The repeal of the Corn Laws

Sir Robert Peel,
by W. H. Pickersgill
saviour and destroyer of his party.
Public domain

Peel's triumph? 

The 1840s should have been a triumphant decade for Peel. He had reformed his party after its defeat of 1832 and won the election of 1841.

There was however, a lurking problem.

1. The Conservative vote was overwhelmingly agricultural and deeply committed to agricultural protection.
2. Peel himself was increasingly in favour of free trade on ideological grounds and his conversion exposed a fault-line in the Tory party. Were they agrarian traditionalists or believers in the free market? Throughout the decade, his government's budgets saw a steady reduction in duties, and disgruntled backbenchers came to believe that the Corn Laws would be next.

The Irish famine

It is usually believed that it was the Irish famine that converted Peel to free trade, but it is now clear that this simply provided him with an excuse. 

There are posts on this distressing and still controversial subject here and here. 

Scene at Skibbereen, Cork, 1847

By the autumn of 1845, with the Europe-wide failure of the potato crop,  Ireland was facing the greatest social and humanitarian crisis in its history. On 15 October, Peel wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the only practical remedy was 

the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence.

But this was not the real issue. Cheaper bread was not the answer to the immediate problem; the Irish could not afford to buy any bread. The only thing that could save them was food relief on a massive scale. The Corn Laws were therefore an irrelevancy.

1840s radicalism (2): the Anti-Corn Law League

A meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League
in London, 1846

This movement achieved a more important place in national life than any previous radical body. Unlike the Chartists, it represented the interests of an urban middle class. Unlike them, too it was well funded and had precise and limited objectives. 

The Corn Laws were a generic term for a whole system of legislative protection of agriculture. In 1815 there was a prohibition on the import of foreign agricultural products until the price at home reached a high figure (80s a quarter in the case of wheat). In 1828 this absolute prohibition was replaced by a sliding scale of import duties. This legislation was not solely dictated by class interests – there was also the desire to be independent in time of war.

However there was a strong body of opinion opposed to legislative protection for agriculture. In 1830, Ebenezer Elliott, the Sheffield-based ‘Bard of Free Trade’ published his Corn Law Rhymes. 

At first this opposition was local and sporadic, but the situation changed in the depression of the late ‘30s when food prices rose. Elliott declared: 

It was born ‘of empty pockets in a respectable neighbourhood’. 

Manufacturing free traders could argue that the Corn Laws had damaging effects throughout the economy: British workmen would agitate for higher wages, which would be spent on food rather than on manufactured goods. The only beneficiaries would be the aristocracy.  

In the late 1830s the topic of the Corn Laws moved to the top of the agenda,  because, with the onset of an acute manufacturing depression, the cause attracted support in the country.  It was brought annually before the Commons by Charles Villiers, Radical MP for Wolverhampton. But the Whig government refused to support him. Melbourne was against any more radical change and declared ‘before God’ that to leave the whole agricultural interest without protection was 

the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into the mind of man to conceive. 

1840s radicalism (1): the Chartists

Chartist meeting on 10 April 1848 at Kennington Common,

by William Edward Kilburn, restored version.

An early daguerreotype.

Public domain 

There are some useful web sites on Chartism.

In 1839 Thomas Carlyle’s pamphlet Chartism stated that there was

a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the working classes is rather ominous at present; that something ought to be said and something ought to be done, in regard to it.

The origins of Chartism

The Chartist movement was the first radical working-class (as opposed to artisan) movement in Britain. It had an ancestry going back to the 1770s, which was reinforced by the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France. In the post-war period  radical agitation once more became a powerful force. In April 1831 the National Union of the Working Classes was founded in April 1831 by the Cornish cabinet-maker, William Lovett, to campaign for manhood suffrage. 

