Political defections, commonly known in Westminster parlance as ‘Crossing the Floor’, have been a phenomenon in Parliament since at least the 17^th century. This has either happened en masse, as part of major schisms within pre-existing parties (such as the establishment of the Liberal Unionists in the late 19^th century, or the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019), or on an individual level, motivated either by political issues of national significance, or as a result of local contexts. In the History of Parliament’s Oral History archive, multiple former MPs have recounted their decision to ‘cross the floor’ and change party affiliation. These were frequently extremely difficult decisions, often at huge personal cost, in some instances causing the end of long-term friendships or associations. They also frequently reflected major changes in British politics happening well beyond their immediate experiences.

Some MPs took the difficult decision to leave their party because of local issues, typically involving conflicts with their constituency parties. In 1973, Dick Taverne, the moderate Labour MP for Lincoln (1962-74), resigned the whip after his local party deselected him due to his pro-European views, particularly for voting in favour of the UK joining the European Economic Community (EEC).

Taverne would subsequently resign his seat to trigger a by-election, which he won under the ‘Democratic Labour’ label. It was the first time a candidate other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals had won an English by-election in the post-war era. While Taverne’s parliamentary career after Labour was brief (he was defeated at the October 1974 general election by Labour’s Margaret Beckett), it anticipated later political events, most notably the defection of Labour’s ‘Gang of Four’ and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Taverne himself would join the SDP, and later stand again for Parliament (in Dulwich, unsuccessfully) in 1983, before becoming a Liberal Democrat peer in 1996. In 1977, Reg Prentice (Newham North-East, formerly East Ham North, 1957-79; Daventry, 1979-87) left the Labour Party due to similar local conflicts, but took the far more controversial decision of defecting directly to the Conservatives. He would later change constituencies and serve as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. Once again, Prentice’s defection partly showcased the various political divisions emerging within the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s.

Other defections were directly motivated by national political issues. In 1976, Scottish MPs Jim Sillars (South Ayrshire, 1970-79; Glasgow Govan, 1988-92) and John Robertson (Paisley, 1961-79) both resigned from Labour to set-up the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ (SLP). They were motivated by the issue of devolution, and frustration with the failure of the incumbent Labour government to establish a devolved Scottish Assembly with substantial economic powers.

While Sillars never regretted his decision to leave Labour and set up the SLP, he did admit that it was a ‘rush to the head’ and not fully thought through.  

Nevertheless, though the SLP ultimately enjoyed little electoral success, and was dissolved by 1981, Sillars and Robertson’s defections reflected the growing influence of Scottish nationalism in British politics, and anticipated the left-wing, pro-European form it would take in the following decades. In 1988 Sillars was returned to Parliament following a by-election in Glasgow Govan, this time standing as a candidate for the Scottish National Party (SNP), on a platform designed to outflank Labour from the left

Like other defections, Nicholson’s departure from the Conservatives reflected wider developments, but was also of notable personal significance, being the member of a very prominent Conservative family.  

Our interviews with both Sillars and Nicholson emphasise the emotional cost of leaving their parties. Party membership is more than a collection of people with shared political outlook; very deep relationships are made and it can be a key part of a politician’s identity.  For Sillars, leaving the Labour Party was ‘like a Catholic leaving the church […] it’s a tremendous trauma, personal trauma’ and the pressure really affected his health (he developed ulcers), his family and marriage. Nicholson described being ‘extremely angry’ with the Conservatives before she left. In part her defection was her response to feeling ‘bullied’ by the whips and a determination to resist that behaviour. Yet it was a decision she reached ‘very sadly, because I am intrinsically a Conservative.’

One of the most unusual political defections recounted in our project was that of Andrew Hunter. Having sat as the Conservative MP for Basingstoke since 1983, Hunter resigned the party whip in 2002, before joining the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2004. This was the first time an MP for a mainland British constituency represented a Northern Irish party since T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland (1885-1929). Hunter’s decision was motivated by conflicts with the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, particularly over the party’s controversial links to the right-wing Monday Club (which Hunter supported), disillusionment with the Westminster system, and a desire to pursue a political career in Northern Ireland, owing to his long-standing connections to the DUP and wider unionist community, particularly the Orange Order.  

Unsurprisingly, many of these defections sparked outrage among their former colleagues. Sillars would describe the ‘vicious’ reaction he received, while others would describe being accused of opportunism, cowardice or treason. In some instances, the defectors’ new political allies were not always entirely welcoming either. Interestingly, in many cases these defections were explained as not due to any significant change in the views of the MPs themselves, but out of discontent with their former party’s trajectory. Versions of the phrase ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’ was commonly used by Labour defectors to the SDP in the 1980s, as well as by Emma Nicholson in 1995. Indeed, while some of these defections proved permanent, such as in the case of the SDP or Sillars, others were ultimately temporary. In 2016, Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservative Party ‘with tremendous pleasure’ (BBC News, 10 September 2016), while more recently, Luciana Berger, who left Labour to form The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019 and later joined the Lib Dems, now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. Both instances suggest that while defections have often been dramatic and bitterly divisive, reconciliation has also occasionally been possible.

Ultimately, stories from our Oral History Project reveal that political defections are often highly personal decisions and experiences, but can also reflect wider political developments, and even play a role in shaping subsequent events.

A.S. & E.P.

Download ALT text for all audio clips here.

Further Reading

Andy Beckett, ‘Emma Nicholson: Not her sort of party’, Independent, 31 December 1995.

