2025 also saw the 1832-68 Commons project take on a new PhD student, in a similar collaborative PhD partnership to those we have previously run with the University of Warwick (Dr Seth Thevoz) and the Institute of Historical Research (Dr Martin Spychal). The successful candidate was Megan Hall. She is now working at the University of Sheffield on a fascinating study exploring the experiences of 19^th century Irish MPs.

Many of our Victorian Commons posts in 2025 explored themes beyond the remit of the MP biographies and constituency histories we write for the 1832-68 project. Kathryn Rix continued her research into the reporting of parliamentary debates, showing how growing demands for accurate reporting led to major changes in the reporters’ gallery, as famously used by a young Charles Dickens. She also described the often-misunderstood role of Hansard and modifications to both the temporary House of Commons and Charles Barry’s new Victorian Palace. At one point in the 1850s a brand-new roof even had to be rebuilt to improve acoustics.

Martin Spychal, meanwhile, extended his work on the first Black MP to represent a Scottish constituency. He investigated Peter McLagan’s complex heritage and extraordinary wealth as the son of a Demerara slave owner and an enslaved woman. This new series of articles was complemented by a one-day workshop held jointly with Joe Cozens at The National Archives, involving scholars of slavery and colonialism. More posts in this series will follow.

Alongside this political ‘first’, Naomi Lloyd-Jones offered a memorable ‘last’ with her account of the last known political duel involving MPs. One of the combatants was the noted ‘pistoleer’ George Smythe MP (1818-1857), later 7th Viscount Strangford and 2nd Baron Penshurst, who was also notorious for getting a daughter of the earl of Orford pregnant but refusing to marry her. His adversary was his fellow MP for Canterbury Frederick Romilly, with whom he had fallen out over election arrangements. Their exchange of shots in a wood in 1852 captured the attention of the national press and was widely ridiculed, helping both MPs get defeated at the next election.

Electoral corruption is a standard feature in all our research on 19^th century politics. Anyone thinking there was little left to say, however, should read Naomi’s post about the murky world of behind-the-scenes dealing in election petitions. This was especially revealing about the understudied practice of party agents ‘pairing off’ or ‘swapping’ challenges against recently elected MPs accused of bribery or malpractice. This ‘secret’ dealing in corruption allegations between the parties seems to have become rife before the reform of the whole election petition system in 1868. The changing nature of corruption also featured strongly in Kathryn Rix’s post comparing the practices and culture of the 1835 and 1865 general elections – an important reminder that adjustments to the UK’s electoral system were ongoing and not just confined to landmark Reform Acts.

Changes to the electorate between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts formed the basis of another article by Martin Spychal, drawing on research undertaken for his recent book. Taking into account the anomalies caused by plural voters, multiple qualifications and inconsistencies in the way ‘returns’ were compiled, this post showed how the large variations in the levels of adult male enfranchisement across the UK’s constituencies narrowed significantly from 1832 to the 1860s. Again this showed that the first reformed electoral system was far from ‘fixed’.

Another type of change was explored in Philip Salmon’s post examining the work of the chairman of ways and means. It was during the 19^th century that this key position in the Commons evolved into its recognisably modern form. The character and impartiality of the men appointed altered significantly. Early 19^th century officeholders – among them a crop of slave owners and fraudsters – were gradually replaced by a series of increasingly high calibre administrators. In 1853 the chairman also began to act as deputy speaker, a move reflected in the growing tendency for retirees to receive a peerage or even be promoted to the Speakership itself. One highlight here was the inclusion of a rare Victorian audio recording of Henry Cecil Raikes MP, the chair of ways and means from 1874-80.

Any idea that the changes outlined in all these posts increased the status or power of the Commons, however, was countered by an article by Philip examining the role and significance of the 19^th century House of Lords, based on a talk given in the River Room, House of Lords. As well as challenging the view that the Lords became subservient to the Commons in the 19^th century, this examined various attempts by Liberals, Radicals and even some Conservatives to reform the Lords. It also charted its perception as a legitimate alternative to the Commons in representing ‘popular opinion’ and the ‘will of the nation’ on key issues.

