Middlesex

County

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790-1820, ed. R. Thorne, 1986
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Number of voters:

about 6,000

Elections

DateCandidateVotes
28 June 1790WILLIAM MAINWARING 
 GEORGE BYNG 
3 June 1796WILLIAM MAINWARING 
 GEORGE BYNG 
13 July 1802GEORGE BYNG3848
 SIR FRANCIS BURDETT, Bt.3207
 William Mainwaring2936
  Burdett’s election declared void, 9 July 1804 
23 July 1804 GEORGE BOULTON MAINWARING2828
 Sir Francis Burdett, Bt.2823
 BURDETT vice Mainwaring, on petition, 5 Mar. 1805 
 MAINWARING vice Burdett, on petition, 10 Feb. 1806 
10 Nov. 1806WILLIAM MELLISH3213
 GEORGE BYNG2804
 Sir Francis Burdett, Bt.1197
18 May 1807WILLIAM MELLISH2706
 GEORGE BYNG2368
 Sir Christopher Baynes, Bt.1252
12 Oct. 1812GEORGE BYNG 
 WILLIAM MELLISH 
26 June 1818WILLIAM MELLISH 
 GEORGE BYNG 

Main Article

Urban development and the increase in population in the second half of the 18th century had a marked effect on the electoral geography of Middlesex. In the census of 1801 the ‘out’-parishes, where urbanization had its most obvious impact, were extended to include Chiswick, Ealing, Edmonton, Tottenham, Enfield, Harrow, Twickenham, Staines and Uxbridge. The county was being opened up as a residential ‘dormitory’ for prosperous London merchants, and although the process had not gone far there had been a significant penetration of the country by the town. Whereas in 1768 the combined urban areas of Westminster and the ‘out’-parishes had contained some 61 per cent of the total electorate, at the turn of the century the proportion seems to have been something between 75 and 80 per cent.1

The former Member, George Byng of Wrotham, defeated in 1784, intended to stand again at the first opportunity, but he died in October 1789. Along with his estates and wealth his son inherited the support of the Whig leader the Duke of Portland, who, after briefly considering a proposal that his own son Lord Titchfield* should stake a claim, arranged the formal process of Byng’s adoption and secured a promise of neutrality from the Duke of Northumberland, who possessed the only single landed interest of any substance. At the dissolution in 1790 Byng came forward with the sitting Members, William Mainwaring, chairman of the Middlesex bench and a supporter of government, and John Wilkes, the erstwhile popular hero, who had been returned in 1784 as a follower of Pitt. Wilkes declared for an unspecified measure of parliamentary reform, but he was a spent force, and at the adoption meeting, 25 June 1790, the sense of the audience was so hostile that he withdrew, leaving Mainwaring and Byng to be returned unopposed. In 1796 an attempt to bring in Sir Watkin Lewes, who had just lost his seat for London, got no further than the show of hands.2

Eighteen years of relative tranquillity were succeeded by five of a turbulence at least equal to that of Wilkes’s heyday, and the struggle for the county representation, involving a fierce party and, to some degree, class conflict, again took on dimensions of national significance. Between 1798 and 1800 Sir Francis Burdett, the wealthy Member for Boroughbridge, an intimate of John Horne Tooke* and his reforming friends and connected also with such extremists as the O’Connors and Despard, exposed in the House the harsh treatment of political and other prisoners in Coldbath Fields prison, Clerkenwell. Despite the efforts of the government and the Middlesex magistracy, led by Mainwaring, to deflect his attack on Governor Aris and the prison authorities, Burdett largely succeeded in vindicating his charges; and on 8 Sept. 1800 Caroline Fox told Lord Holland that Mainwaring, ‘even supported as he is, will find it difficult to stem the torrent of popular clamour so justly excited by his conduct as a magistrate’. More general political discontent with Mainwaring was expressed at a county meeting, 29 Oct. 1800, called to petition for inquiry into the high price of provisions and for legislation to ease the burden of taxation on the ‘middling classes’. Henry Clifford, the radical Catholic lawyer, widened the issue to blame the war as the real cause of distress and secured the passage of an additional resolution instructing the county Members to vote against it on every possible occasion. Byng was absent, but his parliamentary record earned general approval. Mainwaring reacted to criticism of his support for the war by making an ambiguous declaration of his desire for peace and his intention to ‘do everything in his power’ to hasten it; but his supporters were unable to obtain a vote of thanks for his past parliamentary conduct.3

