Reform of the Corporation of the Borough of Marlborough

David Chandler

The Great Reform Bill of June 1832 increased the number of electors in Parliamentary elections from the eleven burgesses of the Corporation of Marlborough to two hundred and ninety-nine £10 freeholders 1.

Marlborough’s two MP ‘s now represented Preshute Parish as well as the Borough of Marlborough. Over half of the new electors lived as tenants of the Ailesbury estate so it was no great surprise when the Ailesbury’s Tory nominees, Lord Bruce and Henry Baring, were returned as MP’s under the re-formed electorate in the General Election of December 1832.

When the Reform Bill had passed in June 1832, the Reformers who had been campaigning for many years, had organised a torchlight procession from the Green to the High Street. There they laid on a dinner for Marlborough’s inhabitants in celebration. The Reformers must have been bitterly disappointed that the two Reform candidates failed to get elected in the December 1832 General Election. During that election campaign there were reports that electors were being intimidated.

Voters Marlborough Extract – The Times NewspaperOne hundred and thirty electors (almost half the electorate) put their names to a petition to Parliament complaining of intimidation. The Times of London carried an article on the 30th November 1832 alleging intimidation against the Shrimpton family and against John Jordan a poor blacksmith from Manton.

The Shrimpton family in particular must have performed a very difficult balancing act between offending their landlord and supporting their opinions and their many reformer friends. John Shrimpton was the tenant of the Castle Inn2 owned by the Ailesbury family and his son Samuel was a tenant of an Ailesbury farm. They were threat threatened with eviction for not supporting the Ailesbury candidates. In recognition of this courage, the Reform supporters of the Shrimptons presented the family with a piece of plate as a “testimonial of their independent conduct”. At the same time the Shrimptons had been praised for providing a dinner to the Ailesbury controlled Corporation and its supporters.

John Jordan a blacksmith from Manton was threatened with losing the business of the Ailesbury estate because of his attending a meeting of the friends of Sir Alexander Malet who was the Reformer’s Parliamentary candidate.

The era was a time of great social tension. The “Swing Riots” which started in Kent, reached Wiltshire in November 1830. Poor agricultural labourers were protesting at the increasing number of machines on farms which were depressing wages and creating unemployment. Threshing machines in particular were targeted for destruction and mobs of up to five hundred roamed rural areas around Marlborough.

Enemies – Tyranny and Oppression

A special meeting at the Town Hall on Saturday November 20th, under the chairmanship of the Mayor, John Gardner, raised £400 for the arrest and conviction of those destroying property. Special constables were sworn in at the Duke’s Arms (later the Ailesbury Arms) and the Marlborough Troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry Cavalry3 was mobilised under the command of a son of the Marquess. The rioting peaked on Tuesday 23rd November when twenty-five Wiltshire towns and villages were affected.

In a riot, Peter Withers of Rockley threw a hammer which injured Special Constable Oliver Codrington and Withers was sentenced to hang. Codrington recovered from his injuries and Withers had his sentence commuted to transportation to Australia.

The situation was under control by Christmas by which time over one hundred threshing machines had been destroyed and one hundred and fifty-three sentenced to transportation.

This was the turbulent background to the Reform campaign of the 1820’s and 1830’s and the General Election to Parliament under the new franchise in December 1832. The election under this new franchise returned a House that was strongly Whig and pro-Reform. One of the first actions of this Parliament was to appoint in February 1833 a Royal Commission of The House of Lords to enquire into the Municipal Corporations of England, Wales and Ireland. The Commissioners were Radicals and the two appointed to look at the Marlborough Corporation were Peregrine Bingham and David Jardine. The Commissioners for Marlborough reported.

” nor could one find that as a municipal institution, the Corporation had for more than two centuries, been productive of any material benefit to the inhabitants of the town”.

For the previous two centuries the Marlborough Corporation had been under the influence of the Seymour family (Whigs) who were supplanted in the early I700’s by the Bruce (Ailesbury) family who were Tories. Both had been as corrupt as the other with the Burgesses of the Borough dropping from ninety-three in the reign of James I to eleven in 1830. The Corporation had become a self-selecting institution. In more recent times up to 1830, no new Burgesses were admired without the agreement of the Ailesbury’s agent. These Burgesses were appointed for life.

For example, in late 1814, the election of three new Burgesses is recorded:
Thomas Merriman4 (lawyer and banker), Nicholas Washbourn (Surgeon of Berkshire and doctor to the Ailesbury family) and John Halcomb (farmer of Savernake Park). One of the Burgesses, the Reverend Charles Francis5, the Rector of Mildenhall resigned in protest at these three hard line Tories being nominated as Burgesses.

