The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  At the political level, the Reform Act registered the steady diminution of the powers and prestige of the House of Lords and of the monarchy. The act did not, as was claimed at the time, upset the balance of the constitution of king, Lords and Commons. For many decades that balance had already been tilting steadily towards the Commons and, more recently, away from the crown. The 1832 Reform Act was a further accession to the prestige of the lower house, and, not least, its ability to respond to the popular will. The obduracy of the House of Lords and its long rearguard offensive against the Reform Bill did not go unnoticed. The Reform Act also marked a further stage in the steady decline of royal power: William IV did not play a positive role during the Reform Crisis. Although he was more inclined to support his Whig ministers than George IV would have been, he was reluctant to dissolve Parliament in 1831 and would have preferred a more moderate bill. Yet he had little choice. He could not realistically dismiss his ministers who had been in office for only a few months. He was even forced to agree, much against his will, to create a bloc of new peers if the third bill was voted down in the Lords. In the end, the king showed himself to be vulnerable to the tactics and strategies of his Whig ministers.

  The passing of the Reform Act marked one of the lowest points in the history of the Tory Party. It had been less the strength of the Whigs than the internal fragmentation of the Tories which had led to the passing of Catholic emancipation, which had paved the way for the Whig triumph on parliamentary reform and thus to the great election defeat which the Tories suffered in December 1832. The results could not have been worse. The old party of government was down to 150 MPs and thrown back upon the proprietary boroughs. Only one county – Shropshire – returned two Tories in 1832 and only one of the Tory borough seats won in 1832 had over 600 voters. Of the newly enfranchised boroughs the Tories took only two out of sixty-five. Having dominated the representation of Scotland for decades the Tories were now virtually obliterated there, winning only eight out of the fifty-three Scottish seats. These dire results only highlighted the ideological ambivalence of the Tory Party. Were the Tories a free-trade party or a party of agricultural protection? Were they an Ultra party or a party of Liberal Toryism? How strongly would they continue to protect the remaining privileges of the Anglican church? What would be their attitude to Whig reforms? They might, with the aid of the monarch and perhaps the House of Lords, be able to veto or to arrest the momentum of Whig reform, but such tactics would hardly impress public opinion. As John Ramsden has remarked, ‘The Reform Crisis marked the final separation of the Tories from residual loyalty to the King.’28 Having deployed royal patronage in the interests of successive Tory governments, were Tories now to oppose ministers of the monarch’s choice? Although the political fortunes of the Tories revived after 1832 – indeed, there were already some signs of a revival at the general election of 1832 – these problems were not effectively confronted and the continuing tensions within the Tory Party were left to sharpen.

  As for the Whigs, they held the immediate political future in their hands. They had absorbed the lesson that the surest way to prevent revolution and violence was to accede to the public’s moderate demands whenever prudential to do so. ‘This will clip the aristocracy,’ wrote Lady Belgrave of the Reform Act in 1832, ‘but a good deal must be sacrificed to save the rest’.29 Lord Grey had no intention of introducing new principles into the political system. He wished to restore the balance of and within the existing constitution. Underpinning the detailed enactments of the Reform Act lay Grey’s essential motivation: to make the world safe for legitimate power and influence ‘arising from good conduct and prosperity of demeanour on the one side, and respect and deference on the other’. In the short term, at least, he had unquestionably succeeded. And in the medium term, the great Whig victory of 1831–2 laid the foundations for further reform. The great heroes of public opinion in 1831–2 had a massive parliamentary majority and they now proceeded to enact a series of measures which have well merited the ‘age of reform’ epithet, including the abolition of slavery (1833), the reform of the Poor Law (1834) and the reform of municipal government (1835). Few nineteenth-century governments can rival the sheer range and amount of their legislative achievement. Significantly, none of this battery of legislation was reversed by Peel after 1841. Further, it is not obvious that these measures can be dismissed as a simple desire to maintain aristocratic power and to reinforce hierarchy.30 The Whigs may not have been an entirely united or coherent party – which parties in British history have been – and they may have turned to these issues piecemeal. Moreover, it is doubtful if they had a systematic manifesto of reform in 1830. Yet many of the measures did not directly impinge upon aristocratic power, and many of the younger Whigs displayed genuine social concern.