Reports that Burdett intended to contest Middlesex were current in the press several months before the dissolution of 1802, though his father-in-law Thomas Coutts, the banker, later wrote that he was initially disposed to renounce Parliament entirely. According to John Colman Rashleigh, the idea of inviting him to stand originated at a meeting in the chambers of Thomas Holt White of four radical lawyers, two of whom went to Wimbledon to put the proposal to Horne Tooke. Burdett’s mentor subsequently claimed to have tried to dissuade his protégé from involving himself and Rashleigh recorded that members of the Wimbledon clique ‘did all they could indirectly to obstruct’ the plan and ‘to prevent a successful issue’. At the end of June there appeared in the press a formal invitation to Burdett, signed among others by William Tooke, Holt White and Michael and John Pearson, and Burdett’s letter of acceptance, in which he spoke of his disgust with the political system and his conviction that only parliamentary reform could save the country.4

Byng, who rested his pretensions on his past and promised future conduct as a good Whig and devoted constituency Member, was in no danger and came comfortably top of the poll. Burdett’s attack was directed against Mainwaring and turned almost exclusively on the issue of Coldbath Fields and his part in defending ‘the Bastile’ and Governor Aris. Burdett was emphatically the popular candidate in an expensive, boisterous, but not particularly violent campaign and Mainwaring soon gave up the hopeless task of trying to secure a hearing from the hustings. Burdett had the active assistance of a number of Foxite Whigs, received the votes of others, including Whitbread, and was supported by Fox himself and the opposition press. The Duchess of Devonshire canvassed for him and there were even rumours, which proved unfounded, that the Prince of Wales was actively interested in his success. At the same time, such notorious extremists of the 1790s as Frost, Gale Jones, Fergusson, Bosville and Bonney were prominent among his supporters. Although he trailed Mainwaring by over 500 votes from the outset, he declared his determination to keep the poll open to the bitter end. As early as the fifth day Mainwaring’s leading supporters, City men and a handful of MPs led by Henry Thornton, met to promote the greater efficiency of his campaign and to open a subscription to defray his expenses, which realized well over £4,000 by the end of the contest. Mainwaring’s lead was reduced to 399 on the thirteenth day, but he still seemed safe. The decisive stroke was played on the penultimate day when 375 voters, claiming their franchise on the highly suspect basis of two-guinea shares in a ‘good-intent’ mill at Isleworth, which had not yet been completed and had a legal existence of less than 12 months, polled for Burdett (281 of them also for Byng) and not one of them for Mainwaring. Burdett was thereby hoisted to within 14 of his opponent and on the last day he polled in sufficient numbers to give him second place by 291 votes.5