House of Lords reform, of course, is likely to be a topic that many commentators will be turning their attention to – historical and otherwise – during the new year. We will be continuing our research into 19th century parliamentary politics, MPs and elections, and look forward to sharing more highlights in 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

It had started so well. Francis Leak, the son of Sir Francis Leak, a prosperous landowner in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, was the first of his family to try to establish himself on the national stage. He had already taken the important first step of marrying the sister of a rising star at court, Sir Henry Carey (later Viscount Falkland in the Scottish peerage). Yet Leak’s ambitions were undermined by a fierce row with his father, who had resigned the patrimonial estate to him in return for a relatively high rent-charge. Once the documents were sealed, Leak refused point-blank to pay anything to his father, on the preposterous grounds of poverty. His true financial state was revealed in 1624, when he paid James I’s favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, £8,000 to be made Baron Deincourt. The son’s ennoblement enraged the father, who was already engaged in a lengthy legal battle with his son. Even the death of Sir Francis in 1626 did not stop the wrangling, as Deincourt’s mother and half-brother disputed the will and won a chancery order for him to pay them rent arrears; this was upheld by the Lords in 1629. Deincourt’s parliamentary service in the later 1620s had been overshadowed by this constant rowing, and the dispute continued into the early 1630s, ending only with the intervention of the privy council, which ruled against the baron. His reputation at court and among the aristocracy never recovered.

Although Deincourt was treated with distain by the royal court during the 1630s, his son, also Francis, was able to succeed where the father had failed, joining the royal family for racing at Newmarket and being given minor ceremonial roles at court. His career was, however, spoiled by his father’s parsimony. Two potential marriages were ruined by Deincourt’s refusal to make realistic financial provision for his son, and by the end of the decade, Francis was languishing in debtors’ prison. Deincourt was equally mean when it came to public affairs. Although a supporter of the king, he was reluctant to give the king money to fight the bishops’ wars against the Scots in 1639-40, and he went on to play very little part in the Short and Long Parliaments. At the outbreak of civil war in 1642, he sided with the king. Francis, who had gone to France (possibly to avoid his creditors) died at about this time, leaving the second son, Nicholas, heir to the barony. Needless to say, Deincourt and Nicholas Leak immediately fell out, with Nicholas joining the parliamentarians.

Civil war did not improve Deincourt’s miserliness. In September 1642, the prominent courtier, John Ashburnham, was sent to Deincourt to secure £5,000 for the king, while Arthur Capell (later 1st Baron Capell), went on a parallel mission to the equally parsimonious Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. The cunning Kingston deflected the request by suggesting the wealthy Deincourt – ‘who was good for nothing and lived like a hog, not allowing himself necessaries’ – could easily supply the money instead. Deincourt, who had ‘so little correspondence with the court that he had never heard his name’, did not accept Ashburnham’s credentials until he had consulted with his wife’s nephew, Lucius Carey, 2nd Viscount Falkland, but afterwards reacted ‘with so different a respect’ that the envoy became hopeful of receiving the money after all. He was soon ‘undeceived’:

The lord, with as cheerful a countenance as his could be (for he had a very unusual and unpleasant face), told him that though he had no money himself, but was in extreme want of it, he would tell him where he might have money enough … that he had a neighbour, who lived within four or five miles, the earl of Kingston, that never did good to anybody, and loved nobody but himself, who had a world of money, and could furnish the king with as much as he had need of. (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, ii. 332-4)

Despite being something of a joke at royalist Oxford, Deincourt did serve the king faithfully, not least in the defence of Newark, and in sending two of his younger sons to serve in the king’s army – both were killed in combat. He was made earl of Scarsdale at the end of 1645, probably in a deal in which he finally agreed to give material support to the king. At the end of the war, the new earl of Scarsdale refused to do a similar deal with Parliament. Unlike almost all peers who were given the option, he declined to compound for his estates, which continued to be sequestered. His heir, Nicholas Leak, who had managed to rent the Derbyshire properties from Parliament, now made a concerted effort to secure legal title to the whole estate, not least to ensure that his mother and the younger children were provided for. He finally succeeded in 1651.

