Hindon

Although 16 miles west of Salisbury, Hindon was a disconnected part of the hundred of Downton, which bordered Hampshire. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Mere), 194. The settlement had been established in the thirteenth century by the bishop of Winchester on chalk downland in a corner of his manor and parish of East Knoyle. By the seventeenth century it was still essentially a village. It occasionally hosted quarter sessions, and about 1650 the diarist John Aubrey rated its corn market as second only within the county to that of Warminster, but its industrial and manufacturing activities were being eroded even before the civil wars. VCH Wilts. xi. 98-100. According to the Compton census of 1676 it had, presumably counting heads of households, 303 conformists, four nonconformists and four Roman Catholics. Compton Census, 123.

Despite receiving several summonses to Parliament in the fourteenth century, it was only in the mid-fifteenth century that Hindon began to send two representatives to Westminster. The franchise was probably vested in the burgage-holders, but double returns in the early seventeenth century reveal a confusion over the distinction between ‘burgesses’ and ‘inhabitants’ and their relative rights. This development may have been connected with the sale of the manor by the bishop and the consequent demise of episcopal influence on elections (exercised above all through the manor bailiff who acted as returning officer) and advent of contests between south-west Wiltshire gentry vying to secure the seats for themselves and their kin and friends. Pre-eminent in all this were the Mervyns and Touchets, seated at nearby Fonthill Gifford until in 1631 the estate was confiscated following the execution of Mervyn Touchet, 2nd earl of Castlehaven; their sometime allies or adversaries were members of the Ludlowe, Thynne and Hyde families. VCH Wilts. xi. 101; ‘Hindon’, HP Commons 1604-1629; ‘Mervyn Touchet’, Oxford DNB.

By the later 1630s there were several manifestations of local discontent with the potential to complicate electoral politics. About 1627 the rector of East Knoyle, Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor and an enthusiast for the beautification of churches, installed a curate or chaplain, Samuel Yerworth, in the free chapel at Hindon. In a petition to Archbishop William Laud in February 1636 Yerworth complained that, having obtained an augmentation of his salary after an expensive chancery lawsuit against the governors and tenants of the chapel, he had since faced a campaign from these parties to oust him. Armed with a warrant for his good behaviour from justices of the peace Robert Hyde* and John Penruddock, the Hindon constable, Thomas Shergold, had kept him cooped up for 24 hours in his church. When he then slipped back into his adjacent house, deputy-constable George Frith, with John Frith and John Clement, had broken open the door and dragged him across the churchyard. CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 217; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Mere), 193. In May Shergold and George Frith, together with lord of the manor Edward Perry and one Alexander Dowle answered a summons to the court of high commission, where a case involving various petitions and counter-petitions was arbitrated by the zealous promoter of Laudian ecclesiastical policies Sir John Lambe. Perry and Dowle, allegedly wealthy men, opted to enter mutual bonds, beyond the means of the poverty-stricken Yerworth, but Laud and Lambe, who had already found the chaplain ‘very troublesome’ were not immediately sympathetic. The dispute appears to have simmered on. CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 434, 502, 506, 515.

Meanwhile, other local residents were resisting the transfer of economically valuable saltpetre manufacture from Hindon to Salisbury, again with some support from magistrates. Edward or Edmund Bowles of Hindon was arrested that autumn as exemplary punishment for refusal to lend his plough-team for the carriage of coals and ashes to the Salisbury works. General resentment in the area at obligations to provide these materials was compounded by differences over jurisdiction between the constables of Hindon and of the liberty of Knoyle, Hindon and Fonthill Episcopi, and between officials of different hundreds. CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 52-3, 148, 193, 208.

Presumably a consciousness that friends in high places were needed to negotiate such disputes lay behind a proposal dated 10 December 1639 in which 36 inhabitants of Hindon offered to a peer, almost certainly the 1st Baron Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), who had acquired Fonthill Gifford, the nomination of both Members for the forthcoming Parliament, ‘we having no fit persons inhabiting within our borough to discharge the places and offices of burgesses’. The signatories included Perry, Dowle, Shergold, the Friths and Clement, but not Bowles; 15 of them apparently could not write their names, although the fact that one of these was the supposedly prosperous Dowle indicates that the copy preserved in the state papers should be interpreted with caution. SP16/435, f. 187. The indenture recording the election on 17 March 1640 had at least 13 signatures, including Perry, Shergold and the Friths, but ostensibly only representing burgesses. C219/42, pt. ii, no. 65. The successful candidates were indeed connections of Cottington. Sir Miles Fleetwood*, a Northamptonshire gentleman, was receiver-general of the court of wards, of which Cottington was master. George Garrard*, master of the London Charterhouse and a close associate of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, had spent several months at Fonthill Gifford in 1637 as Cottington’s guest.

The indenture for the autumn election does not survive, but it seems likely that participation was greater. Cottington’s influence was probably waning, a casualty of his identification, as an energetic chancellor of the exchequer, with unpopular money-raising measures. Fleetwood was again returned, but in the Short Parliament he had proved a critic of innovation in religion and of expedients adopted during the king’s personal rule. His partner this time was the like-minded (as it transpired) Robert Reynolds*, a lawyer known to Cottington through engagement in court of wards business, but also connected to opposition peers and perhaps already at this stage to Northumberland. Insofar as Cottington was still the nominator, he may have been seeking wider support. If he expected Reynolds to stand obliged to him, he was to be disappointed.

