Tag Archives: voting rights

The Peterloo Massacre, or how the British got the vote

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It’s 1819 and we’re in the north of England. At last count–that was in 1780–only 3% of the population of England and Wales was allowed to vote. But that’s guesswork. A later count, in 1831, will estimate it at 1.35%. Voter registration won’t start until 1832, which may be why the numbers are a little hazy.

Can we say that not many people have the right to vote and leave it at that?

With such a thin slice of the population having any semblance of political power, and with wealth highly concentrated, this is a time when you can talk about a ruling class and not have to explain who you mean or argue about whether you’re seeing the world through Marxist-inflected spectacles. So let’s be bold and say that some elements of the ruling class see the value of expanding the vote in order to release a bit of the political pressure that’s been building in the country. Or to put that another way, they think it might help avoid a revolution. 

Irrelevant photo: I have to toss in a photo of holly sometime before Christmas. It grows here. I can’t quite get over that. Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, have a good one.

But reform itself sometimes leads to revolution, and since we’re in the present tense here we–and more to the point, they–have no way of knowing what will happen next. Will reform avoid a revolution or set one off? 

Tough choice. The French Revolution is still too recent, and it was too bloody and too scary, for the ruling class as a whole to take risks. So reform–at least the kind that came from the top down–gets put on hold, leaving it in the hands of scary, bottom-up radicals. 

 

So who can’t vote? 

That’s an easier question than who can. The list includes:

  • The working class
  • The poor in general, in case category one left any of them out
  • Women
  • Catholics
  • All or most or–well, at least much of the middle class

I chased Lord Google all over the internet trying to find some solid explanation of who can vote, and the answer was always murky. I finally found a House of Commons Library paper called “The History of Parliamentary Franchise,” which doesn’t answer the question but does at least explain why Lord G. is so evasive. 

Sorry–using the present tense for the nineteenth century gets awkward when I drag the twenty-first century Lord Google into it, but a commitment’s a commitment. We’ll stay with it if for no better reason than that it’ll give you a chance to watch me tie myself in knots. 

First, who can vote depends on whether you’re talking about England, Wales, Ireland, or Scotland, because they all have their own rules. After that, it depends on where in those four nations you live. In England, at least, the boroughs–in other words, the towns–set their own rules. Or at least the ones that have the right to send an MP to Parliament do. They don’t all have that right. In the counties, the rules seem to be consistent, but I wouldn’t want to put money on that.

What’s important is that no matter where you live, the right to vote depends on wealth, property, and influence. And some MPs aren’t even elected, so even if you have the right to vote it doesn’t necessarily get you much. 

According to the House of Commons Library, “Uncontested elections were common and in some seats an election had not taken place for many years. Parliamentary seats were often considered as property and remained in the control of a family from one generation to the next. This persisted until the beginning of the twentieth century.” 

(Votes won’t be cast by secret ballot until 1872. That’s not strictly relevant, but it’s interesting.) 

If you’re getting a picture of an undemocratic country, let me add another detail to the picture: Voting is only for the House of Commons. The upper house, the Lords, is hereditary.

 

Why does anybody care about the vote?

Nineteenth-century Britain is a country with multiple problems, and the people who suffer most from them don’t have a lot of ways to change their situation. Or if they’re risk-averse, any ways.

Britain’s busy turning itself from a rural country into an industrial one. Huge numbers of people who can’t make a living in the countryside are desperate enough to pour into the cities, hoping to make a living, but the cities aren’t prepared to house them. People are packed in on top of each other and sanitation verges on nonexistent. Wages, hours, and working conditions in the factories (and elsewhere) are terrible, and strikes are illegal: The Combination Acts mean you’re risking three months in prison if you and your co-workers walk off the job in any organized way, or prepare to, although you’re still welcome to quit your job individually and go starve somewhere.

No, I’m not being dramatic. People live close enough to the margin that we’re often talking about eating or not eating. Or ending up in the workhouse, which sets you only a small step above starvation.

The acts won’t be repealed until 1824 and 1825. Union organizing and what the National Archives call labor unrest–a term that takes in everything from riots to organizing a union –won’t break into the open until the 1830s. And here we are, stuck in 1819. 

