The Members
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Family Background and Social Status
Despite the economic opportunities afforded by the commercial and financial revolutions of the late 17th century, social mobility was not much apparent in the House of Commons, where seats were still in large measure the preserve of the established elite. Of course, this statement begs an important question: who or what constituted ‘the established elite’? Professor I.R. Christie, in a published analysis of the social background of 18th-century MPs (covering the period from 1715-1820) sought to establish a definition on which most historians could agree, even if expressed in negative terms: ‘non-elite’ in his formulation meant ‘not born and bred in the landed society of aristocracy and gentry which constituted the traditional ruling class and from which came the majority of the Members of the House of Commons’. In essence, the gentry were ‘set apart from the “non-elite” by their style of life [consumption, leisure] and ownership of land’.1 Other possible criteria might well have included a family history of involvement in the institutions of central and/or local government, and indeed of representation in Parliament, for, as another commentator has noted, ‘to be an MP was and remained the most certain measure of rank, apart from an heritable title’.2 However, even if we are able to agree on a means of defining the ‘elite’ in late 17th- and early 18th-century Britain, there remain some significant difficulties in assessing the status of individual Members and their families, not least the variable quality of genealogical and biographical information available, and the tendency of family historians (and, it might be added, of contributions to this History) to emphasize patrilineal descent at the expense of matrilineal.3
Conceding the limitations of the evidence, some generalizations may be attempted. Even if we look no further back than two generations, almost half of all the Members in this period can be shown to trace their descent from titled families. Some 77 (14%) were the sons or grandsons of peers (with either English, Scottish, or Irish titles), 383 (19.3%) the sons or grandsons of baronets, and 330 (16.6%) the sons or grandsons of knights; amounting in all to 990 (that is to say 49.9%) of the Membership as a whole. Separating out a the Scottish contingent, we find that the proportion of Scottish MPs descended from titled families was even higher: 34.2% sons or grandsons of peers, 20.3% of baronets, and 13.9% of knights, making 68.5% in all. By way of comparison, among MPs for English or Welsh constituencies, the cumulative figure is 48.8%. In all, 95 Members succeeded to peerage titles themselves (57 English titles, 12 Scottish and 26 Irish);4 and a further 307 succeeded to baronetcies.
Another simple test of ‘elite’ status, at least for English and Welsh Members, would be descent from a parliamentary family, although differences between the representative systems of England (and Wales) and Scotland, and the quality of the information on Scottish Members available to this History, make it inappropriate to extent this analysis to Scotland. As many as 908 English and Welsh MPs in this period were the children or grandchildren of parliamentarians, again almost half the total representation (48.5%). If this list is merged with the number descended from titled families, the total would increase to 1,149, that is to say 61.3% of the Membership for England and Wales.
Evidence relating to the social status of the remainder is more varied in nature, some of it very slender, and thus impossible to treat systematically. Clearly the vast majority were themselves landed men, despite the almost obsessive anxiety shown by ‘Country’ back-benchers throughout the period over the alleged invasion of the House by the ‘moneyed interest’. When a Landed Qualification Act was eventually passed, in 1712, it exposed very few landless Members.5 However, the gradations of social status, extent of wealth and income, and balance between real and personal estate, often elude precise definition. Social distinctions between ‘gentlemen’ in early modern England are notoriously difficult to make, whether, for example, one wishes to separate armigerous squires from ‘mere’ gentlemen, ‘greater’ from ‘lesser’ gentry, or, to use yet another terminology popular among social historians, ‘county’ from ‘parish’ gentry;6 and even if historians could establish acceptable criteria for these different classification schemes, the material contained in the biographies would not necessarily permit such tests to be applied to the Members of Parliament in 1690-1715. Authoritative statements of wealth or income are equally scarce, except for those few individuals who have left for posterity detailed accounts of their estates. Often the evidence is only partial, deriving from incomplete estate records or testamentary papers, or even entirely impressionistic, being based on nothing more than the conjectures of admiring or resentful contemporaries. Nor is it always possible to separate landed wealth from an income derived from professional earnings, in legal fees or the salary and perquisites of government office, or from the profits of trade and manufacture. Effectively professional men and businessmen have to be placed in the same category as country gentry if, at the same time as pursuing a successful professional career, they had themselves became landed proprietors, and thus had clearly joined the social ‘elite’. Moreover, in many cases such men were themselves the younger sons of landowners, who, after making careers for themselves, had purchased estates with the proceeds.
Wealth and land were of course not necessarily synonymous. Traditional landed proprietors could well be on the margins of insolvency, while some ‘new men’, in the professions and trade, were very wealthy indeed. The House certainly included peers’ sons and country squires with very broad acres and no hint of financial embarrassment: the great aristocratic families like the Berties, Cavendishes, Cecils, Comptons, Finches, Saviles, and Seymours; and substantial squires like the Curzons of Kedleston in Derbyshire, the Kynastons of Hordley in Shorpshire, the Nortons of Southwick in Hampshire, the Portmans of Orchard Portman in Somerset, and two outstanding individuals, Thomas Sclater of Catley in Cambridgeshire, who died in 1736 reputedly worth £200,000, and Sir William Ellys, 2nd Bt., who lived at his newly built mansion, Nocton Hall in Lincolnshire, it was said, ‘like a prince in his palace’. Some had the good fortune to possess extensive estates with valuable mineral resources, like the Blacketts and Wortley Montagus, whose rent rolls were enhanced by the yield from their collieries. Others had secured their fortunes at the altar, most notably perhaps George Granville (the 1st Lord Lansdown), the Welshmen Francis Herbert and Richard Vaughan II, and William Shippen, whose marriage was said to have brought him £70,000 in ready money. But alongside these wealthy landowners were the debtors. From a plethora of examples we will cite only three: Charles Lord Bruce, heir to the Ailesbury earldom, whose family estates were encumbered with debts of £70,000, forcing the sale of the ancestral home at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire; Sir John Cotton, 4th Bt., whose substantial inheritance was the subject of litigation. and whose seat, at Conington Castle in Huntingdonshire, was in an advanced state of dilapidation; and Thomas Mansel I of Margam, who from a rent roll of £10,000 a year could find only £3,500 in disposable income, and, despite the profits of office (as comptroller of the Household), accumulated liabilities of over £16,000.
Contemporary estimates of individual wealth tended however to focus on the riches accumulated by merchants, manufacturers and other social climbers, partly because the extent of personal estate, especially in cash or stocks, was easier to calculate than income from property; partly because ‘new money’ seemed to many to be somehow unnatural and almost scandalous, and attracted gossip. The scale could be vast: thus Sir John Bucknall was confidently said to have inherited at least £100,000 from his father, the tax farmer Sir William†, and Jeffrey and John Jeffreys to have shared as much as £300,000 from their uncle’s estate. Rumour valued the deceased Samuel Shepheard I’s estate at £800,000, that of Gregory Page at anywhere between £500,000 and £800,000, (Sir) Gilbert Heathcote at between £400,000 and £700,000, Sir James Bateman at £400,000, and ‘Diamond’ Pitt (Thomas I) at £300,000. Fortunes of this magnitude were not only to be made in business, however: Henry Guy’s acquisition of an estate supposedly worth over £140,000 was owing to his long tenure of government office as much as to his interventions in high finance, and the same could be said of Sir Stephen Fox, Robert Benson, and of course for the notorious James Brydges, later 1st Duke of Chandos, for whom the place of paymaster-general offered such opportunities for gain, both legitimate and illegitimate, as to constitute a veritable goldmine. Sir Robert Sawyer made his money at the bar, Nicholas Barbon and Sir William Pulteney through property development in and around London, and the Dutch gamester Sir John Germain through a less orthodox and less respectable, but equally lucrative profession.
Most Members therefore belonged among the social elite in their own right, almost by definition, the few exceptions being small businessmen, and the occasional attorney, returned for provincial boroughs. But in respect of their origins a substantial minority should be accorded ‘non-elite’ status (in Professor Christie’s formulation). The biographies of 34 Members state explicitly the fact of humble birth.7 Such tales of exceptional social mobility were relished, and preserved for posterity, by contemporary snobs like the 1st Earl of Egmont (John Perceval†), though in this respect malicious gossip does not always prove accurate. John Bromley I, the returned Barbadian planter, while not the armigerous squire his pedigree claimed, does not seem to started life as a ‘pedlar’, which was Egmont’s gloss on his obscure origins. Similarly Arthur Moore, whose pedigree was certainly not illustrious and whose upbringing in County Monaghan had been modest, is still unlikely to have been the son of a gaoler, as his detractors alleged. And without any question the East Indiaman Gregory Page, another victim of Egmont’s tongue, was far from being a ‘drayman’ made good, but the eldest son of an alderman of London. Among the others, Sir Owen Buckingham, the wealthy sailcloth manufacturer, came from a line of innkeepers; Nicholas Carey, another prosperous businessman, was the son of an unlicensed London physician and occasional publisher; Edmund Halsey, the great brewer, had been a ‘miller’s boy’; and John Hutton II, the archetypal lad of parts, a Dumfries-shire shepherd taken up by the local Presbyterian minister and educated until he eventually became a court physician. The greatest success stories probably belonged to that insalubrious trio of self-made City plutocrats Sir Robert Clayton, Sir Thomas Cooke, and John Ward IV, who were, respectively, the sons of a Northamptonshire carpenter, a Lambeth hatmaker, and a Lincolnshire dyer; and that self-styled ‘wonderful child of Providence’ Sir Stephen Fox, who rose from a cottage in Wiltshire to be in his own estimation ‘the richest commoner in three kingdoms’, a lord of the Treasury, mentor (and creditor) of dukes, and the progenitor of a great political dynasty.
For these and most other social meteors the most effective means to advancement was commerce and industry: as many as 23 of the 34 Members said to be of humble birth were businessmen of one kind or another, all but three of them based in London (the exceptions being John Mounsher the Portsmouth ropemaker, Thomas Richmond the Maldon tanner, and John Wilkins the Leicestershire coal baron). In addition Leonard Gale was the son of an ironmaster who had brought him up as a gentleman; Bromley and Sir Thomas Lear, 1st Bt., were West Indians; and Arthur Moore, had started out as an attorney before diversifying his interests into stocks and shares. Besides Moore there were two other lawyers (Joseph Girdler and Sir George Hutchins), one medical man (Hutton), and a quartet who may loosely be described as ‘civil servants’ (James Craggs I, Richard Markes, the 1st Earl of Sunderland’s protégé John Mountsteven, and the minor diplomat and man of letters, Matthew Prior).
In as many as 35 cases the biographies fail to provide any indication of parentage, and in a further 19 the evidence is at best tentative. These figures of mystery, at least as far as their social origins are concerned, are again for the most part merchants, many of them this time local worthies, like Edward Bangham in Leominster, John Blanch in Gloucester, John Chambers and Edward Clarke II in Norwich, and Roger Hoar in Bridgwater, but also some City figures like John ‘Vulture’ Hopkins, (Sir) Joseph Martin, Sir George Mathews and the New East India Company mogul Samuel Shepheard I. The list also includes military personnel, among them the professional soldiers Robert Crawford, Edmund Maine, Francis Palmes, John Shrimpton, and Henry Withers, and Admiral Sir John Norris.8
There are other Members whose biographies indicate no family history of landed proprietorship (though of course this would not necessarily mean financial insecurity, let alone penury). Given the nature of the evidence, and indeed an inherent imprecision in the notion of what made a man a ‘landed proprietor’, this classification cannot be watertight. However, in compiling the list certain principles have been adopted: a Member has been classified as coming from a ‘non-landed’ family if his father appears to have possessed no substantial landed estate; had acquired land only after success in a profession, or in business, or (more rarely) as a result of a fortunate marriage; or held his property within the urban area in which he practised his profession or trade. On the other hand, we have classified as the descendant of a ‘landed’ family any Member whose father had made a successful professional or business career (the profits of which may have allowed him to purchase land) but was himself the younger son of a landed proprietor and can thus be said to have originated in the milieu of the landed gentry; or who combined a profession and landownership in the manner of some successful lawyers and parsons. In this way it is possible to identify a further 207 Members from ‘non-landed’ families, among whom merchants, manufacturers and lawyers are once again well represented, with a sprinkling of soldiers, sailors, and ‘civil servants’.9 In addition six Members had fathers who came from a landed background but had forfeited their estates—Henry Cornish, Henry Ireton, Simon Mayne, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, Craven Peyton and Sir John Swinton (though in Peyton’s case he was allowed to keep a single manor from his father’s estate)—and a further six came from families which had slipped down the social ladder through some other catastrophe, dynastic or financial (Samuel Atkinson, Admiral Sir George Byng, John Hill, Owen Hughes, Richard Steele, and another admiral, Sir Charles Wager).
A particular sub-group, on the frontier of the professional and landed classes, were the sons of the parsonage, or sons of the manse; in other words, the 48 Members who were the offspring of English clergymen, and a further three (Sir Samuel McClellan, Robert Urquhart, and Sir James Wishart) the sons of Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. These clerical parents ranged in status from bishops (Dolben and Sharp of York, Beaw of Llandaff, and Burgh of Ardagh), down to relatively humble parish incumbents, such as John Pitt, the rector of Blandford Forum in Dorset, father of Thomas Pitt I of diamond fame, and ancestor of the Earl of Chatham. Few could be described as well-off, not even the cathedral clergy, a fact confirmed by the experience of the prophet of ‘politeness’ Joseph Addison, born as he was into genteel poverty as the eldest son of the dean of Lichfield. Life would have been even harder for the five Members whose fathers were Dissenting ministers, three of whom (the fathers of Sir Charles Hotham, 4th Bt., Samuel Ogle, and Samuel Travers), had been ejected from their livings as a result of the Restoration church settlement.
The limited degree of upward social mobility in this period, even for those ‘new men’ from outside the established social elite who had been able to make their way into Parliament, is apparent from the creation of new titles, in the peerage, baronetage and knighthood. The relationship between parliamentary Membership and this very obvious form of social advancement is however much less easy to demonstrate: it is often unclear whether a gain in social status preceded, or came as a result of, election to Parliament, or whether both were a consequence of other factors, such as the acquisition of material wealth or political influence.
Of the 126 Members for whom peerage titles were created (99 English titles, 21 Irish and 6 Scottish), no less than 112 (88.9%) already belonged to the social elite, in the minimalist terms in which we have already identified it, that is to say with a father or grandfather who himself possessed a title, or a seat in Parliament. Among the remainder only four came from identifiably ‘non-landed’ families, the lord chancellors Peter King, Sir Thomas Parker and Sir John Somers, and the prominent Country Whig politician Sir John Thompson, 1st Bt. In addition Admiral Byng, later Lord Torrington, came from a landed family which had recently fallen on hard times, his father having been obliged to sell the family estates in Kent, and the young Byng being raised in fear of the bailiffs and eventually sent to sea to make his fortune. None had risen from what contemporaries would have considered truly humble origins to a peerage in one generation, the nearest being Parker, whose father, an attorney in Staffordshire, was suffering serious professional difficulties while the future lord chancellor was a child. Thompson’s father was a well-to-do London merchant who had flourished during the Interregnum and enjoyed considerable influence with the Cromwellian regime; Somers came from a family of minor gentry in Worcestershire; and King was the offspring ‘of worthy and substantial parents’, from the mercantile elite of Exeter.
Among the new baronets, the proportion of ‘non-elite’ Members was a little higher: 51 of the total of 87 (58.6%) hailed from recognisably titled or parliamentary families, but only three had made their way from really humble beginnings (the City merchants Sir John Cutler, Sir Henry Furnese and Sir William Hodges), while a further 13 were from families which can be shown to be ‘non-landed’ (including Byng again).
Predictably the number of social climbers among the knights was greater still: 224 Members were knighted, but only 80 (35.7%) came from families within the existing social elite (that is to say with a titled or a parliamentary seat in the previous two generations). However, the number from recognizably ‘non-landed’ families was still a minority: 69 altogether (30.8%), including three who had originally come from landed families, but whose immediate ancestors had fallen on hard times (Byng, yet again, the political writer Richard Steele, and Admiral Sir Charles Wager). More than half (37) of these mushroom knights came from the world of commerce, including a number of eminent figures in the City of London, who may have been honoured for their municipal rather than their parliamentary achievements, together with nine lawyers, five more admirals, and one civil servant (Sir Cyril Wyche).
Marriage, although bringing instant wealth to some Members, rarely if ever served as a means of social advancement. For men a ‘good’ marriage, in a material sense, was more likely to be a recognition, or reward, of enhanced social status. The British social elites were markedly endogamous. Of those Members who became connected by marriage with a titled, or an established parliamentary, family (that is to say those with a father-in-law or brother-in-law possessing a title of some kind, or a seat in the House of Commons), 953 in all, as many as 695 (73.0%) were themselves descended from that same social milieu. Moreover, if we look more closely at the Members who appear by this crude yardstick to have entered the marriage market from outside society’s charmed circle, we find that in fact most hailed from landed families. Only 61 of the Members marrying into the ‘elite’ could not claim a landowning pedigree. No more than six are known to have risen from humble circumstances: Sir John Cutler, Sir Henry Furnese, Sir William Hodges, Sir George Hutchins, Sir Thomas Lear, and John Pollexfen); while in relation to a further eight no firm indication of parentage has been found (Thomas Bliss, Ralph Bucknall, Robert Burridge, Edmund Mayne, Sir John Norris, John Shrimpton, John Stewart, and Robert Yard).
It was also the case that in the marriage stakes the most impressive financial gains were made by established elite families rather than parvenu adventurers, the greatest prizes falling into the hands of the aristocracy, who could of course offer social prestige in return for mere wealth. Here the picture presented by the biographies is of course profoundly affected by accidents of survival, and conclusions must be very tentative. Of the Members for whom we have enough reliable evidence to indicate the financial profit made at marriage (such as an original marriage settlement or contract), 171 may be said to done exceptionally well, taking the criterion to be a portion (tocher in Scotland) equivalent to £3,000 in ready money or £1,000 a year. Only 29 fail to conform to the basic definition of the social elite (that is to say a father a grandfather with a title, or a seat in Parliament), and only 12 originated from ‘non-landed’ families, though not particularly obscure (John Anstis, John Barlow, Oley Douglas, Sir Stafford Fairborne, Thomas Farrington, Peter King, Sir John Parsons, Samuel Sambrooke, Salwey Winnington, Christopher Wren, and Sir Cyril Wyche):. A further 89 Members would appear from the evidence of the biographies to have done well out of marriage, though the evidence of the size of the portion is not specific:10 27 would be outside our minimalist definition of the social elite, but all except Sir Owen Buckingham and Leonard Gale came from landed families (and Gale had been brought up as a gentleman, while Buckingham’s greatest coup came on his sixth visit to the altar, by which time he was already a rich man). The very largest windfalls went to those already at the top of the social pyramid. From those with precisely calculable portions, we find 37 heiresses worth £10,000 or more, and as many as 19 married into the peerage, including the dukedoms of Beaufort and Devonshire, the marquessates of Exeter and Halifax, and the earldoms of Ailesbury, Derby, Oxford, Sandwich, Sunderland, and Sutherland. However first prize had already gone to the ‘great projector’, Thomas Neale. His most lucrative coup was marriage in 1664 to the heiress Elizabeth Garrard, who brought with her from her previous marriage to Sir Nicholas Gould, 1st Bt.†, the princely sum of £120,000, and won her delighted husband the sobriquet ‘Golden Neale’ from the envious denizens of the Restoration court.
Thus although the House of Commons was to some degree representative of the rising professional and business classes of later 17th-century England—lawyers, soldier, sailors, and civil servants, merchants, manufacturers, and financiers—it was still overwhelmingly an assembly of landed proprietors. ‘New money’ did not find the doors of Parliament barred, but the scales were still weighed against it. Upward social mobility was possible, but still relatively slow, for men of low birth, except for those very exceptional creatures who rose to the heights of the legal profession, and who in a single lifetime could travel as far as Lord Chancellor Peter King, from the obscurity of the provincial bourgeoisie (albeit relative obscurity in his case) to a peerage. Businessmen, however wealthy, even the financiers to whom the government kow-towed in order to safeguard public credit, would have to wait for their sons and grandsons to ascend the highest ranks of the social order. Membership of Parliament could be of assistance in this process, but it seems unlikely that parliamentary service by itself was a motor of social advancement. In general those who rose from humble origins had already climbed a long way before being elected to Parliament, and their seat in the Commons was a recognition of status already achieved as much as a means of further promotion to come.
Age
Dates of birth have been supplied for as many as 1,880 of the 1,982 Members whose biographies appear in these volumes (nearly 95%), albeit in many cases approximate or conjectural year-dates. It is possible, therefore, to make some calculations relating to the age of Members at the time of their first election to Parliament, and at the opening of each Parliament in this period. The reader should bear in mind, however, the limitations imposed by the lack of precision in the available data, as well as by the absence of the 106 Members whose date of birth cannot even be estimated. Of these lacunae, a disproportionate number occur among the Members for Scottish constituencies, as many as 26% (28 out of 108) of the biographies lacking a birth-date (as compared with 4%, that is to say 75 out of 1874, of the Members for English and Welsh constituencies). The fact that so many Scots had already served in their own parliament before their appearance at Westminster is also a differentiating, and complicating, factor. In estimates of the age profile of each Parliament the Scottish Members have therefore been considered separately, while in calculations based on the age of Members at their first election to Parliament, they have not been considered at all.11
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries it was common to embark on a parliamentary career early in life. As the following table shows, almost three quarters of the Members who served in this period for English and Welsh constituencies (excluding those for whom no date of birth is known) had already entered Parliament by the time they reached 40, and a substantial proportion had been elected while still in their twenties, the combined figure of those elected under the age of 31 reaching over 40 per cent.
