Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928

Sean Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134670147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Parliamentary Reform 1785–1928 surveys the dynamically changing role of the British Parliament from the pre-reformed Parliament through:

• the 1832 Great Reform Act
• Chartism
• the campaign for working class suffrage
• Catholic emancipation
• the long struggle for the granting of female suffrage.

Beginning with a wide survey of the origins and nature of Parliament, the author offers a detailed context for the campaigns for its reformation of in the nineteenth century and the attitude of Victorians towards it. This comprehensive approach promotes understanding of the wider issues of parliamentary reform and provides an essential aid and context to students studying this topic.

1
THE UNREFORMED PARLIAMENT

BACKGROUND NARRATIVE

Mediaeval parliaments were no more than a gathering of representatives of the three estates of the realm, Church, Lords and Commons. Parliament served the function of a high court, and could, if asked, make financial grants to the crown, but it was of no greater significance than many other institutions of the mediaeval state. Parliament began to play a more important role in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII used it to give a legal basis to the break with Rome. In theory this raised important questions about the relative importance of Crown and Parliament: was Henry’s authority not sufficient on its own? But the issue remained essentially academic until the reign of Charles I. His attempt to impose taxation and to introduce religious changes without seeking the sanction of Parliament drove many of his opponents to declare that Parliament was not just the king’s equal, but his superior.

The basis for Parliament’s claim to sovereignty was that it represented the people, but did it? Cromwell closed down what was left (the ‘rump’) of the Long Parliament in 1653 because it was so long since it had been elected, and its membership was so decimated by the Civil Wars that in effect it was representative of nothing but itself. Parliament hit back. Well into the nineteenth century one of the most damaging accusations that could be made against a power-hungry politician was that he was setting out to make himself another Cromwell, riding roughshod over parliamentary sovereignty.

Parliament’s moment of glory came in 1688 when James II was overthrown by a combination of parliamentary revolt and a Dutch invasion, and Parliament was able to dictate the terms by which the new monarchs, William and Mary, were to be allowed to reign. This ‘Revolution Settlement’ established Parliament and Crown on a basis of mutual dependence weighted in Parliament’s favour, and was regarded throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth with almost holy awe. The delicate balance of the settlement might easily be ruined without constant vigilance on the part of all concerned, so that eighteenth-century politics always resembled a sort of constitutional egg-and-spoon race. There were many potential threats to the balance of the constitution, including foreign invasion, a return of the Stuarts, or concessions to Catholics (too inclined to autocracy) or Protestant dissenters (too radical), but all of these had been averted by the middle of the eighteenth century.

The danger of the Crown seeking to upset the balance of the constitution seemed remote: the first two Hanoverian kings, George I and George II, in particular were happy to leave Parliament largely to its own devices; they worked closely with ministers, like Sir Robert Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle, in whom they had confidence and who commanded the confidence of Parliament. The eighteenth-century Parliament therefore gradually evolved into the normal body of government. A form of cabinet government developed, as did a sort of political split between the supporters of the Hanoverians and of parliamentary sovereignty, known as Whigs, and those who (discreetly) hankered after a Stuart restoration and tended to support the Crown and the Church of England, known as Tories. Parliamentary business, like most public business in the eighteenth century, was fuelled by a system of patronage. Essentially, this meant that to obtain any post, however humble, in any branch of professional or public life, it was important to have the support (‘enjoy the patronage’) of someone higher up who either controlled the post directly, or could influence the appointment. Official appointments under the Crown or in the Church of England, commissions in the armed forces, or seats in Parliament were all subject to patronage. Some ‘boroughmongers’, like Sir John Lowther in the north-west of England, could control the selection of MPs for whole areas of the country. Many eminent politicians began their careers in this way: Pitt the Younger was first elected at Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby in Westmorland, and other major figures elected at pocket boroughs included Castlereagh, Burke and Canning.

The accession of the young King George III in 1760 threw the whole system into disarray. George sought a much more active role in politics than his predecessors, and Whig politicians quickly came to suspect his motives. The Americans blamed him for upsetting their delicate relationship with the mother country, and the Whigs accused him of seeking to upset the constitutional balance between Crown and Parliament. In 1780 the House of Commons even debated and passed a celebrated motion ‘that the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. By allowing a favoured minister to bestow the vast resources of Crown patronage on supporters, the king could in effect use the patronage system to keep his chosen minister in power. Conversely, by denying a ministry access to Crown patronage, the king could severely weaken its authority in Parliament. In 1783 King George set out to do just that to the controversial (not to say unlikely) coalition ministry set up by Lord North and the charismatic Whig leader, Charles James Fox.