You notice how subtly I reminded you of the date?

A few years ago, in 1815, the Napoleonic Wars ended. This means a lot of former soldiers are now out of work. 

Thanks, guys, you’ve been positively heroic. Hope you find jobs somewhere.

Wages fell in England’s textile towns, and the taxes that were introduced to support the war didn’t, they walked into the peacetime years like zombies. The country entered a postwar depression. 

And if that isn’t enough trouble, the Corn Laws were passed in 1815. During the Napoleonic Wars, the country couldn’t import wheat from Europe and British farmers grew more of it. Then the wars ended and since landowners dominated Parliament they passed laws to protect their wheat market. The Corn Laws banned imports unless the price of domestic wheat went from high to astronomical.

Then the 1816 harvest was bad, leading to a winter of food shortages and riots. 

 

Blanketeers

Several strands of discontent wove themselves together: low pay, the Corn Laws, a political political system that shut out the voices of anyone other than landowners. The north–the center of the industrial revolution–became a center of radicalism among working people.

In 1817, a hunger march was organized, to go from Manchester to London. That’s 209 miles if you take the M40, which hadn’t been built yet. Each marcher carried a petition to the Prince Regent and a blanket to sleep in at night (and to mark them all as textile workers). They were called Blanketeers, and 5,000 of them gathered to start the march on St. Peter’s Field, near Manchester, with a larger crowd to see them off. One estimate puts the crowd at 25,000. The gathering was broken up by the King’s Dragoon Guard, which arrested 27 people, including the leaders, and injured several. One–a bystander–was killed. Several hundred people set off anyway, but the group thinned out, with some dropping out and many getting arrested or being turned back under vagrancy laws. 

Legend has one lone marcher reaching London and handing in his petition, but since he’s named both as Abel Couldwell and as Jonathan Cowgill, he may be mythical. Or I may be doing him a disservice.

Also in 1817, two hundred Derbyshire labourers marched to Nottingham in order, their leader said, to take part in a general insurrection. Three of the leaders were executed for treason. This did not calm the nerves of people in power.

The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry was formed. Its purpose was to put down any insurrection that wandered into view.

 

Are we done with the background yet?

Yup.  Finally. It’s August 16, 1819, and the Manchester Patriotic Union Society has called a massive meeting calling for political reform, once again at St. Peter’s Field.

About 60,000 people turn up. A few years earlier, in 1802, Manchester’s population was 95,000, but people have come from other towns and cities. This is a big deal and a lot of preparation’s gone into it. Their banners call for an end to the Corn Laws, for universal suffrage, and for political reform.

What kind of political reform? 

Several kinds. Not only can’t most of the individuals here vote, the north as a whole is under-represented in the Commons. And in spite of its size, Manchester doesn’t have its own Member of Parliament. So this is about both class and region.

At this point, no one’s calling for women to have the vote. When they say “universal suffrage,” they’re talking about men.

Yeah, I know. History’s a real kick in the head, but we don’t get to rewrite it.

The organization involved is impressive. As Samuel Bamford, a handloom weaver who walks from Middleton, later wrote about the journey, every hundred men have a leader, who wears a sprig of laurel in his hat so you can spot him, and a bugler relays the orders given by the man at the head of the column. Everyone’s warned not to carry sticks or weapons. Only the very old and infirm are allowed walking sticks.

Together with marchers who join them from Rochdale, there are about 6,000 of them.

“At our head were a hundred or two of women, mostly young wives, and mine own was amongst them. A hundred of our handsomest girls, sweethearts to the lads who were with us, danced to the music. Thus accompanied by our friends and our dearest we went slowly towards Manchester.”

And in case you think the emphasis on looks only applies to women, Bamford will also write, “First were selected twelve of the most decent-looking youths, who were placed at the front, each with a branch of laurel held in his hand, as a token of peace; then the colours: a blue one of silk, with inscriptions in golden letters, ‘Unity and Strength’, ‘Liberty and Fraternity’; a green one of silk, with golden letters, ‘Parliaments Annual’, ‘Suffrage Universal.’” 

