Tamworth

Tamworth’s chief peculiarity was that it lay in two counties. The north part of the main street of this nucleated town, which included the parish church, lay in Staffordshire. The south part, where the castle and castle yard stood, was in Warwickshire. Shaw, Staffs. i. 415-6. The castle bailey dominated the landscape, even though a third of it had been removed by the seventeenth century. Leland described ‘the base court and the great ward of the castle ... clean decayed’, but around the time James I visited Tamworth on 18 July 1619, a south wing had been added to the first floor hall. R.A. Meeson, ‘The Formation of Tamworth’ (Birmingham Univ. MA thesis, 1979), 56. The town was a market centre for livestock and agricultural produce, and of the trades mentioned in Tamworth parish register entries between 1556 and 1690, one third were connected with textiles, clothing and leather. Meeson, ‘Formation of Tamworth’, 73. With a population of around 2-3,000, Tamworth was similar in size and social structure in this period to many small west midlands towns, and indeed, market towns elsewhere. Compton Census ed. Whiteman, 448.

The government of Tamworth lay in a corporation which derived its authority from a charter of 1560. Under its terms, there were two bailiffs and 24 principal burgesses. C.F. Palmer, Hist. of Tamworth (1845), 106. As with similar corporations, the burgesses were empowered to recruit to their own number. Once, there had been two town halls, called the Staffordshire hall and the Warwickshire hall, but by 1603 they had been replaced by a single town hall at the centre of the market place. Meeson, ‘Formation of Tamworth’, 85. There were two political interests. The mother of the 1st earl of Essex (Walter Devereux) had lived at Drayton Bassett manor. Essex secured the town its second charter, of 1588, which provided for a recorder and high steward. Essex’s reward was the hereditary right to the stewardship, and from that developed his family’s interest in one of the town’s two Members of Parliament. The owners of Tamworth castle provided a challenge to the Drayton manor interest, and themselves nominated the borough’s other, junior, Member. Palmer, Hist. of Tamworth, 111-2, 113. The extended Ferrers family provided the castle interest in this period. Nowhere in Tamworth’s charters was its entitlement to parliamentary representation spelled out. It was evidently a parliamentary borough by prescription, which left the franchise dependent on interpretations of it. Add. 28176, f. 35. The anomaly of its relationship to two counties had produced the custom of sealing two indentures at each election. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Tamworth’.. This arrangement persisted after 1640. The sheriff from each county presided over the return, assisted by the two bailiffs, acting as returning officers.

Elections in the borough were conducted largely without controversy. That of March 1640 produced the only sign of a challenge to the custom that the franchise was confined to the corporation. It is nevertheless noticeable that freeman status was bestowed on most Members as a formality, presumably prior to their election. Even Members whose connection with Tamworth was previously tenuous were described by sheriffs as ‘of Tamworth’. Sir Simon Archer, who had married the daughter of Sir John Ferrers, was elected on the castle interest. Of Tanworth-in-Arden in mid-Warwickshire, he was nevertheless described as ‘burgess’ of Tamworth when returned. George Abbot II was accurately identified on the indenture as ‘of Caldecote’, a parish near Nuneaton, and this apparently minor slight to local sensibilities may provide a hint of a greater provocation to the freeholders. C219/42/2/15. The 87 of them who petitioned the Commons, to lobby on behalf of the 300 of their number who they considered ought to have voices, made no appreciable headway at Westminster, but Abbot did not stand again in October, suggesting that the displeasure of the freemen might have had some local effect. Add. 28176, f. 201v; Palmer, Hist. of Tamworth, appendix, xxvii. Alternatively, it is possible that William Purefoy I*, who must surely have promoted his step-son, Abbot, in March, was behind the choice of a replacement in October. Certainly Purefoy would have approved of Strode’s history of defiance towards the government, and may have responded to a request for a safe seat.

In the Long Parliament elections, William Strode I appeared as a carpet-bagger, but chose to sit for Bere Alston, in Devon, his home county. Ferdinando Stanhope was evidently the choice of the Ferrers interest: his step-mother was the widow of Sir Humphrey Ferrers, and he himself was about to contract a marriage with Ferrers’s daughter. C219/43/2/188; C219/43/3/61. This election was described by a commentator after 1660 as having wider participation than the corporation alone, but there is no evidence of a contest. Add. 28176, f. 35. At the by-election that followed from Strode’s choice to sit for the Devon borough , his seat was taken at the by-election by Henry Wilmot, whose connection with Tamworth may have come through army service with the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), who presumably retained some interest through Drayton manor. C219/43/2/190. It suggests at least some revival in the Drayton interest, since Wilmot was directly opposed to the thinking of Purefoy on the subject of the army in the north. Wilmot, again in contrast to Abbot, was described on the indenture as ‘of Tamworth’. In December 1641 he was convicted by the Commons of misprision of treason; his successor as burgess was the emphatically ‘fiery spirit’, Sir Peter Wentworth, another ally of Purefoy’s. C219/43/2/192.

From the autumn of 1642, Tamworth castle was occupied by royalist troops. It was William Purefoy I who in June 1643 led a parliamentarian assault on the town and the castle, capturing Ferdinando Stanhope, who was present in the castle at the time. Palmer, Hist. of Tamworth, 123, 127, 129. Stanhope’s disablement from sitting, and later death, allowed the way for Abbot to return, to deliver both seats to the control of Purefoy and his ally, Wentworth. C219/43/3/63; C219/43/3/63. This marked the destruction of the Tamworth castle interest. The borough was not separately represented in the Parliaments of 1654 and 1656. It recovered its seats in 1659, and the two Members elected were both probably the choice of townsmen. John Swynfen was returned almost certainly on his own interest. Thomas Fox took the second seat, and was the first town clerk of Tamworth to be returned to the Commons. C219/48, unfol. After 1660, claims from within the borough that there was a history of popular franchise there were revived, as were the Drayton manor and the castle interests. Add. 28176, f. 35; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Tamworth’.