Chapter Four - National and local politics, 1747–1754

Summary

The politics of both borough and county in the next twenty years were very much influenced by the position taken by the Duke of Bedford in the complex interplay of ministerial politics of the period.

The Duke of Bedford

Initially an opponent of Walpole, the Duke had been made First Lord of the Admiralty on 27 December 1744 and Lord Lieutenant of Bedfordshire in 1745. On 20 February 1748, he was moved to the key position of Secretary to the Southern Department, which had responsibilities for relations with France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and the Italian States. His opposite number in the Northern Department was Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle and brother of the Prime Minister. Together they ended the war with Spain and France at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle on 7 October 1748. Surprisingly the treaty was signed by the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Thomas Robinson and not by the Dukes of Newcastle or Bedford. Sandwich, however, had served under the Duke of Bedford at the Admiralty in 1744 and enlisted in the Duke of Bedford's regiment in 1745.

However on 1 June 1751, Bedford resigned because of Newcastle's tendency to meddle in his partner's department, treating him as his junior official.

Bedford now went into opposition to Pelham and in 1753 ran an anti-ministerial paper called The Protestor with William Beckford. In the general election of 1754 Bedford supported opposition candidates, securing the election of two Tory candidates for Bedford borough and two Whigs for the county, one of whom was his relation the Earl of Upper Ossory, and the other, the sitting MP, the maverick Sir Thomas Alston.

The Duke's national importance in politics was in recognition of his great wealth based on both London urban estates and his rural estates in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Devon and Northamptonshire. To his already large Bedfordshire estate, he added the Brandreth estate at Houghton Regis in 1750.

In his article ‘Activities of an estate agent in mid-eighteenth century England; Robert Butcher and the town of Bedford’, Hermann Wellenreuther quotes some revealing statistics. By 1751 the Duke of Bedford's estate as a whole produced a gross income of over £47,000. Butcher, as the Duke's agent, spent nearly £90,000 between 1747 and 1754 in the purchase of property, including, but not exclusively, in Bedfordshire. The purchases made the Duke's estates the fifth largest in England.