Two hundred years ago the Prince Regent succeeded to the throne as George IV. His wife Caroline had been living abroad since their separation in 1814 and the new king wanted the Tory government to pass legislation giving him a divorce. Caroline’s unexpected return to England on 5 June to claim her place as Queen Consort, and the government’s failed attempt to prosecute her for adultery in the House of Lords, triggered one of the most significant political crises of the early 19th century. The unprecedented nationwide popular movement that emerged in her support, and the government’s inability to prevent public protests, had important consequences for the development of British politics.

Only the previous year a large public rally in Manchester calling for parliamentary reform had been violently suppressed by the military. The Peterloo massacre resulted in at least 18 deaths. Fearing similar mass protests the government had imposed one of the biggest clamp-downs in British political history. The Six Acts of 1819 banned all ‘unofficial’ large public meetings and outdoor processions or demonstrations. It became illegal to criticise the state in print and punitive taxes were imposed on newspapers. The public execution in May 1820 of the Cato Street conspirators, for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, reinforced this hard-line message. To preserve Britain from the threat of revolution and radically-inspired insurrection, the Tory Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and his Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth would take whatever action was necessary.

Within a few months, however, this hard-line policy seemed to be in tatters. Large public meetings and processions in support of the Queen had begun to sweep the nation. The issue ‘took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom’, recalled one observer. ‘Every man, woman and child took part in it …nothing was thought of but the fate of the Queen’s trial’. Lord Sidmouth, along with many others who failed to display pro-Caroline ‘illuminations’ at their properties, had all his windows smashed. By September 50,000 protesters carrying anti-government banners were parading on a weekly basis through central London. By October the numbers meeting at Piccadilly had reached 100,000. The Times took the lead in fuelling press outrage at the Queen’s treatment, running brazen attacks on a ‘debauched’ king. The popular petitioning campaign in her support eventually attracted over a million signatures. The satirists and cartoonists had a field day.

All this public protest attracted remarkably little reaction from the authorities. The lack of a response was extraordinary. The Whig diarist Thomas Creevey MP noted with astonishment how ‘every Wednesday the same scene which caused so much alarm at Manchester is repeated under the very nose of Parliament and all the constituted authorities’. Part of the problem for the government was that the military were often involved. On one occasion 5,000 sailors marched to pay their own respects to the Queen, who was then staying with her main supporter in the Commons, the radical MP and former lord mayor of London, Matthew Wood.

Another difficulty was the constitutional and moral context. Although the Queen had separated from the king and was known to have had sexual affairs whilst living abroad, her constitutional status had not changed. Loyalty to the Queen, and demands for her name to be included in the Church of England’s official prayers, for example, could hardly be deemed ‘seditious’ or ‘libellous’. Obtaining ‘official’ sanction from a sympathetic magistrate for a meeting in her support, in these circumstances, was not difficult. George IV’s own notorious promiscuity added a moral dimension too. Fuelled by sympathy for the Queen and indignation about double standards, women marched, spoke and signed addresses in unprecedented numbers. With religious leaders and some members of the Cabinet, including the key minister George Canning, also deeply divided over her claims and treatment, the political and legal situation was far from straight forward.

Perhaps the most significant factor inhibiting the government’s response, however, was the constitutional language and respect for historic institutions widely adopted by so many of the Queen’s supporters, especially in their formal addresses and petitions. When the City of London Corporation petitioned the Commons, for instance, they denounced the Queen’s trial as ‘repugnant to the constitution’ and ‘dangerous’ to the ‘honour and dignity of the Crown’.  Many leading reformers and radicals who rallied behind the Queen’s cause used similar language, distancing themselves from the sort of demagoguery and association with the mob that had helped to trigger the government’s repressive measures. The ‘loyal’ and ‘respectable’ nature of their assemblies, and an emerging alliance between non-violent radicals, middle-class reformers and local Whig leaders in support of the Queen, was widely remarked on.

The History of Parliament volumes on constituency politics in this period suggest that in many towns and cities those who took the lead in organising support for the Queen went on to play an important role in local campaigns for municipal and parliamentary reform. In Taunton, for example, the same people responsible for the meetings and petitions of 1820 helped to establish a growing local reform movement. They eventually founded the ‘Loyal Political Union’ a decade later, with its declared aim of furthering ‘by every constitutional means the great measure of parliamentary reform’ while using ‘every exertion for the maintenance of order’. Put simply, at the local level the Queen Caroline affair seems to have taught reformers and radicals important lessons about how to organise and manage political agitation in ways that were considered legitimate and constitutional. As Thomas Creevey remarked:

The people have learned a great lesson from this wicked proceeding: they have learnt how to marshal and organise themselves … The arrangements made in every parish … are perfectly miraculous – quite new in their nature – and … will be of eternal application in all our public affairs.

Leading Whig politicians, whose campaigns for parliamentary reform had always been hampered by the outdoor activities of the more extreme radicals, also welcomed the shift in politics resulting from the Queen Caroline affair. ‘The Queen’s business’, observed Lord John Russell MP, ‘has done a great deal in renewing the old and natural alliance between the Whigs and the people, and weakening the influence of the violent radicals’.

