Carlisle

Carlisle was the principal administrative centre and stronghold of the West March with Scotland, guarding a crossing on the River Eden a few miles south of the Anglo-Scottish border. Until the accession of James I, the inhabitants had lived chiefly by hosting and catering for those who repaired to the city to attend the warden of the West March, and as late as 1655 it was reported that ‘the greatest part of the city’ consisted ‘wholly of alehousekeepers’. SP14/22/3, f. 3v; SP18/123/42, f. 103. The demilitarisation of the border after 1603 had an adverse effect upon Carlisle’s hospitality and service trades, although the city’s port, fairs and markets continued to function as an entrepôt for the export of wool and hides to Scotland and for the exchange of produce between the arable lands of the Eden Valley and the pastoral uplands to the east. SP14/22, f. 3v; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 319; APC 1626, pp. 401-2; R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 69; S. Jefferson, Hist. and Antiquities of Carlisle (Carlisle, 1838), 302-3; Municipal Recs. Carlisle ed. R.S. Ferguson (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. extra ser. iv), 95. By the late seventeenth century, the city reportedly contained fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, most of whom were ‘ordinarily in a middle and somewhat poor condition, having no manufacture nor stable commodity to enrich themselves by’. H. Todd, Acct. of the City and Diocese of Carlisle (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc., tract ser. v), 30. According to the 1674 hearth tax returns, the city comprised only 327 households – suggesting an overall population of about 1,600 – over a third of them (125) exempt poor. E179/90/76, mm. 4v-7.

Although Carlisle received its first royal charter in the thirteenth century, it was not incorporated until the reign of Charles I. Royal Charters of Carlisle ed. R.S. Ferguson (Carlisle, 1894), pp. xx, xxiii-xxv. Under a charter granted in 1637, the city was governed by corporation consisting of 12 aldermen (one of whom served annually as mayor), 24 capital citizens – referred to as the common council – and numerous other officeholders. Royal Charters of Carlisle ed. Ferguson, 180-212. The returning officer was the mayor, who, with the recorder and the two senior aldermen, served as justices of the peace for the borough. T.H.B. Oldfield, Hist. of the Original Constitution of Parliaments (1797), 149; Royal Charters of Carlisle ed. Ferguson, 201-2. Carlisle had first sent Members to Parliament in 1295, and the right of election was vested in the freemen, who comprised those who had obtained their freedom by patrimony, apprenticeship, purchase or by grant from the corporation. Oldfield, Hist. of the Original Constitution, 147-8; HP Commons, 1386-1421, ‘Carlisle’. The freeman body numbered over 200 in 1619, but its exact size during the civil-war period is not known. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/319. What is also unclear is the method by which Members were returned, although the evidence suggests that the corporation selected its two preferred candidates and then simply presented them to the electorate for its automatic endorsement. There is no evidence in this period of candidates appealing over the head of the corporation to the wider freeman body.

The pre-eminent electoral interests at Carlisle by 1640 belonged to two local gentleman: Richard Barwis* and Sir George Dalston*. Barwis’s estate at Ilekirk Grange lay about ten miles from Carlisle, but he was able to supplement this slender proprietorial interest in the borough by cultivating close links with the civic elite. In 1624, he became a member of the city’s merchant guild and a freeman, and his interest among the inhabitants was such by the late 1620s that he was returned for Carlisle to the 1628 Parliament. Appointed sheriff of Cumberland in 1634, he sympathised with the city’s efforts to secure exemption from the first writ for Ship Money, and several years later he played a leading role in obtaining Carlisle’s charter of incorporation, in which he was named mayor. Infra, ‘Richard Barwis’. Sir George Dalston’s seat at Dalston lay just three miles from Carlisle, and in one of his letters to the corporation he referred to the ‘ancient respects’ that his family had received from the city. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/18. In addition to his strong proprietorial interest in the borough, Dalston had held the captaincy of Carlisle Castle since 1608. Infra, ‘Sir George Dalston’. He was named as senior alderman after Barwis in the 1637 charter of incorporation. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/326; Royal Charters of Carlisle ed. Ferguson, 189.

