Bewdley

Bewdley, on the west bank of the Severn, was in the seventeenth century an important trading station on the river, which had Gloucester and Shrewsbury as its terminal ports. Although John Leland spoke of Bewdley as 'but a very new town' around 1540, there must have been a settlement of substance there before the building of the bridge in 1446-7. Evidence from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests in fact a steady growth in the river trade at Bewdley, to which the building of the bridge and the rebuilding of the housing of the town were a response. Bewdley Historical Research Group, Bewdley in its Golden Age (Bewdley, 1991), 3. It was this rebuilding which prompted Leland to enthuse about the town ‘so comely, a man cannot wish to see better ... At the rising of the sun the whole town glittereth (being all of new building) as it were of gold’. Quoted in J.R. Burton, A History of Bewdley (1883), 11. Cap-making had once been a staple industry of the town but had ‘wholly decayed’ by the mid-seventeenth century; tanning continued to be of importance, but the river provided the life-blood of the town's economy. Burton, Bewdley, 13. In this period, trade on the river through Bewdley was unrestricted by the floods and droughts which in a later age were to hamper it, and the town had in the early decades of the century provided the boats which carried most goods being shipped by Shrewsbury merchants. The Bewdley trade was not confined to goods from the immediate environs of the town. Metalware from Birmingham and north Worcestershire, glass from Stourbridge and hides from north Warwickshire, despatched by river transport, were handled by Bewdley merchants. M.D.G. Wanklyn, ‘The Severn Navigation in the Seventeenth Century: Long-Distance Trade of Shrewsbury Boats’, MH xiii. 35, 39, 42. The population of the town in 1641 has been estimated to be 2,490, but this figure includes the whole parish of Ribbesford. Bewdley in its Golden Age, 26. The borough of Bewdley formed the core of the parish; Ribbesford church stood a mile outside it. The borough had a chapel-of-ease, the responsibility of the bridge-wardens. Tickenhill House or Palace, on the hill above the town, was owned by the king and dominated Bewdley, both physically and socially. In 1499 the proxy marriage between Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon had been solemnised there, and it was frequently the lodgings of presidents of the council in the marches of Wales. Only Ludlow was a more important centre of the council's activities. Another important property, Ribbesford House and estate, was purchased by Sir Henry Herbert* in 1627, to provide him with an interest in Bewdley. E.A.B. Barnard, A Vanished Palace (Cambridge, 1925); Bewdley in its Golden Age, 7-8.

Bewdley received its first charter in 1472, confirmed in 1510 and 1524. The second charter, of 1605, provided a civic government of a bailiff and burgesses, of which 12 were to be capital burgesses. The first burgesses were inhabitants, given the power to appoint an unspecified number of others to join them, whether resident or not. Officers of the corporation – steward, recorder, deputy recorder, constables and serjeants-at-mace – were to be appointed by the bailiff and capital burgesses. It was a charter similar in date and content to that of Evesham, and like that one, left for future settlement the question of the parliamentary franchise. Unlike the case of Evesham, there was to be only one Member of Parliament, and electors were the bailiff and burgesses, but disputes could arise over the question of whether all burgesses should have a voice. P. Styles, 'The Corporation of Bewdley under the Later Stuarts', Studies in Seventeenth Century West Midlands Hist. (Kineton, 1978), 43-4; Burton, Bewdley, 44. From 1619, an attempt was made to define the governing group beyond the capital burgesses; 25 of the ‘most substantial and discreet burgesses’ were to have ‘voices in election of officers and in the orders to be made’. Soc. Antiq. Prattinton Coll. Top. IV (iiB) (Bewdley) pp. 98-108. The wardens of the bridge and chapel were not mentioned in the charter, but by the mid-seventeenth century had become important financial officers of the corporation; their accounts began in 1569. Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236; VCH Worcs. iv, 302.

