Durham County

County Durham is bounded by the Rivers Tyne and Tees to the north and south, by the North Sea to the east and by the Pennine watershed in the west. To the cartographer Richard Blome, writing in 1673 – doubtless from well south of the Trent – the county seemed ‘far engaged northwards and of a sharp and piercing air’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 92. Early-Stuart Durham’s principal distinguishing feature was its unique status as ‘the last principality’ – a county palatine presided over by the bishop of Durham. Its economy was based largely upon arable farming in the south-eastern lowlands, the rearing of sheep and cattle in the Pennine uplands to the west, and upon the burgeoning coal trade in the north and north-east. Many of the largest and most productive collieries in what was, at the time, England’s foremost coal-mining region lay not in Northumberland but south of the Tyne in County Durham. Durham Hearth Tax: Lady Day 1666 ed. A. Green, E. Parkinson, M. Spufford (British Rec. Soc. cxix), xxxiii; H.L. Robson, ‘George Lilburne, mayor of Sunderland’, Sunderland Antiquarian Soc. xxii. 89. ‘Through the plentifulness of coals in these parts’, continued Blome, ‘the inhabitants keep such good fires that the cold is not so offensive unto them’. Blome, Britannia, 92. Using data from the 1666 and 1674 hearth tax returns, it has been estimated that the county’s population by the 1670s numbered approximately 70,000. Durham Hearth Tax ed. Green, Parkinson, Spufford, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.

As a palatinate jurisdiction, Durham had never been represented at Westminster except by the bishop himself in the House of Lords. There had been calls for the county’s enfranchisement since the 1560s, and these had become more insistent following the union of the crowns in 1603 and the consequent re-appraisal of the four northern counties’ ancient privileges as a marcher region, which included exemption from parliamentary taxation. A.W. Foster, ‘The struggle for parliamentary representation for Durham, c.1600-1641’ in The Last Principality ed. D. Marcombe (Nottingham, 1987), 177. In 1610, Durham, along with its neighbours, became liable to payment of subsidies like any other county – and yet alone of all counties it was not represented in the Commons. Bills for enfranchising Durham were introduced in the Parliaments of 1614, 1621 and 1624, but for various reasons they all failed. Foster, ‘The struggle for parliamentary representation’, 177-92.

The summoning of the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640, along with the Scots’ occupation of the north east in the second bishops’ war, strengthened calls from Durham for parliamentary representation, and the result was the introduction of a bill in November 1640 allowing the county to return knights and burgesses (for the city of Durham) after the next session of Parliament. CJ ii. 38a, 40b; Durham Civic Memorials ed. C.F. Whiting (Surt. Soc. clx), 35-6; Foster, ‘The struggle for parliamentary representation’, 192-3. While it waited for this legislation to work its way through the Houses, the county elite, at a general meeting of the quarter sessions in December 1641, despatched a four-man committee to London ‘to agitate the … affairs of the country [i.e. county] with the Parliament as they shall be advised by the country from time to time’. Durham UL, Mickleton and Spearman ms 9, pt. 2, p. 228. The enfranchisment bill passed the Commons in April 1642 and was then carried up to the Lords, where it was apparently lost under the welter of more pressing business. CJ ii. 61b, 219a, 491b, 515a, 523b; LJ iv. 713b; v. 3a; Foster, ‘The struggle for parliamentary representation’, 193. Yet according to a Commons order of 8 April 1645 – made in response to a petition from the county – the bill had in fact passed both Houses. The problem was that it could not take effect until after the Long Parliament had gone into recess or been dissolved, of which there seemed no immediate prospect. Consequently, the House ordered that a new bill might be brought in, when convenient, that would take effect immediately. CJ iv. 103a.

With the entire Scottish army quartered in northern England from the autumn of 1645 and causing great hardship to its reluctant hosts, the county was more eager than ever to secure a voice at Westminster for the remedy and redress of its grievances. Bodl. Tanner 59, ff. 225, 537; W. Dumble, ‘Government, Religion, and Military Affairs in Durham during the Civil War and Interregnum’ (Durham Univ. MLitt. thesis, 1978), 129; K. Beer, ‘How the people of Durham were affected by the civil war between 1642 and 1648’, Durham County Local Hist. Bulletin, liv. 15-16. ‘The cry of the country is “What! Shall we still pay sesses [assessments] and have none in the House for us to grant them? Shall we be ready to perform services for the state and [bear] unequal burdens and still be without the state’s protection?”’. Recs. of the Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. R. Welford (Surt. Soc. cxi), 40. In March 1646 and again in December, Durham sent petitions to the Commons in an effort to expedite the April 1645 order. CJ iv. 474a, 736a; v. 21b; HMC Portland, i. 329; Dumble, ‘Government, Religion and Military Affairs in Durham’, 130. But although a new bill was introduced and orders repeatedly made for its consideration, nothing was resolved before Pride’s Purge. CJ iv. 663a, 672a; v. 21b, 189a, 196a.