Nomination as aldermen in the ‘governing charter’ of 1637 confirmed Barwis and Dalston as front-runners in the elections to the Short Parliament – although Dalston chose to recommend his son William to the corporation while he himself stood as a candidate for knight of the shire for Cumberland. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/18. With the newly-formed corporation apparently determined to exert a tight a grip on parliamentary selection, Barwis and William Dalston were virtually assured of their places from the first. Nevertheless, on paper they faced some formidable competition for the honour of representing the city, whose would-be electoral patrons included the queen and the president of the council of the north, the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†). The queen claimed an interest in the borough as owner of the manor and castle of Carlisle, and she recommended first a kinsman of her receiver-general Sir Richard Wynn and then the future Irish peer Arthur Jones*. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/14, 22 ‘We doubt not’, her council informed the corporation in February 1640, ‘but you will give such respect unto this recommendation of her Majesty ... as not to prefer before it the solicitation of any other person whatsoever’. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/14. Apparently the queen had not thought to discuss this matter with another manager of the crown interest in the north, Strafford. At Strafford’s request, Francis Clifford, 5th earl of Cumberland and Sir Philip Musgrave* attempted to secure the return at Carlisle of a client and kinsman of the Cliffords, George Boteler, who had represented the borough in 1614 and 1620. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/11, 19; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Carlisle’. Another possible candidate was Carlisle’s governor Sir Francis Willoughby, who obtained his freedom of the city at some point in 1640. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/15; CA/2/27.

But the stiffest challenge that Barwis and Dalston faced in 1640 probably came from the Cumberland knight Sir Richard Graham, who had sat for Carlisle in the 1626 and 1628 Parliaments. The corporation refused Graham on the same grounds it did all the other outside candidates – that is, by questioning whether he was a freeman and pleading that the only impartial response to the queen or to the ‘divers others of good quality’ who had recommended candidates or offered their own services was to choose two of the aldermen. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/12, 20, 21. Graham was not impressed by such excuses, however, insisting that he was already a freeman and that he possessed ‘as great [an] interest in the mayor and magistrates of the city ... as any of the members of the town can do ... having, as I conceive, merited more favour from your city than any other man who hath offered himself or recommended any other to you can challenge’. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/10. When this argument failed, he procured a letter from the queen’s secretary insisting that her Majesty, in recommending Arthur Jones, had never intended ‘to hinder the said Sir Richard Graham of what he was otherwise to have obtained at your hands’. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/17, 22. That same day (28 Feb. 1640), Graham wrote to the corporation that he had acquainted the king and queen with the situation at Carlisle and that the queen had ‘taken off’ at least one of her candidates, thus removing any impediment to his own election. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/120/22. But the corporation remained firm in its resolve to favour its own members, and on election day (17 Mar.) the city returned William Dalston and Richard Barwis ‘with the whole assent and consent’ of the freemen. C219/42/1/84. The two men were returned for the city again in the elections to the Long Parliament on 27 October, and on this occasion they seem to have had no competitors. C219/43/1/105.

The civil war divided the city’s MPs, with Dalston supporting the king and Barwis emerging as one of the region’s leading parliamentarians. Most of the aldermen and citizens were strongly royalist in sympathy. In a petition to the king of July 1642, the corporation acknowledged Charles’s ‘care of the true religion and service of God, the liberty of your subjects and the protection of the laws’. It was later reported that ‘divers’ of Carlisle’s citizens had left the city at the outbreak of war to enlist in the king’s forces further south. SP18/123/42, f. 101; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/1 (entries 15 Nov. 1642, 19 Sept. 1644); CA/4/2 (entries for 1643); CA/2/194a. Charles thanked the city in October 1643 for its ‘fidelity and forwardness to further our service’. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/122. By late 1644, Carlisle was under siege by parliamentarian and Scottish forces, and by the time the royalist garrison surrendered to the Scots in June 1645, the inhabitants had been reduced to eating horses. Cumb RO (Carlisle), CA/4/139, f. 92; I. Tullie, Siege of Carlisle ed. S. Jefferson (Whitehaven, 1988), 46, 48.

