How many people could vote in the UK after the 1832 Reform Act? This is one of the most frequent questions that the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project is asked about nineteenth-century electoral politics. The short answer is, it’s complicated. For the long answer, please read on…

To start with, women and everyone under twenty-one could not vote in parliamentary elections throughout the nineteenth century. That’s around 75% of the entire population (more on how I’ve worked out this figure below).

In terms of the remaining 25% or so of the population (those who were male and aged 21 or over), a plethora of data exists to compile reliable UK enfranchisement statistics for each election between 1832 and 1868 (when the electoral system was reformed again). However, UK-wide average figures mask an extraordinary variation in electorate sizes and rates of adult male enfranchisement from country to country, county to county and constituency to constituency during that time.

For instance, at the 1847 general election a maximum of one in six adult males (16.6%) were registered to vote across the UK. However, this general figure disguises the fact that in England at the same election a maximum of around one in five (20.8%) adult males were registered to vote, while in Ireland the same figure was only around one in thirteen (7.5%).

The variations are even starker when viewed at constituency level. At the same general election, a maximum of 1 in 50 adult males living within the boundaries of the Irish county of Mayo could vote for the county constituency of the same name. 1 in 16 adult males could vote in the Welsh borough of Merthyr Tydfil. 1 in 7 could vote in the Scottish burgh district of Ayr. And over 1 in 2 (58%) adult males were potentially registered to vote in the English borough of Beverley.

Why was this the case? A key factor is that the UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868 was not a democracy. Rather, the electoral reforms of 1832 established a complex, mixed representative system intended to balance the nation’s varied political, economic, social and geographic interests. Some constituencies only had around 300 voters, others had over 20,000. Some constituencies were under one square mile in area, others encompassed entire counties that were over a thousand square miles. Some constituencies returned one MP, some returned four. And some voters could vote in multiple constituencies.

One key means of achieving this mixed representative system was via varied franchise regulations. This led to a distinctive combination of, often unique, voting qualifications in each constituency. These might be forty-shilling freeholders, £10 householders, tenants-at-will, copyholders, freemen, potwallopers, burgage holders or scot and lot voters, all of whom are discussed in this article by my colleague, Philip Salmon.

Significantly, most franchises were property-based. This meant that even if two constituencies shared the same legal voting qualification – such as the £10 borough householder franchise – variations in local property values led to wildly differing rates of enfranchisement from region to region. 

As a result, at the 1847 election there were many fewer properties registered in the East Midlands under the £10 a year annual rent qualification than in London. In the borough of Stoke in 1847 a maximum of 9% of adult males were registered as £10 householders, while in the London borough of Lambeth the same figure was 25%. For reference, a £10 a year rent in 1847 equates to around £13,000 a year, or £260 a week/£1,080 a month in 2025.

The complex system of voter registration after 1832 also contributed to discrepancies in enfranchisement levels from nation to nation and constituency to constituency. In England and Wales the 1s. annual registration fee, the reliability of local parish officials in providing annual tax returns, localised rental practices (such as compounding), the efficiency of local party machinery and the strictness of revising barristers at annual registration courts all played a factor in whether someone made it on to the register in the first place.

The unwieldy voter registration systems established in Ireland and Scotland in 1832 were even more significant in terms of preventing potential voters from registering to vote. Loopholes in the Irish and Scottish systems also encouraged fictitious vote creation, and made revising registers so complex that it became almost impossible to remove dead voters from the electoral roll.

Ireland’s unwieldy system was completely overhauled in 1850. Scotland’s burgh and county systems were overhauled in 1856 and 1861 respectively. After these dates the registration process became (slightly) more straightforward and the registers are a more reliable source for calculating adult male enfranchisement levels.

To make things even more complicated men who owned or rented multiple qualifying properties could vote in multiple constituencies (although they could only qualify once per constituency). This means that the ‘maximum’ national and constituency level percentages of enfranchisement discussed here are likely to overstate how many men had the vote. While data does not exist to adjust enfranchisement rates to a high degree of accuracy, contemporary estimates suggested that around 10% of those on the electoral register could vote in multiple constituencies.

This is one reason why I include the word ‘maximum’ before ‘adult male enfranchisement rate’. While a maximum of 16.6% of adult males were registered to vote in the UK in 1847, it was more likely that closer to 15% of adult males were actually enrolled. Statistically speaking, this means the UK-wide adult male enfranchisement rate for 1847 can also be displayed as 15.1%(±10%).

Such a statistical adjustment also provides some leeway for further complicating factors when calculating enfranchisement rates at a constituency level. These factors include men being registered under two or more qualifications in the same constituency and men registered to vote under ancient franchise qualifications via the seven-mile borough residence rule. In a small group of English constituencies (such as Beverley), both factors mean that enfranchisement rates can only be displayed with a confidence range of ±30%.

With all of these provisos taken into consideration, the good news is that sufficient electoral and demographic data exists to model maximum adult male enfranchisement rates at regular intervals between 1832 and 1868 for every constituency in the UK, including for every general election.

The two key sources that I’ve used to do this are parliamentary returns and the UK census. Parliamentary returns detailing how many voters were registered in each UK constituency were published on an almost annual basis between 1832 and 1868 (Figure 5). Census returns detailing the population within each constituency boundary were published every ten years. The decennial censuses also contained sufficient national and local population data broken down by age and gender to model the national rate of adult males in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland at each general election (Figure 1).

This data can then be broken down, displayed and interpreted in a number of ways. I’ve provided three examples in this article. The first (Figure 4) shows how maximum rates of adult male enfranchisement varied across England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the UK between 1831 and 1868. 1831 was the last general election held under the unreformed electoral system. Data for the period between 1832 and 1865 demonstrates changing enfranchisement rates under the reformed electoral system established in 1832. The increase in enfranchisement displayed in each of the four nations in 1868 reflects the changes to the electoral system implemented via the reform legislation of 1867-8 (commonly referred to as the Second Reform Act).

The second way that I’ve displayed this data is spatially via a map of several constituencies in the Midlands at the 1847 general election (Figure 6). Lighter shadings of green reflect a lower rate of enfranchisement, such as in Dudley, where a maximum of around 9% of adult males could vote under the £10 householder franchise, and the county constituency of Warwickshire North, where around 7% of men were registered under the county franchise. Darker shadings of green reflect higher rates of enfranchisement, such as in the boroughs of Lichfield and Coventry. In both constituencies a maximum of around 50% of adult males were theoretically enfranchised due to the continuation after 1832 of several ‘popular’ voting qualifications from the unreformed electoral system.

The third way that I’ve displayed the data is via a box and whisker plot of maximum adult male enfranchisement rates in every UK constituency at each general election between 1832 and 1865. This chart (Figure 8) which might appear confusing at first, is an incredibly efficient way of representing a lot of data.

The ‘box’ for each election year indicates the median, lower and upper quartile rates of enfranchisement across the UK at each election (50% of UK constituencies fit within these enfranchisement ranges). The ‘whiskers’ stretch to what statistically speaking can be considered the ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ rates of enfranchisement in UK constituencies. The dots reflect outliers. These outliers are constituencies with very high maximum adult male enfranchisement rates, which, as discussed above, need to be read sceptically.

Significantly, Figure 8 shows that while variations in adult male enfranchisement between UK constituencies narrowed markedly in the UK as the period wore on, enfranchisement rates remained persistently under 10% in a considerable number of constituencies and that over 1 in 4 men could vote in an equally large group of constituencies. Variation, rather than uniformity, remained the defining characteristic of the reformed UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868.

MS

Further Reading

M. Spychal, Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (2024)

P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841 (2002)

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation 1830-1850 (1953)

K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 (1984)

M. Dyer, Men of Property and Intelligence: The Scottish Electoral System Prior to 1884 (1996)

M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales 1832-1886 (2004)

D. Beales, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: the right to vote, and the opportunity’, Parliamentary History, xi (1992), 139-50

F. O’Gorman, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: a reply’, Parliamentary History, xii (1993), 171-83

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 25 February 2025, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

For a 20 minute talk about the Reform Act by Dr Philip Salmon please click here.

Much attention used to be focused on the number of voters enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act. The extent to which the overall increase of around 314,000 electors in the UK (from around 11 to 18% of adult males) amounted to some form of democratic advance, however, has always been complicated by the Act’s limitations as an enfranchising measure, especially given the huge expectations aroused by the popular outdoors campaign in its support. Not only were most working-class voters excluded from the Act’s new occupier franchises, helping to inspire the important Chartist movement, but also many working-class electors were actually deprived of their former voting rights.

In Maldon, for example, the number of electors dropped from over 3,000 in 1831 to just 716 in 1832. This was owing to the Act’s new restrictions on non-resident voters, honorary freemen and freemen created by marriage. Abolishing the votes obtained by marrying a freeman’s daughter was an aspect of the Reform Act which evidently caused all sorts of problems in some boroughs. Similar reductions occurred in Lancaster (72%), Ludlow (64%), Bridgnorth (50%) and Sudbury (49%), as the History of Parliament‘s detailed constituency articles reveal.

