Stockbridge was a parliamentary borough in Hampshire, which elected two Members of Parliament (MPs) to the
House of
Commons
from 1563 until 1832, when the borough was
abolished by the Great Reform
Act. It was one of the more egregiously
rotten boroughs, and the first to have its
status threatened for its corruption by a parliamentary bill to
disfranchise it, though the proposal was defeated.
History
Early years
The
borough was first enfranchised during the reign of Elizabeth I, and consisted of the
town of Stockbridge
, a small Hampshire market town on the Great West Road that cannot have been a town of any
real size or importance even at the outset. Although in
Hampshire, in Tudor times the borough came within the jurisdiction
of the
Duchy of Lancaster, and it
is possible that it won its right to vote on the assumption that it
would allow the Duchy to nominate its members. However - and unlike
most boroughs within the Duchy's sphere at that period - the
historian John Neale found little evidence that most of early
representatives were Duchy nominees: most were Hampshire men, and
it may be that the influence of the local gentry was too strong.
Nevertheless, towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign
Stockbridge returned several MPs who were probably the choices of
the Chancellor of the Duchy.
The election of 1614
The system came to grief, however, at the election of 1614, causing
a controversy that has been regarded as a significant milestone in
the House Of Commons' assertion of its
privileges. In that year, the
Chancellor of the
Duchy of Lancaster,
Sir
Thomas Parry, sent a threatening letter to the borough claiming
the right by precedent to choose the two MPs, and nominating
Sir Henry Wallop and
Sir Walter Cope as his choices. But the
intrepid 28 electors of Stockbridge ignored his wishes, voting
almost unanimously for their own candidates,
Sir Richard Gifford and a Mr St John.
But the bailiff of the borough (who was ex-officio
returning officer) ignored the vote and
returned the names of Wallop and Cope as elected; furthermore, the
angry Parry, furious to have been defied, had one of the voters
arrested and imprisoned.
The electors now petitioned against this outcome, and the House of
Commons proved strong enough to protect its elections from
interference. Although there was considerable discussion as to the
legal precedents, they eventually resolved that the election of
Wallop and Gifford was void. Furthermore, they expelled Parry from
his own seat for subverting the election in another constituency,
and prevailed upon the
King to
suspend him from his office and from the
Privy Council.
17th century attempts to disfranchise Stockbridge for
corruption
It is not recorded whether the stand of the Stockbridge electors
was based on principle or had some less worthy motive, but their
successors were certainly more venal. At least from the late 17th
century, the right to vote in Stockbridge was exercised by all
inhabitant householders who paid
scot and
lot, which generally amounted to about 100 voters. Bribery was
routine, and led to frequent scandal. In
1689
and again in
1693, the election in the borough
was declared void. After the 1689 election was overturned by the
Commons for "gross and notorious bribery", its original victor
debarred from being re-elected for the constituency in that
Parliament, and the bailiff and three other inhabitants of the town
were thrown in jail. Then an unprecedented motion was put to
disfranchise Stockbridge, and transfer its two seats to the county,
but the other MPs - perhaps nervous as to their own position -
proved unenthusiastic. After debate the proposal was quietly
dropped.
In 1693, very unusually, the House went against the findings of its
own election committee, declaring the election corrupt and void
even though the committee had decided that the winner had been duly
elected. Instead of issuing a writ for a new election, the House
then considered a bill to disfranchise Stockbridge; this time the
bill made considerable progress, but it was eventually defeated on
the third reading and a by-election was held to fill the
vacancy.
Not all the bribery in Stockbridge was as direct as buying votes or
corrupting the bailiff. Thomas Oldfield, the 19th century historian
of and polemicist against electoral abuse, records the following
anecdote of the author
Richard
Steele, elected in 1713:
The ingenious Sir Richard Steele ... carried his
election against a powerful opposition, by the merry expedient of
sticking a large apple full of guineas, and declaring it should be
the prize of that man whose wife should first be brought
to-bed [i.e. have a baby] after that day nine
months.
This, we are told, procured him the interest of the
women, who are said to commemorate Sir Richard's bounty to this
day, and once made a strenuous effort to procure a resolution, that
no man should ever be received as a candidate who did not offer
himself upon the same terms.
