Partisan Politics Sample Chapter and Contents

Partisan Politics
Looking for consensus in

eighteenth-century towns
JO N RO SEBANK
Contents
Acknowledgementsviii
List of Abbreviationsix
Chapter 1: Introduction—a new 1

understanding of towns and their politics
The perspective of the middling sort 2
Local government 9
Resistance to interference 15
Partisanship20
Religion and party 24
In search of stability 29
The research deficit in smaller towns 32
PART 1: THE URBAN COMMUNITY
Chapter 2: Economy and community—39

the key contexts
The major industries: shipping 40
The major industries: textiles 47
Beyond the major industries 52
The distribution of wealth 59
Other solidarities 63
The relationship between economy, society and politics 71
Chapter 3: The significance of the Church77
The structure of dissent 78
Dissent and local government 90
The Established Church 94
The challenge to order 103
Chapter 4: Town government107

The structure of town government 108
Who served? 119
Was town government effective? 125
The threat to good government 134
PART 2: THE POLITICAL PROCESS
Chapter 5: Government patronage139

The Excise service 140
The Customs service 143
Land Tax and Post Office 150
The Admiralty 153
The patronage process 159
Chapter 6: The politics of leading townsmen 163

and the gentry
Bridgwater. The humiliation of the Duke of Chandos 164
Plymouth. The failure of Sir John Rogers 174
Totnes. Amyites and Buckleyites 185
Dartmouth. Holdsworth and Treby—amicitia perpetua191
Tavistock. The third force 194
Taunton. The feud between council and meeting houses 197
Tiverton. The role of the Church party 202
Partisan politics 208
Chapter 7: The politics of the wider society219
Taunton. Mobs and voters 220
Bridgwater. Popular Jacobitism 226
Totnes and Dartmouth. ‘Confidents and Intimados’ 230
at the Hole in the Wall
Tavistock. Fringe voters 234
Plymouth. The role of the freemen 236
Tiverton. Playing with popular feeling 237
The broken cheese beam 242
Chapter 8: Wider contexts247

Regions247
The longer period 256
Where next? 260
Bibliography261
Manuscript sources 261
Printed sources 269
Contemporary 269
Modern works 271
Index285
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction—a new understanding

of towns and their politics
‘One of the least understood periods of English history is the century following
the Restoration of Charles II.’1 This was an extraordinary statement for David
Hey to make in 1991 at the opening of his book on Sheffield and its hinterland.
Hey’s eyes were primarily on economic history, but his comment reflected
the precipitous collapse of an historical consensus that had, until a few years
before, seemed immovable. As recently as 1986, Frank O’Gorman had written
of the later part of this period that it was gripped by ‘a conventional frame-
work of interpretation so compelling that scarcely a single historian has
ventured to stand outside it’.2
We now understand the long eighteenth century much better than we did.
Its historiography has been catching up with our understanding of the sixteenth,
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, many years ago transformed by taking
a local rather than a central perspective. At the same time, we have transferred
our attention from the landed estates towards the overwhelming majority of
the population, engaged in governance and politics, economy and religion in
town and parish. Of these local communities, the most intriguing still to be
explored in depth are the middling and smaller towns, especially in the early
part of the eighteenth century. This was where over half the urban population
lived—indeed, in the South West over half the total population—and where
80 per cent of MPs were elected.3 Together these smaller urban communities
formed the key political constituency. They were the tax and electoral base
of the military–fiscal state. This book explores a sample of them, and argues
1 D. Hey, The Fiery Blades of Hallamshire: Sheffield and its Neighbourhood 1660–1740 (Leicester, 1991),
p. 1.
2 Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England: The Mid-18th Century
to the Reform Act of 1832’, Social History 11 (1986), 33.
3 J. Barry, ‘The South West’, in Peter Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 2, 1540–1840
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 90.
2 partisan politics
that understanding such little places is now central to our interpretation of

the period.
1.1. The perspective of the middling sort
Let us take a moment to understand the historiographical transformation that

has taken place. The interpretations of modernist historians as diverse as Lewis
Namier and E.P. Thompson were rooted in patrician/plebeian understandings
of eighteenth-century society. They proposed a gulf between the decisive and
entitled on the one hand and the powerless and poor, if occasionally protesting,
on the other.4 Even historians who ostensibly rejected both Namier and
Thompson—the historians, for example, of Augustan party—worked within
this bleakly binary world. Politics was apparently directed by aristocracy and
gentry, the rest reduced to a chorus—a framework described as ‘one of the
most powerful orthodoxies in modern British historiography’.5
Fissures began to appear when historians started paying attention to the
‘middle order’ or ‘middling sort’. At first, middle-order merchants and profes-
sionals were imagined emulating their social betters in manners and deferring
to them in politics.6 But this was not sustainable for long. Emulation theory
turned out to be based on slender evidence.7 If urban ‘gentlemen’ invested in
land, or filled their fine townhouses with expensive objects, it was for reso-
lutely middle-order reasons. Land was a good investment and a facade of
prosperity—short of extravagance—good for business. Diaries and directories
reflected a consistently urban sensibility. Indeed, Hunt found that, from the
1690s, the middling sort held a distinctly jaundiced view of landed society,
and particularly its loose morals and its failure to pay its bills.8 Barry showed
that it was the urban rich who led the burgeoning associational life of towns
4 I am using modernist in the sense defined by Bentley. M. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past:
English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005). See the discussion
in Peter King, ‘Edward Thompson’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies: The Patriarch-
Plebeian Model Re-Examined’, Social History 21 (1996), 215–28.
5 F. O’Gorman, ‘Electoral Deference in “Unreformed” England: 1760–1832’, The Journal of Modern
History 56 (1984), 393.
6 For example, N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society:
Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England (London, 1982); P. Borsay, The English Urban
Renaissance. Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989); P. Earle, The
Making of the English Middle Class (Berkeley, CA, 1989).
7 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England 1680–1780
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1996).
8 Hunt, Middling Sort, pp. 4–5, 172–92, 198–208.
a new understanding of towns and their politics 3
in this period, not the country gentry.9 The middling sort, it turns out, had
minds of their own.
So who were these middling sort of people? They were prosperous urban
professionals and tradesmen, many of whom, by the early eighteenth century,
would describe themselves as ‘gentlemen’. But French has shown that the
term signified not so much status as virtue. It was a moral descriptor that
equated financial security with probity and uprightness, embodying authority,
trustworthiness, responsibility, independence and—increasingly—leisure,
learning, sociability and polite manners.10 Political rhetoric also emphasized
independence and honesty, identifying those with sufficient wealth to know
their own mind and to act independently. Urban ‘gentlemen’ emerge as active
townsmen with credit and a reputation for informed freedom of action and
honesty. They were the people who signed petitions as the ‘chief’ or ‘principal’
inhabitants.11 It was a larger group than we had at first supposed. Shani D’Cruze
reckons the middle sort in Colchester encompassed about 20 per cent of the
town’s population. She discovered ‘gentlemen’ who were woollen merchants,
individuals in food and drink industries, gardeners, yeomen and husbandmen.
They also included George Gray, ‘gentleman’, who was a plumber and glazier.12
Hey points similarly to Robert Sorsby, ‘gentleman’, of Sheffield, who was a
cutler working in a High Street smithy.13 As Davison and colleagues have
made clear, by the eighteenth century it was middle-order individuals such as
these who were the most dynamic force in local communities, and especially
in the towns.14
Locality was key. Hindle, working in a slightly earlier period, characterizes
the parish as ‘the locale in which community was constructed and reproduced,
perhaps even consecrated’. With the restructuring of poor relief after the
Reformation, the parish and its institutions had become increasingly important,
embodying not only local government process, but also local ideals and
9 J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in J. Barry and C.
Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800 (London,
1994), pp. 84–112.
10 H.R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2008),
pp. 16–17, 21, 20–24.
11 M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political
Culture (Oxford and New York, 2004), p. 139; French, The Middle Sort of People, pp. 27–28, 93,
102.
12 Shani D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in 18th-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations
and the Community Broker’, in Barry and Brooks, The Middling Sort, pp. 183–84, 199–200.
13 Hey, Fiery Blades, p. 218.
14 L. Davison,T. Hitchcock,T. Keirn and R.B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive:The Response
to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud and New York, 1992), p. xiii.
4 partisan politics
hierarchy.15 In an important study, French has argued that it was in parish

