Newport, a suburb of Launceston, had no municipal organization. The manorial court every year elected two ‘vianders’, and it had been contended in 1628 that the freeholders could claim the poll in parliamentary elections only if the vianders disagreed on the choice of candidates. Normally only a couple of dozen voters attested the returns, but the indenture for the contested election of February 1679 carries 75 signatures. As lords of the manor since 1651 the Morices enjoyed the strongest interest, but they were sometimes required to defend it against the Coryton brothers and Ambrose Manaton, who held property in the borough.1

At the general election of 1660 the past and present lords of the manor, Sir Francis Drake and William Morice, were returned. Both were Presbyterians, though Morice in particular, as the principal adviser of George Monck, strongly supported the Restoration. When he chose to sit for Plymouth, he presumably nominated Laurence Hyde, the lord chancellor’s son, to fill the vacancy. Drake was re-elected in 1661, and as Morice did not require the other seat it was taken by John Speccot, who presumably shared his political and religious outlook. Drake’s death early in the New Year occasioned a contest, though neither writ nor return has survived. Henry Ford, who was connected with the Court through Thomas Clifford, probably stood on the Morice interest against the Cavalier Piers Edgcumbe, who had represented the borough in 1628-9. Edgcumbe was returned, and Ford’s petition was never reported. Edgcumbe died in 1667, when Morice’s younger son Nicholas, who was just embarking on an official career, took the seat. The next by-election did not take place until 1678, and the appearance of three candidates for the seat left vacant by Speccot’s death perhaps suggests that political excitement had even spread as far as Newport. The Morice interest was represented by Sir Walter Yonge of the country party. He was opposed by a court supporter, John Coryton, son of the county Member, who was more closely connected with Callington, and Ambrose Manaton, a trimmer. Manaton was returned by only one of the vianders, but the sheriff refused to send up another indenture. Both the unsuccessful candidates petitioned repeatedly, but in the course of the three short sessions that followed the elections committee failed to report, and Manaton retained his seat till the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament.2

Nicholas Morice, who had succeeded to a comfortable sinecure, never stood again, and the family interest was represented in February 1679 by his brother John, a Turkey merchant. It is possible that Coryton and Manaton joined forces to defeat him, and then paired for the division on the exclusion bill. His petition, like so many others for this distant constituency, failed to emerge from the elections committee. In September Coryton gave way to his younger brother William, a lawyer and a committed opponent of exclusion. But in 1681 the Morice interest reasserted itself at his expense when the grandson of the Convention Member was returned. Manaton, who had retained his seat throughout the exclusion crisis, was replaced in 1685 by Speccot’s son, a Tory, and played no further part in the politics of Newport. In 1688 James II’s electoral agents expected the sitting Members to be re-elected, but the younger Morice died in June, and his father, the 1st baronet, emerged from a lifetime of obscurity to take his seat in the Convention.3