GUILDFORD, a market town and municipal borough, and the county town of Surrey, England, in the Guildford parliamentary division, 29 m. S.W. of London by the London and South Western railway; served also by the London, Brighton, and South Coast and the South Eastern and Chatham railways. Pop. (1901) 15,938. It is beautifully situated on an acclivity of the northern chalk Downs and on the river Wey. Its older streets contain a number of picturesque gabled houses, with quaint lattices and curious doorways. The ruins of a Norman castle stand finely above the town and are well preserved; while the ground about them is laid out as a public garden. Beneath the Angel Inn and a house in the vicinity are extensive vaults, apparently of Early English date, and traditionally connected with the castle. The church of St Mary is Norman and Early English, with later additions and considerably restored; its aisles retain their eastward apses and it contains many interesting details. The church of St Nicholas is a modern building on an ancient site, and that of Holy Trinity is a brick structure of 1763, with later additions, also on the site of an earlier church, from which some of the monuments are preserved, including that of Archbishop Abbot (1640). The town hall dates from 1683 and contains a number of interesting pictures. Other public buildings are the county hall, corn-market and institute with museum and library. Abbot’s Hospital, founded by Archbishop Abbot in 1619, is a beautiful Tudor brick building. The county hospital (1866) was erected as a memorial to Albert, Prince Consort. The Royal Free Grammar School, founded in 1509, and incorporated by Edward VI., is an important school for boys. At Cranleigh, 6 m. S.E., is a large middle-class county school. The town has flour mills, iron foundries and breweries, and a large trade in grain; while fairs are held for live stock. There is a manufacture of gunpowder in the neighbouring village of Chilworth. Guildford is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Winchester. The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Area, 2601 acres.
Guildford (Gyldeford, Geldeford), occurs among the possessions of King Alfred, and was a royal borough throughout the middle ages. It probably owed its rise to its position at the junction of trade routes. It is first mentioned as a borough in 1131. Henry III. granted a charter to the men of Guildford in 1256, by which they obtained freedom from toll throughout the kingdom, and the privilege of having the county court held always in their town. Edward III. granted charters to Guildford in 1340, 1346 and 1367; Henry VI. in 1423; Henry VII. in 1488. Elizabeth in 1580 confirmed earlier charters, and other charters were granted in 1603, 1626 and 1686. The borough was incorporated in 1486 under the title of the mayor and good men of Guildford. During the middle ages the government of the town rested with a powerful merchant gild. Two members for Guildford sat in the parliament of 1295, and the borough continued to return two representatives until 1867 when the number was reduced to one. By the Redistribution Act of 1885 Guildford became merged in the county for electoral purposes. Edward II. granted to the town the right of having two fairs, at the feast of St Matthew (21st of September) and at Trinity respectively. Henry VII. granted fairs on the feast of St Martin (11th of November) and St George (23rd of April). Fairs in May for the sale of sheep and in November for the sale of cattle are still held. The market rights date at least from 1276, and three weekly markets are still held for the sale of corn, cattle and vegetables respectively. The cloth trade which formed the staple industry at Guildford in the middle ages is now extinct.
GUILDHALL, the hall of the corporation of the city of London, England. It faces a courtyard opening out of Gresham Street. The date of its original foundation is not known. An ancient crypt remains, but the hall has otherwise undergone much alteration. It was rebuilt in 1411, beautified by the munificence of successive officials, damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, and restored in 1789 by George Dance; while the hall was again restored, with a new roof, in 1870. This fine chamber, 152 ft. in length, is the scene of the state banquets and entertainments of the corporation, and of the municipal meetings “in common hall.” The building also contains a council chamber and various court rooms, with a splendid library, open to the public, a museum and art gallery adjoining. The hall contains several monuments and two giant figures of wood, known as Gog and Magog. These were set up in 1708, but the appearance of giants in city pageants is of much earlier date.
GUILFORD, BARONS AND EARLS OF. Francis North, 1st Baron Guilford (1637-1685), was the third son of the 4th Baron North (see [North, Barons]), and was created Baron Guilford in 1683, after becoming lord keeper in succession to Lord Nottingham. He had been an eminent lawyer, solicitor-general (1671), attorney-general (1673), and chief-justice of the common pleas (1675), and in 1679 was made a member of the council of thirty and on its dissolution of the cabinet. He was a man of wide culture and a stanch royalist. In 1672 he married Lady Frances Pope, daughter and co-heiress of the earl of Downe, who inherited the Wroxton estate; and he was succeeded as 2nd baron by his son Francis (1673-1729), whose eldest son Francis (1704-1790), after inheriting first his father’s title as 3rd baron, and then (in 1734) the barony of North from his kinsman the 6th Baron North, was in 1752 created 1st earl of Guilford. His first wife was a daughter of the earl of Halifax, and his son and successor Frederick was the English prime minister, commonly known as Lord North, his courtesy title while the 1st earl was alive.
