorland by-election of 1696, that if returned he would stand down at the following general election in favour of his erstwhile rival, Robert Lowther*, he found it impossible to implement. Once elected, Fleming addressed his supporters and asked them to give their votes for Lowther at the next election, ‘but very few liked the proposal and several declared that if he stood not himself they would not be assigned over’.
A self-styled ‘independent’ candidature may often be explained more satisfactorily, however, as a tactical option, the resort of an individual or a local faction driven by opportunism or desperation. Robert Dormer, one of two Whigs putting up for Buckinghamshire in January 1701, ‘pretended’ to an ‘independency’ in order to distance himself from any unpopularity attaching to the Wharton interest in the county, his fellow Whig candidate being Hon. Goodwin Wharton, the brother of the Junto lord. The Kentish Whigs, in the following December, saw an appeal to the wider community of freeholders as the only way in which to overturn the solid Tory majority in the county. Possibly encouraged by the popularity of the ‘Kentish petition’ circulated during the summer, they urged the county electorate to ignore ‘whatever a few gentlemen may have privately agreed upon’. Despite the fact that this experiment made no impact on the Tory ascendancy in the county it was repeated the following year, when the ‘Kentish Petitioner’ William Colepeper, the defeated candidate in November 1701, denounced the practice of holding county meetings to select candidates, on the grounds that it deprived the freeholders of their voice in elections. Again he was unable to make any headway and this time did not even stand. Another abortive challenge to the oligarchy of the greater gentry occurred in Herefordshire, also in the second general election of 1701, when the Cornewall family tried in vain to break the stranglehold on the county representation established by a powerful cross-party alliance comprising the Tory Lord Chandos, the Court Whig Lord Coningsby (Thomas*), and the Harleys. In supporting the maverick Tory, John Prise*, Charles Corn(e)wall made a powerful speech at a gathering of ‘the gentlemen’ at Hereford, alleging that ‘there had been very indirect practices used in this and the former election, the gentlemen at London choosing the knights there, and insinuated that the meeting of the gentlemen was to exclude the freeholders’.
In reality Corn(e)wall’s appeal was probably directed, not to the mass of freeholders who made up the county electorate, but to those gentlemen present at the county meeting who felt themselves deprived of a legitimate say in the election by the preclusive deliberations of a governing clique. The same occurred in Yorkshire in 1699, when a poorly attended county meeting, held at the York assizes, decided far in advance of any dissolution of Parliament that Lord Fairfax, one of the sitting Members, and Sir John Kaye, 2nd Bt.*, be unopposed at the next election, at the expense of the other sitting Member, Lord Downe (Hon. Henry Dawnay). A friend of Lord Downe observed that ‘there was so small a number concerned in it that the gentry have reason to look against it as an affront to them all, and a great presumption in those that did it, so that if it be managed with application it may come to turn to my Lord Downe’s advantage’. In other words, the exercise was interpreted as a political manoeuvre, a pre-emptive strike against Downe’s interest. In such cases, both sides would be inclined to dress up their actions in the traditional conventions of political behaviour. On the one hand, the county meeting would be presented as a legitimate means of discovering the sense of county opinion; on the other, the absentees would be told they had been excluded from their rightful participation, and imposed upon by a minority. Charges of this kind were laid by the Worcestershire Whigs in January 1701 against the supporters of Sir John Pakington, 4th Bt.*, namely that the Tories had packed an unrepresentative county meeting to try and settle an unopposed return for Pakington as knight of the shire. The Tory defence described the episode very differently:
16 or 17 gentlemen, most of them men of very considerable estates in this county and consequently well interested in the election of the representatives in Parliament, meeting together and declaring whom they approved of to be chosen knights of the shire for the then ensuing Parliament was represented as a strange infringement of the rights and liberties of the freeholders and made such an impression upon the minds of many as raised a surprising interest for that gent[leman] that artificially spread abroad that notion, that gent[leman] then affirming he would always stand and fall by the votes of the gentlemen and freeholders.
Glos. RO, Hardwicke Court mss Lloyd pprs. ‘Some observations offered to the consideration of the gentlemen, clergy, and freeholders of the county of Worcester against the next election, which is to be 5 August 1702’.
Pakington himself protested:
It being my misfortune to be greatly misrepresented in a libel put up in this place before the last election by the disingenuous practice of a particular gent[leman], I thought it my duty to undeceive my country and the freeholders and do myself justice. The allegations in that bill were altogether false, for I never attempted anything with the least design of prejudicing the rights of the freeholders ...The happy constitution of England hath always been my care to preserve, and particularly the privileges of the freeholders.
Beaufort mss at Badminton, Coventry pprs. ‘Sir John Pakington’s answer to the papers put up against him’.
A more genuine attempt to put up on an ‘independent ’platform occurred in Warwickshire in 1705, when George Lucy challenged the established interest of the two outgoing Members, Sir John Mordaunt, 5th Bt., and Sir Charles Shuckburgh, 2nd Bt., who had been returned without opposition at every election since 1698. Even here, however, there were strong party-political overtones. Lucy was a Whig, while Mordaunt and Shuckburgh were the representatives of a well-entrenched Tory interest. In common with their counterparts in other midland counties, the gentry of Warwickshire placed considerable emphasis on the use of the county meeting to settle the representation in advance, and avoid contested elections. It was particularly convenient for the Tory majority if this expedient forestalled any challenge. Presumably regarding the political circumstances of the 1705 election as unusually favourable, Lucy risked a single-handed campaign against Mordaunt and Shuckburgh, both of whom were Tackers. He had the active backing of only ‘three or four gentlemen’ but ‘the assistance of all the Dissenters’,
For the most part the control maintained by the major landed proprietors over the choice of candidates, their direction of electoral management, and the considerable influence exercised by landlords over the disposition of the votes of tenants and other dependants, ensured that the outcome of county elections was determined by the views and actions of a narrow élite. This did not mean, however, that ordinary people could not participate. Studies of later 18th-century English politics have drawn attention to the significance of elections as public events, commanding a wide audience and involving bystanders in public demonstrations. This has been interpreted as part of a ‘legitimizing’ process, by which social superiors secured an implicit acceptance of their political hegemony by the lower orders.
Despite the huge numbers involved, most county elections were orderly and peaceful, with the gentlemen marshalling their forces with discipline. Occasionally there would be reports of violence, or threats of violence: the (less than impartial) sheriff of Sussex, and several Whig friends, threatened with assault by an inebriated Tory mob in 1695, late in the day, after their own supporters had gone home; the sheriff of Essex having his windows broken in 1710; one of the candidates for Northamptonshire in December 1701, John Parkhurst*, forced to make a quick exit because the populace was ‘enraged against him’, and suffering the indignity of a public humiliation by proxy as a substitute was carried shoulder-high around the town. These incidents generally took place in the open air, although in Chester in 1705 infuriated Whigs broke out into roaring abuse ‘in court’, and ‘the shouting party of ’em cried “Down with the Church, down with the Church”, both in the streets and hall’.
had Dr Sacheverell’s picture carried before them and the cry was ‘no manager’, ‘no scaffolder’, but that was not all for they pelted Mr Walpole with dirt and stones and drove him out of his tent, spoiling his fine laced coat which they told him came out of the Treasury.
This was a comparatively rare example of organized rather than spontaneous violence, though it may have been no more than a public demonstration of party loyalty which had run out of control. Similarly, in Wiltshire three years later, ‘a mob was raised, and paid by the sitting [Tory] Members, appearing with clubs and drums, marching round the place of polling, till the close thereof, to the great terror of the electors’. Other serious incidents of violence involved the principals themselves, such as the duels that took place after the elections in 1698 in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk, the latter resulting in the death of one of the Members, Sir Henry Hobart, 4th Bt.*
That county elections should be heavily politicized was an inevitable consequence of the size of electorates and the nature of canvassing. George Granville’s* circular letter to the freeholders of Cornwall in 1710 was by no means unusual in that it raised a sheaf of political issues, loyalty to the monarchy, support for the established church, the necessity for a swift end to the war, on all of which the candidate had pronounced views. Printed propaganda, in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, newsletters (especially John Dyer’s rancorous Tory outpourings), broadsides and squibs, was purchased and dispersed among the freeholders. Much of this emanated from London and dealt with issues of national political interest in a general way,
Public demonstrations during canvassing or, more usually, at the poll, were another vehicle for political slogans, if not arguments: the carrying of banners and even portraits (of Dr Sacheverell in 1710); the decorating of headgear and other items of clothing with political favours (as used by the Tories in Northamptonshire in 1705, who appeared with the word ‘Tacker’ written on their hats, and those in Suffolk in 1710, who wore gilded laurel inscribed with the initials of their favoured candidates); and the burning of effigies. When the Whigs in Buckinghamshire sought to play up their party’s opposition to the French commercial treaty by appearing at the 1713 election with wool in their hats, ‘saying ’twas all going into France, and they resolved to keep some on’t, before ’twas all gone’, the Tories replied in kind. They had ‘oaken boughs in their hats, and these jokes in their mouth against their adversaries, that their wits were gone a wool-gathering, and that they looked very sheepish’. The oak was not only a reference to Charles II, but also, apparently, to show ‘that with hearts of oak at the bottom, they will stand fast to the old English constitution both in church and state, in opposition to the miscellaneous tribe of atheists, deists, republicans and Irish sheep-shearers, who triumph in their stolen wool’. In Middlesex the young Whig candidates in December 1701 suffered a novel form of ridicule at the hands of a mob carrying ‘rods and cradles in contempt of them’.
The liveliness of county politics can be demonstrated in the high percentage of elections which were contested. Taking only those occasions when the defeated candidates proceeded as far as a poll, and which are therefore recorded in the constituency articles as having been contested (and ignoring the many instances of abortive candidatures, which did not go beyond a canvass, or at best a cry), as many as 39.6% of all possible county elections were contested in this period (187 out of 470, including by-elections). This compares with a figure of 34.8% for the preceding section of the History. It is also higher than the total figure for English constituencies contested at any general election between 1690 and 1713, with the exception of the 1710 election, in which 40% of constituencies went to the poll. The most frequently contested counties were Gloucestershire (only one of its 11 elections decided without a poll), Essex (ten contests out of a possible 13), Middlesex ( nine out of 12), Buckinghamshire (ten out of 14), and Surrey (eight out of 11); the quietest Dorset (not contested at all during this period), Devon (one out of 11), Staffordshire (two out of 13), Durham (two out of 11), Northumberland (four out of 12), and Lincolnshire (three out of 11).
When counties divided, it was almost invariably on party lines, even if the use of Tory and Whig labels concealed other sources of conflict. Rivalries between major landed interests, sometimes going back generations, would doubtless have given rise to competition even without the additional stimulus that party animosities provided. For example, the Somerset and Morgan families in Monmouthshire would still have been at daggers drawn had the political climate been quite different; and the same might be said of the Russells and Bruces in Bedfordshire, the Verneys and Whartons in Buckinghamshire, the Stanleys and Gerards in Lancashire, and the Newports and Kynastons in Shopshire. But the suffusion of local as well as national politics with party sentiment did more than simply colour these traditional county factions as Tory and Whig; it intensified the division between them and drew other, lesser gentry families into their struggles. In consequence, voters were usually given a stark choice between opposing party interests. Rare indeed were the examples of elections fought between more than three or four contestants, representing Tory and Whig interests: there were six candidates at the poll in Surrey in 1698 and 1701, Middlesex in 1701, and Somerset in 1702; five in Berkshire in 1690, and in Yorkshire in 1708. As many as 11 names were initially mentioned in 1696 in connexion with the vacant seat for Buckinghamshire, but eventually the two by-elections in that year saw only three and four candidates respectively. Usually the consultation process of the general county meeting, or the strategic deliberations of party caucuses, would filter out the hopeless cases. The voters seem to have responded, by adhering firmly to one party interest or the other, and voting for the candidates endorsed by local party élites. The low levels of split-voting revealed by pollbook studies for Buckinghamshire, Kent, Middlesex, and Westmorland (8% of the voterate in Westmorland in 1702, less than 7% in Middlesex in 1705, 5.9% in Buckinghamshire in 1705, and 3.7% in Kent in 1713)
Such was the power of party that some of the longest-established of local loyalties and rivalries, those with a regional or geographical basis, were dissolved by, or subsumed into, the struggles of Whig and Tory. The parliamentary representation of Berkshire had traditionally been divided between the gentry in the western vales of the White Horse and Kennet, and those in Windsor forest in the east. In 1690 agreement broke down under the pressure of party conflict when the Whig Richard Neville*, the only one of five candidates to come from ‘the forest’, was defeated. Various appeals were made to the ‘the ancient custom of the county’ but proved of no avail when set against attachment to party. A similar practice had existed in Buckinghamshire, of electing one shire knight from the Chilterns and one from the vale of Aylesbury. Here tradition survived, but only in so far as both parties, in choosing their candidates, were careful to pair a representative of the Chiltern gentry with one from the vale. When the party battle was joined local loyalties were largely forgotten. This was also the outcome in Kent, where the distinction to be observed was between the eastern and western divisions of the county, following the arrangement of quarter sessions. The factions took care to ensure that their own election tickets were balanced between east and west, but then at the election fought each other on party issues. One opportunist sought to arouse dormant regional antagonisms in Northamptonshire. In December 1700 a Tory squire, Toby Chauncy, put up for knight of the shire on the basis that ‘some gentlemen of the east division’ of the county were dissatisfied that the only declared candidates, the outgoing Members, Sir Justinian Isham, 4th Bt., and John Parkhurst, were both from the west of the county. There was a subtext, however: Chauncy’s candidacy arose from the dissatisfaction felt by high-flyers in the county with the cross-party electoral compact which existed between the Tory Isham and the Whig Parkhurst.
At the root of party conflict everywhere lay the antagonism of Church and Dissent, at its most bitter where Protestant Nonconformists formed a substantial element in the population, in such counties as Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Somerset, Suffolk, and Wiltshire. In Lancashire over a third of the voterate must have been Dissenters, according to one estimate in 1718. Tory supporters routinely complained of the influence of the Nonconformist vote, as in January 1701 when one correspondent of the defeated Thomas Coke in Derbyshire saw the influence of organized Dissent as the crucial element in the Whigs’ success: ‘I believe they have a great dependence upon the Presbyterians all over the county’.
Although the evidence is mostly anecdotal, it does seem that in the counties Nonconformist voters were at their most assertive at the beginning of the period. In Essex, Suffolk, and Wiltshire the 1690 election was very much an affair of ‘Church and Dissenter’: in Essex the two Whig candidates, Henry Mildmay* and Sir Francis Masham, 3rd Bt.*, were both strong supporters of the Dissenting interest, and the contest was seen as a ‘trial of skill’ between their influence and that of Bishop Compton of London; at the Suffolk poll Tory clergymen were howled down as ‘black-coated rogues’; and in Wiltshire a disappointed Lord Weymouth (Thomas Thynne†), whose Tory brother had been rejected by the voters, sighed, ‘ I think an angel from Heaven would have been rejected if he had not declared for a conventicler’.
Thereafter we hear less from vociferous Nonconformists (apart from the Cheshire mob who damned clerical voters in 1705 as ‘the Devil’s black guard’), but a great deal from Tory candidates and High Church mobs, especially in the elections of 1705 and 1710, where ‘the Church in danger’ was the popular issue. In 1705 Sir John Pakington marched into Worcester with ‘a banner carried before him, whereon was painted a church falling, with this inscription: “For the Queen and Church, Pakington”’. In 1710 Tories in Surrey circulated bills portraying their men, Hon. Heneage Finch II* and Sir Francis Vincent, 5th Bt.*, as champions of the Church of England, in opposition to ‘all managers of Oliver’s party and principles, that once murdered their King and thousands of the nation to rule over us’; in Cheshire in the same year ‘the people of all degrees and both sexes, cried “up with the Tackers, and down with the Presbyterians and tub-preachers”’; while in Shropshire, where Sacheverell fever had been raging ever since the doctor’s visit in the summer, one Whig lamented:
it is impossible to imagine what an influence the crying of ‘the Church in danger’ has among the vulgar in this country, and when any of the High Church begs a vote for themselves or party the question they ask the freeholder is, if he be not for the Church. Then if he answers ‘Yes’, then ‘Be for us’, they cry, ‘that we may hinder our churches from being pulled down by Presbyterians and Dissenters’.
In this febrile atmosphere, the clergy involved themselves directly in secular politics. Clerical voters were most numerous, most visible, and most effective in county elections. Contemporary propagandists were inclined to dispute the extent to which the clergy were committed partisans: Dyer’s newsletter and other Tory sources tended to exaggerate clerical involvement, while Whig newspapers correspondingly played down the numbers of clergy appearing at the polls, or at least denied that most parsons were Tories. But detailed analysis from voting records bears out the impressionistic remarks of contemporaries, who observed clouds of clergymen on the Tory side: in Norfolk in 1698, for instance, or in Gloucestershire in 1710, when it was said that the Whig Sir John Guise, 3rd Bt.*, had been ‘thrown out ... chiefly by the interest of the clergy, who were extremely provoked by him having said that the Church might as well be governed by presbyters as bishops’.
The value of clerical voters was not in numbers alone, for indeed by themselves they constituted only a small proportion of the electorate, but in the influence they could exert upon ordinary freeholders, both before the election, in their parishes, and at the poll, where an appearance of clergy en masse was usually stage-managed to secure the greatest effect. The importance of securing the public endorsement of the clergy was thus recognized by both parties. The Tory candidates for Shropshire in 1710 went straight to the parsonage, sending circular letters to ask all the clergy ‘to make interest’ on their behalf. But the most obvious channel of communication was the bishop. Compton of London had set a formidable example with his energetic canvassing prior to the 1690 election in both Essex and Middlesex, his exhortations to his parish incumbents to go to the defence of the Church having roused one parson to such a pitch that he was alleged to have pulled a Whig candidate off his horse in a melee at the Middlesex poll. Episcopal interference also came from Trelawny of Exeter, in Cornwall; Burnet of Salisbury (rather unsuccessfully) in Wiltshire; Nicolson of Carlisle in Cumberland and Westmorland; and of course Sir John Pakington’s antagonist, William Lloyd of Worcester.
While the struggle between Whig and Tory was the constant theme of county elections in this period, it was not the only consideration. Occasionally county voters seem to have been exercised by grievances of an economic nature. Complaints from woollen manufacturers against competition from Ireland, the continent or the East Indies, constituted a regular feature of parliamentary sessions throughout the period. A climax was reached in the 1713 general election, when Whig interests in wool manufacturing counties as far apart as Norfolk, Buckinghamshire, and Wiltshire sought to capitalise on anxiety at the likely repercussions of the treaty of commerce with France and appeared at the polls with various woollen trimmings about their persons. Some local issues divided opinion. In the mid-1690s the Herefordshire freeholders were at odds over the desirability of improving the navigation of the Rivers Wye and Lugg, with vested interests lining up on either side; Derbyshire politics in 1700-2 were similarly complicated by varied local responses to the Derwent navigation, and then by a proposed bill for settling and ascertaining lead tithes; while in Lincolnshire the great question was fen drainage. In these and other matters county Members had to attend closely to the material interests of their constituents or risk the fate of Sir John Holland, 2nd Bt.*, who ‘lost his interest’, and his seat, in Norfolk in 1710 through a general neglect of his duties as knight of the shire. Taxation was always a prime concern. In Worcestershire in 1695 Thomas Foley I* was seriously embarrassed by the charge that he had been ‘the first mover of the coal tax, a crime sufficient in these parts to overthrow the greatest Goliath’, and mightily relieved when a potentially dangerous opponent declined to stand; in a difference between the two parts of the county of Westmorland Robert Lowther* ‘lost many friends’ in the barony of Kendal ‘by standing to the bottom [of the county] about the difference of the book of rates’ during the 1705 Parliament;
In the event of a contest a candidate and his principal backers had to be prepared to put effort and money into their campaign. Tories in Surrey were blamed by their party leaders for missing a prime political opportunity in 1713 by what was seen as their laziness and parsimony.
if those who willingly appeared on your behalf the first time were now obliged by a small entertainment for their first kindness, it may I hope (if it cannot oblige them to be for you the next time) yet at least engage them not to appear against you, and indeed I think that about 18d. a man according to the number of the votes (of which I have a list in each town) will be no great cost betwixt you and I guess will treat them pretty well with good management.
BL, Lothian mss Michael Burton to Coke, 21 Mar. 1701[/2].
The most important time to spend money, however, would be at the election itself, in providing transport from outlying districts, hospitality for the duration of the poll, and for some poorer voters the cost of ‘hiring people in their absence’ and compensation for ‘their own loss of time’.
that during the assizes it might be so managed that for £100 apiece expense in ticketing, which at 12d. apiece every ticket will engage 2,000 electors who will for double voices be entitled to 2s. each which pays horse hire from the remoter part of the county or otherwise buys ale which brings in all the little freeholders that otherwise will not appear.
Outright bribery was less common in the counties than in borough elections, partly because of the potential costs involved, and partly perhaps because of the amour propre cherished by many of the more prosperous freeholders. The Surrey squire Nicholas Carew*, himself a future knight of the shire, proudly refused an extraordinary offer of £500 for his ‘interest’ from the Tory challenger Sir James Clarke in December 1701, and went on to make his rejection of the bribe doubly damaging to Clarke by publicizing their discussions, with the ostentatiously noble declaration that ‘no honest man would pay so dear for trouble if he designed only to serve his country’. Lower down the social scale, a number of Buckinghamshire voters pocketed their pride and permitted the local Tories to buy up debts they had incurred in relation to a local turnpike scheme; while in Suffolk in 1710 Sir Philip Parker, 3rd Bt.†, was said to be ‘scattering’ his money ‘at no rate’ and to be ‘seconded by three [of] the greatest men in this county, who are content too for the forming an interest to stoop to the lowest’. When Parker eventually lost the contest, an opponent crowed, ‘it must have cost my adversary £1,800, for he gave a guinea a man for three days before the election to everyone who would vote for him’.
Possession of the more important offices in local government was thought to have a natural influence on the balance of power in county politics. A sympathetic lord lieutenant gave leadership and inspiration to a local party, as was certainly the case in Cambridgeshire, where the replacement of Lord Orford in 1711 by Lord North and Grey afforded a boost to the Tory interest. In the absence or indisposition of the lord lieutenant, the custos rotulorum assumed something of his importance. Thus in Buckinghamshire in 1702, during the minority of the lord lieutenant, Earl of Bridgwater, local Tories looked to the appointment of one of their number as custos as a way of advancing the party’s interest for the time being. In 1713 Monmouthshire Tories pressed ministers to appoint the Duke of Beaufort to both offices, the lord lieutenancy being vacant and the place of custos being in the hands of the Whig John Morgan I* , who ‘browbeats many freeholders whose inclinations are for the Duke of Beaufort’s interest’.
Lords lieutenant could have their greatest political impact in the influence they might exert on the composition of the commission of the peace. During this period the English county magistracy as a whole was subjected to nine major regulations, in 1694, 1696-8, 1698-9, 1700, 1701, 1702, 1704, 1705-6, 1710-11, all but two of which (those in 1700 and 1704) were undertaken with clear political objectives, and involved the systematic remodelling of the commission (by a combination of additions and exclusions) to ensure a majority for one party or another.
What is indisputable, however, is that in an election year controlling the shrievalty was vital. Partisanship on the part of sheriffs and their underlings was the most frequent complaint in election petitions, and statutory action was taken to guard against the corruption of the office: in the Elections Act of 1696, and two years later in the Act ‘to prevent irregular practices of sheriffs and other officers in making the returns of Members to serve in Parliament ...’ (10 Gul. III, c.7). As returning officer the sheriff could decide (within limits) the date and time at which the poll would begin; where it would be held; and whether or not those who presented themselves to be polled were properly qualified freeholders. Cheshire Tories accused the Whig sheriff in 1710 of delaying the election in the hope that Tory freeholders who had come early to Chester would not be able to stand the expense of five days’ attendance and would return home unpolled. In Lancashire in 1705 the sheriff, acting in concert with one of the candidates, Charles Zedenno Stanley*, allegedly attempted to deceive Stanley’s opponents about the date of the election and was only prevented from making a sudden declaration of Stanley’s return when one of the other candidates ‘by chance heard of it and demanded a poll’. Sometimes the sheriff would decide to change the place of the election from its usual location at the seat of the county assizes.
I am disappointed in my expectation of a civil and fair treatment from the sheriff, who removed his county court to Carlisle, and then to Salkeld Yeats, a place upon the edge of this county, which you know to be a very large one, for several must come above 50 miles, and when they come there, can only meet with three or four straggling cottages, on the edge of a large moor, no place of accommodation being nearer than Penrith, which is four miles off. They do insist that this is the most usual place ... But all contested elections have been held in the centre of the county. I would very nigh double Mr [Richard] Musgrave* if the election was in the middle of the county, yet can’t prevail with the freeholders to go so far, and the sheriff has given me such a taste of what I must expect, that I shall trouble myself no further in that matter.
Another trick was to adjourn the poll before the opposing party could gain an advantage. On the fourth day of polling in Gloucestershire in 1695 the sheriff, concluding that the vote was likely to go against his own favoured candidate, Thomas Stephens I, suddenly retired from Gloucester on the pretext of a quarrel, with several hundred freeholders still waiting to vote. He then adjourned to Wootton-under-Edge, some 20 miles distant. Voting continued to go against Stephens, so a further adjournment was ordered, this time to Bisley, Stephens’s own locality, where the election was concluded. According to a subsequent petition the sheriff’s agents, finding Stephens was still behind, ‘struck off all whose votes were taken during the abdication and the free miners of the Forest of Dean’, thus finally ensuring a majority for their man.
In some counties there was a tradition that polling might take place at more than one location, for the convenience of the freeholders. The eastern and western divisions of Sussex each insisted on their own rights in the matter, the freeholders from the east objecting to Chichester as the place of election, partly for logistical and partly for political reasons. In 1695, after an unsuccessful attempt by the western faction to rush through an election court at Chichester, and an unsatisfactory first attempt to poll (hindered by the presence of an threatening crowd), the sheriff adjourned the election to Lewes to enable him to take the votes of those freeholders from the east. Subsequently Members sympathetic to the eastern faction sponsored a bill to confine parliamentary elections to Lewes, but this was dropped in the face of a well-organized opposition. A similar situation arose in Hampshire, as a result of the difficulties experienced by voters on the Isle of Wight in travelling to elections in Winchester. A clause was included in a statute of 1696 (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25, cl. ix) to permit the sheriff to adjourn the poll to Newport, on the island, once all freeholders attending the court in Winchester had been polled.
The English Boroughs
In aggregate the 203 English borough constituencies (including the eight Cinque Ports) returned 405 Members: two from each borough, except for London, which returned four, and Abingdon, Banbury, Bewdley, Higham Ferrers and Monmouth, which each returned one. In the Welsh fashion, the Monmouth constituency included two out-boroughs, Newport and Usk. In addition, the boroughs of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis had been united by Act of Parliament in 1571, and returned four Members together on a single writ. None of the different systems which may be applied to classify the boroughs will produce watertight categories, but for purposes of analysis the most satisfactory method is still to group them according to franchise,
1
The narrowest form of corporate franchise restricted voting to members of the governing body within the corporation, usually the mayor, aldermen and common councilmen, or their equivalents. In such cases, the number of voters would naturally be small: electorates ranged in size from Buckingham, with 13, to Scarborough and Salisbury, with 44 and 54 respectively, but the more usual figure was either 24 or 32. This number would also, of course, be fixed, according to the arrangements prescribed in the borough charter. Exceptions were the Wiltshire boroughs of Wilton and Calne. Wilton added another stratum to its governing body, which comprised not only mayor, aldermen, and capital burgesses, but another category of ‘burgesses’ above the freemen. Calne’s corporate structure betrayed its manorial origins, as its membership consisted only of burgesses, who were sworn by the steward of the crown manor of Ogbourne St. George. In both boroughs the electorate was capable of expansion: at Wilton the factional struggles of 1701-2 induced the mayor to pack the electorate with new burgesses; at Calne from 1705 onwards Sir Charles Hedges* pursued his designs on the representation by encouraging the `commoners’ of the borough to claim burgess-ship by right.
In the 1690 general election 22 constituencies elected as `corporation’ boroughs: Andover, Banbury, Bath, Bewdley, Bodmin, Brackley, Buckingham, Bury St. Edmunds, Calne, Christchurch, Harwich, Lostwithiel, Ludlow, Newport (I.o.W.), Orford, Penryn, Salisbury, Scarborough, Thetford, Tiverton, Truro, and Wilton. In addition, the Cinque Ports of New Romney and Winchelsea, though technically possessed of a freeman franchise, functioned in practice as corporation boroughs, the mayor and jurats maintaining severe restrictions upon admissions to freedom. Decisions by the Commons in the 1698 Parliament widened the voting qualification in Ludlow and Orford to include the freeman body, and by the election of 1710 the franchise in another erstwhile corporation borough, Penryn, had changed to one based on habitation. On the other hand, in Malmesbury, where in 1690 the lesser orders in the borough, the assistants (equivalent to the common council), `landholders’, and `commoners’ (or freemen), had been permitted to vote, to the number of around 70, the franchise was restricted in 1695 to the chief magistrate and 12 capital burgesses.
Most corporation boroughs were overshadowed by powerful proprietorial interests. Writing in appreciation of the deferential nature of the electors of Buckingham, Lord Fermanagh’s (John Verney*) agent reminded him that ‘your lordship knows very well how this corporation is influenced by the appearance of gentlemen’.
If you are more inclined to maintain the advantage you believe you have at present at Penryn we must leave things to their chance. If you have the best estate in the town it is a very good opportunity put into your hands to oblige your tenants and neighbours but it is not always what the electors are influenced by, who know themselves to be at liberty to make their own choice upon such considerations as sway most of them.
Vernon was, however, anxious at this time to promote an alternative candidate, namely his own son, so his advice may have been disingenuous. A clearer case would be that of Salisbury, where personal canvassing of aldermen and common councilmen was necessary, and where the borough recorder, Robert Eyre, held a seat from 1698 to 1710
Even more striking than the prevalent influence of proprietorial interest is the fact that hardly any townsmen stood in parliamentary elections in corporation boroughs. With the exception of Tiverton, another borough with a substantial Dissenting presence, which preferred to elect representatives of its own Nonconformist mercantile élite, no corporators were returned. The vast majority of candidates were country gentlemen, often with estates in the vicinity of the borough, or at least in the same county. Some Members returned themselves on their own interest: Sir Richard Temple, 3rd Bt. and his son in Buckingham, for example, and Salwey Winnington at Bewdley. More often, a patron would wish to bring in some kinsman or dependant. Lord Radnor nominated several members of his own family at Bodmin; the 2nd Earl of Clarendon brought in his brother Lord Rochester’s (Laurence Hyde†) political lieutenant Francis Gwyn at Christchurch; Wharton found the Whig army officer Hon. Harry Mordaunt a seat at Brackley; and Sir Joseph Williamson* secured the election of his protégé James Sloane (‘his dear Sloane’) at Thetford in 1696. The more tightly controlled of the corporation boroughs also provided safe seats for apprentice politicians, like Joseph Addison or Erasmus Lewis at Lostwithiel in 1708 and 1713 respectively, or Robert Benson at Thetford in 1702, and in some cases for more senior front-benchers temporarily embarrassed by the likelihood of rejection, or by actual defeat, elsewhere, as was the case with Hon. James Brydges at Truro in 1708. Finally there were the London merchants who bought their way into Parliament, and who found corporation boroughs, with their smaller electorates, a relatively economic proposition. He most notable of these was Samuel Shepheard I*, whose exertions on his son’s behalf in Andover in 1701 brought both of them before the House on charges of corrupting the electorate. However, the extent to which a corporation borough was necessarily a bargain would not have been immediately apparent to another City figure, Robert Baylis, who, even with the support of the Duke of Grafton, had to pay 50 guineas a vote in Thetford in 1708.
The political vitality of the corporation boroughs is perhaps surprising, given the restricted nature of the franchise, the pervasive influence of landed proprietors, and the domination of much civic government by self-regulating oligarchies. Of the 256 borough elections conducted in this period under a corporation franchise, no less than 94, or 37%, were contested as far as a poll. If elections in New Romney and Winchelsea are added in the percentage of contests remains the same. This is not, of course, by any means a precise measurement of political ‘activity’ within a constituency, and certainly underestimates the degree to which the representation was disputed, by ignoring occasions on which challengers withdrew before the poll. But it does offer a minimum figure. Using these imperfect statistics, we can see that every corporation borough experienced a contest at one time or another in this period, though there were some constituencies in which very little motion may be observed. Notably passive were the two Cornish boroughs of Bodmin (with two contests out of 13) and Truro (one out of 16), and Christchurch in Hampshire (two out of ten). Tiverton’s economic vigour, as a centre of the Devon cloth industry, was scarcely reflected in its electoral behaviour, with two contests out of a possible 13.
Contests could arise in corporation boroughs for a variety of reasons. Conflict between opposing patrons, or would-be patrons, is perhaps the most obvious: Brackley, divided between Lords Bridgwater and Wharton, and Orford, where the intrusion of Sir Edward Turnor* into a borough which had previously been a preserve of the Devereux family, provide two examples. The situation in Bath has some similarities, although here it was not a case of the clash of rival patrons, but a contest between gentry candidates competing for the favour of the corporation. Instability would also follow the appearance of an outsider, perhaps attracted by the venality of the voters, of which the most notorious were those of Andover, Malmesbury, and Thetford; or by the existence of a pretext for challenging the right of election: besides Ludlow, Orford, and Penryn, which all moved towards a broader franchise, there were attempts in Bodmin, Buckingham, and Bury St. Edmunds to mount a candidature based on a ‘popular’ interest. In a few instances, divisions appeared within the corporation. As a result of the tergiversation of previous royal policy in respect of borough charters, Ludlow and Thetford both began the period with opposing sets of aldermen and common councilmen each claiming to be the rightful corporation. In Bewdley, the repercussions of the events of James II’s reign were long delayed. After the corporate body split in 1705 the Jacobite charter was declared invalid and a new one issued, which in turn was highly disputed, and eventually overturned. But in Bewdley the root cause of factional conflict was the struggle between the Herbert and Winnington families for control of the single parliamentary seat, aggravated by partisan hostility, since the Herberts were staunch Whigs and the Winningtons, originally Whig, had transmogrified during William’s reign into Tories. Party does indeed appear as a factor in electoral contests in most, if not all, corporation boroughs. Whig and Tory rhetoric overlay family rivalries, and the opposition of one gentry interest to another. Party sentiment evidently compelled the Tory antiquary Browne Willis* to stand in a by-election in Buckingham in 1705 to oppose what he saw as Lord Wharton’s engrossment of the parliamentary representation of his county. Occasionally it can also be detected in the foundations of corporate politics. Bewdley would be one example, where the Herberts benefited from the backing of a substantial Dissenting interest; Wilton another, where Dissenting burgesses determined the outcome of elections in 1701 and 1702.
2
The 81 boroughs which elected in 1690 under some form of freeman franchise made up the largest class of borough constituency. London has been included, even though, strictly speaking, the capital belongs in a category of its own, since the franchise rested with the liverymen rather than the freemen at large (roughly 8,000 out of a total of between 15,000 and 20,000 freemen
In seven of the freeman boroughs the franchise changed after 1690, tending in the majority of cases towards a narrowing of the electorate. Malmesbury returned in 1695 to being a corporation borough. Four constituencies, Bishop’s Castle, Boston, Dunwich, and Shrewsbury, moved to a residential qualification, Boston and Shrewsbury adding a further restriction, to resident freemen paying scot and lot. In Maidstone the emphasis was entirely on income and dependence, the franchise being confined to freemen not receiving alms. Only East Retford and Lyme Regis briefly adopted a wider franchise. In 1690 the right to vote in both boroughs lay with the resident freemen. In Retford the residential qualification was dropped, then reinstated; in Lyme the freemen at large, and freeholders, were enfranchised, then residence was reimposed, though the freeholders kept the vote.
Three other constituencies moved towards a freeman franchise. Ludlow and Orford began as corporation boroughs, but in both cases freemen were enfranchised by 1698, Ludlow having passed through an intermediate stage of confining the vote to resident ‘burgesses’. In Portsmouth, however, the franchise narrowed, as the experiment of admitting inhabitants to poll alongside the freemen, begun at the 1690 general election, was abandoned after 1695.
There were huge variations in the size of the electorate/ voterate in freeman boroughs. As with the counties, what we have in most cases are figures for the number of voters rather than the number entitled to vote. London was obviously in a league of its own. Its 8,000 liverymen not only constituted the largest borough voterate in the country, just ahead of Westminster and some distance clear of the rest, but was larger than any county. Then came Monmouth, with just over 2,000 voters, but drawn from three towns; York, with 1,800 on its own; and a dozen boroughs, mostly county towns, where the maximum number of voters recorded was around, or a little above, the 1,000-mark, Canterbury, Chester, Colchester, Coventry, Durham, Gloucester, Hereford, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oxford, Shrewsbury, and Worcester. Bridgnorth, Lancaster, and Sudbury were also pushed into this last category as a result of vigorous competition for parliamentary seats: in Bridgnorth traditional rivalry between the Acton and Whitmore families came to a head in the decade after 1698, when as many as 632 new voters were admitted; in Lancaster repeated admissions of non-resident freemen resulted in the electorate doubling in size during the period 1690-1715; and in Sudbury the conflict between Suffolk country gentlemen and marauding London merchants led the opposing candidates to hunt out suitably disposed freemen from as far afield as the capital, and to provide transport and accommodation to encourage them to exercise their political rights. The majority of freeman boroughs, however, could be described as of medium size, having at their highest point between 350 and 1,000 voters each: Beverley, Carlisle, Derby, Dover, Evesham, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, King’s Lynn, Kingston-upon-Hull, Lincoln, Ludlow (after 1698), Maidstone, Maldon, Much Wenlock, Newcastle-under-Lyme (in 1690), Portsmouth, Preston, Rochester, and Sandwich,. Again, these were for the most part substantial urban centres, though in a few places, such as Carlisle, Ipswich, and the small Shropshire town of Much Wenlock, the number of freemen had been artificially inflated as a result of fierce political infighting. Below the medium-sized boroughs were those with more modest voterates, of between 100 and 350: Barnstaple, Berwick, Boston, Cambridge, Chipping Wycombe, Dartmouth, Dunwich, Eye, Grantham, Great Grimsby, Helston, Huntingdon, Liskeard, Malton, Morpeth, New Woodstock, Orford (after 1698), Plymouth, Stafford, Wigan, and Winchester. Finally, came the small fry, the boroughs with less than a hundred voters: Aldeburgh, Bishop’s Castle, Devizes, Droitwich, East Looe, East Retford, Hedon, Higham Ferrers, Lyme Regis, Lymington, Malmesbury, Marlborough, Plympton Erle, Poole, Totnes, Wells, and Yarmouth (I.o.W.); the Cornish boroughs, Camelford, Grampound, Launceston, St. Mawes, and West Looe; the Cinque Ports, Hastings, Hythe, and Rye; all the way down to the tiniest of all, Queenborough, where at the general election of 1690 only 19 freemen voted. Defoe included Queenborough among the “rotten boroughs”, describing it as ’a miserable, dirty, decayed, poor, pitiful, fishing town’, but it was one of only two such examples among the freeman boroughs, the other being the ‘sadly decayed’ port of Hedon, once ‘a fair haven town’ but now stranded about a mile up a creek overgrown ‘with flags and reeds’, a place where the economy was no longer driven by trade but instead by the business of parliamentary elections.
