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.

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 Replacing him was one Mr Fatt and both men were described as ‘Blackmoors’ [an outdated term indicating Black heritage].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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RDEE

Further Reading:

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

https://www.londonlives.org

ECPPEC

Today most of the UK’s election candidates will be racing around their constituencies trying to make sure their supporters go to vote. But this is just the start of a very long day which will only end with a returning officer’s declaration in the early hours of the morning. This crucial moment for any MP is often discussed in great detail in our oral history interviews: the moment when, one way or another, their lives changed completely.

Most candidates told us they had a good feel for how the wind was blowing on their patch long before polling day. Conservative David Sumberg explained how in 1997 he had already given up any hope of winning and moved all his belongings out of his constituency house the day before polling! For others, the day might be spent as the figurehead whilst supporters knocked on doors. Labour’s Phyllis Starkey spent election day in 1997 driving around Milton Keynes on the back of a lorry with D:Ream’s Things will only get better played on a loop in a loudspeaker. She was joined at times by party dignitaries: ‘which really scared people rigid when they suddenly heard John Prescott’s voice coming out the loudspeaker.’

Most candidates only arrived at the count when their agent – the person with the legal responsibility for the election campaign – told them to do so. This is often another stage-managed affair, a chance to come in to cheering supporters if all looks promising, or to rally worried troops if not. Labour’s Gordon Banks had played the role of agent too many times to be told what to do himself, however:

Despite the crucial moment coming at the end of the night, campaigns and candidates can often get a really good idea how things have gone as the counting is taking place. Observers for each candidate are allowed to oversee the process and make sure everything is fair – but they are also making swift early judgements about their chances, as Phyllis Starkey explained:

After officials check that the number of votes tally with the numbers of ballot papers issued, all the votes from around the constituency are mixed together before being counted. The next time parties are able to get an indication of how they are doing is by looking at the piles of bundles, of 25 or 50 votes for each candidate, and how each side lines up. When it is going well, as it was for Starkey in 1997, you can ‘actually see how far ahead you are, and you can see that lead growing or shrinking as different boxes come in.’

With this feel for how things are going, candidates and agents are able to give clues to their supporters on their performance. As the former Chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, Sir Edward du Cann, told us, when he was first elected his agent promised to give him an idea of his progress by either saying ‘I hope you’ve had a cup of tea’ or instead offering to make him one. However, when he called and completely forgot to mention tea at all du Cann was left ‘assuming it was a disaster’! Similarly, Conservative Robert Hayward was able to wink at his supporters to let them know things were going well in 1983, and Gordon Banks described scratching either his left or right ears to pass on news to his activists.

As the night goes on a close race will lead to a very tense atmosphere. At Gordon Banks’ 2005 count he kept a close eye on his rivals in the SNP, with his spirits buoyed as theirs started to lower. David Sumberg watched the national picture in 1992 to see if he would hold on in his seat:

Matthew Morris, now Lord Naseby’s, first elections in 1974 were extremely close and both went to tense recounts. He remembers being told in the February election by a town clerk to make sure his observers insisted bundles of votes were opened during the process. After the first recount he was ahead by just four votes, before the final tally gave him a majority of 179. At times national parties might add to the tension, as Liberal Democrat Jackie Ballard told us when she lost her seat in 2001:

Ballard’s quotation gets to the heart of perhaps the biggest factor for all the candidates – sheer exhaustion! Former Conservative/Lib Dem MP Emma Nicholson described her team all ‘stumbling around like zombies’ and she could ‘barely keep [her] eyes open’ as the count went on.

The emotions intensify as the crucial moment draws nearer. Conservative John Sykes, who expected to lose in 1997, remembered trying extremely hard to keep a brave face:

So there followed four hours of trying to smile through it, trying to make sure there were no bad photographs and trying to make sure that you bore it with grace, bore it as best you could for the sake of your own self-respect and so on.

We do have stories, sadly, of times when not all candidates manage that. For the winners, the overwhelming emotion was joy. Banks told us in 2005 after his acceptance speech his campaign ‘went and partied, quite frankly. Because you’re on an emotional high of – it’s an immense emotional high.’ Winning against the odds in 1992 gave Conservative David Sumberg a real sense of confidence returning to parliament. He even formed a dining club with other Conservatives who held on unexpectedly, complete with a tie. Few extracts from our archive however match this sense of elation from Labour’s Eileen Gordon in 1997:

More memories are sure to be made tonight.