Frederick North, 2nd earl of Guilford, but better known by his courtesy title of Lord North (1732-1792), prime minister of England during the important years of the American War, was born on the 13th of April 1732, and after being educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, was sent to make the grand tour of the continent. On his return he was, though only twenty-two years of age, at once elected M.P. for Banbury, of which town his father was high steward; and he sat for the same town in parliament for nearly forty years. In 1759 he was chosen by the duke of Newcastle to be a lord of the treasury, and continued in the same office under Lord Bute and George Grenville till 1765. He had shown himself such a ready debater that on the fall of the first Rockingham ministry in 1766 he was sworn of the privy council, and made paymaster-general by the duke of Grafton. His reputation for ability grew so high that in December 1767, on the death of the brilliant Charles Townshend, he was made chancellor of the exchequer. His popularity with both the House of Commons and the people continued to increase, for his temper was never ruffled, and his quiet humour perpetually displayed; and, when the retirement of the duke of Grafton was necessitated by the hatred he inspired and the attacks of Junius, no better successor could be found for the premiership than the chancellor of the exchequer. Lord North succeeded the duke in March 1770, and continued in office for twelve of the most eventful years in English history. George III. had at last overthrown the ascendancy of the great Whig families, under which he had so long groaned, and determined to govern as well as rule. He knew that he could only govern by obtaining a majority in parliament to carry out his wishes, and this he had at last obtained by a great expenditure of money in buying seats and by a careful exercise of his patronage. But in addition to a majority he must have a minister who would consent to act as his lieutenant, and such a minister he found in Lord North. How a man of undoubted ability such as Lord North was could allow himself to be thus used as a mere instrument cannot be explained; but the confidential tone of the king’s letters seems to show that there was an unusual intimacy between them, which may account for North’s compliance. The path of the minister in parliament was a hard one; he had to defend measures which he had not designed, and of which he had not approved, and this too in a House of Commons in which all the oratorical ability of Burke and Fox was against him, and when he had only the purchased help of Thurlow and Wedderburne to aid him. The most important events of his ministry were those of the American War of Independence. He cannot be accused of causing it, but one of his first acts was the retention of the tea-duty, and he it was also who introduced the Boston Port Bill in 1774. When the war had broken out he earnestly counselled peace, and it was only the earnest solicitations of the king not to leave his sovereign again at the mercy of the Whigs that induced him to defend a war which from 1779 he knew to be both hopeless and impolitic. At last, in March 1782, he insisted on resigning after the news of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and no man left office more blithely. He had been well rewarded for his assistance to the king: his children had good sinecures; his half-brother, Brownlow North (1741-1820), was bishop of Winchester; he himself was chancellor of the university of Oxford, lord-lieutenant of the county of Somerset, and had finally been made a knight of the Garter, an honour which has only been conferred on three other members of the House of Commons, Sir R. Walpole, Lord Castlereagh and Lord Palmerston. Lord North did not remain long out of office, but in April 1783 formed his famous coalition with his old subordinate, C. J. Fox (q.v.), and became secretary of state with him under the nominal premiership of the duke of Portland. He was probably urged to this coalition with his old opponent by a desire to show that he could act independently of the king, and was not a mere royal mouthpiece. The coalition ministry went out of office on Fox’s India Bill in December 1783, and Lord North, who was losing his sight, then finally gave up political ambition. He played, when quite blind, a somewhat important part in the debates on the Regency Bill in 1789, and in the next year succeeded his father as earl of Guilford. He did not long survive his elevation, and died peacefully on the 5th of August 1792. It is impossible to consider Lord North a great statesman, but he was a most good-tempered and humorous member of the House of Commons. In a time of unexampled party feeling he won the esteem and almost the love of his most bitter opponents. Burke finely sums up his character in his Letter to a Noble Lord: “He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding, fitted for every sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a delightful temper, and with a mind most disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself,” he continues, “by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command which the times required.”
By his wife Anne (d. 1797), daughter of George Speke of White Lackington, Somerset, Guilford had four sons, the eldest of whom, George Augustus (1757-1802), became 3rd earl on his father’s death. This earl was a member of parliament from 1778 to 1792 and was a member of his father’s ministry and also of the royal household; he left no sons when he died on the 20th of April 1802 and was succeeded in the earldom by his brother Francis (1761-1817), who also left no sons. The youngest brother, Frederick (1766-1827), who now became 5th earl of Guilford, was remarkable for his great knowledge and love of Greece and of the Greek language. He had a good deal to do with the foundation of the Ionian university at Corfu, of which he was the first chancellor and to which he was very liberal. Guilford, who was governor of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, died unmarried on the 14th of October 1827. His cousin, Francis (1772-1861), a son of Brownlow North, bishop of Winchester from 1781 to 1820, was the 6th earl, and the latter’s descendant, Frederick George (b. 1876), became 8th earl in 1886.
On the death of the 3rd earl of Guilford in 1802 the barony of North fell into abeyance between his three daughters, the survivor of whom, Susan (1797-1884). wife of John Sidney Doyle, who took the name of North, was declared by the House of Lords in 1841 to be Baroness North, and the title passed to her son, William Henry John North, the 11th baron (b. 1836) (see [North, Barons]).
For the Lord Keeper Guilford see the Lives by the Hon. R. North, edited by A. Jessopp (1890); and E. Foss, The Judges of England, vol. vii. (1848-1864). For the prime minister, Lord North, see Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, edited by W. B. Donne (1867); Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of George III. (1859), and Memoirs of the Reign of George III., edited by G. F. R. Barker (1894); Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen, vol. i. (1839); Earl Stanhope, History of England (1858); Sir T. E. May, Constitutional History of England (1863-1865); and W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the 18th century (1878-1890).