That “Liberty and Fraternity” is an echo of the French Revolution and may not have helped calm ruling class nerves either, in spite of the emphasis on peaceful, laurel-branched, weaponless demonstrating.

One eyewitness will later describe the gathering at St. Peter’s Field as “large bodies of men and women with bands playing and flags and banners. . . There were crowds of people in all directions, full of humour, laughing and shouting and making fun. It seemed to be a gala day with the country people, who were mostly dressed in their best and brought with them their wives.”

The local magistrates, though, are less poetic than Bamford and less happy with the gathering than the second witness. They’ve pulled together four squadrons of cavalry (that’s 600 men), several hundred infantrymen, the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry (another 400), a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery (no numbers given), two six-pounder guns, all Manchester’s special constables (again, 400), and 120 men from the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry–a kind of amateur cavalry. In other words, a shitload of soldiers and cops and would-be soldiers are on standby.

And their weaponry.

The main speakers arrive and the magistrates decide that Manchester’s “in great danger,” so they order Manchester’s deputy constable to arrest the speakers.

“Can’t do it without the military,” the deputy constable says (although he doesn’t use those words).

“Right,” the magistrates say, “no problem,” although I’m still making up the dialog.

They order in some of the military, and the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry are closest and get the order first. Sixty of them ride into the crowd, which links arms to protect the speaker. Later on, eyewitnesses will claim the yeomen were drunk and the officer in charge will swear they moved erratically because the horses were spooked by the crush of people.

Either way, sabers are drawn. The Yeomanry knock down a woman and kill a two-year-old child. The speaker and a few leaders are arrested, along with some nearby newspaper reporters. 

Always go for the reporters.

Someone in authority decides that the Yeomanry need defending and sends in some of the professional soldiers.

Within minutes, the field is clear and 18 people are dead. Somewhere between 400 and 700 men and women are wounded.

One of the organizers (who’s also a publisher), Richard Carlile, avoids being arrested, is hidden by local radicals, and skedaddles on the first coach back to London, where he gets the story into print as fast as he can. By our standards, that’s none too fast but it’s fast enough to piss off the authorities, who raid his print shop and confiscate every bit of paper they can get their hands on.

The Manchester Observer also reports on what happened and is the first to call it the Peterloo Massacre, echoing the Battle of Waterloo. 

Carlile and the Observer’s editor, James Wroe, are arrested and sent to prison, Carlile for blasphemy and seditious libel and Wroe for producing a seditious publication. 

I have no idea where blasphemy comes into it.

 

The massacre’s legacy

The Peterloo Massacre is over, and thank all the gods I don’t believe in we can shift to the past tense to talk about its impact.

The government got busy and passed six acts–known, creatively, as the Six Acts–that were designed to keep anything like Peterloo from happening again. Not the massacre part, mind you. The radicalism. The mass meeting. That pesky damn press, or as Lord Castlereagh described it, “The treasonable, blasphemous, and seditious branch of the press.” 

Which branch was that? The branch that sold papers to “the lower orders.” 

It wasn’t just the ruling class you could talk about without argument back then. The class structure was clear, identifiable, and right in your face. To challenge it was to join the ranks of the treasonable and blasphemous et ceteras. 

It was “utterly impossible for the mind of man long to withstand the torrent of criminal and seductive reasoning which was now incessantly poured out to the lower orders.” Castlereagh said. 

Newspapers were already taxed, and that mattered because the higher the price, the less likely working people were to buy them. But the more radical papers had avoided the tax by, at least officially, publishing opinion instead of news. 

A tax was now slapped on them regardless of what they published. Game over.

The penalties for publishing blasphemous and seditious material and generally making the authorities mad went up. They now included transportation, which is another name for exile. 

Four other acts were aimed at suppressing mass meetings and protesters who used weapons. That makes five acts, so we’re missing one. Let’s say it outlawed pineapple on pizza, and like so many laws that overreach, it didn’t work. We’re still plagued by the stuff.

