Cullen was a small fishing port on the southern shore of the Moray Firth. In the early 1820s most of the decayed old town, which lay inland, was demolished to make way for improvements to Cullen House, the residence of the lunatic 5th earl of Seafield, who owned most of the local property. A more salubrious burgh was built on the coast, east of the ancient settlement of Fishertown. Its population (burgh and parish) was 1,452 in 1821 and 1,593 in 1831, and its council numbered 19.1 Kintore was an inland village 12 miles north-west of Aberdeen. The Aberdeen canal ran through it and brought some trade. Its population was 312 in 1821 and 402 in 1831, and its council had 13 members.2 The slightly more substantial burgh of Inverurie lay three miles north of Kintore. Its position at the end of the canal gave it a thriving trade in lime, coal, grain, slates and timber. It had a population of 735 in 1831 and 994 in 1831, and a council of nine.3 Elgin, easily the largest burgh in the group, lay five miles inland on the east bank of the River Lossie, 18 miles south west of Cullen. Dominated by its spectacular ruined cathedral, it had a woollen cloth factory, a tannery and breweries and was ‘in a very thriving state’. Its population (burgh and parish) rose from 5,308 in 1821 to 6,130 in 1831, and its council numbered 17.4 Banff was a port 11 miles east of Cullen on the west side of Banff Bay, and was almost contiguous with Macduff to the east. Its fishing and general trade were ‘very extensive’. It had a population (burgh and parish) of 3,855 in 1801 and 3,711 in 1831, when the burgh had 2,935 inhabitants. It had 17 councillors, of whom two represented the incorporated trades.5

Since 1790 the district’s representation had been determined by a system of alternating nomination between the earls of Kintore, who dominated Kintore and Inverurie, and, nominally, the 7th earl of Findlater, whose influence was primarily in Cullen and Banff. From 1811 management of the former Findlater interest was in the hands of Colonel Francis William Grant, Tory Member for Elginshire, the acting head of his clan and curator of his imbecile elder brother Lewis, who inherited his cousin Findlater’s earldom of Seafield that year. Colonel Grant had the controlling interest in Elgin. Between 1806 and 1809 James Duff, 2nd Earl Fife, of Duff House, Banffshire, who had some influence in Elgin, had created trouble, but his nominee and nephew, James Duff * (who became 4th Earl Fife in 1811), had been defeated by Grant’s candidate in 1807. At the general election of 1818 Grant brought in his distant kinsman Robert Grant*, a barrister in England and brother of the Irish secretary Charles Grant*. The quixotic Fife, who was returned for Banffshire at that election, was keen to restore his family’s electoral interest and tried to ‘create disturbance’ at Elgin, but made no headway.6 Fife was appointed a lord of the bedchamber by his personal friend the prince regent in January 1819.

