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.

The 1820s (2): Daniel O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

Daniel O'Connell

by Bernard Mulrenin

 National Portrait Gallery

Public domain

The Catholic question

This question was a running sore in the politics of the late teens and early 1820s.  It involved a range of important problems:

1. the royal prerogative
2. the nature of civil rights
3. the place of religion in the constitution
4. the government of Ireland.

On 9 May 1817 the Commons debated a motion to open up all government posts to Catholics, except for that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Peel, at that time the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was the main speaker on the Protestant side. He argued that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power and that he was not prepared to allow the pope to be a 'fourth estate of the realm'. Thanks in part to his eloquence, the motion was defeated 221/245. ‘Orange’ Peel was now the head of the Protestant party and as a reward he was offered the seat of Oxford University, the most Anglican in the country. 

A further attempt was defeated in 1819. However in 1821 , the Commons had given a small but decisive majority for a bill by the Dublin University MP, William Plunket, to relieve Catholic disabilities. The Lords threw it out.

While the Commons might be moving towards Emancipation, George IV was deeply hostile, backtracking on his days as a Foxite Whig. When he became king he told Castlereagh (a supporter of Emancipation) that ‘once I take that oath I am for ever a Protestant King, a Protestant upholder, a Protestant adherent’. 

George IV in 1821, no longer glamorous.
He had abandoned his earlier
support for Catholic Emancipation

But the balance of opinion in the cabinet was shifting. When Sir Francis Burdett's bill passed its third reading by twenty-one votes in May 1825, the cabinet nearly fell apart. Peel offered to resign, but he was told that his resignation would bring Lord Liverpool's government down. Ministers were saved when the Lords rejected the bill, but for how long could the Lords be allowed to frustrate the wishes of the Commons?

There would have been less of a problem if the question had been confined to England where Catholics were a tiny minority, socially isolated and politically passive. Both Peel and Liverpool supported moves to enfranchise them. But the question involved Ireland and the nature of its relationship with Britain.

The Catholic Association

The position of Irish Catholics was especially anomalous. In 1793 Pitt's government had given the Catholic Irish forty- shilling freeholders. But they could only vote for Protestants.

In 1823, the Catholic barrister, Daniel O'Connell, set up the Catholic Association. The Association campaigned for Catholic emancipation and also for reform of the Church of Ireland, for tenants' rights, and economic development. It was funded by ‘the Catholic rent’, membership dues of one penny per month. The subscription was highly successful, and the Association raised a large sum of money in its first year.

The 1820s (1): the coming of reform

Sir Robert Peel
Home Secretary from 1822
by Sir Henry William Pickersgill
Public domain

Liberal Toryism?

Lord Liverpool’s administration has traditionally been divided into two unequal periods:

1. a reactionary phase 1812-1820 symbolised by Sidmouth and the Six Acts
2. a shorter ‘liberal’ phase associated with the ‘second-wave’ ministers: William Huskisson, Frederick Robinson, Robert Peel.

This is now seen as an over-simplification. But there can be little doubt that the nation was changing. In March 1820 Robert Peel wrote to a friend:

‘Do you not think that there is a feeling becoming daily more general and more confirmed in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country?’

The Whig politician, Henry Brougham, said

‘the schoolmaster had been abroad in the land’.

The Manchester Mechanics' Institute,
founded 1825

The Mechanics Institute movement, the brainchild of two Glasgow professors, John Anderson and George Birkbeck spread education among working men. Henry Brougham’s Practical Observations upon the Education of the People sold 50,000 copies in a few weeks and quickly went through twenty editions. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (founded by Brougham in 1826) provided them with cheap information. 

Free trade
The government was inexorably, if inconsistently, moving towards a policy of free trade.  As far back as 1812, Lord Liverpool had said,

‘the less commerce and manufactures were meddled with the more likely they were to prosper’.

On 26 May 1820 he delivered a speech extolling the virtues of free trade and in 1824-5 Frederick Robinson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, lowered excise duties on a wide range of consumer goods.

The liberalisation of the economy threw into stark relief the anomaly of the Corn Laws, but the power of the landed interest was such that it could not be attacked frontally. The first important modification of the Corn Laws did not occur until 1828 - this was a clumsy sliding-scale of duties which tapered to nominal rates when wheat prices reached 73s – the sum agreed on was a compromise.

The Peterloo Massacre

This post owes a great deal to Robert Poole's brilliant article, '"By the Law or the Sword": Peterloo Revisited', History, 91 (2006): 254-276. The Wikipedia article on Peterloo is also extremely good and takes account of modern research including Poole's article. There is a more recent study of the background to Peterloo in this blog from the History of Parliament website. See also the account here, which gives special prominence to the female reformers.

There is an interesting discussion of Peterloo in Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme on Radio 4. 

In 1819 radical reformers made serious attempts to stage a series of mass demonstrations.

In January there was a parliamentary reform meeting of about 10,000 at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester at which Henry Hunt was the principal speaker. Banners bearing the mottoes ‘Rights of Man’, ‘Universal Suffrage’ and ‘No Corn Laws’ were displayed.

The authorities were deeply alarmed. On 2 March, following reports that radical leaders were arming themselves with pikes, Henry Hobhouse, the permanent under secretary at the Home Office, wrote to the Oldham magistrates that the evidence confirmed the Home Secretary, Sidmouth’s, opinion that

‘your Country will not be tranquillized, until Blood shall have been shed either by the Law or the Sword.’ (Quoted Poole, 265).