Whereas Byng received only 212 single votes, Mainwaring got 1,373 (47 per cent of his total vote) and Burdett an impressive 1,020 (32 per cent). Half of Mainwaring’s total and two-thirds of Burdett’s consisted of votes shared with Byng. Analysis of the poll book reveals no significant geographical pattern in the support enjoyed by Burdett and Mainwaring. The support given to both was drawn from urban and rural elements in proportions almost identical to their distribution in the electorate as a whole. It is just possible to isolate districts in which each man polled a strikingly higher percentage of the vote than his share of the whole. In the populous parishes of the Tower division, where Wilkes had received his most overwhelming support, Burdett did particularly well in Poplar, Shadwell and Hoxton, but Mainwaring’s vote rose markedly above the average in Hackney and East Smithfield. Burdett’s share of the vote was over 40 per cent in Harrow, Hammersmith and St. Luke’s (Finsbury); but Mainwaring’s was as high and even higher in Twickenham, Stanwell, Sunbury, Staines, Brentford, Lincoln’s Inn (Holborn) and St. Margaret and St. John (Westminster). Both men drew some 73 per cent of their single votes from the urbanized hundred of Ossulstone. Establishment figures emphatically favoured Mainwaring: of 77 clergymen, 68 voted for him, 8 for Burdett and one plumped for Byng; of 33 baronets and knights, 29 voted for Mainwaring, two for Burdett and two plumped for Byng; of 64 prebendaries of Westminster and employees and dependants of government, 60 voted for Mainwaring and four for Burdett; and of 44 Members of Parliament at the dissolution of 1802, 33 voted for Mainwaring, ten, all of them Foxite Whigs, for Burdett and one plumped for Byng. The evidence suggests that while Burdett made quite an impressive showing as an independent, radical candidate, he was heavily indebted for his success to Whig support and to his joint general appeal with Byng to the broadly liberal elements among the mass of small freeholders. His wealth was of great importance in securing his victory, which, in the last resort, was won by recourse to a blatant piece of electoral chicanery.

Burdett claimed to have afforded

an opportunity to the independent and public-spirited freeholders of the metropolitan county, deliberately to declare their sentiments of the present system of torture in the dungeons of Coldbath Fields and their opinion of Mr Justice Mainwaring and his humane friend ‘The steeled gaoler, who seldom is the friend of man’.

The Morning Chronicle, assessing his victory as one facet of the wider success it claimed for the Whigs in popular constituencies, proclaimed it a triumph for ‘liberty, humanity, and justice’. William Cobbett†, on the other hand, saw it as evidence of ‘a species of malignity, which never before existed, and which is directed against established authority in all its branches’, and considered that the contest ‘has been regarded, by the lower orders of people, as a struggle between the magistrates and the thieves’. The government, fearing the revival of Jacobinism and the Corresponding Societies, took alarm, and for his small part in canvassing a few votes for his son-in-law Coutts was deprived of the management of the Foreign Office accounts.6

Mainwaring’s supporters, confident that Burdett’s methods would not stand legal scrutiny, kept open the subscription to finance their challenge, and while Burdett was promoting reform at celebratory meetings in the county in the autumn of 1802, took the requisite steps for the ‘vigorous prosecution’ of a petition. This, presented on 6 Dec. 1802, accused the sheriffs, Sir William Rawlins and Robert Albion Cox, of ‘great partiality’ and charged Burdett with bribery and corruption. Later in the month a meeting of Mainwaring‘s supporters considered his public request for assistance and resolved to put their organization on a formal basis by forming a small committee and reopening the subscription. In the House, 18 and 20 Dec. 1802, Burdett tried to make an issue of this transaction, but was unable to substantiate his claim that it constituted a prejudgment of the issue and a breach of privilege. A counter-petition from the freeholders, accusing Mainwaring of a multitude of electoral sins and alleging that he did not possess the necessary property qualification, was rejected after a debate in which Sir William Grant, the master of the rolls, took a leading hostile part, on the ground that it contravened the Grenville Act. The select committee was not appointed until February 1804, immediately following the failure, by 96 votes to 24, of Fox’s attempt to have a freeholders’ petition against Burdett thrown out for the same reason. Burdett was deemed to have been unduly elected and Mainwaring to have been guilty of treating, and the election was declared void, 9 July 1804. Cox and Rawlins were censured for their conduct in admitting the fictitious mill votes in Burdett’s favour, and a year later were committed briefly to Newgate for breach of privilege.7

On 10 July Burdett announced his intention of standing again, and three days later the Mainwaring group, led by Thornton, Sir William Gibbons, John Bowles, the Mellish* brothers and Thomas Wood* of Littleton, invited Mainwaring’s son George, who had just been appointed county treasurer, to come forward. He refused to do so unless guaranteed complete indemnity from any personal expense, but sufficient funds were promptly subscribed to overcome his fears and he accepted the task of ‘rescuing the rights and franchises of the county’. Burdett’s address referred to the need for economical reform and branded his opponent as the supporter of repressive legislation and corruption. The ensuing contest, which began on 23 July, was bitter, turbulent and unsavoury. Both sides traded accusations of the employment of fictitious votes, captious legal obstructions, bribery and unwarranted influence. Burdett’s basic theme was now ‘independence’:

