Sudbury

In the seventeenth century the River Stour was still one of the major trade routes within England. For several centuries much of the cloth which supported the economy of south Suffolk and north Essex had travelled down-river to Harwich to be shipped across to the lucrative export markets on the continent. Located where the river was crossed by the main road running south from Bury St Edmunds to Chelmsford (and on to London), Sudbury could hardly fail to prosper while this trade remained profitable. There was no larger town upstream of Harwich and Manningtree. Although competition from continental draperies had seriously eroded England’s commercial advantage by the seventeenth century, Sudbury, by diversifying the types of cloth it produced, may have had greater success than some other towns in staving off the worst effects of this long-term decline in the English cloth trade.

Incorporated by Queen Mary in 1554 and enfranchised by Queen Elizabeth, the town had first returned MPs to the Parliament of 1559. Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/1/6. Since then the right of election had always been exercised by its corporation, comprising a mayor, six aldermen and 24 chief burgesses. The honor of Clare, which formed part of the duchy of Lancaster, lay to the west of the town, and, at the time of enfranchisement, it might have been thought that the crown would therefore gain a strong electoral interest in the borough. Nevertheless, in subsequent decades no clear pattern as to the rights of the duchy in the nomination of MPs was established, although at times there seems to have been an understanding that the steward of the honor should at least be consulted. In any case, what influence the duchy might have had was much reduced in 1610, when its manorial properties within the town were sold off to one of the local landowners, Sir Robert Crane*. Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 234-5. By this sale Crane gained an electoral interest which would remain dominant until his death in 1643 and which allowed him to sit for the town in six of the eight Parliaments between 1620 and 1640. Possible rival interests included the Gurdons and the Barnardistons, both of whom had provided Sudbury with MPs on occasions during the 1620s.

The meeting at which the corporation elected its two MPs for the Short Parliament was held on 16 March 1640. As in the elections of the 1620s, Crane was returned for the senior place. The junior seat was awarded to Richard Pepys, a talented London lawyer who owned land at Stoke-next-Clare not far from the town. Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/2/7, unfol. As Pepys was steward of the honor of Clare, the influence of the duchy may have played some part in this. The records of the election make no mention of a contest, but, when the new Parliament assembled in April, someone submitted a petition to the committee of privileges regarding the Sudbury elections, presumably challenging the result. CJ ii. 3b. In view of the dispute surrounding the outcome of the elections later that year, the person most likely to have complained was Brampton Gurdon† (who had sat for the town in 1621). Harl. 593, f. 219. One of the Barnardistons may also have been involved. Crane, as a deputy lieutenant, had recently been particularly active in raising levies for the Scottish war and was thus identified with the king’s campaign against the Covenanters. It may also be significant that Crane was among those who had tried to persuade Henry North* to stand for one of the county seats in opposition to Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston* and Sir Philip Parker*, both of whom probably had Gurdon’s support. Bodl. Tanner 65, f. 124.

The contest at Sudbury in October 1640 formed a convoluted subplot to the clash between the Barnardistons and the Norths for the county seats. The first move was made by Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston in early October as part of his attempts to find a seat for his eldest son, Thomas*. Having no wish to offend the Gurdons, Barnardiston’s initial hope of securing one of the Ipswich seats was disappointed by the news that John Gurdon* and William Cage* intended to stand for re-election there. Sir Nathaniel’s fall-back position was to ask Sir Simonds D’Ewes whether he would arrange for Thomas to be nominated at Sudbury. Harl. 384, f. 64. Given that D’Ewes was the incumbent sheriff of the county and that both were gentlemen of considerable standing in the area, this should not have been too difficult to arrange. But D’Ewes had an eye on one of the Sudbury seats for himself, despite the fact that it was probably illegal for a sheriff to preside over his own election (which was why D’Ewes had already approached Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke in the hope of getting elected for a west country seat). Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes ed. J. O. Halliwell (1845), ii. 244-6. It so happened that the Ipswich election was similarly complicated, for Cage was one of the bailiffs there, and a comment by D’Ewes to the lord chief justice, Sir Edward Littleton†, in a letter of 10 October – that Cage’s decision to stand ‘hath occasioned two of my quarrels [the elections at Ipswich and Sudbury?]’ – suggests that the arguments at Ipswich had spread to Sudbury. Autobiography ed. Halliwell, ii. 247. D’Ewes was advised that, whatever its legality, all the Sudbury burgesses would expect to have their say in the result. Harl. 593, f. 219.