Of its very nature, the electorate in freeman boroughs was fluid. Admission to the freedom was customarily at discretion rather than by right, and frequently influenced by political considerations. It became a habit in this period for batches of freemen to be admitted and sworn just before a parliamentary election, and occasionally, when municipal politics had become particularly lively, before the annual elections of chief magistrates. In Canterbury and Gloucester, where the freeman rolls were always extensive, mass admissions took place in every general election year. Attempting to pack the electorate in this way became a weapon of first resort, and as a result, when factional conflict was strenuous and prolonged, the number of qualified voters could multiply rapidly within the space of a few years. Colchester, Grantham, Hereford, Ipswich, Lancaster, Liverpool, and Sandwich each saw a doubling in the number of freemen, and even Queenborough’s electorate increased to 45 by 1715. In Worcester as many as 269 new freemen were admitted prior to the general election of 1698; in Barnstaple 71 freemen were sworn in time for the 1710 election; while in Durham 75 were brought in before the poll in 1708, and a further 52 two years later. Among the many other boroughs in which this phenomenon occurred were Bridgnorth, Chester, Derby, Ludlow, Orford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Shrewsbury. In Cambridge and Winchester the numbers admitted were relatively small, but enough to make a difference to the result of the election, which in the case of Winchester provoked a strong response from the ousted Tory interest in the corporation, and the passing of an ordinance to insist that for the future freemen be admitted only ‘in accordance with established practice’. Elsewhere, in Colchester and Rye for example, the new freemen might find that their right to vote in subsequent elections was subject to dispute.
Many, if not most, of the beneficiaries of these politically-inspired creations were likely to be ‘outlyers’, that is to say freemen resident outside the borough. Family, friends, and connexions of the principals would be provided with votes; neighbouring country gentlemen, and even peers, of the appropriate political kidney complimented with their freedom. These were ‘honorary freemen’, granted their privileges by the grace of the corporation alone, and for the sole purpose of voting in parliamentary elections. In both Cambridge and Winchester enough were admitted to swing the balance of power within the constituency. In Totnes in 1698 Whigs expected their bête noire, Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt*, to arrive at the poll accompanied by ‘as many gentlemen as he can who pretend to be honorary freemen’.
Naturally enough, local reaction to an inundation of this kind was often hostile: resident freemen in both Colchester and Hereford protested repeatedly against permitting outsiders to poll, as did the Whigs in Ipswich after the 1708 election, at which the 50 or so ‘honorary-freemen outlyers’, who formed a majority of the borough’s electors, had all voted for the Tories. A little more successful were the Whigs in Shrewsbury, who succeeded in excluding the largely Tory body of non-resident freemen from voting in 1708 and 1710, and the Tories in Dunwich, headed by John Bence, whose long-drawn-out campaign secured favourable judgment from the House of Commons on two petitions, in 1691 and 1708, even though in each case the rights of the ‘outlyers’ were immediately reasserted at the next general election. Considerations of temporary party advantage were a complicating factor in both boroughs, whereas in the two constituencies in which a residential qualification was made permanent the issue was more clear-cut: a matter of local interests uniting against an interloper. After Henry Newton had bought his way into a seat at Bishop’s Castle in 1695, largely with the support of non-resident freemen, the predominant proprietorial interests of Lord Macclesfield (Charles Gerard*) and the Mores of Linley succeeded in restricting the franchise to residents; while in Boston, in 1712, the ‘outlyers’ forfeited their votes after taking money from the merchant William Cotesworth, an old hand at bribing voters, whose notoriety doubtless assisted in their deprivation.
The enfranchisement of so many non-residents, already qualified to vote elsewhere, renders the steep rise in the number of freeman voters in this period much less significant in a national context. Any attempt to calculate the overall size of the electorate in England and Wales will be vitiated by the presence of multiple votes, and as the biographies of the Members amply demonstrate, it was possible for one man to hold the freedom in several boroughs, sometimes in quite different parts of the country. The palm probably goes to Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt., a freeman of at least five corporations,
In their political behaviour non-resident voters also obscured the easy equation between the size of a borough electorate and its relative docility. An influx of non-residents could, indeed, be the very means by which a local landed interest maintained its control, as Sir Henry Johnson did at Aldeburgh, or attempted to gain control, which was the case with Sir Edward Turnor at nearby Orford. There was a similar story in all of the Shropshire boroughs with the exception of Bishop’s Castle. Bridgnorth was divided between two gentry families, the Actons and Whitmores, almost without reference to the corporation, and even the disruption engendered in 1710 by the candidacy of the self-proclaimed Sacheverellite Richard Cresswell, which resulted in a contest for both seats and the ejection of William Whitmore, was accomplished with the aid of Tory ‘outlyers’ recruited by Cresswell for the purpose. Two Whig gentry families, the Foresters and Welds, dominated Much Wenlock by virtue of their influence among the non-resident freemen. The High Tory Kynastons achieved an ascendancy in the more populous borough of Shrewsbury by similar means, despite the vigour of Whiggism within the town. But perhaps the value of non-resident voters was seen most clearly in Ludlow, whose hectic and somewhat confused political history, with rival corporations each claiming legitimacy, resolved itself, after the abandonment of the residential qualification in 1698, into a familiar pattern of competition and alliances between country gentlemen.
Even without the enfranchisement of non-residents, freeman boroughs, no less than corporation boroughs, tended to come under the control of the landed gentry. (London, of course, in this as in so much else, was the great exception.) As a rule, admission to freedom was in the hands of the corporate oligarchy; sometimes, as in Colchester, by the mayor acting on his own. (Winchester’s more democratic process, in which all the freemen participated, was unique.) But such were the realities of borough politics that only a handful of borough corporations exercised this power with sufficient independence for the corporation itself to possess a decisive influence, leaving aside the powers possessed by chief magistrate as returning officer
Where members of the corporation did influence elections, it was comparatively rare for them to stand as candidates themselves, let alone be chosen. Two Tory aldermen, John Pepys and Isaac Watlington, were returned for Cambridge in 1695, but at the next election Pepys did not stand and Watlington was defeated, and thereafter the representation was left to the local gentry. Other brief sightings include Samuel Swift at Worcester in 1695, putting up on a self-consciously populist platform, almost as the citizens’ tribune; the Gloucester clothiers Robert Payne and John Blanch; and the recorder of Rochester, Francis Barell, in the second election of 1701 (though he was probably as much the candidate of the cathedral interest as of the corporation and inhabitants). The sheer size of London as a commercial and financial centre, the heightened civic consciousness of its inhabitants, and the perceived importance of the capital as a weathervane of national opinion, ensured that the merchant princes of the great trading companies would be the leading players in electoral politics in the City. But in the provinces things were very different, and in only four freeman boroughs were local merchants sufficiently wealthy and self-confident to provide parliamentary representatives on a regular basis: Great Yarmouth, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and York. Even then, York was always more than a trading town, its situation as a regional capital attracting a varied population, which was reflected in the mixture of gentlemen and merchants occupying its parliamentary seats; while Great Yarmouth’s heyday as a port had long passed, many of the leading merchants, from families like the Englands, Ferriers and Fullers, preferring to set themselves up as country gentlemen, and some elements in the town beginning to look to landed magnates for political protection, in the first place to Lord Townshend at Raynham Hall.
For the most part, therefore, MPs returned for freeman boroughs tended either to belong to, or to have strong connexions with, landed society. In the smaller boroughs the most important exceptions to this rule were not townsmen themselves but predatory London merchants and fugitive politicians. Some boroughs were part of the economic hinterland of the capital, either because of geographical proximity, as with Sudbury and Colchester, or because their staple manufacture was handled by London factors, which was the case with the clothing industry in Devizes. In consequence, Londoners like Samuel Kekewich in Sudbury, Sir Thomas Cooke and Sir Thomas Abney in Colchester, and the clothier Josiah Diston in Devizes, were afforded a convenient foundation on which to erect a political interest. Others, more opportunistic, were drawn to the notorious venality of particular boroughs. Great Grimsby almost became a preserve of wealthy Londoners with money to spend on entertainment and votes; while the Ipswich freemen were seduced by Charles Duncombe and Joseph Martin, the voters in Marlborough by John Jeffreys, and those at Grampound by Sir William Scawen. Even the respectable electors of Cambridge fell victim to the blandishments of the New East India Company director Samuel Shepheard I, when he came to dwell among them. The safer seats also attracted some notable political refugees: Lord Somers’s (Sir John*) brother-in-law Sir Joseph Jekyll found sanctuary at different times in Eye, Orford, and Lymington; the Tory front-benchers Francis Gwyn and Sir Christopher Musgrave were provided with a bolt-hole by Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt.*, at Totnes; and the paymaster-general Lord Ranelagh availed himself of opportunities at both Marlborough and West Looe in his hours of need.
The prevailing influence of landed property, supplemented (or even surpassed) by drink, promises, and ready cash, left some constituencies almost entirely at the disposal of a patron or patrons. Sir Henry Johnson could nominate both Members at Aldeburgh, Lord Cornwallis at Eye, Henry Guy at Hedon, the Turners at King’s Lynn, the Burrards and Powletts in alliance at Lymington, William Palmes at Malton, and Sir Edward Seymour at Totnes. The Marlboroughs eventually attained the same authority over New Woodstock, although before their arrival and the building of Blenheim Palace the constituency had been contested between Lords Lichfield, Lovelace, and Abingdon (Montagu Venables-Bertie*). None of these dominant interests remained unchallenged, but no challenge was successful. Elsewhere the Tredenhams generally held St. Mawes, but let slip one of the seats between 1705 and 1710; Sir Roger Bradshaigh retained at least one seat, and sometimes both, at Wigan; Lord Carlisle (Charles Howard*) had one place at Morpeth; the Hernes were in much the same position at Dartmouth; and Bishop Trelawny usually returned three out of four Members for East and West Looe. Lord Wharton possessed a strong but not an impregnable interest at Chipping Wycombe, and the same might be said of the Godolphins at Helston, though their position came under pressure after 1710, and of Lord Rockingham (Lewis Watson†) in the single-seat constituency of Higham Ferrers, which he generally controlled by virtue of holding the manor, under the duchy of Lancaster. At Portsmouth the garrison governorship conveyed a considerable electoral influence, but it took the appointment of an active and vigorous party politician like the Tory Lord North and Grey in 1712 before the full capabilities of the post began to be realized. These more completely dependent boroughs were not always small. Although in most cases the number of voters was indeed about a hundred or less, a few, like Dunwich or Ludlow, distended by the intake of large quantities of non-resident freemen.
A minority of freeman boroughs may be described as genuinely ‘open’. They included constituencies like Ludlow, in which the proprietorial interests were so evenly balanced that election results were unpredictable; and others where the voters’ susceptibility to corruption, in one form or another, could make the strongest patron vulnerable. Stafford’s reputation, ‘as open a borough as any in England’,
London, the most obvious example, would have functioned as an ‘open’ constituency because of its size alone, and the same argument would apply to one or two of the bigger provincial cities, such as Gloucester and Oxford. London politics were also distinguished by the existence of a ‘popular’ interest, which made its electorate more independent. At first this was manifested in radical Whig schemes to weaken the oligarchy of the Tory aldermen and common council and to introduce a more representative element into the constitution of the corporation. Then as the balance of power on the court of aldermen swung from Tory to Whig, party alignments were reversed: the new Whig establishment of moneyed men was denounced by Tory populists, largely on religious grounds, as being composed of Dissenters and foreign Protestants.
In effect, here were two different kinds of ‘popular’ interest, one opposed to oligarchy for its own sake, the other opposed to a particular ruling élite because of its objectionable political views; in other words, at first a radical assault on privilege, fuelled by resentment of social inferiority or by economic grievances, and later a factional opposition to a ruling clique, fuelled by party-political and sectarian antagonism. Examples of each form of populism can be found in several provincial boroughs. Oligarchy came under attack in Chester, where the Whiggish faction headed by Roger Whitley attempted in the early 1690s to establish annual, popular elections to the common council; in Liverpool, where the freemen sought to overturn the charter of 1677, which had deprived them of a say in the election of the mayor and common council; and in Lancaster, where Lord Macclesfield instigated moves for a new charter which would incorporate more companies of tradesmen. It was also reported that, prior to the first general election of 1701, ‘the inferior sort of freemen’ in Carlisle ‘entered into a secret combination to oppose the mayor, aldermen and common councilmen, who they thought engrossed all the reputation of an election to themselves’, though here the motive seems to have been mercenary, originating in resentment at the suppression of large-scale electoral entertainment following the Treating Act of 1696.
In these examples party faction was commonly sharpened by religious animosities. Swift’s supporters in Worcester, for example, swore that the defeat of their champion in 1693 was ‘a cheat, a cheat, a Presbyterian cheat’. On the other side the Whigs in Colchester, Liverpool, and Maldon were fortified by the support of the strong Nonconformist element in the town’s population. The presence of substantial numbers of Dissenters within a borough always gave an edge to local politics, and could help to create a ‘popular’ interest, either directly, if the Dissenting freemen felt themselves oppressed by an Anglican establishment, or indirectly, if sectarian hostilities animated ordinary Churchmen with Tory zeal. Thus at Evesham in 1690 the victorious Whig candidates were acclaimed by ‘the fanatics and rabble’, but boycotted by the leading citizens; and 20 years later in Barnstaple the Tory gentlemen who thought they had settled their election by the admission as freemen of over 60 of their own adherents found themselves the target of a mob, headed by an ‘Anabaptist apothecary’, protesting at the way in which the borough had been ‘bought and sold’. Elsewhere the support of ‘Whigs and Dissenters’ was the basis on which the Duke of Somerset began to subvert the ascendancy of the Bruces in Marlborough, and Sir Richard Gipps made an unsuccessful tilt at Sir Edward Seymour in Totnes. In towns like Gloucester and Shrewsbury, on the other hand, and of course in London too, Tories could play on fears of Presbyterian oligarchy, while in a few boroughs, of which Colchester and Coventry would be good examples, there were sufficient numbers of both Churchmen and Dissenters to create a genuinely ‘divided society’, and almost continuous sectarian conflict, which reached a peak at parliamentary elections.
A lively political culture can be found in some freeman boroughs, reflecting not only bitter religious animosities but also a level of political awareness among ordinary voters. Passions ran high enough for violence to be a feature of political life. Rival claimants to the mayoralty scuffled for precedence in Devizes parish church. An election for town clerk in Cambridge in 1707 resulted in a stabbing. There was rioting in the cathedral cities of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester; a pitched battle between armed factions at Coventry, each over a hundred strong, and armed with ‘halberds’ and ‘little clubs’;
Another characteristic of the more substantial freeman boroughs, and especially those in which the resident freemen were a significant presence, was that a Member would be expected to attend conscientiously to constituency interests in Parliament. The Members for Kingston-upon-Hull in the 1695 Parliament, Charles Osborne and Sir William St. Quintin, enhanced their standing with the members of the corporation and the townspeople in general when they brought in and carried at their own expense a bill for erecting workhouses and houses of correction in the town. River navigation compelled the attention of the Members for Derby and Hereford, the repair of the parish church the Members for Boston, and the depredations of billeted soldiers the Members for Berwick; while the freemen of Maidstone expected their representatives to ensure that the borough retained its privilege and dignity as the county town of Kent. The danger of neglecting such business was brought home to Speaker Paul Foley in 1698, when, as one of the outgoing Members for Hereford, he was obliged to counter ’busy insinuations that I was against making Wye navigable’, a reference to the Wye and Lugg navigation bill, which public opinion in the borough strongly supported.
Overall, the proportion of contested elections in freeman boroughs was much the same as for the corporation boroughs: a total of 364 contests out of 1004 elections carried out under a freeman franchise between 1690 and 1714 (including those in which the franchise was modified by the imposition of a further qualification such as residence), that is to say slightly over 36%. Again, it must be emphasized that this figure is probably an inadequate, and may even be a seriously misleading, indication of electoral activity. In Monmouth, for example, although no poll was taken in this period, a great deal of jockeying for position went on between the rival proprietorial interests, Williams of Llangibby, Morgan of Tredegar, and the dukes of Beaufort. Nevertheless, some broad generalizations can be derived from calculating the percentages of contested elections. For example, if the freeman boroughs are differentiated according to the size of their electorates, the results show (predictably enough) that the smaller boroughs polled much less frequently. In constituencies with less than 350 voters around 30% of elections were contested; in those with between 350 and 999 over 46%. Interestingly enough, this proportion remains constant (at 46%) in relation to the largest boroughs, those with a thousand or more voters. London was contested on every occasion in this period, whereas among the smallest boroughs Hedon and Liskeard went to the polls only once, and Grampound and West Looe not at all.
Counting the number of voters is only one of several ways in which freeman boroughs may be differentiated. Of the constituencies whose electors were polled most often (that is to say on average at least once every other election), a few (Colchester and Coventry, as well as London) had more than a thousand voters, but the majority (Carlisle, Devizes, Evesham, Ipswich, Ludlow, Maidstone, Preston, and Sandwich) had electorates of medium size, and several more (East Retford, Great Grimsby, Marlborough, Orford, Rye, and Wigan), were at the lower end of the scale. Again, as with the more highly contested of the corporation boroughs, it is difficult to see what these constituencies had in common. Some were notoriously corrupt, which would have been an encouragement to a potential candidate and might have attracted predators. This was certainly true of Grimsby (contested eight times out of 11), Marlborough (12 out of 15), and East Retford (six out of 12). In other cases the cause might be the persistent rivalry of well-matched proprietorial interests, as at Ludlow (contested six times out of seven under its freeman franchise), or Preston (10 out of 12); prolonged factional strife within a divided corporation, such as occurred in Ipswich (10 times out of 12), and Orford (five out of seven); or the rumbling antagonism of Church and Dissent, which was to be found underlying party political conflict in boroughs like Colchester (seven contests out of 14) and Rye (six out of 13). But just as the candidates in freemen boroughs were predominantly country gentlemen, so, in general, competition between landed families was by far the most frequent precipitant of contested elections. In 15 boroughs it is possible to trace serious internal divisions within the corporate body (Cambridge, Chester, Colchester, Devizes, Gloucester, Ipswich, Liverpool, Liskeard, Maidstone, Maldon, Orford, Portsmouth, Plympton Erle, Wigan, and Winchester), but in several of these examples the root cause of conflict between corporators can be found in external interference: from the likes of Josiah Diston at Devizes, Sir Edward Turnor at Orford, and Sir Roger Bradshaigh and his various rivals at Wigan.
3
There were only two kinds of real property which conveyed a right to vote in borough elections: freehold and burgage. The only exception to this rule was provided by the ‘little mercat town’ of Cricklade in Wiltshire, where copyholders and leaseholders for three years could exercise the franchise. In five boroughs which were also counties in their own right, Bristol, Exeter, Lichfield, Norwich, and Nottingham, the freehold qualification meant a 40s. freehold, as in county elections.
In only five constituencies was the franchise confined to freeholders: Haslemere, Newton, Northampton, Tavistock, and Weymouth with Melcombe. Of these Haslemere and Tavistock imposed a further qualification of residence, while Northampton’s voters were required to be inhabitant freeholders, not in receipt of alms. Technically the right to vote in Reigate may have been in the freeholders (Browne Willis described it as such)
With the exception of Northampton (in which nearly 1,000 electors went to the poll in 1708) and Weymouth (with 480 voters in 1713), the number of voters in each of the freeholder boroughs (including Great Bedwyn and Cricklade) was relatively small, as few as 70 in Newton and Haslemere, and no more than 160 in Cricklade. All except Cricklade, Northampton, and Weymouth were manorial boroughs, the returning officer either appointed directly by the lord of the manor, as at Great Bedwyn or Haslemere, or nominated at the court leet, which was the practice at Tavistock, where the port reeve was chosen by 24 freeholders who had themselves been selected by the lord’s steward. In such circumstances one would expect close control by a proprietorial interest, but this was not the case.
The least active of the manorial boroughs was Newton, where the Leghs of Lyme were lords of the manor. But although it has been described as ‘the pocket borough par excellence’ in the early 18th century,
Elections in the other manorial boroughs were much livelier. In Tavistock there were as many as seven contests out of a possible 12 in this period, for although the Russells, earls of Bedford, who were lords of the manor, generally controlled one seat, they faced stiff opposition from a local Tory family, the Manatons, who could command a popular following on the basis of their High Churchmanship. At Great Bedwyn the influence of the Bruces, who appointed the port reeve at their court leet, was undermined not so much by the presence of an alternative proprietorial interest, in the shape of Francis Stonehouse, a ground landlord within the borough, nor even by their own political difficulties (arising from the Jacobite exile of the 2nd Earl of Ailesbury (Thomas Bruce†)), but by the bare-faced venality of the electors. Canvassing among this ‘pack of corrupt rogues’ could degenerate into an auction. Evidence given to the committee of privileges after the 1705 election recalled a mysterious figure, ‘Mr Nameless’, setting up shop in the upper room of a local tavern, the King’s Head, and distributing parcels of money to freeholders in return for bonds promising their votes to one of the candidates, Edward Pauncefort*. The Haslemere electors, on the other hand, were neither obviously corrupt nor incipiently rebellious, yet the borough suffered prolonged instability in this period, and three out of thirteen elections were contested. The root cause was the eclipse of the power of the lords of the manor, the Mores of Loseley. Among neighbouring landed families, the Onslows of Clandon and the Oglethorpes of Westbrook were potentially the strongest, and could have divided up the representation, had they not disagreed in their politics. In competition, neither was able to get the upper hand for long, the Whig Onslows having to struggle against the Toryism of the Haslemere freeholders, while the Oglethorpes were suspected of Jacobitism and handicapped by the unwillingness of other Tory interests to join them.
Of the larger boroughs, Weymouth was exposed to varying forms of proprietorial and patronal influence, from the local landed élite, headed by the earls of Shaftesbury, and the government, though the customs service. But competition between the Dorset gentlemen, exacerbated by the interloping of ‘mercenary custom house fellows’ and other itinerant office-holders, produced eight contested elections out of a possible 16 in this period.
Northampton, despite its size, was by no means an `open’ borough, its electorate tending to defer to the local gentry, many of whom kept town houses. There is even evidence to suggest that the more important county families sought to rotate the borough representation among them, or at least that occupancy of the borough seats came into the calculations of `the gentlemen’, as they discussed who might stand for knight of the shire. Only in the 1702 election did rival Whig and Tory interests put up candidates for both seats, the other contests being three-cornered. Yet the vulnerability of the poorer freeholders to financial inducements, and the presence of a strong vein of sectarian animosity in the populace, always raised the possibility that this genteel consensus might be disrupted. In the 1690s, for example, the successful London lawyer William Thursby had made inroads into the governing interests of the Tory Ishams and Whig Montagus, thanks to the ‘industry’ of his supporters; and in 1710 the political temperature of the town was inflamed by Sacheverell fever, the local clergy whipping up opposition to George Montagu*, ‘half-filling the pollbook (though several of them had no votes), brow-beating and discouraging the electors’.
The most frequently contested of the freeholder boroughs was, however, Cricklade, which went to the polls no less than nine times out of 13, its peculiar franchise making the borough resistant to domination by any of the surrounding territorial interests. For this reason, Cricklade attracted the attention of several outsiders, some of them London men with local connexions, like Joseph Haskins Stiles*, tempted by the relative openness of the borough, others the young protégés of prominent politicians, like Lord Wharton’s client, Edmund Dunch, and the secretary of state’s son, James Vernon II, who were brought in on the proprietorial interest of the financier and sometime Treasury lord Sir Stephen Fox*.
Of the boroughs in which both freemen and freeholders voted, the five county boroughs were contested far more frequently: just over 50% of elections (29 out of 57) proceeding to a poll, as compared with just over 40% for all the constituencies which have been treated here as ‘freeholder boroughs’. In all, the voters of Norwich were polled eight times out of 12 possible occasions; those of Nottingham seven times out of 13. Norwich was in many ways the classic example of an ‘open’ constituency, its 2,500 voters putting it well beyond the control of individual or collective patronage.
The situation in Bristol, where the number of voters was even greater, totalling around 3,500, presented strong similarities to Norwich although the outcome, in terms of parliamentary elections, was for much of the period rather different. In 1690 the corporation was split into Tory and Whig factions, and among the inhabitants, including freemen and freeholders, tensions between Church and Dissent ensured considerable popular attachment to the political parties. There were at least as many Nonconformist congregations in Bristol as in Norwich, and Dissenters may have made up as much as a third of the freeman body. What Defoe called the ‘corporation-tyranny’ of the self-perpetuating élite of aldermen and common councilmen had also aroused a populist movement, led by the local merchant and political writer John Cary, who campaigned for a greater say for the freemen as a whole in civic government. Between 1690 and 1695 the ultra-Tories, headed by the hectoring Jacobite alderman Sir John Knight*, lost power in the borough and credibility with the electorate. A formidably coherent Whig faction then took a grip on the corporation, even recruiting Cary by the adoption of his pet scheme for a ‘corporation for the poor’. For a decade and a half these Whig aldermen effectively controlled parliamentary elections, partly through their domination of the borough corporation, and partly because they could count on the solid support of the Dissenters in the city. So whereas elections in Norwich were consistently ‘open’ and hard-fought, Bristol went through a long period of one-party rule. When Toryism eventually revived there, it was as an immediate consequence of the Sacheverell trial, which aroused High Church sentiment among the populace. In a genuinely popular contest the Tories triumphantly carried the 1710 election, largely owing to a number of new voters (whether freemen or freeholders is unclear), and retained both seats in 1713. High Church mobs, and interfering clergymen, were very much a feature of the 1710 election, although it is interesting that in choosing as one of their candidates the philanthropist Edward Colston II, the Tories touched the same vein of municipal paternalism that had been a feature of Whig politics in the city.
Because of their size, prosperity, and civic tradition, both Bristol and Norwich were able to follow such large freeman boroughs as London, Liverpool, and Newcastle, in generating parliamentary candidates from within the resident urban élite. There were a few exceptions: Colston did not live in Bristol, though he had made a reputation among the inhabitants by charitable benefactions; while in Norwich the county magnates sponsored two unsuccessful candidates, Charles, Lord Paston*, son of the 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, in 1702, and Robert Britiffe†, the Walpoles’ family lawyer, in 1713. But the economies of the two cities were significantly different. Bristol depended on trade, and threw up wealthy merchants like Sir William Daines and Sir Thomas Day; whereas Norwich was a regional capital, albeit with a strong manufacturing base, whose more prominent citizens (like those of Great Yarmouth) bought country estates and enjoyed an amphibian existence as urban merchants and rural squires.
Exeter, another provincial city declared by Defoe to be ‘full of trade and manufactures’, displayed some of the features of an ‘open’ borough: a large electorate (1,300 in 1695); a lively political culture, predicated on the opposition of Church and Dissent, which involved the cathedral clergy and could occasionally induce riotous behaviour among the majority Anglican population; and ongoing conflict within the corporation. On three out of a possible 12 occasions in this period the borough was contested as far as a poll. It differed from the two largest county boroughs, however, in the extent to which country gentlemen participated in elections. Only four of its 11 MPs were local merchants. The reputation which Exeter enjoyed among west country Tories as a bastion of ‘loyalism’ attracted a succession of High Church squires, led by Sir Edward Seymour, sometime recorder of the borough, who represented it in the 1690 Parliament, and again from 1698 until his death. Only in the 1695 election was Seymour’s hold broken, when two local Whigs mounted a vigorous campaign on a ‘popular’ platform, appealing not to sectarian emotions (although they derived strong support from the Dissenting congregations) so much as to economic self-interest. They claimed that the local clothing industry could be revived by the greater involvement of Dutch merchants, and promised, if elected, all kinds of economic benefits for the city. More to the point, perhaps, they also enjoyed the underhand assistance of the sheriff, as returning officer, and the favourable opinion of the Whig-dominated House of Commons when Seymour petitioned. By the time of the next election, however, the Exeter voters had returned to their natural Tory bent.
The two remaining county boroughs, Lichfield and Nottingham, were entirely the preserve of landed gentlemen, despite the size of the Nottingham voterate, which numbered some 1,300 (Lichfield was much smaller, with no more than 400). In part, this reflected the realities of social life, since both cities contained a disproportionate number of gentlemen’s residences. At the pinnacle of Nottingham society were the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Kingston, and Sir Thomas Willoughby, 2nd Bt.*, who between them also exercised a powerful influence over parliamentary elections in the borough. This is not to say that the landed proprietors necessarily had everything their own way. Each borough corporation had a sense of its own importance: aldermen required to be courted, rather than simply taking direction, and in Nottingham the Members were expected to look after the economic interests of the citizens. Party divisions were also much in evidence, stoked up in Lichfield by the clerical interest centred on the cathedral close, and exacerbated by the failure of the gentlemen to agree among themselves. In consequence, both constituencies were contested with remarkable frequency: Lichfield on average at every other general election, and Nottingham on as many as seven occasions out of a possible 13.
The importance of the freeholder element in these larger boroughs is unclear. Their electorates always contained far more freemen than freeholders, and the possibility of wholesale creations of new freemen for tactical purposes, as happened in Norwich in 1705, meant that the freeholders were liable to be swamped at any time. Although the influx of new voters into Bristol in 1710 has not been satisfactorily explained, it is unlikely to have been made up of new freeholders. But this did not mean that in practice the county boroughs operated in exactly the same way as those boroughs in which the franchise was confined to the freemen alone. The freeholders formed a separate element in the electorate, and in Exeter in 1695 they seem to have taken up a distinct political position, supporting Sir Edward Seymour against his Whig opponents. As a group, freeholders were usually of a higher social status than mere freemen, and for that reason were assumed to be more independent. In Lichfield, for example, where it was said that ‘every tinker has a vote’, the strenuous contest between William Walmisley* and Humphrey Wyerley at the first general election of 1701 focused attention on the dangers of an unregulated expansion of the freeman body, and of the vulnerability of the freemen to lavish entertainment and even outright bribery. The Commons judgment on Wyerley’s petition attempted to exclude the poorest voters by restricting the franchise to freeholders and freemen paying scot and lot.
The situation in the four smaller boroughs in which freeholders voted alongside freemen, Guildford, Lyme Regis, Okehampton, and Tewkesbury, can be compared much more closely with the freeman boroughs. Indeed, in Tewkesbury (whose electorate of around 500 was the largest of the four) it was not even clear that the freeholders could vote, until the determination of the Commons on the 1698 election confirmed the right of election in ‘the burgesses, freemen, and commonalty’. The franchise at Lyme was disputed throughout the period, and it was only in 1710 that the freeholders established their right to be polled alongside resident freemen. Elections in Okehampton were dominated by the freemen, especially after 1710 when the mayor, Christopher Yendall, doubled the electorate at a stroke by creating 135 new freemen, mostly (or so his enemies said) ‘servants, waggoners and carters’ employed by one of the candidates, John Dibble, a timber merchant and contractor to the navy, together with ‘vagrants, deserters of the Queen’s service, and ... idle persons’. This was an unusual example of any of the corporations acting independently, and was induced by Dibble’s willingness to spend money to purchase a parliamentary seat. Otherwise, all three tended to follow the lead of the local gentry, the Northmores and Harrises in Okehampton, the Dowdeswells and Capells in Tewkesbury, and the Onslows in Guildford. In Okehampton gentry dominance meant political quiescence, and no contest until Dibble’s appearance in 1710; but Tewkesbury was polled five times in 13 elections, and Guildford saw even more frequent contests, the figures here being six out of 11. What caused Guildford’s relative political instability is a mystery: evidently the Onslow interest was vulnerable to a Tory challenge, as John Weston nearly showed in 1698, when coming within a handful of votes of Foot Onslow, and Morgan Randyll proved conclusively in 1708, when defeating Denzil Onslow’s running-mate, Robert Wroth, for the second seat. The experience of the 1689 election suggests that Toryism may have been stronger among the inhabitants of the town than among the members of the corporation, for it was to benefit the Onslows that the Commons then restricted the franchise to those freemen and freeholders paying scot and lot.
4
Besides Reigate, 28 constituencies can be defined as ‘burgage boroughs’: Appleby, Bere Alston, Bletchingley, Boroughbridge, Bramber, Castle Rising, Chippenham, Clitheroe, Cockermouth, Downton, East Grinstead, Heytesbury, Horsham, Knaresborough, Midhurst, Newport (Cornwall), Newtown (I.o.W.), Northallerton, Old Sarum, Petersfield, Pontefract, Richmond, Ripon, Saltash, Thirsk, Weobley, Westbury, and Whitchurch.
In theory the size of the burgage-holding electorate ought to have been fixed, and in a few of the smaller boroughs, like Bramber, Newtown, or Saltash, this was so, but ‘the scandalous practice of splitting burgages and freeholds’, in order to multiply votes, was widely established. When representatives of the Duke of Somerset acknowledged that the burgages in Cockermouth were being fragmented into ‘very small parcels’, some ‘not above two or three yards in length’, their complaints were expressed in terms which indicated that the decline in electoral virtue was relative, for they admitted that until recently a quarter of a burgage was regarded as the minimum qualification for voting.
Just as splitting burgages produced an expansion in the electorate, akin to the inflation in freeman boroughs caused by mass admissions of non-resident freemen, so the perpetual and indissoluble nature of the burgage preserved borough representation and borough electorates despite economic decline. Not all burgage boroughs were ‘rotten’, by any means, but a significant number had seen better days. Bletchingley and Bramber were notoriously ‘decayed’; Boroughbridge was ‘a poor town of about 90 houses, of which 68 are burgage houses’; Bere Alston consisted of ‘a few cob cottages, a market house, and a poor house’, in one main street; while Old Sarum was perhaps the quintessential example: as John Toland wrote, it ‘has but the bare name of a corporation left ... there remaining not as much as the ruins of a house to show it was ever inhabited’.
By their very nature, burgage boroughs could fall easily into proprietorship. Ownership of a burgage meant control over a vote (or indeed several votes, if the burgage was divided up), and usually this ultimate ownership would be retained in one pair of hands, while the title of burgage-holder, and with it the franchise, was entrusted to another, by granting long leases at low rents or by temporary conveyances.
In boroughs with no clearly defined patron the market in burgage property was buoyant. Buyers would sometimes intervene simply as a precaution, to stop votes falling into the hands of their opponents.
The cost of burgages varied considerably, governed by local market-forces, which had more to do with political relationships than with the intrinsic value of the property. A burgage was always a sound investment, as the Yorkshire landowner Sir William Chaytor was informed by his agent him in 1704, in relation to a purchase in Richmond:
On Saturday last old Mrs Plews came to me and acquainted me that Sir Joseph Cradock gave her an old borough house in Richmond for her life but that, it being fallen into very great decay for want of reparations, the rent she now let it for would not pay the present taxes and that it would immediately fall down if not repaired. She would gladly part with it. I went to view it, and find it a mean old house. There’s two low rooms and two above, but I perceive none has ever lived in it but poor people. There’s only one woman now lives in it, and pays 12s. p.a. The roof is decayed and the slates almost all blown down ... I believe I could buy her title for a small matter ... The main reason that I would buy it is that I might upon occasion seise a friend with a vote for a Parliament-man...
In 1703 James Grahme paid £45 for an individual burgage in Appleby;
Where competition for burgages was prolonged, the ultimate cost could be immense. Only rarely did the kind of opportunity arise, as at Boroughbridge or Reigate, where a one-off payment would effectively secure control of the borough. Thus, for reasons of economy, patrons, or would-be patrons, did not always buy burgages themselves. They might encourage their more trustworthy supporters to do so. ‘I hope our friends will buy burgages at Cockermo[uth]’, wrote James Lowther in 1711, adding magnanimously, ‘I shall be willing to buy two or three more myself, upon reasonable terms’.
The buying of burgages was only the first step towards the establishment of a proprietorial interest. The value of the purchase would be maximised by division, which seems to have been common practice in almost every borough, the exceptions being Bere Alston, where an agreement between the two principal proprietors, Lord Stamford and Sir Francis Drake, precluded sharp practice of any kind, and Downton, where one of the principals was advised against creating new voters on the grounds that it might exasperate his rivals, and even cause resentment among the existing set of burgage-holders, who valued their franchise for the monetary gain and liquid refreshment it might bring them. Short-term conveyancing, to manufacture ‘faggot’ votes for the duration of the election, was another popular stratagem, much denounced but very frequently practised. Of Thanet’s opponents in Appleby, Thomas Carleton wrote in December 1701: ‘several of their party who have more burgages than one are conveying them to entitle voters and I fear they’ll make many that way. I have bought five since last election which I hope will do good service’.
One should be careful, however, not to exaggerate the proprietorial nature of the burgage boroughs, and to reduce their electoral history to a series of commercial transactions. In only a few cases would this description be properly applied. ‘Making an interest’ in a burgage borough usually involved a great deal more than buying up property, and issuing the appropriate conveyances. Given that a number of burgage boroughs were decayed, and that in many others the electorate had been inflated by division and conveyancing, a high proportion of the voters would be non-resident,
Such considerations were more likely to apply in the ten burgage boroughs which possessed corporate institutions, where the mayor or other chief magistrate was the returning officer, or where (as in Chippenham) the corporation maintained a register of voters: Appleby, Castle Rising, Chippenham, Newtown (I.o.W.), Pontefract, Richmond, Ripon, Saltash, Westbury and Whitchurch. The mayoralty would become the focus of attention in the year of a parliamentary election, and might be sharply contested, as happened in Appleby in 1708, when Wharton secured the office for himself. In a few boroughs competition between interests resulted in a continuing struggle for dominance over the corporation: the rivalry at Castle Rising between the Howards and Walpoles spilled over from the general election of 1695 and made municipal elections a test of strength; in Pontefract the entertainment was almost as lavish prior to the election of a mayor in 1712 as it had been at the election of Members of Parliament in 1695, when the corporation had been treated with 24 bottles of claret. The corporate oligarchy itself had an electoral interest in Pontefract, in Ripon, where Sir Jonathan Jennings* suffered electorally from alienating the aldermen, and in Westbury whose corporation helped return the Whigs Thomas Phipps and William Trenchard in 1702, possibly driven by anxiety over the difficulties of the local woollen industry, which Phipps, a London merchant, promised to be able to assist. The independence of the corporators in Westbury was short-lived, however. The proprietorial interest enjoyed by the lord of the manor, the Tory Earl of Abingdon (Montagu Venables-Bertie*), had revived sufficiently by 1710 to defeat another Whig merchant, Henry Cornish, who sought to mobilize the clothiers by the expenditure of large sums of money.
The remaining 19 burgage boroughs were essentially manorial: Bere Alston, Bletchingley, Boroughbridge, Bramber, Clitheroe, Cockermouth, Downton, East Grinstead, Heytesbury, Horsham, Knaresborough, Midhurst, Newport (Cornwall), Northallerton, Petersfield, Reigate, Old Sarum, Thirsk, and Weobley. With a few exceptions, such as Clitheroe, whose in-bailiff and out-bailiff were elected annually by the burgage-owners (‘burgesses’) and burgage-tenants (‘freemen’), the returning officer would be nominated by the lord of the manor, or chosen at his court leet. At Cockermouth the names of the voters themselves were enrolled in the court book of the manor.
Treating, and downright bribery, were features of those burgage boroughs in which proprietorship or patronage was unclear. Burgage-owners, and even burgage-tenants, were eager to capitalize on the economic value of their votes, and their willingness to sell made even a small borough like Bramber relatively ‘open’: among its 32 electors the going rate for a vote in 1710 was £20. At Ripon in the same year it was reported that ‘the candidates buy votes as publicly as if they were buying cattle in the market’, and Chippenham was another borough with a reputation for venality, individual votes being bought for a waistcoat, or a bushel of wheat. The most notorious of the burgage boroughs was Weobley, where the poverty of the electorate, including tradesmen and even day-labourers, encouraged a mercenary attitude. ‘So many rogues’, observed a jaundiced Robert Price*, as he contemplated another costly campaign, ‘there is no hold of them.’ At one point the cost of a vote was as little as 5s. (or even a pair of shoes), though strenuous canvassing by more than one set of candidates could raise the price to two pounds. The five ale-houses always did such good business at elections that the town was described by one local gentleman as ‘our liquid metropolis’, and the best advice any prospective candidate could receive was to be prepared to open his purse:
there is no going to Weobley for any agent without money in his pocket to set taps a running in the public houses, and a large sum to deposit in a safe hand as a certain reward and purchase for those votes you can be promised...
