Ashburton returned two burgesses to the Long Parliament after 233 years when the borough went unrepresented. Only twice had the place sent Members to Westminster before: in 1295 and 1407. HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Ashburton’. Its revival in 1640 as a parliamentary borough had little or nothing to do with any demand from within the town. Ashburton was a populous centre for tin mining and cloth production, lying on the edge of Dartmoor on the main road between Exeter and Plymouth. It was one of the four Devon stannary towns, but tin production was in long term decline in the district, so that the place was well on its way to the decline recorded epigrammatically by Celia Fiennes in 1698: ‘a poor little town and bad was the best inn’. Early Tours in Devon and Cornwall ed. R. Pearse Chope (Newton Abbot, 1967), 117. Fiennes was impressed by the poorness, too, of the roads; and by the forbidding surrounding landscape: ‘An army might be marching undiscovered by anybody, for when you are on those heights that show a vast country about, you cannot see one road’. Early Tours, 117-8. It was estimated in 1676 that there were 2,000 communicant members of the Church of England there, but no significant nonconformist presence. Compton Census, 287. The religious affiliations of Ashburton people were evidently more contested during the civil war period, and further back in the century the populace was considered untamed. In 1622 a church ale provoked ‘great disorder ... to the great dishonour of Almighty God, profanation of the Sabbath and the withdrawing of many well-disposed persons from good and godly exercises’. Quoted in M. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (Exeter, 1994), 218.
It was a borough not by charter, but by prescription, and its institutions of government were based on the parish, or town, and the manor. In the 1580s, the manor and the town were fairly evenly balanced in terms of tax yield and the distribution of those paying tax on lands or on goods. Devon Taxes, 103. Over 200 resident individuals paid the poor rate in 1639, and more than 50 others lived outside the parish but held lands there subject to the rate. Devon RO, 2141A/PO 2. The size of the town was apparent from the arrangements for the selection of four overseers of the poor, rather than the two one might encounter in most parishes. The names of the four wards of the town – West Street, East Street, North Street and the Manor – suggest not only the layout but also the significance of manorial regulation in a community that lacked a royal charter.
The freehold of manor and borough had rested in the crown between 1552 and the late 1620s. After 1628, the manors of Ashburton, Buckfastleigh, Bovey Tracey, Heathfield and Pilton were conveyed to a syndicate in the City of London for £9,927. The leading members of this group were Alderman Ralph Freeman and Alderman Robert Parkhurst, father of Sir Robert Parkhurst*. The syndicate enjoyed the right to continue the lease to their heirs and to nominees, and in 1640 the significant lessees were by inheritance Sir Robert Parkhurst and Sir George Sondes†, neither of whom were resident or took an active part in the affairs of the town. H.J. Hanham, ‘A tangle unfolded: the lordship of the manor and borough of Ashburton’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xciv. 446-8. Manorial courts were held in the names of Parkhurst and Sondes, and between 1634 and 1659 the steward was an Ashburton attorney, Jeffrey Sweetland. It has been argued that Parkhurst and Sondes were modernising their holdings by replacing copyholds with 99-year leases on three lives and were attempting to erode manorial customs that benefited widows of copyholders, with the effect that they gained enhanced control as landlords and built up powers of patronage. They also appointed the portreeve. Hanham, ‘A tangle unfolded’, 449.
None of this strategy by the proprietors of manor and town was evident in 1640. No writ for an election in Ashburton was included in the general issue of writs by the clerk of the crown for either of the 1640 Parliaments. The matter was raised in the committee of privileges in November 1640 by John Maynard, who sat for Totnes. The case for re-enfranchising both Ashburton and Honiton rested on a presentation of historical evidence. In Ashburton’s case only the previous return of MPs in 1295 was mentioned in Maynard’s report, but he included the additional evidence that the payment of tenths not fifteenths proved that both towns were lapsed boroughs. In the debate that followed, Maynard was supported in his call for restoration by George Peard, the Barnstaple burgess, and by Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, ever receptive to arguments from history. There seemed agreement that the parliamentary franchise had lapsed because both Devon towns had been ‘ground poor’, and they would not bear the cost of sending burgesses to Westminster. Equally there seemed agreement that service due to the commonwealth could not be forfeited by disuse. No debate seems to have taken place about the precise nature of the franchise in either case. Though well-reported by the diarists, the debate must have been brief and ended in agreement without a division that Ashburton and Honiton should once again send Members to Parliament (26 Nov.). Procs. LP i. 304, 306, 310, 315, 316.
On the same day, but in a debate on a disputed election at Tewkesbury, John Pym* articulated the view that in boroughs by prescription all the inhabitants enjoyed the franchise, and in the absence of any contrary evidence it must be assumed that this was the case in the election at Ashburton. Procs. LP i. 315. The hand of Pym has been detected in the move to recover the town as a parliamentary borough. It has been argued that Ashburton was re-enfranchised ‘because it was certain to return reliable supporters of Pym’, and because it complemented the removal of royalist monopolists from the Commons. H. J. Hanham, ‘Ashburton as a parliamentary borough’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xcviii, 211; D’Ewes (N), 68. In fact, Pym’s influence was less significant than a general scramble for borough seats in Devon during the elections for the Long Parliament, which continued after the Parliament had met. The two seats for knights of the shire were probably settled by arrangement, so that the same pair was returned at elections to both the Parliaments of 1640, but no such agreement could cover seats for the boroughs. The case of Sir Samuel Rolle illustrates this hunger for involvement in this Parliament. He was unsuccessful at the by-election for Bere Alston on 19 November, but was encouraged by the re-enfranchisement of three Devon boroughs. Rolle was determined to find a place in this Parliament, and entertained hopes that Lydford and Great Torrington might be accorded the same treatment as Honiton, Ashburton and Okehampton. Antony House, Carew-Pole BC24/2, f. 58. In this hope he was intending to rely on the advocacy of his brother, Henry Rolle†, recently created serjeant-at-law. Still looking for a seat in early March 1641, Sir Samuel remained hopeful of Lydford. In the event nothing came of the prospect that Lydford might join Ashburton and Honiton, and Rolle found a seat as knight for Devon after the death of Thomas Wise*. Antony House, Carew-Pole BC24/2, f. 69.
