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.

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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 seminar takes place on 28 October 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 2024, the family of J H Whitley, former Speaker of the House of Commons, most generously gave two items to the Parliamentary Art Collection. These were a rosette attached to a medal from Gladstone’s 1884 reform campaign; and a broken chain with padlocks which had been passed down the generations and reputed to be a ‘suffragette chain’.

John Henry Whitley (1866-1935), known as ‘J H’, was Liberal MP for Halifax between 1900 and 1928. His first wife, Marguerita née Marchetti (1872-1925), was President of the Halifax Liberal Women’s Association; her father Guilio fought with Garibaldi in Italy before settling in the UK.

J H Whitley is best known today for giving his name to Whitley Councils, consultative councils between employers and workers, set up following a committee he chaired during the First World War. Whitley Councils continue today in the public sector. In Parliament, he was elected Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means in 1910 and then Chairman of Ways and Means, and therefore also Deputy Speaker, from 1910 to 1921.

As Speaker between 1921 and 1928 he oversaw the decorative scheme for St Stephen’s Hall. On retiring as Speaker, Whitley refused the customary peerage and went on to other public roles until his death in 1935. He married again in 1928 and his second wife, Helen née Clarke (1882-1981), had been a member of the British community in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Whitley was generally known to be a supporter of women’s suffrage, but this had not been researched in detail until I began to investigate the ‘suffragette chain’. As Deputy Speaker, and then Speaker, Whitley had to be politically neutral, of course; and yet office holders have their own personal opinions, and sometimes these may influence political events.

This image is from a report into all Liberal MPs’ attitudes on suffrage from the papers of David Lloyd George, which shows Whitley as a supporter of the first Conciliation Bill in 1910. He expressed support for married women in particular having the vote a year later; and made it clear in 1913 that he had not changed his mind. The Conciliation Bills were unsuccessful cross-party suffrage bills between 1910 and 1912 which would have given a limited measure of women’s suffrage. As private members’ bills they stood little chance of success without government backing.

The Speaker during the years of militant activism before the First World War was James William Lowther, an opponent of women’s suffrage. Lowther had to respond to various suffragette protests in the Palace of Westminster, including at least two known to involve chains. However, Lowther became most infamous in suffrage history for a controversial procedural ruling which scuppered a women’s suffrage amendment to a government bill in 1913. If Whitley had been in the chair, this may not have happened.

In one of history’s ironies, Lowther went on to (reluctantly) chair the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform during the First World War, which under his leadership recommended a measure of votes for women, implemented in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. The Act gave the parliamentary vote to women aged 30 and over who met a property qualification. The battle for equal franchise went on in Parliament for the next ten years. During this time Lowther took the opportunity to scupper another women’s suffrage bill through a Speaker’s ruling in 1920. He stood down as Speaker in 1921, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Viscount Ullswater.

In 1924 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin made a pledge on equal franchise that his party ‘would if returned to power propose that the matter be referred to a Conference of all political Parties on the lines of the Ullswater Committee’. The Conservatives were elected and in due course Baldwin asked Whitley if he would chair another Speaker’s conference. Whitley refused, much to the relief of most of the Cabinet, who wanted to avoid discussion of wider electoral reform issues.

Despite strong opposition led by Winston Churchill, the Cabinet finally agreed to support equal franchise in 1927 and the 1928 Equal Franchise Act was passed the following year. Whitley oversaw all its stages in the Commons, standing down as Speaker shortly before it achieved royal assent in July 1928. It’s impossible to be sure, but it’s entirely possible that the ‘suffragette chain’ had remained in the Speaker’s Office all these years, until the issue received closure and this suffrage-sympathetic Speaker took it home as a retirement souvenir of his long parliamentary career.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 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.

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Some of this material was first presented by Mari Takayanagi at ‘Breaking the chains: Women’s suffrage and Parliament from the time of J.H. Whitley’, the 12th annual J H Whitley lecture at the University of Huddersfield on 17 October 2024. This year’s lecture will be given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, on 30 October 2025.

Mari would like to credit Beverley Cook, Curator of Social and Working History at the London Museum; Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor at the History of Parliament; and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, academic historian and archives consultant, for their assistance with research on the ‘suffragette chain’.

