Bridgnorth

Described by Richard Blome in 1673 as ‘a large town corporate, seated on the Severn’, Bridgnorth was a thriving general market centre in the seventeenth century. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 194. The townsmen made full commercial use of the Severn, and by 1640 were benefiting from an expansion of river trade that reached maturity at the end of the century, when Bridgnorth was among the most important boat-building centres on the river. M. Wanklyn, ‘The Severn Navigation in the Seventeenth Century: long-distance Trade of Shrewsbury Boats’, Midland Hist. xiii. 35. The woollen-cloth trades, in earlier times the staple industry of the local economy, were in decline in the 1620s, but a significant if unquantifiable proportion of the workforce was then engaged in the river trade or its many ancillary crafts. Wanklyn, ‘Urban Revival in Early Modern England: Bridgnorth and the River Trade, 1660-1800’, Midland Hist. xviii. 39, 43. By 1689, 75 per cent of the male inhabitants were dependent on the river for their livings. Wanklyn, ‘Severn Navigation’, 35. In 1636 the corporation denounced the scheme of William Sandys* to make the Worcestershire Avon navigable. They understood how a rival river navigation could threaten ‘the life and chief supportation’ of many in Bridgnorth. Salop Archives, BB/C/1/1/1 f. 19v. They identified wood and coal fuel, butter and cheese as among the principal products filling the holds of the ‘trows’ (shallow-bottomed craft) sailing down the water from Bridgnorth, to be replaced by malt coming up from the ‘low country’ downstream. Salop Archives, BB/C 1/1/1 f. 19v. They might have made mention, too, of cast-iron goods, produced initially in a small way from the nearby furnaces. Wanklyn, ‘Urban Revival’, 53-4. The population of Bridgnorth around 1640 has been estimated to have reached a little over 2,000 in the 1630s. Wanklyn, ‘Urban Revival’, 38.

The government of Bridgnorth was vested in two bailiffs (mayors) and burgesses. In 1635 the crown challenged the corporation on the validity of its charter, and some burgesses went up to London to make a composition, but this was less a serious dispute and more a revenue generating scheme by the financially beleaguered government of Charles I. Salop Archives, BB/C/1/1/1 f. 17v. Bridgnorth was a stopping-point for officials on journeys to and from the council in the marches of Wales, which met at Ludlow; the townsmen feted John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater on two occasions in 1640. Salop Archives, BB/D 1/2/1/50.

The important family interests in the town where those of Whitmore, Acton and Littleton. Sir William Whitmore† of Apley Park represented the borough in three Parliaments of the 1620s and commanded a significant loyalty, as well as enjoying leases of civic property, there. In 1635 he lent the corporation money to install pipes for a rudimentary water supply, and the following year his intervention was decisive in ending a long-running legal action against the coroner which had originated from within the town. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/50, 51; BB/C 1/1/1 ff. 19v, 20, 21. In this latter affair, he was joined by Walter Acton of Aldenham, of another long-standing local gentry family. The recorder until 1640 was Sir Edward Littleton†, in 1641 to be created Baron Littleton of Mounslow. As chief justice of common pleas, a member of the court of high commission and a recently-retired solicitor-general, Littleton’s standing in the borough was considerable purely by virtue of high office. In the first election of 1640, a three-cornered though apparently even-tempered contest took place between representatives of these three families for the two available seats.

In the record of the election preserved by the borough, each of the three candidates was defined in relation to his father: Thomas, son of Sir William Whitmore; Edward, son of Walter Acton; and Adam Littleton of Stoke St Milborough, son of Sir Edward Littleton. The electorate on this occasion was evidently a wide one, and there was evidently a poll. In the surviving informal papers, which recorded details of the election, under each candidate’s name a list of vertical strokes indicated a vote cast. Assuming that each voter used his two votes, some 290 electors may have participated in the process, but there must remain doubts as to whether anything as straightforward as this actually occurred. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/4/1/1. It is hard to discern any element related to the wider politics of the country in the competition, and the victory of Whitmore and Acton probably simply represents the confirmation of the dominant landed interests over the deference owed to the town’s distinguished recorder. The formal record adopted a formula to express the unanimity of the voters and to draw a veil over any elements of dissent that may have underlain the contest. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/5. That the election was not the product of division within the corporation is confirmed by the borough’s election of Adam Littleton later in 1640 as recorder, in succession to his father and on his recommendation. Salop Archives, BB/C 1/1/1 f. 35v.

