Bere Alston

The borough of Bere Alston was a small part of the very large parish of Bere Ferrers, which occupied the whole of the peninsula between the River Tavy on the east and the Tamar on the west, ten miles north of Plymouth. The borough had once been prosperous because of the silver mines which had been worked there, but the whole district was in decline by 1640. John Maynard* was one of a number of speculators who sought to revive the silver mines without success. D. Lysons, Magna Britannia, vi. (1822), 41. It was a borough by prescription, having been granted a weekly market and annual fair towards the end of the thirteenth century, and had no charter. A portreeve and doubtless other officers were chosen at the court leet. At the time of the 1832 Reform Act manorial and parliamentary elections were held under a tree, and there is no reason to suppose that Bere Alston had any kind of town hall in this period. S. Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England (3rd ed. 5 vols. 1835), i. sub ‘Beer-Alston’. Some 248 males over 18 affirmed the Protestation in 1642 in the parish of Bere Ferrers, but the electorate in parliamentary elections was restricted to those holding the burgages in Bere Alston. A number of deeds for the burgages which enfranchised the proprietors have survived, and they were small tenements, with orchards and gardens. Devon RO, 346M/T59, T88. From the early seventeenth century, the two parliamentary seats had been shared between the aristocratic Blount family, lords of the manor, whose electoral interest failed in 1626, and their rivals, the Strodes of Newnham, in Plympton St Mary, who owned lands in the district, including burgages. ‘Bere Alston’, HP Commons 1604-29.

The first election of 1640 was probably held initially on 6 March rather than the 16th as later noted by the Journal clerk. CJ ii. 14b. As early as 13 December 1639, Thomas Wise had established that the officer he knew as the ‘mayor’ of Bere Alston ‘showed willingness to advantage’ him in a rumoured election, but had been led to expect opposition from at least one other candidate, Sir Nicholas Slanning. Antony House, Carew-Pole BC26/18/10. When the election came, it was indeed a competition between the gentry for the seats. William Strode I had already sat for Bere Alston in three Parliaments of the 1620s, and secured the voices of the assembled electors, 26 in number, at the first call of names. There was then a pact made between the portreeve, the voters and the remaining two candidates, Sir Nicholas Slanning and Thomas Wise. As Wise had already represented the borough in two Parliaments, on this occasion it was Slanning, recorder of Plympton, whose appearance could be said to have upset what might otherwise have been a repeat of the 1626 and 1628 elections. It was determined that if either Wise or Slanning were subsequently to be elected knight of the shire for either Devon or Cornwall, Strode should then be declared an undisputed victor of the election on 6 March. What was evidently an attempt on 6 March to manage conflict over the seats was complicated when the electors re-assembled on the 27th, expecting to ratify the agreement.

By this time, Wise had been elected for the county of Devon, and Slanning had been returned for Plympton the day after the first meeting at Bere Alston. It may have been knowledge of these elections that encouraged others to throw their hats in the ring on 27 March. John Harris I, a Devon gentleman married to a daughter of John Mohun, 1st Baron Mohun of Okehampton, stood doubtless on the interest of the Mohuns in the area. Sir Amias Ameredith of Tamerton Foliot, a parish across the Tavy from Bere Alston, was a local gentleman whose great-grandfather had come to Devon in Tudor times. Vis. Devon 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi.), 6. On this occasion, Harris had 24 voices, Ameredith 11 and Strode just six. Aston’s Diary, 149. An indenture in Latin in favour of Harris was signed by Thomas Wise, evidently himself a burgage holder, and about ten others. On the same day, a separate indenture in English, signed by Wise, the ‘mayor’ and about three others, was sent in for Strode, doubtless because he was considered to have been victorious on 6 March. C219/42/1A/4. The election was referred to the committee of privileges probably as a result of a challenge against the return of Strode. Evidence to the committee was given by Strode’s brother, Sir Richard Strode*, whose own election at Plympton was the subject of another investigation. He alleged that Slanning had offered money to a burgess for two voices, and when Slanning himself gave evidence he admitted giving the money, but for the property that would have given him a voice. Aston’s Diary, 150. In this he was probably copying Wise. John Maynard argued that the giving of money by one to another did not invalidate the election of a third party. The issue of whether the meeting on 6 March was invalid because conditions had been attached to the outcome was raised by a number of members of the committee, who were evidently unhappy at the idea of a conditional election. Aston’s Diary, 150-2. Either George or Francis Buller I also noted that the warrant and return had been made out in the names of the mayor and burgesses, when there was no mayor, but a portreeve. Aston’s Diary, 151.

When Charles Jones reported from the committee on 28 April, the unusually long summary of the case reflected the divisions of opinion in the House over what was seen as an unusually perplexing case. The Members seem to have decided that Strode’s election on 6 March was good, despite the fact that his indenture was dated 27 March, and cut the Gordian knot of the tricky issues which had arisen from it. They accepted that his election was not invalidated in the light of Wise’s testimony to the privileges committee that there had indeed been a pact, a ‘declaration’ in fact, between Wise and Slanning over it, and by doing so, swept aside the objection that Strode had had only six voices on the 27th. They found that the fact that Strode’s indenture was the last to reach the clerk of the crown was irrelevant, saw Harris sworn as the second burgess, and affirmed that conditional elections were unlawful without admitting that Strode’s had been one such. CJ ii. 14b; Aston’s Diary, 77-8.

