The economic significance of Dartmouth lay entirely in its trade as a port. Located near the mouth of the wide River Dart, its harbour was said in 1599 to be able to accommodate 600 ships. T. Gray, ‘Fishing and the commercial world of early Stuart Dartmouth’, in Tudor and Stuart Devon ed. T. Gray (Exeter, 1992), 174. This figure was doubtless an exaggeration, but Dartmouth enjoyed the natural amenities of a deep harbour and the protection of a rocky promontory to seaward which made it the envy of other Devon ports which struggled with silting rivers and the maintenance of town walls. The traditional Dartmouth export had once been Devon broadcloths, but by the early Stuart period the most lucrative export from the port was fish harvested in the Newfoundland fisheries, a high risk and high investment industry. In 1630 the shipowners of south west England described this trade as ‘one of the principal nurseries of navigation, and the only means of the enriching of the western parts’. SP16/531/15. The Dartmouth corporation and merchant community were unceasing in their demand for protection for this trade, subject as it was to the attacks and depredations of pirates from north Africa, often described inaccurately as ‘Turkish’, and from ports on the southern side of the English Channel, such as Dunkirk. SP16/61/17; SP16/521/146; Gray, ‘Fishing and the commercial world’, 187-8. In the ships that took fish and Devon cloth to the seaports of France and the Iberian peninsula came back as imports a variety of commodities that included specialized forms of cloth, iron, fruit and a miscellany of other goods. Most of the goods imported into Dartmouth were quickly on the move again by ship, to foreign and domestic markets.
Many Spanish, French and Portuguese ports received Dartmouth fish, but in 1642 the Dartmouth merchants declared that no fish market was more important to them than that of London. PA, Main Pprs. 25 Jan. 1642. The attitude of the Dartmouth merchant elite towards the capital was profoundly ambivalent. They sought the protection of government for their fleet and valued the huge market for their fish, but were deeply critical of monopoly trading companies, and resisted any new incorporations, such as a new charter to Merchant Adventurers in 1631, and even the new soap monopoly of 1634, which in promoting rape and olive oils damaged the market for the whale- and fish-derived ‘train’ oil. SP16/198/59; SP16/279/73. Furthermore, they could plead poverty when approached by the privy council for contributions towards extraordinary taxation, as in April 1627. SP16/61/17. Naturally, Dartmouth merchants were in favour of fast days and other days when the staple of the national diet was supposed to be fish and not meat. SP16/279/73.
Dartmouth’s population grew rapidly in the first half of the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that in 1642 there were over 3,000 people living there, but in such a busy seaport there was a transient population of young people. Gray, ‘Fishing and the Commercial World’, 175. The clergy responsible for estimating the population there in 1676 came up with a total of 3,840 communicants and dissenters, which is further evidence of a growth throughout this period, the disruptions of civil war notwithstanding. Compton Census, 280. The government of Dartmouth rested on a charter of 1604 that provided for a mayor, two bailiffs, 12 common councillors, known as ‘masters’, a recorder and other minor officials. British Borough Charters, ed. M. Weinbaum (Cambridge, 1943), 24. Before 1640, parliamentary indentures were completed in the name of mayor, bailiffs and burgesses, and this pattern prevailed in the election on 15 March for the Short Parliament. Elections were held at the guildhall.
The religious character of Dartmouth is hard to assess. In 1630-1, the townspeople invested in rebuilding the church of St Saviour’s, the most wealthy citizens such as Andrew Voysey* and Roger Mathew* each investing £5. Devon RO, DD 62464. In 1635, in the name of the inhabitants of Dartmouth, an agreement was drawn up with a new lecturer, Anthony Harford, for a weekly Friday sermon at the refurbished church, and a fortnightly sermon and catechising there. Devon RO, DD 62512. Harford was promoted to vicar within three years. I.W. Gowers, ‘Puritanism in the County of Devon between 1570 and 1641’ (MA thesis, Exeter Univ. 1970), 160. This might suggest a puritan town, but the pre-reformation survivals in the fabric and fittings of the church, including altar table and rood screen, suggest a respect for the interior adornments and a limit to reforming sensibilities. In 1634, may-pole revelling still took place in the town, regardless of the disapproval of the mayor and justices. H. Burton, A Divine Tragedie Lately Acted (1636), 25-6.
In 1626, the corporation in the form of the mayor, masters and 12 substantial inhabitants, agreed at the guildhall upon a ‘constitution’, governing parliamentary elections. Freemen electors were enjoined to ‘uphold, defend and maintain the customs, usages, liberties, privileges and rights’ of the borough, and any free burgess giving his voice in an election to one who was not free was to forfeit 40s. Among the signatories to this convention, evidently aimed against involvement in elections by the non-free commonalty, were Voysey and Mathew. Devon RO, SM 2004. Theoretically, there was a duchy of Cornwall interest in the town, as the petty customs, though leased to the mayor and burgesses, were the property of the duchy. Devon RO, DD 62923. In practice, however, the duchy failed to exert any influence, and the mayor and burgesses were the most powerful electoral interest. Church lands were parcelled out to local merchant proprietors, including Voysey and Mathew. Devon RO, DD 62671.
