Aylesbury

Aylesbury was the largest town in Buckinghamshire and by the seventeenth century was, in effect, the county town. Its size and its central location made it a more convenient site than Buckingham for the assizes and for the elections of the knights of the shire. Historically Aylesbury had been governed by its hereditary lord and, even though the town had been incorporated in the reign of Mary I, that lord retained some formal and much informal power within its boundaries. This was true even in this period when the lord, Sir John Pakington*, was an absentee. The other main landowner in the borough was the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral which owned the manor of Walton. Under the 1554 charter, the right of election was held by the corporation, consisting of the bailiff, the 10 aldermen and the 12 capital burgesses. The four petty constables of the two manors, Aylesbury and Walton, acted as the returning officers. This had usually given the Pakingtons even more leverage over the outcome.

The results in 1640 therefore conformed to expectations. In the first of those elections, held on 6 March 1640, the corporation elected Sir John Pakington and Ralph Verney*. C219/42, pt. 1, f. 64; Verney MSS, R. Verney to ?, 3 Mar. 1640 (M636/4). However, Pakington was also chosen as a knight of the shire for Worcestershire, where he also owned estates and where he was usually resident. He had presumably stood for Aylesbury, where he could be assured of a smooth election, only because he was less certain of his chances in standing for the more prestigious county seat. Having been elected to both, he predictably chose to sit for Worcestershire. His replacement, elected on 23 April, was Thomas Fountaine*, a minor local gentlemen who had owned land at Hulcott. He may well have been dependant on Pakington’s backing to get the seat.

The Long Parliament election later that year was an exact re-run of that on 6 March. This time Pakington found that his options elsewhere had narrowed. The Aylesbury election was fixed for the day before the Worcestershire election and even before then he seems to have concentrated his efforts in Buckinghamshire. Two of his rivals would be elected for the Worcestershire seats. This made little difference, however, for he and Verney were again elected at Aylesbury on 20 October. If Fountaine harboured any ambitions of retaining this seat, it did not in the end make that much difference. Elected at Wendover in succession to John Hampden*, he again benefited from a vacancy arising after a successful candidate preferring to sit for a county seat.

Pakington was expelled from the Commons as early as 20 August 1642 for having implemented the king’s commission of array within Worcestershire. CJ ii. 729a; PJ iii. 310-11. This expulsion, of course, was not recognised by the royalists and Pakington sat as MP for this constituency in the Parliament at Oxford in 1644. It was not until the autumn of 1645 that the Commons at Westminster decided to fill the vacancy at Aylesbury. In the meantime, the town had become one of Parliament’s key strategic strongholds protecting the home counties from any royalist attack from Oxford. It was in the middle of a war zone and on several occasions, most notably in November 1642, March 1643 and June 1644, it came under direct attack. The parliamentarian army defending it necessarily became a dominant, often oppressive, presence. G. Lamb, ‘Aylesbury in the civil war’, Recs. of Bucks. xli. 183-9. It remained so until the garrison there was finally disbanded in the summer of 1646. CJ iv. 615a. In the autumn of 1645, in the wake of the victory at Naseby, military events were moving Parliament’s way. The garrison at Aylesbury was still indispensable – the threat from Oxford remained real – but the soldiers were looking ahead to the war’s aftermath, and that made them restless. It was against this backdrop that plans were laid for a by-election.