Of the six acts, Parliament’s website considers five to have been mostly ineffective. The one that had an impact was the newspaper tax, which stayed in place until 1836, when it was reduced from 4p to 1p, before being abolished in 1861. 

Even so, for a while there every significant leader in the parliamentary reform period was jailed and reformist meetings were effectively banned, which doesn’t make the acts sound insignificant to me. 

But that doesn’t mean the game went to the anti-reform forces. Either in spite of the repression or because of it (these things are as likely to backfire as the reforms that are meant to avoid revolution), the massacre fueled the anger that led to the Reform Act of 1832, which didn’t address the deeper issues but smoothed out a few of the worst political inequities and expanded the franchise by an inch or two. 

The deeper issues were left to the people who organized the trade unions, the Labour Party, and the movement for universal suffrage. 

Women’s involvement in the Peterloo gathering was significant. They helped organize it, they marched, and they were targeted by the soldiers. Women’s political groups were starting to form. You can legitimately draw a line from Peterloo to the later struggle for women’s rights in the workplace, within marriage, and in the voting booth.

 

And finally

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Masque of Anarchy about Peterloo. The last stanza is:

   Rise like Lions after slumber

   In unvanquishable number,

   Shake your chains to earth like dew

   Which in sleep had fallen on you–

   Ye are many–they are few.

No publisher was brave enough to touch it and it didn’t come out until a decade after his death.

*

For a glimpse of today’s Tandle Hill, where marchers from Oldham and Saddleworth gathered to walk to St. Peter’s Field, see the Bloggler.

Many thanks to the assortment of people who’ve been pushing me in the direction of writing about this for some time now. The next chapter in the history of British voting rights is the Chartists, and I’ll get to that before too long. Really I will.

If you want to follow the story more or less from beginning to end–and with apologies for referring you to myself (especially when we already know I’m long winded), you can find more posts on the history of voting rights by following the links: The roots of the English parliament, The rotten borough and the history of British voting rights, Suffragists, Sufragettes, and votes for women.

The origins of England’s parliament

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You can trace the origins of England’s parliament’s back as far back as the Anglo-Saxon witan if you have nothing better to do with your life. Clearly, I don’t. 

 

The Anglo-Saxon witan

The witan wasn’t an elected body, but then neither were the earliest English parliaments. It was a council of the country’s nobles and top clergy, and it advised the king on whatever topic he wanted to be advised on. It consented to the laws he proposed and did an assortment of other things that kept the wheels of government creaking onward. 

And since it was his council, he set its agenda, chose its membership, and summoned it when he wanted its help. If it sounds a bit like his collie, to an extent it was. The king whistled and it came. If he didn’t whistle, he could take action anyway. He didn’t need its approval. 

But the collie also had some power. The king needed the support of the nobles and clergy if he was going to govern. Or to stick with the image we’ve got, the collie could either round up all his sheep or miss a few, so it paid to keep it happy and working hard. 

If you’re in the mood, you can call the witan the Witenagemot, which means meeting of the wise men. 

Don’t you just love it when people offer you meaningless choices? 

Irrelevant photo: The last of the begonias, from October.

Lower down the governmental ladder, each shire held a regular meeting, the shire moot. (A moot was a meeting.) It would’ve involved the local lords, the bishops, the sheriff, and village representatives.  Think of it as a collision of a court session and an administrative meeting, because the two weren’t separate at this point. 

Lower down still, moots were also held at the town and village level, and the local freemen would’ve attended.

 

The Normans 

Then the Normans invaded and they established something very much like the witan (and not unlike a structure they were familiar with in Normandy). They called it the commune concilium–Latin for general council, because, hey, they were Normans, they spoke Normish. Or French, actually. And Latin–or enough Latin to get by. 

The concilium was made up of the king’s chief tenants–in other words, the top layer of the aristocracy. It was a smaller group than the witan, but it was a permanent one.

In case you’re in need of confusion, though, I’ll be happy to provide it, and this is as good a place as any to toss it in. The commune concilium also seems to have been called the curia regis (the king’s court), or the aula regis. Unless, of course, Lord Google and the entire damn internet are messing with me.