The death of Fleetwood on 8 March 1641 occasioned a by-election. On 21 April an indenture naming at least 28 electors, not this time described as burgesses and including Dowle, Henry Bowles and Edward Bennett, returned Thomas Bennett*. C219/43/3, nos. 3, 4. Although barely 21 and without office-holding experience, Bennett was from a gentry family seated three miles away at Pythouse; his mother had come from East Knoyle. His candidature may thus have represented an attempt by voters to exert more direct influence. The experiment was short-lived, however. Although he took his seat, Bennett soon died of smallpox. On 13 August a motion by Reynolds for a writ to elect his replacement encountered objections from Sir Walter Erle* and others that the Commons must first resolve a challenge to the legality of Bennett’s election mounted by George Howe*, a gentleman who lived even closer to Hindon at Berwick St Leonard. Harl. 164, f. 28v; Procs. LP vi. 403. Five days later a second call for a new writ was blocked by MPs who denied that the fact that Bennett had sat meant that he had done so legitimately. Harl. 164, f. 38v.

For over five years, no visible action was taken. By the time a new writ was ordered on 11 October 1645 the Fonthill Gifford interest had disappeared altogether. CJ iv. 305a. Cottington had joined the king in Oxford and his house had become a nest of royalists to be rooted out. The grandson of former Hindon MP Sir Edmund Ludlow†, parliamentarian colonel Edmund Ludlowe II*, who was well-known for his doughty defence of nearby Wardour Castle in 1643 and who had since been engaged as sheriff in reducing Wiltshire to obedience, promoted the candidature of his uncle, Edmund Ludlowe I* of Kingston Deverill. Ludlow, Mems. i. 132. A damaged indenture, the date of which is no longer legible, signed by ‘burgesses and inhabitants’ including Dowle, Edmund Bowles, John Frith and constable John Swift, duly returned Edmund Ludlowe I. C219/43/3, no. 8. But the current sheriff, leading county committee member Alexander Thistlethwayte*, who experienced significant danger from royalist raids in conducting a series of elections that winter, was also party to a 30 December indenture with ‘bailiff and burgesses’ in which at least 30 voters (including George Frith, Edward Frith and Edward Bennett) returned George Howe. C219/43/3, no. 5. Although the larger number seem to have signed the latter, Ludlowe II’s claim that his uncle was elected by ‘the principal burgesses and bailiff’, while ‘the rabble of the town, many of whom lived upon the alms of one Mr George Howe’ claimed that they had chosen their benefactor, is probably short of the truth. Ludlow, Mems. i. 132. On 22 January Thistlethwayte, perhaps trying on his own account to resolve the double return before he was compromised by it, had to be reminded to present the official return at Westminster. CJ iv. 414a. According to Ludlowe junior, who was elected for the county (an occasional source of confusion), Howe had already stolen a march on his rival and attended the House before 7 February, when MPs rejected a certificate from the clerk of the crown stating that Howe and Ludlowe had been returned, ‘the one by bailiffs and burgators, the other by burgesses and inhabitants’, and referred the matter to the committee for privileges. Ludlow, Mems. i. 133; CJ iv. 431b. It was re-committed in December 1646 and thereafter seems to have disappeared from sight. CJ v. 1a, 25b, 27b, 30b.

None the less, the Ludlowe family managed to exert some influence. In February 1650 Ludlowe II bought for £4,668 12s 7d, as confiscated episcopal land, the manor of Knoyle and Upton and the borough of Hindon. Bodl. Rawl. B239, p. 44. William Mervyn, rector of Fonthill Gifford, had been hauled before the Committee for Compounding for taking the royalist oath of association, reading declarations against Parliament and suspected Arminianism, while Wren had been sequestered from East Knoyle and was replaced by William Clifford (d. 1655), a signatory to the Presbyterian Concurrent Testimony (1648), and then his son Samuel Clifford. Walker Revised, 377; Calamy Revised, 122, 557. The Wiltshire church survey of 1649/1650 found that both Clifford and George Jenkins, minister of the Hindon chapel, preached twice on Sundays, and recommended that the chapel be made a parish church. Wilts. Arch. Mag. xl. 808. However, Ludlowe II complained that he ‘was kept from’ exercising his right of patronage at East Knoyle ‘by Cromwell and his creatures during the time of his usurpation’, and even what he reported as an eventual acceptance of his candidate Enoch Grey, a refugee from Ireland, appears to have come to nothing. Ludlow, Voyce, 90.

Like many other Wiltshire boroughs, Hindon was not enfranchised under the Instrument of Government. At elections for the 1659 Parliament Ludlowe II was returned for the borough, obtaining at least 32 voices, those of Shergold and two Friths among them. His uncle was still living, but Ludlowe II lacked the grip on the county he had enjoyed in 1646. Perhaps partly because he subsequently refused to take the oath to an assembly convoked under the authority of a protector he declined to recognise, this election went without comment in his edited memoirs. His partner, Edward Tooker, who appears to have received slightly fewer votes, was a much less radical choice. C219/48. A Salisbury lawyer who had bought an estate 14 miles away at Maddington, he had been excluded from the 1656 Parliament because of his closeness to his nephew Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, or suspicions of royalism, or both.

The recall of the Rump in May brought back Reynolds, by this time a leading critic of Ludlowe’s record in Ireland but also more thoroughly established in the Hampshire/Wiltshire region. As the lone Member for Hindon he played an important part in the Parliament, but his influence on national politics was waning by the end of it and when campaigning got underway for the Convention he appears to have sought a seat elsewhere. Hindon was vigorously contested by various local gentlemen. Whereas Howe finally secured his return (with about 26 voices, according to Ludlowe), the latter eventually lost out to a thorough-going representative of the old order, Sir Thomas Thynne†. Ludlow, Voyce, 106-7, 110, 119-20, 151; HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715. The Ludlowe connection was definitively severed, but Reynolds’s grandson Reynolds Calthorp† subsequently sat several times for the borough.