Warwick was incorporated in 1545, and, according to a charter of 1554, was governed by a common council comprising a bailiff, 12 assistants (or principal burgesses) and a recorder. By 1570, 24 secondary burgesses were appointed, to be ‘the mouth of all the commoners’, but these could be dispensed with at the discretion of the principal burgesses, and their number was soon reduced to 12. In this period, with one exception, the common council chose the MP, and paid the wages.

However, the fact is that the town was largely under the thumb of the lord of the borough, and lord lieutenant of the county, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, brother of the Queen’s favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who, between them were responsible for the returns of Thomas Fisher I (1559), Walter Haddon (1563), and Thomas Dudley (1572, 1584, 1586, 1589). John Butler I (1563) was both a borough official and a servant of Leicester, and Edward Aglionby (1571), on the recommendation of the Earl of Warwick, became recorder in the next year. John Fisher I (1571, 1572, 1584), brother of the 1559 man, was town clerk, and James Dyer (1589) recorder. But Dyer had been appointed recorder on the recommendation of (Sir) John Harington II, and cannot be regarded as either the corporation’s man or the Earl of Warwick’s. The latter, perhaps feeling that his patronage was insecure after Leicester’s death, wrote to the corporation before the 1588 election asking them to return Dudley:

I would be loth [that Dudley] should be prevented by any other man’s suit unto you, and therefore I desire your expedition.

By the time of the next election the Earl of Warwick, too, had died, and the MPs were a local gentleman, John Hugford, and a lawyer of counsel to the town, William Combe. The two townsmen returned in 1597 were reelected in 1601. The two remaining Members in this period were both Throckmortons: Thomas came in through his own local influence at the very beginning of the reign, and Job was elected in 1586 with factional support from both inside and outside the borough in circumstances set out in his biography. Sir Richard Grosvenor, reporting a privilege case in 1628, made the point as far as Warwick was concerned:

it was proved that the common council did ever choose the burgesses but once, 28 Eliz., when Mr. Job Throckmorton was chosen by the commons.3