Working-class radicals were literate and politically aware. One of their most successful campaigns was the 'war of the unstamped'. From July 1831 the radical printer, Henry Hetherington published the Poor Man’s Guardian, in defiance of the Stamp Act that kept the prices of newspapers beyond the reach of many working people. He was joined by a young Irish lawyer, James Bronterre O'Brien, who edited the paper and rapidly established himself as the foremost theorist of working-class radicalism.  In 1835 the stamp was reduced to 1d - an improvement, but still too expensive for working-class pockets. The battle over the stamp led to the setting up of a network of organizations and a chain of command that could be revived when the occasion required it.

The working classes (in the early nineteenth-century they were always referred to in the plural) were the creation of the Industrial Revolution, and they bore the full brunt of the economic and social problems it created. The heartland of Chartism was not London but industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Working-class radicals were angered by what they saw as the ‘great Whig betrayal’. If anything, the 1832 Reform Act reduced the number of working-class voters by replacing the old varied borough franchises with the £10 household franchise. Leading politicians, like the Whig Lord John Russell and the Tory Sir Robert Peel, both declared that the Reform Act was a final settlement - there was to be no revision. Along with this feeling of betrayal went resentment at the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

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 Great Reform Act (1832)

The House of Commons (engraving 1808)

You can listen here to a discussion of the Reform Act on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme. This especially indebted to the following:

Edward Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 3rd edn. (Longman, 2001)
Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 (W&N, 2013)
Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, 2006)
Edward Pearce, Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (Pimlico, 2004)

The pressure for reform

After Catholic emancipation the demand for parliamentary reform, which had been growing since the 1790s became irresistible, among many sections of the middle and working classes. Influential provincial journals like the Manchester Guardian and Leeds Mercury were joined in their advocacy of reform by sections of the former Tory press like the Nottingham Journal. In Birmingham, a city of small-scale units of production, Thomas Attwood  founded a ‘General Political Union between the Lower and Middle Classes of the People’ in December 1829. Its main platform - the ‘Brummagen remedy’ - was currency reform - the provision of readier credit and bigger domestic markets for small masters. To the alarm of the king political unions sprang up all over the country, attracting huge crowds to political rallies. The Whig peer Lord Holland feared that:

‘If the great mass of the middle classes are bent upon that method of enforcing their views, there is not in the nature of society any real force that can prevent them.’

The fall of Wellington’s government
The Tories under the Duke of Wellington won the general election of July 1830 - but only just - and then they shot themselves in the foot. On 2 November 1830, the duke, made a disastrous speech in the Lords in which he argued that the state of representation could not be improved, and that the system of electoral representation commanded the ‘entire confidence’ of the nation’. He believed that his uncompromising stand would encourage the forces of Toryism to rally around him, but he had failed to appreciate the depth of the reform movement in the country. 

On 15 November the government was defeated on a minor financial motion. Wellington resigned. and on 16 November William IV asked the Whig leader, Charles, 2nd Earl Grey to form a government. The Whigs has been out of power since 1807, and this was now their moment. There was certainly going to be a major change, as the new government was committed to (modest) parliamentary reform.

Charles, 2nd Earl Grey
Prime Minister 1830-4
Public Domain

On 30 December the diarist Charles Greville wrote:

 ‘I never remember times like these, nor read of such – the terror and the lively expectation which prevail and the way in which people’s minds are turned backwards and forwards, from France to Ireland then range excursively to Poland or Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots and executions here.’

He was referring to the July Revolution in France, continuing unrest in Ireland and Italy, the Polish revolt against Russia, and the Swing Riots in Britain. These were troubled times.

Before 1832: the unreformed Parliament

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

1. Freeman: vote given to freemen of the town or city
2. Burgage: franchise attached to property in the borough
3. Corporation: vote confined to members of the corporation
4. Scot and lot: voters who paid the poor rate
5. Household or ‘potwalloper’: all inhabitant male householders not receiving alms or poor relief.
6. Freeholder: right of voting lay with the freeholders

The size of the constituencies varied hugely. Yorkshire, with 20,000 voters, had the largest electorate, Lyme Regis, one of the smallest boroughs, had an electorate of 200. Old Sarum had seven voters, Dunwich had fewer than forty. 

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.

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.