Download pdf - The 1656 Election, Polling and Public Opinion: A Warwickshire Case Study

Parliamentary History, Vol. 23, p t . 3 (2004), p p . 357-374

The 1656 Election, Polling and Public Opinion: A Warwickshire Case Study

S T E P H E N K . R O B E R T S History of Parliament

The 1656 general election is usually seen as the nation’s verdict on Oliver Cromwell’s major-generals. A new parliament was summoned by the government so that funds could be voted in order to sustain the war with Spain, but at the hustings, the war was not the dominant issue. Across England and Wales, the contests took place a year after the expedient of the major-generals was devised in the interests of domestic security and moral reformation. Inevitably, after the robust, sometimes rough, tactics adopted by the major-generals to secure compliance to their vision of sober, protestant godliness, the major-generals were themselves the focus of electors’ discontent, and they were in any case at the heart of the electoral process, as candidates for election. The impression that the ‘swordsmen and decimators’ were central to the campaigns in the summer of 1656 is reinforced by the principal source for this entire episode in English and Welsh history, the state papers ofJohn Thurloe, widely known to students through Thomas Birch’s 1742 edition. Here we may read the elations and disappointments of the major-generals as they filed their reports to Cromwell’s secretary of state, who rarely replied with the alacrity and decisiveness his men-of- action military correspondents so obviously yearned for. There are few opportunities available to us to study these elections other than through the major-generals’ eyes, but the Warwickshire election of 1656 affords an interesting case study. The survival of a poll book provides us with evidence of psephological behaviour of a relatively sophisticated kind at this early date, and suggests that electors were capable of strategic voting. The evidence from this election also suggests a contest in which the major- general was not the dominant factor, either as manipulator or as observer, but in which the interests of the local military establishment, as it had existed since the late 1640s, gentry social dominance, and a campaign by the beneficed, ordained ministry all figured strongly. This was an election, in other words, in which novelty of format encouraged the expression of co-ordinated public opinion.

1

The 1656 election was the second general contest to be fought under the terms of the Instrument of Government, the paper constitution which had been in force as the foundation of the protectorate since December 1653. Warwickshire, like other counties, increased its representation at Westminster as a result of the constitutional change.

358 Stephen K. Roberts

Its two knights ofthe shire were now four. The Instrument was intended to reflect the distribution of population, and as a relatively small county in territorial size, Wanvick- shire’s gain was modest compared with the ten seats in each county to be contested in Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire, for example. It was, however, comparable with the profile of other midlands counties such as Staffordshire (three seats), Worcestershire (five), Shropshire (four) and Leicestershire (four). No Warwickshire town was disen- franchised under the Instrument, but under the traditional arrangements, Wanvick and Coventry were the only corporations possessing separate parliamentary representation. Coventry retained its two members under the new arrangements, while Wanvick lost one of its two seats. Other than these two towns, Stratford-upon-Avon was the only chartered corporation in the county, and it continued to lack a seat at Westminster after 1653, as it had before. Warwickshire was a compact county, and most communities in the shire were within 20 miles ofwarwick, where county elections were usually held.

The returned indenture for this election in Warwickshire has not survived, but we know that the election for Warwick was held on 26 August, so it is safe to assume that the county election was held within a week or so of that.’ Nearly all our evidence about the contest comes from two poll books among the Temple papers at the Huntington Library, California.2 One is a collection of 14 paper leaves, each measuring roughly 33 cm. by 30 cm., loosely held together by one central stitch. Only one side of each leafis inscribed. Each leaf contains four columns of names, each column headed by the name of a candidate in the election. The whole document appears to be written in a single hand, which was also responsible for creating a subsidiary document, containing the names of three more candidates, under which in identical format, are the names of electors. Each of the seven candidates’ names is accorded a rank or title, ‘Sir’ or ‘esquire’; the names below them in the columns are mainly unadorned either by suffix of social rank or residence. Some 3,053 names are listed under the candidates’ own. This format precludes the possibility that the lists were compiled before election day, as they are not organized by parish or hundred as they would be in a pre-electoral survey.3 There is nothing to suggest that these documents were part of the oficial process conducted by the returning officer, in this case the sheriff of Warwickshire, Thomas Willughby. The final resting place of these papers among the Temple manuscripts, the fact that Sir Richard Temple’s name appears in the first, that is extreme left-hand, column on each leaf and the crosses marked against some names in the Temple columns all suggest that it was an agent for Sir Richard who drew up these lists in order to help his candidature.

’ T h e Black Bonk of Warwick, ed. T. Kenip (Warwick, 1898), p. 413. I should like to thank Ann Hughes and the 17th Century British History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for comments on this paper. I am also indebted to Mary Robertson of the Huntington Library for accurate measurements of the poll books. ’ Huntington Library, California, Temple papers, ‘Parliament’ section, poll hook 1656. There is a large

body of literature on poll hooks, which appear in numbers only from the late Stuart period. For surveys, see S . W. Baskerville, P. Adman, K. F. Beedham, ‘Manuscript Poll Books and English County Elections in the First Age of Party: A Reconsideration of their Provenance and Purpose’, Archivus, XIX (1991), 384-403; Harzrili.qt of Britidn Puriiarnerztury Po!/ Bonks, ed. J. Sims (Leicester, 1984).

For such a survey, see ‘Tactical Organization in a Contested Election: Sir Edward Dermg and the Spring Election at Kent, 1640’., ed. J . Peacey, in Padiament, Pditics and E l d o n s , 1604- 1648, ed. C. R. Kyle (Cainden Soc., 5th ser., XXV, 2001), 237-72.

The 1656 Election 359

Temple was the youngest of the candidates, one of three to have had previous parliamentary experience. He had been returned as member for Warwickshire in 1654, but at the time of his election then was 20 years and a few months old, and had thus been under age. He was the eldest son ofSir Peter Temple ofstowe in Buckinghamshire, and succeeded to his father’s estates in September 1653. Among the patrimonial Temple estates was Burton Dassett in Warwickshire, which gave Temple an electoral interest in the county. But what was striking about Temple was not the size of his landed interest but the extent of his indebtedness. His father’s debts had been estimated at A;20,400 in 1647, and his plight had been worsened by the clandestine marriage ofhis daughter with Thomas Roper, son and heir of Lord Baltinglass. Richard Temple’s mother, Christian Leveson, was the second wife of Sir Peter, but his step-sister was the eldest child by their father’s first marriage. When Sir Richard first married, in 1614, the settlement had stipulated that two-thirds of Burton Dassett should be the portion of any child born of the marriage, and the Ropers laid claim to this for over 40 years.4 In Richard Temple’s minority, his guardians resorted to parliament, to procure by legislation the power for Richard to levy fines and make recoveries while still under age. His bill was before the Rump Parliament in June 1650 and August 1651, but it was not passed before his father’s death, whereupon his debts and his baronetcy, his creditors’ petitions and his own, were all referred to the committee for prisons and prisoners of the Nominated Assembly of 1653.5

