Liskeard, a duchy of Cornwall borough, had sent Members to Parliament since the reign of Edward I. It owed its prosperity to fairs and markets and to its position—re-established early in Elizabeth’s reign—as one of the ‘coinage’ towns of the stannaries.3 Elizabeth confirmed its privileges by charter in 1587. The town was governed by a common council of nine capital burgesses or governors, from whom a mayor was chosen each year. A set of ‘constitutions’ for the borough, drawn up locally a year after the charter had been renewed, added 15 inferior burgesses to the governing body. All 24 held office for life. The council appointed a steward, usually chosen from the local gentry, a recorder and legal counsel.4

Election returns were made in the name of the mayor and burgesses, who met in the common hall or hall house. For every Parliament for which returns survive, one Member at least was returned on a ‘blank’. An irregularity in procedure in 1593 was brought to the notice of the House of Commons. Apparently the Liskeard authorities ‘refused to deliver their indenture to the sheriff’: instead, one of the elected representatives handed it directly to the clerk of the Crown. The return, now lost, was accepted by the House.5

Electoral influence seems to have been divided between the leading local gentry (Peter Edgecombe of Mount Edgecumbe and Jonathan Trelawny of Menheniot) and court patrons (the 2nd Earl of Bedford and Sir Robert Cecil). As lord warden of the stannaries until 1585, Bedford presumably nominated the following outsiders: George Bromley (1563), brother of the lord chancellor and a friend of William Cecil; Henry Macwilliam (1572), a well-connected gentleman pensioner; and Paul Wentworth (1572). Both Reginald Mohun I and Henry Chiverton had local estates, and John Connock, four times mayor of Liskeard, also owned a local manor. It is not known, however, how Basil Johnson, a Holborn lawyer and a recusant, came to be returned for Liskeard in 1571. Bedford’s influence was already waning by the time of the 1584 elections, which were dominated by Peter Edgecombe, who took the senior seat and offered the junior seat to his son-in-law Edward Denny. Edgecombe’s eldest son Richard was returned in 1586 at the age of 16 to the junior seat, the senior seat then being taken by Jonathan Trelawny, himself only 17 years old, who, after a long minority, restored the Trelawny family to a position of prominence in the county. Trelawny retained a seat at Liskeard until the 1597 Parliament when he represented the county. His fellow-Members in 1589 and 1593 were John Jackson, a London lawyer whose return for Liskeard has not been explained, and George Wray, a close neighbour and relative of Trelawny, whose brother later became steward of Liskeard. In 1597 both MPs were connected with the Trelawny family: Henry Neville was Jonathan Trelawny’s brother-in-law and Edward Trelawny was his cousin. In 1601 both Sampson Lennard and Thomas Edmondes were outsiders, and it seems likely that they were both nominated by Robert Cecil, who is known to have been offered some borough seats by Trelawny.6