Paul Townsend

-- Letter of John Croker to Sir Walter Scott, 1831

-- George Macaulay Trevelyan Lord Grey of the Reform Bill

When Lord John Russell rose in the House of Commons on the evening of March 1, 1831 to bring forward, on behalf of the government, a Bill to Amend the Representation of the People of England and Wales, he was not proposing just another law; rather he was opening one of the greatest constitutional debates in modern British history. What Lord John's Bill proposed, the reform of the parliamentary electoral system, was the most fundamental change in the British Constitution since 1688, whe n the position of Parliament in the governance of the realm had been enshrined following the events of the Glorious Revolution.

The first Reform Act, as passed in 1832, had two fundamental effects: it broadened the electoral franchise and redistributed parliamentary representation, in the form of electoral constituencies throughout Britain. By setting the quali fication for the franchise at the ten pound householder in towns, the ten pound copyholders and long leaseholders, and the fifty pound short leaseholders and tenants-at-will in the counties, the electorate was increased by nearly 80%. However, even with this large increase the total eligible electorate numbered about 650,000, a small fraction of the total adult male population. The redistribution of parliamentary seats meant the elimination of fifty-six rotten boroughs and a reduction by one seat each i n thirty other constituencies. Forty-three previously unrepresented boroughs, particularly the newly enlarged northern industrial cities, were enfranchised while the counties received sixty-five additional seats. What did this reform signify for the gov ernance of Britain?

The quotations at the head of this paper, the former by a contemporary, anti-reform Member of Parliament (MP) John Croker, and the latter written by twentieth century British historian G. M. Trevelyan, indicate the great gulf in opi nion about the intent of reform. Croker saw in reform the destruction of the pillars of British society while the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, is described as seeing in reform the means to saving the Crown and the aristocracy. Historians of the liberal-wh ig school, the dominant school of opinion on the meaning of the Reform Act of 1832, such as Trevelyan, Butler, and Gash, present reform as a response by the ruling aristocratic elite to middle class pressure for a share in political power, leading to the opening of Parliament to the middle class and effecting the shift to representative democracy in Britain.

However, the intention of the framers of the first Reform Bill was to instigate electoral reform that would maintain the primary position of aristocratic influence in the House in Commons and in His Majesty's Government. They did n ot see their objective as being incompatible with the limited extension of the political franchise to the emerging middle class, but rather saw such a concession as necessary and justifiable under the principles of the constitution, and believed that by o ffering such inclusion in power to the middle class, they would strengthen the constitution and maintain the political role of the aristocracy. This essay addresses the question of intent by analyzing the writings and speeches of leading, mainstream refo rm advocates in reference to three constitutional principles widely held in early nineteenth century Britain. These three principles, constitutional checks and balances, the acceptance of property as the basis of political power, and the variety of parli amentary representation, are each considered in turn. This analysis is preceded by a section describing the political situation in Britain in the early 1830's, and followed by a consideration of the efforts of the Ultra-Tories, the traditional ardent def enders of aristocratic rights, for electoral reform.

Since the intangible nature of intent makes it difficult to identify, except where it is unequivocally stated, much attention will be placed upon the principles of political thought that prevailed at that time within the mainstream of B ritish politics. No attempt is made to incorporate the democratic ideas of the Radicals, which, as the paper shows, were foreign to the minds of the political elite. Rather, the focus is upon those ideas that prevailed within the elite, as held by leadi ng politicians and their intellectual influences.

Before proceeding, some attention to the meaning of 'aristocracy' and 'political elite' is necessary. Aristocracy refers to the landed nobility and the gentry. Land was the basis of nobility. Without it a peer's claim to a title could be nullified. In Britain at the time of the first Reform Act there were about 350 men who could claim to hold hereditary title of nobility. The hereditary aristocracy was the core of the traditional British political elite. The gentry was that group, o ne rank socially inferior to the nobility, who were untitled, traditional large landowners. Together they are often termed the 'landed interest'. Numbering around 4,000 families, they constituted the traditional ruling elite of Britain.

Over the half century previous to the 1830's there had been an increasing clamor for parliamentary reform. The gross disparities between the size of constituencies, the easy corruptibility of so many constituencies, the narrowness of t he electoral base and the vagaries of the franchise throughout the kingdom combined to undermine the authority of Parliament in the minds of the people. Aristocratic hegemony reigned in Parliament, while in the nation at large the growing capitalist and middle classes felt excluded from power and influence.