I asked Lord G. to translate aula for me. Court seems to be the best match, but it also means inner court, palace, courtyard, his (confusingly), and (even more confusingly) aula. So aula means aula. It’s hard to argue with that, even if it doesn’t tell us much.

Translation programs are strange beasts. But let’s stick with curia regis, since we have a reliable translation for it. To quote one of the sources I ran to in search of some elusive clarity, “It is difficult to define the curia regis with precision.” So I may be slurring together some things that aren’t exactly the same, but if I am it’s not just me who’s short on precision. Blame history. Blame the Normans. Blame Lord Google.

Hell, blame Boris Johnson. Blame Theresa May. She didn’t say aula means aula, but she did say Brexit means Brexit, which was just about as helpful.

I know. Brexit’s just about upon us. It makes it appealing to write about thousand-year-old chaos.

It seems safe to say that the concilium/curia/aula changed over time. So we’ll say that, then sneak out the door and pretend we were never here.

For the sake of more confusion, though, every so often the king would call together a larger circle, the magnum concilium, or great council, adding earls and abbots, bishops and barons to the smaller group. Also priors, but I can’t find a category that makes a neat a counterweight for them. If I said “priors and pigeons,” you’d understand that the Norman kings didn’t really seek advice from pigeons, wouldn’t you? 

The great council was called together when the king needed them to approve his decisions, especially when those decisions involved taxes, because money was  always a sore point and he’d need to get the nobles on his side if that was in any way possible.

In the time of Henry I (that’s 1100 to 1135), a smaller council began to serve, unofficially, as a committee of the larger council. It was made up of the royal household’s officials plus the king’s attendants along with all the king’s horses and all the king’s friends. Its authority was as vaguely defined as the king’s, but it took on some financial responsibilities and gradually grew into the court of exchequer. We’ll skip the Latin for that if it’s okay with you.

Its members were called justices, and when the king wasn’t around, the chief justiciar presided over the court. 

However vaguely defined, this was turning into a powerful body.

 

The non-Normans

Now let’s leave the Normans behind and skip to Henry II, who was a Plantagenet. In 1178, he took five members of the curia, stirred vigorously, sprinkled dried fruit over the top, and turned them into a special court of justice. Unlike the rest of the curia, they stayed in one place instead of traipsing around the country after him. 

Kings (in case you didn’t know this–and if you did, surely someone out there didn’t) traveled a lot of the time, which allowed them to saddle their nobles with the cost of feeding and entertaining their huge and kingly households. It also kept them in touch with their kingdoms at a time when the internet was down.

Other bits and pieces of the original council spun off at different times until the country had the court of king’s bench, the chancery, and the king’s secret council (which eventually became the privy council).

The larger and smaller versions of the curia became clearly separate bodies, and the larger one was first called a parliament in 1236. Parliament’s website (which has some odd and interesting corners) considers the great council the forerunner of the House of Lords.

In 1254, the king (by now we’re up to Henry III) added representatives of the counties to Parliament. You can call them knights of the shire if you like. One site I found does, and it gives you a sense of the layer of society the representatives were drawn from. 

Do you have any idea how hard it is not to type “knights of the shirt”? 

The next addition came in 1265 (it’s still Henry III who’s plonked on the throne): Representatives of the boroughs (called town burgesses) were poured into the mix.

What was a borough? A town with a charter from the king. The charter allowed it to govern itself and go to the candy store without supervision–sometimes without even asking permission. 

Okay, like most things, the charters varied, but that’ll get us close enough.

And what’s a burgess? An inhabitant of a town who had full citizenship rights. You’ll notice, if you peer into the cracks of that definition, that not everyone who lived in a town did have citizenship rights, and that those who did were citizens of the town, not the country. It would make an interesting post.

As usual, Henry needed the burgesses to consent to taxation. 

That was always the king’s weakness. Not just Henry’s. Any king’s. Kings needed money, especially if they wanted to fight a way, and to get it they needed–well, I was tempted to say the consent of the governed, but at this point we’re still talking about the consent, or at least semblance of cooperation, of a very thin but powerful layer of people just below the king. The rest of the governed had to either put up with things or rebel. In between those two choices, they didn’t have a lot of space to maneuver.

