Essex

In 1594 the antiquary and cartographer John Norden had described Essex in the most appreciative terms.

This shire is most fat, fruitful, and full of profitable things, exceeding (as far as I can find) any other shire, for the general commodities and the plenty. Though Suffolk be more highly commended of some wherewith I am not yet acquainted: but this shire seemeth to me to deserve the title of the English Goshen, the fattest of the land: comparable to Palestina, that flowed with milk and honey. J. Norden, Speculi Britanniae Pars, ed. H. Ellis (Cam. Soc. ix), 7.

Others took a more sceptical view. When Edmund Waller* came to write his poem in memory of the first wife of Lord Rich (Robert Rich*) in 1638, he referred to ‘those already cursed Essexian plains,/Where hasty death and pining sickness reigns’. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G.T. Drury (London and New York, 1893), 37, ll. 1-2. Norden’s view was probably the more accurate. The county encompassed considerable economic variety, ranging from the pastoral lands of the south east to the rich arable lands of the north west, from the royal forests of the south west to the clothing industry of the Stour valley in the north. In the county’s south-westernmost corner, the suburbs of London were already slowly expanding outwards and in large parts of Essex the economic pull of the capital was irresistible. Colchester, almost 50 miles from London, had managed to remain a regional centre in its own right, however, providing a base for the production of the ‘new draperies’ to rival the cloth produced elsewhere in East Anglia. Much of the north of the county and Colchester in particular had a reputation for godliness. For John Hampden*, the county was ‘a place of most life of religion in the land’. Eg. 2643, f. 7. That the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†) was the county’s most powerful landowner only added to its godly reputation.

The events surrounding the Short Parliament elections in Essex are well-recorded, but only because the losers complained bitterly about the outcome. The memorandum on the subject prepared by Henry Neville alias Smith of Cressing Temple was intended to challenge his own defeat. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 608-9; Nalson, Impartial Colln. i. 279-80. Neville had been the candidate put forward by Warwick’s opponents in the hope of preventing a clean sweep by Rich clients. Both Sir Thomas Barrington* and Sir Harbottle Grimston* enjoyed Warwick’s support because the earl trusted them to support the king’s critics. Both were major local figures who had sat in Parliament before. To Neville, Barrington and Grimston were the front men for a puritan faction. Neville later complained that the godly clergymen of the county, led by the vicar of Finchingfield, Stephen Marshall, had used their pulpits to preach support for the two Rich candidates. He accused Warwick of abusing his position as lord lieutenant to the same end by encouraging the officers of the trained bands to threaten any waverers with excessive demands for arms for the militia. Neville’s complaints also extended to the conduct of the poll. According to him, the vast crowd which had assembled for the occasion threatened himself and his supporters, including James Hay, 2nd earl of Carlisle, and the 1st Baron Maynard (Sir William Maynard†). CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 608-9. A letter of complaint written to Barrington by Maynard two days after the poll confirms that part of Neville’s account. Maynard was angry that, although the gentlemen who had been present had behaved themselves,

yet when I found the rude, vulgar people to grow to that insolency as from striking of private men to fall to menacing of us all to pull us in pieces, I hold it neither fits in principles of honour, nor safe in our persons to pass it over in silence, but (being armed with authority) to express as well my scorn and contempt thereof as my resolution to punish it severely without respect to their multitudes. Eg. 2646, f. 142.

To Sir Humphrey Mildmay, the crowd had been ‘such a multitude of all sorts of people, as I never before saw’. Harl. 454, f. 30. Passions were running high, in a large part because the choice the electors were being offered was clear-cut. Neville (who was probably a crypto-Catholic) stood for the policies of Archbishop William Laud, while Barrington and Grimston promised their rejection. Even if some of their campaigning techniques were dubious, the stance represented by the two baronets, especially when backed by Warwick’s personal authority, was always likely to prevail. C219/42, pt. 1, f. 101. Neville subsequently submitted his complaints to the government rather than to the Commons, presumably in the knowledge that the latter would have rejected them out of hand.