Only on 25 April 1654 did the council of state order the judges of common bench to declare Temple to be of majority age for the specific purpose of settling his estates on trustees, but this technicality probably opened up the possibility of his standing for parliament.6 He had been admitted to the Warwickshire bench of magistrates in September 1653, and had been made a J.P. in Buckinghamshire shortly after his eigh- teenth birthday, albeit briefly, but he had played no part in Warwickshire government, either in managing the militia or in supervising the collection of taxes.’ His interest in a parliamentary seat is likely to have been as a means to escape his creditors, as he inherited L2,OOO of his father’s debts not included in the 1653 settlement, and his borrowings on bonds alone between 1653 and 1656 totalled L4,500.8 Whether or not it was the haven of parliamentary privilege that attracted Temple to the first protectorate parliament, his election was controversial, and it provoked a petition from 40 Warwickshire freeholders who objected to his standing because he was not yet 21. His step-sister’s husband, Baltinglass, also petitioned against him. He may initially have been excluded, to judge from a letter sent him by the minister ofsoutham, near Burton Dassett, Samuel Andrewes, but he was in the House by 16 October 1654.9 There he

‘ Victon‘a County History [hereafter V . C . H . ] , Warwickshire, V, 71; E. F. Gay, ‘The Temples of Stowe and their Debts: Sir Thomas Temple and Sir Peter Temple, 1603-1653’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 11, (1938-9). 409-36.

CJ., VI, 193a, 219a, 420a. 425b; VII, 4b, 5a, 108b, 220b, 229b. C.S.P. Dorn., 1654, p. 116; Huntington Lib., Temple papers, ‘Parliament’, report of Col. H.

Mackworth, 25 Apr. 1654; E. F. Gay, ‘Sir Richard Temple: The Debt Settlement and Estate Litigation’, Huntington Library Quarterly, VI (1943), 263-4. ’ T.N.A. (P.R.O.), C231/6 pp. 235, 259,268.

C.S.P. Dorn., 1654, p. 58; Gay, ’Sir Richard Temple: The Debt Settlement’, 265-6, 273. Huntington Lib., Temple papers, ‘Parliament’: Samuel Andrewes to Temple, 16 Oct. 1654.


sat on committees in the company of experienced public figures from Warwickshire and Coventry, such as William Purefoy and Robert Beake, but in January 1655 was petitioned against by John Wagstaff, a Warwickshire gentleman.” Wagstaff argued that Temple’s continued presence in parliament would prejudice his chances of sueing him for a debt of ,111,000.’’ Pursued by creditors and petitioners, Temple disappeared from view in the closing months of the first protectorate parliament; his appearance as a candidate in the second cannot be explained by any wider interest on his part beyond his personal circumstances.

We owe the existence of the poll book to Temple’s candidature, but we need to survey the careers of his competitors. The second candidate in the order they appear in the poll book was Richard Lucy, one of the family of Charlecote, near Stratford, and of all those throwing their hats in the ring, the most distinguished as to county family standing. He was a son of Sir Thomas Lucy, memorialized upon his death in 1640 as ‘a light . . . a leader . . . a patriot’.’’ Sir Thomas had sat in seven parliaments, and the Lucys had been seated at Charlecote since the reign of Richard I.’3 Despite the antiquity of his family and the universal recognition of his name in Warwickshire, Richard Lucy was not quite the unambiguous county leader he may have seemed. His family had divided politically in the civil war, and while his eldest brother, Spencer, had been colonel of a foot regiment for the king, Richard was briefly active on the parliamentarian county committee, in 1646.14 He was a third son, and had left Charlecote after 1649, when the estate passed to Sir Thomas’s second son. Richard Lucy attended no quarter sessions meetings between June 1652 and October 1658, but had developed a significant political career in L ~ n d o n . ’ ~ H e had been the candidate of the county committee in Wanvickshire’s ‘recruiter’ election of October 1645, a drawn-out, turbulent event which took place in three separate places, following adjournments.I6 Lucy was unsuccessful on that occasion. Admitted in his early 30s to Gray’s Inn, in 1652, perhaps through the good offices of Warwickshire’s local boss, William Purefoy - his promoter in 1645 - Lucy probably owed his place in the Nominated Assembly to influences outside his native county.” Lucy had an estate on the Isle of Wight through his marriage, and William Sydenham, governor of the island, sat on the council of state committee which reviewed nominations to the Assembly. Sydenham and Lucy were first and second named to the committee for the

l o To the Hiyh Court ofl’arliarnent . . . The Humble Petition ofJohn Wqs ta j ( lh55) . I ’ C j . , VII, 38la, 387b.

R. Hams, Ahnu’s Funeral (1641), quoted in Ann Hughes, Politics, Sociefy nnd Civil War in Wanuickshire, 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 50.

l 3 W. Dugdale, 7’heAntiqirities i?f Wanvickshire, ed. W. Thomas (2 vols, 1730), I, 502; a c e Fairfax-Lucy, Charkclife and the Lucys (1958), pp. 27-42.

‘‘P.R. Newman, Royalist O$cers irr Englattd and Wales, 1642-1660 (1981), p. 241; Wanvick County Rwords. Qirnrter Sessions Order Book, Michaclrnas 1637, to Epiphany 1650 (Warwick, 1936), p. xxi; List .f S/wrifsjir England and Woksfrotti the Earliest Tinics to A.D. 2831 (1898), (T.N.A. (P.R.O.), Lists and Indexes, IX), p. 147; Hughes, Politics, Sociefy and Civil War in Wanuickshire, p. 363.

l 5 Wanuirk Counfy Records, Vol. Il l , XXI; Wawick County Records Vol. IV. Quarter Sessions Order Book Eacfer 1657, fo Epiphany 1665 (Warwick, 1938), p. xxv.

I’ 7’he Scottish Dove, 108 (7-12 Nov. 1645), pp. 852-4; 109 (12-19 Nov. 1645). p. 858; The Lije, Diary and Correspondence CfSir William Dugdale, ed. W. Hamper (1827). pp. 82-3.

The Rejiisfer ofAdniissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521- 1889, ed. J. Foster (2 vols, 1889), I , 262.


army appointed in July 1653, and the two men were working together on the army committee later in the 1650s.’*

Lucy’s work on the army committee continued after the dissolution of the Nominated Assembly, and he added appointments as a commissioner for excise arrears and a judge of probate to his collection of central government ofices fiom late December 1653. From February 1654 he was named as a circuit commissioner of oyer and terminer, and later to ad hoc commissions to try rebels against the Cromwellian regime.’’ As an ‘ejector’ of unsuitable clergy under the new state church arrangements, Lucy was evidently well-disposed towards the government. He was returned for both Wanvickshire and Wanvick in the first protectorate parliament, and waived his Wanvick seat after William Purefoy, returned both for the county and for Coventry, waived his return for Warwickshire.” During this parliament, he served on various committees with a legal element. His candidature in the 1656 election was as a government administrator with a strong family interest to commend him to those who might not approve of his Cromwellian credentials.

