‘Commodiously seated on the goodly River Mersey, where it affords a bold and safe harbour for ships’, Liverpool was the region’s ‘chief port ... a place of great resort’ and one of the main embarkation points for trade and troops to Ireland. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 133-4; Liverpool Town Bks. 1649-71 ed. M. Power (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. cxxxvi), 26; R. Muir, Hist. of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1907), 103-4. The town’s economy rested mainly on the export of coal, salt and textiles from Lancashire and the surrounding counties and the import of foodstuffs (in particular herring) and livestock from Ireland. E190/1337/16; VCH Lancs. iv. 18; M. Power, ‘Cllrs. and commerce in Liverpool, 1650-1750’, Urban History, xxiv. 314; Power, ‘Politics and progress in Liverpool, 1660-1740’, NH xxxv. 119, 124; F. Lewis, ‘The Demographic and Occupational Structure of Liverpool: a Study of the Par. Regs. 1660-1750’ (Liverpool Univ. PhD thesis, 1993), 13-14. Liverpool also had ‘a very considerable market on Saturdays for all sorts of provisions and divers commodities’. Blome, Britannia, 134. According to the 1664 hearth tax returns, the town contained a little over 280 households, suggesting an overall population of between 1,200 and 1,500. E179/250/11, pt. 5; VCH Lancs. iv. 23; Lewis, ‘Demographic and Occupational Structure of Liverpool’, 7.
By its 1626 charter of incorporation, Liverpool was governed by a mayor and two bailiffs – who were elected annually by the freemen – assisted by a common council made up of roughly 12 aldermen (mostly former mayors) and 24 common councillors (mostly former bailiffs), all of whom served for life. In 1619, the number of common councillors had been fixed at 40, but in practice it seems to have fluctuated, falling below the prescribed number by 1642. VCH Lancs. iv. 19; R. Muir, E.M. Platt, Hist. of Municipal Govt. in Liverpool (Liverpool, 1906), 51, 82, 85, 87-8, 91-4; Chandler, Liverpool, 297. Liverpool had first sent Members to Parliament in 1295. VCH Lancs. iv. 5. The franchise was vested in the freemen – of whom there were 454 in 1645 – although the initiative in selecting parliamentary candidates lay with the corporation, especially since it controlled admission to the freeman body. The returning officers were the mayor and bailiffs. Chandler, Liverpool, 37, 329-33, 421.
Liverpool’s traditional electoral patrons were the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, the Stanley earls of Derby and the Molyneuxes of nearby Sefton Park. The Stanleys owned one of the town’s main strongholds, Liverpool Tower, and the Molyneuxes, besides being lessees of its fee farm rent, were hereditary constables of the royal castle. Chandler, Liverpool, 1-2; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Liverpool’. As the owner of Toxteth Park and the manor of West Derby, Sir Richard Molyneux II† (created Viscount Molyneux [I] in 1628) also had, or at least claimed, lordship over much of the town’s commons and surrounding wasteland, and he increased his influence in the area considerably in 1635 with his purchase of the manor of Liverpool, by which he acquired all the manorial and royal rights in the borough, including control of the town’s ferry, mills and markets. When he died the following year, the wardship of his son, the 2nd Viscount Molyneux, was granted to James Stanley†, Lord Strange, the future 7th earl of Derby, who was either unwilling or unable to restrain his ward from prosecuting the family’s claims against the borough. VCH Lancs. iv. 12; Muir, Platt, Liverpool, 94-5, 381; Chandler, Liverpool, 2, 4, 247, 363; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Liverpool’; ‘Sir Richard Molyneux II’; R.C.L. Sgroi, ‘The electoral patronage of the duchy of Lancaster, 1604-28’, PH xxvi. 316-18, 321, 324.
In the elections to the Short Parliament, Liverpool returned James Lord Cranfield and John Holcrofte on 19 March 1640. C219/42/2/142. The son of Sir Lionel Cranfield†, 1st earl of Middlesex, Lord Cranfield was a carpetbagger who almost certainly owed his election to the patronage of his father’s close friend Lord Newburgh (Sir Edward Barrett†), chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Cranfield was also returned for Bramber, Sussex but chose to sit for Liverpool. Infra, ‘James Lord Cranfield’; J.K. Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections (Columbus, 1981), 187. Although Holcrofte was at least a member of the Lancashire gentry, he, too, had no proprietorial interest in the town. What he did have, however, was the backing of his kinsman Thomas Stanley of Bickerstaffe, the town’s mayor for 1639-40, and perhaps also that of Lord Strange himself. Both the Holcrofts and the Stanleys of Bickerstaffe had long-standing links with the earls of Derby. Infra, ‘John Holcrofte’; Chandler, Liverpool, 266. The indenture was signed by at least ten of the freemen but is otherwise unrevealing. C219/42/2/142.
