The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Political discourse is rooted in speech, and students of modern parliamentary politics have a wealth of material to draw on – Hansard, TV broadcasts of debates, newspaper reports, even WhatsApp messages. The picture for the House of Lords in the reign of Elizabeth I is very different. The principal source, the Lords’ Journal, was conceived by the Tudor clerks quite narrowly as a record of business transacted and decisions reached, but with a veil drawn over the accompanying discussions, which were, after all, meant to be confidential.

A typical page in the manuscript Journal has the date of the current sitting at the top, the date of the next sitting at the bottom, and three columns down the rest of the page; of these, two are used for recording which bishops and lay peers attended that day, while the third column, on the right-hand side, is reserved for any actual proceedings. (Not until 1597 was it thought necessary to allocate more than one page per sitting, to allow for a more detailed account of events.)

The final column might list bills read, and the verdicts agreed on them, reports of conferences with the Commons or audiences with the queen, or such mundane matters as apologies for absence. Or it might not – for some sittings no business is listed at all, creating the impression that the peers were twiddling their thumbs or perhaps nodding off to sleep.

By comparison, the Commons’ Journal, augmented in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign by several private diaries, is full of summarised speeches, disputes and other incidents which give a good sense of the moods, initiatives and objectives of the lower House. Unsurprisingly, historians have tended to rely on these sources to reconstruct the political narrative of the Elizabethan parliaments, in the process exaggerating the importance of the Commons at the expense of the poorly reported Lords.

In recent decades some effort has been made to correct this imbalance, utilising a variety of different approaches. During the 1980s and 1990s the Lords’ management of legislation was examined in great detail by Sir Geoffrey Elton and David Dean. In conjunction with their research, T. E. Hartley published three volumes of material supplementing the Lords’ and Commons’ Journals, including a few actual speeches made by bishops or lay peers. Around the same time, a ground-breaking study of the 1559 Parliament by Norman Jones demonstrated how manoeuvrings in the Lords could be illuminated through reports from outside Parliament, close reading of the chronology of events at Westminster, and careful examination of the wider political context.

What was missing from these endeavours was a detailed understanding of the individuals who sat in the upper House, a gap in our knowledge which is now close to being filled by the History of Parliament’s project on the Elizabethan Lords. Since 2020 nearly 250 new biographies have been researched and written, reconstructing the lives of the bishops and lay peers who participated in Elizabeth’s 13 parliamentary sessions, identifying their political networks and personal objectives at Westminster, and pondering the place that Parliament occupied in their wider careers.

In following these men’s careers in the Lords over several decades, it has become possible to develop a sense of what ‘normal’ business may have involved and the routine patterns by which things got done. That in turn allows us to observe anomalies in those patterns, and to consider the political forces which operated in those grey areas for which we have only patchy documentation.

However, it is still enormously helpful to pursue these questions in a scenario where we have enough contextual data to speculate with some confidence on how individual peers may have behaved. Accordingly, the focus of this seminar is the Parliament of 1584-5, and specifically the struggles over religion that gave this session much of its flavour.

A quarter of a century after the Elizabethan church settlement of 1559, English Protestantism had reached another crossroads. The first generation of Elizabethan bishops, many notable for their evangelical fervour, were mostly dead, their hopes of continuing reformation disappointed. Their successors, headed by the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, were mostly content to defend what was now the ecclesiastical status quo, despite the poor quality of many clergy, and numerous abuses in appointments and funding.

Indeed, upon becoming archbishop, Whitgift had attempted to clamp down on Protestant clergy who refused to conform to those aspects of the Elizabethan settlement that seemed to hark back to Catholicism. In the process, Whitgift incurred the wrath of Elizabeth’s two most powerful advisers, Lord Burghley and the earl of Leicester, who believed that the primate’s tactics would weaken the Protestant cause at a time when English Catholic numbers were rising again and the threat of war with Catholic Spain was also increasing. Despite enjoying the continuing support of the queen, Whitgift was forced to scrap his plans. Even so, when Parliament met in November 1584, the archbishop came under attack again, this time from the fervently Protestant House of Commons, which petitioned for major reform of the Church, and introduced numerous bills to the same end.

But what of the Lords? When this Parliament opened, only 11 out of a possible 25 other bishops were present to offer the primate their support. On the face of things Whitgift was isolated and on the back foot. He continued to face hostility from Burghley and Leicester, and three of the Commons’ provocative bills were passed by the peers, before being vetoed by Elizabeth.

The bare facts look bad – but they are not the full picture. By exploring the group dynamics of the bishops in 1584-5, and drawing on contextual documentation both from the Commons and from outside Parliament, this paper will argue that Whitgift stood his ground, gathering his closest allies around him, and in the process consolidating the Church hierarchy’s revised priorities. Moreover, although Burghley and Leicester were broadly sympathetic to the demands of the Commons, they also knew that they could not afford to oppose the queen’s own views on the Church too strongly, and were therefore obliged to moderate their attacks on the archbishop. That sense of royal protection for the bishops in turn sheds light on their status within the Lords during Elizabeth’s reign.