Thus although it was possible for the seeker after a parliamentary seat to find a bargain in a burgage borough, expenses could be high. Thirsk in 1697 was said to offer a secure seat ‘at a very easy charge’,
Given the element of proprietorship, and in some cases the cost, it is perhaps not surprising that there were fewer contested elections in burgage boroughs than in any other group of borough constituencies in this period. The overall figure of 28.3% (representing 104 contests out of a possible 367), which on its own would not appear spectacularly low, is inflated by seven particularly strife-torn constituencies: Appleby (with six contested elections out of 12), Bletchingley (six out of 11), Clitheroe (seven out of 14), Cockermouth (10 out of 12), Pontefract (eight out of 11), Reigate (seven out of 11), and Weobley (six out of 12). On the other hand, there were no contests at all in Bere Alston, Castle Rising, Heytesbury, Petersfield, and Thirsk, and only one each in Downton, Knaresborough, Newtown, and Old Sarum. In general the smaller the electorate, or voterate, the less frequently the constituency would be contested. Burgage boroughs with fewer than a hundred voters went to the polls on average at one election in five (20.7%); those with a hundred voters and above, at one election in three (38.1%). It is important to repeat the point that an absence of contests as defined in this History (that is to say contests which proceeded as far as a poll) does not necessarily mean an absence of tension, conflict, or expenditure. In Castle Rising, for example, a contest was only avoided in 1695 when the Howards and Walpoles came to an agreement to share the representation; and even then bad feeling continued into the mayoral election of the following year.
Only a few constituencies in this category could truly be described a ‘pocket’ boroughs: Heytesbury, throughout the period, Horsham, until the death of the 7th Duke of Dorset in 1701, and Boroughbridge, Newport (Cornwall), Old Sarum, and Westbury, all of which came under the control of a single patron. Bere Alston was divided amicably between Lord Stamford and Sir Francis Drake; Knaresborough between the Stockdale and Byerley families (after 1695); Saltash between the Bullers and Carews; Thirsk between Sir Thomas Frankland and Ralph Bell. In Boroughbridge, before Newcastle’s arrival, Sir Bryan Stapylton and the Wilkinsons co-operated, if uneasily, so that a contest was threatened only once and even then did not materialize. Similar instances of ‘armed neutrality’ can be seen at Castle Rising in the years after the crisis of 1695-6, with first Sir Robert Howard himself, and then his widow, Lady Diana, always on the watch for Walpolean intrigues; and at Petersfield, where the Tory Bilsons returned one Member and the Whig Powletts another, until the appointment of the Duke of Beaufort as lord lieutenant of Hampshire in 1710 released a bull into the china shop of the county’s politics. In a few other boroughs one seat would be spoken for, but the second open to contest: at Bletchingley, where the City financier Sir Robert Clayton was lord of the manor, but faced opposition from the Evelyn family if he attempted to take both seats, and at East Grinstead, where the Whig Duke of Dorset nominated one Member, but generally had to concede the second to the local Tory gentry, and between 1702 and 1708 lost both. The more open, or at least the more frequently contested, constituencies were those in which the interested parties were too numerous (often because of the larger number of votes available) to admit an easy compromise: Lords Thanet and Wharton, and James Grahme* in Appleby; Lord Holdernesse, Lord Wharton again, the Wyvills and Yorkes in Richmond; Wharton again, Sir William Robinson, the Lascelles and Pierse families in Northallerton. The more venal burgage boroughs were also ‘open’, at least to wealthy outsiders, and the scent of corruption drew such City figures as Duncombe to Downton, and Samuel Shepheard I to Bramber. Chippenham was another constituency which attracted figures from the world of commerce, partly because of the venality of the populace, and partly because of the importance of the cloth industry in the local economy and the presence of a manufacturing interest in the electorate. Two London merchants, Sir Basil Firebrace* and Sir Humphrey Edwin* contested a by-election there in 1691, and another, John Eyles, came in at the general election of 1713.
These were exceptions, however. Landed men predominated among the principals in burgage boroughs, and for the most part mere gentlemen, although the proprietorial element encouraged the participation of a few great magnates like Wharton, Newcastle, and Somerset, or Lord Peterborough, who appeared at Chippenham in 1698 in an attempt to have his own son returned. These electoral patrons were inclined to look to the safer burgage boroughs for seats for their political protégés. Cockermouth was one of the oases at which the political caravan of the young soldier James Stanhope* came to rest, in 1702, when Somerset nominated him there. Three years later Wharton was put forward another military Whig, Hon. Harry Mordaunt*, but this was asking too much of the Cockermouth electors, who were alarmed with tales of likely parliamentary absenteeism, and Mordaunt languished at the bottom of the poll. Disappointment also attended the most bizarre example of carpet-bagging to be found in any constituency in this period, at Bletchingley in November 1701, when, if rumour can be believed, Sir Robert Clayton considered putting up none other than the radical journalist John Toland.
Although commerce and corruption were the main themes of elections in burgage boroughs, many of the contests had an air of party conflict about them, even if this was imparted by the principals rather than by the voters. In Bletchingley Sir Robert Clayton was a staunch Whig, his antagonists the Evelyns staunch Tories; in Reigate the Junto lord, Somers, was opposed by the high-flying Tory Sir John Parsons. In other boroughs party hostilities as much as family or individual rivalries determined the pattern of electoral conflict; in Whitchurch the Tories Tylney and Vernon deliberately set themselves against the Whig Wollaston; at Ripon in 1708-13 local Tory interests formed a coalition specifically in order to resist Wharton’s encroachments; while the main interests at Appleby were also aligned along a party axis, the Tories Thanet and James Grahme* against the Whig Wharton.
Evidence of political awareness among ordinary voters is harder to come by. Certainly burgage-holders seem to have had as much amour propre as any other kind of elector. No patron could take them for granted, and paying the respect of ‘a circular visit’ was almost essential: in Appleby Thanet’s failure ‘to solicit in person’ in 1701 caused difficulties for his agents.
5
The remaining boroughs elected on some form of inhabitant, or householder franchise, usually modified in order to specify permanent residence and/or level of income. In the settled conditions of the later 18th century they might be divided neatly into two groups, householder or ‘potwalloper’,
In sum, therefore, we may count eight boroughs which elected on an ‘inhabitant’ franchise at some point during the period, 11 ‘householder’ or ‘potwalloper’ boroughs, and 35 ‘scot-and-lot’. Bedford, Hertford, Leicester, Reading, St. Albans, and Southampton are all probably best described as ‘hybrids’, with a ‘mixed’ franchise. Although they each displayed some of the characteristics of freeman boroughs, for purposes of behavioural analysis Bedford will be treated hereafter as a ‘potwalloper’ borough, Hertford and St. Albans as ‘inhabitant’, and Leicester, Reading, and Southampton as ‘scot-and-lot’. Aldborough has also been included among the ‘scot-and-lot boroughs’ despite the highly significant burgage-holding element in its electorate (already discussed in the preceding section).
Once again changes in the right of voting, where they occurred, achieved a narrowing rather than a widening of the electorate. Always the expressed intention was to ensure that voters were relatively respectable and economically independent. This was seen most clearly in the boroughs with the widest franchise. Among the ‘inhabitant’ boroughs, Ludgershall moved to an electorate of freeholders and leaseholders for lives, while Amersham and Milborne Port both adopted a scot-and-lot qualification (in the latter case inhabitants paying scot and lot). Among the potwalloper boroughs the trend was even clearer, as Abingdon, Honiton, Reading and Southwark all shifted towards a scot-and-lot franchise, albeit with slight variations (in Abingdon it was scot-and-lot payers not receiving alms; in Reading scot-and-lot payers and freemen not receiving alms; in Southwark scot-and-lot payers inhabitant within the borough).
With the exceptions of Hertford, Portsmouth, and St. Albans (where in every case the inclusion of freemen increased the number of electors by at least several hundreds), the inhabitant boroughs tended to have small voterates: nothing above 200, and the majority under 100. The reverse was true of boroughs with a householder franchise. Admittedly, the three Cornish boroughs, Bossiney, Mitchell, and St. Germans, each had fewer than a hundred voters, but the next lowest was Wendover, with about 200, and three householder boroughs had voterates of around 1,000 or more: Reading, Taunton, and the huge constituency of Southwark, with 4,000 potwallopers and even 1,500 voters under its restricted, scot-and-lot, franchise. As might be expected, the numbers voting in scot-and-lot boroughs were in general appreciably smaller. In 27 out of 35 constituencies less than 300 voters went to the polls, and in eight of those cases the numbers were less than a hundred, including the ‘miserable’ hamlet of Gatton, with its 22 inhabitants. Of the larger scot-and-lot constituencies only four exceeded 500: Leicester and Reading, with their enhanced voterates, both at around a thousand; the reduced Southwark electorate producing approximately 1,500 at the polls; and Westminster providing the monstrous exception in this category, with its gigantic voterate of over 7,000.
In terms of their political behaviour, inhabitant, potwalloper, and scot-and-lot boroughs shared a number of common features, deriving from the relative poverty of their voters, most notably perhaps a susceptibility to corruption (extending from the lavish provision of liquid refreshment to outright bribery), which would attract the attention of wealthy outsiders and as a result make contests more frequent. It was in reference to scot-and-lot payers that Anne Evelyn wrote in 1710, when she commented that ‘the practices at Penryn were so foul that Sir Richard Vyvyan* himself got off the bench in dislike of the people Mr [Samuel] Trefusis* polled’. Generalizations about political vitality and relative ‘openness’ apply across all three categories. A few examples could certainly be found in which the narrowing of the franchise by the imposition of a scot-and-lot qualification changed the character of a constituency (as in Abingdon, where electioneering seems to have become cheaper), or at least was intended to change its character (as in Southwark, where action was taken partly in response to evidence of physical violence at the polls in 1702), but, in general, differences between individual boroughs were determined less by the nature of the franchise itself than by other factors, such as the number of voters, the nature (indeed, the very existence) of corporate institutions, and the balance of power between local proprietorial interests.
Electioneering in inhabitant, potwalloper and scot-and-lot boroughs was an expensive business. The Duke of Newcastle was alleged to have gone through £1,200 in supporting a single candidate at Newark in 1710; (Sir) Simon Harcourt (I*) some £1,000 on his own behalf at Abingdon in 1708, on the original, potwalloper, franchise; while Steyning’s 80 or so voters between them consumed as much as £500 of Lord Bellew’s (Richard*) money in a by-election in 1712. Even an unopposed return at Stamford in 1690 left one of the successful candidates, Hon. Philip Bertie, lighter in his pocket to the tune of more than £250. The running costs of keeping up an electoral interest in such circumstances could be enormous, the £18,000 which Sir James Etheridge* spent on Great Marlow between 1690 and 1715 being by no means unusual. At Chichester the contending parties were driven to make an agreement among themselves in 1707 in order to avoid further expenses. A prime cause was the amount of entertaining indulged in by candidates and their patrons or agents in constituencies of this kind, where voters expected to be plied with copious quantities of food and drink. Sir Edward Abney* soon discovered as much when he began electioneering in Leicester in 1695. He recounted the experience with distaste:
nothing is certain till done, that depends upon the suffrage of the unstable vulgar. Last night I treated most of the companies of trades of this town visiting all of them myself at ten several houses wher[e] I entertained them. As the custom is I spoke a little to every company.
Naturally enough, the most expensive constituency was Westminster, with its 7,000 scot-and-lot payers, who may well have cost Sir Thomas Clarges* as much as £2,000 in 1695. On a different scale, but still expensive enough, were Peterborough, at whose 40 ale-houses Sir Gilbert Dolben and Francis St. John between them incurred bills totalling £400 in January 1701, and Honiton, where in the same election Sir Walter Yonge spent on his own between £200 and £300. Other boroughs whose voters expected, and received, ‘great feasts and entertainments’ included Reading (another very expensive proposition because of the size of its electorate), Aldborough, Leominster, Mitchell, Southampton, and Wallingford. Treating was not, however, the surest way to secure loyalty, a fact which Lord Brooke acknowledged in 1705, when, instead of simply keeping ‘open house’ at local hostelries for the populace to avail themselves of his generosity, he issued the electors of Warwick with sealed tickets, redeemable in liquid form, in return for a pledge to poll for his nominees.
Votes were also bought outright. Bribery figured among the complaints and counter-protests of parties to election petitions in no less than 22 of the boroughs in which some form of residential franchise operated, and many of these allegations, even the more colourful and extravagant, were amply proved. The offending boroughs were Aldborough, Amersham, Arundel, Bridport, Chichester, Corfe Castle, Hindon, Ilchester, Leominster, Ludgershall, Mitchell, Newark, New Shoreham, Peterborough, St. Albans, St. Ives, Shaftesbury, Stockbridge, Tregony, Wareham, Warwick, and Wootton Bassett. The list includes some of the most notorious haunts of electoral corruption to be found in this period: Stockbridge, already the subject of one unsuccessful attempt at disfranchisement in the Convention of 1689, and fortunate to escape a second time when a bill was introduced for this specific purpose in 1694, after a particularly scandalous by-election; Hindon, where flagrant bribery in the general elections of 1701-2 provoked MPs to begin similar legislative action, though again without effect; Ilchester, one of several boroughs targeted in January 1701 by Samuel Shepheard I, on behalf of the New East India Company; and New Shoreham, also the subject of an invasion by a New East India Company director in 1701, in this case Nathaniel Gould*,
a mere stranger in the said borough, who, a few days before the last election, came down from London, and ordered the public crier of the said borough to give notice with his bell, to all the votesmen to come to the King’s Arms to receive a guinea a man to drink Mr Gould’s health; by which and other corrupt practices, he procured himself to be elected and returned, most of the votesmen having received a guinea piece.
The New Shoreham electors had not sold themselves cheaply in comparison with their counterparts in similar constituencies elsewhere. When the price of a vote is given, either in election petitions or, more rarely, in election accounts, it scarcely ever exceeds a few pounds. Thomas Neale’s purchase of promises of votes at Ludgershall for 10s. each was something of a bargain. Otherwise, George Morley* paid between £1 and 30s. per head at Hindon in 1701; Hugh Boscawen I*’s agent offered voters a pound each at Tregony; Anthony Rowe* may have had to go as high as £5 in two constituencies, at Mitchell and Stockbridge; and sums between £1 and £8 were being asked at Leominster in 1701. Beyond that, there were allegations that Sir John Garrard, 3rd Bt.*, had spent £10 a vote at Amersham in 1698; and that in the Steyning by-election of 1712 prices may have reached a peak of £20 (though to one fortunate resident of St. Albans the Duchess of Marlborough was said to have given 20 guineas in 1705). Occasionally too, some alternative form of material inducement might be offered, rather than hard cash: at Tregony in 1695 1,000 hundredweight of tin is said to have been distributed among Boscawen’s supporters; at Stockbridge Neale is supposed to have offered prospective voters sacks of wheat; at Aldborough Sir Abstrupus Danby* issued his supporters with tickets for coal from neighbouring pits; while at Ludgershall in 1698 John Richmond Webb* offered one voter a guinea; another ‘a load of straw’; a third, a bricklayer, ‘to make his day’s work worth two guineas’. In whatever form bribes appeared, they seem always to have been offered openly, with the commercial nature of the transaction frankly acknowledged. At Wootton Bassett in 1690 the agent for Thomas Richmond Webb* (brother of John) had handed out 32s.6d. apiece to voters, after parading through the town carrying ‘a bag of money ... upon his shoulders, with a pair of bagpipes playing before him’. Venality was taken for granted, so that when George Pitt* of Strathfieldsaye, one of two patrons at Wareham, quarrelled with the other, Thomas Erle*, it was natural for him to threaten to ‘bring down a merchant to the borough’ for the next election, ‘who would spend £1,000’.
In a few of the larger constituencies physical violence could be expected. In Cirencester the candidates in 1690 were threatened by the mob, and in Portsmouth too there were scuffles in 1695, when a contingent of guards from the garrison was deployed to intimidate the then governor’s political enemies. Such scenes were a common feature of elections in the metropolitan constituencies. The inhabitants of Southwark had a fearsome reputation for violence, which boiled up in the general election of 1702, but may have receded a little thereafter with the alteration in the franchise from potwalloper to scot-and-lot. Westminster, with an even larger electorate, was an even more dangerous place to be at election times. Battles regularly took place between the factions in Tuttle-Fields, with the numbers of injured running into the hundreds. The contest in 1698 witnessed a bloody encounter. James Vernon I* recalled with undisguised pleasure how his supporters had defended themselves against the partisans of his opponent, Sir Henry Dutton Colt*: they had ‘run down his [Colt’s] men at a strange rate, and cudgelled him into ditches full of water, and yet we say they were the aggressors’. An account of voting at the 1710 election, held at Covent Garden, vividly conveys the menacing atmosphere of polling days:
In front of the main door of the church ... they had placed a table, on which lay two great books in which each man wrote his name. One book was for General [James] Stanhope* and the other for [Thomas] Crosse*. Now when it happened that two went up together, one writing in this, and the other in that book, they would be sure on their way down to fall together by the ears. In fact it rained blows right and left.
In other respects elections in inhabitant, potwalloper, and scot-and-lot boroughs were little different from elections in any other type of borough. Except for the few genuinely ‘open’ constituencies (with the largest or most mercenary, and thus unpredictable, electorates), they were subject to varying degrees of control or influence by standing ‘interests’, mainly proprietorial in nature: patrons or would-be patrons like the Lords Cheyne, the Drakes of Shardeloes and Edmund Waller at Amersham; the 7th Duke of Norfolk at Arundel; the two Thomas Strangways, father and son, at Bridport; the Dukes of Somerset and Richmond, and the Earl of Tankerville, at Chichester; the Lords Bathurst and the Master, Powle and Howe families at Cirencester; the Bankes dynasty in Corfe Castle; the Rashleighs at Fowey; various Berties and Cecils at Stamford; the earls (later dukes) of Rutland in Leicester; the Pelhams at Lewes and at Seaford (where for a time they faced competition from Sir William Thomas*); the Medlycotts and Sir Thomas Travell at Milborne Port; Edward Nicholas and the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in Shaftesbury; and the St. Johns and Hydes at Wootton Bassett. Such interests might be based on the proximity of a great estate, or on the possession of property within the constituency itself. There is some evidence of direct dependence: a list of the 56 ‘borough men’ at Aldborough recorded that 33 were tenants of prominent local landowners, and only the minority of 23 were ‘free’;
Not all such standing ‘interests’ were proprietorial, however. Some were institutional: the bishop and cathedral chapter were involved in elections at Chichester and Peterborough; the influence of the Duchy of Cornwall (as well as that of the Rashleighs) could be felt at Fowey, the garrison and dockyards at Portsmouth, and the Navy Board at Shoreham; while the electorate in Windsor seems to have responded to the gravitational pull of the castle and the Royal Household. Nor, despite its size, was the electorate in Westminster immune from such considerations. The proximity of the court at St. James’s Palace, and of the offices of government in Whitehall, could not fail to have some influence on election results, and the choice of such prominent ministers as Treasury Lords Sir Stephen Fox and Charles Montagu, and Secretary Vernon, can have been no coincidence.
In boroughs with municipal institutions the corporation itself might have an interest, most obviously through providing the returning officer (in the person of the mayor or other chief magistrate), which was the case at Fowey, or at Dorchester, where in 1690 a petition alleged that the corporation had permitted a number of unqualified persons to be polled; or by exploiting its powers to intimidate the electors. The corporators in Wallingford made considerable political capital from their right to decide on the admission of freemen, the leasing of the corporation’s property, and the administration of certain charitable bequests; while in Chichester and in Leominster it was the judicial authority of the corporation which was its strength, as alehouse-keepers were threatened with the revocation of their licenses, and other electors, some of them defaulting tenants, with the prospect of various legal proceedings. But hardly any example can be found in which a corporate body exercised a controlling interest in parliamentary elections, unless it should be Bridgwater, whose corporation was perhaps the most politically autonomous of any scot-and-lot borough, and which returned several local merchants as well as landowners during this period. Certainly the Tory aldermen of Leicester mounted a strong counter-attack after 1702 on the Whig ascendancy of the Duke of Rutland, which resulted in the election of Tory candidates in bitterly fought contests, but they could only do so by exploiting the freeman element in the borough franchise, and engineering mass admissions of new freemen. In Chichester, Leominster, Newark, and Wallingford, the corporators worked alongside local landed proprietors, or wealthy interlopers, placing their authority and influence at the disposal of men who, in their different ways, were likely to prove benefactors to the town. The usual relationship between a borough corporation and the surrounding gentry politicians is nicely illustrated in the history of Bedford, where electoral politics reflected the socio-economic context. The borough was encircled by numerous landed estates, the owners of which also kept town houses, and in the same way the parliamentary representation was infiltrated by ‘the gentlemen’, so that elections were almost always contested between neighbouring squires. However, the hybrid nature of the franchise, by including freemen and burgesses as well as householders, afforded the aldermen the possibility of independent influence. In practice they tended not to exert themselves, so long as the balance of forces between the parties in the county reflected their own political preferences, but with the removal to Wiltshire of the leading Tory family, the Bruces, the predominantly Tory corporation was obliged to become more heavily involved in opposing the rise of the Bedfordshire Whigs, which also meant, in their case, the creeping hegemony of the Dukes of Bedford over the affairs of the town.
Except for the greater emphasis on bribing individual voters, many of the tactics employed to develop or consolidate patronal influence were the same in constituencies with a residential franchise as they were in corporation, freeman, freeholder, or burgage boroughs. Public benefactions brought obvious advantages. Sometimes these would be addressed only to the corporate elite, as was the case with Henry Pelham, who lent Lewes corporation £200; Frederick Tylney*, who donated a silver gilt tankard to the corporation of Southampton; and Thomas Guy*, who built a new town hall for Tamworth. More often, however, and understandably, given the nature of the electorate in these boroughs, such acts of philanthropy would be designed for the population at large. Thus we find George Pitt* founding a free school at Wareham, and Lord Brooke playing a leading role in the rebuilding of Warwick following the disastrous fire of 1694; the Luttrells pushing through Parliament a bill for repair of the pier at Minehead, and then sinking a great deal of their own money into the project; and Sir Walter Yonge, 3rd Bt., also making use of his position as an MP to improve his standing at Honiton, through sponsoring the 1698 Lace Act, to protect the local lace-making industry against competition from continental imports. Pre-existing charitable trusts could also be tapped as an electoral resource. The management of John Bedford’s charity, a 15th-century endowment whose trustees provided places in alms-houses and charitable donations to the poor, was particularly important in the disturbed politics of Aylesbury, the more so when those dependent on the trust, the ‘Bedford Charity men’, organised themselves into a voting caucus in 1698 and offered their services to the Whig candidates Robert Dormer* and Simon Mayne*.
There were two elements peculiar to electioneering in scot-and-lot boroughs, both deriving from the nature of the franchise. In the first place, since voting qualifications depended on payment of the poor rate, proof of eligibility was recorded in the lists kept by overseers of the poor, or, in some cases, parish vestries. Inevitably there were complaints about the circumstances in which this documentation was held and (sometimes selectively) released. A defeated candidate for Marlow in 1690 objected against the scot-and-lot franchise on these very grounds, that it effectively put the election into the power of the churchwardens and overseers, who might inscribe whatsoever names they pleased into ‘the poor book’; and when the Leominster election came before the committee of elections in 1701, the parish overseer, John Bubb, was ordered into custody for refusing to produce the ‘lewn book’, in which the names of ratepayers were enrolled.
The percentage figures for contested elections in each of the three residential categories (inhabitant, potwalloper, and scot-and-lot) are remarkably close, and consistently higher than for almost any other type of borough (excepting only the few large ‘county’ boroughs where freemen and 40s.-freeholders voted, and which were, because of their very size, likely to be ‘open’ constituencies). In the 10 inhabitant boroughs (including the two ‘hybrid’ or ‘mixed’ franchises), 51 out of a possible 109 elections were contested (47%); in the potwalloping boroughs (with the one ‘hybrid’), 71 out of 158 (45%); and in the 39 scot-and-lot boroughs (including the three ‘hybrids’ plus Aldborough) 178 out of 436 (41%). Within each category, however, there was considerable variation. Among the inhabitant boroughs, Callington in Cornwall escaped contests entirely, while the venal electorate of Hindon was polled nine times out of 14, and the freemen and inhabitants of the highly politicised borough of Hertford were only twice denied an opportunity of voting in 12 successive elections. Two other Cornish constituencies, Bossiney and St. Germans, were the most passive of the potwalloping boroughs, Bossiney being contested only once during this period and St. Germans not at all, while at the other end of the spectrum Aylesbury electors went to the polls no less than 14 times out of a possible 15. There were striking disparities among the scot-and-lot boroughs too, though the extremes were not quite so far apart. Except for Gatton and Stamford, each of them was polled at least twice (and Gatton was not only contested at a by-election in 1696, but witnessed active canvassing on several other occasions), while the highest frequency was achieved (not surprisingly) by Westminster, where only one general election, and two by-elections, passed without a contest.
Taking all three categories together, a few general observations may be offered to explain why some constituencies were habitually contested, and others remained relatively quiet. In the first place, it must be emphasized that the frequency of contests was not always directly proportionate to the number of voters. Certainly the few constituencies with very large electorates, comprising at least 1,000 (that is to say, in descending order, Westminster, Southwark, Reading, and Taunton), were contested more often than not, and it is easy to see how these two facts might be related. But electoral conflict was also a regular feature of life in smaller boroughs like Hindon and Tregony, with less than 200 voters, and New Shoreham and Steyning, neither with more than a hundred. Occasionally one can point to violent party antagonism between the principals in the constituency, most notoriously at Aylesbury, where the struggle for predominance between the High Tory Sir John Pakington and Lord Wharton not only spread bitterness through the constituency but embroiled both Houses of Parliament in a prolonged legal dispute (in the suit of Ashby v. White); or to conflict between Tory and Whig factions within the electorate itself, grounded on sectarian hostility, as at Cirencester and Hertford, where there were substantial Nonconformist communities. The emblems of party conflict might indeed turn up in the most unexpected places. In the small Wiltshire borough of Hindon in 1713 two Whig candidates, Reynolds Calthorpe* and Richard Lockwood* evidently believed that the French commercial treaty was a vote-winning issue, and at the election, as the Flying Post reported, ‘the Whigs, to show how justly they resented the eighth and ninth articles, as destructive to the woollen manufactures, in which this borough, and county, is so much concerned, advanced fleeces of wool on several standards’. But a more common explanation for repeated contests was one which would have applied particularly to Hindon,
However one explains the almost incessant electoral competition in some of the more politically active of the inhabitant, potwalloper and scot-and-lot boroughs, what is noteworthy about these constituencies, taken as a single group, is that relatively few of them were ‘closed’, that is to say under the direct control of a single patron, or divided between two controlling interests. The Cornish boroughs are the chief exceptions: St. Germans, where the Eliots of Port Eliot seem to have been secure throughout the period; Callington, carved up effectively between the Rolle and Coryton families; and Bossiney, where Lord Radnor could usually return one nominee, although from time to time he had to struggle against the influence of the Duchy. The Phelipses maintained their ascendancy over Ilchester until 1699, when, distracted by a family feud and by the rebellion of a faction in the corporation against their hegemony, they let in various interlopers, the most successful of whom, a rival landed proprietor, Lord Poulett, eventually took over control of at least half of the parliamentary representation for himself. Elsewhere the Pelhams could always control at least one seat in both Lewes and Seaford, and sometimes secured both; and the Hampdens were similarly placed in Wendover, though members of the family occasionally imperilled their interest by absence or inattention. Wareham was for much of this period happily divided between Thomas Erle and the Pitts of Strathfieldsaye; Stamford was carved up in similar fashion by the Berties and Cecils; the Bankes family came to dominate Corfe Castle after the retreat of William Culliford in 1701, with whom they had previously been obliged to share; and in 1710 the 6th Earl of Exeter was able to reassert his ancestral influence over elections in Peterborough, as lord of the soke, though not to the extent that he could nominate both Members.
As with most other types of borough, candidates returned for constituencies with some form of residential-based franchise tended to be drawn from the gentry class, and for the most part from the greater gentry of the county in which each particular borough was situated. Sometimes these borough elections were placed quite explicitly in the context of county politics. In 1694/5 the Hampshire gentry were much exercised by the necessity of ousting from a seat at Stockbridge the Household official Anthony Rowe, a political adventurer who cut a disreputable figure on the county stage. They were keen to have ‘some gentleman of our own county to serve for this borough in Parliament, in opposition to Mr Rowe’.
It would be wrong, however, to over-emphasize corruption and deference in these boroughs. The evidence collected for the constituency articles suggests a degree of political awareness and sophistication among at least some inhabitant, potwalloping, and scot-and-lot electors. This was only to be expected in the great popular constituencies, of which Westminster would be the prime example, where elections generated enormous public interest. In St. Albans in 1708, when the burden of the contest was between the Whig Joshua Lomax* and the Tory John Gape*, the mob openly threatened the mayor, pasting verses on his house that warned
If you return Lomax we’ll be still as a mouse,
If you return Gape then down comes your house.
In Leicester too, Defoe once found political passions running so high that, as he wrote, ‘the contending parties’ were ‘daily together by the ears’, and on another occasion it was reported that the entire population of the borough was mad with party fervour: ‘There is not a chambermaid, prentice, or schoolboy in this whole town but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other.’ In some of the smaller boroughs as well, like Taunton and Wareham, there seems to have been a clear sense of party identity. In reporting the preparations for the 1690 election at Taunton, Sir John Trenchard* described how ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’ in the town were each deciding on their candidates;
The two parties were very nicely distinguished ... buff was the symbol of the Whigs. These had box in their hats, doors and windows, the other had laurel leaves ... the gentlemen who came in with Sir William Drake had a little knob of shoemaker’s thread in their hats to show that they were Tackers.
What then ensued was ‘a terrible mob election’, during which Elwill’s friends ‘sneaked away, not one of them being left to accompany him to his quarters’.
As often as not, what underlay this popular party feeling was religious antagonism, and the conflict of Church and Dissent. It was certainly true for boroughs like Cirencester, Hertford, St. Albans, and Shaftesbury,
Occasionally economic issues were also given a party tinge. The most obvious example was in the general election of 1713, when many Whig candidates sought to exploit local resentment at the concessions the Tory ministry had included in the recently rejected treaty of commerce with France. Woollen manufactures were likely to suffer most, so at Minehead the Whig William Benson† made great play with the fact that he had been invited to stand by several of ‘the most considerable tradesmen’ in the town, and ensured that he was accompanied to the poll by merchants and wool-factors from Bristol, Taunton, and Tiverton, and ‘met there by a crowd of gentlemen, and all weavers and woolcombers, wearing woollen hats’. He was presented to the electorate as ‘a zealous friend to liberty and trade’. In Southwark too, the supporters of the Whig Fisher Tench and his turncoat partner John Lade adopted the same device, and proceeded to the election wearing wool in their hats.
It is also possible to detect the presence of internal conflict of a rather different kind within some boroughs, and whiffs of a populist resentment of oligarchic rule, or even magnate paternalism. William, Lord Cheyne*, one of the candidates for Amersham in 1695, stressed that he enjoyed the backing of ‘all the chief of the town’, as distinct from the population at large, while at the opposite end of the political spectrum the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury claimed to draw some of his support in Shaftesbury (besides those whose votes were for sale) from a ‘popular interest’ in the corporation, which had set itself up in opposition to ‘the select number’.
6
To summarize, the broad tripartite division of English borough franchises produces on closer examination seven distinct groups: corporation, freeman, freeholder, burgage, inhabitant, householder (or ‘potwalloper’), and scot-and-lot. These groups were neither entirely homogeneous nor entirely discrete. There were small differences within each, usually in the form of additional qualifications, especially among the inhabitant and householder boroughs. Moreover, a significant minority of boroughs enjoyed a ‘hybrid’ or ‘mixed’ franchise, most notably the ‘county’ boroughs and others where freemen or other corporators voted alongside freeholders, burgage-holders, inhabitants, potwallopers, or scot-and-lot payers. In 1690 the numbers in each group were as follows:
|
Corporation: |
24 (11.8%) |
|
Freeman: |
81 (39.9%) |
|
Freeholder: |
7 (3.4%) |
|
Burgage: |
29 (14.3%) |
|
Inhabitant: |
8 (3.9%) |
|
Potwalloper: |
11 (5.4%) |
|
Scot-and-lot: |
27 (13.3%) |
|
Mixed: |
16 (7.9%) |
By 1715 the proportions had undergone some very slight shifts, reflecting a growing parliamentary aversion to inhabitant and potwalloper electorates, and a corresponding preference for the freeman, and even for the scot-and-lot franchise:
|
Corporation: |
22 (10.8%) |
|
Freeman: |
82 (40.4%) |
|
Freeholder: |
8 (3.9%) |
|
Burgage: |
30 (14.8%) |
|
Inhabitant: |
5 (2.5%) |
|
Potwalloper: |
8 (3.9%) |
|
Scot-and-lot: |
30 (14.8%) |
|
Mixed: |
18 (8.9%) |
Of course, boroughs might also be differentiated according to size of voterate. This exercise presents obvious difficulties: apart from the frailty of the statistics themselves (for many boroughs the numbers given in the constituency articles are rough estimates or are based upon the polling figures for a single contested election), there will inevitably be a degree of subjectivity in the selection of categories. What follows is only one of many different ways in which the information collected by the History might be presented. Boroughs have been classified into three statistical bands: those with small voterates, less than 100; the medium-sized, between 100 and 350; and the larger constituencies, with more than 350. In 1690 the smaller boroughs were by some way the most numerous, with the larger voterates occurring least frequently. Little had changed by the election of 1713, except for a slight fall in the number of boroughs in the lower two bands, and a corresponding increase in those with more than 350 voters.
|
|
Boroughs in 1690 |
Boroughs in 1713 |
|
with under 100 voters: |
90 (44.3%) |
85 (41.9%) |
|
with 100-350 voters: |
68 (33.5%) |
60 (30%) |
|
with over 350 voters: |
45 (22.2%) |
58 (28.6%) |
The last group has also been subdivided, to separate out the very largest, most ‘popular’ constituencies, those with over 1,000 voters. (Note that the percentages given below relate to the total of English borough constituencies, rather than just those in the highest band.)
|
|
Boroughs in 1690 |
Boroughs in 1713 |
|
with 350-1,000 voters: |
31 (15.3%) |
37 (18.2%) |
|
with 1,000 voters and more: |
14 (6.9%) |
21 (10.3%) |
The 22 borough constituencies with the largest voterates in 1713 were the city of London (over 8,000); the two other metropolitan borough constituencies, Southwark (about 1,500), and Westminster (about 7,000); the ‘county boroughs’ of Bristol (3,500), Exeter (1,400), Norwich (2,500), and Nottingham (1,350); the freeman boroughs of Bridgnorth (1,000), Colchester (1,200), Coventry (1,250), Gloucester (1,400), Hereford (1,000), Monmouth (2,000), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1,300), Worcester (1,500), and York (1,500); and the potwalloping borough of Taunton (1,000). In addition, four boroughs came close to the 1,000 threshold: Canterbury, Chester, Durham, and Shrewsbury, all operating on a freeman franchise.
A number of generalizations emerge from this survey of the borough representation which would apply to all categories of borough, irrespective of franchise or numbers of voters. Perhaps the most important concerns the level of manipulation to which borough elections was subject. Only the biggest constituencies, and some of the more spectacularly venal, could hope to remain entirely ‘open’, but at the same time those which fell utterly into proprietorship, or came under joint control by two landed interests, constituted a minority in every category of franchise, and a small minority in all except ‘residential’, boroughs. The remainder experienced patronage in varying degrees, preserving some independence either because of the resilience of corporate institutions and aldermanic oligarchies, or because of rivalry between would-be patrons who might be played off against one another. Control over the nomination of the returning officer was often a crucial factor, and the difference between a borough with a corporation and one with a manorial court might be as important as the difference between, say, a freeman and a burgage borough. Elections were contested with remarkable frequency under each dispensation, even in burgage boroughs, though the predictable rule obtained that the broader the franchise the more likely the voters were to be polled (an exception perhaps being in freeman boroughs, where the enfranchisement of non-resident freemen could make electioneering less problematic for landed patrons). As for the Members returned, country gentlemen dominated the representation in every category, and not just gentlemen per se, but usually representatives of the greater gentry of the county. Where magnate control was most pronounced, it was easier to nominate outsiders, and to find borough seats for fugitive front-benchers or promising debutants. London financiers and merchants were also on the look out for seats which might be purchased. However, their gaze usually fixed itself upon constituencies where they could accomplish their objective by means of a short-term expenditure on bribery and entertainment, rather than a more capital-intensive investment in burgage or freehold property, or in the prolonged expenditure involved in cultivating the good opinion of a borough élite. Finally, whatever the nature of the electorate, most borough representatives would have to approach with some seriousness the duty of looking after interests of their constituencies. Few seem to have undertaken the regular correspondence that the Members for port towns like Berwick, Chester, Dover, Great Yarmouth, Hull, Liverpool or Sandwich were required to maintain, but a Member who failed to pursue local interests in Parliament or with government, or who neglected to keep voters informed of matters which touched their economic interests, could expect to be treated with reciprocal discourtesy when the time came again to ask the ‘borough men’ for their support.
Cornwall
Cornwall’s over-representation in the unreformed electoral system was notorious. With 21 boroughs, it returned 44 Members in all, more than any other single county (the nearest in size were Wiltshire with 34 and Yorkshire with 30), and one less than the total representation of Scotland in the House of Commons after the Union.
Taken collectively, Cornish borough elections were notable for the narrowness of their electorates, and the relative infrequency of contests. Eight had a modified residential franchise: in Bossiney, Callington, Mitchell, and St. Germans, the right to vote belonged to householders; in Fowey, Grampound, and Penryn (after 1710) to scot-and-lot payers; and in Tregony to all inhabitants not in receipt of alms. A further seven were freeman boroughs: Camelford, Helston, Launceston, Liskeard, East and West Looe, and St. Mawes. In four voting was restricted to the corporation: Bodmin, Lostwithiel, Penryn (until 1710), and Truro. St. Ives went through three different franchises, beginning with householders, becoming a corporation borough in 1698, and then scot-and-lot in 1702. The two remaining, Newport and Saltash, were burgage boroughs, although in Saltash the members of the corporation were also allowed to vote. Even in the more popular constituencies the voterate would seldom exceed 100. St. Ives was a striking exception in the years in which it enjoyed a scot-and-lot franchise, when at least 195 were polled. Elsewhere small voterates were the rule: in over a third of the boroughs (nine out of 21) the number of voters was less than 50. This did not mean, however, that most Cornish boroughs were ‘rotten’. Certainly some were poor specimens of urban life: Tintagel, which contained the borough of Bossiney, was ‘a very ordinary town ... not an open street belonging to it’; Grampound, ‘very mean and one street’; Mitchell (St. Michael) , `a small hamlet scarce containing 30 houses, all cottages save one, which is a public inn ... the only tiled house in this poor borough’; St. Germans, ‘a village, decayed, and without any market’; Saltash largely in ruins; and Tregony ‘a poor market town’ which had suffered and declined in competition with its more successful neighbour St. Austell. But visitors also found Fowey, Helston, Looe, Penryn, St. Ives, and Truro to be thriving; Launceston to be ‘pretty large’; Liskeard `a considerable town, well built, has people of fashion it and a very good market’; and even the less prepossessing borough of Bodmin ‘still not decayed entirely’.
Only 21.5% of Cornish elections were contested in this period (the average for the boroughs alone would be 21.8%), as compared with an average of 39.8% for the rest of England (39.6% for the English boroughs).