The following October a contest was only narrowly avoided. This time the disputes were rather different. As early as 6 October 1640 Warwick made it known that he would back his own son, Lord Rich, and Sir William Masham* for the two county seats and that he would again be present at the election in person. Essex RO, D/Y 2/4, p. 89. Grimston had no reason to object to this, as his son Harbottle* used his influence as the town’s recorder to get his father elected at Harwich three days before the county poll. Persuading Barrington, who was Masham’s brother-in-law, required further manoeuvring. Rich (acting on the advice of Henry Barrington*) and Masham both wrote to Harbottle junior to obtain his cooperation. As well as being recorder of Harwich, Harbottle Grimston was recorder of Colchester and the proposal put to him was that Barrington should stand at Colchester for the seat which Masham had held in the previous Parliament, thereby giving Masham a clear path to the county seat which Barrington had hitherto occupied. Essex RO, D/Y 2/4, p. 51; D/Y 2/9, p. 53. It was probably all one to the Colchester electorate whether Masham or Barrington became their MP, while this compromise gave Barrington the opportunity to withdraw gracefully from the county contest. All sides were probably anxious to avoid the sort of scenes witnessed seven months before. Barrington seems to have accepted the arrangement. Rich and Masham therefore stood unopposed for the county seats on 27 October. C219/43, pt. 1, f. 145. That Martin Lumley*, a leading Rich ally, was the sheriff made the result all the more certain.

Rich sat in the Commons for only 13 weeks before being summoned by the king on 26 January 1641 to sit in the Lords for one of his father’s baronies. The Commons ordered a new writ to be issued the following day . LJ iv. 145b; CJ ii. 74a. The by-election took place three weeks later. Once again, Warwick’s influence prevailed without challenge. This time, instead of presiding as sheriff, Lumley’s role was that of victorious candidate. C219/43, pt. 1, f. 147. There was probably no contest. Lumley remained MP for Essex until he was secluded at the purge of the Commons in December 1648, while Masham agreed to be readmitted in 1649 and continued as an MP until 1653. The leadership of Warwick and almost all the county’s MPs help ensure that Essex, for the most part, sided with Parliament. The county saw no military action during the first civil war, although this good fortune was offset by the siege of Colchester in 1648 which provided a dramatic and very violent climax to the second civil war.

Five men were summoned to represent Essex in the Nominated Parliament of 1653. Both Christopher Erle* and Dudley Templer* were comparative newcomers to the county and they probably seemed more obvious choices to the council of state than they would have done to those they were supposed to represent. Henry Barrington, on the other hand, was well-known, at least within Colchester, as he headed the godly faction which had dominated the corporation since the town’s surrender in 1648. The other two MPs, Joachim Matthews* and John Brewster*, would use this Parliament to promote their scheme for a new meeting house at Barking and possibly they had been chosen with this in mind. Only Barrington can safely be assumed to have opposed maintenance for a preaching ministry.

Essex, with only three borough constituencies (Colchester, Maldon and Harwich), had always been rather under-represented in the Commons under the old electoral system. The redistributions of seats implemented by the 1653 Instrument of Government made amends. The county was now allocated 13 seats, not including the two seats for Colchester and the one for Maldon. This opened up local elections to a far wider range of candidates than ever before. However, the polls in 1654 were met with apathy. The vicar of Earls Colne, Ralph Josselin (probably not an eye-witness), reported that only ‘a very small number of choosers appeared’ at the poll at Chelmsford on 12 July. Josselin believed that no more than 500 electors were present, despite the fact that the meeting coincided with the quarter sessions, although he added that over 100 of those who were there were clergymen. Josselin, Diary, 326. Most of those they elected were local figures who had distinguished themselves by their willingness to serve under the protectorate. A Perfect List of the Members Returned (1654, 669.f.19.8). Sir Thomas Honywood*, Sir Richard Everard*, the Mashams (Sir William and his son William) and Henry Mildmay* had all emerged as the leading county figures now that the Rich and the Barrington interests were in eclipse. Richard Cutts* and Dionysius Wakeringe* were Everard’s sons-in-law and equally devoted to the regime. Men like Sir Thomas Bowes*, Thomas Cooke* or Herbert Pelham* were more minor figures, claiming seats mainly by virtue of their recent hard work as local commissioners. Edward Turnor*, a talented barrister who was going places, and Oliver Raymond* may have been more lukewarm in their attitudes towards the regime, although, in both cases, their local connections were strong. Only the two Mashams had previously served in Parliament. Josselin clearly thought the selection could have been more impressive: ‘the choice as to the outsides of men [was] indifferent good’ and he hoped ‘the Lord [would] make them careful and mindful of Him’. Josselin, Diary, 326. Given the large number of seats, it is likely that there were unsuccessful candidates, but their identities remain unknown.

