In April 1784, George Nevill, 17th Baron Abergavenny, was approached to ask whether he would accept promotion to an earldom. In the wake of Pitt the Younger’s success in the general election, it was time for debts to be repaid and right at the front of the queue was John Robinson. Robinson had formerly worked for Lord North as a political agent but had chosen to switch his allegiance to Pitt and put all of his energy into securing Pitt a handsome victory. Robinson’s daughter was married to Abergavenny’s heir, Henry, so the new peerage would ensure that Robinson would ultimately be grandfather to an earl.

Abergavenny had also made a political journey. Married back in the 1750s to a member of the Pelham clan, he had naturally found himself within the orbit of the Old Corps Whigs and then of the Rockinghams. A consistent opponent of North and his handling of the American crisis, he had distanced himself from the former Rockinghamites who had entered the coalition with North and ultimately helped to bring the Fox-North administration down. So, the earldom was a double reward.

It might all have been very different, as exactly 37 years previously, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Abergavenny had narrowly avoided being tried for murder.

The story, as told in the press and in private correspondence, was that one of the Christ Church scouts (servants) named John or William Franklin (the papers could not agree which) had been found early in the morning of 4 April 1747 in one of the college quadrangles, badly bruised and with a fractured skull. His hair had been shaved and his eyebrows burnt off. There were also tell-tale indications of him having been very drunk.

What appeared to have happened was that a group of students, one of them Claudius Amyand, had been holding one of their regular shared suppers in their rooms, but had decided to entertain themselves by making Franklin, who seemed to have had a reputation as being somewhat eccentric, extremely drunk. The regular attendees had taken the prank (as they viewed it) so far, but things had become more extreme when they were joined by others, who had not been part of the original group. The newcomers were Abergavenny, Lord Charles Scott, a younger son of the duke of Buccleuch, Francis Blake Delaval and Sackville Spencer Bale (later a clergyman and domestic chaplain to the 2nd duke of Dorset). They appear to have handled Franklin very roughly – making fun of him by shaving his head – and to have left him so drunk that he was utterly incapable. According to Frederick Campbell, Abergavenny and Scott retreated to their own rooms at this point, leaving it to the remainder of the party to drag Franklin ‘out to snore upon the stair-case’. [Hothams, 42]

It was unclear what happened next, but it was assumed that after being abandoned on the stairs, Franklin had fallen down, fracturing his skull. On being discovered in the morning, Abergavenny’s valet took Franklin home, where he was examined by a surgeon, but nothing could be done for him. That there may have been a more sinister explanation for his injuries was, however, indicated early on by the news that most of those believed to have taken part in the drinking session had fled, and it was gossiped that the two most responsible for his injuries had been Abergavenny and Scott. [Ward, 169]

Certainly, the coroner’s jury considered that there had been foul play and brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder by persons unknown’. Some observers took a different view. Frederick Campbell reckoned that it had been a joke that had been carried too far and he was certain that none of those in the frame would ever be convicted. He also added that ‘there was not three of the jury but was drunk’. [Hothams, 42] Horace Walpole’s sympathies, unsurprisingly, were also with the students, commenting: ‘One pities the poor boys, who undoubtedly did not foresee the melancholy event of their sport’. He had nothing to say about the unfortunate Franklin, who had lost his life. [Walpole Corresp, xix. 387] The only one of the group who seemed to have played no role in what had happened to Franklin was Amyand, who had quit the supper party early.

Had Abergavenny been charged with murder, he would have been able to apply to the House of Lords to be tried before them, in the same way that had happened to Lord Mohun in the 1690s and was to happen again soon afterwards to Lord Ferrers and Lord Byron.

In the event, there was no need for Abergavenny to face the prospect of a trial in Westminster Hall. While the coroner’s jury had concluded that Franklin’s death had been murder, the grand jury that sat on the case during the summer assizes refused to bring in the bill triggering a trial. The grand jury was said to have been made up of some of the principal gentlemen of the county and to have deliberated for several hours before reaching their decision. No doubt they were reluctant to agree to a trial of students from gentry (or noble) backgrounds, but they may also have been swayed by the convenient death of Lord Charles Scott just a few weeks before the assizes, which left the proceedings lacking a key witness (or a likely defendant).

Whatever his role had been, Abergavenny walked away unscathed. In 1761 he applied to be recognized as Chief Larderer at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, and in 1784 he had his status enhanced with promotion to the earldom. Blake Delaval was also able to cast off whatever opprobrium had attached to him, and just two years after Franklin’s death stood for Parliament for the first time (unsuccessfully). He later represented Hindon and Andover and in 1761 was made a knight of the Bath. What happened, truly, on that night in April 1747 was never discovered and justice for Franklin – or at least a full explanation of what had happened to him – was never achieved.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Hothams: being the chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton…, ed. A.M.W. Stirling (2 vols, 1918)

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale edition)

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958)

General Advertiser

Whitehall Evening Post

In July 1739, the General Evening Post reported the death of a Mr Kent at his house near Seven Dials. According to the paper, Kent occupied the post of chimney sweeper of the king’s palaces ‘a place of considerable profit’. Replacing him was one Mr Fatt and both men were described as ‘Blackmoors’ [an outdated term indicating Black heritage]. The role would have involved ensuring the upkeep of the chimneys at royal residences in London, such as St James’s Palace. Intriguingly, Treasury accounts from 1714 suggest that the holder of the post at that time was Anne Fatt, suggesting that the family had held the role before, under Queen Anne, and had now regained it, under George II.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century commentators were often snide about chimney sweeps. The nature of their profession meant that they were frequently derided for being ‘unclean’, and this sometimes led to them being described as black, or depicted in prints with black skin. Consequently, some caution needs to be used when identifying a sweep’s heritage. However, the fact that the paper used the specific term ‘Blackmoor’ seems indicative of the fact that this was not a case of people being dealt with slightingly because of perceived uncleanliness.

One of the weekly essays in the Scots Magazine for February 1740 noted the ‘Promotion of Mr Fat [sic] the Chimney-Sweeper’, and also employed terminology describing his heritage directly, which appears to confirm the identification. Making reference to a vacancy in one of the Cornish boroughs, the author suggested that he hoped to see Fatt promoted to Parliament, before remarking that the presence of a Black Member of the Commons might give rise to racist abuse. [Scots Magazine, ii. 56] A later essay, in the Oxford Magazine for 1770, also referred to Fatt as the only ‘Black-a-moor’ ever to have held a place at Court. [The Oxford Magazine or Universal Museum, v. 59]

The commentary surrounding Fatt’s appointment offers valuable insights into attitudes to the Black population of Britain in the period. It is interesting that a potentially lucrative contract was held in succession by Black British businessmen; also, that Fatt’s good fortune was the subject of comment in major periodicals. The reports help to add layers to our understanding of the composition of London society at the time. They show that members of the Black population were able to develop affluent careers, but also that their success was remarked upon, and not always favourably.