Some of these gains and losses must represent the outcome of competitive electioneering, in which a decisive advantage was secured long in advance, obviating the need for a poll. But in other cases the turnover of seats is to be explained as a consequence of electoral patrons shifting the direction of their favour, or wealthy outsiders purchasing their return. Proprietorial influence was strong throughout the Cornish boroughs, except for Grampound, where the members of the corporation had established a considerable degree of independence, and Mitchell, whose householders sold themselves to the highest bidder. A few constituencies were entirely at the disposal of a single patron: St. Germans, where the Eliot family nominated; Helston, at least until the death of Lord Treasurer Godolphin (Sidney†), when the iron grip of the Godolphins began to weaken; and the twin constituencies of East and West Looe, whose inhabitants complained that Bishop Trelawny ‘kept us in captivity’. Others were shared: Callington by the Corytons and Rolles; Liskeard by the Bullers and the Wreys; Saltash by the Bullers and the Carews, and Truro by the Boscawens and Vincents. Elsewhere a settled system may have been precluded by the rivalry of aspiring patrons, or the existence of alternative sources of influence (such as the Dissenting merchants on the corporation of Bodmin, who made life difficult for Lord Radnor), but in only a few instances were elections consistently unpredictable: Lostwithiel, in which the Kendall and Robartes families had also to contend with an assertive corporation; St. Ives, where the inability of the Hobart, Powlett, and Praed interests to agree among themselves was exacerbated by party animosities and the habitual arrogance of the Powletts, dukes of Bolton; and St. Mawes, the scene of prolonged conflict (until 1710) between two irreconcilable local enemies, the Tory Tredenhams, who had been accustomed to control the borough, and the Whig Boscawens, determined to supplant them.
On the whole, therefore, the Cornish boroughs seemed to contemporaries to represent so many ‘safe seats’, which were also, it must be said, relatively cheap.
These strangers were of three broad types. Most obviously, perhaps, there were the relations and clients of borough patrons, such as the dukes of Bolton brought in at St. Ives (the 2nd Duke’s crony Ben Overton, and various refugees from Whig reverses in Hampshire), or the Godolphins at Helston (notably John Evelyn II in 1708). A similar case would be Robert Molesworth, who relied for his election at Camelford on the local influence and canvassing energies of his kinsman Sir John Molesworth, 2nd Bt.
Curiously, the influx was particularly large at the general election of 1713 when, despite the extent of the Tory triumph across the country (presumably affording a surplus of available seats for members of the party), a raft of Tory outsiders ended up in Cornish boroughs.
Cornwall in fact always returned more Tories than Whigs (until, that is, the extraordinary reversal of fortune in 1715), reflecting the natural Tory majority among the peers and greater gentry who comprised the county’s ruling elite of borough-mongers. Even in the Convention Parliament of 1689, when both county seats had been taken by Whigs, there was still an overall Tory majority of at least 14 among the Members at large, and in 1690, when the county representation was shared, that majority had risen to at least 20. Subsequent calculations become more complicated because of the tendency of some of the more important political dynasties to drift across the political divide. From the earliest days of the Williamite regime the Robarteses and Vincents gravitated to the Court. The Godolphins were similarly inclined to ‘moderation’ in their politics, and eventually, under the leadership of the 1st Earl, transmuted into Whigs. In their wake followed Lord Treasurer Godolphin’s close friend, the formidable Sir Jonathan Trelawny, successively Bishop of Exeter and Winchester, electoral patron of East and West Looe and an important player in several other constituencies, whose apparently haphazard political course more straightforward party men found mystifying: ‘The Bishop of Winchester’s conduct has never been very uniform’, wrote the High Tory Thomas Carte in 1714,
but now ‘tis more unaccountable than ever. To be so voluntarily warm for the T[ories] in Oxfordshire, and yet to choose four W[higs] for the Looes in Cornwall, to make interest publicly for his son and thereby to oppose two very honest gentlemen who now serve for this county, and to set up the very son in opposition to two other T[ories] at Liskeard is what I can’t well reconcile, and yet it is undoubtedly fact.
Bodl. Ballard 18, f. 71.
Consequently, a substantial minority of Members prove difficult to classify under party headings. In the following table, which presents election results 1690-1715 in party terms, these difficult cases appear as ‘unclassified’. Even though contemporaries did feel able to affix a party label to some of them, it has been thought preferable to err on the side of caution.
Election results for Cornish constituencies by party, 1690-1715
|
Tories |
Whigs |
unclassified |
Tory lead |
overall Tory majority |
|
|
1690 |
32 |
10 |
2 |
22 |
20 |
|
1695 |
25 |
11 |
8 |
14 |
6 |
|
1698 |
24 |
12 |
8 |
12 |
4 |
|
1701 (1st) |
29 |
9 |
6 |
20 |
14 |
|
1701/2 |
28 |
10 |
6 |
18 |
12 |
|
1702 |
33 |
5 |
6 |
27 |
22 |
|
1705 |
28 |
13 |
3 |
15 |
12 |
|
1708 |
23 |
15 |
6 |
8 |
2 |
|
1710 |
29 |
11 |
4 |
18 |
14 |
|
1713 |
35 |
8 |
1 |
27 |
26 |
These calculations qualify the customary hyperbole of contemporary commentators, who claimed, for example, that the Tories had won all but one or two seats in December 1701;
The government’s capacity to influence the Cornish boroughs was potentially very considerable. The small number of voters in most boroughs and the strength of proprietorial interest magnified the power of such patronage as was channelled to borough patrons and their families and dependants, to municipal dignitaries, and even to individual voters. In addition, there were the resources of the Duchy of Cornwall. Its influence was felt directly in the several constituencies which were Duchy manors, and in which there were Duchy tenants: Bossiney, Fowey, Helston, Launceston, and East Looe. More generally, among the population at large, the powers of stannary officials in the regulation of the tin industry could be used to manufacture popularity. What was needed was an effective political manager to co-ordinate and direct the Court’s electoral campaign. Such a manager would be publicly acknowledged by the grant of the most important offices in county government, the lord lieutenancy and the stewardship of the Duchy. For preference, he would also be recruited from the small group of indigenous territorial magnates which dominated Cornish politics. Cornishmen took pride in their own distinct local identity. As one of the knights of the shire professed, in a circular letter to the freeholders in 1705,
I desire to be tried in these principles, I having nothing to value myself upon but having my veins so full of Cornish blood as to have the honour of being related perhaps to every one of the gentlemen to whom you may have an opportunity at this time to communicate my sentiments.
William and Mary inherited just such a local magnate, in the person of John Granville, 1st Earl of Bath, whom they confirmed at the Revolution as lord lieutenant and steward of the Duchy. Bath was also a staunch Tory, and delivered clear Tory majorities among the Cornish Members elected in 1689 and 1690.
The accession of Queen Anne marked a return to traditional management. Radnor was replaced as lord lieutenant and steward of the Duchy by one of Bath’s younger sons, Hon. John Granville*,
After Granville’s departure from the ministry along with his fellow High Churchmen in the reshuffles of 1703-5, his electoral successes were soon overturned by Lord Treasurer Godolphin, who, as a Cornishman himself, appreciated the importance of political management in his native county. Godolphin took over the lord lieutenancy himself in 1705, and made his son Francis* (Lord Rialton), and then his nephew Hugh Boscawen II* lord warden of the stannaries. By 1708 the shrewd and energetic Boscawen had effectively become the ministry’s Cornish manager. The results of that election, reducing the overall Tory majority to two, were especially gratifying. It was reported that ‘all things go to the utmost of his [Boscawen] wishes’.
Two years later, in the aftermath of the Sacheverell trial, Boscawen attempted to strengthen the Whig interest still further by renewing the pre-emption contract. This necessitated a further meeting of the convocation, which threatened political repercussions. The elections took place in the immediate aftermath of the Sacheverell trial, and were highly partisan. Of the 24 stannators, who formed the upper house of the convocation (the lower house was composed of ‘assistants’ nominated by the stannators), and who had been elected by the freeholders of the four stannaries, 10 were sitting MPs, with Cornish seats, and a further seven sat in other Parliaments in this period. The stannators quickly divided into two parties, distinguished as the ‘wardenists’ or ‘court party’ and ‘anti-wardenists’, or ‘country party’, which in reality meant Whigs and Tories. The elections were in some respects a trial run for the parliamentary contests later in the year. The returns for the stannaries of Blackmore and Foymore, held at Lostwithiel and Launceston respectively, both produced strong majorities for the ‘anti-wardenists’, prefiguring the parliamentary elections in those two boroughs, in which four Tories would be chosen (two in place of outgoing Whigs), while the elections for Penwith and Tyrwarnhaile were more favourable to Boscawen, similarly prefiguring the parliamentary elections in the two host boroughs, Helston and Truro, in which only one Tory would be chosen. In the long run this convocation was probably more important as a pointer to the trend of public opinion than for its effects in promoting the lord warden’s interest among the tinners. Despite opposition from the anti-wardenists (dressed up as a defence of the interests of mine-owners but probably politically motivated) Boscawen was able to secure a new contract, only slightly less favourable than the pre-emption of 1703, but at the cost of allowing his opponents a public platform for their views, and furnishing them with a new grievance, when he was accused of bringing in a mob of tinners to intimidate the stannators.
Robert Harley* learnt from his predecessor, and appointed his own Cornish manager. Reverting to traditional Tory practice, he relied on the Granvilles; in his case George Granville, a nephew of the 1st Earl of Bath. Granville had ambitions to succeed to all his uncle’s offices in Cornwall, but although a minister of Cabinet rank, he held no official position in his own county, and managed the government interest on an informal basis, with the 2nd Earl of Rochester (Henry, Lord Hyde* ) as titular lord lieutenant. Management was none the less highly efficient: Granville remodelled the stannary administration,
The Cinque Ports
The Cinque Ports, eight of which were enfranchised (Dover, Hastings, Hythe, New Romney, Rye, Sandwich, Seaford, and Winchelsea), had by the later 17th century lost much of their distinctiveness. Manifestations of their traditional importance might still be glimpsed on ceremonial occasions, such as Queen Anne’s coronation, when the 16 ‘barons’ (as their Members were known) objected strongly, but in vain, to episcopal usurpation of their place at the right hand of the throne.
The economic decline of the ports, seen most strikingly at Hythe, Sandwich, Seaford, and Winchelsea, did not necessarily mean a contraction of political activity into a smaller circle. Every borough but one enjoyed a freeman franchise, (restricted in Sandwich to resident freemen not receiving alms). The exception was Seaford where the right to vote had been extended by a decision of the House of Commons in 1671 from the freemen to the ‘populacy’, a term that lay undefined until a parliamentary judgment of 1761, but which in practice meant scot-and-lot. But there was considerable variation in size. Dover and Sandwich had by far the largest voterates, each expanding through politically motivated admissions of freemen, to 350 and 450 respectively by 1715. At the other end of the scale were Rye and Winchelsea, where admissions were so restricted that in effect both functioned as corporation boroughs. In the majority of cases, however, the voterates were of middling size, somewhere over 30 and under 100.
One consequence of economic decline was that, as trade faltered, the political life of the boroughs could no longer be sustained by local merchants. Parliamentary elections fell prey to neighbouring landed proprietors, notably the Ashburnhams, Lords Ashburnham, in Hastings and Rye, the Thomas and Pelham families in Seaford, and the Austens at Winchelsea. For the most part, parliamentary candidates were now drawn from the ranks of the country gentry. Inhabitants stood little chance of election, even in New Romney, one of the smallest of all the boroughs, where in November 1701 two townsmen put up for election and received a derisory single vote each. The ports also attracted more than their fair share of outsiders, including a number of government officials, like George Clarke, George Dodington, Sir Charles Hedges, William Lowndes and John Pulteney, benefiting from the influence, direct and indirect, which the crown was able to exercise.
An attempt in 1690 to revive the practice by which the lord warden nominated one Member to each of the ports provoked a parliamentary outcry and the rapid enactment of a statute to declare such nominations unlawful (2 Gul. & Mar. c. 7). As the wardenship still lay vacant, the writs for the general election of 1690 were entrusted to the deputy (and lieutenant-governor of Dover castle) Hon. John Beaumont*, who took it upon himself to send ‘mandatory letters’ in favour of Tory candidates to the corporations of Hastings, Hythe, New Romney and Rye.
The variable success rate of different wardens indicates that there was more to the exercise of their influence than the issue of ‘mandates’ or informal recommendations. Dorset’s experience at Hythe illustrates how a warden might have to become actively involved in corporation politics. The fact that Sidney, Winchelsea, Westmorland, and Dorset were all substantial landed proprietors in Kent or Sussex, and Ormond was not, is also suggestive. The more successful of the warden’s nominees seem also to have enjoyed some personal standing of their own in the boroughs they contested; and even those who had arrived as strangers came to develop some electoral interest for themselves. Sir Basil Dixwell, 2nd Bt., was able to help himself to election at Dover in 1695 and 1698, even after he had given up his place as Sidney’s deputy. In the same way, a warden might continue to exercise a personal influence long after his removal from office, as Sidney himself did at Hastings.
The wardenship was not the only government office which conveyed electoral influence in the Cinque Ports. Throughout the boroughs the naval interest was strong: Admirals Matthew Aylmer and Sir John Norris were chosen for Dover and Rye respectively; the secretary to the Admiralty, Josiah Burchett, established himself in 1708 at Sandwich; and the elder Robert Austen’s membership of the Admiralty commission not only assisted his own return at Winchelsea, but his son’s in the same borough and at Hastings. More generally, the Admiralty could exert influence at Dover through the number of its employees present in the port, and as a purchaser of local services. Thomas Papillon’s place on the victualling commission brought similar advantages to his family in Dover. It would seem that employment in the customs service also conferred electoral benefits, to James Chadwick in Dover, Sir John Austen in Rye, and Hon. Thomas Newport in Winchelsea. Offices that were less directly concerned with shipping and maritime trade were less useful: Winchelsea appears to have acquired its later reputation as a ‘Treasury borough’ from the identity of its Members rather than the existence of any significant Treasury influence. On the other hand, a government naval contractor, John Mounsher, rope-maker at Portsmouth, could make headway at Hastings in 1701 by promising mariners ropes for their ships at a reduced price. Nor is it clear how far such placemen depended for their electoral influence on the possession of office alone. The Austens and Papillons, for example, each had a prior involvement of their own in the boroughs they represented. Others, like Lord Ashburnham at Hastings, exploited government connexions to build up proprietorial influence, or, as with William Lowndes at Seaford or George Dodington at Winchelsea, having been nominated originally as Court candidates, developed a personal interest in the boroughs they represented, which in the case of Dodington outlasted his tenure of office.
Despite the extent of the involvement of country gentlemen and government officials in elections in the Cinque Ports, local issues could sometimes be as important as the rivalry of magnates or the conflict of the parties. The voters of Dover, Rye, and Sandwich required Members to pay heed to their constituents and, where necessary, to protect the economic interests of the town. One of the reasons Sir Charles Hedges lost his seat at Dover in 1701 was his neglect of the corporation. John Thurbarne, by contrast, dutifully corresponded with the mayor and jurats of Sandwich, although this was not enough to retain their goodwill in 1701 after his repeated failures to secure legislation on their behalf, and, more particularly, to prevent the neighbouring port of Deal from obtaining its charter. His successors learnt the lesson, and showed greater attentiveness to local needs.
The Universities
The franchise in Oxford and Cambridge belonged to ‘the doctors and masters of arts’. Although there was no residential qualification,
Heads of houses could be crucially important figures in university politics. So numerous were Trinity men among the Cambridge electorate, for example, that the mastership, when it fell vacant in 1700, was seen by many contemporary commentators, inside and outside the university, as the key to future elections. It had indeed been the presence of several Whiggish or ‘Low Church’ college heads in Cambridge which helped the chancellor, the 6th Duke of Somerset, secure the return of at least one Whig Member from 1692 onwards. But the limits of this influence were eventually shown in the ‘Church in danger’ election of 1705, when Somerset’s political management collapsed, and the natural Tory majority among the electorate asserted itself. Many votes were cast on this occasion against the wishes of college heads, with the exception of St. John’s, where the master was himself a Tory. Thereafter, a popular Toryism held sway at Cambridge. In Oxford, by contrast, the heads of houses seem always to have shared the High Church proclivities of the fellows, to the extent that no Whig candidate so much as put up for election in this period. But the absence of leadership from the chancellor, the Duke of Ormond, who rarely presumed to offer guidance to the university electorate, allowed rivalries to develop between the colleges, especially the three largest, All Souls, Christ Church, and Magdalen, which sometimes produced electoral contests.
Both universities attracted the attention of leading politicians, especially those of a Tory disposition. It was a high honour to represent a university, and Oxford in particular could boast a succession of Members from the front rank of their party: Hon. Heneage Finch I, Sir Thomas Clarges, Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt., and William Bromley II. On a more elevated level, various Tory magnates sought to acquire patronage over a university seat. In 1690 Lord Nottingham could claim a significant interest in both Oxford and Cambridge, with a brother returned for each. But it was not until the closing years of Anne’s reign that the most determined efforts were made for dominance over university politics: by Lord Anglesey (Hon. Arthur Annesley*) at Cambridge, and Lord Chancellor Harcourt (Simon I*) at Oxford. Anglesey succeeded while Harcourt failed. Paradoxically, the importance difference lay in the relative weakness of Toryism within the university hierarchy at Cambridge, where remnants of a discredited Low Church Whiggism were still to be found among the college heads. Anglesey was therefore able to mobilize popular Toryism under his own leadership. At Oxford, where the college authorities were uniformly Tory but divided on personal grounds and jealous of their independence, Harcourt’s alliance with the Christ Church faction led by Francis Atterbury provoked such opposition as to deter him from even putting his son forward as a candidate in the general election of 1713.
Wales
The 12 counties of Wales each returned one shire knight, on the same franchise as in English counties but with on average much smaller voterates, the largest belonging to Breconshire and Denbighshire, both with approximately 1,500 voters, and the smallest Anglesey with under 400. In half the counties there were fewer than 1,000 electors.
There were 12 equivalent borough constituencies, all single-Member. Merioneth was the only county which did not contain a borough, while Pembrokeshire had two, Pembroke Boroughs and Haverfordwest. Eight included out-boroughs: Caernarvon, Cardigan, Denbigh, Flint, Cardiff, Montgomery, Pembroke, and New Radnor. In every case an unrestricted freeman franchise prevailed, Haverfordwest adding freeholders and inhabitants paying scot and lot. This could make for large voterates (at least by Welsh standards), especially if there was competition between rival patrons or factions, as occurred in Denbigh Boroughs in 1690 and 1698-1701, between Sir Richard Myddelton, 3rd Bt.*, of Chirk Castle, and Sir Robert Cotton, 1st Bt.*, the heir to the Salusbury estate; in Pembroke in 1708-13, when the previously secure Whig interest of (Sir) Arthur Owen II (3rd Bt.) of Orielton was undermined by the ‘cunning and designing’ Tory Lewis Wogan; and in Caernarvon after 1709, with the appearance of a new Whig interest to challenge the ascendancy of the Bulkeleys of Baron Hill, and a series of wholesale creations of freemen which increased the electorate fivefold between 1710 and 1713. Furthermore, the position in two of the unitary boroughs was by no means settled: in Brecon claims were later to be advanced from several ‘out-boroughs’, while in this period the capital burgesses of Beaumaris were obliged to fight off a demand from the town of Newborough to participate in their return. Beaumaris was the sole corporation borough among the singletons. In Carmarthen the right to vote lay with the freemen at large, as was also the case in Brecon, despite efforts to disfranchise non-residents there. Haverfordwest’s broader-based voterate was not surprisingly the largest by some way.
The Welsh boroughs were highly susceptible to manipulation from outside. Some of the minor out-boroughs were manorial, the lord’s steward or agent being able to admit freemen at will. In larger towns the corporation would usually exert a preponderant influence over the body of the freemen, but would almost always be itself under the sway of a landed proprietor, either the lord of the manor (for example the Dukes of Beaufort in Swansea), or simply the most prominent local magnate (as the Mansels of Margam were in Cardiff). Among the single boroughs, Carmarthen’s cosy oligarchy was the instrument of the Vaughans of Golden Grove, and regularly returned a Vaughan to Parliament. Brecon’s common council was controlled by the Jeffreys family, of Brecon Priory, and when this hegemony was challenged the opposition came from without rather than within, from the other major landed power in the vicinity, the Morgans of Tredegar. Haverfordwest corporation seems to have been unique in requiring to be courted by its prospective and incumbent representatives with public benefactions, though Sir Humphrey Mackworth’s* industrial investments and charitable works in Cardiganshire and Glamorgan were clearly undertaken with election prospects in mind. The nearest any Welsh borough came to furnishing a ‘popular’ interest was the occasion in 1705 in which some of the ‘poorer sort of the inhabitants of Montgomery’ sold their votes to an interloper, Charles Mason*, and briefly overset the ascendancy of the Vaughans of Llwydiarth. In these occasional fits of independence the beneficiaries were still country gentlemen. Even the former attorney, Owen Hughes, who deposed the Bulkeley interest in Beaumaris in 1698, was a self-made squire who had built up his electoral muscle by purchases of property in Newborough. Conflict in boroughs, whether multiple or unitary constituencies, was in essence rivalry between patrons: Bulkeley against Owen in Caernarvon; Pryse against Vaughan in Cardigan; Kemys against Mansel in Cardiff, then Mansel against the rest; Owen against Wogan in Pembroke. Conversely, the absence of conflict either reflected the monopoly of one patron, peaceful coexistence between contending factions, or, in examples like Montgomery, a prevailing political consensus among the country gentry as a whole. Formal agreements between candidates generally covered borough as well as shire representation. They are epitomized by the long-standing cartel in Flintshire, comprising the four families of Conway, Hanmer, Mostyn, and Puleston. These comfortable private arrangements broke down only once, in 1702. Sir John Conway, 2nd Bt.*, refused to stand down for the county for a second consecutive election, only to suffer a decisive defeat at the hands of (Sir) Thomas Hanmer II (4th Bt.*) and Sir Roger Mostyn, 3rd Bt.*. Good relations were restored by the next election, at which Conway was returned unopposed as knight of the shire, though when the election treaty came up for renewal, prior to the general election of 1713, care was taken to prevent misunderstandings from recurring. ‘The intention’, wrote Hanmer,
was to preserve peace and good neighbourhood among us, and the terms which were then proposed and consented to be all then present were these - that all parts of the former agreement should be renewed and stand good, with this alteration and addition only, which was to be the same with the former, when it should be Sir John Conway’s turn to serve, wither for the county or the borough, it might be in his choice to do it himself, or name another gentleman belonging to the county, and agreeable to the rest of the gentlemen of it. This proposition had the consent of all of us who were then present, if the other gentlemen who were not there and the county had no objection to it, when it should be made to them.
In general, consensus rather than conflict characterized Welsh elections in this period, in both counties and boroughs. Certainly, there were instances of political strife as bitter as any the so-called ‘divided society’ in England might afford: in New Radnor in 1692 Robert Harley* was subjected to a serious physical assault by two brothers whose exclusion from the commission of the peace he had supposedly contrived; in 1705-8 the enmity between (Sir) Thomas Mansel (I)* and Sir Humphrey Mackworth* in Glamorgan was deep enough for Mackworth to make allegations that his opponent was out to murder him; while in Anglesey in 1708-9 the local Whig faction mounted a public campaign, including petitions to the Treasury, to have Richard, 4th Viscount Bulkeley*, dismissed from all his local offices. But these were comparatively rare examples. We know of only 31 contests out of a possible 262 in the Welsh constituencies from 1690 to 1714, though there were one or two near misses, notably in Glamorgan in 1708. Seven constituencies never went to a poll: Cardiff Boroughs, Carmarthen, Denbighshire, Glamorgan, Haverfordwest, Merioneth, and Montgomeryshire. Nine others were contested only once. In some cases, prolonged electoral peace was a function of the domination of the constituency by an individual magnate, such as Sir Richard Myddelton, 3rd Bt.*, in Denbighshire; or, as in Montgomeryshire, the ascendancy of a faction cemented together by a common partisan allegiance. Elsewhere the same phenomenon reflects the existence of a broad consensus not only among the leading interests, but among the county gentry as a whole. Evidence for pre-selection meetings may be sparse, Glamorgan in 1705 and Caernarvonshire in 1708 providing the only attested examples, though Robert Harley looked forward to one in Radnorshire in 1705.
The domination of electoral politics in Wales by the greater gentry accounts for the overwhelming preponderance of local names among the Members. All but five were substantial landowners in the counties in which they were returned, either representatives of old-established families or newcomers who had acquired their property through marriage (Sir Humphrey Mackworth, Sir Thomas Powell, Sir Edward Williams). Of the five outsiders, superficially the most exotic, the West Indian William Wheeler who sat for Haverfordwest in 1701-2, had in fact close family ties with the town and was in all probability chosen there on his brother’s interest. With scarcely any boroughs free from proprietorial influence, and most belonging to constituencies of the multiple type, there was little scope for mercenary corporators or spendthrift visitors. An exception was Charles Mason’s successful ambush of the Vaughan interest in Montgomery Boroughs in 1705, a feat which went unrepeated. The London merchant John Jeffreys’s election as knight for Radnorshire in 1692, although probably accomplished in part by the power of his purse, could not have been carried without the backing of major landed interests, especially the Harleys. Jeffreys, moreover, was a younger son of a Breconshire squire and was himself a landowner in adjacent counties. That patrons only rarely recommended strangers may be explained by the fact that none controlled more than two seats and the majority first reserved a place for themselves. In disposing of this patronage wider considerations of county politics would also operate. Thus only twice do we find rank outsiders, and Englishmen to boot, nominated for Welsh seats: Henry Bertie II was returned for Beaumaris 1705-27 on the interest of his brother-in-law Richard, 4th Viscount Bulkeley; and in 1710 (Sir) Simon Harcourt I, having lost his seat at Abingdon at the hands of notoriously partisan Commons’ committee of privileges, found a temporary refuge in Cardigan Boroughs through the good offices of Lewis Pryse*.
The Scottish Counties
By the terms of the Act of Union the 33 Scottish counties were represented by 30 Members, each county being given a single seat and three pairs of smaller counties alternating one with another in electing: Buteshire with Caithness; Clackmannanshire with Kinross-shire; and Cromartyshire with Nairnshire. This was a sharp reduction from the 92 commissioners who since the Glorious Revolution had made up the shire representation in the parliament of Scotland, a Scottish act of 1690 having doubled in 11 counties the previously standard number of two commissioners, and in four more added a third.
The franchise, however, remained essentially the same after 1707as it had been before; preserved by the terms of the treaty and left largely untouched by the united Parliament despite unsuccessful proposals for reform in the 1708-9 and 1710-11 sessions and a minor regulating act of 1713.
Although in pecuniary terms these qualifications were modest, the nature of property relations in Scotland, and the economic configuration of Scottish landed society, meant that only the more substantial proprietors would be enfranchised. Occasional examples can be found of voters, or claimants to the vote, whose economic circumstances were embarrassed, but for the most part these were dubious characters brought along to the electoral court by candidates desperate for votes, like ‘the pitiful barons of the Aird’ made use of by Mackenzie of Fraserdale in Inverness-shire, or the four ‘bankrupts’ and ‘beggars’ permitted to poll for Mungo Graham* in Kinross-shire in 1710. Unlike England or Wales, Scotland possessed a county electorate of landlords rather than tenants, and even in the more prosperous lowland counties the number of voters would be small by English standards. Of the 30 counties for which figures are available in this period, that is to say all except Dunbartonshire, Forfarshire (Angus), and Kirkcudbright Stewartry, the largest voterate was probably to be found in Perthshire, where as many as 80 freeholders may have attended the electoral court, closely followed by Dumfries-shire with 72, Edinburghshire (Midlothian) with 68, and Aberdeenshire and Berwickshire with about 65. A certain prestige attached to these larger, more open counties, especially to Edinburghshire, which was described as ‘the first election in Scotland’.
The relationship of ‘voterate’ to the ‘electorate’ is clearer for the Scottish counties than for counties in England and Wales. A register of electors was maintained for each county, by the enrolment of existing freeholders at the Michaelmas head court, after which new voters were admitted at the electoral court itself. Technically, therefore, the ‘electorate’ comprised those whose names were enrolled. The presence of other potential voters, in possession of a property qualification but not included on the roll, would be irrelevant. Where the rolls themselves survive,
The system was open to various abuses. The most obvious and convenient method for multiplying votes was by splitting a retour (the return into the Scottish chancery of the findings of an inquest, which could therefore serve as legal title to an estate) into separate parcels, each worth 40s. of old extent, or £400 Scots of current valuation. This was the stratagem adopted by the 12th Lord Ross, for example, who broke up his own vast barony in order to multiply his electoral support in Ross-shire.
Although one Scottish historian has contended that ‘the bare-faced roguery and quasi-legal trickery that enabled 18th-century politicians to rig constituencies did not operate before 1707’, examples of the manufacture of votes can in fact be found in elections to the independent Scottish parliament. Even the worst abuse of the system, the creation of temporary freeholders by trust conveyancing, seems to have made an appearance by 1702.
Without a systematic investigation into the conduct of elections between 1689 and 1707 (and it may be that the surviving evidence would in any case prove inadequate) it is impossible to judge the extent to which electoral corruption had become widespread in Scotland before the Union, but contemporaries certainly detected a decline in public morality at the first general election to the united Parliament, observing in many counties ‘such violations and encroachments on our constitution as never were attempted before’. These incidents were deplored in private correspondence, protested in election petitions, and evidently catalogued in a pamphlet published in Edinburgh and attributed to the MP for Fifeshire, Patrick Moncreiff, An Account of the Divisions in Scotland, and of the Measures Taken about the Elections of Members for the Ensuing Parliament. ‘Fictitious voters’ had appeared in significant numbers in Dumfriesshire, Lanarkshire, Perthshire, and even the tiny county of Clackmannanshire; and suspiciously large batches of new freeholders had been polled in Elginshire, Ross-shire, Roxburghshire, and Stirlingshire.
to make votes ... they have been endeavouring the bringing in 11 new barons, several of them inferior servants and dragoons in the Lord Carmichael’s regiment, who were to be purchasers of land they knew nothing of nor had paid for, but their names used even without the knowledge of some of them, and if this trick had taken effect it was redeemable for less than 20s., the freeholds to be redelivered after the elections are over ...
Add. 61628, f. 98.
In Clackmannanshire the election was fought out between stage armies of faggot voters, brigaded behind two rival magnates, the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Mar, who had been responsible between them for issuing most of the new charters. Mar’s intentions in this respect had been clear from the outset. As he explained to his brother Lord Grange SCJ (Hon. James Erskine†):
As to ... Clackmannanshire, I would have you to consider how many barons I can make and let me know the scheme of it that I may take my resolutions in that matter. You may tell me at the same time what inconveniences there may be in it and I will think of the proper persons to entrust. You may be one of them yourself and I will find out the rest; the more I could make, the better.
The moral climate did not improve in later elections. Similar incidents disfigured the reports of contests in 1710, and three in particular were the subject of election petitions, thus achieving a wider currency as the cases were rehearsed in printed broadsheets and discussed in the committee of privileges. Patrick Vans*, Lord Stair’s candidate in Wigtownshire, had recruited large numbers of suspect freeholders, against whom his opponent, Hon. John Stewart*, had lodged protest after protest. The committee not only found for Stewart but resolved that Vans himself had not been entitled to vote. In Dumfriesshire, where the Duke of Queensberry had failed in a previous attempt, in 1708, to swamp his opponents with new voters, as many as half the 72 barons attending in 1710 had provoked objections. Twenty-five were supporters of Queensberry’s nominee, William Grierson*, of whom ten had been enfranchised by means of ’split freeholds’, and at least seven were ‘fictitious’ voters ‘infeft of estates ... redeemable upon’ a pre-arranged payment. A further 11 had been polled for the opposing candidate, Hon. James Murray*, and some of these also owed their entitlement to what had obviously been an extensive campaign of freehold-splitting. Finally, there was the extraordinary case of Kinross-shire, whose electorate, when first enrolled, had consisted of no more than three freeholders. A remarkable influx resulted in an attendance of 12 aspiring voters at the electoral court, the beneficiaries of the subdivision of property and some infeftment on bare superiorities.
Evidently a number of different techniques were being employed in the manufacture of votes, but everywhere short-term conveyancing seems to have been becoming popular. Even if the grantor did not necessarily redeem his property immediately after the election (and evidence from Clackmannanshire and other counties shows that not all ‘trust’ voters were ‘barons for the day’, in Defoe’s phrase, but may in fact have remained enrolled for some years and have voted in successive elections), there was comfort to be had in the knowledge that he could do so. One of the candidates for Kinross-shire in 1710, Mungo Graham*, proposed a variation on the theme. If his ally (Sir) John Bruce* wished to build up electoral muscle, the ‘cheapest way’ would be
to resign in favour of any one person as much land as may make two or three votes ... and pass the charter in that one man’s name; and when it is passed the seals he may assign the precept of sasine a half or third thereof in favour of the other person or persons whom Sir John designs to make barons; they being infeft upon that assignation are publicly infeft, and in the terms of the law have unquestionable votes; and ... to take off the objection of trust, the new barons after they are infeft may dispone back the lands to Sir John to be holden a me or de me; ... and whenever he has a mind they should be no longer barons he may upon the promise of resignation make resignation in the exchequer and pass a new charter in his own favour...
SRO, Montrose mss GD220/5/807/6, Graham to Montrose, 7 Dec. 1710.
Such was the concern over the spread of trust conveyancing that an Act was eventually passed in 1713 to regulate Scottish county elections (12 Anne, c.6), sponsored by the Member for Edinburghshire, George Lockhart, and based on the English statutes of 1696 and 1711 (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25; and 10 Anne, c. 31), for the specific purpose of disqualifying any claim based on an infeftment taken on a ‘redeemable right’ (except for proper wadsets and other legal instruments permitted by the Scottish act of 1681). As further insurance, freeholders were henceforth only permitted to vote by virtue of conveyances completed at least a year before the teste of the writ, and might still be obliged, at the request of anyone present at the electoral court, to swear an oath that theirs was not a ‘trust vote’.
Mr Lockhart knows I have made a purchase to make up my valuation and ... knows I cannot be infeft till the exchequer meets in June and thinks some other freeholders who have long enjoyed their estates have neglected to infeft holding of the crown and these will be cut off.
NLS, ms 25276/58, Dalrymple to Charles Rosse*, 3 May 1713.
Little of a salutary effect was to be observed in the next general election, which gave rise to familiar scenes. In an interesting reversal, Hon. James Murray* shifted his alliances in Dumfriesshire, worked with his former opponent William Grierson, and in order to boost his polling strength was said to have ‘brought in all the voters that were rejected by the House of Commons’ in the preceding Parliament.
The making of voting qualifications was the most expensive part of electioneering in Scottish counties. Although the conviviality essential to successful canvassing made a general election a time of ‘perpetual tippling’, offensive to the sensibilities of some Presbyterian lairds,
Accepting the contemporary belief that electoral corruption had indeed deepened significantly after 1707 (in the absence of sufficient evidence to the contrary concerning previous electoral behaviour), the question arises as to whether this decline in public morality occurred as a direct consequence of the Union. The anti-unionist argument here would be twofold: first, that while the more flexible Scottish representative system had provided sufficient places on the commission for each county to satisfy the different political interests involved, enforced competition for the single seat available in the Parliament of Great Britain encouraged a ferocious rivalry between magnates and factions, and the sacrifice of scruples; second, that whereas prior to the Union disputed cases had been appealed to the court of session, which came to judgment after a proper hearing of the evidence, electoral petitions were now heard by the Commons committee of privileges and elections, where decisions were politically motivated, and inconsistent.
The procedure followed in Scottish county elections had been laid down by the statute of 1681. The electoral court was no more than a head court specifically constituted for the purpose of the election, meeting as customary at the head burgh (though this provision might occasionally be contravened for factional advantage). The first step was the election of a presiding officer, or praeses, and a clerk, on the basis of the existing roll of freeholders, and under the direction of the outgoing Member or the sheriff clerk. The election of the praeses often served as a trial of strength between the principals. Then the rights of other aspiring voters would be vetted by the court, and, once all claimants had been heard, a poll taken, if necessary, to decide the election. The sheriff would make the return. Practice seems to have varied, however, depending partly on the degree of impartiality of the praeses and sheriff, and partly on the condition of the electoral roll. If there had already been a revision at a preceding head court, the statutory procedure could be followed. If not, the roll might be made up during the preliminary stage of the electoral court, before the election of the praeses, and the court, properly constituted, used to register objections, though in some cases of this kind protests were first made at the enrolment, and repeated once the revision had taken place and the praeses chosen. There was also confusion as to the resolution of disputed claims: some examples of the court deciding by majority to disallow individual votes, and occasionally of claimants being ignored, but more usually an almost ritualized sequence of objection and counter-objection, which would result in the objector ‘taking instruments’ to register his protest, and the claimant choosing to exercise his vote in periculo.
The procedure at the court was, therefore, dominated by legal forms, and the atmosphere very different from the hurly-burly of some English county hustings. Only rarely did tempers become heated: in Dumfriesshire in 1708 the exclusion of the Duke of Queensberry’s ‘new barons’ resulted in drawn swords if not actual violence; and in Stirlingshire in the same year two excluded voters defied the decision of the praeses and subscribed the oath of allegiance and the assurance in what was said to be ‘a violent and riotous manner’.
I have a diverting account of the election ... for the shire of Moray [Elginshire]. The competition was between the laird of Grant [Alexander Grant*] and a Tory, one [Robert Dunbar of] Grangehill ... The latter vexed the gentlemen electors with protestations against every voter for Grant. At length he protested against one bold, brisk gentleman ... who rose up and countered him with another protestation ... that primo, the said Grangehill had been at his house, some eight or ten days before the election, craving his vote; secundo that he had said to him that Grant was ‘a damned Whig’; tertio, that, if he desired, he would procure him a letter in his favour, either from my Lord Treasurer [Oxford (Robert Harley*)], my Lord Bolingbroke [Henry St. John II*], [or] Secretary Bromley [William II*]; quarto, that when he was last at London, he had the honour to be with my Lord Treasurer in his closet, and that he was studying the Arabian politics. All this the clerk wrote down; and this effectually stopped Grangehill. Upon this he protested that Grangehill neither could be elected, nor be an elector. It’s thought this will mar the spark’s producing anything in this affair before the House.
Wodrow, Analecta (Maitland Club, lx), ii. 257-8.
Small numbers of voters, and highly formalized procedures, imparted a distinctive character to Scottish county elections. In circumstances in which it was possible for a candidate to canvass every voter, personality, personal circumstances, and personal relationships were of the highest importance. An anxious Lord Roxburghe felt it necessary to follow up his letters to the Roxburghshire freeholders in 1710 by arranging for his mother to tour the county on his behalf. ‘If your ladyship could spare but one week over in Teviotdale to speak to all the gentlemen’, he wrote,
or to write to such as you could not see, assuring those that had been against my brother that both you and I would forget it if they would be for (Sir) William Bennet*, and cajoling them and all the rest, I am sure it would have a great deal of weight.
Roxburghe mss bdle 756 Lord Roxburghe to his mother, 12 Aug. 1710.
Similarly, a wavering Kirkcudbright laird in 1708 was thought to require a letter from the Duke of Hamilton to stiffen his resolve.
That the bane of Scottish politics in this period was the overbearing influence of the magnates was presented as a truism by contemporary political writers, such as William Seton* of Pitmedden.
In other counties rivalry between magnates preserved a degree of ‘open-ness’, or at least maintained a history of electoral contests. The rash of vote-creations in Clackmannanshire in 1708 was entirely owing to the competing ambitions of the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Mar; the hard-fought election of 1710 in Berwickshire the manifestation of a local power-struggle between the Earls of Home and Marchmont; and in the same year the campaign of Patrick Vans* against Hon. John Stewart* in Wigtownshire was motivated by the desire of Lord Stair to upset the ascendancy of the Galloway interest. Queensberry’s troubles in Dumfries-shire, which manifested themselves in two disreputable election campaigns, in 1708 and 1710, can be traced to the unrelenting determination of the 1st Marquess of Annandale to challenge the Douglas ascendancy in the south-west. One modern historian has indeed observed that ‘opposition to Queensberry was almost the only consistent feature in Annandale’s politics’.
The Lord Ross, on a little purchase made by him in Ross-shire, fancied, from the sound of the words (for other pretence in nature or in law he had none) that he should be Earl of Ross. This was legally impossible, if law can make an impediment. The first possession he attempted was to require the whole shire to choose Members of Parliament ... at his prescription. I had the misfortune that my little interest would have a lesion by it, and having so many friends in that shire who noticed that sooner than I could, being at a distance, did prevent that prejudice before I could advise it, tho’ I did kindly thank them for it. Yet his revenge hath done them more hurt than I can well recompense.
