Worcestershire

Seventeenth century Worcestershire was a comparatively populous and wealthy county. In 1662, only in London and 11 other English counties were there fewer acres per fireplace, as recorded by the collectors of the hearth tax. Of the English and Welsh counties, over 60 in number, Worcestershire came sixteenth in the total tax burden imposed on it by one of the Ship Money writs, and nineteenth in its share of the 1641 subsidy. Its per capita tax burden was above the national average. R.H. Silcock, ‘County government in Worcestershire, 1603-60’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1974), 20. The county was well-placed to benefit from trade in normal times, and was strategically important in abnormal ones. Six main roads led through the county, a number of them leading to Worcester, from whence they fanned to points west, in Wales and the marches. An important north-south route was that which linked Bristol with Staffordshire, via Worcester and Birmingham. Silcock, thesis, 8-9. Water-borne communications were important in the county: none more so than the navigable Severn, which linked Gloucester and the Bristol Channel with the towns of the Severn Valley up to Shrewsbury. By the mid-seventeenth century, there were serious attempts to add the Warwickshire Avon up to Stratford-upon-Avon, and the River Salwarpe near Droitwich to this commercial network. M. Wanklyn, ‘The Severn navigation in the seventeenth century’, MH xiii. 34-58.D. P. Hussey et al. Gloucester Coastal Port Books, 1575-1765 (Dudley, 1995). Worcester was an important staging post west of Oxford, and was naturally seen by the military strategists of the civil war as a gateway to Wales. Not as strikingly as in neighbouring Warwickshire, where the Avon valley provided a visible demarcation line, Worcestershire, too, had its Arden and Felden regions, even though those words were not current in the more western county. The south and east were arable country, the north and west were more wooded and industrial, while the region west of the Severn towards Herefordshire was largely enclosed pasture. Silcock, thesis, 11-12. Industrial activity was varied in the county. In the north, iron-working, particularly the production of tools, was concentrated. Further south, in the middle of the county, nail-making was common. The cloth trade was represented by the manufacture of traditional broadcloths in Worcester, while smaller boroughs enjoyed a reputation for specialist production: caps in Bewdley, gloves in Evesham. Droitwich was renowned as a salt-manufacturing town. W.H.B. Court, Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600-1838 (1938); A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 8-9.

There were few peers in Worcestershire, and the county government was effectively in the hands of the gentry, estimated at about 350 in number around 1642. The gentry of the county formed a proportion of the total populace comparable with that found in other diverse counties such as Kent and Lancashire, and cannot be considered exceptional. As in Warwickshire, nearly half the marriage alliances clinched by gentry heirs were with other Worcestershire families, and of the rest, three-quarters were with families of adjacent counties. No single family could be said to have dominated Worcestershire politics. Generally, there were more gentry in the south and east of the county; the parliamentary representation of the county in this period did not favour gentry from any particular part of the shire. Silcock, thesis, 22, 24-6, 28, 319; Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, 39. The peculiarity of Worcestershire politics was its subjection to the authority of the council in the marches of Wales, which provided MPs and others with a campaigning cause against it in the first decade of the century, although after 1614, this opposition was not organized, and rather more muted. P. Williams, ‘The Attack on the Council in the Marches, 1603-42’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion 1961 pt. 1, 4-5; Silcock, thesis, 216-21. The boroughs had problems of their own, and Worcester had a history of tensions between the cathedral authorities and the citizens. None of these had significant impact on the parliamentary elections for the county.

There is nothing to suggest that the election for the Short Parliament was in any way contentious, and the successful candidates, who must be presumed to have been unopposed, were both leading gentry figures, chosen for their standing within the county. For Sir Thomas Lyttelton, a leading gentleman from the north of the county, this was the sixth Parliament he had attended, while Sir John Pakington, of Westwood Park, near Droitwich, was a youth whose election must have been more out of respect for his pedigree and close links with the Coventry family of Croome Court than for anything that was expected of him in the House. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. xxv), 45. A very different atmosphere prevailed when the election for the next assembly took place on 21 October.

On that occasion, Lyttelton was again a candidate. Pakington had decided to take a seat for Aylesbury, where he had a dominant interest, having been double-returned there for the Short Parliament, and where he may well have calculated there would be less opposition. There was a half-hearted candidacy by ‘Mr Dingle’, probably Edward Dineley of Charlton near Evesham, brother-in-law of Samuel Sandys* of Ombersley, who later became a commissioner in the royalist government of Worcester. Procs. LP ii. 626; Nash, Collections, i. 274; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 32, 97, 116, 143, 146, 161, 163, 318, 327. As no votes were recorded for him in the account of the election, it is likely that he withdrew at an early stage. There is evidence of an orchestrated campaign by Sir William Russell, who had emerged in the 1630s as an anti-Court opponent of William Sandys*, promoter of the Avon navigation. ‘William Sandys’, infra. Russell was a deputy lieutenant, and took it upon himself to organize what he called his own ‘side’, once he saw that a poll was going to take place. He first called to the poll men and their tenants in whom he had least confidence, and followed them up with his ‘nearest friends’, who could be relied upon to stay around at the poll long enough to vote. Worcs. Archives, 705: BA 24/647/3. This tactic suggests that the traditional Worcestershire practice of calling voters to the poll by the hundreds of the county persisted. Silcock, thesis, 203, 254. The appearance for the first time as a candidate at an election of Humphrey Salwey, a godly reformer of quarter sessions, and the transfer from the seat of Droitwich of the experienced parliamentary lawyer, John Wylde, is further evidence of a planned campaign to capture the county seats by a group motivated by opposition to Lyttelton’s perceived shortcomings, if not anything wider. His opponents were alleged to have put it about that Lyttelton had ‘in former Parliaments done no service for the country, and that none but a fool or a knave would give his voice for him.’ Procs. LP ii. 626.

