Worcester

The population of Worcester in 1646 has been estimated to have been around 8,000. This is a figure probably swollen by about 25 per cent from pre-war levels, produced by influxes of refugees from the countryside into the walled city during the civil war. Great differences of population and wealth were apparent between the wards of the city. St Michael’s, around the cathedral close, was the home of the wealthy and privileged minority of gentry and higher clergy. High Ward, containing the High Street businesses, was consistently throughout the century marked by the highest wealth per capita of the city population. It contained many merchants’ houses and the best inns. At the opposite end of the social spectrum, St Nicholas ward, in the north of the city and furthest away from the cathedral, housed many poor families, including those in the sprawling suburb of the Tything, beyond the Foregate. I. Roy, S. Porter, ‘Population of Worcester in 1646’, Local Population Studies xxviii. 32-43.

From as early as 1466, the chamber of Worcester comprised two groups known as the Forty-Eight and the Twenty-Four. Recruitment to both bodies was by co-option. From the Twenty-Four were chosen six aldermen, of which, after 1621, five were permanent. The sixth was the ex-mayor, who became high alderman for one year. The charter of 1555 was considered inadequate by the chamber; and by May 1605 it was set on securing separate county status for the city, which would provide it with separate tax accounting mechanisms from those of the rest of Worcestershire. John Cowcher* played a prominent part in this campaign, in which compromise was always regarded as an acceptable outcome. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 83, 90. On 23 March 1616, the corporation succeeded in securing a new charter, which gave the city a new court of record to act on commissions of gaol delivery. This still fell short of what was felt to be the city’s due, and in December 1619 and April 1621, Cowcher was once more named to committees pursuing the city’s interest, and on 31 July 1621 was created permanent alderman so that his name could be inserted in another new charter, received on 16 October. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 8-9, 132, 137, 162, 169, 170. Two features of the new charter were rewards for the corporation’s persistent and consistent campaign: the city was now a county of itself, and its government was in the name of mayor, aldermen and citizens.

Cowcher’s involvement in the cause of charter reform pre-dates his first service as Member for the city. Even so, it is highly likely that his repeated election to represent Worcester owes much to his experience in this particular matter. He sat in all Parliaments between 1604 and 1624, the 1621 Parliament being particularly important as a possible avenue of influence for achieving the desired charter: Cowcher’s presence in London was naturally useful for the corporation. The paramount trading interest in Worcester before the civil war was that of the clothiers, and the Worcester Company of Weavers, Walkers and Clothiers was therefore the leading trade guild. Both John Cowcher (1595) and John Nashe* (1634) became high masters of the company, which did its best to protect the market for Worcester woollen cloth. Worcs. Archives, 705:232/BA 5955/2 f. 25v, 4a unfol., 1634. The right of the Worcester clothiers to sell at Blackwell Hall in the City of London was inadequate defence against competition from abroad and from those selling lighter textiles. Worcs. Archives, b705:232/BA 5955/4b. Cowcher made the defence of older clothing interests in Parliaments before 1640 a speciality. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Coucher’.

The difficulties faced by Worcester’s cloth trade were deep-seated and incapable of resolution within the city. An equally perennial problem, but one rooted almost entirely in local conflict and rivalry, was the friction between the chamber and the cathedral authorities. The city’s interest in achieving a charter with greater privileges was opposed by Gervase Babington, bishop 1597-1610, who feared the extension of civic authority in the cathedral close. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 6-7. Tensions between bishops and the dean and chapter on the one hand, and the city chamber on the other, were to be a recurrent feature of Worcester politics down to the civil war. On the surface, it was the reforms of Archbishop William Laud which brought these tensions to a head. Dean Roger Mainwaring reported to Laud on his reorganising of the cathedral management in September 1635. CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 394-5. By March 1637, the chamber, claiming the approval of the bishop and chapter, had chosen a new lecturer (the first of a series had been appointed by 1630 at the latest) as their way of addressing the shortage of preaching ministers in the city. CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 496-7; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, vol. 2, ff. 103, 113. The new dean, Christopher Potter, took exception to the lecturer’s using the cathedral pulpit and confided to Laud that the lecturer had been heard to call the choristers ‘altarmongers’ at the mayor’s house. CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 390-1. By 1639 the conflict had been exposed for what it really was: a dispute about protocol and the respective dignities of civic and cathedral officers. The bishop was more sympathetic to the citizens than the dean. Halceter, the lecturer, was subsequently shown to be no firebrand, and even Potter thought him ‘an honest, harmless man’. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 79, 106-8, 129-30, 189-90. During this sabre-rattling, the normal annual gifts of wine and sugar of the city chamber to the dean and the bishop continued uninterrupted. Dean Potter received a gift of wine as late as 1 November 1642. Avenues for discussion between the parties were kept open until the civil war impinged heavily on the city, after it became the headquarters of the king’s commission of array. Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, vol. 3, unfol. 1641.

