Harwich

In 1669 the Italian courtiers accompanying Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, on his visit to England would discover that Harwich was

formerly a place of no great note as a sea-port, nor would it have been so at present, had not the king [Charles II], after he had settled the disturbances of the kingdom, improved it by building a fort at the mouth of the river, which it defends, and affords the most secure shelter to ships of the largest size ... The place itself, as a town, with the exception of the port, is not of much consequence. Its buildings are mean and shabby, the population consisting chiefly of sailors, fishermen, and the soldiers of the garrison. [F. Corsini and L. Magalotti], Travels of Cosmo the Third (1821), 274-5.

As this implies, Harwich had never really benefitted from the natural advantages of its location. The Tendring peninsula of Essex and Landguard Point of Suffolk together created a short channel separating the confluence of the Stour and the Orwell from the North Sea. The result was a natural harbour close to the continent with excellent river communications deep into East Anglia. Harwich occupied the narrow headland which commanded the Essex side of the entrance from the sea. The problem for Harwich was that it was Ipswich, located on the upper reaches of the Orwell, which benefitted most from these advantages. It was Ipswich which served as the port through which the commercial traffic across the North Sea flowed, leaving Harwich as little more than a convenient stop on the domestic shipping route up the east coast. At this stage, Harwich’s strategic importance, as with Landguard Fort opposite, was primarily as a bastion protecting the approaches to Ipswich and Colchester.

It was only as recently as 1604 that the town had been formally incorporated by the crown, thereby gaining the right to return two MPs to Parliament. The franchise for those elections was vested in the new corporation, which consisted of a mayor, seven other aldermen and 24 capital burgesses. Charters granted to the bor. of Harwich (1798), 1-42; HP Commons 1604-1629. By the 1620s two men, the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†) and Sir Harbottle Grimston*, had established electoral interests in the town. Warwick commanded respect simply because he was the most powerful peer in the county, but here he had the additional advantage of being vice-admiral of Essex. In 1635 he had risked the corporation’s displeasure by persuading the king to issue a writ of quo warranto against them challenging their ancient claim to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the court of admiralty. That the corporation immediately surrendered could be considered evidence of just how strong Warwick’s influence was. VCH Essex, ii. 282-3. Grimston’s involvement in the town’s affairs was more direct – he was the leading local landowner and his son Harbottle Grimston* had held the office of the town’s recorder since 1634. The corporation, consisting as it did of townsmen, was probably easily overawed. There are however some indications of discord among them. One of the aldermen, John Peck, was dismissed from office in December 1637 because, according to the minutes of the common council, he was ‘a very contentious man and hath vowed the ruin of our charter and that there is none but rogues, rascals, knaves, thieves and fools in the said borough’. Harwich bor. recs. 98/3, f. 62.

It was Warwick’s influence which was most evident in the return made by the corporation on 26 March 1640. Sir Thomas Cheke* was the earl’s brother-in-law and was almost certainly chosen to please him. Who or what had recommended Sir John Jacob* is less clear. Jacob was a Cambridgeshire man, who owned some land in Essex at Wakes Colne, over 20 miles to the west of Harwich. Morant, Essex, ii. 222. His role as a collector of the great customs is unlikely to have endeared him to the town and it has usually been supposed that he must have been returned at Harwich on the interest of the crown. What can be noted is that, by the time the Harwich corporation met, Sir Harbottle and Harbottle Grimston had already secured more prestigious seats for themselves, respectively for Essex and Colchester. Quite why Grimston might have wanted to assist Jacob remains unknown, but a likely desire to assert some influence over the result would make him Jacob’s probable backer. There is no evidence that the election was contested. Harwich bor. recs. 98/3, f. 67; C219/42, pt. 1, f. 105.

That autumn other men claimed the county seats and so required Grimston to use his patronage at Harwich for himself. Jacob did not seek re-election there, preferring instead to stand for the Sussex seat of Rye where he had the backing of the new lord warden of the Cinque Ports, James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox. No one seems to have objected when the Harwich burgesses met on 24 October to elect Grimston and Cheke as their MPs. Harwich bor. recs. 98/3, f. 68; C219/43, pt. 1, f. 150.