The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

PMH

Further reading:

G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England 1559-1581 (1986)

David Dean, Law-making and Society in Late Elizabethan England (1996)

T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (3 volumes, 1981-95)

Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

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.

The finalized ‘Articles of Union’ were signed at Whitehall on 22 July 1706 and formally presented to Queen Anne the following day. They were considered by the Scottish Parliament during October 1706-January 1707, and an Act was then passed declaring Scotland’s assent. The Articles were then debated at Westminster, first by the Commons, then the Lords, during February 1707. A bill was passed for ratifying the Articles to which the Queen gave her assent in person at the House of Lords on 6 March.

After the Scottish Parliament had passed its ratifying Act it had turned to the question of Scotland’s future parliamentary representation. Article 22 of the Treaty had decreed that 16 peers and 45 commoners were to represent Scotland at Westminster, leaving it to Scotland’s Parliament to settle the detail. The Edinburgh parliament was a unicameral body which, by the eve of the Union, had grown to consist of a ‘theoretical’ total of 302, made up of some 143 hereditary peers, 92 ‘shire’ or county commissioners, and 67 burgh commissioners. Inevitably, Scotland’s loss of its representative body – symbolizing the loss of national sovereignty – in favour of a much reduced representation at Westminster produced deep resentment among the Scottish populace.

At the end of January 1707, following a series of ill-attended sittings, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation setting out the procedures for electing the 16 peers and 45 commoners. The 16 representative peers were to be chosen by the entire body of Scottish peers through ‘open election’ rather than by ballot. Each elected peer was to serve for the duration of one Parliament. Upon the dissolution of Parliament all Scottish peers would be summoned by royal proclamation to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where the names of peers were called over and each peer would then read out his list of 16 nominees. It became standard practice for governments to canvass their preferred choices, thus ensuring a controllable bloc of support in the Upper House. The practice of electing ‘representative peers’ of Scotland was to continue until it was abolished by the Peerage Act of 1963.

Far more contentious was the process of allocating the 45 commoner representatives between the shires and burghs. It was eventually fixed at 30 for the shires and 15 for the burghs, but it entailed a substantial redrawing of the electoral map of Scotland. Most of the 33 Scottish counties acquired a single Member of Parliament, but with the six smallest counties being required to alternate in pairs from one election to the next. The county franchise, however, remained unchanged. The 66 royal burghs were now grouped together into 14 ‘burgh districts’, each containing four or five burghs. Each district returned a single MP while Edinburgh retained the right to elect its own Member, making the total of 15. Within each district the place of election rotated from one election to the next according to the order of precedence used in the rolls of the Scottish parliament and as laid down in the Scottish elections act.

Since the Union was to take effect from 1 May 1707, the Treaty declared that the first Parliament of Great Britain was to last for the duration of the current parliament at Westminster. Members of the Scottish parliament who had opposed the Union pressed for a general election in Scotland to elect the 45 Scots MPs. But it was agreed instead that the first Scots MPs should be chosen from, and elected by, the existing parliament in Edinburgh rather than run the risk of allowing Scotland’s small electorate an early opportunity to elect an anti-Union majority. Virtually all the peers and commoners selected had supported the Union and most could be counted on to support the Court in the new Parliament.

The Scottish parliament gathered for the last time on 25 Mar. 1707 and was formally closed by the Queen’s lord high commissioner, the duke of Queensberry. At Westminster the current session ended on 24 Apr. when Parliament was prorogued until 30 April. On that day, a small number of peers gathered in the Upper House (to which the handful of MPs attending in the Commons was also summoned), to hear a proclamation read declaring that the new Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain had now replaced the separate English and Scottish parliaments. A further proclamation of 5 June declared that it would assemble at Westminster on 23 October.

When the new Parliament duly convened on that day the first business in the Commons was to choose a new Speaker. What was usually a political trial of strength was on this occasion a good-natured formality, with the preceding Speaker, John Smith, being unanimously called again to the Chair. In a neatly orchestrated move, the nomination was seconded by the Scots MP, Francis Montgomerie, who, having served with Smith as a Union commissioner, commended Smith’s contribution to the negotiations.

Scots MPs accustomed to the ponderous formality of proceedings in Edinburgh found it necessary to adapt to the cut and thrust style of debate at Westminster. The general election in 1708 gave Scottish voters their first chance of electing representatives to the united Parliament. But the years immediately ahead saw Scottish MPs frequently at odds with British ministers over failure to honour vital aspects of the Treaty.

Further Reading

P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester 1978).

M. Brown and A.J. Mann, The History of the Scottish Parliament, 1567-1707 (Edinburgh, 2005)

This is a revised version of the article ‘England, Scotland and the Treaty of Union, 1706-08′ by Andrew Hanham, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

The Triennial Act of February 1641 was the first piece of legislation passed by the ‘Long Parliament’ in its momentous thirteen-year history of reform, rule and, in 1649, regicide. Of course, none of the peers and MPs who had assembled late in 1640 anticipated that Parliament would overthrow Charles I and seize the reins of government. But what they did foresee was the need to exploit the crisis engendered by his recent and disastrous war against the Scots in order to curtail the royal prerogative – the monarchy’s traditional discretionary powers that enabled it to govern without Parliament. None of these powers was more significant than the king’s right to call and dissolve Parliaments at will. The Triennal Act was brought in to limit this right, introducing legal provisions for summoning Parliament automatically in the event that the king had failed to do so after a three-year period. Here was the first step in a hoped-for revolution in royal government whereby parliamentary laws and taxation, based upon consent, would replace what many at the time saw as the king’s ‘arbitrary’ rule over their lives and property.

