Chester

Situated at the head of the Dee estuary, 11 miles from the Irish Sea, early-Stuart Chester was the main point in southern Britain for embarkation to Ireland and overland passage into north Wales. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 3; A.M. Johnson, ‘Some Aspects of the Political, Constitutional, Social and Economic History of the City of Chester 1550-1662’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1971), 1. At high tide ‘in times past’, wrote the seventeenth-century geographer Richard Blome, ‘great ships’ dropped anchor in the tide-pool below the city, ‘but the channel is now so choked up with sand that it will scarce give passage to small boats, insomuch that all ships now come to a place called the New Key, about six miles distance [sic]’. Enclosed within the city walls were ten parishes, a castle, an abbey church or cathedral and the shire-hall: ‘a goodly large place, somewhat resembling that of Westminster, where all matters of law concerning the county palatine [of Chester] are heard’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 54. The city’s population by 1644 numbered about 7,650 – falling to about 6,000 as the civil war and a plague epidemic took their toll and recovering to approximately 7,000 by the early 1660s. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, pp. 90-1, 95-6; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 7-8.

Chester’s economy rested mainly on the leather industry and its role as a distributive centre. Its markets and fairs traded in a variety of local manufactured goods and agricultural produce – notably, leather goods, wool, linen yarn, iron, lead, corn, livestock, fish and cheese. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, pp. 102-3; HP Commons 1604-29; D.M. Woodward, ‘The Chester leather industry, 1558-1625’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxix. 65, 66, 106; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 22-3, 26. Despite the silting up of the Dee, the city remained the largest port of north-western England. The bulk of its mercantile trade was with Ireland rather than the continent and centred around the export or re-export of tanned calfskins, cloth, corn, lead, foreign fruits and French and Spanish wine and the import from Ireland of skins and hides, fish and (by the 1630s) large quantities of livestock – although the majority of Irish imports were carried by Dublin merchants rather than by Cestrians. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, pp. 103-5; Woodward, ‘Chester leather industry’ 70-1; ‘The overseas trade of Chester, 1600-50’, Trans. Historic Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxxii. 28-42. The city’s trade with the continent was controlled by the Chester Merchant Adventurers’ Company, whose members exerted an influence within the assembly that was roughly equal to that of the other leading occupational groups combined. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, 92, 104-5; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 48.

Under its charter of 1506, Chester was created a county of itself and was governed by a corporation – known as the assembly – consisting of a mayor, two sheriffs, 24 aldermen and 40 common councilmen, augmented by an indeterminate number of former sheriffs, known as ‘sheriff-peers’, awaiting election to the aldermanic bench. The mayor was elected annually from among the aldermen through a complex voting procedure in which the city’s adult male inhabitants were involved in selecting nominees. Former mayors served as the city’s magistrates and were styled the aldermen justices of the peace, who, with the serving mayor, formed the executive core of the assembly. The aldermen were elected for life, usually from among the sheriff-peers; the sheriffs were elected annually from the common councilmen. In both cases, the right of selection and election rested solely with the assembly. The assembly’s legal affairs were administered by a recorder – invariably a lawyer, alderman and justice of the peace – and the clerk of the Pentice, or town clerk. Harl. 2125, f. 147; Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. M.J. Groombridge (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. cvi), viii-xi; VCH Cheshire, ii. 99; v. pt. 1, pp. 97-9; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 14, 36-9, 42, 45, 47.

Chester had first sent Members to Parliament in 1283, but this privilege had then lapsed until 1543, when the city was enfranchised by the Act of Union with Wales. HP Commons 1604-29; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 14. The electorate was referred to as ‘the commonalty’ – a term that seems to have encompassed the city’s adult male inhabitants rather than merely the freemen. Harl. 1929, f. 20v; Harl. 2125, f. 59v; VCH Cheshire, ii. 99-100; v. pt. 1, p. 113. In the disputed election of 1673, it was stated that

the right of election hath been always in the inhabitants as well as freemen. The last burgesses were so chosen, and all elections in the memory of man have been by the scot and lot inhabitants and freemen promiscuously and never questioned until Mr Williams [the defeated candidate in 1673] found himself reduced to the necessity of making it a question’. HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Chester’.

