The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The demand for reform was exceptionally well organized and maintained. Three features require comment. The first is the role of the press in politicizing the lower classes. Since the first decade of the century Cobbett had taught the poor to agitate peacefully. In the years of peace after 1815 his Poor Man’s Guardian sold 40,000–50,000 copies per issue. Newspapers like the Gorgon and the Poor Man’s Guardian were aimed directly at them, the latter selling around 15,000 copies per issue. Now, however, it was the provincial press which came into its own. Important newspapers like the Leeds Mercury and the Manchester Guardian (founded in 1821) advocated class cooperation and peaceful agitation. Significantly, they were even joined by some Tory newspapers, including the influential Nottingham Journal. Second, the sheer scale of petitioning was almost unprecedented. Three thousand reform petitions were sent to Parliament. Some of the petitions were signed by tens of thousands of people – one from Kent by 81,000 – a fact which renders unlikely the possibility of people simply being intimidated into signing. The third feature of the reform agitation was the massive involvement of the middling orders, especially those from the newer manufacturing centres. The ‘big bourgeoisie’ of the City of London and the south-east already enjoyed political influence. Now the great manufacturing bourgeoisie of the north and Midlands, hitherto content with the indirect influence that they enjoyed through their entitlement to vote in county elections, demanded direct representation in the electoral system. It was not just the Nonconformist Dissenters of the north and Midlands but also, in many places, the Anglican middle classes and – it needs to be underlined – the rural middle classes, too, who supported reform in 1830–2. In addition, hundreds of thousands of unenfranchised artisans now demanded the franchise as a right and as a means of securing improvements in their economic and social position. Such men had always been capable intermittently of directing criticism at the political and economic systems under which they lived; now that potential for agitation was to be exploited as never before.

  The organizational thrust of middle-class radicalism was provided by the political unions. In December 1829 Thomas Attwood established the Birmingham Political Union which was the inspiration for, but never became the prototype of, many such reform unions throughout the country. There were around 120 political unions, a third of them in the north, a third in the Midlands, a sixth in the south-west and the rest dispersed throughout the rest of England. About half of them were established in towns which were already represented in Parliament. Significantly, more than one-half of the political unions were based in towns manufacturing cotton, worsted or woollen products, the latter only rarely recorded as being present save in supporting roles and much less active than other unions. Their objectives varied, but in general they campaigned for male universal suffrage, annual Parliaments and the secret ballot. Their main functions were to politicize the public, to organize meetings and to petition Parliament. The objects of the 3,000 petitions which showered upon Parliament between October 1830 and April 1831 alone were overwhelmingly focused on parliamentary reform. Only a small minority, in the end, included such demands as the abolition of tithe and the reduction of taxes. The unions were peaceful bodies – the motto of the Birmingham Political Union was ‘Peace, Law and Order’ – and preached the gospel of patriotic cooperation between the working and middle classes. Indeed, this was no mere fiction. Working-class individuals, including trade unionists, appeared on the lists of union councils and committees, bringing workers and their bosses under the same banner of collaboration. Dissenters of all types were very well represented. Agricultural labourers and women appeared very rarely. Women were only rarely recorded as being present, save in supportive roles and were usually much less active than men. Whatever their social background, however, millions of people awaited Lord Grey’s Reform Bill.

