Bristol

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1690-1715, ed. D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks, S. Handley, 2002
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Right of Election:

in the freemen and freeholders

Number of Qualified Electors:

about 3,5001

Number of voters:

at least 1,800 in 1698; at least 2,500 in 1710

Elections

DateCandidateVotes
24 Feb. 1690Sir Richard Hart 
 Sir John Knight 
 William Powlett 
 Robert Yate 
28 Oct. 1695Sir Thomas Day 
 Robert Yate 
 Sir Richard Hart 
 Sir John Knight 
10 Aug. 1698Robert Yate1136
 Sir Thomas Day976
 Sir John Knight785
 Sir Richard Hart421
 John Cary2792
22 Jan. 1701Sir William Daines 
 Robert Yate 
10 Dec. 1701Robert Yate 
 Sir William Daines 
5 Aug. 1702Robert Yate 
 Sir William Daines 
6 June 1705Sir William Daines 
 Robert Yate 
 Edward Colston I 
5 May 1708Robert Yate 
 Sir William Daines 
25 Oct. 1710Edward Colston II1785
 Joseph Earle1529
 Sir William Daines940
 Robert Yate7443
7 Sept. 1713Joseph Earle656
 Thomas Edwards474
 Sir William Daines1894

Main Article

The life and politics of Bristol were inextricably bound up with its port, the largest outside the capital. The city’s governors were an oligarchy of merchants and manufacturing tradesmen, many from old and wealthy mercantile dynasties interlinked by bonds of marriage, and a strong sense of civic consciousness promoted the virtues of economic well-being. This ruling elite exerted a considerable hold over the city’s large ‘open’ franchise. Bristol could boast the largest urban electorate outside London. In 1700, out of a population of nearly 20,000, an estimated 3,500 were freemen entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Yet considering this potential for the regular demonstration of political passions, the electorate was remarkably subservient. The parties secured and maintained electoral support primarily through aldermanic influence in the parishes and through the infrastructure of credit and employment obligation. A highly significant factor in this situation, however, was the Whig hegemony established in 1693 which for the next 12 years kept Tory sentiment in check. The Dissenters, comprising roughly a third of the city population, formed a large self-contained body of Whig support among the freemen. Until the Tory triumph of 1710 political equilibrium was effectively sustained under Whig rule. Besides establishing a more productive relationship with central government over the specific needs of trade, the city’s governors struck a popular note in their readiness to address increasing anxieties about the moral and spiritual health of the rapidly expanding urban population.5

The corporation, comprising 12 aldermen and 40 common councilmen, elected a mayor and two sheriffs each September. It was a ‘closed’ corporation, the common council co-opting new members when vacancies arose, and almost invariably men were selected from families with a tradition of corporate service. There were already critics of what Defoe was to denounce with special reference to Bristol as ‘corporation-tyranny’. In the 1690s, one of the city’s merchants, John Cary, campaigned for the rights of Bristol’s freemen with a plea for a democratic basis for city government, and was instrumental in the implementation of a scheme applying democratic principles to one primary area of local concern: the relief of the poor. The offices of lord high steward and lord lieutenant of the city had formerly provided the means of aristocratic or court interference in the city’s elections, but from the early 1690s they ceased to have any real political importance. Indeed, the lord high steward for most of the period, the Duke of Ormond, served a quite different purpose in promoting the city’s trading interests in Ireland while viceroy there (1703–7 and 1710–13), for which ‘great services’ he received regular gifts of sherry from the corporation. A limited government presence in the city was provided by the customs establishment, but its role in elections appears to have been negligible. Apart from the corporation, the other major forum in city government and politics was the Society of Merchant Venturers, a company of merchants and traders which assiduously oversaw the interests of its members, and the fact that many of them belonged to the corporation ensured that vital trading issues were accorded priority in council proceedings. The almost symbiotic relationship between the two bodies is vividly illustrated in the way in which the society often sought and obtained corporation backing for its petitions to the Commons on a host of trading grievances.6

