Even if the statues in Parliament Square are not ‘Made of Stone’, as the introductory music to our feature on Matt Chorley’s Radio 5live programme might suggest, the grand figures give an impression of timelessness. However, Parliament Square itself has developed in purpose and layout in the past 150 years, and of course the figures commemorated are complex and intriguing historical actors. I hope I’ve been able to thank on air my Victorian Commons colleagues, in particular Kathryn Rix, for their help in my research, and acknowledge in particular the work of Geoffrey Hicks, whose work on the square I have relied on.

Parliament Square first became a public memorial space in the 1860s, following the designs of Edward Barry, son of Charles, the architect of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. As Hicks has argued, the initial aim of the Square was an ‘outdoor mausoleum’ and ‘sacred space’ for imperial Britain’s political leaders [Hicks, 165-67]. This was in the context of what historians have termed Victorian ‘Statue Mania’. Throughout the country, as Rix for example has recently discussed in an article describing public statues of politicians in the north and midlands, statues of ‘Great Men’ were erected as inspirational figures and decoration for new public spaces. Historians Terry Wyke and Donald Read have demonstrated the importance of the death of Prime Minister Robert Peel in starting this craze, which all seems rather strange in our more cynical political times.

The first five statues are squarely in this tradition: five prime ministers, all added in the decades after their deaths. First to be moved to the Square was George Canning (1770-1827), who until recently was the Prime Minister with the dubious honour to have been in office for the shortest time period. Nevertheless, our biography describes him as ‘One of the most singular and remarkable of the leading statesmen of his time’ [Stephen Farrell] – all the more fascinating given his relative lack of privilege for a political figure of his time. Canning’s statue, by Sir Richard Westmacott, had a difficult origin, falling off the hoist in the studio and killing an assistant sculptor in 1831, and moved from New Palace Yard in 1867 during works on Westminster ground station, to the area now known as Canning Green.

Next to follow Canning was a very different figure, a pillar of the establishment: Edward Stanley, 14^th Earl Derby (1799-1869). This statue, unveiled by his close political ally Benjamin Disraeli in 1874, has excellent reliefs by John Thomas on the plinth commemorating Derby’s political life. Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) by Thomas Woolner was added to the square in 1876, after earlier versions were considered too small. Palmerston’s colourful private life, despite being considered ‘the supreme epitome of Victorian pride, respectability and self-respect’ [Stephen Farrell] featured in our piece. Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), whose statue was added fourth, also in 1876 (after an earlier version was rejected after MPs), led a political life so complex and interesting it was very difficult to squeeze any of it into 8 minutes! Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was the last of the Victorian leaders first added to the square, in 1883. The statue’s role as a shrine to Disraeli by the Primrose League, the Conservative grassroots organisation, in the years after his death demonstrated the extent these Victorian politicians were admired.

That, however, all changed with the First World War, as politicians were blamed for the catastrophe and commemoration shifted to honouring the war dead. However the sixth addition, a copy of Augustus Saint-Gardens’ statue of US President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago, was originally due for inclusion in 1914. Almost as soon as he arrived Lincoln left visitors (and Matt!) asking why he was there; the answer to celebrate Anglo-American friendship in the centenary after the end of the war of 1812-14. As Hicks argued, Lincoln was the first figure added to the square to present a different view of Britain to the wider world as its imperial power declined. [Hicks, p.172]

After the Second World War, Parliament Square was reorganised by the architect George Grey Wornum largely into the design we know today. Canning and Lincoln have remained in Canning Green, with the other four organised around a grassy central area. Two spaces were left for new additions, although the Ministry of Works rather felt that the Square was ‘finished.’ [Hicks, pp.174-5] No-one had told Winston Churchill, however, who on his return to government in 1951 proposed a statue to his friend and war cabinet member Jan Smuts (1870-1950). Smuts was probably the most difficult of the individuals on the square to talk about in a short slot on the radio. Reconciling Smuts, the defender of the Commonwealth and liberal world statesman who directly influenced both the League of Nations and the Preamble to the UN Charter, with Smuts as one of the leading figures and chief architects of a racially segregated South Africa is hard to do justice to in a short period of air time. Churchill (1874-1965) himself was added in 1973, apparently having chosen his prime slot close to the Commons in the 1950s (although this story is doubted by many of his biographers). In recent years the wartime leader has also become a controversial and contested figure.

