The government of Hedon was based on a charter granted in 1348 and confirmed by Elizabeth in 1565, which provided the borough with a mayor, two bailiffs, a coroner and other officers. Municipal and parliamentary elections were conducted in a general assembly of the burgesses. It is not clear how many burgesses had the right to vote and the surviving Elizabethan returns shed no light on this problem. The returns are made out by the ‘mayor, bailiffs and burgesses’. In 1601 a separate ‘blank’ return was made out for each Member.

At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the 6th Earl of Westmorland granted his brother-in-law, Sir John Constable, the seigniory of Holderness. Sir John took the senior seat in 1563, and his son Henry sat in 1584 and 1586. Probably their religious conservatism curtailed their own parliamentary careers but it did not hinder their patronage at Hedon, where on two occasions (1584, 1586) they commanded both seats. Fulke Greville (1584) was a cousin of his fellow MP, and a courtier. John Hotham (1586) of Scarborough in the East Riding, was also related to the Constables. Other probable nominees of the Constable family were John Salveyn of Hemingbrough, Yorkshire, a relative, in 1559; Thomas Salveyn, a relative from the Durham branch of the family in 1597; William Paler (1571), a Yorkshire country gentleman of good standing and also a relative of the Constables, and John Moore I (1572) who, if identified correctly, was a Yorkshire gentleman and lawyer, connected with the Constables by marriage.

The other leading local family was that of the Hilliards, second in importance to the Constables, but closely related to them. In 1563 Christopher Hilliard I took the junior seat to his brother-in-law Sir John Constable, but in 1571, when the latter was sheriff of the county, he took the senior seat over the Constable nominee and retained it in 1572. His namesake, nephew and heir, Christopher Hilliard II, represented the borough in the last four Parliaments of the reign, bringing the family’s total to seven Hedon seats in this period. John Vaughan I (1559) of Sutton-upon-Derwent, and John Alford (1589) of Beverley, both appear to have enjoyed sufficient local standing to secure their own seats at Hedon.

The elections of Henry Brooke alias Cobham II in 1593 and Matthew Patteson in 1601 may signal the beginnings of Cecil interests in the borough, since Cobham was Robert Cecil’s brother-in-law, and Patteson, a Cecil dependant. However, in Cobham’s case the fact that his uncle represented Hedon in 1553 seems to suggest an earlier family connexion with the borough.3