Set on the confluence of two major navigable rivers, the Severn and the Warwickshire Avon, Tewkesbury should have been a prosperous place. Goods imported at Bristol found their way up-river to Tewkesbury from Gloucester; and carried down in the characteristic river boats, the trows, was the agricultural produce of the vales of Evesham and Tewkesbury. The town served as an entrepôt for grain supplies, sent as far as west Wales. CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 445. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, one third of cargoes going downstream were carried in Tewkesbury boats, but the town’s share of trade declined after 1660. F. Redmond, ‘The Borough of Tewkesbury, 1575-1714’ (Birmingham Univ. MA thesis, 1950), 80-1. Springing from the concentration of harvested grain in the area were the specialist trades of malting and coopering, and Tewkesbury gloves were renowned. Redmond thesis, 84. Despite these apparent advantages, however, the Tewkesbury region was notoriously poor. A contemporary pamphleteer spoke of Deerhurst, three miles from Tewkesbury, as famed ‘for three things, old clothes, lice and shitten stiles’. Harry Hangman’s Honour (1655), 7-8 (E.842.13). The causes of local poverty, according to this writer, lay in the dependence of the area on animal husbandry and the limited extent of tillage. A response towards the sluggish traditional pastoral economy was the introduction of tobacco cultivation: by 1639 the vales of Tewkesbury and Evesham had become the main centres for this illegal though profitable trade. J. Thirsk, The Rural Economy of England (1984), 280. Tobacco-growing was a poor man’s trade, but the gentry turned a blind eye to it, in a tacit defiance of privy council directives. Despite the poverty of the people, perhaps because of low land prices, the area remained attractive to outside land speculators. Between 1619 and 1622, Elizabeth Craven, mother of the future MP John Craven*, bought extensively into the district. NRA Report 6040; Glos. RO, D184/77, T100, Z2; VCH Glos. iv. 433; vi. 233; vii. 213; viii. 9, 72, 91, 134, 146, 179, 191, 192, 229; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch.Soc. lxi. 282-3. Between 1622 and 1635, Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex, acquired an estate on a scale enough to buy him a political interest in Tewkesbury. Cent. Kent. Studies, U269/1/M76,77. The Cravens and Cranfields followed the example of Baptist Hicks†, Viscount Campden, who started the trend by buying the manor of Chipping Campden in 1608.
Tewkesbury claimed to be an ancient corporation with a history of 300 years before 1640, but its government rested on a charter of 1609, granted by James I when the manor of Tewkesbury was sold by him to the corporation. There were 24 principal burgesses, who formed a common council, with another chamber of 24 assistants. Two ‘bailiffs’, with the functions of mayors, presided over this structure, with the help of justices of the peace selected from the senior principal burgesses. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1 p. 153; VCH Glos. viii. 147-9. From November 1639, the two bailiffs and two justices became ex officio deputy lieutenants. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1 p. 1. Beyond the structure of borough government there were more than 300 freemen. Only 50 men paid subsidy in 1641, but a local rate of 1644 for the royalist army listed 293 payers. As the 1676 Compton census-taker suggested a population of about 2,000, the implication seems to be that in this borough, ‘freemen’ were basically the rate-paying male populace. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1 pp. 118, 122-6; Compton Census, 538; Redmond thesis, 70. Parliamentary representation was granted only with the 1609 charter. The town had a puritan religious outlook. The minister there, John Geree, was suspended by the bishop of Gloucester, Godfrey Goodman, after 1624, and Humphrey Fox, suspended from the living of Forthampton, also lived in Tewkesbury. His study was searched by the bailiffs in 1639, to no avail. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 582; Redmond thesis, 37. To the disgust of the Gloucester clergyman, John Allibond, both Geree and Fox helped co-ordinate the puritan vote at the Gloucestershire election in March 1640. SP16/448, f. 166.