EP

One of the most iconic images from an 18th-century election was the successful candidate being chaired through the town by a jubilant set of supporters. Possibly the best known image is that by William Hogarth at the conclusion of his series, the Humours of an Election. In it a rotund candidate (normally identified as George Bubb Dodington) struggles to keep his seat as his chair is carried through a rioting throng of supporters and opposition activists. As the ECPPEC project has shown, the chairs used in this ceremony were rarely preserved, so few examples remain. This is perhaps the less surprising when we consider how lively (for which read raucous) the ceremony might be, as is clearly indicated both in images like that by Hogarth and from examining a series of newspaper reports from the period.

The general election of 1734 was dominated by the aftermath of Sir Robert Walpole’s failed effort to pass the Excise the previous year and this was reflected in many of the individual polls. In May 1734, the poll for Derbyshire concluded with Lord Charles Cavendish and Sir Nathaniel Curzon, bt. ahead of the third-placed candidate, Henry Harpur. Cavendish and Curzon’s success infuriated Harpur’s supporters and the press reported how ‘an outrageous Mob’ gathered in front of County Hall to prevent Cavendish from being chaired. Their action resulted in skirmishes between the rival camps which left at least one man dead, several more wounded and a great number of smashed windows. Consequently, Cavendish and Curzon’s chairing was delayed to the following day. [Daily Courant, 28 May 1734]

Derbyshire’s unruly chairing was in striking contrast to that at York, even though the contest had been ‘hard fought’ and there were later to be unsuccessful petitions against the result. Here Sir Miles Stapleton, a Tory backed by some opposition Whigs, was elected for the county, and was carried around the city in triumph, with flags and ensigns carried before him. According to one paper the event ‘was attended by the greatest number of gentlemen, as well as the populace, that ever was known’ in the city. Stapleton gave a ball the same night and there was ‘nothing but rejoicings in the City, (except a few)’. Even such an apparently joyful occasion, though, was too much for the other successful candidate, the Whig Cholmley Turner, who pleaded indisposition through gout, and so passed on being carried around at the same time. [Daily Journal, 7 June 1734]

Three decades on and the country faced an even more charged general election than that of 1734 prompted by a difficult economic situation, widespread unemployment, the presence of numerous carpet-bagger candidates, and chief among them, the return from exile of the divisive figure of John Wilkes. Wilkes’s attempt to secure election in the City of London proved unsuccessful, but he was returned at the head of the poll for Middlesex instead. Even so, Wilkes clearly decided that for once he ought to show some restraint and in spite of efforts to persuade him to be chaired around Brentford, ‘he absolutely refused, choosing to retire with the greatest privacy’. [Public Advertiser, 1 Apr. 1768] His victory inspired celebrations beyond the bounds of his own constituency, though, and in Edinburgh it was reported that a large number of apprentice boys paraded around with an effigy of Wilkes on their shoulders, which they later chaired before committing their ‘mock hero’ to a bonfire erected at the Grass Market. [Lloyd’s Evening Post, 8-11 April 1768]

RDEE

Find out more about the chairing process via our friends at ECPPEC, or read more about 18th century elections through our Georgian Elections Project.

In the 18th century, as now, London was looked to as an important battleground in any election. What might now be thought of as the key areas of present-day metropolitan London were represented by the county of Middlesex, the borough of Westminster and the City of London itself, and the wealth and power of the last of these meant that it commanded four seats in Parliament, rather than the normal two. The electorate was also relatively large – between 7,000 and 8,000 people – though that was a small proportion of the city’s overall population of around 120,000. To qualify to vote, people needed to be a member of one of the city’s ancient livery companies, many of which derived from the old mediaeval trade guilds.

In 1713, there were 60 such livery companies, headed by ‘the great twelve’ – the oldest and most wealthy of them – but also including more modest companies, like the Fletchers. Originally a trade guild for those involved in the craft of arrow making, by the 18th century it was a small company and not particularly wealthy. However, even a compact livery company like the Fletchers was able to offer some insights into the political divisions apparent in the country in the years leading up to and on from George I’s accession as king.