The fact that the Act originated in the Commons and was sponsored by Oliver Cromwell and other radicals has persuaded some historians that it was a power-grab by MPs determined to prove that they were now ‘the active agency of Parliament’ (G. Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Abingdon, 2020), p. 236). Yet even supposing the Commons viewed their handiwork in these terms they faced a major obstacle, for draft legislation still required the endorsement of both the Lords and the king to become law. As sent up to the Lords early in 1641 for their consent, the triennial bill (i.e. the draft Act) was indeed a radical document. It stipulated that if the king did not call a Parliament when required then the task would fall to the county sheriffs and other returning officers and then – if they too failed in this duty – to the electors themselves. Laws for calling regular Parliaments to redress ‘Mischiefs and Grievances’ had been on the statute books since the fourteenth century (The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol. 1, p. 374); but none, so far as is known, had authorised people this far beyond the normal circles of government to act for the crown independently of their political masters. Charles was appalled that his ‘Ancient Prerogative’ would be exercised by ‘Sheriffs and Constables and I know not whom…’ (J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), vol. 4, p. 155).

When the triennial bill was read in the Lords late in January 1641 it provoked ‘serious Debate’ and was referred to a committee to make ‘Additions and Amendments’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1782), vol. 4, p. 247). The king had even bigger problems with the bill and proposed to the Lords ‘that the Lawes for houlding of Annuall Parliam[en]tes be dulie kept and observed’, but that if this safeguard failed then the power of summoning a new Parliament should be vested either in the lord chancellor or the lord keeper (Parliamentary Archives, Main Papers, 28 Jan. 1641). These crown officers were royal ministers of state, appointed by the monarch, and the king seems to have calculated that if push came to shove they would remain answerable to him. The peer who chaired the committee to amend the bill was another royal minister – the lord privy seal, Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester. He was a firm believer in the authority, indeed duty, of the peerage to act for the good of the commonwealth in disputes between the monarch and the people. He and his fellow committeemen did not object to royal ministers or, if necessary, local returning officers summoning Parliament independently of the king. Instead, they inserted between the two groups their own choice as guardians of the public interest – the aristocracy.

Manchester’s committee proposed that if the king or one of his ministers did not summon Parliament as required then the peers of the realm, ‘or any twelve or more of them’, should meet at Westminster and issue the necessary writs for holding elections (The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 ed. S.R Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), p. 147). The number twelve in this context was a highly controversial one and loaded with political significance. In 1601 a group of English noblemen led by Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had justified their rebellion against Elizabeth I by claiming authority under a precedent of 1265 for twelve peers to seize power and summon Parliament. Five members of Manchester’s 1641 committee, among them Essex’s son, the 3rd earl, had invoked this same authority just the previous year, joining seven other noblemen – making twelve peers in all – to petition Charles, demanding that he call Parliament. This demand, backed by Scottish force, had worked; the disaffected peers of 1640, unlike their Elizabethan predecessors, had prevailed.

The Lords’ amended triennial bill was returned to the Commons where it was referred to a committee dominated by Cromwell and like-minded MPs and was approved with only minor changes. A delegation of peers then attended the king on the understanding that if he withheld his royal assent to the bill he would be threatened with ‘the most extreme designs’; Charles ‘yielded to necessity’ and complied (Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1640-1642 ed. A.B. Hinds (1924), p. 126). To him the Act represented a slippery slope towards an aristocratic republic and, in time perhaps, full parliamentary sovereignty. But a more immediate challenge to royal power – certainly once Parliament had been dissolved – was the baronial authority that the twelve petitioner peers had wielded and to which the Triennial Act now gave legal expression. The Commons had acquiesced in the Lords’ re-drafting of their bill because they shared the reformist ideals of the twelve peers. Indeed, some of the leading MPs had conspired with these noblemen to bring down Charles’s ‘personal rule’ the year before.

The two Houses were determined not just to affirm the lordly interest evident in the Triennial Act but to strengthen it. In their final overture to the king before the outbreak of civil war in 1642 they insisted on aristocratic control of royal government in the intervals between Parliaments; but Charles scorned the idea of reigning as a ‘Pupil or Ward’ of his over-mighty subjects (His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), p. 14). On raising an army against him that summer, parliamentarian peers and MPs declared allegiance to their new lord general with the baronial pledge that they would ‘live and die with the [3rd] Earl of Essex’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1786), vol. 5, p. 206).