The selection of the town’s burgesses for the first Parliament of 1640 seems to have been a largely uncontentious assertion of the wishes of the corporation. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper secured the first seat by the unopposed will of the bailiffs. Cooper had impressed them at a dinner following a day’s hunting organised by the bailiffs in honour of Thomas Coventry, eldest son of Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry†. Cooper was a guest by virtue of his standing as the lord keeper’s son-in-law, and recorded how he and the bailiffs got into conversation as, being no great huntsmen, they willingly attended Cooper during one of his frequent bouts of incapacitating pain. They told him of their dislike of the Catholic sympathiser Sir Henry Spiller†, who held an estate at Eldersfield, near the town. Spiller was a counsellor of the queen and evidently no friend of the puritan-leaning townsmen; later, at the dinner, he challenged Spiller’s aspersions, to the delight of his hosts. W.D. Christie, Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper (2 vols. 1871), i. appx. pp. xxi-xxii. The bailiffs were happy to overlook Cooper’s extreme youth: he was not yet 20, and thus technically sat illegally. The indenture records that the second seat was taken by Sir Edward Alford, who held lands and a house in the borough, and was thus probably returned on his own interest. C219/42/1B/2; Glos. RO, TBA/A1/1, p. 125. The bailiffs declined an approach by Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex, to place his eldest son in a seat, pleading the need to safeguard the public good by taking ‘an extraordinary care in elections at this time, when religion is so much concerned, and the good of the commonwealth never more [so]’. Cent. Kent. Studies, U269/1/E127.
Something of the frustration felt by the corporation of Tewkesbury at the failure of the Short Parliament can be gauged from the entry in the borough minute book, recording the November 1640 assembly as having sprung ‘from the broken splinters of a former Parliament which began the 13th of April last and ended the 5th of May following and nothing done’. Glos. RO, TBA/A1/1, p. 114. Ten days before the election for what would become the Long Parliament, once again the bailiffs declined to return James Cranfield. HMC 4th Rep. 303. The selection of Cooper earlier that year, in cheerful disregard of electoral law, proved to have been ominous. On 22 October, two, or possibly even three, returns were made from Tewkesbury. C219/43/193. When the Commons assembled, the election was referred to the privileges committee. John Maynard reported on 9 November that John Craven and Sir Edward Alford were returned on one indenture, Sir Robert Cooke and Edward Stephens on the other. A third indenture may have been a duplicate; the House decided that he who returned it was not guilty of a misdemeanour. Alford was returned also for Arundel, Sussex, but was allowed to defer making his choice in the light of the irregularities in the Tewkesbury return. Two days later, this concession was proposed as a general principle for all returned for more than one seat whose elections were in doubt. Although various Tewkesbury bailiffs’ names were mentioned in the House as possible culprits in the affair, only one, Thomas Hale, was sent for as delinquent, probably because his was the only name on more than one indenture. CJ ii. 22b, 23a, b; Procs. LP i. 95.
The case was reported again by Maynard on 26 November. Since the 9th, the issue of the right of election had emerged as central to the double return. Presumably one indenture had embodied the wishes of a smaller group of townsmen, and the other a larger: as all indentures relating to this election in Tewkesbury have not survived, it is difficult to be more precise. The question of the nature of the electorate turned on whether all inhabitants, or only freemen, had voices. There followed what Sir Simonds D’Ewes* characterised as a ‘long and unnecessary’ dispute on the point. John Glynne, Sir Walter Erle and John Selden were among those arguing for a wide franchise of all male inhabitants: their interpretation of the communitas described in the charter. Procs. LP i. 306, 310. They were convinced that freeholders who did not live within the borough should have no voices, and judged the election void because some freeholders from out of town, probably in the hundred of Tewkesbury, were ‘confusedly’ admitted to the poll. John Pym seems to have taken a minority view in this debate, arguing for a narrow franchise of men free of the corporation. In his view, Tewkesbury was a borough by creation, and ‘the king might restrain the number of electors as well as grant the power of election’. A similar point was made by Sir John Culpeper. Procs. LP i.310, 321. Pym’s concern was only on the legal issue of what was implied in the franchise bestowed by a charter, and the whole argument does not seem to have been conducted with an eye to immediate, popular politics. A local chronicler was clear that no-one was arguing that almsmen should be allowed to vote. Glos. RO, D2688, f. 84v.
