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

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

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

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

An assertive Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposition to the Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1807, Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade – eighteen years after William Wilberforce first moved for abolition on 12 May 1789. The legislation sought to bring an end to the inhumane trips across the Middle Passage as well as the legality of the purchasing, transporting and selling of enslaved people. Slavery, however, continued, with an estimated 700,000 Africans still enslaved in the British West Indies when the Slave Trade Act came into force in 1808.

Accepting the continuation of slavery was a deliberate tactic of the abolitionist movement, which faced opposition from a significant pro-slavery lobby, the West India Interest, which saw an attack on slavery as an attack on their ‘property rights’. It was also the view of abolitionists that ending the slave trade would improve the conditions of the enslaved, and gradually lead to the end of slavery.

Abolitionists within Parliament re-emerged in 1823, after realising that the improvement of conditions for the enslaved they had envisaged after the 1807 Act’s passing had not materialised. Acting as the London Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionists campaigned for the gradual emancipation of the enslaved population that remained in the British West Indies.

The Society was led in the Commons by Thomas Fowell Buxton. On 15 May 1823, Buxton urged Parliament to end the ‘repugnant’ state of slavery which went against ‘the principles of the British constitution’. He voiced his hopes that his speech ‘commenced that process which will conclude, though not speedily, in the extinction of slavery throughout the whole of the British dominions’.

‘Not speedily’ was a fitting assessment of the following ten years. Abolitionists were again faced in Parliament with the strength of the West India Interest, many of whom directly owned plantations and enslaved people. As well as advocating for the continuation of slavery, the West India Interest lobbied for the retention of protective duties on sugar and coffee grown using the labour of enslaved people. In the face of this pro-slavery lobby in Parliament, the Anti-Slavery Society adopted a gradualist approach to abolition.

Although public opinion had shifted considerably to align with the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement during the 1820s, it was not until the appointment of the Whig government of the 2^nd Earl Grey in November 1830 that abolition became a real prospect.

However, with emancipation seemingly on the horizon, some abolitionists became frustrated with the gradualism that had characterised the movement. Inspired by voices outside Parliament such as Elizabeth Heyrick, the Agency Committee was formed in 1831. It contained many younger abolitionists who now called for immediate emancipation. Additionally, the Christmas Rebellion (also known as the Baptist War) of 1831-2 saw around 60,000 enslaved people in Jamaica rise up against the plantocracy. Reports of the brutal suppression by colonial authorities reached the House of Commons, where immediate emancipation was called for to avoid further bloodshed and civil war in the colonies.

At the 1832 general election (the first to take place under the reformed electoral system), the Agency Committee sought to capitalise on widespread public backing for the abolitionist cause by securing pledges from candidates for the immediate abolition of colonial slavery. Over 200 candidates who had taken the pledge were elected to the Commons. At the same time, representatives of the West India Interest had diminished in numbers. Rotten boroughs, where planters had previously placed allies to strengthen the pro-slavery lobby in the Commons, had mostly been eradicated through parliamentary reform.

Although weakened by the 1832 election, the West India Interest maintained one of their core principles – the demand that slave owners receive compensation for the abolition of slavery. George Canning – then Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons – had outlined this argument in 1823, when he advised MPs that

this House is anxious for the accomplishment of this purpose, at the earliest period that shall be compatible with the well-being of the slaves themselves, with the safety of the colonies, and with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property.

Although the previous under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Viscount Howick, had dismissed these claims and developed his own scheme for emancipation, the appointment of Edward Smith-Stanley (later the 14^th Earl of Derby) as Colonial Secretary in 1833, and the resignation of Howick, led to a new plan for abolition.

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833. It had two major caveats, intended to appease the pro-slavery lobby and simultaneously frustrate the hopes of immediate abolitionists. Firstly, West Indian slave-owners were to collectively receive compensation of £20 million to account for the ‘confiscation of [their] property’. This amounted to 40% of government spending in 1833. The formerly enslaved population received no compensation.

Secondly, the enslaved population of the British West Indies were not immediately emancipated. Children under the age of six were to be liberated, but adults were forced into a system of ‘apprenticeship’ – unpaid labour for their former owners – for up to six years. The apprenticeship system was eventually abolished in the British West Indies on 1 August 1838.