Fatt’s striking, if not wholly unusual, surname has also led to the likely identification of new voters. A decade after Fatt took over as sweep to the royal palaces, a by-election was held in Westminster after one of the constituency’s Members, Granville Leveson Gower, Viscount Trentham (later marquess of Stafford) accepted a place in government. Under the rules of the day, he was obliged to seek re-election, on this occasion triggering a contest after Sir George Vandeput, bt. chose to challenge for the seat. The initial result saw Trentham returned with 4,811 votes to Vandeput’s 4,654. Following a scrutiny, the numbers were revised down but Trentham still emerged with 4,103 votes, comfortably ahead of Vandeput, who was left with 3,933 votes.

According to the poll book, one of those voting for Trentham was William Fatt, who was identified as a ‘chimneysweeper’ from Pye Street in the parish of St Margaret and St John. As such, he was one of five men involved in the trade (one of them noted as a Chimney Doctor, rather than sweep), voting in the election. Although more work is needed to confirm the finding without doubt, it seems highly credible that this was the same man who, ten years earlier, had taken on the role of sweeper of the royal palaces. Assuming this to be the case, he thus joined John London as a second Black voter participating in the election.

Fatt’s name is not unique and unravelling the details of the family is complex. Two individuals, both named William Fatt, wrote wills in the 1770s, which were proved within three years of each other. It seems most likely that the first William Fatt, by then described as being of Castle Street, in St Giles in the Fields, whose will was proved in 1773 [TNA, PROB 11/984], was the man appointed to sweep the royal palaces in 1739 and who voted in the 1749 poll, even though the document makes no mention of a trade. This William Fatt referred to a daughter, Mary Knotgrass, which calls to mind the appearance in legal records from 1760 of William (a soot merchant from Swallow Street) and George Fatt (a victualler from Great Earl Street, Seven Dials), who stood bail of £40 each for Peter and Mary Nodgrass [sic]: possibly they were her brothers as William’s will mentioned four sons: William, George, Henry and Thomas.

The second William, almost certainly son of the elder William, died on 9 April 1776. He was buried in St Martin in the Fields, where a memorial was erected to him, his wife (Martha) and to sons-in-law, Thomas Angell (d. 1780) and another named Freeman. His will gave his trade as a chimney sweep, indicating a continuation of the family business. [TNA, PROB 11/1022] It referred to a house in Hampton, Middlesex, which he left to his daughter Mary, along with property at Sharrett (Sarratt) in Hertfordshire, which he left to another daughter, Anne. Both places also featured in the will of William the elder. Execution of the will was deputed jointly to Mary and to a carpenter from Piccadilly, named James Filewood, who received £10 for his trouble. By coincidence, Filewood also featured in the 1749 Westminster poll book.

The Hertfordshire property seems to have offered both William (the younger) and George Fatt further opportunities to vote. Both names appear in the 1774 poll book for the county. William, noted again as resident of Swallow Street, but also a householder in Sarratt, voted for William Plumer and Viscount Grimston. George Fatt, noted of London, but claiming rights as a householder at Great Gaddesden, also voted for Grimston but, unlike William, gave his other vote to Thomas Halsey. George Fatt then featured in the subsequent poll for the county in 1790. This time, he plumped for William Hale, who failed to be returned.

That the family business endured beyond the lives of the two Williams is indicated by the existence of a trade card from 1780 describing George Fatt as son of William and continuing the sweeping business from Sweeper’s Alley, Castle Street, Long Acre. It also noted that he had retained the role as sweeper to the king. George Fatt’s success in doing so appears to have been in spite of the efforts of ‘a great officer’, who had attempted to install his own porter in the role on William’s death. According to the press, ‘P.D.’ complained of the appointment of the man, who had been chosen in spite of knowing nothing of the business of chimney sweeping. [Morning Chronicle, 19 Apr. 1776]

This brief snapshot into the successful establishment of a family business, by people of Black heritage, is just a minor glimpse into the lives of Londoners in the eighteenth century. More work needs to be done to determine beyond doubt the family’s story. However, the findings suggest that there were many more people like them (and John London): successful business operators, who took the trouble to lodge their votes in eighteenth-century parliamentary elections.

RDEE

Further Reading:

Benita Cullingford, British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping (2001)

https://www.londonlives.org

ECPPEC

The devastating fire at the Palace of Westminster on 16 October 1834 made the House of Commons chamber in the former St. Stephen’s Chapel unusable. The need to prorogue Parliament a week later – amid the still smouldering ruins – prompted makeshift arrangements for both the Commons and the Lords. The small number of MPs who attended gathered in one of the surviving Lords committee rooms, before going to meet the peers in what had been the House of Lords library. A further prorogation in the Lords library took place on 18 December 1834.

By the time Parliament reassembled in February 1835, the Commons and the Lords had both been provided with far more adequate temporary accommodation, which in the case of the Commons would be in use for the next 17 years. This was rather longer than anticipated, due to the delays which beset the building of the new Palace of Westminster designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. Some of these delays were exacerbated by the difficulties of constructing new buildings on a site still being occupied by MPs and peers in their temporary accommodation.

In the wake of the 1834 fire, the possibility of moving MPs and peers elsewhere was discussed, and several alternative locations were mooted, including St. James’s Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall, or Exeter Hall, a large public meeting venue on the Strand. William IV offered the recently renovated Buckingham Palace, which he apparently disliked and never moved into, as a possible solution. There were, however, strong objections to this. Its location was considered a major disadvantage: one London newspaper described it as ‘quite out of the way of all business – inconvenient of access’. In addition, it would require a substantial amount of internal remodelling to suit the requirements of parliamentarians, a process which would mean undoing much of the work recently completed at significant public expense. The government tactfully resisted the king’s attempt to foist Buckingham Palace on them.

Instead, plans to rehome MPs and peers at Westminster were rapidly drawn up by Sir Robert Smirke, an architect connected with the Office of Woods and Forests, who had been overseeing repairs to Westminster Hall when the fire took place. The House of Commons would use the building previously occupied by the House of Lords as its chamber, while the upper House was displaced into the Painted Chamber. These rooms had both been damaged by the fire and required considerable renovation work, but this began swiftly. Scaffolding was in place on the interior and exterior walls of the former House of Lords less than two weeks after the fire, in preparation for its conversion into temporary accommodation for MPs. By early November, between 300 and 400 workmen were on site roofing the two temporary chambers.