Having installed a Scottish garrison and governor in the city, the Covenanter leadership sought to capitalise on a Commons’ order of 25 September 1645 for a writ to be issued authorising the election of a new Member for Carlisle in place of Dalston, who had been disabled from sitting in January 1644. CJ iii. 374a; iv. 287a. The Scottish chancellor, the earl of Loudon, secured the mayor and aldermen’s interest on behalf of the recorder of Southampton, Thomas Levingston*. Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. H.W. Meikle (Edinburgh, 1917), 137, 141. Levingston was Scottish himself, and the Scots commissioners conceived that he might prove useful at Westminster ‘in clearing of all differences and preserving a good correspondence between the kingdoms and, particularly, in representing rightly the affairs of the kingdom of Scotland and their army’. It was with some annoyance, therefore, that they learnt in November that the commander of the Scottish army in England, General Leven, had recommended the Cumberland parliamentarian Thomas Cholmley*. Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. Meikle, 137-8. Leven had favoured Cholmley on the understanding that he was sympathetic to Scottish interests. However, as the Scots commissioners informed Leven, although Cholmley had initially opposed the anti-Scottish faction in the region – which was headed by Richard Barwis and Sir Wilfrid Lawson* – he had joined his voice that autumn to the chorus of complaints from Cumberland concerning the oppressions of Leven’s army. Infra, ‘Thomas Cholmley’; Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 35. The Scots procured a letter from the mayor to their parliamentary ally, the Presbyterian grandee Sir Philip Stapilton, in November, asking him to hasten down the writ, and then they wrote to him themselves: ‘We suffer much through the want of another burgess in the House ... we are very desirous to make use of the opportunity [to elect a new Member], but the writ is not yet come to our hands’. Add. 37978, f. 39; Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. Meikle, 140, 148. In the event, the county sheriff, Lawson, delayed the election for Carlisle until after the departure of its Scottish garrison in January 1647. When the English parliamentarians finally took control of the city they found it ‘as the sword, famine and plague had left it ... the model of misery and desolation’. HMC 6th Rep. 158. The ‘recruiter’ election probably took place on 19 February 1647, when Cholmley, the successful candidate, was made a freeman of the city. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/27.

During the winter of 1647-8, Barwis and Thomas Craister* (one of the few solidly parliamentarian members of the common council) used the authority of the Committee for Indemnity* and the legislation of 4 October 1647 against malignant officeholders to purge nine of Carlisle’s aldermen and eight common councillors for having ‘adhered to and aided and assisted the enemies of the Parliament in the late war’. SP24/1, ff. 119, 161-2; SP24/38, unfol. When the city was seized by royalist insurgents under Sir Philip Musgrave at the outbreak of the second civil war – ‘whereat all the body of the town appeared for them [i.e. the insurgents]’ – Barwis, Craister and Cholmley were imprisoned, their families were expelled and their goods confiscated. Infra, ‘Richard Barwis’; ‘Thomas Cholmley’; ‘Thomas Craister’; E134/1653/MICH17; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 206. The six months or so that Barwis suffered as a prisoner in Carlisle probably hastened his death early the following year. Infra, ‘Richard Barwis’.