Tom Chidwick, ‘“Return Taverne”: 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election’, Mile End Institute blog, 1 March 2023

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Ben Jackson, ‘From British Labourism to Scottish Nationalism: Jim Sillars’ Journey’, Scottish Affairs 31:2 (2022), pp.233-239.

Rebecca McKee and Jack Pannell, ‘MPs who change party allegiance’, Institute for Government blog, 12 March 2024.

Emma Peplow and Priscilla Pivatto, The Political Lives of Postwar MPs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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)

The seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

‘The Tartan rage has at length reached Paris,’ declared the World in June 1787. Demand for tartan fabric and accessories had swept British high society earlier that year, with the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reporting in March that ‘the tartan plaid has obtained a complete triumph over every other ribband.’

Not everyone was pleased to see tartan becoming a fashion must-have: in March 1787 The Times archly commented that plaid ‘reminds us of the irritating constitutional disorder of its ancient wearers,’ a remark which highlights entrenched negative views of Scottish identity and history.

Some of this history was recent: during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, plaid had become indelibly intertwined with rebellion in many English minds. In the 1760s, tartan had developed a further negative connotation in England, being used in satirical images to identify the unpopular 3rd earl of Bute, a Scotsman who acted as Prime Minister between 1762 and 1763. In many of these prints (such as Figure 1) Bute was accused of advancing his fellow Scots at the expense of English politicians.

Despite its historic connotations in England, by the spring of 1787, every fashionable woman in London wanted to be seen with a bright plaid ribbon encircling her waist. Who was behind this Scottish fashion revolution?

Born the daughter of an impoverished baronet in Galloway, southwest Scotland, Jane Maxwell leapt up the social ladder when she wed Alexander, 4th duke of Gordon, in 1767. Having spent her teenage years rubbing shoulders with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh, Jane’s social acumen saw her rise to become one of Georgian Britain’s foremost society hostesses, alongside her friend and rival, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire.

Where Georgiana supported the Opposition, Jane was a supporter of the government, led by William Pitt the Younger. Nathaniel Wraxall, a writer and politician, remarked that Pitt’s government ‘did not possess a more active or determined partisan’ than the duchess of Gordon. 

Having already cultivated her reputation as a leading society hostess and patroness in Scotland, in the mid-1780s Jane began to spend more time in London, where she astonished contemporaries with her hectic social calendar. After recounting a long list of Jane’s activities on a single day, the writer Horace Walpole remarked: ‘Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time.’ Jane also hosted many gatherings of her own and she quickly established her reputation as a leading society hostess in the capital.

Society hostesses like Jane participated in what Elaine Chalus has called ‘social politics’. Namely, ‘the management of people and social situations for political ends’. Social politics gave aristocratic women the chance to participate in a political system from which they were officially excluded. For these women, the home was an important site of political networking. Outside the halls of Parliament, balls, visits, and dinners were opportunities for political discussion and alliances to flourish. 

Jane was best known for hosting ‘routs’, gatherings which were more informal than balls, but which also tended to feature dancing, card-playing, and plenty of gossip. At these events, Jane’s guest lists comprised individuals from the highest echelons of British society, including the Prince of Wales and his brothers. One of Jane’s most extravagant events took place in February 1799, when the Courier reported that she had hosted ‘between five and six hundred personages of the highest rank and fashion’ at her home in Piccadilly.

When the trend for tartan swept London’s high society in 1787, it was evident that the duchess of Gordon was responsible. Jane continued to incorporate tartan elements in her clothing, including at Court celebrations for Queen Charlotte’s birthday in 1788, and again in 1792. At the latter event, Jane wore a tartan gown made from Spitalfields silk, setting off yet another frenzy for tartan in the capital.

Five months later, Isaac Cruikshank produced a print titled ‘A Tartan Belle of 1792’ (see Figure 2). It showed a lady (probably Jane herself) bedecked in tartan fabric. Far from a simple fashion statement, Jane’s endorsement of tartan was part of a wider campaign to popularize Scottish identity and culture.

Jane distinguished herself from rival society hostesses by placing her Scottish identity front and centre at her events. In May 1787, The Times reported that 500 guests of the first rank were invited to a ‘tartan ball and supper’ at Jane’s London residence.

At Jane’s parties, Highland dancing and music were the main entertainments, and guests were encouraged to wear ‘Highland’ dress. The trend for tartan among aristocratic women eventually spread to the men. In June 1789, the Star and Evening Advertiser reported that the Prince of Wales would ‘shortly appear in Highland dress’ at an upcoming ball. 

Jane’s persistent assertions of her Scottish identity through fashion had provoked criticism in some quarters, yet her advocacy for Scottish dance was viewed in a more positive light. In October 1808 La Belle Assemblée or Court and Fashionable Magazine praised Jane for making Highland dancing popular at high society events, because it discouraged people from gambling in high-stakes card games.

The popularity of Scottish dance was undeniable and many other society hostesses began to integrate reels and strathspeys into their events. Scottish dancing even received the royal seal of approval. In 1799, Jane’s two eldest children were asked to perform in front of the king and queen at a fête at Oatlands Palace.

By blending her Scottish identity with her role as a society hostess, Jane helped to shift preconceived notions of Scottishness in Georgian England. Once viewed as symbols of rebellion, markers of Scottish identity like tartan and Highland dancing became fashionable in London’s high society thanks to the influence of the duchess of Gordon.

