Politics after the Reform Act

Sir Robert Peel, the up-and-coming
politician of the 1830s
by William Henry Pickersgill,
Public domain.

Plus ça change?

The enfranchisement of the great industrial centres was clearly a hugely important potential change brought about by the Reform Act, but the Act did not transform politics. In particular, the aristocracy continued to play a dominant role, and did so until the growth of mass politics at the end of the century. Most Victorian prime ministers were aristocrats and sat in the Lords rather than the Commons.

The Whigs and Reform

The Whig record on reform was mixed. On the one hand, they abolished slavery in 1833 and passed the first Factory Act in the same year. But in 1834 they passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, which forced paupers into workhouses. In 1835 they brought in a radical reform of local government through the Municipal Corporations Act.

The Factory Act, 1833

The chief advocates for factory reform had been Tory paternalists rather than Whigs. Orthodox Whigs did not believe that the government should interfere with market forces, but Tories like Michael Thomas Sadler believed that the government had a duty to the poor. When he failed to win the newly-created seat of Leeds in the 1832 election, the leadership of the reform movement passed to his fellow Evangelical Tory, Lord Ashley, the heir to the earldom of Shaftesbury.

In 1833 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate conditions in factories.The Commission heard harrowing case-studies from hundreds of witnesses.The eventual Report came down on the side of the economic arguments of the manufacturers, but it accepted that children needed protection from those masters who overworked them. The result was the 1833 Factory Act.

The Act was only a partial victory for Ashley and Sadler and it applied only to textile factories. Factory children were declared to be ‘rapidly increasing’, and it was agreed that (unlike adult men) they were not free agents. A case for some state intervention was advanced while the general inadvisability of the state’s interfering with conditions of work was upheld. The terms of the Act were:

1. The employment of children under nine was prohibited except in silk factories;
2. Children aged from nine to 12 were to work a maximum of nine hours a day and no more than 48 hours a week;
3. Youths from 13 to 18 to work a maximum of 12 hours a day and no more than 69 hours a week;
4. Children from nine to 11 (later raised to 13) were to have two hours of compulsory education every day.

In practice the Act was widely evaded. Little schooling was done in the factories and fines were low and often evaded. Age regulations were also evaded, often with active parental connivance.

Nevertheless, the very operation of the Act brought abuses to light. The state was changing and enlarging its responsibilities. But though children, and later women, were given legal protection, the laws did not apply to adult men, who were assumed to be free agents.

The Poor Law Amendment Act

From 1601 poor relief had been the responsibility of the parish. During the wars with France some had been offering outdoor (i.e. non-institutional) relief  to those in paid employment when they could not make ends meet. This was a radical extension of the Elizabethan Poor Law.

By the 1820s this was under attack. It was argued that the allowances merely encouraged large families and took away the incentive for individual endeavour. Utilitarian reformers of the 1820s argued for a radical remodelling of the poor law that abolished ‘outdoor relief'. Instead the able-bodied poor should be kept in workhouses in conditions ‘less eligible’ than those which might be enjoyed by the most wretched independent labourer. 
This could only be achieved by a new administrative structure that introduced a wholly novel centralisation into the British state.

In February 1832 parliament agreed to the establishment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the poor law and suggest changes.  The Commission saw what it wanted to see and the evidence supported the case it had always wanted to make. Its recommendations were:

1. To reduce poor-rate expenditure by forbidding outdoor relief for the able-bodied.
2. The destitute would keep themselves alive by seeking relief within the workhouse, where they would receive food and shelter but their lives would be ‘less eligible’ than those of the lowest independent labourers. 
3. Parishes would come together and form Unions for this purpose. The ratepayers would elect Poor Law Guardians in each Union in order to reduce the excessive powers of landowners. 
4. A central board was to be set up in Somerset House, with power to appoint assistant commissioners and to frame and enforce regulations.

These recommendations were embedded in the Act of 1834. It took time to implement its provisions, but inexorably new 'Union' workhouses were built, much larger than those existing before 1834. Conditions in them were harsh, and though, after some terrible scandals, some of the worst abuses were corrected, the poor hated and feared the new 'Bastilles'.

A design for a Poor Law 'Bastille', 1835
a workhouse designed to house 300 paupers,
making it very much larger than any
eighteenth-century workhouse.
Public domain.

Peel's 'Hundred Days'

The Whigs came unstuck over Ireland, where they faced the twin problems of a Coercion Bill and their proposal to cut the number of Irish dioceses, a policy that outraged Anglican feeling.

When Grey found himself the victim of Lord John Russell’s plotting, he resigned and was replaced by Lord Melbourne, a languid aristocrat with a scandalous past.