 

Voting comes into the picture

From 1290 onward, representatives of the counties were summoned to parliament regularly, and a bit later on borough representatives were as well. Each county and borough generally sent two members. And at this point, I suppose I have to break down and capitalize that: two Members, as in Members of Parliament.

In 1295, voting comes into clear focus with the Model Parliament summoned by Edward I. It included two knights from each country, two burgesses from (almost) each borough, and two citizens from each city–all of them elected instead of nominated. 

Why “(almost) each borough”? 

A House of Commons research paper says, “There was no single definition of or agreement on what constituted a borough in this period. The issuing of a writ was a royal prerogative and those boroughs that became Parliamentary boroughs were usually the county town of each ancient county and a number of other important boroughs. The actual number of Parliamentary boroughs in early Parliaments fluctuated.”

Did you follow that? 

Don’t worry about it.

So who got to vote?

Not everybody. In fact, not a whole lot of people. But, like most elements in this tale, it was hazy.

Everywhere, only men could vote, but that was by custom, not by law. This is a country with an unwritten constitution, remember, so that sort of haziness feels like home and family. In practice, women who met the qualifications sometimes transferred their right to vote to a male, who’d vote for them. 

In the counties, voters were people with a property freehold worth 40 shillings, and that wasn’t restricted to land. If you’re not sure what that means, it’s enough to know that if you didn’t have a fair chunk of property, you didn’t vote.

In the boroughs, though, it varied from one to the next but usually depended on residence, on owning property, on being a freeman, or on some combination of those. In some it was restricted to members of the corporation running the borough. Again, if the details are slipping through your fingers, don’t worry about it. Same as above: The vote was restricted by wealth and status.

Oxford and Cambridge universities each sent two Members to Parliament, and they were elected by the senates of each university. 

What about the other universities? 

Trick question. They didn’t exist yet.

In 1341 (Edward III’s on the throne by now), the Commons (knights, burgesses, and citizens) and the Lords (barons and clergy) began to meet separately. 

 

More about the vote

Who got to vote was one issue, but it wasn’t the only one. The king’s writ required sheriffs to hold free elections for county representatives, but sheriffs sometimes skipped the election part and declared themselves the winners.

It’s a system I’m sure some modern politicians would envy.

In 1406, a statute specified that county elections had to be held in full view of the participants. My largely useless high school classes taught me that the secret ballot was the standard by which you could measure a fair election. Ha. At this stage, having people cast their vote in public was an attempt to prevent corruption. If you held the election in public, everyone would at least know it happened.

Elections could be raucous, with feuds and factions, and in 1429, the Commons petitioned the king to restrict the vote further, saying elections involved “too great and excessive number of people . . . of whom the greater part are by people of little or no means” and that these people “pretend[ed] to have an equivalent voice . . . as the most worthy knights or esquires dwelling in the same counties.” 

In response, in 1430 leaseholders lost the right to vote, no matter how much the land they leased was worth. The franchise was now limited to what one paper calls “40 shilling resident freeholders,” and I’m quoting because if I mess around with the wording so that it sounds more accessible I’m afraid I’ll change the meaning. What they’re saying, I think, is that you had to own the property, not just rent it.

This was the first time the rules for who could vote in the counties was formalized, and they stayed fixed–more or less–until the Reform Act of 1832. For a bit about the Reform Act, allow me to refer you to that noted non-historian, me. If you follow the link, it’s toward the end of the post.

Under Oliver Cromwell (he was Lord Protector–which is to kingship as margarine is to butter–from 1653 to 1658, and for the time he was in power you can add a few years to allow for a Civil War and assorted chaos if you like)–

Can we start that over? Under Cromwell, they tinkered with the rules on who could vote, but the changes were reversed when he died and the monarchy was restored, so we’ll skip them.

In the seventeenth century, someone came up with a nifty way to game the system. They subdivided large landholdings into smaller ones worth 40 shillings each, creating groups of people who’d vote the way the primary landowners wanted them to. The smaller landowners were called faggot votes. 