In Sir Roger Burgoyne, the electors of Warwickshire in 1656 were presented with a reluctant candidate, disengaged from political life since 1649. Burgoyne’s father had settled the Wanvickshire estate of Wroxall on him in 1641, and he had gained parliamentary experience as knight of the shire for Bedfordshire between March 1641 and December 1648, when he withdrew voluntarily from the Commons, even though he was not targeted during Pride’s purge.21 Burgoyne’s public career had been compromised by two persistent private themes: much family illness, and his commitment to helping his royalist friend, Sir Ralph Verney, escape the attentions of sequestrators and other agents of penal taxation. Ever an ironic, detached observer of public affairs, Burgoyne wrote to the exiled Verney on 7 July 1656 reporting that ‘they begin to talk of a new parliament, which a little discomposes me’: his anxiety arose from his uncertainty as to the likely political behaviour of the Warwickshire electorate.22 By the 26th, he had resolved to quit the county on an unnecessary journey to Yorkshire: ‘The thing that troubles me is the ele~tion,’~ what to doe in it if it can not be avoyded is the question, and now you know the only reason why I take this journey at this time.’24 As a tactic to evade nomination for parliament, his escape was unsuccessful.

Edward Peyto of Chesterton was well-connected with the oldest and most distinguished county families, and his appearance as a candidate in this election came in the year after his service as sheriE His father, Sir Edward Peyto, had before the civil war received ‘many noble favours’ from James, marquess of Hamilton, his ‘ever honoured lord’, particularly in connexion with his young son, Edward.” As brother-in-law of

’* CJ., VII, 287a; B. L., Add. MS 29319, ff. 112, 113. ‘’T.N.A. (P.R.O.), C 181/6 pp. 9, 15, 377-8. 2”T.N.A. (P.R.O.), C 219/44/pt. 3. *’ B.L., MSS Dept., Claydon House letters, Film M636/9: Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 2 Jan. 1649. 22 Ibid. , M636/14: Burgoyne to Verney, 7 July 1656. 23 ‘election’ in cypher. 24 B.L., Film M636/14: Burgoyne to Vemey, 26 July 1656. 25 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust R.O., Stratford-upon-Avon, DR 9811088.


Basil Feilding, second earl of Denbigh, Hamilton was one of what were various faindy and property links between the Peytos and the Feildings of Newnham Paddox.26 A parliamentarian in the civil war, Sir Edward Peyto joined Lord Brooke of Wanvick castle, and was left to command it when Brooke went up to join discussions in parliament in July 1642. The castle was besieged by the earl of Northampton, and Sir William Dugdale declared Sir Edward Peyto a traitor; Peyto famously responded by dangling a Bible and a winding-sheet from the castle wall in a defiant expression of faith and willingness to sacrifice himself for the cause.27 Edward Peyto junior accompanied his father in his military duties, eventually receiving a commission, while still a minor, in the earl of Denbigh’s own regiment. His civil war career was not always happy; in the incidents involving the desertion of some of his troop in London, and the forced sale of his horse because he was unable to return it from London to Warwickshire there is more than a hint of the young inexperienced gentleman soldier out of his depth.2*

The Peytos suffered unwelcome attention from the Coventry-based Wanvickshire county committee from the mid-1640s. Relations between the committee and the older county families worsened generally, in a drive towards an all-out conduct of the war by the centralized New Model Army. In Wanvickshire, the divisions among the parliamentarians festered particularly in a war of attrition between the county committee and the sub-committee of accounts, which was staffed by associates of the earl of Denbigh. Edward Peyto’s by now widowed mother, Elizabeth, pleaded before the less than sympathetic county committee for relief from local taxation, and complained of ‘mushrumps growing in the top of the chambers for want of tiling’ at Chesterton Once Peyto came of age, in 1647, his service by virtue of the seniority of his family in the county commission of the peace and the militia seems to have reconciled the Peytos to the dominant radical faction. He accepted the commonwealth regime to the extent of serving as colonel of the nulitia from 1650.”) He regu- larly attended quarter sessions, served as sheriff in 1654-5 and thus supervised Wanvick assizes in the troubled summer of 1655 when the expedient of the major-generals was dreamt up: Peyto seems to have had no difiiculty in adapting to the pr~tectorate.~’

Temple, Burgoyne, Lucy and Peyto were candidates from established county families. In Richard Creed, Richard Hopkins and Joseph Hawkesworth, in the order in which they appear in the poll book, the electors were presented with figures from outside the klite. Creed was a career soldier, who had been commissioned as lieutenant of a troop in the Staffordshire and Wanvickshire Association in February 1643 who had been promoted by William Purefoy to command a troop of harquebusiers.

’‘I G.C.E., Conipleefe Peeeraye, VI, 261; Dugdale, Wanuickshiree, I, 472. “Dugdale, Diary, ed. Hamper, p. 17; ‘The Genealogie, Life and Death of the Right Honourable

Robert Lord Brooke’. ed. P. Styles, Miscellany, I (Dugdale Society, XXXI, 1977), pp. 175, 179, 18O;J~loyfull Newesfrorn Wowirk (1642), p. 3. ’’ Shakespeare Birthplace Trust R.O., D R 98/1704; T.N.A (P.R.O.), SP 28/136/34. ’” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust R.O., D R 37/box 88/65. ‘“T.N.A. (P.K.O.), C 2 3 1 / h p. 51; Acfs and Ordinances o f the l n t e n e p m , 1642-16611, ed. C.H. Firth,

R.S. Rait (3 vols, 1911); C.S.P. Durn, 1650, p. 507.

Krmrds, Val. 111, Quarter Sessiuns Order Book, Easter 16.50-Epiphany 1657, p. xxi. 31 T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 28248; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust R.O., D R 98/1712; Wanuick C o w r y


Between June 1645 and August 1646, Creed’s troop had been supported by parishes around Stratford-upon-Avon under the direction of the county committee, and thus in the mid-1640s he stood on the other side of the fence from Edward P e y t ~ . ~ ~ In 1647, Creed was commissioned in Colonel Francis Thornhaugh’s regiment, which drew much on Coventry and Wanvickshire for its complement of soldiers, and he signed a regimental letter to Sir Thomas Fairfax soon after he joined, petitioning for arrears of pay.33 He seems to have become ractcalized to a degree, serving on a committee of the army council of officers on how to remove the army’s dependence on free Sent to Scotland in the aftermath of the defeat of the Scots army in 1651, Creed’s troop returned to the midlands and was in the first line of counter-insurgency operations there against royalist conspirators in 1655.35 Described by one historian as a ‘radical opponent of the Protectorate’, Creed may perhaps have harboured doubts about Oliver Cromwell in 1658 but there is nothing to identifjl him in 1655-6 as anything other than a p r ~ t e c t o r i a n . ~ ~

Creed’s superior officer between May 1643 and June 1645 had been Joseph Hawkesworth, himself a candidate for election in 1656. Probably a native of Barnsley, Yorkshire, Hawkesworth had by 1640 become estate steward of Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke, at Wanvick castle.j’ From April 1643, he personified conti- nuity in the local military presence of the Wanvick area. Beginning as a captain in William Purefoy’s regiment, he was at one point in the civil war posted to fight in the north-west of England, but mostly stayed in Wanvick castle to become its governor in February 1649.3* In 1650, he became colonel of foot in the Wanvickshire militia, opposite Peyto, who was colonel of horse, and was given another commission as captain of militia horse when that force was reorganized in 1655.39 With Creed, Hawkesworth became a proprietor of nearby Kenilworth castle when it was made over to the regiment in which he held command. He had acquired the gatehouse of the semi-ruinous castle, and evidently intended improving the e~ ta t e .~”

Though no gentleman, nor a Wanvickshire native, as an important figure in the establishment of both Lord Brooke and the army at Wanvick castle, Hawkesworth

32 T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 28/136/25. Creed is not to be confused with another %chard Creed, a naval administrator, son-in-law of the Welsh minister, Walter Cradoc, and brother of John Creed, colleague of Samuel Pepys. For the other one, G. E. Aylrner, T h e State’s Sewants (1973), pp. 69-70; G. Parry, ’Richard Creed: Mab yng Nhyfraith Walter Cradoc’, National Library of WalesJournal, XXIV (1985-h), 392-4.