JMPB

Further Reading:

Nick Draper, Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society At The End Of Slavery (2013)

S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)

P. E. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (2016)

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

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

M. Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (2020)

When the reformed Parliament first met on Tuesday 29 January 1833 many people speculated about the way the reconfigured House of Commons would conduct its business. Fear that the Whig government would be unduly influenced by newly elected Reformers and Radicals, who might try to seize the initiative over legislation was widespread in conservative circles in the early weeks of the new parliament.

A contemporary analysis of non-Conservative MPs returned at the 1832 general election identified 145 Reformers, 40 Radicals, 33 Irish Repealers and two Liberals, who saw the Reform Act as a springboard for further constitutional change, and 194 Whigs, who could be counted on to support the 23 members of Lord Grey’s administration. The Parliamentary Review, in turn, identified 96 ‘Liberals’ who on questions of reform would ‘go almost as much beyond the Whigs as the Whigs do beyond the Conservatives’. It was this ‘Movement party’, that disturbed the alarmists who ‘dreaded the ascendancy’ of a faction whose ‘noise and swagger’ might ‘bear down the good sense and staunch principle’ of the Commons.

On 29 January nearly 400 MPs assembled in the House, a much greater number than anyone remembered seeing on the first day of any previous parliament. Amidst the bustle and excitement it was observed that the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, and the veteran reformer, William Cobbett, who had been returned for the newly-enfranchised borough of Oldham, were among the earliest attendants and confidently took their seats on the Treasury bench, close to the leader of the House, Lord Althorp. After briefly attending the Lords on the summons of Black Rod, the first business of the Commons was to elect a speaker. Immediately, the veteran Radical MP for Middlesex, Joseph Hume, seized an opportunity to challenge the authority of the government by questioning its proposal to grant a £4,000 annuity to Charles Manners Sutton, the speaker since 1806. Aware that ministers had disagreed over their candidate for the speakership and had opted to support Sutton, Hume nominated Edward Littleton, MP for South Staffordshire, whose candidacy the government had explicitly rejected, but who, Hume announced, had ‘shown himself a zealous Reformer’. The motion was seconded by another veteran radical, Sir Francis Burdett, MP for Westminster, and was supported by O’Connell. Littleton, however, expressed ‘repugnance’ at being nominated, and the motion was defeated by 32 votes to 242, the minority including Sutton, who had voted for Littleton ‘as a matter of etiquette’.

Two days later Sutton took the chair and a ‘considerable’ number of MPs were sworn in according to the alphabetical order of the counties in which their constituencies were situated. After an unusually long king’s speech was delivered from the throne on 5 February, a ‘quite unprecedented’ four days’ of angry debate ensued, which turned on the condition of Ireland. An attempt by the Repeal MP for Dublin, Edward Ruthven, to adjourn the debate on 7 February was defeated by a majority of 236, and the following day O’Connell called for a committee of the whole House to inquire into the necessity of an Irish coercion bill. He was defeated by 42-430, and a more moderate motion by the Lambeth MP, Charles Tennyson, went down by 60-393. Next it was the turn of Cobbett to move his own amendment to the address after observing that ‘the two factions of Whigs and Tories’ had now clearly ‘united against the people’. He was, however, no more successful than O’Connell, losing the division by 23 to 323.

In spite of these Radical failures, the disordered state of the reformed Commons had, according to the diarist Charles Greville, provided anti-Reformers ‘with a sort of melancholy triumph’ as their ‘worst expectations’ were fulfilled. The government, they believed, had failed to manage a House that Greville regarded as very different to the last, pointing to ‘the number of strange faces’ and ‘the swagger of O’Connell, walking about incessantly, making signs to, or talking with his followers’. The Tories were ‘few and scattered’ and their putative leader, Sir Robert Peel, had been evicted from his usual seat in the House by Cobbett and the Radicals, who although ‘scattered’ and leaderless appeared ‘numerous, restless, turbulent’ and increasingly confident.

