Grantham

Grantham lay on the Great North Road about 20 miles south of Lincoln and 10 miles south-east of Newark-on-Trent. Royal Charters of Grantham 1463-1688 ed. G.H. Martin (Leicester, 1963), 11. In medieval times, the town had been a centre for the wool trade, but by the seventeenth century its economy seems to have been based largely on its markets and fairs, the buying and selling of livestock, and the leather and victualling trades. Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 11; B. Street, Historical Notes on Grantham (Grantham, 1857), 127; Borough Government in Newton’s Grantham: the Hall Bk. of Grantham, 1649-62 ed. J.B. Manterfield (Lincoln Rec. Soc. cvi), xxvii; R.H. Quilter, ‘Hist. of Grantham to the End of the 15th Century’ (Leeds Univ. BA thesis, 1929), 52-3. Evidence from the heart tax records and other sources suggests that the town’s population in the mid-seventeenth century stood at between 1,800 and 2,000 people. E179/140/754, mm. 7-8, 11; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, xiii. From its incorporation in 1463, Grantham had been governed principally by an alderman (or mayor) and 12 ‘comburgesses’, who held office for life and, with the alderman, served as justices of the peace for the borough. Further offices were added to the municipal cursus honorum under successive charters, until by the 1630s the corporation consisted of the alderman, the comburgesses (or ‘1st twelve’), 12 ‘burgesses’ (or ‘2nd twelve’), 35 or so common councillors, a recorder and a host of lesser officers. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, ff. 1-1v; Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 14, 15, 19; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, xiv-xviii. The town had first sent Members to Parliament in 1467, and the right of election was vested in the freemen. The electorate numbered at least 160 in the 1660 general election. However, since the corporation controlled admission to the freeman roll, it generally exercised a decisive influence in parliamentary electoral matters. The returning officer was the alderman, who was elected annually from the comburgesses. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, ff. 83v, 86v, 93; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 298, 306; HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1660-90; Quilter, ‘Hist. of Grantham’, 36.

For several hundred years, Grantham’s manorial rights and tolls had been part of the queen’s jointure, and with the calling of the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Henrietta Maria attempted to assert her interest in the borough. Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 20. In mid-March 1640, the corporation received a letter from ‘divers lords’ in the queen’s name ‘touching the choosing of burgesses’. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 83. The corporation, however, seizing on the fact that this letter had not been accompanied by the election indenture, decided to ignore the queen’s request and to oblige instead the town’s established patron, George Manners†, 7th earl of Rutland, whose seat lay at nearby Belvoir. HP Commons 1558-1603. On 21 March 1640, the freemen returned the earl’s kinsman and business adviser Henry Pelham of Belvoir and his step-son Sir Edward Baeshe of Stanstead Abbots, Hertfordshire. C219/42/1/134. Pelham was the town’s deputy-recorder under Rutland and had recently been appointed the corporation’s retained legal counsel in recognition of his ‘love and fidelity’ towards the town. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, ff. 6, 44v, 83.

When the Short Parliament convened early in April 1640, a group of the townsmen petitioned the Houses against one of the town’s two vicars, Thomas Hurst, who, it was alleged, had placed the communion table ‘altar-wise’ in the church and had banned all ‘unauthorised’ preaching on the sabbath. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 88v. This petition suggests the existence of a puritan, or at least strongly anti-Laudian, faction in the town – despite the corporation’s efforts to promote religious ‘conformity’ among the inhabitants. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 49; H. Hajzyk, ‘The Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1980), 354-6. It also reveals that some of the passions that had provoked a violent quarrel in 1627 between the alderman and another of the vicars – an Arminian cleric – over the positioning of the communion table in Grantham parish church. Street, Notes on Grantham, 85-7; E. Venables, ‘The altar-controversy at Grantham in the seventeenth century’, Reps. and Pprs. Assoc. Architectural Socs. xiii. 46-61; Holmes, Lincs. 114-16. However, in 1640 the alderman and his brethren fully supported the vicar, arguing that to allow unauthorised preachers, even at the petitioners’ own expense, was unreasonable. They also solicited the support of the Laudian chancellor of the diocese, Dr John Farmerie*. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 88v. The Commons took the petitioners’ side, however, summoning Hurst to appear before the committee of religion. CJ ii. 7b; Aston’s Diary, 22. Hurst went on to become a royalist and was ejected from his livings by the earl of Manchester in 1644 as a malignant minister. Walker Revised, 252-3.

On 16 October 1640, in the elections to the Long Parliament, the town returned Pelham once again, but in place of Baeshe, who does not seem to have sought re-election, it chose Thomas Hussey I, the eldest son of the prominent local landowner Sir Edward Hussey*. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 86v. The election indenture was signed by nine of the comburgesses and 30 of the freemen. C219/43/2/32. Both Pelham and Hussey agreed to serve in Parliament free of charge, with Hussey bestowing £5 upon the corporation in gratitude for his election. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, ff. 86v-87. On 30 October, four days before the Long Parliament assembled, the corporation drew up a letter to the Houses complaining that some of the townsmen – probably the same group that had petitioned the Short Parliament – were agitating for the removal of the organ lately installed in the parish church and against the placing of the communion table altar-wise. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 88v. In language suggestive of men sympathetic to the Laudian ideal of ‘decency’ in church worship, the alderman and senior office-holders defended both the organ and the position of the communion table as conducive to order in divine service and the better edification of the communicants. But neither Pelham nor Hussey would agree to present the letter, describing it as unfit to be laid before Parliament. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 96v.