The early 1680s in Bristol had witnessed the chronic breakdown of political consensus as the ultra-Tories under the lead of Sir John Knight gained ascendancy in the corporation and pursued a policy of wholesale persecution against the Dissenters. Under James ii the city Tories had taken a stand against the King’s pro-Catholic plans, and Knight had won acclaim for an attempt to suppress Catholic worship which landed him before the Privy Council. In October 1688, after a brief interlude of Whig rule, the revocation of the 1684 charter effectively restored the city corporation to its original state, the Tories emerging as the stronger faction. Continuing Tory supremacy in the corporation was clearly an important key to the Tory success in the general election of 1689, though it did not forestall a challenge from two influential Whigs who had regained their seats on the council, Thomas Day and Robert Yate. However, the victory secured by the two arch-Tory corporation men, Knight and Sir Richard Hart, testifies to the superior strength of Anglican sentiment prevailing in the city.7

The situation at the 1690 election was slightly changed, however, and there are indications that the Tories found a harder battle on their hands. In the course of endless ‘heats and contentions’ the Tory faction in the corporation had gone on adding to its strength chiefly by exploiting the confusion over the status of councilmen who had been elected by James ii’s nominees, and men of Whiggish opinion invariably found themselves excluded. The first signs of a more purposeful Whig threat appear in October 1689 when the corporation expressed anxiety about the number of ‘Dissenters’ in the ‘establishment of the militia’, which they resolved was ‘entirely obnoxious to the Church of England’. Upon the dissolution in February 1690 Knight and Hart immediately declared their candidacy. In opposition to them there first appeared Sir Thomas Earle†, a merchant whose moderate Tory principles were wholly unpalatable to Knight. No sooner had Earle declared his intention of standing in February than Knight, the mayor and other zealous Tories set out ‘on purpose to vilify him’ by using hearsay evidence to accuse him publicly of carrying on a treasonable trade in munitions with the French. Earle withdrew his candidacy but informed Secretary Shrewsbury that the charges had been fomented by ‘their whole party, being known to be the most zealous Jacobites’, in order to defeat the election of ‘well-affected’ MPs. The entry of two Whig contenders, Yate, who was Earle’s nephew, and William Powlett, the city recorder, transformed the contest into an overtly partisan affair in which Knight used every tactic to discredit and humiliate his opponents. His threat to prosecute John Cary for having defended Earle against Knight’s allegations, and who had since made himself invaluable to the Whig campaign, was promptly taken up by the Whig deputy lieutenants who requested the city’s lord lieutenant, the Earl of Macclesfield, to intervene on Cary’s behalf. The Tory councillors’ recent apprehensions about the political activities of the militia officers appear to have been fully justified as it is clear from their missive to Macclesfield that they were playing a central part in the Whig campaign. They professed their ‘strenuous endeavours’ to ensure the return of Yate and Powlett whom they esteemed ‘two very worthy persons and entirely addicted to his Majesty’s government’, being ‘so far advanced therein, and made our interest as we hope so secure, that we shall disappoint the two last Members’. Much support, too, was forthcoming from the Dissenting sects, not least on account of rumours in the city that the Toleration Act would soon be annulled. Seeing these advances, the Tories lost no opportunity to defame the Whig candidates as men who compromised their churchmanship by pandering to inferior citizenry. Despite the slurs, however, the Whigs remained highly optimistic. Polling began at the Guildhall on 24 Feb. and continued for the next five days. The results are unfortunately lost, but there is no doubt that the contest was extremely close, as even after the poll had been ‘shut up’ the general impression was that Yate and Powlett had carried the day. However, the Tory sheriffs declared in favour of Knight and Hart. The losers’ subsequent petition to the Commons on 24 Mar. complained of blatant Tory bias in the way the poll was conducted, ‘many persons’, though qualified, having been barred from voting. The matter was duly consigned to the elections committee but no report followed.8

