ABSTRACT
The image of clergy voting at the hustings in an English general election was first seen in 1679. Before that date, the clergy were taxed separately from the rest of the population, their taxes, and consequently their representation, was arranged by the convocations of Canterbury and York rather than Parliament. After 1665, the agreement that clergy could be taxed by Parliament resulted in their entitlement to vote in Parliamentary elections. As Mark Goldie has claimed of the clergy, ‘suddenly they were a conspicuous voting bloc’.1 There remained in this period some resistance to the idea that clergy should have the right to vote and exercise influence over other voters. In 1690, a broadsheet asserted, ‘the clergy of England not only are a dead weight at elections for knights of the shires, but are so many solicitors in every parish for such as are most likely to carry on their separate interest’. Moreover granting clergy the vote ‘occasioned the proclaiming the day and place of the election in churches’ rather than secular places. There remained those who contested the clergy’s right to vote. A broadsheet advised sheriffs to ‘take the poll of clergymen by themselves, that if their dead weight cast the balance, it may be left to the judgement of the Parliament whether they have the right to vote or no’.2 In some places this advice seems to have been followed, since at Malden in 1694 the defeated candidate for the borough seat complained that he would have won ‘if the sixteen clergymen who voted for Sir Eliab [Harvey] … were set aside’.3 In 1706, a writer bemoaned the ‘abominable shame [that] Parsons should meddle in state-matters, or that such as have been bred … on the endowment of a college, without a foot of land they can call their own, should by their votes in all elections, have the disposal of other men’s estates’.4