Add to this all the bureaucracy involved in the new yearly voter registration system – form filling, paying up arrears of rates, one shilling registration fees – and it is easy to see why so many people failed to benefit as expected from 1832. ‘Many doggedly refused to register’, noted one paper. ‘To the poor man’, complained another, ‘a shilling is a serious amount’. Taken as a whole, for every three new borough electors enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act, at least one pre-1832 voter was deprived of their voting rights. Another restriction with lasting cultural connotations was the Act’s formal limitation of the franchise, for the first time, exclusively to ‘male persons‘.

County voters faced fewer new restrictions, both in terms of continuing to exercise their old franchise (the 40 shilling freehold) even if they were non-resident, or claiming one of the new occupier (tenant, copyholder and leaseholder) franchises. But this did not make the impact of 1832 any more democratic.

One of the most strikingly resilient interpretations of county politics, put forward by the American sociologist D. C. Moore, has been the idea of ‘deference voting’. Vast numbers of newly enfranchised tenant farmers, Moore argued, overwhelmingly polled the same way as their landlords – willingly or otherwise – as part of ‘deference communities’, effectively bolstering the power of the aristocratic landed elite in Britain’s political system and the influence of traditional landed interests (see cartoon below). The tensions between agriculture and industry that underpinned so many 19th century political developments at Westminster, including of course the famous repeal of the corn laws in 1846, have often been linked back to this reconfiguration of British politics in 1832.

Another boost to the ‘county interest’, which is sometimes overlooked, resulted from the Reform Act’s redistribution clauses. As well abolishing the infamous ‘rotten’ boroughs and allocating new MPs to unrepresented towns and cities, almost the same number of extra MPs were given to the English counties. This was done by turning 26 existing county constituencies into 52 double member seats and allocating a third MP to seven counties. The impact on the House of Commons of increasing the number of English county MPs in this way, from 82 in 1831 to 144 in 1832, was arguably just as profound as the Act’s allocation of 63 new MPs to rapidly industrialising English towns, where most attention has traditionally been focussed.

New research by Dr Martin Spychal, published in his book Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act, helps to show just how important this reconfiguration of ‘interests’ and the complex boundary changes of the 1832 Reform Act were in reshaping Britain’s political landscape after 1832. Other pioneering research, carried out by Dr James Smith, has explored the Act’s broader impact on the evolving relationship between the four different nations of the UK and on Parliament’s use of UK-wide legislation in the early Victorian era.

In our own ongoing research on MPs and constituency politics for the 1832-68 project, it has been the cultural impact of reform that has really stood out. The way MPs behaved and the way their constituents expected them to behave clearly shifted as a result of reform, with many MPs – particularly those elected as radicals – becoming far more active and accountable and publicising their activities in the press and through constituency meetings as never before. The growing ‘rage for speaking’ in debate, the introduction of a new press gallery, new public access (including a ladies’ gallery), new voting lobbies and the formal publishing of votes of MPs were just some of the ways in which parliamentary politics began to become more open and ‘representative’ after 1832, just as many anti-reformers had feared. All this, however, was complicated by the parallel survival of many older traditions, especially in the pre-reform constituencies. Here almost tribal patterns of non-party voting, the cult of ‘independent’ MPs, the survival of many ‘pocket’ boroughs and above all the widespread use of bribery, drink and corruption at election time all helped to limit the pace of change after 1832.

Ultimately it would take many other reforms to Britain’s representative system, including the abolition of public voting in 1872 with the introduction of the secret ballot to really bring about more fundamental change.

Further Reading:

‘The English reform legislation, 1831-32’, in The House of Commons, 1820-32, ed. D. Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2009), i. 374-412  VIEW

‘Nineteenth-century electoral reform’, Modern History Review, xviii (2015), 8-12 VIEW

‘Electoral reform and the political modernization of England’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, xxiii (2003), 49-67  VIEW

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 7 June 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The 19^th century is traditionally seen as a key period of ‘democratisation’ in British politics. The reform acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 vastly expanded the number of people who could vote in elections (with the glaring exception of women) and created a constituency system based on similarly sized electoral districts. By the end of the century, a recognisably modern and almost democratic voting system had emerged, underpinning the legitimacy and authority of the elected House of Commons. But where did all this leave the ‘other place’, the unelected and hereditary House of Lords?

The traditional assumption has been that as the electoral system ‘democratised’, so too the Commons became the superior body in Parliament. The constitutional stand-off between the two Houses over the reform bill in 1831-2 is widely seen as a pivotal moment in this process. Under the threat of new pro-reform peers being created, the Lords were eventually forced to surrender to the Commons and agree to pass the 1832 Reform Act. And with a new electoral system in place after 1832, which limited the former ability of many members of the Lords to control elections, the Commons now had an even greater claim to be dominant and implement its policies without opposition.

The leader of the Tory anti-reformers in the Lords, the Duke of Wellington, had little doubt about the significance of the Reform Act, famously declaring that it would ‘destroy the House of Lords’. The constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot, writing 30 years later, agreed, arguing that the Reform Act had fundamentally altered the ‘function’ of the Lords, effectively making it a temporary ‘revising’ or ‘suspending’ chamber. Writing in 1908 the legal expert Lawrence Lowell noted how the ‘Great’ Reform Act had drawn ‘attention to the fact that an hereditary body, however great the personal influence of its members, could never … be the equal … of a representative chamber’. Chris Ballinger in his recent magisterial work on the 20^th century Lords has also suggested that ‘the power of the Lords diminished throughout the nineteenth century’.

One problem with this narrative though is that it does not capture the whole story. One of the most striking features to emerge from our ongoing research on the post-1832 House of Commons is the continuing role of the Lords in actively shaping and even deciding many aspects of the political agenda. Some of this occurred behind the scenes, but there was also a significant amount in terms of policy and procedural initiatives that have been overlooked.

An assertive Lords

Only a few months after the first reformed election of 1832 returned a huge majority for the Whig-Liberals, for instance, the Lords successfully managed to block the Whig ministry’s controversial Irish Church ‘appropriation’ reforms, in what the Ultra-Tory Lord Ellenborough gleefully termed a ‘triumph’. Emboldened, they then went on to modify the terms of the bill to abolish slavery in favour of slaveowners, before proceeding to throw out major reforms granting the admission of Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and allowing Jews to sit in Parliament. The Lords would continue to reject bills for Jewish emancipation – reforms that had passed the elected Commons – on another eight occasions before 1858.

The Lords became even more assertive after the 1835 election reduced the Whig government’s majority, rejecting or amending an all-time record number of Commons bills over the next two Parliaments. One of the most significant of these was the Whig ministry’s 1835 municipal corporations bill, replacing the old corporations that had governed English towns with newly elected town councils. Drawn up by the radical election agent Joseph Parkes, the bill that originally passed the Commons proposed abolishing all the freemen voters who had been admitted by the old corporations, despite their ‘ancient right’ privileges having been preserved under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act.

Latching on to this controversial clause, the Lords drastically amended the bill out of all recognition, arguing that disfranchising these freemen voters was not only grossly unfair, but a modification of the settlement of 1832 by stealth, which went way beyond the remit of a local council bill. Appalled by the attack on their ancient rights, freemen voters across the nation rallied behind the Lords’ amendments, in what became a popular and successful campaign. Sensing this was not the best issue on which to make a stand, the Whig leadership in the Commons reluctantly accepted most of the Lords’ changes, including the preservation of freemen voters. As Joseph Parkes later admitted, ‘we committed a great mistake in the bill. It was absurdly foolish … to attack the freemen … Nor was it exactly fair to attempt it through the municipal bill. We were clearly … causing unpopularity among a large class of the people’.

On this issue, as on many others that followed, the Lords had clearly managed to gauge and represent public opinion in a way that challenged the authority of the Commons. The results of the next general election seemed to vindicate their actions. In 1837 the Whig government’s majority was almost completely wiped out, with most freemen voters supporting anti-Whig candidates.

This notion of the House of Lords being able to articulate the ‘will of the people’ more accurately than the Commons is most famously associated with the extraordinary theories developed later in the 19^th century by the 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury. The leader of the Conservatives in the Lords from 1881-1902, and three times Conservative prime minister, Salisbury did more than anyone else to fashion a ‘doctrine’ of the Lords being a genuinely representative assembly, untainted by party diktats and the ‘demagoguery’ of election cycles. As Salisbury put it in June 1869:

We must try to impress upon the country the fact that, [just] because we are not an elective House, we are not a bit less a representative House … It may be that the House of Commons in determining the opinion of the nation is wrong; and … does not represent the full … convictions of the nation.

After 1885 Salisbury and other Tory peers even began to suggest that owing to the representative deficiencies of the new first-past-the-post system – a system which ironically Salisbury himself had helped to implement in 1885 – the Lords could be a better interpreter of public feeling than the Commons, with its ‘crude’ non-proportional election system based on simple ‘bare majorities’.