With such a liberally-defined franchise, the city had a potentially large parliamentary electorate. In the contested election of 1628, for example, the number of voters has been variously estimated at about 800 or 900. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 113; HP Commons 1604-29. In the 1673 election, the electorate numbered 1,152 voters. HP Commons 1660-90. But in the great majority of parliamentary elections during the seventeenth century there was no contest, and the franchise was effectively exercised by the assembly. VCH Cheshire, ii. 99. The officeholders selected or at least approved the candidates and may then – although this is unclear – have presented them to the voters for their assent. The assembly’s dominance of Chester’s parliamentary affairs was reflected in the convention of electing MPs who were themselves officeholders, with one of the two seats going almost invariably to the city’s recorder. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 113; Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 61. The returning officers were the two sheriffs. Johnson, ‘City of Chester’, 56.

Neither the presence among the civic elite of a small but resolute puritan faction, nor the long-running economic rivalry between Williams Edwardes* and his supporters and the Gamull group, appear to have had any major impact upon the city’s electoral politics in 1639-40. Infra, ‘William Edwardes’; VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, pp. 105-6, 111-12; G.C.F. Forster, ‘Civic government in Chester, 1642-60’, NH xxxvii. 86; HP Commons 1604-29. With the calling of a new Parliament, late in 1639, the mayor of Chester and his colleagues convened and chose their fellow alderman Sir Thomas Smithe* and the city’s recorder, Robert Brerewood*, as their candidates in the forthcoming election. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 341; VCH Cheshire, ii. 113. According to Brerewood, writing to Smithe in mid-January 1640, ‘several persons of good quality have been suitors for a burgess’s place in our city’, but the mayor and aldermen kept faith with Smithe and Brerewood, and none of the would-be candidates opted to challenge their selection. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 341. Nevertheless, in the weeks preceding the election, Alderman Francis Gamul* and his ‘friends’ became convinced that Brerewood* intended to use his influence as an MP ‘to loosen the causey’ – that is, to demolish the weir, or causeway, on the Dee at Chester that sustained the head of water needed to power Gamul’s lucrative corn mills power. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 564, 590. However, when they then began canvassing support in the city to have Gamul elected instead of Brerewood, Gamul’s father-in-law Sir Richard Grosvenor and other influential figures intervened and ensured that Gamul and his friends ‘received so good satisfaction ... that they desisted and agreed to choose the recorder’. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 590. Brerewood seems to have remained anxious about his prospects nonetheless, for a few days before the election he reminded Smithe of the ‘inconstant disposition of the people of this city’ and advised him to prime his tenants and friends in the city accordingly. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 538. His comments suggest that the wider electorate were expected to play some kind of role in the election process. In the event, Smithe and Brerewood were returned (in that order) for the city on 23 March 1640 in what was described as ‘a very free election’. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 564, 590. The indenture returning the two men was signed by at least 20 of the officeholders, including Edwardes and Francis Gamul’s uncle, Alderman William Gamull†. C219/42/1/51. Both MPs had clearly enjoyed the assembly’s backing, although Smithe, as one of the city’s greatest landlords and wealthiest inhabitants, had also possessed a strong proprietorial interest in his own right. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Smithe’. But not all of Gamul’s friends had been convinced by Brerewood’s assurances, it seems, for about half a dozen, including Alderman Charles Walley*, had ‘scattered their voices’ on one of the Gamul family, probably William, although to no effect. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 564, 590.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Brerewood apparently chose not to stand, and on 2 November the city returned Smithe and Brerewood’s erstwhile rival Francis Gamul. Harl. 2125, f. 65; Cheshire RO, ZMF/65/156b. Brerewood later assured the assembly that securing re-election for Chester was ‘an honour I was not ambitious of, but take it as a favour from you to have been omitted, especially since you did choose so honest and deserving a gentleman in my place’. Harl. 2135, f. 44. Thirty men signed the indenture, including William Gamull, Walley and the leading Chester puritan Calvin Bruen. Cheshire RO, ZMF/65/156b.

