The leading magnates in Derbyshire, the Cavendish earls and dukes of Devonshire, had been lord lieutenants for most of the 17th century and regained the post after 1688. However, they were not the only resident members of the aristocracy as the Earl (from 1703 Duke) of Rutland (John Manners†) and Earl of Scarsdale also lived on their Derbyshire estates. Many more peers had estates in the county including the Duke of Newcastle (John Holles†) and the earls of Chesterfield and Stanhope.
That Cumberland experienced only one contested election during this period is suggestive of a degree of electoral calm which in fact only existed during the 1690s, as canvassing became intense from 1700 onwards. Numerous families took a keen interest in, and exerted a significant influence upon, shire elections, and it is possible to attribute party identities to the leading players in county politics.
Following the return to the Convention of two veteran Whigs, Hugh Boscawen I and Sir John Carew, 3rd Bt., the Tory interest reasserted itself in 1690. Carew retreated to Saltash, while the new bishop of Exeter, a Cornish landowner in his own right, Sir Jonathan Trelawny, 3rd Bt., attempted to raise an opposition to Boscawen. His circular letter to his clergy urged support for Hon. Francis Robartes and John Speccot based on their parliamentary record as
The conflict that was the dominant feature of Cheshire elections in this period had its roots in two phenomena. The first was the superabundance of significant gentry families. Defoe commented that ‘there is no part of England, where there are such a great number of families of gentry, and of such ancient and noble extraction’, and the large number of families of sufficient standing to aspire to parliamentary service were confronted by the fact that the county returned only four Members in all, leading to a mismatch between aspiration and opportunity.
The larger landowning interests tended to dominate the political landscape of Cambridgeshire, just as the county’s economy was dominated by agriculture. The urban populations of the university town and the smaller cathedral city of Ely seem to have played little part in elections for knights of the shire, which, when they were contested, were generally decided by a strenuous application of the ‘natural’ influence of landed property.
Buckinghamshire was frequently contested in the first age of party. The sequence of contests began with two by-elections in 1696, and from 1698 seven of the next eight general elections went to a poll (the exception being 1708), as did the by-election in 1704. Such an outcome would have seemed surprising from a viewpoint in the early 1690s, when the Whig hegemony of the Whartons and Hampdens established in 1679 seemed secure, particularly as it upheld the tradition whereby one knight hailed from the Chilterns and the other from the ‘Vale’.
In 1695 James Bertie, 1st Earl of Abingdon, maintained that it was ‘the ancient custom of the county to have one [Member] in the forest and the other in the vale’, and, indeed, there are clear signs that electioneering in Berkshire took account of the basic geographical division between the western vales of White Horse and Kennet and the Forest of Windsor in the east. However, by 1690 the amicable agreement of the gentry to share out the county representation according to tradition had broken down under the pressure of political conflict.
In the terms of the political sympathies of its greater gentry, Bedfordshire was a strongly Whiggish county, ‘the least addicted to Jacobitism of all England’ according to the 2nd Earl of Ailesbury (Thomas Bruce†), who in later life reflected on his own and his father’s inability to command widespread respect there even when holding the lord lieutenancy under Charles II and James II.
