It would be easy to over-simplify the implications and significance of political influence in eighteenth-century provincial society. Political allegiance was influenced by complex considerations, including political, social, personal and family factors. Although the significance of family connections in political questions may have been declining in importance in this period in comparison with political allegiance and clientage, the clergy were part of a small and tightknit society of gentry and prosperous merchants and farmers and, except at unusual moments of high political tension during comparatively rare disputed elections, political allegiances may have been relatively insignificant.
Probably friendship and mutual society decided people's political allegiance rather than a sense of political subservience. It cannot be known how clergy would have voted if they had had different patrons. The letters of Patrick St Clair, vicar of Sustead and Aylmerton in north Norfolk, to his former pupil and patron Ashe Windham of Felbrigg during the 1730s reveal north Norfolk as an almost impregnable Whig stronghold under the Windhams, Walpoles, Townshends, Hobarts and Cokes, with the clergy as apparently steady and contented as their patrons. The reason for this seems to be their shared and common interest.
It was not unusual for patrons to be disappointed in their incumbents. Henry Purefoy thought that his mother had 'over credulously appointed an incumbent to Shalstone in 1705. When he presented a new incumbent in 1742, Purefoy got his London attorney to draw up 'articles' to be agreed with the new incumbent, Wright Hawes, to standardise tithes at 22s. a yardland on 23 yardlands. The prospective incumbent was required to give a 'Bond undertaking to resign if any of these Covenants were not performed' and another bond 'to lay out £100 in repairing the Parsonage House'. These arrangements proved satisfactory, for the Purefoy and Hawes families became friendly and eventually Mary, Hawes's daughter, married Henry Purefoy's heir.
Henry Purefoy was a relatively well-intentioned patron, concerned to protect himself and his tenants from exploitation. Other patrons could be ruthless with incumbents by driving bargains that the land in the parish should be tithe-free or should not be raised above certain limits. Because of their illegality there is little evidence of such agreements. The practice of patrons demanding resignation bonds, which effectively deprived an incumbent of the freehold of his living, seems to have been relatively common. An example of a complicated manoeuvre of this nature occurs in Patrick St Clair's letters to Ashe Windham. The livings of Wickmere, Wolterton and Alby, in the gift of Horatio Walpole of Wolterton, fell vacant, and he wished to present Horace Hamond, his nephew, when he was of canonical age for ordination. Walpole also wished to avoid presentingjohn distance, son of Alderman distance, one of his leading constituents in Norwich. Walpole therefore offered his livings to St Clair, aged eighty, with the expectation that on St Clair's death the livings could go to Hamond. Presumably because of St Clair's advanced age, there is no mention of a resignation bond. Such informal practices may have been more common than formal bonds. Handbooks written for young clergy cautioned them against accepting a living under such circumstances.
Laity's Role in Securing the Patronage of the Clergy