The 1713 general election in London, the last that was to take place under Queen Anne, was particularly lively. There were riots and efforts to upset the course of the election by candidates and those close to them. William Newland, son of one candidate, George Newland (a member of the Joiners’ Company), was said to have encouraged a ‘rascally mob’ to descend on the Guildhall, where they were opposed by ‘a great mob of weavers’. The Tory Lord Mayor himself, Sir Richard Hoare, was even said to have ended up scrapping with one of the other candidates, Robert Heysham, a former Tory but who was now standing as a Whig. The result of the election appeared to hang in the balance for a while, though in the end the four Tories all prevailed. It was a close-run thing, though, with just 33 votes dividing Sir William Withers and the highest place Whig candidate, John Ward.

Examination of individual livery companies offers a valuable perspective on the contest. It might be expected that fellow liverymen might all vote the same way, but that was not necessarily the case. In the poll books for 1713, just 14 Fletchers appear to feature. Of these, nine voted for the successful four Tories: Hoare, Withers, Cass and Newland; another voted for the Whigs Ward, Scawen, Heysham and Godfrey. One member of the company, James Wakefield, showed some independence of spirit, though, and bucked the trend by voting for the former Member, John Ward, a Whig, along with the Tories Hoare, Cass and Newland. Wakefield’s vote reflected more widespread uncertainty about Ward’s own position: a Whig who seems on occasion to have supported Tory measures and himself voted for three of the Tory candidates.

At the following election in January 1715, fortunes were reversed. Now, the Whig candidates Heysham, Ward, Godfrey and Scawen were all returned, each of them substantially ahead of their rivals, two of them former MPs who had been successful just two years earlier. Marking the scale of their victory, whereas before there had just been a handful of votes in it, now 555 votes divided the lowest placed Whig, Sir Thomas Scawen, from the highest placed Tory, Sir John Cass, whose personal vote had declined substantially by 918 votes.

As for the 14 Fletchers, it is difficult to know how they voted in the new election as no poll book appears to survive from January 1715. By 1722, when the next general election was held, though, five seem still to have been alive and voting. Of them, two voted for the same raft of candidates, the two Whigs Heysham and Barnard and one Tory, Godfrey, while another voted solidly for Tories: Parsons, Child and Lockwood. James Wakefield trod his own path once again, and voted evenhandedly for two Tories (Child and Lockwood) and two Whigs (Heysham and Barnard).

Members of the Worshipful Company of Fletchers and the candidates they voted for, as they appear in the 1713 Poll book:

• Brown Philip: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Colebran [Colebrand], Thomas: Ward, Scawen, Heysham, Godfrey
• Eddowes, John: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Fish, Thomas: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Graves, William: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Harding, Thomas: Ward, Scawen, Heysham, Godfrey
• Mason, Nathaniel: Ward, Scawen, Heysham, Godfrey
• Milla, Samuel: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Nedwick, Joseph: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Paine, Thomas: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Potts, Percivall: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Wakefield, James: Ward, Hoare, Cass, Newland
• Ward, Downes: Hoare, Withers, Cass, Newland
• Wilson, John: Ward, Scawen, Heysham, Godfrey

Source: London Politics 1713-1717, ed. Henry Horwitz (London Record Society, XVII)

RDEE

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For much of the middle ages, and even into the modern period, many parliamentary elections were ‘arranged’. This meant that rather than conducting a formal poll, the election meeting would simply rubber stamp a pair of candidates agreed upon by the leading men (and sometimes women) of the counties. The process by which the candidates in question were chosen is by and large obscure, but it is worth noting that their confirmation nevertheless followed a formal process.

The parliamentary elections in the English counties were held in shire courts, and forty days thus had to elapse from the issue of the parliamentary writs to the electoral meeting. This period of grace was necessary not merely because of the time it would take for the writs ordering the elections to be delivered to the English counties, but also because in a select number of northern counties (Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Yorkshire) the county court only met every six, rather than every four weeks. Even so, many electoral writs arrived so late as to make it impossible for the sheriffs to hold their elections within the normal cycle of meetings of the county court. Thus, elections in Lancashire had to be held at specially convened electoral meetings in 1423, 1427, 1429 and 1433; while on other occasions special meetings were also held in Cumberland, Westmorland, Bristol and Nottinghamshire.   