Although the government rallied after Lord Althorp put forward his plan to reform the Irish Church ‘with complete success’ on 13 February, its satisfaction was tempered the following day when Hume moved to abolish military and naval sinecures and pensions. This time he was defeated by a narrower margin of 94, prompting Greville to complain about ‘the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency’ of the new Members, who behaved as if they had taken the Commons ‘by storm’. He was not alone in believing that the government had no power to control them, and so risked ‘a virtual transfer of the executive power to the House of Commons’, which ‘like animals who have once tasted blood’ would ‘never rest till it has acquired all the authority of the Long Parliament’. However, that danger was averted largely due to the influence of Peel, who according to one observer had demonstrated ‘prodigious superiority’ over every other Member of the House during the session and would, it was hoped, persuade his ‘frightened, angry, and sulky’ party to help the ministry to pass its most controversial measure yet, a draconian bill to suppress disorder in Ireland.

With the cabinet divided over the matter, some observers doubted the government’s ability to carry this measure unaltered. Introduced in the Lords by the premier, Lord Grey, on 15 February, the bill was there passed a week later. However, its passage through the Commons was obstructed by O’Connell, who initiated a debate during a supply vote on 18 February. During six nights of debate on the issue, the Cashel MP, James Roe, called for government correspondence on the bill to be produced, and Ruthven twice tried to adjourn the debate but was easily defeated by margins of around 400. O’Connell successfully moved for a call of the House to ensure that the first reading of the bill would be well attended, the turn out reportedly being the largest yet seen in the House, where even the upper side galleries were ‘filled to overflowing’. It did O’Connell little good, however, and the first reading passed by 466-89. The following day Ruthven failed to prevent the government from debating sugar duties, mustering only nine votes, leaving Hume to observe that the first occasion on which the reformed House had met to impose taxes fewer than half the 314 new MPs were present, which ‘did not say much’ for their ‘industry and attention’. The following day Hume’s own intervention prior to the vote on the army estimates was defeated by 23 to 201, and on 11 March the second reading of the Irish coercion bill was endorsed by 363-84. After six more nights of ‘wordy warfare’, the bill passed into law virtually unaltered.

The Radicals’ attempt to alter the course of the government’s programme of legislation had been a signal failure, and it would be some time before they recognised that in the face of a revived Conservative party the best way to pursue progressive reform was to work wherever possible in tandem with the Whig majority.

S B

C. C. F. Greville (ed. H. Reeve), The Greville Memoirs. A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV. and King William IV. (1874), vol. 2.

S. Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (1890), vol. 3.

Morning Chronicle, 30 Jan. 1833.

Hereford Journal, 6 Feb. 1833.

Follow the work of our Commons 1832-1868 project at the Victorian Commons blog page.

This blog, which explores the parliamentary context of the abolition of slavery, is based on Michael’s full-length seminar paper, ‘The West India Interest and Colonial Slavery in Parliament, 1823-33’, which is available here.

It might be natural to think that, when Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, it also abolished slavery itself. But it did not. In fact, when the Slave Trade Abolition Act came into force on New Year’s Day, 1808, there were more than 700,000 enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. In Jamaica alone there were more enslaved persons than the total population of any British city save London. Moreover, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain even expanded its slaving empire by annexing both Trinidad and Demerara from the French.

For much of the fifteen years following the abolition of the trade, the anti-slavery movement was moribund. And when the abolitionists finally stirred themselves in late 1822 and early 1823, slave emancipation was far from practicable, let alone a fait accompli.

Indeed, on the night in May 1823 that Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845) first proposed the gradual abolition of slavery to the House of Commons, he spoke to a Parliament that was – in William Wilberforce’s words – ‘made up of West Indians, Government men, a few partisans, and [only] a few sturdy Abolitionists’.

The ‘Government men’ of Wilberforce’s description could not have been more influential: the home secretary, Robert Peel (1788-1850); the president of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson (1770-1830); the under-secretary for the colonies, Robert Wilmot-Horton (1784-1841); and especially George Canning (1770-1827), who in 1823 was both foreign secretary and leader of the House. These ‘big beasts’ of Lord Liverpool’s Tory administration gave front-bench support to dozens of MPs who were involved either directly or through commercial contacts in colonial slavery.