The final four figures in the Square were all added in the 21^st century, in a ‘reinvigorated’ political space, now as much as a place of protest as a ‘sacred’ space to honour parliamentary politics. The final additions were ‘radical politicians that do not proclaim too obviously the conservative nature of the project.’ [Hicks, p.180] Many of their predecessors would also have been shocked to see direct political opponents honoured in the same way they were! Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and David Lloyd George (1863-1945) were unveiled within a few months of each other in 2007, Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) in 2015 and Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) in 2018. As these figures are all much more familiar to a modern audience, the ‘Made in Stone’ recordings focused more on the campaigns for their commemoration. Mandela, Lloyd George and Fawcett all made it to the square after considerable public pressure; particularly Fawcett as the first, and so far only, woman.

Excitingly, we have more in store for those of you who have enjoyed the ‘Made in Stone’ series so far, as we have recently recorded another seven pieces on statues and memorials all around parliament, from Boudicca to George V. So keep tuning in for more!

E.P.

Catch up with the series so far on BBC Sounds.

Further Reading:

Geoffrey Hicks: ‘Parliament Square: The Making of a Political Space’ Landscapes 16:2 (2015) 164181

Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians

Kathryn Rix, ‘Living in Stone or Marble: The Public Commemoration of Victorian MPs’ in Memory and Modern British Politics: Commemoration, Tradition, Legacy ed. Matthew Roberts (Bloomsbury, 2024), 13970

Kathryn Rix: Parliaments, Politics and People Seminar: Dr Geoff Hicks on ‘Memorialising Britain’s politicians: the politics of Parliament Square’

Terry Wyke, ‘Memorial Mania: Remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel’ in People, places and identities: Themes in British social and cultural history, 1700s-1980s eds Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt (MUP, 2017)

The term ‘One Nation’ comes from Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil; or the two nations. After the young aristocrat Charles Egremont complacently observes that Britain is the ‘greatest nation that ever existed’, Walter Gerard, a working-class radical, tells him that there are in fact

‘ “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”

“You speak of –“ said Egremont, hesitatingly

“The RICH and the POOR.”’

Disraeli never actually used the phrase ‘One Nation’, but it was certainly implied. His belief was that political leadership should aim to overcome the social divisions between classes to make the country ‘One Nation’.

Disraeli was one of a number of novelists and social critics to address the ‘condition of England’ question, the poverty and squalid living conditions of the urban working classes, in the 1840s. A Conservative backbencher at this time, Disraeli used his novels to sketch out a social critique of laissez-faire philosophy. The selfish individualism propagated by Liberal manufacturers and Whig aristocrats influenced by Utilitarianism denied the organic, social ties that existed between people, classes and communities. Disraeli was a paternalist who stressed the social obligations of the nobility to the poor. In his view, social measures to improve the lot of the poor would be the best way of safeguarding traditional institutions such as the Church, the monarchy and the House of Lords. ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’, he once wrote.

With his ‘Young England’ group of young aristocratic followers, Disraeli looked towards an alliance between a paternalistic nobility and the working classes against the selfish Liberal middle classes in the 1840s. As a political project this was a non-starter, but it was not without some successes. For example, the votes of paternalist Tory MPs, including Disraeli, were crucial in passing the 10 hour day for factory workers in 1847. The measure was popular with workers, but many Liberal MPs had opposed the measure as unjustifiable state interference.

Despite the success of his novels, Disraeli only came to political prominence in 1846 when the Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel split his party by repealing the corn laws. Disraeli made his name with a series of witty attacks on Peel for betraying his party. By 1849 Disraeli was the undisputed leader of the Conservative party in the Commons, although Lord Derby remained in overall charge. Disraeli served as chancellor of the exchequer in Conservative minority governments in 1852, 1858-9, and 1866-8 and was prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80.

How far the ideas of Disraeli’s novels informed his political career continues to be debated. Disraeli was in government for a relatively short period due to the dominance of the Liberal party. However, in the 1870s his government passed a number of measures relating to working-class housing, sanitary improvements, education and other social issues. Whether Disraeli could claim much credit for them is debatable, as he was never a man for detailed policy making and most of the measures were due to the efforts of individual ministers. Furthermore, most of these social reforms were low-key, limited and permissive rather than compulsory.