Overriding Scarsdale’s wishes was easy to justify, as his mental health appears to have deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of the first civil war, reaching a low point after the execution of Charles I in 1649, when ‘he apparelled himself in sack-cloth, and causing his grave to be digged some years before his death, laid himself down in it every Friday, exercising himself frequently in divine meditations and prayers’. (W. Dugdale, Baronage of England, ii. 450). That this was not normal behaviour is underlined by the strangeness of earl’s will, written in 1651. He gave unusually detailed instructions about his burial at Sutton Scarsdale church: he was not to be disembowelled or embalmed, and he was to be buried without a coffin, covered only by a sere-cloth or winding sheet, and ‘a little round board of an inch think laid upon my face’. (TNA, PROB11/251, f. 139v). As if this was not odd enough, in the main body of the will the earl completely ignored the fact that the estate had effectively been taken out of his hands: his younger son, Henry, was provided with lands; his four unmarried daughters were given their full marriage portions of £4,000 each; and, in a highly unusual move, these younger daughters were appointed executors. Reality reappeared only after the old man’s death. When probate was passed in 1655, it was granted to Nicholas Leak, now 2nd Baron Deincourt and 2nd earl of Scarsdale, his sisters and widowed ‘having renounced the execution of the said will’. (PROB11/251, f. 140)

PL

Further reading

The biography of Francis Leak will appear in the forthcoming House of Lords 1640-60 volumes; for his earlier career, see House of Lords 1604-29.

Biographies of Sir Henry Carey and Sir Francis Leak in House of Commons 1604-29; George Villiers in House of Lords 1604-29; John Ashburham, Arthur Capell and Lucius Carey in House of Commons 1640-60; Nicholas Leak in House of Lords 1660-1715.

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected. The affair, together with Smythe’s scandalous history, reveals changing attitudes to the practice of duelling and shifting expectations about the character and behaviour of MPs.

Heir to a viscountcy, Smythe entered Parliament for Canterbury at an 1841 by-election, rising to prominence as a key member of the Young England group of Conservatives and as the inspiration for the title character of Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby. After a brief stint in Robert Peel’s government, he was re-elected in coalition with a Whig in 1847. Romilly, a former soldier, was connected by marriage to the prime minister Lord John Russell and was dogged throughout his career by accusations of nepotism. He was returned unopposed for Canterbury at an 1850 by-election, a victory Smythe later claimed was due to his endorsement, which had been requested by Romilly’s committee.

When Romilly stood alongside another Liberal candidate at the 1852 election, Smythe claimed to be surprised at this ‘schism’ in their ‘coalition’ and accused him of ‘perfidy’. He alleged that Romilly had ‘caballed’ against him in a ‘hole and corner deal’ on the ‘trumped up’ pretext of Smythe’s poor attendance record at Westminster. Refuting the charges, Romilly demanded that Smythe withdraw his ‘offensive expressions’, which exceeded the ‘fair license of a political contest’. Smythe refused and Romilly sought the ‘reparation expected of men of honour’.

Duelling was rare in Britain by 1852 but survived longer in France and Italy. In Britain a challenge to a duel was a common law misdemeanour and the killing of one’s opponent was murder, although there were few prosecutions for either. In the early nineteenth century, there were several high-profile duels between politicians, including between two cabinet ministers, Lord Castlereagh and George Canning, in 1809, over the conduct of the Napoleonic War, and between the prime minister the Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchilsea in 1829, over Catholic emancipation, and there were also cases of election candidates issuing challenges to their rivals. An increasingly vociferous campaign against the practice peaked in the 1840s. An Association for the Discouragement of Duelling was formed in 1842, with its membership including numerous MPs, and in 1844 revisions to the Articles of War introduced strict penalties for army officers engaging in duels.

