f Desart and the Marquis of Cholmondeley, with an electorate of
4,396. In West Norfolk the electors were not so numerous, and the
influence was chiefly possessed by the Earl of Leicester, Lord Hastings,
the Marquis of Cholmondeley, Lord Charles Townshend and the Marquis of
that name. In both divisions Conservatives were returned. In the
Eastern Division of Suffolk, which had its headquarters at Ipswich, the
electorate returned two Members--Lord Henniker and Sir Charles Broke
Vere. The leading landlords were the Earl of Stradbroke, the Duke of
Hamilton, the Marquis of Hertford, the Dysart family, and Sir Thomas
Gooch. Sir Thomas had represented the county up to the time of the
Reform Bill; in 1832 Robert Newton Shawe was elected. West Suffolk,
whose chief electoral town was Bury St. Edmund's, returned Tories, under
the influence of the Marquis of Bristol and other landlords. The
boroughs did a little better; Bury St. Edmund's returned one Liberal,
Lord Charles Fitzroy, elected by 289 votes, and Lord Jermyn (C.), who
polled 277 votes. Colchester, however, a very costly seat to gain, was
held by the Conservatives. Chelmsford and Braintree were the chief
polling places of Essex north and south, and in both divisions
Conservatives were returned. Eye rejoiced in its hereditary
representative, Sir Edward Kerrison, Conservative. It is strange that so
small a borough was spared by the first Reform Bill. In our time it has
been very properly disfranchised. Sudbury, a Suffolk borough, a little
larger, which returned two Conservatives in 1837, was very properly
disfranchised for bribery in 1844. Ipswich was also supposed to be by no
means an immaculate borough. Dodd writes concerning it: "Money has long
been considered the best friend in Ipswich, and petitions on the ground
of bribery, &c., have been frequent." In 1837 it returned one Liberal
and one Conservative, Milner Gibson, whom Sir Thomas Gooch, of Benacre
Hall, recommended to the electors as a promising Conservative colt. He
lived to become M.P. for Manchester, to be one of the leaders of the
Anti-Corn Law Movement, the head of the Society for the Repeal of the
Taxes on Knowledge, a society which owed a great deal of its success to
his Parliamentary skill as a tactician, and to be a Member of a Liberal
Administration. There were few finer, manlier-looking men in the House
of Commons than Thomas Milner Gibson. At any rate, I thought so as I
watched him, after