In 1459, special circumstances prevailed, not merely on account of the political crisis which followed the Yorkist rout at Ludford Bridge, and which saw the King’s cousin and principal opponent, Richard, duke of York, his two eldest sons Edward, earl of March, and Edmund, earl of Rutland, and their Neville allies, the earls of Salisbury and Warwick flee into exile. On 9 October the government summoned a Parliament, allowing 41 days before the opening on 20 November. Yet, by the end of October it had become apparent that many sheriffs had not yet identified any candidates, and were due to hand over their offices just a few days later. The administration thus took the extraordinary step of sending letters under the privy seal to all serving sheriffs instructing them to hold their parliamentary elections even if their relevant county court fell after the date of their discharge. This proved to little avail: no elections were ever held in Sussex and Hertfordshire, and the Members for Berkshire, the city of York and Shropshire were confirmed only after Parliament had assembled, in the case of Shropshire as late as 29 November, nine days into the session.

On a few rare occasions it is clear that no agreement could be found among the county elites, and that the choice of MPs therefore had to go to a ballot. One such occasion was the Nottinghamshire election of 1460, when the names of four candidates, Sir Robert Strelley, John Stanhope, Richard Sutton and William Babington, were placed before the electorate. In the ensuing contest Strelley and Stanhope each secured over 150 votes, while Sutton and Babington were left far behind with just 56 and 44 votes respectively.

Before such a poll could be taken, the sheriff (or his deputy) was faced with the onerous task to ensuring that the electors who turned up in the county court were qualified to vote. This meant establishing that they met the statutory income qualification, that is that they each held freehold lands worth 40s. per annum, but also that they actually resided within the relevant county, and not within any separate constituencies within its boundaries. This, for instance, became one of the principal grounds on which the Warwickshire elections of 1427 were challenged, for some of the electors present, ‘pompous men’, were said to have hailed from the town of Warwick, and they or others were moreover said to have shouted unreasonably in making their nomination.

Perhaps the most curious election of the period (as far as the records allow us to tell) was that held in Berkshire in early 1453. The election that year was not held (as was normal) at Abingdon, but instead at Chipping Lambourn, which, while not a county town, had the advantage of being the residence of the sheriff, John Roger. The return names just eleven further voters, and it is perhaps no surprise that one of the men elected was Roger’s son and heir, Thomas. Alongside him, the sheriff returned the county’s veteran representative, the courtier John Norris, who nevertheless seems to have been sufficiently concerned by the odd proceedings to secure for himself an alternative seat in distant Truro.

H.W.K.

Further reading:

H. Kleineke, ‘Parliamentary Elections’, in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61 ed. L.S. Clark (Cambridge, 2020), 219-73. 

J.G. Edwards, ‘The Emergence of Majority Rule’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5^th ser. Xiv (1964).

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.

Foremost among cricket’s early patrons (according to rank) was the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Within three years of his arrival in England in 1728 he attended a match between Surrey and London, and soon after he was playing himself. Cricket may even have determined the very dynastic fate of Britain. Frederick was said to have been struck by a cricket ball while playing with his children and it was assumed that this led to his early death from a ruptured abscess on 20 March 1751. Even if the autopsy revealed other health problems, it was important to contemporaries that this German-born heir prince died in the service of the quintessentially English game.

Frederick’s death came shortly after that of a nobleman who could claim even greater importance in the game’s establishment. Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond, had almost as exalted a lineage as Frederick himself. Richmond’s paternal grandparents were Charles II and his French mistress Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth. Through her, a favourite of Louis XIV, he also succeeded as duc d’Aubigny in the French nobility in 1734. Richmond’s father had been well established with estates in West Sussex around Goodwood House near Chichester, where the 2nd duke lived a comfortable and active life.

Besides his career as an army officer and role as a prominent politician, Richmond’s principal enthusiasm was for sport. Next to hunting, his greatest love was cricket for which he has a number of ‘firsts’ to his name. He was involved in what may have been the first attempt to codify the laws of the game. On 11 July 1727 Richmond’s squad played a team fielded by Alan Brodrick, later 2nd Viscount Midleton [I]. Before the competition started Richmond and Brodrick drew up 16 ‘Articles of Agreement’ on the game’s conduct in order to avoid disputes. These are seen as the earliest codification of the game’s laws, and many of them still pertain, with modifications. For instance, Richmond’s and Brodrick’s teams consisted of 12 players each, contrasted with today’s eleven.