DS

Further reading:

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfild & Nicolson, 2007)

Esther S. Cope, ‘The inconveniences of long intermissions of Parliament and a remedy for them’, Albion, 13 (1981), pp. 1-11

Pauline Croft, ‘The debate on annual Parliaments in the early seventeenth century’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 16 (1996), pp. 163-74

Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The earl of Essex and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 34 (2015), pp. 90-110

Note: the biography of Oliver Cromwell has been published in House of Commons, 1640-60. The biographies of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester, will appear in House of Lords, 1640-60. For a study of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, see House of Lords, 1558-1603 (forthcoming).

The seminar takes place on 11 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In 1881 the House of Lords select committee on the law relating to the protection of young girls recommended the passage of a criminal law amendment bill. The bill proposed raising the age of consent from 13, increasing the power of the police over brothels and criminalising acts of what it called ‘gross indecency’ between men. Despite passing repeatedly through the Lords, the legislation twice failed to pass through the House of Commons in the face of parliamentary inertia.

A campaign to win popular support for raising the age of consent as a means of combating juvenile prostitution had been promoted by the social purity movement from the 1870s. The movement advocated for a single standard of morality between men and women. Its members included Alfred Dyer, who highlighted the traffic of English women to European brothels, and Ellice Hopkins who founded both the Church of England Purity Society and the working-class White Cross Army. Dyer’s journal The Sentinel was the official organ of the social purity movement, which had grown out of the success of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, led by Josephine Butler. Butler had set up the first purity association, the Social Purity Alliance, in 1873.

The Contagious Diseases Acts (the first of which passed in 1864) covered certain areas of the UK around military bases and gave the police powers to compel women suspected of being sex workers to be medically inspected for venereal disease and detained until they were cured. These acts were designed to control the spread of venereal disease within the armed forces but there was no equivalent compulsory examination or detention for men. The ultimately successful campaign for their repeal mobilised middle class women and gave them an unprecedented political voice.

The criminal law amendment bill failed to pass the House of Commons in 1883 and 1884, due primarily to extraordinary pressures on Gladstone’s Liberal government. These included the third reform bill, the Mahdist uprising and the very real prospect of war with Russia in 1885. The bill was also held up, in part, by conflict within the social purity movement, some of whom wanted to focus parliamentary time on the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts after they were suspended in 1883. One source of planned pressure on Parliament to pass the bill surrounded the revelatory trial of the high-class brothel keeper, Mary Jeffries, in May 1885. However, her unexpected guilty plea prevented the giving of evidence and the plan collapsed.

The next attempt to force the bill through Parliament was a series of sensational articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. This series, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was written by the Gazette’s editor, W. T. Stead, over the course of a week in July 1885. The articles highlighted the issue of juvenile and coercive prostitution. They were the result of an investigation by a ‘secret commission’ headed by Stead and including members of the Salvation Army. He described the revelations in these articles as ‘abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables’.

Stead’s articles made repeated reference to Parliament and sometimes directly addressed Lord Salisbury’s new Conservative government, which had taken office a month earlier. The articles had to make a careful and considered appeal to legislators to achieve a change in the law, while also rousing public opinion about the ‘protection of women and girls’.

While the earlier failures of the bill to pass the Commons were mainly due to pressure on parliamentary time, during 1885 the likely success of the bill was bolstered by allegations that some MPs would be personally embarrassed by revelations in Stead’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. Josephine Butler commented that ‘there are guilty men on the Treasury bench who now begin to be most uneasy’.

Some MPs actively supported the bill. They were all Liberals and mainly Nonconformists in religion. These included Samuel Morley, Henry Broadhurst, Samuel Smith, James Stuart and James Stansfeld, who was a veteran of the Contagious Diseases Acts campaign. Two MPs, Morley and Richard Reid, sat on a committee of inquiry which verified the truth of W. T. Stead’s articles, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic Cardinal Manning.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed by Parliament in August 1885.  The new Act raised the age of consent to 16, increased the power of the police over brothels and criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men. Clauses relating to the latter, which criminalised sexual activity between men, were added to the bill by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchere.

Following the Act, the social purity movement coalesced itself into the National Vigilance Association to ensure the legislation was effectively enforced. Their campaigns and subsequent police prosecutions would focus primarily on the anti-brothel legislation, rather than the age of consent clauses. The impact of the Criminal Law Amendment Act’s criminalisation of male homosexuality would continue to be felt until its partial repeal by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

SS

To find out more, Steven’s seminar takes place on 11 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

In the wake of the corruption and expense of the 1880 general election, Sir Henry James, attorney general in Gladstone’s Liberal government, oversaw a landmark piece of legislation which aimed to clean up Britain’s elections: the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act. When this measure was first introduced in 1881, The Times remarked that

if passed in its present form, it can scarcely fail to effect something like a revolution in the mode of conducting Parliamentary elections.

Although James accepted several amendments as the bill passed through the Commons, its core principles remained intact. It restricted how much candidates could spend at elections and what they could spend it on; increased the penalties for corrupt practices, including bribery and ‘treating’ voters with food and drink; and introduced the new category of illegal practices, which including illegal employment and illegal payment.

