Lincoln

A thriving centre for the wool trade in medieval times, early Stuart Lincoln was a city in decline, with relatively few citizens of any great wealth and beset by problems of vagrancy and poor relief. CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 408-9; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/4 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1599-1638), ff. 271-2; F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956), 22, 134-8; Probate Inventories of Lincoln Citizens 1661-1714 ed. J.A. Johnston (Lincoln Rec. Soc. lxxx), xxii. Attempts to revive the city’s wool trade in the early seventeenth century foundered, and its economy continued to rely heavily on its markets and fairs. The city’s poor economic health was reflected in its depleted population. Having contained possibly in excess of 6,000 inhabitants in the Middle Ages, Lincoln had about half that figure by the early Stuart period. Hill, Lincoln, 22-3. The considerable damage that the city sustained during the civil war probably did little to reverse this trend, and by 1662 its population stood at approximately 3,500. Lincs. Archives, BROG 1/1 (Lincoln QS order bk. 1656-63), pp. 115-24; Prob. Inventories of Lincoln Citizens ed. Johnston, pp. xx-xxi, 143. Nevertheless, the city remained the undisputed seat of secular and ecclesiastical government in the county; and the Bail and cathedral close contained the residences of several prominent Lincolnshire gentlemen. SP28/193, pt. 2, f. 48.

Under a new charter issued in 1628, the city was governed by a corporation consisting of 13 aldermen (one of whom served annually as mayor), between 30 and 45 common councilmen, two sheriffs, a recorder and numerous other minor officers. Royal Charters of the City of Lincoln ed. W. de G. Birch (1906),200-52. The aldermen who had served as mayor were magistrates for the city; the returning officers were the two sheriffs. The right of election rested with the freemen, although the corporation and the leading citizens seem to have exercised a decisive influence in this area. Royal Charters of Lincoln ed. Birch, 233; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Lincoln’. The exact method of election is not clear, but it seems likely that the office-holders and ‘best’ citizens selected their two preferred candidates and then simply presented them to the electorate for its automatic endorsement. The number of voters in this period is not known; by the early 1680s, it was over 400. HP Commons 1660-1690.

The dominant electoral interest at Lincoln during the early seventeenth century was that of the godly local knight Sir Thomas Grantham, who was returned for the city to almost every Parliament between 1597 and 1628. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Lincoln’. His death in 1633 led to a weakening of the family’s influence, however, and in the elections to the Short Parliament on 6 April 1640, the city returned Grantham’s eldest son Thomas for the junior place; the senior place was taken by one of the county’s foremost Laudians, Dr John Farmerie, the chancellor of the diocese of Lincoln and a resident of the city parish of St Peter in Eastgate. C219/42/1/109. Farmerie had initially tried his luck in the county elections, but he and his running mate, the city’s recorder Charles Dallison, had been defeated. Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. Farmerie probably owed his subsequent election at Lincoln to his interest as the de facto bishop of Lincoln (John Williams, the actual bishop, having been imprisoned on charges of subornation of perjury in 1637) and to the support of what seems to have been a strong anti-puritan element within the corporation and freeman body. Infra, ‘John Farmerie’. The suggestion that his electoral patron at Lincoln was George Manners†, 7th earl of Rutland, has no basis in the available evidence. B.P. Levack, Civil Lawyers in Eng. 1603-41 (Oxford, 1973), 45, 229. Grantham, for his part, was elected primarily on his interest as the city’s most prominent gentry property-owner, although he may also have received support as a result of his family’s links with the county’s godly interest. Infra, ‘Thomas Grantham’.

In the elections to the Long Parliament on 19 October 1640, Grantham took the senior place at the expense of Farmerie, with the junior place being taken by the godly local squire John Broxolme. At least nine of the aldermen and a further 30 of the leading citizens were named as parties to the indenture. C219/43/2/32. The disastrous outcome of the second bishops’ war that summer had probably destroyed any chance that Farmerie may have had of retaining his seat at Lincoln. Broxolme, a Forced-Loan refuser, probably owed his return to the strength of his interest as head of the city’s leading gentry family after the Granthams and perhaps also to his support for the reform of Caroline ‘abuses’. Infra, ‘John Broxolme’.

