Warwickshire

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Despite its large and potentially independent electorate, Warwick during the 1690s and 1700s continued to lie under the personal influence of the 5th Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville†). His principal seat was the Castle, which overlooked the borough, and from this vantage point he tended an interest which stemmed jointly from his position as recorder and from his ownership of much property within the town limits, the extent of which is revealed in an estate account for 1686 showing a rent roll totalling £695.

Coventry, as Sir John Perceval (John, Viscount Perceval†) observed on his visit there in 1701, was ‘a very populous and trading place’ in which the manufacture, dressing and marketing of cloth was an economic mainstay. The organization of most of the city’s trades into companies endowed the wide freemen electorate with a semblance of political infrastructure. This impression obtains particular weight from the flow of petitions from these trades to Parliament concerning their various economic grievances.

Warwick was virtually a scot and lot borough. Oldfield wrote about it in 1792:Boroughs, iii. 80. ‘There have been frequent struggles here between the Earl of Warwick ... and the popular party.’ In 1754 its patrons were Lord Brooke (later Earl of Warwick) and Lord Archer. In 1774 both seats went to members of Warwick’s family; which led in 1780 to a revolt of the independent party and the loss of one seat to Robert Ladbroke, a London banker with an estate in Warwickshire.

Coventry had a population of about 12,000 in 1754 and an electorate of about 2,500—one third of them non-resident. Its politics, generally conducted without much reference to national affairs, were on a corporation and anti-corporation basis; and elections were riotous and expensive. Lords Craven, Archer, and Hertford at different times concerned themselves with the borough; but it had an unsavoury reputation and the Warwickshire country gentlemen steered clear of it.

‘Lord W[arwick] has friends enough to bring in one Member provided this Member is of his own family, but he cannot bring in two ...’A.L. Ruoff, ‘Landor’s Letters to his Family 1802-25’, Bull. Rylands Lib. liii. 476. This was the basis of stabilization in the borough elections reached in 1802.

With over 2,500 electors, of whom some 30 per cent were outvoters, Coventry was an expensive constituency, difficult to manage.This article is based on T. W. Whitley, Parl. Rep. Coventry, 202-52. Contests had long arisen out of conflict between the corporation (and its allies) and the commonalty, among whom the largest group were the journeymen weavers in the silk factories. The wealth of Lord Eardley, whose colleague his brother-in-law Wilmot had local connexions, carried the day in 1784 when they stood as Pitt’s friends.