affairs that middle-order identity and status were defined: the gaze of the
middle orders was on the surrounding parochial community much more than
on their social superiors.16 Here, local office-holding mirrored the structure
of the local economy, selection of officers matching parish assessment for
rates. Where there were not only parishes but also corporations, common
councillors and aldermen were the men who paid the most, constables or
sidesmen the least.17 Office-holding also reflected local credit, worth and a
reputation for honesty, independence and commitment to local issues.
According to French, parochial institutions broke down if they failed to respect
these local patterns. In 1713, Braintree’s select vestry was, for example,
successfully challenged at Quarter Sessions by its own parish constables because
its membership did not represent the local structure of economic authority.
They were not the right people to run the parish because they were not the
‘best and chiefest of the inhabitants’.18
D’Cruze has used the phrase ‘community brokers’ for these relatively well-
to-do and well-connected townsmen. Whether they were in local office or
not, they were independent and intelligent agents, in a position to organize
their own workforce and so create the leisure to attend to local affairs.19 They
could get things done. Similarly, Jonathan Barry has charted the continued
importance throughout this period of Bristol’s freemen, middle-order indi-
viduals in a very large town who had proved their commitment to the values
of the community and who earned not only recognition but also economic
privileges.20 In an important and extended local study, Gauci finds the same
pattern at Great Yarmouth.21
These glimpses of the middle sorts, wreathed in respectability, busy in local
office and evolving codes of civic gentility, mesh with our growing under-
standing of changes in social mores. What Bryson has characterized as
medieval courtesy, rooted in good lordship and service, and shored up by
religious agreement, had been giving way to secular civility, a performative
15 S. Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish 1550–1650’, in A. Shepard
and P. Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), pp. 96–98.
16 French, The Middle Sort of People, pp. 14–15.
17 Ibid., pp. 26–27, 90–118.
18 Ibid., pp. 126–27, 131–32.
19 D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort’, pp. 194–96.
20 J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’ pp. 84–112; J. Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture in Early
Modern England: The Meanings of Urban Freedom’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (eds),
Civil Histories (Oxford, 2000), pp. 187–93.
21 P. Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth 1660–1722 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 40–47, 66.
quality based on individual virtue played out in the local context. An oral
culture was giving way to a literate one.22 Monod adds to this his sense of a
change from a Reformation community of holy neighbourliness to a society
that was more commercially driven.23 As he found in Rye and Underdown in
Dorchester, the ideal of the godly community had lost its appeal by 1715,
prosecutions for witchcraft and talk of devils fading into memories. ‘Rye
experienced first the failed political revolution of the godly, then the successful
cultural revolution of the polite.’24 Hunt correspondingly found among the
papers of the middling sort that discussions of business difficulties shifted in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from religious to secular.25
The middle order was embedded in a culture of civility, defined by behaviour
and accomplishment, leaving behind the piety, land, lordship and deference
of previous periods.
We have discovered a connection between the evolution of this urban middle
sort and the transformation of the town environment. Borsay’s influential ‘urban
renaissance’ was at first interpreted as a sign of deferential emulation. He
pictures the urban middle order groping towards the mores of the landed
gentry, who had been drawn into certain towns by balls and assemblies and
smartly rebuilt Georgian townscapes.26 With recent research, this ‘urban renais-
sance’ has turned out often to have been a more prosaic phenomenon, driven
largely by the hard-nosed commercial instinct of the middle orders. The recon-
struction of towns with widened streets and fine squares had at least as much
to do with the revolution in fireproof brick and tile that followed the rebuilding
after London’s Great Fire of 1666 as it did with a cultural renaissance. Warwick,
Borsay’s home town, was famously remodelled and reconstructed after its own
fire of 1694.27 The brick industry boomed to meet the new demand. The
rebuilding was also the result of escalating road traffic as agriculture special-
ized, distribution improved and coastal traffic was interrupted by years of war.
Farmers’ carts with their iron-banded wheels were grinding down medieval
22 A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford,
1998).
23 P.K. Monod, The Murder of Mr Grebell: Madness and Civility in an English Town (New Haven, CT,
2003), p. 344.
24 Ibid., pp. 55–97, 237–38; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth
Century (London, 1992), pp. 263–64.
25 Hunt, Middling Sort, pp. 34–40.
26 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance. Borsay’s own recent reassessment draws back a little from his
earlier thesis. Peter Borsay,‘The English Urban Renaissance Revisited’, in J. Hinks and C. Armstrong
(eds), The English Urban Renaissance Revisited (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018), pp. 6–27.
27 S. Porter, The Great Fire of London (Stroud, 1998), pp. 154–57; Borsay, ‘Urban Renaissance
Revisited’, pp. 9, 19.
6 partisan politics
town streets and sweeping away their clutter.28 Beckett and Smith’s detailed
study of Nottingham shows that the town’s remodelling took place mainly
because of the emerging energy of the town council and investment by the
middle sort, especially stocking manufacturers and retailers.29 Urban renais-
sance here was driven by falling food prices and rising real incomes between
1660 and 1750, as well as a move in the direction of ‘corporate responsibility’.
The shift towards ‘polite’ shopping that accompanied it was not necessarily a
revolution from grubby stalls to streets of gentrified shops, but more often a
change within existing urban workshops, where growing prosperity and more
sophisticated marketing puffed exclusivity as a selling point and led to a reor-
ganization of shops’ internal space, separating production from retail.30
Rather than an emulation of the landed gentry, urban renaissance seems
therefore to have been powered by the success of the urban middle orders.
In a detailed study that draws significantly on sociological studies, Stobart,
Hann and Morgan have found that, in the North West at least, urban renais-
sance was almost everywhere a significantly commercial enterprise. Its progress
reflected prosperity, improving local transport links and competition within
the region. The building of new leisure facilities corresponded closely with
the size of towns, suggesting that it was fuelled largely by the internal urban
market. The construction of libraries, theatres, public gardens, racecourses or
assemblies often signified corporate rivalry or calculated commercial invest-
ment by speculative businessmen. Subscription rates were frequently low and
set to maximize profits, while public gardens were intended not as settings
for the polite to stroll so much as for traders to erect money-making stalls
and offer events for profit. If some towns appeared more ‘polite’ than others,
it was often a product of skilful marketing, as profit-minded townsmen attracted
landed society to spend its money in their new-fangled terraces, shopping
streets and assembly rooms.31
Recalibrating the urban renaissance means, as Harris points out, that we
need to question the most important implication of Borsay’s thesis, that there
was a widening gap between polite urban society—the middling sort—and
28 E.L. Jones and M.E. Falkus, ‘Urban Improvement and the English Economy in the 17th and
18th Centuries’, in P. Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Town: A Reader in English Urban History
1688–1820 (London, 1990), pp. 121–47.
29 J. Beckett and C. Smith, ‘Urban Renaissance and Consumer Revolution in Nottingham 1688–
1850’, Urban History 27 (2000), 34–38.
30 J. Stobart, A. Hann and V. Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in an English Town
c. 1680–1850 (London and New York, 2007), pp. 83, 112–18.
31 Ibid., pp. 31, 40, 67–78.
the rest of townspeople.32 Borsay, and Earle before him, may have been right
that, particularly in prosperous spa towns and especially those nearer London,
some chief inhabitants were more inclined than before to sit on cane chairs
at tables in colour co-ordinated rooms, investing in the semiotics of politeness
by taking tea in china cups. As the century progressed some urban streets may
indeed have become more ‘polite’ than others.33 Some historians have argued
that middle-order society was increasingly closed and elitist. French envisages
the parochial ‘chief inhabitants’ as a recognizable elite, a multiplex sub-
community in towns, bound together by kinship, credit, business, religion and
public service, a difficult entity for outsiders to penetrate.34 But this is not
something all historians have accepted. From their close study of Nottingham,
Beckett and Smith find ‘a more open, pluralistic and integrated social order’
in the first half of the eighteenth century.35 Ruggiu finds that the elites of
Chester and Canterbury were much more open than we had thought (and so
too were those of Alencon and Abbeville.) In both English and French exam-
ples, local prominence was open to any individual in the professions or
commerce who participated in public life, ‘une activité permanente au service
de la communauté’.36 This does not look like a pattern of tightening oligarchy
or a deepening rift between rich and poor.
Barry has further pointed out, from his work in Bristol and other material
from London, that urban society was peculiarly characterized by strong vertical
ties, especially within the many town associations that grew up in this period.37
A ‘community’ can, as Macfarlane shows, contain many overlapping networks,
economic, social, marriage, moral, ritual, religious, administrative, political,
even gossip and scandal.38 These were the ‘cross-cutting circles’ described by
the nineteenth-century German sociologist, Georg Simmel.39 Such circles
existed within towns at the level of the neighbourhood and of the street, of
32 T. Harris, ‘Problematising Popular Culture’, in T. Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c.
1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 2.
33 Borsay, Urban Renaissance, pp. 60–79; 232–56; see the discussion in French, The Middle Sort of
People, pp. 145–47.
34 French, The Middle Sort of People, pp. 236–43. See also Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 143–44, 153–55,
and J. Smail, The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax 1660–1780 (Ithaca, NY, 1994).
35 Beckett and Smith, ‘Urban Renaissance’, p. 48.
36 F.-J. Ruggiu, Les élites et les villes moyennes en France et en Angleterre (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris
and Montreal, 1997), pp. 10–11, 106, 141, 210, 238, 296.
37 Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, pp. 94–103.
38 A. MacFarlane, S. Harrison and C. Jardine, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge,
1977), p. 11.
39 G. Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations, trans. K.H. Wolf and R. Bendix (Glencoe,
IL, 1955).
8 partisan politics
a guild, a meat market or a charity. Archer and Boulton have traced these
kinds of networks in London, drawing individuals together through kinship
and marriage, taking out bonds, acting as witnesses to wills or belonging to
urban associations.40 Interlocking communities connected within and even
beyond the town, into its hinterland and along trade routes to neighbouring
centres. Individuals belonged to several such communities, some more strongly
than others, some more at certain times than at others.41
In her careful reconstruction of elites in eighteenth-century Colchester, in
fact one of the largest towns in this period, Shani D’Cruze points out that
the status of the middling tradesmen, who prided themselves on their inde-
pendence, was paradoxically based on a dense undergrowth of hidden
dependencies. She found it was possible to plot many interconnected networks,
stretching a web of personal associations across the town. Personal contacts
included executors, those who put up a loan or a recognizance for a court
appearance, Justices of the Peace (JPs), attorneys, landlords, employers,
vestrymen, neighbourhood victuallers and the local clergy.42 D’Cruze intro-
duces us to an attorney, William Mayhew, who had close contact with 114
individuals in the town. He was, in her phrase, a ‘community broker’, a man
of business who got things done, who would no doubt have styled himself a
‘gent’.43 It is unimaginable that Mayhew would have thought of himself as
disconnected from the wider society in which he lived and conducted his
business, and on which his status and prosperity depended. Such ties and links
were even stronger, and even more vertically organized, in average and smaller
towns, where it was more difficult for urban elites to distance themselves
from the rest of the population, many of whom were engaged in the same
trades and on whose judgement status depended.44 In tiny Rye, for example,
a town strongly dominated by a small merchant elite, the corporation was
nevertheless careful to attend to poor relief and adopted a policy of turning
a blind eye towards the smuggling on which many local people depended.45
40 I. Archer, ‘Social Networks in Restoration London: The Evidence from Samuel Pepys’s Diary’,
in Shepard and Withington, Communities, pp. 76–77.
41 C. Bell and H. Newby, Community Studies. An Introduction to the Sociology of the Local Community
(London, 1971). C. Bell and H. Newby (eds), The Sociology of Community. A Selection of Readings
(London, 1974). C. Bell and H. Newby, ‘Community, Communion, Class and Community Action:
The Social Sources of the New Urban Politics’, in D.T. Herbert and R.J. Johnston (eds), Social
Areas in Cities 2 (London, 1976), pp. 189–207. R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 250–88.
42 D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort’, pp. 182, 189–90.
43 Ibid., p. 194.
44 French, The Middle Sort of People, p. 198–201, 210.
45 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 209–14.
It is difficult in these circumstances to imagine a gulf cutting richer and poorer

off from each other. The role of the leading few absolutely depended on a
close and active relationship with the rest of the town.
Our growing awareness of the middle order, and of the interlacing of its
life with the wider community, has therefore profoundly changed our under-
standing of this period. It has opened a world of town politics for us to explore,
especially in the average and smaller places where most townsmen and towns-
women lived.
1.2. Local government
This in turn has meant that we have had to rethink our understanding of local
government. In a phrase that is significantly now often quoted, the
Northamptonshire pauper poet John Clare referred to the parish as ‘the parish
state’.46 He was echoed by a number of utopian writers and commentators,
who were especially drawn to the towns. The late seventeenth-century cler-
gyman and Tory pamphleteer John Nalson termed the small English town a
‘commonwealth’ where the laws represented the ‘votes of the common people
in general’.47 This is very different from the self-serving oligarchy we used to
imagine running the affairs of local communities.
We know that English local government had acquired increasing powers
since the Reformation.48 Our emerging understanding of the middle order,
however, sets it in a new light, since it suggests that the chief inhabitants who
ran local government were not an unaccountable clique. Heavily enmeshed in
their local community, they were both personally influential and, at the same
time, inescapably answerable to local opinion. As Rogers puts it, power in the
early modern period, depended on complex reciprocities. Dickinson goes
further, suggesting that parish vestries ‘came near to communal democracies’.49
46 Quoted in D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700–1870 (Basingstoke,
1997), p. 47.
47 John Nalson, The Common Interest of King and People (1677), pp. 22–24. Quoted in M. Goldie,
‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), The
Politics of the Excluded 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 176.
48 R. Sweet, ‘Local Identities and a National Parliament, c. 1688–1835’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.),
Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland 1660–1860 (Manchester and New York,
2003), pp. 48–49.
49 N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in 18th Century Politics’, in Barry and Brooks, The Middling
Sort of People, pp. 159–60; see also P. Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: or, History with the Politics
Put Back (Cambridge, 1990); H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Basingstoke and New York, 1994), p. 102.
10 partisan politics
We may not want to venture so far. It is, however, now clear that local
institutions were not restricted to the few. Early modern communities put
much less value on sharing decision-making than in taking up local office. In
a seminal paper, Goldie calls office-holding the mark of citizenship, active,
direct, local and far more important than voting in parliamentary elections.50
Eighteenth-century men (for the most part, although women occasionally
served in office too) participated in government by actually governing. Dozens,
even hundreds, of citizens in towns swept bridges, organized meat shambles,
assessed ale, kept dogs in order, intervened in domestic quarrels and paid dole
to the poor. D’Cruze counts a total of 280 unpaid local government positions
that needed filling every year in early modern Colchester.51 Allowing for
duplication, that required about 6 per cent of the town’s adult male population.
Goldie’s estimate for the nation as a whole is that, in this period, roughly
5 per cent of adult males were in local office, many of them relatively poor
and even illiterate. Since many offices were selected annually, over a decade
half of the men would serve in local office.52 If we consider only those who
paid poor rates and were therefore eligible for office, the percentage rises to
40 per cent in any one year, effectively suggesting that every man who could
would serve in local office over the course of ten years.53 It was another strong
bond between the urban middling sort, at the top of this local structure, and
the more modest tradesmen of their towns, who served in the minor offices.
It was a tie that was growing in significance. Particularly after 1720, as central
control over local government weakened, Eastwood concludes that we enter
‘the apotheosis of English local government’, the pinnacle of a system that
had emerged under the Tudors.54 Goldie has pointed out that at least as much
revenue was raised and spent locally as nationally.55 Local government gave
yeomen, artisans and shopkeepers, in Langford’s phrase, ‘an unshakeable hold
on much of the political infrastructure’.56
There is still a good deal of confusion about the actual structure of local
government, especially the overlapping jurisdictions of manor, parish,
50 Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 153–54.

