Shropshire

Shropshire was important among the west midlands counties for several reasons. It was economically significant as the hinterland for Shrewsbury, capital of the trade in Welsh cloth, and as a county that benefited from the river-borne navigation that linked Shrewsbury with the Bristol Channel. The livestock industry for cattle, sheep and horses was prosperous, and there was industrial activity in the form of iron-working and coal extraction. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 192. The county was an administrative centre, with not only the council in the marches of Wales at Ludlow acting as a magnet for lawyers and their clients, but also the corporation of Shrewsbury embodying the riches acquired by the merchants whose trade in cloth was linked closely with London markets. There were 15 market towns in Shropshire recognised as such in the seventeenth century, but at least five of these merited the description ‘mean’ or ‘indifferent’. Blome, Britannia, 193-4.

The campaign for elections for Shropshire to what was to be the first Parliament of 1640 was under way by February. Vincent Corbett was the twenty-two-year-old head of one of the county’s most illustrious gentry families. He was untried in county government or any other kind of public service, but his late father, Sir Andrew Corbet†, had sat in three Parliaments in the 1620s, and Vincent was plainly seen as a natural successor to the Corbett interest widely defined. Robert Corbett of Stanwardine, who was himself to represent the county in very different circumstances in 1654, sought the support of John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater and president of the council in the marches of Wales, for his cousin Vincent. Robert Corbett requested Bridgewater’s ‘special favour’ indirectly, in a letter to the president’s man-of-business in London, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Davies, and spoke frankly of how Vincent was ‘stiffly opposed’ by Sir Richard Newport, Sir Richard Lee and William Pierrepont. According to Robert Corbett, Lee was putting it about that Vincent regarded Pierrepont as an inseparable running-mate for the county seats, and was threatening not to stand unless Pierrepont stood with him. NLW, Gwysaney Transcripts 24 ii. The latter was of a Nottinghamshire rather than a Shropshire family by ancestry, but as the proprietor of Tong Castle by right of his wife, was no outsider. The ten-year age gap between the two men may suggest that Corbett saw Pierrepont as a man to be followed rather than to be led. Socially, too, their relationship was intriguing; Corbett, the son of a knight with an ancient pedigree in Shropshire, as against Pierrepont, the second son of Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. Neither man was especially experienced in public life before 1640.

Of those said to be in contention against Corbett and Pierrepont, Sir Richard Newport was the most senior figure, with experience of three Parliaments behind him. Sir Richard Lee had succeeded to the baronetcy in 1631 and was another in whose veins Corbett blood coursed. Newport and Lee might in fact have been viewed by the electors of Shropshire as the more predictable and dependable choices. On 6 March, Lady Brilliana Harley, writing from Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire and therefore from some distance away, commented on how the tussle was developing. She thought on the 6th that there were four candidates, which seems to echo Robert Corbett’s analysis. HMC Portland, iii. 60. On or just before the 10th, at a meeting of the Shropshire gentry, probably in Shrewsbury, it was agreed that Vincent Corbett and Pierrepont should represent the shire. The meeting proceeded to allocate the two Shrewsbury seats, to Lee and to Sir Richard Newport’s son, Francis Newport. This was a blow to the electoral ambitions of Sir John Corbet, who declared himself ‘slighted’ at this concordat. Belvoir Castle, letters 1.23. Brilliana reported to her son, Edward Harley* that by the 14th the alliance between Vincent Corbett and Pierrepont had broken down, so that as a result it was no longer known who would be standing. HMC Portland, iii. 61. Brilliana then asserted that the contenders were Andrew Corbett, Sir John Corbet and Pierrepont. Letters of Brilliana Harley, 86. But Andrew Corbett, Vincent’s brother, had ruled himself out in January. HMC Portland, iii. 58.

The compact among the gentry that Lee and Newport should be the burgesses for Shrewsbury served only to annoy the townsmen. Capitalising upon this, Sir John Corbet quickly re-directed his energies towards wooing the town, and successfully persuaded his kinsman, Thomas Mytton*, to ask the high sheriff to detain the writ for the Shrewsbury election until after the shire election, which according to Corbet would be held on 19 March, was over. Belvoir Castle, letters 1.23. In the event, whether standing singly or as a pair, Vincent Corbett and Pierrepont were successful at the shire election, and it is difficult to detect in the evident jockeying for position anything ‘political’, anything more than rivalry between leading county gentry families. No doubt at least in part because of their attempt to encroach on the rights of the townsmen, the gentry contenders succeeded only in placing Francis Newport in Shrewsbury.

