The 3rd Duke of Dorset owned 29 of the 36 burgages in the borough and returned both Members. Nathaniel Dance, whose wife was a near relation of his, nevertheless paid him £4,000 for a seat plus £50 to entertain the electors in 1796. When the duke died in 1799, by a controversial will he left his property and his electoral interest at East Grinstead to his wife for life, his heir being a minor.1 The duchess (d.1825) whom Farington described as having a passion for money and who, the gossips said, paid Countess Gerbetsow £10,000 for the ‘quiet possession’ of her second husband, Lord Whitworth, disposed of the seats for the rest of the period. She placed them at least after 1807 at the disposal of administration (she was a step-sister of Lord Liverpool), except when she wished to return her kinsmen, as in 1818. Her husband would have liked to see his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Russell, 1st Bt., the Indian judge, returned, but the latter ‘did not choose to be any gentleman’s gentleman’.2

In 1802 the radical reformer John Frost stood against the duchess’s nominees and petitioned against their return, alleging that the right of election was in the inhabitants paying scot and lot, as well as in the freeholders, that he thereby obtained a legal majority, having polled 12 of them, and that the returning officer, who alleged that an election at East Grinstead was ‘unusual and uncustomary’, was partial to the other candidates, who indulged in illegal practices. The returning officer had accepted ‘occasional and fraudulent conveyances’ as a franchise qualification, since ‘the deeds were brought in a bag to the place of election by the agent of the Duchess of Dorset, and carried back by him in the same manner’. This petition, however, was found ‘frivolous and vexatious’, together with a similar one from some electors (31 Mar. 1803). Another petition by two defeated Whig candidates in 1807, when 19 votes were accepted, was discharged (25 July), no recognizances having been entered. In 1810 Frost was a prisoner in King’s Bench on account of the costs of his petition for which the duchess had prosecuted him.3