Borough

Bribery was usually an important factor in election contests at Bishop’s Castle, but the candidates were always either local men or the representatives of local electoral interests. In 1690 William Oakeley, a Tory, and Richard Mason, a Whig, were returned unopposed. Oakeley had sat for Bishop’s Castle before, and Mason was from a family with a particularly powerful interest in the borough. Mason died within a month of the election and was succeeded by Walter Waring, Oakeley’s nephew and also a Tory.

A hotbed of party dissension during the 1680s and much of the 1690s, Oxford was emerging as a Tory stronghold by the end of King William’s reign. The city’s large body of freemen, entitled to vote in both parliamentary and corporation elections, constituted a potentially unruly electorate. None the less there were higher forces at work which kept them largely in check.

In the last decades of the 17th century Woodstock was a modestly sized market town of few charms and no special significance. Without a staple manufacture to sustain its economy, the town was, in the 1680s, considered to be ‘poor’. It was, however, beginning to feel some advantage as a social resort, as the local horse racing inaugurated by the 3rd Lord Lovelace (John†) in the later 1670s grew in popularity with gentry from the surrounding areas. The construction of Blenheim Palace nearby during the two decades after 1705 brought substantial economic benefit, and with it a new affluence.

Though Banbury’s franchise was restricted to its corporate body, none of the local landed families had found it possible to assume a controlling interest over the borough’s single seat before 1690. At elections since the Restoration the seat had passed, usually with little apparent competition, from one gentleman to another on prior agreement.

Nottingham at the end of the 17th century was generally esteemed a pleasant town. In 1697 Celia Fiennes remarked that it was ‘the neatest town I have seen, built of stone and delicate large and long streets, much like London and the houses lofty and well built’. In her description she referred to the homes of the Duke of Newcastle (John Holles†), the Earl of Kingston (Evelyn Pierrepont*) and Sir Thomas Willoughby, 2nd Bt.*, thereby inadvertently identifying three of the most important political interests in the borough.

Newark was exposed to influence from several quarters. Magnate influence was represented by Lord Lexington, whose residence at Averham overlooked the town, and later by the Duke of Newcastle (John Holles†) who gradually increased his property in the borough. The gentry from the surrounding area, including neighbouring Lincolnshire, dominated the representation of the borough, although their manoeuvres were carefully watched over by the corporation. In addition the electorate could not be taken for granted because the voters quickly discovered that the franchise was a valuable commodity.

East Retford was the main market town in the northernmost hundred of the shire. As such it played host to the quarter sessions which were held by adjournment from Nottingham and Newark. In size, it was little more than a village. Politically, the corporation, which consisted of two bailiffs and 12 aldermen, was not strong enough to resist the electoral power of the surrounding gentry, who monopolized the seats in this period. J. S. Piercy, Hist. Retford, 1, 7, 10; J. D. Chambers, Notts. in 18th Cent. 51, 79; A. Wood, Notts. 225.

Newcastle’s economic expansion created a wealthy corporation, whose revenue in this period was estimated by contemporaries at between £9,000 and £12,000 p.a. Not surprisingly this body was dominated by the merchants and coal owners who had benefited most from economic development. The complex procedure for election to the common council and the bench of aldermen had allowed members of Newcastle’s company of Merchant Adventurers to establish a dominance over the corporation which, despite sporadic demonstrations of opposition, survived long into the 18th century.

Though located in a county where both Jacobitism and Toryism were popular, Morpeth returned only three Tories among the 14 Members who sat for the borough during this period. Whig dominance of parliamentary elections had its roots in the influence of the lords of the manor, from 1692 the Whig 3rd Earl of Carlisle (Charles Howard, Viscount Morpeth), an interest derived from the borough’s corporate structure.

Though the Evans list claimed that there were 1,100 Dissenting ‘hearers’ at Berwick it was silent on the number of Dissenting voters in the borough. Contemporaries, however, were in no doubt as to the influence of Nonconformity in the town: in 1695 it was asserted that elections there were chiefly in the hands of ‘Presb[yterians] and Dissenters’, while in 1710 another observer claimed that Berwick was ‘riveted in fanaticism’. At least four of Berwick’s seven Members in this period were either Dissenters or had family links to Nonconformity.