In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, the town returned Sir Richard Wynn and Alderman John Moore – probably in that order (the indenture has not survived). Wynn, a Welsh courtier, was also returned for the Lancashire constituency of Newton but plumped for Liverpool. Again, he was a carpetbagger who very probably relied on the good offices of Lord Newburgh to secure his election. Infra, ‘Sir Richard Wynn’; Gruenfelder, Early Stuart Elections, 187. By contrast, Moore was the scion of Liverpool’s leading gentry family the Moores of Bank Hall. He had joined the corporation in the early 1630s, served as mayor in 1632-3 and was returned on a combination of his own and the corporation’s interest. Infra, ‘John Moore’. Despite suggestions that the corporation’s fraught relations with the Molyneux – who were Catholics and would side with the king in the civil war – had pushed the townspeople and their MPs into ‘opposition’, in fact the government interest at Liverpool, exercised by Newburgh, had held up well in 1640, with the return of Cranfield and Wynn. VCH Lancs. iv. 20. Similarly, there is little evidence in the town’s electoral record of the strong puritan sympathies that supposedly animated a majority of its leading inhabitants. VCH Lancs. iv. 19-20; Muir, Hist. of Liverpool, 109-12. Of the four men returned for Liverpool in 1640, only Moore showed much interest in the cause of further reformation in religion.
Both Moore and Wynn threw in their lot with Parliament in 1642 – although in Wynn’s case with reservations, it seems. Infra, ‘John Moore’; ‘Sir Richard Wynn’. Liverpool was garrisoned at the start of the civil war by Lord Strange, the royalist commander-in-chief in the north-west. But with the defeat of his forces in Lancashire in the spring of 1643 the town was stormed and taken by troops under Colonel Raphe Assheton I*. Infra, ‘John Moore’; ‘Sir Richard Wynn’; VCH Lancs. iv. 20; M. Gratton, ‘Liverpool under Parliament’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, clvi. 53-4. In December, the corporation ordered ‘papists and other ill-affected persons or malignants and such as have borne arms against the Parliament’ to leave the town ‘upon pain to be plundered’. Chandler, Liverpool, 323. The 1,000-strong garrison, under Moore, the town’s governor, put up stiff resistance against Prince Rupert’s army in June 1644. But on the last night of the siege, royalist troops were able to enter the town ‘with little or no resistance’, and finding about ‘400 of the meaner sort of men’ they killed most of them, apparently in cold blood (the corporation records refer pointedly to ‘our murthered neighbours’). The corporation later claimed that the victorious royalists had imprisoned the leading inhabitants and plundered them to the tune of £23,000.
Moore’s eleventh-hour escape from Liverpool by ship while royalist troops massacred the townspeople did little to enhance his reputation either locally or nationally. But much of the blame for the town’s capture lay largely, it seems, with some of the soldiers and sailors manning its defences, who either out of faintheartedness or treachery had abandoned their stations, leaving Rupert’s troops free to enter the town at will. Infra, ‘John Moore’; Bodl. Carte 10, ff. 664v-665; CCC 1344; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 102-3; Chandler, Liverpool, 337, 363, 423; VCH Lancs. iv. 21-2; Gratton, ‘Liverpool under Parliament’, 60, 71-3. Liverpool was re-taken in November by a parliamentarian army that included Matthew Alured*, Richard Radclyffe*, George Smithson* and Thomas Talbot II*, who were admitted freemen of the borough for their pains. Chandler, Liverpool, 338-9, 423; VCH Lancs. iv. 22; Gratton, ‘Liverpool under Parliament’, 72-3. Having retained his place as the town’s governor despite considerable opposition from his fellow Lancashire deputy lieutenants and colonels, Moore was obliged to relinquish it in 1645 with the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance. Infra, ‘John Moore’.
Opinion within the corporation seems to have moved in a radical direction during the later 1640s. This was partly in response to the sacking of the town in 1644 by the royalists (who were purged from the freeman body by the corporation during the mid-1640s) and partly also, perhaps, to the increasingly threatening situation in Ireland and the consequent need to remain on good terms with Parliament and particularly with its more bellicose and Anglocentric faction, the Independents. Infra, ‘John Moore’; CCC 1344-5; Chandler, Liverpool, 329-30. The corporation had no compunction petitioning the Commons (requesting relief for the town’s ‘great sufferings and losses’ during the civil war) in the weeks after Pride’s Purge and possibly while the king was on trial. Chandler, Liverpool, 422-3. John Moore, the town’s MP and erstwhile governor, was one of the regicides. Infra, ‘John Moore’. Moreover, the Engagement was incorporated into municipal oaths of office as early as February 1649, and it appears that the town’s recorder William Langton* and its Presbyterian minister Robert Fogg were among only a handful of officeholders who refused to subscribe it. Chandler, Liverpool, 405-6; A.J. Craven, ‘Coercion and Compromise: Lancs. Provincial Politics and the Creation of the English Republic c.1648-53’ (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis, 2004), 47-8. So keen was the corporation to ingratiate itself with the new regime that it granted Colonel Thomas Pride* his freedom of the borough free of charge – perhaps at Moore’s prompting. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 9; Craven, ‘Lancs. Provincial Politics’, 130.