No, I’m not sure either. It’s a word with an odd history, and in modern Britain it doesn’t have anything to do with insulting a gay man. A faggot’s a sausage. And no again: As far as I know any relationship is purely accidental.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Church of England clergymen got the vote. 

In 1831, just before the Reform Act of 1832, an estimated 1.35% of the English population could vote, although the percentage would have varied from county to county. In Herefordshire, it was an estimated 3.6%, but in Middlesex it was 0.22%.

And with that in place, next week we go to another post about the history of British voting rights, the Peterloo Massacre. I’ve been threatening to write about it for a while, and it’s now in the queue. Sorry this one ran so long, and if you got this far, thanks for your patience.

The rotten borough and the history of British voting rights

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The history of British democracy (or semi-democracy, as you’ll see) is long and convoluted, so let’s hack off a small piece to talk about here: the rotten borough. This was an electoral district that had lost most of its population but still sent an MP–that’s a Member of Parliament–to the House of Commons. Or sometimes more than one MP. 

Just before the picture changed with the Reform Act of 1832, 140 MPs represented (if that’s the right word) rotten boroughs. That’s 140 out of 658 Members of Parliament. Fifty of those boroughs had fewer than fifty voters. 

Meanwhile, major industrial cities like Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester had no MPs at all.  What was a rotten borough like? Gatton, in Surry, had twenty voters when the monarchy was restored (that was in 1660, and yes, I had to look it up) and a hundred years later it was down to two. Old Sarum had one farm house, some fields, and a lot of sheep. Both sent MPs to parliament. The former port of Dunwich had crumbled into the sea and only 32 people were left above the water line. It didn’t just send one MP to parliament but two.

Irrelevant photo: A murmuration of starlings (along with some sheep) on Bodmin Moor. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

So who got to vote?

You might want to notice that those examples don’t use parallel categories. For Dunwich, we have the number of residents. For Gatton, though, we have the number of voters. For Old Sarum, we have the number of houses and a vague gesture in the direction of the sheep. What’s worse, I haven’t necessarily given you dates. 

But to hell with it, it gives you enough to work with–as much (if your mind’s at all like mine) as you’ll remember anyway.  

The shifting categories point to a central issue, though: Not many people could vote, so residents form a very different category from voters. Women? Don’t be silly. Who’d trust ‘em with anything as serious as the vote. Men? Well, only the ones who mattered, which is another of saying men of property. How much property varied from place to place, but the requirements everywhere involved (a) being male and (b) owning property.

During the Civil War (that’s from 1642 to 1651), when the Levellers, serving as soldiers in the Parliamentary Army, argued for (nearly) universal male suffrage, their officers defended limiting the vote on the grounds that only people who had a stake in society could be trusted to take part in politics. And by having a stake, they meant owning some part of it.

The Levellers were naive enough to think that risking their lives for a new form of government might prove they had a stake in their country’s political future. They were wrong, and it was centuries before their demands were met. The conviction that owning property qualified a man to vote dominated political thought until the next paragraph, where suddenly it’s 1780.

 

It’s 1780 and we shift to the present tense

Look! It’s 1780. What a surprise. In England and Wales, about 214,000 people have the right to vote. That’s less than 3% of the total population. In Scotland the electorate’s even smaller. 

Now that we’ve pegged those numbers into the ground we can leave 1780 and toss a second element into the discussion of voting: It’s not done by secret ballot. That makes it easy for an ambitious politician–or a would-be politician–to buy votes. Because the electorate’s small, he doesn’t have to buy that many and because voting is public he can see whether the people whose votes he bought are honest enough to stay bought.

In some constituencies, however, this won’t work. Not because the electorate’s above that sort of thing but because whoever holds the power locally controls the process, selecting the MP and tells his people to vote for him. Get his approval and you’re as good as elected. Don’t get it and your chances are thin.

Did you notice how gracefully we slid into the present tense there? It’s going to get in the way eventually, though, so we’ll slip back into the past tense, where we belong. 