Cromartie Corresp. ii. 99.
The electoral influence enjoyed by magnates took various forms. It could be expressed as a direct order to a dependant, as seems to have been the case with the Earl of Mar’s interest in Aberdeenshire, who was reassured by his brother after the by-election in 1709 that ‘Mr Innes and the rest of your people did vote for Sir Alexander, or were absent, and Sir Alexander pretends to have a great sense of his obligations to you’.
Control of the sheriffdom was as important in Scotland as in England or Wales, and in most counties the office was hereditary in a noble family: Queensberry in Dumfries, Atholl in Perthshire, the Earls of Bute in Buteshire. Neither Aberdeenshire nor Edinburghshire had a hereditary patent, but both had noblemen as sheriffs, and in Aberdeenshire Lord Mar’s tenure was transformed into a life patent in 1707. Even in counties where the sheriff was a commoner, the incumbent would be guaranteed a strong electoral interest: (Sir) John Bruce* in Kinross-shire, for instance, and Archibald Douglas of Cavers in Roxburghshire. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Lord Marchmont regarded with alarm the efforts of Lord Home to supplant him in 1710-11 in the sheriffdom of Berwickshire; that Queensberry and Lord Annandale went to law over the possession of the stewardship of Kirkcudbright; or that the Atholl’s enemies in Perthshire made sure that during the Jacobite emergency of 1708, which coincided with the general election, not only the sheriff himself would be taken into custody on suspicion but the sheriff depute as well. Naturally, the most important part played by the sheriff in relation to elections was as returning officer, but he, or more usually his sheriff depute, or sheriff clerk, could exercise considerable influence over the course of the election itself, through deciding the timing and the place of election, and in some cases the procedures to be followed. There are many examples in which a sheriff, or his officials, delayed an election so that one candidate benefited from the opportunity to accumulate more voting qualifications: in Clackmannanshire, for example, in 1708, when Sir John Erskine, 3rd Bt.*, demanded unsuccessfully that the sheriff depute be censured;
and therefore it was no wonder [that] the freeholders were very much surprised when they met at the said election, and particularly those gentlemen, who for 20 years past had been present, and voted in all elections, and had formerly produced their titles for instructing the right of voting, to find themselves excluded (as having no right) by the sheriff, his deputy, and another gentleman scarce known them, and to be told at the same time with much gravity, that these three were the only barons and freeholders in the shire.
Bruce could now dictate the course of proceedings. Graham’s opponent, Sir John Malcolm, 1st Bt.*, and the four supporters he had brought with him were allowed to present their claims only after the court had been constituted and Bruce himself elected praeses. Not surprisingly, all five were rejected.
Elsewhere proprietorial interest was more diffused. In some larger counties the prosperous lairds had a part to play in elections alongside the magnates: the very size of the electorate in Perthshire made it necessary even for the Duke of Atholl to canvass individual voters and to spend time and money on electoral management; while in Stirlingshire a figure like Sir Hugh Paterson did not have to depend upon aristocratic backing but could mount a formidable challenge for the county representation in his own right. The Duke of Roxburghe suffered successive humiliations in Roxburghshire in 1708 and 1710 at the hands of a coalition of lairds, headed by the two branches of the Eliotts (of Stobs and Minto), and braced by the authority enjoyed by Douglas of Cavers as sheriff; and in Peeblesshire the same fate befell Lord March, in 1710 and at a by-election in 1712, when his candidates were twice repelled by the efforts of Alexander Murray* of Stanhope, who as an episcopalian (and future Jacobite) was doubtless attractive to voters of a cavalier disposition, but who also enjoyed the benefit of a distinguished proprietorial interest as son-in-law of the Squadrone leader George Baillie*. The Hamilton interest in Lanarkshire faced opposition from various quarters: lesser magnates like Hyndford, some of the wealthier lairds, like George Lockhart*, and on occasion even elements among the smaller freeholders, who espoused a more radical brand of Presbyterianism than did the Duke himself. The Ayrshire election of 1713 showed the helplessness of another resident nobleman, the Earl of Eglintoun, who had by this time declared himself to be a strong Tory but who could do nothing to prevent the unopposed re-election of the politically uncongenial John Montgomerie II*. Admittedly Montgomerie was supported by alternative magnate interests, the Dalrymples of Stair and the 3rd Earl of Loudoun, but it is still striking that the 34 voters who attended the electoral court proceeded to return him without a hint of opposition.
It would not be going too far to say that in some counties magnate influence was barely perceptible. The absentee Earl of Breadalbane, for example, could make no political capital from his feudal overlordship in Caithness, where ‘considerable parts’ of the estates of the earldom of Caithness had been alienated to the local gentry. ‘I know none within the shire ... we can influence to vote as we would have them’, reported Breadalbane’s son, Lord Glenorchy, ‘I fear the barons have not that deference to us, that our letters would have any weight with them ... our jurisdiction is laughed at there as it is managed’.
There is some evidence of resistance on the part of the ‘lesser barons’ to dictation from above, behaviour that Lord Galloway, writing of the smaller lairds in Kirkcudbright Stewartry, called their ‘insolent carriage’, but which the voters themselves would have seen as reserving their own judgment. Lord Home wrote suspiciously of the Berwickshire freeholders in 1710, ‘some of our barons pretend to be such politicians as not to declare themselves till the day of election’.
It was not just that independent freeholders disliked having to accept terms from a territorial potentate, there was also an element of opposition to aristocratic involvement as such. This was certainly present, for example, in denunciations of Lord Ross. The argument was partly drawn from English precedent. As the Duke of Hamilton informed his mother in 1708, in relation to a projected petition over the Lanarkshire election, ‘I was told my Lord Carmichael would have made use of my meddling in elections against my brother Archibald, it being against the order of the House of Commons’.
As English and Scottish politics became more closely integrated a party spirit gradually infused Scottish elections, manifested in the appearance of Tory and Whig slogans, and the division of freeholders on party lines.
Nevertheless, it is clear that in those counties where the animosity between Presbyterian and episcopalian was strongest, candidates and electors did begin to talk and act in party terms. By 1710 Scotsmen were watching the political scene at Westminster with close attention. The Duke of Hamilton was informed by a correspondent in Edinburgh in March that ‘many people here are well pleased with the turn that Dr Sacheverell’s affair is like to take in his favour; and … the hot prosecution of that affair has rendered the Whigs and our Squadrone most despicable’.
some of the Kirk clergy insinuated among the freeholders, that the petitioner’s father ... and the petitioner were malignants, because his father kept a chaplain of the Church of England in his family; that the glory of God and the interest of Jesus Christ were at stake in this election, and the freeholders ought to vote only for such who were for the glory of God and the interest of Jesus Christ, which Mr Grierson was, who had engaged to be for the interest of their Kirk, but the petitioner was for the Church of England and an enemy to their Kirk.
In that year the substantial episcopalian presence in such counties as Berwickshire and Fife was translated into a stronger showing for cavalier or ‘Tory’ candidates. George Winrame of Eyemouth, a former non-juror, may have failed to dislodge the Marchmont interest in Berwickshire, with Presbyterians rallying to ‘the Kirk ... in hazard’,
The Scottish Burghs
The 66 royal burghs which had sent commissioners to the parliament of Scotland were grouped after the Union into 14 districts, with the exception of Edinburgh, which retained its right to elect separately. Nine districts contained five burghs each (Aberdeen, Anstruther Easter, Ayr, Dumfries, Elgin, Haddington, Perth, Stirling and Tain (or the Northern district)) and the remainder four (Dysart, Glasgow, Inverness, Linlithgow, and Wigtown). Each constituency returned a single Member to Westminster, making 15 in all. Within a district the place of election rotated according to the order of precedence of burghs in the rolls of the Scottish parliament, as laid down in the Scottish act of 1707 settling the manner of elections to the united Parliament,
Unlike the custom prevailing in collective borough constituencies in Wales (and in Monmouthshire), where elections were decided by the aggregate votes of the freemen, the Scottish burghs applied an indirect or delegated system of voting, in which each burgh chose a commissioner (sometimes referred to in contemporary correspondence as a ‘deputy’), to vote on its behalf. In the immediate aftermath of the Union there were some suspicions among the Scots that their new system might be brought into line with practice south of the border. Dumfries council was told in 1709 that ‘the town of Lochmaben are feuding in all the mechanics in the stewartry of Annandale to make themselves burgesses of their burgh, that, in case the election of burgesses to the Parliament be settled in Scotland as it’s in England, that town may outvote this town’.
Although in practice most commissioners tended to be magistrates, or at least councillors, in the burghs they represented, there were few if any legal restrictions as to who might be selected. After the 1708 election in Dumfries Burghs one of the candidates, William Johnstone*, challenged the validity of the commission held by William Alves for Sanquhar, on the basis that Alves himself would not have been qualified to attend the Scottish Parliament as a burgh representative:
that his commission was not in the terms of the platform of the burghs, as wanting that he was a resident or had 3,000 merks worth of land holding burgage of the town; secondly that by the British law no sheriff was capable to be elect or be elected, and he was sheriff-depute of the place.
In reply, Alves was able to remind the other commissioners that he had in fact served in the Scottish parliament, so the objections fell. At Elgin in 1713 it was said against three of the commissioners present that they neither ‘bore a part of the public burdens’, nor participated fully in the business of their burghs. Again, these protests were ignored. Some commissions contained the statement that the burgh concerned had chosen ‘a man fearing God, of the true Protestant religion publicly professed and authorised by this kingdom, without suspicion in the contrair’, attributes deemed necessary under the 1707 statute, but fraught with political implications that militated against a general enforcement. Whereas burghs dominated by Presbyterian and ‘Whig’ interests, such as Irvine (in the Ayr district) made a point of including the clause,
Nothing in law bound the commissioners to vote other than as they pleased,
At the election itself the host burgh provided the officials responsible for the conduct of the poll. The local commissioner would act as praeses (presiding officer), and the town clerk as clerk to the commission. The return would be prepared by the clerk and sent up by the sheriff of the county in which the election had been held.
Occasionally the praeses could also determine the outcome in a five-burgh district. Tain was a special case, because of the obvious difficulties hampering the attendance of the commissioner from Kirkwall on Orkney. Only once in this period (at a by-election in 1709) did the Kirkwall delegate manage to cross the Pentland Firth in time for the poll. In the 1708 election, the other four commissioners were evenly divided, and the commissioner from Tain, David Ross of Balnagown, was able to give a casting vote to his favoured candidate, Lord Strathnaver (William Sutherland). Two general elections later Strathnaver’s father, the Earl of Sutherland, was reassured by an agent that the late arrival of the writ for the district left gratifyingly little time to inform the various councils. ‘I hope it will be scarce be possible for Kirkwall to hear of it, and consequently that your lordship and any other burgh has it at your foot to be disposed of as your lordship pleases.’
Occasionally there were departures from precedence. The confusion in Wigtown Burghs, which led to New Galloway rather than Whithorn presiding in 1710, and Wigtown jumping two places to preside for a second time in 1713, derived from a misunderstanding of the statute of 1707. This declared that at the first general election following the Union the eldest burgh should preside, followed at each general election by the remaining burghs in the order in which they had been inscribed on the rolls of the Scottish parliament.
The principal distinction to be made between individual burghs relates to the degree to which municipal government had been penetrated by the landed elite. The larger and more prosperous towns were still governed by mercantile oligarchies. This was most obviously the case with Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the expanding linen centre of Perth, but it also remained true of the economically more troubled east coast ports of Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness and Montrose, and of some other towns, like Dumfries, and even Kirkcudbright (a ‘little town, which consists of a tolerable street’). On the other hand, there were many smaller burghs whose commerce had fallen into decline and whose political life had been extinguished by predatory lairds: Stranraer, ‘a most miserable place’ where there was ‘hardly a house two storeys high in the whole town’;
The dominance of commercial interests in the politics of the more prosperous towns was expressed in a preference for local merchants and magistrates as parliamentary representatives. Edinburgh chose two lord provosts in succession, Sir Samuel MacClellan in 1708, and after his death Sir Patrick Johnston; Glasgow’s ascendancy in its district was reflected in the return of Provost Robert Rodger in 1708 and the dean of guild, Thomas Smith II, in 1710 and 1713; Aberdeen Burghs elected the experienced Baltic merchant and outgoing provost of New Aberdeen, John Gordon, in 1708, and James Scott I of Montrose in 1710; and Perth Burghs, having returned Provost Joseph Austin of Perth in 1708, replaced him with Provost George Yeaman of Dundee in 1710 and 1713. (The case of James Oswald, the self-made merchant captain and provost of Kirkcaldy, who sat for Dysart Burghs 1710-15, was rather different.) In choosing MPs from their own ranks, councillors were following the recommendation of the convention of royal burghs, which since 1700 had imposed a residential qualification on its own commissioners, and in 1708 pressed the extension of this practice to parliamentary elections as the only way to guarantee assiduous and informed representation in the united Parliament on questions of trade and manufacture, needed more than ever in the precarious economic conditions prevailing at the time of the Union. On 15 May, just before the general election, the convention passed an act expressly encouraging the districts to elect ‘honest, knowing, trading men’, and the following year harked back to this theme, recalling the objections which had been made against various successful candidates in the election, and pointedly reiterating the residence requirements laid down for burgh representatives in the parliament of Scotland by a statute of 1642. Probably more important than the fulminations of the Convention, however, was the tradition within each of the great trading burghs of employing a parliamentary representative as an agent for the advancement of vested interests, a function which it was assumed was best achieved by Members who were themselves concerned parties. As had been customary before the Union, the voters in Edinburgh and the delegates to the Aberdeen district in 1708 issued their newly elected MP with specific ‘instructions’, which in the latter case burdened the hapless Gordon with an impossibly lengthy list of legislative proposals, mostly intended to benefit Aberdeen alone, and relating to matters of trade, manufacture, local government, and even university reform.
It soon became clear, however, that local merchants, without political experience beyond the confines of a burgh council, were unlikely to prove effective agents at Westminster. In 1710, Robert Rodger retired as MP for Glasgow Burghs after a lacklustre parliamentary performance; John Gordon was dropped by Aberdeen after failing to realise any of his constituents’ legislative ambitions; and Joseph Austin, accused by political opponents of neglecting his Commons duties, did not stand for re-election in Perth.
Elsewhere, and especially in the smaller towns, landed gentlemen had already invaded the parliamentary representation before 1707. It was still relatively unusual to find noblemen or lairds demeaning themselves to take an active part in burgh affairs, beyond the acquisition of a burgess ticket (which seems to have been a necessary qualification to stand for Parliament for a burgh constituency), although in the far north the violent struggles between the Rosses and Mackenzies induced some exceptions to this rule: Sir James Mackenzie of Royston was made a councillor of Dingwall burgh in 1708 in time for his challenge for the Tain Burghs seat; his kinsman George Mackenzie* was not only admitted to Fortrose council in 1710 but also chosen provost, preparatory to his election for Inverness district; and even the great Lord Ross himself was honoured with membership of the council of Tain.
A handful of burghs were disposed by decree, as the Duke of Argyll gave his orders to Campbeltown and Inverarary. Campbeltown’s charter afforded the Duke the right to nominate the council, and his letter to the burgh in 1710 added that ‘we shall give you instructions by the next to choose your commissioners, for the current Parliament’.
Other burgh patrons had to struggle with ambitious rivals. In Dingwall Lord Cromarty (who in 1702 had been sent a blank commission by the councillors to be completed with the name of his choice
A few examples can be found of ineffectual opposition to the involvement of the nobility in burgh elections, parallel to the sporadic protests of the ‘lesser barons’ against aristocratic interference in the choice of county Members. At one level this might be simply resistance to dictation. It was reported in 1708 that ‘the two towns of Dumfries and Kirkcudbright judge themselves free and independent of the D[uke] of Q[ueensberry] and will not, as they say, be easily pleased with one of his recommending, for reasons best known to themselves, and they resolve to choose for themselves one they like’.
Some burghs witnessed factional conflicts of a rather different order, in which may be discovered elements of party animosity. These usually arose in centres of episcopalian disaffection, and, although in a few cases (notably Perth
Political divisions within individual burghs, whether deriving from rivalries between magnates or the mutual antagonism of Presbyterians and episcopalians, could produce prolonged and bitter conflict. Disputes over the legality of election commissions occurred at Inverbervie, Pittenweem and St. Andrews in 1710, and at Pittenweem again in 1713, with rival claimants presenting themselves at the poll. Bribery and intimidation began to feature in parliamentary elections. It was believed that at least 100 guineas had been spent in one contest for the Perth district to secure a favourable commissioner from St. Andrews; and on another occasion wholesale bribery was alleged to have taken place at Anstruther Wester where Lord Anstruther SCJ promised the council to pay ‘a considerable part of their public debts, if they would choose a commissioner as would vote for his son’. Anstruther’s influence as a lord of session was also exploited in 1710, to blackmail a councillor whose sons had been implicated in the lynching of an alleged witch at Pittenweem. Hints had been given that a vote in the right direction might procure the safe return of one son, a fugitive from justice, whereas failure would result in the hanging of the son left behind. Occasional incidents of disorderly behaviour were also reported: among the councillors at Kirkcaldy
there were great heats amongst those who stood up for Aithernie and a mob was expected every moment, and at night there were orders given by the convenors and deacons to warn the whole seven trades against Wednesday morning to meet in the church yard (which is not their ordinary place of meeting), which we judged was done to fright the honest party who stand upon the Revolution foot.
The refusal of Crawford’s party to relinquish possession of the ‘council book’ provoked their opponents into threats of violence, and the following morning ‘the trades met and upon many places of the streets the disaffected people met in companies, which made many think that then there should be an uproar’.
The complex dynamics of indirect representation meant that the balance between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ burghs was not replicated at the level of parliamentary elections. Ignoring the effects of the casting vote of the praeses in four-burgh districts (or in five-burgh districts where not every commissioner attended or more than one claimant appeared for a disputed commission), which might convey a controlling interest for a single election, relatively few constituencies may be consistently ascribed to a single patron. Argyll could dispose of the district of Ayr without a second thought, on the basis of his own ascendancy over Inveraray and Campbeltown, and his son-in-law Lord Bute’s control of Rothesay, even without the passivity of the other potentially interested magnates, the Earls of Eglintoun (at Irvine) and Loudoun (at Ayr). Haddington Burghs was safely in the hands of Hon. Sir David Dalrymple, 1st Bt.*, who could rely upon three out of the five commissioners (those for North Berwick, Haddington and Dunbar). Wigtown divided comfortably in favour of the Earl of Galloway against his local rival Lord Stair, for Galloway had the burgh of Whithorn in his pocket, was also able to bend the semi-independent councillors of Wigtown to accept his recommendation, and could trust his political ally, the nonjuring Viscount Kenmure, to deliver the vote from New Galloway. Dysart Burghs ought perhaps to be added to the list, since James Oswald, the Kirkcaldy merchant, seems to have established a sufficient interest in the district to enable him to return himself without difficulty in 1710 and 1713, but Oswald’s position was less secure than Argyll’s, Dalrymple’s or Galloway’s, in that it was not based on permanent, quasi-proprietorial control over a majority of burghs. In this four-burgh constituency Dysart itself was in the hands of Lord Sinclair and the Earl of Leven could direct the vote of the commissioner from Kinghorn, while Burntisland and Kirkcaldy were rather more open. By 1710 Oswald had supplanted Lord Rothes as the dominant force in Kirkcaldy, and with Sinclair’s support was sure of his return, since Kirkcaldy was then the presiding burgh. The next election went to Burntisland, and as Oswald was re-elected unopposed it seems safe to assume that he had made inroads there as well.
Elsewhere political influence tended to be diffused across a district, making election results unpredictable, and subject to the vagaries of canvassing, management, and negotiation. The 4th Duchess of Hamilton and her brothers-in-law were confident that they had only to ‘think of somebody to serve for the district of Linlithgow’, but each of the four burghs acknowledged a different patron, Linlithgow the Hamiltons, Selkirk the Murrays of Philiphaugh, Lanark Lord Hyndford, and Peebles Lord March. The presence of one or more ‘open’ or self-consciously independent, burghs was often a confusing factor. In the four-burgh district of Inverness, for example, Fortrose could be ascribed without question to the Mackenzies, but in Forres and Nairn the respective patrons, Forbes of Culloden and Rose of Kilravock, were not entirely secure, and in Inverness itself poor management (especially in the matter of channelling customs preferments to his adherents)
In both the Northern and Stirling districts these complications resolved themselves into a contest for supremacy between two major political interests, Lord Ross against the Mackenzies in Tain Burghs, Lord Mar against the Squadrone in Stirling. In effect burgh commissions were being caught up in the violent party warfare that had polarized county elections. It was a natural extension of his crusade to replace the Earl of Cromarty as the dominant force in Ross-shire that Lord Ross should have constructed a Whiggish coalition of interests in Tain Burghs; while in Stirling Lord Mar marshalled the forces of his stepfather John Erskine* (who predominated in Stirling and had a significant influence in Culross), and the Court peer Lord Rosebery (patron of Inverkeithing) to wage war against the Tweeddale interest (based on Dunfermline and Queensferry), as an extension to his campaign against Tweeddale’s Squadrone colleague Montrose in Stirlingshire. Other instances in which burgh elections were caught up in the wider conflicts of county or regional politics occurred in the district of Dumfries, which became another arena in the duel being fought by the Duke of Queensberry and the Marquess of Annandale for political mastery in the south-west;
Rivalry between burghs could be another destabilising factor. The arbitrary way in which the districts had been organized created strange bedfellows and strong rivalries, especially among the larger and more prosperous towns. Whereas Glasgow seemed to enjoy an easy dominance over its district, Aberdeen achieved a similar monopoly only with considerable difficulty and in the teeth of a vigorous opposition from Montrose, whose councillors, disinclined to follow the lead of their more northerly rivals, could rely on the close support of neighbours in Brechin, with whom they had strong trading links. In turn, Aberdeen made an alliance with Arbroath, which left the small burgh of Inverbervie holding the balance. In 1710 Inverbervie’s council was split, and William Livingston, Aberdeen’s preferred candidate, was only seated on petition. Three years later the election was determined in advance by an agreement between Aberdeen, Arbroath, and Inverbervie to act ‘in a concert together’.
Finally we come to Edinburgh, which, although preserved in its independence as a parliamentary constituency by the Union, none the less suffered a reduction in its parliamentary representation from two commissioners to one MP. This led to certain peculiar difficulties, and directly to a contested election in 1710. Before the Union it had been customary to return a ‘merchant’ and a ‘tradesman’. In 1708 a ‘merchant’, the lord provost, Sir Patrick Johnston*, was elected without opposition, but although there was no challenge from the trades, the deacon convenor made a point of arguing that the principle of sharing the representation should be preserved by a system of alternation. To retain his seat in 1710 Johnston had to defeat Henry Hamilton, deacon of surgeons, a candidate of the trades. There may have been a tincture of party politics about this election, since Johnston was a Presbyterian and a Whig, and Hamilton was the younger brother of the 2nd Lord Belhaven, who had been suspected of Jacobitism. Hamilton’s petition, besides claiming that the eight deacons of the trades had been improperly excluded from the ‘extraordinary council’ which constituted the electorate in both magisterial and parliamentary elections, also alleged that Johnston was ‘incapable of serving because, by the constitution of the said burgh, one of the merchants and one of the trades ought to be chose[n] by turns’. At the hearing Johnston ridiculed this proposition, pointing out that ‘by the same parity of reason’ a strict rotation might be expected in each Scottish electoral district, whereas it was ‘evident that the district may choose their [sic] members a thousand times out of one and the same burgh without regard to any pretence of equality’. The Scottish statute which had settled the representation simply stated that Edinburgh was to return one Member by holding elections in the same manner as previously, ‘and where the law distinguishes not’, ran Johnston’s case, ‘no distinction can be made’. Hamilton’s renewed petition was rejected in 1712, the committee of elections declining to comment on the alleged exclusion of the deacons, but unequivocally endorsing Johnston’s argument that the Union had altered ‘the constitutions of the royal burghs as to their elections to Parliament’ and that the voters of Edinburgh were ‘at liberty to choose who they please’. No more was heard of the scheme for alternation. Indeed, the sole candidate in 1713, Sir James Stewart, 1st Bt., was neither a merchant nor a tradesman. The then lord provost, Sir Robert Blackwood, tried to maintain the principle that only bona fide merchants or tradesmen were capable of election, but could persuade no more than four deacons of trade and three council members to join him in adjourning. When he and his supporters left, ‘the rest of the council sat still and voted that the provost could not adjourn them without the consent of the majority, they having met by virtue of an act of council to choose a commissioner to Parliament’, so that Stewart was elected nem. con. by the 23 voters who remained behind (out of an electorate of 33).
Thus, despite the oligarchic system of burgh government, the narrowness of individual burgh electorates, and the prevailing strength of patronal influence, the nature of the electoral system produced a remarkably high proportion of contested elections. Although Argyll’s straw men in Ayr Burghs may not have been polled in this period, nor indeed for the rest of the 18th century, and a few other districts were relatively undisturbed (Wigtown being contested once in five elections, Dysart and Elgin once out of four), four districts (Aberdeen, Inverness, Stirling and Tain) witnessed opposition at every election, and the overall percentage of contests ran at 49.1% (26 out of a possible 53), as opposed to 40.6% in the counties (42 out of 101). At least 10 out of the burgh 15 constituencies were contested at the general election of 1708, when there were three competitors for one seat in Perth and in Linlithgow; and although in the years that followed the trend in Scottish constituencies was for the number of contests to decline steadily, the figures for the burgh districts remained respectable, with eight contests in 1710, at least seven in 1713, and even five in the unpropitious circumstances of 1715.
Standing for Parliament
In an English or Welsh constituency, whatever political realities might lie behind a parliamentary candidature, whether nomination by an omnipotent proprietor or the independent championing of a ‘popular’ interest, certain forms and conventions were usually observed. In most cases, the candidate’s intention to stand would be announced publicly, well in advance. In counties this might be done at a ‘county meeting’, often held at the assizes or quarter sessions. Afterwards circular letters would be sent to all the ‘gentlemen’, and many smaller freeholders, the total number easily running into hundreds. These were almost always subscribed in the name of the candidate himself (even if logistics demanded that they be signed as well as written out by a clerk), and by both partners in a joint candidature. In borough constituencies there would be no public meeting, unless the corporation itself wished to adopt a candidate,
The obliging manner in which you were pleased to desire my recommendation of a Member to serve the corporation in the ensuing Parliament, as on the one side it was most kind and obliging, and augmented the honour her Majesty did me of conferring the government of Portsmouth on me, so on the other hand it has given me some pain to be sure that in my recommendation I might acquit myself worthy of your confidence. ’Twas not enough, I thought, in return to your affection at first to recommend a young and inexperienced man, though of my own blood. I would not leave therefore a possibility that the gentleman I recommend should ever by his vote swerve the least from the duty and loyalty of so good a corporation. I therefore have been slow and circumspect in my choice, and could not, till Sir Thomas Mackworth* came to London, tell whether he would be willing to serve again in Parliament. Therefore [I] hope you will excuse that you did not know him sooner. he has served for ten years knight of the shire for Rutland, always true to his country’s interest; in short, a perfect man.
In the many such ‘announcements’ to survive certain common features may be observed. First, the candidate would make it clear that he had not sought a place in Parliament himself but instead had been invited to stand. ‘In compliance with the desires of several gentlemen of Norfolk’, wrote Hon. Roger Townshend* in 1708, ‘Sir John Holland [2nd Bt.*] and I have declared we are willing to serve the county in the ensuing Parliament’.
I am far from presuming upon my own merit when I desire the continuance of that honour which I know you cannot grant without the most convincing proof of your good opinion and esteem. I first aimed at it upon the encouragement of my friends, who persuaded me you would accept of my faithful endeavours to serve you, and this your repeated kindnesses have so far made good, that I am inclined to hope you will continue me in your service when your very good friends hold me worthy of their recommendation ...
Cheshire RO, Shakerley mss Whitley to Peter Shakerley*, 30 June 1700; Cumbria RO (Carlisle), D/Lons/W1/27, Lowther to the mayor, aldermen and freemen of Carlisle, 12 Nov. 1700.
At the very least, some self-deprecation was required. The publisher Awnsham Churchill* wrote of his campaign at Dorchester in 1705 that ‘to appear at this time’, was ‘against my own judgment and inclination ’.
Second, the candidate would offer his ‘services’ to his putative constituents. James Lowther hoped to be of ‘service’ to the town of Carlisle. John Brewer* told the jurats of New Romney in 1695, ‘I have no other ends, than in the first place to study, consult, and promote your interest’; while Hon. James Brydges* begged the mayor of Hereford, ‘and the other gentlemen of the city ... to entreat your favourable acceptance of my past endeavours for your service’.
Occasionally a candidate would appeal to the political prejudices of the voters, with a statement which was frankly partisan. Benjamin Bathurst*, for example, in declaring his candidature for New Romney in 1690, played on fears for the security of the Church of England establishment, in the wake of the passage of the Toleration Act. He wrote that he had ‘at all times heartily espoused’ the interests of the Church, and, if elected,
will very heartily stick to the interest of our church as well as to the preservation of all our liberties and properties as Englishmen and will as earnestly endeavour in particular to serve the interest of your port if anything should offer to be done there for your advantage and service …
Centre Kentish Studies, NR/AEp/56/3, Bathurst to mayor and jurats, 15 Feb.1689/90.
Similar protestations of ‘a steady zeal for the Church and Queen’ came from Lord Scudamore in Herefordshire in 1713, while the Cornish Tory George Granville*, in his circulars in 1710 ‘laid down what amounted to a political programme, outlining his attitude to the monarchy, the Church, the Protestant succession, public credit, and the war with France’.
Almost as frequent were appeals of another kind, to the traditional ideal of a parliamentary ‘selection’ rather than ‘election’, as representing the consensus of opinion within a constituency.
As I am concerned in the peace and quietness of this town, I cannot but wish and endeavour it all I can. I suppose you have heard what steps are taken to breed disturbances ... If it be so, then there will be an end of all that friendship and good neighbourhood which this town hath so long enjoyed …
W. Yorks. Archs. (Leeds), Vyner mss 5782, Heneage Dering to [—], 13 Aug. 1714, Ripon.
Once the candidates had declared, they would have to organize canvassing. In many counties candidates would enjoy the support of a local Tory or Whig caucus, sometimes directed by an electoral magnate, like Lord Nottingham for the Tories in Rutland, or Lord Wharton for the Whigs in Buckinghamshire; and at other times co-ordinated by a ‘club’ of gentlemen, such as were to be found among the Tories in Essex and Hertfordshire (the ‘Royston Club’), Derbyshire (the ‘Swarkeston Club’) and Glamorgan (‘the St. Nicholas Club’). Elsewhere, party organization, even if rather ad hoc and dependent upon the initiative of particular individuals, was usually effective enough to plan and co-ordinate an election campaign.
tell me how many hugs and squeezes have you had from brawny, greasy fists of belching freeholders; what toothless chops have you been forced athwart; for the sake of ancestors what compliances have you been obliged to, in the spirit of your popularity, against the grain? While the bulls and veals around you echo forth ‘viva le Scudamore’, all the merry lads and lasses of the Herefordshire plains tune their oaten reeds to sing their paeans to their young triumphant lord …
But, however energetic the candidate, he would still need help. Canvassing a county, or even a larger borough, was an arduous and potentially difficult exercise, requiring considerable manpower. The Lowthers employed eight or nine agents solely to ‘engage the out-burgesses’ at Carlisle in 1698.
A degree of organization was also necessary to ensure that voters reached the poll. This problem was particularly acute in county elections, but could also affect the outcome in boroughs with substantial proportions of ‘out-voters’, usually non-resident freemen. Londoners were often conveyed to the larger freemen boroughs in the south-east of England, like Aylesbury, Colchester, Harwich, or Hertford, and in 1710 some travelled from the capital as far afield as Bridgnorth in Shropshire. But difficulties over transportation always loomed larger in the counties. Sympathetic landlords would be requested to bring in as many of their own freeholders as they could, and agents dispersed in all directions to muster support.
Until the Elections Act of 1696 (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25), the timing and location of the poll itself was at the discretion of the returning officer, although it was good practice for any variations from the norm to be agreed upon in advance by all the candidates. Where the returning officer himself proved partisan, of course, such prior consultation might well not occur. In corporate boroughs polling was usually held at the seat of municipal government — the town hall, tholsel, or some equivalent building; in boroughs without a corporate structure, at whatever site was customary, ‘the cross’ at Hindon for example,
The proceedings began with an introductory speech from the returning officer, and the nomination of candidates. There may also have been attempts at oratory from the candidates themselves. A surviving draft of a returning officer’s speech, from the sheriff of Cheshire at the general election of 1702, shows him formally announcing the election, and giving the names of the candidates.
During this period the administration of polling, especially in counties, became ever more complex. The Act of 1696, which applied only to county elections, required the sheriff to appoint as many clerks as he considered ‘convenient’ for the purpose. In practice, he tended to consult the candidates, and to allow them to suggest names.
Before a vote could be recorded, the elector himself was obliged to swear that he was properly qualified. The returning officer was responsible for tendering this oath, and for putting the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and eventually abjuration too, if he suspected these might be necessary, to expose a Catholic or otherwise nonjuring claimant, or if one of the principals demanded it. But where there were large numbers of voters, and several booths or tables, the swearing-in could not be done by one man, so again the sheriff, or his equivalent in a borough constituency, would appoint deputies to undertake the work for him; and again he would receive nominations from the candidates. Taken together with the necessary pack of electoral agents, to mobilize and manoeuvre cohorts of voters, and to round up stragglers, and one or two lawyers, to challenge or to defend from challenge the credentials of individual freeholders, a candidate might therefore be obliged to employ a very substantial body of men at election times. In the Northamptonshire election of 1705 Sir Justinian Isham, 4th Bt.*, paid wages and expenses for eight clerks, four ‘swearers’, and for ‘assistants in the booths’, and ‘attendants on the clerks’ (besides the cost of constructing the booths and making out the pollbooks). Even in the scot-and-lot borough of Aldborough, in north Yorkshire, Sir Abstrupus Danby*, one of the candidates in 1698, commanded a troop of agents and auxiliaries. The list of orders issued before the poll showed how thorough preparations had been. ‘Mr Pinkney’ was told to ‘stay at the place where the single votes are assembled, whilst Mr Danby bring parties of ’em up to vote, from Shackleton’s’; ‘Baines and Foster’ were to ‘attend the court’; ‘young Mr Foster’ and ‘Hardcastle’ to ‘take the poll’, with three more men to ‘supervise the enemy’s clerks who take the poll’; while the remaining four, with ‘other friends of theirs’, were required to ‘mix themselves among all the borough-men to prevent the enemy from drawing our friends from us, and to gain as many as they can to our party’.
To judge from the evidence of pollbooks, which display several different methods of construction — with voters listed alphabetically across the constituency, or distinguished topographically by hundred or parish, or the votes for each candidate enumerated separately — the form of election may well have differed according to constituency. Whether a candidate could properly cast a vote for himself was unclear, and may also have been subject to some local variation. Certainly Sir Rowland Gwynne* did poll on his own behalf in the election for New Radnor Boroughs in 1690, though he seems to have lost face with his fellow Members when this fact was revealed in discussion of the petition against him; and there were further deliberations after the 1695 election when it emerged that John Conyers* had also voted for himself in the burgage borough of East Grinstead. There was no formal resolution on this point, and Conyers’ election was confirmed by the House, which would suggest that the Commons, while disapproving of the practice, was unwilling to claim that it was unparliamentary.
Polling in a populous constituency could well last several days, and in elections for London newspapers sometimes published interim polling figures, which naturally had the effect of encouraging supporters of the leading candidates, and discouraging their opponents. Sometimes a challenge would be aborted when early polling returns showed the strength of the other side. But a clever campaign might well have involved holding back voters from the first day’s polling, to trick the opposition into a false sense of security, and dissuade them from bringing in their more expensive or reluctant voters in the latter stages. The Tories in Westmorland in 1702 were even cleverer, planning to keep in reserve until the last minute as many as a hundred ‘plumpers’ whose single votes they could apply to whichever of their two candidates should need them more, a tactic which says much for the high degree of discipline they felt capable of exerting .
In a county election it was always important to bring in large numbers of supporters, even if not all of them were qualified to cast a vote, for the very size of a candidate’s retinue might overawe the other side. Thus the Whigs in Norfolk congratulated themselves in 1705 that their candidates arrived in Norwich accompanied by ‘the greatest number that was ever seen there’. Such a public display of popularity was all the more impressive when these men were on horseback, signifying in the most obvious manner their wealth and social status. It might also serve to confer legitimacy ex post facto. Even though he had been returned to Parliament for a pocket borough, Chichester, in 1705, Sir Thomas Littleton, 3rd Bt.*, made sure that he was accompanied on the first stage of his journey to London, following his election, by 150 electors on horseback, at least as far as Midhurst.
The organization and transportation of large contingents of voters, consultations over strategy and tactics, demonstrations of main force in the form of arraying large numbers of mounted supporters; all these aspects of electioneering encouraged the participants to employ military metaphors and phraseology in describing elections, even those peaceful affairs in which there was no mob violence, nor even the threat of violence. It may be that there was few if any alternative modes of expression available to describe this kind of activity, or that in a period dominated by warfare it was natural for contemporaries to turn to the battlefield for the language of conflict. None the less, the repetition is striking. Even a civilian, Hon. Maurice Ashley, when standing for Wiltshire, could write of ‘the enemies’ attempts upon our headquarters at Bradford[-on-Avon]’; refer to his principal agent as ‘the commander of the place’; and describe his canvassers as having ‘passed every particular freeholder in review’ and ‘prepared ’em for action’. Elsewhere, candidates in Somerset can be found ‘mustering up our forces for elections’; a Buckinghamshire gentleman reporting that ‘the enemy is very quiet and have made no vigorous sallies. I fancy that in this campaign they’ll act only defensively’; and reference being made to ‘the brave stand, and inflexible courage’ of those Northamptonshire freeholders who adhered to the Tory cause in the 1705 election despite the blandishments of the Whig magnates. In 1701 James Grahme was reassured of his son’s electoral success in the most remarkable terms. One of his friends wrote:
I doubt not but this post will bring you an account of our county election from several hands, and they will all tell you that your son did manage to admiration; he now knows the utmost strength of his enemies, for he has attacked them in their trenches and fought all the forces of Westmorland singlehanded. There was a strenuous effort made to throw out not only Sir Christopher [Musgrave, 4th Bt.*] but himself, and if he had not timely foreseen the danger, and turned their own cannon upon them they had certainly gained their point.
PRO 30/24/22/1/95-7; Bodl. Ballard 38, f. 126; Tanner 20, f. 57; Add. 27440, f. 135; Bagot mss at Levens, James Lamb to Grahme, 18 Dec. 1701.
When polling had been completed there was still the opportunity for a defeated candidate to request a ‘scrutiny’. A description of the election for the city of York in 1713 shows that the terms of the scrutiny were settled by the returning officer after consultation (and preferably agreement) between the candidates and their legal advisers. In this case two scrutineers were appointed and given several days to complete their work. (One of the candidates, however, fearing that the scrutiny would be cut short for lack of time, pressed for an extension to what had been settled, only to be refused, a circumstance which was then included in the grounds for his petition.)
Once the result of the poll was declared, it was up to the returning officer to make the return. This was not done in alphabetical order, or according to the order of votes cast, but in a jealously guarded order of precedence. In a double-Member constituency the first named would become the senior Member. Precedence might be decided by social status, or by length of service in Parliament, and could be the subject of vigorous dispute, more usually in counties, where social rankings meant a good deal, but sometimes in boroughs too. The ‘point of precedency’ in Boroughbridge in January 1701 threatened to bring about a poll even in an election with only two candidates.
