Huntingdonshire

Huntingdon was a pleasant but inconsiderable town, physically overlooked and politically overawed by Hinchingbrooke House, the ‘noble’ and ‘ancient’ seat of the Montagus, earls of Sandwich. Such electoral contests as occurred in this period arose from divisions within the Montagu interest itself rather than any challenge from outside. The extent of the franchise, though giving scope for bribery and intimidation, did not render the borough wholly corrupt and thus offered comparatively little encouragement to strangers.

Oldfield wrote about Huntingdon in 1792:Boroughs, ii. 143.

The interest of the Earl of Sandwich is so powerful as always to return two Members; and this he effects, not by weight of property, for his Lordship has but one house in the whole town, but by his popularity, and the obligations which he was enabled to confer upon some of his principal friends during his connexion with Lord North’s Administration.

The Montagus of Hinchingbrooke, earls of Sandwich, remained parliamentary patrons of Huntingdon in this period, as they had been since the reign of Charles II. With only one house in the town, they owed their supremacy primarily to patronage, the 4th Earl having secured Admiralty and other places for the burgesses and he and his successors maintaining their ‘popularity’ by hospitality and grants of land around the town.Oldfield, Hist. Boroughs, i.

Huntingdon was dominated by the earls of Sandwich, who lived at Hinchingbrooke within the town, nominating both Members, usually without opposition. The only contest that occurred between 1715 and 1754 was in 1741, when the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who on coming of age in 1739 had joined the Opposition, put up two anti-government candidates, Wills Hill and Edward Montagu, against two government candidates, Roger Handasyde and Albert Nesbitt.

Very little is known of Huntingdon elections at this time, but Griffith was probably right in calling attention to the significant variations in the wording of the indentures, although his pioneer study (published in 1827) has found few successors. Although the 1660 return has not survived, it is known from Samuel Pepys that this was a straight fight between the Montagu and Bernard interests.

Though there was a connexion with the duchy of Lancaster going back to the thirteenth century, it has not proved possible to associate more than one Huntingdon MP in this period with the chancellor of the duchy. Perhaps there were more—it has been stated that Sir Robert Cecil asked for a seat late in the reign, and some of the nominations attributed below to great men may have been contrived through the duchy—but no links have been established.

Little can be said about the municipal history of Huntingdon in the early 16th century owing to the paucity of its records. The town’s link with the duchy of Lancaster dated from 1267 when its fee-farm of £45 had been included in Henry III’s grant of the duchy to Edmund Crouchback: Richard III reduced the fee-farm by 21 marks. Although favourably situated ‘on the highway from the north to London by means of the river Ouse’, by 1500 the town had been overtaken by St. Ives as the centre of local trade.

Situated at the crossing point of the river Ouse and the main route between London and the north-east, Huntingdon was an obvious site for early settlement, and by the tenth century it had become a market town of sufficient standing to have its own mint. Although at first development was checked by Danish raiding parties, the royal borough of Huntingdon enjoyed a more settled period of expansion after the Conquest, when, according to the Domesday survey, it housed some 256 burgesses.

A Saxon foundation, sited on Ermine Street where it crossed the River Ouse, Huntingdon was a thriving centre of perhaps 2,000 people in 1086. Chartered in 1205 and served by 16 churches in 1291, its prosperity was eroded by the rise of nearby St. Ives and St. Neots, which took over the local markets in livestock and grain respectively, so that by 1603, with only four churches and a population of about 750, the borough was of little consequence.