In 1642, had it not been for the national political convulsions, a local annalist might have noted the passing of a century since Bristol had become a city. Bristol Charters 1509-1899 ed. Latham (Bristol Rec. Soc. xii), 5. It had grown enormously since the 1540s. When the diarist John Evelyn visited Bristol in 1654, he described it as ‘emulating London, not for its large extent, but manner of building, shops, bridge, traffic, exchange, market place etc’. Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, iii. 102. His opinion was echoed by Samuel Pepys†, who in 1668 confided to his diary that Bristol was ‘in every respect another London’. Pepys’s Diary, ix. 234. Visitors were impressed into making these comparisons because they were surprised at what they saw, particularly the ‘most large and noble place’ that Bristol’s quay had become by the time of Pepys’s visit. Pepys’s Diary, ix. 235. Even so, Evelyn was confident that York, not Bristol, was England’s second city, and modern historians have almost all considered this title to belong to Norwich, until Bristol overtook it in during the eighteenth century. Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, iii. 128; J.T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), 4-5; P. Corfield, ‘A Provincial Capital in the late Seventeenth Century’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (1972), 300. For Edmund Ludlowe II*, too, Bristol was ‘the third chief city of England’. Ludlow, Voyce, 246. Rating assessments of the 1650s confirm his judgement. This despite the opinion of a Norwich man in 1634 that Bristol, not his own town, was ‘a second London’. A. and O. ii. 653-6; P. McGrath, The Merchant Venturers of Bristol (Bristol, 1975), 26. There seems much more available evidence for the population history of Norwich than of Bristol, however, and it seems difficult to move beyond the estimate of 20-25,000 for Bristol in the late seventeenth century that was offered by Gregory King at the time. W.E. Minchinton, ‘Bristol – Metropolis of the West in the Eighteenth Century’, TRHS ser. 5, iv. 75; McGrath, Merchant Venturers, 25; Compton Census, 548, 550-1.
Whatever the problems in suggesting a figure for Bristol’s population in this period, there can be no doubt – and there was no doubt at the time – that it was England’s second most important port, after London. Not only was it a prime port for overseas trade with Europe and centre for a growing Atlantic trade; Bristol was growing in importance particularly after 1660 as the entrepôt for a coasting trade that linked towns in south Wales and in the Severn basin. APC 1619-21, p. 121; Minchinton, ‘Bristol – Metropolis of the West’, 69-89; D. Hussey, Coastal and River Trade in Pre-Industrial England. Bristol and its Region 1680-1730 (Exeter, 2000), 196-201. The vitality of the city led it to become a magnet for young people from other places, who came to serve apprenticeships with a range of craftsmen and tradesmen. Only a minority of these were overseas merchants, but the economic community as a whole was involved in some way or another in overseas trade. In the 1650s, as few as one third of the Bristol apprentices were natives of the city. D. Souden, ‘“Rogues, whores and vagabonds”? Indentured servant emigrants to North America, and the case of mid-seventeenth-century Bristol’, Social Hist. iii. 31, 35. This was a pattern seen in microcosm among the city’s MPs for this period. Setting aside the distinguished lawyers from outside, eight Bristolians were returned between 1640 and 1660. Of these only Robert Aldworth, Miles and Joseph Jackson were natives, and even their fathers had come to Bristol from elsewhere. The shallow roots of most Bristol families probably contributed something to the unstable popular culture of the city, even if it is difficult to determine precisely what.
Civic government
The essential features of Bristol’s government were enshrined in the charter of 1499, which proved remarkably durable and survived in spite of the corporation’s wish to see it superseded. It provided for a council of 43 burgesses altogether, whose numbers were maintained by co-option. A revision to the charter in 1581 set the number of aldermen at 12, which included aldermanic status for the recorder, a distinguished lawyer from outside. There was a chamberlain, two treasurers and two sheriffs. The mayor and aldermen could sit apart, as an inner council, leaving a rank-and-file council of 30. The town clerk provided the detailed legal administration of the city courts, receiving from 1613 a salary and more importantly taking fees. From about 1600, he replaced the chamberlain as the city’s likely envoy to London on official business. There were seven important standing committees on which burgesses served as they moved along the cursus honorum before becoming mayors and aldermen. To aspire to the latter dignity, which the charter reserved for the ‘older and graver’ councillors, it was usual for entrants to have passed the chair. The committees included bodies to administer city lands, hospitals, free schools, poor relief and the distribution of coals. The post of claviger or clavenger was associated with administering charities. Election day, when mayors were selected by a process of nomination recorded in detail in the council’s proceedings (order books), and when appointments were made to the various city offices, was 15 September. It was a day attended by civic ritual, involving cakes, wine and trumpets. Bristol Charters ed. Latham, 2, 5, 7, 8, 13. None of this structure was modified by the confirmatory charters granted by the crown in 1604 and 1626. Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 22, 90.
The influence of the Society of Merchant Venturers on the corporation was powerful. It controlled the overseas trading interests of Bristol, and its membership included the most prosperous merchants of the city. At least 69 of the 105 mayors in the century were members, as were 65 of the 118 aldermen. McGrath, Merchant Venturers, 32. Of the MPs in this period, only the recorders John Glanville and John Doddridge and the merchant Luke Hodges were not members of the Society. Meetings parallel to those of the council were held to provide ‘meet instruction’ to the MPs. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 23. The preoccupations of the Merchant Venturers were relatively few and persistent. They sought to reduce duties on the wines they were importing, and to uphold the regional monopolies they enjoyed on exporting finished calf-skins and Welsh butter. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 29, 40, 45, 50, 145, 221, 226, 234, 241-2, 247, 277. In 1648, they struck a deal with Sir William Waller* whereby they paid prisage on imported wines in return for their enjoyment of excise duties payable on them, and continued to pay Waller, through his agent, down to 1660. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 83, 84, 112, 148, 151, 216, 317. Their efforts to protect their trading interests in the Americas led them to oppose the English tobacco-growing trade under the Rump Parliament, and to assert the continuing threat from the Dutch while the protectorate government made war on Spain. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 230, 238, 256. Usually they could rely on the city council to follow their line, and they suborned every Bristol MP to their views. The Merchant Venturers did not confine their lobbying to their own MPs, however; they importuned not only the high steward, Sir Henry Vane II* and the recorder, Bulstrode Whitelocke*, but also those with no obvious connection with the city, such as Edmund Harvey* and Edward Dendy*. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 234, 247.