The election of John Nashe and John Cowcher to both the Short and Long Parliaments was further evidence of this spirit of moderation and compromise. C219/42/2/4/80; C219/43/5/6/87. The franchise on which they were returned was doubtless the same narrow one which had worked effectively through the 1620s. The election often took place in the chamber, when the writ was received: in 1628 the election had taken place on 18 February, and the return not made until eight days later. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Worcester’. The most uncompromisingly reforming influence on the chamber in the early 1640s came not from the city’s MPs, but from the new recorder, John Wylde*, who ‘dined the company’ in August 1640 soon after his appointment. There is evidence that on the eve of the civil war, the city was courting county political leaders of whatever hue, as the 6th Baron Windsor (Thomas Windsor) was made a freeman at around the time of Wylde’s appointment, and William Sandys*, a deputy lieutenant and future royalist was fêted later that year. Lord Windsor, 2nd Baron Coventry (Thomas Coventry†) and Wylde received gifts in 1641, and presents to the chamber came from Sir Walter Devereux*, Sir Thomas Lyttelton* and, on the eve of his impeachment, from the Ship Money judge, Sir Robert Berkeley†. Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, vol. 3, unfol. 1640. Unlike other Worcestershire towns which returned burgesses to Parliament, such as Bewdley and Evesham, Worcester’s electoral choices were largely undisputed. There were none of the conflicts over the size of the electorate and the nature of the franchise which marked the smaller boroughs. This probably owes less to the contents of their respective charters than to a more developed civic culture in the city. Worcester seems to have maintained the dignities and desirability of membership of the Twenty-Four and Forty-Eight throughout this period, as it had done earlier. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 12-20. This sharp sense of what it meant to be a member of the Worcester chamber lay behind much of the continual disputing with the cathedral authorities.

The city chamber’s main interests in the Long Parliament were threefold: the decay of trade, the relationship with the cathedral, and the grievance of the council in the marches of Wales, which exercised authority in four English counties, including Worcestershire. The matter of Worcester’s complaints against the London Merchant Adventurers, whom they considered to be damaging their interests, was aired first in the House on 24 November 1640, and by February 1641, the Merchant Adventurers’ charter was being called into question. By May, however, nothing significant had been achieved, as Worcester’s case was swept aside by more pressing remedial legislation, and the clothiers joined with fellow-merchants of seven other counties to predict that thousands would soon march on London to obtain relief from the collapse of their trade. D’Ewes (N), 521-8; PA, Main Pprs. 6 May 1641.

Tension between the dean and chapter and the chamber of Worcester had not dissipated, but as in the 1630s, in 1640 it was primarily a dispute over property rights. A delegation of citizens, including Edward Elvines*, visited the dean and chapter in December 1640, to press their case over jurisdiction in the cathedral close, which had always been exempt from the chamber’s authority. On 18 November 1641, another meeting with Potter took place, against a background of articles against him having been preferred in the House of Commons. The citizens seemed willing to compromise, to judge from their repeated embassies to Oxford to see Potter. Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city accts. 1640-69, unfol. undated 1642; Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 342, 344, 349. He, too, was conciliatory. Potter and the chapter prepared a reply which reviewed the issues in dispute, including seating in the cathedral, schooling in the city and the chapter’s contributions to road repairs. He concluded his apologia to the chamber by remarking that he was ‘sorry to have lost their love’, but by 1641 the writing was on the wall for the cathedral hierarchy, and their greatest critics in Worcestershire were the county MPs, not the citizens of Worcester. Worcester Cathedral Lib. ms D312.

Work on exempting the four shires from the jurisdiction of the council in the marches began in June 1641, when a bill to this end was given a second reading. A committee for the larger question of whether the council should be abolished was given the task of dealing with the complaints of the English counties. On 14 July the Commons resolved that the jurisdiction did not extend to England, but the following month a bill for total abolition of the council was introduced. For its part, the city hired a lawyer to press its case in Parliament. CJ ii. 191b, 210a, 216b, 242b, 253b; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, vol. 3, unfol. 1641; Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 47-8; P. Styles, 'City of Worcester during the Civil Wars, 1640-60', Studies in Seventeenth Century West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978), 214.