Harwich was not as affected by the civil war as it might have been. The town’s proximity to the continent and its position as the gateway to the parliamentarian heartlands of East Anglia increased the town’s potential strategic importance. There was always the fear that the Stour and Orwell estuaries might be used as the landing site for expeditions sent from abroad in support of the king. When the mayor heard rumours in November 1642 which claimed that Henrietta Maria was planning to land there, he was unsure whether he would be expected to welcome or oppose her. Essex RO, D/Y 2/5, p. 99. A request from the corporation three months later led the Commons to dispatch Sir Harbottle Grimston and Cheke to the town to oversee the repair to its fortifications as a precaution against invasion. Harwich bor. recs. 98/3, p. 76v; CJ ii. 975a-b; Eg. 2646, ff. 313, 315; Eg. 2651, ff. 144-145. In June 1648, faced with the seizure of Colchester by the rebel royalist forces, Parliament prioritised securing Harwich to prevent the rebels receiving reinforcements via the Stour. J.H. Round, ‘Harwich and the siege of Colchester’, Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. v. 191-5.

By then the town had gained a new MP. The result of the by-election held at Harwich in the spring of 1648 represented a reassertion of the Grimston interest in the wake of Sir Harbottle’s death. Several weeks before he had died that February, Grimston’s daughter Mary had married Capel Luckyn*. Harbottle junior (who now succeeded to his father’s baronetcy) was still sitting as MP for Colchester and apparently threw his weight as recorder behind his new brother-in-law. The writ for the by-election was moved on 16 March and the corporation accepted Luckyn as their new MP soon after. CJ vi. 500b.

In the early 1650s the navy began taking an interest in Harwich. Even before the outbreak of the first Dutch war in 1652 the port was being used as a victualling base for naval vessels operating in the North Sea. The construction of a dockyard at the north-eastern tip of the town in 1657 consolidated the navy’s presence. VCH Essex, ii. 284-6. None of this worked to the town’s advantage during the drafting of the Instrument of Government, with the result that both the Harwich seats were among the casualties of the parliamentary redistribution agreed in 1653. The corporation did not get another chance to return MPs to Westminster until the old franchises were revived in 1658. The corporation’s choices on that occasion were two men with strong local connections. The Grimston interest had been in eclipse since Grimston’s replacement as recorder in 1653, probably because he had refused to serve under the protectorate. His replacement was John Sicklemor*, the Ipswich lawyer who sat for Suffolk in the 1654 and 1656 Parliaments. Harwich bor. recs. 2/1; 98/15, pp. 91-115. In late 1658 Sicklemor could not hope to aspire again to a Suffolk county seat and the Bacon brothers (Nathaniel* and Francis*) had prior claims to the Ipswich seats, making election at Harwich a convenient option for him. Thomas King* was one of the town’s leading merchants, having prospered as a naval victualler, and so could be expected to look after their commercial interests. As the corporation minute book is missing for that period, it is impossible to say whether their return was contested.

The years following the Restoration were to bring great changes to the town. The inauguration of a packet boat service to the continent in 1661, replacing that which had formerly operated from Great Yarmouth, brought a useful diversification in the economy of the port and can be seen as the origins of the ferry services which remain one of the major sources of local employment. The agreement of 1661 by which King was leased the former naval dockyards seemed to indicate that the navy no longer saw the town as crucial to its operations. This withdrawal proved to be short-lived, for the navy resumed control in 1664 and the renewal of war with the Dutch in 1665 and later in 1672 convincingly demonstrated the town’s military importance. VCH Essex, ii. 286-7. The navy had come to stay. The elections held there during the later seventeenth century would thus see the first signs of the organised naval interest that would make the borough a dependable and notorious source of electoral patronage for the government in the following century.