Suffolk (UK Parliament constituency)
Suffolk was a County constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of England from 1290 to 1707, then of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801, which returned two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons until 1832, when it was split into two divisions.
History
Boundaries and franchise
The constituency consisted of the historic county of Suffolk.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, Suffolk had two MPs elected by the bloc vote method, under which each voter had two votes.
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 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, 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 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, 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.