Barnardiston gave way to D’Ewes’s wishes and, returning from his hard-won victory over the Norths in the rancorous county poll, recommended to the Sudbury corporation that they elect D’Ewes. Thus Barnardiston reciprocated the efforts on his behalf during the contest for the county seats. He then wrote to D’Ewes assuring him that his return would be valid. Harl. 384, f. 65. Brampton Gurdon seems to have taken the same view and crucially, when he came to challenge the Sudbury return, made no attempt to exploit directly the suspicions of irregularity surrounding D’Ewes’s election. Procs. LP i. 497, 511, 518. The support of the Barnardistons and the Gurdons was enough to secure D’Ewes his place in this Parliament; at the election meeting on 26 October he was elected unopposed to the junior seat. As Gurdon’s subsequent complaints made clear, the real battle occurred over the senior seat, which the mayor, Daniel Byatt, awarded to Crane, apparently without a contest. C219/43/2, no. 174. A week earlier, the county election had seen Crane enthusiastically supporting Henry North against Barnardiston and Parker, who had the backing of D’Ewes and probably also of their kinsmen, the Gurdons. Now, at Sudbury, in a reciprocal arrangement, Barnardiston and D’Ewes probably hoped to support Gurdon against Crane, only for them to find themselves outmanoeuvred by Byatt. The Gurdons proceeded to cry foul.

The result of the Gurdons’ determination to pursue this conflict by other means was the inevitable election petition to the Commons. It was probably with this in mind that D’Ewes prepared a paper defending the legality of his own return. Harl. 158, ff. 289v-292. When the dispute reached the floor of the House the following December, John Gurdon alleged that his father would have been elected were it not that ‘the mayor refused to take the poll for him’. Procs. LP i. 489. Gurdon was also exasperated by the committee of privileges’ rejection of his father’s petition and his claims to have been ‘chosen, though not returned’. CJ ii. 47a. According to Gurdon, his father had polled three times as many votes as Crane. Procs. LP i. 497. Sir Arthur Hesilrige* seconded Gurdon’s demand that Byatt be summoned for questioning about his conduct as mayor. Procs. LP i. 490. When the Commons resumed debate on the subject the next day (8 Dec.), Hesilrige again spoke on behalf of the Gurdons, leading the attack on Crane’s electioneering methods. According to the notes made by D’Ewes (who was clearly pleased that Sir Arthur stressed that the junior place had been uncontested), Hesilrige told the Commons that

the mayor had dealt very foully to advance Sir Robert Crane’s election, altering the day from Saturday to the Monday, then in breaking off the poll; and that Sir Robert himself threatened men and his servant threatened men. Procs. LP i. 511.

The move of the date from 24 October to 26 October had worked to Crane’s advantage because the Sudbury poll thereby clashed with that at Ipswich, in which John Gurdon was standing. The Gurdons had thereby been forced to split their efforts. In the event, John Gurdon had been elected at Ipswich unopposed, but that result could not have been taken for granted, for the town’s freemen franchise made Ipswich a more difficult constituency to manage and John’s election there earlier in the year had been closely contested. The intimidation allegations are similar to those which had been made about Crane during the county contest held the week before. T. Carlyle, Critical and Misc. Essays (1888), vii. 61-2, 64-5. Hesilrige’s speech was followed by contributions from John Whistler* and Edward Bagshawe* (a friend of Richard Pepys) defending Crane. The Commons proceeded to a vote which resolved that Crane’s election should stand. Procs. LP i. 511, 518; CJ ii. 47b. This did not end the matter, for at that point John Pym* and Sir John Strangways* objected that the Commons had thereby condoned the use of threats against electors. But after Sir Robert Harley* and Sir Walter Erle* had argued that ‘Sir Robert Crane’s election being voted to be good, there ought to be no further dispute of it’, the House moved on to other business. Procs. LP i. 511.

