Election Issues and the Borough Electorates in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Kent

ELECTION ISSUES AND THE BOROUGH ELECTORATES IN MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY KENT By MADELINE V. JONES, M.A.(OXON.), PH.D.(LOND.) .,. A STUDY of the Kentish boroughs in the civil-war period lends considerable support to Professor PlUnib's recent contention1 that a politicallyconscious electorate exerted real influence on the choice of members of the seventeenth-century House of Commons.2 Despite the difficulty of penetrating the minds of the 'inferior sort' of freemen who in all eight boroughs voted in Parliamentary elections, it is nevertheless possible to provide some evidence both of the e:ristence of concern for general issues in 1640 and of the growth of such concern by 1660-1. The size of the electorate in these Kentish towns varied from New Romney's 16 or so voters to the 200 or more of Dover, Sandwich and Canterbury.a Even of the smaller boroughs, only decaying Queenborough showed virtually no interest in political and religious matters during this period. New Romney was slow to reject the traditional patronage exercised in the Cinque Ports by the Lord Warden but, by April, 1641, appears to have been making an independent choice.4 As Professor Everitt has shown,6 Kent was not dominated by any great family or small group of such families at this period: apart from the Lord Warden, therefore, with his customary if somewhat precarious right to nominate at least one member at Dover, Sandwich, Hythe and New Romney, only the Archbishop in Canterbury could be regarded as 1 J. H. Plumb, 'The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715', Past and Present, no. 45, 90-116. 2 An expansion of some of the arguments put forward in this m-ticle can be found in M. V. Jones, 'The Political History of the Parliamentary Boroughs of Kent, 1642-1662' (London University, Ph.D. thesis, 1967). 3 Kent County Archives, N.R./AC2, p. 265 et passim; for Sandwich and Dover see below; Hythe had 30-35 in 1640, Hythe Assembly Book 209, pp. 238, 240. For the other boroughs, an estimate of the number of freemen in 1662-3 can be made from the records of the proceedings of the Commissioners for Corporations: Canterbury had over 200, Rochester probably just under and Maidstone just over 200, Queenborough 26; see Canterbury Dean and Chapter Library, A/C5 ff. 59b-62a; Rochester City Archives, Ro/AC2 ff. 71 a and b; Recor