Leominster

Leominster was described in 1646 by the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, which was about to augment the living there, as ‘an ancient borough of large extent containing 1,800 communicants’. Add. 11044, f. 209; HMC Portland, iii. 144. This figure accords with the 1,603 communicants, 105 nonconformists and 6 Roman Catholics reckoned to have formed the adult population there in 1676. Compton Census, 256. The basis of town government was the charter of 1554, which only confirmed and codified the ancient corporation of a bailiff and 24 burgesses, with full powers to fill vacancies among their number. Furthermore, the bailiff and burgesses elected two other officers, the high steward and the recorder. There seems in theory to have been a scot and lot or ratepayer parliamentary franchise, but a corporation order of 1618 giving first choice of a burgess place in Parliament over any outsider strongly suggests that in effect the electors were the bailiff and the 24. G.F. Townsend, Town and Borough of Leominster (n.d.), 332. The manor of Leominster had been granted by the king in 1620 to George Villiers, 1st marquess (later duke) of Buckingham, and its owners enjoyed rents and lands in 12 parishes or liberties outside the boundaries of the borough. Townsend, Leominster, 90.

The burgesses were inclined to bestow the favour of election to Parliament on local gentlemen with estates near Leominster. This held good for one of the seats allocated for the Short Parliament of 1640. William Smalman was the son of Francis Smalman, who had been a Member in 1621; their interest lay in the parish of Kinnersley, a few miles from the borough. Walter Kyrle had no nearby estate, but was a client of Sir Walter Pye*, steward of the manor of Leominster between 1636 and 1648, and a former client, in turn, of Buckingham. The second election of the year confirmed the same pattern. Kyrle retained his seat, the second according to the precedence recorded on the indenture, and the first seat was granted to Sampson Eure, an ambitious lawyer who had through the 1630s been building his estate at Gatley, eight miles north west of the town. On 21 October, the bailiff returned Eure and Kyrle ‘with the consent of the rest of the burgesses’. C219/43/1/202.

Despite the presence in Leominster of the godly Protestant minister, John Tombes, the town as a whole did not subscribe to the puritan outlook of Sir Robert Harley*, whose seat at Brampton Bryan was some ten miles to the north west. In October 1641, during the parliamentary recess, Harley wrote to the churchwardens of Leominster, calling on them to remove crucifixes that he knew were in their church and churchyard, in accordance with a Commons order against idolatrous images. HMC Portland, iii. 81. His demands were resisted, and the following February a former bailiff of the town reported to Harley how Fitzwilliam Coningsby*, whose family had formerly provided Leominster with high stewards and Members of Parliament, was able to ‘command the hearts of this town’. Coningsby had no time for the puritan Tombes, or any other ‘that likes the leaving of ceremonies’. Add. 70003, f. 204; Townsend, Leominster, 294. Successive bailiffs were indifferent to the demands of Parliament, and by the summer of 1642, amid the disturbances in various parts of the marches, there were visits to Leominster by Ludlow men who wished the Brampton Bryan ‘puritans and roundheads’ hanged. HMC Portland, iii. 85; Add. 70110, unbound: Brilliana Harley to Sir R. Harley, June 1642. An attempt to create a party from the thin sources of support for the Harley family was, however, evident at that time. The tradesmen of Leominster were evidently the richest vein of godliness. Tombes wrote to his fellow-minister, Stanley Gower, rector of Brampton Bryan, recommending as godly in the view of Tombes and John Flackett* the mercer Miles Hill, bailiff of Leominster in 1637 and by the early 1640s in debt by trading losses. Add. 70106, ff. 162, 164; Townsend, Leominster, 294. Hill, an elector at Weobley, later went on to become treasurer of county military revenues for Parliament in 1645, by the appointment of the Harleys. Add. 70106, f. 162; Add. 70005, f. 55 (2nd foliation); SP28/257, unfol.

