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.

On 20 October 1774 John Wilkes was returned to Parliament at the general election as one of the two MPs for the county of Middlesex. The election was uncontested and rounded off a successful year for Wilkes who had also just been elected Lord Mayor of London. This all might have been unremarkable enough were it not for the fact that he had previously been expelled the House on multiple occasions and posed a serious challenge to both the government and parliamentary authorities when many in the country had been on the lookout for just such an anti-hero.

Wilkes had long been a controversial figure. He had come to prominence as the proprietor and one of the main authors of the anti-government newspaper, The North Briton, for which he had ended up being arrested. Although the courts released him on the grounds of his privilege as MP for Aylesbury, Parliament later concluded that privilege did not extend to cases of seditious libel, leaving him free to be convicted and expelled.

Wilkes spent the next few years in self-imposed exile but early in 1768 returned home so that he could stand in the general election. After being humiliated in the City of London, he tried again a few days later in the rumbustious county of Middlesex and emerged at the head of the poll. As he had promised before standing, he promptly handed himself in and was sentenced to serve just under two years in prison under his previous conviction. Middlesex, thus, found itself in the peculiar position of having one of its MPs behind bars when Parliament opened that November.

On 14 November Wilkes submitted a petition to the Commons via his ally, Sir Joseph Mawbey, a renowned breeder of rare pigs, seeking redress of grievances. The business was adjourned to the new year when Parliament rejected a motion for Wilkes to be released. Further debates ensued, and during one Colonel Isaac Barre teased the ministry –increasingly perplexed by Wilkes’s continuing popularity – by suggesting that the best way of detaching Wilkes from his supporters was to pardon him and give him a job in government.

Arguments, many of them heated, continued in the Commons on and off until 3 February 1769 when Lord Barrington moved for Wilkes to be expelled:

The arguments for his expulsion were founded on the badness of the man, and the impropriety of suffering such a one to be part of the legislature.

Cobbett, xvi. 545

Of course, not everyone was against him and even some who had reason to dislike Wilkes were willing to argue his case on the grounds of constitutional propriety. The former Prime Minister, George Grenville, now a backbencher and one-time friend of Wilkes’s, who had been pilloried in the North Briton after he took over from the earl of Bute, worried that the ‘mode of proceeding’ was ‘new and unprecedented’. Despite many reservations about Wilkes himself, he concluded ultimately that the Commons’ proposed course of action was ill-advised. Others arguing in favour of Wilkes were the Rockinghamites, Edmund Burke and William Dowdeswell. They were not heeded, and Wilkes was expelled from Parliament by 219 votes to 137.

For many, this would have been the end of the affair. Wilkes was still in prison and Parliament had adjudged that he was not entitled to privilege. But Wilkes was not one to be put off by such a minor setback. Consequently, on 16 February 1769 he stood in the by-election and was re-elected. He was expelled again only for the voters of Middlesex to plump for him once more the following month. Finally, on 13 April, two candidates entered the lists against Wilkes. One need not have bothered as he was able to muster just five votes. The other, Colonel Luttrell, was a more serious proposition. Even so, when the votes were tallied, Wilkes had 1,143 and Luttrell just 296. Two days later, Luttrell was declared the winner.

Even at this stage, there was a sizeable minority in Parliament who were thoroughly unsettled by the implications of seating a person who had so obviously failed to carry the voters with him. There were also concerns about effectively punishing Wilkes twice for the same offence. Thus, on 29 April Sir George Savile presented a petition from the Middlesex freeholders protesting at their votes being discounted. They insisted that this had been no joke return and that they did not mean by doing so:

To throw away their votes, or to waive their right of representation, nor would they by any means have chosen to be represented by the said Henry Lawes Luttrell, esq…

Cobbett, xvi. 588

They requested to be heard by counsel to argue the case out. Parliament agreed and ordered all parties to appear on 8 May, the penultimate day of the session. Once again, the atmosphere was tetchy. Grenville quoted William Blackstone’s Commentaries to support his arguments, while Blackstone himself had put the opposite case. Grenville then came in for criticism from Sir Fletcher Norton when Norton spotted Grenville shaking his head while he was speaking. Norton retorted: ‘I wish the right honourable gentleman, instead of shaking his head, would shake an argument out of it’. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 358-9] One MP, who had formerly voted with the government, Alexander Wedderburn, now came out against, offering a series of closely argued legal reasons why Luttrell should not be seated. His stance cost him his own seat though he was swiftly inundated with offers of alternative berths.