Such shifts do not, however, appear to have prevented Smythe routinely threatening duels as a means of settling political disputes. He issued his first challenge during the 1841 by-election. The Whig candidate, John Wilson, had claimed that Smythe was unqualified to be an MP because, born in Stockholm to Irish parents, he was ‘not even an Englishman’. Far from being the ‘Heaven-born statesman’ trumpeted by the Tory press, he was a ‘devil-inspired orator’. In response to Smythe’s request to clarify his ‘offensive’ remarks, Wilson asked a former Canterbury Whig candidate to ‘act as his friend’. Smythe’s second insisted on an apology or ‘the alternative’, as Smythe was ‘entitled’ to ‘satisfaction’ for the ‘aspersions thrown on his character’. After much back-and-forth a conflict was averted by the desired apology.

Smythe attracted further notoriety in 1844 with his second apparent attempt to initiate a duel, this time against the Radical MP John Roebuck, who had himself previously fought a fellow MP in a duel. After Smythe made personal comments in the Commons about Roebuck apparently wasting parliamentary time, Roebuck retaliated that he would only answer accusations ‘from a more formidable corner’ and implied that Smythe’s habit of voting against the Conservative government was driven by ‘disappointment’. Roebuck later informed MPs that Smythe had demanded that he retract the suggestion of dishonourable motives or refer the matter to ‘some friend’ to whom Smythe’s second could ‘address himself’. When the Speaker asked Smythe to declare that he would not begin ‘any hostile proceedings’, he eventually promised to take things ‘no further’ and apologised for contravening any Commons ‘forms’. He was characterised by one Whig newspaper as a ‘silly young gentleman … bent on making a sensation’.

Smythe’s next challenge to a duel prompted more than a reprimand in the Commons. In 1847, two months before the general election, another MP, Lord Pollington, successfully applied to a London court for a warrant against Smythe, for sending him a letter ‘with intent to commit a breach of the peace’ by inciting a duel. Having paid a £500 bail and had two other MPs put up sureties for him, Smythe was bound over to keep the peace for twelve months. While some reports suggested that the dispute was over the chairmanship of a dinner at Eton, there were rumours that it related to Smythe’s ‘personal history’. In 1846 he caused a scandal when it was rumoured that he made Dorothy Walpole – daughter of the earl of Orford and sister-in-law to Pollington – pregnant and refused to marry her and that she had an abortion. Yet just two years after his court appearance, Smythe faced his fourth would-be duel. In 1849 he received rather than issued the challenge, from the MP Richard Monckton Milnes, who he had mocked in a newspaper article and who later labelled Smythe ‘the most perfectly vicious man he had ever known’. They each engaged seconds but, after months with no resolution, eventually announced the case ‘terminated with honour to both sides’.

When Smythe finally fought an ‘affair of honour’ it was rather farcical. According to a mocking report by The Times, Romilly, Smythe and their respective seconds, the Whig MP John Fortescue and the Liberal former MP John Cranch Walker Vivian, left London for Weybridge at an early hour, on the same train. To ‘disarm suspicion’, they disguised their pistol cases ‘into something like sketch-books’, as if to appear on an ‘artistic excursion’. Finding only one carriage available at Weybridge station and agreeing that men ‘entertaining deadly intentions’ should not be ‘cooped up’ together, Romilly sat inside with the seconds and Smythe sat atop the box. Having alighted near Lord Ellesmere’s Hatchford estate, they decided on a secluded spot, marked their 12 paces and prepared to raise their pistols. They momentarily feared detection, when they were surprised by a male pheasant, which ‘with a loud cry dashed into the adjoining wood’. When the alarm subsided, Smythe and Romilly resumed their positions and ‘exchanged shots … without effect’. Romilly declared himself satisfied, and the party returned together to London by carriage and rail, travelling in silence. They afterwards continued to trade claim and counter-claim in missives to electors.