Bristol and Westminster
Bristol corporation conducted its affairs, including parliamentary elections, in the Guildhall, on Broad Street, a building known to have stood there since 1348. C219/43/1/186; Topography of medieval and early modern Bristol pt 1 ed. Leech (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), xxi, 33. It carried on collecting £4 of ‘Parliament money’ from its two sheriffs as an annual levy on them, as it had done a hundred years earlier. By 1640 the money always appeared in the audit books bracketed with a fine the sheriffs paid for not holding a customary dinner. Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 14. It was thus in effect merely an entry fine on the sheriffs’ office, but the city adhered to it, after lapses during the late 1640s and the 1650s. Bristol RO, 04026/27, p. 50. Bristol burgesses continued to receive an allowance that was usually paid punctiliously after each Parliament concluded. In the whole of the period under consideration, this was set at 6s. 8d. per day, and in addition, the council would pay MPs’ expenses. Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 29; 04026/22, p. 112; 04026/27, p. 53. Usually, the council would reimburse Members with cash, but in the straitened circumstances of February 1649, in the case of Richard Aldworth, it paid him by discounting rents he owed the city. Bristol RO, 04026/23, p. 281. His recruiter colleague, Luke Hodges, was assigned £300 from the £3000 owing to the city by the government, on the public faith. In the 1650s, the council began to refer to their Members’ reimbursement as ‘salary’. In 1650, the council committed itself to reviewing the payments it made to its burgesses, but in 1656 concluded that 6s. 8d. a day had always been allowed and never seems to have made an alteration in this period. Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 4, 116; 04026/26, p. 45. The chamberlains’ accounts record many payments to messengers and representatives of the city who rode to Westminster on business connected with Parliament. Among these tasks were returning the writ and indenture after elections (1642), sending messages to MPs while the House was sitting (1641), drafting and carrying up petitions (Oct. 1653), waiting on Parliament to negotiate on specific issues (1654) and sending up Quakers on the orders of Parliament (1656). Bristol RO, 04026/22, pp. 107, 172; 04026/24, pp. 147; 04026/25(ii), pp. 45-6. From 1642, the city resolved to keep a solicitor in London on stand-by, in order to promote Bristol business. Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 122.
It was usual for the mayor, aldermen and common council to set up a committee from among their number on the eve of a Parliament, in order to draw up instructions for the MPs as they departed for Westminster. They listed ‘public grievances’ in this way in April 1640, and met to consider instructions to the MPs returned in the recruiter election of 1646, the 1654 and 1659 elections, but not apparently to that of 1656. Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 102v; 04264/4, p. 136; 04264/5, pp. 67, 180, 182. It was in this tradition that a committee sat in February 1644 to prepare instructions for the Oxford Parliament, even though the chamber was uncertain how best to represent itself at Oxford other than by depending on John Taylor, their Member there. Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 54, 55. A ‘select committee’ to mandate MPs was set up in January 1648. Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 172. The 1659 committee was explicitly invited to consider ‘all kinds of grievances as well relating to the commonwealth in general as to the city in particular’. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 180. Local issues naturally figured prominently among the grievances identified for redress. In 1641, the corporation was exercised by ships putting into Minehead as a port for landing wool, thus avoiding Bristol city duties, and felt strongly enough about the poll tax to send a letter to Parliament. Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 110; 04026/22, p. 107. From September 1645, after Bristol had fallen to the New Model army, the council began to take an interest in godly reform, sending to Richard Aldworth for a copy of a London publication, A Whip for a Drunkard, which summarised legislation in handy form for those pursuing a reformation of manners. Bristol RO, 04026/23, p. 95; A Whip for a Drunkard (1646, 669.f.10.53). In 1646, the council petitioned the Commons in an attempt to recover £3,000 it had lent to association of adjacent counties at the start of the civil war; it paid Luke Hodges his ‘salary’ on the expectation of recovering it. Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 152. In the second protectorate Parliament it instructed Robert Aldworth to oppose attempts by Bath to make the Avon navigable up to that town, fearing the effects of trading competition. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 116.
Beyond ad hoc petitions, the corporation also undertook campaigns to secure legislation on some of its concerns. In 1647, the council was funding weekly lectures in two parishes. From August 1648, stimulated by the sales of dean and chapter lands, they began to press for an ordinance which would secure the maintenance of preaching ministers in the city and prevent the collapse of preaching in the cathedral. Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 159, 183, An ordinance for more frequent preaching in Bristol (29 Mar. 1650) brought a minister of Independent leanings to the city from Wales, by means of Richard Aldworth’s success in securing enough money from Parliament for investment in dean and chapter lands. CJ vi. 388; Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 156-7. In the 1656 Parliament, the lapse of this ordinance was addressed by a successful drive to produce a more comprehensive scheme for civic-supported churches, considered below. There is evidence that in 1656 the council reached a new maturity in its dealings with Parliaments, not only in its manipulation of Westminster to secure some relief from Quaker disruptions of civic life, but also in its lobbying. A manifesto of some 18 headings for action, to be pursued at Westminster, has survived, ranging over religion, trade and the local administration of justice. Bristol Ref. Lib., 10160, p. 239.
Short and Long Parliaments, 1640-53
The election for the Short Parliament of 1640 followed the customary pattern, with one seat being reserved for the recorder, John Glanville; the other for a senior alderman, Humphrey Hooke. Glanville was chosen Speaker in this assembly, and would have had little or no time for Bristol matters. Perhaps this was why the council passed him over for the second Parliament of 1640, choosing instead another alderman, Richard Longe, to accompany Hooke to Westminster. The franchise lay in the corporation and resident freeholders. The council’s minute of November 1625 asserting this to be the ‘laudable and ancient custom’ suggests a challenge at that time, and two days after the Long Parliament elections came another. A ‘great number’ of burgesses complained that every freeman should have a voice, claiming ‘some statutes’ as their authority. The mayor, aldermen and common council re-asserted the 1625 pronouncement as embodying ‘ancient usage’. Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 108. No more is heard of the complaint. On 12 May 1642, Hooke and Longe were expelled the House as beneficiaries of a monopoly on wines, the unwelcome outcome of the deal that Bristol corporation had struck with the London vintners in the 1630s. CJ ii. 567b-568a; PJ ii. 310. They were replaced on 5 June by Glanville (now Sir John Glanville) and Alderman John Taylor in an election that seems to have gone smoothly and according to the usual form, some 29 freemen attaching their signatures to the indenture. C219/43/1/184.
