Preston was described in the 1670s as ‘a great, fair and well inhabited and frequented borough town’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 135. Situated at the centre of Lancashire, where several major routes crossed the River Ribble, it was the seat of government for the duchy of Lancaster and a focal point for county society. The town was also the commercial centre for a considerable area of northern Lancashire, stretching from the coastal plain – the Fylde – eastwards into the Pennine valleys. Its economy rested mainly on the processing of agricultural products, particularly the leather-related trades, and the wealth generated by its fairs and markets, which were ‘considerable for corn, all sorts of ... cattle, linen-cloth, all sorts of provisions and several other commodities in great plenty’. Blome, Britannia, 135; A. Crosby, Hist. of Preston Guild (Preston, 1991), 35, 45, 46; D. Hunt, Hist. of Preston (Lancaster, 2009), 15, 69. On the eve of the civil war, the town’s population stood at about 1,500, with a further 1,650 or so inhabitants in the surrounding parish. H. Fishwick, Hist. of the Par. of Preston (Rochdale, 1900), 425-7, 432-4; Hunt, Preston, 63.
Preston was governed by a corporation comprising a mayor, two bailiffs and a common council consisting of 12 ‘principal burgesses’ (or aldermen) and 12 other ‘capital burgesses’. The mayor and one of bailiffs were elected annually by 24 of ‘the more worthy and discreet inhabitants’, who were themselves elected by two inhabitants who had been chosen by the mayor and capital burgesses. The new mayor appointed the second bailiff, who also served on an annual basis. Although not stipulated in the town’s charters, the convention by the early seventeenth century was apparently for the mayor to be ‘elected’ on a seniority basis from among the aldermen. J.D. Lingard, Charters Granted to the Burgesses of Preston (Preston, 1821), 16, 19, 21-2, 24-5; W.A. Abram, Mems. of the Preston Guilds (Preston, 1882), 25, 34; HP Commons, 1509-58 ‘Preston’.
The corporation’s officers were responsible for governing the town’s ‘guild merchant’ – that is, the institution regulating admission to the freeman body. Every 20 years there would be a guild festival lasting several days at which all freemen were enrolled as guild members. VCH Lancs. vii. 73-4; Crosby, Preston Guild, 16, 27, 29-30. In 1642, there were nearly 800 ‘in-burgesses’ – either resident freemen or their descendants – enrolled, almost 1,000 honorary ‘out-burgesses’ (who included many of the local gentry), and 156 townsmen who had recently acquired their freedom by purchase. Preston Guild Rolls ed. W.A. Abram (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. ix), xxxiii; Crosby, Preston Guild, 21, 23. Preston had first sent Members to Parliament in 1295, and the franchise, although originally vested in the resident in-burgesses, was exercised in practice by the corporation. VCH Lancs. vii. 72; Crosby, Preston Guild, 30; HP Commons 1509-58. The returning officers appear to have been the mayor and the two bailiffs. C219/42/2/141.
The borough’s principal electoral patron during the Jacobean and early Caroline Parliaments had been the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, who had sometimes nominated carpetbaggers to both seats. HP Commons 1604-29; R.C.L. Sgroi, ‘The electoral patronage of the duchy of Lancaster, 1604-28’, PH xxvi. 327. This custom appears to have been overturned in the elections to the Short Parliament, however, which saw the return on 23 March 1640 of Richard Shuttleworthe I and Thomas Standish. C219/42/2/141. Both men were prominent Lancashire gentry, both were firm Protestants and both had been out-burgesses for a minimum of 18 years. Neither appears to have been intimately connected with the administration of the duchy of Lancaster. On the other hand, the bulk of their estates lay about ten miles to the south of Preston, and it is therefore unlikely that they possessed a strong proprietoral interest in the borough. Standish may have enjoyed the backing of James Stanley†, Lord Strange (the future 7th earl of Derby), whose family had been parliamentary patrons of the borough in the sixteenth century. However, it is likely that both men owed their return primarily to the strength of their standing as Lancashire magistrates and their connections with other locally-influential gentry families. Infra, ‘Richard Shuttleworthe I’; ‘Thomas Standish’. The election indenture has survived, but is uninformative. C219/42/2/141.
Shuttleworthe and Standish were returned for the borough again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, but the indenture has been lost. Standish died in October 1642, and Shuttleworthe emerged as one of Lancashire’s leading parliamentarians. Preston itself changed hands on numerous occasions during the civil war. Garrisoned for the king by the earl of Derby and Sir Gilbert Hoghton* late in 1642, it was captured by the parliamentarians in February 1643, retaken by the royalists in March, seized for a second time by the parliamentarians in April and then briefly held by Prince Rupert in June 1644. Warr in Lancs. 16-17, 23, 29-30; VCH Lancs. vii. 75-6; Hunt, Preston, 99, 102. The majority of the inhabitants seem to have shared the royalist sympathies of the surrounding – and strongly Catholic – region. But puritanism had enjoyed a strong following among the town’s leading inhabitants since at least the 1620s, and the corporation evidently contained men who favoured the parliamentarian cause. Warr in Lancs. 29; VCH Lancs. vii. 75; Fishwick, Preston, 181-3; Hunt, Preston, 97; R.C. Richardson, ‘Puritanism in the Diocese of Chester to 1642’ (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis, 1968), 107-9.
On 14 October 1645, the Commons ordered that a writ be issued to elect a Member for Preston in place of the deceased Thomas Standish. CJ iv. 308a. In the resulting ‘recruiter’ election on 23 December 1645, the town returned the head of one of its leading families, William Langton. According to the indenture, which was signed by only the mayor and the bailiffs, Langton was elected ‘with the full and whole assents and consents of all the burgesses and commonalty of the borough’. Infra, ‘William Langton’; C219/43/2/18. It is not entirely clear whether Shuttleworthe and Langton were among those MPs secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, but it is certain that neither sat in the Rump. Infra, ‘William Langton’; ‘Richard Shuttleworthe I’.
Preston lost one of its parliamentary seats under the Instrument of Government, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 it returned Shuttleworthe. The indenture has not survived. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament, the town again returned Shuttleworthe; the indenture – dated 27 August 1656 – was signed by about 20 of the burgesses. C219/45, unfol. Preston regained its second seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, and on 12 January the borough returned Shuttleworthe and Thomas Standish’s son Richard. Lancs. RO, DDX 123/57.
In the elections to the 1660 Convention, the borough returned Standish and another puritan, only to have the freemen petition the Commons against the result on the grounds that the mayor had refused a poll. The return was duly quashed, and the borough then returned two men who were keen to ingratiate themselves with Lancashire’s leading royalist, Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby. In response to a petition from the town’s anti-puritan faction, the crown purged the corporation in 1661 and issued the borough with a new charter. Following a double return for Preston in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament, the Commons resolved that all the town’s inhabitants ‘had voices in the election’; and although the corporation took this to refer to the resident in-burgesses and not to the inhabitants generally, its exclusive exercise of the franchise was broken. Crosby, Preston Guild, 30-1; HP Commons 1660-90; B. Coward, ‘The social and political position of the earls of Derby in later seventeenth-century Lancs.’, in Seventeenth-Century Lancs. ed. J.I. Kermode, C.B. Phillips, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxxii. 141-2; P.D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic (Cambridge, 1998), 3-4, 79, 98; M. Mullett, ‘‘To dwell together in unity’’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxv. 62-6.