This ... cannot be considered a mere contest between two candidates; but whether a combination of interested distillers, publicans and brewers, of magistrates and contractors, shall have the nomination of a representative for this country. This is the evil I wish to remove; and when I consider that the persons I allude to, and others of the same description, are so much under the influence of the minister, or so completely in the paws of the magistrates, that they dare not exercise their own will, it is with a view to raise the country, or this county at least, to independence, that I encounter so much trouble.

His opponents dwelt on his association with convicted traitors, branded him as a fomenter of Jacobinism and sedition, and supported their charges with allusions to the lowly class of many of his supporters, who were alleged to include disaffected shoemakers and deserters. Although Burdett had damaged himself with speeches in the summer of 1803 which invited interpretation as treason, the loyalist radicals, such as Benjamin Travers, who had turned against him then, now supported him. His Foxite backing was extensive and undisguised. Byng took no personal part, but declared his preference for Burdett. Peter Moore*, Lord William Russell* and Lord Duncannon*, Lord Bessborough’s son, worked actively for him, and Fox himself and many prominent Whig peers and commoners openly declared their interest in his success. Even William Windham* was sympathetic, arguing that ‘Burdett having given up his democracy’, the ‘old family and landed interest must be supported against the money interest’; and Cobbett took the same line, going to great lengths to exonerate Burdett from the charge of Jacobinism. There are suggestions that Burdett, who responded with a qualified affirmation of his attachment to ‘the Whig interest’, forfeited the wholehearted support of some of the leading radicals, but Frost and Bonney were again active in his campaign and he invoked the memory of Wilkes from the hustings. On the last day, 8 Aug., a number of disputed votes were set aside by the sheriffs to be examined after the close of the poll, when Mainwaring had a lead of five votes. The process was partially carried out and it emerged that there were sufficient good votes to give Burdett a majority of one, but the following day, after protests from Mainwaring’s counsel and a protracted legal argument, the sheriffs declared the result as it stood when voting finished.8

On 14 Aug. 1804 a meeting of Burdett’s supporters at the Crown and Anchor, chaired by Moore, decided to relieve him of further personal expense and trouble in the struggle to vindicate the freeholders’ rights against the ‘outrage’ perpetrated by ‘the artifice and activity of the Church and magistracy’ with the connivance of the returning officers, by turning over prosecution of the petition to the freeholders themselves. A subscription was opened and a committee, which included Duncannon, Moore, Lord Robert Spencer*, William Smith*, Hare Townshend, John Cartwright and Travers, was formed to organize its promotion on a local and national basis. Some parochial committees were established in the county, but the evidence is that the national appeal was not very successful and at least one leading Whig, Charles Grey*, had serious reservations about it, regarding ‘as highly impolitic any proceeding that may seem to connect the cause of Burdett with that of opposition’. In November 1804 John Cartwright formed a Middlesex Freeholders Club, designed not only to advance the immediate object, but to become a permanent body for the protection of the independence of the county. Its founder, indeed, envisaged it as a focus for a national revival of liberal enthusiasm, but it does not appear to have been very successful in promoting this wider aim. The other side were also active. A Freemasons tavern meeting, 28 Aug., chaired by Thornton, stressed the proven practice of perjury and personation by the Burdettites in 1802 and the indications that the same methods had been used in the recent contest, and opened a subscription, both to sustain Mainwaring in the seat and to finance legal action against the perpetrators of these ‘corrupt and flagitious practices’. A number of MPs, including Thornton, Blackburn, William Mellish and Sir William Curtis, sat on the committee which was formed. The conviction of two of Burdett’s voters on grand jury indictments for perjury and the prospect of a further 28 true bills being found encouraged them to follow up these prosecutions, and in December parochial subscriptions for the purpose were set on foot.9