These articles formed the basis for another set of laws agreed in 1744, another important date in cricket’s history. Further ‘firsts’ are associated with two matches played at the Artillery Ground in London that summer. The earliest surviving scorecards came from these matches and were collected by Richmond and are still among his papers. The climactic Kent versus ‘all England’ match on 18 June 1744 gave rise to the first known poem about cricket. James Dance dedicated his Cricket: An Heroic Poem to John Montagu, 4th earl of Sandwich, a ‘kind patron of the mirthful fray’. Another aristocrat also featured, as he played for the Kent side that ultimately won. Lord John Philip Sackville was the second son of Lionel Cranfield Sackville, duke of Dorset. Sackville did not notch up many runs, but he made a sensational catch, immortalized by Dance:

And now Illustrious Sackville, where he stood
Th’approaching Ball with cautious Pleasure view’d.
At once he sees the Chief’s impending Doom
And pants for mighty Honours, yet to come.
Swift as the Falcon, darting on its Prey
He springs elastic o’er the verdant Way.
Sure of Success, flies upward with a Bound
Derides the slow Approach and spurns the Ground.

Significantly, Sackville, a scion of a great noble family, played on a side whose other members were commoners. Nor was deference made to his birth by making him captain, which position was filled by the family’s gardener.

Sackville’s elder brother Charles Sackville, earl of Middlesex (later 2nd duke of Dorset), was also a keen player and patron. Their mutual enthusiasm may have led Richmond to look to Middlesex as a candidate for the Sussex by-election in late 1741, which merged Richmond’s two great loves of electioneering and cricket. While Richmond and the Whigs turned to Middlesex, Thomas Sergison put himself forward as the opposition candidate. Victory came through winning the votes of the county’s freeholders, who would be certain to gather at cricket matches. Sergison and Richmond canvassed hard at a match on 15 June between Slindon and Portsmouth. As Richmond described it:

Sergison was at the cricket match attended by…. two or three more of the Chichester Torys. He did not venture to ask a vote, nor could he have got one I do really believe. Tanky [Charles Bennet, 2nd earl of Tankerville,] was there ready to puff his cheeks at him, but he never appeared…. All our friends … were in great spirits especially as Slindon beat Portsmouth, and had nine men to go in. [Richmond-Newcastle Correspondence, 63]

This was a comprehensive triumph for Richmond, both in politics and sport. Matters, however, did not always run quite so smoothly. Sergison and his supporters were more aggressive at a match on 28 July, this time between Slindon and Portslade. The Tories taunted Middlesex with allegations that his father harboured republican sympathies. Blows were exchanged and, at first, the Whigs had the worst of it. As Sir William Gage reported, though, the Slindon cricketers ‘returned with their cricket bats and dealt some heavy blows which carried the victory on our side’. [BL, Add. 32,697, f. 338] Middlesex won the by-election in January 1742. His fellow MP was the duke of Newcastle’s brother Henry Pelham. A little over a year later, he became prime minister, though he does not seem to have needed the assistance of cricket bats to attain his office.

CGDL

Further reading:
Robin Eagles, ‘ “No more to be said?” Reactions to the death of Frederick Lewis, prince of Wales’, Historical Research, lxxx (2007)
David Underdown, Start of Play: Cricket and Culture in 18th-century England (2000)
John Marshall, The Duke who was Cricket (1961)
Timothy McCann, The Correspondence of the Dukes of Richmond and Newcastle, 1724-50 (Sussex Record Society 73) (1983)

Victorian elections in England and Wales were far, far more violent than has previously been thought. During the last general election before the secret ballot in 1868 there were at least thirty-seven riots, over one hundred smaller disturbances and almost two hundred smaller violent incidents. Seventeen deaths were directly caused by the contests taking place. This state of affairs was, in fact, not particularly out-of-the-ordinary for an election. Violence was a fact of everyday electoral life. Below are two images – Market Square, Nottingham, in the present day, and Market Square during the 1865 election:

In 1865, hired thugs waited at various points around the town centre for the election candidates to appear. When the candidates very prudently declined to emerge, the thugs took hold of the hustings platform and set fire to it, burning it to the ground. They then pelted partisan supporters with stones, causing severe injuries. A mob of thousands of people took control of the marketplace, causing the scenes depicted in the image. Police were unable to restore order for several hours. It wasn’t even the most violent riot of that election in England and Wales.