By 20 September it was reported that Colonel Richard Ingoldsby* of the New Model army, a native of Buckingham, had been appointed as governor of the local garrison. The Weekly Account no. 38 (17-23 Sept. 1645), sig. A3v (E.302.21). Presumably the intention was to ensure that the town paid attention to the views of the garrison when making its choice, but on 22 September the Commons received information that, pre-empting any action from Westminster, ‘a great party at Aylesbury [had] assembled and made an election without a writ’. As early as 7 September, county committee-man Christopher Henn had convened a meeting in a wine cellar after Sunday prayers (and continued the next day), at which not just one prospective MP (as per the official vacancy) but two were chosen, the right to do so asserted in a ‘printed paper’. These were Thomas Scot I* and another; one had been endorsed in a letter from ‘a lord’ (who was perhaps Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton). CJ iv. 282a; Add. 18780, f. 124v; Add. 37344, f. 15v. In response, the Commons immediately declared that Verney, who had fled into exile in 1643, should also be expelled, thereby creating two vacancies to be filled. The writ for a by-election was then approved. CJ iv. 282a-b. Tensions at Aylesbury are underlined by the fact that the following day the Committee of Both Kingdoms instructed the governor of Abingdon, Richard Browne II*, to travel there at once to prevent trouble breaking out between the rival regiments commanded by Robert Martin and Charles Fleetwood*. CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 157. (It is possible that Ingoldsby had been detained by his duties in the west, where his regiment had recently taken part in the capture of Bristol.) Two days later the election took place. C219/43, pt. 1, f. 65. The two candidates selected, Thomas Scot I* and Simon Mayne*, were both relatively obscure local men distinguished only by their passionate support for the parliamentarian cause. It is more than likely that they had benefited from the support of at least one of the army factions within the garrison. Scot soon established himself as one of Independent firebrands in the Commons. He and Mayne sat in the Rump and became regicides, making Aylesbury one of the few constituencies in which both the MPs signed the king’s death warrant.

The town was one of the three Buckinghamshire boroughs permitted to remain as parliamentary constituencies under the terms of the 1653 Instrument of Government. However, like Buckingham and Chipping Wycombe, its representation was reduced to only one seat. The person chosen for the 1654 Parliament under these new arrangements was one of the townsmen, Henry Phillips*. What may have done more than anything else to secure Phillips this seat was that he had only recently purchased the manor of Walton, which had earlier come on the market as part of Parliament’s sale of all the cathedral lands. VCH Bucks. iii. 13. In a parallel development, the town had in 1650 gained control of Pakington’s Heydon Hill lands under the terms of the deal between the ex-MP and the Committee for Compounding. R. Gibbs, A Hist. of Aylesbury (Aylesbury, 1885), 172; PA, Main Pprs. 9 May 1649; VCH Bucks. iii. 10. Although badly damaged, the surviving return from the 1654 election carries the names of many of the inhabitants. C219/44, pt. 1: Aylesbury return.

Thomas Scot could plausibly have been elected at Aylesbury in 1654. His connections with the town were at least as strong as those of Phillips, he had already been their MP and he had a national reputation. But he did not stand because he had become the high steward of Chipping Wycombe and the corporation there were keen to elect him as their MP. By 1656 that had changed. On the advice of Tobias Bridge*, the Chipping Wycombe corporation had been purged and the remodelled corporation preferred to elect Bridge as their MP. Scot instead turned his attention to Aylesbury, wheere he found a more sympathetic reception and was duly elected. The protectoral council had other ideas, however, and prevented him taking his seat in this Parliament until the second session in early 1658. CJ vii. 425b. In March 1657 the town’s inhabitants petitioned the council for a new charter, presumably because they hoped to eliminate any vestige of potential Pakington influence. CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 300. Whether this new charter was ever granted is unclear.

With both Aylesbury and Chipping Wycombe regaining their second seats for the elections to Richard Cromwell*’s Parliament, Scot decided to revert to Chipping Wycombe. The Buckinghamshire clerk of the peace, Thomas Dawson, spotted the opportunity and advised Bulstrode Whitelocke* that his son James* should stand. Dawson was ‘very hearty’ about the younger Whitelocke’s prospects. Whitelocke, Diary, 503. And so it proved to be. James Whitelocke was elected there on 24 December 1658, in alliance with Thomas Tyrrell*. C219/46: Aylesbury return. According to Bulstrode Whitelocke, the inhabitants showed ‘much respect’ to his son. The entries in Whitelocke’s diary also imply that they had initially hoped to gain the backing of Richard Ingoldsby*, but that in the event this had not been forthcoming. Whitelocke, Diary, 503. Tyrrell, an old friend of the Whitelockes, knew the town well, for, as an officer in the parliamentarian army, he had been one of the leading figures in the local garrison during the civil war.

Ingoldsby’s electoral interest in the town derived from his marriage to Elizabeth Croke, the widow of Thomas Lee, whose estates at Hartwell lay to the south-west. That interest had been dormant since Lee’s death in 1643 and the long minority of his son, Thomas†. The permanent eclipse of the Pakington interest gave them a better opportunity than ever before and from 1660 the Lee interest became dominant. It ensured that Thomas Lee junior and Ingoldsby together represented this constituency throughout the reign of Charles II.