Northamptonshire was free from aristocratic control and its representation was securely in the hands of the country gentlemen. No election went to the poll during this period and expenses were small: Sir Edmund Isham in 1768 paid just over £180, most of which went in drink for the freeholders.Election accounts, Isham mss, Northants. RO. Until 1784 political issues played little part in elections.
There was no dominant aristocratic interest in Norfolk, but the choice of the knights of the shire was made from a few leading families. At the beginning of the period Whigs and Tories compromised the representation, and in 1754 and 1761 Sir Armine Wodehouse, a Tory, and George Townshend, a Whig, were returned unopposed. On Townshend’s succession to the peerage in 1764 three candidates came forward: George Hobart, Thomas de Grey, and Sir Edward Astley; and de Grey, with the support of the Townshend and Walpole interests, was returned unopposed.
From 1754 to 1771 the representation of Monmouthshire was shared by the allied families of Morgan of Tredegar and Hanbury of Pontypool, hereditary Whigs. The interest of the Duke of Beaufort, leader of the Tories, wrote a correspondent to George Grenville in 1763, ‘has been much neglected ... for many years’.Jacob Price to Grenville, 20 Aug. 1763, Grenville mss (Bodl. Lib.). To some extent this was due to the long minority of the 5th Duke, and when he came of age in 1765 there were rumours that he would offer a candidate to the county.
In 1754 and 1761 Sir William Beauchamp Proctor and George Cooke were returned unopposed for Middlesex. Beauchamp Proctor, a Whig, had represented the county since 1747, Cooke, a Tory, since 1750; and they seemed likely to continue to hold their seats without the peace of the county being disturbed. But below the apparently placid surface of Middlesex politics radical changes were taking place, which were to lead at the general election of 1768 to an eruption of devastating intensity.
The leading family in Lincolnshire was the Berties, who could generally command one seat. There was no contest between 1724 and 1807. Whichcot served until 1774, when he declined on account of age and asthma, having sat for thirty-four years.Lincoln, Rutland & Stamford, Merc. 6 Oct. 1774. His successor, Charles Anderson Pelham, sat for twenty years.
Although there were important aristocratic interests in Leicestershire, notably those of the Duke of Rutland and the Earls of Stamford, Huntingdon and Harborough, the county representation was almost completely dominated by the country gentlemen. Only one son of a peer sat for Leicestershire during this period: the other Members were all country gentlemen, and it was only in alliance with one of these that an aristocratic interest could be effective.
There were no contests for Lancashire during this period. One seat was always held by a Stanley (apart from the years 1771-4), and the other by a country gentleman.
Kimbolton and Hinchingbrooke, two of the three great Huntingdonshire houses or estates whose owners in the reign of Elizabeth I had ‘for long determined the county elections’,Neale, Eliz. House of Commons, 47. retained that primacy after having passed into the hands of new owners, the Dukes of Manchester and the Earls of Sandwich, younger branches of the Montagus of Boughton; and it was not only the size of the estates or the rank of their owners that determined this primacy: an element of local tradition seemed to enter into it.
Kent was one of the largest of the county constituencies, and its independence was jealously guarded. The Duke of Dorset, the leading peer in the county, had considerable influence, and there was a Government interest, based on the revenue officers in the ports; but neither was effective without support from the country gentlemen. It was the custom to elect one Member from east Kent and the other from west Kent.
Oldfield wrote in 1792 that Hertfordshire possessed the ‘singular advantage of maintaining its independence’. There was a number of aristocratic families, with considerable influence in elections, but none of sufficient weight to dominate the county. Its representatives were nearly all substantial country gentlemen, and during this period it was the most contested county in England. There was a large Dissenting element in the population, but it is not easy to trace any pattern in county politics.