51 D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort’, p. 198.
53 K. Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds),
The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 10–46.
54 Eastwood, Government and Community, pp. 12–14, 16, 19.
55 Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, p. 155.
56 P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), p. 177.
corporation and JPs.57 Given the strongly integrating ties that held urban
society together, it is not at all surprising that the legal forms of local authority
were heavily blurred by local practice. Cook long ago demonstrated that
identical urban constitutions in New England towns concealed wide variations
in the practice of government.58 The same was obviously true in Britain. Archer
has pointed out that many town corporations took the opportunity of disrup-
tion during the Interregnum to buy up Crown and Church lands.59 By the
eighteenth century, many therefore owned town manors and ran their estates
and courts. The vestry of a central urban parish might also operate as an agency
of the corporation, integrated into its cursus honorum.60 Unincorporated
towns—Tavistock is an example in this study, Hey’s Sheffield is another—were
even able to combine a variety of manorial, parish and charitable institutions
and extemporize something approaching a town council.61 We are therefore
beginning to understand that examining town parishes, courts or corporations
separately, from a strictly legal point of view, is usually misleading.62
Without extensive prosopography of local communities, exactly how this
overlapping of local government operated in practice is, however, very difficult
to discover. What has at least become clear is that we need no longer accept
the parti pris of the nineteenth-century utilitarians or their Fabian and more
recent successors, who pictured it all as a corrupt and ineffectual ancien regime.63
Of course local government was no more immune from corruption in the
eighteenth century than in our own time. Monod detects that the councillors
57 The best modern accounts of urban government are in J. Innes and N. Rogers, ‘Politics and
Government 1700–1840’, in Clark, Cambridge Urban History, and R. Sweet, The English Town
1680–1840. Government, Society and Culture (London and New York 1999, 2014), chs 2, 3 and 5.
Both, however, underestimate the consolidation of urban government institutions.
58 E.M. Cook, The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New
England (Baltimore, MD, 1976).
59 I. Archer, ‘Politics and Government 1540–1700’, in Clark, Cambridge Urban History, p. 253.
60 See, for example, Jacob’s study of King’s Lynn, where corporation and vestry were effectively
one body. W.M. Jacob, ‘Church and Borough: King’s Lynn, 1700–1750’, in W.M. Jacob and N.
Yates (eds), Crown and Mitre: Religion and Society in Northern Europe since the Reformation (Woodbridge,
1993), pp. 64–80; also Great Yarmouth, Gauci, Great Yarmouth, p. 30.
61 Clark picks this point up in his introduction to P. Clark (ed.), Small Towns in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, 1995), p. 13. See also the case of Sherborne. J. Barry, ‘The South West’, in Clark,
Cambridge Urban History, p. 88. Dickinson, Politics of the People, p. 100; Hey, Fiery Blades, pp. 8,
201–25.
62 Miller makes a similar point, although he then confines his research largely to town corporations.
J. Miller, Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns 1660–1722 (Oxford and New
York, 2007), p. 37.
63 Classically set out in S. and B. Webb, English Local Government (9 vols, London, 1906–29); see
a restatement in F. O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History
1688–1832 (2nd edn, London, 2016), p. 122.
of Rye were, at the very least, making unaccountably large profits from work
on the town harbour, which dribbled on over six decades. But on the other
hand, these same individuals were keeping the corporation itself afloat with
subsidies and loans.64 Miller finds that corruption in local government ‘does
not seem to have been the norm in this period . . . The general impression
. . . is one of probity and competence.’65 Given the communal nature of
identity and credit, that is not a surprise.‘Town governments’, notes Dickinson,
‘usually required a broad measure of agreement, at least from the middle
orders of society, if they were to function effectively and harmoniously.’66 Even
lesser offices were properly performed by individuals aspiring to move up
eventually into positions with more authority, when their names would be
displayed with pride in the parish church or town hall.67
Most historians now agree that early modern local government was in
practice doing a good job. In Hull, Miller charts street cleaning, and paving
with ships’ ballast. The local rulers there and in Oxford had to ensure their
towns’ water supply. In these and other towns, there is plenty of evidence
that local authorities cared for the poor and punished troublemakers.68
Campaigns for poor law reform grew not out of the corruption or inefficiency
of existing institutions but because they were generous and their costs were
rising in time of war.69 Hey shows that Sheffield’s cobbled-together local
authority washed the streets weekly, built an early workhouse, efficiently
maintained the bridges, kept the parish churches in repair, contributed to
the building of a fashionable new one and even installed some oil lamps
around the town. Crime was extremely rare.70 Great Yarmouth’s corporation
busily occupied itself with religion, poor relief, sanitation and trade, and
fought relentless battles against the silting up of its harbour and the protec-
tion of its freemen’s privileges.71 When Colchester lost its charter, townsmen
complained that the corporation’s estate fell into ruin, fishing and grazing
rights—already contentious—collapsed, freemen’s rights were lost and
markets forestalled. As D’Cruze points out, these were issues that hit the
64 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 189, 192–95.

65 Miller, Cities Divided, p. 44.
66 Dickinson, Politics of the People, p. 102.
68 Miller, Cities Divided, pp. 56–82.
69 J. Innes, ‘Central Government “Interference”’, in J. Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History
(Oxford, 2003), pp. 55–57.
70 Hey, Fiery Blades, pp. 205–08, 240–48.
71 Gauci, Great Yarmouth, pp. 29, 47, 176, 256.
town’s modest tradesmen rather than its affluent.72 Halliday comments with
evident feeling that only those historians of a previous generation, who had
not confronted heaps of assembly minutes, deeds, court books, mayoral
correspondence and the endless bundles of local government records in
county records offices, could have imagined that eighteenth-century admin-
istrations did not have ‘a good deal of public business to conduct, and that
most of them took care of it’.73
Several historians have argued that there was a drift towards oligarchy
within these structures of government. Late seventeenth-century legislation,
for example, imposed property qualifications for parish officers. There are
some instances of access to Common Councils becoming more limited.74 Such
a trend sits uncomfortably with local studies that, as we have seen, now
emphasize vertical interdependencies within the community. Innes and Rogers
comment that much of the rhetoric about growing oligarchy came from urban
factions, embittered that power was held by their rivals.75 Archer argues that,
for the period up to 1700, the drift to increasing oligarchy is in fact something
of an illusion. ‘Although central authority was often invoked to consolidate
the position of a ruling group who had appropriated the rhetoric of commu-
nity, the realities of power, the fragility of urban dynasties and the constraints
imposed by the adoption of that rhetoric blunted the force of oligarchy.’76
Sometimes, for example, a lower chamber was suppressed not to bolster an
oligarchy but because it had been impossible to find suitable candidates with
the financial independence to fulfil its functions. Early modern townsmen
preferred probity to democracy. Certainly, this was why Great Yarmouth’s
corporation was reduced in size in 1703.77 Town governance was near impos-
sible, not only without the much-needed cash wealthy townsmen could make
available, but also without the craftsmen and tradesmen who served in its
minor offices and who were being loaded with additional responsibilities by
central government.78 Tightening oligarchy was not a practical option. As
Miller puts it, urban rulers
72 D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort’, p. 206.

73 P.D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 340–41.
74 For examples see Innes and Rogers, ‘Politics and Government’, p. 538; Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged
Republic’, pp. 171–72.
75 Innes and Rogers, ‘Politics and Government’, pp. 529–40.
76 I. Archer, ‘Politics and Government 1540–1700’, in Clark, Cambridge Urban History, p. 241.
77 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 26, 213.
78 Archer, ‘Politics and Government’, pp. 242–43, 244–46.
lived cheek by jowl with their poorer neighbours; they passed

them in the street and mixed with them in the tavern and the
market place . . . The means of coercion at their disposal were
flimsy; they could keep order only with the help of townsmen, as
parish officers or in the watch and the militia.79
Hammer astutely points out that, of course, we should not be surprised if

