Warwickshire

Warwickshire was not contested between 1774 and 1820. The contest of 1774 had highlighted two significant features of elections for the county: the gentry’s jealousy of aristocratic intrusion, and the interest of the Birmingham commercial and manufacturing interests in the north in obtaining a representative. Sir Charles Holte† was then Birmingham’s choice and on his retirement in 1780 Sir Robert Lawley. In 1790 an opposition to Lawley was proposed by Holte’s son-in-law Abraham Bracebridge of Atherton, but he declined on finding the sense of the county in favour of preserving the peace and retaining Lawley’s services.Birmingham Ref. Lib. Boulton and Watt mss, Boulton to Watt, 1 Apr. 1790. His colleague Shuckburgh reported: ‘All was peace ... with us at the election, and perfectly unanimous, although the attorneys and innkeepers talked of a man in the moon, that was to have disturbed it.’NLW mss 12418, Shuckburgh to Lloyd, 25 July 1790. On Lawley’s death in 1793, the first contenders seem to have been Messrs Digby and Adderley. William Windham, canvassing Earl Spencer on the former’s behalf, 22 Mar. 1793, feared that Adderley had Jacobin tendencies, on which subject feeling had run high during and after the notorious ‘Church and King’ riots directed against the leading Birmingham dissenters in 1791. He wrote: ‘Digby or worse, the most high and bigoted Tory would be preferable to an ally of the Birmingham dissenters’.Spencer mss. No contest developed. Sir John Mordaunt, whose father and grandfather had represented the county, was chosen unanimously and was assumed to represent the interests of Birmingham.

In 1796 there was ‘all harmony’ at the nomination and Shuckburgh wrote: ‘My election ... passed off very quietly and without the least interruption from Mr A., or anybody.’Boulton and Watt mss, M. to M. R. Boulton, 2 June; NLW mss 12418, Shuckburgh to Lloyd, 29 June 1796. (‘A’ was most probably Adderley, and presumably Charles Bowyer Adderley of Hams Hall.) The county meeting of 1797 showed the ministerial strength in the county easily outmustering the opposition.Oracle, 25 May, 15 June 1797. In 1802 Mordaunt, who retired, was replaced unopposed by Dugdale of Merevale, though it appears that Mr Legge contemplated standing (presumably Hon. Heneage Legge of Aston, a member of Lord Dartmouth’s family, allied by marriage with Lord Aylesford).

In May 1803 Shuckburgh Evelyn’s illness prompted Abraham Bracebridge to sound his prospects again—he had heard that Birmingham wished for an efficient Member. Matthew Boulton, ‘the father of Birmingham’, advised him to make sure first that Legge was not interested, and added, ‘but it is the common opinion that Mr Dugdale should be considered as the Birmingham Member, and that the gentlemen of the southern side of the county should have the choice of another’. It duly transpired that Legge would not bite, ‘as he considers the upper part of the county to choose a Member in [Shuckburgh Evelyn’s] place’, and Boulton was assured that Bracebridge was ‘not in point of property eligible for the situation’. Shuckburgh Evelyn did not die until over a year later. (Sir) Francis Burdett was rumoured to be standing then. It was Bracebridge who addressed the county, 18 Aug. 1804, but withdrew in favour of Charles Mordaunt, Sir John’s son, who was careful to obtain the goodwill of the Birmingham freeholders.Birmingham Ref. Lib. Assay Office mss B2/111, B5/1-4; G2/81; The Times, 23 Aug.; Bristol Jnl. 25 Aug. 1804.

For the next 15 years there was a stir only in 1812. The Birmingham Whigs were the source of it. An attempt to persuade John William Ward to offer was frustrated by his conversion to Canning’s politics, and although Sir Robert Lawley 6th Bt., was expected to replace him, ‘pledged ... to peace, Catholic emancipation, and Reform’, he did not persevere. Nothing had come of a proposal to sponsor Henry Brougham, hero of the battle against the orders in council, who had even been invited by his adherents to bring a partner with him. William Wilberforce, also invited to champion the town, remarked ‘I am not quite insane’. Thomas Attwood, high bailiff of Birmingham, informed William Roscoe, 12 Oct. 1812, that his friends had wasted their funds ‘in attempting an alteration in the representation of Warwickshire, which has ended unsuccessfully for the present, although it has convinced us that we shall certainly succeed upon any future occasion’. Richard Spooner, in the same interest, informed Brougham (15 Oct. 1812) that he had been ‘strenuously endeavouring’ to get an effectual opposition to Sir Charles Mordaunt and had been urged to offer himself with the assurance of nine-tenths of the vote in the Birmingham district, but found that on the other side of the county the whole landed interest would have been united against a Birmingham man. He added that unless the landed interest was divided (and the commercial interest united) the struggle would be futile, the more so at present as ‘a large proportion of our votes might have been rejected’, owing to ‘some irregularity in the land tax books’. He had to be satisfied with reproaching Mordaunt on the hustings for his conduct as Member and looked to the next election.NLW mss 2791, C. to H. Williams Wynn, 15 Aug.; Add. 51585, Tierney to Lady Holland, 24 Aug.; Carlisle mss, Lady to Ld. Morpeth, 3 Oct. [1812]; Brougham mss 12043, 15339, 32603; Life of Wilberforce (1838), iv. 63; Liverpool RO, Roscoe mss 153.

By then Mordaunt’s independent line had conciliated many of his critics and there was no incident in 1818. But the informal election of Sir Charles Wolseley, 7th Bt.,DNB. by the Birmingham reformers at Newhall Hill on 12 July 1819 as their ‘legislatorial attorney’ was a portent, and in 1820, in the county by-election, Richard Spooner came forward as the champion of unrepresented Birmingham, although the vacancy had been caused by the retirement of Mordaunt, the country Member.