The freedom of the corporation to choose whoever it wished was in practice compromised by the dominance of the tenant of Tickenhill House and the owner of Ribbesford House. Tickenhill and the manor of Bewdley had been granted in 1606 to the father of Sir Ralph Clare†. SO3/3; Lansd. 1217, f. 69. A few years later, Clare became a gentleman of the chamber to Henry, prince of Wales and subsequently to the future Charles I. Harl. 7009 f. 5; SP14/67 f. 147; SC6/Jas. I/1684. Clare was first elected for Bewdley in 1624, and continued to represent the borough in the successive Parliaments of the 1620s. HP Commons 1604-1629, 'Sir Ralph Clare'. In religion, Clare was an opponent of puritans, and particularly of Richard Baxter, when the latter arrived at Kidderminster as lecturer after the invitation in March 1641from the parish feoffees. By contrast, the other leading gentry figure in Bewdley, Sir Henry Herbert, had accommodated the young Baxter in London, and promoted him as a suitable minister at nearby Kidderminster. Reliquiae Baxterianae, 11, 20; Cal. Baxter Corresp. ii. 127. Both Herbert and Clare were traditionalists: their different approaches to Baxter were part of a pattern of rivalry of which the parliamentary representation of Bewdley was only an aspect.

Herbert was chosen to sit for Bewdley in the Short Parliament. It is possible that Clare may have contested the result, because there was a petition from Bewdley before the House on 16 April. CJ ii. 3b. On 23 October, two polls were taken in the election for the second Parliament of the year. C219/43/pt. 3/67, 68. Clare and Herbert were in competition, and according to the chronicler Henry Townshend, Herbert was chosen by the magistrates, who thought the franchise was restricted to them, and Clare was the choice of the ‘commonalty or common burgesses’. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 48. Both indentures survive, although both are damaged. Enough of the signatures remain to suggest that it was the bailiff and burgesses, not the magistrates alone, who supported Herbert, and that Clare drew on the support of a much wider group of over 22 burgesses. That Clare’s was an appeal downwards to include men of low status in the borough is suggested by the appearance on his indenture of the names of at least two illiterate men. C219/43/3/67, 68. The case was referred to Parliament, presumably to the committee of privileges. No record of its findings survives in the Journal, but the outcome was undoubtedly in Herbert’s favour, as he was the only one to take the seat, and was in the House by 6 November, when he was named to a committee to consider the arrangements made for fast days in the last Parliament. CJ ii. 21a.

Clare’s interest in Bewdley was by no means crushed by this reverse. Herbert encountered difficulties at Westminster after being drawn into a quarrel with John Wylde*, which led to his being disabled from sitting in the House on 20 August 1642. During the civil war, Clare was much more active in support of the king, being a regular attender of meetings of the royalist commissioners of array at Worcester town hall. Bodl. Rawl. D918 f. 145, D924 ff. 148v, 150, 151, 153, 154v. As the first crossing place of the Severn above Worcester, Bewdley was of great strategic importance to military planners. The raid on the town by Colonel John (‘Tinker’) Fox on 3 May 1644 tested the royalist defences and found them wanting. Pretending to head a company of Prince Rupert’s troops, Fox bluffed his way into the garrison, dragged Sir Thomas Lyttelton* from his bed in Tickenhill House, and took the governor and his booty of horses and prisoners to Coventry. Dugdale Diary and Corresp. 66; J. Vicars, Gods Arke Overtopping the World’s Waves (1646), 217 (E.312.3); VCH Worcs. i. 223; J.W. Willis Bund, History of the Civil Wars in Worcs. (1905), 122-3; A. Hopper, ‘”Tinker” Fox and the Politics of Garrison Warfare in the West Midlands, 1643-50’, MH xxiv. 107. Although it was garrisoned for the king, who stayed there in June 1644 and for a day on 17 June 1645 during his retreat from Naseby, Bewdley was divided in its political loyalties. Clarendon, Hist. iii. 358; iv. 46. On 28 March 1645, it was reported that Princes Rupert and Maurice had hanged the bailiff. Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 132. In December 1645 there were alleged to be up to 800 foot soldiers in Kidderminster and Bewdley, and the presence of so many soldiers, among them ‘reformadoes’ or men subject to regimental reorganisation, caused physical damage to the roadways of the town. Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 347; Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236 f. 606.

