With a population of around 7,000 in the seventeenth century, Coventry was in the second rank of provincial English cities. In size, it dominated Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and rivalled Worcester; but because of its grievous decline since the 1520s, when it was the fourth largest city in England, it was regarded by its own leading citizens as suffering from chronic ‘decay of trading’. A. Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 12. Under the 1621 charter, the government of the city was provided by a mayor (recruited from among former sheriffs or bailiffs) and his council, supported by a second council of 25. Membership of the second council was restricted to former city office-holders, and vacancies were filled by the mayor and the first council. There were ten aldermen, who wielded the ‘real power in the counsels of the city’. VCH Warws. viii. 265. This structure was more closed than the constitutions of many small English towns and had led to conflict in the earlier part of the century between the freemen and the mayor and council. In the 1628 election, a contest involving 600 freemen voters had ended with the selection of two local gentry, William Purefoy I* and Richard Greene†. The pattern of electoral politics in the 1640s and 50s suggests that the oligarchy had resumed control. With the possible exception of a petition to the Commons in 1641, no popular involvement in the city’s choice of MPs is detectable: the franchise was restricted to the mayor, aldermen and first councillors. Nor are there even any hints, in the city’s very full archive, of disputes within the oligarchy on the subject of who should select MPs, or over the Members themselves.
More apparent are indications that Coventry was indeed facing economic difficulties. There were at least 18 trading companies in the city in 1614, but by 1640 their large number was no indication of prosperity. Coventry Archives, BA/D/BL/1/1, f. 45. The economic problems of the city lay in the commercial pressures under which Coventry’s cloth traders felt themselves to be operating. From the 1620s, a dispute between the companies of weavers and drapers festered for over a decade, and at its heart lay monopoly rights to the city’s clothing industry. The weavers accused the drapers of allowing Gloucester cloth to be stretched to the length of Coventry pieces, and both companies sought help from patrons outside the city. Sir Robert Heath† and the earl of Dorset were among those who were courted by one side or the other in the argument. Coventry Archives, PA 100/12. While the weavers’ case rested on a claim to a monopoly, the drapers argued that the use of Gloucester cloth was a means of addressing the issue of poor quality in the Coventry weavers’ product. At least one of the city’s MPs, John Barker, was involved in this dispute, as a draper; another, William Jesson, was drawn into the internecine feud during his year as mayor. Coventry Archives, PA 100/12/35; ‘John Barker’, infra. Beyond the cloth trade, industrial activity in other sectors was no more promising. In 1636, the courtier Endymion Porter* sought to extricate himself from a lease of the city’s collieries, which proved to be unrewarding. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/159, 162.
In fiscal terms, too, the perception that Coventry was a city in decline was manifest in a long-running dispute between the corporation and successive sheriffs of Warwickshire to secure its independence from the shire in matters of taxation. Particularly during the Ship Money levies of the 1630s, the city fathers fought a campaign to confirm that Coventry was to be rated for national taxes at one-fifteenth of Warwickshire, rather than one-eighth, the preferred rate of the county sheriff. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, f. 1. Among the leaders of this campaign, written up by city clerk, Henry Burton, in a dedicated volume among the city records, were men who served as MPs for the city in the 1640s: John Barker, Simon Norton and William Jesson. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, ff. 8v, 12v, 13v.As with the cloth trade dispute, Coventrians sought help from exalted patrons on their tax problems: in 1635, Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†), their recorder, received two delegations including Barker - Jesson was excused through ill health - at Canonbury, Middlesex, and Barker was among those acknowledging the lord keeper’s ‘noble favours’ to the city. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, ff. 15, 18, 22v, 23v; BA/A/A/26/3, p. 26. The delegates explicitly linked their tax grievance with the decay of trade, untenanted shops and depopulation. Lord Privy Seal Henry Montagu†, 1st earl of Manchester, was sceptical: Coventry was a place of ‘great trading’, enjoying ‘the benefit of travellers ... a great thorough fare town, the great revenues belonging to the chamber of the city, the benefit of great commons’. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, ff. 18v, 26. The undoubted fact of social conflict in the city seemed more to support the case of the petitioners: Coventry annalists recorded enclosure riots in 1628 and 1639. Add. 11364, ff. 15v, 16.
