The Whitmore family of Apley, recorders of Bridgnorth continuously since 1747, who had, as Pitt was informed in 1795, ‘represented the borough from the strongest natural interest for many generations’, returned one Member throughout this period; and both in 1820, not for the first time. Isaac Hawkins Browne, who had headed the poll in the contest of 1784, was a neighbouring country gentleman connected with the Birmingham industrial interest, whom the Whitmores accepted readily as their colleague. In 1790 a joint address was issued, ‘to preclude even the shadow of an opposition’. Whitmore’s agent, Thomas Barnfield, wrote on 6 June that despite their lack of ‘a coincidence in politics, yet it must, at this crisis, be both your interests to join publicly’. The defeated candidate in 1784, Adm. Hugh Pigot, who thought he had been deserted by his fellow oppositionist Whitmore, was still a potential threat. In November 1788, and a year later, there were reports of his standing again, but he was discouraged on the latter occasion and by May 1790 a Whitmore agent claimed that ‘the clamour of an opposition at Bridgnorth has been gradually subsiding’. The admiral disappointed his partisans at the election, and died in 1792.
On Thomas Whitmore’s death in 1795, Browne wrote to Pitt on behalf of the deceased Member’s City cousin, John Whitmore, who would ‘not be in the same political system’, as his family disavowed the late Member’s politics. Pitt approved and gained a supporter. The by-election was uncontested and nothing came of reports that Col. Pigot, the admiral’s son, would stand ‘next time’.
When it is considered how congenial the commercial int[eres]t of these gent[leme]n is with our own from the great property that one of them possesses in the foundation stones of all our manufactories, viz. iron and coal and the other from being a director of the greatest national bank in the world, as well as his extensive mercantile establishments, I say when these things are considered together with the services already rendered to Birmingham on every application from it surely we cannot be so blind to our own int[erest] as to choose in preference a man who is a stranger to us, to our manufactories, to our commerce and our interest.
As it turned out, the Birmingham vote need not have been mustered: Knudson ‘fled the town’ when he saw how poor his prospects were. Whitmore assured Boulton, 8 July, that the opposition was ‘begun vindictively and terminated wantonly’. Knudson had evidently been encouraged by local dissidents, led by Alderman Skelding. To swamp him, 81 new burgesses were admitted in the three days following his appearance. Nothing came of a rumour of a peerage for Browne in September 1804, when R. Atcherley of Bridgnorth invited the Duke of Norfolk to put up a candidate who, he asserted, would be backed by ‘the major part of the aldermen’.
In 1806 John Whitmore made way for Thomas Whitmore, heir of Apley, now of age, and the alliance with Browne continued unchallenged.
The borough of Bridgnorth which from its uniformly quiet and undisputed parliamentary elections has given rise to a well-known provincial adage [‘All on one side like a Bridgnorth election’] is likely to become the scene of a strenuous contest, the Hon. Cecil Forester having declared his intention of offering himself in opposition to the old interest.
Forester was said by Jenkinson, in 1812, to have a ‘very considerable’ interest in the borough ‘which he had most kindly exerted for me’; and Jenkinson had accordingly applied to his half-brother the prime minister for clerical promotion for Forester’s brother.
in the freemen (resident and non-resident)
Number of voters: about 700