Borough

Devizes was a corporate town, the majority of whose MPs in this period comprised either townsmen or neighbouring gentry. Edward Heynes (1559, 1563), George Reynolds II (1572) and Henry Grube (1572) were members of the corporation and sometime mayors of the borough. John Kent (1597) was town clerk. Both Reynolds and Grube had promised to serve without wages, but in 1578 Grube sued the borough in respect of wages for the second session. In Chancery he claimed that his promise to serve without wages applied to the first session of the Parliament only.Waylen, Hist.

The borough of Cricklade, which was not incorporated, was in the hands of the Crown throughout Elizabeth’s reign. In 1557 the stewardship of the borough, together with that of other neighbouring properties, was granted to Edmund Brydges, and Baron Chandos. His son Giles, who succeeded him in March 1573, was granted the same office the following June, and in 1594, his brother, William, was granted the stewardship of Cricklade and held it until his death. Evidence of the family’s interest in Cricklade is to be found in Edmund Brydges’ will.CPR, Ph. and M. iii.

A charter of incorporation granted to Chippenham by Queen Mary on 2 May 1554 and confirmed by Elizabeth on 29 Jan. 1560 placed the government of the town in the hands of a bailiff and 12 aldermen with power to co-opt new members. By Mary’s charter, the corporation was granted lands in Chippenham, formerly the possessions of Lord Hungerford, to provide for the upkeep of the bridge and for the expenses of the town’s burgesses in Parliament. The town appointed a high steward, although the office was not mentioned in the charter, and its holder in 1567 was the first Earl of Pembroke.

The borough of Calne was not incorporated until the late seventeenth century but its privileges were confirmed by Elizabeth in 1569. Government of the borough was in the hands of two guild stewards, two constables and about twenty capital burgesses. One third of the borough lay within the manor of Calne, owned at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign by Thomas Long, who sold it by 1579 to Sir Lionel Duckett. The other two thirds of the borough was within the prebendal manor held by the treasurer of Salisbury cathedral.

A borough by prescription, Appleby was subject to the Cliffords, earls of Cumberland, whose castle dominated the town; the mayor and two bailiffs had no influence on elections. Henry Clifford, 2nd Earl of Cumberland, himself a Catholic, returned two others of that religion to the first Parliament of the reign: Christopher Monckton, a Yorkshire country gentleman, and John Eltoftes, an Inner Temple lawyer whose services had been employed by the family and who had already represented Appleby in the previous reign.

Warwick was incorporated in 1545, and, according to a charter of 1554, was governed by a common council comprising a bailiff, 12 assistants (or principal burgesses) and a recorder. By 1570, 24 secondary burgesses were appointed, to be ‘the mouth of all the commoners’, but these could be dispensed with at the discretion of the principal burgesses, and their number was soon reduced to 12. In this period, with one exception, the common council chose the MP, and paid the wages.

Coventry was a city, incorporated early and granted the status of a county in 1451. Accordingly it received a separate writ, addressed to its two sheriffs, for parliamentary elections. The electorate consisted of all the freemen.

The borough of Steyning formed part of the honour of Petworth, of which the 12th Earl of Arundel was steward, and elections necessarily came under Howard influence in the early part of the reign. Election returns were made by the constable and burgesses.

The manor of New Shoreham was owned by the dukes of Norfolk. The borough, which formed part of the manor, was governed by a constable chosen at the court leet of the lord of the manor.Dallaway, W. Suss. ed. Wright, ii(2), pp. 50, 52.

Throughout the Elizabethan period, and for 200 years afterwards, the lords of the manor and borough of Midhurst were the Browne family, Viscounts Montagu. The first Viscount, though a Catholic, remained loyal to the Crown and was a prominent figure both at court and in Sussex. His grandson, who succeeded him in 1592, was not so judicious in the exercise of his religion and was later implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. Guy Fawkes had, in fact, been one of the 1st Viscount’s servants at Cowdray, the family seat adjoining Midhurst.