The messenger who brought the writs to Coventry for elections to the two Parliaments of 1640 was paid by the corporation 8s in March and 5s in October. Coventry Archives, BA/A/A/26/3, p. 76. After his ‘noble favours’ to the city on their Ship Money problems, Lord Keeper Coventry requested on 17 December 1639 that the mayor and council should look favourably on his son-in-law, Henry Frederick Thynne, for a seat in the Short Parliament. Thynne came recommended as ‘a gentleman of such judgment and integrity as I am confident will very faithfully discharge the duty of that place’. In return for his election, the lord keeper promised to ‘requite in performing to you and your town the best offices in my power.’ Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/190; Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society, 117. Had Coventry still been lord keeper on 31 March 1640, when the election took place, his candidate might possibly have met with success, but within a month of writing his letter to the corporation, Lord Keeper Coventry was dead, and in the event the city returned two of its own leading citizens to the Commons. C219/42/2/51. Jesson and Norton had been active in city campaigns over trade and taxes during the 1630s, were both aldermen and were thoroughly unsurprising choices. They embodied the spirit of independence which marked Coventry’s relations with the wider body politic; for example, in the case of the city’s rebuff to the lord lieutenant, the 2nd earl of Northampton (Spencer Compton†), who wanted to muster its troops beyond the city walls. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/165, 167.
In elections for the Long Parliament, the returns of Simon Norton and John Barker were a continuation of this pattern. Coventry’s Members volunteered £1,000 as security against a loan from the City of London to supply the army in the north: as much as the burgesses of any other town. Procs. LP, i. 228. The Coventry oligarchy was four-square behind the reforms of 1641, and church bells in the city were rung on 17 February to celebrate the king’s acceptance of the bill for triennial Parliaments. Coventry Archives, BA/A/A/26/3, p. 81. On 4 February, a petition arrived at the Commons from William Jesson and 14 other citizens, his witnesses. It was a rather late challenge to the outcome or conduct of the election the previous October. It was referred to the committee of privileges, but nothing further seems to have come of it. Procs. LP, ii. 360. When Norton died, Jesson in the event took his place, as an obvious alternative, at a by-election on 20 July. His departure for London in January 1642 was marked by a modest send-off party in the city chamber, perhaps a recognition that much was hanging on his performance at Westminster. Coventry Archives, BA/A/A/26/3, p. 100. While the corporation was prepared to entertain the earl of Northampton in April 1642, in a show of normality, it was more enthusiastic in its reception of the 2nd Baron Brooke (Robert Greville†). In August 1642, £200 was borrowed from Serjeant John Wightwick† in case the king came to the city, but when Charles summoned city leaders to him at Nottingham, ‘some that favoured the Parliament compelled them to stay at home’. Add. 11364, f. 16v. Nearly 1,200 citizens turned out in favour of the parliamentarian Lord Brooke; the earl of Northampton’s attempt to recruit in Coventry ended ignominiously when he was force to leave the city by the back door of the Black Bull. The king’s cause had its supporters, however; competing aldermen gave out ribbons to the opposing factions, while ‘neighbours were in great fear of each other’. On 1 October Wightwick’s loan was diverted into the war chest established to defend the city. By the 19th, Coventry was safe for Brooke and for Parliament. A council of war headed by John Barker placed Coventry on a war footing, built up an arsenal, and sought funding from Parliament for defence preparations. Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, ff. 30, 31, 34, 34v; Add. 11364, ff. 16v, 17.
