The official web site of Camelford Town Council

With the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, secret ballots were introduced for the first time for the election of members to Parliament.
Before that time, voting was carried out on a show of hands.  Being seen to vote for the ‘wrong’ person would almost certainly cause you to be evicted from your house and you would probably have to ‘live on’ the parish. Votes could be bought and sold. Seats in the House of Commons could similarly be traded. A review of constituency boundaries had never been carried out and, over time, this led to serious anomalies. So, a huge town like Manchester had no representation, while Camelford with no more than 30 voters sent two members to Westminster.  This led to corruption on a grand scale. There were many constituencies in a similar situation, particularly in Cornwall. They were known as the ‘rotten boroughs’, and none was more so than Camelford.
In 1780 the two parliamentary seats were reported to have been bought for £8,000. In the first decade of the 19th Century the Duke of Bedford sold the Borough of Camelford to a John Carpenter for £32,000, who promptly passed it on to Lord Darlington. Thus the Bedford Arms became the Darlington Arms.
Come 1818, and enters  into the fray the Earl of Yarmouth. At the ensuing election Darlington’s candidate received 13 votes and Yarmouth’s 10.  In the confusion that followed, the 1818 election was declared void.
A new election was to be held in 1819 and it saw many of those voters who still felt obliged to Darlington, hiding during the day of the poll on Roughtor. The result was that Yarmouth’s candidate polled 14 against Darlington’s 12.
Seeking to consolidate his position, Yarmouth was busily buying all the property in the town as it came on the market.  In 1823 he acquired land on which he proposed to build tenements to house would-be voters. But Darlington held the mineral rights to the land and drove a mine adit under the first house, blowing it up with gunpowder, before a large crowd that he had assembled.

That same year there was reported in the press a riot that the  newspapers dubbed the ‘Battle of Culloden’.   It seems that four brothers had been left Culloden Farmhouse in trust by their father. Two sons had sold out to Yarmouth and one to Darlington, the fourth being a minor.
At 3 a.m. of the morning before Christmas Eve, Darlington’s supporters took possession of the house. On learning of this, Yarmouth “assembled a great force” and laid siege to the house. Armed with an axe, they made several attacks on the gate and the house, but on each occasion they were repelled by Darlington’s men Order was only restored with the arrival of the town constables and the Mayor who read the Riot Act.