Warwickshire

Situated in the heart of England, and with a population estimated to have been around 80,000 by the 1660s, Warwickshire was a county which in the seventeenth century lacked geographical coherence. Its modern historian has noted how its sub-regions had more in common economically with neighbouring districts of other counties than with the rest of Warwickshire. A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 6, 20. The long-recognized division of the county into the wooded and pastoral northern Arden, and the arable Felden of the south had become less compelling as a summary description than it once had been. The woodlands of the Arden had been much depleted, and enclosure had complicated the landscape of the Felden. Further distinctive districts of the county were the north Warwickshire coal-mining area around Nuneaton, the sheep and cattle-grazing district around Rugby in the east; and in north-west Warwickshire, the Black Country industrial area ran into the shared local economy of north Worcestershire. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, 1-12; Warws. Hearth Tax Returns: Michaelmas 1670 ed. Arkell and Alcock (Dugdale Soc. xliii), 5-7. The county contained only one navigable waterway, the Avon below Warwick, and that only through the entrepreneurial efforts in the 1630s of William Sandys*. The most important urban centre was Coventry, a city and county of itself, leaving Warwick as the county town. These two were the only parliamentary boroughs. By 1640, of the peers with estates in the county, the 2nd earl of Northampton (Spencer Compton†) and the 2nd Baron Brooke (Robert Greville†) were the most significant politically, though no peer enjoyed wealth and influence that set him apart from the most powerful gentry. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, 21.

The background to the elections in Warwickshire for the April 1640 Parliament was one of discontent among the county gentry over the issue of Ship Money. On 16 February two gentlemen in the commission of the peace, William Combe and Thomas Lucy, were summoned before the privy council, and eight days later were removed from the commission. PC2/51, pp.311, 318 They were a contrasting pair. Lucy was a widely respected senior figure in the county, who was also highly regarded as ‘a gentle man of an ancient family’. Warws. RO, CR 1618/W 21/6, f. 269. Combe was a belligerent Stratfordian, whose disputes inside and outside his own family did not prevent his becoming one of the godly circle associated with Lord Brooke at Warwick castle. When the pair were summoned to London, Lucy was too infirm to travel, but Combe was remanded in custody for a period. The sheriff was reported to be in London on 20 February to collect the writ to authorize the holding of the parliamentary election. Add. 11045, f. 96. On 24 February, the day that both men were removed from the magistracy, the deputy sheriff for the county attempted to hold the election for the county seats. Lucy and Combe were evidently candidates, and were probably the only ones. The election was abandoned when it became apparent that the writ had not yet arrived from London. Add. 23146, f. 88. A newsletter writer from London implied that there was an attempt by the sheriff to keep out candidates unwelcome to the government. Although there is some confusion over dates, it is possible that there was a further abortive attempt to hold an election on 2 March, on a date that coincided with a county court meeting. On that date, the sheriff was hoping to succeed in his council-supported strategy: ‘it will not [be] possible for the tenth part of the freeholders to be present, by which means he may have a notable stroke in the election’. Add. 11045, f. 96. In the event it was not until 23 March that the election was successfully held, and despite the wishes of the council, Lucy and Combe were duly returned, seemingly without fuss. Add 23146, f. 88.

