The chief interests at Bossiney in 1715 were those of Samuel Travers, who held a duchy lease of Tintagel castle,Maclean, Trigg Minor, iii. 203. and of Robert Corker, receiver general of the duchy in 1720, who owned property in and around the borough. Until 1741 it returned government supporters and servants of the Prince of Wales. Thomas Pitt, the Prince of Wales’s manager for the Cornish boroughs, wrote c. Oct. 1740:

In 1715 Charles Bodville Robartes, 2nd Earl of Radnor, one of the heads of the Cornish Whigs, whose estate at Lanhydrock extended into the borough, recommended to the corporation his uncle, Francis Robartes, and his brother-in-law, John Legh, who were returned by the corporation unopposed, as was Lord Burford at a by-election caused by Robartes’s death in 1718. Thanking the corporation for their unanimous choice of Burford, Lord Radnor, who in 1716 had secured that the local assizes should in future be held alternately at Bodmin and Launceston, instead of solely at Launceston, wrote:

Chester was dominated by a neighbouring Tory family, the Grosvenors, who sat for it without a break from 1715 to 1874, for 42 years holding both seats. Another local Tory family, the Bunburys, sat for it in every Parliament from 1701 to 1747, with a break between 1727 and 1733, when the Grosvenors took both seats.

The principal Whig families in Cheshire were the Cholmondeleys of Cholmondeley, who held the lord lieutenancy, the Booths of Dunham Massey, and the Cottons of Combermere. The majority of the country gentlemen were Tory, including the Cholmondeleys of Vale Royal, the Warburtons of Arley, and the Grosvenors of Eaton, who represented Chester.

Till 1727 Cambridge University, like Oxford, returned Tories. At the only contested election, in 1720, a strong Whig candidate, Henry Finch, a fellow of his college, whose father, Lord Nottingham, carried much weight with the church party, was defeated.

Cambridge elections were controlled by the corporation, a Tory body, who were able to manipulate the franchise by creating honorary freemen. At George I’s accession the dominant interest in the corporation was that of Sir John Hynde Cotton, the head of the Cambridgeshire Tories, who had shared the representation since 1708 with Samuel Shepheard, a Hanoverian Tory, who had gone over to the Whigs. On 6 Sept. 1714 a Cambridge Tory reported that ‘we are preparing here to throw out Shepheard by promoting Mr.

At George I’s accession the leading Cambridgeshire Tories were Sir John Hynde Cotton of Madingley, who sat for Cambridge, and Lord Oxford’s son, Lord Harley, who had recently acquired Wimpole by marriage. The sitting Members, John Bromley, classed as a Whig who would often vote with the Tories, and John Jenyns, classed as a Tory who might often vote with the Whigs, were re-elected, defeating a Jacobite, Granado Pigot.G. Pigot to Ld. North and Grey, undated, Bodl. North mss c. 9, f. 116.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Whig family of Hampden, who held the manors of Wendover Borough and Wendover Forrens, carrying the right to nominate the returning officers, controlled both Wendover seats. In 1715 Richard Hampden was able to bring in Richard Grenville under an agreement whereby the latter withdrew from the county in favour of Hampden.See BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. At the 1722 election Hampden, who had been dismissed from his office of treasurer of the navy for peculation, returned himself for Wendover with Sir Richard Steele, the Whig essayist.

The principal interests at Marlow were those of the neighbouring Whig landowners. Lord Shelburne, followed by Edmund Waller of Beaconsfield, occupied one seat from 1715 to 1741; the other was usually controlled by the successive owners of the manors of Marlow and Harleyford, Sir James Etheridge, M.P., a Tory, 1691-1719, the Guises, 1719-35, and the Claytons, 1735-87, Whigs. Two property owners on the Berkshire side of the river were able to take one seat between 1732 and 1754.

The franchise at Wycombe was controlled by the corporation, a close body, with the power of creating freemen. At George I’s accession the patron of the corporation was Thomas, 1st Marquess of Wharton, the head of the Whig interest in the county, whose nominees were returned unopposed shortly before his death in 1715. In 1722 the Wallers of Beaconsfield made an unsuccessful bid for a seat, with the support of the mayor, who was deposed by a meeting of the freemen for illegally attempting to create new freemen ‘to overthrow the interest of the late Marquess of Wharton’.L. J.