If you see human history as a story of unending progress, leading from ignorance to enlightenment, you might at the very least want to admit that progress hasn’t gone in a straight line. Take, for example, Britain and the right to vote. The number of people who could vote did gradually expand, but boy did the country find some interesting ways to go a-wandering on its path toward universal suffrage.

I’m picking up here on an earlier post about the 1832 voting reforms. This one isn’t specifically about that set of changes, although it is connected. If you haven’t read the older one, I’ll never know, but if you want to go back and fill in the blank, here’s your link. Meanwhile, the rest of us will waddle on, never knowing whether you’re with us or not. 

Irrelevant photo: Mallow

Women, men, and freedom of the city

In many nineteenth-century boroughs–that pretty much translates to towns and cities–men with the freedom of the city had the right to vote.

The freedom of the what? 

The phrase goes back to feudal times, when a freeman was someone who wasn’t the property of a feudal lord and when living in a city for more than a year and not getting hauled back to the land could free you.  

Were there free women? Yes, but they don’t seem to have gone into the language in the same way. Funny how that works. 

Even while feudalism was turning to dust, echoes of the system were burrowing their way into the language, and the freedom of the city is one of the echoes. In those nineteenth-century boroughs (didn’t think I’d get back to that, did you?), having the freedom of the city gave you more than the right to vote. Depending on what city you lived in, it might also give you the right to trade or own property in the city; it would connect you to a network of people with money and power; it might allow you to graze your cattle on the town square, but only if you actually owned cattle. But let’s focus on that one benefit, the right to vote.

How could you get the freedom of the city?

You could get it by being apprenticed to a freeman or you could inherit it from your father. Or grandfather. Or–well, how many generations back you could go would depend on what city’s freedom you were claiming. 

In some towns, only one son could inherit it; in others multiple sons could. And in some, a daughter could inherit, only she couldn’t use it to cast a vote herself. What she could do was enfranchise her husband so he could vote. The widow of a freeman (again, only in some boroughs) could do the same, enfranchising a second husband, and if he died, possibly a third.  

After the 1832 electoral reforms, the number of boroughs where women could enfranchise a husband shrank from 90 to 15 (did I mention that progress doesn’t know what a straight line is?), but at a time when women’s power in the public sphere was somewhere between minuscule and not noticeable at all, this bit of compromised power is worth  noticing.

Like everything else connected to this story, terms and conditions applied and they varied from place to place. As did the proportion of voters who were enfranchised by their wives rather than voting in their own right: it might’ve been a third here, a sixth someplace else. Pull a number out of a hat and you can convince me that it applied somewhere. 

In some boroughs, marriage wasn’t enough to enfranchise a man. The wife’s consent was required as well. 

Why the right to vote mattered

I’ve always taken it for granted that having the vote was about political power, so expanding it was about spreading the power outward and giving new groups of people a voice. I’ve lived around universal suffrage all my life, which is long enough to know that it hasn’t even come close to spreading power out universally, but that didn’t completely knock the rose-colored glasses off my face. 

The belief that having the vote meant you had a voice isn’t entirely wrong–people fought for it and some died for it, and it has made a difference–but it isn’t the whole story either. In the nineteenth century, having the vote gave you some immediate benefits many people would’ve found more useful than that abstraction about having a voice.

Political wheelers and dealers might’ve offered them free food, drink, and until polling places moved closer to the voters, (generous) travel expenses on polling day. Outright bribes weren’t uncommon. In 1774, in Hindon, Wiltshire, householders (a group who were eligible to vote after the 1832 reforms expanded the electorate) were given as much as 20 guineas each. That would be something along the lines of £2,000 in today’s money. 

It wasn’t legal but it also wasn’t uncommon. 

People’s votes were public, so they couldn’t just pocket the money and vote for the candidate they liked. Not only did they have to declare their vote publicly, it would be written down, along with their name, occupation, and address, becoming part of the public record.

A candidate might also get an opponent’s supporters too drunk to vote. If you’re the opponent, that’s dirty pool, but if you’re a voter and don’t much care who wins, a drink is a drink and a chance to get so drunk you land on the floor? Let’s drink to that.

So forget about using their vote, these voters were without question being used, but for a lot of people the material advantages of being voters would’ve outweighed any abstraction. And I’ll bet a ham sandwich that it was a rare election when the outcome made a difference to the voters’ circumstances after the food and drink were gone and the bribes had been spent.