The death of Crane in February 1643, leaving only heiresses, permanently split the electoral interest he had enjoyed. Others who had envied that interest now found their prospects at Sudbury much improved. In the meantime D’Ewes sat alone as MP for the town. Moves to elect Crane’s replacement began on 2 September 1645 – only 12 days after the decision had been taking to start issuing writs to fill vacancies created by death or disablement – when the Commons ordered that a by-election be held at Sudbury. CJ iv. 262a. This election probably took place soon afterwards and saw the return of Brampton Gurdon, younger son of the losing candidate in 1640. Like the rest of the family, Brampton junior was a strong supporter of the war against the king and had recently seen action as a colonel at the battle of Naseby (14 June 1645). The gift of sugar (worth £1 19s 4d) presented by the corporation to both Gurdon and his father sometime during that year may have been made to mark this election; over the next decade the town continued to send regular consignments of sugar to the Gurdons in gratitude for their services on the town’s behalf. Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/2/7. Gurdon was equally hospitable, for the £8 4s which he spent on this election (which was probably uncontested) was most likely used to entertain the corporation. Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: acct. of Brampton Gurdon, 1644-5. The two Sudbury MPs fared differently in the purge of the Commons on 6 December 1648. D’Ewes was one of the 45 MPs imprisoned by the army, while Gurdon avoided seclusion from the House but did not resume his seat until June 1649. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 371, 375.

By the time Sudbury next got a chance to hold elections to a Parliament the town had been deprived of one of its two seats, for, like most of the other Suffolk constituencies, it lost out in the redistribution imposed by the 1653 Instrument of Government. A. and O. The choice made by the corporation on 10 July 1654 for its single seat fell on a local apothecary, John Fothergill. C219/44/2, no. 29. Although he had been a chief burgess since the 1630s, Fothergill was by no means the most senior member of the corporation and it is even possible that he had stepped down from this position by the time of the election. But he had a record of service as a colonel in the parliamentarian army and he had since held the same rank in the local Suffolk militia. His performance as the town’s MP evidently pleased the corporation, for they elected him to the next two Parliaments as well. That said, in the absence of any record made by the corporation or a surviving election indenture, the return of Fothergill as MP for the town in the 1656 elections can only be inferred from the fact that he is known to have sat in that Parliament. CJ vii. 430a, 435b, 438a, 444a, 449a, 459a, 462b, 472b, 515b, 529b, 542a.

The grant of a new charter on 1 July 1658 provided some scope for changes in corporation membership. The appointment of four new chief burgesses is likely to have required the removal of four existing burgesses and this purge probably served to strengthen the corporation’s support for the protectorate. Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/2/8, p. 1. It may seem odd that Fothergill was not included on the new corporation, but it is less likely that he was a victim of the purge than that he had already resigned for other reasons. His re-election as their MP at the beginning of the following year confirmed his continuing connection with the corporation. Because the elections for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament were held under the old franchise, the town was again able to return two MPs, allowing Samuel Hasell to be elected along with Fothergill. C219/48: Sudbury election indenture, 14 Jan. 1659. Hasell had been chosen by the corporation to be the first mayor of the town under the new charter, and, although that appointment should have disqualified him from election as MP, it may have been recalled how similar technicalities had been ignored in 1640. The following year when the Rump re-assembled, Brampton Gurdon returned once again to Westminster to sit as MP for Sudbury, although his former colleague, D’Ewes, had died long since.

From 1660, the borough witnessed repeated struggles between the corporation, who wished to retain the exclusive right of election, and the freemen, who claimed that right for themselves. In the Convention of 1660, a Gurdon (John*) again sat for the town and in 1661 the remnants of the old Crane interest defeated a Barnardiston (Sir Thomas†) to elect Isaac Appleton, who had married Sir Robert Crane’s widow. These echoes of old contests soon gave way to newer rivalries as other families, notably those of Cordell and Elwes, fought for control.