St Albans survived the dissolution of the monasteries without apparent loss of prosperity, largely because it remained an important staging-post on a major route from London to the north. Its right to parliamentary representation was revived in 1553, when it was incorporated by charter, with a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and ten ‘principal burgesses’. There was also a common council of 24 assistants and a steward.
The predominant interest in Hertfordshire belonged to the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*), of whom Edward Hyde* would later recall that ‘no man [was] so great a tyrant in his country, or was less swayed by any motives of justice or honour’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 543. A sense of the extent of Salisbury’s influence is conveniently provided by the lists which his officials began to draw up to this end in late January 1640, when it was already apparent that the king would soon call a new Parliament.
Ill-served with roads, Hertford stood at the head of navigation of the River Lea and served as the administrative centre of a county rather lacking in natural boundaries. Having failed to return Members since the fourteenth century, its right to be represented in Parliament had been revived recently as 1624, mostly as a favour to the prince of Wales, who held the castle. The lease on the castle had since been sold to Sir William Cowper, the collector of the imposts for the port of London, most of whose other estates were located in Kent. Chauncy, Herts. i.
Hertford was well established before the Norman Conquest, and returned Members to at least 16 medieval Parliaments. However, the town fell into severe decline as a result of the Black Death, and the franchise was allowed to lapse after 1376. During the early sixteenth century the local economy began to recover, mainly because its markets were increasingly frequented by traders from London buying grain, malt, and other staples.E. de Villiers, ‘Parlty. Bors. Restored by the Commons 1621-41’, EHR, lxvii. 180; VCH Herts. iii.
Political division in St. Albans stemmed chiefly from two events at the end of Charles ii’s reign: first, the acquisition in 1684 by John Churchill†, later Duke of Marlborough, of the Sandridge estate, which included the manor of Holywell on the town’s outskirts; and second, the surrender the same year of the borough’s charter, induced by Churchill. Both developments threatened the interest of Sir Samuel Grimston, 3rd Bt., who owned the nearby Gorhambury estate and had been elected by the town in 1679 and 1681.
Hertford was one of the most factious boroughs in England, though such an impression may partly be due to the wealth of surviving sources, which allow a fuller exploration of its political, personal and religious disputes than is possible for many other corporations. The town contained ‘above 300 hundred inhabitants’, a high proportion of whom were Dissenters. The Compton census of 1676 estimated that a third of the adult population of the town were Nonconformists, and the Evans list put the number of Dissenters eligible to vote at 150, with a further 124 votes ‘influenced’ by them.
Hertford was an independent borough, generally reckoned one of the most uncorrupt in the kingdom. ‘The Dissenting interest is very considerable there’, wrote Paul Feilde in 1769,Add. 35639, f. 124. particularly the Quakers. The representatives were nearly all drawn from local gentry; and the leading families concerned in the borough were the Harrisons of Balls Park, the Cowpers of Panshanger, the Calverts, and the Dimsdale and Brassey families. But almost any substantial Hertfordshire country gentleman would have had a chance.
The chief interest in the borough was in the Spencer family, who had inherited an estate near and in St. Albans from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and in the Grimston family of Gorhambury, two miles from the borough. Lord Salisbury, at Hatfield only four miles from St. Albans, had some influence; and so had James West, who during the 27 years he represented the borough built up an interest of his own. A good many town notables carried weight; and there was also a fairly large venal vote.