County

Lord Ailesbury, who sat for the county in 1685 before succeeding to the peerage, commended the excellent practice in Wiltshire whereby the gentry selected two candidates at a preliminary meeting, and ‘they only meet at the place of election for form’s sake’. A rejected candidate would naturally prefer to contest one of the numerous borough seats rather than defy the wishes of his own class and put himself to the expense of a contested county election. No doubt the meeting aimed at preserving a rough geographical balance.

With the exception of Christopher Philipson, whose pretensions were much resented and repulsed on two occasions out of three, all the Westmorland Members in this period came from magnate families with a long parliamentary tradition. The Civil War record of the 4th Lord Wharton precluded his family from occupying a seat except in the two Conventions, and Roger North found the country interest represented by the more moderate Lowthers, who opposed the courtly Musgraves on every possible occasion.

Gentry meetings are mentioned before most of the Warwickshire elections of this period, though they did not always achieve their objective of avoiding the expense and ill-feeling of a poll, and were probably regarded with increasing suspicion by the freeholders. The enclosed and industrialized area north of the Avon predominated in the representation of the county; of the 11 knights of the shire in this period only George Browne, Thomas Mariet and Richard Verney came from the more conservative Fielden in the south.

By the 17th century the convention of returning one Member from West and one from East Sussex was well established, and for most of the period it was represented by a Member of one of the principal families in each division. The county court at which elections were held met alternately at Lewes and at Chichester, although this did not necessarily mean that elections were held alternately in each town. East Sussex had supported Parliament in the Civil War whereas the west was predominantly royalist.

One of the Surrey seats had been occupied by the Onslows since 1628, but Sir Richard Onslow lost the 1660 election

by building too much upon his interest there, and very imprudently insisting upon the choice of his eldest son with him. They both stood, and by that neither succeeded ... the party violence of the Royalists in his own county, with a mixture of envy, being then very strong against him.

Few counties had been so strongly parliamentarian during the Civil War as Suffolk. Yet in 1673 a strong court candidate was defeated by a mere 76 votes, and after the Revolution the county returned two Tories to the Convention. The process began with the dominance of Sir Henry Felton at the general elections of 1660 and 1661. He avoided involvement in the Civil War, though he represented the county under the Protectorate, and by 1659 he had become an active Royalist.

No dispute over the representation of Staffordshire in this period ended in a contested election; the desire for unanimity was great enough for the manoeuvrings that followed the announcement of the summoning of a new Parliament to end in the endorsement by the gentry of only two candidates,who would duly be elected at the county court. The choice of parliamentary candidates lay in the hands of the principal gentry, since there was no outstanding landholder in Staffordshire who could influence elections by reason of his territorial importance.

Somerset had been a notoriously factious county both before the Civil War and during the Interregnum. But once the euphoria of the Restoration was past the electorate showed a marked preference for candidates of moderate views. At the general election of 1660, however, in the words of the indignant republican Edmund Ludlow, the knights of the shire were ‘chosen entirely by Cavaliers, the Lord Poulett’s interest having such sway’.

From the Restoration until beyond the end of the period Shropshire was dominated by Lord Newport, who followed the not uncommon evolution from Cavalier to Whig. No contests are known. At the general election of 1660 the Newport interest was unobtrusive, but the result was all that he could have wished. Indeed the senior knight of the shire, Sir William Whitmore, was probably disqualified under the Long Parliament ordinance as a Cavalier’s son. His colleague, Henry Vernon, had managed to avoid commitment in the Civil War, but his sympathies were not in doubt.

The principal interests in Rutland were held by the Noels of Exton and the Sherards of Whissendine, though from 1679 Sir Thomas Mackworth established a third force. The 3rd Viscount Campden, who had represented the county in the Long Parliament, had been a Royalist in the Civil War, and in the 1660 Convention Philip Sherard, who had avoided political commitment, was joined by an obscure Presbyterian, Samuel Browne.