On 19 February 1835, when Parliament assembled at Westminster after a change of government – Viscount Melbourne’s Whig ministry had been replaced by Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative administration – and a general election, the temporary accommodation was ready. This speedy construction was aided by working at night, the use of prefabricated timber and iron girders, and short-cuts such as papier mâché for the ornamental mouldings. The Times gave ‘the highest credit’ to Smirke, who within the limited space allocated had provided ‘accommodation to a much greater extent than could … have been anticipated’.

The temporary Commons chamber now included the space which had been behind the throne for the king’s robing room when this building had been the House of Lords. At the opposite end of the House, space was taken out for the lobby, which was made considerably larger than that formerly used by the Lords. The strangers’ gallery was erected above this lobby, roughly where the gallery of the Lords had been, and ‘spacious galleries’ for members were erected on the two long sides of the building.

One ‘most important’ feature, according to The Times, which it had not been possible to incorporate within the confined space of the pre-1834 Commons chamber, was a dedicated reporters’ gallery above the Speaker’s chair, with its own separate entrance. In the old chamber, reporters had been allocated the back row of the strangers’ gallery, but often found themselves jostling with members of the public for seats. Their new gallery recognised the growing significance of the press in reporting on parliamentary proceedings.

Initial reactions to the temporary Commons chamber were, like that of The Times, generally positive. The Sun described it as ‘perhaps one of the most elegant specimens of taste’, noting the oak seats covered with green Spanish leather, and the ‘simple but most graceful elegance’ of the galleries. While its plainness led some later observers to compare it to ‘a railway station’, ‘a Primitive Methodist chapel’, ‘a hideous barn’ or ‘a wooden shanty’, its ‘conspicuously neat and simple’ style was widely regarded as an advantage. As one guide to London observed, the lack of ornamentation and draperies showed that this was ‘a place of business’.

The temporary chamber also had the major benefit of being able to accommodate a greater number of MPs than their previous one. According to a statement in the Commons in May 1850, it had room for 456 MPs (including in the galleries), in contrast with the 387 who could find a seat in the old chamber. John Cam Hobhouse, who as First Commissioner of Woods and Forests in the Melbourne ministry had been involved with planning the temporary accommodation, recorded in his diary on the opening day of the 1835 Parliament that he ‘was much pleased with what I had some right to call my new temporary House of Commons’. The MP for Bath, John Arthur Roebuck, declared that ‘compared with the old, ugly place, it is a beautiful and commodious room’. The diarist Charles Greville felt that MPs had got the better side of the bargain when it came to their temporary accommodation, contrasting their ‘very spacious and convenient’ chamber with the ‘wretched dog-hole’ provided for the Lords. The temporary Commons was not without its flaws, however, and there were alterations in subsequent years to improve its acoustics, ventilation and lighting.

In addition, questions were raised about the costs of the temporary accommodation. In June 1835, the Commons was asked to approve expenditure of £30,000 for the temporary buildings and £14,000 for ‘furniture and other necessary articles’. The latter was deemed ‘scandalously extravagant’ by one MP, who protested that ‘the country was called upon to pay upwards of 10,000l. for nothing but a parcel of deal tables and a few rusty old chairs’. The ‘utter absurdity’ of money being ‘squandered’ on temporarily patching up parts of the old Palace, on a site which would need to be built on as work on the new Palace progressed, was highlighted in the press. One Warwickshire newspaper drew an unfavourable comparison between the £28,000 cost of Birmingham’s new town hall, a building large enough to hold the members of both Houses, and the expenditure at Westminster. Allegations that this was ‘a job’ by Smirke were given added fuel by the fact that one of the two main contractors for the temporary accommodation, Messrs. Samuel Baker & Son, were related to Smirke by marriage.

As the temporary accommodation – not only the Commons chamber, but other facilities such as the committee rooms – continued to evolve and to require repair and maintenance over the next 17 years, the costs grew. In 1848, a select committee reported that £185,248 had so far been spent on temporary accommodation for the Lords and the Commons, ‘of which very little will be available for future service’. It argued that this ongoing expenditure was one reason to accelerate the completion of the new Palace. It would be another three years, however, before preparations were finally made in August 1851 to demolish the temporary Commons chamber.

Further reading:

C. Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down (2012)

J. Mordaunt Crook & M. H. Port, The History of the King’s Works. Volume VI 1782-1851 (1973)

See also this post by Rebekah Moore which discusses the temporary Commons.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 28 October 2022, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.

Every 30 January, the rhythm of the parliamentary session in the 17th and 18th centuries was adjusted to make way for the annual commemoration sermon, marking the death of Charles I in 1649. It usually fell to the most junior of the bishops to preach to the Lords in Westminster Abbey, while a senior member of the clergy would perform the same service for the Commons in St Margaret’s. Themed as they were around the subject of expiation for the sins of the nation, the sermons became steadily less well attended as the years went by and by the second half of the 18th century some, like John Wilkes, thought that they should be scrapped and replaced with a day of national rejoicing. Wilkes always made a point of staying away from the chamber on 30 January.

In a similar (though more celebratory) way, the date of the current monarch’s accession was also the occasion for the Members decamping from their chambers and heading across the way to listen to a sermon. For those living under George I, this took place on 1 August and the very first anniversary of his accession in 1715 was marked with an address by the newly minted bishop of Oxford, John Potter (1673/4-1747).

Potter’s background was unusual, though not entirely unique, for an 18th-century bishop. His father had been a linen draper in Wakefield and, more to the point, had been a nonconformist. Potter had been raised as such and educated at the local grammar school (now one of the constituent parts of the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation). From there he proceeded to Oxford, where he transformed himself into a high church Anglican, much to his father’s disgust. Although high church, and with a particular interest in patristics (the study of the early church), Potter remained a confirmed Whig and quickly attracted patronage from some extremely influential people.

From University College, where he had been an undergraduate, Potter proceeded to Lincoln College as a fellow and in 1699, the year of his ordination to the priesthood, he was appointed one of the chaplains to Bishop Hough of Lichfield and Coventry. In 1704, he traded up becoming one of Archbishop Tenison’s chaplains and was thought so closely tied to Tenison that he was known as his ‘darling scribbler’. Two years later, he achieved the key promotion to royal chaplain.

As a clergyman at Court and with close connexions to Oxford, it is perhaps not surprising that he came to the notice of the duke and duchess of Marlborough, and when the regius professorship of divinity became vacant at Oxford, he was their candidate for the place. In his way was the rival claim of George Smalridge, backed by Robert Harley and others, but in the end the Marlboroughs won out (as was so often the case) and in 1708 Potter became Professor Potter.