The most striking example of Salisbury’s ‘doctrine’ in action was the Lords’ rejection of Gladstone’s second Irish Home Rule bill by 419 votes to 41 in 1893, incidentally the largest Lords vote of the century. Salisbury insisted that Irish Home Rule had not been sufficiently mandated at the previous general election and needed clearer national support, as part of what became known as his ‘referendal theory’. In 1894 the Lords threw out other Commons bills on similar grounds, dealing with employers’ liabilities and arbitration for evicted Irish tenants. The result of the 1895 general election then rewarded Salisbury and the Conservative-Unionists with a substantial majority, seemingly vindicating Salisbury’s claims about the Lords being more representative than the Commons and the ‘conscience of the nation’.

Opposition to the Lords

Not everyone accepted the idea that the Lords enjoyed this representative function. The Lords’ steady rejection of bills approved by the Commons – whether it was the civil and religious reforms of the 1830s, financial measures such as the repeal of paper duties in the 1860s, military reforms in the 1870s, electoral reforms in the 1880s, and almost every bill relating to Ireland – triggered regular calls for reform of the Lords in the popular press, on the hustings and eventually in the Commons itself.

Earlier demands for change in the mid-1830s by radicals such as George Grote and John Roebuck and the Irish agitator Daniel O’Connell included plans to replace all hereditary peers with elected delegates, and to deprive the Lords of their ability to completely reject bills. Removing the bishops also became a standard demand. These under-studied proposals, many of which resemble today’s arguments, provided a field-day for satirists but rarely made it to the floor of the Commons, let alone a vote.

By the 1850s, however, a number of leading Whigs and Liberals had also begun to contemplate changes to the Upper House. Faced with likely opposition in the Lords on major policies such the repeal of navigation laws, for example, the prime minister Lord John Russell repeatedly considered introducing life peerages for distinguished men from outside the Commons, only to be dissuaded by his Cabinet warning that this could lead to the ‘packing’ of the Lords by the government of the day, again a familiar modern argument. In the end Russell, like other party leaders, was forced to fall back on the use of ‘proxy votes’ – voting rights transferred by absent peers to other Lords – to get his government’s agenda through. The abolition of these proxies in 1868 by a standing order undoubtedly made it more difficult for some later governments to manage the Lords, increasing the calls for reform.

In 1856 a solitary ‘trial’ life peerage was eventually created with the approval of the Queen, to bolster the legal expertise available to Palmerston’s government. Sir James Parke, a noted jurist, was ennobled as Baron Wensleydale. When it came to it, however, the Lords refused to let him take his seat, arguing that his life peerage would dilute the hereditary honour of the House and establish a dangerous precedent. Wensleydale was quickly upgraded to a hereditary peerage. It would not be until 1876 that two senior judges were admitted to the Lords on a temporary basis, and not until 1887 that these new ‘law lords’ were then made into peers for life.

More substantive proposals for Lords reform eventually emerged in the last two decades of the 19^th century, against the backdrop of Salisbury’s increasingly bold assertions about the Lords’ representative mandate. In 1884, 1886 and 1888 the radical MP Henry Labouchere introduced motions to abolish the Lords, each time increasing his Commons support. In 1894 he won a vote in the Commons calling for the removal of the Lords’ ability to reject bills. No legislation was prepared, however, before the 1895 election brought Salisbury back into power.

Meanwhile in the Lords itself the future Liberal leader Lord Rosebery moved for a committee to look at life peerages and restrictions on hereditary peers in 1884. Four years later he proposed bringing in elections for a limited number of hereditary peers, who would serve a fixed term, and life peerages for delegates representing local councils and some overseas colonies. None of these initiatives was successful. The idea of life peerages, and making hereditary peers undertake some form of public service before they qualified to sit, was later taken up by a group of young, dashing aristocratic MPs in the Commons, famously led by the Liberal Unionist William Palmer and the Conservative George Curzon (later viceroy of India and leader of the House of Lords). As their campaign showed, by the 1890s even some Conservative-Unionists were also beginning to advocate change, not to restrict the Lords’ powers – the policy increasingly favoured by most Liberals and the National Liberal Federation – but instead to enhance the Lords’ legitimacy and authority.

Why wasn’t the Lords reformed during the 19^th century?

This takes us back to the question of why the Lords, unlike the Commons, avoided being constitutionally reformed during the 19^th century? The traditional argument that the Lords adopted a more submissive role following the 1832 Reform Act, accepting the superior status of the Commons, is clearly not the answer. Both in terms of the number of bills the Lords blocked or amended after 1832, and in terms of developing its own distinct claim to reflect the will of the nation, it remained a highly assertive and influential body. The number of public petitions that continued to be sent to the Lords provides yet another indicator of its importance as a national forum for drawing parliamentary attention to all sorts of political causes, and as a useful arbiter of local grievances.

Linked to this, the Lords also performed a crucial but much overlooked role in managing private legislation. The latest edition of How Parliament Works notes that the ‘vast majority’ of laws passed by Parliament ‘and by far the more important, are public’. Throughout the 19^th century, however, exactly the opposite was true. Not only did ‘private’ acts of Parliament (not to be confused with private members’ bills) completely transform the physical environment and create Britain’s modern infrastructure – legalising the construction of railways, canals, tramways, docks, sewers, roads, bridges, museums, parks, and essential utilities such as water, gas and electricity (to name but a few) – but they also outnumbered ‘public’ acts by a factor of more than two to one well into the 20th century. The sheer volume of private bill work undertaken by the Lords, particularly from the 1840s, eventually forced them to develop new, streamlined legislative procedures, many of which went on to be copied or adapted by the Commons and transferred to the handling of public business as well.

The fact that so many prime ministers sat in the Lords rather than in the Commons also helped to bolster its status and legitimacy. Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as peers, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. 

Underpinning this, rather than being separate or even rival institutions, as is sometimes assumed, the Victorian Commons and Lords were deeply integrated in terms of their practical business, politics and personnel. Family ties and patronage networks ensured a very close working relationship between members of both Houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages. Behind the scenes, both the membership of the Lords and the Commons also began to adapt, reflecting new types of wealth associated with industrialisation and the professions such as banking and commerce. Over 40% of the new peers created after 1882 were from non-landed backgrounds.

Most significant of all, the Lords certainly didn’t oppose every progressive measure sent up from the Commons, instead passing many reforms that are now viewed as key milestones in Britain’s political development. It granted Dissenters equal civil rights in 1828, finally agreed to pass Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed the Catholic college of Maynooth to be state funded in 1845, despite so many Lords (and bishops) being staunchly Protestant Anglicans.

In 1846 the Lords even backed Peel’s highly controversial repeal of the corn laws, despite its membership being overwhelmingly landed and major beneficiaries of agricultural protection. Significantly, the rebellion of the Conservative party on this issue against Peel was actually lower in the Lords than it was in the Commons. In 1867, despite huge misgivings, the Lords also agreed to pass Disraeli’s second Reform Act, the greatest extension of voting rights of the 19^th century, only eclipsed in its scope by the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

The fact that it was Tory / Conservative governments that proposed so many of these major reforms of the 19^th century clearly helped to reduce the number of conflicts between the two Houses during this period. Despite years of Liberal peerage creations, the Lords always remained a Tory chamber, with Liberal membership peaking at 40% in 1880. The dominance of the Tory peers combined with their loyalty to party – ironically the very thing that Salisbury liked to criticise the Commons for – ensured that most Tory bills, even highly controversial ones, nearly always passed the Lords.

This partisan bias of the House of Lords is of course often viewed as the cause of its undoing in the early 20^th century, when its veto over legislation was finally reduced to a delaying power of two years by the 1911 Parliament Act. But for most of the 19^th century this same partisan Tory bias also helped the Lords to survive. For as long as Conservative ministries continued to enact progressive reforms in the national interest, the number of dramatic ‘peers versus people’ moments remained limited, keeping the Lords on the right side of history.