The king denied the ministry access to royal patronage; Fox countered by sponsoring a bill to reform the workings of the East India Company, which would also, in effect, give the ministry control of the fabulously wealthy patronage available in India. The king could not prevent the bill passing the House of Commons with a large majority, but by threatening to withdraw royal patronage and favour from anyone who voted for it, he managed to defeat it equally heavily in the House of Lords. George dismissed Fox and North before the night was out.

Fox and his supporters were outraged: the king had interfered in the workings of the House of Lords to defeat and dismiss a ministry which had the clear and overwhelming support of the House of Commons. No leading politician would taint himself by association with such conduct, and George had to resort to the 24-year-old William Pitt to form a new ministry. Characteristically, Fox then so mishandled the business of opposition to Pitt, that by March 1784 Pitt, with the king’s support (and patronage) behind him, felt confident enough to go to the polls, where he won a resounding victory. The Whigs saw the crisis of 1783–4 as the Crown’s successful attempt to undermine the authority of Parliament; the electorate, especially in rural England, saw it more as George and Pitt rescuing the constitution, not to mention the wealth of the East India Company, from the greedy hands of Fox and his cronies.

Subsequent events merely served to confirm each side’s view. For the Whigs, Pitt’s long hold on power, his staunch opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, and his repressive wartime measures all confirmed that executive power was triumphant and Parliament had become an irrelevance: indeed, for a long time Fox gave up attending it at all. From Pitt’s point of view, the Whigs’ record merely confirmed their unfitness for office. Their cherished opposition to royal power disappeared pretty quickly during the king’s illness in 1788, when it briefly looked as if they might benefit from a pro-Whig regency; above all, Fox was loud in his support for the French Revolution long after it had become clear how bloody and threatening the revolution had become. In 1794 the leading Whig patron, the Earl of Portland, led his supporters over to join Pitt, exasperated and alarmed by Fox’s support for the French. During their long years in opposition, the Whigs began to see that their best hope of reducing the power of the Crown—and, incidentally, of returning to office—lay in cleaning up the system which enabled Pitt and George III to hold on to power, and so they were gradually wedded to a policy of parliamentary reform.

ANALYSIS (1):
HOW REPRESENTATIVE WAS THE UNREFORMED PARLIAMENT?

To anyone familiar with democratic forms of government, the eighteenth-century parliamentary system seems transparently, even comically, chaotic. The distribution of constituencies was dominated by the English rural counties with a heavy weighting towards the south of England, while major new industrial centres like Birmingham or Sheffield were totally unrepresented; and borough electorates could be tiny, enabling wealthy patrons to buy and sell pocket boroughs like so much produce. In an extreme case, the parliamentary borough of Gatton in Surrey contained only six houses, and was frequently sold between borough-mongers. While in the counties the normal voting qualification was that of holding a freehold worth forty shillings a year, in boroughs the franchise qualifications varied erratically, from scot and-lot and ‘pot-walloper’¹ boroughs, including Preston and Westminster where, in effect, anyone present at election time could vote, to burgage and corporation boroughs, where control over elections was frequently concentrated either in the local corporation or in wealthy landowners. Plural voting was common. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge could vote both in the constituencies where they lived and in the two university seats; many borough electors also had a vote in elections in the county the borough was in. There are cases recorded of individuals who managed to amass impressive numbers of such plural votes in different constituencies, and with a bit of planning, given that elections were held over a fortnight, they could cast them all.

Above all, what really offends modern sensibilities is the corruption which pervaded the system, from widespread bribery at elections to the patronage circles and faction politics that operated at Westminster, not to mention the manifold opportunities at all levels for embezzlement or fraud. So obvious are the faults of the system that understanding it actually becomes problematic: it is hard to see how anyone other than those with a vested interest could seriously have defended it. But this is the wrong way to look at it. Until the very end of the eighteenth century there was no major drive to reform the system. Apart from the most blatant abuses, like the deserted boroughs of Old Sarum and Dunwich which still returned two MPs each, even radical writers had surprisingly little to say about parliamentary reform until the 1780s, almost a century after the Revolution Settlement of 1688. This lack of demand suggests an obvious conclusion, which is nevertheless generally overlooked by students, that by and large the system was working well and those involved were happy with it.

This point has been made by some historians. Norman Gash argued in Politics in the Age of Peel that until the 1820s the system enjoyed the support of all but the most extreme radicals and was, to all intents and purposes, working satisfactorily. Frank O’Gorman in Voters, Patrons and Parties went even further and argued that, contrary to much received opinion, the unreformed system was actually, in its own terms, rather a good one. ‘Pocket borough’, in his argument, is a misleading term. It suggests that the electorate merely followed the wishes of their local patron at election time, whereas in reality things were never so predictable, which was precisely why patrons spent such vast sums of money on wooing the voters. They were well aware that voters could and did show themselves staunchly independent.