For the next few years, Potter focused his attentions on his role at the university, never apparently being considered seriously for any of the vacant bishoprics that came up. Indeed, in 1714 it was Smalridge who was promoted first, taking on the poverty-stricken bishopric of Bristol. However, soon after the accession of George I another opportunity arose following the death of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury. Thus, when Bishop Talbot of Oxford was translated to Burnet’s vacant see, Potter was appointed to replace him at Oxford.

Potter’s 1 August sermon was his first major opportunity to make his mark in his new role. Unsurprisingly, he attracted criticism from Jacobite Tory opponents like Thomas Hearne, at that point still in post as one of the librarians at the Bodleian, but soon to be forced out as he was unwilling to take the oaths to George I. Recording the sermon a few weeks later, Hearne noted that it had been preached by ‘our present sneaking, poor-spirited, cringing, whiggish bishop’. The content, he thought, was ‘vile, silly, injudicious, illiterate, & roguish stuff, sufficiently showing what the author is’. [Hearne, v. 122] Hearne never lost an opportunity of deriding Potter using terms like ‘snivelling’ or ‘white-livered’ to describe him. [Hearne, vi. 123; ix. 360]

Potter’s chosen text was Psalm 20, verse 5: ‘We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners’. His theme, obviously enough, was the blessings the nation had received by the peaceful succession of the House of Hanover, and how narrowly they had avoided the prospect of civil war. Not only was the nation peaceful, he urged but he may also have had half a mind on his own significant progress when he argued:

Neither can there be any just complaint, that arts and industry, virtue and public services want suitable encouragement; where the way lies open for ever man to advance himself to the highest honours and preferments and after he hath enjoyed the fruits of all his labour in his own person, there is as great certainty… that he shall transmit them entire to his posterity…

As well as lauding the prospect before them under the house of Hanover, Potter also allowed himself some predictable venting against the horrors of life under a Catholic sovereign. Even other religions, he suggested, might be ‘kind and merciful’. He also trotted out the familiar theme of the importance of divine providence in settling King George among them.

Over the next few years, Potter developed his role in the Church, becoming a close associate of William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and co-operating with him closely in opposing two pieces of government-backed legislation. He attracted attention for wading into the ‘Bangorian controversy’, criticizing the apparent Arianism of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor. Even Hearne had to acknowledge that he did so ‘very deservedly’. [Hearne, vii. 82] He also became close to the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Caroline.

When George I died it was widely rumoured that Potter would be promoted to Bath and Wells. Although that proved not to be the case (he seems to have turned the promotion down) he was the person selected to preach the new king and queen’s coronation sermon in October 1727. Controversially, for a Whig, he used high church terminology to justify George’s claim to the throne by hereditary right. [Smith, 37] More controversially, for a Whig, he also emphasized the need for the new king’s subjects to give their ‘entire submission to his authority’.

It was to be another decade before Potter was finally rewarded with a richer diocese. On Wake’s death in 1737, it was Potter who became Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than Bishop Hare of Chichester, backed by Sir Robert Walpole. The translation was widely attributed to the queen’s personal intervention and came just a few months before her death later that year.

Potter may not be the best-remembered of 18th-century bishops, or indeed a particularly memorable Archbishop of Canterbury. Much more attention is paid to his younger son, Thomas, a Member of Parliament, associate of the so-called Hellfire Club and a generally archetypal Georgian rake. But Potter was important in showing that the Church of England was able to adapt in the period, adopt language used by the Jacobites to justify the Hanoverian monarchy and was open to advancing the son of a Yorkshire linen draper, and a nonconformist one at that, to the highest place in the Church.

RDEE

Further reading:
J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832
Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble
Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714-1760
The Theological Works of the most reverend Dr John Potter, late Archbishop of Canterbury

In March 1559, Elizabeth I’s government had a serious problem on its hands. The first Parliament of the reign had been meeting for two months, but the crown’s flagship legislation to bring back Protestantism had run into trouble. With some difficulty, a bill had been passed to restore the royal supremacy over the Church, but the powers granted fell short of what Elizabeth wanted, while plans for reviving Protestant worship had stalled. The House of Commons was broadly in favour of these changes, but in the Lords, where committed Protestants were in the minority, the Catholic bishops were very effectively obstructing the government programme. As the Protestant observer John Jewel reported on 20 March:

the bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being … among the nobility and leading men in the upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices … they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. (Zurich Letters ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, 1842), 10-11)

By this point, the situation was so bad that Elizabeth was seriously contemplating an early dissolution of Parliament, so that she could use her new powers to deprive the existing bishops and appoint new Protestant ones, before pressing on with the reform programme. In the event, the queen decided against this course, but action was clearly needed to weaken the bishops’ hold over the lay peers.

The government’s solution was to arrange a public conference or disputation between two panels of Catholic clergy and Protestant divines. According to a subsequent official account of this exercise, the objective was to thrash out differences of opinion about religion, and reach agreement on the best way forward for the Church. In reality, the government’s objective was to discredit the bishops, and sway public opinion in favour of Protestantism. From the outset, everything possible was done to place the Catholic participants at a disadvantage. Their leader in the Lords, the widely respected Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York, was appointed to help preside over the disputation in his capacity as a privy councillor, a move which would effectively sideline him during the debates. Similarly, the three propositions which the Privy Council selected for discussion were all designed to win support for the government’s reform programme: that church services should be conducted in the vernacular tongue rather than in the traditional Latin, which most congregations didn’t understand; that national Churches had the power to alter the format and content of services; and that the Catholic doctrine of the sacrificial mass was not based on the teachings of the bible.

There’s some confusion over exactly how many people took part in the disputation, though there seem to have been eight or nine men on each side. The Catholic camp comprised a mix of bishops and other senior clergy, while the Protestant delegation was made up almost exclusively of clerics who had spent Mary I’s reign in exile on the continent. In effect, they represented the existing and prospective hierarchies of the English Church. The Catholics wanted to debate in Latin, which would have made it harder for the audience to follow the arguments, but the government insisted on proceedings being conducted in English, and selected the spacious Westminster Abbey as the venue, to allow as many people as possible to attend. As expected, a substantial number of lay peers turned up, precisely the individuals whom the government most wanted to influence.

