Heytesbury

A small town in south-west Wiltshire lying on the principal road between Warminster and Salisbury, Heytesbury was, like many settlements in the region, dependent upon the cloth trade. As part of the royal forest of Selwood, there was also some trade in timber. At its heyday in the late Middle Ages the town had a market, and two annual fairs.E.D. Ginever, Ancient Wilts. Village of Heytesbury, 23-5; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii. 283. Enfranchised as a proprietary borough in 1449, it had never been incorporated.R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Heytesbury Hundred’, 122; VCH Wilts. v. 114. The franchise rested in the freemen, up to a dozen of whom usually signed election indentures. Elections were held at the Angel inn, a local landmark that dated back to the early fifteenth century.Ginever, 25. Throughout the early Stuart period the electorate deferred entirely to gentry patrons. The manor was owned by Thomas Hawker, but since at least the 1570s elections had been dominated by the Thynne family based at nearby Longleat.VCH Wilts. v. 121-3.

In 1604 the first seat went to Sir William Eyre, a kinsman of Sir John Thynne*, while the second Member was Walter Gawen of Imber, whose estate lay less than five miles north of the borough. At the next general election the Thynnes were again responsible for the choice of at least one, and probably both Members, returning their close neighbour Henry Ludlow II, together with Gawen. Ludlow, who was knighted sometime before the next general election, was returned to the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624 but pushed into second place, while Sir John Thynne’s successor, Sir Thomas, took the first seat for himself on both occasions.

Although Hawker sold Heytesbury manor to William Blake in 1624 as part of a marriage settlement involving one of his daughters and Blake’s son, the 1625 election saw the first assertion of electoral patronage by the Hawker family.C78/489/20. The second seat went to another of Hawker’s sons-in-law, Edward Bisse. In first place Thynne nominated Charles Berkeley, a Somerset landowner based at Bruton, 17 miles south of the borough. Berkeley, who later became a Selwood forest official, was re-elected to the next two Parliaments. In 1626 Blake himself took the second seat, which in 1628 went to his nephew, William Rolfe, to whom he had by this time sold the manor.C2/Chas.I/B77/56.