early modern government were oligarchic. ‘Given the society and mentality
of [the period] it would be astounding if it were anything else. The trick rather
is to establish what kind of oligarchy it was and to identify some of the mech-
anisms by which it functioned.’80 Withington argues that oligarchy has to be
set within the context of civic republicanism, a participatory and local culture
of reciprocity, obligation and responsibility. Town government ‘was the embod-
iment and apotheosis of civic community’.81 However oligarchic in principle,
urban government was accountable in practice; the town mayor who pursued
an unpopular policy could discover his business ruined. Stephen Timewell,
mayor of Taunton 1682–83, pulled down the town’s Presbyterian and Baptist
meeting houses and insisted all townsmen over eighteen take the oaths of
allegiance. He loudly proclaimed that his attack on the town’s dissenters had
‘tamed these stubborn Fanatics’. He soon, however, had to admit that ‘ever
since I have done these things not one of a hundred comes near me to buy
or sell and they make it their business to persuade people not to come near
me’. The boycott virtually forced Timewell to abandon his shop.82 And as
Halliday, Gauci, Monod and D’Cruze have discovered, where individuals failed
to live up to civic ideals, other townsmen were very ready to take them to
law at Chancery or King’s Bench.83
Perhaps the key point here is that the institutions of local government, such
as the ill-fated select vestry of Braintree, only worked when they represented
the reality of local society. Gauci has discovered that Great Yarmouth’s corpor
ation played a key role in the town because its membership concentrated key
79 Miller, Cities Divided, pp. 13, 38–42, 55; Innes and Rogers, ‘Politics and Government’, p. 540.
80 C.I. Hammer jr, ‘Anatomy of an Oligarchy: The Oxford Town Council in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries’, Journal of British Studies 18 (1978), 1–27.
81 P. Withington, ‘Citizens, Community and Political Culture in Restoration England’, in Shepard
and Withington, Communities, pp. 134–39.
82 T. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts (Abingdon, 1993), p. 179; W. Gibson, Religion and the
Enlightenment 1600–1800: Conflict and the Rise of Civic Humanism in Taunton (Oxford and Bern,
2007), pp. 127–31.
83 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 20–23, 67–69 and passim. Halliday, Dismembering, passim; Monod,
Mr Grebell, p. 178; D’Cruze, ‘Middling Sort’, pp. 200–01.
interest and kin networks, and broadly mirrored the economic structure of
the town economy.84 In Rye, Monod has found that the town became more
oligarchic, but only as a mirror to the town’s contracting economy and popu-
lation. It was eventually dominated politically by a small, moderate Whig
clique around the mercantile Lamb and Grebell families, trading in particular
to Norway and living at the top of the hill around the parish church. But that
was because this group in practice ran the town’s economic affairs.85 The
various overlapping authorities that Hey describes in Sheffield together faith-
fully reflected the town’s metalworking industry, its other occupations and
professions, and the rural hinterland of its parish.86
We now understand that local government in this period broadly worked
well. It was enmeshed in its local context and reflected its contours. How exactly
its various institutions melded together, and how they related to local politics,
still needs more prosopographical investigation. But it is already clear that
‘oligarchy’ is a term that is too crude to represent the complexity of local
institutions and their relationship with the communities they governed. If middle-
order townsmen were tightly engaged with the people they met in streets,
churches and markets, then so too were the local governments they ran.
1.3. Resistance to interference
The corollary of the middle order’s embedding in the local community and
its muscular immersion in local government was resistance to interference
from outside. Harris has discerned what he calls ‘a distinctly anti-aristocratic
flavour’ to early modern middle-order society.87 In the villages, French finds
that communities resented landowners’ control over hunting and interference
in poor relief.88 Here the ‘chief inhabitants’ actively and successfully defended
the poor against land enclosures and fen drainage, and middle-sort jurors were
reluctant to convict poachers prosecuted under game laws.
If this was true in rural areas, it was even more so in towns. Aristocrats
still expected to be received with some pomp in a city such as Norwich.
Other towns, such as Winchester, might profit from the trade brought by
84 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 57, 62–63, 78–85. The corporation seems not, however, to have
represented the coastal trade so well as the eighteenth century progressed.
85 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 143–44, 153–55, 178–82.
86 Hey, Fiery Blades, p. 247.
87 Harris, ‘Problematising Popular Culture’, p. 17.
88 French, The Middle Sort of People, pp. 87–89, 98, 229, 233, 258.
visiting gentry.89 But local studies suggest that towns stoutly resisted outside
intrusion in their affairs. Archer argues that when landowners intervened, it
was often ‘at the instigation of townsfolk anxious to exploit the relationship
with outsiders to their own ends’.90 The appearance in Great Yarmouth of
aristocrats and gentlemen such as Pastons and Townshends as recorders and
high-stewards, far from a sign of urban weakness, was in Archer’s view a canny
way to purchase the support of friends in influential places.91 Gauci has shown
that even these powerful families had great and persistent difficulty persuading
Great Yarmouth to elect the MPs they nominated. He describes Great
Yarmouth’s relationship with the Norfolk aristocracy as a species of foreign
policy, revealing that the Earl of Yarmouth was expected to work hard on the
borough’s behalf, and that when, in the 1690s, he failed to defend the town’s
interest, his influence evaporated.92 McIntyre similarly portrays the merchants
of Weymouth vigorously keeping politicking gentry at a distance.93 David
Underdown has pointed to outright hostility between godly Dorchester and
rural society given to drinking and whoring, and Miller has found loud resist-
ance to high-handed clerics in Bristol and Portsmouth.94 This research has
shown, in Goldie’s words, that we should abandon the notion of landed
hegemony and social control in the localities ‘in favour of a vocabulary of
agency, reciprocity, mediation, participation and negotiation’.95
This presents us with a paradox, since the more resistant to outsiders the
towns became, the more they seem to have elected members of gentry to
represent them in Parliament—the very development that originally gave rise
to Namier’s beguiling and pervasive thesis of landed control over eighteenth-cen-
tury society. The paradox is resolved by our developing understanding of
Parliament’s transformation after the accession of William and Mary, which
brought annual sessions and sittings far longer than before. Parliament had met
for a total of only twenty weeks in the years 1680–88. It sat for fifty-three and
a half months 1689–97, an average of sixteen weeks a year.96 It was accompanied
89 Miller, Cities Divided, p. 123.

90 I. Archer, ‘Politics and Government 1540–1700’, pp. 235, 261.
91 Ibid., pp. 240–41.
92 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 48–49, 51–53, 70–77, 92–95, 184–85, 206–53.
93 S. McIntyre, ‘Towns as Health and Pleasure Resorts: Bath, Scarborough and Weymouth 1700–
1815’ (Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 1973), pp. 332–38.
94 D. Underdown, ‘Regional Cultures? Local Variations in Popular Culture during the Early Modern
Period’ in Harris, Popular Culture, p. 30. Miller, Cities Divided, pp. 145–47.
95 Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, p. 155.
96 J. Beckett, ‘The Glorious Revolution, Parliament and the Making of the First Industrial Nation’,
Parliamentary History 33 (2014), 36–53; Knights, Representation, p. 12.
by a burst of legislative activity in the 1690s, rising to sixty-four Bills a session.97

The success rate of these Bills also rapidly increased. Over 2,500 Acts were
passed in the decade after 1690, 60 per cent of them directed at private and
local issues.98 After 1689, Parliament was therefore transformed as a means to
resolve local disputes and to give statutory backing to local improvements that
had previously been achieved only with difficulty through royal patent.
Such a burst of parliamentary activity made very serious demands on MPs’
time and purses. They found themselves for many months each year in London,
drawing only on the minimal daily expenses they could extract—and then
not always—from their constituency. The obvious result was a shift towards
MPs who had independent means.Towns chose landowners, or wealthy London
businessmen for whom attending Parliament was cheap and convenient.99
There were other advantages. Sitting in Parliament became an element of
gentle sociability, creating networks, largely of landed friends and relations,
who got things done by working together. Langford and Hayton have shown
how over 20 per cent of MPs contributed to legislation for areas where they
held land, whether or not their own constituents were involved. One group
of twenty-five or thirty MPs, for example, worked together to support the
woollen industry in 1689–1714. A seat in Parliament now fitted neatly with
the emerging lifestyle of the leisured and landed. 100
Parliamentary seats had often in practice been filled by outsiders. Roskell
has found outsiders being chosen for boroughs in the 1380s, and Kleineke
that by 1449 a majority of MPs sitting for boroughs were not resident towns-
men.101 Tittler has identified the same pattern in Elizabethan towns. He adds
that, in this period, it was the towns with one resident and one non-resident
MP that were most successful in getting legislation through.102 With an MP’s
commitment enormously increased after 1689, however, it was more useful
97 J. Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation 1660–1800’, Historical Journal 39 (1996),

109–31. Knights, Representation, p. 12.
98 S. Handley, ‘Local Legislative Initiatives for Economic and Social Development in Lancashire
1689–1731’, Parliamentary History 9 (1990), 14.
99 I.R. Christie, British ‘Non-Elite’ MPs 1715–1820 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 38–53. In 1715, for example,
Bristol (both MPs), Hull, Colchester, Worcester, Edinburgh and Glasgow all returned local busi-
nessmen to Parliament. But most of the other forty businessman-MPs were Londoners. Other
MPs included six lawyers (two of them Londoners), three admirals and a quack doctor.
100 P. Langford, ‘Property and “Virtual Representation” in 18th Century England’, Historical Journal,
31 (1988), 88, 114–15; D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks and S. Handley (eds), The History of Parliament:
the House of Commons 1690–1715 (London, 2002), p. 417; Beckett, ‘Glorious Revolution’, p. 44.
101 H. Kleineke, ‘The Widening Gap: the Practice of Parliamentary Borough Elections in Devon
and Cornwall in the 15th Century’, Parliamentary History 23 (2004), 121–26.
102 R. Tittler, ‘Elizabethan Towns and the “Points of Contact”’, Parliamentary History 8 (1989), 276–77, 286.
than ever to elect men with time and connections. The 1711 Act, setting a
threshold of £300 a year from land for those sitting for parliamentary boroughs,
merely confirmed what was already the case.103
The election of more landed gentry was therefore neither a sign of urban
deference nor of disengagement from national politics. In fact, there were
more petitions and addresses to Parliament in this period than ever before,
and they were widely organized across the country. Stuart Handley finds in
his study of Liverpool and Lancashire that parliamentary Bills were the result
of extended local negotiations:
In practice any prudent and conscientious borough Member would

be obliged, as far as possible, to be in tune with commercial (or
landed) opinion at home and ready to promote the measures
deemed necessary by the corporation. Such solicitude could influ-
ence the selection of parliamentary candidates by local factions,
or might even decide elections.104
In fact, far from lifting political affairs out of the urban context and restricting
them to the county community of Westminster, government departments and
gentlemen were now more than ever before forced to wait on urban political
events. ‘Parliament patrons’, comments Sweet, ‘had to earn their control; they
had to consult the interests of their constituencies, to court the electorate, to
promote their concerns, to see the local bills through parliament, and protect
them from adverse economic legislation.’105 The MP for York complained wearily
of the ‘vast trouble in discharging the duty of a Parliament man’, since there were
‘so many interests . . . so much expected to be done for the citizens or their
friends during the session of Parliament’. Many towns, including Plymouth, Bristol,
Northampton and Appleby, were busily sending their MPs detailed instructions to
follow.106 Keirn and Knights have charted the extended correspondence between
the MP for Taunton, Edward Clarke, and local businessmen engaged in making
the River Tone navigable, and also with local weavers over textile legislation.107
103 Dickinson, ‘The Representation of the People’, p. 21.