At the time of George III’s death a year later, Colonel Grant was in Italy for the sake of his health. His Elgin supporter Patrick Duff, the town clerk, told his local agent James Fraser, 3 Feb., that he had taken ‘occasion to guard our friends here from any kind of engagement for a Member’ and warned him that Fife would probably ‘kick up a dust among the trades’, though to little avail. He was anxious to receive ‘as early notice as possible of the person to whom the council’s views are to be directed’.7 It was in fact the turn of the 7th earl of Kintore, a Whig, to nominate the Member; and Robert Grant’s father, the prominent East India Company director, did not think he could ‘expect to come in again’ for the burghs.8 Dr. Francis Nicoll, principal of St. Andrews University and a loyal devotee of Lord Melville, the Liverpool ministry’s Scottish manager, who had acted as intermediary between Colonel Grant and Kintore in 1816, undertook to ascertain the latter’s views, but Kintore initially declined to commit himself; on about 20 Feb. he promised a firm decision by the 28th.9 On 23 Feb. Fife, as Patrick Duff reported, appeared in person at Elgin and canvassed the Grant councillors for his brother, General Alexander Duff. A struggle for control of the council ensued, with a number of the Grant men wavering. At least one, Peter Nicholson, declared his support for General Duff on 28 Feb., but the next day seven others, Peter Browne, Joseph Collie, Robert Dick, William Gauldie, Robert Goss, John Russell and Francis Taylor, who also vouched for the absent provost, Sir Archibald Dunbar of Northfield, publicly confirmed their loyalty to the Grant interest.10 That day Nicoll informed Patrick Duff that rather than nominate, as expected, Patrick Milne of Crimonmogate, Aberdeen, Member in the 1812 Parliament, Kintore had decided to back Robert Grant, despite their political differences. Calculating that the numbers in Elgin council stood at seven votes each, with three uncertain, Duff urged immediate action to secure its backing for the sitting Member.11 The atmosphere in Elgin became increasingly fraught: on 1 Mar., for example, Patrick Duff told Fraser that Collie had been to see him, ‘quite agitated by a speech of some tradesmen calling that if he did not vote with Lord Fife everything in his shop would be ... thrown into [the] Lossie’; Duff assured the ‘poor timid man’ that he would indemnify him for any such depredations.12 Fife, who had Inverurie and Banff secure for his brother, ‘declared his determination to go through with every measure’ to get Elgin for him, refused to entertain the compromise suggested by Colonel Grant’s ‘Cullen friends’ and on 3 Mar. paraded the streets of Elgin ‘with a mob of boys’. In the evening they smashed some windows. A connection of Colonel Grant informed Melville that Elgin was ‘in a distressing ferment, there being a total stagnation of trade and a great disposition to tumult among the people’, and pressed him to try to persuade Fife, who had threatened to carry ‘his point by force’ if necessary, to back off; but Melville, though sympathetic, replied that he had ‘reason to know that any interference on my part’ with Fife ‘would now be unavailing’. In truth, as he told the lord advocate, Sir William Rae*, he was aware that ‘any such application to Lord Fife would have been followed by one in return from him’ claiming ‘[British] peerage, green ribbon, etc.’13 One Banffshire laird heard on 3 Mar. that Fife claimed to have ‘secured a majority of one’ at Elgin, but on the 6th Patrick Duff calculated that eight councillors were for Grant and six for Fife’s brother.14 The Grant party managers contemplated a ‘plan of choosing no delegate’ in order to make the casting vote of Cullen, the returning burgh, decisive; and on 3 Mar. Patrick Duff drew up a memorial and sent it to Edinburgh for legal advice. This document described how Fife had initially seduced the trades, who had three members on the council, by giving them cheap meat, relieving them of tolls and making inflammatory speeches at their meetings, had started a legal action to overturn the council elections of 1818 and 1819 and was currently working on the seven merchant councillors ‘by promises, threats and, it is even suspected, bribes’. The crucial questions concerned the position of Bailie Alexander Innes, who was reluctant to vote on account of the threat to the validity of the council elections; what effect any sentence of reduction would have on the situation; how far a refusal to vote for a delegate (by boycotting the council election meeting to render it inquorate) would be liable to legal objections, and whether calling in the military would be open to subsequent legal challenge. The lawyers’ reply, 6 Mar., gave the opinion that Innes was disqualified and his vote liable to objection; that deliberate abstention could be construed as a ‘wilful breach of duty’; that a sentence of reduction would invalidate the vote of an Elgin delegate, but there would be nothing to be gained by not sending one; that the Cullen delegate should be instructed to state that as the late Elgin council elections were disputed, he gave his casting vote for the Grant candidate, and that a properly legal summoning of troops would be in order.15 In the continued absence of Dunbar, the sheriff depute of Elginshire delivered the Elgin precept on 9 Mar. to Bailie Francis Taylor, the senior magistrate. Early on the morning of the 11th (a Saturday), when a council meeting to fix a day for the election of a delegate was due to take place, but before he had issued the formal summons, Taylor was abducted by a gang of Fife’s supporters, who ‘almost drowned him by conducting him in an open boat from Moray to Sutherland’. Robert Dick, a ‘steady friend’ of the Grants, was also kidnapped. Fife’s supporters then tried to persuade Patrick Duff to attend the council meeting, but he refused to do so on the ground that it was now illegal. The Fife councillors nevertheless chose Major Alexander Taylor of Monaughty as delegate. Francis Taylor and Dick were not returned to Elgin until the 15th, by when the time allowed for calling a meeting in response to the precept had expired.16 Meanwhile, in response to ‘some ill-judged communication’, several hundred of the Grants’ Strathspey tenants had poured into the town, which was soon ‘in an uproar’, ostensibly to protect Grant Lodge and its occupants, notably the Colonel’s sisters, from the Fife-inspired mob. The situation became ‘very alarming’ when large numbers of Fife’s tenants arrived. The sheriff, Sir George Abercromby of Birkenbog, and the civic authorities intervened and persuaded the Strathspey men to withdraw. Special constables were sworn in and patrolled the streets, and the Fife councillors were removed for their own safety to the gaol. A rumour that the Highlanders were lurking with intent in nearby woods provoked another scare, but it proved to be a false alarm. In London Mrs. Arbuthnot recorded a somewhat garbled version of these events, gleaned from Sir Walter Scott at dinner, and noted that ‘the manners and customs of Rob Roy’s day prevail more in Scotland now than one had imagined’.17 Despite Nicoll’s efforts to keep him straight, Kintore decided to ditch Robert Grant for his Whig friend Archibald Farqhuarson of Finzean, Aberdeenshire, who began a canvass of the district on 17 Mar.18 After taking more legal advice from Edinburgh, Patrick Duff and Fraser decided to hold a council meeting to fix a day for the election of an alternative delegate. Francis Taylor summoned it for 25 Mar., when he, Dunbar, Dick and five other councillors, plus Duff and his son, met. They resolved that although they did not constitute a quorum (nine), they were duty bound to obey the precept, and they set 28 Mar. for the choice of a delegate.19 Their plans were thrown into disarray when Dick, after expressing himself loyal ‘in the most unequivocal style’, defected ‘by bribery’ on the 27th. Consequently the Grant party decided to boycott the next day’s meeting, for which the Fife faction prepared by occupying the court house overnight; the burgh was ‘again in an uproar’. At the meeting, Dick and seven other Fife councillors attended. They went through the motions of sending formal requests for attendance to the seven absentees and the Duffs, who declined to come, thereby rendering the meeting inquorate.20 At the election meeting at Cullen, 31 Mar., the delegate for that burgh, Charles Lennox Cumming Bruce* of Roseisle, Colonel Grant’s cousin, and the delegate for Kintore, William Innes, declared for Farquarson; and the delegates for Banff and Inverurie, George and William Robinson, voted for General Duff. No commissioned delegate appeared from Elgin, but rival minutes of council were submitted naming as delegates Dunbar and Major Taylor. Both were ‘necessarily refused’, and Cumming Bruce gave his casting vote for Farquharson.21 On 11 May 1820, General Duff petitioned against the return, alleging that Major Taylor’s vote had been unfairly rejected, that Cumming Bruce had been illegally chosen as delegate for Cullen and that Innes had been elected as a result of ‘bribery and corrupt practices’. The same day a petition was received by the Commons in the name of Lewis Alexander, a merchant councillor of Elgin in Fife’s interest, accusing the Grant party of wilfully making the meeting to choose a delegate inquorate and rehearsing the same arguments concerning the validity of the Cullen and Kintore votes as in Duff’s petition. Neither was followed up.22