The scene generated plenty of ridicule. The Times mocked the MPs’ ‘tomfoolery’ and advised anyone whose ‘valour’ was insufficient for a trip to France not to ‘play at “duellists”’ in the English countryside, for fear of disturbing any ‘sacred birds’. It published satirical letters signed by the ‘Cock Pheasant’ and narrating a tale of four watercolour artists arrested by a policeman who mistook them for combatants. While much of the commentary agreed that the actual proceedings were absurd, the fact of a duel taking place was seen as troubling. The Liberal Daily News argued that this ‘new Canterbury Tale’ demonstrated that, by ‘substituting pistols for arguments’, Smythe and Romilly held their constituents in contempt, expecting them to take whomever ‘thrashes his adversary’. It reminded Canterbury’s electors that they had the power to check ‘this indefensible practice’, with Parliament needing ‘men of prudence, sagacity, and self-control’. When Smythe described the duel as a ‘common formality’, the Conservative Kentish Gazette condemned him for treating it ‘so indifferently’. A meeting of Canterbury Dissenters pledged not to support either Smythe or Romilly, deeming duelling ‘opposed to the spirit of Christianity’ and anyone abetting it unfit to fulfil the ‘responsible trust of a legislator’. Newspapers also carried advertisements by the Association for the Discouragement of Duelling condemning the practice as ‘practically sinful, unlawful and irrational’ and warning against the events at Weybridge encouraging a revival.  

The duel did have significant political consequences for some of those involved. Although he defended his role as honourable, Vivian, who had been campaigning for Bodmin, recognised that it had shocked his would-be constituents and withdrew from the 1852 contest. Neither Romilly nor Smythe was re-elected for Canterbury. After Romilly polled third, his committee blamed the collapse of his support on the ‘unfortunate duel’. Smythe retired shortly before the nomination, although this was seemingly part of a behind-the-scenes deal with Disraeli, whereby, having secured his supporters’ promises to vote Conservative, Smythe would exit and leave the field open for two other Conservative candidates. In return, he would receive a diplomatic posting, but this never transpired. The 1852 Canterbury election was voided on petition and an 1853 royal commission revealed decades of bribery and corruption, in which Smythe had been a key participant.

The Smythe-Romilly duel is believed to have been the last fought between two Englishmen on English soil. Just five months later, in October 1852, two Frenchmen fought what was apparently England’s final fatal duel.

NLJ

Further reading

M. S. Millar, Disraeli’s Disciple: The scandalous life of George Smythe (2006)

M. Masterson, ‘The political art of duelling’, via https://historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/the-political-art-of-duelling/

M. Masterson, ‘Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2017), 605-28

D. T. Andrew, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850’, Social History 5 (1980), 409-34

S. Banks, ‘“Very Little Law in the Case”: Contests of Honour and the Subversion of the English Criminal Courts, 1780-1845’, King’s Law Journal, 19 (2008), 575-94

S. Banks, ‘Killing with Courtesy: The English Duelist, 1785-1845’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 528-58

V. G. Kiernan, The duel in European history: honour and the reign of aristocracy (2016)

W. D. Brewer, Representing and Interrogating Dueling, Caning and Fencing during the British Romantic Period (2025)

M. Mulholland, ‘The last duel – a French affair with an Irish twist’, via https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/last-duel-%E2%80%93-french-affair-irish-twist

On the eve of the February 1828 Weymouth and Melcombe Regis by-election, a Black seaman named John Lewis was arrested for being ‘at the head of a mob chiefly composed of boys’. Anxious to preserve the ‘peace of the town’, the mayor and magistrates of Weymouth decided to commit him to the county gaol for a month of hard labour.