The chamber of Worcester may well have considered that their concerns were finding genuine remedies in Parliament between 1640 and 1641. In February and March 1642 the Protestation was circulated among the city parishes for signing. There were few refusers, and the absentee in St Helen’s parish, ‘a dangerous person, one whom we know to be a papist and notoriously suspected to be a messenger from one papist to another’, was exceptional. Worcester appeared to be moving with the flow of godly reform. PA, Protestation Returns, Worcester city. Once the civil war broke out, however, legislation or any other palliative measures were swept to one side by the physical disruption to trade and civic life in the city. Worcester was occupied briefly by the forces of Parliament’s lord general, the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) in September 1642, and when they left they were accompanied by clergy such as the lecturers Hardwick and Halceter, and by some godly citizens, such as Edward Elvines*. Styles, 'City of Worcester', 216. Nehemiah Wharton, a junior officer with Essex, was shocked at what he found in Worcester: ‘The city is so vile, and the country so base, papistical, and atheistical and abominable, that it resembles Sodom, and is the very emblem of Gomorrah’. ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, Archaeologia, xxxv. 329-30.

Though hardly a dispassionate observation on the city, coming as it does from one who had lived in a more godly environment in London, it helps us avoid thinking of Worcester as either a reforming Protestant or a devout Laudian place. Both elements were to be found there, but neither had won the allegiance of the majority of the citizens. After Essex left the city, Worcester was from November 1642 in the hands of the king until July 1646. Styles, ‘City of Worcester’, 224. From March 1643, the Guildhall became the headquarters of the commissioners of array, when their poor relationship with the governor, Sir William Russell, became a main theme in their communications with the king’s advisers. Rating disputes in the county were another staple of their discussions. Bodl. Rawl. D918, f. 145, D924 ff. 148, 150-4. The civic government of the city stood up well to the garrisoning. The chamber maintained a stoutly independent line against Russell’s rates demands, and was evidently more sympathetic to him than were most of his gentry fellow commissioners. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 363-4, 368.

Commissions to establish the excise tax in Worcester were issued in May 1644; two months later, three leading citizens were empowered to take accounts of assessments in the city. Bodl. Dugdale 19, ff. 79, 89v, 104v. From January 1645, Samuel Sandys* was effectively governor of Worcester, replacing Russell. Sandys endorsed Prince Maurice’s hard line against the citizens; living within the garrison brought with it a duty to support the king actively by making financial contributions to the war effort. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xxv), 188. A growing sense of desperation at the royalists’ exactions did not weaken the vigour of the chamber. From a total of 14 and 15 meetings in 1640 and 1641 respectively, its members met between 23 and 25 times a year between 1643 and 1645, and their meetings peaked at 33 in 1646, the year the city and garrison surrendered to Parliament. Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 335-424.

The circumstances of the surrender of the garrison were to have repercussions for the later government of the city. The Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards and the Presbyterian-leaning Richard Baxter both considered that the replacement of Colonel Edward Whalley* by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* was an Independent or sectarian ploy to give themselves the credit for taking the city when the hard work had been done by Whalley. The firebrand Independent preacher Hugh Peter and Richard Salwey* were thought to have been behind this, their further motive considered to be the appointment of client ministers in the city, such as George Lawrence and Simon Moore. T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 132, 136, 138; Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), 55-6. Edwards was not in Worcester in 1646, although in June, Baxter was, collaborating with fellow-minister Moore in work on the parliamentarian terms for surrender of the garrison. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 235. It is clear that the royalist soldiers inside the city much preferred dealing with Rainborowe than with Whalley; on matters of protocol and courtesy, Whalley was considered not to ‘return civilities’. This may have owed more to Rainborowe’s greater experience of conducting sieges than to any dark motives of the Presbyterians’ imaginings. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 248. The royalist officers informally conveyed to their parliamentarian counterparts their belief that Whalley or the county committee had intercepted correspondence which might have enabled them to surrender on acceptable terms earlier. For their part, the parliamentarian officers were suspicious of the city chamber, whose members they considered to be playing one side against the other. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 254, 255.

