How "Wicked Jimmy" became the dictator of 18th Century Cumbria
England's richest man, James Lowther, bought control of Cumbria's political system for 50 years. He eventually ran nine MPs and created a Prime Minister.
Nobody can say precisely when the mysterious expression “as quick as Jack Robinson” was first used in England. But it seems to have entered everyday speech in or around 1756. That was when a curious advertisement appeared on a noticeboard outside Cockermouth's Moot, or town, Hall.
Odd things happened after this announcement went up. And in the years that followed if you said someone did something “before you can say Jack Robinson” it meant they were quick or cunning in thought or deed.
This story took place when British public life had plunged into deep pit of rottenness and corruption. It’s about how one man's almost insane lust for power made him test the limits of legality.
He grabbed political control of much of Cumberland and Westmorland and he effectively abolished free elections there. He bought the right to decide who the local MPs should be for about half a century. And he was helped to do this by a crafty and devious man named Jack, or John, Robinson.
Yet their chicanery produced one outcome they did not intend - they accidentally created one of the country's most beautiful places. It has often puzzled visitors how the small market town of Cockermouth managed to acquire more than 200 listed buildings and earned the distinction of being named one of Britain's fifty-one Gem Towns by the highly influential Council for British Archaeology.
Yes, one of the most disgusting, fraudulent and outrageous abuses of the British democratic system inadvertently created a beauty spot. The mysterious advertisement mentioned earlier was published in April 1756 on the wall of Cockermouth's moot hall, a Tudor era building that once stood at the castle end of the marketplace but which was sadly demolished in 1829 because it was allegedly “in the way”.
The notice “reminded” the 278 overwhelmingly male property holders who were entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections of their “rights and their value.”
The advertisement advised readers to only ever sell these rights “in the best interests of the town” - and only to the highest bidder. It was a heavy hint that someone was prepared to pay a lot of money if they acted “wisely”. It was a seductive, timely and successful wheeze. The issue of who had the right to vote was a complex matter in the 18th Century.
In the period between the accession of George I in August 1714 and the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the rules about who could cast a ballot varied a lot depending on whether you lived in a corporation, freeman, university, a scot and lot or even a potwalloper borough. Cockermouth, as it happens, was yet another type - a burgage borough.
This was a place where only people who owned a burgage plot, which usually consisted of a house on a long strip of land with a narrow frontage onto the street at one end, could exercise their franchise.
The special thing about burgages is the votes that came with them were legally private property and they could be bought and sold. It was this peculiarity that was so attractive to the authors of the anonymous advertisement.
But who was offering all this money - and why? The British then as now were not typically obsessed with politics. Cockermouth's prosperous middle class residents were too busy making money from tanning, hat making, milling, fulling, auctioneering and the general commercial and agricultural trade of a market town to get fixated on events in distant Westminster which was up to twelve days away by stagecoach even in the summer.
Just like today, people didn't necessarily follow the nuances all that closely. Most people in the Georgian era thought the parties, the Whigs and the Tories, were as bad as each other. However, for any remote rural community there were not all that many sources of entertainment.
Locals would not turn their noses up at the traditional excitement of hustings where candidates for parliamentary elections would speak to and, very often, bribe voters.
Election agents working for the candidates would be sure to meet these expectations by organising banquets, feasts and tavern dinners where, surrounded by food and drink, members of the electorate would spend the day in the company of candidates for Parliament. Amid the festivities, the agents would ply the guests with money and free booze in return for their votes.
But this time it became clear that what was happening that April in Cockermouth was a bit more than the usual “treating” of electors. By using the power of a large amount of money someone was bent on buying up all the votes of the small electorate in order to gain unrepresentative influence in or, indeed, total political control, of the constituency. The mystery man wanted to create what came to be known as a rotten or pocket borough.
In 1756, the already notorious Sir James Lowther was 21. He had just inherited immense wealth from his cousin, the 4th and last Baronet of Whitehaven, including the town (the first planned town in England), harbour, a flourishing trade with Ireland, the American colonies and coal mines producing annual profits worth about £2.5 million (2020).
Lowther was on his way to becoming England's richest commoner. But James had no interest in luxury or showing off his wealth - he ran around in a rusty carriage and lived on in the leaky shell of his stately home Lowther Hall after it had mostly burned down. He was too mean to spend out on a new one. Instead, he devoted his enormous fortune to the obsessive pursuit of political power.
In time, he also attracted some colourful sobriquets including “Wicked Jimmy”, “Jemmy Grasp-all” and, when he was raised to the peerage as the 1st Earl of Lonsdale, the “Bad Earl” because of his phenomenal ruthlessness and miserliness. The biographer Reverend Richard Carlyle commented in 1861 that he was "truly a madman, though too rich to be confined".
Jimmy immediately started leaning on the eager-to-please Robinson for ideas on how he was to acquire the political leverage he avidly desired. They set about buying the deeds to valuable shop premises known as “burgage plots”, which were the only way to obtain a vote at Parliamentary elections in certain towns. The scheme to ensure that, in effect, Lowther was the only voter. The grateful residents immediately spent the money on upgrading their medieval lath and plaster houses. They replaced them with stone-built high-ceilinged light-filled Georgian designs that are highly admired today, using William Wordsworth’s grand birthplace as their model.
To a rich man seeking power burgages represented valuable tokens in the political game. Buying up enough of these votes bestowed the ability to effectively appoint MPs to the House of Commons without having to risk the uncertainty of fighting proper democratic elections. This gave the rich person disproportionate influence over what legislation was passed by Parliament and who got into the Cabinet.
Wicked Jimmy reached the peak of his influence after he was able to parachute the future Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger as MP for his rotten borough of Appleby in 1781 without the bother of a contested election.
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This is an extract. You can read the rest of this piece in my book called People of the Sacred Valley. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.
Or you can get a copy instantly here:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom
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