Bridport was governed by two bailiffs, two constables and a council of burgesses. It was not incorporated until 1619.Weinbaum, Charters, 28; Bridport mss. red bk. passim. The first seven elections of the reign were dominated almost entirely by the influence of the 2nd Earl of Bedford, whose estate at Berwick lay 4¼ miles south-east of the borough.G. S. Thomson, Family Background, 202. William Page (1559) and Hugh Vaughan (1581) were both Bedford’s servants.
Corfe Castle first sent Members to Parliament in 1572. Almost certainly, enfranchisement was requested by Christopher Hatton who in 1571 or thereabouts received a grant whereby he became lord of the manor of Corfe, constable of the castle and vice-admiral and lieutenant of the Isle of Purbeck. Hatton, who exercised his offices by deputy, never lived in Corfe and this presumably explains why his patronage at elections there did not become fully established until 1586.
The Russell family owned the manor of Tavistock, and the and Earl of Bedford was responsible for the return of the Elizabethan Members until 1586, with the exception of Thomas Williams (1559), who owed this and his earlier elections for the borough to Sir Richard Edgecombe. Edmund Tremayne (1559), a returned Marian exile, had entered Bedford’s service during Mary’s reign. Richard Cooke I (1563) was the brother of Bedford’s daughter-in-law, though pressure to elect him may have come from Cecil.
Totnes was incorporated in 1505, and received confirmations of charters in 1547, 1554 and 1559 showing the usual arrangement of a mayor (who acted as returning officer at parliamentary elections), recorder, and council of burgesses. However, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century the more prosperous merchants embarked upon a campaign to restrict effective power to themselves, and, after a struggle which rent the town, they succeeded in reconstituting the corporation in the hands of 14 of the ‘more substantial burgesses’ and a wider body of lesser burgesses.
Elizabethan Plymouth, a prosperous and fast expanding port, had a governing body consisting of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 24 common councilmen, selected from the leading merchant families. There was also a recorder. The mayor and aldermen—sometimes called the privy council—conducted the town’s affairs and chose its Members of Parliament. In 1570 it was ordered that ‘only such men as be town dwellers and of the council of the town’ could be elected MPs; but this proved impracticable. A decree of 1601 required Members to be freemen of the borough. Wages were paid occasionally to the local men.
Though the borough of Plympton Earl (or Erle as it eventually became) had existed since the twelfth century, it obtained a charter of incorporation only in 1602.J. Brooking Rowe, Hist. Plympton Erle, 2, 79, 95, 117, 362. A stannary town, the local tin mining families of Strode and Southcote provided a number of its Members.
Bere Alston was jointly owned by the marquesses of Winchester and the lords Mountjoy and first returned Members in 1584. Enfranchisement was probably granted as a mark of favour to the 7th Lord Mountjoy, who succeeded to the title in 1581. Charles Blount, the new peer’s brother and heir, was rising in favour at court by 1583 and may well have played a part in the affair.
Dartmouth was governed by a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and a council of bailiffs and burgesses. Thomas Gourney (1571,1572) was a Dartmouth merchant and ex-mayor and Thomas Southcote (1559) owned property in the borough. Otherwise elections at Dartmouth, until his death in 1585, were dominated by the and Earl of Bedford, lord lieutenant of the county. Edward Yarde (1559) was later to become Bedford’s agent; Sir John More (1563) had fought with him at St. Quentin.
Tudor Exeter, a prosperous city with a population rising to perhaps eight or nine thousand, was the economic and political centre of the south-west. The grant of county status in 1537 meant that it had its own sheriff and, by the Elizabethan period, its own lord lieutenant. The government of the city was in the hands of the chamber, a self-perpetuating body of 24 councilmen, recruited for the most part from the wealthiest merchant families. The chamber provided the mayor and the sheriff each year, while eight of their number, together with the recorder, enjoyed the rank of alderman.
A tightly knit group of powerful county landowners, all protestant and close associates of the and Earl of Bedford, monopolized both county seats in the first four Parliaments of the reign. Bedford was lord lieutenant of the county and Sir Peter Carew of Mohun’s Ottery (1559), Sir John St. Leger of Annery in Monkleigh (1559), Sir Gawain Carew of Exeter (1563) and Sir John Chichester of Great Torrington (1563) were all at one time his deputy lieutenants.