It is not clear when Bewdley finally ceased to be under the influence of royalist soldiers, but it must have been no later than the summer of 1646. Payments to the royalist recorder, Sir Edward Lyttelton, brother-in-law of the captured governor, ceased to be made during the year to September 1647, and in 1646 and 1647 the civic accounts record correspondence between the corporation and important parliamentarians like John Wylde* and Humphrey Salwey*. Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236 p. 611. Only after July 1646, when the whole county was under the control of the county committee, could polling safely take place. The writ for Bewdley was moved on 11 November 1646. CJ iv. 719a. The recruiter by-elections for the Worcestershire boroughs were evidently planned together. The Bewdley election took place on 6 January, that for Evesham on 15 January, and that for Droitwich probably on the same day or very near it, in 1647. Unlike the subsequent Droitwich and Evesham elections, which went smoothly, the Bewdley election started the series off badly, with two supporters of Parliament returned.

Daniel Dobbins of Kidderminster was returned by the sheriff. He had come to Kidderminster from London in 1635, having purchased part of the manor of Kidderminster from the poet, Edmund Waller*, and was among the wealthiest citizens of the town. Nash, Collections, ii. 37. He was a cousin of Henry Townshend, the royalist chronicler of the civil war in Worcestershire, had been sheriff of the county in 1641 but was an early partisan of Parliament in the civil war, as were many in the industrial community of Kidderminster. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 50, 72-3. His property was sequestered on behalf of the king by the commissioners of array. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 151, 200-2. Dobbins was a member of the county committee which met at Warwick castle before it was able to move first to Evesham in May 1645, and subsequently to Worcester. He signed the petition of 7 September 1644 calling on the Lords to approve speedily the ordinance to authorize a Worcestershire force to liberate the county from the royalists, and approved the commissions under the ordinance to county officers, including Talbot Badger*. PA, Main Pprs. 7 Sept. 1644; SP28/138/9. Dobbins, like other committeemen, represented the cause of Parliament to the occupants of the royalist garrison at Worcester in the latter part of the siege. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 213, 265. In October 1648 he was a member of the parliamentarian sequestrations committee for the county. Add. 5508, f. 178.

It was therefore as one of the more eminent county committeemen that Dobbins stood at Bewdley. The sheriff, William Lygon, took the poll for Dobbins first, and listed 113 names on the indenture and its annexe. C219/43/3/70, 71. From an endorsement on the other surviving indenture for the election, it appears that a second poll was taken, later that day, for William Hopkins. C219/43/3/70/72, 73. Unlike Dobbins, Hopkins was a resident of Bewdley and a leading figure among the capital burgesses. Ribbesford par. reg.; Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236 p. 611. The contest between the two men owed nothing to deep issues of faith or politics. Both were well-disposed to Parliament, and both were godly. Hopkins was described by Baxter as ‘the most eminent, wise and truly religious magistrate of Bewdley ... my old dear friend’. Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 91. By the time of his return in 1647, Hopkins had fallen mortally ill, declaring himself bewitched, and providing Baxter with a case study both in medicine – Hopkins had somehow swallowed a piece of wood which lodged in his bowel – and demonic possession. Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691), 59-60.

That the contest owed everything to the unresolved conflicts of earlier elections is suggested by the pattern of votes cast for the two candidates. Hopkins’s camp was the smaller, comprising 27 voters. Of these, 5 had cast a vote in October 1640 for Herbert, and 3 for Clare. The reverse, with identical figures, was true for Dobbins’s supporters. There seems no doubt that Hopkins stood for the narrow franchise of bailiff and burgesses, although to have polled as many votes as he did he must have appealed to a wider group than exclusively the 12 capital burgesses. C219/43/3/72, 73. Dobbins’s 113 electors were obviously polled on a quite different principle, probably that of freedom of the borough through membership of a trade guild, or even payment of scot and lot. The double return was noted in parliamentarian newspapers as having been polled in one case by the sheriff, and in the other by the bailiff, although Lygon, the sheriff, actually signed both indentures. Perfect Occurences no. 2 (8-15 Jan. 1647), 12 (E.371.5); Perfect Diurnall no. 181 (11-18 Jan. 1647), 1448 (E.513.34). One report spoke of the town as being ‘much troubled’ at the outcome. His Majesties Gallant Resolution (1647), [6] (E.372.8).

