Salisbury

Salisbury was not only Wiltshire’s administrative centre and the seat of a rich bishopric but also a significant clothing city, although it had relinquished its late medieval pre-eminence and was subject to the more general depression of the early seventeenth century. Somewhat distant from the county’s main textile manufacturing area, it specialised in kerseys rather than whitecloths and depended on smaller-scale producers rather than on the clothier oligarchs who dominated local politics to the north west. Economic power was further diffused – and a certain prosperity sustained – through the existence of other industries including high quality cutlery, leather and parchment; trade companies were active throughout the seventeenth century. VCH Wilts. vi. 129-31, 136; Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry (1965), 1-3, 19-22. In the 1650s it was claimed that the city was less populous than it had been: any assessment as to the veracity of this is partly dependent on whether the 1676 Compton census returned 3,400 adults (which might support it) or heads of households. ‘The Commonwealth Charter of the City of Salisbury’, ed. H. Hall (Cam. Soc. 3rd ser. xiii), 174; Compton Census, 121.

Salisbury first gained a charter and sent representatives to Parliament in the thirteenth century, but for all its importance the city struggled to assert its independent authority. ‘Salisbury’, HP Commons 1386-1421. New charters of incorporation obtained in 1612 and 1630, after lobbying by a succession of borough MPs who were also residents, represented attempts to address longstanding disputes with the bishop. The latter’s jurisdiction was now confined to the cathedral close, which acquired its own commission of the peace. The corporation’s composition and procedures were clarified: its government was vested in a mayor, recorder, 24 aldermen and 48 assistants, who had power to regulate themselves, to admit free citizens with a monopoly of trades and occupations, and to make by-laws; the mayor and ten aldermen were to be justices of the peace holding quarter sessions within the city. ‘Salisbury’, HP Commons 1604-1629; VCH Wilts. vi. 105-6; Wilts. RO, G 23/1/3, ff. 218 seq.; G23/1/9; G23/1/264; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 201.

However, the bishop’s influence proved difficult to eradicate, and competing financial interests and controversial religious policies continued to cause friction between corporation and close. Issues from the leasing of mills to the licensing of a city schoolmaster presented a potential for confrontation. G23/1/3, ff. 355, 372v, 385v; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 415; 1631-33, p. 23. The destruction by the city’s recorder Henry Sherfield† (d.1634) of part of a stained glass window in St Edmund’s church after Bishop John Davenant (d.1641) had refused requests to remove it reverberated for many months in the early 1630s. CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 495; 1631-3, pp. 267, 299, 538–9, 571-2; 1633-4, p. 19. There were suits and counter-suits in chancery between ecclesiastical and lay authorities in 1633 and 1634, while in June 1636 the king referred to counsel a petition from the bishop and the dean and chapter seeking a return to the situation before the 1612 charter. In particular the latter wished to obtain an acknowledgement that citizens’ liberties derived from the episcopate and not from being a free city. VCH Wilts. vi. 118-9; CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 537-8. A succession of privy council orders aimed at compromise, especially on the commission of the peace, failed to settle the dispute. CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 1, 4, 78, 105; 1638-9, pp. 122-3, 148. In December 1638 the corporation registered a hostile response to a new charter proposed by the church which appeared to rank ecclesiastical above lay justices – an ‘indignity’ – and refused for the time being to seal any agreement; ‘the ranking’ remained unresolved in January 1640. Wilts RO, G23/1/3, ff. 407v, 414.

