Partisan Politics: Looking for Consensus in Eighteenth-Century Towns

By Laura Brown

New understandings of the middle order and of the post-1688 English Parliament have shifted the focus from Westminster to the constituencies in the study of eighteenth-century politics. It was the towns, and especially the smaller parliamentary boroughs, that set much of the legislative agenda and which defined partisanship. This is also where religious tension was most intense and enduring.

Yet there has never been a thoroughgoing comparative study of small-town economy, religion, government and politics. Deep in the archives, the history of a clutch of towns in south-west England in the early years of the eighteenth century offers revelatory insights. Their diverse economic structure and religious divisions made these towns extraordinarily difficult to govern, while late Augustan partisanship spread into the streets and taverns, threatening urban order. This precipitated heady local realignments, with three or even four factions in each place cutting across Whig and Tory lines in the pursuit of consensus. In this intensely urban politics, government patronage was peripheral; area gentry were drawn in but had little control. The impact of this many-sided partisanship on national politics was profound.

Building a clearer picture of significant change around the time of the Hanoverian accession, this book proposes a fresh approach both to the study of early modern politics and of towns far beyond its immediate region. It will be an important asset to scholars and students of both.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781905816682

Laura Brown

Laura Brown lives in Massachusetts with her quirky abnormal family. Her husband’s put up with her since high school, her young son keeps her on her toes, and her three cats think they deserve more scratches. Hearing loss is a big part of who she is, from her own Hard of Hearing ears, to the characters she creates.

Book preview

Partisan Politics

Partisan Politics

Looking for Consensus in

Eighteenth-Century Towns

JON ROSEBANK

First published in 2021 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR, UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

© 2021 Jon Rosebank

The right of Jon Rosebank to be identified as

author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publishers acknowledge the generous financial support of

the Marc Fitch Fund in the production of this volume.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-90581-667-5 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-90581-668-2 ePub

ISBN 978-1-90581-669-9 PDF

https://doi.org/10.47788/ITUP3527

Typeset in Perpetua by

Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Cover images: taken from the Holdsworth Bowl by Paul de Lamerie, 1723–24.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction—a new understanding of towns and their politics

1.1. The perspective of the middling sort

1.2. Local government

1.3. Resistance to interference

1.4. Partisanship

1.5. Religion and party

1.6. In search of stability

1.7. The research deficit in smaller towns

PART 1: THE URBAN COMMUNITY

Chapter 2: Economy and community—the key contexts

2.1. The major industries: shipping

2.2. The major industries: textiles

2.3. Beyond the major industries

2.4. The distribution of wealth

2.5. Other solidarities

2.6. The relationship between economy, society and politics

Chapter 3: The significance of the Church

3.1. The structure of dissent

3.2. Dissent and local government

3.3. The Established Church

3.4. The challenge to order

Chapter 4: Town government

4.1. The structure of town government

4.2. Who served?

4.3. Was town government effective?

4.4. The threat to good government

PART 2: THE POLITICAL PROCESS

Chapter 5: Government patronage

5.1. The Excise service

5.2. The Customs service

5.3. Land Tax, Post Office, Army

5.4. The Admiralty

5.5. The patronage process

Chapter 6: The politics of leading townsmen and the gentry

6.1. Bridgwater: the humiliation of the Duke of Chandos

6.2. Plymouth: consensus and the failure of Sir John Rogers

6.3. Totnes: Amyites, Buckleyites and George Treby

6.4. Dartmouth: Holdsworth and Treby— amicitia perpetua

6.5. Tavistock: the third force

6.6. Taunton: the feud between council and meeting houses

6.7. Tiverton: the role of the Church party

6.8. Partisan politics

Chapter 7: The politics of the wider society

7.1. Taunton: mobs and voters

7.2. Bridgwater: popular Jacobitism

7.3. Totnes and Dartmouth: ‘Confidents and Intimados’ at the Hole in the Wall

7.4. Tavistock: fringe voters

7.5. Plymouth: the role of the freemen

7.6. Tiverton: playing with popular feeling

7.7. The broken cheese beam

Chapter 8: Wider contexts

8.1. Regions

8.2. The longer period

8.3. Where next?

Notes

Bibliography

Manuscript sources

Printed sources

Contemporary

Modern works

Index

Acknowledgements

It is my privilege to thank those who have made this book possible. I am grateful to the staffs at the Devon Heritage Centre, the Somerset Heritage Centre and the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office for their invaluable assistance. Special thanks go to Michelle Barnes (Cambridge University Library), Jeff Kattenhorn (the British Library), Anne Morgan (Plymouth and West Devon Records Office), Rachel Ponting (Devon Heritage Centre), Lucy Saint-Smith (Friends House) and Debbie Watson (DW Research) for their generous help in hunting down elusive references. I am glad to acknowledge the Ashmolean Museum for permission to use the cover image.

I am very grateful for the generous assistance of the Mark Fitch Fund, which made publication of this book possible.

Paul Langford introduced me to research and Gary Bennett supervised my doctoral thesis. Penny Corfield, Paul Slack, Jo Innes, Colin Brooks and Perry Gauci have also helped me along the way. Jack Lawrence discussed my work on Bridgwater. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to Jonathan Barry, who has stood alongside this work almost from beginning to end. Without him this book would never have been written. I have learned enormously from all these and many other scholars in this field. But I have insisted on making my own mistakes.

I am very grateful to Nigel Massen and David Hawkins of the University of Exeter Press for nursing this book through to publication. My wife Penelope Middelboe has shared my recent research and enthusiasm, and read my scripts with an editor’s eye. Intelligence, patience and humour are among her many glories.

Abbreviations

BL British Library

CJ Journal of the House of Commons

CUL Cambridge University Library

DHC Devon Heritage Centre

DWL Dr Williams’s Library

EcHR Economic History Review

HJ Historical Journal

NA National Archives

NQSD Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset

PSANHS Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society

PWDRO Plymouth and West Devon Record Centre

SHC Somerset Heritage Centre

TDA Transactions of the Devonshire Association

VCH Victoria County History

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 framework 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 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 professionals 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 resolutely 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 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 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 individuals 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 understanding 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 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 renaissance’ has turned out often to have been a more prosaic phenomenon, driven largely by the hard-nosed commercial instinct of the middle orders. The reconstruction 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 specialized, distribution improved and coastal traffic was interrupted by years of war. Farmers’ carts with their iron-banded wheels were grinding down medieval 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 renaissance 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 reorganization 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 renaissance 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 investment 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 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 examples, 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 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 independence, 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 introduces 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 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 understanding 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 townswomen 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 clergyman 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

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, 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 disruption 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 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 protection 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 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 administrations 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 community, 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 impossible, 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

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 mechanisms 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 embodiment 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 corporation played a key role in the town because its membership concentrated key 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 population. 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 faithfully 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 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 resistance 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-century 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 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 townsmen.101 Tittler has identified the same pattern in Elizabethan towns. He adds that, in this period, it was