Lewis’s entry in the register of Dorchester Prison [Figure 1] identifies him as a native of ‘Congo’ and describes him as ‘a black man with a large cut over his left eye’. Little is known of Lewis’s early years. However, Admiralty records held at The National Archives reveal that in 1811, as a young man no older than 18, he joined the crew of HMS Mutine when she briefly docked in the Azores on her return journey from Rio de Janeiro to Portsmouth. On his arrival in Britain Lewis immediately deserted (along with several other crewmen) and disappeared from the historical record. Seventeen years later and now in his thirties we find him at Weymouth.

Lewis’s fleeting appearance at the by-election of 1828 adds to a growing body of work that continues to dispel what some historians have termed the ‘Windrush myth’, namely the misconception that people of African and Caribbean heritage did not migrate to Britain before the arrival of Empire Windrush in 1948. Lewis’s apparently leading role in the election ‘riots’ also serves as an example of Black political participation in early nineteenth-century England, which in recent years has begun to gain greater historical attention.

Given his maritime connections, it appears that Lewis was part of a motley group of sailors hired to support the campaign of Major Richard Weyland, the ‘Blue’ candidate at the 1828 Weymouth by-election. Weyland was standing thanks to the support of his wife, the dowager Lady Charlotte Johnstone, who possessed considerable property and influence in the constituency. Weyland’s opponent for the ‘Purples’ was Edward Sugden, a chancery lawyer and future Conservative lord chancellor.

At the previous general election in 1826, Lady Johnstone (as she was commonly known) helped ensure the return of her brother, John Gordon, for the four-member constituency. According to the historian and antiquarian, George Alfred Ellis, a notable feature of that election was its lawlessness due to the candidates’ use of hired ‘gangs of desperate individuals’. Reports in The Times suggest that Gordon’s extremely costly campaign (£40,000) relied heavily on the ‘powerful services’ of the sailors of Portland, who lived and worked on the rocky peninsula lying to the south of Weymouth.

The same tactic was employed in 1828, with the Dorset County Chronicle noting that Weyland’s Blues had again ‘called to their assistance a number of the hardy race of Portlanders’, describing them as men who ‘care little for the means by which they obtain their object’.

Weyland began canvassing vigorously from the start of February and shortly thereafter local newspapers reported election disturbances in the streets of Weymouth. Lewis appears to have been arrested on the evening of 8 February, before the official nomination of candidates which took place the following day. He was therefore in jail for the entirety of the polling.

According to a visiting magistrate, John Morton Colson, Lewis’s behaviour in prison was exemplary. Colson contrasted this with his riotous conduct ahead of his arrest, which the magistrate believed had been orchestrated by the Blues. In Colson’s view, the migrant sailor’s ‘ignorance and simplicity’ had been ‘taken advantage of by a cowardly and disigned [sic] party [i.e. Weyland’s election committee]’ who had plied him with drink. Writing two years after the fact, Colson blamed Weyland for corrupting Lewis and for plunging Weymouth into chaos and disorder during the subsequent poll.

Figure 4 – Map showing key sites of the Weymouth and Melcombe Regis By-Election of 1828. Borough boundaries based on TNA, T 72/11. Basemap: © National Library of Scotland

Polling took place in Weymouth and Melcombe Regis across ten days between 11 and 20 February (which was normal for elections before the 1832 Reform Act restricted the duration to two days). During the first days of the poll, Weyland’s election committee was reported to have stationed 300 Portlanders in front of Weymouth’s Guildhall to intimidate electors coming there to cast their vote for the Purples [see Figure 4].

Weyland’s opponent, Sugden, initially tried to secure a suspension in polling, after complaining to town officials that his rival had employed ‘foreigners’ (as he termed them) to win the election by ‘fraud and violence’. After his request was denied, on the third day of polling Sugden engaged his own small army of farm labourers from nearby Radipole to protect his electoral interests. This proved a pivotal moment in the election. Sugden’s supporters gradually gained dominance over key election sites, allowing their candidate to secure a comfortable majority by the end of polling. 