Age of Members at first election (England and Wales only):
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/1,799) | Percentage |
under 21 | 55 | 3.1% |
21-30 | 674 | 37.5% |
31-40 | 553 | 30.8% |
41-50 | 316 | 17.6% |
51-60 | 155 | 8.6% |
over 60 | 46 | 2.6% |
Youth was, however, more clearly a feature of parliamentary entrants from the landed classes. A similar statistical exercise undertaken for the three main occupational groups represented in the Commons—lawyers, officers in the armed forces, and ‘businessmen’—shows in each case a lower percentage elected for the first time in their twenties than that for the Membership as a whole, and a higher percentage who had been elected for the first time in their forties. These age differences were most pronounced among ‘businessmen’, of whom no less than 58.5% were elected for the first time after they had passed their 40th year, which compares with a figure of 28.7% for all English and Welsh Members. The majority of lawyers made their parliamentary debuts in their thirties and forties, at least in some cases after they had acquired experience, reputation and wealth from practice at the bar. The situation prevailing among army and naval officers was rather more complicated: those who had risen through the ranks often entered Parliament relatively late in life, but an equally significant number were the offspring of aristocratic or greater gentry families, who had purchased their commissions when young men and who might also be provided in much the same way with a parliamentary seat. Note that for the purposes of calculation, the category of ‘lawyers’ has been defined so as to include all those who were called to the bar in England, admitted to King’s Inns in Dublin (and therefore permitted to practise at the Irish bar), or practised as civilians, but not the handful of Members who were attorneys. No further attempt has been made to distinguish lawyers as professionally active or inactive, since the evidence available in the biographies is inconsistent on this point. Any Member who held a commission in the army or navy in this period has been classified under ‘armed forces’, while the number of ‘businessmen’ include manufacturers, overseas and domestic merchants, financiers, transatlantic planters, and property developers, but not those country gentlemen who may have been able to exploit the coal or mineral deposits on their estates.12
Lawyers
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/272) | Percentage |
under 21 | 2 | 0.7% |
21-30 | 69 | 25.3% |
31-40 | 108 | 39.7% |
41-50 | 62 | 22.8% |
51-60 | 25 | 9.2% |
over 60 | 6 | 2.2% |
Armed forces
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/165) | Percentage |
under 21 | 12 | 7.3% |
21-30 | 57 | 34.6% |
31-40 | 47 | 28.5% |
41-50 | 40 | 24.2% |
51-60 | 8 | 4.8% |
over 60 | 1 | 0.6% |
Businessmen
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/183) | Percentage |
under 21 | 1 | 0.5% |
21-30 | 24 | 13.1% |
31-40 | 51 | 27.9% |
41-50 | 50 | 27.3% |
51-60 | 38 | 20.8% |
over 60 | 19 | 10.4% |
Narrowing the analysis to those Members elected for the first time within this period, yields a set of general results very close in percentage terms to the previous analysis of age at first election of all English and Welsh Members sitting in the period.
Age at first election of Members elected for the first time in the period 1690-1715 (England and Wales only)
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/1,304) | Percentage |
under 21 | 30 | 2.3% |
21-30 | 481 | 36.8% |
31-40 | 400 | 30.7% |
41-50 | 222 | 17.0% |
51-60 | 129 | 9.8% |
over 60 | 42 | 3.2% |
Separate analysis by occupational group again shows little change, except for a slight increase in the proportion of lawyers chosen for the first time after the age of 40. Among those Members classified as being in trade, the percentage chosen for the first time when over 40 appears even stronger if we look only at parliamentary entrants within the period, the figure now standing at 62.7%, though it should be noticed that unpublished calculations by Dr P.L. Gauci, comparing the ages of Members at their first election across the period 1660-1715, show a substantial increase after 1690 in the number of ‘merchants’ (according to his definition) returned to Parliament before their 40th birthday.13 Our own calculations are as follows:
Lawyers
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/196) | Percentage |
under 21 | 1 | 0.5% |
21-30 | 43 | 21.9% |
31-40 | 79 | 40.3% |
41-50 | 46 | 23.5% |
51-60 | 21 | 10.7% |
over 60 | 6 | 3.1% |
Armed forces
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/129) | Percentage |
under 21 | 5 | 3.9% |
21-30 | 43 | 33.3% |
31-40 | 38 | 29.5% |
41-50 | 34 | 26.4% |
51-60 | 8 | 6.2% |
over 60 | 1 | 0.7% |
Businessmen
Age at first election to Parliament | Number (/137) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0.0% |
21-30 | 13 | 9.5% |
31-40 | 38 | 27.7% |
41-50 | 35 | 25.5% |
51-60 | 33 | 24.1% |
over 60 | 18 | 13.1% |
The most remarkable instances of a Member making his first appearance on the parliamentary stage at an advanced age were nearly all merchants, turning to parliamentary politics late in life: the Londoners Sir John Morden, 1st Bt., and Sir William Turner, elected for the first time at the ages of 72 and 75 respectively; the Leghorn merchant Robert Balle, chosen for Ashburton in 1708 when about 74; John Verney, 1st Viscount Fermanagh [I], the younger son of a Buckinghamshire squire who was apprenticed into the Levant trade, and who eventually secured a seat as knight of the shire a month before his seventieth birthday; the great philanthropist Edward Colston II, whose local popularity made him an obvious choice as a figurehead for the Tory counter-attack in Bristol in 1710, despite the fact that he was well into his seventies; and William Joliffe, whose third marriage in 1686, at the age of 64, brought him into alliance with a parliamentary family of note, the Trenchards of Dorset, and 16 years later the chance of election on the Trenchard interest at Poole. The exception was Major-General Edmund Maine, returned for Morpeth in 1705 when in his early seventies. Other Members who had originally been elected as young men lived on to a great age while retaining their parliamentary seats, the most remarkable being the veteran Whig Sir John Maynard, whose Commons career went back to the Short Parliament of 1640, and who eventually died in October 1690, still MP for Plymouth, at the age of 86.
At the other extreme were the Members elected before reaching their majority. Although against the custom of Parliament, the practice of returning minors to seats in the House of Commons went back at least to the early 16th century.14 It was brought to the attention of the House in 1678, when a protest was made against the presence in the House of two of Lord Danby’s (Sir Thomas Osborne†) relations, aged 17 and 18 respectively, and again in 1685, when a motion to expel two teenage MPs was ‘passed over’.15 Sir Joseph Williamson observed that not only had the issue ‘never yet [been] resolved expressly by the House’, it had in fact been ‘ever industriously avoided’.16 The Membership of the Convention in 1689 included Montagu Venables-Bertie*, Lord Norreys, a knight of the shire (for Oxfordshire) at only 16, and in the first two general elections of this period the presence of minors seems to have become even more common.17 Venables-Bertie was re-elected in 1690, accompanied by three 20-year-olds, Sir John Bolles, 4th Bt. (Lincoln), Henry Henley (Lyme Regis) and Hon. Richard Montagu (Huntingdon), by the 19-year-old Alexander Popham (Chippenham), and by the young Tory firebrand, Sir John Pakington, 4th Bt., who took one of the county seats in Worcestershire at the tender age of 18. Another minor, Thomas Trenchard, who had been returned to the Convention on his family’s interest for Dorchester but had lost his seat in 1690 to Sir Robert Napier, 1st Bt., was seated on petition in the December following the general election, in spite of the fact that counsel for Napier explicitly raised the question of his age (as a secondary line of attack once their main arguments had been foiled), and even went so far as to produce a baptismal certificate. The committee had resolved that Trenchard enjoyed a majority of qualified votes, but left the matter of his qualification to the full House, which then endorsed the report without any explicit declaration on the question of age. These seven Members were joined at by-elections by the 17-year-old Sir John Leveson Gower, 5th Bt., at Newcastle-under-Lyme, by Michael Hill and Henry, Lord Hyde, both returned for Cornish boroughs aged 20, and another 20-year-old, Sir John Walter, 3rd Bt., at Appleby. In the next election, in 1695 Leveson Gower was re-elected, still under age, together with no less than 10 other minors, the most obvious being Lord Godolphin’s (Sidney) son Francis, brought in for the family’s borough of Helston at 17, and Hon. Robert Bertie (Westbury), who was 18.
In 1690 the issue of Thomas Trenchard’s minority had not only been ‘left undetermined’ but effectively undebated.18 At this point the young man’s uncle, Sir John Trenchard *, had observed that ‘the ancient Parliament men are generally of opinion that the exception of minority is frivolous and that my nephew ought to sit’.19 Yet by the beginning of the following Parliament the climate of opinion had undergone a radical change, possibly as a reaction against the influx of under-age Members during the lifetime of the 1690 Parliament and at the 1695 general election; possibly also because of a strengthening in the Country party, whose adherents placed a higher premium on seriousness and gravitas among the representatives of the people. Whatever the reason, the new House of Commons included in its electoral reforming Act of 1696 (7 & 8 Gul. III, c. 25) a clause declaring
That no person whatsoever, being under the age of 21 years, shall at any time hereafter be admitted to give his voice for election of any Member of Parliament ... and that no person hereafter shall be capable of being elected a Member to serve in this or any future Parliament, who is not of the age of 21 years; and every election or return of any person under that age is hereby declared to be null and void ....
At first this provision was generally observed, but as time went by it came to be frequently honoured in the breach. Admittedly, at the next general election, in 1698, two minors were chosen and allowed to sit, Hon. William Cecil (Stamford) and William Tulse (Lymington), but two more of the young Members from the 1695 Parliament who would not yet have been properly qualified did not seek re-election (Godolphin and Greville). Alongside William Cecil, who sat undisturbed throughout four Parliaments until eventually reaching his majority in 1703, there appears to have been only one under-age Member in the first Parliaments of 1701—John, Lord Mordaunt (Chippenham), and two in the second—Richard Ellys (Grantham) and Lewis Pryse (Cardiganshire). In 1702 Cecil was the only minor returned, but in 1705 there were five, and although in 1708 the number dropped again to only one—Robert Furnese in Truro—the 1710 Parliament saw four more and the 1713 Parliament five.
Of the 43 Members returned to Parliament as minors in this period no less than 18 were the sons of peers (proportionately a slight fall from the comparable figure produced by the previous section of the History, which stood at 24 out of 43 for the period 1660-90). In addition, though commoners, the financier Sir Henry Furnese* and former Secretary of State Sir Charles Hedges* were both men of wealth and influence, able to provide borough seats for their sons, Robert Furnese and William Hedges. Equally significant was the number of under-age MPs who had already succeeded to their estates and therefore stood as representatives of their families. They included the Irish peer Lord Scudamore and as many as ten baronets. Robert Clarges was the younger son of a baronet, but had inherited a substantial portion of the family estate on his father’s death. Eight more were country gentlemen whose fathers had predeceased them: Allen Bathurst, Montagu Garrard Drake, John Hoskins Gifford, Henry Henley, Alexander Popham, Lewis Pryse, Thomas Trenchard and William Tulse. The constituencies for which these under-age Members sat tended to be boroughs rather than counties, with some notable exceptions: Hon. Langham Booth in Cheshire, Lord Burghley in Rutland, Lord Norreys in Oxfordshire, Sir John Pakington in Worcestershire, Lewis Pryse in Cardiganshire, Sir Richard Sandford, 3rd Bt., in Westmorland, Hon. Philip Sydney in Kent, and Hon. Francis Willoughby in Nottinghamshire. Otherwise pocket boroughs were well represented, particularly in Cornwall, where Helston, Launceston, and Truro each returned one under-age Member, and Saltash two. It was obviously easier to smuggle a young nominee through the process of election when what was essentially taking place was the nomination of the Members by one or more patrons. Yet even when a minor stood as a candidate in a contested election it was rare for his age to be raised as an objection against him. Thomas Trenchard’s age only became an issue after his election in 1690. Similarly, although Langham Booth’s Tory opponents in Cheshire in 1705 made his minority an argument of their petition, nothing had been made of this at the poll; and that in one of the most fiercely fought county elections of the early 18th century.
Some idea of general trends across the period may be gained from analysing the Membership of each Parliament in terms of the age of Members at their election to that Parliament.20 Members for English and Welsh constituencies have been treated separately from the Members for Scottish constituencies, who only figure from 1707 onwards. It may be worthwhile to begin by recalling the percentage figures for the Parliaments of 1685 and 1689, as recorded in the preceding section of the History.
Analysis of age of Members in the Parliaments of 1685 and 168921
1685 | 1689 | |
Percentage aged under 21 | 2% | 1% |
Percentage aged 21-30 | 17% | 15% |
Percentage aged 31-40 | 25% | 27% |
Percentage aged 41-50 | 24% | 25% |
Percentage aged 51-60 | 20% | 18% |
Percentage aged over 60 | 11% | 12% |
Comparable statistics for English and Welsh Members for the Parliaments of 1690-1715 reveal a perceptible general trend across the period: overall, percentages in the lower age bands fall during the 1690s, then rise after 1701, while those in the higher age bands gradually decrease, perhaps as a result of the greater frequency of elections, and the higher turnover of seats. However, short-term movements are erratic, showing, for example, an inexplicable rise in the percentage of Members over 50 in the First Parliament of 1701, and another peak in 1707 which is probably to be accounted for by the influx of senior Scottish MPs immediately after the Union.
The Parliament of 1690
Age at election | Number (/613) | Percentage |
under 21 | 10 | 1.6% |
21-30 | 109 | 17.8% |
31-40 | 179 | 29.2% |
41-50 | 140 | 22.8% |
51-60 | 113 | 18.4% |
over 60 | 62 | 10.1% |
The Parliament of 1695
Age at election | Number (/548) | Percentage |
under 21 | 11 | 2.0% |
21-30 | 93 | 17.0% |
31-40 | 152 | 27.8% |
41-50 | 145 | 26.5% |
51-60 | 91 | 16.6% |
over 60 | 56 | 10.2% |
The Parliament of 1698
Age at election | Number (/486) | Percentage |
under 21 | 1 | 0.2% |
21-30 | 90 | 16.9% |
31-40 | 141 | 26.4% |
41-50 | 165 | 30.9% |
51-60 | 87 | 16.3% |
over 60 | 50 | 9.4% |
The Parliament of 1701
Age at election | Number (/486) | Percentage |
under 21 | 3 | 0.6% |
21-30 | 82 | 16.2% |
31-40 | 131 | 25.8% |
41-50 | 136 | 26.8% |
51-60 | 110 | 21.7% |
over 60 | 45 | 8.9% |
The Parliament of 1701-2
Age at election | Number (/500) | Percentage |
under 21 | 4 | 0.8% |
21-30 | 98 | 19.6% |
31-40 | 135 | 27.0% |
41-50 | 135 | 27.0% |
51-60 | 92 | 18.4% |
over 60 | 35 | 7.0% |
The Parliament of 1702
Age at election | Number (/545) | Percentage |
under 21 | 3 | 0.6% |
21-30 | 111 | 20.4% |
31-40 | 152 | 27.9% |
41-50 | 147 | 27.0% |
51-60 | 90 | 16.5% |
over 60 | 42 | 7.7% |
The Parliaments of 1705 and 1707
Age at election | Number (/530) | Percentage |
under 21 | 3 | 0.6% |
21-30 | 117 | 22.1% |
31-40 | 142 | 26.8% |
41-50 | 132 | 24.9% |
51-60 | 100 | 18.9% |
over 60 | 36 | 6.8% |
The Parliament of 1708
Age at election | Number (/536) | Percentage |
under 21 | 1 | 0.2% |
21-30 | 120 | 22.4% |
31-40 | 143 | 26.7% |
41-50 | 138 | 25.7% |
51-60 | 102 | 19.0% |
over 60 | 32 | 6.0% |
The Parliament of 1710
Age at election | Number (/585) | Percentage |
under 21 | 3 | 0.5% |
21-30 | 124 | 21.2% |
31-40 | 167 | 28.5% |
41-50 | 151 | 25.8% |
51-60 | 96 | 16.4% |
over 60 | 44 | 7.5% |
The Parliament of 1713
Age at election | Number (/524) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0% |
21-30 | 121 | 23.1% |
31-40 | 144 | 27.5% |
41-50 | 130 | 24.8% |
51-60 | 82 | 15.6% |
over 60 | 49 | 9.4% |
The general trend is easier to see if we consolidate the total percentages for those Members aged 40 and under at the time of their election, and those aged over 51.
Parliament | Percentage under 41 | Percentage 51 + |
1690 | 48.6% | 28.5% |
1695 | 46.8% | 26.8% |
1698 | 43.5% | 25.7% |
1701 | 42.6% | 30.6% |
1701-2 | 47.2% | 25.4% |
1702 | 48.9% | 24.2% |
1705 | 49.5% | 25.7% |
1708 | 49.3% | 27.0% |
1710 | 50.2% | 23.9% |
1713 | 50.6% | 24.0% |
Comparable statistics for the Scottish Members are much less useful, given the smaller numbers involved, and the higher proportion of Members for whom no birth-date can be conjectured. For what they are worth, the resulting figures seem to show that Members for Scottish constituencies were on the whole considerably younger than their colleagues south of the border. The figures for individual Parliaments are:
The Parliament of 1707 (1st Parliament of Great Britain)
Age at election | Number (/35) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0% |
21-30 | 4 | 11.4% |
31-40 | 14 | 40.0% |
41-50 | 15 | 42.9% |
51-60 | 2 | 5.7% |
over 60 | 0 | 0% |
The Parliament of 1708
Age at election | Number (/39) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0% |
21-30 | 13 | 33.3% |
31-40 | 11 | 28.2% |
41-50 | 10 | 25.6% |
51-60 | 5 | 12.8% |
over 60 | 0 | 0% |
The Parliament of 1710
Age at election | Number (/37) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0% |
21-30 | 10 | 27.0% |
31-40 | 11 | 29.7% |
41-50 | 12 | 32.4% |
51-60 | 4 | 10.8% |
over 60 | 0 | 0% |
The Parliament of 1713
Age at election | Number (/37) | Percentage |
under 21 | 0 | 0.0% |
21-30 | 7 | 18.9% |
31-40 | 13 | 35.1% |
41-50 | 12 | 32.4% |
51-60 | 5 | 13.5% |
over 60 | 0 | 0.0% |
Consolidating the percentages of those 40 years old or under, and those over 50, pinpoints that the election of 1708 produced the most youthful Scottish representation in this period, as the elder statesmen of the Union parliament gave way to a new generation, and also indicates a small but significant rise in the number of older Members at the general election of 1713.
Parliament | Percentage under 41 | Percentage 51+ |
1707 | 51.4 | 5.7 |
1708 | 61.5 | 12.8 |
1710 | 56.7 | 10.8 |
1713 | 54.0 | 13.5 |
Education
Available information concerning the early education of Members is at best haphazard. At least 54 are said to have been educated ‘privately’ or ‘at home’, a group which naturally includes a generous sprinkling of noble families: Cavendishes, Cecils, Comptons, Russells, and Thynnes, as well as those from Dissenting or ‘conforming Presbyterian’ backgrounds, like Peter King and Grey Neville, and one Scotsman, John Forbes of Culloden. A few Members had been sent abroad to begin their education with a private tutor, Thomas Coke in Rotterdam, for example, Robert Yard in The Hague, James Brydges at Wolfenbüttel, while at the onset of the crisis over the Popish Plot, in 1678, William Savile, son of the 1st Marquess of Halifax, had been despatched to the physical and moral safety of the Calvinist republic of Geneva.
Attendance at a particular school has been established in 352 of the biographies. Among the great public schools the most popular were Eton, numbering at least 49 Members (and possibly as many as 57) among its alumni, and Westminster with at least 46 (and possibly two more).22 Some way behind came St. Paul’s (17), Winchester (at least 14, and a possible four more), and Merchant Taylors’ (13). Rugby and Shrewsbury were also moderately well represented, with nine and eight Members respectively, though tending to draw their pupils from a distinctively regional base. Even more localized was the intake of the various grammar schools, a great number of which participated in the education of Parliament-men in this period. The grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds stands out, with as many as 15 Members (more than all but three of the public schools), but the only other grammar schools to produce more than two MPs in this period were Exeter with four, and Brentwood, Cheam and Ruthin, with three each. A few Members were obliged to venture much further afield: John Verney, later Lord Fermanagh, began his schooling in the Loire valley, at Blois; while Hon. Sidney Wortley Montagu, was translated in 1662 from a small establishment in Twickenham to the ‘academie’ of M. du Plessis in Paris. Joseph Dudley was unique in his American schooling: the son of a governor of Massachusetts, he attended a ‘free school’ near Boston.
In 12 cases it has been possible to establish that Members attended Dissenting academies, the most popular being that run by Samuel Birch at Shilton, in Oxfordshire, which educated four Members, including, by a considerable irony, such future champions of the High Church cause (and supporters of the 1714 Schism Act) as Simon Harcourt I and Edward Harley. Other Dissenting tutors with future MPs under their care were Ralph Button at Islington (1), Charles Morton at Newington Green (1), Thomas Triplett at Hayes (2), and John Woodhouse at Sheriffhales in Shropshire (2). In the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, and while the Clarendon Code was still being enacted, the 1st Lord Wharton sought to preserve the moral integrity of his sons, Goodwin and Thomas, and to inculcate into them his own Presbyterian religious beliefs, by sending them to the Protestant academy at Caen. The attempt proved a spectacular failure.
Altogether 973 Members had attended a university, almost half the number sitting in this period (49.1%). The percentage remained remarkably constant from Parliament to Parliament, as the following table indicates.
Parliament | Number at university | Total of Members | Percentage |
1690 | 326 | 622 | 52.4%23 |
1695 | 290 | 560 | 51.8% |
1698 | 282 | 545 | 51.7% |
1701 | 268 | 531 | 50.5% |
1701-2 | 265 | 515 | 51.5% |
1702 | 293 | 556 | 52.7% |
1705 | 300 | 553 | 54.2% |
1707 | 309 | 577 | 53.6% |
1708 | 322 | 600 | 53.7% |
1710 | 325 | 644 | 50.5% |
1713 | 306 | 579 | 52.8% |
Some comment is required on the figures for the Parliaments after the Union. The proportion of Scottish Members recorded as having attended university is substantially lower than for English and Welsh Members, 38.0% (41 out of 108) as against 49.7% (932 out of 1,874), which suggests that, as far as the English and Welsh were concerned, there had been a slight but significant rise in numbers towards the end of this period. In this respect, however, the disparity between MPs north and south of the border may be more apparent than real, and may be accounted for, at least in part, by difficulties with the sources, there being no published admission registers for the universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews, which are thus in all likelihood seriously under-estimated in our statistics.
Only 155 of the 912 Members admitted to Oxford or Cambridge, the universities for which the History records information concerning graduation, went on to take their degree, that is to say some 17.0%. A further 17 were complimented with doctorates, ten at Oxford and seven at Cambridge, usually for political rather than academic reasons, despite having no previous link with the university. Sir Richard Vyvyan, 3rd Bt., Horatio Walpole II, and Dixey Windsor all proceeded to college fellowships without having graduated, Vyvyan at Oxford, and Walpole and Windsor at Cambridge. In all 24 Members pursued academic advancement as far as a college fellowship, their numbers divided between the two ancient English universities, though only Isaac Newton, Thomas Paske, and (until he abandoned lecturing in Greek at Christ Church, Oxford, for a brief career as an army bureaucrat) Henry Watkins, viewed their university employment as a professional vocation.
In all 600 English and Welsh Members attended Oxford University (plus one Scot, John Hutton II)24 and 312 Cambridge, perpetuating an imbalance established long before 1690.25 An analysis, Parliament by Parliament, of the relative numbers of Oxford and Cambridge men, shows the older university clearly preponderant throughout, the difference becoming even more pronounced in Parliaments (such as those of 1702, 1710, and 1713) dominated by the Tories.