The first English contest under these new rules, the November 1883 York by-election, suggested that the Act would indeed transform the practice of electioneering. In keeping with its limits, York’s candidates spent just over a tenth of what the 1880 contest had cost, and the number of paid election workers and rooms hired for electioneering fell dramatically. However, some small-scale bribery and treating persisted.

The Third Reform Act of 1884-5 had made major changes to the electoral system by the time the first general election under the 1883 Act’s terms was held in 1885. The extension of the franchise meant that the electorate grew from 3,152,000 in 1883 to 5,708,000 in 1885, while the redistribution of seats into largely single member constituencies completely redrew the electoral map. This major overhaul of the electoral system – particularly the removal of small boroughs and the increased electorate – made its own contribution to diminishing corruption. The 1883 Act was, however, crucial in providing the framework within which candidates – increasingly with the assistance of professional agents overseeing local constituency associations – had to cultivate the votes of this mass electorate.

Election expenditure by candidates declined significantly following the 1883 reform. Candidates’ declared expenditure in 1885 was over £700,000 less than in 1880, despite a longer period of election campaigning and a far larger electorate. The average cost per vote polled fell by three-quarters, from 18s. 9d. to 4s. 5d., and never exceeded this in the period before the First World War, as the table below shows. Assisted by the Act’s restrictions, candidates did away with unnecessary expenditure on vast numbers of election workers or decorative items such as flags and banners.

_{Source: Kathryn Rix, ‘“The elimination of corrupt practices in British elections”? Reassessing the impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2008), 77}

One of the problems revealed in 1880 had been that the total declared in candidates’ election accounts did not always reflect their true expenditure. The 1883 Act made a false declaration of expenses an illegal practice, which undoubtedly encouraged more accurate accounting. However, it remained the case that these official returns did not always present the full picture. One leading Liberal agent claimed in 1907 that

every agent has heard of cases where it has been necessary to “fake” the accounts in order to make it appear that no illegal expenditure has been allowed.

Such falsification of accounts broke the law, but there were also growing concerns about other expenditure which infringed the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1883 Act. Spending at elections by pressure groups such as the Tariff Reform League or temperance organisations – who held meetings, hired committee rooms and distributed leaflets and posters – might benefit particular candidates, but did not have to be included in their accounts.

At the 1892 election the Liberals were particularly concerned about the £100,000 allegedly spent by members of the drink trade in support of Conservative candidates, while in the early years of the twentieth century it was the greater spending power of the pro-Conservative Tariff Reform League in comparison with the pro-Liberal Free Trade Union which sparked most anxiety. The matter was raised in the Commons in February 1908 when 133 Liberal and Labour MPs (and one Liberal Unionist) backed an amendment regretting ‘the way in which large sums, derived from the secret funds of the Tariff Reform League and other similar societies, are spent in electoral contests without being returned in the candidates’ expenses’. A few months later the 1883 Act’s author Henry James corresponded with the lord chancellor about possible legislation to restrict such spending.

These were not the only ways in which the 1883 Act’s aim of curbing the electoral influence of wealth was apparently being evaded. James raised concerns about spending between elections by local party organisations and associated bodies such as the Primrose League on social activities and entertainments. This would have been classed as treating if undertaken in support of the candidate during the election. Yet James argued that

the corruption which causes a man to profess a political faith is as injurious as that which induces him to fulfil it by recording his vote.

In 1892 Conservative MPs at Hexham and Rochester were unseated by petitions because they had subsidised entertainments provided by the local Conservative association or Primrose League, raising hopes that such social activities might be curtailed. These were dashed by the 1895 Lancaster petition, which saw the Conservative MP retain his seat, despite the local party’s extensive programme of ‘politics and pleasure’, from dances to potato pie suppers. Crucially though, the MP had not subsidised these events.

Another continued source of spending to secure political influence was the ‘nursing’ of constituencies by candidates and MPs, who made charitable donations and subscribed to local clubs and institutions, in the hope of winning favour. The Conservative MP Frederick Milner complained in 1897 that

no pig, or cow, or horse dies in the constituency without the member being … asked to contribute towards another. He is expected to assist in the building or repair of each church and chapel … , to subscribe to all the cricket and football clubs, friendly societies, clubs, agricultural shows, and various worthy charities.

Some MPs spent hundreds of pounds annually in this way and the future Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman warned in 1901 that ‘the spending of money for the purposes of electoral influence’ was ‘one of the great dangers now affecting our political system’. It raised the spectre of wealthy ‘carpet-baggers’ effectively buying their way into seats where they had no local connections. It also had implications for the electoral chances of labour candidates, who could not afford such expenditure. However, suggestions that ‘nursing’ should be prohibited came up against the belief that, as MPs were often prominent local employers or landowners, philanthropy was a natural part of their social duties, irrespective of any political ambitions. Private members’ bills on the question in 1911 and 1912 failed to progress beyond their first reading.