  Because the Whigs had no detailed plan of reform when they came into office, Grey appointed a subcommittee of the cabinet, consisting of Lord Durham, Lord John Russell, Sir James Graham and J.W. Ponsonby,16 to draw up a scheme ‘of such a scope and description as to satisfy reasonable demands, and remove at once, and forever, all rational grounds for complaint from the minds of the intelligent and independent portion of the community’. This scheme was presented by Lord John Russell on 1 March 1831 to a House of Commons which quickly showed itself to be astonished at the extent of the proposed reform. Modern scholars like to emphasize the extent of continuity and moderation in the proposals,17 but many contemporaries thought them dangerous, even revolutionary. Russell’s scheme rested upon two simple basic principles. First, an extensive redistribution of seats was to take place: the abolition of small boroughs with populations of fewer than 2,000, the partial disfranchisement (i.e. the loss of one of the existing two seats) of small boroughs with populations of 2,000–4,000 and the roughly equal distribution of the seats thus created to new county and new urban constituencies. Second, a uniform £10 householder franchise was to be established in the boroughs, while the 40s. freeholder franchise was to be retained in the counties. These proposals were well calculated to test the opinion of the House, and it was clear that Grey had gone as far as he perhaps safely could. To have eliminated more than a quarter of the seats in the House of Commons was as much as its members could stomach. On the second reading on 2 March the Bill had a majority of only one (302–301) in the largest house in the history of the unreformed Parliament. When the Bill ran into difficulties during the committee stage, the ministers asked the king for a dissolution. Parliament was dissolved on 22 April. As a result of the subsequent general election Grey secured a majority of well over 100. No fewer than 76 out of 82 English county members were now in favour of the bill. Scarcely a single anti-reform Tory survived in an open seat. When the new House met, it was clear that the electoral verdict was strongly in favour of the ministers. Russell introduced a slightly modified bill which easily passed its second reading by 367 to 231 on 24 June. On 22 September the bill finally passed the Commons by 345 to 236. During the committee stage, the ministry was forced to accept the Chandos amendment, which increased the county electorate by enfranchising tenants-at-will paying rent of over £50 a year. This consolidation of landlord influence was unquestionably the price that the ministers had, in the end, to pay to persuade the Lords to pass it.

  The drama now switched to the upper house, where the Tory peers mustered a final trial of strength. Thanks to their efforts the Lords threw the bill out on 8 October 1831, by 199 to 158, an action which provoked popular indignation. The government rethought the bill and made a number of changes, the most important of which retained the votes of existing freemen voters during their lifetimes. Thus amended, the bill sailed through the Commons by a majority of 324 to 162 in December 1831. With the threat of creating additional peers hanging over their heads, the Lords passed the bill on the second reading by 184 to 175 on 13 April 1832. Even then, the excitement was not finished. On 7 May the peers voted by a majority of 35 to postpone the disfranchising clauses, thus virtually rejecting the entire bill. The government asked the king either to create fifty peers or to accept the government’s resignation. William IV, wavering, accepted Grey’s resignation and invited Wellington to form an alternative administration which might carry a more moderate reform measure, for a reform measure there must be. But there was nothing he could do to assuage public opinion which during May 1832 showed by mass meetings, demonstrations and petitions that only a Whig bill would be tolerated. Fortunately for the peace and security of the country, Wellington had to confess failure, especially once Peel had refused to serve. The Whigs returned to office, and the Reform Bill eventually received the royal assent on 7 June 1832.

  The role of public opinion during the Reform Crisis can hardly be overestimated. At the beginning the favourable result of the general election in the spring of 1831 had been absolutely essential to Grey’s prospects of success. At the end, it was fear of the likely public consequences of the bill’s rejection which finally persuaded hostil
e peers to absent themselves from the final stages of the bill’s passage in May and June 1832. Throughout the crisis, the role of the political unions was of the first importance in persuading the king and the House of Lords that public opinion would not be cheated of reform. The unions were able to frighten the politicians with the threat of uncontrolled popular anger if the bill failed. Certainly both Attwood and Place continually told ministers of the dangerous mood of public opinion. Both of them were prepared to mobilize the streets and risk the possibility of disorder. In point of fact, the importance of violence during the Reform Crisis should not be underestimated. In October 1831 rioters swept through Bristol, protesting against the Tory recorder, while at Nottingham the castle of the Ultra–Tory Duke of Newcastle was set alight. These October demonstrations had a distinctly anti-clerical tone. Out of the bench of twenty-six bishops, no fewer than twenty-one had voted against reform. At Bristol, in fact, the bishop’s palace was burned down. With the public mood angry and unsettled, disorder was never far away. Consequently the unions had to keep the peace in 1831–2, while taking their supporters to the very limit of peaceful protest. The implied threat of violence, however, was enough to stiffen Grey’s resolve to fight on and to persist with reform. Contacts between ministers, radical leaders like Francis Place and the leaders of the political union left the government in no doubt that the bill must pass if civil peace were to be preserved. Moreover, during the Days of May 1832 some petitions, including one from the Common Council of the City of London, demanded that the Commons should stop supplies if a Tory government were formed. In Birmingham 500 wealthy merchants and professionals self-consciously and publicly joined the Birmingham Political Union, while notices appeared in many shops threatening to withhold taxes if the Tories came in. In Manchester on 14 May 1832 over 40,000 people attended a mass meeting at St. Peters Field, the scene of Peterloo. It is well known that Francis Place theatrically advocated a run on the banks, but it is often forgotten that such a run did in fact take place. Within a few days almost half the banks’ reserves were withdrawn. Massive public meetings and the threat – or bluff – of violence did much to dissuade Wellington and the Tories from forming a government in May 1832.