Perceiving that the odds were stacked heavily against them, the Catholic camp looked for ways to sabotage the debates. The Privy Council had ruled that each side should prepare a written statement on each proposition, which would be circulated in advance to the opposing group, and read out on the day. The Protestants seem to have stuck to this format, but the Catholics chose not to cooperate. Invited to open debate on the first day of the conference, 31 March, they claimed that they’d misunderstood the rules, and therefore didn’t have a written statement to present. Instead, Henry Cole, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, launched into a violent and colourful diatribe against Protestantism in general, before finally sketching out the Catholic position on the correct language for worship, essentially defending the use of Latin by appealing to tradition. Once Cole had finished, his opponent Robert Horne read out a learned argument in favour of the local vernacular, with copious references to the bible and early Christian writings. Horne prefaced his remarks with a lengthy prayer appealing to God to reveal the true way forward. As this prayer was introduced, all the privy councillors present except Archbishop Heath fell to their knees, further demonstrating which side the government favoured. Once Horne had finished presenting the Protestant case, the Catholic disputants asked to respond, but were told to wait until the next debate, three days later.

When the conference resumed on 3 April, the Catholic camp tried to pick up where they’d left off, but were informed that they must first set out their arguments on the second proposition, concerning the power of national churches to modify their liturgies. However, the bishops began to complain that they were being treated unfairly, and the conference rapidly descended into a row over the format of the disputation. Recognising that if the Protestants always spoke second, their arguments were likely to carry more weight with the audience, the Catholics called for the order of debate be switched around. When this demand was rejected, the bishops again tried to change the topic, asserting that they represented the true Church, and attacking their opponents as schismatics. At length, once it became clear that the Catholics had no intention of addressing the second proposition, the disputation was brought to a premature close.

Predictably, Catholic commentators on the conference, such as the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, maintained that the bishops had trounced the Protestant divines. John Jewel, who had been present as one of the Protestant disputants, took a rather different view: ‘It is altogether incredible, how much this conduct has lessened the opinion that the people entertained of the bishops; for they all begin to suspect that they refused to say anything only because they had not anything to say.’ (Zurich Letters, 16)

Whether or not Jewel himself was exaggerating, the conference had a decisive impact on developments in Parliament. The five bishops who participated in the debates were all charged with contempt of the crown for failing to follow the agreed format. Two of them, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were imprisoned in the Tower of London until after the end of the session. This unsurprisingly served to dampen opposition in the Lords to the government’s programme. Several staunchly Catholic lay peers suddenly decided to absent themselves, while others dropped their objections to the Protestant legislation. The bill for the royal supremacy was duly revised, though the measure to reintroduce the Book of Common Prayer still only scraped through the upper House by three votes.  Without the Westminster conference, it might not have passed at all. The disputation strategy was clumsy and underhand, but it weakened the Catholic cause, broke the parliamentary deadlock, and helped pave the way for the Elizabethan religious settlement.

PMH

Further reading:

N.L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

G. Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England ed. N. Pocock (1865), vol. 5

The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed. S.R. Cattley (1839), vol. 8

Biographies of all the clerics mentioned above will appear in due course in our volumes on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

Bloomsbury Square, and its immediate surroundings, have long been associated with prominent political figures. In 1706, several peers had residences in the square, notably the (2nd) duke of Bedford and the earls of Northampton and Chesterfield. Close neighbours residing in Great Russell Street, were the duke of Montagu (whose house later became the British Museum), the earl of Thanet and Lord Haversham, and John Hough, at that point bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. By 1727, things had changed somewhat. Montagu was still living in Great Russell Street, now joined by William Baker, bishop of Bangor, shortly after translated to Norwich. But Northampton’s heir had left Bloomsbury Square for Grosvenor Street, though another house had been taken by the earl of Nottingham. [Jones, ‘London Topography’]

Jump forward half a century, and Bloomsbury Square remained a place closely associated with the aristocracy. It was still home to the (5th) duke of Bedford and he had been joined by one of the foremost legal minds of the time: William Murray, earl of Mansfield, who had moved there from Lincoln’s Inn Fields a few years previously. According to Mansfield’s biographer, the square ‘conveyed a delightful atmosphere of leisure and repose, where often the only sounds came from the twittering and chirping of birds’. [Poser, 167] In June 1780, this ‘delightful’ haven was to be turned on its head and Mansfield’s residence was to become one of the principal targets of the Gordon rioters, who flocked to the square on the night of 6/7 June determined to torch the place.

Much has been written about the Gordon riots, which brought London (and other cities) to a virtual standstill for several days in June 1780. The immediate cause was the Protestant Association’s petition calling for the repeal of the 1778 Catholic Relief Act. Having gathered in St George’s Fields on Friday 2 June, members of the Association, led by their president, Lord George Gordon, processed to Parliament to present the petition. While things had begun calmly enough, in the course of the day more unruly elements flocked to Westminster and MPs and members of the Lords found themselves besieged within their chambers.

Thus, what began as a relatively focused cause was soon taken over by general lawlessness, and as Bob Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock have argued persuasively, many of those involved in the later stages of the rioting had as their target the criminal justice system itself and were far less driven by concerns about religion. [Hitchcock and Shoemaker, 346, 349-50] Consequently, several prisons were attacked and the inmates released; lawyers in and around the inns of court went in fear of assault (or worse) and prominent judges, like Mansfield, became very obvious targets. The fact that Mansfield had also been vocal in his support of the Catholic Relief Act made him doubly susceptible.

Mansfield had been singled out for special treatment even on that first day. Arriving at Westminster, his carriage had been attacked and he had had to be rescued by the archbishop of York. After the day’s proceedings were adjourned, Mansfield was forced to make his way out of the Lords via a back door and travelled home by river as his coach had since been torn to pieces.

Over the next few days rioting gripped London. By Tuesday 6 June Mansfield’s nephew (and eventual heir) David, 7th Viscount Stormont, felt the need to advise the officer commanding the guards in London that he had received ‘reliable information’ that several houses were in need of additional protection, among them those of the marquess of Rockingham and Mansfield. [TNA, SP37/20/54, ff. 76-6] Despite Stormont’s efforts, Mansfield himself decided that too visible a military presence might only infuriate the crowd, so he requested the guards remain at a distance. It was a fatal mistake. When a band of rioters arrived outside Mansfield’s house on the night of 6/7 June, they found it undefended and set to work pulling down the railings before breaking into the house itself. There, they gave vent to all their destructive power, burning his library and gutting the building. Mansfield and Lady Mansfield only narrowly escaped, by using the back door onto Southampton Row.

Mansfield’s losses were significant. Consigned to the flames were his own legal notebooks, along with his library and pretty much the entire contents of the house. Efforts to save the building were stymied because when firefighters arrived on the scene, they refused to get involved until the soldiers (who had by then made themselves known) withdrew, in case they got caught in the middle of fighting between the crowd and the troops.