Lewis meanwhile languished in Dorchester jail under a charge of vagrancy. Remarkably, official records suggest he was the only individual imprisoned for offences related to the by-election. This is despite the fact that hundreds of sailors and labourers (not to mention several election agents!) contributed to the ‘disorder’ of February 1828 and Weymouth’s mayor and magistrates threatened to draw up indictments against the worst offenders. This highlights the significance of Lewis’s case for those seeking to develop a wider understanding of racial attitudes within the nineteenth-century English legal system.

At the same time, Lewis’s ‘orderly and inoffensive’ conduct whilst incarcerated caused the prison authorities to raise a small subscription on his behalf. Furthermore, in the run up to his release from prison in March 1828, Colson organised for Lewis to serve as a cook’s mate aboard the naval frigate HMS Blonde that was preparing to embark for the Mediterranean.

After his discharge from the navy ‘with good character’ the following year, we know that Lewis was again arrested, this time for a petty theft he committed while destitute at Wolverhampton. It was this second conviction that prompted Colson to write three petitions on behalf of Lewis. It is these documents, held at The National Archives, which by chance provide us with most of the vivid detail of Lewis’s earlier career as a hired election ‘rough’.

After his release from prison in August 1830, Lewis served aboard two more naval ships. No record of his life after 1849 (when he would have been approaching his fifties) nor of his death (presumably in the middle years of the nineteenth century) can be found, though the author’s search continues…

Reduced from a four- to a two-member borough, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis survived as a constituency after 1832 and continued to be the site of violent contests for decades to come.

JC

Suggested Reading

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

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

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

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

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

S. Farrell, ‘Weymouth & Melcombe Regis‘, in D. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832 (2009)

G. Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (1999)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KR

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

George Cecil Weld Forester (1807-86), or Cecil Forester as he was known, was Conservative MP for the small borough of Wenlock for well over half a century, serving from 1828 until he succeeded to the peerage in 1874. An officer in the Royal Horse Guards, Forester was remembered as ‘the best looking man’ in the Commons, with a ‘handsome face and aristocratic figure’, and was a ‘favourite’ of ‘every fashionable salon’. He once appeared ‘in full regimentals … sword and all’ to cast a vote against the Whig government before heading off to a ball and, having served as groom of the bedchamber to his godfather George IV, was considered a ‘suave and polished courtier’. Objectified for his looks, Forester was mocked for his supposed lack of intellect and it was once rumoured that a junior Guardsman was willing to bet on his inability to spell. Long regarded a ‘confirmed bachelor’, his marriage later in life to the wealthy widow of one of the first MPs from an ethnic minority background, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, who was declared a lunatic at her family’s behest, became a cause celebre by drawing him into a protracted legal dispute with the Indian government.

This picture of Forester is in stark contrast to the one which emerges from the fallout of the notoriously corrupt 1852 general election. Aside from 1832, when he was pelted with mud and stones, Forester’s own campaigns for Wenlock were dull affairs and he went nearly three decades without facing a contest. Yet his entanglement in the murky world of electioneering, orchestrated through the Carlton Club, was revealed by evidence to a select committee which examined events in Norwich, prompted by the suspicious withdrawal of election petitions challenging the election result. This committee’s proceedings shed light on the role of London’s political clubs at elections, and on efforts by the parties to avoid the exposure of electoral corruption through a practice known as the pairing off or swapping of petitions.

The committee found that the Norwich constituency formed part of a ‘compromise’ between two solicitor agents, the Conservative Henry Edwards Brown and the Liberal James Coppock, who agreed to simultaneously withdraw eight petitions that challenged the seats of 10 MPs. When examined, Brown explained that he and Coppock believed it was a ‘waste of money’ to pursue a petition where in any consequent by-election the same party as before would emerge victorious. With a ‘very long list of petitions on both sides’, over a series of meetings each agent offered to ‘withdraw so-and-so’, to the point where it became a case of ‘batch against batch’. The committee warned that such activity, done under the ‘cover’ of the 1848 Election Petitions Act, risked a ‘public scandal’ – yet it remains something about which historians know comparatively little.

