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| Karl Anton Hickel William Pitt the Younger addressing the House of Commons on the outbreak of war with France (1793) Wikimedia Commons |
All the issues raised in this post can be followed up in the History of Parliament online, which is an exhaustive survey of MPs and constituencies.
1832 saw the first of the great nineteenth-century reforms of Parliament. It is open to debate how thorough-going this reform was to be. It replaced a complicated, centuries-old parliamentary system that by the beginning of the nineteenth century was no longer fit for purpose.
Pre-reform Britain was not a democracy, and the political elites reacted in horror at the very word, which to them meant mob rule. Power rested with the landed elites who controlled Parliament and local government, and a substantial proportion of MPs never faced an election. Between 1784 and 1831, fewer than a third of all elections were contested.
The monarch retained considerable prerogative powers, but by the early nineteenth century, this was changing. George IV's reluctant acceptance of Catholic Emancipation showed that the king was losing his power to veto legislation.
It has been estimated that only one in six of the population had the right to vote, though the many anomalies in the system meant that on some constituencies working men possessed the franchise. But however small the electorate, public opinion could not be ignored. The press was (largely) free and the judiciary was independent. The building-blocks of democracy had been put in place and far more people were politically engaged than were registered to vote.
Party, in the modern sense of the word, was re-emerging in the early nineteenth century, though political alliances were still fluid. The terms 'Whig' and 'Tory' should be used with mental quotation marks around them.
The House of Commons consisted of 558 Members elected by 314 constituencies. The 245 English constituencies (forty counties, 203 boroughs, two universities) returned 489 Members; the twenty-four Welsh constituencies and forty-five Scottish constituencies returned one Member each. In 1801 the addition of 100 Irish Members elected by sixty-six constituencies made an Imperial Parliament of 658 Members
Most of the members of Parliament were landowners, elected either on the county forty-shilling franchise (the possession of freehold property valued for the land tax at forty shillings per annum) or on one of the varied borough franchises.
There were six types of borough franchise
- Freeman: vote given to freemen of the town or city
- Burgage: franchise attached to property in the borough
- Corporation: vote confined to members of the corporation
- Scot and lot: voters who paid the poor rate
- Household or ‘potwalloper’: all inhabitant male householders not receiving alms or poor relief.
- Freeholder: right of voting lay with the freeholders
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| Old Sarum: the constituency with seven voters. My photograph |
By contrast the rapidly growing centres of industrialisation - Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - had no MPs. Cornwall was grossly overrepresented, sending forty-four members to Westminster - only one more MP than the whole of Scotland. Lancashire sent just fourteen.
Voters wrote their names in poll books, which were subsequently published. Poll books trace their origins to a 1696 act of Parliament designed to curb disputed election results and fraud. They continued to be used for various elections until the secret ballot was introduced in 1872. Many poll books are now online. This site explains their nature and gives many links.
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| Poll book for Newcastle for the general election of 1780 Public domain |
By 1830 the unreformed parliamentary system was coming under considerable strain. The population was rising and its distribution changing dramatically. It was becoming better educated and more critical of the anomalies in the structure of politics. The largely peaceful struggle over Catholic Emancipation was about to pave the way for further changes.