Glanville was inactive in the Commons, except as a messenger between the two Houses; his legal high office kept him away, according to the custom. At the start of the civil war, Taylor initially conducted himself as one sympathetic to the parliamentary cause. After the surrender of Bristol by Nathaniel Fiennes I* to Prince Rupert (26 July 1643), Taylor, Humphrey Hooke and Richard Longe threw in their lot with the royalists. Taylor joined the Oxford Parliament, inviting the corporation to send someone to join him there to promote the city’s business. The council preferred to invite him to carry on alone, but paid the king £150 for their pardon. Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 54, 55, 57. From then until the city was stormed by the New Model army (10 Sept. 1645), the council co-operated fully with the royalist garrison, framing an oath to defend Bristol against the king’s enemies (11 Nov. 1644). Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 82. Among the collaborators with the royalists were the future MPs Miles Jackson, Joseph Jackson and Richard Aldworth. Of those who were later to sit in Westminster Parliaments down to 1660, only Luke Hodges seems to have left the city during the occupation by the king’s garrison. Hodges was invited to resume his place on the city council on the eve of the storming by the parliamentary troops.
Taylor had been disabled from sitting on 5 Feb. 1644, Glanville on 25 Sept. in the same year. Richard Aldworth and Luke Hodges were elected to their places on 26 January 1646. C219/43/1/186. In any obvious break with tradition, at the time of their election, neither Aldworth nor Hodges had yet been sworn as aldermen. The hand of the New Modellers and their parliamentary supporters is evident in these choices, and in the appointment of the leading Independent, Edmund Prideaux I*, as recorder. Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 145. The New Model maintained its presence by means of its garrison. Its first governor was Philip Skippon*, and the influence of the Independents was maintained through his successors, John Haggatt (a parliamentary candidate in 1654) and Adrian Scrope*. Both Aldworth and Hodges accepted the trial and execution of the king, and went on to serve in the Rump. Aldworth became an important manager of the Committee of Navy and Customs*, while Hodges fell away from energetic service in the House only because he became a salaried commissioner for the excise. In the early years of the Rump, Thomas Harrison I* exercised some authority in Bristol, as major-general of the region. R. Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence (1656), 46.
1654-5 Parliament
Bristol was unrepresented in the Nominated Assembly of 1653, but Denis Hollister*, a Bristol grocer, sat for Somerset. Richard Aldworth and Luke Hodges were probably out of sympathy with the millenarian flavour of the 1653 Parliament, and Hollister in any case represented the sectarian interest of the city of Bristol. The denial of a summons to Bristol to send a Member could have been interpreted as a slight to the corporation, but it was business as usual for the Merchant Venturers, who were prepared to lobby Hollister and George Bishop, a garrison captain and rising star among the Bristol radicals, to suppress English tobacco-growing and uphold the monopoly on calfskins. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, 238. Unrepresented in Parliament, the corporation also considered itself badly-served by its recorder, Bulstrode Whitelocke*, who accepted an invitation to become England’s ambassador to Sweden. The mayor and aldermen wrote for Whitelocke’s resignation with almost indecent haste after his appointment, suggesting some dissatisfaction on their part with his performance. Although the Bristol men’s letters to Whitelocke were later more conciliatory, he finally resigned in April 1655, and evidently thought he had been ungratefully treated. Longleat House, Whitelocke Pprs. xiii. f. 248v; xiv. f. 136v; xvi. f. 91, xvii. ff. 35, 51; Whitelocke, Diary, 404. For very different reasons, Denis Hollister returned to Bristol in discontent after the failure of the Assembly. Although an ‘address and recognition’ were presented to the lord protector in May 1654, a number of grievances in Bristol boiled over in the election of July 1654.
The fullest account of the proceedings in the election for the first protectorate Parliament comes from a source hostile to the city council and disgruntled with the outcome of the poll. On the evening before election day, a council meeting was held where according to supporters of John Haggatt, some members out of sympathy with the selection of Robert Aldworth and Miles Jackson were browbeaten. On the day itself, 12 July, some of the aldermen and councillors sat in the hall, which the opponents of the council took as a further provocation, inimical to that ‘indifferency which ought to be in a free election where all that have votes are equals and where there ought to be nothing done that is matter of force or discouragement to the electors’. SP18/75/14 (iii). There appears to have been a request to the two sheriffs presiding that the clauses in the Instrument of Government concerning qualifications of voters should be read, prompted by doubts arising from the presence of former royalist army officers. The sheriffs refused, declaring that all who came could vote, and apparently declining to make exception for known enemies of the commonwealth. The cry from the hall, ‘qualifications, qualifications’ was ignored or suppressed, and the sheriffs’ pronouncement favouring the widest possible franchise was rumoured to have been the sense of a letter received by the city from the council of state a few days previously. Having previously resisted any relaxation of the narrow franchise, the council now appeared to be throwing it wide open, in defiance of the text of the Instrument.
The sheriffs’ words were said to have been a signal for former royalists, until then gathered uncertainly near the stairs, to come forward confidently. The writ was then read, and the mayor and council voted. The mayor, three aldermen and 17 of the more junior councillors voted for the council’s nominees, Robert Aldworth, the town clerk, and Alderman Miles Jackson. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 72; Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 181-3; C219/44/1. It seems likely that the act of voting consisted of coming forward to sign the indenture. C219/44/1. There seems to have been no controversy over the return of Aldworth, son of the Rumper Richard Aldworth. Nevertheless, those unhappy at the conduct of the election construed the council’s vote to be further encouragement to the former royalists. The controversial candidate was Jackson, never ‘esteemed by the godly and well-affected … to be one in point of godliness or moral abilities qualified for so great an employment’. SP18/75/14 (iii). The self-styled godly began to cry up John Haggatt, colonel of militia and deputy recorder of the city. Despite his evident standing as a public servant, some cried ‘halter, halter’ and ‘horse-stealer’ in response, and their scorn was said to have been echoed, albeit more mildly, by the sheriffs.
