Yorkshire

Aldborough and Boroughbridge were neighbouring boroughs, under the same owner and under joint management. The Duke of Newcastle used to refer to them as ‘my own two boroughs’. He owned most of the houses in Aldborough and a majority of the burgages at Boroughbridge. The Wilkinson family also owned property in both boroughs; they managed them on Newcastle’s behalf and were able to assert a claim to one seat. Still Newcastle, when offering a seat at Boroughbridge to Sir Cecil Bisshopp in 1755, could write:Add. 32852, f.

In 1754 the dominant interest at Hedon was in Lord Anson, first lord of the Admiralty, M.P. for Hedon 1744-7. On Anson’s death in 1762, his place as patron of the borough was taken by his friend, Sir Charles Saunders, Member since 1754. Saunders strengthened his interest by acquiring property in Hedon, and in 1768 and 1774 carried both seats without a contest.

See BOROUGHBRIDGE (1754-90 Section)

There was no predominant interest at Beverley, and contests were frequent. In the second half of the eighteenth century its Members were invariably country gentlemen.

York made up as a market town and social centre for what it lacked in economic vitality. The dispersal of the large freeman electorate and the partiality of the lower class of resident freemen for election favours made it an expensive constituency and ‘not an inviting place for an adventurer’.Fitzwilliam mss X515/20, Cavendish to Fitzwilliam, 18 Nov. [1787]. While the Whig interest, sponsored by Earl Fitzwilliam and centred on the Rockingham Club, were determined to regain the ground they had lost through the defeat of Lord John Cavendish and Sir William Milner in 1784,Ibid.

The right of election in Thirsk was vested in 50 burgages situated in the virtually depopulated old town. All but one belonged to Sir Thomas Frankland, 6th Bt. of Thirkleby, who, for the sake of appearances, transferred them to friends and relations at election time. Throughout the period he returned either guests or members of his family. He resisted Pitt’s invitation to barter them for a peerage. From 1805, his nominees were chosen in accordance with his brother William’s politics.

In 1790 a compromise, which operated throughout this period, divided the patronage of the borough between the young 5th Duke of Rutland’s trustees and Lord Mulgrave; but it was at first attended by considerable suspicion in the duke’s camp that Mulgrave, who owned an extensive estate nearby, intended to gain the upper hand, seeing that the duke’s interest was founded on the less reliable basis of the corporation’s attachment to his late grandfather the Marquess of Granby.

Ripon remained a close borough, the proprietors since 1781 being the heiresses of William Aislabie. His elder daughter, widow of Charles Allanson of Bramham Biggin, had the major share of his estate, and his younger daughter, the wife of William Laurence, the rest.PCC 222 Webster. Until 1807, while he lived, Laurence arranged the returns and the two families nominated a Member each.

Sir Thomas Dundas, 2nd Bt., created Baron Dundas in 1794, whose father had purchased the majority of the burgages in 1762, controlled both seats at Richmond throughout the period. Normally they went to members of his large family; occasionally they were filled by impecunious Whigs. Beauclerk, according to one report, purchased his seat in 1796 for £5,000 and in 1798 sold it to Shakespeare for £2,000.

The electoral conflict at Pontefract in 1790 took the form of a contest between inhabitant householders and burgage owners over the right of election, in dispute since 1768. John Smyth and William Sotheron, neighbouring landowners and the sitting Members, represented the householder party, whose candidates had been declared elected by committees of the House in 1783 and 1784, when parliamentary reform was in the air, contrary to the decisions of previous committees.