Parliament | 1690 | 1695 | 1698 | 1701 | 1701-2 | 1702 | 1705 | 1708 | 1710 | 1713 |
Cambridge | 106 | 96 | 97 | 87 | 84 | 91 | 101 | 107 | 94 | 92 |
Oxford | 219 | 199 | 190 | 182 | 179 | 203 | 201 | 198 | 199 | 208 |
If we attempt an identification of Members by party, taking care not to force any individual classification, and indeed omitting all those who cannot be described consistently throughout their parliamentary careers in this period as being of a particular party orientation, we find a sharp difference between the two universities, with Toryism far more pronounced among those educated at Oxford. Not that these figures necessarily tell us anything about the respective political climates of Oxford and Cambridge in this period, since in each case the cohort of Members from whom the statistics have been drawn includes many whose experience of university life went back 20, 30, 40, and in some cases even 50 years. The totals and percentages (Members for England and Wales only) are:
For Oxford:
Tories | 323 | (53.8%) |
Whigs | 199 | (33.1%) |
unclassified (or changed allegiance) | 78 | (13.0%) |
For Cambridge:
Tories | 130 | (41.7%) |
Whigs | 133 | (42.6%) |
unclassified (or changed allegiance) | 59 | (18.9%) |
A further seven of the Members for English and Welsh constituencies had been undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin. Not surprisingly, they were all from families resident in Ireland, the single exception being John Povey, whose English father was serving as a judge on the Irish bench at the time of his admission. As a Presbyterian from the north-east of England, Samuel Ogle had an obvious motivation in going to university in Scotland, but he was not entirely alone among his compatriots, since the Cumbrian Richard Musgrave was awarded a degree at Edinburgh in 1698, admittedly after having attended Oxford first. Joseph Dudley continued his education in Massachusetts by progressing to Harvard. Continental universities also attracted a few English Members. Six each went to Utrecht and Leiden (half of them after a spell at either Oxford or Cambridge), and two to Rotterdam. As many as 21 attended the university of Padua, but 14 of these had also been to Oxbridge, and for the majority their time at university in Italy served as no more than an extension of their experience as continental travellers, with Padua a convenient base of operations.
Among the Scots, the largest number of university-educated Members, at least 12 (and possibly four more), had been to Glasgow. Then came Aberdeen with nine (five at Marischal College and four at King’s), Edinburgh with four (and perhaps two more), and St. Andrews with two (the last two figures almost certainly understated, given the nature of the evidence available to the History26). Twelve Scottish Members attended university in the United Provinces: eight at Leiden (five of them having begun in Scotland, and then transferred to a Dutch university to study civil law), one at Utrecht (and another possible, John Pringle, who had previously been an undergraduate at Edinburgh), and two at Franeker. John Hutton II acquired his primary medical education at Padua, before going to Oxford, and his fellow physician Charles Oliphant completed his at Rheims. In addition Alexander Murray of Stanhope was said to have been educated ‘at a foreign university’, but the location is not specified.
A separate analysis of Members’ legal education is only appropriate for Englishmen, Welshmen and Irishmen, who were obliged to attend an inn of court. Scottish lawyers completed their legal training at university (usually abroad), admission to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh conferring in effect a licence to practice, corresponding to a call to the bar in England. Among the Members for English and Welsh constituencies, 696 were admitted to an inn of court. Of these, at least 11 (and possibly 12) were also admitted to an inn of chancery, while in addition Lawrence Carter I as a member of Clement’s Inn but was never entered at an inn of court. Just under 40 per cent of those admitted to an inn proceeded to the bar (271 in all). The majority of those nominally enjoying a legal education were young gentlemen, from wealthy landed families, using their time at the inn either to acquire a smattering of knowledge of the law (or even to provide themselves with a pied-à-terre in London). Chronological analysis, Parliament by Parliament, of the numbers of Members who had been admitted to an inn, reveals a small increase until 1698, then a steady, if equally gentle, decline:27
Members admitted to an inn of court (England and Wales only):28
Parliament | Number at inn | Percentage of Members |
1690 | 254 | 40.8% |
1695 | 231 | 41.3% |
1698 | 230 | 42.2% |
1701 | 211 | 39.7% |
1701-2 | 203 | 39.4% |
1702 | 220 | 39.5% |
1705/7 | 223 | 40.3% |
1708 | 198 | 37.2% |
1710 | 214 | 36.5% |
1713 | 180 | 34.5% |
Allowing for 28 Members who transferred from one inn to another, and three more who were each admitted to three inns, the most popular inn was the Middle Temple, which admitted 239 Members, followed by the Inner Temple with 215, Gray’s Inn with 141, and Lincoln’s Inn with 136. The numbers called to the bar show the same descending order: the Middle Temple with 96, Inner Temple 87, Gray’s Inn 49, and Lincoln’s Inn 39.
An analysis by party affiliation of Members admitted to an inn of court shows a distinct bias towards the Tories:
Tories | 325 |
Whigs | 263 |
unclassified (or changed allegiance) | 108 |
Taking each inn separately, it is among Middle Templars that Whigs were best represented, though even there Tories were in a majority. The Inner Temple was the most distinctively Tory of the inns, as far as Members of Parliament were concerned. We should remember, however, that these figures do not necessarily tell us anything of the political orientation of the particular inn during the period 1690-1715, since the respective cohorts include Members whose time as students of the law may have been in (what was for them) the remote past.
Inn | Tory | Whig | unclassified (or changed allegiance) |
Gray’s Inn | 68 | 51 | 22 |
Lincoln’s Inn | 66 | 50 | 20 |
Inner Temple | 109 | 73 | 32 |
Middle Temple | 100 | 99 | 40 |
The same analysis, undertaken for those Members called to the bar, shows a more substantial Tory majority even among Middle Templars.
Inn | Tory | Whig | unclassified (or changed allegiance) |
Gray’s Inn | 28 | 15 | 6 |
Lincoln’s Inn | 19 | 16 | 4 |
Inner Temple | 47 | 30 | 10 |
Middle Temple | 46 | 36 | 14 |
It remains to consider how many Members undertook the lengthy period of continental travel which many felt to be necessary in order to apply the finishing touches to a polite education; what would later be known as the ‘Grand Tour’, usually with Italy as its ultimate destination. In all at least 157 (possibly 158) Members travelled in this way for educational purposes, 95 of whom had also attended, or were to attend, a university. Nearly all were Englishmen or Welshmen, the Scots presumably being deterred by the expense. Besides the Duke of Roxburghe’s younger brother, Hon. William Kerr (who sat for Berwick-upon-Tweed in this period), for whose fretful mother the time he spent gallivanting abroad seemed at any rate less dangerous than his favoured alternative of joining the army, only three Scottish MPs attempted a tour:29 John Bruce, son of the noted architect Sir William; the young ‘virtuoso’ John Clerk of Penicuik; and that somewhat hapless youth, John Forbes of Culloden, who, having ‘shirked’ his studies in Edinburgh, was in desperation sent into Holland for a year by his father, ‘to satisfy your own curiosity’.
An analysis, Parliament by Parliament, of the number of MPs who had travelled abroad in this way serves to emphasize that already by the later 17th century a continental journey was an established feature of a gentleman’s education. Nor does the practice seem to have diminished greatly as a result of the wars against Louis XIV, which only required a change of route, taking the traveller into Italy via the Low Countries and Germany rather than through France.
Members who had travelled abroad: Parliament by Parliament
1690 | 1695 | 1698 | 1701 | 1701-2 | 1702 | 1705 | 1707 | 1708 | 1710 | 1713 |
52 | 54 | 48 | 46 | 47 | 46 | 43 | 48 | 52 | 47 | 45 |
Occupation
The vast majority of Members were landowners, whose estates alone would have afforded them at least an adequate income, usually in the form of rents. Some owned estates in more than one country: a few genuine Anglo-Irish families like the Boyles, Brodricks and Molesworths; some absentee English landlords who had inherited property in Ireland or acquired it through marriage, like (Sir) William Courtenay or Francis Seymour Conway; and a handful of owners of transatlantic plantations, most of them similarly absentees: from Virginia John Bromley I and William Spencer; and from Barbados Sir Peter Colleton, 2nd Bt., Sir Robert Davers, 2nd Bt., James Kendall, Sir Thomas Lear, 1st Bt., Robert Lowther, and William Wheeler (perhaps the only genuine planter of them all, who returned from the Caribbean barely long enough to sit in the two Parliaments of 1701). The number of mere landlords seems to have been relatively small, however; that is to say those who lived on their rental income alone, supplemented by the profits of expedient marriages, or resort to the mortgage market, and for whom the duties of public life, in local government and in Parliament, constituted almost their sole occupation. In other words, the Members did not represent an extensive leisured class of country squires. The evidence of the biographies, which the reader should not presume to be comprehensive in every respect, indicates substantial numbers who found employment in the new `professions’30—especially the law, the army and navy, and the state bureaucracy—or who involved themselves in some way in business enterprises—as merchants, financiers, industrialists or speculators.
Even the gentleman whose interests remained centred on his estate might not be content with a passive role as a recipient of rents. The English countryside was full of determined agricultural ‘improvers’, from the canal-building FRS Cyril Arthington and his fellow Yorkshireman Sir Abstrupus Danby, whose enthusiasm for emparkment set him at odds with his foxhunting neighbours, to Sir John Stonhouse, 3rd Bt., at Radley in Berkshire, for whom more profitable agricultural techniques, involving the systematic enclosure of common land, were necessary to generate funds for the rebuilding of Radley Hall. Others sought to exploit the natural resources at their command, selling their timber to the navy, like Sir John Barker, 4th Bt., in Suffolk, or Sir Stephen Lennard, 2nd Bt., in Kent; mining for silver, like Sir Carbery Pryse, 4th Bt., in Cardiganshire, or more prosaically but profitably, for coal, tin, lead, alum, and saltpetre; extracting salt from the salt pans of Worcestershire and Cheshire; and even selling stone for building, like (Sir) Thomas Wheate (1st Bt.), whose quarries at Glympton in Oxfordshire provided the Marlboroughs and their masons with much of the building material for Blenheim Palace. The fashion for ‘improvement’ was also penetrating into the consciousness of Scottish lairds, although the best-documented examples of such enterprising landowners, the Jacobites Sir John Erskine, 3rd Bt., of Alva and (Sir) Alexander Murray (3rd Bt.) of Stanhope, both blended inventiveness with desperation in sufficient quantities to produce hare-brained and ultimately ruinous schemes: Erskine (who himself claimed no more than an ‘honest farmer’) prospecting for silver in Clackmannanshire; Murray devising an extensive system of canals and waterworks to drain and irrigate his Highland estate.
Then there were the profits to be made from service to the crown. At least 648 MPs enjoyed the benefits of official remuneration at some point in their lives, almost a third of the entire Membership (32.7%), a figure that almost certainly understates the financial benefits derived from royal or governmental patronage, since it omits pensions, secret service handouts, and royal grants. Although perhaps the greater part of the recipients were career officers in the armed forces or belonged to the small but growing band of professional ‘civil servants’, a significant proportion were country gentlemen whose salaries, fees and perquisites augmented their personal income.
In considering those Members whose principal source of income did not derive from landownership, or whose principal occupation lay in one of the professions, or in ‘business’, it should be emphasized that these categories were not discrete. Lawyers, ‘civil servants’, and even army and naval officers might well have had business interests, for example, and would appear under both headings. No attempt has therefore been made to add together the numbers in the professions and in business, and to present this as a proportion of the total Membership of the House, or, a fortiori, to use these figures in order to try and establish the number of ‘mere’ landowners in the House (even assuming that it were possible to quantify precisely the number depending on rental or agricultural income).
In a period dominated by large-scale warfare, at home, in Ireland and Scotland, and abroad, on the continent and in the colonies, it is no surprise to find that service in the armed forces claimed more Members than any other profession. From the evidence of the biographies as many as 296 MPs, amounting to more than a seventh of the Membership (the precise figure is 14.9%), held a commission in the army or the Royal Navy, or both, at some point in their lives. The proportion of military and naval men is significantly higher among the Members for Scottish constituencies than among those for constituencies in England and Wales: 30.6% (that is to say 33 Members out of 108) as against 14.0% (263 out of 1874). This phenomenon would perhaps be most readily explicable by reference to economic differentials, in relation to the landed gentry north and south of the border, the social class from which commissioned officers were drawn. More Scots lairds than English gentlemen were driven to seek their fortune in the most physically dangerous of the professions. Not even the heartfelt expressions of maternal anxiety issuing from the dowager Countess of Roxburghe were enough to dissuade her son, Hon. William Kerr, from pursuing a military career. The temptation was not restricted to younger sons, either, but touched some first-born heirs, of whom the Master of Sinclair (John Sinclair) was probably the most striking example.
With one exception (the Parliament of 1713), the percentage of serving and former army and naval officers in each Parliament is higher than the proportion for the period as a whole, reflecting (one may presume) a tendency among army and naval officers to serve in the House of Commons for longer than the normal run; a tendency shared with other specialized occupational groups. In percentage terms, high points were reached in the Parliament of 1701-2, and again between 1705 and 1710, coinciding with Whig successes at the polls; low points in 1701, 1702 and 1710-14, when the Tories were ahead. The influence of an infusion of Scottish military men after 1707 is also detectable.
Parliament | Number of commissioned officer | Percentage |
1690 | 103 | 16.6% |
1695 | 90 | 16.1% |
1698 | 90 | 16.5% |
1701 | 84 | 15.8% |
1701-2 | 89 | 17.3% |
1702 | 87 | 15.6% |
1705 | 93 | 16.8% |
1707 | 104 | 18.0% |
1708 | 104 | 17.3% |
1710 | 98 | 15.2% |
1713 | 77 | 13.3% |
The higher proportion of military men elected to Parliament from about 1698 to 1710 may be put down to the general expansion of the officer corps to meet the military challenges posed by the wars against France. The decline from 1710 is, however, to be explained by an even more narrowly political factor, namely the increasingly Whig complexion of the military cohort in the Commons (that is, among the Members for English and Welsh constituencies, the more complex political allegiances that were to be found in Scotland not being reducible so easily to straightforward party designations). In such circumstances, any change in the overall balance of forces between the two parties in Parliament would produce a change in the number of army and naval officers in the House. Thus the Tory victories in the general elections of 1710 and 1713 naturally resulted in the return of fewer army and naval officers. Taking the period as a whole, Whigs predominated. Of the 263 English and Welsh Members who are recorded as having held a military commission, 131 can be identified consistently as Whigs, as compared to 95 Tories, the remaining 37 Members either having no clear party classification or transferring their allegiance from one side to the other in the course of their parliamentary service. Interesting chronological trends emerge, however, if we take separate figures for each Parliament. At the outset there was a strong Tory representation among the military Members in 1690, drawn from those loyalists who had served Charles II and James II, which shrank only gradually during the 1690s. In the Tory-dominated Parliament of 1702 there were still more Tory army and naval officers than Whigs. But the balance altered sharply thereafter, and not even the Tory electoral landslides of 1710 and 1713 could restore the status quo. With fewer Whig Members in 1713 than at any time in the period there were still more Whig than Tory soldiers and sailors to be found in the Commons.
Army and Navy officers, classified by party (England and Wales only):
Parliament | Tory | Whig | unclassified |
1690 | 44 | 41 | 18 |
1695 | 28 | 48 | 14 |
1698 | 31 | 43 | 16 |
1701 | 36 | 33 | 15 |
1701-2 | 35 | 38 | 16 |
1702 | 43 | 31 | 13 |
1705/7 | 28 | 51 | 14 |
1708 | 24 | 51 | 9 |
1710 | 37 | 35 | 11 |
1713 | 26 | 28 | 7 |
If we confine our attention to those Members who held their commissions in the army or Royal Navy during the years 1690-1715 the number drops sharply:31 203 in all, a tenth (10.2%) of the total Membership, 173 of whom sat for English and Welsh constituencies (9.2% of all English and Welsh Members) and 30 for Scottish constituencies (24.8% of the Scottish representation). Only one Scot was included in the Navy list, Lord Archibald Hamilton, and that by virtue of his lieutenant-colonelcy of marines. Similarly, among English and Welsh Members the vast majority were army officers: only 29 held naval commissions, seven of whom were also in the army list (in almost every case because of a commission in a marine regiment). As before, the party-political complexion was strongly Whig: 77 of the English and Welsh army officers could consistently be described as Whigs throughout their parliamentary service in this period, as compared with 43 Tories (24 remaining unclassified or changing their party allegiance at some point), while the naval officers divided 17 to 12 in the Whigs’ favour.
As many as 48 of the army officers held higher than regimental rank, among whom were such notable figures as Marlborough’s right-hand-man William Cadogan, John, Lord Cutts, and Thomas Erle, successively commanders-in-chief of the army in Ireland, the young James Stanhope, Hon. Thomas Tollemache, the Whig hero fatally wounded at Brest in 1693, and John Richmond Webb, the Tory hero immortalized by Thackeray, whom Marlborough and Cadogan allegedly attempted to cheat of his moment of glory following the battle of Wynendael. The naval contingent could boast no less than 18 flag officers, headed by Edward Russell (later Lord Orford), the victor of La Hogue, and including some of the most renowned names in 18th-century naval history: Sir George Byng, Sir John Leake, Sir George Rooke, and Sir Clowdisley Shovell. Since service in the armed forces, either on land or at sea, was a recognized path to social advancement, it was natural that some Members would be career officers from humble origins. This phenomenon was less common in the army, where commissions were acquired by means of finance or patronage, than in the navy, where it was possible to rise through the ranks, and for gentlemen-officers to be commanded by old ‘tarpaulins’. Shovell, for example, had originally entered the Restoration navy as a captain’s servant; Leake was the son of a master gunner (admittedly the master gunner of England); while the parentage and education of (Sir) William Gifford have defied investigation entirely. Almost without exception, commissioned officers in the army were recruited from the landowning classes: one held a Scottish peerage himself (Lord Fairfax), five enjoyed Irish titles (Lords Barrymore, Cutts, Fitzhardinge, Shannon, and Windsor), and at least 33 more were the sons of peers, including scions of such formidable noble families as the Berties, Boyles, Campbells, Cavendishes, Hamiltons, Mordaunts, Seymours, and Sidneys. A few generals and field officers had risen from comparative obscurity, most obviously the Irish trio of William Cadogan, Thomas Meredyth and Francis Palmes, but it was still landed obscurity.
A feature of the military presence in Parliament was the influence exerted over individuals and groups of Members by prominent generals or admirals, who could build up political ‘connexions’ through the operation of service patronage. The most obvious belonged to the Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill†), who numbered among his many followers his nephews, Charles and Francis Godfrey, the three Trelawnys, Lord Tunbridge (William Nassau de Zuylestein), Henry Withers, and the ubiquitous Irish trio of Cadogan, Meredyth and Palmes. But there were other gravitational forces within the army, even in Marlborough’s heyday. The Duke of Argyll certainly rivalled Marlborough in ambition and self-regard, if not in ability, and acted as a magnet to those who felt themselves excluded from the privileged clique surrounding the Churchills. Three of Argyll’s Campbell kinsmen were army officers and MPs, while others looked to the Duke for protection, his fellow countrymen Sir Alexander Cumming, 1st Bt., Alexander Grant of Grant, John Middleton II, and Hon. Charles Rosse, and even the occasional non-Scot like the young Charles Boyle II, later 4th Earl of Orrery. A similarly localized influence was enjoyed, within Ireland, by the 2nd Duke of Ormond, especially during his two stints as viceroy at Dublin Castle, from 1703 to 1707 and from 1710 to 1713, when the Irish military establishment came under his direct control. Obviously Marlborough’s Irishmen were immune to this influence, but other officers on the Irish establishment fell under Ormond’s spell, and both the Ulsterman Robert Echlin and the Englishman Thomas Pearce could be counted among Ormond’s closest personal followers. In the navy the equivalent of Marlborough was Edward Russell, whose prolonged ascendancy over the Admiralty administration in the 1690s enabled him to build up a formidable parliamentary ‘connexion’, including a veritable flotilla of flag officers: Matthew Aylmer, Sir George Byng, Charles Corn(e)wall, Sir John Jennings, Sir John Leake, Sir John Norris, and Sir Charles Wager.
Traditionally the best represented profession had been the law, and with rare exceptions, such as William Collier, the quondam ‘pettifogging attorney’ who became manager of the Drury Lane theatre before being elected to Parliament in 1713, the lawyers who made their appearance in the Commons were of the more elevated kind: a handful of civilians (five in all), and a substantial squadron of barristers. Not all barristers continued to practise, of course; some had been promoted to the bench, while others had long since abandoned the law for politics and government office. A number had never practised at all, for, as the modern historian of the early 18th-century bar, David Lemmings, has argued, ‘the traditional market for barristers’ services’ was shrinking in this period, and the number of practitioners was steadily falling.32 Lemmings’ detailed investigations into the careers of barrister-MPs in this period concluded that at least half did not practise; or, to put it more precisely, left no record of having practised.33 The biographical evidence assembled in this History does not extend to a systematic account of the number of Members who practised at the bar. Our calculations are therefore confined to those who were qualified to practise, through being called at one of the inns of court, admitted to the King’s Inns in Dublin,34 or entering the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh.35 A quintet of civilians and 11 attorneys have also been added in.36
Overall, some 305 Members belonged by this definition to the legal profession (15.4%), of whom 18 were Scots (16.7% of the Scottish Membership, as compared with a figure of 14.6% for the English and Welsh Members). If we take the figures Parliament by Parliament, we find in most cases a slightly higher percentage, results which are again explicable by the fact that, taken as a group, lawyers (defined in these terms) enjoyed on average longer parliamentary careers than did the Members as a whole. Relatively little variation is visible in the percentages from one Parliament to another, though a small overall increase occurred across the period, with peaks in the Parliaments of 1701, 1708, 1710 and 1713.
Parliament | Number of lawyers | Percentage |
1690 | 90 | 14.5% |
1695 | 79 | 14.1% |
1698 | 80 | 14.7% |
1701 | 83 | 15.6% |
1701-2 | 70 | 13.6% |
1702 | 90 | 16.2% |
1705 | 82 | 14.8% |
1707 | 87 | 15.1% |
1708 | 95 | 15.8% |
1710 | 106 | 16.5% |
1713 | 98 | 16.9% |
An analysis of the party allegiances of those lawyers who sat for English or Welsh constituencies bears out Dr Lemmings’ conclusion that the majority of practising barristers tended to be Tory rather than Whig.37 Just over half, some 147 in total, can be identified as Tories, as against 104 who appear consistently as Whigs; while the remaining 36 are either impossible to classify in party terms, or can be seen to have shifted from one category to another during the period. However, plotting the numbers in each Parliament demonstrates that the Tory majority actually increased between 1690 and 1715, and increased quite sharply in the second half of the period, if we bear in mind the broad party-political composition of the House after each election.38 The key date appears to be 1701, for the general election in December of that year had produced a House of Commons in which the balance of the parties was more or less even, but there was a clear majority of Tories over Whigs among the lawyers. Thereafter, the Tories maintained this advantage, even in the Parliament of 1708, when overall the Whigs enjoyed a clear margin of victory at the polls.