Further reading:

J. Hargreaves, K. Laybourn & R. Toye (eds.), Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons (2018).

M. Takayanagi, Votes for Women and the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform 1916-17. History of Parliament blog (2017).

M. Takayanagi, ‘Women and the Vote: The Parliamentary Path to Equal Franchise, 1918–28’, Parliamentary History, 37:1 (2018).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An assertive Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposition to the Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ballot Act of 1872 sits alongside the three major Reform Acts of the 19th century (and various Corrupt Practices Acts) in helping to transform British elections into their recognisably modern form. As some of our earlier blogs have shown, it ended a system of open voting and public nominations that had become increasingly associated with bribery, the intimidation of voters and disorderly behaviour, often fuelled by drink.

The calmness and order of Britain’s new secret elections, by contrast, was striking. At the first by-elections to be held in Pontefract, Preston, Tiverton and Richmond, it was widely reported that there was none of the usual ‘horse play’ and ‘excitement’. Some commentators even complained that the secret ballot had ‘taken all the life out of elections’, making them ‘dull’. They have become ‘the most monotonous of monotonies’, commented the South Wales Daily News, wistfully recalling the agitation and passion of ‘olden times’.

These and many similar press reports clearly support the idea of a remarkably smooth transition to secret voting, despite some initial hitches in places like Pontefract, which had just 4 weeks to prepare for the new system. However, a number of longer-term issues did begin to emerge in later polls, which have received less attention. At the municipal level, in particular, problems began to occur in places where multiple councillors were being chosen in each ward. Reports of electors inadvertently crossing the wrong combinations of boxes, because the official ballot papers listed the candidates differently to the leaflets they had received, or of electors being confused about how many crosses they could use, or even writing their names on the ballot as they had done previously in municipal elections, began to fill the local newspapers.

Illiterate voters appear to have had a particularly difficult time. Great fun, in a typically cruel Victorian fashion, was made out of one ‘gaily attired’ female voter at Sheffield’s first council elections held using the secret ballot, who after declaring ‘in the loudest of tones’ that she ‘could not read’, had to be physically restrained by the returning officer from shouting out her votes. She was promptly taken aside and ‘amidst the laughter of those in the room’ made to whisper her choices, before being given a lecture about ‘learning to read’.

The biggest problem, however, which was to become a significant issue in the 1874 general election, was the question of how to cast a good old fashioned ‘plumper’ in those constituencies that continued to elect two (or more) MPs. It is often forgotten that unlike today with our first-past-the-post system, before 1885 the vast bulk of England’s parliamentary seats were multi-member. This created a much more complex voting system in which electors could either divide their support between different candidates or use just one of their multiple votes to support a single candidate, by casting a ‘plumper’. Shortly before the 1874 general election the Reading Mercury, 31 Jan. 1874, published this extraordinary but by no means uncommon advice:

If the voter intends to vote … all he has to do is put a cross (X) against the names of the candidates … Of course if the voter intends to give a “plumper” two crosses must be written opposite the name of the candidate thus favoured.

Reports soon filled the press of voters up and down the country either intending to or actually casting multiple votes for one candidate, all of which, as agents and their candidates frantically tried to point out, invalidated their ballot papers. Many newspapers, especially the London-based journals, blamed this confusion about plumping on the cumulative voting introduced alongside the secret ballot for London’s School Board elections in 1870. Under this system voters could, and often did, cast multiple votes for a single candidate.

The plumping problem, however, was not just confined to London’s constituencies. In Brighton one horrified Conservative candidate reported receiving multiple letters of support from voters saying ‘I shall give my two votes for you’. Fearing the worst, on the eve of the poll he issued a special address, warning that ‘if my voters shall commit that error, hundreds, if not thousands of votes would be lost’. In Sunderland one draper, questioned by a candidate, ‘said he meant to give him his two votes’. Things got so bad in Glasgow that special notices had to be issued telling electors that ‘you cannot give more than one vote to any one candidate or mark more than one X after the name of such candidate’.

Plumping was just one of the traditional forms of voting in multi-member seats that clearly did not translate smoothly on to the modern ballot paper. Unaided by the public conversations with clerks and agents that used to take place before electors orally declared their votes at the poll, many electors also struggled with selecting the appropriate combinations of candidates, especially in the absence of party labels on the ballot papers.