33 Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS LXVII; C.H. Firth and G. Davies, Regimental History of CroinuwN’s Army (2 vols, Oxford, 1940), I, 279-80.

O 4 77ie Clarke Papers, 11, ed. C. H. Firth, (Camden Soc., new ser., LIV, 1894), 190. 35 Firth and Davies, Rqiniental History, I, 284; A Collection ofthe State Papers ofjohn Thurloe Esq., ed.

Thomas Birch (7 vols, 1742), 111, 211, 270-1, 334. 36 Hughes, Politics, Sociefy arid Civil War in Warwickshire, p. 206; Writings and Speeches .f Oliver Cronwel l ,

ed. W. C . Abbott (4 vols, Cambridge, Mass. 1937-47), IV, 740. 37 History of Parliament Trust, 1640-60 section, draft biography of Hawkesworth; Wanvickshire R.O.,

C R 1886/box 41 1: accounts ofJoseph Hawkesworth. ’* E. Carey-Hill, ‘The Hawkesworth Papers, 1601 -60’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological

Society, LIV, (1929-30), 18, 19, 24, 26, 48; Letter Books qfSir William Brereton, ed. R. N. Dore (2 vols, Chester, 1984-90). 11, 7, 24.

3y C.S.P. Dorn., 1650, p. 507; T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 28/248: warrants of 23 Dec. 1652 and 1654; Carey-Hill, ‘Hawkesworth Papers’, p. 36.

4( I Carey-Hill, ‘Hawkesworth Papers’, pp. 19, 21.


cannot simply be dismissed as an outsider, or as one with no local credibility. The standing of the last of the seven candidates, Richard Hopkins, was also ambiguous. Although Hopkins was from the town of Coventry, with which Warwickshire had an uneasy, difficult relationship over rating proportions, his father had served in two parliaments and was himself a university-educated barri~ter.~’ As ‘Captain’ Hopkins he served the town in a legal advisory capacity in the late 1640s, when it was trying to purchase its fee farm rent confiscated from the crown, and was the son-in-law of William Jesson, M.P. for Coventry in the Long Parliament.42 Jesson had been, at best, cool towards Purefoy and the committee, had sought to rid Coventry of its garrison and paid the price for his distaste for the soldiery when he was secluded at Pride’s purge.43 Rather inactive as a sub-committee of accounts member in 1646, the Richard Hopkins o f the 1650s has been characterized by the county’s leading historian of this period as ‘a moderate supporter of 1650s regimes’.44 He was active as a magistrate in Warwickshire in the 1650s, and crucially was recorded as a county freeholder, hence his claim to a place in parliament for the shire in 1656.45

In this election, the candidates could not be categorized simply as for or against the army, or either of the county or not of it. In the case of Temple, bearing an undoubted historic family name to conjure with, the candidate’s motive seems to have been personal, with only a brief and contentious public career to commend him. Lucy, another evocative name, was more distinguished as a government official than as a credible copy of his ‘patriot’ father. Burgoyne never wanted to stand at all. Peyto, Creed and Hawkesworth had had military careers, though each differed significantly. Peyto had begun his public life in the ‘old’ army of Brooke, and had found himself in the Denbigh camp when feuding reached its height between Purefoy and the county committee on the one hand, and Denbigh and the accounts sub-committee on the other. Despite a legacy of antipathy between his family and Purefoy, he was by the mid-1650s rehabilitated enough to serve in the same militia force as Hawkesworth, purchaser of crown lands and visible representative of the military presence. Creed was probably more of as ‘outsider’ figure than the others when he presented himself to the voters, and was probably the most low-born. Hopkins’s Coventry origins were counter-balanced by his fimily’s considerable parliamentary experience, even though there was by this time a greater political distance between Hopkins and Purefoy than between Peyto and Purefoy.

2

The poll book provides our only source material for the mechanics of the election process itself. The very existence of the book suggests, however, either that there was contention on polling day, or that local agents for Temple felt that the doubling of

4’ B.D. Henning, ‘The History qfParliamenf. T h e House ofCommons, 1660-90 (3 vols, 1983), 11, 579 42CoventryR.0., BA/H/U/A79/214; T.N.A. (P.R.O.), PROB 11/219, f. 115. 4’ Hughes, Politics, Sociely and Civil War in Warwickshire, pp. 253-4, 274. 44 Ibid., p. 336.

Ibid., p. 354; Coventry R.O., BA/H/M/28/1.


available parliamentary seats, and the large number of candidates, called for a careful recording of electors’ choices. It goes without saying that there was no secret ballot, and it is dificult to see what motives an elector would have in providing the clerk with a misleading or inaccurate account of his intentions, and the best vindication of the integrity of the poll book as a part of the electoral process is the confirmation it provides of the known result. The voting figures agree with what we already know about the victorious candidates. The columns of names on each leaf of the book are of uneven length, suggesting that each leaf was the record of a particular phase of the polling process, and that the ‘book’ was only stitched together afterwards. Beginning the first leaf with the row of candidates’ full names, the clerk evidently wrote down voters’ names as they stepped forward to tables to name their choices. Slight patterns of ordering of names are detectable in the lists, suggesting how individuals came forward in turn. The holograph quality of the document shows it to be the work of one clerk. His task would have been a hectic one, and the lists contain no cancellations or errors, suggesting a likelihood that it was compiled from separate original lists, now lost. Even if this was so, it does not affect our fundamental picture of how voters revealed their intentions to one or more clerks on election day.

The electorate of Warwickshire, as elsewhere, was not formed on the same basis as it was before and during 1640. Instead of the old 40s. freehold franchise in counties, there was now a property qualification, in real or personal estate, of A200, but the electorate now excluded all who had fought parliament in the civil war, or who had ‘aided, advised, assisted or abetted’ the enemies of parliament since 1642. The definition of who these people were was, in the Instrument of Government, tacitly left in the hands of returning officers, the sheriffs, but since December 1653 there had been a ‘tuning’ of the population by practical, local means that was more effective than constitutional fiat. Sir Roger Burgoyne noted the activities ofthe ‘grand commissioner’, by which he meant Major-General Edward Whalley, in the county.46 The chief gentry were apparently assembled together, to have the penal ‘decimation’ tax imposed on them. Burgoyne singled out Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, Sir Francis Willoughby and Sir Clement Fisher of Great Packington as notable victims of the process. Whalley soon left, but among his local commissioners, Robert Beake of Coventry made many forays into the county during 1656 in the interests of godly reform, until his work at the admiralty in London took up the bulk of his time.47

A natural consequence of the attentions of major-generals o r their commissioners for a local gentleman was exclusion from the political process. The net effect of the Instrument together with this selective tinkering on the size of the electorate are inevitably hard to assess. Professor Paul Pinckney has argued that what was intended

4h Mernoirs ofthe Verney Family during the Civil War, ed. Frances Parthenope Vemey (4 vols, 1892), 11, 30.