Parliament | Tory | Whig | unclassified (or changed allegiance) |
1690 | 44 | 35 | 11 |
1695 | 32 | 36 | 11 |
1698 | 38 | 29 | 13 |
1701 | 47 | 28 | 8 |
1701-2 | 38 | 27 | 5 |
1702 | 62 | 23 | 5 |
1705/7 | 47 | 33 | 2 |
1708 | 42 | 41 | 6 |
1710 | 73 | 19 | 6 |
1713 | 69 | 16 | 4 |
For lawyers, Membership of the House of Commons naturally offered manifold opportunities for professional advancement, through publicly exercising their intellectual and forensic powers in debate or committee, demonstrating the soundness of their political principles and their loyalty to party at crucial divisions, or simply cultivating the powerful at close quarters. Of the barristers and advocates sitting in this period, as many as 94 held some kind of legal office. At the peak of the profession were five lord chancellors (William Cowper, Simon Harcourt I, Peter King, Sir Thomas Parker, Sir John Somers), three masters of the rolls (Sir Joseph Jekyll, Henry Powle, and Sir John Trevor), and one lord advocate in Scotland (Sir David Dalrymple, 1st Bt.). In addition a dozen Members were eventually raised to the bench in England (John Blencowe, John Comyns, Alexander Denton II, Robert Dormer, Robert Eyre, Francis Page, Sir Thomas Powys, John Pratt, Robert Price, Sir Robert Raymond, Sir George Treby, Sir Thomas Trevor); thirteen served as judges on the various Welsh circuits (Spencer Cowper, Charles Coxe, Stephen Hervey, William Jesse, Francis Lloyd, John Meyrick, John Pocklington, Sir John Trenchard, Richard Vaughan I, John Ward III, Charles Whitaker, Edward Winnington, Sir William Wogan); four were judges in Ireland (Gilbert Dolben, Richard Levinge, Sir Richard Reynell, 1st Bt., and John Pocklington again); two were lords of session in Edinburgh (John Murray, Lord Bowhill, and Dougal Stewart, Lord Blairhall); while Roger Mompesson was chief justice of several North American colonies. Halted a little lower down the promotional ladder were three attorneys-general (Nicholas Lechmere, James Montagu I, and Sir Robert Sawyer); six solicitors-general (Hon. Heneage Finch I, John Hawles, Sir John Maynard, William Thompson III, Sir William Williams, 1st Bt., Sir Francis Winnington); and thirteen King’s or Queen’s serjeants (John Birch II, Nathaniel Bond, Lawrence Carter II, Joseph Girdler, Nicholas Hooper, Sir George Hutchins, Henry Lloyd, Hon William Montagu, Richard Richardson, James Sheppard, John Thurbarne, Sir John Tremayne, Thomas Richmond Webb). The remainder occupied either minor places in the courts of Chancery, Common Pleas, or King’s Bench; in the provinces (on the Welsh circuits, in the Duchy of Lancaster, or with the chief justices in eyre);39 or, in the case of civilians like Sir William Trumbull, in church or prerogative courts (Trumbull held inter alia the offices of chancellor of the diocese of Rochester and judge of the prerogative court of Canterbury).
Some lawyer-MPs were privately employed by great landowners or landowning families. None, so far as we know, in so menial a capacity as estate steward, in the way that Robert Britiffe, MP for Norwich in 1715, was employed by the Walpoles (though in his younger days James Craggs I was said to have served in the household of the 7th Duke of Norfolk as ‘steward’ before moving on to the more exalted place of ‘private secretary’ to the then Earl of Marlborough),40 but many as advisers or general ‘men-of-business’. Thus Thomas Christie served the Earls of Ailesbury; Robert Monckton the Duke of Newcastle; Robert Price the Dukes of Beaufort; Thomas Owen the redoubtable Lady Rachel Russell; and Archibald Hutcheson and Thomas Medlycott the hapless Duke of Ormond. Scottish magnates were particularly fond of retaining the services of a ‘factor’, who combined the duties of legal adviser, financial administrator and political manager. The most outstanding example among the Scottish Members of Parliament in this period was probably Mungo Graham, the devoted servant of his distant cousin the Duke of Montrose, to the extent that he had no personal establishment separate from the family, but resided either in Montrose’s London house or in Buchanan castle, the Duke’s Scottish seat. There were also William Cochrane of Kilmaronock, who in general acted for the Dukes of Hamilton; the lord of session Dougal Stewart, whose principal connexion was with Lord Bute; and, in a rather more specialized role, the young John Clerk of Penicuik, the Duke of Queensberry’s private secretary at the time of the Union negotiations.
Other professions were barely represented in the House of Commons in this period, a reflection perhaps of the social standing of the practitioners, the level of remuneration, or (in comparison with legal advocacy, for example), the compatibility of the profession itself with the business of a Member of Parliament. There were only five medical doctors, John Radcliffe, the English royal physician, William Cotesworth, Sir William Langham, and two Scotsmen (albeit with London practices), John Hutton and Charles Oliphant; and two apothecaries, the courtier James Chase, who succeeded his father as apothecary to the sovereign and master of the Apothecaries’ Company, and the modest provincial Samuel Battelley, whose practice was confined to the town of Bury St. Edmunds. Although several Members tried their hands at architecture in an amateur way, the House included only a single professional, admittedly in the person of Sir Christopher Wren. The many offices which Wren held, often concurrently, included the Savilian chair in astronomy at Oxford, and he was joined in the Commons by 23 other college fellows, three of whom could be described as university teachers by vocation: Isaac Newton and Thomas Paske at Cambridge, and Henry Watkins at Oxford.41 Hon. Edward Finch was unique in that he was the only Member in this period (and indeed during the entire 17th century) who took holy orders after giving up his parliamentary seat, becoming rector of Wigan and later a canon of Canterbury. In a House which included numerous published authors, their works ranging from the serious and scholarly (the scientist Newton, the philosopher Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley), the virtuoso John Clerk, the poet Matthew Prior, the historians Thomas Tonkin and Browne Willis, the political thinkers Robert Molesworth, Walter Moyle, and William Seton of Pitmedden), to the ephemeral and even frivolous (the efforts of such poetasters as Anthony Hammond and William Walsh, and the squibs and satires of the ‘rattle-pate’ George Duckett), only a handful ever attempted to make a living by writing: Charles Davenant through composing political pamphlets, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Arthur Maynwaring through something more akin to journalism, in their contributions to periodical publications like the Spectator, Tatler, and Medley. Even then not one of this quartet was able to survive by the pen alone. Davenant, Addison and Steele all benefited from the profits of governmental office, while Maynwaring was employed directly by his patroness, the Duchess of Marlborough, as her private secretary. More unusually, John Anstis was able to find his livelihood through heraldry and genealogy, becoming in due course (in 1718) Garter king of arms, while two Members, Thomas Boucher and the Dutchman John Germain, seem to have made their fortunes as professional gamesters; indeed, when Boucher came to be buried it was reported that ‘two old women were overheard to be very witty, saying, “Why had he no [e]scutcheons? For he might have good arms, a pack of cards, a dice box and a quarter a pair of scissors”.
Employment in government service is the most difficult of the ‘professions’ to quantify in the context of parliamentary representation,42 given that there was no recognized career path in the early 18th-century bureaucracy, and that many individuals who were clearly not professional administrators none the less held office under the Crown for long periods, some with sinecures but others having clear executive duties, such as Sir William Forester at the Board of Green Cloth, Thomas Frankland I at the Post Office, and Samuel Travers as surveyor-general. It is still possible, however, to identify a small number of MPs who may anachronistically be called ‘civil servants’; men whose natural habitat was the offices, closets, and back stairs of Whitehall, whose calling was administration, and whose income was derived principally from the fruits of office. An older generation, headed by Sir George Downing† and Samuel Pepys†, had formed the backbone of departmental government under the Restoration monarchy, and two of Charles II’s bureaucrats survived into the House of Commons in this period: the administrative jack-of-all-trades Sir Joseph Williamson, formerly secretary of state, and now enjoying the reputation of an elder statesman; and Sir Stephen Fox, who had risen to wealth and prominence by way of the royal court and the Treasury. In this period the archetypal bureaucrat was William Lowndes, who spent nearly half a century in the Treasury, as clerk, chief clerk, and eventually secretary, and who represented Seaford between 1695 and 1715. Close by, in the paymaster-general’s office, nestled another MP, Fox’s protégé Edward Pauncefort; while the secretaries of state were served by no less than seven clerks or under-secretaries who sat in Parliament: Joseph Addison, William Blathwayt and his nephew John Povey, John Ellis, Thomas Hopkins, Erasmus Lewis, John Pulteney and Robert Yard. All went on to higher things. The most successful was Blathwayt, who eventually became secretary at war, but even Povey, whom one contemporary ridiculed as ‘a little inconsiderable supernumerary’, became secretary of the Privy Council. Elsewhere we can find another Member, William Bridges, among the permanent staff of the Ordnance, while Adam de Cardonnel, the son of French Protestant refugees, began his career under Blathwayt in the War Office, before attaching himself to the Duke of Marlborough, through whom he obtained not only a parliamentary seat, and the succession to his former patron, but also in due course the kind of factionally motivated dismissal from which the true ‘civil servant’ was protected. Outside the secretary of state’s office, however, the departments best represented in the Commons were those concerned with the administration of the navy. Josiah Burchett, originally one of Pepys’s clerks, was a permanent fixture in the Admiralty, where he held the place of secretary from 1694 to 1742. Dennis Lyddell was another who gave over 40 years’ service, this time in the Navy office, ending as comptroller of treasurer’s accounts, while not far behind in terms of longevity were Lyddell’s colleagues Charles Sergison and Kenrick Edisbury, the former employed for nearly 30 years as clerk of the acts, and the latter, who had started his career in Charles II’s reign as clerk of the cheque at Deptford, rising through various appointments in the clerk’s office to become commissioner of victualling in 1704, and finishing his days in 1734 after a long stint as one of the commissioners for sick and wounded.
It remains to consider those Members who derived at least part of their income from what may be loosely described as business enterprises. These ranged enormously in both scale and type. At one end of the spectrum were the venture capitalists of the City of London, financing voyages around the world or floating massive loans to maintain public credit, and the handful of great industrialists like the iron-master Sir Ambrose Crowley, whose smelting works were said to be the most extensive in Europe. At the other were such small provincial manufacturers as Thomas Richmond, the Maldon tanner; investors in get-rich-quick schemes involving, for example, the salvaging of shipwrecks (or more bizarrely in the case of Goodwin Wharton and his friends, the hunt for buried treasure using fairy guides); local monopolists like the Welsh attorney Owen Hughes, with his patent for the management of the ferries across the Menai Straits; and the would-be theatrical impresarios Henry Brett and William Collier.
Taking the period as a whole, and using this broad, umbrella definition, the Members involved in ‘business’ formed a significant proportion of the House: 411, amounting to just over a fifth of the total (the exact figure is 20.7%). Some 26 were Scots, the percentage for Scottish Members being almost exactly the same as for the Members for English and Welsh constituencies. As with the larger ‘professional’ groups, the representation of ‘businessmen’ in each Parliament was generally slightly higher than this overall figure, and for the same reason. Moreover, there was a remarkable consistency across the period, with a maximum variation of only 3.6% and no clear chronological pattern to be observed; in spite of the consensus in contemporary political debate that the ‘landed interest’ was in decline as a result of the harmful effects of continental warfare, while the ‘moneyed interest’ was flourishing.
Parliament | Number in business | Percentage |
1690 | 134 | 21.5% |
1695 | 128 | 22.9% |
1698 | 121 | 22.2% |
1701 | 117 | 22.0% |
1701-2 | 116 | 22.5% |
1702 | 122 | 21.9% |
1705 | 123 | 22.2% |
1707 | 126 | 21.8% |
1708 | 126 | 21.0% |
1710 | 133 | 20.7% |
1713 | 112 | 19.3% |
These calculations cannot, however, tell the whole story, given the catch-all nature of ‘business’ as an occupational category. In attempting to make sense of such a bewildering variety of different kinds of commercial enterprise, it may be more useful to subdivide ‘business’ interests—into banking and finance, long-range (or overseas) trade, internal (or domestic) trade, manufacture, and mining—always remembering that an individual Member could be involved simultaneously in more than one kind of activity. Coal mining and iron manufacture, for example, were combined to considerable effect by Sir Humphrey Mackworth in the development of his estate at Neath into what was for a time the largest industrial complex in south Wales. And in a slightly different way, trade and high finance obviously complemented each other. Although best known as the first governor of the Bank of England, and thus a pillar of the ‘moneyed interest’ in the City, Sir Gilbert Heathcote was in fact first and foremost an Iberian merchant, investing in the public stocks the fortune he and his partner Arthur Shallett* had originally made from the importation of Spanish and Portuguese wines.
As understood by contemporaries, the (largely pejorative) term ‘moneyed interest’ did not extend to all businessmen, nor indeed to all those involved in trade. At its core were the bankers, financiers, stock-jobbers and speculators who handled money rather than goods. Only 43 Members can be identified as belonging to this group (a mere 2.2% of the total composition of the House), four of whom were Scots (Daniel Campbell of Shawfield, Alexander Duff, Sir William Gordon, 1st Bt., and John Montgomerie I).43 Seven acted as private bankers, either because they were goldsmiths exercising a traditional function of their craft (Sir Francis Child, Sir Thomas Cooke, Charles Duncombe, Stephen Evance, Sir Thomas Fowle, Sir Richard Hoare, John Mead) or because, as men with access to large quantities of ready cash, they were in a position to be able to oblige their friends. Thus both Sir Robert Clayton and Sir Stephen Fox baled out impoverished English and Anglo-Irish aristocrats of their acquaintance, though in each case to the lender’s own ultimate benefit, while Daniel Campbell of Shawfield performed the same service for the Scots nobility.
Clearly a sum total of 43 Members would not constitute the entire parliamentary representation of the ‘moneyed interest’, for it would not comprehend all the Members who bought Bank of England or East India stock or invested in other public companies. More to the point, perhaps, in the present context, there was a close connexion between high finance and trade, especially the more capital-intensive overseas trade. It was impossible to make a clear distinction between the financiers and the overseas merchants who together made up the commercial élite of the City of London; partly because the joint-stock companies in which ‘moneyed’ men invested their fortunes were almost all trading companies, and partly because the merchant princes of the City, the Childs, Dashwoods, Goulds, Hernes and Shepheards, were precisely those who were most likely to have money to invest. There was indeed a considerable degree of overlap between the two groups. Of the 43 ‘financiers’ in the House more than half, 22 in all, were also recorded as having some involvement in long-distance trade. It would seem reasonable, therefore, to combine overseas merchants with financiers in order to produce a figure for the parliamentary representation of the ‘moneyed interest’ (though admittedly this would in all probability still be something of an under-estimate). The number of Members in this period who can be identified as overseas merchants amounts to 212 (10.7% of the Membership), 13 of whom were Scots (10.2% of the Scottish Members).44 Taken together with the remaining 21 ‘financiers’ and bankers, this would give an aggregate of 232 (that is to say 11.7% of the Membership as a whole), not only a more substantial proportion of the House, but a figure that would be commensurate with contemporary apprehensions of the size of the ‘moneyed interest’. The same exercise undertaken for each Parliament also reveals, predictably, that in percentage terms the highest influx of ‘moneyed men’ into the Commons occurred after the first general election of 1701, which had been contested vigorously by the rival East India Companies. More surprising, perhaps, is that this peak was followed by a gentle decline which was only reversed (and then temporarily) in 1710.
| Parliament | Size of ‘moneyed interest’ | Percentage |
1690 | 77 | 12.2% |
1695 | 70 | 12.5% |
1698 | 67 | 12.3% |
1701 | 71 | 13.4% |
1701-2 | 61 | 12.0% |
1702 | 62 | 11.8% |
1705 | 63 | 11.4% |
1707 | 62 | 11.1% |
1708 | 65 | 10.7% |
1710 | 73 | 11.3% |
1713 | 64 | 11.1% |
Evidently overseas merchants did not always specialize in goods or markets. Less than half the Members involved in overseas trade confined their operations to a particular geographical area. Of those who did, the largest number (22 in all) traded with Spain and Portugal, for the most part importing wine. Besides Clayton and Shallett these included Sir William Hodges and Samuel Kekewich, both of whom had themselves lived in Spain for a time; Charles II’s yeoman purveyor of wines to the royal household, Sir Basil Firebrace; Samuel Shepheard I and his sons, a formidable commercial dynasty for whom, like Heathcote, the Iberian trade served as a springboard; the York alderman Edward Thompson; and the exiled Scot William Livingston. Almost as well represented (with 21 Members) was the eastern Mediterranean market, concentrated on the Levant, which was where the Dashwoods and Hernes had originally made their money. A further 21 Members were involved in transatlantic commerce, though the number may be slightly inflated by the inclusion of two families of planters (John Bromley I and his son and namesake in Virginia, Sir Peter Colleton, 2nd Bt., in the West Indies). Here the provinces dominated: the Bristolians Edward Colston II, Sir William Daines, Sir Richard Hart, Sir John Knight, and Robert Yate; John Rogers from Plymouth and John Burridge I from Lyme Regis; the Liverpudlians William Clayton, John Cleiveland, Thomas Johnson and Richard Norris; and eventually the Glasgow burgesses Daniel Campbell and Thomas Smith II. Even Robert Heysham, possibly the largest of the London merchants involved, had strong Lancastrian connexions. Smaller groups traded for slaves along the west coast of Africa, among whom we find such important mercantile figures as Sir Richard Hoare, the Huguenot Sir Bartholomew Gracedieu, and the three Jeffreys (Edward, Jeffrey and John); for Scandinavian timber and Russian tobacco in the Baltic, which particularly attracted the Scots (Alexander Duff, John Gordon, John Haldane, Sir Samuel McClellan, and Sir John Swinton) and merchants from the north-east of England (William Maister in Hull, Michael Mitford in Newcastle); and for silks and spices in the east, most notably the old East India Company hands Gabriel Roberts and Thomas Pitt I. What these sets of figures appear to show is that, as far as MPs were concerned, the older-established lines of trade, to the Iberian Peninsula and across the Mediterranean to the Levant, remained more popular. However, this may well be a statistical illusion created by the nature of the evidence in the biographies. A somewhat different picture emerges if we bring into consideration membership of the various chartered trading companies. Here by far the greatest number of MPs can be found in one of the East India Companies, either the original, ‘Old’ Company, the New Company established in 1697, or the united company created after the merger of the two rivals in 1709: 27 in the Old Company, 10 in the New, and seven more in the united Company, making 44 in all. Then came the Royal African Company with 25 members; the Levant Company with 18; the new South Sea Company, erected to profit from Britain’s acquisition of the asiento at the Treaty of Utrecht, with 14; the Russia Company with 6; and the Eastland and Hudson’s Bay Companies, each with three. The short-lived Company of Scotland also attracted three Members, two of whom (Paul Docminique and John Ward IV) were English.
In purely economic terms, the distinction between inland trade and ‘manufacture’ is also hard to draw. Particular difficulties arise over two of the more important kinds of domestic commercial operation, the beer and cloth trades, both of which involved more than simply manufacturing production. For the purposes of this survey, brewers and clothiers have been placed in the category of ‘inland trade’, alongside local merchants such as John Dibble (whose principal trade was in timber for the navy) and the property developers Nicholas Barbon, John Gilbert and Sir William Pulteney. Since there were some 14 brewers in the House (all Londoners except for Benjamin England in Great Yarmouth, Robert Bene and Thomas Palgrave in Norwich, and Thomas Ridge in Portsmouth45), and 25 clothiers of different descriptions (distinguished by a strong contingent from the major woollen-manufacturing districts of East Anglia, the west country, and Yorkshire)46 plus the army contractors James Craggs I, Richard Harnage and John London, their inclusion makes a perceptible difference to the totals involved.
By this definition, inland trade occupied 94 Members (4.7% of the House), of whom 65 confined their business activities to the domestic market, the remainder also involving themselves in overseas trade or finance. Once again, the percentage for each Parliament was higher than the overall figure, and, just as with the ‘moneyed interest’, a peak was reached in the first Parliament of 1701, followed by a modest but persistent decline.
Parliament | Number | Percentage |
1690 | 77 | 12.4% |
1695 | 70 | 12.5% |
1698 | 69 | 12.7% |
1701 | 71 | 13.4% |
1701-2 | 61 | 11.8% |
1702 | 67 | 12.1% |
1705 | 62 | 11.2% |
1707 | 62 | 10.7% |
1708 | 65 | 10.8% |
1710 | 73 | 11.3% |
1713 | 59 | 10.2 |
Of the Members involved in inland trade, 15 were first and foremost country gentlemen, for whom trading ventures were no more than a sideline; while as many as 25 were Londoners (a fair proportion of them brewers) or had strong connexions with the commercial and financial world of the capital. This would leave only 25 provincial merchants (though the figure is probably again an understatement, given that we know little of the lives of many borough politicians), each of whom was returned for his native town. In regional terms East Anglia and the west country tended to predominate: there were Robert Balch, George Crane and Roger Hoar at Bridgwater; Edward Colston I and Sir Thomas Day at Bristol; Samuel Batteley at Bury St. Edmunds; John Harris at Exeter; John Blanch, Robert Payne and John Snell II at Gloucester; Benjamin England at Great Yarmouth; John Wicker at Horsham; Edward Bangham at Leominster; Jasper Maudit at Liverpool; Thomas Bliss(e) at Maidstone; Thomas Richmond at Maldon; Robert Bene, Francis Gardiner and Thomas Palgrave at Norwich; Samuel Weston at Poole; Robert Burridge and John Worth at Tiverton; Philip Taylor at Weymouth; Owen Hughes at Beaumaris; and James Oswald for the burghs district of Dysart.