The nature of government in early nineteenth century Britain was very different from that of today. Parties, as we know them, with centralized organization and common policies, did not exist. The greatest honor an MP would claim was t hat he was independent. While there were different wings in Parliament, there was no clear dividing line between them, and hence the executive, the Cabinet, was to some degree a coalition of men of the Prime Minister's wing and men of reasonably compatib le views. The expectation was that the Government should embody the interests of the nation, rather than a sectional or party interest, and that it should be able to command majority loyalty in the House of Commons so that it could fulfill the executive function of government.

When Lord Grey assumed the Prime Ministership from the Duke of Wellington in 1830 the Whigs came to power for the first time in a quarter of a century. The Tory administrations from Lord Liverpool until Wellington's had brought about m any needed legal reforms, but they had not dealt with the vital issue of constitutional change which electoral reform entailed. The Whigs, whose politics tended to be more 'liberal' than that of traditionalist Tories, were in a position to consider elect oral reform and were inclined to believe that it was necessary for them to do so if they wished to stay in power.

A series of letters from Grey to Lord Holland, in the years 1816 to 1820, shows how Grey's thinking developed from generally favoring a "moderate and gradual Reform of Parliament" to unequivocally stating "I am convinced, as every ratio nal man must be, that our Administration, if we should form one... could not be acquired and certainly not retained, if we were to put aside the question of a Reform of Parliament." Through time he was drawn toward the conclusion that reform was necessar y, and should be a precondition to the formation of a Whig government. When Grey became Prime Minister ten years later he held true to his opinion and made it a prerequisite for government and a criterion for inclusion in his Cabinet.

What is noteworthy about Grey's Cabinet is how similar it was in its aristocratic make-up to previous cabinets. It had only four MP's in it. All nine others sat in the House of Lords, and all but two members were substantial landowners . Grey is believed to have proudly claimed that "its members owned jointly more acres than any previous administration." The idea that such a Cabinet would initiate electoral reform with the purpose of diluting aristocratic power in Parliament seems inc ongruous. That an unreformed , aristocratically dominated Parliament could consider putting its own position in jeopardy by means of reform seems equally unbelievable. The words of Lord Russell, in a reply to Parliament in 1837, justifying the reforms o f 1832, should help us understand how reform was viewed by the Grey Government:

That such an arrangement of electoral representation could be seen as reform requires an understanding of the currents of political thought at the time.

The constitution of Britain is not a written document, but rather a set of commonly accepted principles, determined by consensus and convention, and based in legal precedent, that have developed over the centuries. While this makes it difficult for groups or individuals to claim specific rights under the constitution, it also allows the constitution to be reinterpreted in a contemporary context. With regard to the elective representation of the people and the conditions of the elector al franchise, the three previously stated constitutional principles, (the concept of constitutional checks and balances, the acceptance of property as the basis of political power, and the variety of parliamentary representation) were broadly accepted by the ruling elite of the early nineteenth century. With reference to these political principles the intent of the framers of reform can be considered.

The constitutional principle of checks and balances between monarchy, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, as established in 1689, could no longer be said to pertain in the Britain of 1830. In the eighteenth century His Majest y's Government had become more independent of royal power, though by no means free of royal authority. The House of Lords, as the upper chamber of Parliament, was fulfilling its function as the representative of the nobility. However, through the rules o f parliamentary elections the aristocracy, and its placemen, had also gained dominance of the lower chamber, the House of Commons. These developments combined to concentrate dominant power in the hands of the aristocracy, who controlled Parliament and th e Cabinet. With the reality of Parliament's dominance of government, new thinking arose on the proper role of Parliament.

Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), the historian and onetime MP who influenced Grey and Russell, was a chief exponent on the new Whig thinking on the need for parliamentary reform. While he wrote on the broader participation of all class es in a representative Parliament, he singled-out for particular attention the role of the aristocracy. He wrote:

He goes on to praise the virtues of the aristocracy:

The words of Mackintosh may seem naive, and even romantic to us, but in its time they reflected the main thrust of 'respectable' reformist thinking. Another excerpt from Mackintosh's essay is highly revealing, "Popular representation.. . tends to make government good, and to make good government secure." Interestingly, he began his essay with this short sentence, "The object of Government, is security against wrong." The specter of reform that Croker feared, respecting "no inequalitie s in the social system" and leveling all "to the plane of petty shopkeepers and farmers," was not the reform that Mackintosh hoped for. Whig reform was a more subtle concept. It sought good, secure, and popular government. It recognized Parliament as t he de facto dominant political institution, and recommended reform as the means to make "good government secure". Such reform was, however, no enemy of aristocracy, but rather saw aristocracy as a vital element in the proper functioning of representative government. It realized that popular representation makes for good government and sought to overhaul the existing system rather than destroy it. By so doing the authority of Parliament would be fortified.

The second broadly accepted constitutional principle, that property was the rightful foundation of political power, was a matter of little contention between the parties as they approached the reform debate. The principle is well refle cted in Sir J. Scarlett's Letter to Lord Viscount Milton, in which he writes, "I hold it a maxim that every Government which tends to separate property from constitutional power, must be liable to perpetual revolution; for power will always seek pr operty and find it."

The right to vote was not considered an individual right. Indeed, the idea of the vote as a 'right' would have been an alien concept to an early nineteenth century British gentleman. The idea would suggest revolutionary thinking, whic h was generally agreed to be an evil thing, as the bloody revolution in France and the horror of dictatorship and European wide war that arose from it, which was fresh in the memory of so many, had attested. The franchise was seen as a 'trust', and as su ch it could only be vested in men of property. It was believed that those without property had no stake in the maintenance of order, and were most likely ignorant, irrational and careless of the general good of the nation.

The difference between reformers and anti-reformers was not over the merits of this belief, but rather whether the middle class was in a position to have the trust of the franchise. Cabinet member Lord Brougham described the middle cla ss as "the genuine depositories of sober, rational, intelligent and honest English feeling" while Grey claimed that they had made "wonderful advances in both property and intelligence." Lord Macaulay, the leading Whig historian and intellectual, said in December, 1831, that "the time has arrived when a great concession must be made to the democracy of England... whether the change be in itself good or bad, has become the question of secondary importance' that good or bad, the thing must be done." Macaul ay expressed the reformist Whig belief that the way to insure that the middle class would not ally themselves with radicalism, or even revolution, was to make concessions to them, and recognize them as the proper ally of aristocracy.

The third constitutional principle, the principle of the variety of representation, should not be confused with the democratic ideal such a concept brings to mind in the late twentieth century. The classic traditional exposition of the principle of variety of representation would point out that the various forms of constituency types were the guarantors of the variety of parliamentary representation. And constituencies were various indeed. Some of the open boroughs (urban constituenc ies), due to their conditions of electoral enfranchisement, had near universal male suffrage, if men of no property were excluded from the reckoning, which they would automatically be. At the other extreme were the close and rotten boroughs, where there might be no more than fifty electors with the right to return two Members of Parliament. What made these boroughs 'rotten' was that in reality the nomination of the candidates was in the control of an aristocratic magnate and it would bode ill for any el ector who dared vote against his nominee. As an elector's vote was not secret, but rather declared on the day of voting at a public assembly, the freedom of choice of electors was severely restricted. These are just two examples of the many different fo rms of constituencies, and the resultant representations, that were part of the unreformed electoral system.

The justification of this system was that it would put in Parliament a range of different men representing a wide variety of interests, and it was this variety that gave Parliament representative legitimacy. A particular argument was t hat it allowed men of talent, who stood little chance of being elected in an openly contested election, the chance to be returned for a 'safe' seat, and so bring their talents into Parliament. Over time, many Cabinet members had secured their position in Parliament through a particular form of close borough, the Cabinet borough. To the majority of modern observers, and to a few contemporaries, this argument sounds like a self-justification of a corrupt and unequal representation. But such a reaction ov erlooks a fundamental underlying concept of representative government still accepted in the early nineteenth century. Representation was not based on the rights of individuals in society, but on the rights of social groups and communities. It was the su m of these groups, and not the sum of the adult male population, which defined political society. The reformist Whig thinkers, who included Lord John Russell and Sir James Gresham, both members of the Cabinet's Committee of Four that drafted the first Re form Bill, accepted the idea of group rights of representation.

