The most important of the Cinque Ports by the early 16th century, Dover had received a number of charters, the earliest known being in 1328. In addition to its long-standing rights and privileges in the Brotherhood of the Cinque Ports the town had a generally effective local government, vested in a mayor, jurats and common council, but limited by the authority of the King’s bailiff. Throughout most of the period, however, the bailiffship was held by townsmen, successively Thomas Vaughan, Edmund Mody and Thomas Portway, and only after Portway’s death in 1557 was it taken by the lord warden of the Cinque Ports, Sir Thomas Cheyne.22

An ordinance of the Brotherhood, in force from 1526 to 1550, restricted the right to elect the mayor to 37 ‘freemen, householders and indwellers’ chosen by the outgoing mayor. The freemen also played an important role in the parliamentary elections conducted at a common assembly, or hornblowing, held in the court hall after the town had received the lord warden’s precept. The names of all but one of Dover’s Members in the period are known from its assembly books and accounts, and the payment in 1511-12 to Nicholas Templeman of £3 ‘in part of his payment for being burgess of Parliament’ suggests that, like John Warren, he had also sat in 1510.23

Dover generally paid its Members at the statutory rate of 2s. a day. It had difficulty raising the money in 1523 and appealed for assistance to Faversham, Folkestone and the Isle of Thanet before levying a special tax. The position of Faversham and other towns or ‘limbs’ of the ports with regard to Members and their wages is obscure at this time. In the 15th century Faversham at any rate had successfully claimed rights in the selection of Members, Dover agreeing to pay wages of 20d. a day to the Faversham resident chosen as one of the Dover Members. The Dover accounts for July 1554 record 40s. ‘paid to Mr. Webbe in part of payment of his parliament wages which he received of the town of Faversham’. Dover’s financial trouble in 1523 may have been partly due to constant royal demands on the port for shipping or maintenance of troops. Dover harbour and even to some extent the castle were in a decayed state. A bill for the repair of the harbour passed the Commons in 1510 but after its receipt in the Lords proceeded no further. Another bill promoted by Thomas Cromwell in 1534 came to nothing, but provision for the work was included in the Subsidy Act (26 Hen. VIII, c.19) of that year. A similar bill introduced in October 1553 to renovate both harbour and castle ‘by five shillings yearly to be paid by every alien’ failed after a single reading. Dover became the seat of a suffragan bishop under the Act for the nomination and consecration of suffragans (26 Hen. VIII, c.14).24

Throughout the reign of Henry VIII Dover adhered to the ordinance of the Brotherhood laying down that no one who was not a mayor, bailiff, or jurat should be elected to Parliament for any port. The ordinance was reinforced in 1523 by a letter from the King for the return of ‘two of the most discreet, expert and sufficient’ residents ‘as now do or heretofore have exercised the office and administration of justice’ at Dover. In 1547, however, the senior Member Joseph Beverley of Faversham was a former town clerk of Dover who was to become clerk of the castle during the Parliament and who may have owed his return to Cheyne. The junior Member in the second Parliament of Edward VI, Henry Crispe, was a country gentleman and former sheriff of Kent, whose son had married Cheyne’s daughter: he does not seem to have received parliamentary wages although his partner Portway, a jurat who had recently succeeded Mody as bailiff, was paid the usual 2s. a day. In September 1553, the town elected Portway and Thomas Colly, a jurat and former mayor, to Mary’s first Parliament, but two days later the mayor and jurats indemnified the commonalty against penalties for breach of the statutes governing elections when Portway and Colly were set aside in favour of Beverley and Webbe. Although both must have been Cheyne’s nominees, they received wages. Webbe was returned to his last Parliament in the autumn of 1554 on a ‘blank’ and in the following year Dover agreed to accept another Cheyne nomination, that of Sir Edmund Rous of Suffolk, a former vice-treasurer of Ireland, ‘for this time’. Despite this proviso, both the Members returned in 1558, by which time Cheyne had become bailiff, may have been nominees, although Beverley had acquired the qualifying juratship. His partner John Cheyne, a Berkshire resident, was the lord warden’s cousin.25