Flint Boroughs

The constituency of Flint Boroughs comprised the shire town and four out-boroughs, of which the largest was Rhuddlan in the county’s north-western corner, with a population by 1670 of approximately 800. ‘Flint Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 37. Flint itself, on the Dee estuary, was a small, castellated town with no market and an above-averagely poor and ageing population that by 1670 probably numbered no more than 600. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 285; Powell, ‘Urban population’, 18, 21, 26, 37. Situated between Rhuddlan and Flint, Caerwys was an assize and market town of roughly 500 inhabitants; Caergwrle (or Hope as it was generally known), to the south of Flint, was little more than a village, notable only for its ruined castle. S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Wales (1834), i. ‘Caerwys’; ‘Hope, or Estyn’; I. Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Chichester, 1983), 94-5, 148-9; Powell, ‘Urban population’, 37, 38. In the negotiations and deal-making among the Flintshire gentry that preceded the elections for the county and Boroughs seats to the Short Parliament in 1640, it was reckoned that ‘for the voices of Caergwrle they are not many, and those questioned by some whether to be allowed or not. They are between 40 and 50 in all, just as many men as be householders’. Three of the county’s gentlemen had ‘command’ of all 50 of Caergwrle’s votes. Infra, ‘Flintshire’; Flints. RO, D/G/3275/29. Overton, lying in the Maelor Saesneg (English Maelor) – a detached hundred to the south-east of the main body of the county – was probably even smaller than Caergwrle. Flintshire’s largest urban community was the unchartered town of Mold, about five miles south of Flint. Blome, Britannia, 286; Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Wales, ii. ‘Overton’; Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, 211-2; Powell, ‘Urban population’, 37, 38. Parliamentary elections were usually held at Flint, and the returning officers for the Boroughs were the town’s two annually-elected bailiffs. C219/43/3/194.

In the elections to the Short Parliament, the Boroughs returned Sir Thomas Hanmer of Hanmer on 9 March 1640. Successive heads of the family, including Hanmer’s father, had sat for Flintshire or the Boroughs since the mid-sixteenth century, and their extensive estate in and around Hanmer, near Overton, gave them a powerful interest in the Maelor. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer’. Some of Hanmer’s friends among the Flintshire gentry had put his name forward in December 1639 as a candidate for the county seat, and he had reportedly solicited for votes at Caergwrle, and doubtless at Overton and elsewhere, ‘and by some exchange, he hopes of the knight’s place’. Supra, ‘Flintshire’; Flints. RO, D/GW/2119; D/G/3275/28. But in what appears to have been a compromise arrangement among the county’s leaders, John Mostyn took the shire seat, with Hanmer settling instead for the Boroughs. It may well have been as part of this electoral pact that a potential rival for Hanmer’s seat, John Salusbury of Bachygraig – a village close to the county’s border with Denbighshire in the Vale of Clwyd – was returned for Denbigh Boroughs. Supra, ‘Flintshire’.

The Flint Boroughs election indenture for the Short Parliament is badly faded but appears to employ much the same layout and wording as its successors for the Long Parliament in which the returning parties were a group of named burgesses and ‘many other freemen of the borough of Flint and the other boroughs in the county’. There were at least 15 signatories from at least four of the boroughs – Caerwys, Caergwrle, Flint and Rhuddlan. C219/42/2/114; C219/43/3/192, 194; G. Roberts, ‘The Boroughs of North Wales: their Parliamentary History from the Act of Union to the First Reform Act (1535-1832)’ (Univ. of Wales, Bangor MA thesis, 1929), app. A.

In the election to the Long Parliament, which was held at Flint on 19 October 1640, Hanmer’s place was taken by Salusbury, who belonged to a cadet branch of western Denbighshire’s leading family, the Salusburys of Lleweni. Supra, ‘Denbighshire’; infra, ‘John Salusbury’. If Salusbury faced competition for Flint Boroughs, it has left no trace in the records. The returning parties named on the election indenture included ‘Thomas Salusbury esq.’, and it, too, was subscribed by at least 15 signatories. C219/43/3/192.

Salusbury sided with the king in the civil war and was disabled from sitting as an MP in February 1644. Infra, ‘John Salusbury’. The House left the Flintshire and Boroughs seats vacant while north Wales remained in royalist hands, and it was not until 11 September 1646 – a few weeks after the last royalist stronghold in the county (Flint) had fallen to Parliament – that the Commons ordered the issuing of a writ for a new election to replace Salusbury. CJ iv. 667b; A.H. Dodd, ‘Flints. politics in the seventeenth century’, Flints. Hist. Soc. Pubs. xiv. 37-8. During November, Sir John Trevor* and Sir Thomas Myddelton* – the mainstays of the parliamentarian cause in the region – and their respective gentry allies came to an understanding as to who should take the shire and Boroughs seats. See ‘Flintshire’, ‘Sir Thomas Myddelton’, ‘Sir John Trevor’. On election day at Flint on 7 December, this compromise was confirmed when the county and the Boroughs returned Sir John’s son John Trevor and Sir Thomas’s son Thomas Myddelton respectively. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Myddelton’. The returning parties on the Boroughs election indenture were nine named gentlemen and ‘many others’, and it was subscribed by about 25 signatories. C219/43/3/194. Myddelton was secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving the Boroughs without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Thomas Myddelton’.

Disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government in 1653, Flint Boroughs regained its seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, to which it returned John Hanmer, son of Sir Thomas. The indenture has not survived. Hanmer was superseded in the elections to the 1660 Convention by the dedicated Flintshire royalist Roger Whitley, who would be returned for the Boroughs again to the Cavalier Parliament and the first and second Exclusion Parliaments. HP Commons 1660-90.