Much of the credit for Durham’s eventual enfranchisement probably lies with two men – the Leveller leader John Lilburne and his cousin Colonel Robert Lilburne*. The Lilburnes belonged to an ancient Durham family and shared the county’s resentment at its lack of parliamentary representation. In one of his pamphlets, John Lilburne referred to Durham as ‘a bastard, as it were, to all the counties of the nation, having yet never enjoyed that right and privilege to send either knights or burgesses to Parliament to represent it or speak for it’. J. Lilburne, A Just Reproof to Haberdashers-Hall (1651), 2 (E.638.12). He was probably the decisive figure in ensuring that Durham was accorded three seats and the city of Durham one in the Levellers’ 1649 manifesto The Agreement of the People. Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. S.R. Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), 362. Although The Agreement was never implemented, it seems to have formed the basis of the Rump’s own proposals for ‘the better and more equal distribution’ of parliamentary seats – which were a key feature of its much-debated, and ultimately abortive, bill for settling the succession of future Parliaments. CJ vi. 344b, 410a. The county and ‘all places within the same’ were allotted four seats under this bill, which was probably on the same basis as in The Agreement. The Rump’s failure to make headway on the enfranchisement issue may help to explain an address from Durham to Oliver Cromwell* and the army in April 1653, congratulating them on dissolving Parliament. The signatories to the address did not doubt that the army would be true to its declarations and give the county ‘liberty … for the choice of Parliament-men to speak out our grievances’. Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 90-1.

The people of Durham finally got their wish in the Nominated Parliament of 1653, although hardly in a satisfactory manner. The county was not represented specifically in this Parliament. Instead, the council of officers selected four men to serve for the four northernmost counties, with the task of representing Durham falling to the godly Newcastle coal-merchant Henry Dawson, who died within a few weeks of the House’s assembling. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 117; Howell, Newcastle, 307. It was not until the end of the year, with the establishment of the protectorate, that the county’s expectations of full parliamentary representation were adequately met. Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, Durham County was given two seats and the city of Durham one. Constitutional Docs. ed. Gardiner, 407. The Instrument’s author, Major-general John Lambert*, was a close friend of Durham’s most renowned military figure Colonel Robert Lilburne, who had served as his second-in-command in the Northern Brigade during the late 1640s and early 1650s. If Lambert had needed any prompting to include Durham in his scheme for the redistribution of seats, then Robert Lilburne seems the likeliest source – just as another of Lambert’s officers, Captain Adam Baynes*, apparently made sure that his home town of Leeds was not left out of his commander’s franchise reforms. Infra, ‘Leeds’.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Durham County returned Robert Lilburne and his uncle George. The indenture has not survived, but it is likely that George Lilburne, as the elder of the two men and one of the county’s most influential figures (not least for the interest he enjoyed in several major Durham collieries), was granted the senior place. There is no evidence of a contest. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament on 20 August 1656, the county returned George’s son Thomas and another leading Durham colliery-owner, James Clavering. The indenture was signed by 198 men – although whether they comprised the entire electorate under the £200 franchise rule, or just a representative sample, is not clear. C219/45, unfol.; Durham Dean and Chap. Lib. Allan ms 7, p. 193. The choice of Thomas Lilburne for his father was a straight swap – George serving as the county’s sheriff in 1656 and thus ineligible to stand for Parliament. The election of Clavering in place of Robert Lilburne is harder to explain. Lilburne was returned for the North Riding of Yorkshire, which may have been his first choice of constituency. But another possibility is that his unpopularity as deputy major-general (under Lambert) for the north east had denied him the honour of representing his native Durham. He himself acknowledged the strength of feeling in the county against the rule of the major-generals, which he attributed to the machinations of Sir Arthur Hesilrige* – the governor of the four northern counties under the Rump. TSP v. 296. Clavering, a one-time ally of Hesilrige, was excluded from Parliament in September on what seem to have been trumped up charges of collusion with the protectorate’s royalist enemies. Infra, ‘James Clavering’.

After Durham’s inhabitants had struggled for so long to secure parliamentary representation, it is ironic that both of their MPs in the second protectoral Parliament – Thomas Lilburne and the Member for Durham city, Anthony Smith – supported the introduction of the Humble Petition and Advice, which instituted a return to the traditional franchise. Infra, ‘Thomas Lilburne’, ‘Anthony Smith’. Thus Durham was excluded from Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, prompting a petition from the county for its re-enfranchisement. A committee was named to bring in the requisite bill, but nothing was achieved before this Parliament was dissolved in April. CJ vii. 622b. The county had to wait a further 16 years before it finally secured permanent representation in the Commons. HP Commons 1660-1690.