Election politics in the borough of Antrim, 1750-1800

Abstract

Antrim was a ‘potwalloping’ borough. It had therefore no corporation nor any corporate function. By the terms of its charter of 1665 it existed simply to return two members to parliament, and this it continued to do till it was disfranchised by the act of the union in 1800. Its only borough official was the seneschal of the manor of Moylinny, who was appointed by the lord of that manor and acted as returning officer at borough of Antrim elections. The borough comprised, roughly speaking, the town and sixteen surrounding townlands of Antrim, known popularly as ‘Antrim and the sixteen towns’. The lord of its soil was the earl of Massereene, who, by a curious freak, was not lord of the manor of Moylinny. This lordship belonged to the earl of Donegall, to whom Lord Massereene also paid a chief rent for the Antrim estate. But because the interests of the two families had always been closely intertwined and had been drawn still closer together by marriage alliance in 1713, Lord Massereene had no difficulty in getting his nominee appointed seneschal of the manor, and in the period 1750–1800 the seneschal was invariably the receiver of the rents on his Antrim estate. The franchise in Antrim was vested by the charter in the inhabitants of the borough. It was limited by the election act of 1727 to the protestant inhabitants only, and further limited by the election act of 1795 to £5 householders, whether protestant or catholic. This was a drastic limitation, since up to then there had been no property qualification in the potwalloper type of franchise. The result in Antrim was an enormous fall in the number of voters. The second earl of Massereene estimated that the electorate prior to 1795 consisted of between 200 and 300 people, and of somewhere around 30 after that date. In 1801 there were 36 registered electors. Such was the constitution of Antrim borough. Although on the face of it simple enough, it was yet sufficiently complex to provide no less than five different parties with a claim to compensation for its disfranchisement in 1800.