In the aftermath of the election, party antagonism continued to dominate proceedings in the corporation. When Earle tried to initiate a prosecution against the Tory mayor Arthur Hart, one of Knight’s leading henchmen, for fabricating evidence for the charge of treason made against him, Knight engineered his expulsion from the corporation as having perpetrated the ‘many indignities and scandals put on the mayor, great disturbances given to the common council, notorious disobedience and contempt showed to the orders and ordinances of this house’. On presenting his case in King’s Bench, however, Earle was entirely exonerated and in February 1691 the council was ordered to restore him. To a large extent it was the extremist behaviour of Knight himself which over the next few years undermined the Tory position. In his determination to uphold Tory control of the corporation, he prosecuted partisan quarrels in the most aggressive manner and his poor relations with the government were unlikely to have been appreciated by the powerful and influential trading elements in the city who at this time of war needed a close rapport with Whitehall. Whiggish merchants were forced to rely on the good offices of Robert Henley*, a Bristol gentlemen and brother-in-law of Robert Yate, who had a foothold in the corridors of power as a commissioner of transports. A classic instance of Knight’s damaging conduct occurred in the late summer of 1691, while he was mayor. After the Tory surveyor of the customs in the city had been convicted of fraud, Knight wrote on behalf of the corporation to Judge Gregory (William†) who was to conduct the Bristol assizes, warning him that his expenses would not be met, and ensured that the judge’s coach was mobbed and pelted on its arrival. When Gregory formally opened the assizes, however, he warned that ‘their Majesties’ government should not be so wounded through him’.9

Political dissension within the corporation came to a head during the corporation elections of September 1693 when the Whig element on the council succeeded in displacing the Tories from the key offices of mayor and sheriff, and began the process that brought Tory domination to an end. When Henley visited Bristol that month he found himself buttonholed by a group of anxious Whig councillors who complained that ‘they had been abused by some men, who pretended to carry on a common interest, but they plainly perceived it was an interest against the government’. They resolved, as Henley reported to under-secretary John Ellis*, that

to prevent this mischief for the future they had thought of putting the civil power into the hands of good men, and desired me to prevail with my brother, Yate, to accept of being mayor for the year ensuing, which they said they had attempted and could not do it, and without his concurrence they would not effect what they desired.

Although the occupant of the mayoral chair was a matter solely for the corporate body, an unusual level of interest and excitement in the outcome was generated in the city at large. Yate, singled out as the man who could inaugurate a new era of Whig rule in the city, was victorious, while the new sheriffs were ‘two of those who had a hand in the revolution’. The result was all the more significant for its indication that Tory solidarity was beginning to break down, for it could only have been possible through the defection or abstention of some Tory councilmen. It was, Henley concluded,

such a turn that you will hereafter find very good men sent to Parliament from hence, but they declare against those that now represent them. I am sure it is a great service to the government to dissolve a knot who might have done mischief by holding things longer in their possession, besides the influence it has had on the neighbourhood already, for three or four gentlemen have already declared themselves hearty likewise for the government, and there’s a mark put on those that are not so.10

By the time a general election appeared certain in the autumn of 1695, the chances of Tory success in Bristol were virtually nil. The government, encouraged by developments on the corporation, remodelled the city lieutenancy in the summer of 1694 so that it was now almost entirely Whig. Knight’s anti-Court stance in Parliament was an annoyance and an embarrassment to the city’s merchant politicians. Since the beginning of the war with France, Bristol merchants had lost through capture or destruction a staggering total of 202 ships, an overall tonnage of 21,755. Yet Knight’s readiness to strike at the ministry in the Commons and rumours of his Jacobite proclivities imperilled his usefulness to the city politicians who urgently needed governmental co-operation over convoy protection and other vital trading matters. Indeed, such enormous shipping losses may have led to disillusionment with Tory direction of naval strategy. The corporation’s unwillingness in 1694 to reward Knight and Hart with their usual parliamentary ‘wages’ points to the deepening of disapprobation. Only when Knight threatened legal proceedings was payment made, although the debt-ridden corporation declared an end to these payments in August 1695. The Tories came under particular disgrace on the death of Queen Mary late in December 1694 when a number of ‘Jacobites’, several of them customs and excise officials, rang bells and lit bonfires, to which the government responded by sending in several regiments. A ‘dutiful’ address of condolence was sent up by the corporation. When Parliament was dissolved in October 1695 the old MPs were opposed by two of the most prominent corporation Whigs, Robert Yate and Sir Thomas Day, the latter having succeeded Yate as mayor in the autumn of 1694. Both Day and Yate had contacts at Whitehall and were well regarded by the Court. Besides the corporation candidates, the radical Whig John Cary also put himself forward, but this ‘inconsiderable and inconsiderate prating man’, as he was described to Robert Harley*, appears to have had only a minor following and withdrew before the commencement of the poll. Knight’s gleeful reaction during the summer to the difficulties confronting the King at Namur and to the loss of Dixmuyde had done no service to him or his party. The low esteem in which both MPs were now held in the city was overwhelmingly clear at the end of the first day’s polling on 28 Oct.: 524 had polled for the Whigs and only 14 for the Tories. The following day the Tories gave up, and Day and Yate were returned.11

The election of politically amenable MPs provided the merchant politicians with the opportunity to exert greater pressure on their representatives over outstanding trading grievances. Leading this initiative was the thwarted candidate John Cary, whose purpose may have been to ensure that the new Members proved their worth. A brisk flow of correspondence was initiated in which Cary and other merchant leaders attempted to lay down the course of action expected of Day and Yate in relation to various trading and other issues. This development was clearly a product of the frustrations arising from the difficulties of obtaining proper consideration of their concerns under Knight and Hart, and showed a determination to secure a closer bond between city elite and MPs. Almost from the beginning, however, the attempt to force the newly elected Members to act more as delegates than as representatives appears to have foundered, as disagreement arose over the type of membership the government’s proposed council of trade was to have. As the council issue came to a head in January 1696 the merchants’ impatience with Day and Yate became such that they delegated Cary to go to London to supervise their activities in relation to several bills then pending in which the city’s trading interests were concerned. The two MPs were asked ‘to give him [Cary] your assistance, not only in what relates to parliamentary affairs, but also to the Admiralty and other offices where we are sure your countenance will procure him easy access and facilitate his negotiation’. There are no grounds to doubt, however, that the accord between the city politicians and their new Whig MPs was considerably improved. Indeed, any sense of disharmony early in 1696 was soon repaired by the Members’ successful promotion of Cary’s pioneering scheme to establish a separate authority removing responsibility for the city’s poor from the parishes and in the process also introducing an element of freeman democracy. The new ‘corporation of the poor’, to which ‘guardians’ were elected by all rate-payers, comprised many corporation men, most of them Whigs, and their association with this forward-looking body contributed to the popularity of the new ruling Whig elite. The task of consolidating Whig rule was completed in September 1696 as the last vestiges of Tory opposition were overcome. The arrest earlier in the year of Jacobite suspects in the city, most notably Sir John Knight, following disclosure of the Assassination Plot, ensured that the process was easily accomplished. Henley informed Under-Secretary Ellis that

the government of the city, not only for the year ensuing, but for hereafter, is well settled as can be wished, for though Sir John Knight was sent for from London, on purpose to disturb the election of mayor and sheriffs, yet they begun with filling up of the council, and though those who signed not the Test offered to come in again, yet ’twas carried against them, and nine or ten very good men are elected, and then they proceeded to choose a mayor and sheriffs, and they carried everything, as they may do, whenever they please.12

Although the Tories had been largely removed from the corporation, Tory sentiment in the city was by no means extinguished and Knight and Hart were encouraged to try their chances at the general election in 1698. The poll, commencing on 10 Aug., lasted four days, and as one newspaper reported, ‘began with great heats, and ended with as much calmness’. Yate and Day won comfortably enough, though as the results show, Knight could still attract appreciable support. On the Whig side, despite Cary’s services to trade and to the poor, his distance from the council, of which he remained a great critic, seriously limited his support. The next election in January 1701 saw the retirement of the elderly Sir Thomas Day. The council chose as his replacement the currently serving mayor, Sir William Daines, who along with Yate was returned unopposed. They were chosen again at the December election.13

