Welsh Journals

THE MYSTERIOUS PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION AT CARDIGAN BOROUGHS IN 1547 THE election of a member of parliament for the constituency of Cardigan Boroughs in 1547 appears to have been a remarkably odd event which has so far escaped the attention of both Welsh historians and specialists in the parliamentary history of the period. Although the surviving evidence for the events is slight, it does nevertheless point to an interesting contested election of a kind not known in any other Welsh constituency, but similar to the two known election disputes which occurred in the very same constituency of Cardigan Boroughs more than half-a-century later, in 1601 and 1604.1 Indeed, it can be claimed that together the three elections of 1547, 1601 and 1604 make the constituency of Cardigan Boroughs unique in Welsh parliamentary history. Cardigan Boroughs was, like all other Welsh borough constitu- encies except Haverfordwest under the terms of the legislation effecting the Union, a contributory-borough constituency, wherein all the so-called 'ancient boroughs' of the shire had the right to be summoned to participate in the election of a single M.P. to represent them all.2 What the three elections mentioned have in common is that on each occasion, instead of the law of joint-election being followed, the two leading boroughs each elected its own member for the one seat available. Cardigan, the county town in the southern half of the shire, elected one man, while Aberystwyth at the northern end chose somebody else to represent the constituency. In 1601 there were two returns, one made through the sheriff, the other not; in 1604 the sheriff made a double return. Illegality in the conduct of elections, especially involving double returns, was common in seventeenth-century Wales; but none of these double returns is like that for Cardigan Boroughs in 1604.3 Further, to the present 1 The events of 1601 and 1604 are briefly related in G. D. Owen, Elizabethan Wales (Cardiff, 1964), pp. 108-9, and H. A. Lloyd, The Gentry of South West Wales (Cardiff, 1968), pp. 99-100. 27 Henry VIII, c. 26; 35 Henry VIII, c. 11. Double returns in Stuart Wales were the result of competition or confusion within the electing body in the county town; sheriffs made indentures with two sets of electors. No double returns, apart from that in 1604, involved competing contributory boroughs. Instances of double returns can be found in The Return of Members to Parliament, 1273-1702 (London, 1878). In Hanoverian Wales, at Cardigan Boroughs (again!) in 1729, a double return was made by the sheriff owing to confusion over whether Tregaron was a proper contributory borough. One candidate who drew most of his strength from that borough and who gained a majority by its votes, was rejected by the House on the argument that Tregaron burgesses were ineligible to vote. This situation was completely unlike that of 1604, when the problem was whether Cardigan or Aberystwyth should elect the M.P.: R. Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715-54 (Oxford, 1970), vol. I, pp. 373-74.