PS

Further reading:

A. Adonis, Making aristocracy work: the peerage and the political system in Britain 1884-1914 (1993)

C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911-2011 (2012)

R. Davis, A political history of the House of Lords 1811-1846 (2008)

R. Davis (ed.), Lords of Parliament. Studies, 1714-1914 (1995)

R. Davis (ed.), Leaders in the Lords 1765-1902 (2003)

R. Davis, ‘Wellington, Peel and the House of Lords in the 1840s’, in C. Jones, P. Salmon & R. Davis (eds.), Partisan politics, principle and reform in Parliament and the constituencies, 1689-1880 (2005), 164-82

R. Davis, ‘House of Lords, 1801-1911’, in C. Jones (ed.), A Short History of Parliament (2009), 193-210

J. Hogan, ‘Party management in the House of Lords, 1846-1865’, Parliamentary History (1991), x. 124-50

D. Large, ‘The decline of the “party of the crown” and the rise of parties in the House of Lords, 1783-1837’, English Historical Review (1963), lxxviii. 669-95

G. Le May, The Victorian Constitution (1979), 127-51

Lord Longford, A history of the House of Lords (1988)

A. Lowell, The government of England (1908), i. 394-422

P. Salmon, ‘Parliament’, in D. Brown et al (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Modern British political history, 1800-2000 (2018), 83-102

E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815-1911 (1992)

R. Smith (ed.), The House of Lords: a thousand years of British tradition (1994)

A. Turberville, ‘The House of Lords and the Advent of Democracy, 1837-67’, History (1944), xxix. 152-83

C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and ideological politics. Lord Salisbury’s referendal theory and the Conservative party, 1846-1922 (1995)

C. Comstock Weston, ‘Salisbury and the Lords, 1868-1895’, Historical Journal (1982), xxv. 103-29

Harriet Grote (1792-1878) was one of the most important British politicians of the 1830s. As I’ve discussed in my previous articles, she had been a key figure among London’s intellectual radicals during the previous decade, before embracing national politics, alongside her husband, George Grote (1794-1871), during the reform crisis of 1830-32.

In the aftermath of George’s election as MP for London in 1832, Harriet wasted little time establishing herself at Westminster. At a time when women weren’t allowed to vote or sit in Parliament (or for that matter play any formal, public role in political life), Harriet became a highly influential figure behind the scenes at Westminster. One of the first things that she did was to establish herself as the hostess of 34 Parliament Street, which quickly became a political hub for reformers and radicals during the 1833 parliamentary session.

The 1832 election (the first election after the 1832 Reform Act) returned one of the most radical Houses of Commons in UK history. When Parliament convened in January 1833 around a third of Westminster’s 658 MPs described themselves as either Reformers, Radicals or Repealers, as distinct from the governing Whigs or opposition Conservatives.

One of the key political issues that served to unite these radicals and reformers (or the ‘popular party’ as Harriet described them) was their demand for additional electoral reforms beyond those granted by the 1832 Reform Act. Top on their list was the introduction of secret voting or ‘the ballot’, which it was hoped would put an end to illegitimate aristocratic and landlord influence at elections.

In January 1833 Harriet and George hosted discussions among Parliament’s reformers and radicals (including veteran radical MPs Henry Warburton and Joseph Hume) to identify who would spearhead the issue in Parliament. With Harriet ‘joining most cordially in the counsel’ it was agreed that her husband George ‘should be the person to undertake the ballot question in the ensuing session of Parliament’.

As I will discuss in a future blog, Harriet was one of the chief organisers of the popular, though ultimately futile, national campaign for the ballot during the 1830s. In the immediate context of 1833, however, it provided her with an opportunity to announce herself to Parliament and to extend her network of political contacts.

One of the most important physical sites of women’s engagement in the House of Parliament prior to the fire of 1834 was an informal women’s viewing gallery above the Commons, often referred to as the ‘ventilator’. Harriet preferred to call it ‘The Lantern’, observing that it allowed for ‘ten or twelve persons’ to be ‘so placed as to hear, and to a certain extent see, what passed in the body of the House’.

In preparation for George’s impending parliamentary motion on the ballot, in February 1833 Harriet ‘made an experiment’ and attended the ventilator for the first time. ‘Going with Fanny [Frances] Ord’, the wife of the MP for Newport, William Henry Ord, Harriet reported that ‘one hears very well, but seeing is difficult, being distant from the members, and the apertures in the ventilator being small and grated’.

When the night eventually arrived for George to introduce his first ballot motion, Harriet effectively held court in the ventilator before hosting a soiree at their Parliament Street residence.

After listening intently to George’s hour-long speech, she described how ‘immediately afterwards’ William Molesworth (MP for East Cornwall) ‘joined me upstairs, in the roof of the House’ and ‘poured out his admiration of [George] Grote’s performance’. In what soon became an annual tradition (on account of George’s repeated parliamentary motions for the ballot), ‘the whole corps of Radicals’ then descended on 34 Parliament Street ‘to come and pour out their congratulations’ for their efforts in promoting the cause.

The Grotes’ association with the ballot instantly elevated them to the forefront of British radical politics. This position was cemented over the following year by Harriet’s unceasing efforts to forge alliances with those she identified as the most important ‘respectable Rads’ at Westminster and beyond.

Harriet quickly cultivated an inner circle of leading politicians, thinkers, journalists and lawyers, who she invited to extended weekend political salons at the Grotes’ ‘country residence’ in Dulwich Wood. As well as the aforementioned Henry Warburton and Joseph Hume, senior radical dignitaries such as Francis Place might be found there on a Saturday evening talking political strategy with Harriet and George in the company of rising new MPs such as John Arthur Roebuck, Charles Buller and William Molesworth, the editor of the Spectator, Robert Rintoul, the writer Sarah Austin, or the young utilitarian, John Stuart Mill.  

She was even willing to defy social convention and drive her guests back into London after their stays, offering another opportunity to extend her political influence. In one particularly revealing passage, in 1834 Harriet recalled:

driving my phaeton to London one morning [from Dulwich Wood], with Molesworth by my side, C[harles] Buller and Roebuck in the seat behind. During the whole six miles, these three vied with each other as to who should make the most outrageous Radical motions in the House [of Commons], the two behind standing up and talking, sans intermission, all the way, to Molesworth and myself.

Unfortunately for Harriet her efforts to organise Westminster’s reformers and radicals did not translate into immediate political results. Parliament itself, she lamented, still contained a majority of ‘men so lamentably deficient in patriotism and purity of principle’ that substantive change did not appear immediately likely. These ‘deficient’ men included the Whigs and the Conservatives, who had effectively formed an alliance of the centre to frustrate radical policy, and the ‘coarse and violent’ (in Harriet’s words) leader of the Irish Repealers, Daniel O’Connell, whom she never trusted.

Harriet’s hope that the Whig government of the 2nd Earl Grey might support her radical ambitions was quashed within a single Parliament. It was for this reason that she relished one small political victory in June 1834, when her husband, together with Henry Ward, MP for St. Albans, introduced a crucial vote over the funding of the Irish Church. The vote prompted the resignation of two cabinet ministers. A month later the Grey ministry would resign.

The ‘rupture of the Cabinet on the Irish Church question, has put us in great spirits’, Harriet informed her sister. What made this moment so positive for Harriet was that in voting against the Whig government, previously subservient MPs appeared to be acting on behalf of the people, rather than aristocratic, ministerial self-interest. The vote ‘was a remarkable proof’, Harriet wrote, of

how powerful the popular party are in that House, for the men who usually support this Government were forced from fear of their constituents to abandon the Ministers.

In my next article I’ll turn my attention to Harriet’s attempts to guide ‘the popular party’ following the 1835 election…

To read part four of Martin’s article series click here

Further Reading

S. Richardson, ‘A Regular Politician in Breeches: The Life and Work of Harriet Lewin Grote’, in K. Demetrious (ed.), Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition (2014)

A. Galvin-Elliot, ‘An Artist in the Attic: Women and the House of Commons in the Early-Nineteenth Century‘, Victorian Commons (2018)

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

J. Hamburger, ‘Grote [née Lewin], Harriet’, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com

H. Grote, Collected Papers: In Prose and Verse 1842-1862 (1862)

M. L. Clarke, George Grote: A Biography (1962)

H. Grote (ed.), Posthumous Papers: Comprising Selections from Familiar Correspondence (1874)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 29 September 2021, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

On 18 July 2022 we marked the anniversary of the Ballot Act with an online event, in collaboration with the Parliamentary Archives. This event was recorded and can now be viewed here.

Before 1872 voting at general elections in the UK was a public act. If you were fortunate enough to be enfranchised (the UK had a limited and locally variable male suffrage), your vote at the polling booth was public knowledge. It was available for your neighbours, landlords and employers to view in perpetuity, often via easily available published pollbooks.

British radical politicians had been calling for the introduction of secret voting at general elections – or ‘the ballot’ as it was generally referred to at the time – since the 1790s. While their theories varied, most radicals reasoned that secret voting would shift the balance of power in the electoral system from the corrupt aristocracy to the people, by ending voter intimidation and electoral bribery, and reducing exorbitant election costs.

In the aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act, the ballot became a central demand of radicals and reformers both inside and outside Parliament. It was one of the major issues on the hustings at the 1832, 1835 and 1837 elections, and from 1833 MPs voted almost annually on whether to implement the measure. The 1830s represented a high point for the ballot as a popular political cause, and by 1839 221 MPs were willing to support its introduction.

During the 1830s the public leader of the ballot campaign was the MP for London, George Grote (1794-1871). Behind the scenes, however, it was his wife, Harriet (1792-1878), who organised much of the campaign. In my previous articles I’ve discussed how Harriet rallied support among MPs at Westminster for George’s annual ballot motions, her attempts to establish a radical party at Westminster after the 1835 election, and her increasing exasperation with radical parliamentary tactics by 1836.