However, the social reforms of the 1870s were of considerable political importance. As a mass electorate was developing, these social reforms and the 10 hour day allowed Conservatives to highlight their record of supporting social measures to improve the lot of the working classes. After his death in 1881, the party developed a Disraeli personality cult.  Local branches of the Primrose League (named after his favourite flower) were established to attract the working classes, including women, with particular emphasis placed on Disraeli’s support for social reform and empire. The Disraelian legacy has been invoked by Stanley Baldwin, Conservative prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s, by the One Nation group of Conservative MPs founded in 1950, and by political leaders of both parties since.

Further Reading:

R. Blake, Disraeli (1966)

J. Parry, ‘Disraeli, Benjamin’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessible from www.oxforddnb.com (available free through many libraries)

M. Pugh, The Tories and the people, 1880-1935 (1985) (on the Primrose League)

P. Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (1967)

J. Vincent, ‘Was Disraeli a failure?’, History Today, 13 (1981), 5-8

R. Walsha, ‘The One Nation Group and One Nation Conservatism, 1950-2002’, Contemporary British History, 17 (2003), 69-120

Lord Lexden, ‘The centenary of One-Nation Conservatism’

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 5 October 2012, written by Dr Henry Miller.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KR

Further Reading:

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

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

The 1866 petition name list is available to download.

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

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

Sir Roderick Floud’s magisterial ‘An Economic History of the English Garden’ revealed for the first time to the general public and to his fellow historians the importance of gardens and gardening to the economy over the last five centuries. Nowadays, gardening supports an industry with a turnover of £11 billion a year, the gardens of the National Trust attract 16 million visitors a year and hands on gardening is a much-loved hobby for a large part of the population. In the nineteenth century gardening was just as important, perhaps more so than now, particularly for the upper echelons of society for whom gardening was at the heart of their cultural and social life, especially so amongst parliamentarians.

The relative importance of gardening in the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth can be seen from an examination of the preferences of the political elite in the two centuries. In 1880 a cabinet of 13 led by Disraeli was replaced by a cabinet of 14 led by Gladstone. Every single member of the two administrations occupied a country seat with an ornamental garden and a fully productive kitchen garden with a gardening staff of about 20, but sometimes many more. Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet. Disraeli coined his famous aphorism ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’ at a meeting of the Wynyard Horticultural Society, correlating happiness with the cultivation of a garden and adding ‘A woman is never seen to greater advantage than in the garden’. John Bright, a commoner member of Gladstone’s cabinet, would practice his House of Commons speeches on his gardener Benjamin Oldham and would sometimes quote him in support of his patriarchal opinions. Another member of Disraeli’s cabinet, the newsagent W.H. Smith, developed the magnificent gardens of Greenlands at Henley where he employed 30 gardeners and was a frequent winner in the local horticultural shows.

One hundred years later, in 1980, Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet had 22 members of whom only one, Michael Heseltine, owned a country seat of the kind occupied by the members of the Disraeli and Gladstone administrations. One other, Lord Carrington, owned a garden of great merit, the Manor House at Bledlow, but this was on a much smaller scale. Of his colleagues, three expressed an interest in gardening in their Who’s Who entry, but none of those possessed a garden of any importance. There were several cabinet members from old money backgrounds, notably Lord Hailsham and William Whitelaw, but Hailsham had sold his ancestral home as the cost of upkeep was too great, and Whitelaw lived in a mansion house with a garden of relatively modest size.

When Disraeli became a rising star of the Tory party his supporters provided him with the money to buy Hughenden, as it was considered essential for him to have a country estate. A mansion in Mayfair would not do; if he was to conform with the norms of upper class society he had to have the sporting and recreational facilities of an estate with an ornamental garden to enable him to entertain in style. Similar motives impelled Joseph Chamberlain, who was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, when he built a mansion which he called Highbury, together with accompanying parkland and garden on virgin land outside Birmingham. Chamberlain’s closest neighbour was Richard Cadbury, the enlightened Bournville factory owner, who marked his entry into society by creating an estate similar to Highbury.

