Whatever the outcome of a modern election, the process of voting is predictable, reliable, and well-understood. However, in the sixteenth century, the picture was a lot more complicated, and sometimes corrupt, as Dr Paul Hunneyball of our Elizabethan Lords section explains…
Hampshire in the 1560s was a divided community. Despite the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, there was still a sizeable Catholic population in the county, which enjoyed the patronage of the leading local magnate, William Paulet, 1st marquess of Winchester. One of the great survivors of Tudor politics, Paulet had been lord treasurer of England since 1550, adapting his own religious opinions to the radically different demands of Edward VI, Mary I and now Elizabeth I, while remaining an indispensable and influential figure at the heart of government. However, many of his own family were openly Catholic, and with the discreet backing of the marquess, they provided the backbone of Hampshire’s recusant community. Set against them was a rival gentry faction, staunchly Protestant, who looked for leadership to the county’s ecclesiastical head, Robert Horne, bishop of Winchester. Horne, who had lived in exile on the continent during Mary’s reign, was a strong-minded character, determined to eradicate Catholicism in his diocese. By the mid-1560s he had already successfully secured the sacking of a number of Hampshire magistrates on religious grounds.
The next major flashpoint came in the autumn of 1566, when a new session of Elizabeth’s second Parliament was summoned. Hampshire’s senior knight of the shire, Sir John Mason, a religious conservative, had died in April that year, necessitating a by-election. Horne was anxious for the new Member to be a convinced Protestant, but there was one very significant obstacle to his plans. The current sheriff of Hampshire, Richard Pexall, was the marquess’s son-in-law, and a leading member of his faction. And as sheriff, Pexall had overall responsibility for managing the election. Writs for the holding of elections were issued by Chancery to sheriffs, who then, in the case of county seats, summoned voters to assemble at the next ‘county day’, a fixed date each month when people routinely gathered to conduct business. In Hampshire, the normal meeting place was the cathedral city of Winchester. On the day of the election itself, the sheriff served as returning officer, assessing the eligibility of both the candidates and the electors, the latter being required to own at least 40 shillings-worth of freehold land in the relevant county. The sheriff also had complete control over the management and duration of the election, and was the sole arbiter of the outcome. In addition, he was responsible for notifying the result to Westminster. Consequently, sheriffs enjoyed considerable scope for manipulating the entire process.
Faced with this situation, Horne responded by trying to wrong-foot Pexall. Already in London for the opening of the new parliamentary session, the bishop used his own contacts, conceivably secretary of state Sir William Cecil or the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, to obtain the election writ from Chancery at the end of September. Instead of passing it straight to the sheriff, as he should have done, Horne sent it to one of his own Hampshire allies, Richard Norton, who hung onto it for several days. Meanwhile, with the next county day looming on 7 October, another of the bishop’s supporters, William Uvedale, the remaining Hampshire knight of the shire, began mobilising Horne’s tenants to turn up at Winchester in force. Pexall finally received the writ just two days before the election was due to be held, which gave him barely any time to rally the Paulet faction.
Horne’s strategy was becoming clear. By law, the election had to be held on the next county day, regardless of how little warning was received, so on 7 October the votes would be heavily weighted in favour of the bishop’s preferred candidate. On the face of things this man was a compromise choice, Sir William Paulet, a Protestant grandson of the marquess. However, there was a catch: Paulet was a Dorset resident, which rendered him ineligible to serve as a Hampshire knight of the shire. Consequently, if he was elected, and Pexall agreed to return him, the sheriff would be liable to a hefty fine and even imprisonment for breaking election law. Pexall subsequently alleged, with some justification, that the Horne camp promoted Sir William as a ploy; assuming that the sheriff stuck to the letter of the law, and disqualified him, that would clear the way for an alternative candidate from the bishop’s faction, the hardline Protestant Henry Wallop. Faced with this unpalatable choice, Pexall himself cheated. On 7 October, around 300 of Horne’s allies assembled at Winchester in anticipation of an election, but the sheriff simply failed to turn up, and instead returned the writ to Chancery unexecuted, complaining that he’d been given too little time to summon the freeholders. Having himself now broken the law in another way, Pexall should by rights have been penalised, but the marquess presumably intervened to protect him, and in the short term nothing happened.
The sheriff’s evasive action restored the initiative to the Paulet camp. After the abortive October election, nothing could happen until the next county day on 4 November, which gave the marquess’s supporters plenty of time to mobilise. A fresh election writ was issued, and this time it was collected from Chancery by Pexall’s under-sheriff. Thus, when the rival factions assembled again at Winchester, the numbers were much more evenly matched. Moreover, the Paulets had now identified their own candidate, Sir John Berkeley, another of the marquess’s grandsons, but crucially also a Hampshire Protestant whose eligibility couldn’t be questioned. Horne’s allies again initially nominated Sir William Paulet, but Pexall debarred him as a non-resident, whereupon Henry Wallop was put forward as a substitute.
The election now settled into a more regular pattern, which again worked in the sheriff’s favour. In the days before secret ballots, votes were conducted in up to three stages, and in this case all three were needed. First, the freemen gathered in the hall of Winchester Castle, where the election writ was read out, and Berkeley and Wallop were formally nominated. There followed a ‘cry’, during which the rival supporters literally shouted the names of their preferred candidate, ‘A Berkeley’, or ‘A Wallop’. After half an hour of raucous bellowing, Pexall ruled that it was not possible to determine which man had the most support, and ordered the voters to re-assemble on the castle green. There, the sheriff took a ‘view’ of the two camps, the second stage available to him. According to Horne’s allies, Wallop’s supporters clearly outnumbered Berkeley’s, but Pexall questioned whether all of the crowd owned enough land to qualify as voters, and again concluded that neither side had a definite majority.
That decision opened the way to the third and final stage of the election, a poll of individual voters, which was again presided over by the sheriff. Unsurprisingly, Pexall opted to record the names of Berkeley’s supporters first, before pausing the whole process around 11 o’clock for a three-hour lunch break. Evidently he hoped that, with winter drawing in, a reasonable number of Wallop’s backers would lose patience and go home before their votes were recorded. When the polling resumed in the afternoon, Pexall began with some more Berkeley voters who had arrived late, then finally turned his attention to the Wallop contingent, who were still present in large numbers. According to subsequent testimony, the sheriff attempted to intimidate some of them into changing sides, threatening to report those that he recognized to the marquess. Eventually, at around eight or nine o’clock in the evening, Pexall declared the poll closed, even though some Wallop supporters who had turned up late insisted that they’d been excluded.
Predictably, the sheriff declared Berkeley the winner, by 216 votes to 209. However, Horne’s faction maintained that they’d been cheated, and that Wallop’s tally should have been as high as 258. Berkeley duly took his seat in the House of Commons, but Pexall was sued in the court of Star Chamber, accused of electoral malpractice. The outcome of that case is unknown, but it had no impact on Berkeley himself. In the event, this contest was the Paulet faction’s last major success. The old marquess died in 1572, and his family declined in importance from then on, leaving Hampshire’s Protestants in control of subsequent elections.
PMH
Further reading:
R.H. Fritze, ‘The role of family and religion in the local politics of early Elizabethan England: the case of Hampshire in the 1560s’, Historical Journal, xxv (1982), pp. 267-87
The House of Commons 1604-1629 ed. Andrew Thrush (2010), i. (especially chapter 4)
The History of Parliament 