NG

Natalee’s seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading:

E. Chalus, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 43:3 (Sep. 2000), 669-697

W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols (1937-83)

H. Wheatley (ed.), The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 5 vols (1884)

At only four years old, a frightened James Lamont witnessed the enormous crowds present in Edinburgh to celebrate the passing of the 1832 Reform Act throwing stones at his window: his father, a Tory, had refused to light up his window at night, which was taken as a signal that he did not support Reform. In contrast with his father’s views, Lamont sat as Liberal MP for Buteshire, 1865-8, but his political career was a brief and irregular interlude in his scientific and literary endeavours, and at odds with the more mobile, heroic, robust figure written about in his accounts of sea voyages to Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya. He was one of the pre-eminent Arctic explorers and celebrity scientists of his day, and his daughter Augusta, who followed her father into science rather than politics, would later note:

Three years in Parliament! – what a contrast to the roving outdoor life that he had hitherto led! His later ‘gloomy reflections’ suggest that there was regret for time so spent.

Contemporary accounts, however, cast a different light on Lamont’s otherwise unremarkable time as an MP, for his political campaigns themselves revealed much about the fault lines in Scottish society in the immediate run-up to the passing of the Second Reform Act in 1867.

Lamont was the son of Lt. Col. Alexander Lamont, of Knockdow Estate, in Toward, Argyll. He was educated at Rugby School and the Edinburgh Military Academy. Upon his uncle’s death in 1849, Lamont inherited a fortune which, as Stephen Mullen has noted, was largely based on government compensation for his uncle’s Trinidad slave plantations. He began to attend to his estates in both Scotland and the West Indies, at the same time devoting himself to travelling and exploration. Lamont’s many voyages included trips to Nova Scotia, Labrador, the Mediterranean and South Africa, but it was his trips to the Nordic and Russian Arctic that remain his defining explorations. In 1858 and 1859, Lamont, on board his schooner the Ginerva, sailed up to and explored areas of Svalbard. He was also a keen hunter of seals, walruses, grouse and polar bears. These adventures formed the basis of Lamont’s first book, Seasons with the Sea Horses; or, sporting adventures in the northern seas (1861).

In 1869, 1870 and 1871, upon a newly-constructed yacht, the Diana, Lamont went further: not only did he explore more of Svalbard and Jan Mayen, but he also went on extensive trips which documented Novaya Zemlya. These voyages were recorded in his second book, Yachting in the Arctic Seas, or notes of five voyages of sport and discovery in the neighbourhood of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya (1876). Both books are bloody reads: the hunting and slaughter of animals dominates Lamont’s stories. A recent article on Lamont by Leah Devlin has focused on his beliefs on the evolution of walruses and polar bears, as discussed in his books, as well as in correspondence with Charles Darwin. Certainly, his political opponents made much of his support for the theory of evolution.

Lamont’s brief political career was sandwiched in between these two major publications. He had been selected by the Liberals to run for the Paisley constituency in 1857, before his first voyage to the Arctic, but did not go to the poll. In 1859 he was selected as Liberal candidate for the island constituency of Buteshire, one of the Conservative party’s safest Scottish seats, bordering Lamont’s ancestral home, but was defeated by nine votes. ‘The result’, he later recollected in Seasons with the Sea Horses, ‘proved unfortunate for the walrus, although perhaps the cynical reader may be disposed to add, “fortunate for the constituency”, and I was once more at liberty to proceed on my intended voyage’. Here, his political career was treated as an inconvenient footnote. It fared no better in Yachting in the Arctic Seas, where Lamont painted his 1868 retirement from Parliament as a chance to get back to his one true passion:

So completely did these ideas gain possession of me that at the general election of 1868 I abandoned a seat in Parliament … and set to work to build a vessel which should embody all Arctic requirements in a moderate compass.

The reality of Lamont’s ‘abandonment’ of his political career was far messier. Standing again for Buteshire at a by-election in 1865, Lamont had launched a scathing attack on his Conservative opponent George Frederick Boyle, the local landlords’ preferred candidate, on account of his religious affiliations. Boyle was both a layman in the Scottish Episcopal Church and a well-known patron of Tractarianism, who famously built an Episcopal training college in Millport. Exploiting the sectarian rivalries between Scotland’s competing faiths, Lamont enlisted the support of local Free Church ministers and sought to portray Boyle as the ultimate nightmare: a Catholic landowner in disguise. ‘When our forefathers rose against the superstitions and mummeries of the Romish Church at the Reformation’, he declared on the hustings, ‘an ancestor of mine, also called James Lamont of Knockdow, pulled down a Roman Catholic Church on Loch Striven side, so that not one stone of it remained upon another’. Although he narrowly lost the by-election, Lamont used his speech at the declaration to charge local landlords with intimating crofter-electors, provoking a riot.

At the 1865 general election six months later Lamont rode the Liberal wave into Parliament. Reporting on his 1865 campaigns, the Tory Edinburgh Courant referred to him as a ‘Darwinite murderer of seals’, whose own graphic exploits, as written about by the man himself, displayed a lust for power. Once elected, however, Lamont failed to make his presence felt in the Commons, rarely speaking at any length in debate and voting infrequently in the division lobbies. After siding with the Conservatives against Gladstone on the question of Irish church disestablishment, to which he was bitterly opposed, Lamont was deselected by Buteshire’s Liberals, forcing his retirement at the 1868 election. That so little space was given to politics either by himself or his daughter in their accounts of his career confirms that unique celebrities of Lamont’s make were not necessarily suited to life at Westminster.