When the government abandoned the Queen’s trial in November 1820, realising they would never secure the parliamentary votes they needed, the whole nation celebrated. Church bells were rung and ‘illuminations’ were held everywhere. The government’s highly controversial decision to prorogue Parliament to prevent any further discussion was one of the first political prorogations of the 19th century. Whigs and radicals hoped the beleaguered Tory government would collapse, but popular support for the Queen quickly evaporated. By February 1821 the political climate had cooled enough for the government to successfully see off radical and Whig calls in the Commons for a public inquiry. The affair, to all intents and purposes, seemed over. Lord Liverpool’s ministry had weathered the storm and survived. On the surface little had changed. At the local level, however, politics would never be quite the same.

PS

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This month marks the 200^th anniversary of the 1818 general election, the first of a series of elections held after the Napoleonic wars that began to reconfigure the structure of British politics in the years prior to the 1832 Reform Act. Although the final outcome of this election apparently changed little – the Tory government led by the long-serving prime minister Lord Liverpool remained firmly in power – beneath the surface a number of important developments took place, which helped to transform the operation of British politics both in Parliament and in the constituencies.

Despite being the first election to be held after the French and Napoleonic wars, at a time of huge economic distress and uncertainty, 1818 has attracted surprisingly little attention from political historians. In many ways, though, it broke new ground, ushering in a new age of party conflict and new forms of political activism. Far from being the easy victory for the Tories suggested by the final result, the election was intensely fought. Indeed more seats were contested in 1818 than at any time since 1734, with almost a third (120) of all constituencies going to the polls. Given that uncontested or ‘walk over’ elections were by this time a well-established norm  –  80% of constituencies on average failed to field rival candidates between 1741 and 1812 – this dramatic upsurge in contests marked a major change, both for politicians and would-be voters.

Men who had never had the opportunity to vote now suddenly found themselves potentially able to poll, often on the basis of franchise requirements which had become obscure through lack of use. This was especially true in the borough constituencies, where disputes over local voting qualifications that had not been used in decades caused endless delays and disruption at the polls. One result of this was that many of the 1818 contests dragged on not just for days, but for weeks, though only the county polls in Berkshire and Kent managed to reach the maximum permitted length of 15 days. With elections also being staggered over time rather than all commencing on the same day – a process which enabled defeated candidates to stand elsewhere if their finances could bear it – the entire 1818 general election ended up lasting from 17 June until 18 July.

More importantly, these local franchise disputes created by the upsurge in contests helped to fuel a new interest in ancient charters and voting privileges, especially in places where a local corporation or patron had annexed control of the parliamentary representation. Campaigns to restore ‘ancient rights’ and ‘open your borough’ became increasingly common in the aftermath of this election, aiding the emergence of local reform groups and the personnel and ideas that would ultimately coalesce around the broader movement for parliamentary reform in 1831-2.

More contests and franchise disputes at the polls also involved candidates in greater expense. The costs of a contest in this period could be vast, with thousands being spent on ‘treating’ voters to drink and food, ‘conveying’ voters to the poll in carriages, paying for agents, bands, banners and decorations, and bribing voters. MPs and their patrons often went to extraordinary lengths to avoid a contest, engineering all sorts of back-room and cross-party deals.

Rather than face such an outlay in 1818, many long-serving MPs simply chose to retire. Indeed the turnover of parliamentarians in 1818 was the highest for over 70 years, with 155 novice MPs being returned for the first time. Moreover, rather than being ‘absent and idle’, as Lord Granville observed, this new cohort of MPs were ‘of a more zealous and active nature’, a feature which helps to explain the steady rise in the number of MPs making speeches and taking part in votes and other proceedings over the ensuing years.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the 1818 election, however, was the platform that it gave to the anti-establishment Radicals and more advanced Whigs after decades of war-time muzzling and suppression. This was to prove especially significant in the larger provincial towns, away from the more famous radical battlegrounds such as Westminster, where so much attention is usually focused. Aided by a surprisingly coherent set of policies centred around reducing taxation and state expenditure, introducing parliamentary reform, and improving civil liberties (including Catholic emancipation), Radical and Whig candidates put up a remarkable fight in many places, prising about 35 major borough seats away from supporters of the Tory government. It was only the government’s similar number of gains in smaller and often corrupt constituencies that evened things out, reducing the opposition’s overall gain to a mere 6 MPs.

The final 1818 election result may have left the Commons looking very much the same as before, with Lord Liverpool’s ministry commanding a comfortable majority, but the greater number of actual polls and the way seats changed hands indicated how politics in the constituencies was becoming far more contested and polarised. Significantly, more people were able to vote in this election that at any time since 1734, many of them for the first time as part of a new post-war generation of voters. These trends towards more contests, higher levels of voter participation, and increasing party divisions on key issues would become ever more apparent at the next four elections, culminating in the sweeping victory of 1831 for the Whigs and their reform bill.

PS

Further Reading:

• F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties. The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734-1832 (1989)
• P. Salmon, ‘”Reform should begin at home”: English municipal and parliamentary reform, 1818-32’ in Partisan politics, principle and reform in parliament and the constituencies, 1689-1880, ed. C. Jones, P. Salmon and R. Davis, (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 93-113  VIEW
• R. Thorne (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790-1820 (1986)

For more from Philip and his team see The Victorian Commons blog and follow them on Twitter. You can also get in touch with the History of Parliament team to gain access to the 1832-1868 project preview site, where you will find draft articles of the Section’s latest research. Contact Sammy on ssturgess@histparl.ac.uk