According to one paper, Mansfield’s losses amounted to £30,000, the library constituting a third of the total. [Morning Chronicle, 9 June 1780] Another paper attributed the destruction to Mansfield’s own ‘ill-judged lenity’, after he had ‘humanely requested [the troops] not fire upon the deluded wretches’. The same paper detailed some of the irreplaceable items that had been destroyed, including a portrait of Viscount Bolingbroke by the poet, Alexander Pope, ‘which, though not having the merit of a professed artist, was always esteemed a great likeness’. [Whitehall Evening Post, 10-13 June 1780]

The tragedy of the Gordon Riots and its impact on Bloomsbury Square did not end on 7 June. Precisely how many people were killed and injured in the rioting remains unclear, but among the rioters well over 300 were killed. Some troops were also among the dead, one of them a cavalrymen posted in Bloomsbury Square, who came off his horse and was finished off by the crowd. [Whitehall Evening Post, 8-10 June 1780] Retribution for some of those involved came quickly and within days there were numerous arrests. By the end of the month the first trials were underway.

As was so often the case, it was the very recognizable among the most marginalized who ended up being handed in. One such was John Gray, whose case has been written about extensively. A native of Taunton in Somerset, who had made his way to London, Gray was one of many on the fringes of society, eking out a living by feeding horses for hackney carriages. [London Courant, 24 July 1780] Although described as ‘a stout made man’, he appears to have had a clubfoot and to have needed a crutch to walk. He seems also to have had mental health issues. He stood out in the crowd taking part in pulling apart one of Mansfield’s outhouses and a few days later was arrested after being spotted trying to pick someone’s pocket.

Gray was convicted at the Old Bailey (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/) and, in spite of a petition for mercy subscribed by several prominent Taunton residents, one of them the chaplain to Lord Bathurst, [TNA, [SP37/21/132, f. 250] and other recommendations that his case was one worthy of the king’s consideration, [TNA, SP37/21/91] the appeals for clemency were rejected. On Saturday 22 July, he was conveyed back to Bloomsbury Square with two others and hanged on a gallows positioned so that their last view was the remains of Mansfield’s burnt-out former residence.

RDEE

Further reading:
Clyve Jones, ‘The London Topography of the Parliamentary Elite: addresses for peers and bishops for 1706 and 1727-8’, London Topographical Record, xxix (2006)
Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013)
Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker, London Lives: poverty, crime and the making of a modern city 1690-1800 (2015)

Organised by Brendan Tam and Chloe Challender and supported by the History of Parliament Trust and the University of Warwick’s Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre, the conference will examine the evolving dynamics between individuals and the Westminster Parliament throughout history.

The conference will explore the complex historic interplay between people and the Westminster Parliament, shedding light on how changing social mores, institutional interactions and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion have developed and changed over time. While numerous accounts of the Westminster Parliament have been written over the centuries, the focus has primarily been on its democratic and constitutional function as an agent of national legislature and accountability, rather than its identity as an institution whose inner life is both shaped by and shapes its public role. By considering interdisciplinary perspectives and critical inquiry, this conference aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the private dynamics of one of the world’s oldest public representative institutions.

Through nine papers and a keynote address, the conference will explore how Parliament has developed over time in relation to individual behaviours and private experiences, considering the influence of factors such as gender, race, and class. Broad conceptual questions that will be considered include: what are the hidden rather than displayed parliamentary rules, conventions, and expectations that have developed over this period, in terms of culture, approach, language, and behaviour of Parliament, and how are they determined by private experience and individual agency?

The keynote address, titled Idem sentire de republica: friendship, community and party in the House of Commons from Bolingbroke to Badenoch will be delivered by Dr. Paul Seaward, Emeritus director of the History of Parliament. His address will align with the conference’s theme of interrogating the dynamics of individual interactions in the Westminster Parliament. This will be followed by three panels, featuring papers ranging from medieval Westminster to the present day that include a range of methodological approaches and historical actors, from elected MPs to parliamentary staff, employees and the public audience. The panel themes are as follows:

1. Gender, Agency, and the Institutional Regime: Women’s Experiences of the Westminster Parliament in the 20th and 21st Century

2. 19^th Century to the Present Day: Westminster Parliament as a Home and as a Stage

3. Feeling, Individual Encounter and Lived Experience in the Pre-1800 Westminster Parliamen

For more information, and to view the conference schedule, please visit: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ecc/eventsnew/cultureofparliament/  

To register for the conference (attendance is free), please email Brendan Tam (brendan.tam@warwick.ac.uk) and Chloe Challender (chloe.challender@warwick.ac.uk by Friday 28^th February.

In November 1749 John London walked from his home to vote in the Westminster constituency parliamentary by-election at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. He was probably with a group of his near neighbours from Hungerford Market, just south of the Strand (where Charing Cross railway station stands today). He cast his vote for the government candidate, Lord Trentham, then presumably returned home to continue his day’s business. His vote, and those of his neighbours, was recorded at the time by the polling clerk and before the year was out all the polling data was available as a published ‘poll book’, price 2s 6d. John London’s name duly appears on page 233, misspelt as John Loudon. The entry is unremarkable: we have his name, address (One Tun, a narrow alley leading from the Strand to the market), occupation (Vict. for victualler, what we would call a pub landlord) and his vote in the T column for Trentham.

His poll book entry does not stand out from those surrounding it in any way.  John London was just one of 9,465 men who had voted, 1,961 of them from his parish of St Martin in the Fields, 694 of whom had, like him, voted for Trentham. Nor was his occupation unusual: among the voters in the 1749 by-election were eight other victuallers who traded in Hungerford Market alone. But the election result was tight. Trentham won by just 157 votes. His rival, Sir George Vandeput, called for a scrutiny, an ex post facto examination of potentially bad votes where disqualification might alter the result. John London’s was one such vote and it is the manuscript minutes of the protracted scrutiny hearings of 1750 (held in the British Library) that reveal that John London, businessman, householder and voter, was Black. A non-white racial identity was no bar to voting. In Westminster the franchise was open to all adult (over twenty-one), British, male ratepayers (‘householders’). The challenge to John London’s vote was not on the face of it based on his Blackness. Rather it was alleged that he was not a ratepayer at the time of the poll. Vandeput’s witness, Mr Rybot the Overseer of the Poor in the parish, had to admit defeat here.  London was ‘on the blew leaf’, that is, the rate collector had written his name and payment on the blue paper cover of his notebook when calling door-to-door for the September 1749 rates. This was because London was a recent arrival in One Tun Alley, so not already listed, although he was ‘in the book’ by the time of the next rate collection in 1750.

