At the beginning of this period William Pierce Ashe A ’Court owned 16 burgages at Heytesbury and the 4th Duke of Marlborough the other ten. These patrons had nominated a Member each since 1772. The borough remained close.J. A. Cannon, ‘Borough of Heytesbury in the 18th Cent.’, Wilts. Arch. Mag. lvii. 223. Marlborough returned relatives and friends. A ’Court, a Portland Whig, returned himself only as a stopgap and took paying guests.
In 1766 Great Bedwyn came under the complete control of Lord Bruce (subsequently 1st Earl of Ailesbury), when he purchased Lord Verney’s 46 burgages. Bruce already owned as many himself and bought two more in 1787; when he obtained the nine church burgages under the Bedwyn Enclosure Act of 1792 he was in possession of all but one.Wilts. Arch. Mag. vi.
Since 1774 there had been a struggle for control of this close borough between Robert Shafto and the earls of Radnor, as coheirs of the Duncombe interest.J. A. Cannon, ‘The Parl. Rep. of six Wilts. Boroughs 1754-90’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1958) i. 143-68. The contenders were evenly balanced: Shafto owned a slight majority of the burgages, but the 2nd Earl of Radnor secured the right to name the returning officer and this gave him the edge in the contests of 1790 and 1796.
In 1790 the Devizes corporation was under the prevailing influence of the leading clothier and former Member, James Sutton, whose brother-in-law Henry Addington was both recorder and Member; and of the London merchant Joshua Smith, whose residence was at Erlestoke, three miles away. In 1805, on Addington’s elevation to the peerage, Sutton’s brother-in-law was replaced by his son-in-law, a member of the corporation who, as Addington expected, was ‘chosen unanimously’.PRO 30/8/107, f. 160. But Smith’s retirement in 1818 occasioned a contest.
As a result of the extension of the franchise to freeholders in neighbouring hundreds in 1782, Cricklade came to resemble a county seat, with the local gentry jockeying for its representation.Materials for a Hist. of Cricklade ed. Thomson, ch. vi. Thus in 1790 two local gentlemen pledged to independence were again returned, sponsored by the two county Members, who lived within the hundreds. They had been adopted at Marlborough, well outside the constituency, on 17 June and this was deplored by their opponent Samuel Petrie, who had applied to Pitt for support, 13 Mar.
Chippenham escaped the fate of most burgage boroughs and never became a close borough, thanks to the vigilance of the local clothiers, who, however, controlled the corporation, with ‘an effect little short of what in other places has been attributed to the ipse dixit of some lord’.J.A. Cannon, ‘The Parl. Rep. of six Wilts. Boroughs 1754-90’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1958), 30; J. Britton, Beauties of Wilts. ii.
The 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, who as Lord Shelburne had been prime minister (1782-3) but had retired from active politics in 1784, was sole patron of Calne, where he had been the principal property owner since the 1760s and had thenceforward named both Members unopposed. He brought about ‘a marked improvement’ in the quality of the Members, for which he was quizzed by the satirists who dubbed him
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the chief interest at Wootton Bassett was in the St. Johns, seated at Lydiard Tregoze, three miles from the borough. The St. John interest began to decline about 1708, when Bolingbroke, then still Henry St. John, who had sat for the borough since 1701, wrote to Harley:
My father makes a scandalous figure, neglected by all the gentlemen, and sure of miscarrying where his family always were reverenced.HMC Bath, i. 190.
Though predestined to fall under the influence of the Herberts, earls of Pembroke, the lords of the borough, who owned the surrounding property, Wilton was still independent in 1715, when the corporation re-elected the former Members, John London, a Blackwell Hall cloth factor, and Thomas Pitt, later Lord Londonderry, whose father, Governor Pitt, owned the neighbouring estate of Stratford sub Castle.
The Berties, earls of Abingdon, Tories, were lords of the manor of Westbury, where they owned a majority of the burgages. One or both seats were taken by members of the Bertie family at every election from the Revolution to the accession of the House of Hanover. From 1715 to 1754 they were less successful, partly because, as Tories, their candidates were liable to be unseated by the Whig House of Commons on petition, partly because their practice had been to grant long leases, which reduced their hold on their tenants.