At this point, there was a poll. The sheriffs conducted it by asking a gentleman to record the names of burgesses for Aldworth and Jackson. A poll for Haggatt was also taken, and the lists of his supporters were later presented as evidence in the appeal against the election result. Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 180-1. The accounts of the making of these lists by the men who made them, who both described themselves as gentlemen, were sworn before the mayor a month later. Both claimed to have been acting with the approval of the sheriffs as well as of Haggatt. The indenture returning Aldworth and Jackson was duly completed and despatched, with 93 signatures. One of the clerks recording names could not recall later that Haggatt’s supporters raised any objection to any particular voters, and Nicholas Holway, council supporter and a merchant only newly made free of the city, entered a deposition that George Bishop had disrupted the proceedings. Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 179, 181. An alternative version of events, promoted by the losers, has the sheriffs’ seizing the lists and barring some Haggatt supporters from entering the hall. In either event, the lists survived the day.
The presence at the election of Haggatt, colonel of the city militia, and the intervention by George Bishop, a militia captain, makes it clear that an element working against the corporation was rooted in the local military. There was over six months later a suggestion that Bishop was himself a candidate, but it seems more likely that he was merely acting vigorously in Haggatt’s interest. TSP iii. 169. Haggatt, then styled a gentleman, was in the city in 1644 when it was under royalist control. Soon afterwards he entered the Middle Temple and was called to the bar in May 1647. He was made a garrison officer in Bristol after 1645, was governor briefly in 1649 before handing over to Adrian Scrope, and was a commissioner for the militia. Haggatt was steward of the city in March 1649, and progressed to be deputy recorder under Bulstrode Whitelocke in 1653, and steward of the Tolzey Court. Bristol RO, JQS/M/3, f. 217; Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 171; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 225, 246, 311; Bodl. Tanner 55, f. 1; Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 281. He was active in his legal role, offering the legal judgments to the corporation in the tradition of the city’s recorders. Bristol Ref. Lib. 10160, pp. 59, 96, 212. He was said by Robert Aldworth to owe his promotion to offices in the city – not only militia office but the deputy recordership – entirely to Richard Aldworth, and it was certainly the case that as near to the election as late April 1654, Haggatt was admitted to the elite Society of Merchant Venturers, on the same occasion as Whitelocke and Aldworth junior himself. Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, 249. This was more than a happy coincidence, as Haggatt remained loyal enough to tip off his ‘good friend’ the recorder about the moves against him in the council, and continued to help Whitelocke whenever he could down to the mid-1660s. Whitelocke, Diary, 404, 710, 760. On 2 May 1654, Haggatt was co-opted to help the council draft its address to the lord protector, enshrining the city’s recognition of Oliver Cromwell’s* authority. Even Robert Aldworth had later to acknowledge Haggatt’s ability and usefulness. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 63; TSP iii. 299.
Whatever Bishop’s role in the election, like Haggatt he cannot be regarded as harbouring an old grudge against the Bristol establishment. Bishop was another who helped the Merchant Venturers, and his help was recognised in admittance to the Society even before Haggatt’s was. He served in Philip Skippon’s regiment while it garrisoned Bristol between February and September 1646. If he stayed with the regiment when it moved to the north of England, or with Skippon himself, he was not the Leveller sympathiser who spoke at Putney. Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 431-2; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 272-4; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 346. By January 1651, he was certainly living in London. In that month he was admitted for ‘many favours and courtesies’ to the merchants, and over the next two years and more, until at the earliest October 1653, Bishop acted as the Society’s agent in London in matters relating to trade in salt, calf-skins and tobacco. Bristol RO, 04417/1, f. 69; Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 187, 206, 221, 226, 241-2. While in the capital, he was employed under the Rump as secretary to the council of state’s committee for examinations and discoveries, and thus had useful access to a range of government activity in Whitehall. G. Bishop, Mene Tekel (1659), 48 (E.999. 13); Extracts from State Papers Rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 120. There is an intriguing possibility of a friendship between Bishop and the city high steward, Sir Henry Vane II. At the very least, they must have known each other. V.A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 223. Bishop was while in London able to help suppress the preaching in Bristol of the Presbyterian minister Constant Jessop, whose offence was to agitate against taking the Engagement. R Farmer, The Impostor Dethron’d (1658), 48-9. He thus reveals himself in the early 1650s to have been an active religious Independent and commonwealthsman, like Richard Aldworth, to whom he probably owed his London post. CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 440, 466, 469, 470; 1651, p. 5; 1651-2, pp. 147, 394. An unintended consequence of the pursuit of Jessop was the opening up of religious faction in the city, which the garrison colonel, Adrian Scrope was expected to subdue. CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 440; 1651, p. 5; 1651-2, pp. 249-50. A little under three months before the election, Jessop complained to the council of state about Bishop’s misrepresentations of him after a sermon he had preached before the Bristol mayor. CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 86, 111. Some years after the election Bishop was alleged to have insisted before the contest ‘that we must choose such Parliament men as should hold my lord protector’s nose to the grindstone’. Farmer, Impostor Dethron’d, 62.
Bishop’s return to Bristol seems to have coincided with that of Denis Hollister, the city’s de facto representative in the Nominated Assembly of 1653, and like Hollister, Bishop seems to have come home radicalised by his stay in London. The garrison was evidently the place where suspicions towards the city council were fostered. Governor Adrian Scrope wrote to the lord protector on 6 August that the mayor and sheriffs were not to be trusted, identifying the discouragement of the godly at the election, and complaining about their upholding a franchise open to all freemen, regardless of their political record. CSP Dom. 1654, p. 331. Scrope supported the despatch of petitions about the election to the protector’s council, as did Hollister, who compiled a brief but unflattering portrait of Miles Jackson’s past allegiances. CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 331-2. The thrust of the complainants was that the Instrument provided for voting in the interests of ‘liberty contended for, and brought through (by the good hand of the Lord) such seas of blood and multitudes of unspeakable sufferings and ruins of the saints and good people of these nations. SP18/75/14(ii). Men who had ‘durst not shown their teeth’ under the Rump had now appeared boldly. The rumour that the council of state had given instructions for the widest franchise was cited, and the appeal concluded by asserting that the enemies of the lord protector were their own enemies, and requesting that new MPs ‘nominated and chosen by your petitioners’ should be approved by the council of state. This was a request for a reversion to the selection methods employed to bring into being the Nominated Assembly.