John Pym was part of an extensive kinship network of south western gentry in whose cultural outlook service in Parliament figured strongly. Motivating Rolle and others like John Bampfylde* was a fixation on the need for extensive political and religious reform, and Machiavellian scheming by Pym need not be invoked to explain the gentry’s interest. It has been stated that Thomas Ford of Ashburton would have been expected to take one of the Ashburton seats had he not died on 10 November 1640, but this assertion seems to rest simply on speculation about Ford’s status and proximity to the borough, not on any evidence about his political aspirations. Hanham, ‘Ashburton as a parliamentary borough’, 212. There has also been speculation that Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, may have exercised patronage at Ashburton. Keeler, Long Parliament, 42. Bedford’s influence was apparent elsewhere in the south Devon boroughs, Pym at Tavistock and Oliver St John at Totnes evidently owing their places to him. But a patronage link connection between Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, and Devon seats was in existence, because Northumberland’s secretary, Hugh Potter, demonstrably owed his seat at Plympton Erle to his master’s intervention. John Northcote, who took one of the seats at Ashburton, was also linked to Northumberland. The evidence for this lies in Northcote’s parliamentary diary for the last few months of 1640, which is bound in a volume with notes on earlier events in that year including contacts with the earl over the conflict in the north with the Scots. Northcote Note Bk. 118-22.
Aristocratic patronage need not be invoked to explain the election of Northcote and Sir Edmund Fowell at Ashburton. Northcote was a friend of Edward Seymour, the knight of the shire, whose family’s estates were centred on Berry Pomeroy near Totnes and whose interest could have helped Northcote to his seat. Devon RO, 3799-3, J. Bampfylde to E. Seymour, 9 Jan. 1641. Sir Edmund Fowell, the other Member returned, enjoyed extensive landed influence in the district, and was probably able to mobilise this to secure his own election. Answers to questions about the date of the by-election and the composition of the electorate are frustrated by the absence of the returned indenture. The election had taken place by 9 January 1641, when John Bampfylde wrote to Edward Seymour mentioning it. He referred to his son, John Bampfylde*, having ‘stayed the longer for your friend Northcote’s cause’. Devon RO, 3799-3, Bampfylde to Seymour, 9 Jan. 1641. Bampfylde was named to committees of the House on 19 December 1640 and 27 February 1641, so perhaps the interval and his father’s comment, taken together, suggest that he returned to Devon after 19 December for an election that took place at Ashburton between then and 9 January. The portreeve, appointed by the lords of the borough, was the returning officer. Hanham, ‘A tangle unfolded’, 449.
Both Fowell and Northcote took the side of Parliament through the civil war and retained their seats. In August 1645 at ‘Ashburne’, thought to be Ashburton, William Ford of Ilsington, at the head of a ‘clubman’ or unauthorized band in this case loyal to Parliament, captured 100 horse of Sir John Berkeley*, the royalist governor of Exeter. Perfect Passages no. 44 (20-26 Aug. 1645), 347 (E.262.51); Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality, 123. In January 1646, Sir Thomas Fairfax* and the New Model army cleared the royalists from the town, but by March 1647 Ashburton was in the grip of the ‘plague’, which continued to afflict the town at least until the autumn of the following year. J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 341 (E.348.1); Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 256, 275-6, 289. From 1647, the ‘rough-hewn people of Ashburton’ came under the puritan ministry of Alexander Grosse, whose ‘particular friend’ was Thomas Ceely, father of Christopher Ceely*. DWL, John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, 402, 410; PA, Main Pprs. 9 Dec. 1647. Grosse owed his appointment to the intervention of the county committee, and lent his name to the Presbyterian Joint-Testimonie of the Ministers of Devon (1648). Oxford DNB. Both Northcote and Fowell were completely out of sympathy with the political complexion of the Long Parliament by the autumn of 1648, and it is unlikely that either was in London when the army staged its coup early in December.
Ashburton was disenfranchised again under the Instrument of Government of 1653, and so the election of 10 January 1659 was only the second in its recent history as a parliamentary borough. The surviving indenture shows that 52 ‘burgesses’ elected Thomas Reynell and John Fowell. C219/46. Reynell had been a knight of the shire in the 1654 and 1656 Parliaments, but had taken a detached view of the protectorate. He was doubtless returned on his own interest in Ashburton. John Fowell was the eldest son of Sir Edmund Fowell, but played only a small part in the first Parliament to which he had been elected. The large number of ‘burgesses’ involved in this election, in a borough which still had no charter, shows that this was in effect a franchise of the inhabitants. In the elections for the Convention of 1660, Reynell was replaced by Sir William Courtenay of Powderham, who had emerged from private life in December 1659 to join the petition in favour of a recall of the Members secluded in December 1648 as a step towards free elections. Som. RO, DD Baker 9/3/3. The size and composition of the franchise at Ashburton appears to have remained broadly the same until it was defined in 1708.