Observers of the election noted that there was first a call of voices in the Castle Yard, near the cathedral, in which Lyttelton ‘had the canvass’. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 48. When the acclamation was for Lyttelton and Salwey, the sheriff apparently adjourned the election to Pitchcroft, the large meadow below the city walls, on the Severn, which cost Lyttelton many supporters at what then apparently became a poll, in which votes were recorded by the sheriff. At 11 in the morning, the poll was halted, and adjourned until 2 pm at the bishop’s palace yard, back within the city walls. Voters from the city who held lands in the county were denied a voice at this meeting, and Lyttelton withdrew, conceding that the campaign against him was inexorable. His private interview with the sheriff later that day, to establish why the first canvass had been denied, met with only a promise that he would find out later. Procs. LP ii. 626-7. Altogether, at least 1,270 votes are thought to have been cast in this election. Procs. LP ii. 681.

When the case was later examined by the privileges committee of the House of Commons, Lyttelton’s opponents emphasized the disorderliness of the first calling of voices at the Castle Yard, and alleged that the adjournment was in the interests of a fair and regular poll. Lyttelton’s voices had included ‘boys, women and poor people’, while those who wished to call out for Salwey and Wylde could not gain access to the restricted space of the Castle Yard. It was certainly true that Pitchcroft was an open field, where there were no problems of assembly. Procs. LP ii. 680-1. At Pitchcroft, the poll was supervised informally by two senior gentry, Sir William Devereux and Sir John Rous†, and the 38 names recorded on the election return included well-known county figures, even if it is striking that only the first ten were of esquire status or higher. C219/43/3/66. It was evidently the case that there were factions mobilized at this election, and that the merits or otherwise of polling over election by voices were lost in the recriminations which followed: three days of debate at the committee for privileges, and a physical scuffle between Wylde and Sir Henry Herbert* over the reputation of Sir William Russell. ‘Sir Henry Herbert’ infra.

The successful candidates of October 1640 held their seats throughout the 1640s, and the partnership of Wylde and Salwey, in various ways a practical one throughout the decade, was only broken by the death of Humphrey Salwey in December 1652. With the turning-out of the Rump Parliament in April 1653, any plans there might have been for a by-election would have been swept aside, first by talk of the ‘new representative’, and then by the arrangements for the Nominated Assembly. In Worcestershire, the godly interest was influenced by a group sympathetic to the energetic minister of Kidderminster, Richard Baxter, and by the Worcester-based county committee. In December 1652, Baxter had presented to Parliament a reaffirmation of support for a state-funded ministry, The Humble Petition of Worcestershire, for which he had enlisted the support of John Bridges, new proprietor of the advowson of Kidderminster, and Thomas Foley, the plutocrat arms supplier to the government, both of whom were to sit for the county in Parliaments of the 1650s. The Humble Petition of... Worcestershire (1652), 3, 6-8 (E.684.13); VCH Worcs. iii. 172, 175. For men of this conservative religious stamp, John James of Trippledine was a commendable figure, having an association with Edward Harley* of the Brampton Bryan family friendly with Baxter, and indeed connected by kinship with him. HMC Portland, iii. 203; Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 221. James’s association with the county was through his birth, at Astley in the county, and through prominence as military governor of Worcester after the battle with the Scots in September 1651. Richard Salwey, the other selected Member, was of a different political complexion. Baxter attributed the removal of Edward Whalley* from the command of the New Model forces before Worcester in 1646 to Salwey, and thought the arrival of Thomas Rainborowe* as his successor was engineered ‘to gratify the sectaries’. Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), i. 55-6. Salwey acted as a supplier of arms from London for the use of the Worcestershire county committee in the late 1640s. SP28/187, pt. 1, f. 37. He played a role in the breaking of the Rump, and was not afraid to speak his mind to Lord General Oliver Cromwell*, who sought to keep Salwey in some active role in public life. In the event, Salwey abstained from participating in either the Nominated Assembly itself or its council of state, but his nomination for Worcestershire reflected, his unquestioned godly credentials and his continuing importance as a commissioner for the navy. His local credentials as a son of Humphrey Salwey counted for less, and he owed nothing to Baxter’s influence.