On 25 Jan. 1805 a petition of the freeholders complaining of the sheriffs’ refusal to admit the examined votes was presented. It was followed three days later by another alleging that Mainwaring was not qualified to sit in Parliament either by property or as the eldest son or heir of a man so qualified. On the basis of the first petition the committee reinstated Burdett in the seat, 5 Mar. 1805. The second was eventually discharged. Given a fortnight in which to state his case, Mainwaring petitioned on 13 Mar., accusing Burdett of the employment of corrupt practices, fictitious votes, bribery and treating. The Burdettites were evidently in some financial difficulty. Burdett himself was believed to have spent as much as £100,000 on Middlesex elections, and although the subscription was left open, the amount of the residue was deliberately kept secret, and it was only after protests from Clifford, Cartwright and Robert Waithman* that Moore’s proposal to turn over the surplus to Burdett was dropped. On 1 May 1805 Burdett informed the Speaker that as Mainwaring intended to lodge objections against 1,944 of his voters, he would not contest the issue. Certain freeholders petitioned and were allowed to be heard on Burdett’s behalf, but they did not appear before the committee, which decided, 10 Feb. 1806, in favour of Mainwaring.10

Burdett made no secret of the disillusionment which overtook him in the summer of 1806 on the failure of the ‘Talents’ to produce a measure of parliamentary reform, and by the time of the dissolution there was considerable speculation as to the attitude of the new government to his candidature. Holt White, promising Byng his second vote, assumed that they would be ‘cold and at least neutral’. Writing from the Dutch Commissioners Office, John Bowles, a prominent supporter of the Mainwarings, encouraged Lord Grenville to start a candidate with the full backing of government, or at least to give no official countenance to Burdett. The issue was forced by Burdett’s election address, in which he blasted the party politicians and appealed for purely voluntary support:

I will not distribute, nor consent to the distribution, even of a single cockade; nor will I furnish, nor consent to the furnishing, of a single carriage. If the freeholders of Middlesex feel the situation of their country, and desire to redress its grievances, they will do their easy parts towards such redress by an uncorrupt vote.

The address was immediately endorsed by the Middlesex Freeholders’ Club, which opened a subscription to support Burdett on the terms specified.11

The ministry and its supporters were maddened by the attack which, according to Lady Bessborough, ‘caused such indignation at the Exchange that some of the chief people there undertook to raise £20,000 in a few hours if any popular candidate would start’. The government approached William Mellish of Bush Hill, Member for Great Grimsby in the previous Parliament, a director of the Bank, merchant and contractor, who had been an active supporter of the Mainwarings, and Lord Grenville gave him a firm promise of support. He was formally adopted at a meeting of 31 Oct. 1806, dominated by Gibbons, Mainwaring senior and Bowles, when Burdett was denounced as a Jacobin. Although Mellish had the backing of the Grenville wing of the coalition and of such Foxite ministers as Lord Howick and Lord Henry Petty*, other yeading Whigs, principally Lord Holland, the Duke of Bedford, Lord William Russell and Lord John Townshend*, found him no more acceptable than Burdett, as the manner of his formal adoption clearly identified him with the Mainwaring faction. There was talk of their starting a fourth, Foxite, candidate, to run in harness with Byng. This pressure appears momentarily to have influenced Grenville and Mellish. Lady Bessborough reported that from the premier she had received a message ‘begging us to let Duncannon stand’, and that Mellish at one point ‘wished to give it up’. It was finally decided not to interfere with the original arrangement, for the sake of preserving the appearance of ministerial unity; but Lord Holland remained discontented and worried:

I am confident the support of Mellish will do much harm. If he had been contented to start as the government candidate and not mixed his cause with that of the jobbing justices, though all the body of Whig and low church freeholders might have thought him a bad choice, they would have voted for him, but any support now given to him by Sir Francis Burdett’s former friends is in fact a justification of some part of his infamous calumnies; and if we are at all anxious to preserve any popular interest in the country we must not, even to gratify our feelings, much less to preserve mere appearances, support ... the men [and] the means which we formerly resisted. ... It is really playing Horne Tooke’s game and turning over all our real interest in the community to him or to opposition. In this view of the subject ... what votes I can influence must give plumpers to Byng but be assured that a very large portion of his second votes will go to Sir Francis which with any other candidate would have been given to the government.