Violence broke all over the country during elections, and many Victorians had long thought that the secret ballot would make elections less corrupt and less violent. Before the secret ballot, not to our knowledge did violence break out in any general election in Pontefract, the first place in the UK to use the secret ballot to elect a Member of Parliament. Between 1832 and its famous secret ballot by-election, things were peaceful. This wasn’t to last.

Many thought the secret ballot would curb violence– in Pontefract, if anything, it had the opposite effect. Our project has no newspaper reports of violence recorded in the ten general elections between 1832 and 1868, but after the introduction of the ballot in 1872, violence occurred at Pontefract in the next five general elections,1874–1892.

As the graph above illustrates, after the ballot was introduced (represented by the red line) violence was more widespread for a time across England and Wales. Despite appearances, the ballot wasn’t to blame for the any general increase in violence in the decade or so after its introduction – other factors came into play.

These included wider corruption, including the hiring of thugs by interested parties, popular anger and unrest, and the continuing (if declining) atmosphere of popular celebration and drunkenness which accompanied Victorian election contests. 

The secret ballot did, however, change the character of much of this violence. Before the ballot and expansion of the franchise, there might only be a few thousand, or even a few hundred voters in a constituency. Often, lists of voter choices were published as books, or even in the local newspaper. As shown in the image below, some also listed the street where each voter was registered.

George Abel, of Northgate Street, Bury St Edmunds, was one of 606 who plumped in 1868 for the candidate Edward Greene. Being a voter before the ballot left a person very exposed. This was especially the case if voters lived in a close or a hard-fought constituency. Individual intimidation, escalating to assault and destruction of personal property, was a real fear for many. In 1832 in Hertford for instance, individual violence was endemic – thugs imported from outside the town assaulted specifically-targeted local voters to discourage them from voting. One poor voter was assaulted in half a dozen separate instances across two weeks.

The secret ballot largely removed the ability to employ this unsavoury electioneering method – vote choices were now anonymous, and there were many more voters in each constituency. Violence which focused purely on individual voters was no longer viable in the new age. Groups of voters could still, however, be targeted, albeit less precisely.

In Birmingham during the 1880 election for instance, there were several polling stations in different areas throughout the city. At the Ladywood station, hired roughs illegally pretended to be special police constables, to prevent entry to polling stations, causing fights; at St Stephens station, roughs allegedly prevented Liberals from voting and demanded money from them, before storming the Conservative committee HQ, requiring the intervention of a dozen policemen.

Conservatives deliberately targeted specific polling stations, located in geographical areas which were known to be Liberal-leaning. Elsewhere in the country in 1880, and during other General Elections, supporters of both parties participated in mass voter suppression.

This is at least partly why recorded violence appears to increase after the introduction of the Ballot. Small-scale harassment, occasionally leading to violence, of individual voters was much less likely to be visible before the Ballot. Mass voter suppression, by contrast, is a bigger, messier phenomenon, more likely to be noticed by newspapers and the police.

Other changes also contributed to the increase in violent events, related to the culture and structure of elections. In Birmingham during the 1880 violence, for instance, there were different many polling stations, and many political meetings were held in the run-up to the election. Before the 1870s, there were fewer polling stations, and fewer political meetings – fewer flashpoints at which violence was likely to break out.

Overall, elections were becoming steadily less carnivalesque, less drunken, and less heated after the introduction of the secret ballot. There is less evidence, however, that they were becoming less corrupt. While the ballot didn’t, on its own, lead to a reduction in violence, it was a vital component contributing to its eventual decline.  The ballot, alongside, later efforts to challenge wider corruption, further expansion of the right to vote, and social and cultural change, eventually resulted in a much more peaceful electoral culture in the United Kingdom. 

G H

Follow the Causes and Consequences of Electoral Violence project on their website and on twitter @VictorianEV_UK.

Find lots more information about electoral reform on our Victorian Commons blog site.

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)