The 1883 Act had clearly done much to curb election spending, but had not eradicated the electoral influence of wealth. A similar pattern emerges when assessing its impact on corruption. The number of MPs unseated by election petitions fell dramatically. Eighteen MPs lost their seats because of bribery and other corrupt practices at the 1880 election. In contrast, despite the law’s increased stringency, there was no election after 1885 which saw more than five MPs unseated. In total, 25 MPs were unseated for corrupt or illegal practices between 1885 and 1911. Cases such as the 1906 Worcester election petition, where around 500 individuals were involved in corruption, demonstrated that the 1883 Act had not been entirely successful.

Moreover, as with election accounts, the fall in petitions indicated a relative decline in corruption, but did not tell the full story. The significant costs and uncertain outcome of petitions deterred petitioners. So too did the unpopularity of petitions among voters, which might prove damaging to future election prospects. Petitioners also had to be sure that the election had been pure on their own side, or risk recriminatory charges. Where both parties had been involved with corruption, it might be better to collude to cover matters up, avoiding the potential threat of the constituency being disfranchised.

There continued to be rumours of corruption in constituencies which escaped petitions. The Liberal election agent for Thanet published a detailed account of the electoral misdeeds of Harry Marks, who won the seat for the Conservatives in 1906. He alleged that Marks had exceeded the 1883 Act’s limits, falsified his election accounts and funded treating and other forms of corruption. Marks had only narrowly survived an election petition against him in another constituency in 1895 and his involvement in commercial fraud was notorious. Thanet’s Liberals did not, however, petition against him, deterred by the expense and the difficulty of securing reliable witnesses who would not be ‘got at’ by Marks.

The complicity of both parties in corruption at Penryn and Falmouth, where it was alleged that ‘every man in the place was bought’, apparently prevented a petition after the 1900 election. Electoral malpractice continued: John Barker, Liberal MP from 1906 until his January 1910 defeat, later admitted to having spent thousands of pounds more than the Corrupt Practices Act’s limits during his two contests.

Yet while corrupt practices were not eliminated, The Times’s forecast of a revolution in electioneering remained accurate. Electoral contests after the 1883 Act were far purer and less costly than before this landmark reform. Sir Harry Verney, a veteran MP who first entered the Commons in 1832, and sat intermittently until 1885, summarised the transformation in 1892 when he reflected on

the great improvements I have lived to see in elections, when I remember the bribery, the drunkenness, and the extravagance of the old political contests.

Further reading:

For the first two articles in this series, see here and here.

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

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

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

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

An assertive Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposition to the Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the early modern period, both England’s Church and its Parliament changed. A Catholic country split from Rome and the importance and prominence of the two Houses of Parliament dramatically increased. These two seismic shifts were not isolated from one another. Parliament’s role in the transformation and governance of England’s ecclesiastical settlement has been much debated, especially since the seminal work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who argued Parliament’s role in enacting the early stages of the Reformation was a formative moment in parliamentary history. To address this complex relationship, the History of Parliament hosted a colloquium on 26 April 2025 entitled ‘Parliament and the Church, c.1530-c.1630’. Convened by Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford) and Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament), eight speakers and almost twenty audience members, many of them leading academics, debated a myriad of issues and topics in an energising and convivial atmosphere.

The eight speakers, split between three chronological panels, had produced their papers, (which will be published in a special edition of Parliamentary History) for pre-circulation; this meant the majority of the day was spent in discussion of their findings. In the first panel, Dr Gajda and Dr Paul Cavill (University of Cambridge) delved into the first half of the sixteenth century. Dr Cavill launched a vigorous attack on a famous essay of Elton’s, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: the triumph of parliamentary law in the sixteenth century’ which argued that in the 1530s emerged the twin ideas of the supremacy of parliamentary law (i.e. common law) and the notion of the king-in-Parliament being the ultimate authority in the kingdom. Using the example of the court of delegates, Dr Cavill’s paper skilfully showed how laws other than common law continued to be used, and that the monarchy ruled through the common law rather than under it. Dr Gajda took the discussion forward into the mid-century, showing that the Parliaments of Edward VI deserve to be known as Reformation Parliaments which enacted sweeping reforms via statute. This process did not occur because the crown believed the two Houses to be particularly appropriate as authorities on religious matters, but because parliamentary statute reached all the monarchy’s subjects and because the lay members of Parliament were more amenable to changes in religious practices than Convocation.

After a lunch break, the second panel of the day focussed largely on the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr Paul Hunneyball (History of Parliament) produced an excellent study of the bishops in the Lords as a group during the 1584-5 Parliament. Drawing on the cutting-edge research of the Lords 1558-1603 project, Dr Hunneyball teased out a number of insights about the bishops and their political activities, showing the value of investigating the Lords Spiritual as a body. Dr Esther Counsell’s (Western Sydney University) fascinating contribution focussed on the same Parliament, investigating a manuscript speech-treatise written by Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council, which was intended for the Parliament but never delivered. Dr Counsell argued that Beale was representative of a group within the English establishment which was eager for further religious reformation, worried about the encroachment of Catholicism, opposed to the jurisdictional overreach of ecclesiastical authorities and courts, and concerned that the denial of Parliament’s authority to determine ecclesiastical matters would undermine the stability of Elizabeth’s reign. The third speaker, Adam Forsyth (University of Cambridge), took the panel into the early seventeenth century with an impressive analysis of statutory interpretation and multilateralism in judicature, delineating the disputes between civil and common lawyers about who could interpret statutes and the different positions which civil lawyers adopted concerning the prerogatives of statutory interpretation.

