Sutherland had always been afflicted with a shortage of freeholders, so much so that the act of 1633 which granted the county the right to send commissioners to the Scottish parliament specifically extended the franchise beyond the ‘free barons’ to ‘other inhabitants’.
That the Stirlingshire freeholders neither subsided into obedience to a single magnate nor found themselves swamped by ‘fictitious voters’ was owing to a combination of circumstances: the presence of several substantial lairds with independent influence; the persistence of party spirit; and, most important, the balance of aristocratic power between the Earl of Linlithgow and the Duke of Montrose, ‘cousins’ who, had they acted together, would have been able to ‘carry what man we please’, as Montrose himself put it, but who were kept apart by political jealousy.
The influence of the Murrays of Philiphaugh, hereditary sheriffs of Selkirkshire, was so powerful that in terms of electoral politics the county was quite moribund. Sir James Murray had been deprived of office in 1680 for being ‘remiss in punishing conventicles’, but at the Revolution was raised to the session bench as Lord Philiphaugh and reinstated as sheriff. The two commissioners returned by him to the Scottish parliament in 1702 were his brother John Murray* of Bowhill and future son-in-law John Pringle of Haining.
The story of electoral politics in Roxburghshire after the Union was a continuation of conflicts originating in the last Scottish parliament, where the county’s four seats had been equally divided at the 1702 election between Archibald Douglas* of Cavers and Sir Gilbert Eliott, 1st Bt., of Minto, supporters of the Court, and (Sir) William Bennet (2nd Bt.*) and Sir William Kerr, 3rd Bt.*, who had not only been endorsed as Country party candidates by some of the local gentry, but also enjoyed support from the Earl (later Duke) of Roxburghe.
The impression conveyed to the English Whig ministry in 1708-10 by one of the competing factions in Ross-shire that the recent political upheavals in the county were a local manifestation of the great national conflict of parties, contained some elements of the truth but underplayed the most important, namely that the two sides were defined by family allegiance.
Neither the hereditary sheriff the Earl of Eglintoun (who was also hereditary bailie of the regality of Paisley), nor the other principal magnates who were thought to exercise influence in the county, the dukes of Hamilton and Montrose, played much of a role in elections in Renfrewshire after the Union. Instead, the electoral court in this period was the province of the lesser barons.
Although New Radnor itself exceeded in size any of the other out-boroughs the disparity was not so great as to afford it an easy dominance within the constituency; nor did the fact that its bailiff acted as returning officer give the corporation the power to control parliamentary elections. There was an alternative focus of influence in the person of the steward of the crown manors in the county, who admitted freemen to three of the four remaining boroughs (the exception was Cefnllys) at his courts leet.
The Owens of Orielton had controlled the Pembroke Boroughs constituency almost without interruption since 1626, their influence centring upon the county borough, which provided both the venue for the poll and the returning officer. Until Queen Anne’s reign they were also the dominant power in Tenby, like Pembroke itself an ‘agreeable town’. The second and smaller of the out-boroughs, Wiston, was the manorial preserve of an impoverished branch of the Wogan family, which as yet had played only an insignificant part in elections.
Haverfordwest surprised Defoe: it was ‘a better town than we expected to find, in this remote angle of Britain . . . strong, well built, clean and populous’. The franchise had been settled by a decision of the Commons in 1663 in ‘the burgesses inhabitants’, that is to say the resident freemen, and ‘the inhabitants which paid scot and lot’ (a definition construed in 1715 to include freeholders as well), but it seems clear that the corporation still constituted the most important element in the parliamentary constituency.
‘An ancient, but not a decayed town . . . well built and populous’, Carmarthen borough no less than the rest of the county was in thrall for most of this period to the Vaughans of Golden Grove, and was represented in every Parliament by the head of a cadet branch of the family, Richard Vaughan I of Cwrt Derllys, who was also recorder of the corporation. Vaughan’s connexion with the borough went back to 1683, when he was first elected to the recordership as a Tory and in all probability a client of the 1st Duke of Beaufort (Henry Somerset†).
