with the Worcestershire Lytteltons, Sutton put up his brother John as a candidate, in an attempt to stop the election of Sir Edward Littleton of Pillaton Hall, a close ally of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Sutton ensured success by procuring a blank election return from Thomas Whorwood, the High Sheriff, who was John Sutton's father-in-law. Littleton, cheated of certain victory, filed bills against the Suttons and Whorwood in Star Chamber. Among his complaints against Lord Dudley was that he had personally voted for his brother in the voice vote at Stafford. As a peer, Sutton should have no part in elections to the Commons, Littleton maintained, apparently the first time this constitutional principle was expressed. The other candidate, Sir Christopher Blount, Essex's stepfather, was also offended at having been placed below Sutton on the election indenture. His wife, Essex's mother, wrote to the Earl complaining about the outrage, and Sutton was summoned before the Privy Council. However, the parliament was soon over, and it appears that Littleton chose to concentrate his efforts on the hapless Whorwood. Although his chicanery and bad manners had alienated some of the greatest in the land, the consequences for Sutton might have been worse. Landowner and industrialist Edward Sutton spent most of his life pressured by the authorities to meet debts that were beyond his ability to pay, partly inherited from his father, and partly the result of his own poor management of his resources. Lord Dudley, like his immediate ancestors, owned substantial estates around Dudley Castle including the manors of Dudley, Sedgley and Kingswinford. He developed the mineral resources of these estates, building (probably) five blast furnaces on them. He obtained a licence to use the patent of John Robinson (or Rovenson) for making iron with pitcoal (that is, mineral coal) in 1619, and in 1622 renewed this patent in his own name. Sutton was said to be an innovator who set up an early reverberatory furnace using coal and a glassworks directed by Paul Tissac, or Tyzack, where coal rather than wood was first used as fuel. These projects brought him no profit. Edward Sutton brought his illegitimate son Dud Dudley home from Balliol College, Oxford to manage his ironworks, but this strategy was not entirely successful. Ultimately Edward Sutton fell out with Dud and expelled Dud from the new coke-fired blast furnace that Edward had built at Hasco Bridge on