Bristol remained unaffected by the upsurge of Tory feeling at the accession of Queen Anne. Tory sentiment certainly lingered, but the Whigs had by now rendered their own position impregnable, and at the election in 1702 no challenge was offered to the sitting MPs. The city’s Whig governors were nevertheless anxious to demonstrate their attachment and loyalty to their new sovereign, and while the Queen was visiting Bath at the beginning of September she accepted their invitation to pay Bristol an impromptu visit a few days later. The occasion was rich with civic panoply and highly successful. In 1705 the Tories, evoking signs of renewed confidence, broke their electoral quiescence, and in an effort to weaken the Whig monopoly over the city’s parliamentary seats, put up Edward Colston I as their candidate. It is likely that they first of all approached Colston’s wealthy uncle and namesake (Edward Colston II), renowned in the city for his conspicuous, though pronouncedly Anglican philanthropy, who on turning down the candidature for himself would not have missed the opportunity of suggesting his nephew and intended heir. A bitter party clash ensued in which the ‘mighty stir’ made for the younger Colston was answered by the Whig slogan, ‘No alms houses, No Churchmen, No Jacobites’. The exact results of the poll have not been found, but it is apparent from a newswriter’s report that Colston lost by ‘214 voices’. At the time of the next election in 1708, however, the national pro-Whig mood appears to have discouraged the Tories from renewing their efforts.14

In the highly charged Tory atmosphere of 1710, however, the Whigs finally lost their hold on the city’s parliamentary seats. Growing disenchantment with the Whig ministers in London and their failure to bring about a much-needed peace inevitably redounded to the discredit of the Whigs in Bristol. In the summer of 1709 the corporation refused the government’s request to accommodate Palatine refugees in the city on the pretext that its sagging economy would not bear the intrusion, but the decision was also doubtless influenced by fear of Tory reprisals. The Sacheverell trial early in 1710 provided a popular stimulus for High Church feeling. During an eruption of violence over the issue, a Dissenting meeting-house was pulled down and the debris thrown into the river. Despite the widespread speculation emanating from London about the likelihood of a parliamentary election, the dissolution in September seems to have caught the Tories unprepared. An account of the election in the Bristol Post Boy expressed the general feeling that the old Whig Members would carry it ‘without opposition’, implying that the Tory candidatures materialized almost on the eve of polling. Whether such surprise tactics were part of strategic planning is impossible to determine. Leading city Tories were determined to capitalize on the popularity of the elder Edward Colston, but it was with difficulty that he was prevailed upon to stand, and he at first refused to do so on grounds of age. He was, despite his advanced years and infirmity, an ideal, almost symbolic, focus for the Tory revival. Although not a native of the city, his good works and Anglican influence were everywhere apparent, and in July he had been at the centre of ceremony and celebration to mark the opening of his most ostentatious venture, a boys’ school known as ‘Colston’s Hospital’. The other Tory candidate was Joseph Earle, a wealthy merchant and son of the former MP Sir Thomas Earle. Hitherto, Earle had had little political involvement in the city. His subsequent drift towards the Whigs would suggest that his commitment to full-blown Toryism was not as thorough as he affected to show. But the opportunity of leading the Tory campaign, in Colston’s absence, enabled him to maintain the appearance of aggressive High Churchmanship and attachment to Tory principles. The poll began on 25 Oct. and lasted four days. The clergy were especially prominent, the dean leading a contingent to vote for the ‘Church’ candidates. The resulting Tory victory in Bristol was the subject of much admiration and comment in the political world. Scrutiny of the result suggests that it was obtained much less through the loss of Whig support (which fell only slightly in comparison with 1698) than from the Tories’ success in attracting support from new voters. The Quakers were barred from voting for the Whigs owing to their refusal to take the oath of Abjuration, while it was felt that the mayor and corporation shamed themselves, having ‘stiffly opposed’ the city’s most notable philanthropist. Earle was ‘chaired’ through the city with a mitre before him amid great applause and bell-ringing. Soon afterwards, Colston’s leading supporters founded a Tory association called the ‘Loyal Society’ with Colston as its first president, which over the next four or so years acted as the party’s main organizational base in the city.15