One upshot of all this, with long-term consequences, was the stimulus given to local party organisations in the constituencies to produce better guidance and campaign literature and develop new types of electioneering. Aided by their efforts, a deluge of additional information and advice about how best to support either the local Conservative party or the Liberals soon became available. But where did this leave the non-party voters, the backbone of the old public voting system, whose votes it must be remembered accounted for around one-fifth of all those cast between 1832 and 1868?

The data currently available indicates that non-party voting – either supporting candidates from different parties (in what amounted to a cross-party vote) or casting a non-partisan plump (voting for only one candidate from a particular party even when others were standing) – declined significantly in the 1874 and 1880 elections, for the first time dropping below 8%. The move to secrecy, it seems, made the whole business of casting non-party votes in multiple member constituencies more complex and liable to confusion, requiring a greater political awareness and level of knowledge on the part of the voter.

It would not be long of course before this whole system of multiple votes and being able to make non-party choices would be almost completely eradicated, making the use of the new secret ballot papers much more straightforward. After just one more general election in 1880, and yet another dramatic expansion of the franchise in 1884, most of the UK shifted to winner-takes-all single member seats in 1885 – a system that for better or worse, continues to define our modern party politics today.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 22 November 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

Public or ‘open’ voting is often associated with the most glaring iniquities of Victorian elections, including the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, violence and the harassment of electors at the poll, as well as bribery and the intimidation of voters by employers and landlords. In parliamentary elections voters declared their choices orally, stating how they wished to vote in front of election officials and assembled spectators, so that everyone knew immediately what their choices were. Running tallies of how well candidates were doing provided a live form of race-like entertainment, while also allowing agents to bring up or hold back ‘tallies’ of electors, along with all sorts of other nefarious tactics, such as kidnapping voters.

Other types of election, however, such as those held for town council polls after 1835, simply required the elector to sign and hand in a voting paper. These ballots have a modern appearance but the fact that they still exist, of course, illustrates the key difference with today’s practice: they were not kept secret. In some types of parish election it was even possible for single propertied women to vote, as surviving records of some local polls show. Lists showing the way individuals voted often appeared in local newspapers. They also formed the basis of special pollbooks produced by enterprising local publishers. The fact that these books were sold for a profit illustrates just how much public interest there was in the way people had voted – especially neighbours, relatives, shopkeepers, employees and tenants.

The idea that this system only produced negative results – with tenants being threatened with eviction if they didn’t vote as their landlords directed, or electors selling their votes to the highest bidder – overlooks the many positive features associated with public voting at the time. Chief among these was accountability – the idea that the vote was a public trust or duty that should be exercised ‘in the full glare of publicity’, in order to ensure it was done honestly. As the prime minister Lord Palmerston, expressing the view of most mid-Victorian leaders, explained:

An individual is invested with the power of voting, not for his own personal advantage or interest, but for the interest and advantage of the nation … to be exercised in perfect day, and be open to the criticism of our friends and neighbours and the public at large. (Click here for the full speech)

Most early Victorian MPs agreed. Asked for his views at the 1859 election, for instance, the Berkshire MP Captain Leicester Vernon declared:

Damn the secret ballot … Give me the bold-faced Englishman who, with his hat on one side, swaggers up to the polling booth, and when the clerk says, ‘For whom do you vote?’, answers manfully and IN THE FACE OF HIS NEIGHBOURS.

Openness was considered especially important at a time when only a limited number of people could vote. Rather than being completely excluded from the electoral process, non-electors could see and judge how everyone had polled. As a result, they were often able to play a part in trying to influence how voters behaved. Women, in particular, feature frequently in surviving canvassing books and electioneering papers, with comments like ‘wife says he will vote’ or ‘sister promised’ testifying to their role. As one MP noted during an 1867 Commons debate about giving women the vote, ‘Every one acquainted with elections was aware of the influence which was already exercised by women’. Disraeli, no stranger to electoral shenanigans, noted in his book The Election, ‘If the men have the vote, the women have the influence’.