The election of March 1640 followed the pattern of the previous three elections in the 1620s, in which John Upton I, a gentleman from Lupton, near Brixham, took the first seat while the second went to a prominent Dartmouth merchant. There seems little doubt that had Mathew not been ineligible to stand because he was the serving mayor, he would have been returned to serve in what would have been his fifth Parliament. Upton was particularly well placed to exert some influence with the opposition junto, having family ties with John Pym*. Whatever resentment may have been directed by the Dartmouth oligarchy towards Upton in 1625, when he was first elected, by 1640 he had become a senior figure in Parliament and a respected figure of marked puritan outlook in the town he represented. In the second election of 1640, Upton again took the first seat, and Mathew, now free of his civic commitments, replaced Voysey, his brother-in-law. After Upton’s death in September 1641, Samuel Browne, a lawyer, took the seat in a by-election. Browne was a cousin of Oliver St John*, himself an important figure in the interest of Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford and thus connecting Browne with John Pym.
The Short Parliament proved to be Voysey’s only period of parliamentary service, and after he returned to Dartmouth he claimed 40 days’ service at 5s a day from the mayor and burgesses. Devon RO, DD 62692. In July 1641, Voysey backed a petition in favour of retaining the stannary courts, against the attacks of reformers such as William Strode I*, calling instead for a summoning of the Stannary Parliament. PA, Main Pprs. 16 July 1641. Attracting a broader measure of support was the petition of January 1642 from Dartmouth, which complained against bullion imports designed to ease the economic difficulties of English settlers in war-torn Ireland, and rehearsed familiar arguments against the threat to shipping from piracy. The petitioners, who included the vicar, Harford, and Voysey, complained of the lack of action against popish plotters, both in Ireland and England, and explicitly identified their own anxieties with those of London citizens, who, they declared, constituted their greatest trading partners. Having dilated on the consequences for them of a failure of trade in London and Ireland, the Dartmouth men called for the rooting out of Catholic peers and bishops from the House of Lords. PA, Main Pprs. 25 Jan. 1642. The January 1642 petition was a clear indication that at this time the corporation was entirely in support of the parliamentary leadership at Westminster.
When civil war broke out in England, Dartmouth was put into a state of defence by the merchant oligarchy. During 1642, 144 townspeople contributed £2,668 towards the Irish Adventure, by which land grants in Ireland were promised in return for advances towards the campaign to suppress the rebellion there. SP63/297/259. Among the most generous donors were Thomas Boone*, Arthur Upton* and Charles Vaghan*, who though involved in trade, were local gentry rather than mere merchants. SP63/297/285 From October 1642, fortifications were constructed, including at Boone’s house above the town, where guns were mounted. Devon RO, DD 62703, 62705. A special martial rate was levied, with local payments to Captain George Thomson* and John Upton II*, serving in the horse regiment of William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford, in the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. Devon RO, DD 62706; A Catalogue of the Names of the Dukes, Marquesses, Earls and Lords (1642), 14. Among the most enthusiastic contributors to the war effort in Dartmouth was Andrew Voysey, who not only equipped three dragoons, but also provided a ship to patrol the Dart. Devon RO, DD 62707. For their part, the mayor and burgesses brought in an order or ‘constitution’ limiting feasting after ‘the feast of the birth of our Lord God’ (Christmas 1642), thus retrospectively providing further evidence that the puritan group in the town had not been dominant. Devon RO, SM 2004.
Dartmouth was taken by Prince Maurice in October 1643, despite efforts by Roger Mathew and Andrew Voysey in urging the townspeople to resistance. The town was garrisoned for the king by Edward Seymour*, who with Mathew, attended the rival Parliament at Oxford. Inevitably, there were later narratives of rough treatment accorded to the prominent parliamentarians in the town, including by Voysey, but Anthony Harford, the minister who by this time was unambiguously puritan in his loyalties, was unusual in leaving the town rather than endure the royalist administration. Devon RO, DD 62708, CCAM 566; R. Freeman, Dartmouth and its Neighbours (Dartmouth, 1997), 95. Merchants such as Voysey and Mathew knuckled under during the period of the royalist garrison, and continued to serve in civic office. Devon RO, SM 2004. The parliamentarian press reported Dartmouth as ‘ready to revolt’ in March 1644, and provided a glimpse of a town in which religious observance had declined ‘because the cavaliers neither care for fasting, prayer, nor the church, and the townsmen did so dislike their popish ceremonies that they used, that they had no affection to it’. Mercurius Veridicus no. 6 (27 Feb.-5 Mar. 1644), sig. A2 (E.35.20). In August 1645, there were reports of mutinies among the royalist soldiers in the town, together with a general residual sympathy towards the parliamentarian cause. SP16/510/34. In late January 1646, the borough changed hands again, with Francis Rous* made governor for Parliament in succession to the royalist Sir Hugh Pollarde*. Citties Weekly Post no. 7 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1646), 4 (E.320.6). Inevitably, Roger Mathew was brought to the bar of the House for his defection to Oxford and then subjected to the scrutiny of Parliament’s agency for penal taxation, dying during his efforts to clear his name.
