Poole ‘with its suburbs’ had, in 1568, a constitution modelled on that of Southampton. It was ‘a county, separate from the county of Dorset’ and so, whereas the 1559 election indenture, for example, was made between the sheriff of Dorset and the corporation, the known election writs in this period from 1572 were directed to the sheriff of the town and the indenture made between the sheriff of the town and the corporation.7

As with a number of Dorset boroughs the 2nd Earl of Bedford was the dominating influence over elections until his death in 1585. Both 1559 MPs were his candidates, Walter Haddon, a master of requests in good odour with the Queen, and Humphry Michell, either then or soon to become a servant of Bedford. Next time Mitchell was returned again, with a Poole burgess. In 1571 Bedford’s man was the puritan George Carleton, the local man a Poole merchant. The two 1572 men were the mayor of Poole, William Green, and John Hastings, a country gentleman resident nearby who had connexions with Bedford. In 1584 the Earl of Leicester obtained the nomination of a burgess,8 but in the event his man Laurence Tomson came in at Weymouth and Melcombe, and was replaced at Poole by Francis Mylles, a government official, re-elected for Poole in 1586. The other 1584 Member, Thomas Vincent, a Surrey country gentleman, was brought in by Bedford. John Savile II (1586), a Lincolnshire country gentleman, was returned through the mediation of the Earl of Warwick, guardian of the young 3rd Earl of Bedford. Savile, however, was returned also for and chose to represent Lincoln, William Fleetwood II, a neighbour of the Russells, being returned in his place at Poole. In the Parliament of 1589 for the first time in this period neither MP was an outsider, Henry Ashley being a country gentleman whose father had connexions with Poole and Edward Man being a Poole merchant. Man came in again in 1593, with an outsider, James Orenge, secretary to Lord Keeper Puckering. Orenge probably came in through the influence of his uncle Thomas Hannam, the lawyer who had taken charge of the bill concerning the Lyme Regis cobb in the Parliament of 1585. Orenge was re-elected in 1597 along with Roger Mawdley, who served four times as mayor of Poole. The 1601 MPs were Robert Miller, a Dorset country gentleman related to Swayne, the recorder, and Thomas Bellot, an outsider who owed his return to Thomas Howard, 3rd Viscount Bindon.