Halifax

Halifax was one of the largest boroughs to be enfranchised under the Instrument of Government. The constituency, which comprised not simply the town but the entire parish of Halifax, covered an area of approximately 124 square miles and contained 23 townships. W. Sheils, S. Sheils, ‘Textiles and reform: Halifax and its hinterland’ in The Reformation in English Towns 1500-1640 ed. P. Collinson, J. Craig (Basingstoke, 1998), 131-2; T.W. Hanson, ‘Jeremy Bentley, first MP for Halifax’, Halifax Antiquarian Soc. xxvi. 354. Halifax was known as a ‘place of great clothing’, and most of the parish’s inhabitants were said to be clothiers, although animal husbandry also figured prominently in the area’s economy. Add. 28566, f. 26; J. Watson, Hist. and Antiq. of the Par. of Halifax (1775), 593. By the mid-seventeenth century, the population of Halifax township alone was about 4,500, and that of the parish as a whole was undoubtedly substantially larger. H.P. Kendall, ‘The civil war as affecting Halifax and the surrounding towns’, Halifax Antiquarian Soc. vii. 52. The town was governed by the parish overseers and churchwardens and, from 1635, by the master and the 12 governors of the Halifax workhouse for the poor. W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:12/2/1-8; Watson, Par. of Halifax, 592-608. By the workhouse’s charter of incorporation, granted by Charles in 1635, the master and ‘prime governor’ were appointed magistrates for the parish during their tenure of office. Watson, Par. of Halifax, 602. The franchise was determined according to the county qualification, which under the Instrument of Government lay with those who possessed a real or personal estate to the value of £200. Hanson, ‘Jeremy Bentley’, 354.

During the civil war period, the Halifax area was widely regarded as a bastion of parliamentarianism. Edward Hyde* (the future earl of Clarendon), like many contemporaries, was inclined to see manufacturing towns such as Halifax as hotbeds of sedition. R. Howell, ‘Neutralism, conservatism, and political alignment in the Eng. revolution’, in Reactions to the Eng. Civil War ed. J. Morrill (1982), 67-8. Thus he described Leeds, Halifax and Bradford as ‘three very populous and rich towns (which, depending wholly upon clothiers, naturally maligned the gentry)’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 464. In the parish of Halifax, where godly religion had apparently won many adherents by the 1640s, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the majority of the population sided with Parliament. Sheils, Sheils, ‘Textiles and reform’, 141-3; H.P. Kendall, ‘Local incidents in the civil war’, Halifax Antiquarian Soc. vi. 8, 9, 22-5. In September 1642, it was alleged that when Sir William Savile*, a man of considerable influence in the south Pennines, had attempted to recruit soldiers in Halifax for the king’s army, the inhabitants had ‘turned him out of the town, and not a man would obey him’. H. Dickenson, The Last True Newes from Yorke, Nottingham, Coventry and Warwicke (1642), sig. A3 (E.116.9). Moreover, in April 1643, about 250 of the parish’s leading inhabitants entered into an ‘association’ for the preservation of the ‘true reformed Protestant religion’ and for driving the earl of Newcastle’s ‘bloody and barbarous’ troops out of the area. W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), FW:14/1. Nevertheless, the king’s cause was by no means unrepresented in the parish; at least some of the 800 or so royalist troops who occupied the town in 1643 were local men. Kendall, ‘The civil war as affecting Halifax’, 37-8. But if the majority of the parish's inhabitants supported Parliament initially, the fact that the king’s arms were not removed from Halifax church until 1650 and the commonwealth’s arms not erected until October 1652 suggests that few of the parish’s inhabitants welcomed the king’s execution, or looked favourably upon the Rump. W. Yorks Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, f. 41.

Halifax’s first MP, and its last before the Reform Act, was Jeremy Bentley – a godly clothier and former paymaster of Parliament’s northern army and one of the parish’s wealthiest inhabitants. He was also well-connected politically, being a friend of Captain Adam Baynes*, a leading figure in the West Riding Cromwellian interest. Infra, ‘Jeremy Bentley’. Bentley’s links with Baynes and with Baynes’ influential patron, Major-general John Lambert*, may partly explain why Halifax, and not the more important administrative centre of Wakefield, was joined with Leeds as the two new parliamentary constituencies for the West Riding under the Instrument of Government (of which Lambert was the architect) in December 1653. Infra, ‘John Lambert’; D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, EHR cviii. 873. Lambert may have opted for Halifax in the knowledge that it would return a member favourable to his interests. In the summer of 1654, a Member of Lambert’s interest attempted (unsuccessfully) to have the elections at both Halifax and Leeds to the first protectoral Parliament delayed as a favour to Baynes. Add. 21422, ff. 328, 331. On 12 July 1654, 59 of the parish of Halifax’s principal inhabitants returned Bentley as their first MP. W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, f. 82; Hanson, ‘Jeremy Bentley’, 359-60. Three weeks after his election, Bentley chaired a meeting of the parishioners to petition for a charter of incorporation for the borough, although none was ever obtained. W. Yorks. Archives (Calderdale), HAS/B:22/27, ff. 153-4.

The indenture returning Bentley to the second protectorate Parliament in the summer of 1656 has not survived, but it is likely that the electorate on this occasion was substantially the same group that had returned him two years earlier. In 1656, however, he was excluded from the House, along with a hundred or so other MPs, as an enemy of the protectorate, which strongly suggests that he was no longer an intimate of Lambert and Baynes, who were both keen to exclude Presbyterians and others opposed to the army. How exactly Bentley had offended against the Cromwellian regime is not clear. The excluded MPs for the West Riding – Henry Arthington, John Stanhope and Henry Tempest – were barred from sitting primarily, it seems, because of their close association with the Fairfax interest and its opposition to the rule of the major-generals – and having served under the Fairfaxes in the 1640s, Bentley may have been targeted for the same reason. Supra, ‘Yorkshire’; infra, ‘Jeremy Bentley’; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 362. The parish was disenfranchised with the replacement of the Instrument of Government in 1657 and was to remain unrepresented at Westminster until the electoral reforms of the nineteenth century.