Both of Chester’s MPs sided with the king during the civil war – as did a majority of the city’s inhabitants – and were disabled from sitting by the Commons on 22 January 1644 for attending the Oxford Parliament. Infra, ‘Francis Gamul’; ‘Sir Thomas Smithe’; VCH Cheshire, ii. 113-14. The city was a royalist stronghold from the autumn of 1642 until its surrender in February 1646 to parliamentarian forces under the command of the county’s MP, and an ally of the parliamentary Independents, Sir William Brereton. Even before Chester’s fall, Brereton had been lining up William Edwardes, who had served as a captain in his army, and the Cheshire lawyer and future regicide John Bradshawe* for the city’s vacant parliamentary seats. Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 378, 440, 557. Brereton and his allies at Westminster were almost certainly the prime movers behind an ordinance that passed both Houses in October 1646 for remodelling the assembly, purging it of leading royalists – including Brerewood, Gamul, Smithe and Walley – and appointing Edwardes the new mayor. LJ viii. 506; A.M. Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester during the civil wars and Interregnum 1640-62’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns ed. P. Clark, P. Slack (1972), 216. With the city’s royalist faction formally removed from office, the Commons, on 3 November, ordered that a writ be issued for holding new elections at Chester. CJ iv. 712b. Bradshawe’s failure to visit the city and court the ‘honest’ inhabitants meant that he was never in the running for one of the seats; and on 14 December 1646, ‘the citizens’ elected Edwardes and the city’s recently-appointed recorder John Ratcliffe, in that order. Harl. 2125, f. 69; C219/43/1/74. The indenture is formulaic and the only signatories are those of the two city sheriffs. It has been argued that Ratcliffe could not have been nominated as an MP in 1646 if Brereton had opposed his candidature. Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 557. But as recorder and the scion of one of the city’s leading puritan families he would have been a strong candidate regardless of Brereton’s approval or otherwise. Infra, ‘John Ratcliffe’

In fact, both of Chester’s ‘recruiter’ MPs would prove a disappointment to Brereton. Both men attended the House during the Presbyterian counter-revolution of late July-early August 1647, when most of the Independent Members fled to the army for refuge. And in the summer of 1648, they managed to foil an attempt by Brereton to merge the city and county militia commissions, ‘and thereby the county would bring the city under their power’. Infra, ‘William Edwardes’; ‘John Ratcliffe’; Cheshire RO, ZML/2/320. The assembly, too, may not have been entirely happy with the performance of the city’s MPs at Westminster. One of the assembly’s parliamentary agents believed that Edwardes and Ratcliffe were more concerned with prosecuting their own affairs at Westminster than the city’s, although he conceded that ‘Mr Recorder [Ratcliffe] has been, and still is, willing and ready to do the city good according to his abilities’. Cheshire RO, ZML/2/315, 317. Both Chester MPs were secluded at Pride’s Purge – presumably, for having aligned with the Presbyterian interest on several occasions since entering the House; although crossing swords with Brereton in the summer of 1648 would not have helped their cause either.

Although Chester was not represented in the Nominated Parliament of 1653, its small community of religious Independents may have played a part in securing the nomination of the city’s governor, Colonel Robert Duckenfeild, and his lieutenant-colonel, Henry Birkhened, to represent the county. Supra, ‘Cheshire’. The only known communication from Cheshire to the council of officers that selected the Members of the Nominated Parliament was sent from Chester on 15 May 1653. The writers, who styled themselves ‘a small remnant of God’s people within the city of Chester’, expressed the hope that

the Lord will make you circumspect ... in the choice and permission of representatives for the several counties, that not the eminency of their persons but the excellency of their spirits may be looked at; that the Saints’ interest may be enlarged, the enemies hopes and expectations frustrated; that we may bring our causes before them and have our grievances removed by them; that those heavy burden upon the back of the freeborn subjects of this nation (of which this city hath not the least share) may be eased. Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 93.