The tables below record the current status of the 28 landed estates of the Disraeli and Gladstone cabinet members (there are 28 as one of the 27 cabinet members, the Duke of Richmond, occupied two estates). Three no longer exist, as the houses have been demolished, and the land redeveloped. Of the remainder, 12 of the gardens have been listed and are open to the public, two of which are run by the National Trust, and a further three are also open to public view. Most of the other houses have found an alternative use, as a hotel, a wedding venue or as flats, with a private garden attached on a much smaller scale than formerly. Of the kitchen gardens most have been destroyed or built on, but nine are either fully or partially cultivated. Of those gardens which survive, most have a skeleton workforce; at Belvoir, there is a single head gardener and a team of volunteers. This reflects the reduced scale of the gardens and the fact that the beating heart of the garden, the kitchen garden with its array of hothouses and forcing pits, no longer exists. Visitors to those gardens which survive will admire their beauty without knowing just how much more magnificent they were in the past, or their significance in the social and cultural lives of their former owners.

JD

Look out for the second part of Jonathan’s series, for a closer comparison of two great parliamentary gardeners!

Jonathan Denby holds a D.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and an MA in Garden History from Buckingham University. His research interests are gardens, gardening and economic and social conditions in the C19th. Find out about Jonathan’s own garden here.

Like the impending coronation of King Charles III, the coronation of Queen Victoria took place in the year after her accession to the throne. The ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838. Naturally this major national event was attended by members of both Houses of Parliament. Although it was members of the House of Lords who performed key roles in the ceremony, with peers paying homage to the new queen, MPs also had a privileged view of proceedings, with two of the three galleries above the altar being reserved for them. (The third gallery housed the trumpeters of the orchestra.)

On the morning of the coronation around 500 MPs assembled in the Commons chamber. One newspaper report recorded that

Some excellent scenes took place on the entrance of Members noted for carelessness in their dress on ordinary occasions, but who appeared upon this instance in splendid attire. Mr Fector and Mr Campbell, the former of whom wore a peach-coloured velvet Court dress, while the latter was attired in the plaid of his clan, were assailed with loud cries of Hear, hear, and as they advanced up the House, the assembly of the first gentlemen in the world stood up, and with one accord shouted their acclamation.

John Fector was the House’s newest member, having been re-elected for Maidstone at a by-election less than two weeks earlier. After prayers, the Speaker announced that there would be a ballot to determine the order in which MPs would take their seats in the Abbey, and the names of counties were drawn from a glass by the Clerk of the House. The representatives of those counties and of the boroughs which lay within them then left the House in turn, the Irish county of Meath being the first to be drawn.

The need to dress appropriately meant that Fector’s fellow Conservative MP for Maidstone, Benjamin Disraeli, had initially decided against attending, writing to his sister that

I must give up on going to the coronation, as we go in state, and all the M.P.s. must be in court dresses or uniforms. As I have withstood making a costume of this kind for other purposes, I will not make one now, and console myself by the conviction that to get up very early (eight o’clock), to sit dressed like a flunky in the Abbey for seven or eight hours, and to listen to a sermon by the Bishop of London, can be no great enjoyment.

However, Disraeli changed his mind, writing on 29 June that

I went to the coronation after all. I did not get a dress till 2.30 on the morning of the ceremony, but it fitted me very well. It turned out that I had a very fine leg, which I never knew before! The pageant within the Abbey was without exception the most splendid, various, and interesting affair at which I ever was present… I had one of the best seats in the Abbey, indeed our House had the best of everything… The Queen looked very well, and performed her part with great grace and completeness, which cannot in general be said of the other performers; they were always in doubt as to what came next, and you saw the want of rehearsal.

He noted that the Duke of Wellington ‘was loudly cheered when he made his homage’, but was disdainful of the performance of the Whig Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne, who ‘looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great sword of state like a butcher’. Disraeli also commented on Fector’s ‘gorgeous dress’ and the fact that the Irish parliamentary leader, Daniel O’Connell, had bowed to convention and ‘looked very well’ in his court dress, although he was ‘hooted greatly… by the mob’. The Radical MP Joseph Hume refused to wear court dress, and was therefore prevented from sitting in the gallery reserved for MPs, but found a place elsewhere in the Abbey. A month later, motivated by his customary desire for retrenchment, Hume asked questions in the Commons about the expense of the coronation.