As the 1837 parliamentary session approached, Harriet and George sought to galvanise radical forces at Westminster and in the country by trying to turn talk and theory about the ballot into a realistic prospect. While MPs had voted on parliamentary motions for the ballot in 1833, 1835 and 1836, the fine detail of what they had been voting for had been unclear. If MPs approved of the ballot, what would a Ballot Act look like, and how would secret voting work in practice?

Harriet took to solving both issues and publicising their solutions ahead of a planned parliamentary debate and vote on the ballot in February 1837. The first issue at hand was the creation of draft legislation. To do this she enlisted her friend, the barrister and reformer, Sutton Sharpe (1797-1843). In February he mocked up a draft ballot bill with Harriet, which she published in the Spectator.

The response to the bill was mixed. She wrote to Sharpe exclaiming:

I am almost as fagged as George himself, with helping him in his many tasks. I have sundry letters to reply to from new correspondents who have let fly at him since the apparition of “the [Ballot] bill” in last Sunday’s Spectator.

One of the key discussion points was: what would an actual ballot box look like and how would it work? The easy option – and Sharpe’s preferred solution – was a box that voters slipped voting cards into – similar to that in use in the UK today. For Harriet though and many others (including the ballot’s opponents) a simple box left too much room for fraud from election officials and voters.

As a result, Harriet advocated a more complex machine that required voters to punch holes in preloaded cards, and that allowed for illiterate and blind electors to vote with the verbal support of an election officer in a different room – but also for that election officer to monitor the process of the voting card entering the ballot box.

A week after the publication of their ballot bill, Harriet published plans in the Spectator of their proposed ballot box, which she and George had developed with a Hertford carpenter, William Thomas.

Once a physical model was built, Harriet then sought endorsements from high profile public figures, including her close friend, the mathematician, inventor and ‘father of the computer’, Charles Babbage (1791-1871). She wrote to Babbage in April 1837:

I have been desirous of sending to your house the model of the balloting frame which we have adopted … You can show it to your friends who take an interest in the subject. It has been exhibited at the Reform Club.

Babbage was evidently enamoured with the model, forcing Harriet to wrest it from his possession in June, when she wrote to him ‘permit me to ask for the balloting case, per chariot herewith’.

With their models and bill in hand, parliamentary support for the ballot increased to 160 MPs in February 1837. The Grotes’ campaign was then given further impetus by the 1837 general election, which was prompted by the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria. The results were dispiriting for radicals and reformers as Conservative candidates won over 300 Commons seats. Harriet and many radicals across the country blamed the rise in Conservative fortunes on ‘venality and corruption in the old boroughs, and intimidation in the counties’. These were symptoms that Harriet and George were sure the ballot would cure.

To ensure that MPs continued to feel public pressure to support the ballot, Harriet and George paid for around 40 of their model ballot boxes, which they distributed to leading radicals and reformers across the country by November 1837. Their hope was that the boxes would be displayed at public meetings, which would then petition Parliament in favour of the ballot.

Demand for the model ballot boxes quickly caught on. Harriet wrote to her ally, the veteran radical, Francis Place, asking:

Could you let me have that ballot box again now you have shewn it to most of your people? I really can’t get them back from country towns, fast enough to circulate, and are hard up for one to go to Worcester by special request from the radical mayor of that town Mr. [George] Allies and his co-rads.

Requests for ballot boxes, and levels of incoming correspondence, were so high by December 1837 that the Grotes set up a ‘London Ballot Union’ to co-ordinate their public campaign. In doing so they sought to replicate the strategies of the parliamentary reform and anti-slavery movements of the early 1830s.

Harriet wasn’t the only woman helping to co-ordinate the campaign either. In December 1837 she wrote to Mary Gaskell, the ‘formidable’ wife of the former MP for Wakefield, Daniel Gaskell:

If you will return Mr Oldham’s model (as he seems ravenous for it), you can have one for yourself now, by writing to the secretary to our new Ballot Union … We have now ceased to be the issuers of models, being, to tell you the truth, somewhat weary of furnishing them to so many applications gratis. We have fixed it upon Mr. [William] Thomas, who supplies them at the cost price, 24s. …. We have had shoals of letters expressive of delight with, and approbation of, the contrivance; and many who wished for secrecy yet mistrusted its being attained, have become hearty balloteers since “the box” was exhibited to them.

The campaigning worked and Parliament received 365 petitions signed by 181,506 persons from across the country during the 1837-8 session. It even inspired Cleave’s Penny Gazette to publish an illustrated depiction of a ballot box in operation (see below). Despite a decline in the number of radical and reformer MPs since the 1837 election (many of whom were beginning to call themselves ‘Liberals’), the number of MPs willing to support Grote’s annual ballot motion in February 1838 increased to 203 (from 160 the previous year).

Constituency pressure on non-Conservative MPs then became so much that by the following year the Whig Melbourne government was forced to declare the ballot an open issue. This meant that when Grote held his annual ballot vote in June 1839, 221 MPs supported his motion, 18 of whom were either in the Whig cabinet or in lesser government positions.

However, while on paper the June 1839 vote appears to be a high point in the ballot campaign, in private Harriet and George had accepted it had come to an end. While the ballot had been the popular issue in town meetings across the country in the winter of 1837-8, it was no match for the more visceral and emotive demands of the People’s Charter (1838), the Anti-Corn Law League (est. 1838), and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (est. 1839).

All was not well among Parliament’s dwindling band of radicals either, who had irreparably split over how to respond to the rebellions of 1837-1838 in Canada and the government’s proposed suspension of the Jamaican constitution in 1839. George confessed in private to only introducing the June 1839 ballot motion in order that members could ‘satisfy their constituents’. And Harriet was dismayed at the response at Westminster:

the flatness of debate itself was incontestable, insomuch that scarcely a soul called to say a word to me respecting it; a melancholy contrast with previous occasions, when the whole corps of Radicals were wont to come and pour out their congratulations.

For Harriet and George, the 1839 ballot motion marked the beginning of the end of their parliamentary aspirations. It was also the end, at least temporarily, for the prospects of the ballot. It would be another two decades before Parliament exhibited such high levels of support for allowing electors to vote in secret.

MS

To read Martin’s earlier articles on Harriet Grote click here

Part 1: ‘‘Had she been a man, she would have been the leader of a party’: Harriet Grote (1792-1878), radicalism and Parliament, 1820-41’

Part 2: ‘The radical hostess of Parliament Street: Harriet Grote (1792-1878), the 1832 election and establishing influence as a woman at Westminster’

Part 3: ‘Harriet Grote (1792-1878) and the first reformed Parliament, 1833-34: a woman at Westminster’

Part 4: ‘‘Another of my female politicians’ epistles’: Harriet Grote (1792-1878), the 1835 Parliament and the failed attempt to establish a radical party’

Part 5: ‘‘She, yes, she was the only member of parliament’: Harriet Grote, radical parliamentary tactics and House of Lords reform, 1835-6’

Part 6: ‘Ballot boxes, bills and unions: Harriet Grote (1792-1878) and the public campaign for the ballot, 1832-9’

Further Reading

S. Richardson, ‘A Regular Politician in Breeches: The Life and Work of Harriet Lewin Grote’, in K. Demetrious (ed.), Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition (2014)

B. Kinzer, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics (1982)

J. Hamburger, ‘Grote [née Lewin], Harriet (1792-1878)’, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

H. Grote, Collected Papers: In Prose and Verse 1842-1862 (1862)

H. Grote (ed.), Posthumous Papers: Comprising Selections from Familiar Correspondence (1874)

M. L. Clarke, George Grote: A Biography (1962)

When the reformed Parliament first met on Tuesday 29 January 1833 many people speculated about the way the reconfigured House of Commons would conduct its business. Fear that the Whig government would be unduly influenced by newly elected Reformers and Radicals, who might try to seize the initiative over legislation was widespread in conservative circles in the early weeks of the new parliament.

A contemporary analysis of non-Conservative MPs returned at the 1832 general election identified 145 Reformers, 40 Radicals, 33 Irish Repealers and two Liberals, who saw the Reform Act as a springboard for further constitutional change, and 194 Whigs, who could be counted on to support the 23 members of Lord Grey’s administration. The Parliamentary Review, in turn, identified 96 ‘Liberals’ who on questions of reform would ‘go almost as much beyond the Whigs as the Whigs do beyond the Conservatives’. It was this ‘Movement party’, that disturbed the alarmists who ‘dreaded the ascendancy’ of a faction whose ‘noise and swagger’ might ‘bear down the good sense and staunch principle’ of the Commons.