Of the six known signatories to this letter, one (Hugh Leigh) was an alderman and two (Samuel Buck and John Whitworth) were members of the city’s sequestrations commission and a common councillor and captain in the city’s militia respectively. SP28/225, f. 10; Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, ff. 79v, 82v; ZML/2/298; ZCTB, f. 53. It is likely that some, or all, of these men were members of the gathered congregation that had been established in Chester under Duckenfeild’s protection during the late 1640s. Calamy Revised, 178. While it may be true, therefore, that there is no evidence of ‘extensive support’ for religious Independency in Chester during the 1650s, it nonetheless appears to have had some very influential sympathisers among the city’s municipal and military elite. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 124.

Chester lost one of its seats under the Instrument of Government of 1653 and consequently the tradition of electing the city’s recorder was laid aside. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Chester returned one of the men that Parliament had purged from the assembly in 1646 – Charles Walley. Walley’s political rehabilitation had begun in June 1649, when the Rump had ordered that he be ‘absolutely freed and discharged from all imputation of delinquency’, restored to the ‘favour and good opinion of this House’ and discharged from paying the remainder of his composition fine. CJ vi. 246b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 112. Walley’s restoration to political favour was almost certainly linked to the vital role he played as Parliament’s shipping and victualling agent at Chester (a role he had also performed for the royalists). Between April 1649 and July 1654 he disbursed in excess of £100,000 towards maintaining the war-effort in Ireland, reducing the Isle of Man to parliamentary authority and for defraying the costs of the trial and execution of the royalist leader the earl of Derby in October 1651. Infra, ‘Charles Walley’. In recognition of his administrative talents, and probably also his high-level contacts at Whitehall, the assembly had re-elected him an alderman in July 1653 and had presumably backed his candidacy in the 1654 parliamentary elections for much the same reasons. The indenture is no longer extant, and the exact date of Walley’s return is not known.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament, Chester returned Alderman Edward Bradshaw (a distant relation of John Bradshawe) on 20 August 1656. Cheshire RO, ZMF/77/2/107. He probably owed his return largely to the backing of the assembly. Infra, ‘Edward Bradshaw’. The parties named on the election indenture were ten of the aldermen, nine ‘citizens’ (all, apparently, officeholders), ‘and divers other persons qualified and capable to elect Members to serve in Parliament’. Cheshire RO, ZMF/77/2/107.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659 – in which the city regained its customary two parliamentary seats – Bradshaw seems to have stepped aside in favour of his brother Alderman Richard Bradshaw, who stood on the corporation ticket in partnership with the recorder, John Ratcliffe. Harl. 1929, f. 20v. At a meeting of the assembly on 17 January 1659, the alderman JPs nominated Bradshaw and Ratcliffe, ‘but the commonalty [i.e. the citizen electorate] wholly stood for’ two of the junior aldermen, Jonathan Ridge and John Griffith III. When the senior aldermen saw which way the wind was blowing, they adjourned the meeting, presumably in the hope of buying time in which to rally the voters behind Bradshaw and Ratcliffe. But when the assembly reconvened the next day, 18 January, the commonalty persisted in backing Ridge and Griffith. At this point, Ratcliffe made an impassioned speech in which he warned the citizens that ‘one of those men which they looked upon for burgess, if they chose him (meaning Ridge), would rather be for their undoing then otherwise, and that he aimed and sought the destruction of the city then the maintenance of its privileges’. What exactly Ridge had done to provoke this attack upon his civic loyalty is not clear. That most of the senior officeholders disliked him either personally or politically is evident from the mayoral election the preceding autumn, when Ridge had received the highest number of votes from the commonalty only to be rejected by the aldermen, 15 to five, in favour of the citizens’ second choice. Cheshire RO, ZAF/37b/2. Having been denied their favourite candidate as mayor, the ordinary citizens were in no mood to compromise in the parliamentary election, and they duly elected the two junior aldermen over their more senior colleagues. Unfortunately, the election indenture has not survived, although it is likely that Ridge, as the senior of the two aldermen, took first place. The alderman justices of the peace took their defeat badly, and on 25 January the assembly ordered that in light of the ‘undue means which hath lately been practised in the obtaining of voices [for Ridge and Griffith] in the late election’, and to avoid similar irregularities in the future, an account of the proceedings should be drawn up in the name of the mayor and citizens and presented to Parliament (although if such a document was indeed drawn up it does not appear to have survived). Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 123v.