The Presbyterian city minister and commentator, Ralph Farmer, laid responsibility for the petition squarely on the shoulders of George Bishop. He believed the protesters’ intention was to catch the city council off guard by engineering a swift summons to appear before the council of state, but the chamber acquired copies of the material sent to London. Depositions were hastily taken in the mayor’s court, unsurprisingly supportive of the recorded outcome of the election. They included assertions by 11 men that their signatures had appeared on Bishop’s petition without their consent, a statement that Bishop had come to the hall with armed men, the list of voters for Haggatt and that for Aldworth and Jackson. Farmer, Impostor Dethron’d, 61, 66; Bristol Deposition Bks.1650-4, 179-83. In August, a city delegation including Farmer appeared before the council in connexion with Bishop’s petition, and Bishop himself was there too, protesting that he was acting on behalf of ‘honest men’. Farmer claimed that another petition had then been offered, without the request that nominees be approved for the seats. Bristol RO, 04026/24, p. 230; Farmer, Impostor Dethron’d, 61. It is certainly the case that Bishop’s list of petitioners differed from the lists of voters recorded in Haggatt’s interest on election day. Some 40 extra men, whose votes had not been recorded, lent support to the petition to the council, although at least four of these later disavowed their involvement. SP18/75/14(ii), (vii), (viii), (ix); Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 180-1.
The names of the 196 men who voted for Aldworth and Jackson, and the 82 who voted for Haggatt lend themselves to rudimentary analysis. Apart from a very small number whose identities may possibly have been personated by Bishop or his supporters, all who participated in the election were freemen of Bristol, so there seems to have been no attempt to assert a franchise based on residence alone. A significant difference between the two camps was that the council threw its weight behind Aldworth and Jackson, with only one councillor, an associate of Hollister, supporting Haggatt. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 72; SP18/75/14 (ii), (vii), (viii), (ix); Bristol Deposition Bks.1650-4, 180-1. The seniority of 223 voters’ standing as freemen can be traced in the city burgess books. Bristol RO, 04359/2a, 2b, 3a. The average length of time a typical supporter of Jackson and Aldworth had been free of the city at the time of the 1654 election was 12.5 years, while an average Haggatt voter had been 10.7 years out of his apprenticeship. There was thus little to choose between the two groups as to their maturity as freemen, although Haggatt seems to have drawn marginally more support from among the younger burgesses.
The analysis can be extended further, to cover the trades practised by the voters. The trades of 136 voters in the Aldworth and Jackson group and 67 of Haggatt’s can be identified, using the city’s burgess rolls and employing categories somewhat different from those in a published alternative account. D.H. Sacks, The Widening Gate (Berkeley, Ca. 1991), 272. The result can be meaningful only when cast in percentage terms, as one group of voters outnumbered the other by more than 2 to 1. It suggests a remarkable similarity in social composition between the two groups. Omitting some singular occupations, such as playing card making and tobacco pipe making, where their sole practitioners defy ready categorising, the wide range of trades can be aggregated into the following 11 groups: gentlemen, merchants, cloth-working, soap-making, leather-working, building, maritime, food and drink, retailing, wood and metal-working and medicine. The percentage of voters in each camp from the soap-making, maritime, retailing and wood and metal trades is remarkably similar. The most significant divergence lies in the behaviour of the merchants. By definition, they were a prosperous group, many being members of the Society of Merchant Venturers. Only four (approximately six per cent) of those voting for Haggatt were merchants, but 20 merchants voted for Aldworth and Jackson (15 per cent of their total vote). Those describing themselves as gentlemen split in a different pattern. Six gentlemen voted for the successful candidates (four per cent of their total), and four for Haggatt (six per cent of his). Haggatt had thus been able to match his rivals in his appeal to those of independent means outside the governing elite of the city. The largest occupational group voting for either camp was the cloth-workers, where Haggatt enjoyed strong support, but there is no reason to suppose that the total of 56 voters in that category did not simply reflect the dominance of these trades in interregnum Bristol.
Internal divisions, 1654-6
The city council spent nearly £80 on its delegation to London to ‘maintain and justify’ the election result, and from their viewpoint the expense was worthwhile, as the protector’s council did nothing to call into question the returned indenture. Writing four years after these events, Farmer interpreted Bishop’s petition as a Quaker plot, but in the summer of 1654 the Friends were hardly in a position to manipulate the election. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 80; Farmer, Impostor Dethron’d, 61, 62. It is true that the first visit of Quakers to Bristol is recorded as having taken place on the very day of the election – in the evening, after the poll was over – but at that point the Friends were a visiting ginger group whose missions over a period of months swung Bishop, Hollister and others away from an undefined sectarian Independency and into the new Quaker movement. The Cry of Blood (1656), 2-3 (E.884.3). There is no evidence to support the view of a recent historian who has followed Farmer in interpreting this election as a Quaker attack on the corporation. Sacks, Widening Gate, 270-2. Bishop was on a spiritual journey from a loose Congregationalism to Quakerism, but Haggatt was not. Between 1646 and 1648, Haggatt was churchwarden of the city central parish of Christ Church, and became a commissioner for propagating the gospel in Bristol in 1651. Records of a Church in Broadmead, 103; Bristol RO, P/Xch/chw/1(b); P/Xch/V/1a. This suggests that he was sympathetic to the doctrines of Independency, since the commissioners chose a man of that stamp as minister; but also implies that he was in tune with a local form of Erastian control by the corporation over city churches. There is nothing substantial to connect Haggatt with the Quakers, despite recent claims to the contrary. After all, his legal counsel continued to be valued by the corporation not only throughout the 1650s while disputes raged with the Friends, but also as late as 1663. Sacks, Widening Gate, 271; Bristol Ref. Lib. 10160, pp. 96, 212.