47 Ibid., p. 31; ‘Diary of Robert Beake, Mayor of Coventry, 1655-1656’, ed. L. Fox, Miscellany, I, ed. R. Bearman (Dugdale Soc. XXXI, 1977). pp. 111-37. For references to Leigh, Willoughby and Fisher see Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Wanvickshire, passim. For the major-generals’ commissioners, see J. Sutton, ‘Croniwell’s Commissioners for Preserving the Peace of the Commonwealth: A Staffordshire Case Study’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statmien in the English Revolution, ed. I . Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden, (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 151 -82, and C. Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals (Manchester, 2001), pp. 59-70.


in the Instrument was a 50 per cent increase in For Wanvickshire, we only have figures for the December 1640 by-election with which to make comparisons. O n that occasion, 3,511 votes were cast for four candidates competing for two seats. If every voter cast his two votes (admittedly very unlikely to have occurred), there would have been 1,755 electors at the Though there may have been some who preempted the twentieth-century Northern Ireland folklore injunction to ‘vote early and vote often’, more are likely to have voted for only one candidate, suggesting 1,755 as an absolute minimum. In 1656, the 3,053 names in the poll book, when separately listed and analyzed in a Microsoft Excel database, can be reduced to 934 individual men who cast votes, and this is likely to be a somewhat inflated figure because of some name duplication. The Warwickshire evidence provides no support for Pinckney’s view of an expanded electorate.

Only a handful of county gentry participated in the election as voters. Raucous and turbulent as they often were, elections were generally no place for men of refinement and gentility. Bruisings at the hands of the major-general and his helpers will have done nothing to encourage them to attend. The antiquary, Sir Simon Archer of Tanworth-in-Arden, was the only voting knight.’” Five were recorded by the compiler of the poll book as bearing the suffix ‘esquire’, all of them former accounts committeemen or serving magistrates, men reconciled to the protectoral regime.51 But beyond these immediately identifiable figures were at least another 33 parish gentry, some distinguished with the suffix ‘g’ for gentleman, some with names unadorned with any title, but whose status can be recovered by the use of primary sources.52 The majority of these community leaders cast four votes each, casting them for the Combination of Lucy, Burgoyne, Yeyto and Hawkesworth. Of this sample of the electorate, Lucy was the most popular candidate, taking 29 votes, followed by Burgoyne, Peyto and Hawkesworth in that order. Temple only secured ten votes, and Hopkins and Creed two each. The most socially distinguished voter, Sir Simon Archer, voted for this combination, as did William Colemore of Birmingham. Both Archer and Colemore were conservative figures who accepted the prevailing regimes of the 1650s rather than enthusiastically embracing them. John Wagstaff, who had led opposition to Temple’s election in 1654, also voted this way.53 Individual electors doubtless had their own local and personal reasons for their preferences. William

‘’ P. Pinckney, ‘The Suffolk Elections to the Protectorate Parliaments’, in Politics arid People in Reiwlutiunary England, ed. C. Jones, M. Newitt, S. Roberts (Oxford, 1YR6), p. 207; P. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire Election of 1656’, Bidletin oftlzeJolin Rylands Library, XLIX (1967). 419. The size of the electorate is not discussed in Ilurston, Cromudl’s Major-Generals.

4‘) Proreedin‘qs i t i the Opertin): Session of fhe Long Parliament. House of Conitriotis. Vol. 11. 21 December 1640-20 March 1641, ed. M. Jansson (Rochester, New York, and Woodbridge, 2000). p. 215. ’“ For a biography, see ‘Sir Sinion Archer: “A lover of Antiquity and of the lovers thereof” ’, i n P.

Styles, Stirdies in W~st Midlanils History (Kineton, 1978), pp. 1-53. 51 Charles Bentley of Kineton, John Ludford of Anstey, John Fethenton of Packwood, Mathew

Holbeach of Meriden, William Colmore of Birmingham. 5 2 Including Dugdale, Antiqiritic.5 of Wanuirkshire, ed. Thomas; Hughes, Politics, Society arid Civil War in

IV~ru~irkshire; Ann Hughes, ‘Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire 1620-1 h50’, University of Liverpool Ph.D., 1980, esp. Kineton hundred high constables list, pp. 491 ff.; Warwick Coiinty Records, Vd. 1X, Hcnrtli Tnx Refitrris 1, ed. M. Walker (Warwick, 1957).

s3 T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 18/74/71; To flie High Court of Parliurrierrt . . . T h e Hi4ntbk Petitiori qfJohpi Wagst~j f ( lh55) .


Jesson, one of the two gentlemen who voted for Richard Hopkins, was his nephew. Hopkins himself, the only candidate known to have voted, chose Lucy and Burgoyne, in accordance with his conservative and cautious political outlook. O f the magistrates known to have occupied the Wanvickshire bench in the 1650s, only the names of Archer, Hopkins and Colemore are found on the poll book, suggesting that the magstracy on the whole kept aloof from polling.54

The mass of the 934 individuals who voted were not gentry but freeholders of the county. No territorial features of the voting are discernible. As already remarked upon, Wanvickshire was not a particularly large county territorially, and all parts of the shire were represented at the poll. Other than Hopkins and Jesson, there were eight voters who were Coventry men with estates in Wanvickshire; half of them supported their fellow townsman, Hopkins, the other half, with one exception who cast just a single vote for Creed, opted for a variety of permutations. As Coventry had retained its own two seats under the Instrument, there was hardly a general issue of under-representation to motivate them. Wanvick men seem to have been much more active in this election, even though the county town enjoyed separate representation. Wanvick had lost one of its seats, but it was probably the town’s role as venue for the county poll that ensured a high turn-out of its citizens. In Suffolk, Pinckney noticed an invasion of borough men into the county election, a consequence of disenfranchisement. Between at least 60 to 70 individuals seem to be identifiable as having Wanvick residence, on the evidence provided by hearth tax returns, Dugdale’s Warwickskire, and miscellaneous sources. Twenty of these men went on to vote some years later in the 1659 election at Wanvick, under the restored traditional electoral arrangement^.^^ This small sample again follows the general pattern of support for Lucy, Burgoyne, Peyto and Hawkesworth. Another analyzable interest group of a different sort were the opponents of Richard Temple in 1654. O f the 38 who lent their names to the petition against him, 25 voted in 1656. Unsurprisingly, only three had, since the last election, changed their minds about Temple sufficiently to vote for him. Twenty of the 25 voted for the most common permutation of Lucy, Burgoyne, Peyto and Hawkesworth.