Unrest continued in Elgin during the summer of 1820, and Patrick Duff reported on 22 June that ‘a kind of determined conduct of hostility against Colonel Grant is still in action’. A lawsuit was soon afterwards brought against him (and his son), accusing him of ‘acting as kind of political agent for Colonel Grant at the same time that he was town clerk’; it evidently had no significant outcome.23 Francis Taylor’s legal grievance on account of his abduction was pending, and Patrick Duff worked on the neutral Alexander Innes, who, being covetous of the provostship, was inclined to support the Fife party’s plan to vote Colonel Grant out of the council at the approaching Michaelmas elections; Duff tried to fix him with a promise that Grant would definitely retire in 1821.24 The Grants also sought to neutralize Deacon Alexander McIver, who was reported to want £1,000 as his reward; a plan to remove him from the burgh was frustrated by the vigilance of the guards the Fife party had given him.25 On 6 Sept. Robert Dick, Peter Nicholson, McIver and five other Fife councillors issued a public address complaining of ‘attempts ... of the most improper and corrupt nature’ to thwart their plan to secure the election of men ‘fully qualified agreeable to the sett of the burgh’ and ‘restore to the burgesses ... their lawful franchise’ and so get rid of ‘a yoke of the most degrading and arbitrary nature’. The plotting and manoeuvring continued for about three weeks, with the Grant party trying in vain to reclaim Dick.26 On 15 Sept. Colonel Grant sent Dunbar a letter to be read at the council meeting on the 18th (if he could not attend), in which he deplored the disturbances of March, criticized Fife’s irresponsibility and stated his willingness to accede to the wish of ‘the real and independent members of the guildry at large to have the council made up of persons strictly qualified’ and to stand down himself if required. A week later George Macpherson Grant* of Ballindalloch urged Fraser to make public the extent of the colonel’s personal expenditure (£1,500 in the last year) on burgh and local improvements.27 Before the decisive council meeting on 26 Sept., Colonel Grant, Dunbar and their friends made a parade of unity at church. But the council elections ended in ‘a complete revolution’ and victory for the Fife party: in the choice of three new councillors permitted by the sett, Innes gave his decisive vote (9-8) for the ‘independent’ candidates. Thus the Fife faction had a majority of 12 to five. Innes was rewarded with the provostship. The town was illuminated and the populace paraded the streets in celebration.28