  The social consequences of the bill are much more controversial. It is one of the most persistent of all historical generalizations that the working classes were cheated out of representation in 1832. The truth is that they were. It is difficult to see what, if anything, they gained from the bill. A smattering of respectable working men came in under the £10 franchise, but they were outnumbered by their counterparts in places like Lancaster and Preston who lost the vote. Over 80 per cent of adult males and all women had failed to obtain the franchise. The secret ballot had been abandoned at an early stage. Even many of the more radical reformers had never taken seriously the prospect of a working-class franchise. At the same time, it is difficult to defend either the Grey government or the middle classes from the charge of deserting the working classes. Several recent treatments emphasize that it was decisions taken at the very summit of politics which were of decisive importance and not so much taken with reference to popular clamour. Asa Briggs has always argued that there never was a real danger of revolution in 1831–2; John Cannon has written that popular pressure counted for little while crucial decisions were being made; Michael Brock even doubts that the ministers were much moved by reports of popular resentment; Eric Evans wonders whether the threat of violence made much difference to the course of events.31 The government could hardly have been unaware of the consequences of its own legislation; the truth was they had no desire to enfranchise voters whom they believed to be vulnerable to Tory beer and bribery. The middle classes had employed the threat of mass unrest to frighten the government, but once they had secured their objectives they dropped even the pretence of being seriously concerned with the political objectives of working-class reformers. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to exaggerate the degree of frustration among the working classes. Many of them were uninterested in parliamentary reform, preferring to agitate peacefully for trade union rights. Other working-class reformers were more interested in factory reform and cooperatives or, in many cases, the campaign to abolish slavery. Nevertheless, the fact remains that popular agitation was crucial in sustaining the campaign for the Reform Act, through petitions, propaganda, marches and meetings and even through the violence that occurred in Bristol, Derby and Nottingham in October 1831. It is difficult to estimate the precise extent to which the radical tide of 1831–2 intensified immediate working-class political consciousness, but there can be no doubting the long-term politicizing effect of the agitation. Certainly, the resentment caused by the unwillingness of the government to concede a working-class franchise swelled over the years and contributed powerfully to a widely felt sense of betrayal and, within a decade, to the Chartist movement.

  The middle classes were content with the enhanced electoral and political power which they had seized, particularly at the local level. It was to be in vestry and municipal as well as in parliamentary politics that the middle classes were able to exert political control and to manage political parties. They had no immediate desire to replace the landed elite as a ruling class at national and parliamentary level. They lacked the leisure, the traditions and the accumulations of unearned capital enjoyed by the landed classes which might have enabled them to do so. But most of all they lacked the will.
They were determined to contain and to control working-class agitation and to defend the political gains they had made, but they lacked a strategy for transforming the ancien régime into a middle-class body politic. In any case, there was no need to. The Whigs, abetted by the Tories, were anxious to conciliate the middle classes. Neither of the parliamentary parties had an interest in creating a resentful and hostile middle-class radical party. After 1832 both Whig and Tory governments were forced to show themselves sensitive to public opinion in order to earn middle-class electoral support. This, together with the political reforms being hatched by civil servants and others at the centre, created an impetus for reform measures which continued the transformation of the ancien régime which had been proceeding since 1828. The stream of Whig reforms, followed by Peel’s repeal of agricultural protection in 1846, completed the dismantling of the major political and religious structures that had dominated Britain since the Glorious Revolution.

  NOTES

  1.J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), p. 409.

  2.Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, pp. 372–3.

  3.J. A. Cannon, ‘New Lamps for Old: The End of Hanoverian England’, in J. A. Cannon, The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (1981), p. 103. It seems to me that many of the older interpretations of the Reform Act assume that ministers, not least Grey, somehow had the perspicacity, to say nothing of time and leisure, to construct logical models of what they wished a Reform Act to accomplish. Those who argue that the Reform Act was a deliberate ‘concession’ appear to me to make that assumption. See, for example, J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (1993), p. 80. D. Eastwood, ‘Contesting the Politics of Deference: the rural electorate, 1830-60’, in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor (eds), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (1997). So also do those who argue that Reform Act was to be a ‘cure’; see D. C. Moore, ‘Concession or Cure: the Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act’, Historical Journal, 9 (1996), pp. 39–59; D. C. Moore, The Politics of Deference (1974). On occasion, too, James Vernon’s Politics and the People: a Study in English Political Culture (1993) hovers perilously close to the same danger.

  4.William Huskisson (1770–1830), a Canningite and specialist in economic affairs. He was Minister of Woods and Forests, 1814–23, and President of the Board of Trade, 1823–7. He joined the Wellington government as Colonial Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, but resigned within a few months. F. J. Robinson (1782–1859) became Viscount Goderich in 1827. His two nicknames, ‘Prosperity Robinson’ and ‘Goody Goderich’, were provided by Cobbett. Nicholas Vansittart (1766–1851) was Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1812–23 and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1823–8).

  5.See, for example, Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad Dangerous People: England 1783-1846 (2006); The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, c1795-1865 (1991); J. E. Cookson, Lord Liverpool’s Administration, 1815-22 (1975).

