Mid-seventeenth century Totnes was a town in decline. It had failed before 1640 to capitalize on the opportunity to modernize its industrial capacity represented by the rise of the so-called ‘new draperies’, the lighter cloths exported by other Devon towns in preference to the traditional heavy Devon broadcloths. In 1676, Totnes was said to have a population of 1,950, in comparison with more than 3,000 thought to be living in the three parishes that made up Dartmouth. Compton Census, 280. With the silting up of the Dart, Totnes merchants utilized the harbour of Dartmouth, eight miles below the town, for most of their business, as the Dartmouth port books make clear. A leading Totnes merchant such as Christopher Maynard* imported grain and specialized French fabrics in quantities that made him the equal of his colleagues, or rivals, domiciled at Dartmouth. E190/952/3. In the eyes of Totnes merchants, their borough was a town ‘of great and free trading into all parts for woollen drapery and other inland commodities’. PA, Main Pprs. 25 Jan. 1642.
The castle of Totnes was in decay at this time, a crumbling symbol of the town’s downward progress, but the barony was in the hands of the Seymours of Berry Pomeroy, three miles away. W. Cotton, Graphic and Historical Sketch of the Antiquities of Totnes (1850), 26. They seem not to have exercised any electoral influence, for themselves or others, that this proprietorship may have given them. The governance of the borough derived from a charter of 1596, and consisted of a mayor and burgesses, a recorder. Mayor, recorder and the last mayor to serve in office were the three town magistrates. There was a council consisting of 14 or more of the most substantial burgesses, and known as the ‘masters and councillors’. Town ordinances were made by the mayor, 14 councillors and 20 burgesses. This latter group was called the ‘twenty-men’. The phrase ‘mayor and burgesses’ which is found on the election indentures for March 1640, July 1654 and December 1658 meant in this period the mayor, the masters and councillors and the twenty-men. Cotton, Graphic and Historical Sketch, 9, 10, 91, 94, 95.
The election of Oliver St John, a complete outsider, to the first of the borough’s two seats in the elections of 1640 has to be attributed to the patronage of Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, in whose household St John served as steward. His colleague in the second seat, John Maynard, was a Middle Temple lawyer with plenty of influence in Devon: through family origins in the South Hams, through his father, who was probably the county’s leading barrister, and specifically in Totnes through links with his kinsman, Christopher Maynard. It is an exaggeration to describe John Maynard as ‘closely related’ to Christopher, but the relationship was close enough to be meaningful, and Bedford’s influence need not be invoked to explain the election. P. Russell, The Good Town of Totnes (Exeter, 1964), 65. The election appears to have been uncontested, and the indenture provides no indication as to how many electors participated on 3 March. C219/42/1A. The combination of St John, made solicitor-general in 1641 during the reforms imposed on the king in which Bedford was an early prime mover, proved durable. Maynard endured through the Long Parliament, only to fall foul of the army in the purge of December 1648, and St John lasted until the Rump was expelled in April 1653.
Christopher Maynard was one of the burgesses who petitioned Devon quarter sessions in January 1642 with a comprehensive catalogue of grievances. They attributed the decline in their trade to competition from trading companies such as the Spanish and French Companies of London, to whom they had to pay ‘intolerable taxes and burthens’, even though trade with France and Spain was their main business, since domestic trading was in sharp downturn. The burgesses complained of the royal monopoly over the tin industry, of the Book of Rates – which they considered imposed customs duties on a scale they found oppressive – and of the depredations of Turkish pirates. They also reckoned that the scale of the ‘decay of trade’ could be assessed at a sum greater than £15,000, lost to them since the slump. Almost as an unrelated addendum the townsmen also listed the plots of papists, the persecutions of bishops and lax enforcement of the recusancy laws, the unrestrained mayhem of the Irish rebels, and other unspecified conspiracies. It is clear that in the minds of the Totnesians, the general crisis of 1640-2 was inseparable from the crisis afflicting the economic life of their community, but the well-rehearsed content of some of these complaints should be noted: Totnes merchants had first complained of the French Company to the privy council in 1613. Main Pprs. 25 Jan. 1642; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Totnes’.
During the civil war, Totnes was a divided town. In 1643 the townspeople refused to co-operate with a royalist troop in pursuit of parliamentarians, and sent soldiers to Parliament’s garrison at Plymouth. M. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (Exeter, 1994), 46. In 1644, the hinterland of the South Hams proved a thorn in the flesh of Edward Seymour’s* garrison at Dartmouth, and a number of Totnes people left the town when it came firmly under royalist control. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality, 48; Devon RO, 1579A/17/33. Among these was the puritan minister John Garrett, who fled to Somerset, to return after Parliament’s victory in 1646. Devon RO, 1579A/17/33; Calamy Revised, 218. But in December 1644, the sum of £239 was collected from the inhabitants for the king’s use by Lord Hopton, Sir Ralph Hopton*, indicating that by then the majority were prepared to submit to royalist rule. Devon RO, 1579A/17/30. The town maintained links with the world beyond Devon, doubtless by sea routes. Thus, money was contributed in 1644 towards a parish brief from Kent, and in 1645, the corporation was still sufficiently well-disposed towards its MP, John Maynard, to elect him recorder. Devon RO, 1579A/7/1/47. Christopher Maynard*, the recorder’s kinsman, was probably typical of the townsmen in his successful avoidance of any firm adherence to either side in the civil war. In January 1646, 3,000 men responded to the invitation by Sir Thomas Fairfax* to assemble at Totnes in support of Parliament. Moderate Intelligencer no. 48 (29 Jan.-4 Feb. 1646), 280 (E. 320.11).
Not until 1654 was a fresh parliamentary election held in Totnes. The Instrument of Government had reduced the representation of the borough to one seat. In the indenture returning John Disbrowe, elected on 10 July 1654, he was described as one of the gernerals-at-sea, but his local standing derived from his other post, that of major-general of the south west, a role he had kept since 1649. The names of 31 burgesses appear on the indenture, suggesting in electoral terms an elastic definition of burgess-ship. C219/44. Disbrowe was undoubtedly elected on his merits as an important state personage, but in 1656, an election which elsewhere saw the major-generals and their allies working hard to find seats, the townsmen seem to have changed tack, and sent to Westminster one of their own, the mayor and leading civic figure, Christopher Maynard. When the Humble Petition and Advice restored the traditional electoral arrangements in time for the election held at Totnes in December 1658 for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, two townsmen were again returned, with 44 burgesses lending their names to the indenture. C219/46. Seventeen of the electors of 1654 were among the 44.
