Buckingham was a parish, town and borough, each with a different constitution, but the powers of each were inadequately defined, leading to uncertainty at elections. Under a charter granted by Mary Tudor, the 13 ‘burgesses’ yearly nominated two of their number for bailiff, and the inhabitants chose one of the nominees. Vacancies among the burgesses were filled by co-option.
At Aylesbury, the four constables acted as returning officers. Two were appointed at the court leet of the Pakingtons, lords of the borough, and the others by the lessees of the prebendal manor; but neither interest was active in this period, when both seats were normally controlled by the Lees of Hartwell. Interest apart, it is probable that the moderate ‘country’ politics of the first baronet were congenial to the electorate, about one-fifth of which was nonconformist. Throughout Charles II’s reign he and his step-father (Sir) Richard Ingoldsby represented the borough.
Amersham, a borough by prescription, had been a centre of radical Protestantism since Lollard times, and an 18th century vicar wrote:
General Fleetwood lived at The Vache, and Russell on the opposite hill, and Mrs Cromwell, Oliver’s wife, and her daughters at Woodrow High House, where afterwards lived Captain James Thomson; so the whole county was kept in awe and became exceeding zealous and very fanatical; nor is the poison yet eradicated.
Ludgershall was a non-incorporated borough granted in 1539 to Richard Brydges for 40 years at a rent of £15 per annum. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the widowed Lady Jane Brydges lived there but only the 1563 MPs can be said to have owed their returns to her: Griffin Curteys, servant of the Seymours, a neighbour, and George Cope, who married Lady Brydges’ niece.
Chipping Wycombe had been owned since 1483 by the dean and chapter of Windsor, who, about 1568, leased the fee farm to Robert Christmas, a servant of the Earl of Leicester. Christmas himself came in for the borough in 1571, and within the next three years he conveyed it to one Robert Raunce, who returned his friend Geoffrey Calfield in 1584. The dean and chapter were themselves responsible for John Morley I (1584), a courtier, and the ex-provost of Eton, Thomas Ridley (1586), who had married the daughter of the dean of Windsor, George Day.
Throughout Elizabeth’s reign the Pakington family were lords of Aylesbury. Although the town was incorporated in 1554, there is no evidence that the corporation challenged Pakington control over elections in this period. The original returns testify to the completeness of that control. In 1572, when the borough was under the lordship of Dame Dorothy Pakington, widow of Sir Thomas Pakington, the return reads: ... know ye, me, the said Dame Dorothy Pakington to have chosen ...
In this period Buckingham was governed by 12 principal burgesses, a bailiff and a steward, in accordance with the charter of incorporation granted to the town in 1554. The corporation chose John Fortescue I of Salden as steward by 1584. The electorate consisted of the bailiff and the capital burgesses. The Carey family, former lords of the manor of Buckingham, maintained a residual interest in the borough, and exercised the dominant patronage there, securing one seat in each Parliament except that of 1559 for their family or followers.
Situated in rich pastoral country along a river which supported a large number of mills, Chipping Wycombe was a centre for the woollen trade. Although in 1500 the town had had its fee-farm reduced from £30 to £26, when taxed for the subsidy of 1524 it remained the wealthiest place in the county. The privileges of the free borough rested on an early 13th-century grant, several times confirmed by the crown. A confirmation at the beginning of Mary’s reign (15 Nov. 1553) was followed at its end by the incorporation of the borough (27 Aug.
In the early 16th century Buckingham was a country town of little significance. Its list of taxpayers for the subsidy of 1524 runs to only 111 names and it was to be one of the 11 towns to which the Act of 1542 for urban revival (33 Hen. VIII, c.36) applied. The castle of the dukes of Buckingham appears to have fallen into ruin and nothing in the neighbourhood was worth a comment by Leland.Subsidy Roll for Bucks. 1524 (Bucks. Rec. Soc. viii), 61-62; Browne Willis, Bucks. 49-50; Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, v. 111-12; VCH Bucks. iii.
The manor of Aylesbury, held by the Butler earls of Ormond, was inherited in the early 16th century by Margaret, widow of Sir William Boleyn. In 1538 her son Thomas, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, sold the manor to (Sir) John Baldwin, who already held of the King a manor there called Otters Fee. On Baldwin’s death in 1545 the property passed to his grandson Thomas Pakington, son of his daughter Agnes by Robert Pakington.
