Rye was managed by giving the corporation posts in the customs service, with which this stagnant port was well provided, having in 1729 a collector, a deputy collector, and twenty other officers.1 Under George I and George II the patronage was administered through Sir John Norris and Phillips Gybbon, who had been adopted by the corporation as their patrons, sharing the representation till their deaths in 1749 and 1762. Even when Gybbon was in opposition from 1730 to 1742, he continued to act as the link between the corporation and the Duke of Newcastle,2 whom the Treasury allowed to recommend to all customs posts in Sussex. It was not till Norris’s death that Newcastle was able to bring in one of his own relations, Thomas Pelham of Stanmer, to whom James Pelham wrote on 11 July 1749:

There’s now a vacancy at Rye by the death of Sir John Norris ... Upon the earliest notice from the Duke of Newcastle [I] went immediately to Rye with his Grace’s and Mr. Pelham’s recommendation of you to succeed Sir John, and had the promise of every voter, who are thirty-three. I gave them a handsome entertainment in your name for under thirty pounds and left them next morning in perfect good humour, and though the election can’t be till the House meets again, I don’t apprehend the least alteration, the whole town having been always in our interest for the county, and wished to have one of our family to represent them.

The readiness with which Newcastle’s nomination was accepted is accounted for by a demand from Norris’s executors for the repayment of a sum of £900 which Norris and Gybbon had lent the corporation to pay for the building of a new town hall. The debt was cancelled by Newcastle and Gybbon after the general election of 1754, at which Newcastle’s nominee, George Onslow, had been returned with Gybbon.3