There was no contest between 1768 and 1820. The dukes of Devonshire returned one Member, invariably a member of the Cavendish family, as a Whig, and the gentry returned the other, during this period a Mundy of Shipley, as an independent. In February 1795 Thomas Coutts approached a representative of the duke in case Lord John Cavendish wished to ‘quit’, suggesting his son-in-law (Sir) Francis Burdett* ‘as a locum tenens in the minority of his Grace’s own immediate representatives’, guaranteeing his attachment to the family. Nothing came of this—Burdett himself was not ambitious of it.1 There was popular unrest in the industrial areas in the last decade of the period, but it had no electoral repercussions, Lord George Cavendish insisting that reports of it were exaggerated.2