Bridgnorth

Borough

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

Background Information

Right of Election:

in the freemen (resident and non-resident)

Number of voters:

about 700

Population:

(1801): 4,319

Elections

DateCandidateVotes
21 June 1790THOMAS WHITMORE I 
 ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE 
28 Apr. 1795 JOHN WHITMORE vice Whitmore, deceased 
30 May 1796JOHN WHITMORE 
 ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE 
5 July 1802JOHN WHITMORE268
 ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE237
 St George Knudson57
1 Nov. 1806THOMAS WHITMORE II 
 ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE 
6 May 1807THOMAS WHITMORE II 
 ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE 
8 Oct. 1812THOMAS WHITMORE II 
 HON. CHARLES CECIL COPE JENKINSON 
20 June 1818THOMAS WHITMORE II 
 SIR THOMAS JOHN TYRWHITT JONES, Bt. 

Main Article

The Whitmore family of Apley, recorders of Bridgnorth continuously since 1747, who had, as Pitt was informed in 1795, ‘represented the borough from the strongest natural interest for many generations’, returned one Member throughout this period; and both in 1820, not for the first time. Isaac Hawkins Browne, who had headed the poll in the contest of 1784, was a neighbouring country gentleman connected with the Birmingham industrial interest, whom the Whitmores accepted readily as their colleague. In 1790 a joint address was issued, ‘to preclude even the shadow of an opposition’. Whitmore’s agent, Thomas Barnfield, wrote on 6 June that despite their lack of ‘a coincidence in politics, yet it must, at this crisis, be both your interests to join publicly’. The defeated candidate in 1784, Adm. Hugh Pigot, who thought he had been deserted by his fellow oppositionist Whitmore, was still a potential threat. In November 1788, and a year later, there were reports of his standing again, but he was discouraged on the latter occasion and by May 1790 a Whitmore agent claimed that ‘the clamour of an opposition at Bridgnorth has been gradually subsiding’. The admiral disappointed his partisans at the election, and died in 1792.1

On Thomas Whitmore’s death in 1795, Browne wrote to Pitt on behalf of the deceased Member’s City cousin, John Whitmore, who would ‘not be in the same political system’, as his family disavowed the late Member’s politics. Pitt approved and gained a supporter. The by-election was uncontested and nothing came of reports that Col. Pigot, the admiral’s son, would stand ‘next time’.2 In 1802 Browne and Whitmore allied against an outside challenger, Knudson, whose address was issued from Brasenose College, Oxford, and they obtained the backing of the Birmingham vote: Matthew Boulton left his sick bed to promote an advertisement in favour of the sitting Members. On 6 July he wrote:

When it is considered how congenial the commercial int[eres]t of these gent[leme]n is with our own from the great property that one of them possesses in the foundation stones of all our manufactories, viz. iron and coal and the other from being a director of the greatest national bank in the world, as well as his extensive mercantile establishments, I say when these things are considered together with the services already rendered to Birmingham on every application from it surely we cannot be so blind to our own int[erest] as to choose in preference a man who is a stranger to us, to our manufactories, to our commerce and our interest.

As it turned out, the Birmingham vote need not have been mustered: Knudson ‘fled the town’ when he saw how poor his prospects were. Whitmore assured Boulton, 8 July, that the opposition was ‘begun vindictively and terminated wantonly’. Knudson had evidently been encouraged by local dissidents, led by Alderman Skelding. To swamp him, 81 new burgesses were admitted in the three days following his appearance. Nothing came of a rumour of a peerage for Browne in September 1804, when R. Atcherley of Bridgnorth invited the Duke of Norfolk to put up a candidate who, he asserted, would be backed by ‘the major part of the aldermen’.3

In 1806 John Whitmore made way for Thomas Whitmore, heir of Apley, now of age, and the alliance with Browne continued unchallenged.4 In 1812, before his retirement, the latter secured Whitmore’s approval of his replacement by the prime minister’s half-brother, who had inherited the Pitchford estate. There was supposed to be some indignation, because Browne ‘most shabbily offered up his constituents to the brother of the prime minister before he had made known his intention of retiring’, but there was no ‘proper candidate’ to challenge the arrangement.5 In 1818 Jenkinson found another seat and made way for another neighbouring country gentleman, Tyrwhitt Jones of Stanley Hall. He was supported by Browne and by the Birmingham outvote which claimed, 29 May, that ‘the interests of the town of Birmingham are materially connected with the proper representation of the borough of Bridgnorth’. Tyrwhitt Jones took Browne as his model and claimed to be ‘distinct’ from Whitmore and an ‘independent man’.6 Perhaps his stance was influenced by the report of a challenge:

The borough of Bridgnorth which from its uniformly quiet and undisputed parliamentary elections has given rise to a well-known provincial adage [‘All on one side like a Bridgnorth election’] is likely to become the scene of a strenuous contest, the Hon. Cecil Forester having declared his intention of offering himself in opposition to the old interest.

Forester was said by Jenkinson, in 1812, to have a ‘very considerable’ interest in the borough ‘which he had most kindly exerted for me’; and Jenkinson had accordingly applied to his half-brother the prime minister for clerical promotion for Forester’s brother.7 Forester fell back, however, on his own seat at Wenlock.

Author: R. G. Thorne

Notes

  • 1. Trans. Salop Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. (ser. 4), liv. 171; PRO 30/8/102, f. 45; 30/29/6/2, ff. 20, 22; Salop RO, Watkins Pitchford mss, Barnfield letterbks. 24 Nov. 1788, May, 6 June 1790.
  • 2. PRO 30/8/102, f. 45; 116, f. 289; Barnfield letterbks. 5 May 1795.
  • 3. Birmingham Ref. Lib. Boulton and Watt pprs., B 2 70-72, 74, 75; Barnfield letterbks. 5 July; Salopian Jnl. 7 July; Shrewsbury Chron. 9 July 1802; Trans. Salop Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. (ser. 4), xlvii. 188.
  • 4. Bradford mss, Browne to Bradford, 20 Oct., Whitmore to same, 20 Oct.; Salopian Jnl. 22, 29 Oct. 1806.
  • 5. Add. 38328, f. 46; Gent. Mag. (1818), ii. 179; Salop RO, Forester mss 1224/337; NLW, Pitchford Hall mss, Jenkinson to Sheffield, 4 Oct., to Liverpool, 5 Oct. 1812.
  • 6. Shrewsbury Chron. 5 June, 3 July 1818.
  • 7. Gloucester Jnl. 4 May 1818; Trans. Salop Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. (ser. 4), v. 9; Add. 38250, f. 38; 38739, f. 74.