The contest for the Long Parliament later that year was more turbulent. A crowd assembled in Warwick for the election on 5 October, and it is possible that this was the occasion for another botched attempt to hold an election, in the same pattern as those earlier in the year. Add. 23146, f. 90v. Even if a contest was not actually held then, the election indenture was completed late, on 2 November, and was followed immediately by controversy. C219/43/3/55; Add. 23146, f. 91. The failing Sir Thomas Lucy was moved to sit for Warwick, a safe seat for clients of the Warwick castle interest, possibly to protect him from the contest expected for the shire seats. On the morning of the election, the town hall at Warwick was filled with freeholders. Presumably for reasons of convenience, the sheriff read the writ outside, in a field, then began polling. At Priory Yard, the poll was broken off before completion. Procs. LP, i. 426. James Compton, Lord Compton, son of the 2nd earl of Northampton, and William Combe were elected. On 7 November 1640 a petition of freeholders arrived at the House of Commons, alleging irregularities by the sheriff, George Warner. William Combe supported it in the House two days later, and Warner was sent for to answer the allegations. Procs. LP, i. 56. On 2 December, he appeared as a delinquent and knelt at the bar. In the petition, he had been accused of adjourning the court to various different venues, denying the freeholders their call for a poll, and having pronounced Compton and Combe elected, when William Purefoy I was evidently the preferred popular choice. In the House he was accused only of refusing to continue polling when the freeholders demanded it. Combe again spoke to provide evidence that Purefoy should have been returned instead of Compton. In his view there were three times as many voices for Purefoy as for Compton, and he added that Warner was ‘a common stirrer up of suits and a turbulent fellow in his country’: an apt description of Combe himself. Warner admitted that he had discontinued the poll, and gave as his reason his understanding that Purefoy had been elected for Warwick, and that therefore he could not stand in the county contest. Procs. LP, i. 426. The sheriff was fined £100 and sent to the Tower. He was released on 5 December. Procs. LP, i. 417, 423, 426. Moreover, the elections of both Combe and Compton were declared void, after Sir Simonds D’Ewes had intervened to argue that Combe’s return was good. Procs. LP, i. 421.

The writ for a second election was dated 13 December; the election itself, on the 28th, took place with as much controversy as the first. C219/43/5/3/56. There were four candidates, with those from the original contest augmented by Richard Shuckburgh and Sir Francis Nethersole, of Polesworth. The candidacy of the latter was somewhat surprising, after his overzealous devotion to the cause of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia had drawn him in 1634 to disgrace at court and a withdrawal to private life. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Francis Nethersole’. Polling, begun because of ‘uncertainty of voices’, lasted for five days, and on 1 January the undersheriff read out the number of votes polled by each candidate, and then, to uproar, pronounced Compton and Combe, instead of Compton and Shuckburgh elected. Once a degree of order had been re-established, he announced the correct result. Nethersole and Combe, the defeated candidates, promoted a petition against the conduct of this election, presumably the one promoted in the House by William Purefoy I on 18 and 19 January 1641 and not read then, but taken up on 30 January. Procs. LP, ii. 215. In response to this, a counter-petition from the Warwickshire freeholders was drafted, which dwelt on underhand dealings by Nethersole and Combe against Compton. It had been put about that Compton was a popish recusant, and the petitioners admired ‘his grave and modest fashion and carriage at the time of the election’. Duplicity by Combe, who had once promised to help Compton, but then joined with Nethersole, was exposed. Nethersole, so it was alleged, after seeing his own chances of election dwindle, provoked a minor brawl at the poll, hoping to bring into disrepute the undersheriff. The petitioning freeholders, evidently detecting a plot by a godly faction, which included the less than honourable Nethersole and Combe, and which was controlled by Purefoy, commended the returning officer for his patience and fairness. They were confident that by the end of the protracted contest at Warwick, there was no-one ‘left in town on either side unpolled’. Warws. RO, CR 2981/box 8/bdle 25/29. On 30 January, a petition was read in the House, and was referred to the committee of privileges; it was not theirs, but one in favour of Combe. Nothing more came of it. Procs. LP, ii. 318, 320. When the Warwick schoolmaster Thomas Dugard wrote petitions to the Commons around the same time, they were probably aimed against episcopacy rather than against malpractice in the election. Add 23146, f. 92.

