Dunwich ~ the Rotten Borough

 

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You have probably heard about bribery and corruption in politics. Maybe you have come across the term “rotten borough”.  Well, George Downing III and his wife were very much involved in political chicanery. In O. J. Pickard’s Dunwich ~ The Rotten Borough there are fascinating details about the Downing’s intrigues. He described Sir George Downing I as “a shady but exceptionally able administrator who acquired great wealth from holding public offices under the Crown” and his son, Sir George Downing II as “a nonentity who displayed his father’s talent for making money for himself out of the public purse”. What follows are extracts from Pickard’s work which shed more light on the Downings.  

 

Dunwich – Downing’s pocket borough

 

Since the Middle Ages the English parliament developed with Members of the House of Commons elected by the freemen (land or property owners over the age of 25) from the towns and boroughs. Membership was eager sought after by men wanting to win royal patronage and political power. In Suffolk, each of its seven boroughs returned two members of parliament. As Dunwich only had a population of about 100 in the early 18th century, very few of whom were freemen, it was one of the easiest ways into parliament if you could get them to vote for you. Freemen who lived in the borough were known as ‘insetters’ and absentee landlords as ‘outsetters’. There was no secret ballot. Members of Parliament were elected at a public meeting and it was common practice for payments and other inducements to be made to secure votes.

 

…In 1708 … George Downing (III), arrived in Dunwich and began buying property in the town as a means of acquiring political influence in the borough. In May 1710, by devious means which are not yet fully understood, he purchased a number of properties totalling in extent something like 1,000 acres.

 

Before coming to Dunwich he had fought an election at Cambridge as a Whig, but in October 1710 he contested Dunwich as a Tory. He and his fellow Tory candidate swamped the election meeting with the outsetters. They won by 88 votes to 12. Had they relied on the insetters alone they would still have won b 12 votes to 11. 

 

In 1711 he succeeded to the baronetcy and the family’s fortune. The next election came in 1713 when Downing stood again, this time with Sir Robert Kemp, also a Tory, as his fellow candidate. They brought more than 40 outsetters to the meeting only to find that they were not being opposed. This apparent victory was no however a sign that the Freemen of Dunwich had now accepted Sir George Downing and Sir George Kemp, the largest owners of property in the borough, as their natural Members of Parliament. Queen Anne’s death in 1714 made a fresh general election necessary. Confident of victory the two sitting Members brought no outsetters to the election meeting, but to their dismay, when they arrived they found they were to be opposed by two Whigs, Colonel Charles Long and Field Marshal Robert Rich, son of the late admiral. The result was for the Tories a humiliating defeat by 25 votes to 1.

 

 

It looks very much as though the ousting of Sir George Downing and Sir Robert Kemp had been planned with military precision. Sir George had already made himself unpopular in the borough, and in the 1713 election seems to have been used to deceive him and to give him a false sense of security. Strict secrecy must have been imposed on the insetters so that the contest at the 1714 election came as a complete surprise to the unsuspecting Tories, leaving them no time to call up their outsetting supporters.

 

The sequence of events points inevitably to the two soldiers having used their military training and experience to good effect. No other explanation is possible: no great swings of the political pendulum swayed the freemen of Dunwich in 1713 and in the reverse direction in 1714. Furthermore the Rich family had a history of involvements in political plots.

 

Sir George Downing was determined to get his revenge. Petty persecution of one of the bailiffs was abandoned for a more ambitious scheme. Sir George took a ninety-nine year lease of the right to collect taxes for the Crown in Dunwich. As these had not been paid for many years, Sir George was able to have the freemen incarcerated for debt in Beccles jail – or at least those who had not been able to abscond in time to escape this fate. The judge who tried the case at the assizes however decided that judicial commonsense should prevail over legalized revenge. Taking the poverty of the borough into account, he ruled that “where it could not be had, the ling must lose his right”, The borough was acquitted and the freemen were discharged.

 

Unabashed by this setback, Sir George next gave the freemen who were his tenants notice to quit their homes. Colonel Long promptly built houses for them on part of the small amount of land that he owned in Dunwich. To this day these houses are known as Long Row. Housing thus became a feature of politics in Dunwich, and later was a major part of Sir George Downing’s strategy for gaining and keeping political control over the freemen of Dunwich. In pursuit of this aim, he next bought the Kemp estate in 1721, which made him virtually the owner of Dunwich.

 

During this hectic decade of political activities in Dunwich, Downing made another move designed to strengthen his hold over the freemen. In 1715 the freemen were forced by “the irresistible surges of the sea” to abandon their town hall. The prison was lost at about the same time. Whereupon Sir George Downing had a new town hall and jail built, adjoining the residence he had acquired as part of his large purchase of property in 1710. This had been situated amid the ruins of Greyfriars Priory and was known as “The Place”. At the time that he added the town hall and the jail he had built an extraordinary brick façade three storeys high on the seaward side of these buildings. This was crenellated, and thereafter Dunwich was often thought to have a castle. Thus it was that Sir George Downing became the landlord of the freemen’s town hall and prison as well as of the homes and farms of many of them.

