Yarmouth I.o.W.

Borough

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1660-1690, ed. B.D. Henning, 1983
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Right of Election:

in the freemen

Number of voters:

over 60 in 1695

Elections

DateCandidate
3 June 1660SIR JOHN LEIGH
 RICHARD LUCY
11 Apr. 1661RICHARD LUCY
 EDWARD SMYTHE
28 Dec. 1678THOMAS Lucy vice Lucy, deceased
12 Feb. 1679SIR RICHARD MASON
 THOMAS LUCY
15 Aug. 1679SIR RICHARD MASON
 THOMAS WYNDHAM I
15 Feb. 1681LEMUEL KINGDON
 SIR THOMAS LITTLETON, 2nd Bt.
30 Mar. 1685THOMAS WYNDHAM I
 WILLIAM HEWER
14 Jan. 1689SIR ROBERT HOLMES
 HON. FITTON GERARD

Main Article

Lord Cutts, a subsequent governor of the Isle of Wight, wrote of Yarmouth:

The corporation consists of a mayor and 12 aldermen, who have a power to add as many freemen to the corporation as they please (who have all of them voices in the election of Members of Parliament), insomuch that the mayor and any five of the aldermen can turn the elections as they think fit.

The chief property interest in the borough passed with the manor of Thorley from the Lucy family to Sir Robert Holmes, who from 1679 returned first one and then two nominees.1

At the general election of 1660 Richard Lucy, a Commonwealth official who had acquired Thorley by marriage before inheriting the family estates in Warwickshire, was returned with a neighbouring Presbyterian squire, Sir John Leigh. Leigh, never an active figure in public life, retired after the dissolution of the Convention, and in 1661 Lucy was re-elected with his brother-in-law, Edward Smythe, a rising lawyer who soon chose to make his career in Ireland. The advent of Holmes as governor of the Isle of Wight in 1668 introduced a new interest. He built a large house in Yarmouth, occupied by his brother Sir John Holmes, and in 1670 the corporation passed a bye-law requiring the approval of the mayor and at least five aldermen for new freemen, probably to prevent Holmes from packing the freeman roll with his nominees. Lucy died in the last session of the Cavalier Parliament, and was succeeded by his son Thomas, an army officer. At the first general election of 1679 he probably agreed to divide the borough with Holmes, who himself sat for Newport in the first Exclusion Parliament, but brought in a court official, Sir Richard Mason, for Yarmouth. Before the next election Holmes had bought out the Lucy interest, and in the autumn he returned Mason and another courtier, Thomas Wyndham. The bye-law on the election of freemen was rescinded in 1680, and in the following year Yarmouth elected two more outsiders, Lemuel Kingdon, a revenue farmer, and the seasoned debater Sir Thomas Littleton, who had been given a seat on the Admiralty board. Mason was returned for his own borough of Bishop’s Castle, but Wyndham was not elected. Like the other Isle of Wight boroughs Yarmouth produced loyal addresses approving the dissolution and abhorring the ‘Association’, and Holmes was apparently able to protect it from quo warranto proceedings or the forfeiture of its Jacobean charter.2

Mason, Littleton and Sir John Holmes all died before the general election of 1685. Sir Robert Holmes was returned for Newport and Kingdon for Bedwyn. Accordingly Yarmouth was represented in James II’s Parliament by Wyndham and William Hewer, a commissioner of the navy. The royal electoral agents reported in September 1688 that Sir Robert Holmes had undertaken for this constituency, and the secretary of state, the Earl of Sunderland, recommended as court candidates Hewer and Edward Roberts, who was probably one of the royal electoral agents, but has not been further identified. At the general election of 1689 Holmes, who had lost control of Newport on the enlargement of the corporation, returned himself for Yarmouth with the Whig Fitton Gerard, whose father must have been well known to him at Court in the early days of the Restoration.3

Author: Paula Watson

Notes

  • 1. HMC Astley, 77; VCH Hants, v. 285.
  • 2. Worsley, Hist. I.o.W. 140, 158-62; CJ, xviii. 533; London Gazette, 21 June 1681, 4 May 1682.
  • 3. Duckett, Penal Laws (1882), 432; CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 276; Grey, ix. 108.