3

A striking feature of the election in this county was the clerical vote. In the absence of convocation or an alternative form of separate representation in the constitution, and given that the clergy held personal and real estate, it is natural that some of them should have been keen to have their voices heard. Clergy were included in calculations by candidates in the Kent election of the Spring of 1640.56 Some 47 clergymen can be shown to have participated. Some were entered in the poll book by the scribe with

‘4 Names 0fJ.P.s from Wanvick County Records, Vol. III. Quarter Sessions Order Book, Easter 1650-Epiph-

” T.N.A. (P.R.O.), C 219/48: indenture for borough of Wanvick. ” ‘Tdctical Organization in a Contested Election’, ed. Peacey, p. 247.

any 1657, pp. xvii-xix.


the suffix ‘clerk’, while others can be identified using lists of Wanvickshire clergy.” The names of 158 clergy can be recovered for the county from these sources. This is 50 less than Professor Hughes takes to be the county’s pre-civil war full complement, but exclusions and professional mobility have to be taken into account in arriving at an accurate picture for a given year. An influential grouping within the ranks of the Wanvickshire clergy was the Kenilworth classis, whose members were listed by Thomas Hall, minister of King’s Norton, in 1658. According to Hall, there were 20 members in 1658, and in 1656, 13 of them participated in the election. The classis was a forum for discussion and a mutual support group for ministers, but was, as Professor Hughes has pointed out, ‘far from being a comprehensive ecclesiastical structure’ in fully formed presbyterian mode5* Again the majority, all but five, voted for the most common combination, casting all their four votes. These voters included senior ministers like Thomas Dugard of Barford, Henry Butler of Warwick, Alexander Beane of Stratford-upon-Avon and John Trapp, the schoolmaster there. All were vigorous proponents of godly reform in the 1650s, even if some conformed to the anglican church after 1660.59 The minority group of five who used their votes in different ways included Robert Morton, the embattled minister of Church Lawford, engaged in a war of attrition with the dominant royalist landowner, Francis, Lord Dunsmore, and his heirs. Morton, who owed his place to the London-based committee of plundered ministers, voted for one person only: Hawkesworth, the embodiment of local military authority. Daniel Eyres was the only classis member to vote for Temple; his living of Whitnash was within Temple’s sphere of influence, based on nearby Burton Dassett. Lawrence Bott and Joseph Packwood voted for Hopkins; no-one voted for Creed.

The Kenilworth classis was an organized network, and its 13 voters in 1656 accounted for an impressive proportion of the 47 ministers in total who involved themselves in the poll. The association’s choices accorded with the general clerical vote, in favour ofLucy, Burgoyne, Peyto and Hawkesworth. By this time, most royalist clergy had been removed or suppressed; those who survived, such as Christopher Harvey at Clifton-on-Dunsmore, did not vote. However, John Onley, who also opposed the orthodox ministry (though from the other side) did vote. He was a General Baptist disputant with John Bryan at Kenilworth.60 Two others called Onley also voted, and all three selected Temple. Onley was also distinctive in voting twice

57 The main sources for Warwickshire clergy in the 1650s are Calamy Revised, ed. A. G. Matthews (Oxford, 1934), p. 557 ( 7 % ~ Warwickshire Ministerr T~stimony, 1648): T. Hall, [Greek] sive Apologia pro Ministetio Evan~elic~r (Frankfurt, 1658), list of 20 nlinisters in the Kenilworth classis; T.N.A. (P.K.O.), E 339/1: ‘The names and surnames of the ministers of the severall rectoryes and viccaridges chapplrs donative and curacies’ In Warwickshire; a few more names can be gleaned from Jane Houston, Catalogue of Eccleriastiral Records of the Comtnmtwealth 1643- 1660 in fhe Lambefh Palace Library (1968).

5x A. Hughes, Godly Refomation and its Opporrrnts in Warwickshire, 1640- 1662 (Uugdale Soc. Occasional Paper XXV, 1993), p. 10.

59 For these men, see Hughes, Godly R$wnat ion , passim; Calarny Revised. ed. Matthews, esp. for Beane; A. Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 16.70s - A “Parliamentary-Puritan” Connexion?’, HistoricalJournal, XXIX (1986), 771-93.

At least he probably did; as he was not ordained, his nanie is unadorned with any indication as to his husbandmaii status, and thus there is a possibility that he was not the Onley who voted. For Onley, see A Publick Disputation Sundry Dayrs ar Killigworth (1655); Hughes, Godly Refomation, pp. 13, 23.


for Creed and for Hopkins: an emphatic preference for the outsiders in the contest. But Onley was poles apart from the orthodox, ordained ministers. O f the latter, not in the classis, there was evidently some attempt to shore up Temple’s vote by his clerical neighbours. For example, Samuel Andrewes, minister of Southam, an enthusiastic supporter of Temple in 1654, probably brought with him Henry Cowp, minister at Stoneleigh, Richard Hall, vicar of Newbold and Richard Hunt of Bishop’s Itchington. These were all places in or near the Dassett hills. Richard Creed received virtually no support from the clergy. Other than Onley, whose radical challenge to the ministry strictly speaking disqualifies him from inclusion in this group, only Thomas Gibbs, parson of Ladbrook, voted for Creed, in combination with a vote for Temple and no others.

Temple also received support from Thomas Pilkington of Claverdon and Richard Venner or Venour of Wanvick. Pilkington did not sign the Testimony, so was not especially sympathetic to the Presbyterians. He copied a 1653 petition of the ‘gentlemen, freeholders and other inhabitants’ of the county into his parish register. It was a plea for a ‘pious, conscientious, orthodox ministry’, requesting protection for ministers against their public detractors such as the sectaries, and hoping that congregations will be supplied with educated clergy.61 Pilkington weathered the Restoration, remaining at Claverdon until his death in 1685; Richard Venner, too, ‘was to exhibit great enthusiasm for the Book ofCommon Prayer at the Restoration’.62 Their careers after 1660 suggest that perhaps Temple, commonly thought to have held some kind of post in the household of Oliver Cromwell, may actually have been an attractive candidate for those with a hankering after the structures and respect for learning of the anglican ministry.

The clergy of this compact county were used to organizing themselves. The 1648 Testimony of the ministers, attested by clergy from various denominational perspectives, is evidence of this, as is the persistence of the classis and the 1653 petition copied by Pilkington. Even so, it was a minority of the clergy, 47 out of 158, who voted in this election. There were many prominent ministers who held aloof probably because they did not hold property in the county: Obadiah Grew and John Bryan the public disputant, based in Coventry, and Thomas Hall, minister at King’s Norton, Worcestershire, but member of the Kenilworth classis, come into this category. The abstention of others raises further questions about motivations in this election. It will come as no surprise, in view of the evidence presented so far, that the winners of this election were Lucy, Burgoyne, Peyto and Hawkesworth. The figures recorded by the poll books are as follows: Lucy 687 votes, Burgoyne 678, Peyto 573, Hawkesworth 572, Temple 340, Creed 145 and Hopkins 68. Moreover, although the election return is lost, the published result lists the victors in the order in which their names appear in the poll book, a further suggestion that they stood as a Although Professor Pinckney has presented evidence to suggest that there were counties in 1654 where, following pre-1653 practice, men deployed just

6’ ’A Seventeenth Century Wanvickshire Clergyman’, in P. Styles, Studies in West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978), pp. 76-7.