London had arrived at his new home just in time to exercise his householder’s right to vote in November. It is Rybot’s throw-away next remark at the hearing that identifies London as Black: ‘… he paid me he’s a Blackamoor’ [an outdated historical term describing a Black or dark-skinned person]. Was this an attempt to move the challenge on to the question of Britishness based on racial identity? If so, this too failed. London appeared in person (unusual at the scrutiny). He was asked where he was born and with his answer – ‘St Edmunds Bury in Suffolk’ – the matter was closed in London’s favour. His vote stood. This fact makes John London the earliest known Black person to have voted in a British parliamentary election, some twenty-five years before Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729-80), the formerly enslaved Black Mayfair grocer, composer, and writer who voted in Westminster elections in 1774 and 1780.

What does this episode tell us about voting and race in Georgian London? Firstly, it is a salutary reminder to historians not to assume that names in an eighteenth-century list are necessarily those of white people. There was a significant and rising population of Black Londoners, numbering some 10,000 in a total population of between 575,000 and 700,000. Many had been enslaved and had arrived from Britain’s Atlantic colonies rather than directly from Africa. Although technically free in England, they were often found working in domestic service in conditions of near servitude, or eked a living among the capital’s poor. Black soldiers, sailors, musicians, street sellers, seamstresses, beggars, prostitutes and their pimps are depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Such men, like their white neighbours, were unlikely to be ratepayers and have the franchise. The discovery of John London, however, shows us that we should not assume all Black Londoners fell into these two categories. It confirms the presence of Black men who were entrepreneurs on a small scale, sufficiently prosperous to be independent householders and so exercise the right to vote. This was active participation in civic life, not the bystander role of Black men depicted in images of polling-day crowds. There may indeed have been other Black voters who have not yet come to light since, as with John London, there was no need to include any racial identifier in the polling records themselves. 

Finally, while John London was clearly enjoying a modicum of success in life in 1749 the scrutiny records do hint at the vulnerability of Black people and the inherent racism they faced in Georgian London.  He was clearly not prevented from casting his vote in November 1749, but we cannot tell whether this was straightforward or whether he was subject to abuse in any way (as Sancho records he was in moving about the city a generation later). There may have been some protection from the presence around him of his neighbours from Hungerford Market.  We can interpret his appearance in person at the hearing as his understanding that his racial identity might be discussed and might count against him were he not there to speak for himself.  The term ‘blackamoor’ as used by Rybot was, after all, not exactly affectionate. London’s name appears in parish rate book records until 1751 and in none of these is he noted as a Black man – racial identity did not matter as long as one paid up. After 1751 he was gone from One Tun Alley and is archivally elusive until spring 1770 when, a sick man, he was admitted to the St Martin’s workhouse where he died.  At the end of his life, he was recorded as both a pauper and as Black. As with his challenged vote, this again marks him out as vulnerable and marginal.  Racial identity was irrelevant to his settlement rights under the Old Poor Law but was perhaps noted because he was now a cost to the parish. Was whoever recorded admissions expressing an underlying anxiety about Black paupers?  Finally, there is one other record for John London in the licensing lists for Westminster that shows something of the bold spirit, sense of humour, or enterprise in seeking out a specifically Black clientele of this Black voter and businessman. He named his victualling business The Blackamoor’s Head.   

Further Reading

A Copy of the Poll for a Citizen for the City and Liberty of Westminster (‘Poll Book’) (London: J. Osborn, 1749).

Frances Crewe., ed., Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Nichols, 1782).

David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987).

David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: A Forgotten  Georgian History (London: John Murray, revised edn 2002,1st pub. 1995).

Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016).

Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

The story of the Gordon Riots is well known and has been told many times before. However, one aspect that has not been considered so much is what they tell us about access to the old Palace of Westminster. Key to this is the evidence that was presented at Lord George Gordon’s treason trial in February 1781, when several well-placed MPs and parliamentary officials offered their testimony on how the crowds had pressed their way into the heart of the palace.

While the original delegation bringing the Protestant Association’s petition to Westminster had been orderly enough, by the late afternoon of 2 June 1780 the Palace of Westminster was clogged with protesters. Protesting later turned to rioting, and in London there were days of lawlessness, with houses and chapels pulled down, prisons broken open and widespread looting. Only after several days was order restored by the army and militia.

One of the most useful witnesses summoned to give evidence at Gordon’s trial was Thomas Bowen, officiating as the Commons’ chaplain on the day the petition was presented. Bowen had accompanied the Speaker to the chamber at the beginning of proceedings, but already found the lobby ‘crowded, and the people… clamorous’. After leading those MPs present in prayers, Bowen retreated to a place ‘under the gallery, by the door’. He was, thus, well-placed to observe Gordon interacting with the crowd outside the chamber. He witnessed Gordon going to the door frequently, and repeating what was being said by the Members. Gordon assured the crowd that the Speaker considered them ‘good people’, while (likely) George Rous, who had form on calling for aggressive action to quell troublemakers, was calling for the magistrates to be called. Lord North dismissed them as ‘a mob’.

When the motion to consider the petition was eventually called for, Bowen exited the chamber and made his way to an adjoining room, but noticed that the crowd was refusing to quit the lobby, making a division impossible. He was prevailed on to speak to them to encourage them to retire, but without success. At least one person insisted they would only go if Gordon told them to do so.

Bowen then left the lobby and went to ‘the eating room’, where he was joined by an exhausted Gordon. He told Gordon what he had heard, and Gordon made his way to the gallery overlooking the lobby so that he could speak to his supporters. Bowen followed, and deposed that Gordon spoke to those gathered below, urging them to be peaceable, though Gordon also took Bowen by the gown, introduced him to the crowd and tried to get Bowen to give his opinion on the Catholic Relief Act. According to Bowen, this was the only time in the whole proceedings when he felt unsafe. John Anstruther, who was in the lobby, gave his own account of Gordon addressing the crowd, but made no mention of Bowen. He agreed, though, that there ‘was great confusion in the lobby’.

Following Bowen, MP John Cator offered his evidence of the events of 2 June. He said he had been ‘going from some of the committee-rooms to the gallery over the lobby’ and found the lobby packed with people and the Commons stymied in their efforts to hold a division, as the officers of the House were unable to get the lobby cleared. He heard someone call Gordon by name, and then witnessed him make his way ‘to the rails, and looked over’. Cator followed suit to observe Gordon’s interaction with the crowd. Gordon advised that most of the MPs were opposed to considering the petition at that point, but asked what the crowd wished: ‘they cried out, “Now, now.”’

