Truro, a stannary town, was one of the more prosperous parliamentary boroughs in Cornwall. In 1589, when a charter of incorporation was received, government was vested in the mayor and 24 capital burgesses, four of whom were to be aldermen. Parliamentary election appears always to have been made by the mayor and burgesses.G. R. Lewis, The Stannaries, 126; Weinbaum, Charters, 18.
It is not known how St. Mawes came to return Members for the 1563 Parliament. Oliver Carminowe and Edmund Sexton, along with MPs from five other boroughs, were requested (22 Jan. 1563) to produce letters patent justifying their presence in the House. Whether they did or not is unknown.SP 12/27 no. 23; CJ, i. 63. Possibly the 2nd Earl of Bedford had a hand in the matter. He was certainly behind the return of Oliver Carminowe, one of his servants, to the 1563 Parliament.
A duchy of Cornwall borough, Saltash was enfranchised in the reign of Edward VI. According to the antiquary Richard Carew, the town prospered through ‘honest trade of merchandise’, and was ‘of late years well increased and adorned with buildings’. He added that ‘it was not long since that the neighbouring ministers successively bestowed their pains in preaching there on the market days, and the bordering gentlemen yielded their presence’.Carew’s Surv. Cornw. ed. Halliday, 181-2. In Elizabeth’s reign the town made more than one attempt to obtain a new charter.
Quite how St. Germans came to send MPs to Parliament has not been ascertained. A small market town, once the seat of the diocese of Cornwall, it had come into the hands of John Eliot, who in 1577 was succeeded as lord of the manor by his nephew Richard. The borough was not incorporated and its portreeve had a hand in choosing the Members. This official, appointed from the local family of Kekewick, was chosen annually at the court leet.
‘Of mean plight’, St. Ives was governed in this period by a portreeve and 12 other councilmen. The portreeve was chosen by a wider body of 24 burgesses. First enfranchised in 1558, probably through the agency of the 2nd Earl of Bedford, St. Ives, until the last Parliament of the reign, returned only outsiders, with the sole exception of John Newman (1571), and he, though resident in the borough, was a local official who may have owed his return to a patron. Bedford was responsible for the return of (at least) both the 1559 Members, one in 1572 (Thomas Randolph) and John Harington I (1563).
The borough of Penryn, together with the manor of Penryn Foreign, belonged to the bishops of Exeter. The leading family of the district, the Killigrews of Arwennack, had a lease of Penryn Foreign and a disputed lease of the fee farm of the borough. There was a portreeve and burgesses, but the borough was not incorporated until the reign of James I. Judging by the surviving Elizabethan returns, elections were conducted by the portreeve, in the presence of up to a dozen burgesses.
Lostwithiel was the administrative centre of the duchy of Cornwall. Its privileges were confirmed in 1565 and a charter of incorporation granted in 1608. William Kendall (1571) was the only known Elizabethan MP who was a local man.
Mitchell, alias Michael, alias Medishole, was owned by the Arundell family of Lanherne, the lords of the manor with which the borough was co-extensive. The borough government was rudimentary. The parliamentary returns for 1584, 1589 and 1597 state that election was made by the bailiff and burgesses, but the return for 1563 mentions the constable, burgesses and free inhabitants. In 1572 Sir John Arundell of Lanherne is named as one of the burgesses. In that year, and again in 1601, the portreeve is specified but not a constable or bailiff.
Newport adjoined Dunheved, and the two together constituted Launceston. Newport originally belonged to Launceston priory, around which it was built, but at the dissolution of the monasteries was annexed to the duchy of Cornwall. It first sent Members to Parliament at some time between 1512 and 1529. The surviving Elizabethan parliamentary returns usually state that election was made by the two bailiffs and a number of burgesses. In 1572 a portreeve was mentioned.
By the opening of this period East Looe was part of the duchy of Cornwall. After a lapse of time it resumed sending Members to Parliament in 1571, probably through the influence of the 2nd Earl of Bedford, lord warden of the stannaries and lord lieutenant of Cornwall. Its right to do so was challenged in the House 6 Apr. 1571. Some years later in an Exchequer suit concerning the market, the leading inhabitants claimed, wrongly, that East Looe ‘now is and at all time heretofore hath been charged with the setting forth and finding of burgesses to her Majesty’s Parliament’.