The magistrates of Banff banned an illumination to mark the abandonment of the bill of pains and penalties against Queen Caroline in November 1820, but there were celebrations in Inverurie and Kintore. The council of Cullen voted a loyal address to the king.29 The incorporated trades of Banff and the burgesses and inhabitants of Inverurie petitioned the Commons for restoration of the queen’s name to the liturgy, 24 Jan., 1 Feb. 1821.30 On 12 Mar. the Commons received from Inverurie burgesses and guild brethren a petition complaining of ‘gross waste, mismanagement and negligence’ by the chief magistrate, involving the misappropriation of revenues and contraction of illegal debts, since 1805. On 21 Mar. it was referred to the current select committee on the municipal government of the royal burghs. The evidence given there revealed that under the regime of the non-resident provost, William Robinson, and the chief resident magistrate, George Lyon, an innkeeper, the accounts had been irregularly kept and large sums paid to Lyon for entertainment of the council between 1805 and 1817, when the burgesses had brought a legal action against them. This had terminated with the court of session’s decision in December 1820 that the burgesses were not legally competent to sue the magistrates. The select committee’s report stated that since 1817 the burgh’s financial affairs had been more properly handled and audited; but it cited the case of Inverurie as ‘a strong illustration of the defective state of the law of Scotland, with regard to affording the means of controlling the expenditure of the funds of the royal burghs’.31 (Government legislation to regulate burgh accounts and prevent non-residence by councillors followed in 1822, but did not satisfy the Whig advocates of comprehensive municipal reform.) In July 1824 Farquharson wrote to Peel, the home secretary, in support of Colonel Grant’s nominee for a vacancy in the church at Elgin, but discovered that the living had already been given to a man recommended by the council and Fife. The fact was that Rae had asked Peel to postpone making a decision until he had looked further into it, but Peel and Melville had decided that Fife’s ‘local claims’ as heritor of the parish were ‘stronger than the political ones of Colonel Grant’.32 The inhabitants of Inverurie, Kintore and Banff, and the ministers, elders and inhabitants of Elgin petitioned both Houses for the abolition of slavery in 1826.33 All five burghs sent up petitions against interference with the Scottish banking system that session.34

From late 1824 Patrick Duff, Fraser and their associates at Elgin mulled over the possibility of attempting a coup on behalf of Colonel Grant before the next general election. Duff initially reckoned that there were only five ‘staunch Fifes’ on the council, with the rest open ‘to be acted upon’. He told Fraser that

the important question is who ought to be the candidate ... One will not do who is so nearly connected with Colonel Grant by interest or relationship as to be looked upon as a party man in the late struggle, because he will have to combat at his outset the prejudice and animosities then created ... If one can be found who possesses talent and above all wealth and interest, a liberal Tory and a good speaker and not prominently a Grant, he is the person to succeed. I should think such a person could be found who on being offered the certainty of Cullen and Kintore would take his chance at Elgin on getting from Colonel Grant such quiet but sincere support as should be found prudent to exercise.

Duff believed that Provost Innes, a ‘designing, avaricious, intriguing, ambitious [man] with a spice of smothered vanity’, could easily be seduced from Fife ‘in the plea of independence in order to gain for himself profit or advantage, or what is his grand aim, some great improvement to the city during his provostship’. Yet he considered the situation overall to be ‘extremely difficult’ and was ‘not surprised that Colonel Grant is at a loss how to act’.35 In late 1825 a Mr. Dundas (who has not been positively identified, unless he was Melville’s kinsman Robert Adam Dundas*) was canvassing the district on the Grant interest, but his attempt with Kintore to set on foot a legal action to have the recent election of Inverurie council reduced was thwarted by the dominant influence of William Robinson. Dundas reconnoitred Elgin, dining with Colonel Grant and Cumming Bruce’s brother Sir William Gordon Cumming* of Altyre, but Fraser thought it would be ‘most impolitic’ to try anything there ‘beyond [cultivating] such good will as may be acquired by a little generosity towards the poor and projecting canals, railroads and other public improvements’.36 In February 1826 Nicoll expressed to Fraser his hope that the ‘sanguine’ Dundas would not ‘recklessly throw away his time and his money’, as ‘we have no chance on the present occasion’; and a month later he received ‘a most deplorable account of Elgin politics’, which indicated that the Grants would ‘have scarcely a vote’. Fraser agreed that Dundas, who had decided not to oppose General Duff if he stood, had not ‘obtained the promise of a single vote in the council’.37 Accordingly, even though it was theoretically Colonel Grant’s turn to nominate the Member, Duff was returned unopposed at the general election of 1826, with Elgin, Inverurie and Banff secure for him.38