Women, of course, were not the only type of non-elector. Working men, including all those disfranchised by the new voting restrictions of the 1832 Reform Act, also played a significant role in Victorian elections as non-electors, setting up meetings and pressure groups to influence voters and even threatening to boycott certain shopkeepers or traders, in a practice known as ‘exclusive dealing’. This was not considered as inappropriate or ‘unconstitutional’ as it might seem today. As one MP reminded a crowd of non-electors  during an 1841 campaign:

The vote is public property, the elector is only a trustee, and you the non-electors have the right to scrutinise and to direct the exercise of the voters’ function.

As well as being considered ‘unmanly’, ‘unEnglish’ and unfair on anyone without a vote, secret voting also suffered a series of presentation problems in the early Victorian period. Those most in favour in Parliament – including a significant group of Radical MPs elected after the 1832 Reform Act – found themselves arguing for secrecy in elections, but at the same time pressing for the votes cast by MPs in the Commons to be made more public. The official publication of MPs’ votes from 1836 and calls for greater accountability in public life sat uncomfortably with demands for complete secrecy at the polling booth.

The leadership of the secret ballot campaign in the four decades after 1832 also didn’t help. The cause was first led by the Radical MP George Grote, whose eccentric plans for ‘secret ballot’ voting machines were a gift to satirists. His successor was the unconventional ‘political opportunist’ Francis Berkeley MP, one of three notorious brothers sitting in the Commons renowned for their family feuds, violence and bizarre political behaviour. Motions in support of the secret ballot only ever passed in ‘thin’ Houses, when most MPs were absent, and before 1868 never exceeded the number achieved on 18 June 1839, when 216 MPs voted in its support, but 333 against.

What ultimately led to secret voting being implemented in 1872 was not the success of any popular outdoors campaign in its support. Secret voting never attracted the sort of backing that the anti-corn law movement, for instance, achieved. Instead, for the sake of unity within his Liberal cabinet, Gladstone agreed to carry out a trial of the ballot, on the basis that the 1867 Reform Act, by creating so many more voters, had undermined the idea of voting as a ‘public trust’ exercised on behalf of the unenfranchised. Drawing on experiences of secret voting in Australia and recent London school board elections, the cabinet forced a temporary measure through a very reluctant Parliament. It was only the success of this experiment that eventually led to its permanent adoption.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 14 July 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

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

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

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

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

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

The 1835 and 1865 general elections both took place under the electoral system established by the 1832 Reform Act, with 1865 being the last general election before the 1867 Reform Act made significant changes to the representative system. There were, however, many ways in which electioneering had evolved in the thirty years which separated them.

These two elections happened in rather different circumstances. The 1865 contest – one of five July general elections during the period between 1832 and 1867 – took place because the Parliament elected in 1859 was approaching the end of its maximum seven year term. The elderly Viscount Palmerston and the Liberals retained office after slightly increasing their majority, although Palmerston’s premiership ended with his death in October 1865, meaning that it was Earl Russell who was prime minister when the new Parliament met for the first time in February 1866.

In contrast the general election of 1835 – which took place across January and February and was one of only two winter elections in this period – had been called by a minority Conservative government. Sir Robert Peel had taken office in December 1834 at the end of a turbulent year that had seen the resignation of four Cabinet ministers from Earl Grey’s Whig government over proposals to reform the Anglican Church in Ireland, including the future Conservative prime minister Edward Smith Stanley (later Lord Derby). This had precipitated Grey’s resignation in July 1834. He was succeeded as Whig prime minister by Viscount Melbourne. In November 1834, however, King William IV dismissed Melbourne’s ministry, the last time in British history that a monarch used their power to remove a government.

Peel, who sought to present a moderate reforming Conservatism in his ‘Tamworth manifesto’, improved his party’s position at the 1835 election, and scuppered Stanley’s hopes of forming his own ‘third’ or ‘centre’ party, the so-called ‘Derby dilly’. However, the Conservatives failed to secure a majority of seats. Although some members of the ‘Derby dilly’ gave him their support in the division lobby, Peel was forced to resign in April 1835 after a series of Commons defeats, with Melbourne returning to lead another Whig ministry.

As this summary suggests, one difference between the 1835 and 1865 elections was the role played by party. Party labels were much less clear-cut and party affiliation far more fluid in 1835 than in 1865, which had an impact on electioneering and the ways in which candidates presented themselves and their political message. Statistics compiled by our research fellow Dr Martin Spychal indicate the range of party labels used by non-Conservative MPs in 1835, including Whigs, Reformers, Radicals, moderate Whigs, moderate Reformers and Repealers. In contrast, in 1865 the vast majority of non-Conservative MPs were listed as Liberals.

