Borough

Abingdon was an open borough, subject to no predominant influence. The mayor and corporation were Tory, but though they put the strongest pressure on their tenantsElizabeth Pevvy to Walpole, 10 Apr. 1734, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss. they could not prevent the return of Whigs, in the persons of Hucks and Wright, from 1722 to 1747. Only candidates with local interests were returned; ‘as to a stranger’, an authority on Berkshire boroughs warned the Duke of Bedford when he was thinking of intervening and 1753, ‘they only want such a person to pluck and defeat him’.

As in the county the Whig and Tory strengths in Bedford were about equal. The recorder was Lord Bruce, a Tory, appointed in 1711, who sold his Ampthill property, a few miles from the borough, to the Duke of Bedford in 1730.VCH Beds. iii. 271. The Dukes of Bedford at Woburn exerted a strong influence from 1726, mainly in support of anti-government candidates. Elections seem to have been managed by the local landowners, from whose ranks most of the ten Members were drawn, two only being strangers. With a wide franchise, corruption was rife.

None of the six Members who actually sat in this period resided in any of the Radnorshire boroughs; three were Englishmen and one a North Walian. For the first 20 years of the period the Harley interest was dominant, though acquired, as their opponents pointed out, ‘in the worst of times’. Edward Harley had been one of the corporation of New Radnor (the ‘Twenty-Five’) since about 1647, and at the Restoration his brothers were respectively recorder of New Radnor and steward of the crown manors, thus controlling between them the burgess rolls of four of the contributory boroughs.

The Owens, with their principal residence only two miles south-west of Pembroke, established a claim to the borough seat in 1626, which, with the exception of the Protectorate Parliaments, they retained until 1695. Of the two out-boroughs, Tenby lay in the Owen orbit, but Wiston was controlled by the Wogans.

The indentures for Haverfordwest are extremely full and informative: they give names and occupations of the electors, and indicate the importance of the leather trade in the town. There were many contested elections, probably due in part to internal divisions, but also to attempts to impose court candidates. The two great county families, Owen of Orielton and Philipps of Picton, seem to have avoided open contests; but plainly exerted an influence in the borough.

Unlike the county, political activity was strong in Montgomery Boroughs and marked by contested elections. Only in 1689 was a candidate apparently returned without opposition. The period saw a determined effort by the Herberts of Chirbury, who controlled Montgomery, to disfranchise the out-boroughs. Of these, Welshpool and Llanfyllin were under the influence of their Roman Catholic cousins of Powis Castle, while the Lloyds of Berthllwyd were lords of the manor of Llanidloes.

Although the earls of Pembroke are said to have controlled most of the Glamorgan boroughs, there is no evidence of a Herbert candidate in any of the elections. In 1660 there was a double return of the Cavalier Herbert Evans, an ambitious young man of royalist sympathies who enjoyed the dominant interest in Neath, and Bussy Mansel, who had been one of the leading figures in South Wales during the Commonwealth.

The indentures do not always specify the names of the boroughs, but it would appear that the bailiffs and burgesses of Overton seldom attended elections in this period. The success of the Whitley interest from 1660 to 1681 is remarkable for more than one reason. The family was only recently established among the county gentry, and Roger Whitley was a younger son, who never resided in Flintshire during this period. Doubtless, as a prominent Cavalier conspirator, he would not even have been considered if the general election of 1660 had been held at the proper time.

It seems that only Denbigh and Holt voted in the earlier elections in this period. John Carter, one of the tyrants of North Wales during the Interregnum, may have retrieved his reputation with the electors in March 1660 by superintending the slighting of Denbigh Castle, which had ‘long burdened the neighbouring gentry’, and was returned to the Restoration Convention in the following month. But the traditional territorial interests soon reasserted themselves.

There were no contributory boroughs in Carmarthenshire, and the Vaughans of Golden Grove monopolized the seat in this period. Excluded as Cavaliers from the election in 1660, they put up Arthur Annesley, who had married the sister-in-law of the 2nd Earl of Carbery, and was returned by about a hundred named ‘burgesses’, besides many more unnamed. Carbery’s second son John sat for the borough in the Cavalier Parliament, and his youngest son Altham in the Exclusion Parliaments.