In June there were a series of meetings in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and the west of Scotland. These peaceful meetings pounded the same theme: the sufferings of the people were due to the inadequacies and extravagance of government, and the remedy lay in annual parliaments and manhood suffrage.

Waterloo to Peterloo

Problems of the peace

The radical, Samuel Bamford wrote: 

While the laurels were yet cool on the brows of our victorious soldiers ... the elements of convulsion were at work among the masses of our labouring population.

Samuel Bamford in his respectable old age
Public domain

The immediate post-war years, 1815-21, saw unemployment and high bread prices coincide with renewed political discontent.

1. Adjustments had to be made in line with reduced demand for products associated with the war effort: provisions, timber, clothing, iron, leather, canvas, rope.
2. During the wars the armed forces of Britain had been increased to 400,000 men (with as many again in the reserves) compared with about 60,000 in 1791. Rapid demobilisation put nearly a third of a million ex-servicemen on the already glutted labour market. This depressed wage levels, added to unemployment, increased the burden of local taxation and ensured that the discontented would be led by those with military experience.
3. Added to this came the strains of technological redundancy. The number of shearing frames in Yorkshire had increased in the past decade from under a hundred to over 1,400 and in October 1817, 3,625 croppers petitioned Parliament for help. In Lancashire the number of handloom weavers continued to rise while their wages continued to fall.

The Corn Law

Even before Napoleon’s final defeat, the government of Lord Liverpool had bowed to massive agricultural pressure. In 1813 an abundant harvest sent prices tumbling. Peace in 1814 brought foreign grain imports with the promise of more to come. The government came under strong pressure from the landed interest , which argued that a Corn Law was justified in the interests of national security and domestic stability:

1. Britain might once again need to maximise the domestic supply of foodstuffs to counteract the effects of blockade.
2. Agriculture was the largest single employer of labour and was already subject to rural depopulation.

In February 1815 a parliament overwhelmingly dominated by the landed interest passed a law allowing the free importation of foreign corn only when the price of home-grown corn had reached the price of 80s.  a quarter. This decision -together with a run of bad harvests - helped ensure that the average price of corn was higher in the years 1810-19 than at any other time during the whole of the nineteenth century.

Radicalism and the end of the war

Whigs, Tories and radicals

The death first of Pitt and then of Fox in 1806 helped transformed politics. The ‘friends of Mr Pitt’ formed an embryonic Tory party. The ‘friends of Mr Fox’ grouped round Charles, 2nd Earl Grey.

The Whigs agreed on two issues: the need to reduce the power of the Crown and the need to settle the Catholic question. But they were embarrassed by radical elements within the party, who mounted frequent criticisms of the government’s war policy. There were also radicals outside the party, such as the radical baronet, Sir Francis Burdett, and the journalist, William Cobbett. They demanded a radical reform of taxation and manhood suffrage. 

From 1810 onwards, although the Tories were firmly in power, the country itself was becoming more unsettled. 1811 and 1812 were crisis years: a time of economic hardship, disillusionment at the Regent’s failure to dismiss his Tory ministers, war with the United States. In May 1812 the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons. 

This is the background to the Luddite disturbances.

Luddism

The word Luddite has entered the vocabulary to denote an attitude of stubborn resistance to change an innovation. But the original Luddites were not ignorant, indiscriminate despoilers. They were skilled men who attacked specific targets. Nor was machine-breaking a new phenomenon. Spinning jennies, water-frames and carding engines were all attacked in Lancashire in the 1770s. Gig mills and shearing frames were attacked at the same time by ‘croppers’ or ‘shearmen’ (who raised and cut level the nap of woollen cloth) in the west of England. (In 1804 French weavers attacked the Jacquard loom in Lyons.)

From Trafalgar to the Peninsular War

The Treaty of Amiens

Pitt’s resignation came at a time when the nation was war-weary. Taxation was high, prices were rising and there was no immediate hope of military success. It was a crucial point in the war when Napoleon seemed to have Europe within his grasp, and Britain was without allies. The demand for peace was irresistible. 

On 1 October 1801 the peace preliminaries were signed and accepted by Parliament with comparatively little opposition.  In a Commons speech Pitt strongly endorsed the peace. The Treaty of Amiens was signed on 27 March 1802.  The terms were not advantageous to Britain, who finally acknowledged French hegemony in Europe, and took no account of recent British victories. Britain handed back the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch and Trinidad to Spain. It recognised French dominance of northern Italy. However, the treaty’s popularity was confirmed by a comfortable win for Addington’s government in the general election of 1802.

James Gillray, The First Kiss
Library of Congress
Public domain

In the interval of peace, there was a spate of British visitors to France, including Fox, who travelled to France in the autumn of 1802 with Mrs Armistead. On 2 November he finally met First Consul Bonaparte, and was deeply disillusioned to learn that he was a dictator! 

Addington did not believe that the peace was permanent. He did not withdraw troops from the West Indies and made only moderate cuts to the army and navy. Meanwhile the French invaded and occupied Switzerland. By the spring of 1803 Britain’s defences were sufficiently good for Addington to take the initiative, declare war on 18 May and take Bonaparte by surprise.