Commons 1790-1820

The majority of the burgages at Clitheroe were owned by Thomas Lister of nearby Gisburn Park, a Whig, and Assheton Curzon, a ministerialist. Lister got the upper hand in 1780 and kept it in 1784, returning himself and a nominee on both occasions, but before 1790 he and Curzon came to terms and agreed to revert to their former practice of returning one Member each. Lister retired at the general election, his colleague John Lee was provided with a seat elsewhere and, probably at the behest of his friend the Duke of Portland, he brought in Sir John Aubrey, a recent convert to opposition.

The representation of Lancashire continued to be shared between the Whig Edward Smith Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby, and what Oldfield referred to in 1792 as the ‘independent’ gentry and in 1816 as ‘the old Tory families’.Oldfield, Boroughs (1792), ii. 179 and Rep. Hist. iv. 89. There was little electoral excitement in this period. In 1796, both sitting Members, Derby’s cousin Col.

The presence of the naval dockyard and the victualling office gave the Admiralty a permanent interest at Rochester, but in one seat only was it secure and contests were frequent. Sir Charles Middleton, the Admiralty Member in the Parliament of 1784, complained to ministers that the freemen had ‘reaped very little advantage from the being the side of government’,PRO 30/8/173, ff.

The arrangement whereby the Admiralty and the Ordnance returned a Member each was maintained without difficulty until 1802. Management of the borough was in the hands of the latter department. The 3rd Duke of Richmond, then master general of the Ordnance, informed Pitt, 22 June 1790, ‘Queenborough is over as we would wish though there was a contest’.PRO 30/8/171, f. 149. One of the defeated candidates was the nabob William Popham, late Member for Milborne Port, who was in opposition to Pitt.

Maidstone was an open borough with a reputation for venality. Oldfield stated that successful candidates spent between £3,000 and £5,000 per election and contests were insisted upon. Sir Matthew Bloxam had spent £15,000 by 1802, in four elections.Rep. Hist. iv. 76; Spencer mss, Bloxam to Spencer, 30 July 1802. Over a third of the electors were non-resident, but no poll lasted more than three days. There were two parties in the town, Red (or Purple) and Blue, the former ministerialist and the latter independent.

Of nine Members elected for Canterbury in this period only one, Lushington, cut any kind of figure in the House, for all the fierce contests that they faced to get there. Only citizens or Kentish gentry won the seats, and as over two-fifths of the large and growing electorate were non-resident, candidates could expect much expense. This was exacerbated, as at Maidstone, by the party rivalry between Reds and Blues, the latter supporting the Whigs.

The balance of forces in Kent between ministerial and independent interests was upset when both Members, Honywood and Marsham, more especially the former, inclined to opposition in the Parliament of 1784. To remedy this, Pitt’s government, with a Kent resident at its head and supported by its dockyard and maritime dependants and aristocratic clients from the lord lieutenant the 3rd Duke of Dorset downwards, put up Sir Edward Knatchbull against Honywood, a committed Whig, in February 1790.

The Montagus of Hinchingbrooke, earls of Sandwich, remained parliamentary patrons of Huntingdon in this period, as they had been since the reign of Charles II. With only one house in the town, they owed their supremacy primarily to patronage, the 4th Earl having secured Admiralty and other places for the burgesses and he and his successors maintaining their ‘popularity’ by hospitality and grants of land around the town.Oldfield, Hist. Boroughs, i.

The uneasy coalition by which the Montagus of Hinchingbrooke, earls of Sandwich, and the Montagus of Kimbolton, dukes of Manchester, shared the representation of the county derived its force from mutual fear of the expense of a contested election rather than from cordial agreement. Their principal challenger, John Joshua Proby, Lord Carysfort, seated at Elton, who had aspired to the county in 1774, his father having represented it on the Sandwich interest, renewed his ambition in September 1787.

The leading interests were those of Lords Spencer and Grimston, who had returned a Member each since 1768. Earl Spencer’s was the stronger, based on his hold over the corporation and sustained by loans, the support of the local dissenters and superiority among the outvoters;H. F. C. Lansberry, ‘Politics and Govt. in St. Albans 1685-1835’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1964), summarized in I.H.R. Bull, xli.