St Mawes

St Mawes was a fishing village overshadowed by Henry VIII’s castle, which commanded the eastern side of the Carrick Roads, facing its partner, Pendennis Castle, across the estuary of the River Fal. Richard Carew, writing at the turn of the century, was impressed by the castle, but scarcely noticed the borough; and the insignificance of the latter was used by the mayor in 1639 to justify his failure to raise the modest sum of £4 for Ship Money, as ‘our town is so weak that we have not a man or woman worth in real or personal estate above £20, and those [mostly] not above £6’, while the borough itself had virtually no profits at all. Carew, Survey, f.142v; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 429. By the time of the latter complaint, the castle itself had become increasingly shabby. In 1634 it was estimated that it needed repairs costing over £500, and in 1642 the local gentry lamented that it was ‘extremely decayed in platforms and carriages, wants ordnance and has divers unserviceable, [and] is not furnished with any sort of ammunition’. CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 158-9; Humble Petition of…the County of Cornwall (1642), 3 (E.143.19).

The borough of St Mawes had returned MPs since 1563, the franchise belonging to the portreeve and the freeholders, grandiloquently styled ‘mayor and burgesses’, with the ‘mayor’ being chosen not by the corporation but by the court leet of the manor of Toverne, which covered much of the borough. Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 304, 308; C219/43/55. Although St Mawes had been influenced by the royal court in the Elizabethan period, the duchy of Cornwall had no direct influence over the borough, and in the early seventeenth century the electoral patronage was controlled by local landowners, especially the competing interests of the Trevanions of Caerhays and the Vyvyans of Trelowarren, with the latter exerting further influence as the customary governors of the castle. Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii. 303-7; HP Commons 1604-1629. This situation survived the 1630s, despite the removal of Sir Francis Vyvyan† as captain of the castle (apparently engineered by the Trevanions), and his eventual replacement with Charles I’s friend, Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel. CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 439; Coventry Docquets, 196-7.

In the weeks before the Short Parliament, the duchy of Cornwall proposed Sir Nicholas Selwyn as a candidate, but the election, held on 19 March, was contested by two other men. DCO, ‘letters and warrants, 1639-43’, f. 44v. The first was the Laudian chancellor of Exeter diocese, Dr George Parry, who presumably with the blessing of the court; but Parry was not a carpet-bagger, having recently acquired estates in the area, including the manors of St Mawes and Tolverne. Alongside Parry was another outsider, James Sheffield, but as he was the son of a prominent opponent of the Caroline regime, Edmund Sheffield, 1st earl of Mulgrave, it is unlikely that there was any influence from the centre in his election either. The two indentures for this election named nearly 30 electors, but none were men of quality, and many – including the mayor, Thomas Shere – used marks instead of signatures. C219/42/27-8. Less is known of the Long Parliament election, held at St Mawes on 12 October 1640, but it resulted in the return of Parry once again, this time balanced by the future parliamentarian, Richard Erisey. C219/43/53. Significantly, the duchy of Cornwall did not nominate a candidate on this occasion. DCO, ‘letters and warrants, 1639-43’, ff. 66-7.

During the first civil war, St Mawes Castle was soon garrisoned by Sir Ralph Hopton* for the king. Its commander was Hannibal Bonithon, who had served as lieutenant under Vyvyan and Arundel, and was eventually promoted to the rank of major. Bonithon had never been a whole-hearted royalist: he had obstructed the raising of troops against the Scots in 1640, was investigated in 1643 and 1644 for disaffection (including a remark that ‘he would never shoot a gun against the earl of Warwick’ [Robert Rich, 2nd earl]); and in March 1646 he surrendered to the advancing parliamentarians with indecent haste. CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 289, 438; CCSP i. 277; Cornw. RO, R(S)/1/1062; Coate, Cornw. 194; Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva, 224. The war seems to have had little effect on the borough, but the peace allowed another election to be held, and on 9 February 1647 the Commons ordered that a writ be issued to replace Parry, who had been disabled as a royalist in January 1644. CJ v. 79b. With the royalist Vyvyans and Trevanions displaced, and the governorship of the earl of Arundel overturned, St Mawes was more open to outside interference, and when the election was held on 14 April 1647, the 15 named electors ‘unanimously’ elected William Priestley, a Hertfordshire Presbyterian with no known connections with Cornwall. C219/43/55. Priestley was the son-in-law of the Hertfordshire Presbyterian MP Sir Thomas Dacres, whose son Thomas had recently been elected for another Cornish borough, Callington. The St Mawes and Callington elections may well have been managed to Sir Thomas Dacres’s advantage by his Presbyterian allies at Westminster, who included men with powerful political and proprietorial interests in Cornwall. Supra, ‘Callington’; infra, ‘Sir Thomas Dacres’; ‘Willian Priestley’. In June 1647, George Kekewich* was appointed governor of the castle, but he seems to have exercised no particular influence over the borough itself. CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 563.

Both Priestley and Erisey were secluded from Parliament at Pride’s Purge in December 1648. As no by-elections were held during the Rump, and the borough was disenfranchised in the early years of the protectorate, it was over a decade before any further elections took place. In the interim, the castle was kept in good order, and was put into a state of alert in 1655, during the Penruddock rising. CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 444, 478. Kekewich continued as governor during this period, and increased his local influence still further by leasing lands adjoining the castle from Francis Buller I*. Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/25/10; HD/4/6/8. Whether he had any say in the elections for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, held on 8 January 1659, is uncertain. Thirty electors were named on the indentures, and the return of John Lampen, a man from eastern Cornwall perhaps backed by Colonel Anthony Rous*, and William Tredenham, a young man from a rising local family, suggests that the result was determined by Cornishmen rather than outsiders. C219/46/26. Tredenham’s father had purchased Tolverne and St Mawes from Parry in the late 1640s, and William had consolidated the family’s interests in the area in the 1650s, and they were by now one of the dominant local landowners.

After the Restoration, St Mawes reverted to something close to the patronage patterns of the pre-civil war era. Sir Richard Vyvyan*, who had been granted the reversion of the governorship of the castle in 1642, was now granted it in full, despite the entreaties of Kekewich, who had been reappointed by George Monck* as recently as February 1660. Cornw. RO, V/BO/33/3, 10; T/1662A-B. The Vyvyans’ dominance was not left unchallenged, however, and the Tredenhams assumed the role formerly played by the Trevanions, as pretenders for control of the borough and its immediate hinterland. HP Commons 1660-1690.