In spite of such gestures, the House once again voted to abide by their original decision to nullify Wilkes’s votes and accept Luttrell as the new MP by 221 to 152. Wilkes’s supporters may have lost, but Lord Temple, for one, heralded it as a triumph, noting that it was ‘the greatest minority I believe ever known the last day of a session’. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 357]

The Wilkes case took up substantial parliamentary time and at times passions ran high. In the end, though, Parliament’s right to adjudicate who had the right to be an MP was maintained, whatever the two principals made of it. Following his release from prison in 1770 Wilkes would occasionally irritate the clerks by attempting to take his seat, but was always quietly shown the door. Even Luttrell seems to have become discontented with the situation and applied, unsuccessfully, for the Chiltern Hundreds.

As for those who chose to continue to vote for Wilkes long after it had been made clear that he would not be permitted to sit, their case was portrayed as one where they had opted, knowingly, to make a futile gesture and had thereby suspended their own rights, akin to the modern notion of spoiling a ballot paper:

Those who obstinately and wilfully persevere in voting for an unqualified person, are to be considered as not voting at all; their right of suffrage is acknowledged; but if the elector obstinately refuses to exercise this right according to law, he wantonly suspends his own right for the time, and his act being illegal is consequently void, and he is only in the situation of a man who had neglected to attend…

Cobbett, xvi. 595

RDEE

Further reading:
Chatham Correspondence, III
Cobbett, Parliamentary History, XVI
Robin Eagles’ biography of Wilkes, Champion of English Freedom: the life of John Wilkes MP and Lord Mayor of London, is published in June by Amberley.

The requirement for every elector to justify their right to vote at the hustings was a routine part of Georgian elections. Eighteenth-century England did not enjoy universal enfranchisement, and the confusing array of franchises (which determined who was legally entitled to vote in parliamentary elections) created fertile ground for legal challenge over individual voters’ qualifications. A closer look at the parliamentary borough of Minehead highlights how, before the reforms of the nineteenth century, disputes over voters’ rights could ironically allow non-voters to play a crucial role in parliamentary elections – but that the process could also be manipulated by powerful political figures.

A small coastal town in Somerset, Minehead’s politics were dominated for most of the eighteenth century by the Luttrell family of Dunster Castle. Over the course of the century, a drastic decline in the port’s economic importance was mirrored by the general dilapidation of the town’s buildings – exacerbated by the ‘Great Fire’ of 1791. As a ‘potwalloper’ borough, Minehead’s franchise lay in the inhabitant householders (i.e. those who could boil – or ‘wallop’ – pots on hearths in their houses). To complicate matters, the borough was composed of three tithings (a sub-unit of a parish) which confusingly corresponded with parts of the parishes of Minehead and Dunster. Therefore, to qualify as a voter, along with the usual requirements of being an adult male, one also had to be a parishioner of Minehead or Dunster, a housekeeper (i.e. the occupier of a house) within one of the three tithings, and not in receipt of alms.

There were therefore four main directions from which a Minehead elector’s right to vote could be challenged. Were they over 21? Were they in receipt of alms? Were they a settled parishioner? Were they a legal housekeeper? However, there were dozens of grounds on which these last two points could be challenged. Had they served an apprenticeship in another parish? Did they live separately from their family? Had they lived in their house for less than 40 days prior to the election or, after 1786, six months? And so on.

The pre-election canvass was a crucial opportunity to gather information on voters. In Minehead, candidates’ agents travelled from door-to-door to solicit votes, but also to gather information on the legitimacy of potential voters. In 1747, for example, the agents of Percy Wyndham O’Brien marked one voter as ‘No Friend. – query vote as not being a housekeeper’, and wrote next to another, ‘Query vote he’s had relief’. As the preface of ‘No Friend’ implies, O’Brien’s canvassers sought to identify and subsequently disqualify individuals who would vote against him – while also collecting evidence to protect the votes of his supporters. By the end of the eighteenth century, election agents had developed more sophisticated methods. In preparation for the elections of 1796 and 1802, John Fownes Luttrell’s agents listed every townsman alongside both ‘Proofs to Support’ and ‘Proofs to Disqualify’ their votes. Where the voter’s intentions were unclear, notes would be added to both columns.