In 1656 the local deputy major-general, Hezekiah Haynes*, worked hard to obtain results throughout East Anglia that would be acceptable to the government in London. Probably assuming that Essex would be less troublesome, Haynes concentrated his efforts in Norfolk and, to a lesser extent, in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. An Essex man himself, Haynes preferred to stand for an Essex seat rather than (as was suggested) for Norfolk or the Isle of Ely. All the county polls were set for 20 August and, significantly, Haynes chose to be at Norwich on that day. TSP iv. 328. In the event, the Essex election did not pass off without trouble. According to Josselin, ‘the sectaries did not very much appear at Chelmsford, not a Quaker in the field noted to be so’ and yet they disrupted the meeting. ‘One Loddington’ who was ‘the head of that party’ may well have been the Quaker William Loddington. Josselin, Diary, 377-8; The Short Jnl. and Itinerary Jnls. of George Fox, ed. N. Penney (Cambridge, 1925), 330-1n. The poll had to be postponed until the following day, when the result proved to be much the same as two years earlier. Eight of the 13 men who had been elected in 1654 were re-elected; of the other five, Sir William Masham had since died. Some of the 1654 MPs who were re-elected, like Honywood or Templer, were closely associated with Haynes. Three of the replacements were Presbyterian figures who probably disliked Haynes’s rule. Gobert Barrington* was Sir Thomas’s younger son, (Sir) Harbottle Grimston* was the son of the Short Parliament MP, and John Archer* had been one of the leading Lincolnshire Presbyterians in the 1640s. On the other hand, the remaining two places were filled by Templer, the 1653 MP who was probably now one of Haynes’s allies, and by Haynes himself. Josselin mentions that the Independents failed to get two of their candidates elected. Josselin, Diary, 377-8. Once again, Josselin was ambivalent about the result, which was ‘not very good nor very bad, a strange mixture of spirits’. He told God that ‘I cannot trust them with our gospel concernments but I will thee, and I trust thou wilt look after them, and not suffer the reason to be wrapped up by these men into any evil whatsoever’. Josselin, Diary, 378. The order in which he lists the winning candidates – Grimston, Honywood, Everard, Bowes, Wakeringe, Barrington, Raymond, Templer, Turnor, Henry Mildmay, Carew Hervey alias Mildmay, Archer and Haynes – may indicate a descending order of how many votes each received or, alternatively, Josselin’s sense of their social rank. Josselin, Diary, 378. Whatever the explanation, it is interesting that Haynes’s name was placed last. Josselin also reported that a cross had appeared in the sky above Chelmsford during the election meeting. Josselin, Diary, 378. Not all the Essex MPs then met with the approval of the council of state. By the time Parliament assembled, the council had ruled that Bowes, Grimston, Henry Mildmay, Raymond and Turnor would not be allowed to take their seats. CJ vii. 425a. Archer may also have been excluded. One measure of just how exceptional the elections under the reformed franchises had been is that of the 17 men who sat for Essex in either the 1654 or 1656 Parliaments, only two (Masham and Grimston) had sat in Parliament before 1653, while only three (Henry Mildmay, Turnor and Grimston) would sit after 1658.

The clearest indication that the election for the 1659 Parliament represented a return to normality was in the choice, for the third time in 30 years, of the heir to the Rich inheritance. By December 1658 Lord Rich, the Long Parliament MP, had succeeded as 3rd earl of Warwick, but his only son Robert (who had married Oliver Cromwell’s daughter Frances) was dead, leaving the earl’s younger brother Charles Rich* next in line. Unlike his brother, Charles had supported Parliament during the civil war and had sat in the Long Parliament as recruiter MP for Sandwich. The choice of Rich was balanced by the more conservative Turnor. Henry Cromwell Corresp. 439. Sixteen months later Rich (who by then had succeeded as 4th earl of Warwick) and Turnor found themselves on opposite sides in the bitter contest for the Convention, with Warwick supporting Grimston and Raymond as the godly alternatives to the successful and more openly royalist candidates, Turnor and John Bramston†. Bramston, Autobiog. 114-15; CCSP iv. 670. Over the following decades the Warwick interest barely survived the death of the 4th earl in 1673, while the 2nd duke of Albemarle (Christopher Monck†) enjoyed a brief period as the major electoral patron in the county. Henry Mildmay became a permanent fixture, sitting in a further six Parliaments as MP for Essex.