Hereford

The city of Hereford was remote and on the borders – Welsh was regularly heard on the city streets – but Hereford was of strategic importance in governing the Welsh marches, whether as a centre for criminal justice at quarter sessions and assizes, or during the civil war as a garrison town. Harl. 7189, f. 243. The economy of the town in 1640 was not in a particularly healthy condition. Its market was noted for sales of wool from the hinterland – the finest wool in all England was said to come from nearby Canon’s Pyon – and thanks to local patriots such as Dr Roger Bosworth* its cider was later famous, but the interest among the citizens in improving water navigation from the city to the coast betrays their anxiety about their isolation. J. Aubrey, Three Prose Works ed. J. Buchanan-Brown (Fontwell, 1972), 325; Hereford City Lib. Webbs Collection, Civil War vol. pp 100-1; I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Early Stuart England: the career of John, 1st Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 2000) 152-3; The River of Wye (in true examination) very difficult and chargeable to be reduced (1624); R. Vaughan, Most approved and long experienced Waterworkes (1610). The government of the city was established by a charter of 1597, and was invested in a single chamber, a common council of 31, which included the mayor and aldermen. A chief steward and town clerk owed their authority to this charter, which was renewed with minor modifications in 1619. E.M. Jancey, The Royal Charters of the City of Hereford (Hereford, 1989), 24. The chief steward from 1630 was John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I], in whose gift lay the office of deputy steward, in effect the city’s chief law officer. Hereford City Lib. Hill MSS, Vol. 4 (Hereford), 139. The deputy steward in 1640 was Richard Seaborne*. There is some evidence that in this period the city’s high steward and his deputy were granted the same titles vis-a-vis Hereford cathedral, though the precise boundaries and implications of this grant from the dean and chapter are at present unclear. The population of the city was stated to be under 1,000 in 1676, but that may well be a serious underestimate, in the light of roughly consistent figures from 1646 and 1676 that reckon Leominster’s population to have been 1,600-1,800. Compton Census, 251, 256; Add. 11044, f. 209.

Hereford elections were conducted at the Guildhall. By custom, the high steward enjoyed the perquisite of appointing one of the city’s MPs, while the chamber chose the other. Eminent townspeople or those connected with the corporation by ties of mutual service were their natural choices, and these principles prevailed throughout the period. There is no evidence of any elections being tumultuous or involving large numbers of voters. In the election to the Short Parliament of 1640, Richard Weaver was chosen on the strength of his previous parliamentary service and his distinguished progress through the civic cursus honorum. Richard Seaborne, who took the second seat, was a prominent Middle Temple lawyer who had from the mid-1630s been Scudamore’s deputy steward. It was he who brought in a bill to make the Wye navigable, stimulated no doubt by parallel but more successful efforts in Warwickshire and Worcestershire by William Sandys*. The same pair were returned in the second election of 1640, on 20 October, when 13 electors put their names to the indenture. C219/43/1/210.

After various premature reports of his demise, Richard Weaver died in 1642, precipitating a contest for his seat which all who were interested had had plenty of time to anticipate. Even before Weaver’s death, Brilliana Harley of Brampton Bryan was working on behalf of her son, Edward Harley*, for the seat, which also drew indications of interest from Sir Robert Whitney, also of a county gentry family. Sir William Croft, later to provide backbone to the Herefordshire royalist party, seems to have played an ambivalent part in this period of manoeuvring, though it became clear that he had his own sights on the seat. Brilliana Harley Letters, 124, 154. When Weaver did die, on 16 May 1642, the previous month’s activity was immediately relegated to oblivion as a phoney war. Brilliana Harley stepped up her promotion of Edward. Brilliana Harley Letters, 162. On 19 May she was still optimistic that Croft’s support might be available to her son, even after Croft had indicated that he would not intervene: ‘he would leave all men to themselves’. Brilliana Harley Letters, 163. Other candidates mentioned as expressing an interest were Bennet Hoskins*, one of the Price family of Wistaston, near Hereford, ‘but they stir not yet’. Brilliana Harley Letters, 164. The franchise was wide enough for there to be discussion of how many ‘voices’ the candidates could muster, and some of the aldermen advised the Harleys that Edward’s chances would be improved if he could spend two or three days in Hereford instead of remaining in London. Harley seemed assured of the support of the corporation, but early in June, the high steward made it known that he wished the place to be bestowed upon his son. This announcement by Scudamore stopped the campaign dead in its tracks, and was sufficient to make Brilliana and other competitors drop their interest. Despite the early jockeying, James Scudamore was duly elected without a contest, but not until 26 July. Brilliana Harley Letters, 165, 166; C219/43/201.