I know. When I write anything sane, I comb through and straighten out that sort of thing. Blogs make no commitment to sanity, however, and I enjoy the freedom to screw up so openly.

Buying off the electorate was done as openly as I just shifted tenses. You can even find a few statistics on who spent how much in what year buying which constituency. Approaching a powerful lord if you wanted a seat in parliament was done just as openly. That was democracy in action.

 

That pesky middle class

Pressure to change the system was growing, though. The middle class was getting larger and richer. 

And here I have to interrupt myself: I just hate it when I have to talk about the middle class. It means I have to define it, and it’s a baggy old piece of clothing. It’s easy enough to say that the middle class was made up of people who weren’t poor but weren’t aristocrats, but that’s a hell of a range and tells you less than it seems to. It includes everyone from the most marginal professional or shopkeeper to the richest industrialist. Not only did their incomes range all over the place, so did their interests.

We could probably pick that definition to pieces but I’m going to move on before we get a chance.

A middle class person who was rich enough could vote, but because of the way constituencies were drawn that didn’t mean they’d be in a position to influence an MP. The richest members of the middle class wanted political power that would match their economic power. 

At this point, a couple of little things happened, like the French and American revolutions, and they spoke to people lower down on the economic food chain. Things that had once looked unchangeable had been shaken to pieces. By the end of the eighteenth century, corresponding societies that pushed for universal manhood suffrage had come into existence.

 

Reform vs. revolution

In 1819, a public meeting calling for universal manhood suffrage was attacked and eleven people were killed. It’s known as the Peterloo Massacre. I keep promising to write about it and eventually I will. For the moment, take it as a visible sign that the demand for change was flowing outside the established political channels.

People in power gradually began to acknowledge the need for reform, and the rotten boroughs were high on the list of changes that needed to be made. But that was some people in power, not all of them.

By way of an example, take Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington and in 1830 the Tory prime minister. In an 1831 letter, he defended the rotten borough system, writing, “I confess that I see in thirty members for rotten boroughs, thirty men, I don’t care of what party, who would preserve the state of property as it is; who would maintain by their votes the Church of England, its possessions, its churches and universities. I don’t think that we could spare thirty or forty of these representatives, or with advantage exchange them for thirty or forty members elected for the great towns by any new system.”

That does have the virtue of honesty.

But in 1830 the Tories lost power and a Whig government, headed by Earl Grey, supported reform, which it counted on “to prevent the necessity of revolution.” Toward that end, the House of Commons passed a reform bill in 1831 but it was defeated in Tory-dominated Hour of Lords. 

In response, all hell broke loose, taking the form of riots and “serious disturbances.” You know what serious disturbances are. They’re sub-riots. They’re earnest young riots-in-training. They broke out in London, Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Bristol, and other places that we’ll skip over. In Bristol, people set fire to public buildings and houses, doing more than £300,000 worth of damage, which was a hell of a lot more money then than it is now. Twelve people died, 102 were arrested, and 31 sentenced to death.

France had just had another revolution–the 1830 one, which tossed out a Charles and installed a Louis-Philippe. It was enough to make a British king nervous, and William IV agreed to pack the House of Lords with some Whigs so that when another Reform Bill passed the Commons, it could go on to pass the Lords, becoming the Reform Act of 1832. 

As far as I understand British politics, packing the House of Commons is a no-no, or at least getting caught at it is. Packing the House of Lords, though? That’s business as usual.

 

The Reform Act

Fifty-six rotten boroughs disappeared in the Reform Act of 1832 and sixty-seven new constituencies were created, although constituencies still weren’t of remotely even sizes. 

In the countryside the franchise was extended to include small landowners, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers. In towns, men who paid a yearly rent of £10 or more could vote, along with some lodgers, even if they didn’t own the property. If they could afford to rent someplace expensive enough, they could be trusted to vote responsibly.

That left out working class men. In fact, it left out six men out of every seven. 

And for the first time, women were specifically excluded from the franchise. Before that, women’s exclusion was a matter of custom, not law, and in a few rare instances women had voted.

Yeah, progress. It’s a wonderful thing.