Commons 1790-1820

By purchasing the Morice family’s estate of Werrington, Hugh, 1st Duke of Northumberland, acquired the leading interest from 1780; his heir Hugh, who succeeded to the title and to the recordership of Launceston in 1786, preserved his interest there by charging low rents and finding places for the corporators, as well as by keeping down the number of freemen created. Having fallen out with Pitt he had refused to return George Rose, the latter’s secretary at the Treasury, when he sought re-election at Launceston in 1788, and this decision had disagreeable consequences for him.

The principal interest in this corporation borough lay with Francis, 5th Duke of Leeds, heir to the Godolphin interest there. His hold on the borough had, however, been undermined by a decision of the House, made in 1775 and subsequently confirmed, whereby the right of voting lay not in the new corporation, created by a charter of 1774 on the Godolphin interest, but in the surviving old corporators, whose number had dwindled by 1787 to one, the obstinate octogenarian Richard Penhall.

Grampound had been quiescent since Edward Eliot, created Baron Eliot, took over the patronage in 1758: he usually sold the seats to friends of government. It was, however, the most vulnerable of the Cornish boroughs he managed, being the one where he had the least natural interest; and although he was able to arrange the returns as usual in 1790, he lost control thereafter. No patron was safe at Grampound again. The electors terrorized all comers and Grampound was under sentence of death by 1820.

The principal interest at Fowey was in the Rashleigh family represented by Philip Rashleigh of Menabilly, assisted by his brother Charles; next, though not so much based on property as on goodwill, came that of the 1st Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, who built the town hall in 1792. They proposed to share the representation in 1790, as they had done for many years, but met with ‘a very powerful and expensive opposition’ ostensibly in the name of the Prince of Wales, but actually fomented by local intrigue.

‘For the space of 80 years, no such thing as a contested election has been heard of in this borough; nor can the oldest inhabitant remember to have ever seen the face of any one of its Members’.Morning Chron. 2 June 1796. For the last generation Camelford had been managed, on behalf of administration whose friends they returned, by the Phillipps family.

George, 3rd Earl of Orford, as Baron Clinton in his mother’s right, was the nominal patron of Callington, where he owned the majority of the 62 burgages, the rest belonging to the Buller (of Downes) and Coryton (of Crackadon) families.

Since 1754 the 3rd Earl of Bute (in the right of his wife) and Lord Mount Edgcumbe had by a pact returned one Member each for Bossiney, a hamlet of 16 houses in the parish of Tintagel. The disfranchisement of revenue officers reduced the electorate to ten in 1783 and throughout this period it formed a ‘self-created corporation’ or oligarchy which expected about £1,000 to be distributed among its members by prospective candidates at elections, or according to another source £150 a vote, and £500 to be divided among them at by-elections.

The active element in Bodmin elections was the competition of the local gentry to control this decaying corporation borough. The corporation had a negative capability: to quote John Wilson Croker, who canvassed them in 1820:

one third are in the rank of gentlemen, the rest trades-people. Their patron is rather their agent than their master: he has no other hold on them than good offices and goodwill ... they jealously elect their own fellow-corporators, who must be resident, so that the patron can never get his own private friends into the corporation.

While the Cornish boroughs were largely controlled by the resident nobility, the county, to quote Oldfield, was ‘as independent as any in England, and the gentlemen appear determined to keep it so’. The contest of 1790, the only one between 1774 and 1831, arose from the fact that Sir William Lemon had been joined in hostility to Pitt’s administration, during the Regency crisis, by Sir William Molesworth, returned in 1784. In the summer of 1789 Pitt’s friends in the county sponsored the candidature of Francis Gregor of Trewarthenick, who had ‘the sinews of war’ in readiness.

The Grosvenors of Eaton Hall, about four miles from Chester, held one seat continuously from 1715 to 1874, and both for 36 of the 76 years between 1754 and 1830. They enjoyed great influence with the corporation and the guilds and had a large number of houses in the city, obtained on lease from the crown, which were let for short periods at low rents.