The ‘Jamaican’ lobby included the Tory slaveholder Alexander Cray Grant (1782-1854), the Wiltshire playwright George Watson Taylor (1771-1841), and the pro-slavery polemicist John Rock Grossett (c.1784-1866). Demerara’s leading agent was a coarse and foul-mouthed Irishman, William ‘Black Billy’ Holmes (c.1777-1851), who as the government’s chief whip had curated an intimate knowledge of the ‘tastes, wishes, idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, and family connections’ of other MPs.

The eastern ‘Spice Isle’ of Grenada was represented by Joseph Marryat (1757-1824), ‘a forceful and innovative chairman’ of Lloyd’s who was, in Wilberforce’s words, a pro-slavery ‘fanatic’. Antiguan MPs included Thomas Byam Martin (1773-1854), a future Admiral of the Fleet, and George Henry Rose (1770-1855), a diplomat whose missions included Berlin and Washington. St Kitts meanwhile connected two major financial figures: William Manning (1763-1835), a former governor of the Bank of England, and Alexander Baring (1773-1848), a senior partner in the eponymous bank.

It was a dizzying, daunting roster of pro-slavery politicians who were landowners, bankers, businessmen, sailors, judges, lawyers, and intellectuals, and they were but a portion of the pro-slavery party in parliament.

For the next seven years, the abolitionists faced fierce resistance to any of their proposals. When Buxton proposed gradual abolition in 1823, Canning stepped in to bind the Commons to a pair of meaningless resolutions that promised progress without effecting anything. In 1824, when the government enacted an ‘ameliorative’ Order in Council in Trinidad, it gave force only to measures that the West Indian planters themselves had crafted, safe in the knowledge that they would not diminish the productivity of the slave colonies.

At the election of 1826, as Buxton fended off pro-slavery Tories at Weymouth – and as Wilmot-Horton stared down abolitionist protestors in Staffordshire – the anti-slavery party made few, if any gains. And under the successive administrations led by Canning, Goderich, and Wellington, the West Indians knew they were safe from censure.

It was not until the Tories’ implosion over Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and the subsequent entry of Grey’s Whigs in late 1830, that the abolitionists had even the scarcest hope of pushing through emancipation. Even then, they knew it would be a merely secondary concern for the Whigs, who, although friendlier to the idea of slave emancipation, were preoccupied with the reform of Parliament, not of the colonies.

So, the abolitionists bided their time. This was torment for some of the younger, more impetuous members of the anti-slavery lobby, in particular for George Stephen (1794-1879) – the brother of the Colonial Office bureaucrat – who in 1831 founded the abolitionist Agency Committee as the vanguard of a growing movement for ‘immediate emancipation’.

Yet while the slaveholders in the House of Lords attempted to rally their forces by convening an utterly partisan select committee to ‘investigate’ colonial slavery, events in the West Indies began to persuade politicians in London that slavery was simply unsustainable. The Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica, which saw 60,000 enslaved people rise up against the white colonists, struck a note of fear into ministers that, without emancipation, the Caribbean would be lost to civil war.

It followed that the first election to the reformed House of Commons, during the winter of 1832 marked the demise of the pro-slavery lobby at Westminster. Stephen and his immediatist allies bound hundreds of candidates to pledges in favour of emancipation, and with the West India Interest losing dozens of allies as rotten boroughs were disfranchised, the Commons that met in 1833 was the first in British history with a majority in favour of abolishing slavery.

Within seven months the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act – legislation which compensated the West Indian planters to the tune of £20,000,000 – had received royal assent.  

MT

Michael will be responding to your questions about his research on the parliamentary resistance to the abolition of slavery between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on 3 November 2020. Details on how to join the discussion are available here or by contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

This blog is based on Michael’s full-length seminar paper, ‘The West India Interest and the Parliamentary Defence of Slavery, 1823-33’, which is available here.

Dr Michael Taylor is the author of The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (The Bodley Head, 2020). He is a historian of colonial slavery, the British Empire and the British Isles. He graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD – and also won University Challenge. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies.

By June the UK will have clocked up its fifth general election this century – an average of one every 3.4 years. Although this is slightly higher than the 19^th century average (one every 3.8 years) and the 20^th century (one every 4), it is remarkably similar in terms of each century’s first two decades: five elections had taken place by 1818 and five by 1918, an average of one every 3.6 years. Add in last year’s referendum, however, and modern voters will have experienced two general elections separated by a gap of just two years, and three national polls in a row. Both these scenarios are far more unusual.

