Worcester, a cathedral city and county of itself, had ‘the largest hop market in the kingdom’ and was also noted for the ‘superior quality’ of its porcelain and fine china. It was as the ‘principal seat of the glove trade’, however, that the city employed the ‘greater proportion’ of its ‘capital and labour’.
Nottinghamshire, a county ‘rich in produce and manufactures’, was the centre of the Dukeries, the ‘immense domains of the ducal houses’, and, according to the local reformer Thomas Hinton Burley Oldfield, the representation was ‘entirely under the influence of the nobility’. Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iv. 315-17; Hatherton diary, 3 Nov. 1821; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 323. Of these, the 12th duke of Norfolk, who had a country house at Worksop, was deemed by Oldfield to have such large estates as ‘must command a powerful interest’. Oldfield, iv.
The small county of Cromartyshire (112 square miles) consisted principally of an ancient sheriffdom comprising Cromarty parish, most of Resolis and a portion of Mullbuie, situated in the northern extremity of the Black Isle between the Cromarty and Moray Firths. There were also eight detached districts amounting to 344 square miles.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 310-11. The sitting Member in the 1818 Parliament had been Roderick Macleod of Cadboll, a Whig, whose Tory father Robert Bruce Aeneas Macleod had represented the county in the 1807 Parliament.
A county palatine of seven hundreds, separated from North Wales by the River Dee and from Lancashire by the Mersey, Cheshire’s fertile plains were bounded to the south and east by Shropshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. It had industrialized early, and between 1821 and 1831 its population increased from 270,098 to 332,391.
Camelford, a small market town situated on the River Camel in the north-east of the county, was ‘a place of little trade’ and the houses were generally ‘rather poor’. Its immediate vicinity consisted of ‘good agricultural land’, but the country beyond was largely ‘bleak and dreary’ and included the ‘prolific’ Freburget lead mine, three miles away. S. Drew, Hist. Cornw. (1824), ii. 402-3; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 139; Parochial Hist. Cornw. i. 191-3. The borough comprised ‘about one-tenth’ of the parish of Lanteglos-by-Camelford.
The industrializing county of Derbyshire, with its mixture of market towns and manufacturing concerns, was supposed to have over 3,000 (or, according to one source, 3,600) freeholders, but this figure was merely notional as there had been no contests since 1768. Politically, it was dominated by the Whig magnate the 6th duke of Devonshire of Chatsworth, the lord lieutenant, whose family had held one seat continuously from 1734.
Malton, a non-corporate town governed by a bailiff, who was appointed at the court leet of the lord of the manor, remained under the total control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam throughout this period. He never neglected to attend to the needs of its inhabitants, most of whom were his tenants, and after a challenge to his authority in 1807 there was no contest until 1874. The early days of January 1820 brought very severe weather, and the navigation of the Derwent, on which many of Malton’s residents relied for employment, became impossible, leaving many families destitute. On 10 Jan.
Newtown, a pocket borough abolished by the 1832 Reform Act, lay at the head of a fine natural harbour on the north-west coast of the Isle of Wight, but by the mid-sixteenth century had fallen into decay as a port and settlement. A salt manufactory and oyster fishery operated nearby, but an 1830 directory noted that the place itself ‘scarcely deserves the name of a village’. VCH Hants, v. 265; Pigot’s Commercial Dir.
Derby, ‘a medium town, between a manufacturing and a genteel one’, continued to prosper during this period, notably because of its iron, silk and porcelain production. As well as the Paving Act of 1825, improvements included such recent buildings as the gaol, although Colonel William Dyott in 1826 commented that it had ‘become a filthy, dirty place, particularly the new part’. R. Phillips, Personal Tour (1828), ii. 110-12, 155-6; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1829), 125; PP (1835), xxv. 445-6, 450-1; S. Glover, Hist., Gazetteer and Dir. Derbys.
The return of the Members for Peterborough had been under the complete control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam of nearby Milton, the principal property owner and custos rotulorum of the liberty, since 1786. The unusual jurisdiction enjoyed by the dean and chapter of the city’s cathedral over the soke of Peterborough and their power to nominate the returning officer (normally their steward) meant that their interest had always to be considered, but for many years they had been content to follow Fitzwilliam’s line.