On 28 August 1649, a few weeks after Wynn’s death, the Rump ordered that a writ be issued for holding a new election at Liverpool, and on 10 (or possibly 17) September the town returned its newly-appointed governor, the radical Lancashire parliamentarian Colonel Thomas Birche. Infra, ‘Thomas Birche’; CJ vi. 286b; Chandler, Liverpool, 421. Moore’s death the following year left the town with only one MP at Westminster for the remainder of the Rump. Within a few months of the Rump’s fall in April 1653, the corporation took note of the ‘many exceptions ... taken to the old oath of a freeman which, because of the change of government, needs to be amended’, to strike out the words ‘as it now established without a king or House of Lords’. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 46.
Under the Instrument of Government of 1653, Liverpool was reduced to a single parliamentary seat, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 the borough re-elected Birche. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 55. If Colonel Gilbert Irelande (a local gentleman who had replaced Birche as governor in 1655) had not been returned for Lancashire in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656 then it is possible that he would have secured a place at Liverpool. As it was, the town re-elected Birche – a revealing choice given that he had been removed as governor and was a known opponent of the protectorate. Infra, ‘Thomas Birche’; Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 85. The indenture returning Birche was signed by at least 18 of the freemen. C219/45, unfol. Soon after his election, Birche wrote to the officeholders, asking how he might best serve them in the new Parliament. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 85. The main item of parliamentary business for the corporation was to secure a statute establishing Liverpool as a separate parish from Walton on the Hill. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 86, 92, 94, 95, 105. In the event, Birche failed to take his seat at Westminster and may have been among those excluded from the House by the protectoral council as an opponent of the government. Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 280. However, his name appears on only one of the contemporary lists of those excluded in 1656, and it is perhaps significant that the corporation apparently expected him to attend Parliament regardless of the protectoral council’s exclusion of MPs. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 93, 104; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 303. It is therefore possible that Birche was not excluded at all but simply refused to attend the House in protest at those who were. If that was indeed the case, he seems to have overcome his objections, for the ‘Colonel Birch’ who attended the short session in January and February 1658 was apparently – to judge from his interest in Lancashire issues – Birche rather than John Birch (who had also been elected in 1656 and excluded). CJ vii. 580b, 589a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 332.
Liverpool regained its second seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, and on 17 January it returned ‘by general consent’ Gilbert Irelande. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 117. Alderman Thomas Blackmore, who had served as mayor the previous year, was also elected for the borough, but for some reason his return is not referenced in the corporation records. On 28 January, the corporation ordered ‘that a horse and £10 be paid to Alderman Blackmore ... and what more he spends is to be allowed during his attendance in Parliament with Colonel Irelande’. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 120. Birche returned to Westminster and resumed his seat following the fall of the protectorate in April 1659 and the restoration of the Rump. He may well have been involved in securing orders from the council of state and Parliament in July for demolishing Liverpool Castle – a task committed to his charge and rendered even more urgent (certainly in the corporation’s eyes) after Colonel Irelande seized the town in August as part of Sir George Boothe’s* ill-fated royalist-Presbyterian uprising in the north west. Infra, ‘Gilbert Irelande’; Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 75, 97, 190; CJ vii. 704. However, as relations between the Rump and the army deteriorated again that autumn, Birche seems to have abandoned his seat, whereupon the corporation urged him ‘to return speedily to London to exercise his trust as burgess ... and that he be moved to cause the walls of the castle to be demolished’. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 119.
The elections to the 1660 Convention and to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661 reveal a division among the freemen between the supporters of the old parliamentarian interest, headed by John Moore’s heir Edward, and the royalists, who successfully returned a younger brother of Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, and Gilbert Irelande to both Parliaments. VCH Lancs. iv. 25-6; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Liverpool’. In November 1662, the corporation commissioners removed six aldermen and seven common councillors (including Blackmore and his son William) for refusing to take the oath renouncing the Covenant. Liverpool Town Bks. ed. Power, 146-7.