Alongside this, the presence of the ‘Derby dilly’ and other ‘independent’ MPs who were willing to give Peel’s minority government ‘a fair trial’ meant that the party system in operation in 1835 looked rather different from the more obvious Liberal/Conservative distinctions in 1865. In an article published in February 1835, The Examiner analysed the likely voting patterns of 71 MPs it considered to be ‘doubtful men’ when it came to their party affiliation. However, party allegiances were by no means set in stone in 1865. There were around 50 MPs – mainly Conservatives wishing to indicate their moderate views and willingness to give general support to Palmerston’s ministry – who termed themselves ‘Liberal Conservatives’. Meanwhile, not all Liberals could be relied upon to support their party leaders, as the ‘Adullamite’ rebellion against the Russell ministry’s 1866 reform bill made plain.

The evolving complexities of party were not the only ways in which the 1835 and 1865 contests differed. Although no major Reform Act was passed until 1867, other legislation had altered the framework of electioneering. At both contests, 658 MPs were elected, but the constituencies for which they were chosen were not identical. In 1835 Sudbury and St Albans each returned two MPs. However, persistent corruption in these constituencies meant they were stripped of their representation in 1844 and 1852 respectively.

Their four seats were redistributed in 1861. One went to the new borough of Birkenhead, whose voters chose the shipbuilder John Laird as MP at a by-election that year, and re-elected him in 1865. There was also a by-election in 1861 to select a new third MP for the previously double-member constituency of South Lancashire. Voters for the final two new seats had to wait until the 1865 election, when the double-member West Riding of Yorkshire was split into two double-member constituencies. Lancashire South’s third seat took on an added significance in 1865 when it was won by William Gladstone, then Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, who needed a new berth after being rejected by Oxford University’s voters.

Other reforms had a nationwide impact. In 1835 polling in most constituencies lasted two days, the exception being Irish counties where the polls could be kept open for up to five days. For borough constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales, 1835 was the last general election at which two day polls took place. Legislation later that year cut the length of the poll in these seats to just one day.

It was hoped that this would help to curb the expense and corruption of elections, by reducing the window of opportunity for bribery, treating, intimidation and disorder. It had not been uncommon for electors to delay casting their votes until the second day of polling, in the hopes of securing larger bribes as the close of the contest approached. Praising the shift to a one day poll, the Radical MP Richard Potter noted that ‘the mischief under the old system was generally done in the night’. Successive reforms – for Irish boroughs in 1847, English, Scottish and Welsh counties in 1853, and Irish counties in 1850 and 1862 – meant that at the 1865 election, the only constituency where the poll was allowed to last for two days was Orkney and Shetland, although in the event its Liberal MP was re-elected unopposed.

The most significant corrupt practices legislation in the 1832-68 period was the 1854 Corrupt Practices Prevention Act, which provided detailed definitions for the existing offences of bribery and treating and created the new offence of ‘undue influence’ or intimidation. Its stipulation that payments for ‘chairing’ victorious candidates after the poll would be considered illegal had the effect of curbing one of the most colourful aspects of election ritual. Chairings were relatively common in 1835, as at Swansea, where the newly re-elected MP John Vivian was carried through the town by sixteen men ‘with shirts decorated in blue and yellow’, in a chair bearing the slogan ‘Vivian and independence’, accompanied by a procession with a band of music. Although some MPs took part in informal victory processions in 1865, we have not yet found any examples of the traditional chairing ceremony.

When it came to the prevalence of bribery, however, 1835 and 1865 had much in common. In terms of the number of successful election petitions, which unseated MPs for electoral malpractice, the latter contest was in fact worse than its predecessor. In 1835 there were 12 cases in which the election result was overturned, while in 1865 there were 16. The most shocking examples of corruption in 1865 included Lancaster, where an astounding 64% of voters took or gave a bribe, and Totnes, where as much as £200 was offered for a single vote. These two boroughs, together with Great Yarmouth and Reigate, suffered the same fate as St Albans and Sudbury, being disfranchised for corruption under a special clause in the 1867 Reform Act.