Despite the hot weather and the lack of air conditioning in the History of Parliament’s common room, spirits and energy remained high for the third and final panel of the day. Professor Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent), who was chairing, prefaced the panel with an elegantly concise set of remarks about Parliament and religion in the 1630s before introducing the speakers. Emma Hartley’s (University of Sheffield) paper insightfully investigated the early Jacobean Parliaments, showing how their disputes and proceedings demonstrated that the future of the English Church was still considered to be uncertain at the time. Enormous tensions existed over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Parliament’s role in religious matters, and the constitutional positions and authority of bishops and Convocation. She was followed by Dr Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University) whose paper offered a brilliant account of how, pace earlier revisionist historiography, religious issues and constitutional crisis became a deadly combination in English politics well before the end of the 1620s. Dr Marshalek’s study of the 1620s Parliaments argued that the European geo-political situation made a re-negotiation of the English religious settlement, and the place of English Catholics within it, possible. It was in this context that calls from Parliament for the enforcement of religious conformity became more forceful and provoked a broader consideration of the relationship between the king, royal prerogative, and parliamentary statute. Closing the day’s proceedings, Dr Andrew Thrush (History of Parliament) offered a thought-provoking overview of the right of the House of Commons to debate religious matters between 1566-1629. He discussed why the Commons right to do so was not clearcut and why the crown, despite strenuous efforts, repeatedly failed to prevent the lower House from considering religious matters. He finished by concluding that the Commons achieved little in the way of tangible results through their extensive debates since they lacked the ability to enforce their will.

As with their predecessors, this final panel stimulated plenty of questions and debate between speakers and audience which continued in a more relaxed atmosphere following the end of official proceedings. As the vivacity of the day demonstrated, the relationship between Parliament and Church in early modern England remains a topic with potential for important discoveries and exciting insights.

ALB

The House of Lords Act 1999 was the last major reform to membership of the House of Lords; removing the rights of all but 92 hereditary peers to sit in the House. This act was intended to be a ‘first stage’ but since then other attempts to reform the Chamber have stalled. The presence of any hereditary peers in parliament at all has been called ‘undemocratic and indefensible’ by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer [BBC News, 5 September 2024], and the government included a bill in the July 2024 King’s Speech that would remove them entirely [Lords Library, 6 November 2024].

Almost since it passed, the 1999 Act has been criticised as a missed opportunity. Alexandra Kelso has argued that 1997 Labour government – who enjoyed a huge majority in the Commons and considerably popularity – had an ‘irrational fear’ that the Lords would hold up their governmental programme if reform was pursued, and ‘shrank’ from more ambitious measures [Kelso, 2011, p.111]. Subsequently the elections to choose which hereditary peers kept their seats, and to replace members when they died, have been described by Donald Shell as ‘nonsense’ [Shell, 2000, p.300]. However, reforming membership of the Lords is fraught with controversy, and consensus about what the House should look like is hard to reach.

Without understanding the context of the 1999 House of Lords Act the current composition of the chamber indeed seems rather strange. The decision to save 92 hereditary peers was largely due to behind the scenes negotiations between leading Conservative and Labour peers. The back and forth of negotiations is described by the journalist Michael Cockerell in a 2001 article for the Journal of Legislative Studies, written based on interviews Cockerell held for a BBC documentary ‘The Lady and the Lords’. Our own oral history project has interviews with two of the key protagonists of these talks: Ivor, Lord Richard, who was Leader of the Lords from 1997-98, and Lord Cranborne, now the 7^th Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Conservative peers. Their reflections in our archive suggest further insights into the complicated politics around the 1999 Act.

In 1997 the Labour party were elected with a manifesto commitment to reform the House of Lords in a two-stage process. The ‘initial, self-contained reform’ promised to remove ‘the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote […] by statute’ [Labour Party, 1997]. Whilst this was clearly understood as the start of the process, no detail was included on further reforms. This was a significant change from the 1992 Labour manifesto, which had promised a largely elected House of Lords. A reform bill was not introduced in New Labour’s first parliamentary session, which was dominated by other constitutional changes such as devolution in Scotland and Wales.

However, behind the scenes in 1997 and 1998 talks were already underway between the leaders of the two parties in the Lords. In Salisbury’s 2016 interview for our oral history archive, he remembered that after the 1997 landslide he had accepted that Lords reform was coming, and hoped to reach a compromise to secure both stages of reform. He wanted to avoid a situation where hereditary peers were removed (stage one) with no former reform to follow: ‘unless we had some reminder that we still needed stage two, then we’d just have stage one and a purely nominated House’. This was both a matter of principle and of politics, he remembered, as it was easier to unite pro- and anti-reform peers behind the position ‘no stage one without stage two’. In this extract from his interview, Salisbury explained his tactics, as discussed with his then party leader, William Hague:

Salisbury proceeded to disrupt the government’s legislative programme in their first parliamentary session, notably the European Elections Bill, which was later forced through using the powers of the Parliament Act.