On 29 January nearly 400 MPs assembled in the House, a much greater number than anyone remembered seeing on the first day of any previous parliament. Amidst the bustle and excitement it was observed that the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, and the veteran reformer, William Cobbett, who had been returned for the newly-enfranchised borough of Oldham, were among the earliest attendants and confidently took their seats on the Treasury bench, close to the leader of the House, Lord Althorp. After briefly attending the Lords on the summons of Black Rod, the first business of the Commons was to elect a speaker. Immediately, the veteran Radical MP for Middlesex, Joseph Hume, seized an opportunity to challenge the authority of the government by questioning its proposal to grant a £4,000 annuity to Charles Manners Sutton, the speaker since 1806. Aware that ministers had disagreed over their candidate for the speakership and had opted to support Sutton, Hume nominated Edward Littleton, MP for South Staffordshire, whose candidacy the government had explicitly rejected, but who, Hume announced, had ‘shown himself a zealous Reformer’. The motion was seconded by another veteran radical, Sir Francis Burdett, MP for Westminster, and was supported by O’Connell. Littleton, however, expressed ‘repugnance’ at being nominated, and the motion was defeated by 32 votes to 242, the minority including Sutton, who had voted for Littleton ‘as a matter of etiquette’.

Two days later Sutton took the chair and a ‘considerable’ number of MPs were sworn in according to the alphabetical order of the counties in which their constituencies were situated. After an unusually long king’s speech was delivered from the throne on 5 February, a ‘quite unprecedented’ four days’ of angry debate ensued, which turned on the condition of Ireland. An attempt by the Repeal MP for Dublin, Edward Ruthven, to adjourn the debate on 7 February was defeated by a majority of 236, and the following day O’Connell called for a committee of the whole House to inquire into the necessity of an Irish coercion bill. He was defeated by 42-430, and a more moderate motion by the Lambeth MP, Charles Tennyson, went down by 60-393. Next it was the turn of Cobbett to move his own amendment to the address after observing that ‘the two factions of Whigs and Tories’ had now clearly ‘united against the people’. He was, however, no more successful than O’Connell, losing the division by 23 to 323.

In spite of these Radical failures, the disordered state of the reformed Commons had, according to the diarist Charles Greville, provided anti-Reformers ‘with a sort of melancholy triumph’ as their ‘worst expectations’ were fulfilled. The government, they believed, had failed to manage a House that Greville regarded as very different to the last, pointing to ‘the number of strange faces’ and ‘the swagger of O’Connell, walking about incessantly, making signs to, or talking with his followers’. The Tories were ‘few and scattered’ and their putative leader, Sir Robert Peel, had been evicted from his usual seat in the House by Cobbett and the Radicals, who although ‘scattered’ and leaderless appeared ‘numerous, restless, turbulent’ and increasingly confident.

Although the government rallied after Lord Althorp put forward his plan to reform the Irish Church ‘with complete success’ on 13 February, its satisfaction was tempered the following day when Hume moved to abolish military and naval sinecures and pensions. This time he was defeated by a narrower margin of 94, prompting Greville to complain about ‘the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency’ of the new Members, who behaved as if they had taken the Commons ‘by storm’. He was not alone in believing that the government had no power to control them, and so risked ‘a virtual transfer of the executive power to the House of Commons’, which ‘like animals who have once tasted blood’ would ‘never rest till it has acquired all the authority of the Long Parliament’. However, that danger was averted largely due to the influence of Peel, who according to one observer had demonstrated ‘prodigious superiority’ over every other Member of the House during the session and would, it was hoped, persuade his ‘frightened, angry, and sulky’ party to help the ministry to pass its most controversial measure yet, a draconian bill to suppress disorder in Ireland.

With the cabinet divided over the matter, some observers doubted the government’s ability to carry this measure unaltered. Introduced in the Lords by the premier, Lord Grey, on 15 February, the bill was there passed a week later. However, its passage through the Commons was obstructed by O’Connell, who initiated a debate during a supply vote on 18 February. During six nights of debate on the issue, the Cashel MP, James Roe, called for government correspondence on the bill to be produced, and Ruthven twice tried to adjourn the debate but was easily defeated by margins of around 400. O’Connell successfully moved for a call of the House to ensure that the first reading of the bill would be well attended, the turn out reportedly being the largest yet seen in the House, where even the upper side galleries were ‘filled to overflowing’. It did O’Connell little good, however, and the first reading passed by 466-89. The following day Ruthven failed to prevent the government from debating sugar duties, mustering only nine votes, leaving Hume to observe that the first occasion on which the reformed House had met to impose taxes fewer than half the 314 new MPs were present, which ‘did not say much’ for their ‘industry and attention’. The following day Hume’s own intervention prior to the vote on the army estimates was defeated by 23 to 201, and on 11 March the second reading of the Irish coercion bill was endorsed by 363-84. After six more nights of ‘wordy warfare’, the bill passed into law virtually unaltered.

The Radicals’ attempt to alter the course of the government’s programme of legislation had been a signal failure, and it would be some time before they recognised that in the face of a revived Conservative party the best way to pursue progressive reform was to work wherever possible in tandem with the Whig majority.

S B

C. C. F. Greville (ed. H. Reeve), The Greville Memoirs. A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV. and King William IV. (1874), vol. 2.

S. Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (1890), vol. 3.

Morning Chronicle, 30 Jan. 1833.

Hereford Journal, 6 Feb. 1833.

Follow the work of our Commons 1832-1868 project at the Victorian Commons blog page.

What influenced a nineteenth-century MP when they voted over policy and governments in the Commons? Were they voting for ideological reasons or to advance their personal and business interests? Were they voting disinterestedly or following the dictates of prototypical party whips? Were they voting on behalf of their constituents or countrymen and women? Or were they voting in response to shifts in public opinion and extra-parliamentary campaigns?

The voting records of MPs in the Commons – which were published officially by Parliament from 1836 – are a vital source for researchers trying to answer these questions. The History of Parliament Trust has digitised a very substantial number of these official voting records, as part of a longer-term project to develop digital resources on MP voting.

This data includes over 20,000 Commons division lists between 1836 and 1910. In doing so they have created an incredible set of ‘big data’ that has huge potential for historians trying to understand the relationship between Westminster, the post-1832 reformed electoral system and nineteenth-century UK politics and political culture.

My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 16 March introduces the work that I’ve been doing to develop this dataset into a resource that can be used to help answer the kind of questions outlined above. It uses a constituency-led analysis of voting in the Commons between 1832 and 1868 to examine the diversity of party labels in the reformed UK electoral system, provide a four-nation analysis of MP behaviour in the division lobbies, and explore the political effects of England’s reformed constituency system after 1832.

One of the things that I’ve been doing to expand the original datasets has been to include the unofficial records of votes in the Commons that took place after the 1832 Reform Act but before the official publication of divisions in February 1836. These voting records, which for major votes were usually highly reliable, were published in the press or in dedicated books, such as Richard Gooch’s The Book of the Reformed Parliament.

I’ve also been exploring ways of analysing MPs voting records against the mass of parliamentary returns published by Parliament during the nineteenth century relating to voters and constituencies. One really helpful method of doing so has been to visualise constituency and voting data using geographic information system [GIS] software.

Unlike today, where the UK electoral system operates under a single-member constituency system, in the nineteenth century most constituencies returned two MPs, and some returned up to four. This means constituency maps for the UK during the nineteenth century have to be presented in a different way to the ones you might be used to seeing on election night, which show a constituency in a certain colour depending on an MP’s party.

The map above is one method I’ve used for understanding how MPs for different constituencies voted in the Commons between 1832 and 1868. It visualises how MPs for Yorkshire and Lancashire voted on 26 February 1835, when they were asked whether to accept the policy agenda of the new Conservative Government led by Sir Robert Peel.

A dark blue constituency (such as Lancaster) indicates that both of its MPs voted for Peel. A white constituency returned a neutral vote, either because both its MPs cancelled out each other’s votes (such as Leeds) or none of its MPs voted (such as Pontefract and Oldham). And a dark orange constituency (such as Yorkshire West Riding) indicates that both of its MPs voted against Peel. A light blue (Warrington) or light orange (Thirsk) constituency indicates a single vote for or against Peel respectively, either because it was a single-member constituency or because one member was absent.

As well as having a very different constituency system, the nineteenth-century Commons was filled with MPs who identified with an array of different party labels to those in use today. While many referred to themselves as Conservatives or Liberals, others preferred terms such as Reformer, Whig, Repealer, Radical, Protectionist, Independent Opposition, Liberal Conservative or Chartist, and some even refused a party label. Party was also used in a much more fluid sense than today, usually as shorthand to identify the political principles of an MP rather than their membership of a formal party organisation.

To make an analysis of MP voting as faithful to the conditions of the nineteenth century as possible I’ve been linking the voting records of MPs to a new database of party labels that I’ve been developing for the period. This database assigns an MP a contemporary party label based on annual copies of The Parliamentary Pocket Companion, manuscript sources, newspaper reports of election results, speeches and election addresses of MPs. These party labels can then be used in conjunction with voting records as a starting point for identifying shifting levels of party discipline in the Commons, and how particular issues came to define or split groupings of MPs.