If a similar competition developed in the weeks prior to the second Parliament of 1640, no trace of it is evident in the surviving sources. On 29 October, Sir Richard Lee and Sir John Corbet, both in contention earlier in the year for parliamentary seats, were returned. Both were senior to Vincent Corbett in age and social status, so the latter may have been edged aside. Pierrepont found a seat at Much Wenlock, but his success there was not built on any known interest in either the borough or the extensive liberty of that place. He signed the indenture to return Lee and Corbet, however, suggesting that he was not sufficiently alienated by what many might have seen as a downgrading from the county seat to a burgess-ship in a minor borough to abstain from participation in the election. Other voters at this election, which took place in Shrewsbury castle, were Humphrey Mackworth I*, a leading Shrewsbury puritan, Thomas Owen*, the Shrewsbury town clerk and a recent enemy of Mackworth’s, Edward Cressett, father of Richard Cressett* and the mayor of Shrewsbury. Eg. Ch. 5755.

Once at Westminster, Sir John Corbet joined in the programme of reform that was pushed through the Commons in 1641, but from the outset Sir Richard Lee was inactive and evidently out of sympathy with the tenor of activities in the House. In August 1642, the grand jurors at the Shrewsbury assizes declared their intention to defend the king’s person, the privileges of Parliament, the laws of the land and the liberties of the subject, but it was in effect a statement of adherence to the king as civil war approached. The Declaration and Protestation (1642, 669.f.6.69.137). For his part in mobilizing opponents of the parliamentary cause that summer, Lee was summoned to the House to explain himself, but failed to attend and on 6 September was disabled from sitting further in that Parliament. CJ ii. 755a. Shropshire quickly fell under the control of the king’s party, who settled their headquarters in Shrewsbury. At the end of August 1643, the first parliamentary garrison in the county was established at Wem, but it was an embattled outpost for a long period, staffed by Thomas Mytton, Humphrey Mackworth I, Thomas Hunt*, Robert Clive*, Andrew Lloyd* and Robert Charlton*, among others. Because of personal rivalries, an unclear chain of command and the stress of isolation and constant threat of being overwhelmed by the royalists, there was much scope for internal wrangling in the parliamentarian camp, which was exacerbated when the county committee chose Humphrey Mackworth I as governor of Shrewsbury after the town fell to Parliament on 22 February 1645. Mytton had set his heart on the honour, and the perceived slight rankled with him for long after. On 15 February 1646, a year after Mackworth had been made governor of Shrewsbury, the county committee including Mackworth, Lloyd, Clive and Charlton, reported to Speaker William Lenthall a paper by Mytton which was critical of them, and one of Mytton’s principal complaints was that the committee had denied pay to his soldiers. Bodl. Tanner 60A, ff. 461, 463.

After Shrewsbury had become a reliable garrison for Parliament, the times were propitious for recruiter elections in the county. The writ to replace Lee was moved on 5 June 1646, and the election was held on 27 August. The extent to which Mytton, now high sheriff of Shropshire and therefore returning officer at the election, still harboured resentment at the actions of the county committee in denying him the prize of Shrewsbury had been underestimated. The Shropshire freeholders were to meet at Oswestry on 27 August at eight in the morning, as a meeting of the ‘county court’ there had determined earlier, probably at Shrewsbury, the usual venue for county elections. On their way there, some of the freeholders heard that Mytton was instead to be at Alberbury, 13 miles from Oswestry. They rode instead to Alberbury, a place where there was a decayed castle and little else, where they found Mytton with a group of individuals they later claimed included some who were not freeholders. Mytton read out the writ at nine o’clock, and the freeholders elected Lloyd, which presumably meant by acclamation. Mytton refused to accept that Lloyd had been elected, and so Lloyd’s supporters demanded the poll and an examination of all those present, on their oaths. This would have been a long and elaborate process, but Mytton abruptly refused to poll, and persisted in his refusal despite repeated requests. Before 10 o’clock was recorded by one of the later protesters on the sun-dial, Mytton had signed a return for Humphrey Edwardes and had ordered the crowd to disperse. NLW, Aston Hall Deeds 2462, 2464, 2465. Lloyd himself was one of a group of 84 freeholders who complained to the committee of privileges. Edwardes was a kinsman of Mytton’s who had played no part in the trials faced by the Shropshire county committee since 1643, but no-one could doubt his commitment to the cause of Parliament. Although the Shropshire by-election was referred to a parliamentary committee to which Sir Robert Harley was named, which must have given the county committee and the freeholders grounds for optimism, as Harley was of a similar Presbyterian stamp to Lloyd nothing came of the challenge. Edwardes remained in the House through the Rump Parliament, unlike Sir John Corbet who left the House in 1648 before the purge on 6 December. NLW, Aston Hall Deeds 2467.