Following Hussey’s death in March 1641, several local gentlemen apparently considered standing for the borough, including John Brownlow of nearby Belton (elder brother of Sir William Brownlow*) and William Welby*, who were both granted their freedom on 18 March. Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 92v. On 29 March, however, the freemen ‘openly and freely’ elected the godly Lincolnshire knight and veteran Parliament-man Sir William Armyne, who had been pricked for sheriff in 1639 and had thus been prevented from standing in the 1640 elections. Infra, ‘Sir William Armyne’; Lincs. RO, Grantham Hall Bk. 1, f. 93. Both Pelham and Armyne sided with Parliament at the outbreak of civil war and were involved in sustaining the parliamentary war-effort at local and national level. The municipal elite, on the other hand, was far from unanimous in its support for Parliament – indeed, there is evidence to suggest that many in the corporation and a sizeable number of the inhabitants were strongly royalist in sympathy. Mercurius Aulicus no. 3 (15-21 Jan. 1643), 23 (E.245.36); no. 13 (26 Mar-2 Apr. 1643), 155 (E.96.5); Grantham during the Interregnum: the Hall Bk. of Grantham, 1641-9 ed. B. Couth (Lincoln Rec. Soc. lxxxiii), 21-2, 29, 37, 72-3, 91-2, 94, 97-8, 103, 119; Street, Notes on Grantham, 93, 100, 103-4; Holmes, Lincs. 161. One parliamentarian newsbook writer described Grantham as the most ‘malignant’ of any town in Lincolnshire. The Scotish Dove no. 104 (10-17 Oct. 1645), 832 (E.305.6).

The presence of an organised puritan, or proto-parliamentarian, faction among Grantham’s freemen can perhaps be inferred from the election of Armyne, who was one of the acknowledged leaders of the Lincolnshire godly. However, it was not until the very end of 1646 that the town’s parliamentarians appear to have gained the upper hand in the corporation, reversing the ‘illegal proceedings’ of the town’s royalists in 1643 – when men loyal to Parliament had been forced to flee the town due to the ‘prevalency of the enemy’ – re-establishing Grantham’s pre-war weekly lecture and reducing the quorum in the alderman’s court to overcome the absenteeism of the royalist comburgesses. Grantham during the Interregnum ed. Couth, 70, 72-3, 79. With the introduction in the autumn of 1647 of parliamentary legislation for purging malignant office-holders, the town’s leading parliamentarians succeeded in removing or forcing the resignation of six of the comburgesses and another ten officeholders for offences ranging from holding correspondence with the enemy to serving in the king’s army. Grantham during the Interregnum ed. Couth, 91-2, 94, 97-8, 103, 119; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, xix.

The civil war destabilised the town’s finances as well as its municipal affairs. Changing hands at least four times during the mid-1640s, Grantham was heavily assessed by both sides and was over £2,000 in debt by 1649. Grantham during the Interregnum ed. Couth, 29, 30-1, 80, 137; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, xxiv, 10; Holmes, Lincs. 161, 163, 164, 165. It was only by borrowing large sums from William Welby and other local gentlemen that the corporation was able to purchase the town’s tolls and fee farm rents. E121/3/3/20; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 10, 19, 24. Some of the impetus behind this and other municipal initiatives during the early 1650s seems to have come from the prominent civil-war parliamentarian William Bury*, who had been elected a comburgess following the removal of the royalist faction in the autumn of 1647. Infra, ‘William Bury’; Grantham during the Interregnum ed. Couth, 54, 67, 95, 103, 111, 116, 127-8, 133, 139; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, passim. Bury was instrumental in securing the appointment of the Presbyterian divine John Angell as town preacher in 1652. Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, xxxi-xxxii; Seaver, Puritan Lectureships (Stanford, CA, 1970), 104-5. As this appointment suggests, there is no evidence that the corporation was strict in tendering the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and the Lords), although it does appear that the vote in municipal elections was denied to those disqualified under parliamentary legislation. Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 170.

Following Pelham’s seclusion at Pride’s Purge in December 1648 and the death of Sir William Armyne in April 1651, Grantham was left unrepresented in the Rump. Under the Instrument of Government, the town lost one of its parliamentary seats, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 it returned Bury. Unfortunately, the corporation minutes contained no details of this or of the two subsequent elections under the protectorate. Having apparently neglected to apply the Engagement with any rigour, the corporation resolved in October 1655 that the protector’s proclamation prohibiting delinquents bearing office or participating in public elections be punctually observed. Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 198. The result was a spate of resignations and refusals to serve office. Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 210, 211, 213, 228, 232.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, the town returned its recorder, William Ellys (the Cromwellian solicitor-general), who was another firm Presbyterian – Bury having removed to Ireland, where he had been appointed to the Irish privy council. Infra, ‘William Bury’; ‘William Ellys’. Grantham regained its second seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, which saw the return of Ellys and the Gray’s Inn lawyer Thomas Skipwith, who was the son of one of the town’s leading inhabitants, Edward Skipwith. Infra, ‘Thomas Skipwith’. The elections to the 1660 Convention were hotly contested at Grantham, with Bury and Ellys losing on a poll to Skipwith and a local royalist gentleman. HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Grantham’.

At the Restoration, royalist sentiment among the freemen undermined the corporation’s electoral interest, while pressure from central government forced it to restore many of the officeholders displaced in the 1640s. HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Grantham’; Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, pp. xx, 300-3, 311, 319-20. The privy council, in 1661, claimed that Grantham corporation ‘was, and still continues, in the hands of some such who ... were and are persons disaffected to regal government and adhered to the late usurpers and strengthened themselves by making divers persons of their own principles to be freemen of the said corporation’. PC2/55, f. 75. In August 1662, the commissioners for corporations removed one comburgess – even though he had taken the ‘several oaths and declarations’ required by statute – and six other office-holders. Hall Bk. of Grantham ed. Manterfield, 342-4.