The election was discussed again on 11 December, when a committee of 17 MPs and any interested lawyers in the House met in part with a view to drawing up a bill on ‘inconveniencies’ in elections generally. D’Ewes took issue with the point made by Pym two weeks earlier, and expressed himself uneasy at the possibility that a restricted franchise might make dominance by important men more likely. He thought that if places in Tewkesbury hundred were anciently (that is, before the charter) of the borough, their inhabitants should have voices. His instinct to favour a wide franchise was supported by what he typically called ‘better opinion’, that is, D’Ewes found himself in the majority. There the matter rested, with Bulstrode Whitelocke, Sir Gilbert Gerard, Sir Thomas Widdrington and John Glynne lending support. Procs. LP i. 566, 570, On 11 January 1641, there was a motion before the House that none returned for Tewkesbury should sit until the election was decided, but it was never put to the question. None of the men returned on the two writs took a seat, except John Craven, who first appeared in the record of the House on 4 May. CJ ii. 134b. It was not until 6 August 1641 that the House finally ruled that the whole election had been void, and that a new writ should be issued for a fresh contest. CJ ii. 212b, 239b. Alford then elected to sit for Arundel, and Craven must subsequently have withdrawn from the Commons.
The Tewkesbury corporation noted in its order book the ‘great men questioned’ and the ‘judges questioned’ in 1641, probably approvingly. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1. The minister of the town, John Geree, was an enthusiast for the Protestation when it was sent down by Parliament for mass subscription; more than 400 Tewkesbury men signed, either in 1641 or early 1642. J. Geree, Judah’s Joy (1641), sig. A2 (E.170.8). In October 1641, a second election was held, and again there was an irregularity. On this occasion, the poll was taken by the town clerk, and the poll book was later inspected by William Prynne*, counsel to one of the contestants. A return was made by the majority of burgesses and freemen for Alford and Sir Robert Cooke, but another return, by ‘the inhabitants’, was made for Cooke and Edward Stephens; there appear to have been about 360 voters. CJ iii. 378b, 379a; Inner Temple MS 511/23, f. 1. There was also another candidate: a Mr Spencer. The most likely fit for this person is George Spencer, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas Russell of Strensham, north of Tewkesbury. Vis. Warws. 1619 (Harl. Soc. xii), 285. On 2 November, the House fixed on a hearing for the complaint that Alford already sat for Arundel. CJ ii. 302b. Cooke’s appearance in the House on 2 November, when the matter was discussed, seems confirmation of a general acceptance of his standing, and Prynne was keen to add his voice to the expressions of content. CJ ii. 302a; Inner Temple MS 511/23, f. 1. On the 12th, there was a debate on the Tewkesbury case, postponed probably in order to allow candidates to find legal counsel. Alford’s standing seemed clear enough, but his case provided material for the legalistically-minded D’Ewes. Alford stood up and announced he would serve for Arundel. Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s response was that he could make no other choice; D'Ewes’s, that Alford had no choice to make. D’Ewes (C), 126-7. With the position of Cooke and Alford apparently settled, there remained issues about the standing of other candidates, and whether a third election should be held. Edward Stephens employed the formidable Prynne to argue that he should take the second seat, as there seemed little doubt that Cooke was duly elected. On Stephen’s behalf, Prynne argued that the issues were twofold: as in the previous election, in whom did the right of election lie? and what was the standing of the other candidates if Alford’s election was illegal?