Only 40 Members were manufacturers (excluding brewers and clothiers), which amounts to slightly over 2% of the House. Four were Scots (John Cockburn, John Haldane, Hugh Montgomerie and William Morison), and 11 were also engaged in some other form of commercial activity (either overseas or inland trade). The majority seem to have combined the roles of country gentleman and industrial enterpreneur. Iron-working was the most popular, undertaken on a grand scale in Worcestershire by Sir Ambrose Crowley, and the Foley brothers (Thomas I, Paul and Philip, who inherited their father’s foundries), and in Glamorgan by Sir Humphrey Mackworth; and more modestly by Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. II, Peter Gott, John Hanbury, Thomas Renda, and Samuel Western. Other industries represented included copper-smelting (Joseph Herne, Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. I, and Sir Thomas Mackworth, 4th Bt.); glass working (Arthur Champneys, Nathaniel Herne, Thomas Neale), sugar refining (Sir Thomas Day and Sir John Knight at Bristol, William Clayton and Thomas Johnson at Liverpool), paper mills (Sir Orlando Gee, and Thomas Neale again), pottery kilns (John Lawton), and publishing (Awnsham Churchill); and several that serviced the needs of war: gunmaking (Stephen Evance) and the production of gunpowder (Morgan Randyll); and on the naval side shipbuilding (Sir Henry Johnson, with his great yards at Blackwall, and the naval architect and projector Edmund Dummer, who had started out as a master shipwright at Chatham), sailmaking (developed into a mass production at Sir Owen Buckingham’s Reading factory) and rope (John Mounsher, conveniently for the navy, at Portsmouth).
Finally, we come to the country gentlemen who mined their land, or allowed it to be mined, for coal, lead, tin, and precious metals, or drew income from their ownership of saltpans. This mining interest comprised 95 Members (4.8% of the total Membership), of whom only 11 were involved at the same time in other kinds of business venture. Coal-seams were still the most lucrative asset a landowner could possess, and many Members enjoyed substantial profits from their collieries, especially those in the far north of England: men like Sir William Bowes, William Lambton, Henry Liddell and the Vanes in County Durham; the Carrs, Delavals, Blacketts and Sir Francis Blake in Northumberland; the Musgraves and Lowthers in Cumberland. But coal also made a significant contribution to the financial well-being of the gentry of north and west Yorkshire; of Nottinghamshire and the dukeries; the Forest of Dean; and in Glamorgan, where Sir Humphrey Mackworth and Thomas Mansel II were not only rivals in politics but in coal production. Tin was still of course a staple of the Cornish economy, as was salt manufacture in Worcestershire and Cheshire, while copper, lead, alum, and occasionally the mirage of silver kept up the incomes and spirits of many a country squire in a remote and mountainous demesne, from the Pryses in Cardiganshire to the Erskines in Clackmannan (though only seven Members belonged to the Mines Adventurers’ Company).47
Whether Members with no involvement in commerce or industry other than the possession and exploitation of mineral resources on their property ought properly to be classified as ‘businessmen’, or should be left among the ‘landed interest’, must be open to question. If we subtract this number (84 in all), leaving in the ‘business’ category only financiers, overseas and inland traders, and manufacturers, we may be able to trace the contours of the ‘business’ interest in the House more precisely. The total number of ‘businessmen’ now stands at 317 (16% of the Membership). Plotting the representation chronologically also discloses a degree of variation: higher percentages between 1695 and 1701, and again from 1705 through to 1715.
| Parliament | Number in business | Percentage |
1690 | 100 | 16.1% |
1695 | 103 | 18.4% |
1698 | 95 | 17.4% |
Feb. 1701 | 91 | 17.1% |
Dec. 1701 | 80 | 15.5% |
1702 | 83 | 14.9% |
1705 | 88 | 15.9% |
1707 | 93 | 16.1% |
1708 | 96 | 16.0% |
1710 | 105 | 16.3% |
1713 | 92 | 15.9% |
In their political preferences, English and Welsh Members with `business’ interests were evenly divided between the two parties, the Tories enjoying a narrow advantage, but with a large minority of unclassified Members (or who changed their party allegiance during the period).
The figures were:
Tory | 163 |
Whig | 152 |
Unclassified (or changing allegiance) | 59 |
The proportions remain much the same when we exclude those landed gentlemen whose sole `business’ interest was in mining:
Tory | 129 |
Whig | 121 |
Unclassified (or changing allegiance) | 47 |
Taken Parliament by Parliament, the analysis shows no significant change over time, the positions of the parties reflecting their general standing after each election, though the numerical strength of Tory ‘businessmen’ in the last two Parliaments of Queen Anne’s reign is certainly striking.
All Members active in ‘business’(England and Wales only):
Parliament | Tory | Whig | Unclassified (or changed allegiance) |
1690 | 66 | 49 | 16 |
1695 | 50 | 57 | 17 |
1698 | 46 | 48 | 25 |
1701 | 55 | 45 | 17 |
1701-2 | 45 | 52 | 15 |
1702 | 64 | 46 | 7 |
1705/7 | 55 | 55 | 10 |
1708 | 50 | 56 | 4 |
1710 | 74 | 37 | 6 |
1713 | 65 | 30 | 5 |
Excluding those landowners involved only in mining enterprises:
Parliament | Tory | Whig | Unclassified (or changed allegiance) |
1690 | 47 | 40 | 13 |
1695 | 39 | 39 | 13 |
1698 | 31 | 43 | 21 |
1701 | 37 | 40 | 14 |
1701-2 | 30 | 40 | 10 |
1702 | 45 | 34 | 4 |
1705/7 | 41 | 42 | 5 |
1708 | 39 | 45 | 1 |
1710 | 61 | 32 | 4 |
1713 | 52 | 24 | 4 |
Even more remarkable is the broad equality between the two parties among those English and Welsh Members who may be assigned to the ‘moneyed interest’ (as defined here, those participating in banking and finance, and overseas trade), given the popular assumption, in contemporary political polemic, that ‘moneyed men’ were predominantly Whig.48 Even those elected for the first time in this period were evenly divided, with 59 Whigs, 58 Tories, and 24 either doubtful or inconsistent in their party loyalties. Moreover, a chronological analysis shows that the Tory element was actually increasing. Following a sudden and inexplicable shift towards the Whigs in the second Parliament of 1701, not only was parity immediately restored at the general election of 1702, but the Tories reinforced their position in succeeding Parliaments, achieving a majority of ‘moneyed men’ in the House even in the Whiggish Parliament of 1708.
Parliament | Tory | Whig | Unclassified |
1690 | 37 | 29 | 11 |
1695 | 28 | 35 | 7 |
1698 | 28 | 28 | 13 |
1701 | 31 | 30 | 10 |
1701-2 | 22 | 33 | 6 |
1702 | 34 | 29 | 4 |
1705/7 | 30 | 28 | 4 |
1708 | 30 | 27 | 1 |
1710 | 42 | 23 | 4 |
1713 | 33 | 19 | 4 |
Religion
All except a small minority of English and Welsh Members belonged to the Established Church. Only 39 can be identified with any degree of certainty as Protestant Dissenters,49 and very few of those on their own admission. Seldom if ever is the evidence precise enough to enable us to indicate a regular mode of worship. Exceptional cases would include two young enthusiasts from old puritan families, Grey Neville and Edward Harley, the former irreverently nicknamed ‘the bishop’ because of his consuming interest in theological matters, the latter briefly committed, as a young man, to the life of a wandering missionary in ‘the dark corners of the land’, until recalled to his secular duties by his rather more worldly father. For the rest we have been obliged to rely upon the observations of contemporaries, and other such circumstantial evidence. Of these 39 Members, the largest group (at least 22) were the Presbyterians, including a number of ‘moderate’ Presbyterians of pre-Revolution stock, like the Foleys and Harleys, Hugh Boscawen I, Sir Walter St. John, 3rd Bt., John Swinfen and John White, who followed Richard Baxter’s comprehensionist approach to church government, accepting with regret their exclusion from the restored Church of England, and whose families eventually conformed (their descendants, as with the Foleys and Harleys, sometimes transmuting into High Churchmen). Five Members attended Independent congregations, including Grey Neville (after a flirtation with conventional Presbyterianism); one was a Baptist (the London brewer and East India Company director Gregory Page); and one a Quaker, albeit a late convert at the close of his parliamentary career (Edmund Waller, son of the poet and already something of an eccentric, who in December 1697, in what was to be his last session as an MP, announced his admission to the Society of Friends, ‘being convinced of the innocency and agreeableness of their principles and practices to the Holy Scriptures and the civil government’). The remaining 10 cannot be assigned to any particular denomination, although it is likely (given the balance between the different denominations among those whose affiliation may be satisfactorily demonstrated) that they were for the most part Presbyterians. The evidence of the biographies indicates a remarkably high incidence of outward conformity, even among these demonstrable Dissenters. As many as 28 can be shown to have attended services in the established church as well as in their own places of worship, thereby earning the detestation of High Churchmen as `occasional conformists’.
A further 31 Members were probably Protestant Dissenters, though the evidence is not quite strong enough to permit a firm identification.50 Some had certainly been Dissenters in the past: the Quaker John Archdale, for example; Joseph Paice, the offspring of Dissenting parents who in his will left £10 to the pastor of the Dissenting congregation near his home at Clapham in Surrey; and the London merchant George Boddington, whose brief `autobiography’ recalled his spiritual awakening at the time of the great plague, and subsequent attendance at various Independent congregations in the City. Others were closely associated with Nonconformist political interests, in the manner of Samuel Ogle, Member for Berwick, who in his other capacity as an Irish revenue commissioner sought to assist Ulster Presbyterians in their solicitations against the maintenance of the ‘Test clause’ in the Irish Popery Act of 1704; or Sir William Cowper, 2nd Bt., whose family’s political interest at Hertford was based in part on the support of the large Dissenting element in the borough’s freeman electorate. Again, the largest individual group were Presbyterians, a dozen in all, with a strong representation of the ‘moderate’ wing of the Presbyterian church (in this case the Abneys, Ashursts, Sir John Carew, 3rd Bt., and Richard Hampden I) which was already demonstrating conformist tendencies. There was one Independent (Boddington); one Baptist (Sir Owen Buckingham, the sail-cloth manufacturer); one Quaker (Archdale); and 16 whose denomination cannot be established, but who are again most likely to have been Presbyterians. Among these 31 ‘probable’ Dissenters, occasional conformity was even more widespread than among those whose Dissenting credentials are undeniable, only the Quaker Archdale not being recorded as an attender at his parish church.
Finally, there are some 96 Members connected in some way with Nonconformity (either personally or through their parents or wives), who may for that reason be suspected, if not of belonging to a Nonconformist congregation, at least of entertaining Dissenting sympathies.51 The evidence, however, varies greatly in quality, and in some cases an inference of Nonconformist tendencies rests on little more than a record of parental radicalism during the Civil War or participation in government under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Of the ‘possible’ Dissenters, 21 had connexions with Presbyterian congregations; one (the veteran Welsh Exclusionist, Bussy Mansel) had earlier been an Independent; two may have been Baptists (the clothier Josiah Diston, and Benjamin Overton, son of the Roundhead colonel and Fifth Monarchist Robert Overton†); while Admiral Sir Charles Wager had been brought up by a Quaker stepfather. The remaining 71 Members cannot be classified in any way by denomination, though it seems reasonable to assume that Presbyterianism accounted for most.
In sum, therefore, there are 166 English and Welsh Members who at some point in this period were either outright Nonconformists or occasional conformists, or who retained some sympathy for, and fixed association with, Dissent as a political cause.
Presb. | Ind. | Baptist | Quaker | No denom- ination | Total | |
Identifiable Dissenters | 22 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 10 | 39 |
Probable Dissenters | 12 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 16 | 31 |
Possible Dissenters | 21 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 71 | 96 |
Total | 55 | 7 | 4 | 3 | 97 | 166 |
While the element of uncertainty in the identification of Protestant Dissenters in this period cannot be over-emphasized, further analysis of these cohorts—of ‘identifiable’, ‘probable’ and ‘possible Dissenters’—may still be of some value, in establishing general answers to questions which have exercised historians: relating to the size of the Dissenting interest within the House of Commons across the period; the party-political disposition of Dissenting Members; their involvement in trade and manufacture; and their reliance on borough seats, particularly those urban constituencies where their co-religionists formed a substantial element of the electorate.
Before examining the numbers of Dissenters within each Parliament, it may be useful to recall the proportion of Presbyterian and Independent Members stated to have been in the House in the period covered by the preceding section of this History (including those whose identification was only ‘probable’, and those described as ‘Presbyterians and Independents who conformed’).52
Parl. | Identifiable Presbyterians & Independents (%) | Probable Presbyterians & Independents (%) | Presbyterians & Independents who conformed (%) | Total (%) |
1660 | 14% | 10% | 28% | 52% |
1661-78 | 3% | 4% | 13% | 20% |
1679 (Mar.) | 6% | 6% | 14% | 26% |
1679 (Oct.) | 6% | 8% | 14% | 28% |
1681 | 6% | 8% | 13% | 27% |
1685 | 0% | 2% | 2% | 4% |
1689 | 4% | 6% | 8% | 18% |
What is immediately apparent from a comparison of the figures for the Parliaments of 1690-1715 is the steady decline in the number of Members with any claim to be included in the Dissenting interest—a trend discernible as early as the first general election in this period, and continuing, despite a temporary revival in the more Whiggish Parliaments of 1705-10, down to a low point of under 5% after the 1713 election, less than half the percentage recorded in 1690.
Parl. | Identifiable Dissenters | Probable Dissenters | Possible Dissenters | Total Dissenters | Percentage of Members |
1690 | 19 | 14 | 37 | 70 | 11.3% |
1695 | 15 | 12 | 38 | 65 | 11.6% |
1698 | 12 | 13 | 35 | 60 | 11.0% |
1701 | 12 | 8 | 33 | 53 | 10.0% |
1701-2 | 8 | 11 | 23 | 52 | 10.2% |
1702 | 7 | 9 | 25 | 41 | 7.4% |
1705/7 | 7 | 6 | 33 | 44 | 8.0% |
1708 | 9 | 3 | 37 | 49 | 8.2% |
1710 | 6 | 4 | 24 | 34 | 5.3% |
1713 | 2 | 3 | 21 | 26 | 4.5% |
Part of the explanation may well lie in the significant numbers of ‘moderate’ or ‘conforming’ Presbyterians to be found in the early Parliaments of William III’s reign. With generational change came in due course outright conformity, and as the remaining veterans of the Commonwealth and Protectorate Parliaments died off (men like Sir John Maynard and Sir Edward Harley) their descendants revealed themselves as Church of England men, even (in the case of the Cabinet colleagues Robert Harley and Henry St. John II) as outright Tories. Perhaps the most telling statistic is the drop in the numbers of ‘identifiable Dissenters’, from 19 in 1690 down to only two in the Parliament of 1713. These last were John London, a Whig merchant returned for the notoriously Dissenter-infested borough of Wilton, and ‘Auditor’ Edward Harley, and in any case Harley would soon be joining the rest of his family in the ranks of the Churchmen, resorting to the same abusive political language in relation to Nonconformity as the High Tories habitually employed, as he denounced his electoral opponents in Leominster as ‘fanatics’.53
Predictably, an analysis of the party-political allegiances of Dissenting Members shows an overwhelming bias towards the Whigs. Overall, 138 of the 166 Members who have been included in the Dissenting interest can be shown to have voted consistently Whig throughout this period. A further 17 are unclassifiable in party terms, while 8 more changed their party affiliation (seven of them ‘conforming Presbyterians’, moving away from Whiggery to a Country position and ultimately to Toryism).54 This leaves only three who acted consistently with the Tories: Edmund Boulter, MP for Boston in the two Parliaments of 1698 and February 1701, about whose personal religious beliefs little is known, but whose brother-in-law and business partner were both Dissenters; the brewer Felix Calvert, returned for Reading in the 1713 election, whose father may have been a Dissenter, to judge from the phraseology used in the preamble to his will; and Thomas Carr, alderman of Chichester and Member for the borough only in the 1708 Parliament, whose connexions with Dissent, again through his father, are even more conjectural. The separate figures for each category of`Dissenter’ are as follows:
Consistently Whig | Consistently Tory | Unclassified(or changing allegiance) | |
Identifiable Dissenters | 31 | 0 | 8 |
Probable Dissenters | 28 | 0 | 3 |
Possible Dissenters | 79 | 3 | 14 |
By contrast, the close relationship that is often assumed to have existed between Protestant Dissent and ‘business’ (and which Tory polemicists like Charles Davenant* and Jonathan Swift did much to promote by demonizing the stereotype of the Dissenting merchant or City financier) is not entirely borne out by an analysis of the careers of Nonconformist (or reputedly Nonconformist) Members. The percentage active in trade or manufacture is much the same as the percentage for the Membership of the House of Commons as a whole in this period. Among the cohort of 166 Dissenters, as defined above, no more than 60 (that is to say a little over 36%) can be shown to have participated in a ‘business’ enterprise of some kind or another, and eight of these were country gentlemen whose only income outside rental or agricultural returns, or the profits of government office, came from the exploitation of the mineral resources on their estates. Although only three Dissenters may be described as financiers (Sir Robert Clayton, Sir Henry Furnese and Sir Thomas Mompesson), there were as many as 40 overseas traders, who would also have been allotted by contemporaries to the ‘moneyed interest’.55 They included a number of important City figures—(Sir) Gilbert Heathcote and his business partner Arthur Shallett, John Eyles, Nathaniel Gould, John `Vulture’ Hopkins, Samuel Shepheard I, and various Abneys, Ashursts, and Papillons—but also a fair sprinkling of provincial figures—General John Disbrowe’s son-in-law, John Burton, in Great Yarmouth; the Burridges in Lyme Regis; the Exeter clothier John Elwill; the old Cromwellian Samuel Foote at nearby Tiverton; and the Bristolian Robert Yate. Six were inland traders: the brewers Felix Calvert, John Cholmley and Thomas Ridge; the publisher Awnsham Churchill; the clothier Josiah Diston; and the only Welshman in the list, the Anglesey attorney and local entrepreneur Owen Hughes. Finally there were five manufacturers; Edward Brent in shipbuilding; Sir Owen Buckingham with his great sail-cloth manufactory in Reading; Philip and Thomas (I) Foley, who had inherited shares in their father’s ironworks; and Francis Pengelly, attorney to the Duchy of Cornwall, who, among other interests, had inherited a thriving brickworks near Plymouth, from which he supplied the local dockyard.
The presence of a substantial number of ‘mere’ country gentlemen of a Nonconformist bent is also borne out by a consideration of the type of constituencies represented. Just over four fifths of the Dissenting Members, amounting to some 133 in all, were only elected in borough constituencies; but 25 held both county and borough seats at some point during their careers, and as many as eight Members were only ever returned as knights of the shire (though it has to be admitted that in seven out of the eight cases the identification of the Member concerned as a Dissenter is only conjectural,56 the solitary exception being John White, the undeniably Presbyterian MP for Nottinghamshire from the first Exclusion Parliament until 1698).
Given that every Member was obliged to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy before taking his seat, we should not expect to find any Roman Catholics in the House in this period, but in fact one may have slipped through the net, in the person of the army contractor Richard Harnage, who sat for Bishop’s Castle from 1708 until his death in 1719. Harnage certainly came from a devout Catholic family: his father and elder brother were convicted recusants; two other brothers were Catholic priests; and one of his sisters became a nun. At some point he may well have conformed, but a petition against his election in 1713 alleged that he had not ‘taken the oath of qualification’ when it had been put to him at the poll. Two other Members had converted to Protestantism some time before their return: the Irish peer Lord Bellew, whose change of religion, although it served a very secular purpose in securing possession of his ancestral estates, had occurred well in advance of his electionand seems at any rate to have been sincere enough for him to have become a staunch Whig; and Benedict Leonard Calvert, a younger son of the 3rd Baron Baltimore, and altogether a considerable opportunist, who conformed to the Church of England shortly before his successful candidature for Harwich in 1714.
Of course, those who were loyal, or at least unequivocally conforming, members of the Church of England, and who in every Parliament made up the vast majority of the Membership of the House, differed in the degree of seriousness with which they practised their religion. To enrol with the Tories and proclaim oneself a supporter of the ‘Church interest’ was no guarantee of pious churchmanship. ‘These men that cloak themselves with a pretence of defending the church are men that never go to church’, complained the Whig Gervase Scrope (doubtless thinking of his disreputable Shropshire connexion Richard (‘Black Dick’) Cresswell), ‘but are for the most part atheists and libertines’.57 Of the veteran Tory leader Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt., it was wittily remarked that he was not so much a pillar of the Established Church as a buttress, since he spent so little time inside its walls. In the next generation Henry St. John II was not only denounced as a libertine but a sceptic, who came ultimately to profess in private a kind of deist religion, ‘a harmless rationalism, a belief in a Supreme Being, based on the evidence of natural law’.58 Nor was he the only freethinker in the House: Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 1st Bt., brother of the more notorious Charles, also championed reason above superstition in his collected philosophical Essays, which appeared in print in 1691;and the satirical playwright and Treasury officer Sir Robert Howard published in 1694 a History of Religion which, although primarily an anti-Catholic tract, aroused the wrath of the clergy by its advocacy of the individual’s own reason as the best guide in spiritual matters, and provoked Francis Atterbury to denounce Howard as a ‘scorner’. Then there were the stridently anticlerical ‘commonwealth men’, Hon. Anthony Ashley (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), Robert Molesworth, and Walter Moyle (of whom his kinsman Dean Prideaux of Norwich wrote, ‘as to his religion, I believe as yet he hath some, and as the world now goes, few gentlemen really have, and I believe a libertine humour is in the bottom of it’);and, less well known to contemporaries, the parliamentary diarist Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt., whose published and unpublished writings reveal a hearty contempt for ‘priestcraft’ in all its forms, and a belief in the power of the individual’s reason to discover religious truth (though in his case as applied to Scripture).59
At the other extreme were those Members who wore their piety on their sleeve. The most publicly visible were those who associated themselves with evangelical enterprises like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.); who spent their money in philanthropic enterprises of a Christian nature, of which the most fashionable was undoubtedly the foundation of charity schools; or who expended their energies in promoting, in Parliament, on the commission of the peace, or through the efforts of the so-called ‘societies for the reformation of manners’ a programme for the reformation and regeneration of society, in order to prevent what they saw as an impending providential judgment on the moral dereliction of the English people. Occasionally evangelical and moral zealots combined to bring forward a distinctively ‘reforming’ programme in the Commons, including bills against profane swearing, duelling, gaming, and even adultery; while more generally they constituted a distinct element within the Country opposition, condemning the political corruption of the Court on moral rather than libertarian grounds.60 Included in their ranks were a number of Protestant Dissenters, or Dissenting sympathisers, but we may also find such staunch Churchmen as Maynard Colchester and Sir Humphrey Mackworth, two of the founders of the S.P.C.K.; later recruits to the society like William Farrer, the Whig Member for Bedford, and the Tory Lord Digby, pupil, friend, and patron of the nonjurors Kettlewell and Bray, who throughout his life abided by the advice he gave to others, to keep ‘always a sense of religion in your thoughts’; the lawyer John Comyns, who drafted the charter of the S.P.G.; the Yorkshire baronet Sir William Hustler, the Irish judge Gilbert Dolben, and the eminent west-country philanthropist Edward Colston I, all keenly interested in the establishment and maintenance of Anglican charity schools; supporters of the local societies for the reformation of manners, who included the Bristol alderman Sir Thomas Day; and active ‘reforming’ justices of the peace, of the calibre of William Brockman in Kent, John Hutton II in Yorkshire, and even Speaker William Bromley (II) in Warwickshire. Although this list contains a number of prominent High Tories—Bromley, Comyns, Digby, Dolben—and others could be added, it also features moderate Tories, and even Whigs like Hustler and Day. Just as in the Church itself the devout were not to be found all on one side, so among laymen Anglican piety was far from being a preserve of the Tory party, let alone the high-flyers on the Tory side. The personal religiosity of Secretary of State Sir William Trumbull, evident in his voluminous personal archive, which includes many meditations, prayers and exercises in self-examination, did not prevent him from abandoning his former Tory allies to serve with a Whig administration under King William, although it must be added that Trumbull’s Churchmanship was of a latitudinarian nature, which in any case would not have resided easily with those who espoused a narrowly exclusive version of ecclesiastical politics. Nor, it must be said, was a deep personal interest in religious matters always manifested in public exhibitions of enthusiasm. Private archives show that religious impulses could disturb the thoughts of even the most worldly politician. The notorious Restoration rake, Sir Charles Sedley, once a boon companion to the poet Lord Rochester in his blasphemous excesses, seems to have undergone a religious reawakening towards the end of his life, if astonished contemporaries are to be believed (‘and in the arms of mother Church at last, more than atones for all his wanderings past’).61 A different, and altogether more puzzling, case is that of the egregious James Brydges, perhaps the most disreputable of all government servants in this period, whose prolonged occupation of the post of paymaster-general made his name a byword for corruption. Brydges was not brought to his senses from a life of debauchery by intimations of mortality; rather, throughout adulthood he seems to have been able to confine in separate mental compartments his spiritual yearnings and material satisfactions, and from the evidence of his private papers appears as a regular churchgoer with a genuine if entirely unexpected interest in scriptural study.