Two more Commons’ staff were summoned to give their evidence. One was Joseph Pearson, one of the doorkeepers. He had been posted in the lobby, and his testimony confirmed Bowen’s, that Gordon had come to the door on several occasions to pass on what was happening to the crowd outside. He reckoned the ‘mob’ had finally dispersed by nine in the evening, but ‘so great was the confusion I cannot say how [the lobby] was cleared’. Another doorkeeper, Thomas Baker, supported Pearson’s account, noting that the crowds only disappeared after soldiers arrived.

What was clear from several of the witnesses was how easy it was for the crowd to make their way deep into the parliamentary estate. Sampson Rainsforth deposed being in New Palace Yard when about 200 people had made their way over Westminster Bridge and at about 2pm ‘the whole cavalcade came from Charing Cross down to New Palace Yard, with flags and music’. He also observed that ‘they had blue cockades in their hats’: the colour of the Protestant Association. This tallied more or less with at least one newspaper report that related that the delegation arrived at the Houses of Parliament at about half past two. [Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 June 1780] Like Anstruther, Rainsforth then made his way into the lobby where he observed Gordon standing at the door leading into the Commons’ chamber, though he did not catch what was said. Clearly, though, it was still possible to access the lobby in spite of the reports of large crowds making the passageways impassable.

Witnesses to what took place in the lobby generally agreed that while potentially unruly, the crowd there was reasonably well behaved, though at least one MP, Philip Jennings Clerke, reckoned that the original petitioners were distinct from those in the lobby, whom he dismissed as ‘a different class of person’. Certainly, all was not peaceful. Constable Charles Jealous, stationed in Palace Yard, witnessed the bishop of Lincoln’s coach being attacked as he arrived to attend the House of Lords. The coach, he said:

was stopped by the mob, and the wheels were taken off. I saw a gentleman taken out of it, who, they said was the Bishop: they pulled off his wig, and struck him in the face… He got into the house in order to escape.

Jealous observed that those involved in roughing up the bishop were not wearing blue cockades, suggesting they were not part of the more organized group who had been involved with presenting the petition. One newspaper also reported six peers being ‘extremely ill-used… their bags pulled off, and their hair left flowing on their shoulders’. Several chose not to hang around and summoned hackney carriages to get them away.

Dispersing the crowds from around Parliament proved just the beginning of the business as protests turned to riot and a general breakdown in law and order. But what the opening moments of those chaotic days in June 1780 showed was how intimate the palace could be. Access was easy right up to the doors of the Commons, with spaces – like the gallery over the lobby – available for Members to address people gathered below. It all goes to show that Parliament was a dynamic space, where Lords, MPs, officials and the general public rubbed shoulders and where so much depended on a sense of what was and was not reasonable behaviour.

RDEE

Further Reading:
The Trial of the Honourable George Gordon, commonly called Lord George Gordon, for High Treason… On Monday, the 5th Day of February, 1781.
The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge, 2012)

As Frank O’Gorman has shown, the qualities looked for in 18th-century MPs, while having a number of features that would be recognizable now, were subtly different from those looked for in modern candidates. In the absence of the kinds of organized party structures that emerged in the 19th century, people looked for alternative markers:

“The ideal candidate should be accessible, approachable, and sensitive to the wishes of the constituency. This meant that he should be a local man, of honour, reputation, and integrity, known to everybody. He should be a gentleman but he should be cordial with all classes.” [O’Gorman, 123]

Obviously, candidates might take the opportunity of years of careful cultivation to become known to their prospective constituents and in the case of county elections, in particular, selection of candidates might happen months in advance. Elections brought all of that into sharp focus, though, and ultimately candidates were expected to perform well in pre-election meetings convened in inns and town halls and ultimately on the hustings. Here, it was expected they should:

“command the platform, silence the heckler, and amuse the crowd” [O’Gorman]

While some national issues did play at times of election, the interests of each constituency were normally paramount, so every contest was subtly different. Again, as O’Gorman has argued:

“Questions of political significance to Westminster politicians seemed much less real to voters than critically important issues concerning the welfare and prosperity of the constituency at a time of rapid social and economic change” [O’Gorman, 124]

The first opportunity for candidates to set out their stalls and gauge the interests of the voters was normally a series of meetings, sometimes convened long before the date of the election was known. These were held with the clear intention of avoiding expensive and divisive contests. Many seats were settled in this way, such that in the period 1715-1754 when there were six general elections, the county of Berkshire only had contested elections twice, Cumberland once and Cornwall had no contests at all. Borough constituencies might be more likely to see contests, but even here there were places that rarely experienced a contested election. Again, in that period 1715-1754 there were no contests in Brackley (Northamptonshire) or Camelford (Cornwall). Bath, by contrast, had elections each time.

These sorts of pre-election meetings might also be an opportunity for candidates to address each other – as well as their prospective constituents. Arguments might also play out in the local press. As Perry Gauci has shown, one prominent 18th-century politician, William Beckford, who was both an MP and Lord Mayor of London, had to battle hard in 1761 to retain his seat in the City of London, amid criticisms from the Livery that he had neglected them in favour of Parliament. At a meeting of the Livery in advance of election day, Beckford argued strenuously in favour of his record, noting the importance of spending time in Parliament for London’s benefit.

Beckford did not just deal defensively, though. Having settled the issue of his own attendance, he turned to what he thought was the rank injustice of London’s under-representation:

‘By his calculations, “this great City” paid one-sixteenth of the land tax and one-eighth of taxes in general but elected only 4 of the 558 MPs’. He then continued with further examples of his own contribution and ‘defied anyone to contest that he had not done his utmost “where the trade, liberty and franchises of the City were concerned”’ [Gauci, 102]

All of this built up to the day of the poll, when everyone gathered at the hustings and the candidates had a further chance to address the crowd. The liveliness of the occasions offered perfect opportunities for print satirists to capture the atmosphere and the desperation of some candidates to win over their voters. In one James Gillray print, The Hustings, Charles James Fox is shown at St Paul’s Covent Garden during the 1796 election for Westminster, addressing a ragged crowd and assuring them of his opposition to the Pewter Pot Bill. In response they cry ‘We’ll have a Mug, a Mug, a Mug’. Fox ended at the top of the poll, largely aided by the second votes of those supporting his competitors.

Even at such a late point of an election, efforts were usually made to decide the contest without going to the trouble of actually polling with a show of hands being called for from the assembled voters. It was only once this mechanism had failed to reveal a clear decision that those qualified to do so were finally invited to come forward to cast their votes, and all along the candidates continued to be free to discourse with the crowd to try to sway them right up to the moment they presented themselves to the clerks.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Perry Gauci, William Beckford: First Prime Minister of the London Empire (2013)
Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (1989)

Find out more about hustings over on the History of Parliament’s TikTok channel!