Tensions between the victorious military and the county committee were not smoothed away by the surrender of Worcester. Attitudes towards the citizenry, more than religious affiliation, seem to have been at the heart of differences between Rainborowe and the county committee. Rainborowe was sympathetic to the royalist mayor, imprisoned by the committee in his house and prevented from suing for his composition, ‘whereas many others as active as himself are at liberty’. In response, the de facto leader of the committee, Nicholas Lechmere*, wrote complacently ‘it may be we were not regular, I am sure we were not nice, we always observing our rule with such kind of people to handle them without mittens’. SP23/207/261; HMC Portland, ii. 146. Although the committee which had been formed under the ordinance of 23 September 1644 to raise and direct the Worcestershire force was formally disbanded in 1646, many of its members continued to exercise power and influence in Worcester. Some, like Edward Elvines* and Edmund Gyles*, were active in taking the accounts of soldiers, committeemen and individual parishes in 1646 and 1647. From February 1648 an ad hoc committee was established to sell the lead from the cathedral steeple and invest the profits in repairs to city churches and almshouses. Members included William Collins*, Elvines and Gyles, Lechmere and John James*, all MPs of the 1650s. By August 1653, this body was calling itself the ‘committee of the city and county of Worcester’. Worcester Cathedral Lib. mss D247, D224a, D225, D303.

The chamber continued to meet throughout the 1650s, but less frequently and with much less real authority than had ever previously been the case. Not only were William Collins* and his committee colleagues with a supervisory role ensconced in the College, or cathedral close, but Wylde* and Lechmere* were recorder and deputy recorder respectively, and many citizens simply stopped attending the chamber meetings. Edward Elvines* found himself holding up the city government virtually alone at various times, such as after the battle of Worcester in September 1651, when disease and property destruction compounded the problems of the citizens’ abstention. Add. 34326, f. 54. The chamber accounts for the 1650s misleadingly suggest a pattern of normal civic life, as the traditional gifts were bestowed on William Collins and Edmund Gyles on their return from Parliament. Former MPs like John Nashe were tempted back to their places in city government. Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A13, box 1, sessions bks. 1632-55, 1656-73. But the 1654 election in Worcester, according to the royalist Henry Townshend, whose chronicle appears to give the date as 12 July, was contested between William Collins and Captain Thomas Bound of Upton-on-Severn. Bound, a militia captain, had been named a commissioner for poor prisoners in October 1653 during the Nominated Assembly, and was sympathetic to Quakers. That there was a contest at all suggests that the chamber was no longer in control of the electoral process. Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 270; A. and O.; First Publishers of Truth ed. N. Penney (1907), 282.

The 1656 election was uncontested, and the city returned Collins, the committeeman, and Edmund Gyles, a young lawyer of a gentry family who had been a member of the local sub-committee of accounts. The indenture has not survived. This was the start of a pattern of the city’s returning lawyers, noted for the period after 1660, but Gyles was from Whiteladies Aston, a parish five miles outside the city, unlike Thomas Street, another lawyer and Collins’s fellow- Member in 1659, who was a citizen. C219/48. Street was not carefully selected by the chamber: he promoted himself, and was alleged by his enemy Collins to have had the support of the ‘profane rabble and cavaliers’. Even after discounting the pejorative epithets, it is clear that the franchise had certainly by this time been flung open to the freemen. Burton’s Diary, iii. 69. A kind of vetting committee consisting of godly citizens such as Simon Moore, the minister, was at work to approve or ‘except against’ the nominations of candidates. Street passed this hurdle, and the poll was taken of the mayor, aldermen, the Twenty-Four and the Forty-Eight; but this time also of others, among them almsmen. Collins, whose election seems already to have been secure, disapproved of these, and of the ‘papists’ and obvious ex-royalists who appeared to vote for Street. When Street’s case went before the committee of privileges on 22 February 1659, the evidence heard was on the subject of his character and personal history, not on the size and nature of the Worcester franchise. Counsel for Street’s defence produced a list of 300 men who had signed a petition for Street and a list against him of 35. While these cannot be taken as polling figures, they do perhaps suggest that while Collins had been supported by the compliant chamber, there had also been an appeal to a wider, more volatile electorate by those frustrated at the continuing grip of the committeemen. Burton’s Diary, iii. 254, 432-3.

The nature of the franchise for elections to the Convention remains obscure, but in 1661, over 1,000 votes were cast by the freemen, and the wide franchise persisted. The disruptions caused by the civil war, and especially the destruction visited on the city’s fabric and institutions by the battle in September 1651, must be given their place in an assessment of the changing balance of power in the city. But the reluctance of the county committeemen to share power with the chamber after 1646, and the unwillingness of the citizens to accommodate themselves to the rule of successive parliamentary regimes, have to be identified as decisive influences in shaping the changing Worcester parliamentary franchise.