After the declaration the successful candidate would have the opportunity to make a speech. This might be a graceful occasion, as at the Westminster election of 1691, when Sir Stephen Fox* thanked the voters ‘for the honour you have done me; and if there be any occasions wherein I can serve you, either in relation to the community or in a particular capacity, you shall always find me ready and willing to serve you’; or it might degenerate into partisan abuse, as in Westmorland in December 1701, when the representation was shared between a Whig and a Tory, and each spoke in denunciation of the other party. Constituents could also address their representatives, and present ‘instructions’ as to how the newly elected Members should behave at Westminster. This was common practice in the pre-Union Scottish parliament, and survived in Scotland after 1707 to some degree, in the form of legislative ‘shopping lists’ issued by some burghs to their Members. It was less common in England, but had been used extensively by the first Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley†) and the Exclusionists as a propaganda device in 1681, and was revived by their Whig successors in the second general election of 1701, in an orchestrated campaign in which individual sets of ‘instructions’ were evidently drawn up by candidates themselves, by local party caucuses, and individual Whig magnates, one of whom was Shaftesbury’s grandson, the 3rd Earl.
Finally there were the celebrations for those returned. Sir Abstrupus Danby at Aldborough in 1698 made sure that among his many agents and employees present at the election were three whose function was to ‘be always ready at the door to carry me out first’. At Scarborough the chairers waded into the sea, so that the Member was ‘rid admiral’. Accounts of election expenses generally included payments for chairmen, and also for bell-ringers, and musicians (‘waits’, ‘hautbois’ and so on) to celebrate their triumph. A Member elected in absentia would have a ‘representative’ chaired on his behalf. Occasionally, however, best-laid plans would fail, with embarrassing results. At Worcester in 1690 the local Whigs were so apathetic and disorganized they could hardly get anyone to acclaim their successful candidates. There was ‘no echo of Bromley or Somers’ in the town hall, so ‘the sergeants were sent out into the streets to hatch an acclamation’. But although they ‘threw up their caps and bawled as loud as they could’, it was ‘all to no purpose’.
The pageant after was very ridiculous. For they had much ado to get any to carry them, and none followed the slighted chair, but a company of boys; till, as they came back from the cross, some drummers met them, and when against ... the coffee-house Mr Wyld and Mr Bearcroft, seeing their dearly beloved Members so strangely slighted and fearing they should be taken for Shrove Tuesday cooks, and so knocked down as soon as set up, issued forth, and throwing up their hats gave an halloo to the good old cause.
N. Yorks RO, Swinton mss Danby pprs. ‘memorandum’[?1698]; Dorset RO, D124/box 238, bdle. 24, expenses at Salisbury election 1713; Northants. RO, IC3299, expenses at Northants. election 1705; Cumbria RO (Carlisle), D/Lons/W2/1/25, Thomas Tickell to Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. I, 9 Mar. 1689/90; W. Yorks Archs., TN/C6/4/6, A. Todd to John Redes, 12 Dec. 1693; Ballard 35, f. 48.
Afterwards came the election petition, if a defeated candidate felt his case to be strong enough, or that he would have enough friends in the new House of Commons to make up for any weaknesses in argument. But this too required considerable effort and expense: the collection of evidence, which might include pollbooks, charters, and borough records, the recruitment, transport and entertainment of witnesses; obtaining counsel’s opinion; drawing up briefs, the petition itself, and sometimes a short printed case to distribute to Members; and eventually canvassing for support in the House.
That electioneering should have been an expensive business is therefore no surprise. Where bribery and treating were undertaken on any considerable scale the sums involved might be astronomical. There were allegations that over £1,500 was spent by one candidate in Suffolk in 1710, and that £1,400 had been spent by another at Chester in 1695. Even the relatively sober canvassing undertaken by Hon. Maurice Ashley in Wiltshire in 1701-2 left him the poorer by about £700, ‘with his travelling charges and his four-months’ stay in the country’. Boroughs too could be very costly: Sir Stephen Fox* spent over £600 on one by-election at Westminster in 1691 and his son Charles over £300 in the much smaller constituency of Cricklade in 1702. Evidence concerning election expenses has to be treated with some care, as surviving accounts (of which they are many) are often fragmentary, and concentrate on the immediate circumstances of the election, the arrangements made for the poll, and the bills submitted by local inn-keepers for meat and drink. But a great deal had to be expended on preliminary preparations, and additional sums reserved for pursuing or defending an election petition: Thomas Jervoise*, for example, spent nearly £150 in supporting his petition at Hindon in 1702; James Stanhope* (whose witnesses had to be brought a good deal further) over £640 in resisting an attempt to unseat him for Cockermouth in 1710-11. It may be true, as one historian has suggested, that the cost of elections inflated during this period, encouraging Members of Parliament in 1696 to seek to restrict the expensive practice of ‘treating’ the voters, and eventually, in 1716, to extend the intervals between elections by the passage of the Septennial Act. But huge bills, and the ruin of men’s estates through the indulgence of their parliamentary aspirations, were by no means unknown in 1690. It seems more likely that the significant factor was the greater frequency of elections, rather than their greater cost.
The ‘Government Interest’
Possession of government office conferred influence over elections in relatively few boroughs. The greatest concentration was in the Cinque Ports, where holders of the wardenship (or in the case of Prince George of Denmark, his deputy) issued recommendations with varying degrees of success, and Admirals and their administrators exploited the dependence of individual towns on naval business in order to cultivate electoral interest.
Electorally, the most powerful single office-holder in government (other than the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and the steward of the Duchy of Cornwall) was the governor of the Isle of Wight, who might have expected to exercise influence over the three island boroughs of Newport, Newtown, and Yarmouth. This was certainly the case in the general election of 1690, at which the then governor, Sir Robert Holmes, nominated, or at least approved the election of, all six Members. But Holmes had been in post since 1667. Long residence on the island, and the acquisition of property at Yarmouth (whose freeman franchise made it the least easily controlled of the three boroughs) had cemented his power. His successor, John, Lord Cutts* found it more difficult to exercise gubernatorial authority. Only the docile corporation of Newport was brought quickly under his control, or, as Cutts himself put it, placed ‘upon a good foot with regard to his Majesty’s governor’. In the general election of 1695 both Newtown and Yarmouth were given up to local gentlemen. In Yarmouth Anthony Morgan and Henry Holmes (Sir Robert’s nephew and heir) easily defeated Cutts’s brother-in-law; and in Newtown another powerful proprietorial interest, that of the Worsley family, undermined the governor’s party on the corporation and defeated his nominee, Anthony Henley*. Newtown became the focus of Cutts’s struggle with the island gentry, as the Worsleys campaigned to restore the previous burgage franchise in the borough, which would have underpinned their control. By 1698 Cutts agreed a settlement by which he accepted the restoration of the vote to the burgage-holders at large, in return for a peaceful sharing out of the parliamentary representation between his own and the Worsley interest.
The subsequent history of the three boroughs emphasizes the limitations of the crown’s electoral influence on the island. In Newtown and Yarmouth the gentlemen continued to dominate, though the reality was hidden by their co-operation with successive governors, Cutts (until 1707), the Duke of Bolton, and John Richmond Webb*. The Worsleys engrossed both the seats for Newtown in 1705, and maintained this monopoly until 1722, while in Yarmouth Anthony Morgan and Henry Holmes continued to take a seat each until 1710. Even in Newport gubernatorial power showed itself to be vulnerable, first to a rival government interest, that of the navy commissioner Henry Greenhill* in 1698, then to the free-spending London merchant and financier Samuel Shepheard I in January 1701. Even though the governors eventually re-asserted their authority, the ability of one of Cutts’s nominees, William Stephens*, not only to outlast the term of office of his original patron but to keep his seat under the politically uncongenial Bolton, may well indicate that Stephens (who resided just outside the borough) had established a personal interest of his own. By the end of Anne’s reign the governor could be sure of only one nomination, at Newport, although the competition between Morgan and Holmes at Yarmouth, exacerbated by party-political differences, did offer the opportunity for a significant tactical intervention. Morgan’s position had previously been strengthened by his appointment as lieutenant-governor of the island under Cutts (and against the governor’s wishes) in 1702. With the fall of the Whig ministry in 1710 and the replacement of Bolton by Webb, Morgan, a Whig, was ejected from the lieutenant-governorship in favour of his rival, the Tory Holmes, who was able to return himself and another Court candidate in 1710 and 1713. On the other hand, how much of Holmes’s success was due to his acquisition of office, and how much to the natural strength of his proprietorial interest, remains unclear.
Other potentially influential local officials faced similar problems with venal electors, factious corporators, and powerful proprietors. The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster expected to be able to nominate one Member at Preston, the seat of the Duchy administration, partly by virtue of his own local prestige, and the deference due to his office, and partly because the bureaucracy of the Duchy could provide him with ready-made electoral agents; but, contrary to the assumptions made both by contemporaries and by some modern historians, the Duchy interest proved insufficient by itself to guarantee election. Although a well-established and energetic chancellor could usually secure the return of one candidate, and sometimes two, he would still be obliged to considerable expenditure in terms of both effort and money, and serious difficulties would arise if management was relaxed, or if there was a change of chancellor just before an election, as occurred in 1702 when Sir John Leveson Gower, 5th Bt.*, took over the office, again in 1706, when Leveson Gower (now Lord Gower) was replaced by the Earl of Derby (Hon. James Stanley*) in the run-up to a contested by-election, and once more in 1710, when Derby was succeeded in his turn by Lord Berkeley of Stratton. In 1706 many of the Duchy officials, including the attorney-general and the clerks of the Lancashire chancery court, had already committed themselves to a local Tory squire, Henry Fleetwood*, and were reluctant to obey Derby’s requirement that they canvass for his nominee in the by-election, the Whig journalist Arthur Maynwaring*. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Maynwaring was returned, but in 1710 Berkeley was far too late getting his man into the field, and tasted defeat. The house of Derby was of course, a traditional power in the locality, and it was presumably as much this personal influence as the authority of the chancellorship that enabled the Earl to overcome the difficulties attendant upon Maynwaring’s candidature in 1706. Indeed it was always necessary for the Duchy to placate one or other of the two major local interests, belonging to Lord Derby himself and to a more recent arrival, the 4th Duke of Hamilton, who in 1698, by means of his second marriage, acquired an estate in the vicinity of Preston.
Of the quartet of garrison governors accustomed to exercise electoral influence the most comfortable may have been the governor of Kingston-upon-Hull. Until 1699 this post was held by the Duke of Leeds (Sir Thomas Osborne, 2nd Bt.†), whose brother Charles Osborne acted as deputy and sat for the borough until the election of January 1701, when two local Whigs, William Maister and (Sir) William St. Quintin, were chosen. Osborne’s exclusion, and the Whig takeover, may be attributable to the replacement of Leeds as governor by the 1st Duke of Newcastle, although the influence accruing to the two new Members in their own right (Maister as one of the most prominent merchants in the town, and St. Quintin as an East Riding squire and an important figure in Yorkshire politics) should not be discounted. By contrast, the dominance which the 1st Earl of Bath (John Granville†) had enjoyed over elections at Plymouth as governor of the garrison there seemed to disintegrate under his successor, Major-General Charles Trelawny*, who had to come to terms not only with a surviving pro-Granville party on the corporation but also with the revival of a Whig interest in the borough, led by Sir Francis Drake, 3rd Bt.* The new charter given to the town in 1697, appointing Drake as recorder for life, initiated a sustained effort on the part of Drake’s adherents to remodel corporate government and the freeman roll. There followed a bitter and protracted struggle for control of the borough between Whig and Tory factions, headed respectively by Drake and Trelawny. The general managed to hold a seat himself at every election until 1713, and in the two elections of 1701 even obtained the second place for his brother Henry, but it is impossible to say whether this was the fruit of his influence as governor, or an indication of the strength of Toryism more generally among the voters. Certainly the return of two Whig candidates at the general election of 1713 would militate against regarding Plymouth as a settled ‘government borough’.
In Portsmouth and Queenborough the opposition to the garrison governor came not so much from local gentlemen as from other ‘official’ candidates, representing a naval or Admiralty interest. The loyalties of the Portsmouth voters were divided between army and navy. The governor could deploy the brute force of the licentious soldiery to intimidate voters, and also a certain degree of commercial pressure, as in the 1695 election , when the ‘master gunner’ threatened one shopkeeper with the withdrawal of all garrison business should he poll against the lieutenant-governor, Colonel John Gibson*. Ultimately, however, it was the many admirals involved in Portsmouth elections (beginning with Edward Russell* in 1690, and ending with Sir James Wishart* in 1713) who had the stronger cards to play, because of the vital importance to the town’s economy of the dockyards and victualling trade. Although the governor was able to hold on to one seat until 1702, naval candidates took both seats at the next election, and again in 1708. Two years later all four candidates were admirals. The governor of the garrison at Sheerness was usually strong enough to command at least one seat at Queenborough, though the election in 1690 of the local plutocrat Sir John Banks, 1st Bt.*, was a sign that money might overcome, or at least balance out, the advantages offered by the governorship. The first naval assault came at a by-election in 1696, when Admiral Sir George Rooke*, supported by the full might of the Navy Board and especially by the navy commissioner in charge of Sheerness dockyard, stood against the lieutenant-governor, Thomas King*, for the second seat alongside the governor, Robert Crawford*. On this occasion Rooke’s broadside was beaten off, and the two soldiers held on to both seats until the highly politicized, and savagely violent, election of 1705, at which Crawford was ousted by Admiral Sir John Jennings*. It was thought that Crawford’s popularity suffered badly in 1705 from his having supported the Tack, but in other respects the intrusion of party politics, and in particular the polarization of the corporate body into opposing factions, seems to have assisted the army against the navy in both constituencies. It had been by means of a politically motivated purge of Queensborough corporation, following the 1696 by-election, that the two colonels, Crawford and King, had previously secured an ascendancy over the borough. Among the Portsmouth aldermen factional conflict did not break out until much later, but it set admiral against admiral in 1710, and eventually enabled the new governor, the High Tory Lord North and Grey, to reassert the garrison interest at the next election, through an alliance with one faction within the corporation.
The power of the navy as an employer, or in purchasing goods and services, was also important at New Shoreham, whose main industry was shipbuilding; at Harwich, where the packet service of the post office also conveyed influence; and at Rochester, which was overshadowed by the great dockyard at Chatham. However, the venality of the scot-and-lot payers at Shoreham also turned elections there into an industry, and the navy commissioners who appeared as candidates, Charles Sergison* and Anthony Hammond*, had to compete against wealthy Londoners. In fact, after Hammond’s expulsion from the Commons in December 1708, on the grounds that his election contravened the ‘place clause’ of the 1706 Regency Act, the field was left clear to the ‘moneyed men’. The situation in Harwich was complicated not only by the co-existence of three quite different (and competing) sources of government influence, the Navy Board, the commission of victualling, and the Post Office, all of which produced parliamentary candidates in this period, but also by the presence of a powerful proprietorial interest in the form of the Davalls of Dovercourt, who could usually command one seat, and by an unusually lively political culture within the corporation electorate. Party loyalties ran deep, fostered by the open hostility of Churchmen and Dissenters among the town’s population; and the corporators were also given to a certain self-importance. Members of Parliament could not take them for granted, as the under-secretary of state, John Ellis, discovered, before his election in 1702, when he was informed of the ‘absolute necessity’ of appearing in person in the borough, and again shortly afterwards, as he received notice from one of his supporters of
a complaint against you, which, though silly and ridiculous in itself, yet it is industriously improved by some people; and that is, that the corporation had not had one single word from you since the choice, which shows, so to speak, in their own style, that you value very little, or have soon forgot, the honour conferred on you.
The naval interest was potentially strongest at Rochester, though it still required careful management. Admiral Sir Clowdesley Shovell held one seat between 1695 and November 1701, but at the next election there may have been no Admiralty candidate, unless we count (Sir) Edward Knatchbull* (4th Bt.), who besides being a prominent Kentish gentleman was also at this time a sub-commissioner of prizes. The 1705 election saw greater exertions, and the return of two Whig admirals, Shovell and Sir Stafford Fairborne*. Thereafter, the resident commissioner at Chatham drilled his forces with firmness and precision, and kept both seats for government nominees. One of the complaints voiced by the defeated Whigs in 1710 was that
the ministry had obliged many ... to vote against their own inclinations, particularly the dock officers, who had a hot zeal for their commissioner that held a rod over them, and they were sensible that their own clerks’ expectations of succeeding them were so sanguine that they [the clerks]were ready to insult them [the officers].
Other manifestations of electoral interest based on office-holding are harder to measure. While influence was certainly ascribed to the resident customs commissioners in the ports of Arundel, Lyme Regis, and Weymouth, little is visible in terms of election results. Occasionally ‘Court’ candidates appeared at Arundel, though none can be identified among the Members returned. Lyme elected the customs commissioner Robert Henley in 1695 and 1698, but the Henleys were a powerful local family who were able to provide other parliamentary representatives without the benefit of office. Despite the fact that Weymouth and Melcombe returned four Members to Parliament, the combined boroughs rarely provided scope for an official candidate: only John Knight, the customs receiver, in 1695; Arthur Shallett, a government contractor, in 1698; and the navy commissioner George St. Loe in 1701 and 1702. Finally, there is the case of New Windsor, undoubtedly subject to some gravitational pull from the castle, even if the mechanics of the process are not readily observable. Government influence here may have taken the less tangible form of a customary deference, both from the electorate and from candidates, towards what were perceived to be the predilections of the monarch. After the death of Queen Anne one of the sitting Members, Charles Aldworth, observed that, as he had always refrained from announcing his candidature in previous elections ‘till I first had the Queen’s approbation’, so it would be now proper to await the arrival of George I, in order that ‘we might learn his pleasure before we engaged in a corporation so directly under his Majesty’s’ eye’. It seems likely that the two Members chosen in 1695, Lord Fitzhardinge (John Berkeley) and Sir William Scawen, had enjoyed the backing of the ministry. Moreover, Fitzhardinge, who held his seat until the general election of 1710, was a familiar figure in the royal household, as a master of horse to the Princess Anne before her accession to the crown,. and thereafter as treasurer of the chamber. But the clearest instance of royal influence over elections at Windsor occurred in the by-election of 1711. The Duke of Northumberland, constable of the castle and high steward of the borough, had already recommended Charles Aldworth to the vacancy, when he heard that the court wished to see the return of Samuel Masham, newly appointed cofferer of the Household and, more important, the husband of Abigail Masham, the Queen’s favourite. Northumberland immediately went to Windsor to inform the corporation that ‘his gentleman would desist, so that he was at liberty to solicit them for Mr Masham’, who was returned unopposed.
The difficulty involved in isolating ‘official’ influence from other factors promoting the election of individual candidates emphasizes the essentially provisional nature of any attempt to calculate how many seats in the Parliaments of 1690-1715 may be attributed in this way to the ‘government interest’. At the most favourable estimate, there were never as many as 20 Members classifiable as ‘government’ nominees for ‘government boroughs’. Including the Cinque Ports, and those constituencies in which the Duchy of Cornwall had a direct interest (Bossiney, Fowey, Helston, Launceston, and East Looe), the totals would be as follows:
|
Parliament |
Returned at general election |
Sitting at dissolution |
|
1690 |
14 |
13 |
|
1695 |
13 |
14 |
|
1698 |
15 |
14 |
|
1701 |
17 |
17 |
|
1701/2 |
15 |
15 |
|
1702 |
15 |
15 |
|
1705 |
14 |
16 |
|
1708 |
19 |
18 |
|
1710 |
16 |
16 |
|
1713 |
11 |
11 |
It is not altogether surprising that the ministry of 1708 should have returned the highest number of Members on a ‘government’ interest in any general election in this period, since other evidence shows that Lord Treasurer Godolphin and his colleagues were paying particular attention to electoral management, in the Cinque Ports (through the deputy warden, Lord Westmorland), in Cornwall (through the lord warden of the stannaries, Hugh Boscawen II*) and elsewhere. However, it should not be assumed that the exercise of ‘government’ influence in parliamentary boroughs was always co-ordinated, or indeed that it was always used to the benefit of ‘government’ candidates. There is some evidence of direct ministerial involvement in elections in particular boroughs, and of instructions being issued to particular officials. Secretary Nottingham seems to have concerned himself with the Rochester election in 1702, and Lord Bolingbroke (Henry St. John II*) displayed a similar determination to force through the election of his protégé Carew Hervey Mildmay* at Harwich in 1713. But there is no documentary proof of any concerted overall campaign to maximise the government’s electoral influence as such, not even in 1708, and in any case orders from the centre might not always be obeyed. Lord Cutts evidently disliked being told by the secretary of state whom to recommend to the Isle of Wight electors. In 1695 he prevaricated over a request to nominate Hon. James Stanley* at Newport, claiming a prior obligation to a friend, and in 1698 again committed himself before hearing the pleasure of the King, to the thorough annoyance of Secretary Vernon (James I*). In other examples, the official dispensing electoral influence might well be personally unsympathetic to, or even estranged from, the ministry. The Tory Lord Bath remained as steward of the Duchy of Cornwall throughout the first Junto administration of 1693/4-1700, while the Whig Duke of Dorset held on to the wardenship of the Cinque Ports long enough to be able to be able to make a significant impact on the outcome of the general election of 1710.
More often than not, the reality was that individual office-holders acted in elections on their own initiative. Even the arrival of four members of the Navy Board to support Sir George Rooke in Queenborough in 1696, in a unique gesture of departmental solidarity, may well have represented no more than a simple recognition of Rooke’s personal popularity with his colleagues. He was, after all, an Admiralty commissioner and an imposing political figure in his own right. In any case, Rooke was standing in direct competition with another ‘official’ candidate, the lieutenant-governor of Sheerness, Thomas King. This was one of many such instances, in which individual office-holders, some with ministerial backing, fought each other in ‘government boroughs’. Soldiers and sailors were often in conflict in Queenborough, and in Portsmouth, where they were joined in the 1695 election by a third candidate, the naval commissioner Edmund Dummer*, sailing his own course against all comers. Charles Sergison*, another maverick from the Navy Board, challenged the lord of the Admiralty Henry Priestman* at New Shoreham in 1698, at the same time as his colleague Henry Greenhill* was making use of the patronage of the Portsmouth dockyard to undermine Lord Cutts in the Isle of Wight, by ’promises of places and by sending great quantities of junk [old ropes and cables] to be made into oakum by the poor people of Newport’. Harwich, over whose corporation electorate government influence was especially strong, witnessed something of a free-for-all between different varieties of placeman. The two navy officials, Samuel Atkinson* and Dennis Lyddell*, were at each other’s throats in both elections in 1701; Under-Secretary Ellis faced a threat of opposition in 1705 not only from both Atkinson and Lyddell, but also from Thomas Frankland II*, the son of the postmaster-general; and finally, in 1708 Frankland became engaged in a disputed by-election with a commissioner of victualling, Kenrick Edisbury*, in which ‘packet-boat captains’ were ranged against ‘sailors’, in order to determine which of two ‘government’ candidates would be returned.
The Influence of the Peerage
Participation by peers of the realm in parliamentary elections was a fact of political life throughout Great Britain, against which the House of Commons occasionally and ineffectually registered its protest. Aristocratic influence of one kind or another contributed towards the return of many MPs, although the available evidence does not enable us to say with confidence exactly how many. The complexity and volatility of the political system meant that in only a minority of constituencies does the distribution of electoral ‘interest’ appear clear-cut:
The presumption shown by members of the House of Lords in nominating parliamentary candidates and canvassing in elections, was rarely challenged, and it would seem from the surrounding correspondence that it was not even resented very much. The resident peers were expected to play their part in shire elections. They sent out signed circular letters to express their own preferences and recommend candidates; canvassed ‘their’ freeholders, either through their agents or even in person; and sometimes attended the poll. When the greater gentry of an English or Welsh county foregathered to choose shire knights (the situation was quite different in Scotland) it was customary for each party to have titled landowners at its head; indeed, the absence of such noble adornment was sometimes regarded by the freeholders at large as a public admission of weakness.
There were times, however, when commoners did object to the intervention of the nobility in parliamentary elections or, to put it more precisely, the infringement of constitutional proprieties which occurred when members of the Upper House took part in elections to the Lower. On 15 Feb. 1701, the Commons resolved that ‘for any peer ... to concern themselves [ sic ] in the election of Members to serve for the Commons in Parliament, is a high infringement of the liberties and privileges of the Commons of England’.
This declaration only ever achieved a symbolic significance (which may have been all the Commons had intended). In practice, it was a dead letter almost as soon as it was made: it was ignored, for example, in the hearing of the Winchester election only three months later, in the face of overwhelming evidence not only that the Duke of Bolton (Charles Powlett*) had ‘appeared and meddled very much’, but that he had been joined in his interference by two other dukes, St. Albans and Richmond.
Presumably Members’ heightened anxieties over aristocratic encroachment on their own electoral independence stemmed from a consciousness that the influence of the peerage over parliamentary elections was increasing. This trend may be measured by counting either the number of seats held by nominees of peers, or the number of MPs who themselves hailed from noble families. Although, as we have already seen, control over seats can be difficult to define, the available figures indicate no more than a modest increase during this period. By contrast, preliminary calculations made by Professor J.A. Cannon in 1984 of the number of ‘aristocratic’ Members, defined as the sons of peers, appear to show a decline, at least from 1708, which was Professor Cannon’s starting point; the number going down from 70 (12.5%) to 54 (9.7%) in 1710, and 48 (8.6%) in 1713.
|
Parl. |
Stood |
Returned |
At dissolution |
|
1690 |
38 |
35 (6.9%) |
34 |
|
1695 |
49 |
46 (9.0%) |
44 |
|
1698 |
36 |
29 (5.7%) |
31 |
|
1701 |
40 |
38 (7.5%) |
41 |
|
1701/2 |
40 |
36 (7.1%) |
37 |
|
1702 |
39 |
32 (6.3%) |
30 |
|
1705 |
47 |
38 (7.5%) |
43 |
|
1708 |
54 |
51 (10.0%) |
47 |
|
1710 |
45 |
37 (7.3%) |
29 |
|
1713 |
35 |
32 (5.5%) |
30 |
It should be noted that these figures almost certainly understate the total number of MPs with aristocratic connexions, since they omit not only the holders of Irish and Scottish titles but also the grandsons and other blood-relatives of peers, and those who had married into peerage families. But it was not Irish or Scottish peers, grandsons, nephews, cousins, or sons-in-law of peers whose presence in the Commons agitated the ‘country gentlemen’. As the popular response to the Derbyshire elections of 1701 amply demonstrates, it was the candidature, and election, of two heirs to great dukedoms as representatives of the commons of the county that constituted the real offence against constitutional convention. North of the border this objection had been formalised into a legal provision. The eldest sons of peers had been prevented from sitting as shire or burgh commissioners in the Scottish parliament, a restriction embodied in the Act of Union and confirmed by several test cases in the session following the first election to the united Parliament.
It seems unlikely, however, that popular opinion in the Commons would really have been determined by sensitivity to such proportionally minuscule changes in the Membership of the House. A more persuasive explanation for the sudden protest in 1701 against aristocratic interference in elections is that it followed a series of notorious episodes featuring meddlesome peers, mostly of a Whig complexion, contemplation of whose alleged misdeeds concentrated the minds of the Tory majority on the back benches, already accustomed to present themselves (rightly or wrongly) as the party of ‘the gentlemen of the country’, and their opponents as an exotic coalition of grandees, placemen and plutocrats.
a peer of this realm, of great place and trust in the said county [Radnor] did not only persuade and influence the said electors not to choose the petitioner, before the election, but appeared there, and recommended for burgesses George Booth* and Samuel Travers* ... for whom his lordship declared he would be answerable.
No action was taken by the House on this petition, and Hicks was eventually given leave to withdraw it. But the following winter the hearing on the Maldon election disclosed that not only had two Whig lords, Fitzwalter and Manchester, been present at the election, but that Manchester had actually cast a vote (in his capacity as an ‘honorary’ freeman of the borough). What made the incident even more galling to the Tories was that the Whig, Irby Montagu*, had taken the second seat from his Tory opponent, William Fytche*, by a single vote. Although Montagu kept his seat, the House passed a resolution affirming that no peer was entitled to vote in any election to the lower House.
The final straw came at the next election, in the contest for Huntingdon. Ironically, the offending peer on this occasion was the 3rd Earl of Sandwich, who, if not a Tory himself, had at least been managed and manipulated by his Tory wife in the interest of her favoured candidate, Hon. Charles Boyle II* (himself the son of an Irish peer), and the defeated candidate was a Whig, John Pedley*. Capitalizing on the Commons’ suspicion of the peerage. Pedley directed his allegations against Lord Sandwich, who, he alleged,
with the assistance of others, with swords and clubs, did menace, assault and strike the recorder of the ... borough, and others of the petitioner’s voters. Some being wounded, others were carried under a strong guard to give their votes for Mr Boyle, but were not permitted to give their second votes, which they would have done, for the petitioner, nor his friends, could speak with them.
Although this petition too was ultimately withdrawn, there had been a sufficient outcry at its first presentation that the Commons had ordered it to be heard at the bar, and had added the resolution declaring such behaviour on the part of peers to be ‘a high infringement’ of their ‘liberties and privileges’. Little evidence survives of the debate, except for a draft speech of Boyle’s, in which he put the case for the right of the nobility to take part in elections. Sandwich, Boyle observed, had previously refused the compliment of the freedom of the borough, which would have entitled him to involve himself directly in the election, and had only then sought to exercise what was a customary and legitimate influence:
I ... must submit it to the equity of the House how far they will think it inconsistent with their order or privileges, that a gentleman who has the ill fortune to be a peer, and the good fortune to have a considerable estate about a borough, a noble and ancient seat just by it, and a firm and a large interest in it, should give himself the trouble to appear there at the election of one whom he is pleased to esteem his friend, and has the honour to be his relation.
E. Budgell, Mems. Earl of Orrery and Boyle Fam. (1732), pp. 198-202.
This was not a sentiment with which many of Boyle’s parliamentary colleagues would have been happy to concur in public. In the same debate, as James Lowther* reported, ‘a great many ... complained of lords meddling in elections’. Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt.*, had even grasped the opportunity to ‘take notice’ of Lord Carlisle’s (Charles Howard†) having convened the customary county meeting in Cumberland for the selection of candidates.
Churchmen and Dissenters
1
In England and Wales the clergy of the Established Church were thought to exercise a considerable influence over elections, and particular attention was paid to their opinions and disposition. One Wiltshire Whig observed that ‘a good or bad clergyman for a neighbour is capable of giving much ease or much trouble to a gentleman who concerns himself in public elections’.
The pulpit was an obvious medium for communication, and was sometimes used by local politicians in the most straightforward fashion, simply to broadcast the date and time of a forthcoming election.
by the order of the bishop and chapter (as supposed), the schoolmaster ... preached before them at the cathedral in the morning, and the same sermon in the afternoon to the mayor and aldermen at the market-place church. The text was the third verse of the twelfth chapter of the first [book] of Samuel, and the words they say by hard straining he perverted into the management of elections, on which his whole discourse run, lashing all those who opposed Mr Conyers [Thomas*], concluding that damnation would be their future lot if they did not repent of such a heinous sin, as the very attempting to reject so true and trusty a member of the Church. Whether this glorious doctrine, or that our major-general [Sir Henry Belasyse*] depended in his interest, I am not to judge, but that night late he decamped, and has not since been heard of, so the field of battle was clear yesterday for Mr Conyers and Mr James Nicolson*, who were declared duly elected ...
Herts. RO, D/EP F197, f. 35, James Clavering to Lady Cowper, printed in Arch. Aeliana (ser. 4), xxxiv. 17.
Probably even more significant in practical terms, and certainly more often commented upon by contemporaries, was the involvement of clergymen in the cut-and thrust of secular politics. We hear of men like the rector of St. Paul’s, Winchester, active in ‘promoting ... the opposition which was made to the nomination of my Lord Rialton [Francis Godolphin*] for a burgess-ship in that city’, much to the disgust of his bishop; the parson in Northamptonshire, who in polling for the county in 1705 was able to ‘carry several with him which he prevailed upon’; and no less than 16 clerical freemen in the borough of Maldon, who not only voted but lobbied hard for their favoured candidates.
In the counties and larger boroughs it was particularly important for a candidate to have the public support of the clergy. Clerical voters would make little mathematical difference to the outcome in a populous constituency (in Leicestershire clergymen made up only 3% of the county voterate in 1708
[must] needs be a terrible mortification to Mr St. John [Henry II*], who some time ago, by way of advertisement in the Post Boy, told the world with equal truth and modesty, that Mr Harvey would offer himself to the service of his country, at the request of the whole body of the clergy of Bedfordshire, when, by what I can learn, the generality of the clergy knew nothing of the matter.
The Whig coup in Bedfordshire was all the more remarkable in that, as a general rule, the lower clergy tended to poll in overwhelming numbers for Tory candidates.
I am well assured that the Church interest rather gains than loses ground in this country. They [the Whigs] have but one clergyman in the whole weald to countenance their cause, and ‘tis too well known, that he is awed into compliance by secular considerations. God deliver all men from those temptations which arise from poverty.
Bodl. Ballard 15, f. 103.
For the most part, detailed analysis of voting records would bear out the generalization, although it must be remembered that we are dealing here only with clergy who went to the poll, the clerical ‘voterate’ so to speak, not all those entitled to vote.
Although there was never a general election in which clergymen collectively stayed at home, the level of clerical participation varied sharply. It was at its highest when the constitutional position of the Church of England itself was perceived to be at issue, that is to say in 1690, in the aftermath of the passage of the Toleration Act; in 1702, in the first stirrings of the controversy over ‘occasional conformity’; in 1705, the so-called ‘Church in danger’ election’, with High Churchmen standing four-square behind the ‘Tackers’; and of course in 1710, in the political hurricane whipped up by the trial of Dr Sacheverell. At times like these, passions were inflamed. The stories of clerical extremism told by the Whig journalist, John Tutchin, must be taken with a generous pinch of salt, but they do at least convey the spirit of the times. In 1705 he wrote:
The diligence of the inferior clergy in this election is notorious, not one in ten of ’em but what is for the Tackers. A certain parson in Hertfordshire not long since, being in the company of very creditable witnesses, and speaking of the Tackers, out of his passionate zeal for High Church said, ‘The devil take me, if it be not a greater sin to poll against the Tackers than to murder my own father’.
Observator, 28 Apr.-2 May 1705.
While the electoral influence exercised by parish incumbents would be localized (and at worst limited to exhortation from the pulpit), many of the bishops of the established church behaved like secular political magnates. The Bishop of Durham at Northallerton and the Archbishop of York at Ripon, could recommend to borough seats by virtue of an episcopal privilege of manorial lordship. Others were propelled into intimate involvement simply by force of personality. William Nicolson successively archdeacon and bishop of Carlisle, was such a presence in the town that one of the candidates in the 1705 election was obliged to admit, ‘truly my great dependence is upon the bishop’. In March 1711 Nicolson was called before the Commons to explain his actions in the recent, highly disputed, election for the borough. He was accused, inter alia, of threatening to turn out any chorister who would not vote according to episcopal direction. An even more formidable figure was Sir Jonathan Trelawny, successively bishop of Exeter and Winchester, and one of the greatest borough-mongers of his day, not merely in his own cathedral cities, in the political affairs of which, like Nicolson, he meddled quite shamelessly, but in several small Cornish and Devonian boroughs (in particular Liskeard, and East and West Looe), in which he had inherited, or had cultivated, a personal interest.
Both Nicolson and Trelawny also sought to direct clerical opinion in their own dioceses, Nicolson sending circular letters to the clergy of Cumberland and Westmorland to advise them on how to vote,
2
The London Presbyterian minister John Evans calculated the electoral strength of the Dissenting interest throughout England and Wales in a manuscript drawn up in 1715 with a view to justifying political demands for a repeal of the Test.
With a few exceptions, Nonconformists were a force in elections in boroughs rather than in counties. Nonconformity itself was an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, at least in so far as the wealthier Dissenters were to be found in towns rather than the countryside, and although these town-dwellers could often vote in county elections by virtue of their urban property, they tended to be a small minority in county constituencies. The visible exceptions here are the East Anglian counties, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and possibly also Hertfordshire; Gloucestershire and Wiltshire in the west country; and Cheshire, where shire elections were disfigured by sectarian violence (though possibly the work of the city mob in Chester).
The parliamentary boroughs in which Dissenters were most active at elections, and in which they were powerful enough to constitute a distinct political ‘interest’, tended to be the larger and more ‘open’ constituencies, with a freeman or resident franchise: London first and foremost, and the neighbouring constituencies of Southwark and Westminster; the provincial capitals of Bristol, Chester, Exeter, Norwich, and York; and larger towns like Colchester, Hertford, Liverpool, Taunton, and Shrewsbury. Each contained a substantial proportion of Nonconformist voters, amounting in the case of Bristol, Colchester, and Hertford to as much as a third of the total electorate. There was also a significant Dissenting element in the population of some smaller urban constituencies — Bodmin, Chipping Wycombe (with its five meeting-houses), Cirencester, Devizes, Great Yarmouth, Kingston-upon-Hull, Leominster, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Sandwich (thanks to the 17th-century influx of Walloons), and Wilton. In every case, however, what mattered was not the number of Nonconformist voters as such, nor even their coherence as an electoral pressure-group, but their presence among the urban political elite, as members of the corporation, or, occasionally local landed proprietors. Indeed, in some places the very size of the Dissenting population proved to be a disadvantage, giving rise to sectarian animosities and eventually to a popular Tory backlash, which in London, Bristol, Exeter, and Norwich resulted in the return of High Churchmen at parliamentary elections. The Dissenters of Bedford, who were numerous enough, and bold enough, to mount public demonstrations in November 1714, ‘dressing up the Pretender and Dr Sacheverell, and burning them’, were unable to make any impact on borough politics.
The nature of party politics made it natural that Nonconformity would be identified with the political interests of the Whigs, and increasingly so once the issue of occasional conformity had been raised by High Churchmen in the Parliament of 1701, and the cry of ‘the Church in danger’ echoed by Tories across the country.
some of the Dissenters came to me at Bury [St. Edmunds], some time before the Parliament broke up, and told me it was a prejudice to your interest that you did not apply yourself to Mr Bury and Mr Snelling, and some others of the heads of the party, upon which I asked them this plain question, whether they thought it their interest to have you chose. They readily answered yes. Then I told them it was very strange and unusual for men to be courted and solicited to do that which is for their own advantage.
Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Cullum mss E2/18, f. 162, Pitches to Cullum, 30 May 1702.
On this occasion the Suffolk Dissenters put aside their resentments, but there were a few exceptions to this record of electoral servility. In the Essex by-elections of 1693/4 the ‘fanatic interest’ was observed to be divided, though for no discernible reason.
Quaker voters, by contrast, retained to the end of this period a reputation for unpredictability. Sometimes they were happy to vote Whig, as in Essex and Oxfordshire, but at other times they consulted their own interests more narrowly. In Buckinghamshire they supported Lord Cheyne when he promised to help their cause in Parliament, but dropped him when he failed; in Hertfordshire they abandoned the Whig William Cowper for his Tory opponents after a scandal involving Cowper’s brother Spencer* and the alleged rape of a Quaker girl. The Suffolk Quakers teased both parties in 1710: one Tory reported that they ‘promise nobody, and preserve themselves indifferent, by which I conclude they have yet received no instruction from their leaders’.
However reliable the Dissenting vote might be, it would still require husbandry, and there is evidence of candidates or their supporters availing themselves of the appropriate clerical or sectarian contacts to ensure a full turn-out. The Whigs in Cheshire in 1702 were said by their opponents to have the support of ‘all that could be wrought upon by the Dissenting preachers and teachers’; the noted Presbyterian minister Daniel Burgess wrote from London to the congregations at Poole in 1705, at the behest of the Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley*), in favour of (Sir) William Phippard* and Edward Hooper; and in 1710 the Suffolk MP (Sir) Thomas Hanmer II*, desperate to hear how the local Quakers would vote in the county election, sought the advice and intercession of no less a figure than William Penn.