Further Reading:

Augusta Lamont, Records and Recollections of Sir James Lamont of Knockdow (self-published, 1950)

A.G.E. Jones, ‘Lamont, Sir James, first baronet (1828-1913)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [www.oxforddnb.com]

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 26 October 2016, written by Dr Matthew McDowell.

On 6 March 1725, Pope Benedict XIII (1724-30) was roused from a period of private prayer with the news that ‘Queen’ Clementina, consort of the exiled James Edward Stuart (to his Jacobite supporters, James III and VIII) had given birth to a son in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. In spite of James and Benedict having decidedly tricky relations, the Pope hurried over to greet the new infant and promptly baptized him Henry Benedict (along with perhaps as many as ten other names).

Unlike his older brother, Charles Edward, Henry Benedict has attracted comparatively little attention. This is hardly surprising given his reputation for caution and his eminently sensible decision not to follow his brother to Scotland in 1745. Instead, it was left to Henry to undertake the thankless but necessary task of remaining in France, rallying support, while Charles tried and failed to regain a crown, and ultimately to organize a ship to rescue the by then rather battered Young Chevalier after his months hiding in the heather.

The failure of the 45 Rebellion no doubt confirmed Henry in his view that further escapades were ill-advised, and helped convince him to follow an alternative path. In 1747, he made the momentous decision to enter the church and was fast-tracked through the clerical ranks, emerging as a Cardinal that summer. It was by no means welcome to his family, though James seems to have become reconciled to it sooner than Charles, writing to ‘My dearest Carluccio’ that he was:

Fully convinced of the sincerity and solidity of his vocation; I should think it a resisting of the will of God, and acting directly against my conscience, if I should pretend to constrain him in a matter which so nearly concerns him. [Kelly, 36]

It seems, in any case, that Henry’s decision was not wholly a surprise, and that plans may have been afoot to have him made a cardinal as far back as 1740. [Corp, 225] James was not minded to agree to a suggestion by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) that Henry be made Cardinal Protector of England, Scotland or Ireland, [Corp, 232] though the British press reported that ‘when’ the exiled dynasty was back in possession, Henry was to be sent as Papal Legate. [St James’s Evening Post, 25-28 July 1747]

Henry’s decision to abandon a potential military career did not prevent him from being an occasional focus for disloyalty in England. His birthday, the year after he entered the church, was celebrated by five inebriated students of Balliol College, Oxford, with minor hooliganism committed against staunchly Whig Exeter College, while one of them shouted out ‘God bless King James, God damn King George’. Two of the ringleaders were later sentenced to two years in prison for their actions. [Monod, 276-7]

In stark contrast to his undergraduate fan club, Henry appears to have set about his new vocation with studied seriousness. That he had not altogether forsaken his position as a claimant to the British throne is indicated, though, by his decision to issue a medal with his image on it following the death of his father in 1766, even though Charles (Charles III to the Jacobites) chose not to bother. The same medal was then reissued 22 years later, after Charles’s death, when Henry became (again, according to the Jacobite succession) Henry IX. On the reverse was a diplomatically worded Latin motto, taken from Peter’s first epistle: ‘Non desideriis hominum, sed voluntate dei’, which as Monod observes ‘was so inoffensive as to lack any real seditious import’. [Monod, 88, 91]

As the medal demonstrated, while Henry chose not to do anything to encourage rebellion against his cousin, George III, he was keen to insist on his royal status and to keep up certain rites and standards. Insisting on wearing ermine was one, but perhaps most important, he persisted with the family tradition of ‘touching’ for scrofula, issuing special tokens for people afflicted with the condition. His brother, Charles had touched at least one sufferer while in Edinburgh in 1745 [Brogan, 213, 217]

If Henry trod a cautious path from his entry into the church through to his own ‘succession’ on Charles’s demise, he was unable to prepare for the dramatic changes ushered in by the French revolution. In 1796, Bonaparte invaded Italy, and Pope Pius VI (1775-99) was forced to hand over vast sums to prevent widespread pillaging in and around Rome. Henry made his own contribution by parting with a ruby, once the property of his maternal family, worth an estimated £60,000. [Kelly, 97] The following year, a new invasion force proved less willing to be bought off, and Henry became an exile twice over – quitting his villa outside Rome for Messina, thence to Corfu before finally returning to the Italian peninsula and settling in Venice.

It was there, that the cardinal’s journey in some ways came full circle. Having spent his whole life a representative of a rival dynasty to the ruling Hanoverians, it was to his cousins that Henry was ultimately indebted for saving him from penury. Thanks to an intercession from Cardinal Borgia, contact was made with a sympathetic Catholic gentleman in England, whose contacts ultimately passed the petition for assistance to the king. Advised by William Pitt that Henry ‘the last relick of an Illustrious Family’ was now ‘reduced to a state of distress which bordered on wretchedness’, George concurred that something needed to be done and through Lord Minto, ambassador at Vienna, he offered Henry an annual pension of £4,000. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 30 Dec. 1799] Acknowledging the king’s ‘noble way of thinking’, Henry accepted.

Having been saved from eking out his final days in a state of poverty, Henry was able to focus on the Conclave, summoned following Pius VI’s death in August 1799, and which convened in Venice from the winter of 1799 through to the spring of 1800. While there had been various reports in the British press late the previous year of efforts being made ‘to seat Cardinal York in the Papal Chair’, he seems never to have been a serious candidate for the papacy himself. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 9 Dec. 1799] Rather, it was left to him to play a supporting role in the eventual election of Cardinal Chiaramonti as Pope Pius VII (1800-23). Later that year, he was able to stage a return to Rome, where he lived out his remaining days in comparative luxury.