Also present at the coronation was another figure who, like Disraeli, would become a major political force during Queen Victoria’s reign: William Gladstone. The coronation took place on his sister Helen’s birthday. Unlike Disraeli’s gossipy account to his sister, Gladstone’s diary entry recorded tersely that ‘The service is noble. The sight magnificent’. After attending at the Abbey, he went to the Carlton Club to see the coronation procession, and then to Bath House to see the fireworks, before returning home at 1:30 a.m.

Disraeli and Gladstone were certainly not alone in enjoying the coronation festivities. It was thus perhaps hardly surprising that when the Commons met the following day at 4 p.m., it was found to be inquorate, and the Speaker duly adjourned the House.

K.R.

This post was originally published on the Victorian Commons website.

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

On 31 July 1868 the Election Petitions and Corrupt Practices at Elections Act received royal assent. This measure transformed the way that Parliament investigated allegations of bribery and corruption at elections. Rather than election petitions challenging the result of the contest being considered at Westminster by election committees composed of MPs, they would now be tried in the constituency by an election judge.

Although it did not pass until 1868, this Act needs to be understood as part of a wider package of electoral reform, at the heart of which lay the Conservative ministry’s 1867 Reform Act. When he introduced that measure, Benjamin Disraeli declared that the ministry ‘would not be doing its duty’ if it did not also ‘attempt vigorously to grapple with this question of bribery and corruption’. During the debates on the Election Petitions Act, the Liberal Henry Fawcett declared that ‘Reform legislation could not be considered as complete till some measure of this kind was passed’.

The 1865 election had revealed the extent of the problem: candidates spent £705,429 on their campaigns, compared with £403,852 in 1859, although part of this increase was due to a higher number of contested elections. There were also more successful election petitions which unseated MPs for electoral malpractice: 16, compared with 11 in 1859. Four constituencies – Great Yarmouth, Lancaster, Reigate and Totnes – were considered so corrupt that royal commissions were sent to investigate further. At Lancaster the commissioners found that a staggering 64% of voters had been involved with corruption, while at Totnes, bribes of up to £200 had been offered. All four boroughs were punished by being disfranchised in 1867.

Yet it was evident that the problem of electoral malpractice went beyond this venal quartet. During the debate on the 1867 reform measure, there were several backbench attempts to add clauses to tackle corruption. Francis Berkeley introduced a motion for voting by ballot, as he had done almost annually since 1848, but this was rejected after a cursory debate. His concern was to safeguard voters against intimidation, but other MPs were more worried about protecting their own pockets from the increased election costs which an extended electorate would bring. John Hibbert, Liberal MP for Oldham, successfully added a clause making payments for conveying voters to the poll illegal in boroughs. However, the Commons rejected an attempt by Sir Thomas Lloyd, Liberal MP for Cardiganshire – who confessed that his £4,000 election expenditure in 1865 was ‘principally for public-houses’ – to prohibit the use of hotels, pubs and licensed premises as committee rooms at elections.

Conservative ministers took a different approach to tackling corruption. Rather than trying to curb the opportunities for electoral misdemeanours and excessive expenditure at their source, they hoped to deter corruption by increasing the likelihood that its perpetrators would be detected and punished. There had long been complaints that the existing system of election committees was inadequate. The success of royal commissions in uncovering the full extent of corruption in the most venal constituencies had shown the benefits of on-the-spot inquiries. Witnesses were felt more likely to be honest when testifying in front of their neighbours than in a Westminster committee room.

It was also hoped that trials in the constituency would be cheaper, as witnesses would no longer need to be brought to London, where they were ‘given good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink’. These trips often became ‘a sort of Saturnalia’, hardly the appropriate moral atmosphere in which to pass judgement on bribery and treating. An additional consideration was that election committees could not meet until Parliament reassembled after the election, delaying proceedings. Nor were MPs necessarily the best judges of their colleagues’ conduct. The Times described election committees as ‘the softest of tribunals’, where ‘each judge bears in mind that the alleged delinquent is a member and a brother’.

Disraeli’s decision to deal with corruption separately from the main reform bill was also tactically shrewd. Firstly, it removed the possibility that opponents of reform would try to scupper the measure by overloading it with clauses relating to bribery and corruption. Sir Rainald Knightley had already used the issue as a blocking tactic against the Liberal ministry’s 1866 reform bill. Secondly, disconnecting the question of electoral impurity from the reform bill helped to suppress uncomfortable questions about the representative system, in particular the fitness of prospective working-class voters for the suffrage. Robert Lowe, the Adullamite, had highlighted the perceived link between a wider franchise and corruption in 1866, when he declared,

‘If you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimidated … where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?’