 

In March 1722 came the next general election. It was a hard fought contest between the two sitting Members and Sir George standing with a Mr Edward Vernon. The fight was marked by a great deal of bribery, corruption, and irregularities of one kind or another on both sides, from which Sir George and his companion emerged as victors by some 30 votes to 10. Vernon resigned his seat shortly afterwards. A by-election was fought between Colonel Long and Sir John Ward. Again Colonel Long was decisively defeated. He and Sir Robert Rich made no further attempt to challenge Sir George Downing – they could neither match his wealth nor his ruthless determination to have Dunwich as his pocket borough. 

 

Sir George’s Pocket Borough

 

Having defeated his rivals, Sir George Downing set about consolidating his hold over the freemen of the borough. Many of them were his tenants, and he encouraged them to fall into arrears with their rents. The understanding was that no action would be taken against them, such as giving them notice to quit or having them imprisoned for debt, provided that at every election they voted for Sir George and whoever stood with him. He was not however content to rely on the power that this arrangement gave him over a large section of the freemen. He also paid “election money” to the freemen who voted for him, as part of a somewhat confused deal whereby they bound themselves to pay very large sums as security for their arrears of rent. The purpose of this outrageous scheme was to make it so costly that no wealthy rival would be tempted to pay off the debts of the freemen as part of a bargain designed to end the Downing influence in elections in Dunwich. Many of the freemen were illiterate and few understood the nature of the bonds they were executing in Sir George’s favour. Even to the extent that they did understand them, they were willing to rely on his promise that no action would be taken to enforce the bonds as long as they continued to support him at elections.

 

The amalgam of menaces, trickery and bribery enabled Sir George Downing to sell the second Dunwich seat at each election. From the fragmentary evidence available, the price each time seems to have been £1,000 which would have some way compensated Sir George for the rents foregone and the election monies paid out. Although he had been a Tory for more than a decade Sir George Downing transferred his allegiance to the Whigs, who were firmly in power at Westminster.

 

Until 1741, Sir George (III) sold the second seat to one or other of his political associates in Parliament, but in that year he sold the seat to his heir and young cousin, Jacob Downing. He, however, displeased Sir George over some parliamentary business. Therefore, when the next election was due in 1747, Sir George sold the seat to a neighbouring Suffolk landowner, Mr. Miles Barne, who had recently bought an estate at Sottherly, 10 miles north of Dunwich. Clearly Sir George was taking a risk when he allowed a wealthy owner of property so close to Dunwich to come into his pocket borough. What his motive was in doing so remains a mystery, which he took to his grave when he died in 1749. Jacob Garard Downing succeeded to the baronetcy and the Downing fortune. He was promptly elected by the freemen of Dunwich to fill Sir George’s seat in the Commons.

 

Sir Jacob Downing set about renewing in his own name all the bonds that the freemen had given his cousin while, at the same time, notifying Mr. Miles Barne that the arrangement for him to have the second seat would not be renewed. If Sir Jacob suspected that Miles Barne was ambitious to gain control of the borough, he would have been quite right. In 1750 Miles Barne bought the Long estate and unsuccessfully tried to buy that owned by the Rich family.  He decided to wait and see how things turned out for Sir Jacob Downing before taking any further action. The seven year Parliament was dissolved in 1754 and at the ensuing election, Sir Jacob sold the second seat to one of his political friends. Miles Barne, meanwhile, appointed Edmund Watling as his agent to watch over his interest in Dunwich.

 

Sir Jacob Downing had no son, and although he had not been married very long, it was k=known that his health was poor, giving rise to speculation about whether or not he would have an heir. There were others besides Miles Barne who wondered for how much longer the borough could remain in the Downing pocket. One of the potential contenders for the support of the freemen of Dunwich was the vastly rich Sir Joshua Vanneck. He was a busy banker and merchant in the City of London, and in 1754 he bought an estate in Heveningham, not far from Dunwich, with the intention of challenging the Downings if the opportunity arose. He knew of Miles Barne’s interest in and connection with the borough and sought his support in a joint effort to dislodge the ailing Sir Jacob Downing. Barne’s agent had discovered that the freemen were bonded to Sir Jacob and Miles Barne had decided it would not be prudent to make an attempt to capture the borough while Sir Jacob lived. He advised caution, and he and Sir Joshua decided to bide their time.

 

Sir Jacob Downing was a pompous aristocrat who was persistently having bitter rows with the “little freemen” of Dunwich. They in turn found a leader from among their own ranks, a tenant farmer and merchant, Francis Robinson. He was one of the more literate freemen. As relations with the overbearing Sir Jacob Downing deteriorated, Robinson showed himself to be capable of driving quite hard bargains with their landlord, on behalf of the freemen. Sir Jacob’s health steadily grew worse and after several years of increasingly painful illness, he died in February 1764 without leaving an heir.

