Banbury

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1558-1603, ed. P.W. Hasler, 1981
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Elections

DateCandidate
1558/9THOMAS LEE 1
26 Dec. 1562FRANCIS WALSINGHAM
23 Jan. 1563 (new writ)OWEN BRERETON vice Walsingham, chose to sit for Lyme Regis
1571ANTHONY COPE
14 Apr. 1572ANTHONY COPE
29 Nov. 1584RICHARD FIENNES
18 Oct. 1586ANTHONY COPE
4 Oct. 1588ANTHONY COPE
1593(SIR) ANTHONY COPE
16 Sept. 1597(SIR) ANTHONY COPE
3 Oct. 1601(SIR) ANTHONY COPE

Main Article

Banbury, a single Member constituency, was governed by a bailiff, 12 aldermen and 12 capital burgesses, and parliamentary returns were made by ‘the bailiff, aldermen and burgesses’. The names of the Elizabethan high stewards, if any, have not been found, but the 1608 charter appointed William Knollys to that office. Knollys’s father Sir Francis was in fact the chief influence at Banbury after his return from exile at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, though he was not in time to arrange anything for the 1559 election, when he himself had to find a borough outside the county, and when the Banbury seat was taken by a local gentleman, Thomas Lee of Clattercote. Knollys, whose wife’s uncle Sir John Carey was Walsingham’s stepfather, arranged for Walsingham to be returned at Banbury in December 1562, but Walsingham prepared to sit elsewhere, and Knollys brought in his own servant Owen Brereton. In 1571 and subsequently, with the exception noted below, the Banbury seat was taken by Knollys’s fellow puritan, Anthony Cope, whose estate adjoined the borough. In 1584 another puritan, Richard Fiennes, whose father had been granted, in June 1568, a Crown lease of Banbury castle and hundred, was returned. What happened is not clear. Fiennes was sheriff of Oxfordshire for the year 1583-4, and it is just conceivable that Chancery refused to accept his return of himself. A second writ was issued on 14 Nov. for the election of a Banbury Member, stating that information has been given, ‘to the Queen in the Chancery’, that Banbury was ‘an ancient town and used to have a burgess at every Parliament ... and now had not any burgess’. Since Fiennes had then ceased to be sheriff, there could be no objection to his return. The return to the second writ is dated 29 Nov., more than a month after the other borough elections in Oxfordshire, and several days after any other return and the opening of Parliament.

No record has been found of payments to Banbury Members in Elizabeth’s reign, nor are any likely to have been made.2

Author: Alan Harding

Notes

  • 1. E371/402(1).
  • 2. A. Beesley, Hist. Banbury, 218-22, 230, 254-8; Read, Walsingham, i. 13, 27; CPR, 1566-9, p. 153; Bodl. Tanner, 234, f.1; Harl. 6849, f. 74.