Cumberland

very mountainous and therefore inclined to sterility; nevertheless, it is not without many fertile valleys, which bear good crops of corn … On its mountains are fed great flocks of sheep and other cattle … This county produceth several manufactures, amongst which heretofore fustians and now linen-cloth and coarse broad-cloths, in great plenty. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 67.

The county’s principal urban centres – Carlisle, Cockermouth and Penrith – were sustained by their markets, which enjoyed a lively trade in cattle, corn and wool. Carlisle and Cockermouth were also minor centres for the manufacture of cloth. Blome, Britannia, 69, 70; W. Camden, Britannia ed. E. Gibson (1695), 822; Fleming-Senhouse Pprs. ed. E. Hughes (Cumb. Rec. Ser. ii), 35, 57. By the 1680s, Cumberland contained 13,277 households, which suggests an overall population of around 60,000. C.B. Phillips, ‘Town and county: economic change in Kendal c.1550-1700’, in The Transformation of English Provincial Towns ed. P. Clark (1984), 108. The size of the county’s electorate during the mid-seventeenth century is not known.Cumberland’s greatest landowner by 1640 was Sir William Howard of Naworth, although he apparently made no attempt to translate his wealth and proprietorial influence into an electoral interest – probably because he was a Catholic recusant. Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 286-7. Another of the region’s great landowners however, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, certainly did have pretensions as an electoral patron for Cumberland. In the campaign to represent the county in the Short Parliament in 1640, he backed the candidacy of his friend and client William Pennington of Muncaster. Alnwick, P.I.3(n): ?Hugh Potter* to ?, 22 Jan. 1640. Northumberland recommended Pennington to his friends and tenants and issued instructions to his bailiffs ‘that they use their best endeavours in it when time serves’. Pennington’s main rivals were his fellow Cumberland gentlemen Sir George Dalston and Sir Patricius Curwen, who may have stood as electoral partners. Both men were deputy lieutenants and had helped to muster the county’s trained bands against the threat of Scottish invasion during the first bishops’ war. Dalston enjoyed the added distinction of holding the captaincy of Carlisle Castle – a crown office. Infra, ‘Sir George Dalston’, ‘Sir Patricius Curwen’. By election day, on 17 March 1640, they had apparently forced Pennington out of the contest, for there is no evidence of a poll. The indenture returning Dalston and Curwen was signed by ten men, including Sir Philip Musgrave*, Sir Wilfrid Lawson* and Richard Barwis*. C219/42/1/83.

Dalston and Curwen were returned for the county again on 27 October 1640, although the election indenture is now too faded to make out the names of any signatories. C 219/43/1/102. Again, there is no sign that their return was contested on election day. Once at Westminster they contributed little to the Long Parliament’s efforts to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule of Charles I – indeed, Curwen voted against the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†). They both abandoned their seats in the summer of 1642 and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, took the king’s side in the civil war. They were disabled by the Commons on 15 March 1643. Infra, ‘Sir George Dalston’, ‘Sir Patricius Curwen’; CJ iii. 256a. Like their unseated representatives, most of the region’s leading gentry and a significant proportion, probably the majority, of the ordinary inhabitants were either active royalists or royalist sympathisers. C.B. Phillips, ‘The royalist north: the Cumb. and Westmld. gentry, 1642-60’, NH xiv. 169-92; P.R. Newman, ‘The royalist north: a rejoinder’, NH xvii. 253-5; D. Scott, ‘The Barwis affair: political allegiance and the Scots during the British civil wars’, EHR cxv. 845; C.S. Colman, ‘The paralysis of the Cumb. and Westmld. army in the first civil war c.1642-5’, Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. ser. 3, i. 133-4. The county’s small group of parliamentarians, led by Richard Barwis, MP for Carlisle, remained weak and isolated until the Scottish Covenanters invaded the region in the autumn of 1644.