To the very end, Henry maintained the careful course he had always navigated. In his will of 1802, signed (rather optimistically) Henry Roi, he repeated an earlier declaration that the de jure succession to the British throne lay (after him) with the reigning king of Sardinia. However, on his death five years later he was also careful to acknowledge the assistance he had received from his Hanoverian cousins by returning to George, Prince of Wales, some of the regalia carried overseas by his grandfather, James II and VII, almost 120 years earlier.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (2015)
Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719-1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (2011)
Bernard Kelly, Life of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1899)
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788 (1989)

Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in Kilmarnock in 1786 and, encouraged by his local supporters, arrived in Edinburgh in January 1787 to arrange a second edition. He quickly found a patron there in James Cunningham, 14th earl of Glencairn making an introduction through common Ayrshire connections. Both the earl and his mother, the dowager countess, strove to ensure that his poems would appear in a new edition from an Edinburgh publisher, with Glencairn putting Burns in touch with bookseller William Creech, Glencairn’s tutor during his Grand Tour, who agreed to produce it.

Glencairn encouraged Burns to dedicate the new volume to the Royal Caledonian Hunt, an elite social and sporting club. At a meeting on 10 January Glencairn persuaded the members of the Hunt to pledge to purchase 100 copies, bringing Burns £25 in advance. Glencairn also sent blank subscription forms to James Graham, marquess of Graham, in order to have them filled up by the ‘first Scottish names about Court’. He also enlisted William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke of Portland, to solicit subscriptions from other peers in London [Letters, i. 73]. Few English subscribers signed up, apart from the duchess of Devonshire and countess of Derby. When Burns’s revised Poems appeared in April, it was dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, which headed the list of subscribers. Between them Glencairn and his mother pledged to purchase 24 copies, the countess dowager alone subscribing for sixteen.

Glencairn had succeeded to his peerage in 1775, and three years later was commissioned a captain of the Western Fencible Regiment, a temporary outfit raised to defend the Scottish west coast. Like many Scots, he was angered by Westminster’s unwillingness to trust the Scots with a more established domestic military force, on the lines of the English militia.

Elected one of the 16 representative peers in 1780, Glencairn quickly joined the patriot movement for an independent Scottish militia. In spring 1782 he witnessed the unsuccessful attempts of Lord Graham to promote a Scottish militia bill in the Commons. Glencairn took up the cause himself and was its main driver from the summer. He was in Westminster in June 1783 when Graham once again brought the Scots’ desire for their own militia before the Commons. However, the session was prorogued a month later without the militia bill having been introduced.

Glencairn supported the Fox-North coalition and voted for its East India Company bill in December 1783. He failed to be included on the Court’s list of representative peers for the general election, and was heavily defeated when standing as an independent. For the rest of his life he opposed William Pitt and his Scottish manager Henry Dundas. On 6 Dec. 1785 he was named to an Ayrshire committee tasked with countering Dundas’s planned diminution of the number of judges on the Court of Session. [Public Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1785] He was also a member of the Independent Friends, a society of Scottish Whigs. As he had done in 1784, Glencairn threw his interest behind the Opposition candidate in Ayrshire elections in 1789 and 1790, but without success.

Thus, when Glencairn met Burns in late 1786 he already had extensive credentials as a Scottish patriot and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of Burns’s wish to project a genuine Scottish voice. Burns was solicitous of Glencairn’s opinion on his poems, especially those with political content. He submitted his piece on the American war, When Guilford Good, for Glencairn’s approval, worried that ‘my political tenets… may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends’ [Letters, i. 77]. Glencairn countenanced its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and would have agreed with Burns’s positive view of the Americans’ cause.

Burns and Glencairn also found common cause on the issue of the Scottish militia. Burns’s 1784 poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer urged the 45 Scottish MPs to fight back against an Act that had increased the excise on whisky. He felt that if the measure were allowed to continue, Scotland, already on edge because ‘Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid’ [blood], would be ready to resort to violence.

Burns did not have many years to enjoy his friendship with Glencairn and the earl’s death on 30 Jan. 1791 while returning from a trip abroad distressed Burns greatly. He composed a Lament, which concluded: ‘The mother may forget the child / That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;/ But I’ll remember thee Glencairn / And a’ that thou hast done for me!’. In 1794, Burns even named his newborn son James Glencairn Burns.

Another Ayrshire native and peer who encouraged Burns’s poetry in 1787 was Archibald Montgomerie, 11th earl of Eglinton, a fiercely proud Highlander. He had commanded a regiment in America during the Seven Years War and served as a representative peer for 20 years. James Boswell described him to Dr. Johnson as ‘a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he [Johnson] was an Englishman’ [Life of Johnson, iii. 170, 503]. In January 1787 Eglinton provided Burns with an unsolicited donation of 10 guineas [Letters i. 79, 84], and subscribed to 42 copies of his Poems, one of the largest individual subscriptions.

In 1796 all these connections were abruptly severed, beginning with Burns’s own death on 21 July, aged just thirty-seven. On 24 September Glencairn’s younger brother, John, the 15th earl, died childless, and the title became extinct. Eglinton died without a male heir on 31 October, and his distant cousin Hugh Montgomerie of Coilsfield (mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer) succeeded him in the peerage.