Yet conflicts cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy between lay and clerical parties. Both communities were divided; both contained individuals who had brushes with or allies in central government. Davenant, a doctrinal Calvinist and a leader of rearguard action against advancing Arminianism, was generally relatively lenient to nonconformists, and in his treatment of Sherfield risked alienating his archbishop and his canons as well as Salisbury aldermen. CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 538-9, 571-2; 1633-4, p. 19; 1639, p. 347; ‘John Davenant’, ‘Edward Mason’, Oxford DNB. The chapter, itself riven by personal as well as ecclesiological differences, included local men like Matthew Nicholas, brother of the clerk of the council and later secretary of state, Edward Nicholas†, and Alexander Hyde, brother of Robert Hyde*, recorder from June 1635. CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 93, 162, 198-9, 241, 242, 306, 400-1; 1634-5, p. 20; ‘Humphrey Henchman’, ‘Matthew Nicholas’, ‘Alexander Hyde’, Oxford DNB. Meanwhile not all members of the corporation shared the godly zeal of activists like Sherfield, Bartholomew Tookie†, John Ivie and John Dove*, whose ambitious schemes for poor relief in the 1620s and 1630s threatened the interests of both brewers (of whom Dove himself was one) and the dean and chapter. P. Slack, ‘Poverty and politics in Salisbury’, Crisis and Order in English Towns, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (1972), esp. 183-8; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. vi (Old and New Sarum), 356 seq. Moreover, the troubles of the cloth industry and taxation imposed from London had as much divisive potential as elsewhere: some of the Ship-Money refusers, as the mayor, William Joyce, informed Edward Nicholas on 22 March 1640, were men whose great quality deterred the collectors from pressing them. Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, 97; CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 535; 1633-4, pp. 44, 62; 1635-6, p. 345; 1639-40, p. 571.

Some indication of simmering resentment is given by the election to the Twenty-Four in September 1639 of Sherfield’s stepson Walter Long* of Whaddon, who had been an MP for the city in 1625 and who had been one of the opposition martyrs of the 1628-9 Parliament. This was possibly a prelude to his re-election to Westminster, as his admission to the Forty-Eight had been on the previous occasion. Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 411v. However, although on 26 February 1640 the council repealed an order that only residents were eligible for election, this move was apparently for the benefit of Michael Oldisworth*, who took his oath as a free citizen that day. Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 416. An indenture dated on election day, 30 March, and naming the mayor and just 12 aldermen (not including Ivie or Dove), announced a unanimous choice of Oldisworth and Recorder Hyde. C219/42, pt. ii, no. 66. This was both a surprise and a distortion. The vote of 26 February had been narrow – 25 to 21 – suggesting that Oldisworth might have faced considerable opposition. That this was overcome then and in March was perhaps only because of Oldisworth’s close relationship with the county’s lord lieutenant, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, seated at nearby Wilton and as lord chamberlain potentially a powerful and sympathetic advocate at court. Furthermore, a letter to Edward Nicholas from his father on the day of the election noted an opinion current that Hyde would be unsuccessful. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 604. Indeed, the council register gives no indication of unanimity, simply noting 64 names of council members, of whom 12 lack a dot against their names, indicating either absence or dissent – which, is not certain. Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 416. A separate document reveals another dimension. A meeting convened to consider the ‘several misdemeanours committed openly’ on 30 March by Alderman Maurice Aylerugg and an assistant, Richard Phelps, was held on 26 August; the mayor and 17 aldermen were minuted as present. There it was alleged that once Hyde had ‘signif[ied] his willingness to serve in Parliament’ Aylerugg and Phelps had launched into a series of pointed remarks, criticising especially his stance on religion and Ship Money, and observing that there were precedents for not electing a recorder. For this ‘offence and scandal’ both men were suspended. There were, however, only eight endorsing signatures, including those of the mayor and Hyde himself; Ivie and Dove were among notable attenders missing. P. Slack, ‘An Election to the Short Parliament’, Hist. Res. xlvi. 108-14. Clearly, there was significant disagreement, although the number and identity of alternative candidates can only be conjectured.

