Aylesbury

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Right of Election:

in inhabitant householders

Number of voters:

about 400

Elections

DateCandidateVotes
26 Jan. 1715NATHANIEL MEAD 
 JOHN DEACLE 
 Simon Harcourt 
 Philip Herbert 
30 Apr. 1715TREVOR HILL vice Deacle, chose to sit for Evesham 
20 Mar. 1722RICHARD ABELL 
 JOHN GUISE 
16 Aug. 1727SIR WILLIAM STANHOPE 
 PHILIP LLOYD 
 John Guise 
21 Feb. 1728EDWARD RUDGE vice Stanhope, chose to sit for Buckinghamshire 
13 Feb. 1730THOMAS INGOLDSBY vice Lloyd, appointed to office186
 Philip Lloyd154
22 Apr. 1734GEORGE CHAMPION266
 CHRISTOPHER TOWER209
 John Stanhope143
4 May 1741CHARLES PILSWORTH344
 WILLIAM STANHOPE320
 James Bertie135
26 June 1747WILLIAM O'BRIEN, Earl of Inchiquin 
 EDWARD WILLES 

Main Article

There was no predominant interest at Aylesbury, where the principal qualification for success was, as the 2nd Lord Egmont wrote in his electoral survey, c.1749-50, to be ‘a moneyed man’. In 1727 Philip Lloyd estimated his expenses at £900;1 in the same election an agent of Sir William Stanhope’s spent £541, chiefly at public houses, including £173 on the election day.2 Of 15 Members returned, 10 were local landowners, while 2 others had local connexions, so that only 3 seem to have been strangers. All were Whigs, the majority of whom were independent or usually voted with the Opposition. None of them represented Aylesbury in more than one Parliament or, except John Guise and Philip Lloyd, stood more than once. After the 1747 election, when two of the Prince of Wales’s supporters were returned unopposed, it was alleged by Richard Grenville that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Willes, had deliberately removed the summer assizes from Buckingham to Aylesbury, holding them there himself about the time of the election, in order to procure the support of a grateful electorate for his son, Edward Willes.3 The holding of the assizes became, therefore, a political issue, on which the Grenvilles were successful in procuring an Act of Parliament in 1748 for their removal back to Buckingham.

Author: R. S. Lea

Notes

  • 1. Lloyd to Walpole, Aug. 1727, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss.
  • 2. Gibbs, Hist. Aylesbury, 211-12.
  • 3. Parl. Hist. xiv. 222-3; Oswald, 385-8.