In Scotland the Established Church was Presbyterian, as were most of the Members of Parliament, but the number of Episcopalians was not insubstantial: 34 in all, out of 108 Scottish Members in the period 1707-15 (that is to say, those Members who sat for Scottish constituencies, together with James Johnston, George Hay (Lord Dupplin) and Hon. William Kerr, who sat for constituencies in England), slightly over 30%. Naturally enough, some Members were more committed to the Episcopalian cause than others. While the emigré Aberdeen merchant William Livingston actually abandoned his Episcopalian allegiance and conformed to the Church of Scotland, his opponent in the Aberdeen burghs district in 1710, James Scott I of Logie, sometime provost of Montrose, orchestrated in 1712 a violent opposition to his local provincial synod, for its politically motivated proclamation of a fast (possibly in response to the passage of the Scottish Toleration Act). Having publicly burnt the act of proclamation in full view of the Kirk congregation at the market cross in Montrose on the day of the fast, he afterwards instituted proceedings against Presbyterian ministers and congregations. Less extreme, but still resolute in defence of their beliefs, were men like Sir Alexander Cumming, 1st Bt., of Culter in Aberdeenshire, who made a point of disposing of such ecclesiastical patronage as he controlled for the benefit of dispossessed Episcopalian clergy; or the Dundee merchant George Yeaman, who took up the case of an Episcopalian congregation in his native town, which had been prosecuted by the local presbytery for ‘possessing a place ... for a meeting-house’.
During the 1710 Parliament Cumming and Yeaman, together with other committed Episcopalians, of whom the most prominent were Sir Alexander Areskine, 3rd Bt., (the Lord Lyon), John Carnegie of Boysack, George Lockhart of Carnwath, and Lord Stormont’s son, the Hon. James Murray, pushed through not only a Toleration Act, but further legislation to restore to lay patrons their rights of appointment to church livings, and also to restore the traditional ‘Yule vacance’ (Christmas holiday). They were able to do this principally because of the large Tory majority in the House as a whole. None the less, the campaign on behalf of the Episcopalian minority in Scotland had been effectively kick-started in the Commons by a sharp increase at the 1710 general election in the ‘Tory’ or Episcopalian element in the Scottish representation. A breakdown of the percentage of Episcopalian members among those returned for Scottish constituencies shows a sudden and dramatic rise in 1710, which began to taper off again in 1713, as the zenith of Scottish Toryism rapidly passed.
Parl. | Episcopalians | Percentage of Scottish Members |
1707 | 12 | 26.6% |
1708 | 9 | 17.6% |
1710 | 24 | 47.1% |
1713 | 13 | 29.5% |
Reasons for going into Parliament
Why men should have wished to enter the House of Commons is one of the most obvious questions for a parliamentary historian to ask. It was, indeed, the very first question posed and answered by Sir Lewis Namier in his classic work, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of King George III (1929).62 For this purpose, Namier classified Members under eight headings: the ‘inevitable Parliament-men’, who were predestined to occupy seats in the House; country gentlemen, looking for ‘honour with ease’; the ‘politicians’ taking their places on the Treasury bench; the ‘social climbers’ for whom Parliament offered a sure avenue to a coronet; ‘placemen and purveyors of favours’ seeking ‘private and pecuniary’ rewards; merchants and bankers concerned with ‘contracts, remittances, and loans’; and finally, those who saw in Membership of Parliament immunity from arrest, ‘robbers, muddlers, bastards, and bankrupts’.
With one major exception, the answers given in this survey are broadly the same as those suggested by Namier. The exception is the motive actually proclaimed by most candidates, in their public pronouncements and, more often than not, in their private correspondence: the desire to serve the public, either the general good of the realm, or the particular interests of their constituents; or both. This was the common language of parliamentary candidates, employed when canvassing voters, acknowledging the assistance of patrons, or explaining to friends a decision to stand for election. It was also customary for a candidate to declare that he was only putting up at the behest of his putative constituents, and sometimes at their urgent request;63 the usual story was one of modest reluctance, even better judgment, eventually overcome by civic virtue. As the London publisher, Awnsham Churchill*, wrote in 1705 to the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, to explain his candidature in one of Shaftesbury’s boroughs,
I am infinitely obliged that your lordship will approve of my intentions to appear at Dorchester. I have had long experience of your good opinion of, and goodness towards, me. It was against my own judgment and inclination, especially at this time, to appear, and it had been better on all accounts that some of the gentlemen about Dorchester would have been persuaded, for alterations must be, and I hope I shall in a little time have the honour of satisfying your lordship that I intended the service of my country and county in what I have done ...64
How much will be made of such claims depends very much on the assumptions about moral integrity and psychology made by the individual reader. In many cases, no doubt, Namier’s cynicism would be supported by circumstantial evidence, supplied from the later career of the would-be Member whose ultimately shallow pretensions to public spirit had been carefully enshrined in his letters of application to voters and patrons, and the self-important reflections on political affairs which he communicated to his friends. But in a period in which the political virtue of Members of Parliament was taken very seriously, as constituting an essential check upon the ‘corruption’ of the constitution, and a security against tyranny, it would be unwise to discount their force entirely. Especially for the Country Whigs, perhaps, ‘civic virtue’ in defence of liberty, both at home and abroad, was a guiding principle, even if occasionally diluted by ambition. There were also those in both parties who saw in parliamentary legislation an instrument for renovating the moral fabric of society: Sir Edward Harley, the old Presbyterian, who successfully dissuaded his son Edward from an evangelical vocation with the argument that ‘magistracy’, was as much a godly calling as ‘ministry’; Robert Yate, the Bristol merchant, who in congratulating Harley* on his election for Herefordshire in 1693 observed that, if there were more such ‘honest and fit men’ at Westminster ‘we might hope God would give a blessing to the public affairs, which seem now to labour under his displeasure’; ‘the good Lord Digby’ (William), who endeavoured to keep ‘always a sense of religion in [his] thoughts’; and Francis Barrell, the High Tory (yet theologically Calvinist) recorder of Rochester, who confided the following prayer to his diary at his election in 1702,
O Lord, I beseech you, enable me by Thy grace faithfully to discharge this trust to the advancement of Thy glory, the safety, honour and welfare of my King and country, and ... above all that it may not be prejudicial to me in that great affair of my life, the making my calling and election to a betterworld sure ...65
Similarly, it was also natural, in a period of intense political conflict, to wish to stand for Parliament in order to promote or defend the cause of one’s own party, rather than necessarily for private gain. This factional loyalty was of course bound up with wider questions of principle. Almost all Whigs would have professed agreement with Lord Shaftesbury, who characterized the general election of 1702 as a contest between Jacobites and Williamites, between the friends of the exiled King and ‘those that were friends of the late government, and lovers of the deliverance and deliverer’.66 On the other side, many Tories were undoubtedly prompted to seek entry into the Commons by their anxiety for the maintenance of the Established Church against the threat posed by Whigs and Dissenters. Lord Digby, writing in 1690 to his fellow High Churchman Lord Weymouth (Thomas Thynne*), forcefully expressed the ‘zeal I have to see the next H[ouse] of C[ommons] well filled’ with men of Tory principles; while the ’Sacheverellite’ agitation of 1710 drew in many Tory squires in defence of the Church.67
Leaving aside those who decided to become parliamentary candidates for reasons of constitutional principle or partisan bigotry, either to serve the public or their party, and not in the first instance only themselves or their dependants, we find the same broad types whose existence (for a much later period) was recognized by Namier. There were those to whom the acquisition of a seat in Parliament was as natural as matriculation at university or admission to an inn of court. The experience of sitting in the House of Commons gave the finishing touches to the education of a gentleman; indeed, one observer described it simply as ‘the school’.68 The sons of the aristocracy expected to be elected to Parliament, even if, in due course they would assume their inherited place in the Upper House. The wealthier landed proprietors also looked upon entry to the Commons as their birthright, particularly the representation of their own counties, for which gentlemen considered that they, and they alone, were properly qualified. As James Lowther* observed, ‘country gentlemen are fitter to be knights of the shire’ than, for example, army officers and other such social undesirables.69 The difficulty was, of course, the competition; for ‘it is a governing principle in everybody, to choose to represent county rather than a private borough’,70 and more county families entertained parliamentary aspirations than could be accommodated with county seats.
The material advantages to be gained from parliamentary Membership are too well known to require cataloguing here. A good many Members undoubtedly went into the House in hopes of obtaining some pecuniary reward from ministers, either in recognition of their potential usefulness, in support of government, or their actual effectiveness in opposition. The emergence of a class of ‘professional’ politicians who made their careers entirely through their performances in the House of Commons, was a natural consequence of the establishment of regular and long-lasting Parliaments after the Glorious Revolution. A substantial proportion consisted of lawyers, for whom success in the Commons became a recognised avenue to the most distinguished preferments. Sir John Somers, William Cowper, (Sir) Simon Harcourt, Peter King, and Sir Thomas Parker all made the ascent to the greatest legal office in the land, that of Lord Chancellor, from beginnings on the back benches. But ambition did not have to reach so high. Not everyone wished to be Lord Chancellor, or for that matter a Privy Councillor or a Cabinet minister. Most had less exalted objectives. Sir Stafford Fairborne, for example, hoped merely for a land office to supplement his admiral’s pay, in the difficult financial circumstances in which he found himself in 1705, and therefore put up at Rochester in general election of that year. Following his return, he was given a place on the Admiralty Council. The Duke of Ormond’s military secretary, Henry Watkins, stood for the first time in the general election of 1713, after some years’ drudgery in minor government offices; presumably he saw the possession of a vote in the House of Commons as likely to give him sufficient leverage with Lord Treasurer Oxford (Robert Harley*) to encourage Oxford to make good his many promises of more lucrative and less strenuous employment. Many and various, of course, were the returns which government service might offer; not just offices, or even pensions, but favourable contracts to businessmen, especially those involved in supplying the war effort, like the timber merchant John Dibble or the ropemaker John Mounsher, and the opportunity (all the more valuable in the volatile money markets in this period) of advancing funds to the Treasury at favourable rates of interest.
Then there are those, Namier’s ‘social climbers’, in search, not of monetary gain but of enhanced social status. As we have already seen, in a previous section, as many as 126 Members acquired peerage titles in this period: 99 of these English titles, 21 Irish, and 6 Scottish.71 Others made the most of their parliamentary careers to secure promotion within the aristocracy, like Thomas Wharton, whose father was a baron but who passed on a marquessate to his son, or James Brydges, who in his own person took the Chandos peerage from a barony to a dukedom. A further 51 Members were created baronets, and 224 were knighted. Not all these titles came directly as a result of parliamentary docility, or mischief-making. This would be especially true of the great London merchants who form a substantial percentage of the new parliamentary knights in this period, and whose acquisition of a title did not necessarily derive from their election to the Commons but may simply have been a reflection of their standing in the City and perhaps also their financial importance to government. Some had indeed been knighted before ever appearing in Parliament, most frequently on the presentation of a loyal address to the monarch from the corporation of London, occasions on which it was customary to honour the presenter.
A few Members had very much more specific objectives in mind when putting themselves forward for election. The future lord chancellor of Ireland, Paul Methuen*, was advised to seek a seat in 1690 on the grounds that Membership of the House would assist his attempts to secure from government the arrears of salary due to his father. Sir Christopher Wren resumed his parliamentary career after the Glorious Revolution with the probable aim of placing himself in a position to influence decisions over the planning and financing of the reconstruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral and other great architectural projects. The eagerness of Sir Charles Barrington, 5th Bt., to enter Parliament in 1694 may have been owing to a wish to safeguard the passage during the current session of a bill enabling him to settle a jointure on his first wife. Sir Cleave More, 2nd Bt, seems to have been motivated principally, if not solely, by his desire to see through the House a bill to establish a waterworks in Liverpool, drawn from the ‘springs’ on his own estates. The West Indian William Wheeler exploited his family interest at Haverfordwest in 1701 in order to give himself a springboard from which to mount (on behalf of his fellow planters) a parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the governor of Barbados. A squadron of eight Members came into the Commons at the first general election of 1701 as, in effect, representatives and parliamentary agents of the New East India Company, as a result of an electoral campaign conducted by Samuel Shepheard I* and others in venal boroughs the length and breadth of England: Shepheard himself, his sons Francis and Samuel II, William Cotesworth, Nathaniel Gould, Joseph Martin, John Ward II, and Sir William Withers. There were also three examples of Members who, in seeking election, were serving not their own purposes but the purposes of others: Samuel Batteley, the Bury St. Edmunds apothecary, who in 1712 agreed to be drafted into a vacancy in the borough simply to keep the seat free until such time as his patron Lord Hervey’s (John*) eldest son, Carr*, should return from the Grand Tour; the King’s Lynn merchant, John Turner, who performed similar seat-warming duties for Robert Walpole II*, during Walpole’s short sentence of expulsion from the House in 1712-13; and Sir Nicholas Pelham, who sat briefly for a succession of family boroughs in Sussex, just to guard against any intrusion by non-Pelhams.
A minority saw the prime benefit of their election to the Commons as the acquisition of legal immunity. In most cases these Members were making use of parliamentary privilege to evade the consequences of financial mismanagement (either their own or that of their parents). Direct and absolute proof is seldom attainable, but it seems likely (often from circumstantial evidence) that the following Members sought entry to the House in order to forestall legal proceedings for the recovery of debts: Sir Richard Allin, 1st Bt., Robert Apreece, John Asgill, John Backwell, Theodore Bathurst, Edmund Boulter, Sir William Gostwick, 4th Bt., Hon. Ralph Grey, Arthur Shallett, Thomas Tonkin, Sir Edward Turnor, Michael Wicks, and Lewis Wogan. In Tonkin’s case insult was added to injury, since the candidate he defeated at Helston in 1714 was none other than Samuel Enys, Tonkin’s principal creditor and the plaintiff in the lawsuit that the election effectively stopped. Wicks differed from the others in that his creditor was government (he had defaulted on payments to the crown as receiver of plantation duties), while Asgill was seeking protection from investors in the failed land bank. The bleakness of the alternative is revealed in the fate of the Gloucestershire baronet Sir Ralph Dutton, driven to dwell in obscurity in Dublin to avoid the attentions of his creditors; and, more dramatically still, the Household official Philip Bickerstaffe, who gave up his place as knight of the shire for Northumberland at the general election of 1698, was promptly seized by bailiffs for unpaid debts, and spent the rest of his days in the Fleet prison.72
In a further four examples, Members were evidently concerned to obtain privilege for fear of defeat in the civil courts. Henry Gorges first stood for Parliament in 1698 in response to a lawsuit mounted against him by his wife’s cousin for possession of her father’s estate, having already tried and failed to put off the hearing of the case by various stratagems. Similar stories may be told of the incurably litigious Nottinghamshire gentleman, Sir Matthew Jenison; of Sir Henry Oxenden, 4th Bt., who became embroiled in a number of Chancery suits over the personal estate bequeathed to him in his uncle’s will; and of the Herefordshire squire John Prise, whose estate had been devastated as a consequence of his family’s misplaced (and unrequited) loyalty to the Stuarts, and who faced a battery of legal cases in consequence. The deplorable Sir Hopton Williams, 3rd Bt., may well have put up for knight of the shire in Monmouthshire in 1705 for no more elevated reason than to gain privilege in the divorce case his wronged wife had initiated in order to obtain for herself the right to retain the few possessions she had acquired since his desertion. However, the most unusual example of a Member entering Parliament with legal immunity as his chief ambition was probably the future Jacobite William Shippen, in whose predicament money played little part. A sharp observer of the political scene, and possessed of considerable literary talent, Shippen made his first steps in public life not as a politician, but as a writer. He had published, anonymously, a number of vicious satires on the Whig governments of William’s reign, and the ‘moderate’ policies of Lord Treasurer Godolphin (Sidney†) before eventually suffering arrest in 1706 on a secretary’s warrant. Although the prosecution was dropped, Shippen was sufficiently alarmed to persuade his friend Lord Windsor (Thomas*) to nominate him a year later at a by-election for Bramber.
Parliamentary Experience
Despite the frequency of general elections in this period, and the active engagement of so many of the ‘political nation’ in the party strife which animated proceedings in Parliament itself and in the localities, the reservoir of potential parliamentary candidates in England and Wales was in reality relatively small. Of the 1,238 candidates who stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in this period in English and Welsh constituencies (defined for our purposes as those who maintained their candidacy as far as a ‘cry’ or a poll, and listed in Appendix 23, together with defeated candidates for Scottish constituencies), only 381, that is to say 30.8%, failed to obtain a place in Parliament at any time. As many as 797 (64.4%) were returned to Parliament at another election or for another constituency in this period, and a further 60 (4.8%) sat either before 1690 or after 1715.
The Members themselves included few fully-fledged ‘carpet-baggers’. In fact, more than a third kept to a single constituency, while a little over 10% courted more than two sets of voters, the most promiscuous Member in this respect, so to speak, being the Whig solicitor-general (Sir) John Hawles, who at successive elections between 1689 and 1710 was chosen for no less than seven different boroughs: Mitchell, St. Ives and Truro in Cornwall, Bere Alston in Devon, Stockbridge in Hampshire, and Old Sarum and Wilton in Wiltshire. The following figures include not only English and Welsh Members, but also their Scottish counterparts, with the exception of those who served only in the first Parliament of Great Britain (1707-8), as part of the representative contingent chosen from the membership of the last parliament of Scotland, and therefore cannot be said to have represented an individual constituency.
Number (/1955) | Percentage | |
Chosen for one constituency | 1298 | 66.4% |
Chosen for two constituencies | 449 | 23.0% |
Chosen for three constituencies | 145 | 7.4% |
Chosen for four constituencies | 38 | 1.9% |
Chosen for five constituencies | 18 | 1.0% |
Chosen for six constituencies | 6 | 0.3% |
Chosen for seven constituencies | 1 | 0.1% |
The same broad pattern emerges from a scrutiny of each of the three main occupational groups represented in the House (leaving aside the mass of landed gentlemen), that is to say those whose income came from the law, military service, or trade. In terms of attachment to a particular constituency, lawyers and military men were not notably more promiscuous than their landed counterparts; and indeed the degree of fidelity shown by those Members involved in trade was marginally higher than the norm (possibly because this category includes a significant number of provincial merchants chosen for the towns in which they lived). For purposes of analysis, we have classified as ‘professional lawyers’ all Members called to the bar at one of the inns of court in London, admitted to King’s Inns in Dublin (excluding the occasional complimentary admissions of non-lawyers73) the faculty of advocates in Edinburgh.74 Those holding commissions in the army and navy have been counted together in the category of military service.75 The third category, that of ‘businessmen’, comprises overseas merchants, financiers, and transatlantic planters, but not property-developers, like Nicholas Barbon, or landowners mining the mineral deposits on their estates, like Sir Carbery Pryse, 4th Bt. In each case Scottish Members have been included, with the exception of those whose only parliamentary service at Westminster was in the first Parliament of Great Britain.
Lawyers
Number (/290) | Percentage | |
Chosen for one constituency | 195 | 67.2% |
Chosen for two constituencies | 55 | 19.0% |
Chosen for three constituencies | 26 | 9.0% |
Chosen for four constituencies | 8 | 2.8% |
Chosen for five constituencies | 4 | 1.4% |
Chosen for six constituencies | 1 | 0.3% |
Chosen for seven constituencies | 1. | 0.3% |
Armed forces
Number (/200) | Percentage | |
Chosen for one constituency | 117 | 58.5% |
Chosen for two constituencies | 55 | 27.5% |
Chosen for three constituencies | 24 | 12.0% |
Chosen for four constituencies | 2 | 1.0% |
Chosen for five constituencies | 2 | 1.0% |
Businessmen
Number (/206) | Percentage | |
Chosen for one constituency | 155 | 75.2% |
Chosen for two constituencies | 30 | 14.6% |
Chosen for three constituencies | 18 | 8.7% |
Chosen for four constituencies | 3 | 1.5% |
More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that frequent elections and an unbroken succession of Parliaments had a limited effect in producing what we might term a class of ‘professional parliamentarians’. Prolonged parliamentary service was comparatively rare. The overall number of parliamentary candidates in this period may have been low, but a substantial proportion of the Members who were elected held their seats for only a short time. Because of the varying length of Parliaments in the period 1660-1760, and, just as important, the varying length of individual sessions, it is easier to define and to express an individual Member’s parliamentary experience in terms of the number of Parliaments in which he sat, rather than attempting a more complex chronological calculation in years, months, or even days. In this respect, the very different situation of the Scottish Members, who were only admitted to the Westminster Parliament in 1707, demands that they be treated separately.