In Prynne’s view, the right of election lay in the freemen only, by which was meant in the 1609 charter ‘the better or wealthier sort of the borough’. Inner Temple MS 511/23, f. 2. Communitas must mean the freemen only, and excluded those who lived in the hundred, not in the borough, and alms-takers. Prynne was thus nearer to the line taken by John Pym, and argued for a more restricted franchise than Tewkesbury was used to. Drawing on statute- and case-law, he dismissed the claims of the hundred dwellers, some of them 22 miles distant from the town. They might even be of the corporation, but could not be of the borough. Thus, the votes taken for Spencer from outsiders and the poor should be discounted. As for Alford’s election, the foolish voters might as well as have polled for a peer or a dead man. It was as if his election had never occurred, and thus Cooke was in first place, Stephens second and Spencer third. He introduced the parliamentary interests of the borough to urge acceptance of this election: ‘It will be both a prejudice to the Parliament to want a Member till a new election, when there have been two elections already, and to the electors too’. Inner Temple MS 511/23, f. 8. For such a formidably learned advocate, Prynne’s approach on this occasion was pragmatic. There was no case for a fresh poll, as no voters had been denied, the election was not in itself illegal, and there had been no fraud or abuses. The return should be amended by the Tewkesbury bailiffs in the House.
The debate on 12 November seems to have produced no result. It took petitions from Tewkesbury corporation to bring the case of this borough to the Commons’ attention again, in May 1642, but again with no conclusion. CJ ii. 589b. By this time, Parliament had other preoccupations, as the country moved towards civil war. The town was garrisoned for Parliament for a few months in 1642, but the conflict made its first traumatic impact on Tewkesbury when Sir William Russell, kinsman of the disappointed parliamentary candidate, Spencer, occupied the town on behalf of the king on 6 February 1643, four days after Prince Rupert took Cirencester by storm. Glos. RO, D2688, f. 87v. Russell exacted a contribution of £500 from the townsmen, and although Sir William Waller* occupied the town briefly for Parliament that same month, the royalists were only displaced in April. Even then, when Edward Massie* secured the town again for Parliament, the town was not considered a valuable prize. He installed the town’s single serving Member, Sir Robert Cooke, as governor, but Cooke slighted the defences and moved on, to his death somewhere on Waller’s campaign trail. Glos. RO, D2688, f. 88v. The Welsh troops under Sir William Vavasour re-took the town, which was in any case difficult to defend. J. Corbet, ‘An Historical Relation’ (1645) in J. Wasbourn, Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1825), 45; Newsbooks: Mercurius Aulicus, i. 98, 186, 196, 202, 212, 225; Redmond thesis, 39. Doubtless some of the delay in resolving the election irregularity was occasioned by this continuing instability of control. Only on 25 December 1643 did the House agree with the committee chaired by Sir Robert Harley that Edward Stephens’s election was good, and that the indenture should be amended in the House to record the fact. CJ iii. 352a, b, 373a, b, 378b, 379a.
By the time the House resolved the outcome of this election, the winner of the first seat, Sir Robert Cooke, was dead. Over a year after the town had fallen finally into the hands of Parliament – the interval was a measure of uncertainty as to how permanent this control would be – another by-election was held for Cooke’s seat (3 Oct. 1645), the place going without contest to John Stephens, brother of Edward. The indenture contains no signatures of bailiffs or burgesses, and the election was safely controlled by the sheriff, Thomas Stephens, Edward’s son. C219/43/196; Vis. Glos. 1623 (Harl. Soc. xxi), 151. The issues that had plagued the previous two elections were thus safely suppressed. Edward Stephens was secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, and John Stephens only took his seat in the Rump after 27 November 1651. It was during 1649, when the town was thus unrepresented, that a dispute blew up over the election of bailiffs, and a petition was preferred to Parliament. According to the contemporary town chronicler, the prime mover in this was Thomas Bulstrode, an arriviste lawyer, who had become recorder, and who was disaffected because he could not gain exemption from local rates. Glos. RO, D2688, f. 94v; Vis. Glos. 1682-3 ed. Fenwick and Metcalfe, 32. Bulstrode supported a small faction who sought a reduction in the size of the common council, and other alterations in the borough government. Their petition to Parliament was referred to the Committee for Indemnity, but provoked a counter-petition from the majority seeking to preserve the status quo ante as the best means to ‘conduce to the maintenance of the Parliament’s interests and commands’. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1, p. 153. The whole case was forwarded by the Indemnity Committee to local county magistrates, among them Sylvanus Wood* and Sir William Constable*, but they in turn chose to turn over the affair to an arbitrating committee of MPs: Isaac Penington and Sir Henry Mildmay for Bulstrode’s faction, John Venn and Luke Hodges for a group of 8 of the common council, who found themselves facing allegations of misdemeanour from the Indemnity Committee. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1, pp. 153, 154, 155. In the settlement, it was recommended that the town clerk rather than the annually-elected chamberlain be clerk of the statutes: ‘sometimes the chamberlain cannot write his own name, which is ridiculous’. Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1, pp. 158-9.