By the next election the opposition seems to have been more organised. On 19 October 1640 a meeting of 61 councillors again officially returned Hyde and Oldisworth. Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 421. This time John Dove and his brother Francis led the disaffected in a petition to Parliament against Hyde, signed also by William Stone*, Richard Hill*, and Humphrey Ditton*. Harl. 541, f. 91v; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. vi (Old and New Sarum), 391. It complained that Hyde had acted inappropriately to get himself returned, that he had used his office of recorder to the prejudice of those who had opposed him in the spring, and that he had countenanced Ship Money, opposed preaching, and taken the side of the clergy against the city. Procs. LP i. 373, 380, 382-3. The report on 3 December of a committee of investigation (including Wiltshire Members Sir Francis Seymour*, Sir Edward Hungerford* and Sir John Evelyn*) prompted robust debate on Hyde’s religious and political stance, but did not oust him from his seat. CJ ii. 39b, 44a; Procs. LP i. 438-9. When a second challenge prompted a further enquiry it emerged (3 Mar. 1641) that, while Hyde and Oldisworth were the (majority) choice of the corporation, ‘the whole number of the other citizens’ had elected John Dove and Ivie. Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, to whom they were unknown, was none the less among 133 MPs (‘the religious and sound men of the House’) persuaded that Dove’s and Ivie’s election should be preferred on the ground that a statute of Henry VI extended the franchise to all citizens. But this was still insufficient: 216 concluded otherwise, ‘many out of affection especially for the earl of Pembroke’, so the original return was upheld. CJ ii. 48b, 95b, 96a; Procs. LP i. 554, 558, 612-13, 618; D’Ewes (N), 430-2.

An opponent of the attainder of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, Hyde took little part in Westminster politics after the spring of 1641. In late July 1642 he was summoned to the chamber to answer accusations of trying to persuade the mayor of Salisbury to recognise the king’s commission of array rather than Parliament’s Militia Ordinance, and of releasing a townsman arrested for proclaiming that ‘Parliament was all rebels’. PJ iii. 252; CJ ii. 685b, 696a-b. Found guilty on 4 August, he was disabled from sitting and sent to the Tower. CJ ii. 696a-b, 701a, 702a, 703a; PJ iii. 280-1. Although a new writ was ordered, no action was taken on this and Hyde was released from custody within a week. CJ ii. 704a. He remained recorder of Salisbury until some time between September 1643 and January 1644, when he attended the Oxford Parliament. Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, f. 12v; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574.

Meanwhile, the Dove brothers remained highly active in local politics. With the coming of war, they were instrumental in securing the city’s allegiance. John took on the transmission of parliamentary instructions and ordinances to the city while Francis captained the volunteers who on 23 August 1642 offered their services to Pembroke, Parliament’s lord lieutenant; both lent money to the cause. Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, ff. 1v, 2v, 5v, 8-9, 11; [F. Dove], To the Right Honourable Philip Earl of Pembroke (1642). The city experienced a series of brief occupations by troops from both sides, but the only serious fighting occurred in December 1644 and January 1645 between forces under Edmund Ludlowe II* and Sir Marmaduke Langdale, and the most sustained threat to local parliamentarians came as late as February-March 1645, when George Goring*, Lord Goring was in possession for five weeks. VCH Wilts. vi. 118-19; Wilts RO, G23/1/4, ff. 8v seq.; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 233, 240, 478-9, 489, 495, 506; 1644-5, pp. 31, 41, 46, 90, 92, 156-8, 194, 225, 227, 399, 415, 454. On this occasion Francis Dove, as mayor, and John Dove, as the most prominent enemy, were particular sufferers. VCH Wilts. vi. 143; CJ iv. 519a.