Taking only the Members returned for English and Welsh constituencies, therefore, and considering the parliamentary career of each in its entirety (rather than confining our calculations to the Parliaments in which they sat between 1690 and 1715), we find that over 20 per cent sat in only one Parliament, and a third sat in no more than two. At the other end of the scale, less than 40 per cent sat in five Parliaments or more (including a significant number who were returned to each of the three Exclusion Parliaments, between 1679 and 1681, or sat in each of the four Parliaments held between 1700 and 1702). The detailed proportions stand at:
Number (/1874) | Percentage | |
Members sitting in only one Parliament | 396 | 21.1% |
Members sitting in two Parliaments | 293 | 15.6% |
Members sitting in three Parliaments | 256 | 13.7% |
Members sitting in four Parliaments | 209 | 11.2% |
Members sitting in five Parliaments | 167 | 8.9% |
Members sitting in more than five Parliaments | 553 | 29.5% |
Looking again at the three main occupational groups in the Commons (and this time including Scottish Members, except those who were chosen in 1707 but not thereafter), some interesting general trends can be discovered. In the case of businessmen, a higher than average percentage sat in only one or two Parliaments, and a lower than average percentage in five or more. Among the lawyers, the proportion sitting in more than five Parliaments was predictably higher than the norm. Even if a lawyer embarked on a parliamentary career relatively late in life, after making reputation and fortune at the bar (the attorney-general, and later lord chief justice, Sir Robert Raymond would be a prime example), he would still be more likely to remain for a considerable time in the House, where his professional expertise and oratorical talents could be displayed, unless some lucrative legal preferment supervened. (Note that in the following tables the Parliaments of 1705 and 1707 have been treated as one.)
Lawyers
Number (/290) | Percentage | |
Members sitting in only one Parliament | 65 | 22.4% |
Members sitting in two Parliaments | 44 | 15.2% |
Members sitting in three Parliaments | 42 | 14.5% |
Members sitting in four Parliaments | 25 | 8.6% |
Members sitting in five Parliaments | 21 | 7.2% |
Members sitting in more than five Parliaments | 93 | 32.1% |
Armed forces
Number (/200) | Percentage | |
Members sitting in only one Parliament | 41 | 20.5% |
Members sitting in two Parliaments | 29 | 14.5% |
Members sitting in three Parliaments | 31 | 15.5% |
Members sitting in four Parliaments | 27 | 13.5% |
Members sitting in five Parliaments | 18 | 9.0% |
Members sitting in more than five Parliaments | 54 | 27.0% |
Businessmen
Number (/206) | Percentage | |
Members sitting in only one Parliament | 50 | 24.3% |
Members sitting in two Parliaments | 32 | 15.5% |
Members sitting in three Parliaments | 28 | 13.6% |
Members sitting in four Parliaments | 25 | 12.1% |
Members sitting in five Parliaments | 16 | 7.8% |
Members sitting in more than five Parliaments | 55 | 26.7% |
An analysis of the parliamentary experience of all English and Welsh Members, Parliament by Parliament, discloses a steady expansion in the numbers of Members who had sat in more than five Parliaments, until this increase was arrested by the transformation of the House in party-political terms at the election of 1710. In the case of the ‘freshmen’, that is to say Members without any previous parliamentary experience, a decline from 1695 to 1702 was followed by recovery, possibly associated with the Union of 1707.
Given the disjointed history of Parliaments between 1681 and 1689, it is perhaps predictable that the 1690 Parliament should show a relatively high proportion of Members with little or no previous parliamentary experience, although at the same time we may notice a remarkable continuity in personnel between the Convention Parliament and its successor: 382 of the Members of the Convention were elected to the 1690 Parliament, and of these 159 had also served in James II’s Parliament, elected in 1685. A further 32 Members had served in the 1685 Parliament but had not been returned to the Convention. Moreover, the 1690 election returned a significant band of parliamentary veterans, as many as 25 who had first been returned to Parliament before the Restoration, headed by Sir John Maynard and Hon. William Montagu, both of whom had originally been elected to the Short Parliament in 1640 (and in Maynard’s case attending his tenth, and last, Parliament, before his death in October 1690 at the grand age of86).
1690 Parliament
Number (/622) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 167 | 26.8% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 152 | 24.4% |
Members of twoprevious Parliaments | 94 | 15.0% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 55 | 8.8% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 65 | 10.5% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 53 | 8.5% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 37 | 5.9% |
1695 Parliament
Number (/560) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 176 | 31.4% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 102 | 18.2% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 92 | 16.4% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 64 | 11.4% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 37 | 6.6% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 43 | 7.7% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 46 | 8.2% |
1698 Parliament
Number (/545) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 156 | 28.6% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 120 | 22.0% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 82 | 15.0% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 57 | 10.5% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 38 | 7.0% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 27 | 5.0% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 65 | 11.9% |
1701 Parliament
Number (/531) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 118 | 22.2% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 109 | 20.5% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 100 | 18.8% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 61 | 11.5% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 41 | 7.7% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 29 | 5.5% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 73 | 13.7% |
1701-2 Parliament
Number (/515) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 82 | 15.9% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 91 | 17.7% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 86 | 16.7% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 91 | 17.7% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 55 | 10.7% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 35 | 6.8% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 75 | 14.6% |
1702 Parliament
Number (/556) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 90 | 16.2% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 79 | 14.2% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 82 | 14.7% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 85 | 15.3% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 76 | 13.7% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 48 | 8.6% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 96 | 17.3% |
1705 and 1707 Parliaments
Number (/577) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 151 | 26.2% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 64 | 11.1% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 60 | 10.4% |
Members ofthree previous Parliaments | 70 | 12.1% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 54 | 9.4% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 70 | 12.1% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 108 | 18.7% |
1708 Parliament
Number (/549) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 12976 | 23.5% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 112 | 20.4% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 44 | 8.0% |
Members ofthree previous Parliaments | 42 | 7.7% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 43 | 7.8% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 40 | 7.3% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 139 | 25.3% |
1710 Parliament
Number (/593) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 168 | 28.3% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 84 | 14.2% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 83 | 14.0% |
Members ofthree previous Parliaments | 38 | 6.4% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 44 | 7.4% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 35 | 5.9% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 141 | 23.8% |
1713 Parliament
Number (/535) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 118 | 22.1% |
Members ofone previous Parliament | 127 | 23.7% |
Members of two previous Parliaments | 62 | 11.6% |
Members ofthreeprevious Parliaments | 56 | 10.5% |
Members of four previous Parliaments | 24 | 4.5% |
Members of five previous Parliaments | 27 | 5.0% |
Members of more than five previous Parliaments | 121 | 22.6% |
The two most important general observations, a high proportion of inexperienced Members throughout the period, except for a dip in 1701-2, and a steady increase in the number of highly experienced Members, appear rather more clearly if we compare consolidated percentages, on the one hand of those with experience of less than two Parliaments, and on the other of those with experience of more than four Parliaments. The results, Parliament by Parliament, are as follows:
Parliament | Percentage of Members with experience of less than two Parliaments | Percentage of Members with experience of more than four Parliaments |
1690 | 51.2% | 14.5% |
1695 | 49.6% | 15.9% |
1698 | 50.7% | 16.9% |
1701 | 42.7% | 19.2% |
1701-2 | 33.6% | 21.4% |
1702 | 30.4% | 26.0% |
1705/7 | 37.3% | 30.8% |
1708 | 43.9% | 32.6% |
1710 | 42.5% | 29.7% |
1713 | 45.8% | 27.7% |
The high proportion of inexperienced Members, sometimes almost as much as half the House, is all the more remarkable given the continuity of Membership from one Parliament to another. In every case approximately 60% or more of the English and Welsh Members were re-elected, and in December 1701 the figure rose to nearly three quarters.
Parliament | Number re-elected | Percentage |
1690 | 382/622 | 61.4% |
1695 | 335/560 | 59.8% |
1698 | 331/545 | 60.7% |
1701 | 363/531 | 68.4% |
1701-2 | 376/515 | 73.0% |
1702 | 387/556 | 69.6% |
1705/1707 | 344/577 | 59.6% |
1708 | 372/549 | 67.8% |
1710 | 351/593 | 59.2% |
1713 | 366/535 | 68.4% |
Similar calculations relating to the parliamentary experience of the Scottish Members have more limited value, since Scotland returned representatives to only four Parliaments in this period. Of the MPs selected to serve for their country in the first Parliament of Great Britain, or returned at subsequent elections for Scottish constituencies, some 108 in all, a little over half (58) had previously served in the parliament of Scotland. Competition for the limited number of seats available after the Union, the changing balance of forces in Scottish politics after 1708, with the decline of the Queensberry faction and the gradual emergence of a recognizable Tory interest, promoted a rapid turnover of seats. Over half the Members sat in only one British Parliament in the period 1707-15, while less than 10 per cent were elected to all four.
Number (/108) | Percentage | |
Members returned to only one Parliament | 59 | 54.6% |
Members returned to two Parliaments | 24 | 22.2% |
Members returned to three Parliaments | 16 | 14.8% |
Members returned to four Parliaments | 9 | 8.3% |
However, if these figures are taken Parliament by Parliament it becomes apparent that the initially high number of parliamentary innocents had declined sharply by 1713, although at the same time there were relatively few permanent fixtures in the Scottish representation, the electoral swings of 1710 and 1713 having each resulted in the exclusion a number of outgoing Members.
1708 Parliament
Number (/51) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 23 | 45.1% |
Members of the parliament of Scotland but not of the united Parliament | 10 | 19.6% |
Members of one previous British Parliament | 18 | 35.3% |
1710 Parliament
Number (/51) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 22 | 43.1% |
Members of the parliament of Scotland but not of the united Parliament | 0 | 0% |
Members of one previous British Parliament | 18 | 35.3% |
Members of two previous British Parliaments | 11 | 21.6% |
1713 Parliament
Number (/44) | Percentage | |
Members with no previous parliamentary experience | 6 | 13.7% |
Members of the parliament of Scotland but not of the united Parliament | 2 | 4.5% |
Members of one previous British Parliament | 13 | 29.5% |
Members of two previous British Parliaments | 14 | 31.8% |
Members of three previous British Parliaments | 9 | 20.5% |
Reasons for leaving Parliament
To account for the closing of a parliamentary career may at first glance appear easier than to explain its beginning, for whatever the confusion of motives which may originally have prompted candidates to put themselves forward for election, a decision to leave the House for good was very often imposed by force of circumstances, most dramatically by serious illness, physical incapacity or death, by the onset of financial or political ruin, or through disqualification on constitutional grounds, following the acquisition of a peerage title, for example, the passage of new place legislation, or expulsion. For the majority of Members sitting in this period, however, a clear explanation of their final departure from the Commons simply cannot be provided. In the absence of an obvious force majeure, we may speculate on various possibilities: in general terms, a deteriorating political climate, such as the exclusion which obviously affected many Tories adversely after 1715;or, more specifically, the loss of influence in a particular constituency, the loss of a patron, changing family circumstances, disillusionment with Parliament and with politics in general, or merely the onset of apathy.
No less than 581 Members (or nearly 30% of the entire Membership dealt with in this History) were taken from their seats by death, the ultimate force majeure.77 Of these, 353 died within the period, 249 of them while Parliament was actually sitting, and 40 in the interval between a prorogation and a dissolution. In addition, 13 Members died after the dissolution of one Parliament but before the next general election, at which they might reasonably have expected to be returned: eight within the period (Nicholas Barbon, Samuel Barker, Thomas Carew, William Cary, William Coward I, William Hayne, Sir Henry Pickering, 2nd Bt., and the chronic invalid Roger Price), and a further five after 1715 (Sir Charles Barrington, 5th Bt., John Curzon, William Lewen, Sir John Pakington, 4th Bt., and Hon. Edward Watson).
The Members who died ‘in harness’ (so to speak) within the period included of course some parliamentary veterans, like the septuagenarians Bussy Mansel and Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt., and the octogenarian Sir John Maynard, who may justifiably be regarded as having expired of old age. But there were others taken long before their time, some very young men at the outset of their careers, whose epitaphs spoke sincerely and movingly of promise unfulfilled. In an age when the medical profession was afflicted with acute diagnostic inexactitude, causes of death were variously and unhelpfully given in such general terms as ‘fever’, apoplexy, or palsy. We can also find ‘a quinsy’, ‘a rheumatism’, ‘an asthma’, and ‘the flux’ among the fatal illnesses cited. But the dreaded smallpox was also a constant presence, carrying off old and young alike, nobleman and commoner, the prominent and the obscure. Among its victims were Walter Chetwynd I in 1693, Anthony Carey, Viscount Falkland in 1694, Francis Buller in 1698, Hon. Robert Greville in 1699 (who contacted the disease while on a visit to France after the Treaty of Ryswick), ‘the great Morgan’, Thomas of Tredegar, in 1700, Hon. William Howard in 1701, ‘little Lord Lumley’ (Henry) and the Somerset squire John Prowse in 1710, Clobery Bromley, the Speaker’s (William II) son in 1711, and two more young men of promise, Robert Shirley, Viscount Tamworth, and Reynolds Calthorpe II in 1714.
Not surprisingly, the list of the dead also includes some casualties of war. Charles Herbert was killed in the last great battle of King William’s Irish campaigns, at Aughrim in 1691, having been taken prisoner by the Jacobite forces and, it was alleged, ‘barbarously murdered when on the point of being rescued’. Three years later, a survivor of the Irish wars, the hero of the forcing of the Shannon at Athlone in 1691, General Thomas Tollemache, was mortally wounded in the spoiled landing at Brest. In 1704 another parliamentary soldier perished when the Duke of Marlborough’s (John Churchill†) aide-de-camp Lewis Oglethorpe, driven by his ‘desire for glory’, received a serious thigh wound at Schellenberg, which became infected and quickly brought him to his deathbed at the age of 25. And finally there was Admiral Sir Clowdesley Shovell, drowned in the wreck of his ship off the Scillies in 1707 (or, as the more colourful legend would have it, strangled on the sands by a scavenging old crone after he had struggled, half-dead, to what he vainly presumed would be the safety of the shore). Others may be described as casualties of peace: Sir David Ramsay, the Scottish baronet, ‘fell from his horse and so bruised himself that he immediately died’, and a similar fate may have befallen the Cornish MP James Buller.
A few Members must be said to have borne some responsibility for their own demise. This is most obviously true of the suicides: John Lamotte Hon(e)ywood, who, after various blackly humorous failures, eventually succeeded in hanging himself from ‘the curtain rod of his bed’; John Mountstephen, who ‘cut his throat from ear to ear’; and George Newland, like Mountstephen pronounced a lunatic by a coroner’s court, who pitched himself out of a second storey window to his death in the street below. In an indirect way Henry Thynne may have brought on his own physical decay by gluttony, as the gruesome details of the post mortem examination of his corpse would seem to indicate. The Tory lawyer Sir Bartholomew Shower expired of a fever or ‘pleurisy’ allegedly the consequence of ‘a debauch of ill wine, which he made after the term with his brother lawyers’; and (Sir) Thomas Felton’s ‘gout in the stomach’ may equally well have been the wages of a lifetime’s over-indulgence. Paul Foley I’s fatal gangrene was said to have begun after he had ‘buckled his shoe too straight and worn it so’, while George Rodney Brydges suffered a similar terminal decline after clumsily doctoring his own ingrowing toenail. Finally two Tory Members fell in affairs of honour: Sir Cholmeley Dering, 4th Bt., was shot dead in a duel into which his own filthy temper had drawn him, and Charles Aldworth met his end at the hands of a Whig army officer with whom he had quarrelled over politics. In a related case, the customs commissioner and prominent Court Whig Sir Henry Hobart, 4th Bt., also died after a duel, which arose from his defeat at the 1698 general election for Norfolk, and took place as he was in the process of mobilizing his considerable political influence to find an alternative seat in a pocket borough.
For other Members ill-health appears to have been a determining influence in the decision to give up their Commons seat. In 17 examples the connexion is perfectly clear:14 of these retired from parliamentary politics during the period 1690-1715, for the most part relatively elderly men but including the future 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who as Anthony, Lord Ashley had made an immediate impact as a ‘Country Whig’ in his first session in 1695 but thereafter found that his feeble constitution hindered him from playing the prominent role in the Commons which his intellect and pedigree presaged: ‘when in that House, he constantly attended the service of the House by day, and was late at night at the committees in a close room, with a crowd of people, where he was often carried into an eagerness of dispute, he contracted such a weakness of lungs, as to bring on a convulsive asthma’. The other invalids were Edward Bagot, Sir Walter Clarges, 1st Bt., Hon. John Grey, Sir Robert Howard, Thomas Lee, Sir John Lowther 2nd Bt. I, John Mounsher, Isaac Newton, Thomas Papillon, Sir Richard Reynell, 1st Bt., Sir St. Andrew St. John, 2nd Bt., Sir Walter St. John, 3rd Bt., and the Hon. James Thynne;while Sir William Ashburnham, 2nd Bt., Sir William Daines, and Sir William Hardres, 4th Bt., departed the Commons after 1715 on health grounds. In a somewhat larger number of cases we may infer from the biographies that the Member concerned left Parliament because he no longer felt fit enough to continue, but the evidence is not conclusive:28 of these retired before 1715 (Matthew Appleyard, Paul Burrard I, William Campion, Maynard Colchester, Edward Colston II, Richard Corbet, Sir Herbert Croft, 1st Bt., Sir Thomas Day, Richard Dowdeswell, Sir John Duke, George Evelyn I, 2nd Bt., Nicholas Glynn, Hon. Hugh Hare, Sir Anthony Keck, Sir Thomas Lear, 1st Bt., Hon. Charles North, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, Sir George Rooke, Hon. Edward Russell, Edwin Sandys, Charles Sergison, Sir Henry Seymour, 1st Bt., William Seymour, John Speccot, Richard Taylor, Samuel Western, Sir Henry Winchcombe, 2nd Bt., and Sir Francis Winnington); and two after, Sir William Robinson, 1st Bt., and Richard Steele, though Steele was also very short of money, or, as he put it, ‘submitting to the inconveniences which a certain easiness and irregularity in my own affairs subject me to’.78
Financial difficulties were undoubtedly a contributory factor in many retirements, but the argument in such instances is complicated by the existence of parliamentary privilege, which offered debtors an opportunity to hide from their creditors. Thus while the political career of the notorious Charles Mason, the crooked paymaster for transports, may ultimately have been shipwrecked by financial disasters, in parliamentary terms Mason kept afloat for as long as possible simply to avail himself of the respite which privilege gave him. The Iberian merchant Arthur Shallett went straight to the Marshalsea when he failed to keep his seat at the first general election of 1701, for a debt of £26,000 in unpaid customs duties, but on closer examination it appears that his books were already sadly unbalanced when he was returned to Parliament (for the first time) in 1698. In a handful of the biographies it is stated categorically that financial problems were the root cause of a Member’s decision to step down: the Southwark brewer Charles Cox in 1713, shortly after a catastrophic fire had destroyed much of his brewery; Tobias Jenkins of York, in 1722;Sir John Mainwaring, 2nd Bt., the somewhat overbearing knight of the shire for Cheshire, who had been implicated in 1702 in the defalcations of Morgan Whitley, the disgraced receiver-general of taxes for north Wales; and, long after 1715, the ruined Dorset gentleman George Chafin, who had already secured two private Acts to permit the sale of estates before finally relinquishing the nomination for his county in 1754. In a further 21 cases, evidence points towards the conclusion that problems with money at least contributed to withdrawal from the Commons. Fifteen of these occur within the period (Philip Bickerstaffe, Sir John Clerke, 4th Bt., John Dibble, Sir James Etheridge, Sir William Gostwick, 4th Bt., Sir Batholomew Gracedieu, Sir Thomas Hesilrige, 4th Bt., Sir Mathew Jenison, Thomas Jervoise, Warwick Lake, John Praed, Thomas Tipping, John Tregagle, Leonard Wessell, and George Whichcot), and a further six after 1715 (John Austen, John Hardres, James Medlycott, William Stephens, John Trelawny II, and the physically ailing Richard Steele).
A substantial minority of Members left the Lower House to go to the Upper. In total 35 succeeded to peerages:27 before 1715, and eight more thereafter, among them Algernon Seymour, Lord Hertford, who was summoned to the Lords in error in 1722, on the death of his mother, in respect of the Percy barony, and 26 years later succeeded his father as 7th Duke of Somerset; and John Campbell, who inherited the dukedom of Argyll between the dissolution of the 1754 Parliament and the general election of 1761). As man as 42 new titles were created: 27 before 1715, and 15 thereafter, the recipients including Thomas Coningsby, whose Irish title was upgraded to a British barony in 1716, and Charles Powlett, Marquess of Winchester, who in 1717 was created Lord Pawlet of Basing in his own right, while waiting impatiently to succeed his father as 3rd Duke of Bolton. Five of the Members were summoned in a paternal barony, of whom Charles, Lord Bruce, and James, Lord Compton, were members of Harley’s ‘dozen’ peerage creations in December 1711, designed to push the ministry’s peace policy through the Lords, while Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, and Richard Lumley were summoned just before the opening of George I’s first Parliament in March 1715. Holders of Scottish peerages were disqualified at the Union, a provision which promptly turned out of the Commons William Cheyne, Viscount Newhaven, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, and Lionel Tollemache, Earl of Dysart; and a resolution passed after the general election in 1708 extended this prohibition to the eldest sons of Scottish peers, disqualifying William Gordon, Lord Haddo, James, Lord Johnston, William Sutherland, Lord Strathnaver, and John Sinclair, the Master of Sinclair (who would in have been ineligible to sit any case as he was under sentence of death from a court martial). In addition William Cowper, Simon Harcourt I and Sir John Somers each left the Commons upon being appointed lord keeper (in 1705, 1710 and 1693 respectively), and were subsequently promoted to lord chancellor and ennobled.