CGDL

Further reading:
Ian McIntyre, Robert Burns: A Life (1995)
The Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1: 1780-89, ed. G. Ross Roy (1985)
J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985)
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1934-1950)

The recent riots engulfing parts of Britain have rekindled interest in the propensity of the populace to riot during the eighteenth century – the Sacheverell riots of 1710, the Porteous Riots of 1736 and the Gordon Riots of 1780, being three examples that spring to mind. The latter took place in June 1780, taking their name from the principal instigator of the disorder, Lord George Gordon (1751-93), MP for Ludgershall, who was charged with high treason, but acquitted in February 1781.

Lord George was the third son of Cosmo Gordon, 3rd duke of Gordon, and Catherine, daughter of Alexander Gordon, 2nd earl of Aberdeen. This article provides some family background to the main actor in the drama, focussing mainly on his two elder brothers, who were in Scotland when the riots occurred.

Gordon’s eldest brother was Alexander (1743-1827), 4th duke of Gordon, a Scottish representative peer from 1767 to 1784, and from 1784 earl of Norwich in the British peerage. He was married to Catherine (1748-1812), younger daughter of Sir William Maxwell, 3rd bt., ‘a great beauty but no fortune’, according to the duchess of Portland [University of Nottingham Library, Pw F 801]. Subsequently, she became a society figure and hostess for Henry Dundas and his friend William Pitt the Younger when Prime Minister in the late 1780s. The couple split in the 1790s, and after the death of the duchess, Gordon married his long-time mistress, Jean Christie, mother of five of his eight illegitimate children.

The duke of Gordon was heavily involved in trying to secure a seat for his youngest brother in the House of Commons. Preparations seem to have begun in 1772 for Lord George’s campaign for Inverness-shire. However, the sitting MP, Simon Fraser, son of the notorious Lord Lovat, executed after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-6, kept his seat after a negotiation which saw Gordon returned instead for the venal borough of Ludgershall, owned by George Selwyn.

Selwyn sold his seats at Ludgershall to the ministry, so with Lord North in agreement, and the duke of Gordon presumably paying – hence his comment in 1776 that he had given it to his brother ‘as a free gift without laying you under any restriction whatsoever’, Gordon was safely elected as an MP. [NRS, GD224/655/7/2] However, his conduct there soon caused comment. In April 1778 Gordon was said to have ‘rather looked mad in the House last night’, where ‘his abuse of Lord North was in regard to the bargain about the borough he comes in for’. [A. and H. Tayler, Lord Fife and His Factor … 1729-1809 (1925)] Consequently, an analysis of the forthcoming election in 1780, noted that Lord George Gordon had no chance of being re-elected for Ludgershall, and indeed, he never sat in the House again.

Initial reports in London suggested that both the duke of Gordon and another brother, Lord William, were attempting to raise their clans in Scotland in support of Lord George. These rumours turned out to be false, though, the opposite being the case. Indeed, the duke made sure that there was no disorder and wrote to the king to assure him of his loyalty. [Jones Letters, ed. G. Cannon, i. 412] The duke did, however, travel to London to begin the organization of his brother’s defence, arranging visits to the Tower from his sister, the dowager countess of Westmorland, and George Gordon, 3rd earl of Aberdeen.

Informed observers were unsure as to whether Lord George’s his actions could be deemed treasonable. On 13 June Lady Spencer was informed that ‘the lawyers seem to be of opinion, that Lord George Gordon cannot be convicted of high treason’. The duke himself was nervous as the date of the trial approached, writing on 26 Jan. 1781, ‘God grant it was well over. I am in great anxiety about him I do assure you but I hope all will go right’. [NRS, GD44/43/248/9] His brother’s ultimate acquittal on 6 February 1781 had surprisingly little effect on the duke’s career. He remained involved in politics and achieved office in the 1790s as a supporter of the government.

The other brother, Lord William Gordon (1744-1823) was originally perceived as ‘one of the most accomplished young noblemen of the age’, [Namier and Brooke, ii. 519], but his career was sent into turmoil by his scandalous elopement in February 1769 with Lady Sarah Bunbury, sister of Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, with whom he had already had a daughter. Lady Sarah eventually went to reside with her brother and was divorced in 1776. Having been described in March 1769 by one commentator as ‘odd to a degree, and certainly a little mad (several of his family are shut up)’, and by another as ‘a beggar and mad’ [Leinster Correspondence, i. 568, 570], Lord William seems to have escaped abroad for a few years.

Upon Lord William’s return his brother, the duke, managed to secure his return in a by-election for Elginshire in April 1779, which he retained in the general election the following year. in March 1781, he married Frances Ingram Shepheard, daughter and coheiress of Charles, 9th Viscount Irwin, who resided at Temple Newsam, near Leeds, a convenient staging post for visiting Scotland. In 1784 he transferred to Inverness-shire, and after a two-year break, he was returned for Horsham, on the interest of the dowager Viscountess Irwin.

As for Lord George Gordon, upon his release he continued to agitate for political change, was eventually cast adrift by his family in 1785 and two years later converted to Judaism. He died in Newgate prison on 1 November 1793.

Biographies of Lord William Gordon can be found in both The House of Commons 1754-90, edited by Namier and Brooke, and The House of Commons 1790-1820, edited by R. Thorne. Lord George Gordon features only in Namier and Brooke. The Duke of Gordon will be covered in the forthcoming House of Lords 1715-90 volumes and in the planned volumes on The House of Lords 1790-1832.

SNH

In July 2024, the History of Parliament Trust supported the two-day conference Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union, c., 1700-1945, held at Durham University and organised by Naomi Lloyd-Jones. In this blog, Brendan Tam, one of the speakers, reflects on the event and on the state of Scottish and British political history.

