Portsmouth

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Right of Election:

in the freemen

Number of voters:

about 100

Elections

DateCandidateVotes
31 Jan. 1715SIR EDWARD ERNLE 
 SIR CHARLES WAGER 
7 Apr. 1715WAGER re-elected after appointment to office 
28 Mar. 1718WAGER re-elected after appointment to office 
24 Mar. 1722SIR JOHN NORRIS 
 SIR CHARLES WAGER 
19 Aug. 1727SIR JOHN NORRIS 
 SIR CHARLES WAGER 
24 Apr. 1734THOMAS LEWIS 
 PHILIP CAVENDISH 
10 Feb. 1737CHARLES STEWART vice Lewis, deceased 
21 Feb. 1741EDWARD VERNON vice Stewart, deceased 
6 May 1741PHILIP CAVENDISH60
 MARTIN BLADEN54
 Edward Vernon9
23 Mar. 1742CAVENDISH re-elected after appointment to office 
14 Dec. 1743SIR CHARLES HARDY vice Cavendish, deceased 
28 Dec. 1744ISAAC TOWNSEND vice Hardy, deceased 
3 Mar. 1746THOMAS GORE vice Bladen, deceased 
1 July 1747ISAAC TOWNSEND 
 THOMAS GORE 
15 Dec. 1747EDWARD LEGGE vice Gore, chose to sit for Bedford 
  Election declared void, 19 Dec. 1747 
28 Dec. 1747SIR EDWARD HAWKE 

Main Article

An Admiralty borough, Portsmouth was managed by channelling local patronage through the corporation, who controlled the representation by their power to create freemen. Soon after George I’s accession its governor, Lord North and Grey, an extreme Tory, was informed by his agent there that Sir Charles Wager had come down, caused 59 new freemen to be admitted, and deprived the agent of his receivership of the land tax. Next month Lord North was dismissed.1 Thenceforth government nominees were returned unopposed. Before the general election of 1734 Wager told Walpole: ‘whoever is recommended by you will, I think, undoubtedly be chosen’, as in fact they were.2 In 1741 Wager wrote to Vernon, then in the West Indies, that at a by-election for Portsmouth he had recommended Vernon to the corporation, who had chosen him unanimously and would have done so at the general election, but that, finding that Vernon was already being put up for half a dozen other places, he had decided to replace him by Martin Bladen, ‘having no other sea officer proper to setup’. A copy of the poll shows, however, that Vernon was nominated.3 When in 1747 Edward Legge was considered for a vacancy at Portsmouth, his brother, Henry Legge, wrote to the Duke of Bedford, then first lord:

The wishes of the town to be represented by a sea officer will be gratified, and properly gratified, by that officer’s being entirely of your own nomination, and not having resided to make interest for himself independent of the Admiralty.4

The first of several attempts to break the Admiralty interest by creating a large number of freemen was led in October 1750 by John Carter, a prominent local merchant and Dissenter.5

Author: Paula Watson

Notes

  • 1. John Mellish to North, 11 Sept. 1714, North to Duke of Marlborough, 17 Oct. 1714, Bodl. North mss c.9, f. 88, and b. 2, f. 141.
  • 2. 8 Dec. 1732, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss.
  • 3. Original Letters to an Honest Seaman (1746), 39, 47; Portsmouth archives, PE 2/5c.
  • 4. 4 Aug. 1747, Bedford mss.
  • 5. Ex inf. N. W. Surry and J. H. Thomas.