3
The part played in elections by the clergy of the established Church of Scotland and by nonconforming Episcopalian interests is difficult to assess, because of the fragmented and confused nature of the Scottish ‘party system’, and because of the narrowness of the Scottish parliamentary electorate.
Certainly religious beliefs and affiliations influenced political loyalties in Scotland committed Presbyterians tended to be strong Whigs, and by 1713 most Episcopalians could be described as Tories. But in the 1690s the labels ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘Episcopalian’ had become confused: Scots politicians of all colours had been keen to paint themselves as ‘Revolution men’ or ‘Presbyterians’, while ‘Episcopalian’ had become a useful term of abuse, implying Jacobitism and disloyalty. Some of this confusion remained after the Union: former Episcopalians like the 2nd Duke of Queensberry had reconstructed themselves as political ‘Presbyterians’ by steadfast support for the Revolution and the Union, while religious Presbyterians like the 1st Duke of Atholl and the 4th Duke of Hamilton appeared to some of their countrymen, and to the English, as ‘Episcopalians’ because of the political company they kept. Furthermore, the fact that a two-party polarity in Scottish politics emerged only slowly after 1707, and the survival of important magnate-based ‘connexions’, such as the Argyllites, who were not always easy to define in party terms, meant that individual parliamentary elections might well be devoid of a partisan, or sectarian context.
Equally important is the scope of the Scottish representative system, with for the most part small county voterates, and burgh elections conducted collectively, according to districts, by commissioners selected by individual corporate oligarchies. In looking for evidence of voting being determined by issues, in other words for a ‘popular’ element in electoral politics, the historian is naturally drawn to the handful of larger counties, and the livelier burgh corporations. Elsewhere personality and personal connexion remained dominant.
When a relatively large or otherwise politicized electorate coincided with a strong tradition of Presbyterian militancy, as in the south-west, or a tradition of cavalier loyalism transmuted into Episcopalian piety, as in the north-east lowlands, or the capital and its environs, sectarianism could become a feature of electoral politics, with clergymen, both Presbyterian and Episcopalian, drawn into the fray. Although no instance has been discovered of a minister of religion casting a vote in a parliamentary election north of the border, there are occasional references to clergymen at work behind the scenes, especially towards the latter end of this period. In 1710 the ‘Tory’ candidate in Dumfriesshire complained that the Presbyterian clergy (under the direction of the Duke of Queensberry) had been active in support of his opponent, and in Inverbervie, one of the constituent burghs in the Aberdeen district, the local minister was said to have helped the provost to wrest control of the corporation away from the resident magnate, Viscount Arbuthnott. In 1713 there was even more clerical activity, though it was not always successful. Hon. Sir David Dalrymple, 1st Bt.*, failed to secure his election in Edinburghshire (Midlothian) despite having canvassed Presbyterian incumbents; the ‘intermeddling’ of the clergy in Lanarkshire, on behalf of the Glasgow merchant Daniel Campbell* of Shawfield, was frustrated by the Hamilton interest; and in Linlithgowshire a Tory candidate, John Houstoun*, obtained the county seat on petition after complaining to the House that ‘several ... Presbyterian ministers ... were guilty of divers illegal practices, whereby to influence electors, in wrong of the petitioner’.
Women and Elections
Rarely was the presence of women noticed in reports of parliamentary elections, so that not only the right to vote, but the entire public proceedings relating to the choice of Members in counties and boroughs, would seem to have remained very much a male preserve. The Whig journalist John Tutchin recorded two incidents in 1705 in which women were prominent in the crowds attending the poll, but these may have been exceptional. Both occurred in large urban constituencies in England. In Coventry, where hostility between the parties was ferocious, the throng of Tory supporters included a female contingent headed by ‘Captain Kate’, who herself addressed the assembled multitude and urged the Tory candidates on with the cry ‘now, boys, or never, for the Church’; while in Southwark, a borough accustomed to tumultuous scenes at elections, local women responded to the misogynist utterances of one of the unopposed Tory candidates, specifically a notorious remark that ‘he had rather see a sow and pigs, than a woman and her children’, by appearing en masse at the election, and shouting ‘no sow and pigs’.
On the other hand, evidence of canvassing techniques in several other English boroughs suggests that women were assumed to have at least an indirect involvement in the electoral process. Elizabeth Wattle, wife of a former mayor of Maidstone, and ‘a woman of good repute’, was ‘asked ... for her interest’ by a candidate for the borough in 1701, and gave as resolute a reply as any man might have done to an unwelcome canvasser.
At a more exalted level, there is ample evidence that the wives of propertied Englishmen and Scotsmen were actively involved in the management of electoral ‘interest’. Whig and Tory loyalties inspired such passions that ‘many upper-class women took an eager interest in politics and were strongly partisan’.
It would be foolish to generalise about relationships of this kind, but clearly in some cases wives were able and willing to determine their husbands’ political conduct. As the Scottish MP Alexander Mackenzie observed, in such matters ‘the influence of a ... bedfellow is hard to resist’.
It was more usual to find a woman acting in this capacity in the special circumstances of widowhood. The death of her husband Anthony* in 1693 permitted Mrs Mary Parker to resume control over her father’s burgages at Clitheroe, until her son Christopher* came of age and returned himself in 1708.
Especially instructive is the speed and evident zest with which Katherine, Lady Lonsdale, assumed the reins of power after the death of the 1st Lord Lonsdale (Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. II*) in 1700. Unusual among her kind, she intervened in county as well as borough elections, clutching her husband’s mantle to become, briefly, one of the more important political magnates in the north-west of England.
She told me Lord Weymouth [Thomas Thynne†]and others would have persuaded her at first that it was too early for her to meddle or make in elections, that they took advantage of this to make the country believe she was indifferent and would stand neuter, and afterwards that they declared she had given Col [James] Grahme* her interest, and that there was a match going on between his son and one of her daughters, all which she highly resents and has caused Mr Holmes to write to disprove it, and she will write for herself or do anything that you will advise may be useful towards any of the elections in either county.
Cumbria RO (Carlisle), D/Lons/W2/2/3, James Lowther to Sir John Lowther 2nd Bt. I, 3, 17 Sept. 1700.
A few widows remained personally involved in elections even after their children had come of age. The dowager Countess of Roxburghe actively assisted her son, the 1st Duke, well into his maturity, by managing his electoral campaigns at home in Roxburghshire while he pursued a political career in London;
A similar role to that of the widow was played by women whose husbands were out of the country or were otherwise prevented from taking charge of electoral management themselves. This was an occupational hazard for Scottish politicians, and the Duchesses of Hamilton and Roxburghe gave their respective offspring valuable assistance at critical times. So too did the wife of the nabob, ‘Governor’ Thomas Pitt I*, who tried strenuously, although with mixed success, to make the most of her husband’s investment in the rotten borough of Old Sarum, during his prolonged tours of duty in India; and, to a lesser extent, Lady Ailesbury, wife of the Jacobite exile, who was fortunate in having brothers-in-law to help her, but who still played a part in election business, even to the point of helping to organise the transport of witnesses to Westminster in support of a petition for Great Bedwyn.
The most notable example of this type of female politician is obviously Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who said of herself, ‘I am confident I should have been the greatest hero that ever was known in the Parliament-House, if I had been so happy as to have been a man’.
Results: How Were General Elections Decided?
The simplest and easiest method of calculating the outcome of general elections in this period, and of analysing the results, involves the classification of Members by party. Although on occasion, and particularly in 1698 and 1705, the primary political significance of election results might well be sought elsewhere, in their effect upon the relative strengths of ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ interests, rather than in the relative numbers of Tories and Whigs returned, serious obstacles would hamper any attempt to construct an alternative set of statistics based upon degrees of support for, and opposition to, government: the problems involved in classifying individuals in terms of their precise relationship to the ministry; in characterizing contests in constituencies; and in maintaining comparisons between general elections. Of course, categorizing Members as Tories and Whigs risks incorporating into the analysis all kinds of hidden assumptions and circular arguments. Preferring to err on the side of caution, we have therefore assigned party labels to individuals only where the evidence is clear and unequivocal. The basis for each identification is set out in the respective biography, while the general problems attendant upon the exercise, in terms of evidence and interpretation, are discussed at length in the section of this survey dealing with ‘The Politics of the Members’.
1
The Parliament of 1690
At the dissolution of the Convention Parliament the Whigs were the better represented of the two parties, in a House of Commons which comprised 254 Whigs, 221 Tories, and as many as 38 ‘unclassified’ Members. The general election of 1690 shifted the balance back towards the ‘Church party’. It was fought in many constituencies on the issue of the perceived Dissenting threat to the established church, and the Tories also drew advantage from the ministerial influence of men like Lords Carmarthen and Nottingham. After the House had given judgment on six double returns, for Aldborough, Devizes, Hertfordshire, Knaresborough, New Windsor, and Thetford (which seated six Tories, one Whig, and two Members who must remain ‘unclassified’), the parties ran neck and neck, although again the presence of a substantial minority of ‘unclassified’ Members (slightly over 5% of the House) clouds the picture:
|
243 |
Tories |
|
241 |
Whigs |
|
28 |
unclassified |
Taking as the base line the state of the representation at the end of the previous Parliament, it would appear that in all as many as 145 seats had moved from the control of one party to the other, or had slipped out of the possession of either. Of this total, however, only 113 had actually changed hands (in 99 constituencies), the remainder being accounted for by a re-classification of the party affiliation of the individual Member concerned. Less than half were won and lost in contests, that is to say only 56 seats (in 47 constituencies). Of the 55 gains made by Tory candidates 31 came as a result of contested elections, while on the Whig side the figure was somewhat less impressive, only 18 out of 44. Isolating those constituencies in which parties gained or lost seats as a result of contests, we find nine counties (Berkshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Breconshire in Wales) and eight of the more ‘popular’ boroughs (Chester, Coventry, Gloucester, Leicester, London, Southwark, Westminster, and York), but smaller borough constituencies were better represented: 36 with voterates under 1,000, of which 32 had voterates of under 500. Overall the county representation was evenly divided, 40 Whigs and 39 Tories being returned for the English shires, seven Tories and five Whigs in Wales, but in terms of seats gained, the Tories outperformed their rivals in county elections, acquiring 13 new Members (11 at the expense of the Whigs) as opposed to the seven Whig gains (all at the expense of Tories). The disparity remains proportionately the same if one looks at seats won through contests: six Tory gains as against three Whig. Among the largest English boroughs, defined for the purposes of this analysis as those containing roughly a thousand or more voters, the Tories predominated, carrying 27 seats over the Whigs’ 18. Overall, the Tories may be said to have taken a narrow advantage in the ‘popular’ vote, since 97 Tory Members were returned in contested elections, as opposed to 85 Whigs (and with a further 21 `unclassified’). Finally, we should note some significant local variations, especially the tendency for each party’s electoral gains to cluster in particular counties. The Tories did well in Cornwall, under the assertive political management of the Earl of Bath, taking eight new seats. They also enjoyed considerable success in Lancashire (six gains), and in the vicinity of the capital (all four seats won in London, and another in Westminster). The Whigs prospered in some of their traditional heartlands, where there was a strong Nonconformist presence: in Devon (three seats gained), Gloucestershire (three more), Suffolk (four), and some of the midland counties (two gains in Leicestershire, and three in Northamptonshire).
During the lifetime of the Parliament the balance between the parties shifted in favour of the Whigs, but only slightly. The hearing of disputed elections produced no overall movement, the Tories gaining a seat at Mitchell, and the Whigs clawing this back at Devizes. A further 32 seats changed hands in by-elections, but the net result was less than dramatic: the Tories suffered eight losses, but only two of these translated as Whig gains, leaving the standing of the parties at the dissolution in 1695 at:
|
243 |
Whigs |
|
235 |
Tories |
|
34 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1695
Since the 1690 election the number of ‘unclassified’ Members had increased, as some former ‘Country Whigs’ broke with their party and stayed in opposition to the Junto ministry, and some Tory placemen and pensioners clung on to their salaries and aligned themselves temporarily with the Court. The 1695 general election accelerated this trend. It was also notable for an improvement in Whig party fortunes at the expense of the Tories, which furnished the Junto with an overall majority, albeit a very narrow one. After judgment had been given on the one double return (for Mitchell) the Membership of the House comprised:
|
257 |
Whigs |
|
203 |
Tories |
|
53 |
unclassified |
This time changes of classification had occurred in 137 seats, but in only 115 had the identity of the Member changed (22 re-elected Members having been reclassified). The Whigs enjoyed a net gain of 23 seats from the Tories (55 won and 32 lost). Altogether, no more than 46 seats (or 40%) changed hands from one party to another as a result of contests (in 37 constituencies). There was again a clear difference between the parties here: 26 of the total of 60 new seats gained by the Whigs were taken in contested elections (43.3%), as opposed to 10 out of 34 Tory gains (29.4%). Overall, the Whigs could plausibly have claimed a ‘popular’ victory. They registered a remarkable success in the larger and more open boroughs (as previously defined), with 29 Members now against the Tories’ 14 (and a further four unclassified); and they outnumbered their opponents in shire knights as well, 44 to 33 in England, and 49 to 37 with the Welsh counties added in. Moreover, the aggregated results of all contested elections show a decisive Whig majority of 97 to 55, with 13 other Members left ‘unclassified’. This picture would be modified slightly if we were to concentrate on the 28 constituencies in which seats had shifted between the parties because of contests. They included six counties and eight of the largest boroughs, although 17 were boroughs with voterates numbering less than 500. The Tories again made more progress in county contests, with four seats gained in four constituencies (Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Breconshire), as against the Whigs’ three seats in two constituencies (Middlesex and Surrey); but this time the Whigs did much better in polling in the most populous boroughs (those with 1,000 voters or more), recording 14 gains (in Bristol, Canterbury, Chester, Colchester, Exeter, London, Preston, Taunton, and Westminster) while their opponents made none. In this election few local variations are to be observed, although the Whigs did remarkably well in and around London, carrying three out of four Members for the City itself, taking over the county representation of Middlesex from the Tories, and picking up additional seats in Westminster and in Surrey.
By-election results allowed the Junto to consolidate their position slightly during the lifetime of the Parliament, though this was less the effect of their own successes than of their opponents’ failures. The Whigs recorded a net increase of two seats, while the Tories lost seven, the greatest expansion again appearing in the ‘unclassified’ category. The position of the parties at the dissolution in 1698 was:
|
259 |
Whigs |
|
196 |
Tories |
|
58 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1698
Although in some constituencies the 1698 general election was fought between self-styled ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ interests, the most notable feature of the results was a revival in the fortunes of the Tories. It was not enough to furnish them with a majority, but did undermine the ascendancy of the Whigs. The ‘independent’ or ‘Country’ element among the still substantial number of ‘unclassified’ Members now held the balance. After the adjudication of the one double return (for Weobley) the respective totals stood at:
|
246 |
Whigs |
|
208 |
Tories |
|
59 |
unclassified |
A total of 108 seats changed classification, but subtracting those which simply involve the reorientation of individual Members, we are left with 92 seats gained by, or lost to, the parties, in 91 constituencies. The Tories gained 46 (39 from the Whigs); the Whigs 33 (25 from the Tories). Of the Tory gains, 16 were county seats (15 taken from outgoing Whig Members), and seven were won in the largest boroughs; while the Whigs gained four county seats, and four in the largest boroughs. There was now a clear Tory majority among the county Members: they led the Whigs by 43 to 33 in England, and by 49 to 38 overall. On the other hand, despite the Tories’ inroads, the Whigs maintained their superiority in the most populous borough constituencies (containing at least 1,000 voters), with a decisive advantage of 28 seats to 16. In contrast to the two previous elections, the majority of the seats changing hands between the parties (including those which had previously been unclassified, or which now moved into this category) did so as a result of contests, 52 out of 92 (56.5%). Oddly, a slightly higher proportion of these seats were won by Whigs. Indeed, calculating the results of all contested elections would give the Whigs a slight majority, of 95 to 93 (with a substantial proportion of ‘unclassified’ Members, amounting to 24 in all). Almost exactly the same proportion of Whig as Tory gains came after contests (respectively, 19 out of 33 as compared with 26 out of 45). The 45 constituencies in which contested elections produced a change in party control included 12 counties and seven of the largest boroughs, but as usual the majority were smaller fry, as many as 22 with voterates of less than 500, and eight of these having less than 100 voters.
The tendency of the Commons to favour Tory candidates in election petitions, and the growing popularity of the Tory interest in the country at large, was reflected in a steady increase in the party’s representation during the Parliament. Tories gained 11 seats through petitions and by-elections, while the Whigs lost seven. At the dissolution in 1700 the relative strength of the two parties was:
|
239 |
Whigs |
|
219 |
Tories |
|
54 |
unclassified |
The First Parliament of 1701
The Whig decline deepened in the first general election of 1701, held in January and February, in which the Tories recovered control of the Commons, inspired by the dismissal of the Junto leaders, and the reconstruction of the ministry on a predominantly Tory basis. The results of the election (incorporating the decision of the House on the double return for Banbury) were:
|
249 |
Tories |
|
219 |
Whigs |
|
45 |
unclassified |
Altogether 98 seats must be redefined in party terms at this election, though only 90 actually changed hands, in 80 constituencies, the remainder representing alterations in the political allegiance of individual Members. As many as 56 seats shifted in or out of party control as a result of contests, representing a further increase in the figure for previous elections, to a little over 62% of all changes. Of these a mere nine were county seats, while the borough constituencies, which can thus be seen to have constituted the real ‘battleground’ of the election, were predominantly on the small side: 39 out of the 44 borough seats changing classification in contested elections possessed less than 500 voters, and 20 of those had less than 100. The 52 seats gained by the Tories included nine from counties, but 33 from boroughs with under 500 voters, of which 14 had less than 100. The figures for seats gained by Tories in contests are just as striking: out of a total of 27, five came in shire elections, but 18 in boroughs with under 500 voters, 11 of which feature in the smallest circle of borough constituencies, where less than 100 electors went to the poll. The Tory advance in the counties seems to have slowed down a little, for Whig candidates also made four gains in contested county constituencies, though the overall result of the election showed the Tories had consolidated their majority among knights of the shire. In the English counties alone they led their Whig rivals by 49 to 30; in England and Wales by 56 to 34. The Whigs, however, retained their clear advantage in the largest boroughs, where they held 26 seats to the Tories’ 17. The slight narrowing of this gap is to be attributed to several reclassifications of individuals: in fact the Whigs had made two gains in boroughs with voterates of 1,000 or more while their opponents had only managed one, in Westminster. Generally it would be difficult to argue that either of the two parties enjoyed a clear-cut advantage in terms of the ‘popular’ vote, for, taking contested elections as a whole, it was the Whigs who emerged with a majority of seats, by 84 to 75 over the Tories, with a further 10 Members ‘unclassified’.
It may be evidence of the intensification of party hostilities which some historians have claimed to detect in this Parliament that during its single session as many as 15 seats changed hands between the parties, eight as a result of decisions taken by the House on election petitions, which invariably favoured the Tories. In all the Whigs lost 11 seats, including two which were declared void and not filled subsequently, and the Tories gained 10, leaving the state of the parties at the dissolution as:
|
259 |
Tories |
|
208 |
Whigs |
|
44 |
unclassified |
The Second Parliament of 1701 (the Parliament of 1701-2)
The second election of 1701, held in November and December, was regarded by King William as a test of public opinion. Out of patience with the Tories, he had acceded to Whig requests for a snap dissolution, but made no significant ministerial alterations in advance of the polls. Meanwhile the Whigs mounted a sustained campaign of propaganda, organizing addresses from counties and boroughs, and vilifying their opponents in the press as crypto-Jacobites. Tory writers did their best to reply in kind. The outcome was a close call, with the Membership of the new House polarized more sharply than at any previous election in the period, and a narrow, but ultimately indecisive, majority for the Whigs. The standing of the parties at the opening of the Parliament (incorporating a judgment on one double return, for Coventry) was:
|
248 |
Whigs |
|
240 |
Tories |
|
24 |
unclassified |
The closeness of these figures cloaks a remarkable Whig success, especially in the more ‘open’ constituencies. Counting the Members returned for each party in contested elections would give a majority of Whigs over Tories of 95 to 75. The improvement in Whig fortunes stands out even more clearly if we look at the parties’ gains. In fact, relatively few seats were won and lost on this occasion: a total of 85 shifted between the parties, seven of which involve the reclassification of individuals. Of the 78 seats which actually changed hands, in 72 constituencies, a little over half did so in contested elections (42, that is to say 53.8%). Altogether the Whigs were able to make 54 gains, 42 at the expense of their opponents, while the Tories registered only 19 gains, 12 at the expense of the Whigs. This calculation of the Tories’ final position would be appreciably less advantageous were it not for a notional ‘gain’ of seven seats accruing from the reclassification as Tories of Robert Harley I* and several former Whigs who had followed him into the ‘New Country Party’. The most noticeable Whig advances came in the English counties, where they gained no less than 15 seats: in Buckinghamshire, Cumberland (2), Dorset, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire (2), Middlesex, Norfolk, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Sussex, Westmorland, Wiltshire, and Yorkshire (all bar Dorset, Leicestershire, and Yorkshire as a consequence of contests). By contrast the Tories gained just five new county Members: in Cornwall, Derbyshire (2), Kent, and Northamptonshire (in every case apart from Cornwall, after a contest). This still left the Tories with more knights of the shire in the Parliament as a whole, by a margin of 47 to 43, but in England alone the Whigs had restored their advantage, by 40 to 38. Whig candidates also did well in the largest boroughs, making three gains (in Gloucester, Norwich, and Westminster) while their opponents made two (in Leicester and Nottingham), the net result increasing slightly the disparity between the two parties in this type of constituency, where there were now 28 Whigs and 17 Tories. The majority of Whig gains, however, were made in smaller boroughs. All told, 33 of the 54 seats the Whigs gained at this election came in constituencies with less than 500 voters (including Cambridge University), 16 of them in constituencies where under a hundred votes were cast. Of the 16 seats gained by the Whigs in contests 15 were in constituencies with under 500 voters (again including Cambridge University), seven of those with less than 100. Thus although the Whigs did particularly well in the counties, their overall success depended more on their performance in corporation and burgage boroughs, and the less populous of the freeman boroughs.
Only a few changes occurred in the Membership of the House of Commons during this Parliament. The Whigs lost one seat, declared void on petition, and three more at by-elections to the Tories, who also picked up a vacant seat at Calne. These by-election successes might be taken to indicate that the popularity evidently enjoyed by the Whigs at the time of the election had quickly faded with the onset of another European war, except for the fact that in only one of the four constituencies was the incoming Member opposed, and that was in the burgage borough of Cockermouth, not the best medium for testing public opinion. In practice, however, the net result was to wipe out the Whigs’ early advantage. At the dissolution in May 1702 the parties appear to have been on exactly level terms:
|
244 |
Whigs |
|
244 |
Tories |
|
24 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1702
The general election of 1702 effected an extraordinary change in the political complexion of the House of Commons. Only eight months after the Whigs’ popular success at the polls in November and December 1701, the Tories now scored a crushing victory, recovering their previous losses, recording many new gains, and achieving an overall majority of at least 83 seats. After the adjudication of double returns for Haslemere and Milborne Port the relative strength of the parties may be stated at:
|
298 |
Tories |
|
184 |
Whigs |
|
31 |
unclassified |
In this calculation a total of 98 seats have been reclassified, and in every case except one they represent the election of a new Member. All told, the Tories had made 69 gains, 65 at the expense of outgoing Whig Members, while the Whigs had made 16 gains, 15 of them from the Tories. To some extent these figures may even be said to understate the Tory victory, since nine of the Whig gains were promptly reversed on petition. Over half the seats lost in the winter, 23 in all, returned to their previous Tory allegiance. Tory candidates did particularly well in the shires, where they gained 20 seats, and a thumping majority of the county representation: 56 to 23 in England alone, and 66 to 25 when the Welsh results are included. More remarkably, perhaps, they also reversed the trend of the preceding decade and took a clear majority of the seats in the largest boroughs, a net gain of seven seats in this category, headed by three out of the four places in London, giving them 26 Members to the Whigs’ 18. Approximately half the number of seats changing hands did so as a result of contests: 53 out of 97. Fifteen were county seats, and nine came in the largest boroughs. On the other side, however, 26 were from borough constituencies with less than 500 voters, including ten in the smallest range, with under 100. Where elections were contested, the Tories made more gains in ‘popular’ constituencies, 14 in counties and eight more in the largest boroughs, but they also recorded three in boroughs with voterates below 100, and 10 more where the number of voters was between 100 and 500. Their popularity with the voters is emphasized by counting the results of all contested elections, which would give a Tory majority of 101 to 63. Geographically, the Tory gains were spread across the country, but the party did particularly well in Wiltshire, where Tories made a total of seven gains, including both the shire knights; in Cornwall, where co-ordinated management by the Granville interest yielded five new Members; in Cumberland and Westmorland, where the vigorous local leadership of Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt.*, helped them add four more seats; and not least in London and its environs, where, besides their triumph in the City, they also gained both seats in Westminster and one for the county of Middlesex.
The first two sessions of the new Parliament saw the triumphant Tories increase their overall majority in a series of partisan committee judgments on election petitions, all of which were decided in favour of Tory candidates, and which gave the party a net gain of 12 seats. On the other hand, by-election results during the Parliament went consistently against the Tories, the Whigs gaining four seats in the first year, and six more subsequently, which partly offset their losses on petition, so that at the dissolution in 1705 the parties stood at:
|
304 |
Tories |
|
178 |
Whigs |
|
31 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1705
The general election of 1705 was fought under unusual circumstances. After the dismissal of Lord Nottingham and the other High Tory ministers in April 1704, Lord Treasurer Godolphin (Sidney†) and the Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill†) had reconstructed their administration around a coalition of ‘moderate’ Members, comprising their own personal dependants, other placemen and pensioners, and a number of Court Tories headed by Secretary of State Robert Harley. They had also entered into an understanding with the Whig Junto. The alliance of Courtiers and Whigs was reinforced in the crisis over the ‘Tack’ in the following November. In the aftermath of this episode, the bulk of the Tory party, which stood in opposition to administration, sought to persuade the electorate that the Church of England stood ‘in danger’ of subversion by Protestant Dissenters and their allies in Parliament. In response Godolphin and Marlborough lined themselves up behind Whig interests in the localities, removing any residual High Tories from influential offices, reorganising the electoral management of Cornwall, and actively assisting Whig candidates in key constituencies. Party propagandists were active on both sides, Tories playing on the threat to the Church, and Whigs arguing that the real issue was the continuance of the war and the maintenance of the Protestant succession.
|
260 |
Tories |
|
233 |
Whigs |
|
20 |
unclassified |
A head-count shows that the Whigs had made considerable progress in recovering ground lost to the Tories in 1702, and detailed analysis enhances this performance still further, especially in relation to contested elections. Adding up the results of all contested elections shows a numerical superiority on the Whig side, of 117 seats to 90, and the situation is even clearer if we look at the seats which were won and lost. In aggregate, 119 seats altered their party orientation at this election, all but one involving a change in occupancy. The Whigs made 82 gains (76 from Tories), while the Tories could only manage 34 (27 from Whigs). A substantial proportion of the 118 seats which had changed hands had done so as a result of contests: 72 in all (61%). But there was a striking difference between the two parties in this respect: 72% of Whig gains came after contests (60 from a total of 83), as compared with only 36% on the Tory side. Moreover, many of the gains made by Whigs in contested elections had occurred in the larger constituencies: 14 in counties, and 13 in boroughs with more than 500 voters, with only 12 in constituencies where less than 100 electors were polled. The revival of the Whig cause in the shires, with 16 gains (14 as a result of contests) left them just behind the Tories in terms of English county seats, with 37 to the Tories’ 40, though so pronounced had the Tory ascendancy become in Wales that the Tories enjoyed a clear majority among shire knights in the Parliament as a whole, with 50 to their opponents’ 39 49. In the biggest English boroughs, too, Whig candidates recovered ground in this election, their ten seats gained (eight through contests) restoring their previous superiority by a margin over their opponents of 24 to 22.
The 1705 election was not only a battle between the parties, however. Much of the pre-election propaganda from the Court side was directed specifically against the high-flyers who had supported the ‘Tack’, and it proved effective. Of the 134 seats ‘Tackers’ in the Commons at the dissolution, only 90 remained after the election, a significant element in the overall Tory losses: 34 seats out of a net deficit of 44.
It was ironic that by the time the division within the Tory party had been healed, with the resignation of Harley and his followers in February 1708, the notional majority which the party had enjoyed as a result of the general election had already disappeared. Partisan judgments on petitions, and Whig successes in by-elections had eroded the Tories’ position to the point at which they were no longer the largest grouping in the House. The Whigs gained seven seats as a result of decisions on election cases, and a further 14 at by-elections, while their opponents made only six gains, all at by-elections, to leave the support for the respective parties among English and Welsh Members at:
|
248 |
Whigs |
|
245 |
Tories |
|
20 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1708
The election of 1708 was the first since 1695 to be held under a Whig administration, but although the Whigs improved their position significantly, their advances were still not spectacular. A net gain of 20 seats left the Whigs with a clear superiority over their opponents, and an indisputable overall majority, but their victory fell short of the Tories’ in 1702. With no double returns for the House to adjudicate, the strength of the parties among the Members for England and Wales may be estimated at:
|
268 |
Whigs |
|
225 |
Tories |
|
20 |
unclassified |
In the English and Welsh constituencies 88 seats (in 79 constituencies) may be reclassified in terms of their party orientation, including two in which the allegiance of the Member himself has to be redefined. Of these, 49 (57%) changed hands as a result of contests, but there was an interesting difference between the parties in this respect: 28 of the 51 Whig gains came in contested elections, amounting to nearly 55%, but on the Tory side the proportion was much higher, at 22 out of 31, or nearly 71%. All told, more Whigs than Tories were returned in contested elections, but the difference was not massive, at 97 to 78, and a closer examination of the seats gained in contests shows a surprising Tory resilience, especially in constituencies with larger voterates. The 27 Whig gains in contests included five county seats (one each in Bedfordshire, Rutland, and Sussex, and two in Kent), and five in the largest category of boroughs, with around a thousand voters or more (one in Nottingham, and both seats in Canterbury and Coventry). On the other hand the party gained 17 seats through contests in constituencies with less than 500 voters, 16 of those with voterates under 100. The proportions on the Tory side were not dissimilar, but less weighted towards the smallest boroughs: of the 21 gains made by Tories in contested elections, two came in counties (Hertfordshire and Westmorland), five in the most populous boroughs (including two seats in London, and one each in Reading and Westminster), and only five in constituencies where there were less than 100 voters. If the analysis is extended to include all constituencies in which seats had been gained or lost since the dissolution, the Whigs’ dependence on small electorates (predominantly in corporation or burgage boroughs) becomes even clearer. In the counties the Whigs gained five seats and lost two, putting them ahead of the Tories in the English shire representation, by 42 to 36, although still trailing badly in Wales and thus two seats down among county Members overall. In the largest boroughs there were now 28 Whig Members and 22 Tories. Of greater significance, however, is the proportion of seats gained by the Whigs in the smaller boroughs: at least 32 of the 51 seats gained by the party at this election came in constituencies with voterates below 500 and of these no less than 25 had fewer than 100 voters. In part these successes could be ascribed to organized management. In Cornwall Hugh Boscawen II* contrived five gains (in Bodmin, Bossiney, Camelford, Fowey, and Grampound), although there were three losses to set against them (St. Ives, Saltash, and West Looe); and in the Cinque Ports Lord Westmorland helped bring in new Whig Members at Hythe, Rye, and Winchelsea.
The contingent of Members elected in Scotland in 1708 is harder to categorize by party; indeed, at this point a majority are better described according to their adherence to individual magnates. The largest phalanx was to be identified with the old Court interest headed by the Duke of Queensberry, and included followers of Lords Mar and Seafield. There were also smaller groups owing allegiance to the Squadrone (the combined interests of Lords Montrose, Roxburgh, Rothes, Marchmont, and Tweeddale), the Earl of Sutherland, formerly an ally of the Squadrone and temporarily estranged from them, the Duke of Argyll, and Earl of Annandale, and a single nominee of the Duke of Hamilton. Those who were unattached to magnates may be broadly divided into ‘Cavaliers’ (Tories) and Presbyterian supporters of the ‘Revolution interest’ (Whigs), with the remainder left ‘unclassified’. The numbers are as follows:
|
18 |
Court |
|
3 |
Squadrone |
|
2 |
Sutherland |
|
3 |
Argyll |
|
1 |
Annandale |
|
1 |
Hamilton |
|
7 |
‘Revolution interest’ (Whigs) |
|
4 |
Cavaliers (Tories) |
|
6 |
unclassified |
Under normal circumstances, at least 28 of the 45 Scottish Members could therefore be expected to support the ministry, the old ‘Court’ group under Queensberry, in alliance with Godolphin, the Squadrone, in alliance with the Junto, and the ‘Revolution men’.
During this Parliament the Junto exploited the Whig majority in the Commons to increase their strength still further among English and Welsh Members, by a series of frankly partisan decisions on disputed elections. They took 13 seats from the Tories on petition, against the loss of just one seat (at Lostwithiel). Although similar abuses of power had been committed in the past, the bias shown by the House in the 1708/9 session became notorious. It was focused in particular on the elections for the single-Member constituencies of Abingdon and Bewdley, where Whig interests were shamelessly maintained in the teeth of the evidence. In the case of Bewdley the sitting Whig Member, Henry Herbert, retained his seat against a Tory challenge, while in the Abingdon election the Tory Simon Harcourt I* was turned out after a heated debate in a very full House. Harcourt’s speech, subsequently published, denounced the flagrant partisanship shown by his opponents: ‘any opposition may give a handle to a petition. No matter for the justice of it; power will maintain it.’
|
283 |
Whigs |
|
210 |
Tories |
|
20 |
unclassified |
The seven changes which took place in the Scottish representation during this Parliament, all of which were the result of by-elections, made little significant change, other than a doubling in the Duke of Hamilton’s support from one Member to two. More important were shifts within the ‘Court’ interest. Lords Morton (with three members at his disposal) and Mar (with two) broke with Queensberry, and moved into opposition,. Sutherland’s two Members (referred to derisively in 1708 as the ‘Squadruche’) had ceased to function as an independent force. One (Sutherland’s own son) had lost his seat, and the other had been reintegrated into the Squadrone. The state of play at the dissolution may be summarized as:
|
19 |
Court |
|
4 |
Squadrone |
|
5 |
Argyll |
|
3 |
Morton |
|
2 |
Hamilton |
|
2 |
Mar |
|
1 |
Annandale |
|
4 |
‘Revolution interest’ (Whigs) |
|
4 |
Cavaliers (Tories) |
|
1 |
unclassified |
The Parliament of 1710
The impact of the Sacheverell trial on English public opinion was such that from the early summer of 1710 it became a common assumption among commentators in either party that a new general election would bring a sweeping Tory victory. Whigs trembled in fear of a dissolution of Parliament while their opponents, by contrast, fairly salivated at the prospect: one Shropshire Tory wrote in July, that ‘if we miss this opportunity we are bewitched, for the like will never offer again’.
|
329 |
Tories |
|
168 |
Whigs |
|
14 |
unclassified |
In all 148 seats were gained and lost by the two parties at this election (excluding the reclassification of two Members), and, in what was the most widely contested general election in this period, no less than 108 of these seats, that is to say 73%, changed hands after contests. The Tories won a clear majority of all contested elections, with 161 Tory Members returned as against 95 Whigs, but their superiority becomes even more evident if we concentrate on those seats which changed hands between the parties. Tories gained 132 seats overall, of which 98 (a little over 74%) involved contests (95 of those at the expense of outgoing Whig Members); whereas Whigs gained a mere 13 seats, eight of which came in contested elections. Admittedly, 35 of the new Tory Members were recovering ground which had been lost to the party at the 1708 election or since. The Tory gains included 30 county seats, of which 27 were won in contests, and 24 seats in the largest boroughs (those with 1,000 or more voters), 19 of them after contests. This not only left the Tories with a thumping majority in the counties (64 Members to 15 in England, and a clean sweep of the Welsh shires), but restored the supremacy they had fleetingly secured in 1702 in the largest English borough constituencies, where they now led the Whigs by 44 seats to 10 (including all four Members for London, for the first time since 1690), a remarkable performance, and clearly attributable to the popularity of the ‘High Church’ cause among ordinary voters.
In Scotland ‘Tory’ interests (as they should probably now be called, in preference to the outdated terminology of ‘cavaliers’) also did remarkably well.
|
17 |
Tories |
|
7 |
Old Court party (Queensberry, Seafield) |
|
6 |
Whigs |
|
5 |
Squadrone |
|
5 |
Argyll |
|
1 |
Hamilton |
|
1 |
Atholl |
|
3 |
unclassified |
Although Henry St. John II* boasted that the Tory majority in the Commons acted with greater impartiality in determining election petitions after 1710 than their opponents had done before them, a claim which has been endorsed by at least one modern historian,
|
355 |
Tories |
|
145 |
Whigs |
|
13 |
unclassified |
There had been fewer changes in the representation of Scotland during this Parliament, but an important shift in the alignment of the Scottish factions. Four seats had been reallocated on petition: two to Tories, one to a Whig at the expense of a Tory, and one to an Argyllite. This process reduced the Squadrone contingent by two, and the Queensberry interest by one. It was a followed in 1713 by the defeat of a Queensberryite candidate in a by-election for Dumfries Burghs at the hands of Lord Annandale’s supporters. But by this time the 2nd Duke of Queensberry was dead, and his party had broken up: Lord Seafield’s two nominees supported the ministry, George Douglas in Linlithgow Burghs had reverted to a Tory allegiance, John Montgomerie II in Ayrshire had gone over to the Argyll connexion, and the remainder (Hon. Sir David Dalrymple, 1st Bt., John Pringle, and John Stewart) had ‘turned Whig’. At the end of the Parliament the Scottish Members comprised:
|
19 |
Tories |
|
2 |
Seafield |
|
11 |
Whigs |
|
7 |
Argyll |
|
3 |
Squadrone |
|
1 |
Hamilton |
|
1 |
Atholl |
|
1 |
Annandale |
The Parliament of 1713
The Whigs made strenuous efforts to influence public opinion prior to the 1713 general election, focusing their arguments on the peace and the French commercial treaty. Whig propagandists insinuated that Harley’s ministry had been careless of British trading interests, and even that there were schemes afoot to bring over the Pretender. In East Anglia and the West Country Whig candidates publicly identified themselves with the woollen manufacturing interest.
|
354 |
Tories |
|
148 |
Whigs |
|
11 |
unclassified |
In Scotland opposition interests did better, possibly because of popular discontent with the malt tax proposals of 1713, which had led to an abortive parliamentary attempt to repeal the Union, or because of the greater sensitivity of the Scots on the issues of trade and the succession. Moreover, by this time Argyll had gone into opposition, and the conjunction of his followers with the Whigs and the Squadrone was enough to put ministerial supporters in a minority among the Scottish Members. It is also noticeable that while Argyll’s support increased in this Parliament, the following of other individual magnates had declined. Mar, the Scottish secretary of State, and Seafield, Lord Chancellor of Scotland, each of whom was able to return one Member, were of course entirely identified with the Court; the Hamilton interest, managed in the minority of the 5th Duke by his mother, grandmother and uncles, and also reduced to a single representative, was more distinctively Tory; while the Earl of Annandale, who had taken advantage of the Queensberry minority to secure both the county and borough seat in Dumfries, remained unpredictable and ultimately self-interested. In sum, the results of the election appear to have been:
|
12 |
Tories |
|
1 |
Court |
|
1 |
Mar |
|
1 |
Seafield |
|
1 |
Hamilton |
|
10 |
Whigs |
|
4 |
Squadrone |
|
13 |
Argyll |
|
2 |
Annandale |
In England and Wales, there can be no doubting that the Tories were the more popular party: more than twice as many Tories as Whigs were returned in contested elections (the precise proportions were 124 to 59), and there were again huge Tory majorities among the county Members, of 80 to 12 overall, and 69 to 11 in England alone, and in the representation of the largest and most ‘open’ boroughs (with 1,000 or more voters), of 44 to 12. Moreover, the 38 English constituencies which remained entirely in the hands of the Whigs at this election (providing the party with exactly half its strength in the Commons)
On the other hand, if the election results are analysed in terms of seats gained or lost, the results appear more to the Whigs’ advantage. Only 80 seats changed hands between the parties at this general election (excluding two in which a re-elected Member has to be reclassified), in 72 constituencies. The Tories made 40 gains, and the Whigs 39, but a higher proportion of Whig gains came as a result of contests, 64% (25 out of 39) as opposed to 52.5% (21 out of 40) by the Tories; and among the Whig gains were six county seats (in Co. Durham, Huntingdonshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Surrey, and Cardiganshire) against the Tories’ six (in Bedfordshire (2), Buckinghamshire, Essex, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire); and seven in the largest group of boroughs (in Bridgnorth, Colchester, Shrewsbury, Sudbury, Caernarvon and Denbigh Boroughs), where the Tories’ gained only two more seats (at Nottingham and Reading).