Neither can the contest be seen as driven by simple economic discontent: one of the city’s annalists was moved to record that grain prices that year were remarkably low.Bristol RO, 07831, ‘1654’. The merchant community apart, the Bristol electorate had clearly been split by Haggatt’s challenge to the council’s nominations, and no pattern of alienation from the council by particular trading groups can be discerned. The significance of the 1654 election lies in its contribution to social, political and religious tensions between Bristol’s rulers that had existed in embryo before the contest and which grew significantly worse afterwards, degenerating into an ‘extreme feud’. TSP iii. 169. When Friends returned to the city in September, they drew crowds of several thousand, and the hostile aldermen, including Richard Aldworth*, later interrogated the Quakers. The Cry of Blood, 2-3, 6-7. Immigration to Bristol from the surrounding country grew as the local economy recovered, and in September 1654 the corporation intervened to regulate the busy local labour market. Young people leaving Bristol for indentured servitude in Barbados or Virginia henceforth had their details recorded at the Tolzey, in order to reduce kidnapping and other abuses. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 22; Souden, ‘“Rogues, whores and vagabonds”?’, 25, 37.
The crowds, including apprentices, had turned against the Quakers by December 1654, and in riots on and around Bristol bridge (19 Dec.), Denis Hollister barricaded himself and some Friends into his house after having rescued them from the mob. The Cry of Blood, 28. The hostility of the apprentices and their masters would not have been quelled by the certificates the city council gave to discharged soldiers, allowing them to practise trades in Bristol whether or not they were freemen. Bristol RO, 04417/1. Bishop, a beneficiary of this scheme, and his Quaker allies discerned the hand of cavaliers in the riots, and regaled John Thurloe* in the early months of 1655 with reports on the threat from royalists, rumours of the appearance in Charles Stuart’s interest of Edward Massie* in the district, and the inadequacy of the city council, all developments of points in the previous summer’s petition. TSP iii. 153-4, 161, 165; The Cry of Blood, 33. Ominously for future events, James Naylor had made his first appearance in Bristol, being known to the mayor and aldermen by mid-January and being considered by them to be a possible Jesuit. Bristol RO, 04417/1, ff. 14, 14v. After the 1654 election, splits appeared among the garrison officers, some supporting Bishop and the Quakers, others siding with the city council. The government despatched Major-general William Boteler* to Bristol, to report back. Boteler sided with the council, advocating the removal of Bishop and Hollister from positions of influence over the soldiery. Amid evidence that there were indeed plots among the royalists, Robert Aldworth began to reform the militia, finding no further employment as a soldier for Haggatt, who pursued his career elsewhere, as a Welsh judge. TSP iii. 169, 170-1, 172, 177, 183, 223-4, 231, 248-9, 259-60, 268, 296, 299; Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 181-3.
In September 1655, the council swore John Doddridge*, a staunch Presbyterian, as recorder. They had to relax the rule that a recorder should be of senior standing at his inn of court in order to accommodate him, but at least he was willing to work with the government. The same could not be said of the high steward since 1651, Sir Henry Vane II. Vane had visited Bristol in 1654, perhaps in that troubled summer, but by 1655 had moved into outright opposition to the protectorate. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 18; 04026/24, p. 149; infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’. Against a background of various incidents in the city involving Quakers, Vane’s ally George Bishop was by the summer of 1656 openly associated with the sect. Major-general John Disbrowe* made several visits to Bristol during his tour of duty in 1655-6, identifying three crypto-royalist councillors to be ‘not in any measure qualified or spirited for government’. After he lent on the mayor to secure their resignations, the three aldermen withdrew (18 Feb. 1656). Both Disbrowe and the council seem to have been anxious to act discreetly, allowing a decent interval to lapse before the ejected men’s successors were named. Bristol RO, 04417/1, ff. 34-6.
1656-8 Parliament
The 1654 election was the first to be thrown open to an electorate beyond the city council, and the wide franchise was the basis of the 1656 election in Bristol. The election to the second protectorate Parliament was also as in 1654 conducted in a heated atmosphere, although on this occasion there was no petition against the result, and no evidence survives as to how many votes were cast, or by whom. Again, the military element was active, on this occasion in favour of Disbrowe, who had agreed to stand. The day before the election Disbrowe was in the city, en route for Gloucester. He was made a freeman of Gloucester on 13 August and was elected to Parliament there, so the Bristol election must have coincided with the bestowing of that honour. G. Bishop, The Throne of Truth Exalted (1657), 105-6 (E.907.2); Glos. RO, GBR B3/2, p. 876.
In Bristol, hostility to the absent Disbrowe was evident in the hall at election time. Cries of ‘no swordsman’ greeted his name when read by the sheriff. George Bishop attributed the rejection of Disbrowe to the Presbyterian minister Ralph Farmer and a group of freemen whom Farmer controlled. Bishop ascribes Farmer’s hostility to the major-general’s release of the Quaker James Naylor from prison in Exeter. This occurred in October 1656, after the election, but Disbrowe had recently been sympathetic to the Quakers in prison in Cornwall, and so a Presbyterian antipathy towards him in the hall is plausible. Bishop also suggested that Farmer was assisted by a militia captain at the election; if this was so, it makes the pattern of events at the 1656 comparable with those of 1654, when Captain Bishop intervened. Bishop, Throne of Truth, 105-6; Jnl. of George Fox ed. J.L. Nickalls (1952), 265-6; W.C. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism (2nd ed. 1955), 247, 249. One of the captains in 1656 had been a hostile sheriff at the 1654 election; another would soon pen a diatribe against the Bristol Quakers. TSP iii. 296, 299; W. Grigge, The Quakers’ Jesus (1658) (E.942.2); SP18/75/14(iii). The appearance of John Doddridge as a candidate, with the support of Farmer and the Presbyterian-inclined elements in the city council probably therefore represented a deliberate rebuff to Independents thought to be soft on the unruly sects. Robert Aldworth was returned again without contention, but Doddridge found himself excluded from the new Parliament when it assembled on 17 September. It is open to doubt why he was kept out. His standing in the election against Disbrowe may have contributed, but many other Members were excluded on very dubious grounds or on the poor quality of intelligence at the government’s disposal.