  6.See C. P. Cuttwell, Wellington (1936), p. 105.

  7.J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: a History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (1998), p. 39.

  8.Lord John Russell (1792–1878), a Whig MP since 1823 and the most notable reformer in the party. It was his initiative in 1828 that did so much to secure the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. Russell became a prominent Whig cabinet minister in the 1830s and later prime minister 1846–52 and 1865–6.

  9.Catholic emancipation is the phrase usually applied to the demand that Catholics be allowed to hold office, to vote and to sit in Parliament. Since 1793 Catholics had been allowed to vote and even stand for election but the law required them to take two oaths, one of them renouncing transubstantiation, the other affirming their loyalty to the Church of England. These in effect made it impossible for them to take their seats.

  10.Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), an Irish lawyer and champion of Irish nationalism, known as ‘the liberator’. An early advocate of Catholic emancipation in 1805.

  11.Wellington was more statesmanlike and even more moderate than several of his cabinet colleagues. Indeed, during the political crisis that followed the success of Burdett’s Bill in 1825 he had advocated a settlement of the Catholic question which would have included a concordat with Rome, which would have limited the papacy’s influence in Ireland, and a scheme which would have brought the Catholic Church in Ireland more closely under the control of the British government. Although these precedents were not to be followed in 1829, their existence indicates that Wellington was not the extreme reactionary on the issue that he is usually portrayed.

  12.Both Liverpool and Peel had supported bills presented in 1823 and 1824 to give Roman Catholics the vote. Moreover, they would have been willing to admit Catholics to office on the same basis as that enjoyed by Protestant Dissenters down to 1828, i.e. by annual Indemnity Acts.

  13.The point is a valid one, but it can be exaggerated. In practice, only about half (29) of Ultra county MPs were to support the reform of Parliament.

  14.The revolution of July 1830 in France came too late to have much effect upon the outcome of the election, although it was to be much discussed by reformers in the months that followed. See N. Gash, ‘English Reform and French Revolution in the General Election of 1830’, in R. Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (1956).

  15.George Lambton, 1st Lord Durham (1799–1840), was a Whig county MP for Durham (1813–28) before his elevation to the peerage in 1828. He was Lord Grey’s son-in-law and was Lord Privy Seal from 1830. The 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne (1780–1863), Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Talents ministry (1806–7) and a fervent advocate of the abolition of the slave trade. He was instrumental in the coalition between the Whigs and Canning, and became Lord President of the Council under Grey. Lord Holland (1773–1840), nephew of Charles James Fox, was Lord Privy Seal in the Talents ministry and became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under Lord Grey in 1830.

  16.Sir James Graham (1792–1861) became a Whig MP in 1818 and First Lord of the Admiralty (1830–4). Later crossed the floor of the House and became Home Secretary under Peel in 1841–6. F. W. Ponsonby (1781–1847), a Whig MP from 1805, became Viscount Duncannon in 1834.

  17.See J. A. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform (1972), particularly the discussion on pp. 254–9; N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), pp. 2–4; M. J. Turner, British Politics in an Age of Reform (1999), pp. 194–8.

  18.See the argument by R. Quinault in ‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History, 257 (October 1994). Quinault underlines the very real fears of revolution in England at a time of revolution in Europe.

  19.D. Beales, ‘The Electorate Before and After 1832: The Right to Vote and the Opportunity’, Parliamentary History, II (1992), pp. 139–50.

  20.On Ireland, see T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–85 (1984).

  21.See the valuable calculations of Beales, ‘The Electorate Before and After 1832’, p. 143. On the size and structure of the electorate more generally, see F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (1989), pp. 178–82. See also the figures in M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), pp. 312–13. In brief, of a population of slightly less than 2.4 million the Scottish electorate increased from 4,500 to 65,000. Of a population of slightly less than 7.8 million the Irish electorate increased from 49,000 to 90,000.

  22.On this, and on so many of the features of the old electoral system in the last years of its existence, see the magisterial The House of Commons, 1820-1832, ed. D. R. Fisher, 6 vols (2009), I, pp. 5, 52.

  23.D. C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the mid-Nineteenth Century Political System (1976).

  24.W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (1963), pp. 38–40.

  25.O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 199–23.

  26.The issue of consistency in the voting behaviou
r of electors before 1832 is discussed in O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 363–83.

  27.For the spectacular development of voter partisanship after 1832 see J. A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818-1841 (1992); J. A. Phillips and C. Wetherill, ‘The Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the Rise of Partisanship’, Journal of Modern History, LXIII (4) (1991), pp. 621–46.