Patronage in the 18th and 19th centuries
Yet despite the apparent need to secure every result by bribery,
Stockbridge continued to have a generally-recognised "patron",
without whose support it was considered difficult if not impossible
to be elected, and despite the precarious hold that this patronage
entailed, it was as much a commercial property as the ownership of
pocket boroughs where control of the
elections was absolute. In
1754, the patron was
the
attorney-general,
Robert
Henley, who had personal rather than government-backed
influence over the borough. He passed control to his colleague
Henry Fox by leasing
the rights for a term of years. Fox hoped to reduce the venality of
the voters but quickly saw a deterioration rather than an
improvement, and must have considered his payment to have been a
poor investment. Namier and Brooke quote correspondence to show
that in
1767 Fox's son, the
Whig leader
Charles James Fox, was admitting that
while they felt certain of securing one seat for their chosen
candidate at the following year's election they saw little
likelihood of being able to choose both MPs: the 96 voters had
already been bribed in advance to the extent of 50 guineas a man,
and if the election was carried to a contest the need for further
treating of the voters and payments to the
returning officer would bring the cost to a candidate into the
region of £2,500. (In the event this election was not contested,
presumably because the votes bought in advance had already made it
a foregone conclusion; but there were contests at each of the next
four opportunities.)
By
1774 the younger Fox was in need of money
and no longer able to afford the expense of maintaining control of
Stockbridge's elections. Yet it seems that he was able to sell his
interests there to the Luttrell family, a transaction that can in
reality have entailed little more than a guarantee not to oppose
the Luttrell candidates and so bid up the price of votes: lavish
bribery by the Luttrells was still necessary to secure their seats.
When the Luttrells tired of it, the borough passed into the hands
of a West Indies merchant,
Joseph
Foster Barham, who occupied one seat himself and later kept the
second for his step-grandson,
John
Foster Barham. But when he, too, found himself in monetary
difficulties, he sold the borough to
Earl
Grosvenor. He not only vacated his seat immediately to allow
Grosvenor's nominee (
Edward Stanley, a
future
Conservative Prime
Minister but then a
Whig) to be
elected, but took the trouble to introduce Stanley to the electors.
By the time of the Reform Act, Grosvenor was being accused of
having countered the prevalence of bribery by a different form of
corruption, having hostile voters disqualified by persuading the
local overseers of the poor (his appointees) not to rate them for
scot and lot, and creating new votes by finding nominal jobs for
"unemployables" with the surveyor of roads.
Abolition
By the 19th century, Stockbridge was no more than a village, and
had no case for survival as a constituency even had its elections
been impeccably pure. In 1831, the population of the borough was
663, and contained 188 houses. It was abolished as a separate
constituency by the
Great Reform
Act in
1832, being included within the
Northern
Division of the county thereafter.
Members of Parliament
1563-1640
1640-1832
Notes
References
- Robert Beatson, A Chronological Register of Both Houses of
Parliament (London: Longman, Hurst, Res & Orme, 1807)
[464129]
- Michael Brock, "The Great Reform Act" (London: Hutchinson,
1973)
- D Brunton & D H Pennington, Members of the Long
Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
- John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640-1832
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)
- Cobbett's Parliamentary history of England, from the Norman
Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803 (London: Thomas Hansard,
1808) [464130]
- Maija Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament, 1614 (House
of Commons) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
1988) [464131]
- Lewis Namier & John Brooke, The History of Parliament:
The House of Commons 1754-1790 (London: HMSO, 1964)
- J E Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1949)
- J E Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559-1581
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1953)
- T H B Oldfield, The Representative History of Great Britain
and Ireland (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1816)
- J Holladay Philbin, Parliamentary Representation 1832 -
England and Wales (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1965)
- Edward Porritt and Annie G Porritt, The Unreformed House of
Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1903)
- Henry Stooks Smith, The Parliaments of England from 1715 to
1847 (2nd edition, edited by FWS Craig - Chichester:
Parliamentary Reference Publications, 1973)
- Frederic A Youngs, jr, Guide to the Local Administrative
Units of England, Vol I (London: Royal Historical Society,
1979)
- House of Commons Journal
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