Suffolk was a
county constituency of the
Parliament of the United Kingdom, which returned two Members of Parliament (MPs) to the
House of Commons from 1290 until 1832, when it was split into two divisions.
History
Boundaries and franchise
The constituency consisted of the
historic county of
Suffolk
Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...
. (Although Suffolk contained a number of boroughs, each of which elected two MPs in its own right, these were not excluded from the county constituency, and owning property within the borough could confer a vote at the county election.)
As in other
county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the
Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed
freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.
Except during the period of the
Commonwealth
A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has been synonymous with "republic". The noun "commonwealth", meaning "public welfare, general good or advantage", dates from the ...
, Suffolk had two MPs elected by the
bloc vote method, under which each voter had two votes. (In the nominated
Barebones Parliament, five members represented Suffolk; in the
First and
Second Parliaments of
Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, there was a general redistribution of seats and Suffolk elected ten members. The traditional arrangements were restored from 1659.)
Political character
Elections were held at a single polling place,
Ipswich, and voters from the rest of the county had to travel to the county town to exercise their franchise, which made elections almost prohibitively expensive in a county as big as Suffolk. The inconvenience of holding the elections in Ipswich, situated in one corner of the county, is emphasised by the fact that for almost all other county purposes, including the Assizes, Suffolk was divided into two sections with proceedings held at
Bury St Edmunds
Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as Bury, is a historic market town, market, cathedral town and civil parish in Suffolk, England.OS Explorer map 211: Bury St.Edmunds and Stowmarket Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – ...
as well as Ipswich; the arrangement must certainly have worked to the benefit of candidates whose voting strength was in East Suffolk rather than West Suffolk. It was normal for voters to expect the candidates for whom they voted to meet their expenses in travelling to the poll, and to "entertain" them – in other words provide free food and alcoholic drink – when they arrived.
Peter Jupp includes in his collection of documents relating to elections round the turn of the 19th century a contemporary account of the Suffolk election of 1790, one of the rare contested elections, which well illustrates the arrangements for treating the voters on such occasions. A committee set up to support the candidacies of
Sir Charles Bunbury and
Sir John Rous, ''"for the better regulating of the expense of maintaining the freeholders upon the days of election"'' issued printed tickets with the names of public houses upon them, entitling the bearer to a fixed amount of provision and maintenance – black tickets worth five shillings for the day, and red tickets worth seven shillings and sixpence for a man and horse for the night. After the election, the innkeepers presented their bills for providing this hospitality, which amounted to £3,500 for a two-day election; and the committee, much dissatisfied by the scale of these charges, declined to pay in full so that several of the publicans afterwards sued the two candidates.
Partly as a result of the expense, contested elections were rare in Suffolk (there were contests at four of the nine general elections between 1701 and 1727, but at only three of the twenty remaining before the Reform Act in 1832), and even when they took place were often only token contests. There was no dominant aristocratic interest in Suffolk, though it would probably have been impossible to defy the county's wealthier peers (such as the
Duke of Grafton,
Marquess Cornwallis and the
Earl of Bristol) had they stood together, since no competing interest could hope to match them in an out-and-out spending contest.
In practice, the choice of members usually lay with the country squires, with matters generally settled more or less amicably by a test of strength at the county meeting with no need for the expense of a formal poll; when there was a contest, in 1784 (when three candidates stood for two seats), the weakest of the three quickly withdrew when it was clear after the first day of voting that he could not win. Nevertheless, the freeholders were not necessarily entirely deferential and manipulable by the gentry: Cannon cites the work of
Professor J H Plumb, who showed in his study of Suffolk pollbooks from the reign of
Queen Anne that the voters could act independently in a seriously contested election, while their humiliating rejection of their long-standing MP
Thomas Sherlock Gooch in favour of a Reform Bill supporter at the tumultuous
election of 1830 demonstrates similar intractability more than a century later.
Abolition
By the time of the
Great Reform Act in 1832, Suffolk had a population of approximately 300,000, It was assumed to have around 5,000 qualified voters, but since no full-blooded contest had taken place in living memory this could only be an estimate. (Before the Reform Act there was no permanent register of voters). The
Great Reform Act raised Suffolk's entitlement from two to four county MPs, while abolishing three of its seven boroughs. The single county constituency was abolished, being split into two divisions,
East Suffolk East Suffolk may refer to the following places in Suffolk, England:
* East Suffolk (county), a county until 1974
* East Suffolk District, a local government district established in 2019
* East Suffolk (UK Parliament constituency), an electoral dist ...
and
West Suffolk West Suffolk may refer to the following places in Suffolk, England:
* West Suffolk (county), a county until 1974
* West Suffolk District, a local government district established in 2019
* West Suffolk (UK Parliament constituency), an electoral dist ...
. At the first election after Reform, with a somewhat extended franchise, the electorates of these two new divisions totalled about 7,500.
Members of Parliament
1290–1640
1640–1832
Notes
References
Knights Of The Shire In Parliament For The County Of Suffolk.*D Brunton & D H Pennington, ''Members of the Long Parliament'' (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
* John Cannon, ''Parliamentary Representation 1832 – England and Wales'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)
*
Cobbett's Parliamentary history of England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803' (London: Thomas Hansard, 1808)
*F W S Craig, ''British Parliamentary Election Results 1832–1885'' (2nd edition, Aldershot: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989)
*
Peter Jupp, ''British and Irish Elections 1784–1831'' (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1973)
* Lewis Namier & John Brooke, ''The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790'' (London: HMSO, 1964)
* J E Neale, ''The Elizabethan House of Commons'' (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949)
* J Holladay Philbin, ''Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Suffolk (Uk Parliament Constituency)
Parliamentary constituencies in Suffolk (historic)
Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom established in 1290
Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom disestablished in 1832