Plympton in the Olden fime, by James Hine, F.R.T.B.A. 99 
as a brave soldier in the siege of Bristol. Then we have the 
memorable names of Sir George Treby (ancestor of the late Mr. 
H. H. Treby), and Sir John Maynard, and at quite a late period 
in the history of this borough, Lord Castlereagh represented it in 
Parliament. 
In an interesting address delivered by the last recorder of the 
town, Mr. Deeble Boger, on the occasion of the corporation resign- 
ing their functions in 1859, it was stated that the borough was 
*' what was called a nomination borough, that is, those two families 
who had the greatest number of friends, and to whom, from the 
period of the revolution, the gratitude of the borough was justly 
due, — the Trebys, in whom great interest naturally centred, and 
the Edgcumbes, who were connected with the borough in the same 
way, — possessed the power of nominating a member, and this nomi- 
nation consisted in their recommending him for election. This 
power was subject to one limitation, that the person recommended 
should be of the same politics as the electors." 
Perhaps the greatest representative the borough ever had was 
Sir Christopher Wren. It was in May, 1685, that this distin- 
guished architect was elected member of parliament for Plympton. 
How this came to pass, and which of the two great parties he 
represented, we are not precisely informed, but may easily con- 
jecture, as Plympton was always a Tory borough. No doubt he 
occasionally thought, though he might not say, with Mercutio, " a 
plague on both your houses," for men of science and artists — and 
he was in a high degree an artist — are seldom very ardent poli- 
ticians. Still we know he was a staunch royalist and churchman. 
His father was dean of Windsor ; his uncle, the Bishop of Ely, 
had been imprisoned in the tower for nearly twenty years during 
the Commonwealth ; he himself was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, 
and held a professorship at that University, at an extremely 
orthodox period. There are other reasons for supposing that he 
stuck pretty close to the court and government of the day. His 