By the summer of 1642, the civic elite appears to have been either divided, or uncertain, in its allegiance. When the parliamentarian lord lieutenant of the county Francis Willoughby, 4th or 5th Baron Willoughby and his deputies arrived at Lincoln early in June, they found the mayor and the office-holders ‘very forward’ in obeying orders to muster the city’s trained bands. ‘Only the Bail of Lincoln and most of the close of the great church [Lincoln cathedral] neglected to appear’ – a group headed by the city’s recorder, Dallison, ‘whom we may justly suspect not to be well-affected to the service, and some others of his leaven (popishly inclined) near the great cathedral’. LJ v. 131b. A few weeks later, it was reported that the mayor had delivered the keys of the county magazine to Lord Willoughby and had refused to publish the king’s proclamation forbidding the execution of the Militia Ordinance. Bodl. Nalson XII/I, f. 35; CSP Dom. p. 342. Soon afterwards, however, the mayor repented his defiance of the king orders and went to York to obtain a royal pardon. HMC 5th Rep. i. 141. On returning to Lincoln he published the king’s proclamation as ordered, although several of his fellow senior officeholders apparently continued to muster the militia as Willoughby had instructed. HMC 5th Rep. i. 141; LJ v. 216b, 227b. When Charles himself visited the city on 15 July 1642, he appears to have been loyally received by the corporation, with the recorder, Dallison, making a speech in which he offered the king ‘myself, estate and fortune’, adding that ‘I have warrant from the mayor of this city and the whole body of the corporation to beseech your majesty to accept of the like offer from them’. A Speech Delivered to His Maiesty, by the Recorder of Lincoln (1642, E.200.56). By early 1643, it appears that relatively well-defined royalist and parliamentarian factions had emerged in the city, with the result that several of the aldermen were ‘plundered, imprisoned and sequestered’ and removed from office for their adherence to one side or other. Infra, ‘William Marshall’; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 246; J. G. Williams, ‘Lincoln civic insignia’, Lincs. N and Q, viii. 101-2. Unfortunately, the corporation minutes have not survived for the period 1638-53, and it is therefore difficult to ascertain the extent of partisan commitment among the leading citizens.

Both of the city’s MPs sided with Parliament in the civil war and were closely involved in sustaining the parliamentary war effort in Lincolnshire. Their efforts and those of the Lincolnshire county committee to protect the region against royalist incursion proved unsuccessful, however, and on two occasions in 1643-4 and again in 1648, Lincoln was seized and plundered by the king’s forces. Add. 5508, f. 9; HMC Hastings, ii. 128-9; HMC 7th Rep. 144; The Moderate Intelligencer no. 172 (29 June-6 July 1648), sig. L1111111 (E.451.15). On the first occasion, in August 1643, the city’s parliamentarian mayor, William Marshall*, was either removed from office or fled the city (or both) and a royalist was installed in his place. Lincs. Archives, Lincoln City Officials, f. 16; Anon. Names of the Mayors, Bailiffs, Sheriffs, and Chamberlains of Lincoln (c.1787), 40, 114; Williams, ‘Lincoln civic insignia’, 102. When the parliamentarians re-took the city in the autumn of 1643, they, in turn, displaced two of the aldermen. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 246; Williams, ‘Lincoln civic insignia’, 102. A further three aldermen were displaced in 1647 for having accepted commissions in the king’s army. Hill, Lincoln, 164.

Broxolme died in 1647, and in the subsequent ‘recruiter’ election, on 24 May 1647, Lincoln returned a leading member of the Lincolnshire county committee, Colonel Thomas Lister, whose residence was at Coleby, a few miles south of Lincoln. It is likely that Lister enjoyed at least some proprietorial interest in the Lincoln area, but his election probably owed more to his prominence in the county’s civil and military councils. Infra, ‘Thomas Lister’. The mayor and 17 of the citizens, including the future Lincoln MP Original Peart, were parties to the indenture. C219/43/2/34. Both Lister and Thomas Grantham retained their seats at Pride’s Purge, Lister becoming one of the most active figures in the Rump.

