Dartmouth was governed by a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and a council of bailiffs and burgesses. Thomas Gourney (1571,1572) was a Dartmouth merchant and ex-mayor and Thomas Southcote (1559) owned property in the borough. Otherwise elections at Dartmouth, until his death in 1585, were dominated by the and Earl of Bedford, lord lieutenant of the county. Edward Yarde (1559) was later to become Bedford’s agent; Sir John More (1563) had fought with him at St. Quentin. If John Lovell (1563) was the sea captain who sailed with (Sir) Francis Drake, he would have owed his seat at Dartmouth to Bedford, who leased lands to his family. John Vaughan I (1571), a Yorkshire country gentleman, was a kinsman of Burghley, who no doubt used his influence with Bedford to secure Vaughan’s return. William Cardinall II (1572), was an Essex lawyer known to Bedford. William Lyster, returned at a by-election in 1576 after Thomas Gourney’s death, was a relative of Bedford’s friend Thomas Bromley. At the by-election in 1581 following Lyster’s death, Bedford asked for a ‘blank’ indenture on which the name of Cuthbert Reynolds, his servant, was inserted.7 The return of both 1584 men has been attributed to Bedford.8

Bedford’s death left no great patron to take his place at Dartmouth. Roger Papworth (1589) almost certainly owed his seat to Bedford’s son-in-law, the Earl of Bath, and John Osborne (1597), an Exchequer official, probably owed his return to Lord Burghley, but these were isolated interventions. The other MPs in this period were local men. Robert Petre (1586) was an Exchequer official whose family held estates near the borough and were influential in the county. George Carey of Cockington (1586) needed no patron. Richard Drew (1589) was town clerk for the borough, while Nicholas Hayman (1593), Thomas Holland I (1593), and John Treherne (1601) were local merchants. William Bastard (1597, 1601), a lawyer in the service of the borough, was made recorder when Dartmouth was incorporated in 1604.9