James Compton and Richard Shuckburgh were both disabled from sitting in the House for their royalist activities, on 16 February 1643 and 13 January 1644 respectively. In each case, expulsion followed a motion by William Purefoy I. CJ ii. 967b, iii. 366b; Add. 18779, f. 48; Harl. 164, f. 298. What altered the pattern of electoral politics decisively in the county was the build-up of a large military presence at Warwick castle, where there was an important garrison for Parliament, under the direction of the county committee. The radicals on the committee included Purefoy, and allies of his in Coventry, a city which provided a base for the committee that was more congenial than Warwick, the county town. The more conservative committeemen, mainly from long-established county gentry families, found a natural vehicle for their railings against the pace of reform in the sub-committee of accounts which operated from Warwick, and which had been established as a check against the committee and the soldiery. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, 215, 241-2. The writ was successfully moved for both vacant seats on 11 October 1645. CJ iv. 304b. The election was held on 27 October, the day of the county court at Warwick. It was a contest in which a parliamentarian army and county committee interest was opposed by residual royalist and neutralist elements among the freeholders. Servants of the 3rd earl of Northampton, (the former James Compton, Lord Compton) campaigned for a particular individual, probably Sir John Burgoyne. Prominent county soldiers, such as Major George Purefoy, kinsman of William, and Captain Waldive Willington of Tamworth, used strong-arm tactics to prevent freeholders from reaching the shire hall. When a large crowd had assembled, the court was adjourned to High Cross, and the freeholders ‘carried their knights on their shoulders’: presumably the popular vote was behind Burgoyne and Sir Thomas Boughton. After another adjournment and change of venue, polling took place in one of the town’s churches until 5 pm. The following day, at 9.00 in the morning, some freeholders were arguing that the poll should be restricted to those who had heard the writ read. This was rejected by the sheriff, and may have provoked the soldiery into more energetic manipulation of the assembled electors in favour of their candidates, Richard Lucy and John Bridges. The story of adjournments and moving venues persisted through another two days, with reports of heavy intimidation by the soldiers, and freeholders being kept away. These tactics, if reported at all accurately, were unsuccessful. On Wednesday 5 November, after three clear days in which no polling was attempted, the election was moved to Coleshill, in the north of the county, where the influence of Purefoy and other radical committeemen was greatest. Boughton wrote with trepidation about the move, which exposed those participating to raids from the three royalist garrisons of Lichfield, Dudley and Ashby-de-la-Zouch. The Scotish Dove no. 108 (7-12 Nov. 1645), 852-4 (E.309.5).

This removal of the election by a sheriff sympathetic to the committeemen to a new venue smacked of desperation, and was in any case unsuccessful. Fears of royalist raids affected the turn-out of voters severely. As soon as the polling reconvened at Coleshill, the nervous committeemen adjourned once more, to the village of Meriden, where Burgoyne and Boughton were declared elected. Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 82. The names of William Purefoy and his kinsman John Hales of Coventry headed the indenture, but it was no victory for the radicals. C219/43/3/58. The moderate parliamentarian newspaper, The Scotish Dove, hailed the result as ‘a good prediction and a presage to future happiness to a distracted kingdom’, and commented favourably on ‘discreet, just, able and godly men’, who had succeeded those expelled MPs who had ‘perfidiously revolted from the truth’. The Scotish Dove no. 109 (12-19 Nov. 1645), 858 (E.309.24). But the circumstances of the election did nothing to endear Burgoyne and Boughton to the radicals on the committee, or to the army, and both were victims of Pride’s Purge in December 1648. In 1653, one of the defeated candidates of 1645, Richard Lucy, was summoned to sit in the Nominated Assembly. It is hard to detect local influence at work in his selection, which probably owed more to the influence of William Sydenham*, a member of the council of state which scrutinized invitations to the assembly. The selection of Warwickshire’s other Member, John St Nicholas, is attributable to the influence of his more important brother, Thomas, who was a religious Independent nominated by gathered churches in Kent. John St Nicholas’s magistrate-cum-clergyman status doubtless helped, as did the patronage of the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding). No nominations of gathered congregations in Warwickshire have been noted: the county was by this time dominated by orthodox puritan clergy for whom the term ‘Presbyterian’ seems appropriate. Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society, 304-16.

