The leading interests were those of Lords Spencer and Grimston, who had returned a Member each since 1768. Earl Spencer’s was the stronger, based on his hold over the corporation and sustained by loans, the support of the local dissenters and superiority among the outvoters;H. F. C. Lansberry, ‘Politics and Govt. in St. Albans 1685-1835’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1964), summarized in I.H.R. Bull, xli.
Hertford was invariably represented by the local gentry, and as the corporation could not make more than three honorary freemen the competition was limited. In 1790 William Baker of Bayfordbury tried to regain the seat which he had won in 1780 and lost to John Calvert of Albury in 1784. The other candidate, Nathaniel Dimsdale, was the heir of the retiring Member and, like Calvert, well disposed to Pitt’s government, which Baker opposed.
At the accession of George I the chief interests in St. Albans were those of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, derived from the estate of Sandridge, close to the borough, of the Grimstons of Gorhambury, two miles away, and of the corporation from the mayor’s power of creating honorary freemen. The Lomax and the Gape families, whose estates lay near the town, also had some electoral influence. The Grimstons and the Lomaxes were government Whigs; the Duchess soon became bitterly opposed to Walpole; the Gapes were Tories; the corporation sided alternately with the two major interests.
Hertford was always represented by members of the local landed families, mostly of comparatively recent origin, descended from London lawyers, merchants and bankers, who had bought estates in the county. There was a large nonconformist vote, which supported the Whigs, except for the Quakers, who even before the Spencer Cowper case in 1699 appear to have voted Tory.CJ, x.
Under the charter of 1554 the corporation of St. Albans consisted of the mayor, who acted as returning officer, and ten ‘principal burgesses’. All returns before the Revolution were made in the name of the ‘burgesses’, though it was claimed that the inhabitants at large customarily exercised the franchise, as at Hertford. The Gorhambury estate, bought by Sir Harbottle Grimston in 1652, provided the strongest traditional interest, but its owner preferred to sit for Colchester.
Hertford, an open borough throughout this period, was conspicuous for the number of its dissenters. But strong interests were enjoyed by the Cowpers of the Castle as well as by the Fanshawes of Ware Park, until they sold out to Sir Thomas Byde in 1668. At the general election of 1660 the Fanshawes were ineligible as Cavaliers, and they probably supported Arthur Sparke, a kinsman by marriage and former town clerk. The senior seat was taken by James Cowper, who had sat for the borough in the last two Parliaments, though the son and brother of Royalists.
The town of St. Albans, much of which reverted to the Crown at the dissolution of the monasteries, received its first royal charter in 1553. The new corporation was to consist of a mayor and ten capital burgesses, who could nominate an unspecified number of ordinary burgesses to assist them.Clutterbuck, Hist. Herts. i. App. IV. According to a petition entered in the corporation court book in 1587, a common council of 24 men, drawn from the trading guilds, had been in existence since Edward VI’s charter, or even before.
St. Albans grew up under the protection of the Benedictine abbey and remained under the lordship of the abbot until the abbey was surrendered in 1539. A borough in the Domesday survey, the town was hampered in its constitutional development by the insistence of successive abbots on the servile status of the inhabitants. It returned Members to at least ten Parliaments between 1310 and 1337, but the concessions extracted from a weak abbot in 1327 were revoked by his successor.M. Beresford, New Towns in the Middle Ages, 326; VCH Herts. iv.
St. Albans owed its prosperity to its position as the first staging-point out of London, where the main highways to Ireland and the north-west diverged. Royal stables were maintained there, and municipal hospitality could be exercised in an enviably wide selection of well supplied inns. It was also the administrative centre of the liberty of St. Albans, comprising the former estates of the wealthy abbey scattered throughout Hertfordshire, with its own sessions of the peace and gaol.
By 1820 St. Albans, a stagnant market town and centre of coaching traffic, had become a largely unmanageable borough: of the 16 elections which occurred between 1784 and 1832, only three were uncontested.PP (1835), xxvi. 2930; W. Page, St. Albans, 100. The strongest natural interest belonged to James Walter Grimston†, 1st earl of Verulam, an anti-Catholic Tory and brother-in-law of the prime minister Lord Liverpool, whose residence at Gorhambury lay two miles west of the town. His ancestors had supplied several Members for St.