At the beginning of this period William Pierce Ashe A ’Court owned 16 burgages at Heytesbury and the 4th Duke of Marlborough the other ten. These patrons had nominated a Member each since 1772. The borough remained close.J. A. Cannon, ‘Borough of Heytesbury in the 18th Cent.’, Wilts. Arch. Mag. lvii. 223. Marlborough returned relatives and friends. A ’Court, a Portland Whig, returned himself only as a stopgap and took paying guests.
In 1766 Great Bedwyn came under the complete control of Lord Bruce (subsequently 1st Earl of Ailesbury), when he purchased Lord Verney’s 46 burgages. Bruce already owned as many himself and bought two more in 1787; when he obtained the nine church burgages under the Bedwyn Enclosure Act of 1792 he was in possession of all but one.Wilts. Arch. Mag. vi.
Since 1774 there had been a struggle for control of this close borough between Robert Shafto and the earls of Radnor, as coheirs of the Duncombe interest.J. A. Cannon, ‘The Parl. Rep. of six Wilts. Boroughs 1754-90’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1958) i. 143-68. The contenders were evenly balanced: Shafto owned a slight majority of the burgages, but the 2nd Earl of Radnor secured the right to name the returning officer and this gave him the edge in the contests of 1790 and 1796.
In 1790 the Devizes corporation was under the prevailing influence of the leading clothier and former Member, James Sutton, whose brother-in-law Henry Addington was both recorder and Member; and of the London merchant Joshua Smith, whose residence was at Erlestoke, three miles away. In 1805, on Addington’s elevation to the peerage, Sutton’s brother-in-law was replaced by his son-in-law, a member of the corporation who, as Addington expected, was ‘chosen unanimously’.PRO 30/8/107, f. 160. But Smith’s retirement in 1818 occasioned a contest.
As a result of the extension of the franchise to freeholders in neighbouring hundreds in 1782, Cricklade came to resemble a county seat, with the local gentry jockeying for its representation.Materials for a Hist. of Cricklade ed. Thomson, ch. vi. Thus in 1790 two local gentlemen pledged to independence were again returned, sponsored by the two county Members, who lived within the hundreds. They had been adopted at Marlborough, well outside the constituency, on 17 June and this was deplored by their opponent Samuel Petrie, who had applied to Pitt for support, 13 Mar.
Chippenham escaped the fate of most burgage boroughs and never became a close borough, thanks to the vigilance of the local clothiers, who, however, controlled the corporation, with ‘an effect little short of what in other places has been attributed to the ipse dixit of some lord’.J.A. Cannon, ‘The Parl. Rep. of six Wilts. Boroughs 1754-90’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1958), 30; J. Britton, Beauties of Wilts. ii.
The 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, who as Lord Shelburne had been prime minister (1782-3) but had retired from active politics in 1784, was sole patron of Calne, where he had been the principal property owner since the 1760s and had thenceforward named both Members unopposed. He brought about ‘a marked improvement’ in the quality of the Members, for which he was quizzed by the satirists who dubbed him
Apart from a by-election contest in 1772, the peace of Wiltshire was not disturbed between 1715 and 1818. On a vacancy, the leading gentry families chose one of their number to represent them at a meeting of the Deptford and Beckhampton Clubs and he was duly adopted at the county meeting. The county aristocracy, confined to borough influence, were reduced to the role of Greek gods.
James, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, and Sackville, 8th Earl of Thanet, had agreed in 1773 to be joint patrons of Appleby for their lives, an arrangement made by their forebears in 1725 and uneasily renewed after a disastrous collision in 1754. Before he died in 1786, Thanet had the edge on Lonsdale by the purchase of additional burgages, but his heir Sackville, Lord Tufton, being in his 17th year, did not seek to take advantage of this at first, any more than his father had.
James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, had returned both Members for the county unchallenged since 1774 and there was no further contest until 1818. On Lonsdale’s death in 1802, his cousin and successor William, Viscount Lowther (afterwards 1st Earl of Lonsdale) a veteran Pittite, faced no particular problem until the death of Sir Michael Le Fleming in May 1806, when there was an ominous incident.
