Hertfordshire was described in 1819 as ‘a county, in which there is no certainty’.Fitzwilliam mss, box 99, Lamb to Fitzwilliam 24 Oct. 1819. James Cecil, 1st Marquess of Salisbury, who aspired to predominance, discovered this in 1790. He had procured the return of Viscount Grimston, a fellow supporter of Pitt, in the contest of 1784; but now the Whigs turned the tables on him.
There was ‘no rumour even of opposition’ to the sitting Members, representatives of the county’s established parliamentary families, in 1790.Malmesbury mss, Cornewall to Malmesbury, 28 June 1790. Harley supported Pitt and Cornewall the opposition. There had been no contest since Harley’s election in 1776; and the contest of 1796 was directed not against him, but against his turncoat colleague. Cornewall had gone over to government with the Portland Whigs and was now subjected to a vendetta.
The death of James, 3rd Duke of Chandos, on 29 Sept. 1789, opened a new chapter in county politics. Robert Thistlethwayte, Chandos’s protégé, announced his intended retirement. The initiative did not pass to Chandos’s former rival, Harry, 6th Duke of Bolton, though Pitt admitted to George Rose apropos of Bolton’s son-in-law: ‘We cannot appear to put a negative on Orde if the principal interests of the county are inclined to him’. By this he meant that the country gentry were the final arbiters and would react strongly to dictation, whether by government or aristocracy.
The electoral pact of 1783 whereby the 5th Duke of Beaufort, a Pittite, and the 5th Earl of Berkeley, a follower of the Prince of Wales, had agreed to end their long rivalry and settle for the nomination of one Member each, remained in force in this period. The aristocratic monopoly provoked considerable resentment among the gentry, the lesser freeholders and the wealthy clothiers of the Stroud area. Opposition was frequently threatened, but did not materialize until 1810.
A compromise between the leading interests of the two opposite parties was maintained in the county from 1774 until 1810. Bramston was the Member inclined to government, and Bullock the representative of the ‘old Whig’ interest, though he rallied to ministers during the French revolutionary war.
The strongest territorial interests in Durham belonged to the Vanes of Raby, earls of Darlington, and to the church, headed by the bishop of Durham and the diocesan officials. The leading gentry families, though often divided by personal rivalries, tended to be Whig in politics. The Wearside and Tyneside shipping and commercial interest were important, but with many of the old landed families having a stake in the coal trade, protection of which was obligatory on all Durham Members, the frontier between land and trade was blurred.See E.
No Dorset county seat had been contested since 1727. ‘The gentlemen of the county being numerous and opulent’, no family could claim a controlling influence. Lord Rivers came nearest to being ‘the leading aristocratical interest’, to quote Oldfield.Boroughs, i. 174. His son George Pitt gave up his seat for health reasons in 1790 in favour of his cousin William Morton Pitt of Encombe, and Francis Browne stood again. Lord Uxbridge thought of putting up his heir Lord Paget, but, so he informed Pitt (9 Sept. 1790):
Devon’s size, scattered population and large electorate, which entailed heavy expense in transporting of voters to the poll at Exeter, were strong deterrents to would-be contestants. The contest of 1790 was the first for 78 years and another 26 elapsed before the next one worthy of the name.
There was no contest between 1768 and 1820. The dukes of Devonshire returned one Member, invariably a member of the Cavendish family, as a Whig, and the gentry returned the other, during this period a Mundy of Shipley, as an independent.
Having failed in his ambition to carry both Members for the county in 1768 and likewise in his subsequent attempts to buy out his competitors, James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, adhered to the compromise reached in 1774 whereby he returned one Member, and the independent junto led by the Dukes of Portland and Norfolk and the Earls of Carlisle and Egremont the other. The pact had been ineffectually challenged in 1774 and 1780 by Sir Joseph Pennington and his son John. By 1787 Lonsdale was on the defensive and anxious to canvass for the next election.