Byng rejected an invitation from the Middlesex Freeholders’ Club to join his interest with that of Burdett, who promptly condemned him and his fellow ‘professing Whigs’ for their unprincipled junction with the Grenvilles. Byng, who insisted that he stood alone, on sound Whig principles, and Mellish, who declared his ‘honest and independent’ support for King and constitution, allowed Burdett to dominate the verbal exchanges. As well as indulging in vituperative denunciations of the Whigs and elaborating his monarchical and constitutional radical theories, he laid increasing stress on the need to exclude placemen and pensioners from the House. Although he was well beaten, he claimed to have found the independent public which he had been seeking. In view of his methods, his poll of 1,197 was not unimpressive. There was considerable evidence of popular animosity towards the Whigs, a pointer to that dissension between Whigs and radicals which was to be very significant in the resuscitation of the reform movement, and Byng clearly suffered from the withdrawal of Burdettite support.12

In 1807, the leadership of metropolitan radicalism transferred to Westminster with Burdett. Holland and his cronies pressed Duncannon to stand against Mellish, but he would have no part in it; and the challenge to the sitting Members came from a ‘No Popery’ candidate, Sir Christopher Baynes of Harefield Place, a long-serving Middlesex magistrate and a promoter of the London Dock Company. His avowed intention was to oust Byng as ‘one of the party of the late administration, whose object was to deprive his Majesty of his prerogative’, and his sponsors included Gibbons, Curtis and Bowles, who had been closely involved with the Mainwarings and Mellish. He ‘expected to participate in the same interest’ as the latter, but received no cooperation from that quarter and complained that Mellish, by canvassing only for single votes, had in effect combined with Byng against him. On the sixth day, when he was over 800 behind Byng and 1,200 below Mellish, he announced his retirement from the contest. A group of his more zealous supporters subsequently resolved to keep the poll open but a second meeting, chaired by Bowles, decided to give up, and the election ended with Baynes and Byng trading party political insults in the press.13

Although there was no serious threat to Mellish and Byng in 1812 and 1818, the former’s ministerial politics provoked mounting dissatisfaction among leading radical elements in the county and unsuccessful attempts were made on both occasions to revive reform as an electoral issue. In 1811 Cartwright and the Freeholders’ Club went to elaborate lengths to persuade Sir Samuel Romilly* to come forward as an avowed and explicitly pleyged reformer, but he refused to become involved. At the dissolution of 1812 a similar approach to Henry Brougham* foundered on his objections to annual parliaments. At the freeholders’ meeting, 19 June 1818, Thomas Clarke of Swakeleys, a reformer who supported Cartwright at the 1818 Westminster election, was nominated, but he later declined to stand, on the pretext that a man of his views ought ‘to deprecate, rather than desire’ a seat in the existing House. Last-minute proposals to put up a reforming Whig collapsed in confusion and disagreement.14

