Borough

The active element in Bodmin elections was the competition of the local gentry to control this decaying corporation borough. The corporation had a negative capability: to quote John Wilson Croker, who canvassed them in 1820:

one third are in the rank of gentlemen, the rest trades-people. Their patron is rather their agent than their master: he has no other hold on them than good offices and goodwill ... they jealously elect their own fellow-corporators, who must be resident, so that the patron can never get his own private friends into the corporation.

The Grosvenors of Eaton Hall, about four miles from Chester, held one seat continuously from 1715 to 1874, and both for 36 of the 76 years between 1754 and 1830. They enjoyed great influence with the corporation and the guilds and had a large number of houses in the city, obtained on lease from the crown, which were let for short periods at low rents.

The combination of Pitt, the prime minister, and Lord Euston, son and heir of the chancellor of the university, the Duke of Grafton, had overpowered the Whig sitting Members in 1784. In March 1790 it became clear that the Whigs wished to avenge themselves: Lawrence Dundas canvassed the university, accompanied by Lord John Townshend, one of the victims of 1784, and encouraged by the Prince of Wales.

By an agreement made in 1787 between John Mortlock†, the banker who had acquired a political ascendancy in the town, and the 4th Duke of Rutland, who possessed an established interest there, Cambridge became a Rutland nomination borough. The duke’s death soon afterwards made no difference.

In 1788 John Barker Church, a former bankrupt, who had made a fortune from his business activities in America during the revolutionary war, purchased Earl Verney’s property in Wendover, undeterred by the continued truculence of the mercenary element which had broken Verney’s careless hold in 1784, Unlike his predecessor, he was wealthy and assiduous enough to profit from his investment and returned himself as a Foxite Whig in 1790.

The principal interests at Marlow changed hands with the neighbouring property in the decade before 1790, but the borough retained its essentially venal character and continued to require attentive management.This account is based principally on letters from John Fiott to Sir William Lee between 1786 and 1796 (Bucks.

From 1754 to 1790 the representation of Wycombe was controlled jointly by the Waller family of Hall Barn, Beaconsfield and the Petty family of Temple Wycombe and Loakes House, whose head from 1761 was William, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. Their control derived from influence exerted within the common council, a self-electing body with the power of creating freemen, almost half of whom were non-resident by 1790.L.J. Ashford, Wycombe, 189-90.

Buckingham remained entirely under the control of the 1st and 2nd Marquesses of Buckingham, high stewards of the borough, who imposed their dictates on the corporation, a hand-picked body composed largely of their tenants and employees, from their nearby seat at Stowe.PP (1835), xxiii. 166. The only incident to ruffle the 1st Marquess occurred in July 1806, when his brother Lord Grenville arranged the return of Fremantle, who was to be appointed secretary to the Treasury, for a vacancy which Buckingham had created for his relative, Lord Percy.

The 1st Marquess of Buckingham, head of the Grenville family, gained a foothold at Aylesbury with the return of his private secretary Scrope Bernard at a contested by-election in 1789, when he defeated another local landowner, Gerard Lake, equerry to the Prince of Wales. Lake, who was supported by his fellow members of the Buckinghamshire Independent Club led by the Duke of Portland, continued to spend lavishly at Aylesbury, where venality was deep-rooted.

Amersham remained completely under the control of the Drake family, who were seated at Shardeloes about one mile away, and owned most of the property in the town.