It was thus in return for services rendered locally and nationally that, when a belated election to replace Hyde was held on 16 October 1645, presided over by Ludlowe as sheriff and Francis Dove in an extended term as mayor, John Dove was elected. The indenture named 11 aldermen, including both Hyde’s erstwhile opponents Ivie and Ditton, and supporters like Maurice Green, and ‘other citizens’. C219/43/3, no. 22. Of the 53 councillors listed that day, 28 had dots against their names, suggesting continued division. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 17v. None the less, on the face of it Dove’s election signalled a new regime. In addition to serving on important Westminster committees and undertaking frequent business in London on the city’s behalf, he was active on the county committee with such stalwarts as Alexander Thistlethwayte* and Ditton, leaving his brother to serve again as mayor in 1649-50. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. iii (Cawden), 34; Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, ff. 18-75; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 124, 126, 134. Hyde was replaced as recorder on 11 May 1646 by William Stephens*, recruiter MP for Newport and man of business to Pembroke, and the city gained a notable victory on 15 November 1647 when, following the abolition of episcopacy and representations in London by Ivie and Francis Dove, it finalized purchase (albeit for the potentially crippling sum of £3,590 7s 8d) of the lands and rights formerly belonging to the bishop. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 19v; Bodl. Rawl. B239, p. 3; Hatcher, Hist. Modern Wilts. 412. Wiltshire grandee Sir John Danvers*, much in John Dove’s company in the later 1640s, acquired the bishop’s palace, while Dove himself bought into dean and chapter lands. Bodl. Rawl. B239, p. 15; ‘Sir John Danvers’, infra; Stowe, 184, f. 250. The opportunity was also taken to augment the maintenance of godly local ministers. CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 434; VCH Wilts. vi. 150-2; Calamy Revised, sub. William Eyre, John Strickland.

The city was not free of either old allegiances or new tensions, however. In May 1650 royalists used the cover of the race meeting to discuss the king’s business, while in August 1653 the council of state instructed John Disbrowe* to order a search of the house of a former alderman for papers. CSP Dom. 1650, p. 153; 1653-4, p. 87. In a charge delivered to the jury at the assizes in August 1650 Judge Robert Nicholas* thought it helpful to settle ‘the people’s minds as to the present government’ by identifying the parliamentary regime with popular rule. J.S. Cockburn, A Hist. of Eng Assizes (1972), 244. Dutch prisoners transferred from Southampton at the end of March 1653 constituted a financial burden on the corporation and by October had effected considerable damage on the cathedral cloisters and library, where they were confined. CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 233, 252, 575; 1653-4, pp. 195, 294.

At a meeting on 29 June 1654 the council noted that, following the instruction of the sheriff’s writ, at the forthcoming election MPs would be chosen by the mayor and commonalty, but the prospective candidate admitted free the same day was an unlikely popular choice. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* satisfied the criterion of loyalty to the government, being a councillor of state, but, notwithstanding his links to city worthies, he was an outsider who would hardly satisfy the aspirations of the godly or those who sought social reform. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 32. By 10 July, when the election was held, it had probably become clear that Sir Anthony would be returned elsewhere. His substitute, admitted as a freeman that day, was conceivably more generally acceptable – his guardian Edward Tooker*, a 1640s parliamentarian activist whose father had been a borough MP and recorder and whose mother was from a city family. Tooker’s partner was the current recorder, William Stephens. All except one of the Twenty-Four appeared or voted at the election meeting, and 38 assistants were listed; at least 27 signed the indenture. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, ff. 32, 32v; C219/44/pt. 3.

It is not clear whether Dove had again sought a seat in Parliament. Instead, that autumn he was made sheriff. When insurrection broke out in Wiltshire in March 1655, he garnered special opprobrium. Seized by the Penruddock rebels on 12 March with assize judges Nicholas and Rolle, he was soon released, but having allegedly held out the promise of clemency to his former gaolers, he then seemed to go back on his word. Mayor Richard Phelps, the anti-Hyde activist of 1640, collected 63 signatures from well-affected inhabitants asking Dove to obtain a reprieve for the man who had supposedly saved his life during the incident. Dove’s failure to do so probably damned him on both sides. CSP Dom. 1655, p. 80; Wilts. N and Q iii. 542.