KR

For more on changes in electioneering during the nineteenth century, see Dr Philip Salmon’s article on developments in transport to the poll and Dr Kathryn Rix’s article on elections under the secret ballot.

As politicians continue to debate the House of Lords’ future, including legislation to eliminate its remaining hereditary peers, they might draw lessons from its past. Particularly instructive are the events of the English Revolution, which saw the House of Lords and monarchy abolished in 1649. Both were collateral damage in the single-minded pursuit of King Charles I’s trial by a radical minority of MPs abetted by the parliamentarian army. The unicameral parliaments that followed in the 1650s proved unmanageable, or at least unserviceable to what Oliver Cromwell and the godly believed should be the agenda for settlement.

Even after expelling the torpid Rump Parliament by force in 1653, and assuming the title of Lord Protector under Britain’s first written constitution, The Instrument of Government, Cromwell struggled with his parliaments. Desperate measures, including the exclusion of around a hundred MPs before the meeting of the Second Protectorate Parliament in 1656, failed to bring that assembly to heel. Cromwell was particularly alarmed when that same parliament gave rein to its religious intolerance, not least by claiming the power to define, judge and punish the alleged misdemeanours of a Quaker named James Naylor, who MPs unilaterally found guilty of ‘horrid blasphemy’ and voted a suitably savage punishment. As Cromwell warned a meeting of army officers in February 1657, the ‘case of James Naylor might happen to be your own case’. As far as he was concerned, the Commons needed ‘a check, or balancing power’ in the form of a second chamber (John Morrill et al, The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iii. 340-1).

His wishes were answered in March 1657 when MPs presented Cromwell with a new written constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, which created an ‘Other House’ of parliament. This was no straightforward revival of the House of Lords. Its membership would consist of a maximum of seventy men, sitting not by hereditary right, but chosen by the Protector and approved by the Commons. Members would serve for life, or until removed for misdemeanours, whereupon new ones would be chosen to fill vacant places. While Cromwell was no political theorist, he found hereditary systems of rule inherently unsound. He failed to see the logic in an arrangement where it mattered little if a person was ‘a fool or wise, honest or not’, for ‘whatever they be’, they ‘must come in’ (Morrill et al, iii. 144). Instead, admission to the Other House was based on what Cromwell perceived to be individuals’ merits or principles. He claimed to chose men who valued ‘not titles’, but ‘a Christian and an English interest’ (Morrill et al, iii. 493).

This does not mean Cromwell was unwilling to select noblemen for the Other House. Ultimately, though, only seven old English peers received summons: the earls of Manchester, Mulgrave and Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lords Eure, Fauconberg and Wharton. These were men who had either shown a willingness to play some role in the Cromwellian regime, or were erstwhile allies from the 1640s who Cromwell hoped to win back. Many other peers were overlooked, however, including some, like the earl of Salisbury, who had sat in the House of Commons during the 1650s. Other noblemen were chosen who had not been eligible to sit in the English House of Lords, including the Irish Lord Broghill and the Scottish earl of Cassillis, perhaps suggesting that Cromwell aimed to make the new chamber representative of the fragile union achieved by the English republic’s conquest of Scotland and Ireland.

Yet, the vast majority of the sixty-two members summoned to the Other House were not noblemen but new men: Cromwell’s ‘sons and kindred, flattering courtiers, corrupt lawyers, degenerated swordmen, and… self-interested salarymen’, as one critic put it (A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (so called) (1658), pp. 23-4). The charge had substance: over a quarter of the members were closely related to the Protector, including two sons and three sons-in-law. They also included all but one of Cromwell’s privy councillors, and many administrators, court officials and judges.

It is hardly surprising, given Cromwell’s desire for the new chamber to act as a balance on the Commons, that he selected those who shared his political and religious vision. But this made the Other House a very different animal to the old Lords. Its membership was more socially diverse: several had amassed fortunes only after rising through the ranks during the civil wars, such as the shoemaker John Hewson, the brewer Thomas Pride, and James Berry, who was a clerk at an ironworks before the conflict. Of course, this made it easy for critics to suggest the Other House was an assemblage of men of mean birth and low principles, but from Cromwell’s perspective it represented a meritocracy not an aristocracy.

Those old peers summoned to the ‘Other House’ recognised its novelty. Writing to Lord Wharton in late 1657, Viscount Saye was clear that they must not accept Cromwell’s writ of summons. To do so would make them complicit in the ‘laying aside of the Peers of England who by birth are to sit’; they would ‘disown their own rights and the rights of all the Nobility of England’. By breaking the ancient link between hereditary nobility and parliamentary membership, Saye believed the Other House was ‘a stalking horse’ to ‘carry on the design of over-throwing the House of Peers’ (Bodl. Carte MS 80, f. 749).

Saye’s warning was prophetic. When the Other House assembled in January 1658, Cromwell pointedly referred to it as ‘our House of Lords’, implying it now assumed the position of its predecessor (Morrill et al, iii. 467). To complete the charade, its members were styled ‘lords’ and sat in the Lords’ chamber at Westminster. Yet, the Commons were not easily deceived. As the republican MP Thomas Scot mischievously put it, if the Other House was really the House of Lords, Cromwell must summon all ‘the old peerage’, but the ‘old nobility, will not, do not, sit there’. The Other House were ‘but Commoners’; its members were ‘part of the Commons, in another place’ (The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J.T. Rutt (1828), ii. 389-90). Other MPs stressed that the new chamber must be styled the ‘Other House’ to make clear it derived its authority from the Humble Petition and Advice alone. As the MP William Brisco explained, it must have a ‘new name’ because it was a ‘new constitution’; its members and powers were ‘new’. The ‘Other House’ was not a ‘revival’ of the old upper chamber but was a new creation, brought into being by the Commons through the written constitution. As Brisco informed the Commons, it was ‘a House set up by you’ and ‘the derivative power shall never exceed the primitive power’ (Burton, ii. 410-11). The old House of Lords was a different matter because its membership sat by virtue of their birthright, not election; their membership and authority had been independent of the Commons.

The parliamentary session ground to a halt as the Commons failed to agree on how to address, or define, the new chamber. The feeling of exasperation was best summed up in the speech of Griffith Bodurda, who pleaded with the Commons to give the new chamber ‘some name… You must call them a House, of men, or women, or something that have two legs’ (Burton, ii. 432). His calls fell on deaf ears and Cromwell angrily dissolved the parliament on 4 February 1658. Ironically, Cromwell’s hope that a second chamber would better control the Commons foundered upon MPs’ unwillingness to own that chamber as a balance over them.

So much about the Other House was novel: a membership of life peers, fixed in number, and more socially and geographically diverse than any House of Lords had been. Yet, in a society that revered precedent, it was always going to be a hard sell. Cromwell failed to convince others that it was a suitable replacement for the House of Lords: styling it as such was never enough. The lack of the old peers left many questioning the extent to which it was a legitimate, or independent, component of the parliamentary trinity.

Perhaps, as the final hereditary peers are removed from the House of Lords, politicians will emulate their counterparts from the 1650s by reflecting on the identity crisis posed by a House of Lords without the ancient nobility. Will it essentially become another House, an ‘Other House’? On what basis will its remaining members sit, and what will be the chamber’s constitutional foundation? Is it destined to become a cipher for the government, or a House of Commons sitting elsewhere?  These are thorny issues, but the Cromwellian era has lessons to offer.

JF

Further Reading:

The biographies of James Berry, Griffith Bodurda, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle), William Brisco, the earl of Salisbury (William Cecil), Oliver Cromwell, John Hewson and Thomas Pride are in the recently-published Commons 1640-60 volumes.

J. Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s House of Lords: Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642-1660 (2018)

C.H. Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War (1910)

P. Little and D.L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007)

J. Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 1095-1128.

On 7 June 1866 the first mass petition for women’s suffrage was presented to Parliament. Signed by around 1,500 women, it was presented to the Commons by John Stuart Mill, who had been returned as Liberal MP for Westminster at the general election of July 1865. Among the most prominent signatories were Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Emily Davies, Elizabeth Garrett (later Anderson) and the mathematician and scientist, Mary Somerville. Only two known copies survive of an 1866 pamphlet which listed the names of 1,499 women who signed the petition. This has been transcribed and is available in a searchable format via the UK Parliament’s website.