  The political unions represented collaboration between the middle and the working classes. Yet the Reform Crisis also fostered the stirrings of a much more radical form of proletarian radicalism, especially in the factory towns. The Reform Crisis is an event of historic significance in the formation of an organized working class. The crisis marks the moment when vast sections of the working class came to political consciousness, when they began to relate their own personal experiences to the broader context of national politics. There can be no mistaking the currency of the language of class. Richard Carlile preached regularly to enthusiastic audiences the gospel of class conflict in London in 1830. In the same year Cobbett toured the country lecturing to labourers in rural as well as urban areas. In April 1831 the National Union of the Working Classes was established, led by William Lovett, Henry Hetherington (the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian) and John Cleave. This was a body based on the Blackfriars Rotunda and reflected a mixture of ideas derived from Robert Owen and William Cobbett. The virulent class language of this body outraged middle-class reformers, some of whom, including Francis Place, established the rival National Political Union, which aimed at cooperation, not conflict, between the classes. Such bodies were perhaps at the height of their influence in the Days of May in 1832, when reports of their revolutionary inclinations, however exaggerated, probably did much to concentrate the minds of the propertied classes. In general, most working-class radicals were willing to support the bill even though it would not have enfranchised the poorer classes. They seem to have reasoned that the present bill was only the start of a process which would eventually enfranchise them. Having expected so much less from the bill than it was seen to include, working-class reformers became its most ardent supporters. Despite these divisions, an impression of unity between the classes was given out during the Reform Crisis which was never really justified. Indeed, as soon as the bill was passed, the political unions, having unleashed sections of the working class in order to widen a propertied, middle-class franchise, suddenly ceased their agitation, leaving working-class radicals isolated and frustrated. Henry Hunt, who had opposed the bill as a liberal and middle-class measure, now once more came into his own. The scene was set for the Chartist movement.

  The background of national discontent had a further bearing on the nature of the Reform Act itself. It did much to fashion the intentions of Whig ministers. As a primarily landed party, the Whigs represented the terrors of a ruling order which had feared for its security during the 1790s and again, in the disturbed period after the war. Grey’s government was anxious to settle the state of the country and, if possible, to remove not merely the symptoms but the causes of disorder. Yet the ministry was not united over the purposes of a Reform Act. The old Canningites, Melbourne and Palmerston, were the least optimistic, prepared reluctantly to enact reform in order to settle the country. Grey, too, was now convinced that a Reform Act was necessary to preserve the peace of the country and to remove the underlying political causes of the prevailing discontent. To do so would strengthen the constitution, reinforce the power of the ruling classes, detach the middling orders from the dangerous radical demands of the working classes and make them junior partners in a rejuvenated electoral system. To delay reform and to defy public opinion might be dangerous.18 Others, such as Althorp and Durham, were much more positive about the prospects for change and renewal. To such men there was little danger in extending the franchise among the propertied middle class who would become the best guarantors of the constitution. Althorp actually liked to talk about strengthening the power of the industrial and commercial middle classes, but such opinions were not common among ministers. Consequently, the Whig case for reform was not democratic, it was not theoretical and it had everything to do with political realities. Lord Grey, who cut a lofty and impressive figure in these months, recognized that at this moment the Whig Party must be capable of serving the national interest. After all, his ministry was embarking on the first major reconstruction of the representative system since the middle of the seventeenth century. His ministers lacked political and administrative experience and they were confronted by powerful enemies. And now they had to attempt to play a part in British history equivalent in importance to that played by their ancestors at the time of the Glorious Revolution. The reform would have to be a balance of the traditional and the familiar, on the one hand, and with the demands and interests of the people, on the other. Grey told the House of Lords at the outset of his ministry that he wished to ‘stand as much as I can upon the fixed and settled institutions of the country’ while ‘doing as much as is necessary to secure to the people a due influence’ in Parliament. He understood that in the new electoral system aristocratic influence would have to be exercised in a much less arbitrary fashion. He told the Lords on 24 March 1831 that the future influence of the aristocracy must depend on their cultivating a good understanding with the people; becoming known for their good offices, supporting the principles of the Constitution, and the rights of the people, and by the performance of these duties for which alone the public trust and confidence, and all the privileges they enjoyed were given them.