Again it was Sir James Mackintosh who best represented the thinking of the reformers in this regard. He looked at the changing social and economic composition of Britain in the early nineteenth century and explained why parliamentary re form was needed to represent the new reality. He described two forms of government, the old and the new. The old form reflected the primacy of aristocracy in government, which gave it stability and vigor. He praised "the natural tendency derived from [ landed] wealth, to settle and consolidate into a sort of patriarchal chieftainship, which gains strength by descent and duration." He continues:

In the new Britain there had arisen to join the "aristocracy of rank and hereditary wealth" an "aristocracy of personal merit." This new group were the leaders of the middle class; men of talent, education, culture and property. "In o rder to make any form of government secure and peaceful these two aristocracies must be united," he concluded. In this union he saw the foundation of new government.

Reform, once more, is not portrayed as a threat to the 'aristocracy of rank'; rather it is the acceptance of the new reality and the modification of the constitution to incorporate the new men who are of the new aristocracy. It is a co ncession to the middle classes, but not a repudiation, nor a confiscation, of aristocratic power. Through concession, by amendment of the constitution, the preservation of aristocratic power, and the maintenance of secure and peaceful government can be a ssured.

The historian D.C. Moore contends that "the myth of the [Reform] Bill being a Radical measure" is presented in history "as a means of defining the political character of the Grey administration." We have seen already that the influence on the framers of reform was that of the mainstream reformers. Very little consideration seems evident in their work for the ideas of the Radical reformers, who argued for universal male suffrage, the secret ballot and democracy. But Moore is not refer ring to these mainstream liberal thinkers. He is referring to the ultra-Tory faction in Parliament, staunch traditionalists and advocates of the aristocracy and landed interests. Yet, they too embraced reform and their thinking is reflected in the thinki ng of the framers of the first Reform Bill.

The reforming legislation that had been introduced by the Tory administrations from the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815, up until the fall of the Wellington government in 1830, had not pleased the ultra-Tory wing of the Tories. The p assage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 "broke up the old Tory party of Pitt and Liverpool that had so long dominated the political life of the country" and helped lead to the fall of the Wellington administration.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was the forum used by the ultra-Tories to make their views known. In a series of three articles, published between August 1829 and February 1831, Blackwood's put forward their argument for e lectoral reform. In the last of these articles, their concerns with the inequality of electoral representation were presented:

The control of close boroughs, the ultra-Tories believed, had fallen under the influence of "aristocrats", a small group of peers and commoners, wealthy men of trade and manufacturing, who now owned those seats, who represented no local community or interest but their own, who stood for no principle, and who were willing to sell their votes to any government that made it worthwhile for them. As the MPs from these boroughs could not be relied upon to uphold the interests of the aristocr acy, then if needs be, these boroughs should be abolished, and the seats, by right, redistributed in favor of "the most flourishing part of English history," the aristocracy. After much more haranguing of manufacturers, trade and the derisively termed 'a ristocrats', the article concludes that:

As empirically suspect and as self-serving as the assertions of the Blackwood's article may be, its appearance just weeks before the introduction of the first Reform Bill highlights their belief in the inevitable marginalization of the aristocracy and the need to seek redress through electoral reform.

In Lord Russell's speech introducing the Reform Bill the House of Commons in March, 1831, he put great emphasis in the distinction between 'legitimate influence' and corrupt, or more properly, 'illegitimate influence', upon the electora l system. His meaning in using such language would have been understood by many in the chamber that evening. In the late eighteenth century the historian Thomas Oldfield had distinguished between two types of influence in his History of the Boroughs< /I>. For Oldfield, legitimate influence "only derived from extensive property, eminent personal qualities or from good neighbourhood and hospitality." Those with legitimate influence were the aristocrats that Lord Russell referred to in his speech, livin g on their estates, "receiving large incomes, performing important duties, relieving the poor by charity, and evincing private worth and public virtue... It is not human nature that they should not possess a great influence upon public opinion, and have a n equal weight in electing persons to serve their country in Parliament... I contend that they will have as much influence as they ought to have." Illegitimate influence, Lord Russell claimed, was held by those who did not "live amongst the people... [kn ew] nothing of the people... and... care[d] nothing for them" and "who seek honours without merit, places without duty, and pensions without service - for such an aristocracy I have no sympathy." For Oldfield this influence was at work in "limited corpor ations and burgage tenures, and in what are termed rotten boroughs, with only ten or twelve houses in each."