County

There was no contest between 1768 and 1820. The dukes of Devonshire returned one Member, invariably a member of the Cavendish family, as a Whig, and the gentry returned the other, during this period a Mundy of Shipley, as an independent.

Having failed in his ambition to carry both Members for the county in 1768 and likewise in his subsequent attempts to buy out his competitors, James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, adhered to the compromise reached in 1774 whereby he returned one Member, and the independent junto led by the Dukes of Portland and Norfolk and the Earls of Carlisle and Egremont the other. The pact had been ineffectually challenged in 1774 and 1780 by Sir Joseph Pennington and his son John. By 1787 Lonsdale was on the defensive and anxious to canvass for the next election.

While the Cornish boroughs were largely controlled by the resident nobility, the county, to quote Oldfield, was ‘as independent as any in England, and the gentlemen appear determined to keep it so’. The contest of 1790, the only one between 1774 and 1831, arose from the fact that Sir William Lemon had been joined in hostility to Pitt’s administration, during the Regency crisis, by Sir William Molesworth, returned in 1784. In the summer of 1789 Pitt’s friends in the county sponsored the candidature of Francis Gregor of Trewarthenick, who had ‘the sinews of war’ in readiness.

The representation of Cheshire, uncontested between 1734 and 1832, remained the preserve of a few county families in this period. The richest of them, the Grosvenors of Eaton Hall, played little part, concentrating their attention on Chester.

The two leading interests in the county, both ministerialist, were those of the Earl of Hardwicke and the Duke of Rutland. They had been opponents in an expensive contest in 1780 and their subsequent collaboration was uneasy, not least because they were hard put to it, if members of their families were not available, to find suitable candidates among the gentry.

Immediately after the hard-fought election of 1784, the friends and supporters of Lord Verney, a Coalition sympathizer, who had been narrowly ousted by John Aubrey, a Pittite, established the Buckinghamshire Independent Club.

There was no commanding aristocratic presence in Berkshire; large landowners were few, and there was a comparative absence of propertied and traditional influence. The 6th Lord Craven, a Whig, had had a major say in the disposal of one seat until 1784, when the Coalition sitting Members were ousted by two ministerialists. He died abroad in 1791 and there is no indication that his successor sought to restore the family interest to its former strength.

At the dissolution of 1790 the influence of the 5th Duke of Bedford was paramount in Bedfordshire. His cousin, Lord Upper Ossory, occupied the seat which was customarily filled by a Woburn nominee. The other Member, St. Andrew St. John, sat nominally on the interest of his brother, Baron St. John, with the support of the county’s lesser Whig elements, later described as being ‘not amongst the gentry, but amongst the middle classes and more particularly the dissenters’,Add. 51662, Bedford to Holland, 11 Aug.

The principal interest in Wigtown and Whithorn belonged to the Stewarts, earls of Galloway; the Dalrymples, earls of Stair, were in control at Stranraer; New Galloway, in Kirkcudbright, was more open owing to the attainder of the Jacobite Earl of Kenmure in 1716. Perhaps because of a series of unopposed returns, the rota of presiding burghs, as laid down in the Act of Union, was not strictly adhered to.

The chief interests in Tain Burghs were those of the Sinclairs of Ulbster at Wick, the earls of Morton at Kirkwall, the Munros of Foulis at Tain, the earls of Cromartie at Dingwall, and the earls of Sutherland at Dornoch. From 1715 to 1741 the seat was held, with government support, by Sir Robert Munro, who wrested the control of Dingwall from the Cromarties in 1716,NLS, 1392 (Delvine Pprs.), f. 170. retaining it by arresting and kidnapping opponents.Alex.