Ripon

Ripon lay a few miles to the west of the Great North Road, commanding a crossing of the River Ure where it flowed from the Yorkshire Dales into the Vale of York. The largest borough in the West Riding until the enfranchisement of Leeds and Halifax in the 1650s, the town contained approximately 350 households by the early 1670s, suggesting a population of about 1,500. E179/262/11, pp. 14-17; E179/210/400, mm. 60-5. Ripon was dominated by its minster (cathedral) and was said to have owed its ‘greatness’ to religion – although until Tudor times it had also been a major centre for the manufacture of cloth. With the decline of town’s clothing industry, the inhabitants had turned to a wide variety of other trades, including spur-making, for which it became famous. Ripon Millenary ed. W. Harrison (Ripon, 1892), ii. 14, 46, 48, 55-7. By the 1670s, Ripon was reportedly ‘well inhabited with gentry, and its market ... is very great for cattle, corn, provisions and chiefly wool, which is much brought up by the clothiers of Leeds’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 259. Under its charter of incorporation, granted in 1604, the borough was governed by a mayor – who was elected annually – and 12 aldermen and 24 assistants, who served for life. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC I. The corporation elected new aldermen from three assistants nominated by the mayor; and it was also the mayor who nominated three freemen from which the assistants, freemen and inhabitants elected new assistants. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, pp. 303, 310.

Ripon had returned MPs to three Parliaments under Edward I, but its representation had then lapsed until the borough had been re-enfranchised in 1553. The town’s principal electoral patrons were successive archbishops of York, who were lords of the manor of Ripon and, as such, appointed the steward of the borough court. As in the neighbouring constituencies of Aldborough and Boroughbridge, the franchise was restricted to the owners of burgage properties. In 1647, there were 150 such burgages, of which no more than three were owned by any one person. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Ripon’; T.S. Gowland, ‘The manor and liberties of Ripon’, YAJ xxxii. 52, 56, 80. Prospective parliamentary candidates were evidently required by the corporation to become freemen of the borough, which gave the officeholders at least some influence over the selection process. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, pp. 356, 362, 506.

The dominant electoral interests at Ripon by 1640 were those of Archbishop Richard Neile and the principal local landowner William Malory*, who had represented the town in almost every Parliament since 1614. In the elections to the Short Parliament that spring, the borough returned Malory and the archbishop’s son Sir Paul Neile. C219/42/2/94. Defeat in the second bishops’ war in August, and the high price that Yorkshire paid in military charges and free quarter, would have a disastrous impact on the archbishop’s interest at Ripon, for Neile was closely identified with Archbishop William Laud, the perceived author of the king’s ill-fated Scottish policy. Moreover, for the first three weeks of October – while the elections to the Long Parliament were in full swing – Ripon was the venue for talks between the triumphant Scots and a group of English peers representing the king, and this can only have heightened awareness among the townspeople of the wretched state to which Charles’s war against the Covenanters, and its promoters, had brought the nation. Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby ed. D. Parsons (1836), 62-3. But Archbishop Neile may well have been beyond such concerns anyway; he had less than a month to live by early October and was probably unable to promote his interest as vigorously as he had done in March. Indeed, according to a Scottish commentator, Sir Paul Neile received just one voice on election day (9 Oct.), when his place was taken by Malory’s son John. Princeton Lib. MS C0938 no. 224 (John Nevay letters 1640-1): Nevay to presbytery at Irvine, 30 Oct. 1640. The election indenture returning William Malory and John Mallory was signed by the mayor, seven of the aldermen and 36 of the assistants and other burgage-holders. C219/43/3/120.

Both Ripon’s MPs sided with the king at the outbreak of civil war and were disabled from sitting by the Commons in September 1642 and January 1643 respectively. Infra, ‘John Mallory’; ‘William Malory’. The townspeople appear to have been generally royalist in sympathy during the war. The commander of the king’s army in the north, William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle, saw fit to remove only one alderman from the corporation, and it seems that several of the town’s leading inhabitants, including three of the aldermen, were active in raising forces for the king. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 383; SP23/1, pp. 99-100; PA, Main Pprs. 2 Mar. 1646, f. 70. According to a history of Ripon published in the 1730s, Sir Thomas Mauleverer* and a detachment of parliamentary troops entered the town at some point late in 1642 or early 1643 and defaced the memorials in the minster and smashed the stained glass and ‘offered many indignities to the inhabitants’, before being driven out by Sir John Mallory and royalist forces from Skipton Castle. T. Gent, Hist. of Rippon (1733), 118; Ripon Millenary ed. Harrison, ii. 58, app. p. xiv. If there is any substance to this story, then Mauleverer’s raid would certainly have strengthened royalist feeling in the town.