Since 1800 there have only been five comparable occasions when a pair of general elections has followed this timing, starting with 1818 and 1820. Moreover, two of these five examples – 1818/20 and 1835/37 – were triggered not by political events, but by the death of a monarch, George III in 1820 and William IV in 1837. (This practice – the cause of three elections in the 19^th century – stopped with the 1867 Reform Act.) A monarch also prompted the completely unexpected 1835 election. Upset at the Whig ministry’s plans to reform the Anglican Church in Ireland, William IV controversially dismissed his government in late 1834 and installed a minority Conservative administration, led by Sir Robert Peel, who immediately called an election. The new government’s bid to win a majority at the polls, however, failed, although it did kick-start the rise of the Conservatives after their rock-bottom performance in 1832. General elections held either side of a ‘gap-year’, for political reasons, are certainly unusual.

It is the holding of a national poll in three successive years, however, which really stands out. This has only happened twice since 1800, with the earliest example again taking place in the 1830s. The parallels between today and the trio of general elections held in 1830, 1831 and 1832 go further too, since the middle poll, held after the defeat of the Whig government’s reform bill, was effectively a ‘referendum’ about whether or not to reform the UK’s representative system. Even some of the 1831 slogans, about ‘restoring’ the constitution and championing  the ‘rights of the people’, have a familiar modern ring.

The third poll in this trio, held after the passage of the 1832 Reform Act, was mainly about public approval for the Whig ministry’s handling of the reform issue, which had sparked a major constitutional crisis. The whole question of reform had not only seriously divided the nation – prompting everything from family feuds to full-scale riots – but had also pitted the Commons against the Lords, before the unelected peers were forced to give way. Bolstered by nearly a third of a million extra voters and newly enfranchised industrial towns like Manchester, the Whig ministry led by Lord Grey won a famous landslide victory in 1832, which remains the largest in British political history. Within 18 months, however, Grey’s ministry had collapsed, torn apart by internal divisions.

While voters in 1910 and 1974 faced two general elections within the same year, the only other example of a national poll occurring in three successive years comes from the early 1920s, when the traditional parties and the growing Labour party vied for support from a newly expanded electorate, following the breakup of the wartime coalition. The Conservatives won the 1922 election, but Stanley Baldwin’s decision to seek an electoral mandate for major tariff reforms in 1923, giving trading ‘preference’ to the colonies, seriously backfired, allowing Labour to form its first government under Ramsey MacDonald, initially with tacit support from the Liberals. Conservative and Liberal opposition to Labour’s handling of relations with communist Russia, however, forced the ministry to resign after just 10 months in office, prompting the 1924 election. Aided by the Zinoviev Letter in the Daily Mail, an early example of ‘fake news’ alleging a communist conspiracy in Britain, the Conservatives were able to secure a major victory.

Both these examples of three consecutive national polls – from the 1830s and 1920s – have modern resonances, with the middle poll in both cases amounting to a form of referendum, whether on electoral reform or a new foreign trade policy. The outcome of the third election in each case, however, obviously turned out very differently. The first awarded the government of the day a landslide victory; the second brought about a dramatic shift in political opinion and a change of ministry. We will soon discover which model today’s trio of national polls – only the third since 1800 – will most closely resemble.

PS

It’s very fitting that the formation of Earl Grey’s reforming government in 1830 should fit neatly into our series of Parliament Week articles. Aside from the blend of tea, Earl Grey is best known as the Prime Minister whose government passed the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832, which many historians see as the first step in Britain’s road to democracy. To read all about Grey’s ministry, read Dr Philip Salmon’s article here.

What I found most interesting when reading Dr Salmon’s article was the amount of popular support the bill had. People wrote about reform, petitioned government and began to treat Grey’s ministers as national heroes – as seen here on these commemorative jugs. I’m sure that today’s politicians would be very jealous of this sort of public support!

A different way of engaging with the political process than today’s tweeting and blogging perhaps, but this popular support helped to ensure the bill was passed into law. To find out how you can engage with our democratic process today, visit www.parliamentweek.org. You can also read more about the reform bill itself on our website.