To find out more Martin’s full length paper ‘The geography of voting behaviour: towards a roll-call analysis of England’s reformed electoral map, 1832-68’ is available here

Martin will be taking questions about his research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 16 March 2021. To register for this Virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Martin, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

If there was a History of Parliament award for ‘constituency most under the thumb of an aristocratic patron’, the Highland county of Sutherland would be a top contender. Following the Act of Union in 1707 a succession of earls, ladies, dukes and duchesses of Sutherland effectively controlled who would represent the county at Westminster.

The 1832 Reform Act, which extended Sutherland’s electorate from 20 life-rent tenants to a mere 104 voters (or around 2% of adult males) did little to challenge this influence. Most of the county’s electorate lived on land owned by the Sutherlands (the family owned 80% of the county), leaving one commentator to dismiss the constituency in 1838 as a ‘pocket county’ containing nothing but ‘serf voters’.

Little had changed by February 1867, when Sutherland’s incumbent MP, David Dundas (1799-1877), advised his patrons, the Duchess of Sutherland (1806-1868), and her son, the 3^rd duke of Sutherland (1828-1892), that he wanted to retire from Parliament. Over family discussions at the dinner tables of two of London’s most exclusive residences, Stafford House (now Lancaster House) and Chiswick House, the family settled on a new nominee – the duchess’s fourth son, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916).

While Gower’s return for Sutherland was all but guaranteed, it was still felt necessary that he embark on a full canvass of the county. Gower’s diary, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, offers a rare glimpse into electioneering in a constituency usually dismissed for its political inactivity. His account offers intriguing insights into how the Sutherland family maintained a network of relationships with the county’s voters and non-voters, the transformative role that the railways had on increasing connectivity between Westminster and the furthest reaches of the United Kingdom, and Sutherland’s breathtaking landscape.

After being informed by his brother on 13 May 1867 that he was to stand as the family’s nominee for Sutherland, Gower had to make hasty plans to complete the 600-mile trip to his family’s estate in Dunrobin.

I shall start for Dunrobin [from London] by Limited Mail tomorrow. I have written to all of the principal tenants to let them know what has and what will take place; and an address (by Sir D[avid Dundas]) will probably be published in some of the northern papers in a few hours.

Gower left London Euston by train at 8.40 p.m. on Tuesday 14 May and arrived at Bonar Bridge at 6 p.m. the following evening, taking an ‘intensely cold’ ride on the top of a coach for the final leg of the trip to Dunrobin Castle. Over dinner Gower ‘had a chat about plans for the canvassing’ with his election agents, Joseph Peacock, the factor of the Dunrobin estate, and Donald Gray, a banker in nearby Golspie.

Over the following ten days Gower met Sutherland’s electors and non-electors in towns and villages across the south-east of the county before travelling north to meet electors around Tongue.

The first visit of his canvass on Thursday 16 May was to ‘old Mrs Houston’ of Kintradwell, likely the mother of William Houston of Kintradwell (1819-1898), who had started a preliminary canvass of the county when a vacancy appeared in 1861. Gower recorded that Mrs Houston ‘was highly delighted at seeing me and was a very amiable poor old lady. She is 88 and has still a marvellous memory’. Later in the day he visited Crakaig, before meeting ‘about 20’ voters at Helmsdale where ‘old Dr [Thomas] Rutherford was of great use’ as ‘he knew where all the electors lived and all about them’.

On Friday 17 May he canvassed in Dornoch and Little Ferry, and on Saturday endured ‘one very long day’s work from 10 a.m. till near 10 p.m’, visiting Lairg, Skibo, Achany and Bonar, when ‘it poured all the afternoon, and the east wind was bad’. Gower noted in his diary that it was ‘quite a relief waking on Sunday to remember that it was a no canvassing day’.

Resuming his canvass on Monday 20 May, Gower visited the Reid family at their Gordonbush estate, where he ‘fished at the top of the Brora and Blackwater but it was too cold for any sport’, and on the following day he returned to Little Ferry, before calling ‘on the electors at Golspie’. With a trip to the north of the county beckoning later in the week, he spent Wednesday 22 May meeting ‘about half a dozen electors’ at Brora, before ‘fishing again but not with the same success’. As he was leaving Brora he finally met William Houston, who Gower was disgruntled to find had caught ‘2 fine trout, rather aggravating’.

Gower spent most of Thursday 23 May travelling the 40-mile journey via horse-drawn carriage from Dunrobin to Altnaharra, stopping on the way to meet voters at Lairg and Pittentrail. He arrived at Altnaharra Inn at 7 p.m. where he enjoyed ‘a very pleasant evening tete a tete … full of anecdotes and talk’ with Sutherland’s sheriff and returning officer, George Dingwall Fordyce (1809-1875). During dinner Gower was able to revel in:

the view of Clebrig [Ben Klibreck] from our sitting room window [which was] very fine and during sunset became of a deep purple; a cuckoo close to the house made it sound very spring like.

On the following morning [Friday 24 May] Gower travelled to Tongue, recording that the first leg of the journey ‘along Loch Loyal’ took in the ‘splendid view of Ben Loyal’ which ‘was almost covered with snow’. His guide at Tongue was John Crawford, of Tongue House, a long-serving factor for the Sutherland family estates. Gower travelled with Crawford to an auction at a farm in Borgie where he was ‘able to see many of the voters belonging to this Western part of the county, without having the time lost by going from one to the other’. He returned to the Altnaharra Inn that night.

Gower departed for Dunrobin the following morning [Saturday 25 May] at 9:30 a.m. stopping on the way at Lairg for a ‘lunch (of whisky)’ with the former MP for Ashburton, Thomas Matheson (1798-1873), of Achany House, before arriving home at Dunrobin Castle at 7 p.m. He enjoyed a leisurely Sunday – ‘there was no Kirk till 5’ – before preparing his election speech for the nomination, which had been arranged for the next day.  

As had always been expected, on Monday 27 May Gower was returned unopposed as MP for Sutherlandshire. He was elected at a brief, rain-soaked nomination outside Dornoch County Buildings, walking through the crowd to the hustings at 12:15 p.m., counting ‘fifty people or so formed [in] a semi-circle below’ who ‘looked imposing owing to the number of umbrellas’.

The nomination had concluded by 12:25 p.m., before the returning officer completed the legal formalities at Dornoch Court House. Gower then enjoyed a ‘large luncheon’ at Dornoch Inn with many of the electors he had met over the past ten days, before departing at 2 p.m. for Bonar Bridge to catch the 4 p.m. train to Inverness. Gower left Inverness at 10.18 a.m. the following morning, reaching London at 4.27 a.m. on Wednesday 29 May. He took his seat in the Commons the following day.

MS

This post is part four of a five article series. Follow the links to read more:

Further Reading

Part one: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part two: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the social life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act‘

Part three: ‘The ‘beautiful boy’ of the Commons: Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and sexual identity in Parliament at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part five: ‘‘Covent Garden was lit up by a lucid light’: an MP’s account of the fire at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6 December 1867‘

For details on how to access Sutherland’s draft constituency article for the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 see here.

For a history of the constituency of Sutherland between 1707 and 1832 see:

D. Hayton, ‘Sutherland’ HP Commons 1690-1715

E. Cruikshanks, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1715-1754

J. Cannon, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1754-1790

D. Fisher, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1790-1820

T. Jenkins, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1820-1832

Abingdon was widely regarded as an easily managed ‘pocket’ or ‘nomination’ borough during the 19th century. For a while at least it certainly had all the appearance of being one. During the decade and a half either side of the 1832 Reform Act its politics were completely dominated by two influential MPs. From 1818 until 1832 John Maberly MP, a wealthy cloth manufacturer and banker – the epitome of a self-made entrepreneur – effectively bought the borough. His generous gifts of coal to the poor and distribution of one guinea ‘treating’ and dining tickets to every elector ensured his return as a Whig at five successive elections before 1832, in four of which he faced no opposition. His connection with Abingdon’s principal trade, the manufacture of cloth and carpets, also secured him support, though his own business interests were based in Scotland and often viewed as rival operations.

Abingdon’s oddities as a constituency also shored up Maberly’s position. Before 1832, Abingdon was one of just five English boroughs that elected one MP rather than two. The lack of a second seat greatly reduced the number of candidates willing to risk the expense and trouble of a contest. Abingdon’s franchise was another factor. Before 1832, all residents who paid local taxes were eligible to vote, as a part of a ‘scot and lot’ franchise. Around 300 inhabitants fell into this category, but doubts about who qualified after long periods of uncontested elections meant that the result of any poll would almost certainly be challenged on petition, at considerable expense. Regular changes to the local rate assessments used to determine this type of franchise further muddied the waters.

