POLITICAL HISTORY 



made Privy Seal and in 1606 lord-lieutenant of Norfolk, in which capacity- 

 he wrote a spirited letter to the king complaining of the insufficient forces 

 kept in the county for home defence, with such good results, that matters 

 were much mended by 1621, when some excellent regulations and instruc- 

 tions as to what was to be done in case of invasion were prepared.^ They 

 provide for the forces to be concentrated on Cawston Heath, the old men 

 and women to be sent inland to Marshland, and in fact do not materially 

 differ from the precautions taken later on during the Bonaparte scare. 



The creation of baronets in i 61 1 was headed by the name of Sir Nicholas 

 Bacon of Redgrave, for whom a Norfolk descent from the Bacons of Bacons- 

 thorpe has often been erroneously claimed, genealogists ignoring the fact that 

 Bacon was a very common name all along the east coast of England. 

 Among the Norfolk men who purchased, compulsorily or freely, the title, 

 were Sir Philip Knyvet, Sir Henry Hobart, Sir Roger Townshend, Sir Philip 

 Wodehouse of Kimberley, and later on Sir Richard Berney of Reedham, 

 Sir William Yelverton, Sir Henry Clere of Ormesby, and Sir Henry Jerning- 

 ham of Cossey — all with two exceptions still represented in the county. All 

 these, however, were men of standing and position, and there is no reason to 

 suppose that this title could have been bought by anyone who found the 

 jri,ooo required. 



The old sore of illegal enclosures broke out again in 161 1, when there 

 was an insurrection, or rather an attempted one, at Norwich headed by 

 Thomas Townsend and Thomas Harrison on this pretext, but it came to 

 nothing, the mayor of Norwich having taken prompt measures and sent the 

 ringleaders up to the Privy Council.^ 



It was in this reign that traces first appear of a real desire on the part 

 of the Norfolk electors to do their duty in returning members of Parliament, 

 and to petition against improper returns. The merits of the dispute as to 

 the elections of 1614 and 1623 are hard to understand, but it is clear that 

 the organized opposition to the king's or court party was growing. No 

 question of right, however, seems to have arisen, so the incident has no 

 political interest, the disputes being as to facts, but the incidents are worthy 

 of notice as showing that the voters were beginning to value their power 

 of voting. 



On the death of James I in 1625, Charles continued the Howards in 

 favour by at once nominating Thomas, earl of Arundel and Surrey, who was 

 resident in his palace at Norwich, as lord-lieutenant. He found the county 

 troubled by the growing impossibility of carrying on either export or import 

 trade in the face of the enormous increase of piracy. It has been said, but 

 most unjustly, that it was to protect the Yarmouth fishing boats and to keep 

 the Dutch from our shores that Charles and his advisers lit upon the notable 

 expedient of ship money, which eventually cost the king his life and crown. 

 Not only was the ' expedient ' an old and quite constitutional one, but the 

 proceeds seem to have been honestly applied in ship-building, and that the 

 need for a fleet was a very real and urgent one can easily be shown. The 

 first trace of any organized refusal to pay ship money at all was in 1629. 

 It is singular that more notice has not been taken of the fact that in this 

 year, six years before the general writ for ship money was issued, two ships 



' Mason, Hist. ofNorf. 218. ' Blomefield, op. cit. iii, 363. 



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