By the time the by-election took place, the city sessions had been disturbed by the defiance of the jury foreman, a supporter of Parliament, against the royalist commissioners of array. Harl. 7189, f. 241. It seems likely that Scudamore’s uncontested return, against this turbulent atmosphere in Hereford, was seen as an opportunity for wounds to be healed, but in August, the assizes were forced by supporters of the royalist ‘Nine Worthies’, and a number of parliamentarian sympathisers among the justices fled from the wrath of servants and apprentices to the house of one of their number. There was an aggressively royalist climate in the city, with reports of one man keeping a helmet with horns which he called Essex’s head (alluding to the unsatisfactory marital history of Parliament’s commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex) and pictures of the chief parliamentarians in his privy. Harl. 7189, ff. 241v, 242. Though Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford garrisoned the city for eleven weeks, he was obliged to withdraw in December, and the city was governed by Fitzwilliam Coningsby* on behalf of the king. Although Scudamore was disabled from sitting in the House on 22 January 1644, it was not until 1646 that there was any prospect of a by-election.

Hereford and the surrounding countryside were not reliably royalist during the period of the king’s ascendancy. During Coningsby’s governorship, 6,000 insisted on reparations and relief for dependents of those killed in recent fighting, demands which Coningsby rejected. Harl. 7189, f. 246v. In March 1645, Edward Harley and the parliamentarian committee in waiting reported that 15-16,000 countrymen surrounded the city, hostile both to king and Parliament. Add. 70005, f. 35 (2nd foliation). The Scots besieged the city briefly, to the lasting fury of the inhabitants, who considered the district bespoiled by them; after their departure, the king himself was nearby, and ‘shuffled up and down’ in his uncertainty after Naseby. Harl. 7189, f. 247. By the time that John Birch* was able to take Hereford for Parliament, the city’s infrastructure was in a parlous condition, its financial stock normally used to support productive industry like the clothing trade being run down and consumed in malting and brewing, trades maintaining a subsistence economy. Harl. 7189, f. 249. When Birch set up as governor, he asked Sir Robert Harley* for help in winning over the loyalty of the ‘extremely disaffected’ city, but Harley’s response was to rebuff Birch and begin a war of attrition against him that only ended after Edward Harley had been impeached by the army as one of the Eleven Members. Add. 70005, f. 2 (3rd foliation). Harley secured an order from the Committee for Plundered Ministers to augment the income of the city’s churches in April 1646, but only in September was the writ for the election moved. Add. 70062, Cttee. for Plundered Ministers order, 15 Apr. 1646; CJ iv. 667b. Richard Seaborne had been disabled in January 1646, thus making available both the city’s seats.

The Hereford writ was moved at the same time as those for Leominster, Weobley and the county (11 Sept. 1646). The politics of the four elections were bound closely together, with the Harley interest, supported by the committeemen, working to suppress the aspirations of John Birch. According to John Flackett*, Birch had been working since June to influence the Hereford by-election, but no party could be certain of the outcome. Add. 70058, John Flackett to Edward Harley, 6 June 1646. In August, Edward Massie* was working on the assumption that Edward Harley would take the county seat, and that one of the city seats would go to another of the Harley family, Edward’s brother, Robert*. Add. 70005, f. 42 (3rd foliation). The election took place on 17 November, and the first seat was taken by Bennet Hoskins, without a contest. Hoskins’s father, Serjeant John Hoskins, had been MP for the city in three Parliaments, and his family retained a sufficient interest there to account for his success. The second seat was contested, between Edmund Weaver, who had been noted as of some local significance in the 1642 by-election to replace his deceased father, and Herbert Perrott*, of a gentry family and more importantly, of the parliamentarian committee for Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and south Wales. Perrott, presumably after seeing the election slide away from him, asked for the poll, but Weaver beat him by twice the number of voices. Add. 70125, Nathaniel Wright and John Flackett to Edward Harley, 17 Nov. 1646. The result was to elevate two men of the city to Westminster, and the corporation appointed Sir Robert Harley high steward. The pretensions of the military governor, John Birch, had been checked, but as he took a seat in Leominster, the result was some kind of draw.

The honour of high steward in Harley’s case carried with it some emphatic duties. The corporation looked to him to redress their grievances and problems, the greatest of which in 1647 was the ‘motion of delinquency’ that Parliament had imposed upon the ‘tottering and decaying city’. Add. 70106, f. 48; Add. 70005, f. 83 (3rd foliation). In response, Harley created two deputy stewards instead of the usual one. Add. 70005, f. 34 (4th foliation); Add. 70006, f. 15. Bennet Hoskins as burgess for the city was an obvious and sensible choice. Edward Freeman*, one of Harley’s clients from Presteigne, was rather more problematic, and had to be restrained from his rather brisk way with the clergy, but proved the more redoubtable defender of the Harleys’ wider political interest, especially in Wales. The appointment of the high steward seems to have been decided annually by the corporation in the years immediately after 1646, and Harley in turn went each year through the ritual of reappointing his deputies. Add. 70006, ff. 15, 45. Birch was succeeded as military governor by someone more acceptable to Harley in March 1647, and the transfer of the castle to a trust composed of the MPs for the county and boroughs marked an important step in the healing process between the two men. Add. 70061, bdle. 3; Webb, Memorials, ii. 421. Sir Robert Harley took his duties as a representative of the city seriously. He led a delegation of citizens to the Speaker in September 1647, in an attempt to reduce Hereford’s burden of direct taxation, and received an address from its ministers on the need to remove the military presence, a topic on which he was in full accord with them. Add. 70005, f. 80 (4th foliation); Add. 70006, ff. 1, 5. Bennet Hoskins was in charge of resuming the legal system of the city, and reported to Harley on how he had begun with commissions on charities, and moving on to restoring the city courts. Add. 70006, f. 19. Nevertheless, the ministers warned Harley that in 1648 there was only one reliable candidate for the office of mayor, and urged Harley to attend his election in purpose, in order to assert his interest among the townspeople. They noted how the terms of the charter did not help them in their task of developing a loyal, godly civic culture. Add. 70006, f. 34.