104 Handley, ‘Local Legislative Initiatives’, pp. 22–23, 37.
105 Sweet, The English Town, p. 60. See also, for example, N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics
in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), p. 291; Miller, Cities Divided, pp. 127–31.
106 Gauci, Great Yarmouth, pp. 192–97.
107 T. Keirn, ‘Parliament, Legislation and the Regulation of the English Textile Industries, 1689–
1714’, in L. Davison et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, p. 14; M. Knights, ‘Regulation and Rival
Interests in the 1690s’, in P. Gauci, Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850 (Farnham, 2011),
pp. 64, 74–78.
The significance of this last example may be that weavers were among the
poorest sections of urban society, but that in potwalloper Taunton many would
have had a vote. Ignoring the demands of voters was electoral suicide, a process
that began long before elections. Indeed, Clarke’s wife, acting as his election
agent in 1695, had angrily informed the council that he ‘had not failed to give
them an account by every post during the session of Parliament and had not
acted in anything without their consent’. Two years later, she was ticking her
husband off for spending too little time in the town and going around with a
long face.108 ‘I am half dead already,’ wrote one electioneering gentleman from
Preston in 1715, ‘what with drinking, smoking and walking the streets at all
hours.’109 In this vigorous urban politics, it was, writes Dickinson, local issues
that dominated. ‘Hundreds of thousands of individuals—voters and non-voters
alike—experienced politics at this level.’110
Gauci’s study of Great Yarmouth charts in great detail the enormous labour
the town’s MPs now had to put in to satisfy the town’s ‘barrage of requests’.
The Corporation was writing a letter to its MPs very nearly every week in
1706–07 and probably in other years. It was not afraid of sending a stinging
rebuke when it believed its MPs had let it down, nor of sidelining its patrons
if they lost their positions of influence. Gauci gives us the eloquent image of
Viscount Townshend, dispatched to the Hague to negotiate peace between
Britain and France in 1709, and there receiving regular, detailed reports on
the state of factions within the corporation of Great Yarmouth, where local
clergy were struggling to mediate their own local truces. Once Townshend
had been eclipsed by the Harley ministry, the town curtly suspended all contact
with him.111
The transformation of Parliament from 1690 therefore materially shifted
the political initiative, not only to the gentry who served as MPs, but also to
those constituents who governed the localities and who now saw Parliament
as a means to resolve local issues. As a result, Beckett concludes, ‘the business
of the house meant that many MPs—particularly those sitting for boroughs—
found that they were drawn ever more tightly into constituency affairs’. This
was, as Davison et al. observe, where the political initiative now largely lay.112
In fact, even the late Stuart monarchs, prepared as they were to exercise
royal muscle, had been unable to interfere successfully in town government.
108 Gibson, Religion and the Enlightenment, pp. 170–71.

110 Dickinson, Politics of the People, pp. 13, 49–50.
111 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 227–35, 246–47.
112 Beckett, ‘Glorious Revolution’, p. 41; L. Davison et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, pp. xiv–xv, li.
Archer has found that the Crown could not avoid compromise with urban
leaders, who in turn depended on the assent of craftsmen and tradesmen.113
Norrey agrees. Vigorous later Stuart attempts to dictate the membership of
corporations were sometimes successful. But even in smaller towns, they were
equally often resolutely resisted, and those who had been excluded quickly
found their way back into office.114 Subsequently, as we might expect, growing
prosperity made local communities more and not less resistant to outside
interference. Halliday has shown, and Hayton confirms, that no government
after 1688 even attempted to dictate to the corporations as the Stuarts had.
Indeed, the Hanoverians signally failed to exploit the opportunities local
quarrels offered them to remodel corporations.115
We have travelled a long distance from the plebeian/patrician world of
Cannon’s ‘aristocratic century’. Westminster may have become the preserve
largely of the landed. But this was a small part of the story. If we are to
understand the politics of the nation as a whole, our attention has been
refocused firmly on the local community. Above all, we are now sharply
aware of feistily independent middle-order urban community brokers who
mediated between the forces of county society, or the demands of central
government, and the local society in which they derived identity, credit,
office and standing.
1.4. Partisanship
Between 1650 and 1730, a new force apparently emerged in the middle orders
of the towns. Partisan political culture breached the fundamental norms of
community, dividing local society. Indeed, partisanship posed questions about
truth-telling and independence, the very values that constituted the gentility
to which the early modern English middle orders aspired. Opposing camps
bitterly accused each other of cant, jargon, banter, bamboozlement and
conspiring against the public good.116 Politics became, as Paula McDowell puts
it, ‘a matter of competing public representations’.117
113 I. Archer, ‘Politics and Government 1540–1700’, p. 261.

114 P.J. Norrey, ‘The Restoration Regime in Action: The Relationship between Central and Local
Government in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, 1660–78’, Historical Journal 31 (1988), 809–12.
115 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. 149–262; D. Hayton, Introductory Survey, House of Commons 1690–
1715, p. 250.
116 Knights, Representation, for example pp. 6–7, 210–15.
117 P. McDowell, Women of Grub Street (Oxford, 1998), p. 7.
Halliday’s extended study of the corporations from 1650 to 1730 charts the
evolution of partisanship as a transition from consensual to competitive politics.
It was not, in Halliday’s analysis, imposed from outside, but emerged directly
from the bitter local conflicts of the Civil War and interregnum.118 Locally, the
Restoration led to purge and counter-purge as competing factions struggled for
control of urban government, the ideal of communal consensus at odds with
the reality of factional, and particularly religious, division. The late Stuart kings
were dragged into this urban maelstrom, their bouts of what Halliday calls
‘rechartering’, attempts to establish control by backing one local faction or
another. As we have seen, they did not succeed. Instead, the royal courts devel-
oped legal instruments, notably Mandamus and Quo Warranto, that were
increasingly manipulated by local factions to resolve local disputes. By the early
eighteenth century, the result had been a shift in corporate praxis, from embit-
tered attempts to establish local hegemony to the coexistence, dynamic if not
peaceful, of rival parties. Urban factions—or parties, the words were inter-
changeable—did not therefore derive primarily, or even mainly, from the
Exclusion Crisis and the appearance of Whigs and Tories. Indeed, the tags of
Whig and Tory rarely appeared outside Westminster, even at the height of the
‘rage of party’. Parties were defined locally, according to Halliday, by loyalty or
disloyalty towards the governing regime, by differences in religion or by char-
ismatic local individuals. As Parliament established itself in the 1690s, these local
factions intersected insistently with Westminster parties, fuelling local struggles
that clattered loudly on at least into the middle of the eighteenth century.
This is an important finding because it shifts the ‘rage of party’ from a
national to a local context. Each time we examine town records in detail we
find communities that were torn by bitter quarrels. At Penzance, Portsmouth,
Brackley, Devizes and elsewhere there were rival mayors or corporations.119
Knights charts bitter feuds in Hertford and Chester, where eight people died
in the general election of 1695. Gauci finds repeated injunctions in the Great
Yarmouth corporation for order in debate. Even so, business ground to a halt
completely in 1710 and 1719.120 These were battles fought out not just in
parliamentary elections but year by year among the townsmen themselves.121
And if party clashes led to violence and a mass march, breaking down the
door of the town hall in Rye in 1681 and throwing the town clerk into prison,
or to bloodshed in Macclesfield in 1716, or if the mayor of Doncaster locked
118 This paragraph draws on Halliday, Dismembering, pp. xi–v, 3–28.

119 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. 309, 315–17; Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, pp. 184–88.
120 Knights, Representation, pp. 68–86; Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 24–25, 231, 246–47.
121 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. xiv–v, 306–08, 317.
his party rivals out of the town hall in 1723, there were townsmen prepared
to take their partisan grievances to law.122 Anyone who has worked through
the bundles of King’s Bench affidavits can testify that such clashes reached the
courts from Oxford, Wigan, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Scarborough, Bewdley
and dozens, probably hundreds, of other similar towns spread right across the
country.123 Indeed, the atmosphere of bitter local feuding was such, argues
Halliday, that the Court of King’s Bench had become essential to maintaining
stable government. He argues that the Act of 1711, which made it easier to
obtain writs of Mandamus and QuoWarranto, and the Act of 1719 for the Quieting
of Corporations, reflected shock at the depth of unending partisan conflict in
the localities.124 Knights similarly links the repeal of the Triennial Act in 1716
to horror at the corrosive effect of frequent elections and the party propaganda
they nurtured in the towns.125
This is an important corrective. Parties turn out not to have been fabrica-
tions of the gentry, playing out their rivalries by getting townsmen drunk or
paying them to vote. We now understand that they were equally—perhaps
primarily—manifestations of urban tension. On the other hand, there is still
a great deal we do not understand. Towns, after all, had always been compet-
itive. Tittler has described Elizabethan towns as ‘highly fractious, socially
complex and politically fluid entities’.126 Local partisan conflict also continued
long into the period of seeming Hanoverian stability, the numbers of cases at
King’s Bench continuing to rise. Colley has noted that, in the boroughs, there
were also more contested polls in the six parliamentary elections after 1715
than the six before. And this followed a much-increased rate of contested
elections 1690–1715.127 Fraser finds opposing factions entrenched in Victorian
corporations, vestries, improvement commissions and utilities.128 As Dickinson
points out, confrontation was a product of the towns’ closely interlocking
societies. Communities that were knitted together by kinship, work, churches,
societies and residence—the ‘cross-cutting circles’ of community—inevitably
spawned conflict; so ‘power in the towns was never won without a struggle
122 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 117–22. Halliday, Dismembering, p. 335.

123 L.K.J. Glassey, ‘Local Government’, in C. Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750:
Essays presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London, 1987), pp. 151–72. See Chapter 8, Section 3.
124 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. 319–21, 336–40.
125 Knights, Representation, p. 219.
126 Tittler, ‘Elizabethan Towns’, p. 283.
127 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. 21, 346. L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, The Tory Party 1714–60
(Cambridge, 1982), p. 119; Knights, Representation, pp. 11–12.
128 D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England. The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester,
1976).
and it could rarely be retained for long if compromise and balance were not
regularly sought’.129 Scribner has shown indeed that competing discourses and
strategies of power are inherent in every kind of community. As Halvorsen
and Spierling put it, ‘conflict is an integral part of community dynamics’, and
again, ‘an inherent characteristic of early modern communities’. Competing
parties within a single community are, adds Sabean, ‘engaged in the same
argument’.130 We are beginning therefore to perceive that conflict was an
endemic characteristic of towns, an enduring aspect of their urban-ness.
Patterson has shown that, before the Civil War, serious local conflicts were
resolved by mediation, usually reference to neighbouring gentry but in extreme
cases to the terrifying and costly ordeal of pleading before the Board of the
Privy Council.131 Halliday’s picture of an emerging, dynamic partisanship may
in this sense not be so much a new phenomenon as a return to normality
after the terrors of the mid-seventeenth century, albeit a normality in which
mediation took place at King’s Bench and not before the Privy Councillors.
There remains, however, a sense that the period immediately before and
after the Hanoverian accession was unusual; a spike in partisanship—or perhaps
the culmination of a long gestation of local conflict—followed by a period,
not of calm but of what Halliday has termed ‘dynamic’ stability, in which local
partisanship could at least be kept within bounds. Knights argues that, early
in the eighteenth century, there was an unprecedented interlocking of issues,
of competing notions of war and commerce, along with the rise of print and
literacy and divisive clashes over religion and the succession. All this combined
with deep-rooted local tensions to create a volatile cocktail. It exploded a
traditional ideal of local consensus. We might add to his list the economic
impact of twenty years of war, escalating poor relief, poor harvests in the
1690s and the effects of recoinage.132 What this period witnessed was not the
crude and often brutal purging of the previous century but a much more
complex partisan struggle that took some years to reach a condition of stasis.
How this crucial struggle played out deep within town society has been
largely hidden from our eyes. Examining parliamentary elections—for long the
usual approach to local politics—is of limited use since most parliamentary
129 Dickinson, Politics of the People, pp. 95–96.