When an election came around, voting took place at specially-constructed polling booths. It was here that each elector was required to swear oaths and declare their votes, but also where votes could be objected to and challenged by the candidates’ agents and attorneys. In most cases, witnesses were called upon to ascertain whether or not a vote was valid. Often this was prearranged before the poll began: men and women, voters and non-voters alike, would be summoned to the hustings to present documentation or reveal their interactions with voters. These were frequently older residents who acted as ‘repositories of electoral memory’ [Chalus], and could speak to particular families, living arrangements, or past voting customs.

A minute book detailing the Minehead elections of 1796 and 1802 shines a fascinating light on this process, giving a voice to many witnesses – albeit as summarised by a clerk. In an effort to prove that William Jones (a Luttrell supporter) had not been resident in his house for six months prior to the general election of July 1802, Mark Coles alleged that Jones’s bed had been removed at Christmas to ‘give room for a Dance’. This was refuted by Ann Cann, who attested to the fact that Jones had ‘eat, drank & slept in his house for 6 months past’. However, Cann’s evidence was discredited by both weight of numbers and a misogynistic slight on her manner at the hustings; one Mr Blake dismissed her words as ‘a frenzy’ and claimed she had not visited the house with the past six months. As a result, Jones’ vote was rejected.

At the same election, a different Luttrell voter survived an objection. The opposing attorney sought to disqualify John Widlake as not being a housekeeper, since he lived separately from his family. Several female witnesses – including a former employee – confirmed that Widlake’s wife lived and had been ‘brought to bed’ at a place called Lang’s House, while Widlake lived with his mother. It was one Mrs. Jones who provided the full story: upon his return to Minehead from Bristol, Widlake had moved in with his mother, but as he had ‘married against his mother’s consent… she never would suffer [his] wife to come there’. Despite this personal revelation, Luttrell’s agents successfully defended Widlake’s right to vote because he had paid the rent for his mother’s house.

Potential voters would try various methods to qualify for a vote ahead of an election. One common practice involved ‘splitting’ houses whereby the rule of ‘one housekeeper per household’ could be circumvented by dividing the house into separate apartments with their own front doors and cooking arrangements. Especially scandalous were the votes tendered by William Fry and Joseph Hurford, who each lived in one half of an old barn divided with ‘rough planks’ without ceilings or chambers. One witness was asked, ‘do you know where this miserable wretch lives?’, replying, ‘in the Barn with the Rats’. The questioning attorney raged at Fry as a man ‘degraded & debased from man to beast’ who was ‘unworthy to give his vote’. Despite his best efforts, the Returning Officers accepted the votes.

Such examples highlight the ambiguous divide between who could and who could not participate in eighteenth-century parliamentary elections. The fact that non-voters could play an influential role as witnesses serves as a reminder of the substantial social ‘reach’ of elections. Through their memories of people and places, they were important political actors.

Any parallels between modern voter ID requirements and the eighteenth century cannot be taken very far. Qualifications to vote in the eighteenth century were often so complex that attempts to challenge individual voters’ right to poll became a routine feature of elections. Minehead serves as an excellent example of how local custom, tradition, and precedent were interweaved throughout the opaque Georgian electoral system, creating huge scope for challenge, disagreement, and differing legal interpretations over individual votes. Critics of modern voter ID requirements have framed it as a barrier to democratic participation which will disproportionately impact more marginalised members of society. While this was also true in the eighteenth century (the ‘miserable wretch’), challenging votes at the hustings also allowed non-voters to participate in the electoral process by acting as witnesses: legitimising or discrediting votes and, by extension, influencing the outcomes of elections.

J.H.