By contrast with Sir Robert Harley’s active interest between 1646 and 1649, the Members who had been elected for Hereford in 1646 proved inactive and uncommitted, perhaps as a direct consequence of Harley’s continued energy, aged though he was. Bennet Hoskins and Edmund Weaver played little part in Parliament, and both were away from the House when the army purged it on 6 December 1648. Had they been present, they would have been victims. As it was, the exclusion of Sir Robert and Edward Harley from Parliament at Pride’s Purge, and the trial and execution of the king, which was in any case abhorrent to them, marked in official terms the end of their authority in Hereford. It is true that in August 1649, the mayor and citizens wrote to Sir Robert for his help in acquiring some lands of the Hereford dean and chapter, then on the market, for the corporation. But by November, Harley was told that his enemies, Wroth Rogers*, the new military governor, and Miles Hill, a failed businessman and religious radical who had been advanced by the Harleys to be treasurer of taxes raised for Parliament in Herefordshire, but who was now their fiercest critic, were made freemen of the city. In a most painful affront to Sir Robert, the corporation elected the millenarian Colonel Thomas Harrison I* as high steward. Add 70006, ff. 107, 124. During the period of the Rump Parliament, Hereford was left without parliamentary representation.

Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, Hereford lost one of its Members during the two Parliaments of Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate. In 1654, Bennet Hoskins managed to take the seat, an obvious expression of support by the city for one of its own against outsiders. C219/44/1. Hoskins’s election provoked outrage among the republican and Cromwellian local establishment, including Benjamin Mason* and Miles Hill, who petitioned the council of state against Hoskins, dredging up allegations that he had been a royalist during the 1640s, never loyal to Parliament. SP18/74/110; SP18/74/85. His case was not taken up in the House, however. The election outcome may have played some part in the decision to maintain the Hereford garrison, when its future was reviewed some months afterwards. The reason for its continuation, according to Oliver Cromwell*, was that it lay as a staging post between north and south Wales which had ‘had not forgot their mountainous qualities’: in other words were still a source of lawlessness. Burton’s Diary, i. p. xcii. When elections for the second protectorate Parliament took place in 1656, Wroth Rogers, the governor who by this time had been embedded in the castle for eight years, and was a full member of the corporation, ensured that he took the seat on his own interest.

In 1659, the city recovered its second seat, as elections were held on the old franchise. Wroth Rogers, still in place as governor, ensured that his interest was represented by his son, Nathan, who had been elected a freeman of Hereford in 1658. Herefs. RO, transcripts of city docs. 23. By this time, Wroth Rogers had married a grand-daughter of Humphrey Salwey*, and was thus becoming integrated into local gentry society, albeit its most godly wing, so the success of Nathan Rogers, who took first place in the election, should not be viewed as a victory for military outsiders. The second seat at Hereford went to the local patriot and cider connoisseur, Dr Roger Bosworth, a physician popular in the city, but a man with only slight interest in politics. C219/47. Bosworth’s election owed everything to a revival of Viscount Scudamore’s interest. Even the traditional public preoccupations of Hereford citizens seemed to be reviving; Bosworth wrote to Robert Harley* to assure him that he would like to see more progress on the question of weirs on the Wye. Add. 70057, loose.

Wroth Rogers was sharing military authority in Hereford with an ally of Edward Harley’s by 5 March 1660. The garrison of 120 soldiers was said to contain an element hostile to the restoration of the king, and aggrieved at 14 months’ backlog of pay due to them. Add. 70114, John Greene to Edward Harley, 5 Mar. 1660. The Harleys were outraged at the persistence of support, even among the ministers, for Wroth Rogers, but once the king had arrived at Dover, the city welcomed his return with cannon and bonfires. Even Thomas Pury II*, a former stalwart of the Rump Parliament, was said to have taken a cup of wine in Hereford ‘in a very civil and kind manner’. Add. 70007, ff. 77v, 218. On the surviving evidence, elections in the city during the 1650s cannot be said to have been tumultuous or disordered, and the stable military presence personified by Wroth Rogers may have done much to ensure that political divisions in Hereford were managed in the interests of good order on the streets.