It came in the context of increasing polarisation within the ranks of former parliamentarians, as more radical elements manoeuvred for power to effect further religiously-motivated social reform. Petitions for revision of the city charter were presented in November 1655 and January 1656, the latter being referred to the committee on municipal charters. CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 41, 195, 204, 330; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. vi (Old and New Sarum). 436 seq. Writing to Ivie on 17 May, Recorder Stephens represented these as politically-motivated attempts to purge the corporation. ‘The alteration’ would be ‘so great’ that, despite his sacrificial service ‘in the acquiring of power and privileges to and for the city’, he had declined ‘to have any hand’ in the ‘putting out’ of members. Dove was to be removed and Stephens himself was to be replaced by Henry Eyre*, a kinsman and protégé of Tooker but one who would ‘punish sin, suppress alehouses and administer justice with greater courage than I have done: for the omission of the former duties is said to be my ruin’. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. vi. 438-9. The new charter granted by the protector and read to the council on 15 September 1656 bore out many of his concerns. Presented in its preamble as a confirmation of the recent acquisition of dean and chapter lands and (less convincingly) as an answer to the difficulty in finding aldermen and assistants owing to the ‘late decay’ of trade and commerce, the document placed the close under the government of the city and reduced the corporation to 15 aldermen and 24 assistants. Stephens was indeed supplanted as recorder by Eyre, the Doves were omitted, and while Ivie retained his position as an elder statesman, ‘commonwealthsmen’ like Ditton and former army officer James Hely* were prominent. ‘The Commonwealth Charter’; Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 91.

As evidenced by the survival of Ivie, this was not quite total regime change. The (belated) parliamentary election presided over also on 15 September by Mayor William Stone, a campaigner against alehouses and thus a not unnatural opponent of Dove the brewer, returned Stone himself. However, his partner – initially at least – was Tooker, until shortly after the opening of the session two days later he was excluded as a Presbyterian or as disaffected. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 93. Tooker’s replacement, in position for his first committee nomination on 26 September (and thus liable to have been waiting in the wings), was the radical Hely. CJ vii. 429a. Both Hely and Stone were also nominated to revise legislation on alehouses and on wages. CJ vii. 430a, 435a, 435b.

But the tide soon ebbed. In the short term Dove was pursued for debts owed on the public purse and retreated to his estate outside the city, but in April 1658 he was in negotiation with the corporation over land. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, ff. 92, 93, 98, 102v, 104v. On 3 January 1659 the council register recorded a reversion to the order of June 1654 including the commonalty in the franchise, before proceeding to re-elect Eyre to Parliament, this time with another reformer, Ditton. It is impossible to tell exactly what transpired – the indenture contains neither a list of burgesses nor signatures – but it is significant that in the register alongside 24 assistants (23 with dots), in contravention of the 1656 charter there were not 15 but 17 aldermen (16 with dots). Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 112; C219/48. Unlike his predecessors of 1656, Ditton proved inactive at Westminster.

By this time the radicals’ hold was weakening. Some time early in 1659 Ivie was consulted by a deputation consisting of Mayor Christopher Batt, Recorder Eyre, his kinsman William Eyre, a city minister, and Hely over their plans for poor relief. Although sympathetic to their aims, he felt compelled to dash their hopes, telling them that ‘our government is now so divided and our church officers so unruly, that I thought it impossible to set up so good a work’. Poverty in Early Stuart Salisbury ed. P. Slack (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xxxi), 109. On 2 August that year the restored Rump, to which Dove and Oldisworth had returned, ordered the cancellation of the new charter and reversion to the old one. CJ vii. 745a, 745b. The entry of the order in the Salisbury register on 11 August was accompanied by the appearance of some councillors excluded three years earlier, including Francis Dove, although Cooper and John Dove were officially recorded as absent, being at Westminster. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 116. There was a more complete attendance on 13 September, when nominations to a party to participate in the surrender of the charter in London included Ivie, John Dove and Oldisworth. Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 116v.

An effective return to the status quo ante occurred when the election to the Convention was held on 2 April 1660. The corporation had reached a well-nigh full complement of 24 aldermen and 45 assistants. Yet in an apparent reversion to voting by councillors only there was also innovation. The register pointedly noted that ‘the persons elected were chosen by way of tickets, videlicet [thus], each person of the corporation present having written two names each person was called before Mr Mayor’; whichever two who had the most voices would be chosen. ‘This order and rule to be observed for the future.’ Wilts RO, G23/1/4, f. 119v.