Commons 1690-1715

The representation of Rochester was often shared between a local landowner and an Admiralty nominee. The key to the Admiralty’s influence lay in the importance to the economy of the town of the adjacent Chatham dockyard. Rochester itself was somewhat wary of the economic power of its newer neighbour; in particular, efforts were made in 1689 and 1710–11 to suppress Chatham’s market. The borough’s chief concerns related to matters such as the financial outlay in maintaining the important bridge over the Medway.CSP Dom. 1689–90, p. 18; F. F. Smith, Hist. Rochester, 93.

A small port on the south-west point of the Isle of Sheppey, Queenborough was described by Defoe as ‘a miserable, dirty, decayed, poor, pitiful, fishing town’. Even worse from Defoe’s point of view, it was one of a number of rotten boroughs ‘who send up gentlemen to represent beggars, and have had more money spent at some of their elections, than all the land in the parishes would be worth if sold at a hundred years’ purchase’.

Maidstone was the county town of Kent and continuous vigilance was expected from its MPs to keep it so. Thus in 1695 Sir Thomas Taylor, 2nd Bt., wrote to Lord Chief Justice Sir George Treby*, who had been appointed to the Home Circuit, to ensure that the assizes were held in Maidstone as ‘it is the most convenient place and has good accommodation [and] assizes have been generally held there at least 50 times to once elsewhere’. Convenient it certainly was, for although it staged the quarter sessions for west Kent, it was centrally placed to serve the whole county.

Canterbury was probably the largest town in Kent in the later 17th century, boasting a population of about 7,000 in 1670. It was a county in its own right, the lord lieutenant usually being given jurisdiction over the city by virtue of his patent of office. The large freeman franchise made it difficult for any one interest to control, although there were many groups enjoying some say in elections.

Although Kent had numerous resident peers, none had sufficient estates to domineer their gentry neighbours. Indeed, what differentiated the Kentish aristocracy from the greater gentry was merely their access to estates and wealth drawn from outside the county’s borders.

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.

In terms of its landowning elite, Huntingdonshire was a small pond containing two very big fish, both of them Montagus, the Earl of Manchester at Kimbolton and the Earl of Sandwich at Hinchingbrooke House, which lay adjacent to the county town itself. Yet there was always sufficient independence among the greater gentry and the freeholders to prevent either or both of the magnates from engrossing the representation had they been able to attempt it.

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.

Although contested six times in the period, Hertfordshire was, after the by-election of 1697, firmly in the grip of the Tories, who monopolized its representation in Parliament for the next 30 years, with only a single seat being conceded to the Whigs in 1705. This situation may appear surprising given the county’s strong Dissenting interest, but Tory control owed something to the large number of absentee freeholders, many of whom lived in London, and to superior organization by the gentry, especially in the northern and eastern districts.