During the Nominated Assembly of 1653, Shropshire was represented by two religious radicals with links to the millenarians. Thomas Baker of Sweeney opened his house up for sermons by the Welsh minister, Vavasor Powell, a close ally of Colonel Thomas Harrison I*; and William Botterell was the Ludlow military governor who was probably selected as much because of his reliability in security matters as because of his godliness. A third man from Shropshire attended the ‘Barebones’ assembly: John Browne of Little Ness, Baschurch, who sat as one of the representatives of Wales. Browne was an elder of the congregation of Morgan Llwyd at Wrexham. Browne, Baker and Humphrey Mackworth I had been named in February 1650 to the commission for the propagation of the gospel in Wales, which illustrates the cross-border dimension to religious radicalism of the early 1650s.

The establishment of the Cromwellian protectorate was a blow to the religious radicals, but the stock of the Mackworth family rose as Humphrey Mackworth I transferred his allegiance effortlessly to the new regime. Mackworth was invited to a seat on the lord protector’s council in February 1654, handing over the governorship of Shrewsbury to his second son, Humphrey Mackworth II*, who was already ensconced as Shrewsbury’s town clerk. The Mackworth interest was very evident in the composition of the four representatives returned from the town on 12 July 1654 to the first protectorate Parliament. The election was held in Shrewsbury, and Thomas Mackworth* was first in the list of names, over 30 in number, which appear on the return as voters. C219/44. The indenture is damaged, and the names are now illegible, but the name of Humphrey Mackworth I, as a serving privy councillor, must have been first. Of the others, Philip Yonge was a kinsman of the Mackworths by marriage, and Robert Corbett was Yonge’s first cousin. They were all beyond challenge from old Shropshire gentry families. Only Thomas Mytton stood out as emphatically not a client of the Mackworths, but he contributed nothing to the Parliament, and was possibly included against his own better judgement.

The death of Humphrey Mackworth I in December 1654 robbed the county of a distinguished leader, but his family retained a presence among the county’s MPs when elections took place probably in July 1656 for the second protectorate Parliament. The return is currently either missing or completely illegible, but the Official Returns compiled in Victorian times provide the names. Humphrey was replaced by his eldest son, Thomas Mackworth, who had been elected to the Long Parliament in 1646 for Ludlow, and the Mackworth cousin, Philip Yonge, retained his seat. The other seats went to veterans of the civil war. Samuel More had been an MP for Hastings as long ago as 1621 and 1624, but reappeared here by virtue of his standing as a colonel and military governor for Parliament in the 1640s. Andrew Lloyd had been a stalwart of the county committee with military rank, albeit a virtually nominal one. On the face of it he seemed set to achieve an ambition to sit in Parliament that had been thwarted by Mytton in 1646, but ten years later he encountered insurmountable objections to his candidacy imposed by the Cromwellian council, which barred him from taking his seat. In other places, military men in the shape of the standing army (former New Modellers) were a significant presence, as the major-generals tried to ensure that they and their allies were returned in numbers. While two of those elected in 1656 did indeed bear military titles of by this time an honorific kind, the fracturing of the Mackworth interest seems to have been plastered over by co-optees from the county committee interest of the 1640s.

The elections of 1659 were held on the basis of the historic constituencies and franchises. The durability of the Mackworth family was on display with the return of Thomas Mackworth and his cousin Philip Yonge, each with two previous Parliaments behind him. With the collapse of the protectorate, Shropshire went without representation in the Rump, as Humphrey Edwardes had died in 1658. There is no evidence that Sir John Corbet responded in February 1660 to the call to the secluded Members to return to the Long Parliament.