Bewdley sent a Member to Parliament for very nearly three hundred years, and for part of that time it managed to run two corporations, two bailiffs and two men who each insisted he was the town’s rightful MP. The Commons had to sort it out. The town then marked the death of a queen as an annual day of thanksgiving, which takes some explaining.
How the town got a seat
The right to return a Member was not part of Edward IV’s charter of 1472. It came later, under the charter James I granted on 12 September 1606, which re-incorporated the borough with a Bailiff and twelve Capital Burgesses at its head. That charter, modified by the Municipal Reform Act, was still the governing charter of the borough when John Richard Burton wrote about it in 1883.
The surrender, and what the town was offered for it
In 1684, under the pressure Charles II was applying to borough charters across England, the Corporation surrendered the charter of James I. They were not simply bullied into it. The inducements are on the record and they are very Bewdley: every boat passing under the bridge would pay toll to the Corporation, and the burgesses would be allowed to form themselves into companies and keep outside traders out of the town.
Then Charles II died before the replacement charter was issued. James II granted one dated 4 May 1685. That charter was afterwards declared void, because of an informality in the way the old one had been surrendered.
Which left a problem nobody had planned for. If the surrender was void, the old corporation still legally existed. But a legal act needed seven of its burgesses, and by then only one of them, Samuel Slade, was still alive.
Two corporations
Queen Anne granted a fresh charter in 1708. The result was that Bewdley now had two bodies each claiming to be the Corporation, and, in the phrase that has followed the episode ever since, two Bailiffs “who fulminated against each other like rival Popes”.
It came to a head at an election. Salwey Winnington was returned as Member under one charter and Henry Herbert under the other, and both went to Westminster. The House of Commons, with a Whig majority, decided in Herbert’s favour by 211 votes to 132. That is a division on the fate of a small Worcestershire borough with more Members voting in it than most towns of the size had inhabitants entitled to vote.
Saved by a death
The Tories did not let it rest. They resolved that the charter of 1708 was “void, illegal and destructive to the constitution of Parliament”, and set about repealing it. The charter survived, and the reason it survived is that Queen Anne died before the repeal could be carried through.
The Corporation understood exactly what it owed her. Her obit, on 1 August, was kept in Bewdley for many years afterwards as a day of thanksgiving for the preservation of the charter. A town giving annual thanks for a monarch’s death is not a sentiment that appears on many civic calendars.
The end of the borough seat
The borough was enlarged in 1832 to take in Wribbenhall, Hoarstone, Blackstone, Netherton, and Lower Mitton with Lickhill, which is to say that the growth of Stourport was formally acknowledged by pulling part of it into Bewdley’s constituency.
In 1885 the parliamentary borough was abolished altogether and merged into the county representation. The name did not disappear with it. It survived as the Bewdley division of Worcestershire, and it was that seat that returned Stanley Baldwin at a by-election in 1908 and kept returning him through three terms as Prime Minister.
One earlier Member deserves a mention here, because the town has a permanent reminder of him and does not know it. Miles Peter Andrews, then Member for the Borough, gave £3,000 towards the cost of Telford’s bridge, out of a total of £11,000. It is the single largest contribution anybody made, and there is nothing on the bridge to say so.