The incorporated trades and inhabitants of Elgin and the trades of Banff petitioned both Houses for repeal of the corn laws in February 1827.39 In December that year Lord Binning* told his leader Huskisson, a member of the Goderich ministry, that there was a strong possibility of persuading Duff to retire for a Huskissonite by ‘a hint that ... salutary means may be found to fill up his place without putting Fife’s interest to hazard by a contest’;40 nothing came of this. The council and inhabitants of Banff petitioned the Commons against the Scottish gaols bill, 1 May; the fish curers of Banff and Macduff did so for the continuance of the herring bounties, 12 May, and the inhabitants of Banff, Macduff and Inverurie petitioned for the abolition of slavery, 26 June, 4 July 1828.41 In 1829 the burgesses, gentlemen and inhabitants of Banff petitioned both Houses in favour of Catholic emancipation, but another group of burgesses and inhabitants petitioned the Lords against it.42 The bankers of Elgin petitioned the Commons for abolition of the death penalty for forgery, 24 May 1830.43 There was a report three weeks before the general election of 1830 that in ‘a trial of strength between the Fife and Grant interests’, John Kennedy, the second son of the 12th earl of Cassillis and husband of William IV’s bastard daughter Lady Augusta Fitzclarence, was to challenge Duff, with the backing of Inverurie and Kintore. This ended in smoke, and Duff was quietly returned.44

Abolitionist petitions were sent to the 1830 Parliament from Banff and Elgin.45 The incorporated trades of Banff petitioned the Commons for reform of the Scottish representative system, 21 Dec. 1830, and the Lords for general reform, 28 Feb. 1831. The burgesses, freemen and inhabitants of Banff, Elgin, Inverurie and Kintore sent up petitions for Scottish reform in February and March 1831.46 Later in March there was petitioning in favour of the Grey ministry’s reform scheme from the trades and inhabitants of Banff, where a reform committee composed of local merchants, bankers and solicitors was formed to monitor its progress, and the inhabitants of Elgin, Inverurie and Kintore.47 Duff voted against the second reading of the English reform bill, 22 Mar., but with ministers against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. The Banff reform committee held a meeting and dinner to vote an address thanking the king for the dissolution.48 Duff stood down, and Gordon Cumming (who was related to Fife as well as to Colonel Grant) was returned unopposed as an opponent of the government’s reform measures.49 Petitions in their support reached the Lords from public meetings of the burgesses, householders and inhabitants of Banff and Elgin, where a reform committee had also been set up, 3 Oct. 1831; and after the English bill’s rejection by the Lords, the incorporated trades of Banff addressed the king in support of ministers.50 According to The Times, when news of the reinstatement of the ministry reached Elgin in mid-May 1832, it spread through the town ‘with the rapidity of lightning, and diffused unbounded joy among all ranks and classes of the inhabitants’. Church bells were rung and a bonfire lit. The reform committee organized an outdoor celebratory public meeting, which was preceded by a musical procession of the trades, attended by about 2,000 people and chaired by Captain Duff of Braemorrison.51 The inhabitants of Elgin and Banff and Macduff belatedly petitioned the Commons to withhold supplies until reform was secured, 1 June, 13 July.52 On 4 June 1832 the Commons received a petition from the burgesses and inhabitants of Banff asking for the sheriff of Banffshire to be made the returning officer for the reformed electoral district and for it to be called Banff rather than Elgin Burghs; and one from Banff council asking for their burgh to be designated the permanent venue of elections.53

The Scottish Reform Act added the ‘flourishing’ seaport of Peterhead (the most easterly point of land in Scotland) to the five existing burghs to create a constituency with 777 registered electors at the general election of 1832.54 The Liberal Andrew Leith Hay of Rannes, Aberdeenshire, comfortably defeated a Conservative and another Liberal in a poll of 698. He beat a Conservative by 120 votes in a poll of 648 in 1835. The seat remained in Liberal hands for the rest of the century and beyond.55