Launceston (Dunheved)

The principal interests at Launceston in 1715 were in two Tories; George Granville, 1st Lord Lansdowne, the recorder of the borough, with which he had an hereditary connexion; and Sir Nicholas Morice, whose interest was based on his estate at Werrington. In 1715 two Tories, Anstis and Herle, were returned on the recommendation of Lansdowne and Morice against Sir William Pendarves, a moderate Tory, who had agreed with Hugh Boscawen, the government manager for the Cornish boroughs, to stand jointly with Charles Statham, a Whig.N. & Q. (ser. 8), xii. 442-4. Two extreme Tories, Alexander Pendarves and John Freind, were returned in 1722, when Sir Nicholas Morice complained of ‘being attacked by the court brokers both at Newport and Launceston’.Sir Nich. Morice to Humphry Morice, 6 Apr. 1722, Morice mss at Bank of England. On petition Freind was replaced by John Willes, a Whig, the House disallowing the votes of the non-resident freemen by a resolution that the right of election was ‘in the mayor, aldermen and freemen, being inhabitants at the time they were made free’.CJ, xx. 297-8. Lansdowne then withdrew from Cornish politics, leaving the borough to be shared by the Morices with a government Whig in 1734 and an opposition Whig in 1741. In 1747 Sir William Morice and his nephew, Sir John St. Aubyn, another Tory, were unopposed. On Sir William Morice’s death in 1750 his nephew and heir, Humphry Morice, a government supporter, was returned unopposed for the vacancy, the Duke of Bedford, who had proposed to put up George Brydges Rodney, finding that the corporation was entirely in Morice’s interest.Rodney to Bedford, 24 Jan. 1750, Bedford mss. In 1752 Pelham wrote that Morice’s ‘two boroughs’ (Newport and Launceston) were ‘absolutely his own’.To Newcastle, 22 May 1752, Add. 32727, f. 242.