It was reported that the case was referred to the committee for privileges, but there matters rested for over a year. Hopkins died on 19 July 1647, and many local observers evidently considered him to have been elected: the minister of Ribbesford described him in the parish register as ‘a gracious and able Christian; then burgess elected for the borough of Bewdley’; from the opposing religious camp Baxter, too, thought of Hopkins as a ‘Member of the Long Parliament’. Neither remarked on his never having taken his seat, although an influential historian in the following century was clear on the point. V. Green, Hist. and Antiquities of the City and Suburb of Worcester (2 vols. 1796), ii, 102-3; Burton, Hist. Bewdley (1883), app. xxxix. Hopkins is known to have visited London on at least two occasions, but the last time was in 1646 to seek the best possible terms for the new minister, John Tombes. Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236 p. 611. Whatever moral victory Hopkins was considered to have achieved by supporters of the restricted franchise, there seems no reason to think that in Westminster the election of either Hopkins or Dobbins was ever regarded as valid.

A new writ was issued for an election at Bewdley on 10 May 1648. By this time the grip of the county committee and the rule of Parliament were firm in the area, despite distractions elsewhere in the second civil war. On 15 June a second writ was issued, this time with an explanation that there had in 1647 been a double return, ‘voted to be no good returns’. CJ v. 556a, 601a. On this occasion there was only one candidate, the dominant figure of the county committee but not yet a Member, Nicholas Lechmere. Bewdley burgesses had negotiated with the county committee on at least three occasions before the election, to reduce the tax burden on the town, and had sent a gift of wine and ale to John Wylde* in July 1647, so recognised the usefulness of the ruling party for their local concerns. The election was held on 4 July 1648, under the supervision of Sir Thomas Rous*, the sheriff, himself a reliable member of the county committee. Of the 32 men whose names are entered on the indenture, 12 had the previous year cast a vote for Hopkins, and only 3 for Dobbins. C219/43/3/75. The remainder cannot be identified as having previously voted at all: some must have been men too young to have voted, or who were absent or disinclined to participate in earlier elections. Nevertheless, it is clear from these figures that Lechmere owed his election to those who took the franchise at Bewdley to be a narrow one: he was the legatee of the campaign by Hopkins to be elected. Lechmere’s election did not end the visits of the burgesses to Worcester to plead before the committee and quarter sessions their case for relief, but they could at least obtain some expert assistance from the lawyer Lechmere. Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/236 p. 619.

Under the Instrument of Government, Bewdley was disenfranchised, and only recovered its electoral privileges during the protectorate of Richard Cromwell*. Nicholas Lechmere had by then moved on to become knight of the shire in successive Cromwellian Parliaments, but the apparently uncontested return of Edward Pytts, his client, suggests that Lechmere’s grip on the electoral politics of Bewdley remained strong. In the Convention, the seat was taken by Thomas Foley*, of a wealthy iron-working family seated at Witley Court, again probably without a contest. The old pattern of disputed elections at Bewdley was revived when on 15 April 1661, Sir Henry Herbert stood against Sir Ralph Clare, in a re-run of the Long Parliament election. Clare again asserted a wide franchise of all burgesses, on the ground that custom over-rode the charter. The report of Job Charlton* from the elections committee found against Clare, who was subject to a libel from young cavaliers for having contemplated standing in the county against Sir John Pakington* and Samuel Sandys*, as well as taking on Herbert in Bewdley: ‘Is old Sir Ralph mad will nothing do/ but knight of the shire and burgess of Bewdley too’. They evidently took satisfaction from the result in Bewdley: ‘’Twas Harry Herbert killed the old knight dead.’ HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Bewdley’; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 325-6. The outcome of two visits to Bewdley by the commissioners for corporations in August 1662 was that 25 members of the corporation were ejected, confirming that in the eyes of the government, the borough was still infected with Presbyterian principles. Worcs. Archives, 498/BA 8681/1 (ii), pp. 24-5. Many of those ejected had voted for Hopkins in 1647 and Lechmere in 1648, and only one had voted for Dobbins: it was a blow aimed against Presbyterianism in the corporation, rather than a wider campaign against perceived enemies of the government. Sir Henry Herbert was in no doubt of the deplorable religious outlook of the borough; in his will he specified bequests to be directed to Ribbesford church, not to the chapel at Bewdley. PROB11/342 f. 51. In the by-election of November 1673, the issue of how a burgess was to be defined, whether as an inhabitant who paid scot and lot, or whether as one of the capital burgesses or of the Twenty-Five, re-surfaced, as it did in the first election of 1679. Styles, ‘Corporation of Bewdley’, 50; HP Commons 1660-169.