One striking consequence of Abingdon’s ‘scot and lot’ franchise was that the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832 made almost no difference to the size of its electorate. Most people who qualified for the new £10 household franchise were already ‘scot and lot’ voters. The Reform Act also made no changes to the borough’s boundaries. Maberly’s dominance therefore looked set to continue after 1832. In the event, however, the dramatic collapse of his finances in 1832 and his ensuing bankruptcy forced him to abandon politics and flee to the Continent.

His replacement as Abingdon’s MP was Thomas Duffield of Marcham Park, a local Tory squire, who easily saw off a challenge by Maberly’s son William Leader Maberly at the 1832 election. Duffield’s immense wealth – he had married an heiress to the fortune of John Elwes MP – gave him the same sort of hold over Abingdon that Maberly had enjoyed. The fact that he was a Tory, albeit of an ‘independent’ and moderate kind, seemed to matter less than his ability to continue Maberly’s patronage and philanthropy, including coals for the poor. Re-elected without opposition in 1835, 1837 and 1841, Duffield eventually became so secure in his berth that he was able to act as the borough’s patron. In 1844 he resigned to provide a safe seat for the Conservative solicitor general Frederick Thesiger, who was duly elected unopposed.

Any resemblance Abingdon had to a pocket borough, however, was completely destroyed the following year. Emboldened by their recent gains in the town’s council elections, a group of reforming tradesmen and businessmen organised an opposition to Thesiger at the 1845 by-election, triggered by his appointment as Conservative attorney general. Led by John Thomas Norris, a London paper manufacturer with local paper mills at Sutton Courtenay and Sandford-on-Thames, and Gabriel Davis, an Abingdon wine and grain merchant, the group brought forward the wealthy nabob General James Caulfeild as their candidate. Although he was narrowly defeated after a notoriously venal contest, at the 1847 election they tried again. This time they came within three votes of success. In 1852 Thesiger decided he had had enough and transferred to the safer (and cheaper) seat of Stamford. A series of Tory hopefuls then attempted to muster support but all quit, leaving the Liberal Caulfeild to be elected without opposition.

Caulfeild’s unexpected death shortly after his election set in train a different series of challenges to the status quo in Abingdon. Although Caulfeild had been invited to stand by Abingdon’s tradesmen, he had also been acceptable to the local Whig squires and gentry who traditionally dominated county politics. The suggestion that the paper manufacturer Norris now replace him, however, was firmly resisted by the local aristocracy. They instead settled on the former Conservative MP for Oxfordshire Lord Norreys, who had recently become a ‘Liberal-Conservative’. Norris reluctantly agreed to stand aside and support Norreys, but only on the understanding that he would be next in line for any vacancy. When Norreys succeeded to his family’s peerage just two years later, however, a more ‘moderate’ Liberal candidate, the young aristocratic army officer Joseph Reed, was introduced by the Whig squires with the support of an ‘influential’ section of Abingdon’s reformers. Norris, it was asserted, was too much of an ‘upstart’ and in ‘too great haste to get to the top of the ladder’.

With Norris refusing to give way a second time the 1854 by-election became a contest between two different types of Liberal candidate: one a nominee of the area’s traditional ruling elite, the other a self-made businessman and local employer backed by local tradesmen. Although Reed won, his tenure was short. Plagued by debt and fearing more election expenditure, he stepped down at the 1857 election and sought re-election elsewhere, before landing in debtor’s prison. The Whigs and Liberals were left with little option but to rally around Norris. The ‘pretentious upstart’, by now a director of the Eastern Counties Railway, was duly elected unopposed. A supporter of many radical causes in the Commons, he successfully saw off a Conservative challenge at the 1859 election. Like many businessman MPs, however, he found that Parliament interfered with the running of his company. Accused of neglecting his parliamentary duties, at the 1865 election he lost his seat to another well-connected ‘Liberal Conservative’. Within a year he was declared bankrupt.

The aristocratic credentials of Norris’s successor were impeccable. A younger son of the Earl of Crawford, who had served with the Grenadier Guards in the Crimean war, including at Balaklava, Colonel Charles Lindsay sat until his defeat in 1874. At that year’s election the pendulum swung back again in favour of a businessman MP, the Liberal John Creemer Clarke, who as well as being Abingdon’s former mayor and chairman of the local railway, was appropriately enough another clothing manufacturer. He sat until the borough’s abolition in 1885.

Abingdon was just one of many small English boroughs in which local political activity during the Victorian era revolved around rival party attachments, interest groups and preconceptions about who was fit to be an MP. Underpinning these tensions the distribution of money, either in the form of bribery or patronage of local institutions, ensured that representation remained an extremely costly business, placing a serious strain on any MP’s purse. It remains to be seen how typical Abingdon was in this respect, but for 25 of the 67 years covered in this brief survey Abingdon was represented by an MP who subsequently went bankrupt. Abingdon may not have been a pocket borough in the traditional sense, but it certainly needed deep pockets.

P.S.

Useful links:

Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society

Find all of our Oxfordshire local history blogs here. Keep up to date with the research of our Commons 1832-68 project through the Victorian Commons blog page.

Like most English boroughs in our period, York elected two MPs. Our constituency articles begin by setting out some of the key statistics relating to a constituency: the size of its electorate; its population; its boundaries; its area; the qualification required for the franchise; and what form its local government took. York had long been a parliamentary borough and its electorate after 1832 therefore included not only the £10 householders, who had been given the franchise by the 1832 Reform Act, but also a significant number of ‘ancient rights’ voters who retained the franchise, provided that they continued to live within seven miles of the polling place. In York’s case, these ‘ancient rights’ voters were the freemen, who significantly outnumbered the new £10 householders: in 1832 there were 531 £10 householders and 2,342 freemen in the electorate. Even as late as 1862, freemen made up 56% of York’s electors. This helps to explain why it was among the constituencies with the highest proportion of working-class voters: more than a third in 1865-6. Freemen were often blamed for the corruption which was prevalent in York’s elections in the 1830s, but an 1835 inquiry found that the new £10 householders were far from immune to bribery.

All our constituency articles provide an overview of the economic and social make-up of the constituency. Although York’s population continued to expand, the commissioners who advised on its future parliamentary boundaries in 1831-2 noted that, with neighbouring towns growing rapidly due to the textile industry, it was ‘no longer a northern metropolis’. There was, however, some manufacturing, including of linen, iron, chemicals, glass, combs, carpets, gloves and lace, as well as a product for which York became renowned: confectionery. There were three major firms in existence during this period, two of which remain familiar names today: Joseph Terry and Co., Rowntree’s, and M. A. Craven and Son. A small proportion of York’s population was employed in agriculture and market gardening, including 400 people in chicory farming in 1851.

York remained significant as a market town and administrative centre, being the home to Yorkshire’s general assizes (although assize business for the West Riding was transferred to Leeds in 1864). It also had a focal position in England’s railway network, being at the junction of the York and North Midland railway and the Great North of England railway. The so-called ‘railway king’, George Hudson, played a prominent part in York’s municipal and parliamentary politics on the Conservative side, although he was himself MP for Sunderland, 1845-59. Our articles also give details about the different religious groups within each constituency. In York’s case, the 1851 religious census showed that Anglicans made up 43.7% of adult attendances at church or chapel, with Nonconformists slightly less (42.5%) and Catholics comprising 9.2%. Our economic and social profiles conclude by listing the newspapers published in each constituency: their reports are a key source for our research.

After looking at what might be termed the ‘anatomy’ of the constituency, our articles then examine its electoral history, looking at the nine general elections which took place during our period, as well as any by-elections. In York’s case, there were two by-elections, both caused by the death of an MP: Samuel Adlam Bayntun died of scarlet fever in 1833 after less than a year in the Commons, while Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, one of the small number of non-white MPs in our period, committed suicide in 1848.

York’s election results indicate how closely balanced the parties were, with one Liberal and one Conservative being elected for the borough at every general election from 1835 onwards. Such ‘shared representation’ was not unusual in the double-member seats which made up the bulk of England’s constituencies during this period. The Conservatives – whose MPs were drawn from Yorkshire’s landed gentry – were generally happy with this state of affairs, only putting forward a second candidate on two occasions. On the Liberal side, however, it prompted divisions between those willing to share the representation and those who thought the party should try to win both seats. This also reflected a fault-line within the local Liberal party between Whiggish or ‘moderate’ Liberals and the ‘advanced’ or Radical wing. The latter were keener to challenge the Conservatives for the second seat, but performed less strongly at the polls.

A key source of disagreement between these two sections was parliamentary reform, and a Chartist candidate, Henry Vincent, stood in 1848 and 1852, polling almost 900 votes on each occasion. Not until 1859 did the Liberals put aside their differences to field two candidates standing together in coalition, but they still failed to win the second seat. Like the Conservatives, their candidates mainly came from outside York. In our period, it was not until 1865 that York elected one of its own townsmen, George Leeman, as an MP. Our constituency articles explore in detail the factors which influenced the choice of candidates and the outcome of each election, and end with a brief summary of the constituency’s history after 1868.

K.R.

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