An Admiralty borough, Portsmouth was managed by channelling local patronage through the corporation, who controlled the representation by their power to create freemen. Soon after George I’s accession its governor, Lord North and Grey, an extreme Tory, was informed by his agent there that Sir Charles Wager had come down, caused 59 new freemen to be admitted, and deprived the agent of his receivership of the land tax. Next month Lord North was dismissed.1 Thenceforth government nominees were returned unopposed. Before the general election of 1734 Wager told Walpole: ‘whoever is recommended by you will, I think, undoubtedly be chosen’, as in fact they were.2 In 1741 Wager wrote to Vernon, then in the West Indies, that at a by-election for Portsmouth he had recommended Vernon to the corporation, who had chosen him unanimously and would have done so at the general election, but that, finding that Vernon was already being put up for half a dozen other places, he had decided to replace him by Martin Bladen, ‘having no other sea officer proper to setup’. A copy of the poll shows, however, that Vernon was nominated.3 When in 1747 Edward Legge was considered for a vacancy at Portsmouth, his brother, Henry Legge, wrote to the Duke of Bedford, then first lord:

The wishes of the town to be represented by a sea officer will be gratified, and properly gratified, by that officer’s being entirely of your own nomination, and not having resided to make interest for himself independent of the Admiralty.4

The first of several attempts to break the Admiralty interest by creating a large number of freemen was led in October 1750 by John Carter, a prominent local merchant and Dissenter.5