Ewen Cameron’s keynote address at the Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union conference, held in July at the University of Durham, while focused on the question of ‘where did the nineteenth century go’ in relation to Scottish political history, was emblematic of the broader themes, developments and approaches that define the current landscape of the field. Equally, the five sections by which Cameron structured his keynote – historiography and sources, structures of the union, local government and localism, slavery, and empire – captured many of the topics and methodological approaches that were addressed throughout this two-day conference.

Papers approaching the two topics of slavery and empire utilised a range of methodological approaches and sources, highlighting the ground that remains to be covered in exploring the interaction between Scotland, empire and slavery across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries at both a regional and global level.  Matthew Lee tracked the coverage of five Scottish newspapers to explore the effect competing narratives of the Haitian Revolution had on the public debate over abolition in Scotland between 1791 and 1792. Glasgow, whose economy was tied to the Caribbean, exhibited a greater interest in the revolution. Drawing on the appointment diaries of Colin Dunlop Donald (1777-1859), Secretary of the West India Association and a Tory election agent, Stephen Mullen located the electoral interest and control of the West India Interest in early nineteenth century Scotland as being primarily regionally bounded, largely to Glasgow and its surrounds. Thomas Archambaud traced connections between the West Indian and East Indian interests through exploring the globe-spanning political and commercial careers of James and John Macpherson. James Wylie provided a material culture perspective on the intersection of Scottish culture and slavery, exploring the dual role of tartan as both a commodity and a symbol which reinforced hierarchies within the system of slavery.

A significant theme that emerged from the conference was the role of women in Scottish political life. As has been well established in modern historiography, women were not passive observers of political events but active participants, using both formal and informal avenues to influence public life. Natalee Garrett examined the Duchess of Gordon’s use of what Elaine Chalus has termed ‘social politics’ in playing an active role in late eighteenth century politics. By hosting social events like tartan balls, and dinners, Gordon was able to forge relationships across the political divide and wield political influence during moments of political crisis. Lisa Berry-Waite, focusing on a 1938 portrait of Scotland’s first female MP, Katharine, Duchess of Atholl, currently held by the UK Parliament Heritage Collection, emphasised the importance of embracing a broad range of sources to reconceptualise the past. Beyond aristocratic circles, women also played crucial roles in regional political movements. Frankie Aird highlighted the importance of the Perth Female Anti-Slavery Society, which was founded before its male counterpart, and played an active role in the global dialogue relating to the abolition of slavery. Hannah Speed assessed the life writing of three Scottish suffragists, charting how their respective involvements in the WSPU are key to understanding their later political careers, noting the importance of the friendships and networks forged in the WSPU.

The structure of politics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often mediated through networks of patronage, friendship and personal alliances. This theme was evident across papers discussing political figures and their relationships, both elite and non-elite. My own paper analysed the patronage networks of Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville. I argued that his friendship with the 4th Duke of Buccleuch reflected how life-long friendships shaped political careers and allowed for the creation and maintenance of political networks that traded on both electoral influence and preferment. Michael Fraser explored how John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, crafted a public persona of patriotic heroism through speeches and ballads, positioning himself as a defender of Whig Presbyterianism and the Scottish nation.

As Scotland’s political landscape evolved after Union, new forms of popular and radical politics began to emerge. Karin Bowie traced the culture of Scottish loyal addresses and political petitions before and after the 1707 Act of Union, arguing that by tracking loyal addresses and the way they were used as displays of strength by rival factions, a more nuanced image of the Scottish political landscape can be recovered. Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller contended that petitions played a distinctive political role in Scottish politics between 1780 and 1918. That Scotland was over-represented proportionately to the rest of Britain in the number of petitions lodged suggests that petitions were viewed as an avenue for political involvement in the context of the restricted electoral system in Scotland. Dave Steele’s analysis of the 1838 Radical Demonstration on Glasgow Green emphasised the co-operation and connections between English and Scottish radical groups in understanding the radical movement immediately prior to the emergence of the Chartists.

In considering the past, present and future of Scottish political history, the roundtable discussion that closed the conference, featuring Colin Kidd, Emma Macleod,conference organiser Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Malcolm Petrie and Valerie Wallace summarised the trends exhibited by all the contributions made at the conference. Macleod’s reflections of the broad base which political history can cover as typified by the varied papers delivered at the conference, observing that politics can refer to ‘rout parties, balls, portraits, railways and fashion’, brilliantly encapsulated the diversity of approaches that were on show and the many discussions that were had across the two days. Furthermore, the convening of a Scottish history conference in England is noteworthy. It reflects that there is a need to consider all the constituent parts of Britain when exploring and contextualising Scottish political history, taking a ‘four nations’ approach that also includes empire. At the same time, electoral cultures and local level politics at both a macro and micro level cannot be ignored. To understand the dynamics and rhythms of not only Scottish political history but British political history, we must consider the local, national and global dimensions at work.

B.T.

Brendan Tam is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Brendan previously completed degrees at the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh and is an elected member of the Society for the History of Emotions Council. His dissertation is focused on exploring the role played by and the dynamics of political friendship in British politics during the late Hanoverian period (1760-1837).  

The story of the Gordon Riots is well known and has been told many times before. However, one aspect that has not been considered so much is what they tell us about access to the old Palace of Westminster. Key to this is the evidence that was presented at Lord George Gordon’s treason trial in February 1781, when several well-placed MPs and parliamentary officials offered their testimony on how the crowds had pressed their way into the heart of the palace.

