As the entrepôot of the Devonshire cloth trade Exeter ranked third or fourth among provincial towns in population and wealth. The city had long been established as a fulling centre; but mill-owners were second in economic standing to the larger merchants, who profited from the great expansion of the port after the extension of the Exeter ship canal in 1676.
As a port, Dartmouth was vitally interested in the Mediterranean, West Indies and Newfoundland trades; of the 17 Members elected during this period, six were merchants. There was a strong inclination to religious dissent; four Members seem to have been nonconformists, seven more showed dissenting sympathies, and none, with the possible exception of the Herne brothers, could be described as strong churchmen. It would have been a difficult constituency for court candidates to fight but for the urgent need of the merchants, especially in wartime, for government favours.
Serjeant Maynard, the great lawyer, bought the borough of Bere Alston together with the manor of Bere Ferrers from the Cavalier Earl of Newport in or before 1654. The portreeve, who acted as returning officer, was chosen in his court leet, and he controlled one seat throughout the period. In 1660 and 1661 his candidates were involved in contests with the Drake interest; but, having established the burgage franchise, he was willing to lease some of them to Sir Francis Drake, 3rd Bt. and share the patronage.
Since Elizabethan times the Chichesters of Raleigh had claimed one seat at Barnstaple; but until 1679 the other was usually reserved for a townsman, although there were no other borough seats available to the North Devon gentry. No strangers from outside the county were elected in this period, nor is there evidence of the rampant venality that characterized the borough in the following century, probably because the corporation, consisting of the mayor, recorder, two aldermen, and 22 ‘capital burgesses’, insisted on removing non-residents from the roll of freemen.Ibid. i. 223.
Ashburton was restored as a parliamentary borough in 1640, but the franchise was left undefined until 1708. The returning officer was the portreeve, appointed by the joint lords of the manor and borough. Until the new charter of 1684 he signed the indentures in the name of the ‘burgesses’, varying in number from 40 in 1661 to 12 in February 1679.
The corporation of Saltash, consisted of ten aldermen (all burgage-holders) from whom the mayor was elected every year. A substantial proportion of the burgage tenements was in the hands of the Buller family of Shillingham, who also owned the advowson. The size of the electorate precluded independence of spirit: when disaster struck the Bullers, the borough passed from their pocket to the Granvilles’.Luders, Controverted Elections, ii. 122-5; Gilbert, Paroch. Hist. Cornw. iv. 170-1.
The Russell family owned the manor of Tavistock, and the and Earl of Bedford was responsible for the return of the Elizabethan Members until 1586, with the exception of Thomas Williams (1559), who owed this and his earlier elections for the borough to Sir Richard Edgecombe. Edmund Tremayne (1559), a returned Marian exile, had entered Bedford’s service during Mary’s reign. Richard Cooke I (1563) was the brother of Bedford’s daughter-in-law, though pressure to elect him may have come from Cecil.
Totnes was incorporated in 1505, and received confirmations of charters in 1547, 1554 and 1559 showing the usual arrangement of a mayor (who acted as returning officer at parliamentary elections), recorder, and council of burgesses. However, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century the more prosperous merchants embarked upon a campaign to restrict effective power to themselves, and, after a struggle which rent the town, they succeeded in reconstituting the corporation in the hands of 14 of the ‘more substantial burgesses’ and a wider body of lesser burgesses.
Elizabethan Plymouth, a prosperous and fast expanding port, had a governing body consisting of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 24 common councilmen, selected from the leading merchant families. There was also a recorder. The mayor and aldermen—sometimes called the privy council—conducted the town’s affairs and chose its Members of Parliament. In 1570 it was ordered that ‘only such men as be town dwellers and of the council of the town’ could be elected MPs; but this proved impracticable. A decree of 1601 required Members to be freemen of the borough. Wages were paid occasionally to the local men.
Though the borough of Plympton Earl (or Erle as it eventually became) had existed since the twelfth century, it obtained a charter of incorporation only in 1602.J. Brooking Rowe, Hist. Plympton Erle, 2, 79, 95, 117, 362. A stannary town, the local tin mining families of Strode and Southcote provided a number of its Members.