The convenience to the corporation of having the city’s MPs in their midst now no longer obtained since neither Colston nor Earle was a member, or for that matter shared the political views, of the governing elite. Moreover, Colston’s visits to the city were rare. High Church activism reached new extremes and is perhaps most vividly seen in an initiative of 1712 to secure legislation for an annual rate for the maintenance of city clergy. The address of thanks presented to the Queen upon the proclamation of peace in May 1713 was Tory-inspired, and came from the ‘clergy, deputy lieutenants and loyal inhabitants of Bristol’, while the event went unnoticed by the mayor and corporation. A London newspaper commented that the ‘general gladness and joy’ in Bristol on this occasion ‘ought to put those envious people out of countenance who repine at the prosperity and advantages which her Majesty’s peace will give to the public weal’. The extent of Whig desperation was evident in the general election of September. Not unexpectedly, Colston retired on account of his great age, the Tories willingly accepting his recommendation of Thomas Edwards who was not only a son of Colston’s close friend and legal adviser but had married Colston’s niece. The Tories thereby neatly maintained their useful connexion with the ‘mighty benefactor’. Earle was readopted, though not, it would appear, without some misgiving by his original supporters, having on several occasions during the previous Parliament sided with the Whigs against the administration. The Whigs fielded only one candidate, Sir William Daines. According to one Tory reporter, Daines and the ‘Low Church party’ despaired of succeeding through ‘the suffrage of the substantial citizens and electors’, and so put themselves to ‘profuse expense’ in procuring the freedom of the city ‘for many hundreds of poor people’, a ploy which ‘incensed’ their opposers. Deciding that their key to success lay in a strategy of intimidation, the Whigs formed a mob mainly of sailors, ‘giving to some 5s., to some 7s. 6d., to others 10s. and more, to all oaken cudgels and much drink’. ‘Mobbing’ had begun several days before the election, but this developed into full-scale pitched battles of stone- and bottle-throwing when polling began on the morning of 7 Sept. and continued until the middle of the following afternoon. By then Daines’s mob, finding themselves overcome by the ‘High mob’, began to turn against him and by the evening the Tories were claiming that he had no more votes to poll ‘though many were then indulging themselves, eating and guzzling at his expense’. Daines insisted that he still had hundreds of supporters to poll whose entry to the Guildhall was being obstructed. The Tory newspaper, the Post Boy, described what followed:

All the court knew the falsity of the assertion, but to remove the least occasion of complaint, Lawford Cole Esq., now high sheriff of the county of Gloucester, and a gentleman very well affected, generously offered to head and protect what men he had, and accordingly he, with the sheriff’s officers, went to Sir William’s men who had not been polled and made them a tender of his protection, if they themselves committed no insults, and assured them they might appear with all security, and be polled for whom they pleased, but they rejected his proposal, saying they had good meat and drink where they were and would not stir.

After the Bristol sheriffs had failed in further attempts to get Daines’s voters to the poll, the books were cast up and Earle and Edwards were returned. Daines gave a somewhat different account of the situation in his petition against the return, in which he claimed that many of his voters were prevented from polling by a violent mob organized by Edwards and his agents, most of whom had no right to vote and were not even inhabitants. He said that the sheriffs had been forced to close the books to avoid further bloodshed despite his having ‘many hundreds more’ to poll. The illegality of these proceedings, as Daines claimed, was compounded by the fact that only one of the sheriffs signed the return. A private Tory account of the election stated that the Whigs had prevented the other sheriff from signing, presumably to ensure that there were grounds to invalidate the whole election. In the immediate aftermath of the contest, it was whispered that Earle had ‘underhand rather encouraged the Whig side notwithstanding his outward appearance’, and that the intention was to disown him ‘if he makes one bad vote next Parliament’. He had clearly benefited from the second votes cast on the Whig side, and rumours as to how those votes were obtained evidently featured in his subsequent rejection by his party brethren in 1714. For form’s sake Daines’s petition against the return was referred to the elections committee but the overwhelmingly Tory House gave it no attention. The pomp and ceremony in November marking the birthday of Edward Colston II proved to be the last occasion for Tory festivity. The Duke of Beaufort, accompanied by ten Tory MPs, headed a procession of 400 or so members of the Loyal Society to the cathedral, and afterwards to Colston’s Hospital for ‘a handsome entertainment’. The day concluded with bonfires and bell-ringing, while ‘’twas very observable that no Whigs were to be seen, . . . but one peeping out of a sash window, and another who lay sneaking in a comb-maker’s shop’.16