By making it clear that corruption would be dealt with in a separate measure, ministers reduced the scope for awkward questions about the potential pitfalls of widening the franchise.

Disraeli presented his initial plans for reform of the election tribunal in February 1867, when he proposed that two assessors – experienced barristers selected by the Speaker – should try election petitions in the constituency, with a right of appeal to the Commons. This established the fundamental principle that election petitions should be tried locally rather than at Westminster. The appeal procedure and the Speaker’s role in appointing the assessors were an attempt to soften the blow of the Commons surrendering control of the trial of election petitions. This was overturned by the much bolder scheme put forward by the select committee which considered the bill after its second reading. It recommended that the Commons completely relinquish its jurisdiction over election petitions, which had previously been defended as a vital and historic privilege of the lower House. Petitions would be presented directly to the court of queen’s bench, and tried locally by an election judge drawn from the superior courts. It was hoped that judicial trial would encourage the belief that ‘bribery was a serious offence of which an honest man should be ashamed’.

In 1868 the ministry introduced a bill embodying the committee’s proposals. Unexpectedly, there was opposition from the judges, concerned about overwork and the impact on their reputation if ‘angry and excited partisans’ questioned petition judgements. MPs also proved unwilling to surrender their jurisdiction without a fight, but opponents of the reform were weakened by their failure to unite around a coherent alternative. Disraeli’s skills in overcoming these objections and guiding the measure through the Commons earned him ‘a new sort of regard’ even from those usually his critics. The Spectator recorded that ‘when [MPs] have got overheated he had adjourned the discussion; he has taken one or two important defeats with good temper and yielded with alacrity’. He was, however, firm in resisting a flurry of amendments, predominantly from Liberal backbenchers, who wanted wider measures to tackle corruption and the related problem of excessive election spending.

After what Gathorne Hardy wearily described as ‘hot, hot long nights’ of debate, the measure received its third reading in the Commons on 24 July 1868. It was rapidly ushered through the Lords in order to receive royal assent a week later, on the day of the prorogation of Parliament, which Disraeli had been prepared to delay in order to secure the passing of this crucial reform.

KR

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

It is often forgotten that Benjamin Disraeli intended to mitigate the democratising impact of the 1867 Reform Act’s borough householder franchise through boundary changes and the redistribution of seats. For Disraeli, boundary reform also offered an opportunity to increase Conservative influence over the English electoral system, and the chance to put his increasingly ambitious electoral intelligence network to the test.

The 1868 Boundary Act provided new boundaries to 59 English boroughs as well as 10 Welsh borough districts, and altered the temporary limits that had been assigned to 9 of the 10 new English boroughs by the 1867 Reform Act. It also made additional changes to three of the thirteen counties that had been divided by the 1867 Reform Act and modified the names and nomination towns of several county divisions. Minor amendments to Scotland and Ireland’s boundaries were made via their respective Reform Acts.

The English and Welsh boundary settlement of 1868 had a protracted history. For Disraeli, boundary reform offered a means of settling scores dating back to the Whig reform legislation of 1832. In public Disraeli had repeatedly condemned the 1832 Reform Act as partisan legislation, although in private he appreciated how boundary reform in the counties and small boroughs had actually been beneficial to the Conservative party. By 1859, however, he was deeply concerned that the expansion of urban populations outside of borough boundaries was starting to hamper Conservative electoral fortunes in the counties.

This was in stark contrast to the two-time Liberal Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, who had been a pivotal figure in the Whig government that passed the 1832 Reform Act. One of Russell’s major regrets concerning 1832 was that boundary changes had led to a distinct divide between MPs who represented the urban and rural interests in the Commons. For Russell, this divide reached its zenith during the 1840s when the movement for the repeal of the corn laws dominated the political landscape. Russell’s 1852 and 1866 governments introduced reform legislation which intended to address this divide by deliberately leaving borough boundaries unchanged. Urban expansion, Russell hoped, would gradually lead to an increase in the influence of urban (usually Liberal) voters over the Conservative dominated counties.

