Euston Hall, seat of the Dukes of Grafton, is four miles from Thetford, and during this period the borough was under Grafton’s control.
The corporation was a power in Yarmouth politics, and the corporation was controlled by the Walpole and Townshend families, who each filled one seat. But there was always an anti-corporation party and in 1754 this found a leader in John Ramey, an attorney who had acted as agent for the Townshend-Walpole interest and had been disobliged by them.
From 1754 to 1774 one seat at King’s Lynn was held by Sir John Turner and the other by a member of the Walpole family. In 1765 Turner quarrelled with one of his principal supporters, and an opposition developed against him which soon assumed a political character. Turner, who had held office under the Grenville Administration, remained with Grenville in opposition; his opponent, Crisp Molineux, was a friend of Wilkes and admirer of Chatham; while the Walpoles preserved their neutrality.
There was no dominant aristocratic interest in Norfolk, but the choice of the knights of the shire was made from a few leading families. At the beginning of the period Whigs and Tories compromised the representation, and in 1754 and 1761 Sir Armine Wodehouse, a Tory, and George Townshend, a Whig, were returned unopposed. On Townshend’s succession to the peerage in 1764 three candidates came forward: George Hobart, Thomas de Grey, and Sir Edward Astley; and de Grey, with the support of the Townshend and Walpole interests, was returned unopposed.
Castle Rising was a complete pocket borough, shared by the families of Walpole and Howard. George, 3rd Earl of Orford, nominated to one seat throughout this period; the other was controlled by Henry, 12th Earl of Suffolk, and after his death in 1779 by his mother, Lady Andover.
From 1754 to 1771 the representation of Monmouthshire was shared by the allied families of Morgan of Tredegar and Hanbury of Pontypool, hereditary Whigs. The interest of the Duke of Beaufort, leader of the Tories, wrote a correspondent to George Grenville in 1763, ‘has been much neglected ... for many years’.Jacob Price to Grenville, 20 Aug. 1763, Grenville mss (Bodl. Lib.). To some extent this was due to the long minority of the 5th Duke, and when he came of age in 1765 there were rumours that he would offer a candidate to the county.
Although Monmouth had a comparatively large electorate, it was a complete pocket borough of the Duke of Beaufort.
In 1754 and 1761 Sir William Beauchamp Proctor and George Cooke were returned unopposed for Middlesex. Beauchamp Proctor, a Whig, had represented the county since 1747, Cooke, a Tory, since 1750; and they seemed likely to continue to hold their seats without the peace of the county being disturbed. But below the apparently placid surface of Middlesex politics radical changes were taking place, which were to lead at the general election of 1768 to an eruption of devastating intensity.
Westminster was the largest urban constituency in the kingdom, and invariably returned men of the highest social standing: of its fourteen representatives between 1754 and 1790, nine were sons of peers, one was an Irish peer, and four were baronets. Indeed, in 1762 Newcastle was uncertain whether Edwin Sandys, whose father had been ennobled only in 1743, was ‘of dignity enough’ to represent Westminster.Add. 32936, f.
In 1784 Thomas Cooke, mayor of Stamford and returning officer, wrote about the borough:J. Drakard, Hist. Stamford, 155.