Hughes, Godiy Reformation, p. 9. A Per$ct List of the Names o f t h e Several Persons returned to serve in this Parliament o f 1656 (1656), p. 7.

370 Stephen K. Robert5

two votes, in this particulx election the dominant voting pattern was one man, four In the confused circumstances of the poll it is unsurprising that there was

also some double voting, where individuals cast two votes for the same candidate. Some 25 cases suggest ‘plumping’, bestowing more than one vote on a particular candidate. This, however, is an anomaly, not part of the main psephological pattern. The most notable feature of the voting pattern is that the four successful candidates won because voters selected them as a slate, not because of random single votes or the unlooked-for consequence of other voting permutations.

In this respect, the fate of Richard Creed is instructive. There were 24 voting patterns involving Creed’s name alone along with other single candidates or with groups. Seventeen men voted for a Creed, Burgoyne, Lucy and Hawkesworth victory, for example, and 16 for a solely military combination of Creed and Hawkesworth. But 55 voters, the largest preference involving Creed, voted for him alone. He came last but one in the poll. Most of his other supporters, that is, those voting for him in combination, saw him either as a partner of Burgoyne (45 electors) or of Hawkesworth (44 electors). Another unsuccessful candidate, Temple, received a relatively high proportion of single votes (45), but Hawkesworth acquired only 15 and Lucy and Burgoyne ten each. This seems to point to the irresistible conclusion that to be successful in this election it was good to be part of the slate, and not to be reliant on individual ‘unaligned’ votes. Sir Roger Burgoyne’s behaviour during the summer of 1656 is worth recalling. He escaped from the midlands, fearing some ineluctable process was at work, and these anxieties persisted after the election in which he had been successful. O n 1 September, still in Yorkshire, he heard ‘such unwellcome newes of an election at Warwick which does much disorder and afflict me’ 65 Clearly some organizing process involving him was afoot, without his direct involvement or even approval. If the winners in this election formed part of a slate, as I have suggested, questions remain as to who constructed it and for what purpose. In the absence of hard, conclusive evidence beyond the secrets of the poll book, one can only offer some tentative suggestions, based on the local and national politics of the period.

.

4

It is relatively easy to discount a number of possible interest groups as incapable of organizing themselves electorally. The most powerful county gentry, purged from the bench of magistrates, decimated by taxation and excluded from the electoral process by constitutional fiat, were in no position to organize. Elements of the lesser gentry and freeholders had been left enfranchised still, but lacked a political mechanism at election time. Their natural vehicle of protest or of mere public statement was the sessions or assize grand jury; their voice, the presentment. For them to have reached up, so to speak, to manipulate their social superiors in their interests would defy our understanding of how seventeenth-century society functioned. As we know, the

64 Pinckney, ‘Suffolk Elections’, pp. 209-10. h5 B.L., Film M 676/14: Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Vemey, 1 Sept. 1656.

The 1656 Election 37 1 military interest was active in many counties, in the form of the major-generals. The army presence in Wanvickshire was significant but not ovenvhehng. The Wanvick garrison had never been large, and by 1655 may have been reduced to a troop of 30. Cromwell was willing to see it close altogether seeing it as neither significant nor ‘considerable’. Coventry had hosted a substantial garrison of 200 down to 1651, but in March 1655, there were but two troops of soldiers present.66 Moreover, it was not a county in which Major-General Whalley took a close interest, and there is also the problematic evidence of the divergent fate of the two military candidates, Hawkesworth evidently being part ofthe slate and Creed not so. The huge discrepancy between the two in their electoral fortunes suggests that voters were perfectly capable of differentiating between them: there was no simple unified military interest at work behind the scenes. It is tempting to distinguish between Creed and Hawkesworth on the basis of their credibility as local men. Hawkesworth had been rooted in Wanvick castle since before the start of the civil war, as steward and then soldier; Creed served in the field army, and was vigorous in tackling insurrection in the county in March 1655. Creed himself implied in a report to Lord Protector Cromwell concerning that incident that he was prepared to go further than Hawkesworth in gathering intelligence on the rebels.67 But a characterization of them as local man versus outsider is only superficially convincing. Creed after all had served in and around the county for many years, and had once been Hawkesworth’s subordinate. This enabled Creed to pride himself in 1655 on the local composition of his troop, persuading Cromwell that his soldiers were the most fit for policing service at Wanvick.

The most active associate ofthe major-generals in Wanvickshire was Robert Beake, mayor of Coventry in 1655-6, who made forays into the county from his urban base, in the interests of godly reformation.@ Whalley described Beake in December 1655 as a recent convert to the virtues of the protectoral government, one with a ‘great interest with the godly’.69 It is doubtful whether this kind of ‘interest’ could be converted into political clout: Beake as a single-handed political fixer in a county where he lacked an electoral ‘interest’ seems unlikely. In the same report to Secretary John Thurloe, Whalley noted the changed attitude of ministers: ‘And truly, sir, it is evident in most places, where I have bin, there is a great change in the godly ministers. They exceeding well resent the b u y ~ n e s . ’ ~ ~ The business was the regime of the major- generals; their resentment, in a construction with the opposite meaning of modem usage, was their well receiving of it.71 The clergy now showed affection for the lord protector, and were praying for him from their pulpits in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Coventry, and probably Nottinghamshlre and Derbyshire, and although Whalley did not mention Wanvickshire, there is every reason to consider they were doing so there, too. The major-general was doubtless in danger of being carried away by his own enthusiasm, but the emergence of a pro-protectoral clerical interest was a reality,

66 H. M. Reece, ‘The Military Presence in England, 1649-1660’. University ofOxford D.Phil., 1981,

67 State Papers ofJDhn Thurlue, ed. Birch, 111, 212-3. 68 ‘Diary of Robert Beake’, passim. h9 State Papers ufJuhn Thurloe, ed. Birch, IV, 272-3. ’(’ Ibid. 7’ Oxfird English Dictionary for changing usages of this word.

pp. 132, 133, 291, 292; State Papers ojJohn Thurloe, ed. Birch, 111, 212.


if somewhat glossed by his optimistic tone. An alliance of pro-government clergy, together with elements of the military and minor gentry is beginning to emerge as the likely shaper of this election, held a little over six months after Whalley’s remarks. The strong showing of the ministers at the poll, the inevitable presence there of the freeholder class, and the involvement of the military all point in this direction.