  He and his ministerial colleagues did not expect the new electors to be unduly deferential. What Lord Durham, at least, wanted was ‘an independent and excellent constituency’, not a servile electorate. Even Lord Grey predicted that after the bill had passed the aristocracy would not ‘retain the power of dictating to the electors’. The new system, in short, would be a combination of continuity but with a well-calculated measure of change.

  THE REFORM ACT OF 1832

  What did this mean in practice? At the outset, at least, we can discern a number of palliative proposals which were designed to take the sting out of extra-parliamentary protest. The first requireme
nt was the elimination of the more scandalous abuses which had discredited the electoral system. This entailed the abolition of the rotten boroughs and the corresponding enfranchisement of the greatest of the hitherto unrepresented towns. It is difficult to believe that the Whigs were ignorant of the fact that most of the existing members for the rotten boroughs were more sympathetic to the Tories than to the Whigs. Their removal, and their replacement by members elected from places which were more sympathetic to old Whiggism than to old Toryism, might well give the Whig Party a built-in political advantage in subsequent decades. The second requirement was that the Whig Party would have to present itself as the party of property, not merely aristocratic property, nor merely landed property, but property in general. By enfranchising property they would ensure that electoral reform would strengthen the legitimate influence of property in the constitution and draw a clear distinction between an electoral system based on property and one based on individual rights. Third, a Reform Bill would have to include some improvement in the method of polling. Many reformers had criticized the lengthy and often disreputable polling period, which gave many opportunities for the coercion and intimidation of voters. If the idea of a secret ballot was still much too adventurous for those who sought to defend a propertied electoral system, it was still imperative to improve the method of taking the poll. Fourth, at the level of future policy it would mean a series of concessions to middle-class demands while maintaining the fabric of aristocratic government. How extensive the concessions might have to be, and on what particular topics, remained to be determined.

  If these were the strategic principles of the Reform Bill, what were the grounds of the Tories’ opposition? These were four in number. First, the Tories argued that the bill was an attack on the property rights of those who were threatened by it, especially in the disfranchised boroughs. This, they argued, was not merely wrong in itself but a dangerous precedent. Second, they attacked inconsistencies in the proposed bill which, while claiming to reform the existing franchise, maintained old anomalies and introduced new ones. For example, some of the proposed constituencies with one seat had a bigger population than some of those with two. Third, they attacked the likely political consequences of the bill. Deprived of the reliable votes of members for the small boroughs, governments would find it increasingly difficult to maintain their majorities in the House of Commons. Fourth, they argued that the bill would not be a permanent settlement of the electoral system but might lead to a democratic polity. And, indeed, in spite of all their protestations about the sanctity of property, the Whigs had already conceded the principle that political power should, in part at least, be related to population. The bill was full of calculations about the population of boroughs. Ultimately, the Tories argued, reform would lead to the destruction of the existing balance of the constitution by reducing the importance of the non-elective elements, the monarchy and the House of Lords. Politicians would inevitably compete with each other for popular support until in the end the existing propertied electoral system would be replaced by a democratic system.