The Hanoverian succession ten months later saw the rapid recovery of Whig morale, though Tory resistance proved hard to break down. Both these trends were reflected in the extremely high and almost equal turn-outs that both parties achieved in the 1715 election. In the months following George i’s arrival in England the political atmosphere in Bristol intensified as the Tories found themselves under threat from the new Whig order. The government’s severity in dealing with the Tory–Jacobite ‘coronation day’ riot in October 1714 did nothing, however, to cow Tory voters in February 1715 and they succeeded in scoring a marginal victory over their opponents. None the less, the sheriffs, in league with the corporation, disregarded the results and returned the Whig candidates, confident that the expected Whig majority in the Commons would deny the Tories the opportunity of unseating them.17

Author: Andrew A. Hanham

Notes

  • 1. N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 261.
  • 2. Post Boy, 13–16 Aug. 1698.
  • 3. J. Latimer, Annals of Bristol 18th Cent. 85.
  • 4. Ibid. 102.
  • 5. Rogers, 261.
  • 6. Defoe, Tour ed. Cole, 435–6; Latimer, 104.
  • 7. Pols. of Relig. in Restoration Eng. ed. Harris et al. 169–81; J. Latimer, Annals of Bristol 17th Cent. 453.
  • 8. Latimer, 412, 456–8; CSP Dom. 1689–90, pp. 241, 248; Add. 5540, ff. 27–28; 70014, ff. 291–2, 301; Thomas Speed, Reason Against Rage (1691), 13, 16.
  • 9. Latimer, 459; Bristol AO, common council procs. 1687–1702, f. 47; Add. 28877, ff. 129–30; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 277.
  • 10. Add. 28877, ff. 129–30; Luttrell, iii. 148.
  • 11. CSP Dom. 1694–5, p. 235; D.W. Jones, War and Econ. 159; Latimer, 472–3; Luttrell, iii. 423–4; London Gazette, 7–10 Jan. 1695; Add. 70018, ff. 94–95; 70241, Henley to [Harley], 27 July 1695; Flying Post, 29–31 Oct. 1695; Hants RO, Jervoise mss, James Hooper to Thomas Jervoise*, 2 Nov. 1695.
  • 12. Add. 5540, ff. 78–94; 28880, f. 330; Soc. Merchant Venturers Recs. in 17th Cent. (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvii), 258–9; Reform and Revival in 18th Cent. Bristol (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlv), 9–10; CSP Dom. 1696, p. 193.
  • 13. Post Boy, 13–16 Aug. 1698; London Post, 24–27 Jan. 1701.
  • 14. Post Boy, 5–8 Sept. 1702; Latimer, Annals of Bristol 18th Cent. 44–45, 56; Bodl., Rawl. D.863, f. 90; A Collection from Dyer’s Letters Concerning the Elections (1706), 15.
  • 15. Common council procs. 1702–22, pp. 198–200; EHR, lvi. 81, 85; H. J. Wilkins, Edward Colston, 67; Latimer, 84–85; Add. 70421, newsletter 31 Oct. 1710.
  • 16. Common council procs. 1702–22, p. 280; London Gazette, 16–19 May 1713; Post Boy, 28–30 May, 15–17 Sept., 7–10 Nov. 1713; Bodl. Ballard 31, ff. 116, 119; Bristol AO, calendar hist. of Bristol 1067–1724, sub. 1713; W. Seyer, Mems. Bristol, 560.
  • 17. Latimer, 106–8; Jacobite Challenge ed. Cruickshanks and Black, 127–8.