On the Labour side, our 2015 interview with Lord Richard also discussed the behind the scenes negotiations. In line with Salisbury’s reflections, the two sides believed they were getting ‘somewhat near a settlement’ on the full reform package in summer 1998:

As Richard mentions, at this point he was sacked as Labour leader in the Lords. Both he and Salisbury later reflected that this must have been because of opposition to an elected upper chamber at the very top of the New Labour government. This testimony suggests that rather than being ‘frightened’ into accepting hereditary peers in a newly-constituted House of Lords, the government were equally resistant to agreeing to an elected chamber, a deal the peers themselves were close to reaching.

With Richard gone, his place in the negotiations was taken by Blair’s close ally, the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine. Salisbury describes the ‘utterly loopy’ negotiations to agree that 92 hereditary peers would remain: 10% of the hereditary peerage, with 15 further peers to man committees in the ‘interim’ period before further reform, and then adding in the Earl Marshall and Lord Chamberlain.

However, just before this deal was agreed and a bill to reform the Lords included in the 1998 Queen’s Speech, Conservative leader William Hague and a select group of his shadow cabinet rejected the deal. Instead, they wanted Salisbury and the Conservative Lords to continue to resist any reform. In our interview, Salisbury explained why he would not continue to do so. Firstly, he clearly accepted that Lords membership needed reform, but was opposed to a purely nominated chamber. Secondly, and importantly, he thought resisting all reform would be unconstitutional. The amount of opposition the Lords could give to an elected government was (and is still) governed by the terms of the ‘Salisbury convention’. This had been most recently defined by Salisbury’s grandfather, the 5^th Marquess (Conservative leader in the Lords 1942-1957): the Lords would not oppose a government bill if it had appeared in their manifesto. In his interview with us, the 7^th Marquess respected this as ‘grandfather’s convention’, and was not prepared to ignore it. Salisbury had spent a significant part of his childhood living with his grandfather when his own parents were away in Africa, and spoke about him with pride during his interview.

Nevertheless, Salisbury’s next decision to save his deal with Irvine was unorthodox, as he explains in this extract:

What followed was an extraordinary sequence of events where Salisbury dealt directly with his opponents in Number 10, including Blair and his chief of communications Alistair Campbell, to ensure his deal remained whether Hague wanted it or not. Salisbury and Campbell agreed the plan to save the 92 hereditary peers should be introduced as a crossbench amendment to the government’s bill, according to reporting in the Times the following week as an attempt to ‘bounce’ Hague into accepting it.

On the day the crossbench amendment was due to be announced, however, a furious Hague discovered that Salisbury had gone behind his back. Trying to seize the initiative, Hague announced the proposed deal to a shocked House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions, accusing Blair of reneging on his promise to remove all hereditary peers and trying to create a Lords full of ‘Tony’s Cronies’. Unfortunately for Hague, however, he had acted without knowing the feelings of Conservative peers. Instead of backing Hague they supported the deal to save 92 hereditary peers: indeed Hague was only able to secure a new Leader in the Lords (Lord Strathclyde, Salisbury’s close ally) and keep his front bench by agreeing that they could vote for the deal. Hague had to back down and ended up harangued on Newsnight over the whole episode.

This proved to be the end of Salisbury’s career in the Lords. Unsurprisingly sacked by Hague, he later retired from the House so as ‘not to cause trouble’ for Strathclyde. In his diary, Alistair Campbell expressed astonishment at Salisbury’s motives:

I still could not fully understand why he would do this – he didn’t know me from Adam, and what he did know he probably didn’t like and yet we had just sat down and agreed a line-by-line plan that he must know would damage his leadership, help us through a difficulty, and … he was going to be implicated. [Campbell, 30 November 1998, p.578]

From our interview these motives seem a lot clearer. At the end of the interview he reflected that he was ‘pleased’ with the outcome even if it was ‘a negative achievement’ as ‘if Blair had been able to go full-bloodedly for a stage one reform plan he might put the thing to bed for the foreseeable future’. Salisbury then laughed as he realised ‘You could say that he did that anyway! 17 years later, or whatever it is’ the Lords remains the same. Instead of being frightened into accepting that hereditary peers remain, the Labour government did create a mostly-nominated chamber.

E.P.

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Further Reading

Alistair Campbell, The Alistair Campbell Diaries, Volume Two: Power and the People, 1997-1999 (London: Arrow, 2001).

Michael Cockerell, ‘The Politics of Second Chamber Reform: A Case Study of the House of Lords and the Passage of the House of Lords Act 1999’, Journal of Legislative Studies 7:1 (2001), 119-134.

Alexandra Kelso, ‘Stages and Muddles: The House of Lords Act 1999’, Parliamentary History 30:1 (2011), 101-113.

Labour Party, New Labour: Because Britain Deserves Better (1997) [Accessed online: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml]

Donald Shell, ‘Labour and the House of lords: A Case Study in Constitutional Reform’, Parliamentary Affairs 53:2 (2000), 290-310.