Among the Northamptonshire gentry were some of the stars of the Elizabethan firmament. Sir Walter Mildmay of Apethorpe had an amazing record of appearances as knight of the shire, for he was elected to every Parliament of the reign until his death after that of 1589. Sir William Cecil himself represented the county in 1563, preferring it to Lincolnshire, where he really belonged, and his heir sat in 1593 and 1597. Christopher Hatton I, who had two estates in Northamptonshire at Holdenby and Kirby Hall, sat in the three Parliaments before his appointment as lord chancellor in 1587, and in the first election after his appointment he supported the candidature of Mildmay and Hatton’s ‘very good friend’ Sir Richard Knightley of Fawsley. Christopher Yelverton was a lawyer who had married into a Northamptonshire family. He was to be Speaker in 1597, and a high court judge in 1602. (Sir) John Stanhope (1601) of Harrington, had just been made vice-chamberlain of the Household and a Privy Councillor, and his fellow-Member was another courtier, the equerry, (Sir) William Lane II of Horton, son of the 1571 MP. Altogether Northamptonshire had four MPs who were Privy Councillors—Mildmay, Sir William Cecil, Hatton and Stanhope.

It is a little surprising that the Montagus of Boughton should have taken but one turn as knight of the shire in this period. Edward Montagu I (1559) was one of the largest Northamptonshire landowners, in good standing with the government and active in local affairs until the end of the reign. Even it he had not wished to sit again in Parliament, his sons Edward II, Henry and Sidney did, but they had to contrive borough seats, sometimes as far afield as Devon and Wiltshire. The intervention by Hatton in 1588 only five days before the election was probably addressed to (Sir) Edward Montagu I; and if so its purpose must have been to discourage him from standing against Knightley, by his own estimate a man of ‘simple wit and weak capacity’ whose claims to the seat might otherwise have been diminished by his suspected involvement in the affair of the puritan printing press, for which he was imprisoned some months after the close of the 1589 Parliamerlt. Nevertheless Knightley was again knight of the shire in 1597, when Montagu’s heir had to be content with Tavistock.3