Further still behind the scenes, there was, reportedly, ‘a little coterie’ at the Carlton Club which many of those involved in the numerous electoral investigations held in 1853 assumed operated as a ‘committee’. According to Lothian Sheffield Dickson, who was defeated at Norwich and then saw his petition withdrawn without his consent, Forester and his fellow MP William Forbes Mackenzie were, together with Brown as agent, ‘known at the Carlton’ for the ‘principal management of elections’. When hauled before the committee, Forester was adamant that, far from there being a group ‘superintending elections’, he had taken it upon himself to discuss vacancies with several boroughs, maintain a list of those in need and do his best to ‘send them down’ candidates. Forester’s insistence that he was the ‘sole and responsible person’, however, seems at odds with one agent’s remark to the commission probing bribery in St Albans that it was common knowledge that ‘you go to the Carlton’ for a Conservative candidate and to the Reform Club for a Liberal or Whig.

Moreover, there had for decades been rumours that the Carlton Club administered a central election fund, possibly drawn from its membership fees. In 1852 accusations swirled that ‘Carlton gold’ had been ‘thrown about like dirt’ in the constituencies. Proving its existence was another matter, with various lines of questioning at the 1853 inquiries prompting rebuttals from witnesses. In both Cambridge and Barnstaple, the Conservative candidates, whose returns had been overturned, denied knowledge of ‘any fund whatsoever’, being raised by ‘subscription’ or used for their expenses. Forester, too, was resolute that he had ‘nothing to do with any money’, for either campaign or petitioning costs. Yet there were likewise agents who claimed to have been advised to apply to Forester at the Carlton for funds.

Also vague, and perhaps deliberately so, was the relationship between Forester and Brown. Brown was said to have advised clients that he had ‘one of those little dark rooms’ in the Carlton and various witnesses referred to having meetings in ‘Mr. Brown’s room’. However, there was confusion over whether Brown in fact shared a space with Forester, and the MP admitted that Brown – who as a non-member should not have had a separate room – had a key to Forester’s office, where he would have had access to electioneering papers. Forester throughout maintained that he personally had ‘never paired a petition, and never entered into any compromise’. He did nonetheless acknowledge that ‘people naturally will make the best bargain they can’.

During a Commons debate, the Radical MP Thomas Duncombe, who chaired the Norwich committee, urged that, with agents being ‘directed’ by the Carlton, any ‘indignation’ around a petition’s fate should be directed at ‘those who pulled the wires’. Forester’s frustration at the accusations was palpable, and, in a rare parliamentary speech, he explained that whereas Brown had ‘helped him’ with elections, Forester had never ‘consulted with him’ on or given him ‘directions’ as to the Norwich petitions. Forester doubled down on his line that he ‘had nothing to do with petitions’ and that ‘no Committee sat at the Carlton’. The controversy even threatened to boil over into a duel, with rumours in the clubs that the preliminaries had been agreed between Forester and Dickson, and that a duel was only averted at the ‘eleventh hour’ thanks to the ‘friendly intervention’ of another MP.

This scrutiny of Forester’s electoral skulduggery did not ultimately impact his parliamentary career, which ended with him holding the position of ‘Father of the House’ from March 1873 to October 1874, when he went to the Lords as the third Baron Forester. The 1868 Election Petitions and Corrupt Practices Act overhauled the process for challenging election results, handing constituency-based election judges the power to try petitions.

Further reading

S. Thevoz, Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (2018)

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1968)

C. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (repr. 1970)

A. Cooke and C. Petrie, The Carlton Club 1832-2007 (repr. 2015)

K. Rix, ‘The Second Reform Act and the problem of electoral corruption’, Parliamentary History, 36: 1 (2017), 64-81