The Municipal Boroughs Reform Act of 1835 instituted a uniform system across England (as had been done with the electorate for Parliamentary elections in the Great Reform Bill). The Act ended the closed oligarchy of the old corporation. The reformed boroughs were obliged to publish their financial accounts and appoint salaried town clerks and treasurers who were not allowed to be members of the elected council. This was a big change from the old system where the Merriman family seemed to have made the Corporation a family affair with four of them either councillors, Town Clerk or Deputy Town Clerk!

In the case of Marlborough there were to be twelve councillors and four alder men elected by Ratepayers (this was a bigger electorate than for Parliamentary elections). One third of the councillors were elected every three years with the fourth year being elections of councillors to be aldermen6. The first election under the reformed system was to be on Christmas Day 1835.To be Executed on Marlborough Common

With a reformed system there must have been strong hopes from the Reform Party7 that some of those who had worked so hard to get reform would now be elected to the Borough Council.

This election to the reformed “Corporation of the Borough of Marlborough” was keenly contested by the Tory members of the old Corporation and new Reform candidates.

A blizzard of pamphlets and leaflets was produced by both parties under various pseudonyms. The Tories produced one signed Paul Pry which lampooned the candidates for the Reform party, in particular Nathaniel Reed8 who seemed to be lining himself up to be Mayor and John Woodman who was described as “Black Jack” or the “Grinning Baboon”. A riposte by the Reformers delighted in the bankruptcy of the firm of Paul Pry and Co.

Election Town CouncillorsThe venom reached new heights with a leaflet announcing the mock execution of Black Jack on Marlborough Common.

There were also individual leaflets addressed to the electorate. One comes from a Reform candidate, Thomas Brealey, who had appeared on the Petition alleging intimidation at the parliamentary election. The Tory candidates (formerly Councillors of the old Corporation) produced a joint declaration. The tone of this leaflet is rather wearied and takes credit that the new Corporation will have to publish its accounts and have annual elections: this is a bit rich coming from a group who had run the old oligarchic system!

The Reformers must have been bitterly disappointed when none of them were elected and all the Tory members of the old Corporation were returned for the new Council. It must have been as big a disappointment for the Reformers as failing to win the General election a few years before.

I suspect that the former Tory members of the old Corporation must have been surprised by their success. Unlike the old secretive methods of choosing Burgesses and Councillors, the new Councillors had had to fight for votes and canvas the electorate. That they had succeeded was an incentive to be more engaged with the people of the town in the future.

For the first years of the new Borough Council all the Mayors were former members of the old corrupt Corporation.

The Borough Council elections which continued until 1974 with annual elections of councillors for three years and an Aldermanic election in the fourth year were always keenly contested. In the 1900’s Borough elections attracted a turnout of almost 50% which was one of the highest in the country.

Notes:

  1. The electorate for Parliament was now male householders who lived in a house worth over £10 a year in rent
  2. The former Castle Inn is now “C” House of Marlborough College. The Inn closed when the town was by-passed in 1840 by the Great Western Railway through Swindon. The coaching trade collapsed at this time and many in the town became unemployed and destitute.
  3. The Wiltshire Yeomanry deployed to Egypt as mounted cavalry in 1939. They converted to armoured vehicles in 1940 and served throughout the war in North Africa and Italy (including El Alemein).
  4. The Merriman family’s name still carries on the Solicitors Office of the Merriman Partnership at 107, High Street.
  5. The Rev Francis a Burgess and Mayor of Marlborough in 1779, 1784, 1794 & 1802, was enlightened and personally paid for the building of a new Church School in Mildenhall.
  6. This is the same system that survived until 1974 when small ancient Boroughs like Marlborough were abolished and became towns (with the legal status of Parish Councils).
  7. The “Reform” party were not like a formal grouping as in a political Comments of Interest party of today. They probably thought of themselves as reforming Whigs, as opposed to Tories. The Tories often referred to them as “Radicals” in an attempt to make them sound extreme. Most would not have considered themselves “Radicals” and Sir Alexander Malet regarded himself as a “Reformer” and not a ”Radical”.
  8. Nathaniel Reed has given his name to Reeds Ground in Marlborough where he lived. He and his family raised almost £400 in 1864 for a new lifeboat called “The Royal Wiltshire”. It was on the Dover station between 1864 and I 878 and saved twenty-two lives in that time.

Acknowledgements:

Nick Baxter
A History of Marlborough by J E Chandler
Marlborough and the Kennet Country by A R Stedman

The Marlborough History Society would like to send their thanks to The Merchants House, Marlborough for kindly giving permission to post this article on our website. The article was published in The Marlborough Journal, Issue 66.

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