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James Harris
Historians have rarely considered the political views of electorates in small constituencies with strong proprietorial interests, or ‘pocket’ boroughs. However, through a detailed case study of the Cornish borough of Mitchell, this article reveals a rural settlement with a multifaceted and divided community, which experienced a high degree of partisan conflict during the later Stuart period as its inhabitants engaged in an ongoing struggle over the nature of the franchise. A group of often‐disenfranchised inhabitants launched a sustained and independent assault on the lord of the borough's limited franchise, in favour of an inhabitant‐based vote; they were opposed by a group which oscillated between loyalty to the borough's patron and attempts to secure its own influence. Party allegiances and political ideologies can occasionally be identified on both sides, but the franchise dispute did not always align with these divisions. The article argues that while partisan conflict occurred in ‘pocket’ boroughs, it took extraordinary circumstances for this to boil over and facilitate change – in Mitchell's case, these circumstances were the frequent elections to the Exclusion Parliaments, and the patron's self‐imposed exile in France. Yet even once a popular inhabitant‐based vote was established, the widened electorate still found it difficult to determine the outcome of elections, as the borough's patron and local gentry families soon reasserted their authority. Therefore, while the electorates of boroughs such as Mitchell were not supine or monolithic, their ability to actively participate in the electoral process was ultimately fragile.