130 M.J. Halvorsen and K.E. Spierling, Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008),
pp. 5–6, 21. R. Scribner, ‘Communities and the Nature of Power’, in R. Scribner, Germany. A New
Social and Economic History I 1450–1630 (London, 1996), p. 320. D.W. Sabean, Power in the Blood.
Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), p. 29.
131 C. Patterson, ‘Conflict Resolution and Patronage in Provincial Towns, 1590–1640’, Journal of
British Studies 37 (1998), 1–25.
132 Knights, Representation, pp. 25, 28, 168–72, 362–65.
elections were uncontested. Dickinson puts the figure at between 50 and 70

per cent in the early eighteenth century.133 We now understand that in the
towns the ‘rage of party’ at the parliamentary hustings was just one iteration
of a perennial urban political turmoil, played out at mayoral elections, church-
wardens’ elections and the selection of many dozens of local officers. Kishlansky
has demonstrated that, at these levels of local government too, selection without
a poll was preferred to election by vote because it preserved the stable consensus
that was essential to local credit and government. For the local community, a
contested election was a scandal that ‘violated every other social norm by which
it operated’.134 Decision by bare majority was literally unthinkable, the high
road to anarchy. Even Locke himself had nothing to say about it.135 But how
these perennial urban compromises were being forged we do not know. We
do not yet have the deep local studies in this period that would allow us to
understand how and why partisanship continued to escalate in some towns
until resolution was only possible at law, while in others, townsmen eventually
learned to differ more or less agreeably among themselves. In this sense, we
have yet to reach much of the inner working of everyday politics in the early
eighteenth century.
1.5. Religion and Party
One clue might lie in the evolution of religious conflict. Goldie argues that
the ‘predominant language of politics was overwhelmingly the language of
religious parties and civil war wounds’.136 Both Archer and Halliday point out
that deep religious rifts dated back to the early seventeenth century and then
escalated bitterly during the Civil War and Interregnum. Harris adds that the
association of dissent with the Rye House Plot and the Monmouth Rebellion,
and the imprisonment of dissenters who refused to pay their fines, seriously
escalated the mood of alarm.137 Knights contends that the issues swirling
around religion changed significantly in the 1690s, when official toleration of

134 M. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England
(Cambridge, 1986), p. 61.
135 H.T. Dickinson, ‘The Representation of the People in 18th Century Britain’, in Maija Jansson
(ed.), Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (New
York, 2007), pp. 25, 34.
136 M. Goldie, ‘Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie (eds),
The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), p. 79.
137 Halliday, Dismembering, p. 17. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, pp. 179–81.
dissent turned religious division into a highly partisan issue, quite different
from the black and white confessional confrontations of the Restoration period
and the subtler tensions of early Stuart and Tudor periods.138
We are coming to understand that this religious conflict was very much an
urban issue. One pattern emerging from local research is that attendance at
the Established Church was often very low, but stronger in towns than in rural
villages, its services held more often, its clergy better supported.139 Attendance
was noticeably better in towns where dissent was strong, and especially so in
the south, where most parliamentary boroughs were found and where local
research has shown that the Established Church was more effective than we
used to suppose. Patronage of livings, for example in Canterbury or Winchester
dioceses, was already 60 per cent in church hands, and most clergy were
educated and hard working.140 In a parallel mode, according to one estimate,
at the Hanoverian accession, half the dissenting meeting houses and almost all
the larger ones were found in towns.141 This was certainly the case, for example,
in Norfolk, where almost all the meeting houses were in Norwich, King’s
Lynn and eleven smaller market towns.142 In Oxfordshire, dissent was similarly
concentrated in Banbury, Bicester, Chipping Norton and Witney.143 If all manner
of church practice was more vigorous in the towns than in the rural parishes,
this is where religious conflict was most likely to happen.
Exactly how these religious tensions translated into local partisanship, however,
is still largely obscure. We might guess that it was partly because the dissenters’
relationship with wider society was complex. Had they completely separated
themselves, urban politics might have been calmer. But just how far dissenters
cut themselves off from the rest of society is still unclear. Anne Dunan-Page’s
study of dissenting meeting house books has revealed the jeopardy suffered by
nonconformists in the decades after the Restoration and the deep commitment
it required to found a meeting, and to build and equip its premises.144 The disgust
138 Knights, Representation, pp. 20–22.

139 Ibid., p. 7–24. J. Spurr, ‘The Lay Church of England’, in G. Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart
Church 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 106–07. F.C. Mather, ‘Georgian Churchmanship
Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship 1714–1830’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History 36 (1985), 255–83. Gauci found, however, that few attended the parish churches in Great
Yarmouth. Gauci, Politics and Society, p. 182.
140 J. Gregory and J.S. Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of
England and the Regions 1660–1800 (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 6–7, 18, 73–97.
141 M.R. Watts, The Dissenters, 1 The Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), pp. 285–89.
142 W.M. Jacob, ‘Church and Society in Norfolk 1700–1800’, in Gregory and Chamberlain, National
Church, pp. 175–96.
143 W.M. Marshall, ‘The Dioceses of Hereford and Oxford 1660–1760’, in ibid., pp. 197–221.
144 A. Dunan-Page, L’expérience puritaine.Vies et récits de dissidents (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2017).
of the surrounding community was often palpable and attempts to close meet-
ings down deeply troubling, leaving ugly scars in town communities that took
generations to heal. While those who attended the Established Church or the
meeting houses often heard two sermons on a Sunday and frequently one during
the week also, dissenters in addition met for prayer and self-examination.
Religious commitment could consume much of a churchgoer’s waking life.
But if this suggests that townspeople nestled into religious huddles, Dunan-
Page also finds that dissenters in this period usually married in the parish church
and, more strikingly, frequently married outside the dissenting community. The
boundaries between the nonconformist meetings and the rest of society were
both clear and permeable.145 Stevenson has found in the parishes of East Anglia
that, however tight knit dissenting communities were, their members often
served in parish office and were protected by their conforming neighbours from
legal penalties they incurred. Dissenting and non-dissenting witnessed each
other’s wills, traded land with each other, left money to the parish poor what-
ever church they attended.146 On the other hand, in places as disparate as Great
Yarmouth and Rye—where one estimate put the dissenting population at half
the town—dissenters and members of the Established Church tended to live in
different parts of the town and pursue different occupations, constructing their
own networks of kin and apprenticeship.147 Dissenting meeting houses had their
own ‘inner circle’, a dominant group, usually of the middling sort, who could
present an organized challenge to town government. These are patterns Jonathan
Barry has traced in some detail in Bristol.148 In towns such as Nottingham,
Coventry and Cambridge, dissenters played a role in town government, but in
Exeter, Liverpool, Leicester, Norwich, Newcastle and Taunton they were a
vociferous opposition, while in Birmingham, Manchester, Southampton and no
doubt elsewhere tensions led to violence. The division between the Established
Church and dissent was therefore one more ‘cross-cutting circle’ in urban
communities. But how sharp it was, how it varied from town to town, and how
exactly it aligned or clashed with other urban divisions is still difficult to fathom.
It seems that while dissenters in some ways integrated themselves into the rest
of society, they nonetheless often remained distinct within it.
145 Ibid., ch. 10.

146 W. Stevenson, ‘Sectarian Cohesion and Social Integration, 1640–1725’, in E.S. Leedham-Green
(ed.), Religious Dissent in East Anglia (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 69–86.
147 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 180–983; Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 106–15.
148 J.M.Triffitt,‘Believing and Belonging: Church Behaviour in Plymouth and Dartmouth, 1710–30’,
in S. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988),
pp. 179–202; J. Barry, ‘The Politics of Religion in Restoration Bristol’, in T. Harris et al., The
Politics of Religion, pp. 163–89. J. Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, pp. 89–91.
Religious divisions, perhaps even more than other urban tensions, certainly
adopted the colours of Whig and Tory.149 Clergy in the Established Church were
often actively Tory and faced an alliance of Whigs and dissenters.150 At the local
level, however, it was rarely a binary conflict. In Great Yarmouth, Gauci points
to conflict between Presbyterian and Independent congregations, and Dunan-
Page confirms the sharp differences between Calvinist and Arminian dissenters.
Nor were divisions confined to dissent. There was conflict also within the
Established Church.151 Spaeth’s study of the diocese of Salisbury in 1660–1740
shows that local parishioners bitterly resented diocesan attempts to suppress
dissent. They were content to hear a dissenting preacher in their parish church
and reluctant to report dissenters to interfering diocesan visitations. Far from
treating parish clergy with deference, they complained loudly about men they
found divisive or unsympathetic and refused to accept communion from them.
Two-thirds of parishes saw clashes between clergy and people in this period.152
Many dioceses also now split as Laudians and Latitudinarians tussled for
supremacy. High Churchmen preached that society was threatened by the loss
of religious unity, paraded their shock at toleration and pursued a programme
for the reform of manners and education. But it was, Knights argues, obvious
to contemporaries that the Laudian cry ‘Church in Danger’ was also being used
as a tool in party politics.153 Others in the Established Church accommodated
their nonconforming friends.154 How all these discords, both between dissent
and the Established Church, and within each side of the divide, translated into
political partisanship we are not yet clear.
At a national and diocesan level, the Latitudinarians would eventually emerge
victorious after the conflicts of the years 1710–15, stirred up particularly by
the inflammatory High Church rhetoric of Dr Sacheverell, and after the
149 Halliday, Dismembering, p. 17. J.E. Bradley, ‘Nonconformity and the Electorate in Eighteenth-
Century England’, Parliamentary History 6 (1987), 236–61.
150 G. Tapsell, ‘Pastors, Preachers and Politicians: The Clergy of the Later Stuart Church’, in
G. Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), p. 87.
151 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 88–90; Dunan-Page, L’expérience puritaine, chs 1, 4; Archer,
‘Politics and Government’, pp. 253–58; Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 179. Bradley
also finds Anglicans split although he does not analyse how or why. Bradley, ‘Nonconformity and
the Electorate’, pp. 244–47.
152 D. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge,
2000), pp. 22–28, 61–63, 155–72.
153 Knights, Representation, pp. 20–22.
154 M. Burden, ‘Theology and Education: Later Stuart Academies for Protestant Dissenters in
Southern England, and the Exeter Subscription Controversy 1713–19’, Southern History 36 (2014),
133; O.P. Grell, J.I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution
and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 10–15, also chapters by Israel and White.
suppression of Convocation in 1717. Recent historians of the church have

concluded that religious tension then subsided, not only at a national but also
at parish level, a modus vivendi emerging between Established and noncon-
forming congregations.155 More parish clergy made their peace with the Whigs
while, paradoxically, after toleration, many dissenting meeting houses struggled
to recruit both members and pastors. What White has called ‘the heroic age’
of dissent passed into a ‘twilight of puritanism’ in which churches were torn
with doctrinal and disciplinary disputes.156 Even though the leadership of
dissenting communities continued to constitute organized and influential pres-
sure groups, in towns such as Great Yarmouth they now negotiated local
compromises.157 As we have seen, among a wider public—including the many
who never went to church—religious world views of the Reformation and
earlier seventeenth century were giving way to the more secular, less confron-
tational sensibilities of civility and gentility. If religious issues had been among
the most potent ingredients of party, at the local level partisan rage might
have ebbed away partly because numbers attending any church at all were
dropping.158 The rise and fall of the ‘rage of party’ may have been at least as
much about this partly exogenous escalation and decline of religious tensions
in the towns, playing as they did on other urban divisions, as it was about the
conduct of wars, or the succession, or the distant echo of duelling parties in
Westminster. But exactly how this equation worked at local level—and whether
church practice declined partly because party did—we do not yet know.
Given the urban concentration of both dissent and parish attendance,
however, it is not surprising that conflict would continue the longest in the
boroughs. Dickinson finds that, even though the religious violence of the
seventeenth century had faded into the past, religious divisions in many constit-
uencies continued in different guises throughout the eighteenth century.159 We
have seen that local partisanship, legal wrangling and contested elections also
continued, but what role religion played in them is not clear. We still know
too little about how, why or to what extent religious partisanship subsided in
some towns, was resolved in others and continued elsewhere.
155 N. Tyacke, ‘From Laudians to Latitudinarians: A Shifting Balance of Theological Forces’, in

