County

Cheshire contained only one borough which sent Members to Parliament, and the county representation was monopolized by the country gentlemen.

Cambridgeshire was dominated by the aristocratic families of Yorke and Manners. ‘I know of no county in England’, wrote the Bishop of Ely, ‘where there is so great a scarcity of gentlemen fit to represent a county as in Cambridgeshire.’Add. 35680, f. 250. The sitting Members at the dissolution in 1754 were Philip Yorke (subsequently Viscount Royston), and Soame Jenyns, a client of the Yorkes. But when Lord Granby, heir to the dukedom of Rutland, declared himself a candidate, Jenyns withdrew, and Yorke and Granby were returned unopposed, as also at the general election of 1761.

Buckinghamshire possessed a number of wealthy landed families with claims to the county representation: the Stanhopes, the Lowndes family of Winslow, the Hampdens of Hampden, the Claytons of Marlow, the Drakes of Shardeloes, the Lees of Hartwell, etc. The most considerable were the Grenvilles of Stowe and the Verneys of Claydon, and there was great rivalry between these two for pre-eminence in the county. In 1754 and 1761 Sir William Stanhope and Richard Lowndes were returned unopposed, and on Stanhope’s retirement in 1768 the county representation was thrown open.

There was no contest for Berkshire between 1727 and 1768 during which period the county returned a succession of Tory country gentlemen. The strongest interest was that of the Craven family; the Berties also had considerable influence, particularly in the towns of Abingdon and Wallingford.

One of the two county seats was regularly conceded to the Duke of Bedford, and usually filled by one of his family. Even in filling the other seat the Bedford influence was exerted; discussing the forthcoming general election, Philip Yorke wrote on 5 Aug. 1753 that he saw no other choice that could ‘be made in order to keep up the Whig interest’ than Thomas Alston, and ‘the Duke of Bedford is very willing to consent’. Ossory and Alston were returned unopposed. When Ossory died, 23 Sept. 1758, Henry Osborn was returned on the Bedford interest as a stop-gap till Lord Tavistock was of age.

The dominant interest was that of William, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, the Whig grandee who owned about a sixth of the county and was landlord to a third, in 1795, and a half, in 1815, of the registered electorate. Despite this, as Morley Saunders put it in 1815: ‘For some years past it has been understood by the gentlemen of the county that your lordship’s wishes were confined to the return of one representative, and you were pleased to say, you would leave the return of the other to their choice’.

The leading resident proprietary interest was that of the 1st Marquess of Ely, but Lords Portsmouth (an absentee), Courtown and Mountnorris and the latter’s brother-in-law Sir Frederick Flood, Lord Spencer Chichester and, among the gentry, the Alcock, Carew, Colclough and Ram families possessed substantial interests.

The leading interests were those of George Rochfort, 2nd Earl of Belvidere, who was childless and who had been represented since 1798 by his kinsman Gustavus Hume Rochfort; and of George Frederick Nugent, 7th Earl of Westmeath, represented since 1783 by William Smyth.

The 5th Duke of Devonshire, an absentee Whig grandee, had the leading proprietary interest on paper. It had become so run down that his kinsman William Brabazon Ponsonby, to whom he entrusted its management, had come to terms with the Marquess of Waterford, head of the Castle-orientated Beresford family, who had the strongest resident interest, whereby each returned one Member. This compromise ended on the death of the marquess on 3 Dec.

Tyrone, a large and populous Ulster county in which Protestants outnumbered Catholics, did not go to a poll in this period despite some contention among the leading proprietary interests of Lords Abercorn, Belmore, Northland, Caledon and Mountjoy and of the Stewarts of Killymoon. The latter, represented by James Stewart, who had succeeded his father to a county seat in 1768 and had held it ‘against government’, as his friend Charles James Fox alleged in 1806, for nearly 40 years, drew extensively on ‘the old presbyterian faction’ of independent freeholders for support.