In the resulting by-election, held on 26 April 1649, the freemen returned the Yorkshire peer Edward Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Escrick, who was the father-in-law of the Cumberland parliamentarian commander Charles Howard*. CJ vi. 185a, 201b; Naworth Estate and Household Accts. 1648-60 ed. C.R. Hudleston (Surt. Soc. clxviii), 17. Lord Howard seems to have owed his return to his son-in-law, whose accounts for 26 April reveal that he went to Carlisle ‘to move that my Lord Howard might be burgess’ and that he spent over £30 on treating the corporation and garrison ‘in wine, drink, fees, rewards, guns, soldiers and the rest’. Naworth Estate and Household Accts. ed. Hudleston, 17. The Howards could probably rely on the support of Cholmley, Craister and Sir Wilfrid Lawson – all of whom had been appointed aldermen by April 1649. Infra, ‘Thomas Cholmley’; ‘Thomas Craister’; ‘Charles Howard’; ‘Sir Wilfrid Lawson’. Charles Howard also took care to cultivate the city’s deputy governor Colonel Thomas Fitch*, whose patron Sir Arthur Hesilrige* – the city’s governor from October 1648 until 1653 – was the Rump’s most trusted and powerful servant in the north. Infra, ‘Thomas Fitch’; ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; Naworth Estate and Household Accts. ed. Hudleston, 17. As a member of the Committee for Revenue*, Lord Howard was able to obtain an order remitting payment of the city’s fee farm rent (due originally to the crown) for 1648. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/123, 124. However, there were those in the corporation who felt that Howard neglected the city’s business, and they had been joined by the autumn of 1649 by the new mayor, Craister, who opined that Howard was unfit to serve as a Parliament-man. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/125a. This was possibly a reference to Howard’s blatant self-aggrandisement at the expense of the public purse, for which he was expelled from the Rump in June 1651. Infra, ‘Edward Howard, Lord Howard of Escrick’. In November 1651, the corporation removed the king’s arms from the main civic church and complied early in 1653 with an order from the Rump to call in the city’s charter for renewal – but for some reason this was blocked by a ‘contrary order’. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/4/3.

Under the Instrument of Government of 1653, the city lost one of its parliamentary seats, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament on 12 July 1654 it returned Colonel Thomas Fitch. The parties to the indenture included Charles Howard, who was – or would shortly be appointed – the city’s governor. Infra, ‘Charles Howard’; C219/44/1, unfol.; CA/2/392. Fitch had been replaced as deputy governor of Carlisle late in 1651, when he and his regiment had been transferred to Inverness. Nevertheless, the corporation had remained on good terms with him and had feasted him on at least one occasion after his transferral. Infra, ‘Thomas Fitch’; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/4/3; CA/2/128. At the time of his election, however, Fitch was sheriff of Inverness-shire and thus, in his own view at least, ineligible to sit in Parliament, although it is not clear that there was any ruling preventing a sheriff from sitting for a constituency outside the county in which he held office. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/128. On 10 August, the corporation wrote to the protector, requesting that Fitch’s return be allowed to stand or that a writ be issued for a new election. TSP ii. 534. The situation does not appear to have been resolved before this Parliament was dissolved early in 1655.

The emergence during the mid-1650s of a powerful ‘malignant party’ in Carlisle, which successfully frustrated the efforts of Craister and the ‘well-affected’ to curb unlicensed alehouses, was apparently not reflected in the elections to the second Cromwellian Parliament in the summer of 1656, which saw the return of Scoutmaster-general George Downing. Infra, ‘Thomas Craister’; SP18/123/42, ff. 101, 103; SP18/126/8, ff. 12, 13; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/21/9. Downing had first come into the north as Hesilrige’s chaplain or secretary. However, his strongest connection with Carlisle was as brother-in-law to the city’s governor, Deputy Major-general Charles Howard, who was Cumberland’s most influential military figure. Infra, ‘George Downing’; ‘Charles Howard’. Downing was also returned for Peebles Burghs in Scotland but opted to sit for Carlisle. P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Scottish representation in the Cromwellian Parliament of 1656’, SHR xlvi. 104-5. Having regained its second seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, the city on or about 4 January returned Downing and Craister, the leader of Carlisle’s ‘well-affected’ interest. CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 247.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, the corporation ignored Sir Richard Graham’s efforts to re-assert his interest in the city and returned its recorder, William Brisco*, and Howard’s deputy as governor of Carlisle, Major Jeremiah Tolhurst*. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/133; HP Commons 1660-90. At the Restoration, the local royalist interest re-asserted itself, and in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament the city returned its new governor Sir Philip Musgrave and Howard’s royalist younger brother Sir Philip Howard. HP Commons 1660-90. Musgrave, Sir Patricius Curwen* and Sir William Dalston, as corporation commissioners, were probably the leading figures behind the purge of Craister, Brisco and at least half of the aldermen in 1662. Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/17, 385.