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Launceston (Dunheved)
Borough
Available from Boydell and Brewer
Background Information
Right of Election:
in the freemen till 1722, then in the resident freemen
Number of voters:
less than 100
Elections
Date | Candidate | Votes |
---|---|---|
28 Jan. 1715 | EDWARD HERLE | 66 |
JOHN ANSTIS | 62 | |
Sir William Pendarves | 28 | |
Charles Statham | 25 | |
26 Dec. 1717 | ANSTIS re-elected after appointment to office | |
11 May 1721 | ALEXANDER PENDARVES vice Herle, deceased | |
12 Apr. 1722 | ALEXANDER PENDARVES | 43 |
JOHN FREIND | 43 | |
Thomas Smith | 25 | |
John Willes | 25 | |
WILLES vice Freind, on petition, 17 Mar. 1724 | ||
29 Mar. 1725 | JOHN FREIND vice Pendarves, deceased | |
31 May 1726 | HENRY VANE vice Willes, appointed to office | |
28 Aug. 1727 | JOHN KING | |
ARTHUR TREMAYNE | ||
3 May 1734 | SIR WILLIAM MORICE | 32 |
JOHN KING | 30 | |
Sir William Irby | 29 | |
Charles Wyndham | 29 | |
IRBY vice King, on petition, 24 May 1735 | ||
12 May 1741 | SIR WILLIAM MORICE | |
SIR WILLIAM IRBY | ||
2 July 1747 | SIR WILLIAM MORICE | |
SIR JOHN ST. AUBYN | ||
2 Feb. 1750 | HUMPHRY MORICE vice Sir William Morice, deceased |
Main Article
The principal interests at Launceston in 1715 were in two Tories; George Granville, 1st Lord Lansdowne, the recorder of the borough, with which he had an hereditary connexion; and Sir Nicholas Morice, whose interest was based on his estate at Werrington. In 1715 two Tories, Anstis and Herle, were returned on the recommendation of Lansdowne and Morice against Sir William Pendarves, a moderate Tory, who had agreed with Hugh Boscawen, the government manager for the Cornish boroughs, to stand jointly with Charles Statham, a Whig.1 Two extreme Tories, Alexander Pendarves and John Freind, were returned in 1722, when Sir Nicholas Morice complained of ‘being attacked by the court brokers both at Newport and Launceston’.2 On petition Freind was replaced by John Willes, a Whig, the House disallowing the votes of the non-resident freemen by a resolution that the right of election was ‘in the mayor, aldermen and freemen, being inhabitants at the time they were made free’.3 Lansdowne then withdrew from Cornish politics, leaving the borough to be shared by the Morices with a government Whig in 1734 and an opposition Whig in 1741. In 1747 Sir William Morice and his nephew, Sir John St. Aubyn, another Tory, were unopposed. On Sir William Morice’s death in 1750 his nephew and heir, Humphry Morice, a government supporter, was returned unopposed for the vacancy, the Duke of Bedford, who had proposed to put up George Brydges Rodney, finding that the corporation was entirely in Morice’s interest.4 In 1752 Pelham wrote that Morice’s ‘two boroughs’ (Newport and Launceston) were ‘absolutely his own’.5