It was an election in which the press had been deployed to persuade voters. Whalley had evidently feared the effects of an anonymous pamphlet, England’s Remembrancers, found in London by the bookseller George Thomason on 1 August, ‘scatred about the streets’.” This work combined an excoriating attack on Cromwell’s selfish ambition with a call to give priority to the polls over the summer’s work: ‘Think not upon this as a small thing, that must give place to a bargain, or a daies harvest work, or as the saving of a load or two of hay or Corn, do not think it of such mean concernment, that it is indifferent with you whether you go to the elections or not, unless your friend or your land-lord send to The tract went on to warn voters not to be cowed by the soldiery, and it fashioned a restatement of the principles of the ‘good old cause’ of republicanism, but its effects in the midlands were slight. Whalley was able to report to Thurloe on 23 August his relief that the pamphlet had had little effect in his territ~ry.’~ If there was no encouragement for republicans in the outcome of the poll, sections of the midlands clergy by contrast did harbour high expectations of the new parliament. Edward Harley, returned for Herefordshire, wrote on 2 September to the Kidderminster organizer of the Worcestershire association of ministers, Richard Baxter, for advice on how he should conduct himself in the forthcoming assembly, in the interests of the godly. Baxter replied with a long, detailed prescription, in which the interests of the orthodox, godly community, lay and clerical, were unsurprisingly his priority.75 The Worcestershire association, organized for orthodox ministers across the denoniinational divide of Presbyterians and independents, provides an example from an adjacent county of the kind of cross-denominational activity that seems to lie behind clerical voting in Warwickshire in 1656. A link between Wanvickshire and a Baxterian outlook on politics and religion is personified in John Bridges, who once, like Hawkesworth, was a Wanvick castle steward, possibly Hawkesworth’s superior, and was by the mid-1650s a loyal supporter of Baxter and a former M.P. to boot.76

Bridges’s origins may suggest the key to understanding why Hawkesworth was accepted by the electors while Creed was emphatically rejected. The Warwick castle interest may have continued to exert a significant pull. Hawkesworth was still an accountant to the Wanvick castle estate as late as 1648, and as military governor there, was a symbol of con t in~ i i ty .~~ The presence in numbers of Wanvick men at the poll

7 2 Englands Remembrancers. Or a word in season to all English men about their Elections of the membersfor the

” Ihid., p. 5. 74 State Papers ujjohn Thurloe, ed. Birch, V, 343. ’j Caleridar ofthe Correspondence ofRichard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble, G. F: Nuttall (2 vols, Oxford, 1991).

I, 221 -6. ’‘ Warwickshire KO., CR 1886/box 411: accounts ofJoseph Hawkesworth, for their relationship as strwards; T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 28/1d/458; C . S . P . D o m , 1645-7, p. 240 for their relationship as soldiers. ” Warwickshire R.O., CI1 1886/box 414: Brooke House disbursements, Mar. 1648-Mar. 1649, p. 33.

approorhig Parliament (1656), ‘Thomason’s annotated copy. B.L., E.884.5.

77te 1656 Election 373 has already been noted. Like John Bridges, but unltke Creed, Hawkesworth was a local magistrate, and although in his purchase of part of Kenilworth castle he appeared to be a classic example of the local soldier as cuckoo in the property nest, his attitude to the Church suggests limits to his radicalism. The hostile vicar of Kenilworth, while deploring the army officers’ take-over, had to admit that they never appropriated the tithes there, ‘but from time to time set up ministers and allowed them to have and enjoy all the tithes’.78 Furthermore, in October 1653, Hawkesworth had been asked by the council of state to help appoint a minister at Henley-in-Arden, and after 1654 was a commissioner for ejecting scandalous clergy, additional evidence to suggest he was no sectary, but in sympathy with Cromwellian ideas about the state Creed, by contrast, seems to have been moving in more radical directions. But we cannot elevate Hawkesworth to make him the designer of the slate: like Burgoyne, he seems to have been absent during the campaign.80 It is in any case unlikely that any sole draughtsman, acting alone, can be identified as the architect of the 1656 Warwickshire election slate. The person who could play an important role was the sheriff, the returning officer. In Thomas Willughby of Sutton Coldfield, sheriff that year, we have probably a very significant actor in the event. Willughby was a long-serving county committeeman, on the radical side of the disputes between Warwickshire committees in the late 1640s, and one who had transferred his allegiance from the commonwealth to the protectorate. Himself an M.P. for Warwickshire in 1654, and a colonel of the county militia through the 1650s, his appointment after his service at Westminster as sheriff in a year in which domestic security was a government preoccupation confirms his reliability.8’ His earlier career provides another link to Warwick castle. Commissioned by Lord Brooke in June 1642, Willughby appeared probably with John Bridges at a muster at Coleshill the following month.82 We cannot tell how he conducted himself at the 1656 election, but he was well placed to influence the outcome.

5

Analysis of the Warwickshire poll book suggests the existence of a group of candidates placed before the electorate as a slate of four, in the interests of the godly minority of the county. This was probably a collaborative venture between the vanguard of the godly clergy, certain magistrates and those elements of the military with a shared history of service in the Warwick castle establishment. It was a political construction broadly supportive of the protectoral regime, insofar as that government afforded support to orthodox protestant interests. Though public service on the radical wing

78 Wanvickshire R.O., ‘Hawkesworth Papers’, p. 21. 79 C.S.P. Dorn., 1653-4, p. 182; Acts and Ordinances, 11, 975. ‘(’C.S.P. Dorn., 1656-7,p. 399. *’ T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 28/124/274-7, 280-2, 284-7, 288-91, 295-7; List OfSheriJi (List and Index,

IX), p. 147. X2T.N.A. (P.R.O.), SP 16/539/92; Wanvickshire R.O., CR 1886/box 411. It has been noted by

Professor Hughes how unusual Willughby’s commission was; it subjected his choice of junior officers to the approval of the rank-and-file. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Wanuickshire, p. 153.

374 Stephen K . Roberts

of comnlittee activity in the county, under the domination of local boss William Purefoy, was common to a number of participants, it was not a universal common factor, and the election cannot be seen as the pursuit of 1640s feuds by other means. In this county the election was not seen as an opportunity to pass judgment on the major-generals, but there was a readiness by the electorate as a whole to discriminate between candidates with a military background. The poll book suggests an electorate reduced in size from that common under the old constitution, contrary to the view of Professor Pinckney that it was expanding. It also suggests that voters were capable of deploying their four votes for four seats imaginatively and subtly, and that plumping for one candidate alone was practised, if not by the majority. Finally, the conduct of this election suggests a rather more optimistic view of the protectorate than the one which has become dominant. Professor Hirst identifies the problem for all 1650s regimes as a lack of capacity to translate the personal codes of puritanism into social action, and Dr Durston’s recent study concludes that godly rule and military rule became conflated under the major-generals, ‘and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people’.x3 The evidence from Wanvickshire suggests rather that this was an election process that worked, that it was unmarred by violence or crude manipulation of the sort common in the period, that there was no sign ofrejection of the procedure by the electors, and that it was a contest in which the clerical black gown dominated at least as much as the sword.

’’ D. Hint, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’, Past and Present, No. 132 (1991), 33-66; Durston, Cromwell’s Ilfojor-Cmemls, p. 232. For a more optimistic view, drawing on evidence from the adjacent county, C. D. Gilbert, ‘Magistracy and Ministry in Crornwellian England: The Case of King’s Norton, Worcestenhire’, Midland History, XXIII (1998). 71-83.