Such arguments paint a refreshingly different picture of eighteenth-century electors, but they have not gone unchallenged. Derek Beales criticised O’Gorman for basing his analysis on six relatively large towns, untypical of the wider range of constituencies. He also pointed out that, however sturdily independent electors might be, it made little difference if the large proportion of uncontested elections meant that in practice they ‘had fewer opportunities to cast a vote than to observe Halley’s comet’.² D.C.Moore in The Politics of Deference argued that the voters he had looked at were much more inclined to defer to the wishes of local patrons than O’Gorman suggests, but then he was looking at rural areas whereas O’Gorman was concentrating on towns. Detailed studies of individual constituencies, of which there are many, make it even more difficult to reach satisfactory general conclusions. There could be major differences in what determined the outcome of elections even in neighbouring constituencies. Most elections were won or lost on local issues or rivalries, but sometimes a topical national issue could play an important role. Local rivalries might not follow supposed ‘party lines’, and there are cases of candidates changing their party colours in the course of an election campaign, or of voters electing for one candidate from each party; there was even a case, at Hertford in 1832, of voters cheerfully accepting the bribes offered by the Tories and then electing a Whig, though this caused quite a scandal and the borough came close to being disenfranchised. In short, the more deeply one looks at the unreformed Parliament, the harder it is to come up with any wholly acceptable general analysis of it.

What is clear is that the people who used the system generally thought that it worked, but that their conception of how it worked was very different from our own. The modern parliamentary system is seen as representing the electorate which is, to all intents and purposes, the adult population; the eighteenth-century Parliament was conceived of as representing the different ‘interests’ that constituted the nation. These might be economic interests, such as the woollen interest in East Anglia, or the farming interest, or it might be the Church of England or the armed forces. The nobility as an interest group was well represented, and not just in the House of Lords, but many lords had connections with one or more other ‘interests’ as well. Plantation owners in the Caribbean, who opposed the abolition of the slave trade for so long, were the ‘West Indian’ or ‘Sugar’ interest; those with investments in the East India Company were the ‘Indian interest’, and so on.

To eighteenth-century thinking, it was very important that all major interests should be represented in Parliament, but it was by no means necessary for them to be represented directly. As long as there were people in Parliament—in either house—to speak up for each particular interest, it did not matter which constituencies any of them happened to represent. When Radicals complained that huge sections of the population were not represented in Parliament, either because they did not have the vote or because they had no MP, the answer was that they did not need to be directly represented because they were virtually represented. This idea was common currency in the eighteenth century: until the 1760s it was quite happily accepted, for example, by the American colonists, even though not one of them had a vote or an MP. Neither Catholics nor slaves lacked voices in Parliament, often very eloquent voices, even though none of them had the vote. To eighteenth-century ears, to argue that everyone had to be represented directly was as illogical as it would be today to claim that an MP cannot represent children because they cannot vote, or cannot speak on behalf of constituents who voted for his opponents.

Virtual representation operated at the constituency level too. It was not necessary for everyone in a constituency to have the vote, as long as a selection of the local population could vote on everyone else’s behalf. The forty-shilling freeholder, which was as near as the system came to a standard franchise, was generally regarded as the epitome of the stout-hearted Englishman, independent enough to make up his own mind, but close enough to his fellows to be able to speak for them. This was one of the reasons why voting was done in the open, on the hustings, in full view of the large crowds who habitually gathered at election time. It is often assumed that this was done in order to intimidate the voters, who would not dare vote against the wishes of the squire in case they got evicted from their cottage; in fact, cases of this actually happening are relatively few, even though there are plenty of examples of voters going against the squires’ wishes. On the contrary, having open hustings was a safeguard against corruption. Voters were held to be answerable not to their landlords or patrons, but to the unenfranchised community as a whole, who had a right to know which way their ‘representatives’ were casting their votes. Elections were communal events, notoriously robust, n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• SERIES PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE UNREFORMED PARLIAMENT
• 2: THE GREAT REFORM ACT
• 3: CHARTISM: THE DEMAND FOR UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE
• 4: DISRAELI AND THE SECOND REFORM ACT
• 5: THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF POLITICS, 1867–1900
• 6: THE LABOUR MOVEMENT AND THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY
• 7: THE DECLINE OF THE MONARCHY AND THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS
• 8: VOTES FOR WOMEN
• NOTES AND SOURCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY