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.

Peter McLagan senior was born in 1774 in Moulin, Perthshire. He was the son of a tenant farmer, John McLagan, and Girzel ‘Grace’ McLagan, née McInroy. McLagan senior had travelled to Demerara (modern-day Guyana) by around 1797, where his uncle, James McInroy, was an enslaver, merchant trader and plantation owner. McInroy was a founding partner of McInroy, Sandbach & Co., part of the ‘mercantile conglomerate’ that later became Sandbach Tinné & Co.

McLagan senior managed the enslaved labour forces on several plantations on the Essequibo coast during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most of which were owned by (or financially connected to) McInroy, Sandbach & Co. Two of these plantations were the Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates. In 1820 467 enslaved persons were recorded on both estates, where a mixture of coffee, sugar and cotton were grown. The slave-produced coffee, sugar and cotton (and rum) was exported primarily to the UK, where it was distributed by the Liverpool and Glasgow partner branches of McInroy, Sandbach and Co.

McLagan senior managed Coffee Grove and Caledonia as a joint enterprise from at least 1804. By 1815 he had made sufficient income to become a co-owner of the estates and a partner (with a 5% stake) in McInroy, Sandbach & Co. He sold out of McInroy, Sandbach & Co. in 1821, when his 5% share was worth at least £12,500, but continued to own Coffee Grove & Caledonia until at least the late 1830s. In 1829 his 50% stake in these plantations (his co-owner was Samuel Sandbach) was valued at £31,200 (for more on calculating wealth in modern terms see below).

Outside of plantation management on the Essequibo coast, McLagan senior lived in the elite Kingstown district of Georgetown from at least 1814, probably at a property he owned on Water Street. A Presbyterian, in 1815 he was a founding committee member and benefactor of St Andrew’s Kirk, Georgetown. Two years later he purchased a second Georgetown property in the Cummingsburg district.

Although he did not marry until his return to the UK, McLagan senior was the father of two sons born in Demerara, John (1821-1850) and Peter junior (1823-1900). The latter served as MP for Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893, and a number of contemporary sources indicate he was of African or Caribbean heritage. No formal record identifying either boy’s mother has yet been discovered. However, between 1820 and 1823, McLagan senior purchased a Barbadian-born enslaved woman named Filly and her three children (Henrietta, Joe and Robert) from another domestic residence in Georgetown.

Filly and her children were enslaved at McLagan’s senior’s Water Street residence between 1820 and 1823, where they continued to live until at least August 1834. Filly, whose story I’ll explore in the next article in this series, may have been John and Peter’s mother, or possibly their wet nurse. Alternatively, the timing of her sale to McLagan senior, and the birth of his two sons, may have been a coincidence.

McLagan senior left Demerara with his two sons John and Peter in June 1825 on board the Boode. The boat, which was owned by McInroy, Sandbach & Co., was loaded with an extensive cargo of sugar, rum, cotton, coffee and ‘one pipe’ of madeira wine. McLagan senior and his children arrived in Liverpool in August 1825, following which they lived between Perth and Edinburgh. In 1827 McLagan senior married Elizabeth Hagart Steuart. The family subsequently moved to 77 Great King Street, Edinburgh. Elizabeth died in November 1833.

Over the following three decades McLagan senior played a limited role in Scottish public life. Politically he was a Conservative: he was probably the Peter McLagan who signed the Edinburgh anti-reform petition in April 1831, and in the later 1830s he offered some financial assistance to Conservative electioneering efforts. He supported the authority of the Court of Session over rights of patronage in the Scottish church in the lead up to the Disruption, and remained a member of the Kirk following the establishment of the Free Church.

By January 1836 McLagan senior had been awarded extensive ‘compensation’ under the terms of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act for formerly enslaved persons at his Water Street residence and Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates in British Guiana (formerly Demerara). On 14 December 1835 he received £189 0s. 3d. for Filly and her two surviving children (Joe and Robert), who continued to live at Water Street. On 18 January 1836 he was awarded a share (probably 50%) of £21,480 10s. 10d. for 407 formerly enslaved persons on the Coffee Grove and Caledonia plantations.

In 1842 McLagan senior purchased the Pumpherston and Calderbank estates in Linlithgowshire (modern West Lothian), which covered around 1,000 acres. Following this he referred to himself as a ‘landed proprietor’ in official documentation. That said, he continued to live primarily in Edinburgh, while entrusting the management of the estates to his son, Peter McLagan junior. McLagan senior died of a ‘disease of [the] heart’ in April 1860, aged 85, at his Great King Street residence.

An exact probate valuation for McLagan senior’s estates has not yet been discovered. However, in a subsequent interview, Peter McLagan junior claimed that his father had been ‘worth £100,000’ at his death. While this may have been a retrospective embellishment, it is in keeping with McLagan junior’s own place in Britain’s ‘Upper 10,000’ by the 1870s.

If McLagan senior had died with an estate worth around £100,000 in 1860 it would have comfortably made him one of the richest 10,000 people in the UK, and one of the 1,000 richest people in Scotland. Trying to make modern comparisons of estate values and personal wealth of historic figures is an imperfect science. However, the online historical financial tool MeasuringWorth does offer some comparative figures. It suggests that dying with an estate worth £100,000 in 1860 is equivalent to leaving assets with a ‘relative income’ value of around £128 million in 2025.

Check back for the next article in the series in early 2026. To read the first article in Martin’s series click here

This article reflects ongoing research into Peter McLagan (1865-1900). The author would like to thank Dr Alison Clark for sharing her research on McLagan senior and Sandbach Tinne & Co. and the participants of a workshop on Peter McLagan held at the National Archives in October 2025. If you would like to discuss this article and the sources used, please contact Martin at mspychal@histparl.ac.uk.

Suggested Reading

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Caribbean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

M. Al Nasir, Searching for My Slave Roots: From Guyana’s Sugar Plantations to Cambridge (2025)

M. Al Nasir (ed.), ‘Sandbach Tinne Collection’, Cambridge Digital Library

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (2013)

C. Hall, N. Draper, K. McClelland, K. Donington & R. Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)

‘Peter McLagan’, Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/41631

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’ (2022)

Born into ‘the inner circle of English aristocratic life’, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) is best known as the likely inspiration for the hedonistic aristocrat, Lord Henry Wotton, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and as the sculptor of the Shakespeare Memorial in Stratford-upon-Avon. He is a prominent figure in Britain’s nineteenth-century LGBTQ+ history on account of his connection with Wilde (who spoke at the unveiling of the Shakespeare Memorial), his own output as an artist and author, and his centrality to queer metropolitan society from the 1870s.*

As Joseph Bristow has suggested, despite Gower’s ‘sexual interest in other men’ becoming an increasingly open secret in high society by the end of the nineteenth century, his wealth and social status allowed him to avoid the criminal sentencing that destroyed the lives of less connected queer men (both before and after the 1885 Labouchère Amendment).

This relative freedom allowed him to play an influential role in shaping, and to an extent asserting, queer identities during the late nineteenth century. Whitney Davis has astutely observed that in terms of his artistic practice, by the late 1880s Gower ‘had begun self-consciously to enact the possibility – the aesthetic possibility – of an essentially homosexual life-historical identity’. And John Potvin has suggested that Gower’s remarkable bric-a-brac ‘treasure house’ at Windsor Lodge, which became a meeting point for a generation of young aesthetes from the 1870s, reflected Gower’s ‘unique sense of queer time and place’.

In 1867, at the age of just 21, Gower was returned for the Scottish county of Sutherland. He represented the constituency until 1874. For most of those years he kept a detailed diary, parts of which found their way into his popular two volume autobiographical memoirs, My Reminiscences, published in 1883. After working on the manuscript of Gower’s diary for the History of Parliament’s forthcoming Commons 1832-1868 volumes it has become clear to me that Gower undertook a considerable amount of self-censorship in his memoirs. More importantly it is evident that the document warrants specific attention beyond the scope of the traditional History of Parliament biography format.

As well as being a significant source for understanding the machinations of parliamentary politics at the time of the second Reform Act, Gower’s unpublished diary offers an amazing opportunity to understand the life of a young, aristocratic queer man as he navigated his way through the homosocial world of Westminster politics, and established himself in London society. It also offers an opportunity to examine Gower’s connection to London’s queer culture during the 1860s, discussed in Charles Upchurch’s excellent Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009).

In this series of articles I’ll use Gower’s diary to consider various aspects of his life in London as an MP during 1867 and 1868, from his reputed nickname as ‘the beautiful boy’ of the House of Commons, to his election at the 1867 by-election, and his experiences as an MP at Westminster. Moving outside Parliament, I’ll consider his busy social life (featuring aristocratic balls, West End nightlife and an intriguing predilection for spectating at major London fires), an apparent summer romance with the son of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, his close friendship with his cousin and MP for Argyllshire, the Marquess of Lorne, and his developing connections with London’s art world.

MS

* Following the theories pioneered by leading queer theorists since the 1980s (including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner) I use the term ‘queer’ because, to borrow from Warner, it ‘defin[es] itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual’. Queer allows for a much wider definition of sexuality because it avoids the binary of homosexuality vs heterosexuality.

Read the rest of the series on Gower via these links:

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

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

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

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

Further Reading

S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others (2006)

S. Avery, K. M. Graham, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (2018)

J. Bristow, ‘Oscar Wilde, Ronald Gower, and the Shakespeare Monument’, Études anglaises (2016)

M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

W. Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (2010)

W. Davis, ‘Lord Ronald Gower and ‘the offending Adam’, in D. Getsy (ed.), Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain (2004)

E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort (2014)

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

C. Upchurch, “Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain (2021)

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Lord Ronald Gower, Gustave Doré and the Genesis of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford-on-Avon’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1987)

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Gower, Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson- (1845-1916)’, Oxf. DNB

M. Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 19 February 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

One of the most privileged men in nineteenth-century Britain, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916), was returned to Parliament in May 1867, aged 21, for his family’s pocket county of Sutherland. As discussed in my first article of this series, historians and literary critics have shown how Gower played an influential role in shaping British queer identities, utilising his position of privilege to navigate life as a queer man in late nineteenth-century Britain.

My research into the first two years of his parliamentary career for the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project has revealed new insights into Gower’s life as a young queer MP. This blog focuses on Gower’s social life during his first year in Parliament, which mixed London’s more conventional aristocratic social calendar with London’s queer nightlife.

Gower’s detailed private diary reveals that he maintained a very busy social life after taking his seat in Parliament in May 1867. As well as attending aristocratic dinners and balls and the major cultural events of that year’s London Season, he was a devoted attendee of London’s art galleries, West End theatres and Covent Garden nightspots. He was usually accompanied on these frequent, and elongated, nights out by one or more of his close school or university friends: Robert ‘Jorcy’ Jocelyn (1846-1880), John ‘Ian’ Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne (1845-1914), Lord Archibald Campbell (1846-1913), or his brother Albert Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (1843-1874).

During 1867 Gower was a regular presence in London’s West End theatres: the Strand, the Adelphi, Drury Lane Theatre, Haymarket, St James’s, the Royal Italian Opera House and the Royal Alhambra Palace. The acerbic witticisms that litter his diary suggest that he fancied himself as something of a theatrical critic, and he was more than happy to prioritise attending a new play over important debates in the Commons.

On 28 June 1867, for instance, he missed a close vote over the Conservative ministry’s reform bill to attend the St James’s Theatre to watch his favourite play of the season for the second time, Les Idées De Madame Aubray by Alexandre Dumas fils. The crowd, he reported, were ‘cheering [Monsieur] Ravel and [Mademoiselle] Deschamps being the principal performers but the whole company is excellent’.

After attending the theatre (or escaping from what he invariably found to be ‘very slow’ aristocratic dinners or balls) Gower would usually move on to his favourite late-night Covent Garden drinking haunt, the notorious Evans’s Supper-room, 43 King Street.

Evans’s was a male-only late night dining room and music hall (with women only admitted to view proceedings from behind a screen and on presentation of their address). Known for its heavy drinking culture and ‘madrigal glees’ sung by ‘well known boys’, it was derided by temperance reformers during the 1860s for ‘vice and profligacy’ and for attracting disreputable gentlemen ‘who had not paid a tailor’s bill for the last seven years’.

As a number of historians have shown, the theatres, pubs and clubs of London’s West End were some of the most significant queer spaces in nineteenth-century London.

One contemporary recalled how from the 1850s ‘the Adelphi Theatre, the Italian Opera, and the open parks at night became his fields of adventure’. That Evans’s Supper-room may also have been regarded by contemporaries as one of London’s queer spaces is suggested by its mention in Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park’s sodomy trial of 1870. During their trial a witness reported that waiting staff at Evans’s refused to remove the cross-dressed Park and Boulton from the establishment, as well as the latter’s partner, the former MP for Newark, Lord Arthur Clinton (1840-1870).

Several remarkably open entries in his diary suggest that these queer spaces allowed Gower to pursue a brief relationship during July and August 1867 with the ‘quite beautiful’ and ‘Spanishy’ William John Mayne (1846-1902), the son of the first commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Richard Mayne (1796-1868). The relationship embraced the complete array of Gower’s social haunts, evolving from a meeting at a conventional aristocratic ball, to a series of nights out in Gower’s favourite Covent Garden nightspots.

It appears that Gower and Mayne either met at a ball at Stafford House on 15 July 1867, or at the India Office Ball held later that week to celebrate the London visit of Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz, which Gower described as ‘probably the finest ball ever given in London’. A week later Gower took Mayne for lunch and then to the Royal Academy of Arts:

27 July 1867

On Saturday 27^th [July] to town after lunch (a new friend) W. Mayne (Sir Richard’s last son and youngest) came with me to the [Royal] Academy; he is 22 and quite beautiful; Spanishy; lived a good deal in Paris and has the most charming manners.

Gower’s diary suggests he met with Mayne on four further occasions over the following few weeks. In addition to the places already discussed above, Gower’s diary entries listed below mention Chiswick House, where Gower lived during 1867 with his mother the 2^nd duchess of Sutherland; St. James’s Club, Gower’s gentleman’s club then situated at Grafton Street; and 80 Chester Square, Mayne’s home address:

28 July 1867

Mayne came [to Chiswick House] in the afternoon and was (in Archie’s [word illegible]) booted … I drove Mayne back to [80] Chester Square at 7.

3 Aug. 1867

Later out with Will. Mayne (who I am exceptionally fond of).

5 Aug. 1867

Dined with W. Mayne at my Club (St. James’s), and we went to the Adelphi to see Kate Terry in ‘The Lady of Lyon’, much disappointed; also to Evans’s.

15 Aug. 1867

I went to town on the 15^th and stopped the night, dining with W. Mayne and going with him to a concert at Covent Garden and also to Evans’s.

Gower’s diary contains no further mentions of Mayne, suggesting that the relationship ended abruptly. It may have been that Mayne spurned Gower’s advances, that either one grew tired of each other, or that they were spotted. Both were high profile figures – the son of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a member of Parliament – and if the affair had become public knowledge it would have been a society scandal.  Little is known about Mayne following this, aside from that he died, aged 56, unmarried and ‘without profession’ in Ostend, in August 1902.

Either way, for Gower the moment appears to have been a watershed. As my next blog will discuss, it was not long before rumours surrounding Gower’s sexuality surfaced in Parliament, leading him to change his social habits and to long for an alternative mode of life.

MS

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

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

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

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

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

Further Reading

S. Avery, K. M. Graham, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (2018)

M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

S. Joyce, ‘Two Women Walk into a Theatre Bathroom: The Fanny and Stella Trials as Trans Narrative’, Victorian Review (2018), 83-98

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

C. Upchurch, ‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of the Queen vs. Boulton and Others’, Gender and History (2000), 127-57

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 21 October 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

In May 1868 the twenty-two-year-old MP for Sutherlandshire, Ronald Gower (1845-1916), made his maiden parliamentary speech. When reporting on the speech the Leeds Mercury shared some unexpected Westminster gossip. The paper informed its readers that Gower had

the reputation of being the handsomest man in the House of Commons, and when he first entered it a year ago he obtained the name of ‘the beautiful boy’, which has clung to him ever since.

Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1868.

MPs were regularly given nicknames by their colleagues, but in our research for the History of Parliament’s forthcoming Commons 1832-1868 volumes, Gower’s designation as ‘the beautiful boy’ stands alone as an example of the objectification and sexualisation of a young MP by his older colleagues.

Gower was not the only MP to be labelled as ‘the handsomest man in the House of Commons’. Seeking re-election for Hull in 1868, Charles Norwood was commended to the electors with the observation that ‘the ladies, so many of whom now grace us with their presence, say that he is the handsomest man in the House of Commons’. However, the use of the nickname the ‘beautiful boy’ for Gower carried rather different connotations. A Commons full of classically trained MPs could surely not have failed to note the association of such a moniker with notions of the ‘beautiful boy’ (or erômenos) of ancient Greek culture, a figure synonymous with sexual desire between an older man and a younger male.

At first glance, then, the existence of such a nickname suggests a level of openness in attitudes towards same-sex desire in the homosocial private club culture of the nineteenth-century Commons. This would be surprising, however, given Ben Griffin’s insightful research into masculine identity at Westminster during the period. As Griffin astutely notes, mid-Victorian MPs ‘could not abandon heterosexuality, domestic responsibilities, domestic authority, independence or self control without abandoning one’s claim to be a “real” man’.

What seems more likely is that in calling Gower ‘the beautiful boy’ MPs were referencing, and adding to, Westminster gossip and innuendo surrounding his sexuality. Following his arrival in the Commons in May 1867 it is conceivable that MPs came up with the nickname to marginalise a colleague who they perceived as unmanly or effete. Certainly, reports in the Elgin Courant suggest some perception of what would now be termed Gower’s camp aesthetic. In reporting on his parliamentary nickname, the paper couldn’t resist the play on words of calling Gower ‘his Grace’s graceful brother’, ‘his grace’ being Gower’s brother and fellow parliamentarian, the 3^rd duke of Sutherland (1828-1892).

As his first year in Parliament wore on, though, it is highly plausible that MPs started to link Gower’s nickname to rumours about his sexuality. As discussed in my previous blog, Gower’s private diaries indicate that he spent most of the 1867 parliamentary session mixing London’s conventional aristocratic social calendar with London’s queer West End nightlife. Covent Garden’s theatres and drinking establishments were a stone’s throw from Parliament and were very public spaces. It is not hard to conceive that reports of Gower’s regular attendance in the area, and apparent relationships with other men, got back to his colleagues.

By calling Gower ‘the beautiful boy’, then, MPs may at best have been offering a coded warning to Gower to ensure that his extra-parliamentary activities were in keeping with the expected norms for a figure in public life. Alternatively the nickname was simply deployed as a form of bullying.

A distinct change in Gower’s social habits during the 1868 parliamentary session suggests that he was more than aware that questions were being raised about his extra-parliamentary nightlife. His diary for 1868 indicates that he stopped his regular trips to Covent Garden’s theatres and Evans’s Supper Rooms of the previous year. In their place were visits to the more respectable, and private, Mayfair gentleman’s ‘night clubs’ (as Gower called them) of Pratt’s Club House, 14 Park Place, and Egerton’s, 87 St James’s St.

As 1868 progressed, Gower’s diary also suggests his increasing disaffection with parliamentary life and the social expectations of conventional aristocratic society. In March 1868, Gower’s nephew and close friend, John ‘Ian’ Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne (1845-1914), was returned to Parliament. Lorne’s constant presence in London over the following months came as a great relief to Gower:

What a difference his being in the House [of Commons] makes to me I cannot say, it only wanted such a company to take away the feeling of loneliness that I formerly felt among so many older people than myself; and our walks or drives to and from the House are charming.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 5 Mar. 1868

Although his friendship with Lorne provided some respite from the ‘loneliness’ of the Commons, by the summer of 1868 Gower complained increasingly in his diary of the ‘pain and boresomeness’ of much of London society. In doing so he began pining for a more selective social set that shared his love of art and literature.

In July 1868 he was inspired by a visit to the Holland Park residence of the artist, Frederic Leighton (1830-1896):

If only I could see more and live more with the people (and society in general of those) with whom Ian and I breakfasted this morning (Thursday 2^nd) life would be intensely more enjoyable and interesting. We broke fast nearly at 12 with F. Leighton and a far greater brother artist [George] Watts; with these was also young [Valentine] Prinsep, a rising artist and I do not think I have ever spent two pleasanter hours.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 2 July 1868

His disdain for conventional aristocratic society was compounded that autumn after enduring a fortnight at his family’s estate in Dunrobin in the company of the future Edward VII, the Prince of Wales. He complained that ‘I do not enjoy the society (if it can be called such) which the Wales’s bring’. Regretting that ‘the more I am here [Dunrobin] the greater I feel the change from old times’, he went on to imagine an alternative future life in an idealised ‘Spanish Castle’ in Kilmarnock:

My “Spanish Castle” is a wee house at Kilmarnock. It’s large enough for me or two friends where I can feel and be perfectly free; with my books and myself. All this may sound and perhaps is selfish. If so I cannot help it; surely, we all may follow unnatural tendencies (if right and honourable) and mine is to be utterly independent and not obliged to live at all with a set of people utterly and wholly uncongenial and unsympathetic to myself.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 4 Oct. 1868

As well as foreseeing his future bric-a-brac ‘treasure house’ at Windsor Lodge (which as John Potvin has demonstrated became a meeting point for a generation of young aesthetes from the 1870s), Gower’s statement presents as a remarkably frank admission of his sexuality and disillusionment with the conventions of aristocratic society.

As with the multiple meanings inherent in his parliamentary nickname of the ‘beautiful boy’, it is hard to escape the notion that in privately admitting his ‘unnatural tendencies’ Gower was coming to terms with his sexuality. ‘Unnatural’ was nineteenth-century shorthand for same-sex desire and ‘unnatural offences’ was the principal legal term used to categorise an array of criminal sexual offences enacted by men such as ‘sodomy’, ‘indecent assault’ or ‘carnal knowledge’.  

Within eighteen months of entering public life as a member of Parliament, Gower had clearly come to realise that a career at Westminster was not for him. While he would be returned again to Parliament at the November 1868 general election, his position of immense privilege as a member of one of Britain’s leading aristocratic families allowed him to devote the next few years of his life to forging an alternative career as a sculptor and writer…

MS

This is the third part of the five article series. Read the other posts via the links below:

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

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

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

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

Further Reading

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

K. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (first published 1978, most recent edition 2016)

B. Griffin, The politics of gender in Victorian Britain: masculinity, political culture and the struggle for women’s rights (2012)

J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014)

R. Scruton, Beauty (2009)

S. Sontag, Notes on “Camp” (first published 1964, most recent edition 2018)

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 12 November 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

In September 1836 the veteran radical, Francis Place (1771-1854), shared his thoughts on one of his closest Westminster allies, Harriet Grote (1792-1878). While women could not vote or sit in Parliament (which would remain the case until 1918), he wrote that

she [Harriet], yes, she was the only member of Parliament with whom I had any [verbal] intercourse in the latter third of the [1836] session, we communicated freely, but we could find no heroes, no, no decent legislators.

Place’s suggestion that Harriet was a de facto MP was anything but a joke. As I’ve explored in previous articles, during the 1830s Harriet enjoyed as much influence at Westminster as many of her male counterparts. This included her husband, the MP for London, George Grote (1794-1871). After George’s election in 1832, Harriet combined her role as a hostess, her growing correspondence networks, and a physical presence at Parliament to establish herself as one of Westminster’s leading politicians.

In early 1835 this culminated in an abortive attempt to mastermind the establishment of a radical party, capable of forming a government. As this article discusses, over the following eighteen months, Harriet proved herself to be an accomplished political analyst and radical tactician. And with politics pushing her to her wits’ end by the summer of 1836, she put her words into action and sought out new means of influencing politics.

***

With the Whig government headed by Viscount Melbourne in place and her brief dreams of a radical administration scuppered, Harriet cut an increasingly cynical figure throughout 1835. This reflected a wider radical malaise with British politics, which had promised so much only three years earlier with the passage of the 1832 Reform Act.

In June 1835 Harriet confessed her increasing frustration to Francis Place, regretting that ‘I have exerted myself as far as is becoming to my sex and position, to animate the good to courage’. The ‘good’ for Harriet were the pool of around 180 radical and reformer MPs returned at the 1835 election, who due to the lure of favours from the Whig government had become ‘timid’ in their politics. By contrast, Harriet felt that she and her dwindling band of allies had avoided such a fate by maintaining their independence: ‘we don’t by conversing with Whig pismires [ants], get Whig spectacles astride our noses, and Whig hearts in our breasts’.

For Harriet it was not just the lure of Whig patronage that had stalled radical progress. She perceived a deeper problem with the nation’s radical, male, leaders who were failing to fulfil their ‘duty’ as ‘popular organs’ in Parliament. ‘If popular representation be good for anything’, she wrote to Place, ‘it is because the “organs” are sent up there to lead and to give the tone to the public mind’. In fact, reformer and radical MPs were doing nothing of the sort. She continued:

If after all the sweating, the striving, the bawling and the paying to get your man seated, he is to do nothing, but sit there waiting for the people to agitate and consult and direct him what to do! Stuff, besotted ignorance, swinish ignorance. If I ain’t sick and tired of seeing the whole rationale of representation virtually repudiated and nullified by the twaddle men in and out of Parliament (but chiefly by men in P[arliament] to this disgrace be it spoken).

Harriet’s assessment of parliamentary radicalism continued to worsen over the following year. This was compounded by a period of illness that kept her away from Westminster during the first months of the 1836 parliamentary session. When she returned to London in May 1836 she was dismayed with the continued disorganisation of radical forces. She advised one correspondent: ‘I have been in town for a day or two and observe with regret that our party does not appear braced for vigorous action’.

Her brief absence had confirmed her belief that her constant presence was required at Westminster to prevent George, and the entire radical parliamentary cause, from falling foul of Whig advances. She advised Place:

My motive for going up [to London] is the grave importance of this juncture. [George] Grote likes of course to have me at hand when any emergency falls out likely to draw him forth. I carried him up to the best of my power last year [1835], and with effect against the vehement railing of Joseph Parkes, who wanted to muzzle him about the English Municipal Reform Bill!

The important ‘juncture’ was the opportunity that political circumstances had presented for establishing House of Lords reform, or ‘peerage reform’ as it was also known, on the political agenda. The issue had recently been given publicity by the leader of the Irish Repealers, Daniel O’Connell, who had announced his intention for a parliamentary motion on the issue. However, Harriet dismissed O’Connell’s motion as futile gesture politics. Here was another radical parliamentary motion (in a crowded agenda of radical parliamentary motions) that was certain to fail.

Instead, Harriet wanted to use the House of Lords’ recent amendments to the government’s Irish municipal reform proposals to begin a long-term campaign of exposing the power of the unelected peers. She advised Place:

Here is a plain quarrel [Irish municipal reform], on a broad and definable ground, the real rights of England and Ireland. There is no “jug” in it, no sectarism. There is no “vested rights” in the way, there is no sacrifice of money to compensate injured parties. There never can be a more favourable position for the popular men to improve into strength, and the people see clearly now, that legislation unfairly stopped by the Ho[use] of Lords.

As George and his colleagues were doing little to set the political agenda, Harriet took matters into her own hands. She called in a favour from one of her closest contacts on Fleet Street, the editor of the Spectator, Robert Rintoul (1787-1858). Harriet couldn’t sit in Parliament, or speak on the hustings, but she could publish anonymously in the press.

In an article in the 28 May edition of the Spectator Harriet urged the leaders of the ‘popular party’ to ‘preach the truth’ on the necessity for peerage reform. She also demanded ‘vigorous coercion on the part of the people’ to ‘signify to the enemies of the popular cause that resistance is hopeless’. She was under no illusions as to the speed at which reform could be expected: ‘the present condition of politics resembles the commencement of a game of chess. We must strive to play the pawns skilfully’.

As well as setting the tone for a long-term campaign, Harriet began to orchestrate parliamentary tactics. The Lords’ amendments to the Irish municipal corporations bill were about to return to the Commons. And rumour in Westminster suggested that the Whig government would agree to some form of compromise. Radicals and reformers could not compromise, so she began to organise a motion rejecting the Lords’ amendments. She told one correspondent:

I have used all the influence I possess, without I trust stepping out of my province, to hearten up our lads to take a division upon a stout motion for sending back our bill, intact, to the Lords. Nous venons! [we come!]

For Harriet, the strategy provided the ‘few Roman souls’ in Parliament with the opportunity to distance themselves completely from any ‘shuffling dirty compromise on the part of the Whigs’. She advised another friend, ‘if the Whigs attempt to drag the Radicals in the mud anew, all I can say is the Rads ought to turn restive’.

Within days of her Spectator article and attempts to corral a radical rebellion, the Whig government backed down and refused to accept the Lords’ amendments. The bill did not pass that session, and the continued intransigence of the Lords meant that Irish corporation reform would not pass for a further four years. For a few years, at least, this helped to keep peerage reform at the top of the radical agenda.

For Harriet the episode served another important purpose. It confirmed the necessity of her constant presence at Westminster. By the end of the 1836 parliamentary session, she and George had sold their Dulwich Wood residence and purchased a central London house in Belgravia, at 3 Eccleston Street. After a brief trip to Paris that autumn, Harriet was ready to resume full political activity…

To read part six 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)

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

W. Thomas, ‘Place, Francis (1771–1854)’, www.oxforddnb.com

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

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

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

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

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 16 March 2022, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

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 1832 election introduced Harriet Grote (1792-1878) to several of the traditional, and not so traditional, avenues through which a politician’s wife could engage in nineteenth-century electoral politics. As I discussed in my previous article, Harriet had established herself as a central figure among London’s intellectual radicals during the 1820s, before being thrown into the world of Westminster politics during the reform crisis of 1830-32.

At the 1832 election her husband, the radical reformer and banker, George Grote (1794-1871), stood for election for the first time. He came forward for the City of London, which with over 18,000 voters, was the UK’s largest constituency. Due to the size of its electorate, canvassing in London took on a different character to most other constituencies. A huge bureaucratic machine was established, with Harriet and George operating as figureheads overseeing campaign workers.

Harriet described their closest friend and George’s banking partner, William George Prescott, as ‘the life and soul of our committee’, and remarked how at one point ‘seventy clerks’ were ‘at work all day and night’ at the King’s Head Tavern, 25 Poultry, running the campaign. In private, Harriet fulfilled the unpaid and generally unnoticed secretarial roles attached to being a politician’s wife, writing speeches, responding to correspondence and overseeing George’s schedule, or as she termed it the ‘duty of arranging his existence’.

During the election Harriet was also asked to fulfil one of the more traditional tasks associated with the politician’s wife: supplying the rosettes for George and his election team. She described how at the declaration thirty of George’s stewards ‘wore my colours in their button-holes, made by myself, a rosette of crimson satin – their especial request’.

The nomination and declaration for the City of London took place at London’s Guildhall. As it was not customary for women to stand on the hustings, Harriet was able to spectate proceedings from a ‘peep-box’ or ‘eyrie’ on one of the upper balconies of the Guildhall. In her journal she recalled: 

the scene below will never be effaced from my mind. About 4,500 electors studded the hall in dense order. The hustings was occupied by the candidates and their trains, the Sheriffs presiding in full costume. I thought I should have sunk down when I saw my “Potter” [George Grote] step forth to the rostrum when his turn arrived, amid a roar of applause, a waving of hats and shouts of tremendous nature that the vaulted roof rang again.

George was elected at the top of the poll with over 8,000 votes in December 1832, the largest recorded for any candidate at the 1832 election. This made him, in Harriet’s view, the ‘senior member for the capital of the Empire’.

In contrast to later years this was a moment of intense political opportunity and excitement for both Harriet and George, who felt that the political momentum was finally behind their reformist and utilitarian ideals. In her journal she reflected ‘I doubt if ever again I shall experience the intense happiness of those inspiring moments’. She continued: ‘George is in good health, thank God, and never has the ‘dolors’ now – nor glums’. Both dared to dream that the British public were ‘echoing the sentiments which for years we had privately cherished, but which were now first fearlessly avowed’.

With the parliamentary session about to commence Harriet revived her role as the influential Threadneedle Street hostess at the heart of Westminster. In doing so she skilfully co-opted the aristocratic model of the political hostess, traditionally associated with the likes of Lady Holland or the Countess of Derby. Harriet, however, stamped her own radical middle-class identity on the hostess model, one that was fit for the exciting new world of reformed politics.

In January 1833 she moved into newly rented lodgings with George at 34 Parliament Street, above what was then Oakley’s grocers and is now the Houses of Parliament Gift Shop and Boots. She wrote to her sister ahead of the opening of Parliament, revealing her plan to turn their flat into one of Westminster’s parliamentary and intellectual hubs:

We have got some excellent apartments in Westminster, the corner of Parliament Street and Bridge Street, handsome drawing-room, anteroom and dining room communicating, good bedroom, another bedroom for George – using it as his dressing-room or to sleep in if I am not well, rooms for maids and men over that, nice people below and everything we could wish as a lodging – only £8 a week for six months, and we are lucky to get it. Here we shall be most of the session save Saturdays and Sundays – coteries of friends, political and other, and as much intellectual society as the world affords.

Her mother visited their new residence during the opening weeks of the parliamentary session. She confirmed that Harriet’s plans were coming to fruition: ‘while I was there I met many members flocking in with all the news’.

One of Harriet’s first ‘soirees’ took place on 13 February 1833, which was a night of light business in the House. Harriet assured her sister, who she was trying to convince to visit Parliament, that it was a far from male-dominated affair: ‘the Waddingtons in full force … E[liza] Shireff came with girls; also Mrs. [Sarah] Austin, Mrs. [Mary] Gaskell of Yorkshire, and a bevy of MPs, and John [Stuart] Mill to top up with’.

Harriet’s choice to live with George at Westminster, rather than remain at their residence in Dulwich, led to mutterings that she was encroaching on the bounds of acceptable behaviour for an MP’s wife. It was usual practice for male MPs without London property to live alone at their clubs or hotels during the parliamentary week.

The election agent Joseph Parkes warned Harriet that some suspected her of ‘conceit’ at seeking to exert influence over radical politics as the hostess of 34 Parliament Street. While these accusations were probably close to reality, Harriet couldn’t admit as much in polite society. Accordingly, she brushed off Parkes’s concerns by playing the dutiful wife card, assuring him that:

My chief object in taking a lodging in Parliament Street is to be enabled to look after my man … I shall “minister” to G[eorge] and when not wanted, shall tend my flowers and lead my rational course at D[ulwich] wood. My conceit, however monstrous it may sound, is not what is understood by conceit. I live with one so much my master, that the true feeling of “conceit” is effectually stopped out. I am made sensible of my inferiority most days in the week.

As we will see in my next article, Harriet proved herself more than equal to her husband and his parliamentary colleagues. She also spared little thought for fulfilling the role of subservient parliamentary spouse…

To read part three 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)

K. Rix, MP of the Month: Daniel Gaskell (1782-1875), Victorian Commons

J. Davey, Mary, Countess of Derby, and the Politics of Victorian Britain (2019)

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

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

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

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

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

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 24 May 2021, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

Harriet Grote, née Lewin, grew up in the comfortable surrounds of Ridgeway Castle near Southampton, which her father, Thomas Lewin (1753-1843), built with his earnings as a merchant for the East India Company. A tall and commanding presence in the Lewin household, Harriet was known from an early age as ‘The Empress’ or ‘Empress of the world’ by her parents, siblings and family friends.

Her height set her apart from her peers. Harriet recalled how at eleven ‘I grew tall of my age, and naturally stooped a little, as most growing girls do’. Her parents tried to ‘counteract’ her slouching by requiring her to wear an elaborate back brace. ‘This accursed instrument’, Harriet recalled, was ‘one of the bitterest grievances of my youth’. She later blamed the brace for her ‘bad headaches’ (migraines) that she suffered throughout adulthood.

Harriet was educated by a string of governesses, one of the longest serving being the ‘brutal’ and ‘tyrannical’ Miss Beetham, who Harriet nicknamed ‘The Beetham’. From an early age her teachers struggled to match her intellect, forcing Harriet to seek her early mentorship in politics, literature and music from her father, aunts and family friends.

Harriet’s childhood home ‘Ridgeway Castle’ c.1800 © Bitterne Local History Society

Her governesses also struggled to keep up with what Harriet referred to as her ‘energetic disposition’ and love for ‘any bodily exercise requiring skill and even personal danger’. Miss Beetham was particularly alarmed by this ‘active, ardent … [and] unfeminine’ character trait, taking it upon herself to ‘cure’ Harriet of such ‘propensities “unbecoming a young lady”’. Thankfully, Miss Beetham failed and Harriet’s unwillingness to conform to gender stereotypes in dress, speech, character, hobbies and intellectual pursuits remained one of her most commonly remarked upon characteristics throughout her life.

By 1815 Harriet and her family had moved to Bexley in Kent, which was where she met the banker, self-trained scholar and future MP, George Grote (1794-1871). During a five-year courtship George took it upon himself to educate Harriet in the ‘classic texts of political economy and philosophy’. Harriet was easily George’s intellectual match and together they cultivated a shared radical, utilitarian and atheist outlook. They eloped against both of their parents’ wishes in 1820.

After their marriage Harriet and George lived between their central London residence, 62 Threadneedle Street, and a string of suburban North London homes, eventually settling in Green Lanes, Stoke Newington. It was at Threadneedle Street, or ‘Threddle’ as she referred to it, where Harriet established herself as a key figure among London’s radical intellectuals of the 1820s.

The Grotes became close friends with the leading utilitarian thinkers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill (1773-1836), who they hosted at their twice-weekly reading group and evening salons at Threadneedle Street. The reading group, which at various points included figures such as John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch, John and Sarah Austin, and John Arthur Roebuck, ‘met every Wednesday and Saturday … at the dreary hour of 8:30 am, and broke their fast upon the latest emanation of the [James] Mill brain’.

In contrast to her reclusive husband, Harriet was outgoing, charming and sociable. One contemporary remarked ‘I like him [George], he is so ladylike, and I like her, she’s such a perfect gentleman’. As an active hostess and contributor to discussions, it was Harriet rather than George who turned ‘Threddle’ into an intellectual hub for London’s utilitarians and political economists. Importantly, her role as the Threadneedle Street hostess set her on the path to becoming a prolific ‘woman of letters’, placing her at the centre of an expansive national, and international, network of political and intellectual correspondents over the following decades.

Having previously remained aloof from Westminster politics, the Grotes were thrown into a decade of parliamentary and political activism during the reform crisis of 1830-32. With the blessing of James Mill, George ran the reform campaign for the City of London at the 1831 general election and Harriet recalled how at times, particularly during the ‘Days of May’, politics became ‘so intensely exciting’ that ‘we scarce did anything but listen for news, and run about from one house to another’.

In the 1832 Reform Act, and for a brief period of time during the Grey ministry, Harriet and George saw a path to real, radical political change. As I’ll explore in subsequent articles, Harriet spent the next decade pushing the boundaries of political convention in an attempt to effect this change…

MS

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

Links to Martin’s series on Harriet Grote are below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harriet Grote’s letter to John Arthur Roebuck was on display as part of the Reform, React, Rebel exhibition at UCL, which was curated by Martin and Dr Vivienne Larminie. The exhibition catalogue and a video introducing the exhibition can be viewed online.

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)

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

Lady Eastlake, Mrs Grote: A Sketch (1880)

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

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

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

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 4 January 2021, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

Peter McLagan (1823-1900) represented the Scottish county of Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893. A Liberal MP for most of his career, he was regarded as one of Britain’s ‘leading agriculturalists’ and on his retirement was the longest serving Scottish member. At the time of writing, McLagan is thought to be the seventh Black MP to sit in the Commons, and the first to represent a Scottish constituency*. He is currently considered the tenth MP elected to Parliament from a ‘minority ethnic’ group (as defined by the UK Parliament in a 2023 briefing).

I’ve been researching Peter McLagan for the House of Commons 1832-1868 project as part of my wider research into Scottish county politics during the period. In this series of articles I’ll explore McLagan’s personal, political and professional life, the biographies of key family members and the McLagan family’s colonial connections, particularly to the British Caribbean and slavery. My research builds on that already completed on McLagan by the historians Sybil Cavanagh, David Main, the National Records of Scotland and Dr Alison Clark, as well as Professor Ewen Cameron, who wrote McLagan’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Identifying the ancestry and ethnicity of historical figures can be a difficult, often contingent and imperfect process. Archival sources such as birth records might not exist, or may contain deliberately incorrect information, particularly when the person in question had legally been considered ‘illegitimate’ at birth (born outside marriage). Without formal records, a person’s ethnicity might be extrapolated from their birthplace, historical knowledge about their family and wider social networks, visual imagery (e.g. portraits, caricatures or photographs) or fleeting remarks discovered in a diary, court case or newspaper.

It is by employing a combination of these approaches that historians have identified, and continue to uncover, Black participation in numerous historic British institutional and social settings. While such discoveries are of importance in their own genealogical and biographical right, they are also of major significance in complicating assumptions (written or unwritten) about British society in the past, and providing new ways for researchers, students, teachers and readers to conceptualise British history. In this regard, McLagan’s story is an example of Black elite participation in nineteenth-century British politics, and adds an important Scottish dimension to evolving understandings of Black presence in Victorian Britain.

Such discoveries have increased over the past decade as Black British history has become an integral aspect of curriculums and research in schools and universities, and the digitisation of genealogical records and newspapers has allowed for new methods of source interrogation. Histories of politics and the UK Parliament are no exception, as demonstrated by Helen Wilson’s ground-breaking research into Black participation in British politics between 1750 and 1850, Gillian Williamson’s discovery of the earliest known Black voter in the UK at the 1749 Westminster by-election, and Amanda Goodrich’s biography of the father of Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, MP for York between 1841 and 1848.

As no formal birth records exist for McLagan, his status as a Black MP is based on a number of considerations. We know from his entry in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion from 1865, and a number of his public statements thereafter, that he was born in Demerara (now Guyana). In modern terms the ethnicity of his father was White British. However, at no point during his life did McLagan disclose the identity of his mother. There are also, at present, no known official or unofficial records that confirm who she was.

In addition to comments on his birth in Demerara, a number of contemporary statements were made about McLagan’s nationality and ethnicity. During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was ‘not a Scotchman’ and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan’s racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military.

There was little further public comment about McLagan’s ethnicity until the publication of the 1885 Popular Guide to the New House of Commons. In the guide, McLagan was described as ‘a creole, born in Demerara’. While ‘creole’ may just have been employed in this sense to describe someone of European descent born in the Caribbean, it led to a number of racist descriptions of McLagan in the press. For instance, in 1888 the Sheffield Independent welcomed the prospect that McLagan faced defeat at the next election on the basis that he ‘was not only born at Demerara – he is not even a white man’.

On his retirement in 1893 journalists deployed a range of racist descriptions in their potted biographies of McLagan. The Western Morning News stated he was ‘one of the swathiest [sic] men in the House of Commons’, the Newcastle Journal reported on his ‘dark complexion’, the Dundee Courier suggested that he was ‘in appearance a little heavy, Dutch-looking man’, and the Penny Illustrated Paper stated that his ‘sensible honest face bore traces of the dark blood which flowed in his veins’.

In addition to these newspaper reports, there are a number of contemporary portraits, caricatures and photographs of McLagan. As well as the cartoon noted above from the 1868 election, he was caricatured standing upright as ‘the judicious McLagan’ by Punch in 1888, and in a head and shoulders profile etching in the Linlithgowshire Gazette following the 1892 election. He was also the subject of an etching [Figure 1], which was probably published at an earlier stage of his parliamentary career, potentially following the 1865 election. The image, which is pictured above, was recently discovered by a descendant and is now held by West Lothian Council Museums and Archives Service.

McLagan was also captured in at least four known photographs. There are two side profiles of McLagan that probably date to the 1880s, one of which held by the Hulton Archive can be viewed here. McLagan also appears in two photographs taken in December 1887 during the foundation stone laying ceremony for Victoria Halls, Linlithgow. McLagan laid the foundation stone at the ceremony in full masonic attire (he was the Linlithgowshire provincial grand master), and is pictured at the centre of a group photo of local dignitaries in front of Linlithgow Palace Fountain [Figure 3]. In a second, remarkable, group photo of the laying of the foundation stone, McLagan can also be seen under a set of pulley chains, staring directly at the camera with a somewhat bemused look on his face [Figure 4].

Considered together, these sources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent. To explore why this was likely to have been the case, the next articles in the series will focus on McLagan’s family.

The first will discuss McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860), who enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara. McLagan’s father was awarded a share in over £20,000 (around £2.5 million today) in compensation for persons formerly enslaved on his plantations and personal estate following the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833. Along with the profits of a three-decade career in Demerara, McLagan’s father invested this compensation into estates in modern West Lothian, which allowed McLagan to establish himself as one of Scotland’s leading agriculturists, shale oil proprietors and longest-serving MPs.

Following this I will explore the potential identity of McLagan’s mother. Recent research by Dr Alison Clark has suggested that McLagan’s mother may have been Elizabeth Games or Elizabeth Goodwin, two ‘free women of colour’ that McLagan senior made property transactions with in Demerara in 1817.

My research into the enslaved persons on McLagan’s father’s estates has also identified a Barbadian-born woman named Filly (b. c. 1789/90), another possible candidate to have been McLagan’s mother. Filly, and her three children, Henrietta, Joe and Robert, were enslaved on McLagan’s father’s personal residence on Water Street, Georgetown, between 1820 and 1823, just before McLagan was born. While McLagan and his father left Demerara for Scotland in 1825, Filly and her children continued to live on McLagan’s father’s residence as enslaved ‘domestic servants’ until at least 1834.

To read the second article in Martin’s series click here. To find out more about the House of Commons 1832-1868 project click here.

MS

* I use Black as a category of ethnicity in its modern sense to refer to people of African and Caribbean heritage. This contrasts with contemporary nineteenth-century British discourse, and some twentieth century political and historiographical contexts, where ‘black’ was also used as a term to refer to persons of non-African and Caribbean heritage, particularly people of South Asian descent.  It also understands race as a cultural, social and political phenomenon.

The author would like to thank Sybil Cavanagh for sharing her unpublished research on McLagan, and several quotations which have been used in this article.

Suggested Reading

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

D. W. Main, ‘The Remarkable Career of Peter McLagan MP’, History Scotland (April 2021)

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’, (2022)

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Carribean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

J. Baker, ‘1833 Slavery Abolition Act: The Long Road to Emancipation in the British West Indies’, History of Parliament (2024)

‘C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

T. Scriven, ‘‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849’, History Workshop Journal (2024)

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)

A. Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772-1813 (2019)

D. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (2018)

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)