Further Reading

Chalus, Elaine, ‘Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in the Eighteenth Century’, in Women in British Politics: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Catherine Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke, 2000), 19–38.
Dyndor, Zoe, ‘Widows, Wives and Witnesses: Women and their Involvement in the 1768 Northampton Borough Parliamentary Election’, Parliamentary History, xxx (2011), 309–323.
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/L, Luttrell Family of Dunster Papers.

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.

Today – 2nd August – marks 150 years since the 1869 Municipal Franchise Act received royal assent. This measure widened the municipal franchise for the town councils created in 1835 by reducing the amount of time that a voter was required to occupy a ‘house, warehouse, counting-house, shop or other building’ in a municipal borough from three years to just one. What made it a landmark piece of legislation, however, was not this change, but the fact that, thanks to the efforts of the Liberal MP for Manchester, Jacob Bright, it extended the municipal franchise to women. Its ninth clause stated that

wherever words occur which import the masculine gender the same shall be held to include females for all purposes connected with and having reference to the right to vote in the election of councillors, auditors, and assessors.

However, as Bright was at pains to point out when he introduced his clause on 7 June 1869, this was not ‘an innovation – a departure from the custom and customary legislation of the country’, but a restoration of ‘long established rights’. Echoing the 1832 Reform Act, the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act had specifically excluded women voters, disfranchising many who had previously enjoyed this right. Yet as Bright noted, women continued to be entitled to vote as ratepayers in towns which had not been incorporated under the terms of the 1835 Act. He cited the example of Southport, where in 1866 women made up 588 of the 2,085 electors qualified to vote for the improvement commissioners – the local body responsible for the town’s government. However, when Southport was incorporated in 1867, ‘these votes were extinguished’. Such anomalies – and the fact that women were allowed to participate in other local elections, such as those for parish vestries (as outlined in this guest blog) – highlighted how illogical the existing law was.

Speaking on behalf of the Gladstone ministry, Henry Bruce, the Home Secretary, gave Bright’s clause his ‘cordial support’. It was agreed to ‘amid cheers’, with no speeches in opposition in the Commons. Lord Redesdale’s objections to it in the House of Lords on 19 July 1869 were swiftly quashed by the Earl of Kimberley, who emphasised that

this Bill merely restored to women a franchise which they formerly enjoyed, and their Lordships were not discussing the wider and more doubtful question of extending to women the right to vote at Parliamentary elections.

Endorsing this reform, Lord Cairns contended that

as an unmarried women could dispose of her property, and deal with it in any way in which she thought proper, he did not know why she should not have a voice in saying how it should be lighted and watched, and generally in controlling the municipal expenditure to which that property contributed.

As Cairns’s speech hinted, however, there was a crucial difference in the position of married and unmarried women. Just three years later, a court ruling in the case of Regina v. Harrald (1872) decided that married women were not eligible to vote at municipal elections, since ‘by the common law, a married woman’s status was so entirely merged in that of her husband that she was incapable of exercising almost all public functions’. This restriction on married women voting in these local government elections remained in place until 1894. The question of whether to lobby for the parliamentary vote for all women or unmarried women only was to prove a complicated one for the women’s suffrage movement.

Despite the importance of Bright’s alteration to the municipal franchise, the Hansard report of proceedings in the Commons on 7 June 1869 made no mention of it, merely recording that the Municipal Franchise Bill was ‘considered as amended’. This stemmed not from a lack of interest in this reform, but was due to the fact that Hansard relied heavily on press reports for its information at this time. Since the discussion on Bright’s clause took place at 2 a.m., it only received brief coverage in the press: The Times devoted just 45 words to it, while the Morning Post gave it 85 words. However, Thomas Hansard clearly recognised the significance of this debate, since he subsequently printed a fuller account – covering four columns – as an appendix to the bound volume of Hansard which contained that day’s proceedings. This report had been supplied to him by an unnamed MP ‘who was interested in the subject’. It may well have been Jacob Bright himself, who continued to be one of the leading parliamentary advocates of female enfranchisement, introducing a bill the following year to give women the parliamentary vote.

KR

Further reading

For more on Jacob Bright and his election for Manchester in 1867, see this earlier blog from our Victorian Commons team, and on women’s participation in local government elections, see this blog on women and politics, 1868-1918.