Tapsell, The Later Stuart Church, pp. 46–67.
156 White suggests that dissenting numbers may have increased between 1690 and 1716 but that their
theological divisions became much more serious. B.R. White, ‘The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years
before and after 1688’, in Grell et al., Persecution to Toleration, pp. 307–08, 315, 328.
157 Gauci, Great Yarmouth, pp. 215–16, 260.
158 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The ‘Rise of Puritanism’ and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in Grell
et al., Persecution to Toleration, pp. 42–44.
159 Dickinson, Politics of the People, pp. 55, 96–97.
1.6. In search of stability
It is difficult to contest that, at a national level, there was some kind of polit-
ical sea change at the time of the Hanoverian accession.The House of Commons
swung decisively towards the Whigs and remained so for decades. How such
a change could have arisen out of a myriad of highly local constituency concerns
is now something of a mystery. Given our understanding of the dense
complexity and stubborn independence of urban societies, the old explanatory
tools of bullying, deference, corruption and patronage no longer work. But
we have very few detailed studies of average or smaller town partisanship—
in other words, of the overwhelming majority of constituencies in the early
eighteenth century—to help us find a new understanding.
Miller has clung, to some extent, to an older narrative of this moment.
Politics before the Hanoverian succession, he argues, was lively and partici-
pation stretched across the social scale. But, he continues, after 1714
partisanship was rapidly overwhelmed by Whig manipulation, a drift to
oligarchy in the towns and a systematic corruption of the electorate by jobs,
favours and heavy-handed paternalism. Miller even proposes an ‘extensive and
brutal’ military campaign, terrorizing voters into a stability of fear and apathy.160
Perhaps in some towns Miller may be right. There were no doubt constitu-
encies—Underdown’s study of Dorchester suggests one—in which communal
consensus finally reasserted itself and inertia, even torpor, apparently set in.161
Much more evidence, however, is at odds with Miller’s account. As we have
seen, after 1714, more electoral contests than before failed to find a resolution
without a poll. Halliday discovered a continuing stream of borough spats that
ended at King’s Bench, testifying ‘to the vitality of such political contests well
beyond 1715, and to the ability of relatively humble players to wreck the
plans of so-called borough “magnates”’.162 Miller himself found continued party
conflict in Leicester and other towns into the 1730s.163 Even in somnolent
little Rye, Monod discovered factional tension that simmered over decades
and led to a short-lived coup in 1758–59.164
So was this electoral change towards the Whigs imposed from above on
reluctant or internally divided constituencies? If it was, we no longer under-
stand how. Hanoverian governments completely failed to exploit potential

161 Underdown, Fire from Heaven, pp. 263–64.
162 Halliday, Dismembering, pp. 21, 330.
164 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 224–31.
royal power over charters, which had been so ruthlessly used by Charles II
and James II.165 Miller’s notion of a Whig military dictatorship seems to be
based on a very small number of examples. Indeed, when in 1717 the corpor
ation of Tiverton requested military protection from protesting workers in
surrounding districts, the request was so unusual that the government had to
seek advice on the legal situation.166 It used to be thought, of course, that
Hanoverian politicians were able to subvert the electorate with an enormous
flood of contracts and patronage. But this interpretation has also collapsed
with our evolving understanding of the military–fiscal state. Long ago, Baugh
showed that politicians’ attempts to interfere with the Navy Board ran up
against the Board’s insistence on high standards of effectiveness and economy.
Hoon’s work on the Customs pointed in the same direction.167 More recently,
Braddick has shown that government revenue departments had begun a deci-
sive shift towards efficiency and centralisation from the 1640s.168 Brewer’s
celebrated study of the military–fiscal state proposes that three long periods
of warfare between 1689 and 1783 transformed British administration into a
remarkably effective revenue-raising machine.169 Key to the state’s success was
the professionalization of the revenue services, not only the Customs but
especially the Excise and particularly in the period 1688–1714. After political
purges in 1715–17, the Excise, in particular, shook off political interference
and, by the 1720s, had become ‘a byword for administrative efficiency’.170
There was little room left for political manipulation.
One possibility remains that, although the military–fiscal state had
profoundly changed the nature of administration, it was still enmeshed in
dense personal and local networks of credit and patronage, and that it exercised
some residual electoral influence there. Britain was, to borrow Knight and
Wilcox’s construction from a slightly later period, a ‘contractor-state’.171
Graham has gone on to demonstrate that the new efficiency of revenue and
victualling was paradoxically dependent on these personal contacts and
165 Hayton, Introductory Survey, pp. 247–50.

166 See Chapter 4, Section 1. I have come across no similar examples in these towns.
167 D.A. Baugh. British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, NJ, 1965) 296–320
and passim; E.E. Hoon, The Organisation of the English Customs System 1696–1786 (1938, 2nd edn,
Newton Abbot, 1968).
168 M. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 177–78.
169 J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989),
pp. 22, 56, 61.
170 Ibid., p. 56.
171 R.J.B. Knight and M. Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 1793–1815: War, the British Navy and the
Contractor State (Woodbridge, 2010), p. 210.
networks of private contractors, or even on the connections created by party.

The military–fiscal state only functioned because it was the ‘product of nego-
tiations at local, regional and national levels’. Graham concludes that ‘English
political culture and its structures were surprisingly consensual, communal,
amateur, and participatory, but were not necessarily less effective for this.’172
This might suggest that there was still some room to use government jobs
and contracts for local electoral manipulation, even if it was only through
convoluted negotiation with local interests.
Our problem is that we lack the local prosopography to know in what way
and to what extent anyone was able to take political advantage of this ‘contractor
state’. Monod tells us that several members of Rye Corporation had local
customs positions. But it seems to have made no difference whatever to local
politics, which were governed after 1705 by the rich Whig merchant family
group that dominated the local economy.173 Brooks’s entertaining study of
Baron Ashburnham’s struggle to procure revenue places for his constituents
in Hastings shows that it ended in frustration for everyone. Competent men
got places anyway, whatever their party. The hopeless cases who pleaded for
Ashburnham’s support were mostly disappointed and earned him neither credit
nor votes. Brooks pictures Ashburnham ground between the millstones of the
revenue commissioners, pressing for efficiency, and the divided elites and
competing constituents in Hastings, none of whom could he afford to antag-
onize and none of whom could he satisfy. In the end, Ashburnham decided
that trying to recommend candidates for revenue places was a waste of time
and refused to take on any more.174 These studies are small straws in the wind,
provoking more questions than they answer. We do not know whether, in
general, the pressure for administrative efficiency trumped marginal electoral
gains in the constituencies, or to what extent a small electoral advantage in
the boroughs was dissipated among a host of competing local political brokers.
Until we have the local studies, we cannot be sure.
Having stripped away the layers of deference and patronage, we are there-
fore perplexed about the relationship between MPs and their constituents.
We have now grown accustomed to the spectacle of MPs who worked hard
to win their electors’ vote and to keep it.175 But how and why opinion was
172 A. Graham, Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702–1713 (Oxford, 2015), p. 18.
173 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 210–14. Monod states that Rye was, through the Customs appoint-
ments, ‘a Treasury borough’. But his evidence points to something different. Ibid., 231.
174 C. Brooks, ‘Interest, Patronage and Professionalism: John 1st Baron Ashburnham, Hastings and
the Revenue Services’, Southern History 9 (1987), 51–70.
175 See Chapter 1, Section 3.
changing within the constituencies after the Hanoverian accession—and in