Coventry became the headquarters of the Warwickshire county committee, a vehicle for a radical godly faction which after Brooke’s death early in 1643 found itself frequently at odds with the county gentry and with the senior military commander for Parliament, the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding). Among the dominant figures in the committee were Barker, as governor; Thomas Willughby*, George Abbot II* and his step-father, William Purefoy I. Add. 11364, f. 17v; Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, f. 35v. The city’s representation in the Commons remained stable throughout the civil war. Threats of sieges by the royalists came to nothing, but the lives of the citizens were made uncomfortable by the influx of country people seeking refuge – a city annalist reckoned the population was swollen to 9,500 – and by the many nocturnal alarms sounded by the governor. On one occasion, the women of the city filled in quarries to prevent royalist troops from sheltering in them. Add. 11364, f. 18. In 1645, the logic of provisional government organisation was followed through when Barker became both mayor and governor, wearing ‘a sword and buff coat under his gown’. Nevertheless, some older disputes persisted. Coventry’s MPs revived the city’s claims to fiscal independence from Warwickshire, and in their accustomed spirit of suspicion of outsiders sought to rid themselves of the military garrison. By April 1647, Jesson was reporting back to the mayor on the Coventrians’ delegation to the Commons to wind up the garrison and restore the militia to the freemen citizens. The delegates resisted appeals to allow Warwickshire deputy lieutenants to supervise their militia, and Jesson found even more unreasonable a demand that the chamber should disenfranchise council members who had supported the king at the outset of war. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/214. In February 1648, Barker and Jesson were still pursuing their claims for separate assessment from Warwickshire, and did nothing to endear themselves to the Independents and the New Model army. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/ 212, 216. Their hostility to the army, except in its guise as a local militia, cost them their seats at Pride’s Purge, although Barker quickly made his peace with the Rump. From December 1650, he and Purefoy managed to reduce the burden of taxation on the city from one-seventh to one-twelfth. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, f. 78.
Under the commonwealth, Coventry drew nearer to its former MP and committeeman, William Purefoy I, who helped the city secure valuable fee farm rents confiscated from the crown; took the city’s side in its perennial dispute with Warwickshire over their relative tax burdens, and secured a measure to promote a preaching ministry in the city. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/221, 224b, 227; CJ vi. 330a, 458a, 551b. By 24 March 1652, he had succeeded the earl of Denbigh as recorder. Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, f. 103v. His election as MP for Coventry in the three Cromwellian Parliaments provided confirmation of his standing in the city. In August 1653, Purefoy declared himself ‘ready at all times to honour and respect the city to the farthest extent of his power’: in the 1654 elections, he chose Coventry when he was double-returned for Warwickshire as well. Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, f. 112. His colleague in every one of these Parliaments was Robert Beake, a former soldier and a protégé of his, who shared Purefoy’s distaste for sectarian religion. In the tradition of the city Members of the 1640s, Beake kept the Coventry chamber informed of his efforts at Westminster to promote local business: over the ownership and common rights of city parkland, for example, in 1656 and 1658. Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/230, 234; Add. 11364, f. 19v. The chamber explicitly recorded its request to Beake to strengthen parliamentary legislation to secure maintenance for Coventry’s ministers. Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, f. 124. He and Purefoy were successful in making a reality the city’s cherished aspiration of paying one-fifteenth of the tax bill of Warwickshire: throughout the 1650s, there were no expressions of hostility to either Purefoy or Beake traceable in either the chronicle of the annalist, or the city records. Coventry Archives, BA/H/K/2/1, f. 92. Whether the small number of councillors who lent their names to the election indenture in 1654 is evidence of an uncontentious selection or a further narrowing of the ruling oligarchy is hard to tell. C219/44/3. In December 1659, it was Beake who put himself at the head of a crowd who kept Coventry firm for Parliament against the army, but on 23 February 1660 the bells were rung at St Michael’s church for a free Parliament, and on 22 September the 3rd earl of Northampton, the former James, Lord Compton*, entered the city and soon organized the demolition of its defences. Add. 11364, f. 20; Coventry Archives, BA/A/A/26/3, p. 369.
