Queenborough was a small, decaying fishing village which subsisted on its oyster beds. It was governed by a mayor, four jurats, and two bailiffs. The Herberts, who had estates on the Isle of Sheppey, had a considerable interest, as did the Hales family. The proximity of the Sheerness garrison provided government influence.
Of the 11 Members returned for Maidstone, the county town, only Sir Edmund Peirce was not resident in or near the borough, and he had a Maidstone connexion through his wife, the daughter of a former recorder. No one interest prevailed; among the neighbouring gentry the Barnhams, Tuftons, and Fanes had considerable influence, as did the relatively parvenu family of Banks.
No one interest was dominant at Canterbury, though the dissenters, nourished by the foreign churches in the city, increased in importance during the period. Of the 11 Members returned, only Heneage Finch, who belonged to a leading Kentish family, and Lewis Watson, who had married a local heiress, did not reside in or near the constituency. At the general election of 1660 Finch, whose royalist sympathies were unconcealed, was returned with Sir Anthony Aucher, who had been in arms for the King in both wars, ‘with a very universal consent of that city’.
Rochester was an incorporated borough, elections were held in the guildhall and returns were made in the name of the mayor and citizens. The size of the electorate is unknown, but the franchise was not confined to members of the corporation. Indeed, at Rochester, unusually for the period, not one MP was mayor or held other borough office apart from the wardenship of Rochester Bridge.
A county in itself from the time of Edward IV, Canterbury had its own sheriff, tax assessors, escheator and justices of the peace. A charter of 1498 provided for a mayor, 12 aldermen and a common council of 24. The right of parliamentary election belonged to the freemen. Parliamentary writs were received and returned by the city’s sheriff.
December 1559 Maidstone obtained a new charter to replace one granted by Edward VI. The 1559 charter restored the corporation and gave the town, among other privileges, the right to send two burgesses to Parliament. Maidstone first returned Members in this period to the 1563 Parliament, but unlike most returns made for the first time, Maidstone’s return was not challenged in the Commons. The electorate consisted of the mayor, jurats and commonalty defined in the 1559 charter as persons dwelling in the town, having freehold lands or tenements.
Queenborough was one of the smallest boroughs enfranchised during Elizabeth’s period, its adult male population in 1585 amounting to only 35. By a charter of 1368, confirmed in 1559, the government of the town was in the hands of a mayor and two bailiffs. The mayor had to take an oath before the constable of Queenborough castle. This office was held from 1559 by Sir Robert Constable, who lived in the north and appears not to have involved himself in the borough’s electoral affairs.
Placed on a bend of the Medway and on the direct road from East Kent to London, Rochester was visited by many eminent foreigners during this period. In 1522 one of the Emperor Charles V’s entourage wrote that ‘we came to Raygester, a little city and bishopric, and slept there’, and about 1544 the Duke of Najera’s secretary described the city as ‘consisting of about 500 houses; near which flows a beautiful river. There is an elegant stone bridge of eleven arches’.
A flourishing market town with some 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants, Maidstone was becoming the judicial and administrative centre of West Kent, although under Henry VIII it was still only one of six or seven towns where the county assizes were held. Elections of knights of the shire were generally held at nearby Pennenden Heath. Since the river Medway was navigable through Maidstone the ragstone for which the town was famous was both used at Canterbury and shipped further down river; in 1541 Calais was largely repaired from this source.
From 1461 Canterbury was a county in itself, an elected sheriff replacing the former bailiff. In 1498 a new charter remodelled the governing body headed by the mayor; the number of aldermen was doubled to 12 and the common councilmen reduced from 36 to 24. By the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign the earlier quarrels between the corporation and successive archbishops over their liberties had largely subsided, but a clause saving the archbishop’s rights was repeated in the confirmatory charters of 1522 and 1548. Civic records survive from the period.J. Brent, Canterbury, 108; C.