As befitting a county capital, Lincoln retained both of its seats under the Instrument of Government, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament on 12 July 1654 it returned two of the city’s most prominent parliamentarian aldermen, William Marshall and Original Peart. The parties to the indenture were 16 named individuals and ‘divers other citizens and inhabitants’. C219/44, pt. 2, unfol. Marshall, an affluent mercer, was the younger brother of Alderman Robert Marshall*, who was perhaps the most influential figure within the corporation by the mid-1650s (although he was not among those named on the indenture). Infra, ‘William Marshall’. Peart, who had served his apprenticeship in Lincoln, had been a captain in the New Model army during the 1640s and owned a considerable amount of property in the city. He was also an admirer of one of the cathedral preachers, the Presbyterian divine George Scortreth. Infra, ‘Original Peart’. Marshall and Peart may well have faced a challenge from Humphrey Walcott – a gentleman residing in the city parish of St Mark’s, who had represented Lincolnshire in the Nominated Parliament and would represent the city in 1656. It was probably no accident that he had obtained his freedom of the city on 10 July 1654, just two days before the election. Infra, ‘Humphrey Walcott’; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/5 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1653-4), f. 4.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Peart replaced Marshall in the senior seat, with the junior place being taken by Walcott. Their election may well have represented a victory for the city’s godly, pro-Cromwellian faction, which had been locked in a ‘long and hot difference’ with a powerful group of royalist sympathisers among the senior office-holders and common councilmen. TSP iv. 197. This struggle appears to have centred on control of municipal office, and it had come to a head in the year preceding the election in a dispute over the appointment of a new town clerk. The godly faction, finding itself outmanoeuvred in the autumn of 1655, had appealed to the protectoral council and to Major-general Edward Whalley* against the activities of ‘wicked’ magistrates in the city and the election of a delinquent mayor and town clerk. CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 364, 399; TSP iv. 273; Hill, Lincoln, 165. The royalist mayor was promptly displaced, but the godly faction was not powerful enough to re-instate its own appointee as town clerk. In an attempt to reach a compromise, Whalley intruded a candidate of his own, a firm Cromwellian, for the post. Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/6 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1656-1710), pp. 95-6; Hill, Lincoln, 165. This was evidently regarded by both factions as an unwarrantable intervention in municipal affairs, but threatened by Whalley with the removal of its sword and charter, the corporation had no choice but to bow to what it later described as the major-general’s ‘usurped, illegal, [and] pretended power’. Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/6, pp. 95-6. To satisfy Whalley further, the corporation admitted him and his lieutenant, Major-general James Berry*, as freemen in July 1656. Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/6, f. 57v. Whereas the two Lincoln MPs were allowed to take their seats, about 100 other Members were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the government. On 22 September, Peart and Walcott were among the 29 MPs who voted against a motion that the excluded Members apply to the council for approbation to sit, which was interpreted as support for ‘the bringing in of the excluded Members into the House’ and was comprehensively defeated. Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166; CJ vii. 426b. Most of these 29 MPs have been accounted Presbyterians. M.J. Tibbetts, ‘Parliamentary Parties under Oliver Cromwell’ (Bryn Mawr Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1944), 127-9.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in the winter of 1658-9, the city returned Alderman Robert Marshall and Thomas Meres. Marshall was the most prominent of the city’s parliamentarian alderman, and his heir and namesake, Robert Marshall junior, had been elected recorder by the corporation in November 1658 in place of Henry Pelham*. Infra, ‘Robert Marshall’; LA, L1/1/1/6, f. 57v, p. 76. Meres, an episcopalian, resided in the cathedral close and was the son of the civil-war royalist Dr Roger Meres, chancellor of the cathedral. Infra, ‘Thomas Meres’. He probably owed his election to the strong body of royalist sympathisers in the city that had vied for control of the corporation in 1655. At the Restoration, the corporation sent a loyal address to the king and returned him the city’s fee farm rent which, from ‘inevitable necessity and self-preservation’, it had purchased during the interregnum for £700. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 67.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, the city returned Meres (knighted that June) and another royalist, John Monson†, who were re-elected to the Cavalier Parliament the following year. The assault on the power of the parliamentarian ruling clique, which had begun in the spring of 1660, concluded in August 1662 with the removal by the corporation commissioners (who included the arch-royalists Meres, Monson and Dallison) of seven aldermen – among them Robert and William Marshall – and 16 other office-holders. PC2/55, f. 132; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/6, pp. 89-90, 97-8, 101, 107, 111-13; Hill, Lincoln, 171-3.