The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [284]
Mr Wyndham Martell was in an enviable position: he didn’t have to please anyone. Master of a large estate, heir to another, a graduate of Oxford, of good character: in the society in which he lived there was no man, unless such a person were impertinent, to find fault with him. If he was courteous – and in his somewhat reserved way he was – this was because he would have despised himself for being anything else. The only danger to his enviable estate might have been if he were a gambler or a debauchee and Martell, whose natural inclinations were towards the pleasures of the intellect, was far too proud to be either. He had enough personal vanity to present himself well; he had concluded, quite reasonably, that for a man in his position to be without vanity would be an affectation. He intended, for himself and for his family name, to make a figure in the world and he could afford to do it on his own terms. That is to say, he had decided to enter public life as that phenomenon, so rare in the politics of any age, an independent man who cannot be bought. And if this should be adduced as evidence that his pride was really quite above the usual, why then, so it must have been.
His real reason for coming to see young Edward Totton, besides his kindly feelings towards the young man, was that Lymington, which lay conveniently between his two estates, returned two Members of Parliament.
‘And I think that at the next election’, he had informed his father, ‘I might like to be one of them.’
Why had the modest borough of Lymington two Members of Parliament? The short answer was that good Queen Bess had granted them a few years before the Armada when she wanted some extra political support. Did two Members for such a small place seem excessive nowadays? Not very, when you considered that Old Sarum, the so-called pocket borough on the deserted castle hill above Salisbury, returned two Members – and had practically no inhabitants at all.
The system of elections evolved in the borough of Lymington was actually typical of many of England’s towns in that Age of Reason and, it must be said, it had the merits of safety, convenience and economy. Indeed, its electors considered it a model for all times and places.
Elections in some boroughs, alas, were not so well managed. Scurrilous pamphlets about the candidates provoked bad feeling. There was expense, for electors had to be bribed; there was trouble, when electors for another candidate had to be made drunk and then locked up; there could be still more trouble if they got out. Even a limited democracy, it was agreed by all parties, was a dangerous thing and nothing showed it more clearly than the drunken brawling of an election. They ordered this matter better, however, in Lymington.
The two Members of Parliament were chosen by the town’s burgesses, of whom there were about forty; and the burgesses, in theory anyway, had been elected by the modest tradesmen and other obliging freeholders of the borough. Who were elected to the position of burgess? Sound men, worthy men, trustworthy men: friends of the mayor or whoever had the responsibility of running the town. Quite often the burgesses of Lymington actually lived there; but the quest for good men might lead much further afield. Twenty years ago when Burrard, as mayor, had decided to create thirty-nine new burgesses, he had only chosen three from the town itself; his search for other loyal men had taken him all over England. Why, he had even gone to the trouble of finding one gentleman who lived in Jamaica!