The election held on 12 October 1640, for what became the Long Parliament, was genuinely unanimous, with no challenger to Whitmore and Acton. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/6. Twelve days before the indenture was signed, however, Henry Frederick Thynne sounded out opinion in the borough on his chances of securing one of the Bridgnorth seats. Thynne wrote to Stephen Totty, estate steward of Sir William Whitmore, making explicit his belief that Totty’s influence would be critical among the voters. Thynne claimed that the better inhabitants had assured him of their votes during the recent shrievalty of his father, Thomas Thynne of nearby Stretton and of Longleat, Wiltshire. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/4/1/2; 215/18; Vis. Salop, 1623, i. (Harl. Soc. xxix), 461; VCH Salop, x. 89. Thynne was no more successful at Bridgnorth than he had been at Coventry in the elections for the Short Parliament earlier in the year, and he never in fact occupied a parliamentary seat. infra, ‘Coventry’. At Coventry, he had been able to mobilize the support of his distinguished father-in-law, Thomas Coventry†, Lord Keeper Coventry, but after the recent death of the latter, Thynne was obliged to invoke the name of his locally significant but hardly eminent father in his determined quest for a place.

On 19 November 1641 the town was thrown into panic by rumours from Kidderminster of a ‘sudden insurrection and rising of the papists ... in this kingdom’, but Bridgnorth was within secure royalist territory during the civil war. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/51. The king came to the borough on 12 October 1642, a few days after rallying support at Shrewsbury for his cause. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/52; Articles or Demands made by the King's most Excellent Majestie (1642, E.121.40). He issued a proclamation for peace in the county from Bridgnorth on the 14th. Bodl. Blakeway 8, f. 387. Both Whitmore and Acton later seceded to the Oxford Parliament, and both were disabled from sitting at Westminster on 5 February 1644. CJ iii. 389b. The garrison for the king was housed in the castle, atop the cliff overlooking the Severn, and from there the royalist committee for Shropshire, including Whitmore, Acton and the governor, Sir Robert Howard*, directed the military affairs of the county and the attempts to link up the field army with the Oxford headquarters. Salop Archives, BB/C 1/1/1 f. 45. Bridgnorth was stormed by Parliament and surrendered on 26 April 1646, but not before the royalists had fired parts of it, inflicting damage estimated at £70,000, making 300 families homeless and destroying the commercial heart of the town. The Kingdomes Weekly Post no. 3 (5-12 Jan. 1648), 15 (E.422.1); Wanklyn, ‘Urban Revival’, 37-8.

Writs for fresh elections to the Long Parliament were moved on 13 May 1646. CJ iv. 543a. On 5 June warrants for the election were taken into the ‘liberties’ (suburbs) of the borough, and on the 8th, leading members of the Shropshire committee were invited by the bailiffs and burgesses to claim freedom of the town whenever it suited them, an order which probably marks the date of the parliamentary election of Robert Charlton and Robert Clive. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/56; BB/C/1/1/1 f. 47v. The corporation obliged the leading Salopian parliamentarians, including Humphrey Mackworth I* and William Pierrepont*, with the customary tokens of esteem, including wine, and in 1647 made Mackworth its recorder. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/57, 58, 59. Thomas Baker* supervised the demolition of Bridgnorth castle, but among the fire-damaged buildings restored was the ‘burgess hall’ where parliamentary elections had previously been held. Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/57, 58; BB/B/6/4/1/3.

Neither Charlton nor Clive were sufficiently radical to survive the army’s purge of Parliament in December 1648, and the borough was not invited to send a representative to the Nominated Assembly of 1653. It was therefore not until the elections in July 1654 for the first Parliament of the Cromwellian protectorate that Bridgnorth was again enfranchised, with one Member only, by the terms of the Instrument of Government. With the complete eclipse of the royalist interest, Humphrey Mackworth I, a Cromwellian councillor as well as recorder of the borough, was the dominant figure, and his influence accounts for the installation of his brother-in-law, William Crowne, royal herald and former secretary of Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, in the seat. Forty-one names appeared on the indenture, in the name of ‘the bailiffs, burgesses and inhabitants’. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/7. By the time the next election took place, on 27 August 1656 for the second protectorate Parliaments, Crowne had taken up an opportunity to become a proprietor in North America and Mackworth was dead. The influence wielded by his sons, Humphrey Mackworth II* and Thomas Mackworth*, and by other protectorians, ensured that the seat remained in the hands of someone loyal to the government. Edmund Wareing enjoyed some family influence locally in his own right, as a proprietor and as an active commissioner for Major-general James Berry. As in 1654, some 40 men signed his indenture. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/8.

Wareing survived the return of the old franchise in 1659 to take the senior of the two seats. The second went to John Humfrey, who had probably been actively seeking a seat in Parliament and was attracted to Bridgnorth by Wareing, through the network of returned New Englanders. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/9. The indenture was cast in a way that itself marked a recovery of former procedures. Only half the number of names appeared on the 1659 document that were entered on the 1656 one, with a gesture in 1659 to ‘others’. If the names appearing on the indentures are meaningful as indicators of participation, the Cromwellian protectorate saw a decline in electoral activity with each successive election. Only six names appear on all three indentures for the Parliaments of 1654, 1656 and 1659. The restoration of the monarchy saw an immediate revival of the Aston interest. Salop Archives, BB/B/6/3/1/10.