 

Lady Margaret Downing - “A High Spirited Lady”

 

Sir Jacob’s widow, Lady Margaret Downing, wished to retain control of the borough (of Dunwich). In expectation of her husband’s death she had a candidate for his seat standing for his seat standing by, Mr. Peter Taylor. Mr. Miles Barne went into action as soon as the news reached him. He first tried to reach an agreement with Lady Downing whereby he would agree not to stand against Mr. Taylor at the forthcoming by-election provided that in future she would agree to his having one seat, the other being reserved for her nominee. Lady Downing rejected this proposal. Mr. Barne met the freemen of Dunwich over dinner and as was well received by them. He promised that if they would transfer their support to him against Lady Downing’s nominee, he would see that they did not suffer from any action she might take. The freemen, given this assurance, were more than ready to desert the Downing interest, and at the by-election Miles Barne was elected to represent Dunwich at Westminster by 13 votes to 2.

 

Receiving the news of the election result on the day she buried her husband, Lady Downing was furious. Her action in revenge was drastic and immediate: she caused Francis Robinson and the rest of the freemen to be arrested for the debts due under the terms of the bonds which they had given to her late husband. Miles barne now had to fulfill his promise to the freemen, and being a careful man, he prudently went into partnership with Sir Joshua Vanneck. They agreed to pool all their resources in relation to Dunwich and to share expenses equally with each having one of the two seats at future elections. Accordingly they bailed the freemen out of jail and began proceedings in the court to have the bonds given to Sir Jacob Downing declared illegal, or alternatively, to have them amended to cover only the actual arrears of rent.

 

The litigation lasted three years, favouring first one side and then the other. Sir Joshua Vanneck disliked being involved in legal proceeding, distrusted lawyers, and at one stage tried to reach a compromise settlement with Lady Downing. But she was in no mood to compromise and the lawyers continued with the battle in the courts. The eventual outcome of this complex legal wrangling was that Lady Downing was not able to enforce payment of the bonds. Had she been successful, Sir Joshua Vanneck and Mr. Miles Barne would have had to find some £14,000, a huge sum then, to discharge the bonds and keep the promise they had made to the freemen. Sir Joshua had a sneaking admiration for his opponent, whom he referred to as that “high spirited lady”. What she thought of him, we have no means of knowing.

 

In the course of the proceedings Lady Downing gave the freemen who were her tenants notice to quit. The two partners then had to lease land from the borough and from Dunwich charities on which to build houses. The freemen had these rent free. The partners also had to find farms to let to the freemen at subsidized rents. In return they were required to support the partnership at elections. All this was costly and required protracted negotiations, but in the borough-mongering that went on in the eighteenth century, Dunwich was not an expensive borough: up to £30,000 was not unknown as a sum paid out to obtain control of a borough.

 

“That Wicked Lady”

 

Although the conclusion of the case of the freemen of Dunwich v Lady Downing effectively brought her political influence in the borough to an end, she remained involved in the affairs of Dunwich until her death in 1779. thereafter her family continued to influence events until the early years of the next century. To understand how this was so, we have to go back to 1717, when Sir George Downing drew up his will. He had made an unhappy marriage in 1700, when only 15 years of age. He and his child bride – she was 13 at the time – never lived together. A few years later they tried but failed to obtain a divorce. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to have the marriage annulled. All they were able to achieve, by a private act of Parliament, a legal separation. Consequently, Sir George knew that he would be unable to have a son as his heir as long as his wife lived. She died in 1734, but strangely, Sir George did not re-marry.  When he made his will in 1717, at the age of 32, he named his young cousin, Jacob Downing, as his heir. He then named a succession of other relatives as heirs on condition that they changed their name to Downing. In the unlikely event of all these relatives dying without leaving a male heir, he made a final provision for his estates to pass to trustees who were to found a college bearing his name in the University of Cambridge.

 

When Sir Jacob Downing died in 1764 without leaving a male heir, it was found that all the other relatives named by Sir George had predeceased hi, also without having left a male heir among them. His estates should then have passed to trustees for the college, but Lady Downing refused to surrender them. The Attorney-General brought a case against her to enforce the terms of Sir George’s will. It was not until 1802 that this litigation at last came to an end. For the most part, the court decided that Sir George’s estates should pass to the University according to the will, but in Dunwich his estate was divided between Lady Downing’s relatives and the Master and Fellows of Downing College. For nearly 40 years Lady Downing and her relatives had hung on to the estates and retained most of the rents for that period. It is understandable that in the Senior Combination Room of Downing College, Lady Margaret Downing is known as “That Wicked Lady”.

     

Pickard, O. J. (1988), Dunwich ~ The Rotten Borough, The Trustees of Dunwich Museum

 

What happened to the property in Downing Street? On the marriage of Lady Margaret Downing’s neice to Francis Say (1753 – 1796), the vicar of East Hatley, Hatley St George and Whaddon, she bequeathed it to him, presumably to ensure it did not fall into the hands of the trustees of what was to become Downing College, Cambridge. (Alum. Cantab to 1751, iv. 24-5; East Anglian,  N.S. x. 310, 328-30)

 

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