The 1659 Chester election has been characterised as a struggle between the supporters and opponents of the protectorate, with victory going to the ‘hard-line Cromwellians’, Ridge and Griffith. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 125; Forster, ‘Civic government in Chester’, 101; Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester’, 225. However, both of the losing candidates held positions of considerable trust under the protectorate – Bradshaw was the government’s diplomatic resident at Hamburg, and Ratcliffe had been appointed an attorney and sergeant of the duchy of Lancaster barely a month before the elections. Infra, ‘John Ratcliffe’; ‘Richard Bradshaw’, Oxford DNB. Ridge and Griffith, on the other hand, appear to have had a more problematic relationship with the protectorate by 1659. Ridge had been appointed a captain of militia foot under the Rump and had been recommended by the House as an alderman in place of Ratcliffe, who had been removed from office in 1651 for refusing to take the Engagement (he was re-appointed as recorder in 1657). Infra, ‘Jonathan Ridge’; Forster, ‘Civic government in Chester’, 94. Moreover, in September 1659, Ridge would emerge as the leader of the Chester ‘well-affected’ in their petition to the restored Rump, urging the House to remodel the corporation and to remove from office and punish the mayor, recorder (Ratcliffe) and those of the aldermen who had been complicit in that summer’s Presbyterian-royalist rising under Sir George Boothe*. Harl. 1929, ff. 10-11v, 27, 30v-31. It is hard to imagine that men supposedly committed to the protectorate in January 1659 would have solicited the Rump so earnestly eight months later. Griffith, for his part, had been a zealous member of Cheshire’s pro-army interest during the early years of the protectorate and had been a leading member of the county’s commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth. Infra, ‘John Griffith III’. Indeed, in April 1656, Major-general Charles Worsley* had recommended him to Secretary John Thurloe* as ‘one that doth you special service in that county’. TSP iv. 746. It is not clear whether Griffith would have welcomed the fall of the protectorate in April 1659, but it seems likely that he had not relished the more civilian and conservative direction it had taken since 1657. Assuming, therefore, that the contest between the two sets of parliamentary candidates in January 1659 did not turn on exclusively local issues, it seems reasonable to assume that Ridge and Griffith represented not the protectoral but the republican or ‘well-affected’ interest in Chester. This group, which may have included some of the self-styled ‘Saints’ who had written to the council of officers in 1653, probably had close links with the soldiers in the castle garrison under its ‘tolerant’ commander Thomas Croxton and was hostile to the Presbyterian clique among the senior officeholders. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, pp. 123-4. If this assumption is correct, it further suggests that repeated claims as to the city’s ‘minimal’ engagement with parliamentary and national politics during the 1640s and 1650s should be re-assessed. VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, p. 125; Forster, ‘Civic government in Chester’, 100; Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester’, 220.

The restoration of the Rump in May 1659 once again left Chester without formal representation at Westminster; and neither Edwardes nor Ratcliffe resumed their seats following the re-admission of the secluded Members in February 1660. In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Chester reverted to the tradition of electing one of the aldermen and the city’s recorder, Ratcliffe. HP Commons 1660-90; VCH Cheshire, ii. 128. But the Restoration period as a whole witnessed the gradual intrusion of outside, gentry interests into the city’s electoral politics and the steady weakening of the civic oligarchy’s claims upon the city’s parliamentary seats. VCH Cheshire, ii. 127-8.