The city council despatched an ambassador – a junior councillor and supporter of Aldworth and Jackson in 1654 – to London about the election. Bristol RO, 04026/5 (i), p. 54; 04264/5, p. 163; Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 182. Even so, it was not until January 1658 that Doddridge took his seat, and until then the city was short of one MP. The city council found itself drawn into other journeys to London as a result of the case of James Naylor. The council’s usual way of dealing with disruptions to church services and other aspects of public life in the city, by Quakers and sectaries in general, was to examine offenders; then the mayor and aldermen, meeting apart from the wider council, would make an order, usually for punishment. Bristol RO, 04417/1, ff. 14, 14v, 18v, 27v, 28, 28v, 29. When Naylor entered Bristol on 24 October in an apparent re-enactment of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, they made no attempt to follow the usual procedure. Naylor and his followers were imprisoned on the day of their arrival, and examined the following day. The mayor and aldermen must then have written promptly to Robert Aldworth, their one functioning representative at Westminster, because on 31 October, Parliament appointed a committee with Aldworth in prime place, not only to consider Naylor’s case but also to report defects in the law. Grigge, Quakers’ Jesus, 11; CJ vii. 448a. On 10 November, the message to send up Naylor to London was received in Bristol, and he and a small party of his followers made the journey accompanied by William Grigge, a freeman but not a councillor, one of Aldworth’s choices for a militia captaincy and shortly to become the council’s apologist in the Naylor affair. Grigge’s expenses also included payment for an earlier journey ‘about the burgesses’, and in November two other Bristol men were rewarded for a journey to London on the same topic. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the menace of Quakers and the unresolved contention over the city’s choice of MPs were very closely linked in councillors’ minds. Bristol RO, 04026/25(ii), pp. 45, 46, 58; TSP iii. 299; Grigge, Quakers’ Jesus. It is also difficult to agree with the verdict of modern historians that the council was indecisive or genuinely at a loss how to respond to Naylor’s behaviour. T.A. Wilson, F.J. Merli, ‘Naylor’s Case and the Dilemma of the Protectorate’, Univ. of Birmingham Hist. Jnl. x. 46.
In November, the council perfected a remonstrance to Parliament on the Quakers, which attributed their virulence in Bristol to the patronage of the garrison soldiers, and urged Parliament to ‘take up the reins of government into your hands, which have too long lain loose in this particular’ of curbing the excesses of the sects. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 119; Grigge, Quakers’ Jesus, 34-6. Once Naylor had been despatched, and the remonstrance lodged, the council reverted to its usual practice of dealing with religious disruption in meetings of the mayor and aldermen. Bristol RO, 04417/1, ff. 61v, 65, 70v, 71. On 17 January 1657, James Naylor returned to Bristol for the third part of his punishment, a whipping through the streets, albeit a restrained scourging by the standards of the treatment meted to him in London. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 266-7. The Bristol Quakers distanced themselves from their notorious colleague. George Bishop deplored Naylor’s ‘conceited answers and cant’ and switched allegiance to the Quaker leader, George Fox. Even so, he noted with satisfaction that the former garrison commander, Adrian Scrope, who had been sympathetic to Friends in the turbulent days of 1654-5, was the first to sign the petition seeking clemency for Naylor. H. Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, 1964), 148 n. 69; Rabshekah’s Outrage Reproved (1658), 14, 19. Meanwhile, the city council had religious reform plans of its own. Ten days before Naylor’s punishment in Bristol, Robert Aldworth had been instructed with Joseph Jackson* to seek a new act for propagating the gospel in the city, the one of 1650 having lapsed. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 122. By April the content of what was intended in this bill is apparent from the council’s plan to amalgamate parishes, annexe at least one city church to itself and fund a public library from the proceeds. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 125. The fabric of the church buildings was to be preserved, and the city ministers funded, by a rate to be levied on the citizens in the parishes. Parochial funding for the church would replace the uncertainties of the historic basis of tithes, and cut through the lack of progress nationally on church finance. The Bristol scheme also bestowed the right to appoint ministers on the rate-paying parishioners, thus divesting the city council of some of its own powers. Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 142-4.
The council’s approach to funding the parochial ministry was bound to be cautious. They paid due regard to the meagre income of the ministers, but also considered ‘how greatly we are impaired in our estates by the late wars at sea’. Bristol Ref. Lib., 10160, p. 239. Even so, the beleaguered councillors found themselves under attack again, this time from opponents of the bill. Throughout the turbulence associated with the Quaker presence in Bristol, the behaviour of the apprentices and the crowd in general had been unpredictable and volatile, invoking alarm in both the Friends and the magistrates. Bristol RO, 04417/1, ff. 12v, 15v; Cry of Blood, 28, 30, 36, 40-1, 65. The Quaker analysis of events since the 1654 election rested on an assertion that there were indeed many opponents of the government in Bristol: not themselves, but a wide range of unpurged royalists. Their view gains credibility in the light of petitions to the mayor and aldermen on 30 November 1657 by five substantial citizens. These were printed petitions against the proposed bill on Bristol churches, but whether those handing them over were demonstrating support for their own views or merely presenting evidence against a group of whom they disapproved is unclear. What is certain is that they were claiming to be victims of crowd violence, that one, William Colston, had been dismissed from the council in 1645 as a royalist, and that he and John Knight were to emerge in 1660 as prominent supporters of the restored monarchy. Bristol RO, 04417/1, f. 81; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 185, 207, 252-3, 297, 325. Shortly afterwards, the city was put on alert against another rumoured royalist rising. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p.146. The bill passed Parliament despite the opposition, but implementing it proved difficult, as practical as well as ideological objections confronted the city council. Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 148, 150; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 273-4.