Author: David R. Fisher

Notes

  • 1. See G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 80 and Hanoverian London, 19.
  • 2. Alnwick mss 57, ff. 29, 33, 37; Portland mss PwF9194; Public Advertiser, 14, 21, 24, 26 June 1790; True Briton, 21, 28 May, 3, 4 June 1796.
  • 3. Holland House mss, Add. 51735; Procs. Mdx. Freeholders, 29 Oct. 1800; The Times, 30 Oct. 1800.
  • 4. The Times, 3 Feb., 15 Apr., 29 June 1802; PRO 30/8/126, f. 119; Cornw. RO, Rashleigh mems. i. 52; J. Horne Tooke, Letter to The Times (1807), 3; M. W. Patterson, Burdett, i. 132-4; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth, 128-33.
  • 5. General Election of 1802, pp. 51-69; Considerations on Westminster and Mdx. Elections (1802), 14-55; Mdx. Election candidly considered (1804); Add. 41854, f. 322; 47566, f. 67; 51736, Caroline Fox to Holland, 22 July; 51822, Perry to same, 20 July; Morning Chron. 13 July; The Times, 1, 5, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27-29 July 1802; Prince of Wales Corresp. iv. 1660; Jerningham Letters, i. 217; Hone, 133-4.
  • 6. Patterson, i. 139; Morning Chron. 30 July; Pol. Reg. 17, 24 July 1802; Geo. III Corresp. iv. 2648, 2652; PRO 30/8/126, ff. 116-21; PRO, Dacres Adams mss 4, f. 81; Hone, 135-6.
  • 7. Pellew, Sidmouth, ii. 72; The Times, 9 Aug., 10 Nov., 17 Dec.; Morning Chron. 8 Oct., 18 Nov. 1802; CJ, lviii. 54, 63, 86-87; lix. 7-8, 58-60, 396-7; Debrett (ser. 4), i. 217-19, 363-71, 467-8, 475-83; Parl. Deb. i. 996-1025.
  • 8. Morning Chron. 24 July, 9 Aug.; Pol. Reg. 25 Aug., 1 Sept. 1804; Procs. Mdx. Election (1804); [J. Bowles], Letter to Mdx, freeholders (1804); W. H. Yate, Serious and impartial address (Gloucester, 1804); Geo. III Corresp. iv. 2839; Prince of Wales Corresp. v. 1908; Hunt, Mems. ii. 139-41; Windham Pprs. ii. 284-5; L. Melville, Cobbett, i. 225-7; Patterson, i. 146-9; Add. 37906, f. 176; 41856, f. 181; Glos. RO, Redesdale mss C9, Long to Redesdale, 11 Aug.; Carlisle mss, Huskisson to Carlisle, 14 Oct. 1804; Brougham mss 36412; Hone, 141-4.
  • 9. Morning Chron. 15, 18, 20, 23, 29, 30 Aug., 3 Oct., 6, 10 Nov. 1804; Creevey Pprs. ed. Maxwell, i. 3-4; Grey mss, Grey to Ld. R. Spencer, 23 Aug. 1804; Cartwright Corresp. i. 322; The Times, 10, 15 Nov., 21, 22 Dec. 1804, 5 Feb. 1805; Hone, 144-5.
  • 10. CJ, lx. 18, 21, 67, 89, 121, 136, 210, 225, 242, 340; lxi. 31, 35; Morning Chron. 6 Apr.; The Times, 13 July 1805.
  • 11. Morning Chron. 6 Oct.; Wakes Mus., Selborne, Holt White mss, White to Byng, 28 Oct.; Fortescue mss, Bowles to Grenville, 25 Oct. 1806; Patterson, i. 182-3; Hist. Westminster and Mdx. Elections of 1806 (1807), 307-8.
  • 12. Leveson Gower, ii. 223-6; Wentworth Woodhouse mun. E209; Sidmouth mss, Sidmouth to Bragge Bathurst, 30 Oct.; Creevey mss, Petty to Creevey, 31 Oct.; Grey mss, Howick to Holland, 2 Nov.; Add. 51544, Holland to Howick [1, 2 Nov.]; 51570, Townshend to Holland [3 Nov.]; 51576, Whitbread to same, 5 Nov.; 51661, Bedford to same, 13 Nov.; 51681, Russell to same [c.7 Nov.]; Pol. Reg. 8 Nov. 1806; Hist. Westminster and Mdx. Elections, 308-11, 321-443; Patterson, i. 182-91; Hone, 154-6.
  • 13. Carlisle mss, Lady to Ld. Morpeth, 14 May; The Times, 27, 29, 30 Apr., 7, 12, 13, 18-23, 25-28 May 1807.
  • 14. Romilly, Mems. ii. 415-13, 415-26; Brougham mss, Brougham to Grey [18 Sept. 1812]; The Times, 18-20, 22, 24, 26, 27 June 1818; The Late Elections (1818), 219-28; Hone, 213-14, 283.