On 25 September 1645, the Commons issued a writ for returning two new Members for Cumberland in place of Dalston and Curwen. CJ iv. 287a. The consequent ‘recruiter’ election was held on 31 March 1646 and saw the return of William Armyne – the son of the Lincolnshire grandee and prominent Independent MP William Armyne – and his fellow 23-year old, Richard Tolson, the scion of an ancient Cumberland family. Once again, the indenture is too faded to identify all but a handful of the signatories. C219/43/1/104. According to the radical Cumberland pamphleteer John Musgrave, Armyne was returned through the machinations of the county sheriff Sir Wilfrid Lawson as a favour to Sir William Armyne. [J. Musgrave], A Fourth Word to the Wise (1647), 8 (E.391.9). Sir William had been intimately involved in the region’s politics since his appointment as a parliamentary commissioner to Scotland in 1643 and had helped to protect Lawson from charges of treachery and delinquency levelled against him by the Scots commissioners in 1645. Infra, ‘Sir William Armyne’, ‘Sir Wilfrid Lawson’. Musgrave further alleged that Tolson, too, had been returned through the influence of Lawson and Barwis – the leading figures on the Cumberland county committee – and yet at the same time had received the backing of the county’s ‘malignants and delinquents’. [Musgrave], A Fourth Word to the Wise, 18. Tolson’s father certainly appears to have been a member of the Barwis-Lawson faction, while Tolson himself subsequently opposed the release of Musgrave, who had been imprisoned by Parliament in 1645 after mounting a public attack upon this group. CJ iv. 368a; A. and O. i. 707; [Musgrave], A Fourth Word to the Wise, 18. This alliance between the county’s parliamentarians and royalists, backed by the Independents at Westminster, was based on a common desire to rid Cumberland of the ill-disciplined Scottish army – a cause that Tolson was willing to forward. Scott, ‘Barwis affair’, 843-63. This may help to explain why his candidacy had been favoured by the earl of Northumberland, who was a leading figure in the Independent interest at Westminster. Infra, ‘Richard Tolson’.

Neither Armyne nor Tolson proved a particularly conscientious MP. But while Lawson, Barwis and their fellow county committmen were prepared to tolerate Armyne’s absenteeism, they held Tolson to stricter account; and in the spring of 1648 they wrote to the House, requesting that he be ordered to attend his seat: ‘we finding ourselves already prejudiced by his absence, to whom we have so often made our addresses’. CJ v. 543b; Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 772. Tolson was secluded at Pride’s Purge, leaving just the ineffectual Armyne to represent the county’s interests under the Rump.

Cumberland, like Westmorland, was not represented specifically in the Nominated Parliament of 1653. Instead, the council of officers selected four men to serve for the four northernmost counties, nominating the captain of Oliver Cromwell’s* lifeguard, Charles Howard, with particular reference to Cumberland. A Catalogue of the Names of the New Representatives (1653, 669 f.17.14); Clarke Pprs. iii. 5; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 117. Howard was a grandson of Sir William Howard of Naworth and had inherited the family’s extensive estates in the county. But it was probably not the extent of his local influence that recommended him to the council so much as the trust reposed in him by Cromwell. Infra, ‘Charles Howard’.

Under the Instrument of Government, Cumberland regained its two seats, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament on 12 July 1654, the county returned Howard and his steward or legal advisor William Brisco. C219/44/1, unfol. By the mid-1650s, Howard was unquestionably the most powerful figure in Cumberland. Not only was he the greatest landowner in the county, but also the senior military commander in the region. Brisco, on the other hand, was one of Cumberland’s second-tier gentry landowners, with an estate worth no more than £300 a year, and he probably owed his election to Howard’s backing. Infra, ‘William Brisco’. The two men were returned for Cumberland again to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, but this time there is evidence of a contest for one of the places, for in February 1658, Brisco was obliged to withdraw from the House following a resolution that no Member elected on a double return should continue to sit until the committee of privileges had determined their case. Burton’s Diary, 405-6. The identity of Brisco’s challenger remains a mystery.

Howard’s creation by Cromwell as Viscount Morpeth in July 1657 resulted in his elevation to the Cromwellian Other House, and on 3 January 1659, in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament, his place as knight of the shire was taken by his long-time political ally and social companion Sir Wilfrid Lawson. CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 247. In this as in the two preceding elections for Cumberland, there is no evidence of a contest. Once again, Brisco took the second seat, and again we may detect the influence of Howard. Lawson, however, was a leading Cumberland landowner in his own right and would probably have been returned in Brisco’s place in 1654 and 1656 had he not been serving his second term as county sheriff. Infra, ‘Sir Wilfrid Lawson’. The fall of the protectorate in April 1659 robbed Cumberland of parliamentary representation until the meeting of the 1660 Convention a year later.