Like many boroughs, Tewkesbury lost its own representation in Parliament during the Nominated Assembly. Under the Instrument of Government it recovered one seat, which for the first protectorate Parliament was taken by the town’s old favourite, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, now a member of the protector’s council. The indenture, signed by over 130 voters, denotes a wide franchise and a return to popular parliamentary politics in the town, and the bailiffs described themselves as ‘bailiffs but no electors’. C219/44, part 1. Cooper’s simultaneous election for Wiltshire denied the borough its choice, however. In an undocumented by-election, the seat went instead to Francis St John, son of Lord Chief Justice Oliver St John*. No territorial connection can be established between Tewkesbury and St John, and the town’s chronicler noted that St John ‘never sat until the Parliament was dissolved’. Glos. RO, D2688, f. 99v. During the episode of the major-generals, John Disbrowe* stamped his presence on this part of Gloucestershire. The major-general was in the county in December 1655, and had been entertained at Gloucester. In January 1656, he intervened to remove nine Tewkesbury councillors and the town clerk for royalism; they did not recover their places until November 1660. TSP iv. 396. Disbrowe’s standing in the borough was reflected in the election to the second protectorate Parliament. Ninety-eight voters signed an indenture on 5 August 1656 for Valentine Disbrowe, his sixth son. Glos. RO, TBR/A14/2. On 13 August 1656, he was made a freeman of Gloucester prior to being elected to one of the city, so the compliant Tewkesbury freemen were anticipating their larger neighbour in seeking to return his son. Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley vol. III, f. 71; GBR3/3, pp. 857, 876. The indenture, in good order as it appears to be, never left the borough. Instead, on 25 August, Colonel Francis White, another senior army officer acceptable to the Cromwellian interest, was returned. C219/45 part 2. The suspicion must be that Valentine Disbrowe was under age, as his eldest brother was only born in 1637. M. Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral-house of Cromwell (2 vols. 1784), ii. 284.
The borough recovered its two seats under Richard Cromwell*, but the corporation remained compliant after Disbrowe’s purge. Nine councillors, including the two bailiffs, wrote to John Thurloe* in December 1658 to confirm their understanding that he was ‘pleased so much to honour this poor corporation as to accept of our free and unanimous electing you one of our burgesses in the next Parliament’. TSP vii. 572. As a mark of the esteem in which they held Thurloe, they were quite happy that he should himself choose his fellow-burgess. Their hopes were dashed when Thurloe declined their invitation: he was returned for two East Anglian boroughs and Cambridge University, choosing the university seat. Instead, the corporation fixed its choice on Edward Cooke, son of the energetic parliamentarian and Tewkesbury MP, Sir Robert; and on ‘Robert Longe’, who is presumed to have been Robert Long II – a man with no obvious link to Tewkesbury – but with no concrete evidence. A Perfect List of the Lords of the Other House (1659). Edward Cooke’s politics were very different from his late father’s, and he did nothing to halt the town’s drift towards support for the monarchy and uncontested elections after 1660. There were no more than 35 ‘burgesses’ participating in these elections, and so Disbrowe’s intervention in 1656 to regulate the borough seems to have suppressed popular parliamentary activity in a lasting way.
