County

The 45 Members who took their seats in the first Parliament of Great Britain, in November 1707, had been chosen by the estates of the Scottish parliament in the preceding February, according to the terms of an act of the Scottish parliament, passed only a short time before, for settling the representation of Scotland in the united Parliament.

The largest English county, Yorkshire demonstrated over five contested elections that its political awareness was as keen in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as in the 1730s, 1770s and 1780s. The county grandees tended to be Whigs, with the exception of the Marquess of Carmarthen (Sir Thomas Osborne†), who had led the northern rising at the Revolution and in 1690 was chief minister to William III and lord lieutenant of all three ridings. However, many of the gentry appeared to favour Toryism. W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig, 66.

The greater gentry monopolized the representation of Worcestershire between 1690 and 1715, albeit in a series of bitterly contested elections. The same families had dominated the county in the Restoration period and were to retain their influence into the Hanoverian period, which saw most of them ennobled. The role of the largely absentee peerage seems to have been to exert influence in favour of one of these gentry families, rather than to impose one of their own relations, kinsmen or nominees.

Defoe heartily approved of Wiltshire, its agriculture and industries, especially weaving, making it in his view ‘one of the most important counties of England’. The northern and western parts, ‘infinitely populous’ and ‘full of . . . manufactures’, where Dissenting interests were especially well entrenched, pleased him best, but it was in the south-east, at Wilton, that the knights of the shire were elected, and there ‘the clothing trade’ and Nonconformity were much less in evidence. For most of this period the Tories dominated county elections.

Electoral conflict in Westmorland stemmed from the influence of party which itself had two roots, the national prominence and political identities of the county’s leading political figures and the strong partisan sentiments of many of the other families and individuals possessed of significant electoral interests. The first of these factors was most clearly demonstrated by the disputes between Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt.