Early Stuart Northampton was notable for its extensive town walls and as a bastion of puritan resistance to royal policies. At the heart of the town’s large godly community by 1640 was the combative figure of Thomas Ball, the stridently Calvinist vicar of the principal civic parish of All Saints (patron: Northampton corporation), which was described as the most ‘scornful’ towards Laudian church ceremonies of any in England. CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 278; 1637-8, p. 535; 1640-1, pp. 109, 351-2; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 391-7, 435-7; Diary of Robert Woodford ed. J. Fielding (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xlii), 81, 83; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Ball’; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the church courts: the diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 20-1, 97, 147, 148-50, 191, 207-8. The town’s wealth derived primarily from its role as the county’s administrative centre, the working of cloth and leather – tailors, tanners and, by the mid-seventeenth century, shoemakers being the most important trades – and its market, which was ‘very great for cattle, corn and provisions, as also for leather and shoes’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 175; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 275; VCH Northants. ii. 317-8; iii. 28-9. According to the 1670 hearth tax returns, Northampton contained approximately 1,100 households, suggesting a population of nearly 5,000 people. E179/157/446, mm. 65-8.
Northampton was governed by a corporation consisting of a mayor, two bailiffs, the aldermen or ex-mayors (usually numbering about 12), the ex-bailiffs or the ‘twenty-four’, and the ‘forty-eight’ or the ‘burgesses’. The mayor and bailiffs were elected annually by the entire corporation, but admission to the forty-eight was determined by the mayor and aldermen. Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 17-18; VCH Northants. iii. 9. Northampton had first sent Members to Parliament in 1283, and by the early Stuart period the franchise was vested in the corporation. Northampton Bor. Recs. i. 25; VCH Northants. iii. 17. The pattern in parliamentary elections since the Elizabethan period had been for the corporation to return the town recorder and to yield the second place to a member of the local gentry. VCH Northants. iii. 17; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Northampton’. Elections were usually held in the guildhall, which is where the corporation met. VCH Northants. iii. 7.
In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, a ‘full assembly’ of the corporation, meeting on 26 March, returned two godly local gentlemen: Zouche Tate and Richard Knightley. Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 56; C219/42/1/158; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 496. The corporation’s decision to break with the tradition of choosing the town’s recorder for one of the places may have been influenced by concerns that the man who then occupied that office – the prominent future royalist Richard Lane – was not likely to champion the reformist cause at Westminster. Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 105-6; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Richard Lane’. According to an eighteenth century chronicle of the town’s affairs, Tate was returned without ‘making any interest and without his knowledge till after the election’, when the mayor and aldermen went to his house at Delapré Abbey to inform him that he had been ‘unanimously elected ... which at first he modestly refused, but after some time, upon their request, did accept of it’. Bodl. Top. Northants. c.9, p. 93. Neither Tate nor Knightley enjoyed any notable proprietorial interest in the borough, and it seems that they owed their election primarily to their credentials as leading figures in the county’s puritan-led opposition to royal policies. Infra, ‘Richard Knightley’; ‘Zouche Tate’. On 18 April, Knightley presented a petition to the Commons from the town to the same effect as a petition from the county presented the previous day (17 April) protesting against Laudian religious innovations, Ship Money and other ‘undue impositions’ and calling for annual Parliaments. CJ ii. 6a; Aston’s Diary, 12; Procs. Short Parl. 158, 275.
The second bishops’ war in the summer of 1640 deepened the division within the corporation between the godly faction and the minority of officeholders that supported the policies of the personal rule of Charles I. In the municipal elections that August, the godly faction succeeded in installing a mayor and bailiffs to its liking, but in the teeth of strong opposition from the ‘adverse’ party – a contest that may have stirred resentment towards the corporation among the freeman body. On 26 October, at another ‘full assembly’ of the corporation, the ‘greater number’ of the officeholders returned Tate and Knightley to represent the town in the Long Parliament. Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 60; FH3501; C219/43/2/73. But this time some 200 or so of the freemen were determined to challenge the corporation’s choice of Members on the grounds that – in the words of their subsequent petition to the Commons – the election of burgesses for the borough ‘doth of right belong to the mayor, aldermen and the freemen ... as by many returns of election ... remaining upon record doth appear’. Gathering outside the guildhall on election day, but denied admittance by the corporation, this group of freemen held its own election in which Tate was likewise chosen, but Knightley was rejected in favour of another local gentleman, John Bernard†. Angered by this act of presumption, the mayor had one of the freemen voters imprisoned, ‘to the terrifying ... and disheartening’ of his fellows, 200 of whom, ‘at the least, were denied their voices and excluded from that election ... by the sinister carriage’ of the mayor. Northants. RO, FH3501; Woodford Diary ed. Fielding, 84-5, 359, 360, 373-4.