The way was then clear to hold a by-election to fill Mathew’s seat, and on 20 April 1646, Thomas Boone was returned. He was a son-in-law of John Upton I, and had been a leading parliamentarian in Devon during the civil war. He had served in no civic offices, however, and for the first time during the seventeenth century, no townsman represented the borough in Parliament, Boone joining the Bedfordshire lawyer, Samuel Browne, at Westminster. The indenture was made out in the usual formula of the ‘mayor, bailiffs and burgesses’, sealed and not signed, and it is not possible to determine the extent of popular involvement in Boone’s election. C219/43/1. The new regime in the town trod carefully over matters such as collecting arrears of tithes: the ‘illness of the times’ suggested to one observer that ‘there is enough done already to civilize the men’ of Dartmouth, without a ruthless campaign to recover outstanding tithe payments. Devon RO, DD 62722.
After Samuel Browne left the House in October 1648 to become a serjeant-at-law, Boone continued to sit as a Rumper, so that Dartmouth continued to be represented in Parliament until April 1653. The borough acquiesced in the trial and execution of the king, and in November 1649, during the early days of the Rump, a ‘constitution’ was passed to regulate the weekly meetings of the corporation in the guildhall. Devon RO, SM 2004. During the early 1650s, the maritime trade of the town came under the watchful eye of the naval agent, Henry Hatsell*, and in 1653 there were credible reports of 1,000 mariners sailing from Dartmouth for the Newfoundland fisheries, despite the reservations of the government as to whether it could provide a convoy: clear evidence that during the commonwealth period the port’s trade was making a healthy recovery. CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 27, 107, 258, 514, 523, 526. Under the electoral arrangements of the Instrument of Government of December 1653, the borough was entitled only to one Member. On 26 June 1654, Thomas Boone was returned, on an indenture that was signed by 35 ‘burgesses and inhabitants’, a clear departure from previous practice. C219/44. Boone, who had been an active Rumper, played no discernible part in the first protectorate Parliament.
The indenture for the election held in the summer of 1656 for the second of the Cromwellian Parliaments has not survived. The Member returned was Edward Hopkins, who had no local link to the borough but was an admiralty commissioner. He was returned on what by this time had been built up to be, in electoral terms, a navy interest. It is highly likely that he, too, was returned by the inhabitants as well as the burgesses, a further eclipse of the mercantile elite, who saw their electoral base eroded even as the security of their businesses increased under the protection of the expanding navy. As an office-holder, Hopkins was obviously in the pay of the government. Petitioning the government for protective convoys against pirates and the enemies of the state, in 1653 the Dutch and in 1657 the Spanish, resumed among the Dartmouth merchants, shipowners and inhabitants. Some 27 petitioned in January 1653, and 49 in March 1657. SP18/32/44; SP18/154/50. This participation in lobbying that went beyond the mayor and burgesses doubtless fed into the growing involvement by the inhabitants in elections, culminating in the double return of January 1659.
The Humble Petition and Advice of June 1657 restored the two parliamentary seats for Dartmouth. In the election for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, on 6 January 1659, two indentures were made out and returned. One, in the name of the burgesses, was for Robert Thomson and Colonel John Clerke II*; the other, claiming to represent ‘the burgesses and inhabitants’, named John Hale* and Clerke. At least 63 voters lent their names to Hale and Clerke; 32 to Thomson and Clerke. The ministers John Flavel and James Burdwood were among the voters for Hale and Clerke, and a proxy vote for this pair was recorded by Thomas Boone, using an inhabitant to sign on his behalf. The smaller group of 32 voting for Thomson and Clerke included 16 who had in March 1657 petitioned the lord protector to complain about the depredations of Spanish men-of-war against the Newfoundland fisheries, suggesting that the division may have been the more highly capitalized merchants, voting for the obviously military and naval interest represented by Thomson and Clerke, as against the more evidently civic interest to whom a vote for Hale seemed to appeal. C219/46; SP18/154/50. When apprised of the double return at Dartmouth, the House referred the case to the committee of privileges, which investigated whether the franchise lay in the mayor, bailiffs and freemen only or in the mayor, bailiffs, freemen and inhabitants. On 23 March, the committee found against there being a franchise in the inhabitants, but on a division, the House rejected the report by six votes. Sir John Northcote and Thomas Reynell were tellers against adopting the committee’s report. CJ vii. 618b, 619a. The case was re-committed, but before anything further was done, the Parliament was dissolved. None of the three returned men appears to have appeared or acted in the House while the election was in dispute. It seems that after 1660 the franchise was agreed to lie in the freemen, the expansion to include the inhabitants thus a temporary variant that did not survive the protectorate.