The acceptance of an office of profit under the crown became an increasingly common cause of the exclusion of individual Members, as Parliament in this period passed a succession of specific Place Acts, targeting particular offices. Prior to 1715five Members were expelled the House for taking up a government employment which had been declared incompatible with a Commons’ seat, who did not thereafter return to the House: Samuel Atkinson, a commissioner for licensing hawkers and pedlars; Henry Cornish and James Isaacson, commissioners of the stamp office; and the navy commissioner Anthony Hammond, and Philip Herbert, a commissioner for sick and wounded, who both fell foul of the provision in the 1706 Regency Act against the holders of ‘new’ offices. Another 42 Members left the House of their own volition after taking up a prohibited office, or as a result of the passage of legislation which rendered their existing position untenable, 19 within the period (including the lawyers Robert Dormer, Robert Eyre, Sir Thomas Parker, Sir Thomas Powys, John Pratt, Sir George Treby and Sir Thomas Trevor, who were each raised to the bench), and 21 more after 1715 (including the five new judges Lawrence Carter II, John Comyns, Alexander Denton II, Robert Raymond, and William Thompson III, and Thomas Erle and Thomas Pelham II, whose disqualification arose not from accepting office but apension). In two cases, Sir Matthew Dudley, 2nd Bt., named a customs commissioner, and John Pratt, made a judge of King’s bench, the appointments occurred shortly after George I’s accession, in the interval between the final prorogation of the 1713 Parliament and its eventual dissolution. Additionally, the customs commissioner Robert Henley would have lost his seat in 1702 when the relevant legislation came into effect, but chose discretion and did not stand at the general election of that year (nor thereafter), and Thomas Legh II left the Commons in 1713 on a promise of preferment, and in return for offering his seat at Newton to the nominee of Lord Treasurer Oxford (Robert Harley*). Three Members accepted an office which was perfectly compatible with the retention of their parliamentary seat, but chose nevertheless to retire from the Commons: John Meyrick, a Pembrokeshire Tory who took a Welsh judgeship in 1712 (and soon lost it again after the Hanoverian succession), the Anglo-Irish politician (Sir) Richard Levinge, previously a migratory bird, who decided to make his career exclusively in Ireland after being named attorney-general in Dublin in 1711;and the former Speaker, Sir Richard Onslow, 3rd Bt., who stepped down on the receipt of a lucrative tellership of the Exchequer in November 1715, and took a peerage the following year.
Besides disqualified placemen, 12 Members were expelled the House, for a variety of offences, none of them ever to return. Six of these expulsions took place before 1715: Adam de Cardonnel, Richard Jones, Lord Ranelagh, John Knight I and Sir John Trevor (who was also Speaker at the time) for corruption in one form or another; John Asgill, for publishing a pamphlet which the House deemed to be blasphemous; and the Quaker John Archdale, whose request to affirm rather than swear the necessary oaths of allegiance and supremacy was denied. After 1715 John Carnegie and Thomas Forster II were expelled for participating in the Fifteen, and their fellow Jacobite Lewis Pryse for refusing to swear the oaths to King George; John Aislabie as a result of his involvement in the South Sea Bubble;John Ward IV for fraud and forgery in his cheating of the young Duke of Buckingham; and Denis Bond in 1732 following a damning parliamentary report into the affair of the Charitable Corporation. Three others escaped formal expulsion by voluntary action. Sir Thomas Dyke, 1st Bt., decided to stand down at the general election of that year, lest he be challenged on his continuing failure to subscribe the loyal Association; and in a similar way Robert Fagg I left Parliament in 1702, rather than take the Association, though his scruples were of a different kind to Dyke’s. Edmund Waller’s case, on the other hand, was related to his conversion to Quakerism. While Archdale was elected in 1698 and then expelled, Waller avoided risk, and resigned his seat at Amersham.
The available information relating to Members’ departure from the House may therefore be summarized in the following table:
Cause | Members retiring before 1715 | Members retiring after 1715 | Total |
Death (while sitting) | 353 | 228 | 581 |
Ill-health (plus probables in parentheses) | 14 (+28) | 3 (+279) | 17 (+30) |
Financial difficulties (plus probables in parentheses) | 3 (+15) | 1 (+680) | 4 (+21) |
Move to House of Lords | 60 | 25 | 85 |
Scottish peers and peers’ eldest sons | 7 | 0 | 7 |
Effects of place legislation | 24 | 21 | 45 |
Expulsion | 6 | 6 | 12 |
Ref Volumes: 1690-1715
Author: D. W. Hayton
End Notes
- 1. I.R. Christie, Brit. Non-Elite MPs 1715-1820 (1995), p. 2. Cf. L. and J.C.F. Stone, An Open Elite? (1986), pp. 3-10.
- 2. EHR, cvi. 636-7.
- 3. Christie, 8, 12-17. I wish to record my debt to Professor Christie for his advice on this point.
- 4. Irish peers could of course keep their seats in the British House of Commons, as could Scottish peers before the Union.
- 5. See The Business of the House; and J. Habbakuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: Eng. Landownership 1650-1950 (1994), pp. 403-4.
- 6. K. Wrightson, Eng. Soc. 1580-1680 (1982), ch. 1; F. Heal and C. Holmes, Gentry in Eng. and Wales 1500-1700 (1994), pp. 6-19.
- 7. The Members concerned are: Joseph Austin, John Bromley I, Sir Owen Buckingham, Nicholas Carey, Sir Robert Clayton, Sir Thomas Cooke, Thomas Coulson, James Craggs I, Sir John Cutler, 1st Bt., Stephen Evance, Sir John Fleet, Sir Thomas Fowle, Sir Henry Furnese, Leonard Gale, Joseph Girdler, Thomas Guy, Edmund Halsey, Sir William Hodges, 1st Bt., Sir George Hutchins, John Hutton II, Sir Thomas Lear, 1st Bt., William Lewen, Richard Markes, Arthur Moore, John Mounsher, John Mountsteven, George Newland, Joseph Paice, John Pollexfen, Matthew Prior, Thomas Richmond, John Ward IV, and John Wilkins.
- 8. A full list is as follows: Those for whom no parentage is given: Edwards Bangham, William Betts, John Blanch, William Bokenham, Thomas Boucher, Jeremiah Bubb, Ralph Bucknall, Robert Burridge, John Chambers, Edward Clarke II, Robert Crawford, Sir William Daines, Thomas Davenant, Sir Thomas Day, Henry Goodwell, Roger Hoar, John Hopkins, Reginald Marriott, Joseph Martin, Anthony Morgan, John Nicholson, Sir John Norris, Henry Priestman, Sir Jonathan Raymond, Thomas Renda, Samuel Shepherd I, John Shrimpton, Philip Taylor, John Venables, William Wallis, John Ward I, John Wicker, Michael Wicks, Henry Withers, and Robert Yard. Those with only tentative identification of parentage: John Bagnold, Thomas Bliss, Edmund Boulter, Benjamin Buller, William Collier, Charles Cox, Thomas Filmer, John Harris, Nicholas Hedger, Edmund Maine, Sir George Mathews, James Nicholls, Francis Palmes, Robert Rodger, Charles Sergison, John Stewart, William Walmisley, Samuel Western, and Walter Whitfield.
- 9. The full list is as follows: Richard Acland, James Anderton, Sir Matthew Andrews, John Anstis, Sir Henry Ashurst, 1st Bt., Sir William Ashurst, Christopher Bale, Samuel Barnardiston, Francis Barrell, Sir James Bateman, Samuel Battelley, Robert Baylis, Robert Bene, Sir John Bennett, William Berners, Abraham Blackmore, William Blathwayt, Edward Brent, Robert Bristow I, George Bruere, Josiah Burchett, Anthony Burnaby, John Burridge I, John Burridge II, John Burton, James Butler I, Felix Calvert, Daniell Campbell, Adam de Cardonnel, Sir Ralph Carr, William Carr, John Cass, Francis Chamberlayne, Thomas Chapman, Hugh Cholmley, John Cholmley, Thomas Christie, Awnsham Churchill, William Churchill, Sir Thomas Clages, Thomas Clarke, William Colemore I, Edward Colston II, John Comyns, William Cotesworth, Thomas Cowper, Thomas Crosse, Sir Ambrose Crowley, Sir Rushout Cullen, 3rd Bt. Thomas D'Aeth, John Dalby, Sir Francis Dashwood, 1st Bt., George Dashwood ii, Sir Robert Dashwood, 1st Bt., Sir Samuel Dashwood, Sir Thomas Davall I, Sir Thomas Davall II, John Dibble, Paul Docminique, Oley Douglas, Alexander Duff, Joseph Erle, Thomas Edwards, Sir Gervase Elwes, 1st Bt., John Elwill, Benjamin England, George England I, George England II, Sir John Flagg, 1st Bt., Sir Staffod Fairborne, Thomas Farrington, Richard Fownes, Thomas Frewen, John Fuller, Samuel Fuller, Thomas Gery, John Gilbert, Sir Edward Goodere, 1st Bt., John Gordon, William Gore, Henry Gorges, Peter Gott, Nathaniel Gould, Sir Bartholomew Gracedieu, Henry Greenhill, John Hardes, Roger Harris, Michael Harvey, William Hayne, Gilbert Heathcote, Frederick Herne, Joseph Herne, Nathaniel Herne, Thomas Herne, Robert Heysham, William Heysham, John Hicks, Sir Richard Hosre, Richard Holt, William Hooker, Richard Hopkins, Thomas Hopkins, Thomas Hopson, Sir James Houblon, William Hucks, Johathon Hutchinson, James Issacson, Sir Joseph Jeckyll, Sir Edmund Jennings, Sir Joseph Jennings, Edward Jones, Walter Kent, Peter King, Thomas Lyddell, William Maister, Jasper Maudit, Sir John Maynard, James Medlycott, Thomas Medlycott, John Naylor, Sir Benjamin Newland, William Newland, James Nicholson, Sir Edward Northey, Joseph Offley, Robert Orme, James Oswald, Gregory Page, Thomas Papillion, Sir Thomas Parker, Sir John Parsons, William Paul, Robert Payne, Sir Henry Peachey, William Phippard, Thomas Phipps, Hnery Pinnell, John Pollen, Nicholas Pollexfen, Thomas Powell, Sir William Prichard, Jasper Radcliffe, John Ramsden, Issac Rebow, Samuel Reynolds, Thomas Rider, Thomas Ridge, Gabriel Roberts, Edward Rudge, Sir James Rushout, 1st Bt, Samuel Sambrooke, Edward Seyward, Francis Shepheard, Samuel Shepheard II, Robie Sherwin, Thomas Smith II, John Snell II, Sir John Somers, Richard Staines, Thomas Stanwix, Francis Stratford, John Stratford, Anthony Sturt, Samuel Swift, Nathaniel Symonds, John Taylor, Richard Taylor, Fisher Tench, Sir John Thompson, 1st Bt., William Thompson III, Joseph Tily, Silus Titus, Richard Topham, Thomas Turgis, James Vernon II, Isaac Watlington, Thomas Webb, Sir Thomas Webster, 1st Bt., Leonard Wessell, Samuel Western, Thomas White I, Sir George Willoughby, Edwards Winnington, Sir Francis Winnington, Salway Winnington, Sir William Withers, Nicholas Wood, Christopher Wren, Sir Cyril Wych, Richard Wynn, Robert Yate, and George Yeaman.
- 10. The list is as follows: Sir John Aubrey, 2nd Bt., Charles Baldwyn, Samuel Baker, William Berners, Hon. Charles Bertie II, Hon. James Bertie, Anthony Blagrave, Sir Francis Blake, William Blathwayt, Edmund Bray, Henry Brett, Sir John Brownlow, 5th Bt., George Rodney Brydges, Sir Owen Buckingham, Anthony Carey, Viscount Falkland, Sir Francis Child, John Dutton Colt, Thomas Coningsby, Sir John Cotton, 2nd Bt., Richard Crawley, Richard Cresswell, Sir Alexander Cumming, 1st Bt., Alexander Denton I, Sir Cholmley Dering, 4th Bt., Gilbert Dolben, Sir James Dunabr alias Sutherland, 1st Bt., Edward Eliot, John Essington, Thomas, 5th Lord Fairfax, Hon. William Fielding, Thomas Foley III, Hugh Fortescue, Thomas Frankland II, Leonard Gale, George Granville, Hon. John Granville, Hon. Anchitell Grey, Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Bt., Lord Archiblad Hamilton, Thomas Hanmer II, Thomas Heath II, John Hervey, Sir Henry Hobert, 4th Bt., John Grobham Howe, William Jennens, Sir Henry Johnson, Sir Charles Kemys, 3rd Bt., John Laugharne, Robert Lowther, Francis Luttrell, Sir Humphrey Mackworth, Hon. Sidney Wortley Montagu, Josseph Moyle, Sir Richard Myddelton, 3rd Bt., William Norris, Denzil Onslow, Foot Onslow, Sir Richard Onslow, 3rd Bt., John Pershall, John Philipps, Sir Gilbert Pickering, 3rd Bt., Sir Henry Pickering, 2nd Bt., Hnery Powle, Lord William Powlett, Robert Price, Sir Jonathan Raymond, Edward Rolt, Sir Rice Rudd, 2nd Bt., Edward Russell, Hon, James Russell, Thomas Sclater, Gilbert Searle, Sir Chowdesley Shovell, Sir Thomas Skipwith, 2nd Bt., John Snell II, Anthony Thompson, William Thompson III, Joseph Tily, Sir Thomas Travell, Samuel Trefusis, Christopher Vane, John Vaughan I, Richard Vaughan II, William, Viscount Villiers, Horatio Walpole I, Sir John Williams, Ashe Windham, Thomas, Viscount Windsor, Edwards Winnington, and Thomas Wynn.
- 11. For present purposes ‘Scottish Members’ are defined as the Members for the Scottish constituencies, with the three Scotsmen returned for English constituencies in this period, George Hay (Viscount Dupplin), James Johnston, and Hon. William Kerr, included among the English Members
- 12. For a discussion of this classification scheme, see below.
- 13. I am very grateful to Dr Gauci for making these provisional calculations available to me. They will be discussed in his forthcoming study of ‘merchant culture’ in later 17th-century England.
- 14. E. and A.G. Porritt, Unreformed H. of Commons, i. 223-6.
- 15. The Commons 1660-90, i. 2-3.
- 16. SP 9/22, f. 51v.
- 17. For a list of under-age Members elected in this period, see below, Appendix 10. To compare the figures for the Parliaments of 1690-1715 with what had gone before, see The Commons 1660-90, i. 1.
- 18. Williamson again: SP 9/22, f. 51v.
- 19. Dorset RO, Lane (Trenchard) mss D60/F56, Sir John to Henry Trenchard, 27 Nov. 1690.
- 20. At either the general election or a by-election. In the case of Members re-elected to the same Parliament, only their first election has been taken into account.
- 21. The number of Members whose age was unknown to the History at the time the original tables were compiled was recorded as 3% for 1685 and 2% for 1689.
- 22. The image, popular among historians, of Westminster School as a nursery of High Churchmen is not borne out by an examination of the political affiliations of its former pupils: 20 of those who we know for certain to have been Westminsters can be classified with some confidence as Tories, but a further 16 must be regarded as Whigs, with the remaining 10 eluding identification in party terms. The political complexion of the Old Etonian contingent in the Commons was equally indeterminate, the figures (for definite Etonians) standing at 24 Tories, 20 Whigs, and 5 unclassified.
- 23. The paradox that the percentage figure for each Parliament is higher than the total figure of 49.1%, for all Members sitting in this period, may be explained by the tendency of university-educated Members to sit longer in the House than their less privileged colleagues, many of whom did not come from landed or influential families.
- 24. In addition John Hutton II, who was returned for Dumfries Burghs in 1710, having taken his doctorate in medicine at Padua in 1677, was incorporated at Oxford in 1695.
- 25. The Commons 1660-90, i. 5.
- 26. See above.
- 27. By contrast, comparative figures for the numbers of English and Welsh Members called to the bar show, overall, a slight percentage increase across the period. See below.
- 28. Compare with the figures given in D. Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers, 180. For a similar Parliament-by-Parliament analysis of Members called to the bar, see below.
- 29. Mungo Graham of Gorthie may possibly have been another, but the evidence is weak on this point.
- 30. For which see in general G. Holmes, Augustan Eng.: Professions, State and Soc. 1680-1750 (1982).
- 31. See below, Appendices 13-14.
- 32. Lemmings, 125.
- 33. His figures for practitioners are as follows: 1690 Parliament 7.2% of the Membership as a whole (as compared with 14.1% who had been called to the bar); 1695 6.9% (13.9%); 1698 7.9% (15.0%); February 1701 7.1% (15.0%); December 1701 7.1% (14.5%); 1702 7.4% (15.5%); 1705 [including the 1707 Parliament] 7.6% (15.4%); 1708 8.2% (15.5%); 1710 8.9% (16.5%); 1713 8.4% (16.1%). Lemmings, 182. Cf. below.
- 34. Four Englishmen holding high office in the Irish administration, the lords justices Sir Henry Capell, Thomas Coningsby, and William Duncombe, and chief secretary Francis Gwyn, were complimented with admission to the King’s Inns on their arrival in Dublin. They were not barristers, and their membership must be regarded as merely honorific. They have therefore been excluded from these calculations.
- 35. There are no examples among the Scottish Members for this period of lesser legal practitioners, the Writers to the Signet, who are the equivalent of English solicitors and attorneys.
- 36. Identifications are given below, in Appendix 15.
- 37. Lemmings, 230. See above.
- 38. See Constituencies and Elections.
- 39. Thomas Medlycott was unique in holding an office in the County Palatine of Tipperary, in the gift of the Duke of Ormond.
- 40. For an account of the office of estate steward in this period see D.R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People (1992).
- 41. See above.
- 42. See Holmes, Augustan Eng. ch. 8.
- 43. See below, Appendix 16.
- 44. See below, Appendix 16.
- 45. The metropolitan brewers, based in the City of London, Southwark, and Westminster, were Ralph Bucknall, Felix Calvert, Charles Cox, Thomas Crosse, Edmund Halsey, William Hucks, John Lade, Sir John Parsons and his son, also John, and Sir Jonathan Raymond.
- 46. Hugh Bokenham, Edward Clarke II, and Francis Gardiner were based in Norwich; Isaac Rebow and Sir Thomas Webster, 1st Bt., in Colchester; John Blanch and Robert Payne in Gloucester; John Elwill in Exeter; and Ralph Bell at Thirsk. The other clothiers were Sir William Ashurst, Sir Robert Bedingfield, Henry Cornish, Josiah Diston, George Dodington, Nicholas Hedger, Sir George Mathews, Francis Merewether, Sir Alexander Rigby, Thomas Scawen, Sir William Turner, George Walcot, John Ward IV, Isaac Watlington, Sir William Withers, and the Edinburgh councilman Sir Samuel McClellan.
- 47. James Chadwick, Arthur Champneys, Thomas Felton, Richard Grobham Howe, Edward Jeffreys, Sir Humphrey Mackworth, and James Thynne.
- 48. Of those who can be confidently assigned to particular branches of commerce, the Tories appear to have established a clear majority among financiers and East India merchants, with the Whigs dominating the Baltic and Iberian trades. The majority of overseas traders would, however, be excluded from this analysis.
- 49. See below, Appendix 11.
- 50. See below, Appendix 11.
- 51. See below, Appendix 11.
- 52. The Commons 1660-90, i. 13.
- 53. Add. 70144, Edward Harley to Abigail Harley, ‘Tuesday 4’.
- 54. Philip Foley, Thomas Foley I, Thomas Foley II, Thomas Foley III, Edward Harley, Michael Harvey, and Samuel Shepheard I.
- 55. Sir Edward Abney, Sir Thomas Abney, John Arnold, Sir Henry Ashurst, 1st Bt., Sir William Ashurst, Ralph Bell, Edmund Boulter, John Bromley I, Sir Owen Buckingham, John Burridge I, John Burridge II, John Burton, John Elwill, John Eyles, Thomas Fairfax, 5th Lord Fairfax [S], Samuel Foote, Sir Henry Furnese, Nathaniel Gould, Thomas Guy, Sir Eliab Harvey, Thomas Heath II, Gilbert Heathcote, John Hopkins, Jonathan Hutchinson, Thomas Johnson, Thomas Lewes, John London, James Lowther, Sir Hugh Owen, 2nd Bt., Gregory Page, Joseph Paice, Philip Papillon, Thomas Papillon, Isaac Rebow, John Rogers, Arthur Shallett, Samuel Shepheard I, Sir Thomas Webster, 1st Bt., Robert Yate, Sir Walter Yonge, 3rd Bt.
- 56. Richard Assheton (Lancs. 1703-5), John Bromley I (Cambs. 1705-7), Thomas Browne (Beds. 1690-5), John Dryden (Hunts. 1690-5, 1699-1708), John Lamotte Honywood (Essex 1679- 94), Richard Neville (Berks. 1695-1710), and Lionel Vane (Co. Durham 1698-1702).
- 57. Lincs. AO, Monson mss Scrope to Sir John Newton, 3rd Bt., 1 July 1710.
- 58. H.T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke, 160.
- 59. Cocks Diary, pp. xxi, xxiii-xxv.
- 60. On this point see Past and Present, no. 128, pp. 48-91, and works cited.
- 61. V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley, 311-14; Bunyan Studies, iv. 66-69.
- 62. L. B. Namier, Structure of Pol. (1965), pp. 1-61.
- 63. For examples see Herefs. RO, Foley mss E12/F/IV/BE/264, Henry Paget* to Philip Foley*, 11 Sept. 1693; Cheshire RO, Shakerley mss Roger Whitley* to Peter Shakerley*, 30 June 1700.
- 64. PRO, 30/24/20/214, Churchill to Shaftesbury, 1 Feb. 1704[/5].
- 65. Add. 70140, Sir Edward to Edward Harley, 2 Jan. 1691/2; 29/85, Yate to Sir Edward Harley, 7 Feb. 1692[/3]; Birmingham Central Lib., Wingfield-Digby mss ’B’, 159, ’Some few rules for your conduct’; Centre for Kentish Studies, Barrell diary, U145/F11.
- 66. T. Forster, Orig. Letters of Locke, Sidney and Shaftesbury, 179-80.
- 67. Bath mss at Longleat, Thynne pprs. 26, f. 310; Lincs. AO, Monson mss 7/13/124, Gervase Scrope to Sir John Newton, 1 July 1710.
- 68. Bradford mss at Weston Park, C. Cratford to Sir John Bridgeman, 2nd Bt., 9 Mar. 1697.
- 69. Cumbria RO (Carlisle), Lonsdale mss D/Lons/W2/1/41, Lowther to William Gilpin, 3 Feb. 1707[/8].
- 70. Add. 27440, f. 147 (the writer is Charles Allestree).
- 71. See above.
- 72. Add. 40773, f. 28.
- 73. See above.
- 74. Listed below, Appendix 15.
- 75. Listed below, Appendices 13-14.
- 76. Includes James Johnston (MP Ilchester), who had previously sat in the Scottish parliament.
- 77. The figures presented in this section of the survey derive from researches and calculations made by Richard Harrison, for which I am very grateful.
- 78. Steele Corresp. ed. Blanchard (1941), p. 397
- 79. Includes Richard Steele, who also figures under ‘financial difficulties (probable)’.
- 80. Includes Richard Steele, who also figures under ‘ill-health (probable)’.