The elections for the second Parliament to be summoned in 1640 saw a revival of the Blount interest, since Sir Thomas Cheke, brother-in-law of Mountjoy Blount, was returned with Strode. The indentures returned at this election have not survived. When Cheke chose instead to sit for Harwich, a by-election was held on 19 November. CJ ii. 22b. The indenture, in Latin, sent in by the sheriff, was made in the name of the ‘mayor and free burgesses’, and at least six of the ten electors signing it were illiterate. C219/43/1/5. It returned Hugh Pollarde, an army officer from north Devon, who was an associate of John Northcote* and probably a client of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland. Sir Samuel Rolle* stood in this election, and told Thomas Wise he believed that he had lost because Pollarde’s backers had bribed the voters and threatened the tenants of ‘my lord’, by which he might have meant Mohun. Another indenture has survived for this election, incomplete and kept in the papers of the Buller family. This was probably intended for Rolle, and was signed by Sir Francis Drake* and Ellis Crymes*, as well as by six non-gentry burgesses of Bere Alston. It was made out in the name of sheriff, mayor and free burgesses, as was the one that reached Westminster. Buller Pprs. 28-9. The implication is that the two indentures were prepared on 19 November, and the election determined by calling of voices. On this occasion the wishes of two gentry burgage-holders were overborne, and the part played by the sheriff, Sir Nicholas Martyn*, must have been crucial in ensuring that Pollarde was victorious.

After a little over a year, Pollarde was disabled from sitting any further, and at some time around February 1642 the seat went to Charles Pym, son of John Pym*, thereby confirming that seats in the smaller Devon boroughs were now more firmly under the control of the parliamentary ‘junto’ that was in command at Westminster. CJ ii. 337a. The indenture for Pym’s election has not survived. During the civil war, Bere Alston was in the hinterland of Plymouth, which withstood a lengthy siege by the royalists. The houses of many gentry families in the district were ransacked or damaged, including those of Sir Richard Strode*, John Maynard* and Thomas Wise*. Only in 1646, after the relief of the south west by the New Model army under Sir Thomas Fairfax* were political and military conditions deemed sufficiently stable to fill the seat vacated on the death in September 1645 of William Strode I. The writ was moved on 17 February, but it was not until 29 June that the election was held. CJ iv. 445b. At this by-election, the only candidate known to have stood was Sir Francis Drake, who had participated in the election of November 1641 as a voter. His father had been an elector in the 1626 election. Among the voters who returned him to Parliament in June 1646 were other members of the Drake family, including his brother-in-law, Ellis Crymes. Drake had also been the brother-in-law of William Strode I, so the outcome was a perpetuation of the Strode interest in the borough. The seals of 11 burgesses, including Crymes, were affixed to the indenture. C219/43/1/5.

The political careers of both Pym and Drake were temporarily halted at Pride’s Purge of Parliament in December 1648, and so the borough went unrepresented during the period of the Rump Parliament. Bere Alston was not one of the boroughs which was included in the paper constitution of the Instrument of Government. Not until 1659, therefore, was another election held there. The electoral arrangements for the 1659 Parliament were those which had prevailed before 1648, so two seats were available. On this occasion, a single indenture was drawn up for the two burgesses returned, and the language was English, used for the first time since the 1620s for a Bere Alston indenture. The chief officer was described as portreeve. Around 17 signatures of burgage-holders are visible, apparently none of them unable to sign their names. The first seat went to John Maynard, doubtless standing on his own considerable interest in the borough, since in 1654 he had bought the manor of Bere Ferrers and with it the interest of the Blounts. CCC 3212. The second seat was bestowed on Ellis Crymes, Drake’s brother-in-law. C219/46. In the event, Maynard chose to sit for Newtown, Isle of Wight (he had also been elected for Camelford), and a new writ was ordered on 2 March for Bere Alston, but no by-election was ever held.

As Maynard inherited the Blount interest, and Crymes that of the Strodes, the 1659 election continued a division of patronage in the borough which had been visible since the beginning of the century. The election on 9 April 1660 for the Convention saw a challenge to that pattern. Maynard’s son, also John Maynard, was safe enough, but there was a double return for the other seat, in which George Howard, a voter in the 1659 election, stood against Drake. The indenture with the names of Maynard and Howard was in the name of portreeve and 17 ‘burgesses and freeholders’; the one naming Maynard and Drake carried 12 signatures of freeholders only. The attempt to elect Drake has been interpreted as a challenge to the narrow franchise, presumably because of the wording. ‘Bere Alston’, HP Commons 1660-90. Howard had been accused in quarter sessions during the commonwealth of assault and being in an unlawful meeting, and was never trusted enough by successive regimes of the 1650s to play any part in local government. Devon RO, Devon q.s. bundles, Mich. 1651, indictments. He seems to have enjoyed amicable enough relations with the Independent minister of Tavistock, Thomas Larkham, until 1662, when Howard put himself at the head of a move to eject Larkham’s son-in-law from his head constableship in Tavistock. The Diary of Thomas Larkham, 1647-1669 ed. S. Hardman Moore (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. xvii), 178, 186. In 1660, he was also elected at Tavistock, but a mutual sympathy between Howard and Maynard, which it has been speculated lay behind his return at Bere Alston, seems inherently improbable. Howard is more likely to have represented the first electoral stirrings of the cavalier interest in the district. R. Grenville, The King’s General in the West (1908), 205-7. Political, rather than electoral, considerations were probably decisive.