Petitioning was a well-used method of bringing issues to the attention of parliamentarians, having been deployed by anti-slavery campaigners, the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League. The Liberal ministry’s introduction of a reform bill in 1866 had brought the question of the franchise to the fore, but its proposals for widening the electorate applied only to men. The women’s petition – couched in cautious terms, and side-stepping the potentially contentious issue of marital status – asked the Commons to ‘consider the expediency of providing for all householders, without distinction of sex, who possess such property or rental qualification as your Honourable House may determine’.

For Mill, the petition provided an important weapon against the argument that ‘the ladies themselves see no hardship’ in their exclusion from the suffrage ‘and do not care enough for the franchise to ask for it’. Writing to Caroline Liddell on 6 May 1866, he encouraged her to draft a petition, urging that ‘a woman who is a taxpayer is the most natural and most suitable advocate of the political enfranchisement of women’. In the event, it was Mill’s stepdaughter, Helen Taylor (who urged Bodichon that they should ‘commence the first humble beginnings of an agitation’), who produced the initial draft of the petition presented by Mill, although Liddell was among the signatories. The signatures, reportedly gathered within a fortnight, were collated at the London home of Clementia Taylor, whose husband Peter – a member of the Courtauld business dynasty – was Liberal MP for Leicester, 1862-84.

With discussions on petitions occupying an increasing amount of the time of the Commons, the Liberal and Conservative front benches had agreed informally in 1835 not to allow debates when petitions were presented. Debates on petitions were formally abolished by a standing order in 1843. This meant that there was no substantive discussion when Mill presented the women’s petition on 7 June 1866.

Mill was, however, able to make some remarks on the petition when he moved on 17 July 1866 for the compilation of a return of the number of freeholders, householders and others who fulfilled ‘the conditions of property or rental prescribed by Law as the qualification for the Electoral Franchise’ but were ‘excluded … by reason of their sex’. Informing his fellow MPs that the petition had originated ‘entirely with ladies, without the instigation, and, to the best of my belief, without the participation of any person of the male sex in any stage of the proceedings, except the final one of its presentation to Parliament’, he emphasised ‘the number of signatures obtained in a very short space of time, not to mention the quality of many of those signatures’. Mill himself had been surprised by the petition’s size, having been willing to present a petition containing just 100 signatures. Seeing the ‘large roll’ containing the petition for the first time when he met Davies and Garrett in Westminster Hall, he declared, ‘I can brandish this with effect’.

Although Mill’s speech was brief – it occupied less than two columns of Hansard – he took the opportunity to note that Benjamin Disraeli, who had since become chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Derby’s newly formed Conservative government, had suggested during the debates on the Liberal ministry’s reform bill that there was ‘no reason why women of independent means should not possess the electoral franchise, in a country where they can preside in manorial courts and fill parish offices’.

Even before the failure of the Liberals’ reform bill had removed the possibility of introducing an amendment on women’s suffrage, Mill, showing his shrewdness as a parliamentary tactician, had decided that it was imprudent to pursue the matter any further that session. He did not wish, as he told a fellow MP, to be accused of ‘taking up the time of the House’. Pressing a matter which had no chance of practical success risked being seen as deliberately obstructive. Mill did, however, achieve his aim of laying ‘the foundation of a further movement when advisable’. Outside Parliament, women continued to organise, and further petitions were presented in spring 1867.

Mill’s opportunity for bolder action came when the Conservative ministry introduced its own reform bill in 1867. On 20 May – which was, coincidentally, Mill’s birthday – he moved, in a powerful and eloquent speech, to replace the word ‘man’ in clause 4 of the bill with ‘person’. His amendment for female suffrage was defeated by 196 votes to 75 (including tellers). Petitions continued to be presented to Parliament as part of the women’s suffrage campaign, including a ‘survivors’ petition’ in 1890, signed by 78 of those whose names had been included on the original petition of 1866.

KR

Further Reading:

J. Rendall, ‘The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in C. Hall, K. McClelland & J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian nation (2000)

Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2014)

The 1866 petition name list is available to download.

A. Dingsdale, ‘”Generous and lofty sympathies”: the Kensington Society, the 1866 women’s suffrage petition and the development of mid-Victorian feminism’ (PhD, University of Greenwich, 1995)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 7 June 2016, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.