In November 1834 William IV dismissed Melbourne – the last time a monarch dismissed a prime minister. Peel, hastily recalled from Italy, accepted office, and in December he called an election. During the campaign he issued an address to his constituents, the Tamworth Manifesto.

The manifesto was recognised at the time as an important constitutional innovation, the first time a prime minister had come out with a full political programme. It was addressed not merely to Peel’s constituents but to 

that great and intelligent class of society … which is far less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the course of good government.

He accepted the Reform Act as a ‘final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question’ and declared himself in favour not of

 following every popular whim, promising instant redress of every alleged abuse, abandoning respect for ancient rights and prescriptive authority, 

but of ‘a careful review of institutions, both civil and ecclesiastical’ and ‘the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’.

He promised reform in order to conserve the essentials of the constitution and to give the Tories, increasingly calling themselves Conservatives, a broader basis of support. 

The election was fought in January 1835. The Tories increased their numbers from 175 to 273, though that still left them in a minority of 112. Their morale was greatly boosted and they were able to hold onto power for a few more months. 

The Lichfield House Compact

The Whigs were seriously demoralised by the loss of seats. In February 1835 leaders of the Whig, radical, and Irish opposition groups met at Lichfield House in St James’s Square to concert their forces. In April, they were able to use the parliamentary majority they had created to get rid of Peel in April, but the Liberals, as the Whigs were increasingly called, remained an uneasy alliance of aristocratic Whigs, radicals and Daniel O'Connell's Irish.

Peel: the man of the moment?

Peel was out of office, but he was clearly the leading politician of his day, with his ‘betrayal’ over Catholic emancipation apparently forgiven. He was refreshing his party by gathering around him a group of young men such as William Ewart Gladstone. He was patient. Rather than try to bring the Whigs down, he waited for them to disintegrate.

In 1838 he told his followers at a great Conservative party banquet at Merchant Taylors Hall: 

You are supported by the clergy, the magistracy, the yeomanry, and the gentry of the country, as well as by the great proportion of the trading community.

However, this was too optimistic. Though Conservative strength grew very substantially between 1835 and 1841, far more of this support came from rural and small-town England than from the industrial North or the rest of the country. It still represented what was known as 'the landed interest'.

The Municipal Corporations Act (1835)

The Whigs were in decline but they had one last, and very significant, achievement. With the  Municipal Corporations Act

1. 178 'closed' boroughs were replaced by bodies of councillors elected by ratepayers and with power to levy rates. 
2. Councillors were elected on householder or ratepayer suffrage, which was considerably more generous than the £10 occupier qualification for parliamentary elections. 
3. A third of the councillors had to be elected annually. 

New rulers, old problems

The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 brought about another election. The Conservatives came within 30 seats of their opponents and with a majority of English seats. After this election, Whig dependence on Irish votes was total and this made it even easier for the Conservatives to claim to be the patriotic party of England. The new poor law was also proving an electoral liability. 

Mainstream Whigs were becoming increasingly alarmed that they were being associated with radicalism. To counter this, in 1837 Lord John Russell declared that the Great Reform Act had settled the question of parliamentary representation once and for all. After this, he was given the nickname ‘Finality Jack’. Radical disillusionment with the Whigs deepened.

Melbourne’s great consolation in the dying days of his premiership was his avuncular relationship with the young queen, whom he had turned into an ardent Whig. This reached a peak of intensity in May 1839 when he decided to resign after the government’s majority fell to five. The Prime Minister advised the queen to send for the man she saw as ‘that nasty wretch, Peel’.

However, Victoria refused to sacrifice her Whig ladies of the bedchamber to permit the appointment of some Tory sympathisers. 
Peel refused to take office under these circumstances and Melbourne agreed to resume office and save the queen from a constitutional crisis with which she would not be able to cope.

But his handling of the 'Bedchamber Crisis' laid him open to the accusation that he had clung to office on the petticoats of the monarch.

In 1841 Melbourne lost a vote of confidence and the Whigs were defeated in the general election. The issue that emerged during the campaign was that of the Corn Laws. The Whigs had promised their supporters that they would consider the existing levels of protection for corn.

The Whigs had frittered away their victory of 1832, though the Factory Act, the abolition of slavery and the Municipal Corporations Act were significant achievements.

Conclusion: the ticking time bomb?

1. The 1830s had been a decade of turbulence and innovation. Peel seemed to offer the Conservatives as a party of stability and calm. 
2. However the question of agricultural protection was to be a ticking time bomb under the new administration.
3. The election was Peel’s moment of triumph. But had he been elected on false pretences?