In July 1642, Coningsby summoned a chamber of the corporation to try to raise money and horses for the king by the authority of the commission of array, but no-one was willing to contribute. HMC Portland, iii. 93. Working with another local gentry leader, Wallop Brabazon, Coningsby engineered a disturbance in Leominster church (31 July) by provoking volunteers for the king to attempt to force a visiting minister to read one of the king’s publications against Parliament, but the town was by no means uniformly royalist. Add. 70106, f. 165; HMC Portland, iii. 95-6. The bailiff and burgesses were in November sufficiently uncomfortable at being objects of the displeasure of the parliamentarian commander, Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, that they asked Sir Robert Harley to intercede with him on their behalf, and later in the war they petitioned Parliament against Wallop Brabazon, accusing him of maintaining church music, opening an alehouse and bowling green, promoting Ship Money, harbouring Catholics and privatizing the common lands. HMC Portland, iii. 102; Add. 70086, unbound petition, n.d. Inevitably, however, once the royalists had the county in their grip, Leominster became in 1643 a place to billet the king’s troops. HMC Portland, iii. 111, 117.

Sampson Eure was disabled from sitting in the Commons on 22 January 1644, but it was not until September 1646 that the writs for Leominster, Weobley, Hereford and Herefordshire were moved in the House. The governor of Hereford, John Birch, had his sights on a place in Parliament for one or other of these constituencies. By July, he had harnessed the support of Miles Hill, whose apparent godliness and approval by John Flackett and the Harleys no longer bound him to the Brampton Bryan family. Birch’s credibility as a potential burgess for Leominster must have rested at least in part on his purchase in July 1646 of an 800-acre estate at Letton and Atforton, north west of the borough. Brampton Bryan MSS, bdles. 5/4, 5/8. Even though their influence was not unlimited, it must have been through the good offices of the Harley family that in July 1646 the Committee for Plundered Ministers augmented the minister’s stipend at Leominster from the tithes sequestered from John Scudamore†, 1st Viscount Scudamore [I] and Wallop Brabazon, just as the campaign for the Herefordshire recruiter elections was getting under way. Add. 11044, f. 209; HMC Portland, iii. 144. The election for Herefordshire was held at Leominster on 14 November, probably in an attempt by the Harley family to restrict Birch’s interest, which was drawn mainly from Hereford. The election for the borough itself was reportedly held on the same day. Birch dated his resignation from the post of garrison commander of Hereford as occurring on 17 November. Add. 70005, ff. 70-4 (2nd foliation), f. 36 (4th foliation); Herefs. RO, 057/1; Perfect Occurrences no. 47 (13-20 Nov. 1646), sig. Yy3 (E.362.23).

On 22 November 1648, Birch was created high steward by the borough, a post which he held until June 1660. CJ vi. 84a; Townsend, Leominster, 291. The burgesses also confirmed their confidence in the soldier-turned-landowner by returning him to the two Parliaments held under the rubric of the Instrument of Government of 1653, when the town had only one Member. A single indenture for the elections of the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell* has survived, which bears the names of only six electing burgesses. C219/44/1. The religious tone of the borough in the 1650s seems to have been of the Presbyterian-leaning godliness of Birch and the Harleys, who would probably have concurred with the opinion of the parishioner who stormed out of Leominster church in December 1656, adamant that ‘if there had never been Anabaptists there had never been Quakers’. Add. 70052, loose pprs. Religious disturbances added to social and economic problems: the town was evidently suffering under the burden of large numbers of poor people in the mid-1650s. Brotherton Lib. Univ. of Leeds, Marten Loder MSS, vol. ‘Thomas Deane Letters II’, ff. 25v-26. The return to England by 1657 of George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, former (some would have said rightful) owner of Henry Marten’s* manor of Leominster Foreign encouraged the townspeople to tardiness in paying Marten his rents. Brotherton Lib. Univ. of Leeds, Marten Loder MSS, vols. ‘Thomas Deane Letters II’, f. 10; ‘Thomas Deane Letters III’, ff. 32, 33, 38. Soon after Birch had been made high steward, Edward Freeman, an associate of the Harleys and of Bennet Hoskins, was awarded the other principal office in the town’s gift, the post of recorder. Freeman was thus an obvious choice to fill the second parliamentary seat at the election in 1659, held under the pre-1653 arrangements. C219/47. Although Birch had to concede the high stewardship to Fitzwilliam Coningsby at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Freeman seems to have retained his office until his death.