The council meanwhile continued to send emissaries to Parliament on its behalf, one of whom was its chaplain, the Presbyterian minister and writer of anti-Quaker polemic, Ralph Farmer, who had been himself a controversial figure in Bristol on the eve of the civil war. In November 1657, Farmer went up ‘about the burgesses’, and may have been successful, in that John Doddridge appeared in the House soon afterwards. Two others went up at around the same time ‘to prosecute against the Jesuit’, implying that the council adhered still to its view that Quakers were Catholics in disguise. Bristol RO, 04026/26, pp. 41, 42. Farmer’s credentials for the position of ambassador, other than his willingness to use a vitriolic pen, were his chequered history, catalogued by the Quakers in remorseless detail, as a solicitor and minor bureaucrat. Bishop, Throne of Truth, 109. There is evidence from this time – the closing session of the second protectorate Parliament (Jan. 1658) – that the city was using a professional agent, Samuel Hartlib junior, son of the celebrated polymath, to progress its affairs in Westminster and Whitehall, notably about the purchase of the city’s fee farm rent, but probably also on other business. Bristol RO, 04026/26, p. 43; 04026/27, p. 52. The council had adopted hostility to the farming of the excise as a restraint on trade, and sought the re-establishment of a court of admiralty in the city; the Merchant Venturers continued to plug away at the perennial concerns of the calfskins monopoly, and sought to forge an alliance with other west country merchants against Dutch encroachments on their trade in the Americas, which mattered more to them in a practical way than the government’s ideological hostility to Spanish trading interests. Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 123, 126; Soc. Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 247, 256, 277.
1659 Parliament and its aftermath
When Richard Cromwell* succeeded his father as lord protector, the council met at the Guildhall in scarlet gowns, and bonfires were lit among a cacophony of bells, trumpets and guns firing in the marsh and on ships. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 164. The elections for the new Parliament held on the basis of the historic constitution, not under the provisions of the Instrument of Government. In Bristol, they were again held behind closed doors, thus obviating any of the unseemly displays that had accompanied the previous two contests. Even so, the bells of the suburban Temple church were rung to mark the occasion. J. Barry, ‘Politics and religion in Restoration Bristol’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England ed. B. Reay (1985), 182. Joseph Jackson and Robert Aldworth were selected by the mayor, aldermen and common council (18 Jan. 1659), and if there were protests against this reversion to oligarchy, a record of them has not survived. According to Edmund Ludlowe II, Sir Henry Vane II stood in this election, securing the majority of voices, but if this were so, there is no direct record of it. There was certainly a thaw in the council’s relations with Vane, however. They had frozen him out, but now they voted him his four years’ arrears of salary as high steward since the start of the protectorate. Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51; Bristol RO, 04026/26, p. 53. A committee of councillors, including Miles Jackson, drew up instructions for the two Members, ‘in reference to all kinds of grievances as well relating to the commonwealth in general as to the city in particular they think fit’. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 180. In particular, though as an afterthought, the council charged Aldworth and Jackson with the task of trying to secure an enlarged charter for the city. Had they been successful, one of the clauses of their model charter would have entrusted the city militia unambiguously in the mayor, aldermen and common council, as a solution to the struggles with the garrison earlier in the decade. Their plans also stimulated some of the city trading guilds into requesting reform of their constitutions, and elicited a request for incorporation by the previously unchartered plumbers and glaziers. Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 182, 183.
These schemes died with Richard Cromwell’s Parliament on 22 April 1659, but during the assembly’s life the council chose John Stephens*, ‘a stranger’ to them, as recorder, passing over Matthew Hales* and Nicholas Lechmere*. Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 185. Stephens was one of a well-known Presbyterian Gloucestershire family, but more than his local standing, it was probably Stephens’s hostility to the military, vocally expressed in the 1659 Parliament, his moderation in religion and his wish to preserve as much of the pre-1649 constitution as was compatible with the protectorate that appealed to the Bristol corporation. Neither a new charter, had it been granted, nor an anti-military recorder would probably have prevented the riots in Bristol early in 1660 (6 Feb.). Two horse troops were denied entrance to the city, and apprentices swarmed the streets crying up a free Parliament. Leading figures who had supported Parliament had their houses ransacked, although the magistrates were able to restore a degree of calm by appealing for support in an address to the restored Rump. Elements in these riots included the presence of Welshmen, discontent among the soldiery – mollified by George Monck* – and resentment at the excise. The last two of these were grievances which had been festering away for years. The principal grievances of the city were set out in a publication supposedly by the apprentices, who made common cause with their London counterparts. There was a specific attack on the revived Rump Parliament for its damage to ‘our distressed church, our lives, liberties and estates’. A Letter of the Apprentices of the City of Bristol (1660), 4 (E.1015.20). The apprentices called for a free Parliament, relief from the burden of taxes, peace with Spain and an end to the oppressions associated with military rule. They feared that the arrival of fresh soldiers would herald ruinous new taxes. Despite the apprentices’ show of solidarity, the mayor and aldermen were divided among themselves, although a contemporary opinion that Robert Aldworth was making common cause with the sectarian elements among the soldiers of John Okey* strains credibility. Mercurius Politicus no. 606 (2-9 Feb. 1660), 1084 (E.775.1); no. 607 (9-16 Feb. 1660), 1110 (E.775.4); no. 608 (16-23 Feb. 1660), 1117 (E.775.8); no. 609 (23 Feb.-1 Mar. 1660), 1137 (E.775.9); HMC Leyborne-Popham, 144-5, 160, 161. Vane never received the money voted him in 1658; the council dismissed him as high steward, and cancelled the order for payment. Bristol RO, 04027/27, p. 61.
The violence in Bristol was over within a few days of its eruption, but the tensions behind it were carried forward to the disordered elections for the Convention. In scenes recalling the elections of 1654 and 1656, the Guildhall was packed with hundreds of men, who now had no vote. A poll was demanded because of the tumult in the hall, and one of the sheriffs pushed his way through the crowd to speak to the protestors. In his absence and apparently without his knowledge, the other sheriff declared John Stephens and John Knight elected, adjourned the court and left the hall. It seemed likely that a third, unidentified, candidate, whose supporters were calling for the poll, would have had most of the votes had one been taken. The council was concerned enough about this disorder to commission an opinion on the procedural issues from William Prynne*, a friend of John Stephens. His pronouncement made no difference to the result, but the council’s willingness to allow in 1660 that the electorate did indeed consist of more than the mayor, aldermen and common council shows that the restricted franchise of 1640 was no longer being upheld. Bristol Ref. Lib. 10160, p. 192.