In Scotland only nine seats had changed hands since the dissolution, excluding the rotation in the three pairs of counties, which duly brought back Buteshire, Clackmannanshire and Nairnshire into the parliamentary representation. Only four changed hands as a result of contests, which gives little opportunity for generalizations about the disposition of Scottish ‘public opinion’, insofar as this could be reflected by the electoral system. Tories suffered in the southern lowlands, where Lord Annandale’s nominee recaptured Dumfriesshire from the High Tory Hon. James Murray*; and another Tory, John Houstoun*, was ousted by a Whiggish alliance in Linlithgowshire; but made corresponding advances, at the expense of more moderate elements within their own party, in the north-east, where the fugitive Dumfriesshire candidate, Tory Hon. James Murray*, defeated Seafield’s nominee at Elgin Burghs, and in the semi-highland county of Perthshire, where another James Murray, this time Lord James Murray of Dowally*, successfully defied the power of his brother, the Duke of Atholl. A broadly similar pattern emerges from the results in all contested elections, allowing for the local peculiarities engendered by the rivalries between individual magnates: solid Whiggish and Squadrone successes in the south, in Dumfriesshire, Haddingtonshire, Kirkcudbright Stewartry, Linlithgowshire, and Haddington and Linlithgow and Stirling Burghs; a few Tory victories in the north, in Orkney, Perthshire, and Elgin Burghs, partly cancelled out by the advances of the Argyll interest, at Aberdeen and Inverness Burghs.
Once the Parliament sat, systematic exploitation of their massive majority brought the Tories ten more seats in England and Wales as sitting Whig Members were turned out on petition. There were also two Tory gains in by-elections, so that by the time of the prorogation in August 1714 (followed in due course by a dissolution in January of the following year) the relative strengths of the parties in the English and Welsh constituencies stood at:
|
366 |
Tories |
|
135 |
Whigs |
|
11 |
unclassified |
Among the Scottish Members there had only been one change, the Tories recovering the seat for Linlithgowshire on petition, so that by the prorogation there were:
|
13 |
Tories |
|
1 |
Court |
|
1 |
Mar |
|
1 |
Seafield |
|
1 |
Hamilton |
|
9 |
Whigs |
|
4 |
Squadrone |
|
13 |
Argyll |
|
2 |
Annandale |
2
In summary the results of each general election in the period, in England and Wales, are set out as follows. (Figures within brackets indicate the changed position at the dissolution of each Parliament.)
|
Tories |
Whigs |
unclassified |
|
|
1690 |
243 (235) |
241 (243) |
28 (34) |
|
1695 |
203 (196) |
257 (259) |
53 (58) |
|
1698 |
208 (219) |
246 (239) |
59 (54) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
248 (259) |
220 (208) |
45 (44) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
240 (244) |
248 (244) |
24 (24) |
|
1702 |
298 (304) |
184 (176) |
31 (31) |
|
1705 |
260 (245) |
233 (248) |
20 (20) |
|
1708 |
225 (210) |
268 (283) |
20 (20) |
|
1710 |
329 (355) |
168 (145) |
14 (13) |
|
1713 |
354 (366) |
148 (135) |
11 (11) |
The most obvious method of measuring the level of political activity within the system would be to compare the incidence of contested elections across the period (always remembering that the definition of a ‘contest’ used in this History excludes those candidacies which did not proceed to a cry or a poll, and therefore certainly understates the number of occasions in which the successful Members had been opposed). The number of constituencies contested at each general election in England and Wales was as follows:
|
1690 |
103 constituencies (38.3% |
|
1695 |
85 (31.6%) |
|
1698 |
104 (38.7%) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
92 (34.2%) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
91 (33.8%) |
|
1702 |
89 (33.1%) |
|
1705 |
110 (40.9%) |
|
1708 |
95 (35.3%) |
|
1710 |
131 (48.7%) |
|
1713 |
94 (35.0%) |
In this calculation the general election of 1710, fought in the shadow of the Sacheverell impeachment, appears to have been the most contentious, by some distance, though even then less than half the total number of constituencies were subjected to a contest. Lesser peaks of activity were reached in 1690 and 1705, again occasions of fierce controversy over religious issues, with Tory candidates and voters mobilized in defence of the Church of England, and in 1698, when the main issues (‘corruption’, the maintenance of a standing army) aroused ‘Country’ hostility towards the Court. Particularly striking is the comparison between the election of 1690 and that of 1689, to the Convention Parliament, the percentage of constituencies contested rising sharply from 23 to 38.3. But of course, a contest in a double-Member constituency did not necessarily involve a dispute over both seats. Counting the number of seats contested reveals a similar chronological pattern but on a diminished scale, the same peaks, and differences, but the percentages consistently lower.
|
1690 |
147 seats (28.7% |
|
1695 |
118 (23.0%) |
|
1698 |
149 (29.0%) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
124 (24.2%) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
122 (23.8%) |
|
1702 |
127 (24.8%) |
|
1705 |
161 (31.4%) |
|
1708 |
132 (25.7%) |
|
1710 |
205 (40.0%) |
|
1713 |
143 (27.9%) |
Comparable calculations for Scotland show an uninterrupted decline in political interest and activity, from a high point in the first election after the Union, in which two thirds of the 45 Commons seats were contested, to the quieter and more controlled conditions of 1715, when only a fifth of Scottish constituencies went to the polls. Since no constituency returned more than a single Member, there is of course, only one set of figures. The full totals and percentages are as follows:
|
1708 |
26 constituencies/seats (57.8% |
|
1710 |
22 (48.9%) |
|
1713 |
16 (35.6%) |
|
1715 |
9 (20%) |
There are, however, other ways by which to measure the degree of movement within the political system. If we look at the turnover of seats between Parliaments, comparing the Membership at the dissolution of one Parliament with the Membership immediately after the general election to the next (including any decisions on double returns but not taking account of exclusions and intrusions on petition) a somewhat different pattern emerges. The totals for England and Wales are:
|
1690 |
206 seats (40.5% |
|
1695 |
226 (44.1%) |
|
1698 |
226 (44.1%) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
176 (34.3%) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
163 (31.8%) |
|
1702 |
160 (31.2%) |
|
1705 |
197 (38.46%) |
|
1708 |
182 (35.5%) |
|
1710 |
220 (42.9%) |
|
1713 |
198 (38.6%) |
In general these figures approximate to the proportions of constituencies contested, the highest point still being under 50%. The most obvious exception is the election of 1695, in which a surprisingly large number of seats changed hands, something which can only be partly explained by the length of time which had elapsed since the previous election. It is also worth noting that the 1710 election, although still the busiest in terms of turnover of seats, was not in this respect as far ahead of all other elections as it was in recorded contests, and that by this criterion the ‘Country against Court’ election of 1698 was the second busiest.
For Scotland, similar calculations must begin in 1710, and are of limited utility. What they show is a higher proportion of seats changing hands than elections contested, and an upturn in the relatively quiet electoral conditions of 1715:
|
1710 |
21 seats (50.0%) |
|
1713 |
14 (33.3%) |
|
1715 |
19 (45.3%) |
Elections were decided by the number of seats changing hands between one party and the other. Given the complexities of political allegiances among Scottish Members, meaningful calculations of this kind can only be made in relation to the constituencies in England and Wales. They highlight the points at which the fortunes of the two political parties altered most sharply: in the elections of 1690, 1702, and 1710, when the Tories made sweeping gains; and in 1695 and 1705, which similarly marked the strongest Whig advances in this period, though neither witnessed the party’s best performance overall. Interestingly, the clear Whig majority in 1708 was achieved on a relatively low turnover of seats. The detailed figures, for the number and percentage of seats changing hands, are:
|
1690 |
113 seats (22.0% |
|
1695 |
115 (22.4%) |
|
1698 |
92 (17.9%) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
90 (17.5%) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
78 (15.2%) |
|
1702 |
97 (18.9%) |
|
1705 |
118 (23.0%) |
|
1708 |
86 (16.8%) |
|
1710 |
148 (28.8%) |
|
1713 |
80 (15.6%) |
The number of seats won and lost in contested elections, as a proportion of the total of those changing hands, was generally quite high, over 50% in all but two cases, and in the general election of 1710 almost reaching 75%: enough to suggest that ordinary voters had an important contribution to make in determining the end result of an election. The influence of ‘public opinion’ (however it may have been motivated in individual cases, by issues, influence, or downright bribery) was most obvious when an election transformed the political complexion of the Commons: in 1702, for instance, and in 1710, both occasions on which an existing Whig majority was buried under a Tory landslide. But close analysis reveals other examples, albeit less dramatic, of one party or the other enjoying a pronounced ‘popular’ success: the Tories’ revival in 1698, and further expansion in the first general election of 1701; the Whigs’ recovery in November and December 1701, assisted by their playing of the Jacobite card, and their later advances in the ‘Church in danger’ election of 1705. Excluding from consideration those changes which only involve the reclassification of individual Members, the figures are:
|
1690 |
56 seats out of 113 (49.6%) |
|
1695 |
46 out of 115 (40.0%) |
|
1698 |
52 out of 92 (56.5%) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
56 out of 90 (62.2%) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
42 out of 78 (53.8%) |
|
1702 |
53 out of 97 (54.6%) |
|
1705 |
72 out of 118 (61.0%) |
|
1708 |
49 out of 86 (57.0%) |
|
1710 |
10 out of 148 (73.0%) |
|
1713 |
46 out of 80 (57.5%) |
As a guide to the respective popularity of the two parties among the electorate as a whole in England and Wales, and not just among those seats which were gained and lost, we might look first at the aggregate results from all contests. One conclusion is to emphasize the remarkable success which Whig candidates continue to enjoy at the polls, right up until the party’s collapse in 1710 (except for the 1702 election, when they had suffered a rare epidemic of defeats). The figures (again adjusting for decisions on double returns, but not petitions) are:
|
Tories |
Whigs |
|
|
1690 |
97 |
85 |
|
1695 |
55 |
97 |
|
1698 |
93 |
95 |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
75 |
84 |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
75 |
95 |
|
1702 |
101 |
63 |
|
1705 |
90 |
117 |
|
1708 |
78 |
97 |
|
1710 |
163 |
93 |
|
1713 |
124 |
59 |
These totals are, however, at best a very crude index of ‘popularity’, since they encompass the full variety of types of constituency, from the most populous county to the tiniest corporation or burgage borough. Some finer shading may be applied by concentrating on the most ‘open’ or ‘popular’ constituencies, in other words those containing the largest numbers of voters: the counties, and those boroughs with voterates approaching and over 1,000. In county elections, the Whig performance was rather less successful than it was over the whole range of constituencies. At their best they could do no more than establish a narrow majority among the English knights of the shire, whereas each Tory election victory was distinguished by a massive superiority in the county representation. The following table gives the number of Members returned on the interest of each party in English counties at each general election in this period, incorporating judgments on double returns, (the numbers in brackets refer to seats won in contested elections):
|
Tories |
Whigs |
unclassified |
|
|
1690 |
39 (17) |
40 (12) |
1 |
|
1695 |
31 (9) |
44 (18) |
5 |
|
1698 |
43 (25) |
33 (15) |
4 |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
49 (13) |
30 (9) |
1 |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
38 (14) |
40 (22) |
2 |
|
1702 |
56 (24) |
23 (10) |
1 |
|
1705 |
40 (21) |
37 (28) |
3 |
|
1708 |
36 (10) |
42 (15) |
2 |
|
1710 |
64 (36) |
15 (10) |
1 |
|
1713 |
69 (17) |
11 (7) |
0 |
If the results from Welsh counties are added in, the position is even more favourable to the Tories, thanks to their increasingly firm ascendancy in the politics of the principality during this period.
|
Tories |
Whigs |
unclassified |
|
|
1690 |
46 (18) |
45 (13) |
1 |
|
1695 |
37 (10) |
49 (18) |
6 |
|
1698 |
49 (25) |
38 (15) |
5 |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
56 (13) |
34 (10) |
2 |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
47 (14) |
43 (23) |
2 |
|
1702 |
66 (26) |
25 (10) |
1 |
|
1705 |
50 (22) |
39 (28) |
3 |
|
1708 |
46 (12) |
44 (15) |
2 |
|
1710 |
76 (39) |
15 (10) |
1 |
|
1713 |
80 (18) |
12 (7) |
0 |
In the most populous borough constituencies (numbering 28 in all
|
Tories |
Whigs |
|
|
1690 |
27 (16) |
18 (11) |
|
1695 |
14 (5) |
29 (22) |
|
1698 |
16 (9) |
28 (16) |
|
1701 (Jan./Feb.) |
17 (7) |
26 (13) |
|
1701 (Nov./Dec.) |
17 (8) |
28 (15) |
|
1702 |
26 (15) |
18 (6) |
|
1705 |
22 (9) |
24 (13) |
|
1708 |
22 (9) |
28 (14) |
|
1710 |
44 (31) |
10 (8) |
|
1713 |
44 (21) |
12 (7) |
It remains to consider those constituencies which provided each party with its core of ‘safe seats’.
|
Tory |
Whig |
|
|
Counties |
13 |
3 |
|
larger boroughs (500 voters+) |
5 |
10 |
|
smaller boroughs(-500voters) |
46 |
37 |
|
universities |
2 |
0 |
|
Totals |
66 |
50 |
More generally, it is no surprise that a large number of ‘safe seats’ tended to occur in constituencies with quite small electorates, 38 out of the total of 116 being returned by less than 100 voters. But only five were to be found in corporation boroughs, and 14 in burgage boroughs, as compared with 22 in which there was some form of residence-based franchise (inhabitant, householder or scot-and-lot), a fact which in itself may constitute a commentary on the relative amenability of different kinds of elector.
Government and the Boroughs
Interference with borough charters by Charles II and James II had been one of the most controversial features of English politics in the 1680s. Prior to the election of 1685 no less than 99 parliamentary boroughs had been remodelled, in the interests of the Tories. Then in the winter of 1687-8, King James, frustrated by the intransigent opposition of High Churchmen to any softening in the penal laws, reversed this policy, on the assumption that reinstated Whig corporators (including some outright Nonconformists) would at least be sympathetic to the Declaration of Indulgence and possibly agree to support his ecclesiastical policies more generally. At last, when it became clear that the Prince of Orange would invade, a panic-stricken James had turned about-face once more: on 17 Oct. 1688 he gave orders to restore immediately all former charters in cases which were legally pending, that is to say where deeds of surrender had not been enrolled or judgments recorded; promised restoration to the remainder; and issued instructions for the dismissal of all magistrates and corporators holding office by virtue of charters issued since 1679.
Thus the direct involvement of the crown in borough politics had not ended with the Revolution. There was still a good deal of unfinished business (and in a very few boroughs some remained unfinished at the end of the period). This was most immediately obvious at Ludlow and Thetford, for in both constituencies the two rival corporations each made their own return in the general election of 1690. Elsewhere, festering problems took a little longer to rise to the surface. In Orford, where competition between party factions had been intensified by the irruption into borough politics of an ambitious Tory squire, Sir Edward Turnor*, the local Whigs tried unsuccessfully in 1693 to exploit lingering uncertainties over the quo warranto proceedings of Charles II’s reign with an application for a new charter, and as a preliminary raided the town chest to seize various municipal muniments. The perceived necessity of a new charter to settle the affairs of Plymouth was eventually satisfied in 1696, and in the process Sir Francis Drake, 3rd Bt.*, was able to overturn the ascendancy of the Granville party on the corporation. New charters were also obtained during the 1690s in Colchester and Tewkesbury; while the conflict between rival corporations at Liskeard broke out anew after the general election of 1698 and was eventually decided in a trial at Launceston assizes. At Wigan the argument was more narrowly focused, on the position of the borough recorder, Bertie Entwistle, attacked by his Tory opponents after standing unsuccessfully at the parliamentary election of 1695, on the grounds that his appointment had been under the superseded Jacobite charter. A rather different case was that of Liverpool, whose inhabitants harked back even further for the origins of their municipal disputes. The recall of the 1685 charter had re-opened long-standing differences about representation arising from the grant of the previous charter in 1677, which had provoked anger among ordinary Liverpudlians by restricting the municipal franchise (in elections to the officers of mayor and bailiff, and to the common council) from the freemen at large to a self-perpetuating oligarchy of common councilmen. The Whigs, as the ‘popular’ party, were able to acquire a new charter in 1695 to reopen civic government to the main body of freemen; and thereafter factional strife within the corporation came to be expressed less in terms of Whig and Tory than of adherence to the ‘old’ (1677) or ‘new’ (1695) charter.
Other local disputes arose after 1690, in which the Privy Council, or the law courts, became concerned. The most scandalous example was probably that of Bewdley, for which Lord Herbert (Henry*) pursued a new charter in 1698 as a way of regaining control over the corporation. After a decade of political infighting, at local and national level, Herbert received his wish, but his opponents refused to lie down and this particular controversy was still raging in 1714. Almost equally fraught were the affairs of the corporation of Devizes. Conflict between Whig and Tory factions reached such a pitch in 1706 that there were effectively two sets of corporators. Each side had its own claimant to the mayoralty, and each mayor had removed opposing burgesses and filled the vacancies with his own supporters. The Whigs were able to obtain a quo warranto against the Tory mayor, but this was ignored; in 1707 writs of mandamus were issued to elect replacements for the Whig officers, in an attempt to patch up a compromise; and then two years later the judges, and the Privy Council, became involved again, this time in a lengthy series of legal actions brought by each faction in turn. Much the same process happened in Portsmouth, whose corporation also suffered binary fission in 1709. This time the House of Commons, after hearing a tortuously argued election petition, requested the attorney-general to intervene, which resulted in the issuing of writs of quo warranto and a hearing at the Hampshire assizes. Hertford was another borough to trouble the government’s law officers, after the Cowpers had been advised by their counsel in 1698 that the only way to challenge the Tory corporation in its mass creations of freeman voters was to bring a quo warranto themselves; and Colchester, despite its new charter of 1693, continued to pose problems because of the ‘great heats and animosities’ prevailing between Churchmen and Dissenters among the freemen, with appeals to the Privy Council and actions at law over the election of aldermen in 1696, and against the appointment of Prince George as high steward in 1703. Occasionally an individual might also pursue a claim far beyond his own bailiwick and transform a personal grievance into a cause célêbre. Thomas Dunch, a frustrated Whig candidate for alderman of Norwich, went to Queen’s bench in 1705 for a writ of mandamus when the Tory lord mayor refused to accept his election (on the grounds of bribery and intimidation); and the Whig recorder of Ipswich, Charles Whitaker*, took the same expedient two years later to recover his office after the Tory aldermen had removed him.
A trend can be observed in the determination of these local disputes away from direct governmental intervention, through the granting or restoring of charters, towards a reliance on referring matters to the judgment of the civil courts. After a flurry of new charters in the 1690s, to Ludlow (1692), Colchester (1693), Liverpool (1695), Plymouth (1696), and Tewkesbury (1698), there is a long gap to Bewdley in 1708 (whose charter had in any case been applied for a decade earlier), and then nothing. Of course, there were still ways in which ministers might interfere in judicial determinations, either by instigating quo warranto proceedings themselves, as happened over the Portsmouth affair, or by the issuing of a nolle prosequi to forestall an action, which was done by the Whig Junto ministry of 1694/5 in the case of Orford, and again by the Whigs in 1709 over Devizes. But on the whole these direct interventions became rarer as the years went by. In a small minority of cases the responsibility for adjudication fell to the House of Commons itself; not directly, but by implication, through the hearing of an election petition. The judgment of the House on the Ludlow and Thetford elections in 1690 effectively settled the question of which of the alternative corporations was legally constituted, although in 1711 Members clearly felt that the tangled affairs of Portsmouth corporation were too complicated for them, and shuffled off responsibility to the law courts.
Also clearly observable, from individual examples like Orford and Devizes, and from the general pattern of new charters, is a difference in approach between the two political parties on the question of the propriety of central government intervention in municipal politics. Evidently Whig ministers were more inclined than Tories to be proactive, and occasionally high-handed. The single definite exception on the Tory side would be the quo warrantos issued against the Portsmouth Whigs in 1711, though even in this instance it was the majority in the House of Commons rather than the ministry itself that took the initiative. The Liverpool Tories also succeeded in extracting a writ of scire facias against the 1695 charter from the chancery court of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1712, but this was very much a local process, presided over by the Duke of Hamilton as chancellor of the Duchy. Nothing Tory ministers did could compare with the conscious promotion of Whig interests in disputed boroughs undertaken during the lord chancellorship of Lord Somers (Sir John*), by the granting of the Plymouth charter, for example, or that of Tewkesbury; or the systematic interference in 1707-10 by the Whig Secretary of State Lord Sunderland (Charles, Lord Spencer*) in the lawsuits emanating from Devizes. Above all, there was no equivalent of the controversy over the Bewdley case, which provoked bitter denunciations of the Junto ministers by High Churchmen at the hearing of the Tory petition in 1709, and a formal condemnation by the Commons two years later. Particularly effective were Robert Harley’s jibes in 1709, as he reminded the Whigs of their libertarian past, in questioning ‘whether the talking away of charters and forcing new ones upon Parliament boroughs was [not] one cause of the Revolution?’
Yet it would be easy to exaggerate the extent to which the willingness of the Junto to bear down upon local political interests with the full weight of governmental authority reflects a different attitude to the constitutional issue of intervention: a greater fondness for control, and a rather too prompt adoption of the methods of ‘Stuart absolutism’ by its former critics. In the first place, we should remember that at no time did post-Revolution governments (of either party disposition) instigate action against borough corporations. The initiative always came from the locality; usually when factional strife in a corporation boiled over, creating a situation which demanded resolution by an external arbitrator, or more occasionally when some ambitious local magnate (Lord Herbert in Bewdley, or Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth) saw a new charter as the most convenient means of reinforcing his authority. Second, in several of the more notorious cases of Whig ministerial interference individual Junto lords were personally interested: Whigs in Bewdley and Tewkesbury exploited their local connexions to persuade Somers on the strength of their arguments, while Lord Wharton’s involvement in Wiltshire politics predisposed him to favour the claims made by the local party caucus in Devizes. The record of the Junto in 1693-1700 and 1705-8 certainly marked a change of tune from the localist resistance orchestrated by their Exclusionist forbears, but their interference in municipal affairs was in fact far less systematic than their opponents’ rhetoric, and concentration on a few well-publicized examples, might lead one to believe.
Changes to the Franchise
Judgments of the House of Commons on election petitions and double returns during this period recognized or imposed no less than 43 changes in English borough franchises, leaving 29 constituencies with a different voting qualification in 1715 than had obtained in 1715: Abingdon, Aldborough, Amersham, Ashburton, Bishop’s Castle, Boston, Dunwich, East Retford, Grantham, Hertford, Honiton, Ilchester, Lewes, Lichfield, Ludgershall, Ludlow, Lyme Regis, Maidstone, Malmesbury, Milborne Port, New Windsor, Orford, Penryn, Portsmouth, Reading, St. Ives, Shrewsbury, Southwark, and Wallingford. At least 34 other boroughs witnessed unsuccessful attempts to alter the franchise: Aldeburgh, Andover, Arundel, Aylesbury, Banbury, Bath, Bodmin, Brackley, Buckingham, Bury St. Edmunds, Cambridge, Christchurch, Coventry, Droitwich, East Grinstead, Great Marlow, Higham Ferrers, Hindon, Ipswich, Lymington, Morpeth, Much Wenlock, Newton, St. Albans, St. Mawes, Sandwich, Scarborough, Shaftesbury, Southampton, Sudbury, Totnes, Warwick, Wells, and Winchester.
Acting collectively, Members of Parliament showed a consistent preference for smaller electorates. Of the 43 alterations made by the Commons, 28, almost two thirds, accomplished a narrowing rather than a broadening of the franchise. The relative proportions in cases where the franchise remained unchanged were neatly reversed: the House rejected nearly twice as many claims for a wider as for a more exclusive franchise (the exact figures being 27 to 14). This bias had been as well entrenched in 1690 as it was to be in 1714. The Parliament of 1690 made 17 decisions on disputed franchises, of which 11 went in favour of narrowing the electorate, or keeping it close. Comparative statistics for the 1708 Parliament show the Commons voting 13 out of 19 times for a more restrictive franchise, though the trend shifted with the Tory election victory in 1710: in the last two Parliaments in the period there were eight judgments in favour of narrowing the franchise, and seven in favour of broadening it.
Modern historians have argued that the Tories were in this respect the more ‘populist’ of the two parties. ‘It was the Tories, and the old-fashioned Whigs who were associated with them in the New Tory Party [sic], who were being elected on the wide franchise, defending it, and fighting for it’;
Over time the two parties may have adopted more settled preferences. At least, the Tories seem to have shifted their ground. In the 1690 Parliament Tory interests tended to favour narrower interpretations of the franchise: on eight out of 12 occasions Tory candidates argued for restriction; Whigs for expansion. Yet in the 1708 Parliament Tories were pressing for the wider franchise in six cases out of seven, and even after they had achieved a parliamentary majority in 1710 they still supported an extension of the electorate more often than their opponents did. For their part, the ‘new Whigs’ headed by the Junto did not become indisputably the party of urban oligarchy until relatively late in the period. Not until the 1708 Parliament were Whigs to be found consistently advocating a narrowing of the franchise in disputed borough elections. But in some respects the heyday of Whig constitutional populism had already come and gone. It was in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution that many Whigs had embraced a radical approach to the issue of disputed borough franchises. Just as activists in London and some other corporations, including Bristol, Chester, and Liverpool, were pressing for the reform of municipal institutions in order to increase popular participation in civic government, Whig candidates in the election of 1690 challenged corporate oligarchy in Buckingham, Bury St. Edmunds, Sandwich, and Wells; championed the rights of all householders against scot-and-lot payers in Warwick; and even claimed votes for the ‘commonalty’ against the freeholders in Newton. In a by-election in 1693 in the corporation borough of Scarborough local Whigs unsuccessfully called for ‘a free vote’ of all the freemen. Then in 1695 Whigs sought to broaden the definition of ‘burgess’ or freeman in boroughs like Banbury, Morpeth, and Wells, in order to admit more citizens to the polls; and to include scot-and-lot payers alongside freemen in elections in Portsmouth. The 1695 general election did not, it is true, mark the final convulsion of this Whig populism, but thereafter the kind of broadening of the franchise which Whigs advocated was often of a rather different kind: the removal of the ratepaying qualification in an inhabitant or potwalloping borough, as at Amersham or Honiton, in order to make the electorate more respectable and responsible; or the extension of the freeman qualification to include non-residents, as at East Retford or Much Wenlock.
It is important to emphasize at this point that narrowing the franchise did not necessarily ‘close up’ a constituency, that is to say make it more amenable to direction; just as widening the franchise did not necessarily render elections more ‘open’. Certainly the inclusion of a ratepaying qualification into the inhabitant or potwalloping franchise, in such places as Abingdon, Milborne Port, Reading, or Southwark, did have a pacifying effect, in reducing to some extent the venality of the voterate, so that electioneering there became less attractive to wealthy outsiders. But in other types of constituency size had little direct bearing on the liveliness of electoral politics or the susceptibility of the electorate to influence. In corporation boroughs like Malmesbury and Thetford, corporators who were secure in their possession of office, and well aware of the financial value of their votes, might well prove flighty and fractious, even if for no more than mercenary ends, while other larger and ostensibly more ‘popular’ electorates meekly accepted the nominations of local proprietorial interests. Elections in Malmesbury became much less predictable when, in 1695, they passed out of the hands of the landholders and ‘commoners’, and became concentrated in the persons of the capital burgesses, while each of the four elections in St. Ives in which corporators alone were permitted to poll, between 1698 and 1702, were contested. In Brackley, East Retford, Hertford, Ipswich, Ludlow, and Orford, political unrest began with conflict on the corporation itself, so that the extension of the franchise beyond the corporators to the freemen merely exchanged one kind of political instability for another. Indeed, in both Ludlow and Orford it might be argued that broadening the franchise ultimately enabled neighbouring country gentlemen to establish some form of patronage over elections. The fact that the freeman franchise made no stipulation as to residence was probably a considerable help to the Baldwyn, Herbert, Powys, and Walcot interests in Ludlow, and the Felton, Tollemache, and Turnor interests in Orford, in that each was able to import into the borough troops of tenants and dependants from the surrounding countryside. A similar situation obtained in boroughs like Shrewsbury, where the admission of ‘out-freemen’ advantaged the Kynastons and other Tory families, who were stronger in the suburbs and environs of the borough than among the townsmen proper; and in Ipswich, where the Tory Sir William Barker, 5th Bt.*, relied upon ‘out-liers’ and ‘honorary freemen’ in order to retain his seat. This was not an absolute rule, however. Elsewhere, the absence of a residential requirement only served to magnify the powers of the corporation and chief magistrate in admitting new freemen. Thus attempts in Hertford and Southampton to exclude non-resident freemen from voting in parliamentary elections were each aimed at curtailing the influence of a faction on the corporation, which was abusing its powers to create votes.
Often in such cases opportunism seems to have been the guiding factor. It is difficult to detect in the actions of the principals and their parliamentary backers any constitutional principle. This would certainly be the only rational explanation for the extraordinary events in East Retford in 1701-2, when, in quick succession, first one side and then the other advocated the extension of the franchise to the freemen at large. Nevertheless, it may still be possible to construct some general conclusions from the remarkable variety of judgments made by the House of Commons between 1690 and 1713 (involving over 30 different changes of voting qualification).
In the first place, it is clear that there was a strong and gathering reaction against the type of franchise which permitted the poorest inhabitants to poll. Ilchester and Lymington were unusual in moving, and being allowed to move, towards an inhabitant franchise, from scot-and-lot and freeman respectively. On the other side, six former potwalloping boroughs (Abingdon, Amersham, Honiton, Milborne Port, Reading, and Southwark) acquired a scot-and-lot qualification, as did Lichfield, with its compound electorate of freeholders, burgage-holders, and freemen; Ludgershall moved from an inhabitant franchise to one based on freehold property; and Ashburton shifted from potwalloper to burgage. In addition, Portsmouth lost its inhabitant voters and reverted to a freeman franchise, while in Maidstone and Grantham, both freeman boroughs with large numbers of indigent electors, voting came to be restricted to freemen not in receipt of alms. In every case except Ludgershall and Portsmouth the change took place after 1701, which may indicate a revulsion against what was perceived to be a rising tide of electoral corruption and malpractice.
Second, populist attacks on corporate oligarchy made relatively little headway. Of 19 attempts to replace a corporation franchise with something broader (freeman, scot-and-lot, or more rarely potwalloper), only five were successful: New Windsor in 1690, Ludlow and Orford in 1698, St. Ives in 1702 and Penryn in 1710).
Finally, the most frequently disputed question would appear to have been whether it was desirable to restrict the franchise in freeman boroughs to residents, or at least to exclude ‘honorary’ freemen. The conclusion of the debate evidently favoured resident freemen, with eight boroughs imposing a residential condition by 1715 (Bishop’s Castle, Boston, Dunwich, East Retford, Hertford, Ipswich, Lyme Regis, and Much Wenlock), against only one (Shrewsbury) in which previous restrictions were abandoned to admit ‘out-liers’.
Parliamentary Reform
It is usually assumed that the century between the Cromwellian experiments of the 1650s and the Wilkite agitation of the 1760s offers little of interest to the historian of parliamentary reform.
We think ’tis no small misfortune to the English constitution, that so great a number of Members are chosen by the corporations of England, and, according to our weak opinions, it seems not equal that all the freeholders of a county should be represented by only two men, and the towns in the county be represented by above 40, as it is in Cornwall, and near the like in other counties.
John Toland’s The Art of Governing by Partys ..., published the year before, had made the same point. ‘Moneyed men’, casting about for an entrée into Parliament, naturally alighted upon ‘decayed’ boroughs, where the inhabitants, reduced to poverty, were easily seduced by ‘the corruption ... of private entertainments, public feasts, and bribes’. Toland’s examples included two, Bramber and Great Grimsby, where the East India money had been liberally scattered, and another, Stockbridge, which had long been a byword for venality. He listed numerous boroughs
which were formerly rich and populous (as Winchelsea for example), but, being now reduced to mean villages, there is not still the same reason they should enjoy a privilege of sending Members to Parliament. One place, to wit Old Sarum, has but the bare name of a corporation left, and it may be truly said of it, that ‘corn grows now where Troy town stood’, there remaining not as much as the ruins of a house to show it was ever inhabited; yet it sends as many representatives to Parliament as the richest county in England. Stockbridge, Gatton, Bletchingley, Grimsby, Bramber, Dunwich, and many more, are of this sort. That these places ought not to send any Members, and that their votes may be bought or gained by the most indirect methods, everybody will confess, but such as despair of being elected where there are more and better judges of their merit.
Toland, Art of Governing by Partys ... (1701), pp. 75-76, 120-2.
Toland’s suggested remedy anticipated the arguments of later reformers:
I conceive ... that the King may erect new corporations where towns are grown to considerable riches and extent, as Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Newbury, Croydon, and others, some of which had anciently sent Members to Parliament, and may now be empowered (as Newark not long since
Newark had been enfranchised in 1673. ) to elect representatives. The addition of these new Members to the knights of the shire, and those who served before for open boroughs, will quickly disfranchise the places aforesaid, or always outvote their Members, many of which might approve of this expedient, though perhaps they would not think decent to appear in it.
Such advanced thinking was unusual, to say the least. As the author himself admitted, contemporaries, if they recognized the existence of the problem, resorted to a different solution: ‘it being granted therefore that our representation is very unequal, some have thought of throwing all the boroughs into the counties’.
A general lack of concern with enfranchising prosperous but unrepresented towns is not difficult to understand. For one thing, they might already enjoy an effective ‘virtual’ representation, through knights of the shire, or sympathetic Members for neighbouring enfranchised boroughs, as was the case with Manchester;
Similar attitudes and preoccupations are revealed in the legislative proposals for constitutional reform in this period: above all, concern with restoring the representative system to what was assumed to have been its pristine purity, before Members of Parliament, and the electorate, had been corrupted by the improper influence of governments, magnates and money. The Country programme of the early 1690s had put faith in ordinary voters as judges of the civic virtue of their representatives. The first place bill to be introduced after the Revolution (and rejected or vetoed in three successive sessions between 1692 and 1695), was comprehensive in scope but did not seek to exclude office-holders as such, only those who had taken office since election, so that, as one ‘Country Whig’ put it, ‘a good rich corporation should not choose to entrust with all their liberties a plain, honest, country neighbour, and find him within six months changed into a preferred, cunning courtier’.
It was already, clear, however, that frequent elections by themselves could not guarantee the health of the body politic. The evidence of hearings on election petitions reinforced Members’ own perceptions of the maladies of the electoral system. responding to what was seen as the exercise of improper influence, the Commons passed resolutions denouncing the involvement of peers in elections, and an Act of 1690 (2 Gul. et Mar. c. 7) outlawing the practice whereby one Member in each of the Cinque Ports was nominated by the lord warden. More general problems, the prevalence of malpractice, corruption, and outright bribery, prompted a battery of legislative proposals, some of which succeeded in reaching the statute book. They covered two broad areas: partisanship on the part of returning officers and other electoral officials; and the procurement of votes by improper means.
The conduct of returning officers was regulated by two statutes of 1696, the Act to Prevent False and Double Returns (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 7), and the Elections Act (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25), which included provisions against malpractice by county sheriffs. They followed three unsuccessful bills to the same purpose, debated in the Commons in 1690, 1691, and 1693.
Votes could be corruptly procured by various means. The most obvious, bribery and entertainment, were directly legislated against in the Act of 1696 to Prevent Charges and Expense at Elections (the ‘Treating Act,’ 7 & 8 Gul. III, c.4), which specifically forbade the payment of money for votes, and the provision of food and drink to electors ‘after the teste of the writ of summons to Parliament ... or the issuing out ... of the writ of election’. It was soon obvious that this measure would not work. Some candidates tried to stay within the law and either refused to spend money, or made sure that it was spent before the writs were issued.
Discoursing this week with some men about this bribing, they said it was not a time so nearly to sift into those affairs, that it did take up too much of their time from more weighty concerns. I replied that they could not spend their time better than to examine and punish such a vile practice, that did and would destroy the very constitution of our government ... a short bill should be brought in which should declare all persons guilty of bribery, or being bribed, that should presume to sit in the House of Commons, betrayers of the liberties of England, and that they should suffer as traitors without any possibility of pardon if they did not forthwith leave the House, and that in the same bill they should be forever incapacitated to serve in Parliament, or to have, hold, or possess, any office, place of honour, or trust in His Majesty’s dominions. This notion has been told some of the Members and is approved of. What it will do I know not, but it such a bill do pass it will purge this present House and cure the disease for the future ...
It seems unlikely that such an extreme measure was ever seriously placed before the Commons, but a bill ‘to prevent bribery and corruption at elections’ was introduced and lost in the 1701 Parliament, and further unsuccessful attempts were made to secure strengthening legislation in 1702, 1708, 1709, 1710, and 1711.
The 1708 bill, which in fact responded to a wide range of electoral abuses and not simply bribery and treating, also tackled corruption in an indirect way, by proposing to remodel the borough franchise in order to exclude those in receipt of alms from voting in any constituency.
that in all cities and boroughs ... all inhabitants paying to church or poor, or either of them, shall have a vote, and none else, and that all elections be determined by the poll; that all votes be taken by order as they stand in the church rates, and so in the poor rates, and the same persons as have right to vote shall annually choose the officer in like manner that shall make the return.
Som. RO, DD/SF 3078, 3842.
If the economic independence of the electorate could not be guaranteed, an alternative was to try to improve the moral fibre of the candidates, and in particular to exclude those carpet-bagging financiers and merchants who put temptation in the way of the voter. This (as much as any genteel distaste for the ‘moneyed interest’ as such) was the rationale behind a series of legislative attempts to impose a property qualification on Members of Parliament, beginning with Sir William Williams’s elections bill of 1696, which included clauses requiring that candidates in shire elections possess at least £500 p.a. in real estate within the county in which they were standing, and candidates in boroughs at least £200 p.a.
Members of Parliament also took a close and disapproving interest in the practice of manufacturing votes, by trust conveyances and the division of freeholds or burgages. Clauses appeared in the 1696 Elections Act (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25) to regulate the use of trusts and mortgages to establish voting rights in counties, and to prevent temporary conveyances of property for electoral purposes. A general regulatory bill of 1708, which did not reach the statute book, included further measures against trusts and temporary conveyances, and, for the first time a provision aimed specifically at burgage-splitting.
It would be misleading, therefore, to depict the Commons in this period as complacent in constitutional affairs, and unconcerned about parliamentary reform. There were a number of reforming initiatives, some of which were realized in statute. But with rare exceptions these bills did not seek to innovate. Instead, their intention was fundamentally conservative; to safeguard a representative system hallowed by tradition but in danger of being undermined by new forms of political ‘corruption’, at the hands of unscrupulous governments and a predatory ‘moneyed interest’. Even the rare proposals for franchise reform or the redistribution of seats embodied a constitutional conservatism driven by a fear of the moral weakness of the needy, which restricted voting rights to those with sufficient property to render them independent.