For Disraeli, the Liberal government’s deliberately lackadaisical approach to boundary reform was one of its chief weaknesses when it introduced its 1866 reform bill. As a result, Disraeli instructed his chief statistician, Dudley Baxter, and the rising electoral agent, Markham Spofforth, to gather masses of electoral data to demonstrate to parliamentarians why wholesale boundary reform was vital.

Throughout the country Conservative agents saw widespread borough boundary extension as doubly advantageous. It would temper the forces of radical Liberalism in the boroughs, which Conservatives generally felt was focused around urban dwellers at the centre of towns, rather than in the newly forming suburbs – an early incarnation of the theories behind ‘Villa Toryism’. Furthermore, by ‘taking a larger number of town voters out of the counties’, Baxter advised Disraeli that the counties would be secured for the Conservatives for a generation. Disraeli and Baxter were also alive to the power of cartography, and Baxter’s presentation in the Commons lobby of a raft of maps showing the extent to which many boroughs had outgrown their bounds by 1866 was retrospectively considered by Baxter’s wife to have been a pivotal moment in the downfall of the 1866 reform bill.

When the Conservatives formed a government in June 1866, Disraeli tried repeatedly to establish a boundary commission prior to the introduction of another reform bill. In doing so he hoped to delay the reform process, ensure the creation of voting requirements that would mitigate the democratising extent of any extension of the suffrage, and allow for boundary reforms that provided a clear party advantage to the Conservatives. He didn’t quite get what he wanted, however, as the then Prime Minister, Lord Derby, rejected his initial proposals for a forestalling commission in September 1866, and the Conservative government’s ‘reform resolutions’, of which a commission formed a major part, received a lukewarm response in the Commons in February 1867.

To Disraeli’s dismay, the question of franchise reform had to be settled via the 1867 Reform Act before a boundary commission could get to work. While the eventual timing of a commission prevented Disraeli from delaying reform and establishing stringent evidence-based franchise requirements, he wasted little time in ensuring its conservative bias. He did so by appointing sympathetic commissioners and providing them with guidance that would create boundaries thought to be favourable to Conservative candidates.

One of the most interesting things about the commission, which visited every English and Welsh constituency during the autumn of 1867, were the public boundary hearings that they held. Most of the working papers and ephemera (maps, local proposals, petitions and records of public meetings about boundaries) gathered at these hearings are held by the National Archives, and provide a rich untapped resource for understanding mid-Victorian constituency politics.

The commissioners, however, were generally dismayed about the tenor of discussion at these public meetings – particularly as they revealed that many men were unenthusiastic about being granted the right to vote. Local rivalries between villages and suburbs on the periphery of a parliamentary borough often proved so strong that voters expressed a desire to remain unenfranchised rather than return a member of parliament with their neighbours. In the new borough of Dewsbury for example, an artisan from nearby Batley, Joshua Taylor, told the commissioners that he

would rather be without the franchise than that Batley should form part of the parliamentary borough of Dewsbury … when parties went to be married some affection ought to exist.

Furthermore, despite telling members of the public that parliamentary boundary changes would have no bearing on local municipal boundaries, voters threatened with inclusion in a parliamentary borough repeatedly complained that parliamentary enfranchisement would lead to them having to pay municipal rates, or losing the right to ‘compound’ their rates by paying them as part of their rent to their landlord.

The commissioners also repeatedly encountered obviously partisan boundary proposals, as political factions in each borough – supported by emerging national party machines – plotted to design boundaries in their favour. When the commission published its proposals in March 1868, it was clear to many that the Conservatives had benefitted most from this highly co-ordinated scheming between local and national election agents. In response Liberal MPs secured a select committee to review the commission’s proposals, which successfully amended fifteen of the commission’s most controversial boundary proposals.

While not ideal, Disraeli still remained upbeat as the majority of the commission’s proposals were passed intact. Following the changes he reported to Queen Victoria that while the boundary bill had been ‘somewhat curtailed of its excellence’, it was still ‘a very good measure’. As a warning note to future psephologists, however, it transpired that the electoral intelligence provided to Disraeli between 1866 and 1868 had been somewhat optimistic. Under Britain’s reformed electoral map at the 1868 election, the Liberals, led by a resurgent Gladstone, swept to power.

MS

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