The county committee had not exercised as much patronage over the nominations to the 1653 Assembly as it had at its disposal, but this deficiency was made good with the poll for the first protectorate Parliament, conducted at Pitchcroft on 12 July 1654. Those 14 whose names were entered on the election return were friends or members of the committee, among them Daniel Dobbins of Kidderminster, a former candidate for a seat at Bewdley, and Gervase Bucke, the first under-sheriff of the county to be appointed after Worcestershire came wholly under parliamentary control in 1646, and a militia commissioner under the Rump. Madresfield Court Muniments, 989; Worcs. Archives, 705:7/BA 7335/40/4/2. William Moore and Thomas Millward were also committeemen, and Theophilus Andrewes* was just emerging at Evesham as the borough’s leading lawyer. SP28/187 pt. 2, ff. 233-48; 188 pt. 1, ff. 77, 91-2, 140, 301. Nicholas Lechmere was the main beneficiary of this committee presence at the poll, and his influence accounted for the success on the same platform of his associates Sir Thomas Rous, Edward Pytts and Talbot Badger. E.P. Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere (1883), 24, 25, 26. Only John Bridges stood a little removed from the Lechmere electoral machine. Bridges, like the others, was a godly conservative, enthusiastic for a state-maintained ministry. He played no part in the county committee, however; his links with Baxter and the army, with his status as a leading landowner in Kidderminster were enough to ensure his return on a separate interest.

There were signs that the county committee was experiencing difficulty with a reviving royalism in Worcestershire by 1654. The appointment as sheriff of Sir Henry Lyttelton, son of Sir Thomas, may have been intended to draw the sting of the royalists; such a move would have been consistent with the preference for social harmony among the gentry, regardless of political differences, that marked Lechmere’s approach to such matters. List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 159; Bodl. Rawl. A15, f. 562. Certainly the 1656 elections saw at least one unexpected development. The military interest was transferred smoothly from John Bridges to James Berry, another friend or more accurately former friend, of Richard Baxter’s. This relationship was probably more of a coincidence than a serious political factor; it was Berry’s position as major-general for the county that landed the seat for him. He chose not to sit for Monmouthshire or Herefordshire, two other seats in his province for which he had also been returned. CJ vii. 432a. The election of John Nanfan was the surprise, and a further indication of the limits of the county committee’s power. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 274. Nanfan was something of a political ambidexter, ‘a justice for all times’, in Baxter’s phrase, who either before or just after his election to Parliament denounced Baxter at the Worcester assizes for organizing a petition against popery. Baxter wrote to Nanfan to deny responsibility for the petition, which attracted signatures from magistrates, the grand jury and ‘thousands of the county’, and admonished the MP for knowingly misattributing the petition to him. Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 198, 246. The origins of this petition, which has not survived, suggests that the county committee must have had a hand in it; Baxter’s denial and Nanfan’s denunciation indicate the fissiparous tendencies in county politics at this time.

The election to the 1659 Parliament, fought on the traditional allocation of two seats to the county, were a further demonstration of Lechmere’s interest. He noted frankly in his journal that he and Thomas Foley had spent £614 in the inns of Worcester to secure votes, and a substantial proportion of this must have come from the fabulously wealthy Foley. Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 28. Their opponents, Nanfan and John Talbot† of Salwarpe, represented families that were certainly not supporters of the protectorate. Talbot was the son of Shervington Talbot, a very active royalist commissioner of array who had been imprisoned in Warwick castle in 1644, and then fined over £2,000 for his active opposition to Parliament. VCH Worcs. iii. 207; CCC 1035; Nash, Collections, ii. 336-7. The election took place at Windmill Field, outside the city of Worcester, and must have been well-attended, to account for Lechmere’s comment that it was ‘a very full county’. Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 28. It is noticeable that among those whose names were on the return as electors were known royalists such as Samuel Sandys* and Henry Bromley of Holt, who joined with committeemen like Gervase Bucke and William Collins*, and Lechmere clients like Edward Dineley of Hanley Castle. Worcs. Archives, Coventry mss, box 13, election indenture 19 Jan. 1659; Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 28, 48. The disappointed Talbot moved into resistance to the government after the collapse of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. On 4 May 1659, he was one of a group of plotters seeking recognition by Charles Stuart for their activism. Talbot was a first cousin of Charles Lyttelton†, son of Sir Thomas*, and both Talbot and Charles Lyttelton were involved in the rising of Sir George Boothe*. Neither man was a successful rebel: Talbot was arrested early in August, and Lyttelton and his followers fled from the Wrekin after a failed attempt to assemble a force. Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 244-5, 272-3. The circumstances of the rising helped embitter the atmosphere in the county, and ensured that the elections to the Convention were keenly fought, but the 1659 election had suggested that a return to normal electoral politics had been under way. That such political opposites as William Collins and Samuel Sandys, who both signed the election indenture, could even allow their names to appear on the same piece of parchment suggests that a degree of settlement in Worcestershire might at least have been possible, had the Cromwellian regime not collapsed for reasons beyond the control of those in the county.