To what extent this electoral dispute was an extension of, or cut across, the division within the corporation between the godly faction and its opponents is not clear. Bernard’s brother was sympathetic to ‘Arminianism’, but he himself – although labelled by various authorities as either a royalist or neutralist in the civil war – would be named to successive parliamentary commissions for Northamptonshire during the 1640s. Woodford Diary ed. Fielding, 169, 274; S.C. Osborne, ‘Popular religion, culture and politics in the Midlands, c.1638-1646’ (Warwick Univ. PhD thesis, 1993), 83; A. and O. i. 50, 93, 115, 150, 233, 547, 620, 636, 970, 1088, 1240; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir John Bernard’. Moreover, the first of the 90 or so signatories to the freemen’s petition to the Commons was apparently a man of godly convictions. Northants. RO, FH3501; Woodford Diary ed. Fielding, 151. On 6 January 1641, the House resolved, upon the question, that Tate and Knightley be allowed to sit on a provisional basis in line with a vote taken in the committee of privileges after consideration of the two election indentures received from Northampton – neither of which had been sealed by the mayor – but ‘without examination of the right of election’. CJ ii. 63b; Procs. LP ii. 124. This would be the first and last action that the Commons took in relation to the disputed election at Northampton, thereby handing victory to Tate and Knightley and confirming the town’s restricted franchise, by default.
Tate and Knightley sided with Parliament during the civil war, while Northampton itself became a major parliamentarian garrison and source of military resources. Osborne, ‘Popular religion’, 176, 181, 258-9, 290, 312, 322. In the summer of 1642, for example, the town’s shoemakers received an order from Westminster for 4,000 (in one source, 8,000) pairs of shoes for the Protestant forces in Ireland. PJ ii. 448, 452; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 294-5. Although the royalists occasionally plundered to the very walls of Northampton during the civil war, the town remained secure behind its defences until May 1649, when it was briefly occupied by Leveller army mutineers. Osborne, ‘Popular religion’, 195; Bodl. Top. Northants. c.9, p. 105; I.J. Gentles, The New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), 346. Tate and Knightley were both excluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving the town without formal representation in the Rump and thus requiring the regular dispatch of municipal delegations to London to defend the town’s interests at Westminster and Whitehall. Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, pp. 108, 111, 118, 121, 122. In the autumn of 1649, some of the municipal officeholders and ‘well-affected’ of Northampton petitioned the Rump, requesting amendment of the town’s charter ‘as will further enable us to do you service’. The petitioners praised the Rump for its ‘faithfulness and indefatigableness for the establishing of religion and the good of the commonwealth’ and expressed approval of ‘the government as it is now established without king and House of Lords’. The Commons set up a committee on 22 November to consider this petition; but a few months later the corporation sent a delegation to lobby the committee for corporations to prevent any alteration to the charter, insisting that ‘the vote of the greatest part of this assembly is against it’. CJ vi. 324b; Northants. RO, FH3506; Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 108.
The 1653 Instrument of Government reduced Northampton’s representation to one Member; and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, the corporation returned the leading godly officeholder, Alderman Peter Whalley. Although the corporation elected Whalley on 26 June, the election indenture was not signed and sealed until 3 July. Fifty-six of the ‘burgesses and inhabitants’ were named as parties to the indenture, and approximately the same number signed it. Infra, ‘Peter Whalley’; Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 128; C219/44/2, unfol. Whalley would doubtless have been the corporation’s choice to represent the town in the second protectoral Parliament had he not died in April 1656. In his place, the corporation ‘unanimously’ elected the town’s deputy recorder Francis Hervey on 24 July 1656 – although, once again, the indenture was signed (by at least 50 of the ‘burgesses and inhabitants’) over a week later, on 1 August. Infra, ‘Francis Hervey’; Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 137; C219/45, unfol.
Having regained its two seats for the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Northampton returned Hervey and James Langham on 7 January, when the indenture – featuring 56 signatures – was also dated. Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 147; C219/46, unfol. Langham, who had sat for the county in the previous Parliament, probably owed his election to his father’s donation of £600 to the town for the maintenance of poor widows. Infra, ‘James Langham’; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 342, 345, 361. As a result of a series of disputed parliamentary elections at Northampton during the early 1660s, the Commons widened the franchise to include every townsman not in receipt of alms. HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Northampton’; In 1662 the town’s walls were demolished by way of punishment for its puritan defiance of Charles I; and the corporation commissioners removed 57 of the officeholders, including the mayor-elect and eight of the aldermen. Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, pp. 167-70, 180; Bodl. Top. Northants. c.9, pp. 112-13.