particular why so many local constituencies swung towards the Whigs—is still
very largely hidden from view. Was it simply the case that, after the accession
of George I, Tories could not get enough done at Westminster to satisfy their
constituents? Or were there other significant shifts at a local level, perhaps
related to religious or other societal change? Even in many of the larger
constituencies we lack the detailed prosopography that would allow us to
unlock this kind of local politics.
Most constituencies have only been studied by the History of Parliament,
which has consistently answered these questions in terms of landed influence.
But this is a matter of optics. David Hayton’s towering introduction to the
1690–1715 volume makes it clear that, although his team set out to examine
civic politics where it affected the composition of the electorate, they did not
normally consult borough records.176 Using only the papers of the country
houses, however, is to look down the historical telescope from the perspective
of the gentry, making borough affairs appear trivial and irrelevant. Switch
ends and examine local affairs from within the constituencies’ own records,
and it is the gentry who appear distant and unimportant.What we are reaching,
slowly and so far mostly only in a few of the larger towns, is a binocular view
in which we can see both perspectives. Until we have more examples, however,
we are unable to explain much of the change that occurred in the constitu-
encies, and especially in the years immediately before and after the arrival of
the Hanoverians.
1.7. The research deficit in smaller towns
Above all, we know very little about boroughs below the level of the regional
centres, even though it was the smaller towns that were the dominant polit-
ical force of the period. Why smaller towns have been neglected is an
historiographical discussion for another place. As Finberg observed, research
in unglamorous little localities has long been regarded as an exercise in
‘providing footnotes for somebody else’s History of England’.177 In Britain,
the approach of the annalistes was largely directed at rural communities. When
the tremors of microhistory spread from Ginzburg’s Il formaggio e i vermi after
176 Hayton, Introductory Survey, pp. 75–76. Hayton references secondary work only on thirteen
boroughs, seven of them from the present study. Ibid., pp. 6, 13–14.
177 H.P.R. Finberg, Local History in the University (Leicester, 1964), p. 14, quoted in Gauci, Politics
and Society, p. 2.
its publication in 1976, they reached Spain, Germany and Scandinavia and
spread to the Americas, but very largely by-passed the United Kingdom.178
For many years the study of average and smaller towns was also plagued by
an arbitrary urban threshold, maintained for years at around 5,000 and later
at 2,500 inhabitants.
Faced with a rambling collection of poor and disconnected sources, from
leases and random receipts to property surveys, patchy, often badly kept
corporation accounts and rare surviving poll books, the historian of the smaller
town can only construct a database of local individuals and try to discern
patterns among them. Newspaper accounts, diaries and correspondence rarely
appear, and where they do, they have to be painstakingly compared with the
generality of the surviving documents. It is intensely laborious. As Ruggiu
wryly comments, if a local study were to have any value, ‘il fallait creuser
profond’—you had to dig deep.179 Gauci pointed out in 1996 that ‘a growing
chorus of political analysts have recognised the rewards to be gained from
corporate prosopography, and have heralded provincial town government as
an area requiring urgent investigation’.180 But so far Gauci’s own detailed work
on Great Yarmouth in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has stood
almost alone in print.
Early modern urban government in small and average British towns still
waits for its modern monograph.181 Religion in smaller towns has not found
its specialist historian. Their economy remains obscure, especially in the early
eighteenth century. Their population seems to have been stagnant in 1700–30,
though they may have benefited from falling real food prices and spent more
on consumer goods.182 They seem to have had professional, service, manufac-
turing, building and retail sectors, perhaps sharing what Clark calls the ‘advent
of a more sectored, multi-linear and diffuse social hierarchy and Sweet terms
‘infinite gradations’ between rich and poor.183 Long ago, Marshall found weavers
and cordwainers lending money in Kendal. Chalklin found finance for building
178 C. Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ´500 (Turin, 1976). D.A. Bell,
‘Total History and Microhistory: The French and Italian Paradigms’, in L. Kramer and S. Maza
(eds), A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford, 2002), pp. 262–76.
179 Ruggiu, Les élites, p. 11.
180 Gauci, Politics and Society, pp. 6–7.
181 The most recent is B. Keith-Lucas, The Unreformed Local Government System (London, 1980). It relies
heavily on the Royal Commission on Municipal Corporations of 1835, a source we should now
regard as unreliable for any period before the nineteenth century (and even then questionable.)
182 J. Beckett and C. Smith, ‘Urban Renaissance and Consumer Revolution in Nottingham 1688–
1850’, Urban History 27 (2000), 40–44 and references.
183 Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, pp. 2–3; P. Clark, The Transformation of English Provincial
Towns (London, 1984), p. 30; Sweet, English Town, p. 163.
coming from bakers, fishermen and carpenters, and Reed found that cloth
workers, metal workers and shoemakers disposed of fields and cottages around
Ipswich.184 But how widely any of this applied in the first part of the eighteenth
century to the generality of towns below the level of the larger regional centres
we still do not know.
The present study was originally conceived as an attempt to write a first,
tentative histoire totale of average and smaller early modern towns in England,
taking a group that would open the possibility of comparison. The period
1710–30 was short and would allow deep research into a number of boroughs
at a significant juncture. I originally set out to investigate the parliamentary
boroughs of Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall, a total of forty-nine
towns. After five years of intensive documentary work, I had completed analy
sis of just seven. Once my thesis had been submitted, a distinguished historian
of the ‘rage of party’, perceiving how profoundly this material challenged
what was then the accepted paradigm, proposed that I must simply have
fabricated my evidence. So the work remained unpublished, if not unread.185
Since then, as we have seen, old orthodoxies have collapsed and new inter-
pretations have emerged that correspond strikingly to what I had found. New
research has appeared touching on the towns in the sample and confirming
the conclusions I had come to.186 The present work, however, remains a rare
attempt to explore the politics of a regional group of average-sized constitu-
encies at truly close quarters during a key moment of change.
To five Devon towns—Tavistock, Plymouth, Dartmouth,Totnes,Tiverton—
I was able to add Taunton and Bridgwater in Somerset. Serendipitous though
this sample might be, these towns are important in their own right and bring
together a range of urban sizes and economic types. Two of them, Taunton
and Plymouth, were 6,000–7,000 in size, Tiverton perhaps 5,000 and the others
1,500–3,000.187 Somerset was below the regional average for urbanization;
184 J.D. Marshall, ‘Kendal in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the
Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society new series 75 (1975), 188–257.
C.W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process 1740–1820
(Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), chapter 7; M. Reed, ‘Economic Structure and Change in Seventeenth
Century Ipswich’ in P. Clark (ed.), Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England (Leicester, 1981),
pp. 87–142. See also Barry, ‘South West’, pp. 67–92.
185 ‘Politics and the Urban Community: Parliamentary Boroughs in the South West of England’
(Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 1985).
186 The one exception is at Tiverton, where new data in Peter Maunder’s excellent Tiverton Cloth
(Tiverton, 2009) has enabled me to understand that this town was more like the others than I
had thought.
187 See Chapter 2, Sections 1 and 2. Previously published population figures for these towns are
largely guesswork or based on misinterpretations of sources.
Devon well above.188 The two Somerset boroughs belonged to a sergemaking

region centred around Tiverton, which reached its zenith shortly after 1710
and then declined quite quickly. Bridgwater was important (among other
things) for the import of coal and wool, Taunton for serge manufacture, and
Tiverton both for serge manufacture and for export, largely to the Netherlands.
The South Devon boroughs include two significant ports—Dartmouth and
Plymouth—alongside Totnes, a cloth town far gone in decline, and Tavistock,
which was a market and artisanal centre on the edge of Dartmoor. Plymouth
had an important, though (as we shall see) much misunderstood relationship
with the Admiralty. There were many connections between these places. To
anticipate just one example, Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the atmos-
pheric engine, ran a blacksmith’s shop in Dartmouth. His son was a sergemaker
in Taunton and he had at least one significant friend and correspondent, the
physician John Allen, who lived in Bridgwater.189 Dissent, especially
Presbyterianism, was strong in all these towns and three—Bridgwater, Taunton
and Plymouth—had formidably godly reputations stretching back far into the
previous century. Most of these towns had just one parish; Plymouth and
Taunton had two. Men and women from Dartmouth also drifted along the
shore to a chapel of ease belonging to a neighbouring parish. These were all
corporate towns except Tavistock. They were all parliamentary boroughs,
electing two MPs.
Were these towns typical? It is a question mal posée. Without similar prosop-
ographical studies of town clusters in this period, we have to ask what they
would be typical of. This is, after all, a foray in method. It is not a study of the
urban rich, the urban middle order or the urban poor, their identity, economics
or mentality; of dissenting churches, parish vestries or town corporations. It
is not a study of individual industries, of economic structure, of the professions
or the government revenue service, of town elections or parliamentary elec-
tions or relations with the gentry. It is not a study of oligarchy or of the
crowd. It is an attempt to build all of these things into one interpretation of
urban life and politics at the level of individual lives and circles of urban
connection. Until we have other studies of this kind, it is not possible to ask
whether this sample is typical.
The most important finding of this work is that it puts beyond doubt that
politics, even in the average-sized little town, cannot be separated from the
188 Barry, ‘South West’, pp. 75, 78.

189 A.P. Woolrich, ‘Mr Newcomen’s Friend: Dr John Allen (1660–1741) of Bridgwater’, Proceedings
of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society (PSANHS) 142 (1999), 261–66.
rest of the urban experience. It turns out to be essential to understand the

structure of the leather or the innkeeping trade or who was selling what on
the quays in the ports, who was marrying whom and who was investing with
whom, if we are to grasp the political process in the early eighteenth century.
By examining everything, from who lived where to who went to which church
and who served in which local office, the intricate patterns of eighteenth-
century politics begin to give up their secrets.
In these seven towns, at least, the mysterious exclusion of the Tories after
the Hanoverian accession did not happen. These towns certainly elected more
Whig MPs than before. But beneath the outward appearance, ‘Whig’ and
‘Tory’ tell only a small part of the story. At a local level, many ‘Tories’ remained
in government. It is something that Halliday noticed but, without much more
local research, could not explain, save to point out that many Tory councillors
had life tenure on their seats.190 What we find in these towns is that extreme
partisanship at the end of Anne’s reign and in the first years of the Hanoverians
posed a threat to urban order that compelled constituency politicians to make
compromises. In some places, moderate Whig and Tory factions allied.
Elsewhere extremists came together. The result was not Whig ascendancy but
inter-partisan alliances that sometimes survived but often did not. They may
have elected more Whigs to Parliament, but in every one of these towns not
two, but three—and sometimes four—political factions fought for control
from at least the early years of the century and continued long after 1714 to
contend on a range of issues. Within this little region there was therefore a
profoundly urban dimension to the course of events from 1710 to 1730. It
was never a simple question of Whig and Tory.
The following chapters fall into three sections, corresponding to the
schedule that Mollenkopf originally set out for community study.191 It echoes
broadly also Braudel’s tripartite analysis of historical causation.192 I begin by
examining the community through the economic and social structure—termed
by Mollenkopf ‘the greatest level of abstraction’. I then consider institutional
structures—primarily the churches and local government. Finally, I analyse
political alliances in action. We are working from the most powerful but least
obvious forces to the least powerful but most explicit, each level exercising
a profound influence over the others.
190 Halliday, Dismembering, p. 322.

191 J. Mollenkopf, ‘Community and Accumulation’, in M. Dear and A.J. Scott (eds), Urbanisation
and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society (London, 1981), pp. 319–37.
192 F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et la monde Méditerranéan à l’époque de Philippe II (1949, trans. Sian
Reynolds, London and New York, 1972), pp. 20–21.

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Partisan Politics

Looking for consensus in

Chapter 1: Introduction—a new 1

PART 1: THE URBAN COMMUNITY

Chapter 2: Economy and community—39

Chapter 4: Town government107

PART 2: THE POLITICAL PROCESS

Chapter 5: Government patronage139

Chapter 6: The politics of leading townsmen 163

Chapter 8: Wider contexts247

Introduction—a new understanding

that understanding such little places is now central to our interpretation of

1.1. The perspective of the middling sort

Let us take a moment to understand the historiographical transformation that

hierarchy.15 In an important study, French has argued that it was in parish

It is difficult in these circumstances to imagine a gulf cutting richer and poorer

1.2. Local government

50 Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 153–54.

64 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 189, 192–95.

72 D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort’, p. 206.

lived cheek by jowl with their poorer neighbours; they passed

Hammer astutely points out that, of course, we should not be surprised if

1.3. Resistance to interference

89 Miller, Cities Divided, p. 123.

by a burst of legislative activity in the 1690s, rising to sixty-four Bills a session.97

97 J. Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation 1660–1800’, Historical Journal 39 (1996),

In practice any prudent and conscientious borough Member would

103 Dickinson, ‘The Representation of the People’, p. 21.

108 Gibson, Religion and the Enlightenment, pp. 170–71.

113 I. Archer, ‘Politics and Government 1540–1700’, p. 261.

118 This paragraph draws on Halliday, Dismembering, pp. xi–v, 3–28.

122 Monod, Mr Grebell, pp. 117–22. Halliday, Dismembering, p. 335.

129 Dickinson, Politics of the People, pp. 95–96.

elections were uncontested. Dickinson puts the figure at between 50 and 70

1.5. Religion and Party

133 Dickinson, Politics of the People, p. 42.

138 Knights, Representation, pp. 20–22.

145 Ibid., ch. 10.

suppression of Convocation in 1717. Recent historians of the church have

155 N. Tyacke, ‘From Laudians to Latitudinarians: A Shifting Balance of Theological Forces’, in

1.6. In search of stability

160 Miller, Cities Divided, pp. 280–82.

165 Hayton, Introductory Survey, pp. 247–50.

networks of private contractors, or even on the connections created by party.

changing within the constituencies after the Hanoverian accession—and in

1.7. The research deficit in smaller towns

Devon well above.188 The two Somerset boroughs belonged to a sergemaking

188 Barry, ‘South West’, pp. 75, 78.

rest of the urban experience. It turns out to be essential to understand the

190 Halliday, Dismembering, p. 322.

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Chapter 1: Introduction—a new 1

Chapter 2: Economy and community—39

Chapter 4: Town government107

Chapter 5: Government patronage139

Chapter 6: The politics of leading townsmen 163

Chapter 8: Wider contexts247