Under the Instrument of Government, the county was entitled to four seats in Parliament. At the first election under this constitution, on 12 July 1654, there were four candidates, and no evidence of a contest. C219/44. In their different ways, all four represented interests that were not hostile to the protectorate. Richard Lucy was a government office-holder who had not only survived the transition to the new regime, but had taken on a number of new central offices. Thomas Willughby represented the Warwick castle military interest, and the election of William Purefoy I was not the prelude to any attempt at Westminster by this most formidable of Warwickshire politicians to undermine the government. The most unusual of the elected Members was Sir Richard Temple, a minor, who had been granted majority status at the behest of the council of state in order to settle his huge inheritance of debt. For Temple, service in Parliament may have been a refuge from creditors. A month after the return was made, and before the first protectorate Parliament assembled, 38 freeholders petitioned to have Temple’s election declared void, on the grounds that he was a minor. SP18/74/71. They were joined by, not so say manipulated by, Thomas Roper, Viscount Baltinglass [I], an old adversary of both Temple and his father. Although critics and would-be litigants demanded that Temple’s election be overturned because of his minority, it was William Purefoy’s double return for Coventry as well as for the county which occasioned a by-election in December 1654. There is no evidence that this was fought on issues relating to the legitimacy of the protectorate. On 16 October, the minister of Southam, loyal to Temple, asked his patron whether he and his friends should turn out to vote, so as to frustrate any candidacy by clients of Baltinglass, and answered his own question by concluding that they probably should. HEHL, Temple ‘Parliament’ mss, Samuel Andrewes to Temple, 16 Oct. 1654. If there was any opposition to the election of Edmund Temple, cousin of Sir Richard, it has not been recorded. C219/44.

In other parts of England and Wales, the elections for Oliver Cromwell’s second Parliament have been characterized as a contest over the record and legitimacy of the regime of the major-generals, introduced in the wake of Penruddock’s rising in the summer of 1655. This interpretation cannot easily be applied to the 1656 elections in Warwickshire. No indenture has survived of the result, but a ‘poll book’ among the Temple papers provides ample evidence of the candidates and the voters. This document consists of columns of voters’ names under each candidate’s name, written in one single hand. Crosses against some voters for Sir Richard Temple tend to confirm that this was a compilation made in the interest of promoting his candidature from original lists of voters, which were made on the day of the poll by the sheriff or his deputy. HEHL, Temple ‘Parliament’ mss, poll book 1656. A number of conclusions about the conduct of the election can be inferred from the poll book. Small groupings of voters’ names recur in the different columns. This suggests that freeholders came forward in groups to have their votes recorded by at least one clerk, who must have polled for each candidate one at a time and kept a running record; or by a number of clerks who recorded names for a number of candidates. Most voters cast four votes. The winning combination of Richard Lucy, Sir Roger Burgoyne, Edward Peyto and Joseph Hawkesworth was successful mainly through the choice of those who voted for them as a ‘slate’. There is some evidence of ‘plumping’, that is, of voters bestowing more than one vote on a single candidate of their choice. This practice was however limited in extent among the voters, and in any case cannot be properly substantiated, because the same name may have been shared by two or even more voters, and the poll book gives no further information about each participating freeholders. Giving a single vote for one candidate only was more likely to be the preference of those backing losers. Some 55 men voted only for Richard Creed, the field army officer; 45 voted in this way for Sir Richard Temple, while 15 single votes were the most cast for any successful candidate. The implication of this pattern is probably that Creed and Temple attempted to mobilize support among their followers, presumably towards the end of the poll. The possible permutations of voting with four votes for four candidates allowed a range of responses, quite apart from the doubtful practice of using more than one vote for one candidate. In Creed’s case, for example, there were 24 combinations of votes, the electors who voted for him combining that vote with support for one, two or three other candidates. Analysis of these patterns suggests that 934 individual men cast votes in this election.S.K. Roberts, ‘The 1656 Election, Polling and Public Opinion: a Warws. Case Study’, PH xxiii. 366.