After the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644, the entire West Riding was gradually reduced to parliamentary obedience, and on 12 September 1645 the Commons ordered that a writ be issued for the election of new burgesses at Ripon. CJ iv. 272b. Two months later, on 12 November, the burgage-holders elected Alderman Myles Moodie, who had served as mayor in 1643, and Sir Charles Egerton, another prominent local landowner. Moodie was presumably returned on the corporation interest. The indenture was signed by 33 of the burgage-holders, including the mayor and several of the aldermen. C219/43/3/122. Three of the signatories were later accused by Egerton of having raised troops for the king during the war, and it is likely that there was a strong conservative, perhaps even crypto-royalist, element among the burgage-holders. SP23/1, p. 100. Certainly, neither Egerton nor Moodie demonstrated much in the way of parliamentary zeal. After the Independents regained control of the Commons in August 1647, Egerton seems to have abandoned his seat altogether and would be secluded at Pride’s Purge. Infra, ‘Sir Charles Egerton’.

Moodie may have remained in Ripon until the winter of 1646-7, and upon finally arriving at Westminster, he fell ill and died. Infra, ‘Myles Moodie’. A writ for a new election at Ripon was issued in mid-March 1647, but the election could have taken place at any time between thenand mid-May 1648, when the new MP, the zealous Independent Sir John Bourchier, received his first appointment in the Commons. C231/6, p. 81; CJ v. 557b. The election indenture does not appear to have survived. Bourchier had no estate in the immediate vicinity of Ripon and almost certainly owed his election there to the influence of the Fairfaxes – the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), who had commanded Parliament’s northern army in the civil war, having been appointed steward of Ripon’s manorial courts in September 1646. SP20/2, f. 249; Gowland, ‘Manor and liberties of Ripon’, 52. There is certainly little to suggest that Bourchier’s politics commanded much sympathy within the corporation. For several years after the king’s execution in January 1649, a significant number of the office-holders either resigned their places or persistently failed to attend corporate meetings. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, pp. 427-30, 440, 445, 451, 453. In May 1649, for example, ten aldermen and 15 assistants were declared absent. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 428. And it was not until March 1651 that the corporation ordered that the royal arms on the town mace be replaced by those of the commonwealth. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 447.

Ripon was disfranchised under the Instrument of Government in 1653, but regained its seats in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. On 5 January 1659, the burgage-holders returned two of Ripon’s leading inhabitants: Edmund Jenings and his younger brother Jonathan. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 506. Edmund Jenings would have enjoyed considerable local influence as the farmer of tithes for the former episcopal demesne lands at Ripon – which were sold off in the late 1640s and early 1650s – for which he paid ‘a great yearly fee farm rent’ to the protectorate. Infra, ‘Edmund Jenings’; Gowland, ‘Manor and liberties of Ripon’, 52. Bourchier returned from political retirement in the spring of 1659 to represent the town in the restored Rump.

At least three candidates contested the seats at Ripon in the elections to the 1660 Convention – Edmund Jenings, the West Riding Presbyterian gentleman Henry Arthington* and the region’s foremost republican John Lambert* – and the result was a double return. The Commons upheld the election of Jenings and Arthington, who, according to the mayor, had received ‘the greater number of voices’. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 525; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Ripon’. Although Arthington owned property in the Ripon area and was a governor of the town’s grammar school, he very probably owed his election to the influence of his brother-in-law the 3rd Baron Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax*) as lord of the manor. Infra, ‘Henry Arthington’. The Fairfax and political Presbyterian interest in the town may have been strengthened since the late 1640s as a result of purchases of former episcopal lands by many of the burgage-holders, who were probably dismayed at the prospect of having to return them in the event of a full restoration of the episcopate. York Minster Lib. Hailstone mss, QQ 6.1 (Sir J. Jenings, ‘The naked truth’ [unpub. tract, n.d.], p. 3). The presence of a sizeable anti-episcopal bloc among the officeholders would help to explain why the corporation commissioners found it necessary to remove eight of the aldermen and a third of the assistants in 1662. N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 548.