While the original delegation bringing the Protestant Association’s petition to Westminster had been orderly enough, by the late afternoon of 2 June 1780 the Palace of Westminster was clogged with protesters. Protesting later turned to rioting, and in London there were days of lawlessness, with houses and chapels pulled down, prisons broken open and widespread looting. Only after several days was order restored by the army and militia.

One of the most useful witnesses summoned to give evidence at Gordon’s trial was Thomas Bowen, officiating as the Commons’ chaplain on the day the petition was presented. Bowen had accompanied the Speaker to the chamber at the beginning of proceedings, but already found the lobby ‘crowded, and the people… clamorous’. After leading those MPs present in prayers, Bowen retreated to a place ‘under the gallery, by the door’. He was, thus, well-placed to observe Gordon interacting with the crowd outside the chamber. He witnessed Gordon going to the door frequently, and repeating what was being said by the Members. Gordon assured the crowd that the Speaker considered them ‘good people’, while (likely) George Rous, who had form on calling for aggressive action to quell troublemakers, was calling for the magistrates to be called. Lord North dismissed them as ‘a mob’.

When the motion to consider the petition was eventually called for, Bowen exited the chamber and made his way to an adjoining room, but noticed that the crowd was refusing to quit the lobby, making a division impossible. He was prevailed on to speak to them to encourage them to retire, but without success. At least one person insisted they would only go if Gordon told them to do so.

Bowen then left the lobby and went to ‘the eating room’, where he was joined by an exhausted Gordon. He told Gordon what he had heard, and Gordon made his way to the gallery overlooking the lobby so that he could speak to his supporters. Bowen followed, and deposed that Gordon spoke to those gathered below, urging them to be peaceable, though Gordon also took Bowen by the gown, introduced him to the crowd and tried to get Bowen to give his opinion on the Catholic Relief Act. According to Bowen, this was the only time in the whole proceedings when he felt unsafe. John Anstruther, who was in the lobby, gave his own account of Gordon addressing the crowd, but made no mention of Bowen. He agreed, though, that there ‘was great confusion in the lobby’.

Following Bowen, MP John Cator offered his evidence of the events of 2 June. He said he had been ‘going from some of the committee-rooms to the gallery over the lobby’ and found the lobby packed with people and the Commons stymied in their efforts to hold a division, as the officers of the House were unable to get the lobby cleared. He heard someone call Gordon by name, and then witnessed him make his way ‘to the rails, and looked over’. Cator followed suit to observe Gordon’s interaction with the crowd. Gordon advised that most of the MPs were opposed to considering the petition at that point, but asked what the crowd wished: ‘they cried out, “Now, now.”’

Two more Commons’ staff were summoned to give their evidence. One was Joseph Pearson, one of the doorkeepers. He had been posted in the lobby, and his testimony confirmed Bowen’s, that Gordon had come to the door on several occasions to pass on what was happening to the crowd outside. He reckoned the ‘mob’ had finally dispersed by nine in the evening, but ‘so great was the confusion I cannot say how [the lobby] was cleared’. Another doorkeeper, Thomas Baker, supported Pearson’s account, noting that the crowds only disappeared after soldiers arrived.

What was clear from several of the witnesses was how easy it was for the crowd to make their way deep into the parliamentary estate. Sampson Rainsforth deposed being in New Palace Yard when about 200 people had made their way over Westminster Bridge and at about 2pm ‘the whole cavalcade came from Charing Cross down to New Palace Yard, with flags and music’. He also observed that ‘they had blue cockades in their hats’: the colour of the Protestant Association. This tallied more or less with at least one newspaper report that related that the delegation arrived at the Houses of Parliament at about half past two. [Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 June 1780] Like Anstruther, Rainsforth then made his way into the lobby where he observed Gordon standing at the door leading into the Commons’ chamber, though he did not catch what was said. Clearly, though, it was still possible to access the lobby in spite of the reports of large crowds making the passageways impassable.

Witnesses to what took place in the lobby generally agreed that while potentially unruly, the crowd there was reasonably well behaved, though at least one MP, Philip Jennings Clerke, reckoned that the original petitioners were distinct from those in the lobby, whom he dismissed as ‘a different class of person’. Certainly, all was not peaceful. Constable Charles Jealous, stationed in Palace Yard, witnessed the bishop of Lincoln’s coach being attacked as he arrived to attend the House of Lords. The coach, he said:

was stopped by the mob, and the wheels were taken off. I saw a gentleman taken out of it, who, they said was the Bishop: they pulled off his wig, and struck him in the face… He got into the house in order to escape.

Jealous observed that those involved in roughing up the bishop were not wearing blue cockades, suggesting they were not part of the more organized group who had been involved with presenting the petition. One newspaper also reported six peers being ‘extremely ill-used… their bags pulled off, and their hair left flowing on their shoulders’. Several chose not to hang around and summoned hackney carriages to get them away.

Dispersing the crowds from around Parliament proved just the beginning of the business as protests turned to riot and a general breakdown in law and order. But what the opening moments of those chaotic days in June 1780 showed was how intimate the palace could be. Access was easy right up to the doors of the Commons, with spaces – like the gallery over the lobby – available for Members to address people gathered below. It all goes to show that Parliament was a dynamic space, where Lords, MPs, officials and the general public rubbed shoulders and where so much depended on a sense of what was and was not reasonable behaviour.

RDEE

Further Reading:
The Trial of the Honourable George Gordon, commonly called Lord George Gordon, for High Treason… On Monday, the 5th Day of February, 1781.
The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge, 2012)