The unsuccessful candidates all had local connections. Richard Creed was the least associated with the county gentry. He had been commissioned lieutenant in Lord Brooke’s regiment of reformadoes in 1643. He served subsequently in William Purefoy’s regiment, under Joseph Hawkesworth, and later received commissions from the Warwickshire county committee. After April 1646, Creed transferred into the New Model army, and represented his regiment at the army general council in 1647. He served in the army in Scotland, and returned to England in November 1654. SP28/136/25; Wanklyn, New Model Army, i. 164, ii. 56; Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society, 206, 257, 269; Roberts, ‘The 1656 Election’, 362-3. By March 1655, he was assisting Hawkesworth, the governor of Warwick castle, in arresting royalists in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. He was thus an active representative of the army in its most interventionist guise, and the lack of enthusiasm for him evinced at the poll is unsurprising. TSP iv. 211, 212, 213, 270-1, 289, 334. Temple’s lack of success in his second election may be attributed to the failure of the council of state to respond effectively to the freeholders’ complaints of his minority after the election of 1654. Richard Hopkins, the third unsuccessful candidate, was a Coventry man. As the owner of Foleshill manor, he was a substantial property owner there, and was steward of the manor of Coventry. He supported the religious policy of the protectorate, and was a friend of the county committee of the 1640s. Although he held property in Warwickshire, he must have been seen by the freeholders as a Coventrian, and thus as, at least to some extent, an outsider. Coventry RO, PA 100/14; BA L/A/2/1, 2; VCH Warws. viii. 60, 86, 148; Roberts, ‘The 1656 Election’, 364.

It is hard to know who orchestrated the voting for the successful quartet, but the names of at least 47 Warwickshire clergymen are to be found among the voting freeholders’ names, and they seem to have voted fairly solidly for the winning combination. Their concerns are unlikely to have changed since 1653, when they supported a petition of freeholders in favour of a learned, tithe-supported ministry, protected by the government from defamation by detractors. P. Styles, Studies in Seventeenth Century West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978), 77; Roberts, ‘The 1656 Election’, 367-9. In the circumstances of 1656, the principal enemies of the learned ministry were the Quakers. Some planning for the result evidently went on, as at least one of the candidates, Burgoyne, was unhappy about his own name being put forward, and contrived a long journey to Yorkshire to escape becoming involved. When his ruse failed, and he heard that he had been elected, he was dismayed. Verney ms mic. 636/14, Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 7, 26 July, 1 Sept. 1656. That this was not a return of Members that was wholly acceptable to the council of state is suggested by the temporary exclusion from the House, until 22 November at the latest, of Edward Peyto when he arrived to take his seat. Peyto’s family had been the victims of antagonism by the Warwickshire county committee in the 1640s. His mother had sought the financial help of Sir Simon Archer*, and the family was friendly with William Dugdale, the royalist antiquary and herald. ‘Edward Peyto’, infra. Of the newly-elected Members, Peyto must have been least acceptable to the military interest at Warwick castle, given its former close association with William Purefoy I. It is noticeable that voters for Richard Creed gave conspicuously fewer votes to Peyto than to other victorious candidates, suggesting that he was regarded as unsympathetic to military interests.

The reversion to the old franchise and distribution of seats in elections to the 1659 Parliament involved no great upheaval in Warwickshire. It was a similar pattern to that which had prevailed through the Parliaments of 1654 and 1656. There was a representative of a county family, Richard Lucy, recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, who was also a government office-holder, and Joseph Hawkesworth was still the principal soldier in the county, as governor at Warwick castle. Only Hawkesworth’s name is decipherable on the surviving indenture, and the date is no longer legible, but the majority of names of freeholders recorded on it were those who voted for the successful candidates in 1656, and there is no evidence of a contest. C219/48.