by Simon Heffer
Cardwell wrote to Gladstone on 30 April, with this intelligence: ‘I have reason to think that a Proclamation is contemplated forbidding the proposed meeting in Hyde Park’.78 Petitions were delivered to Parliament to ban the rally. On 1 May Walpole, unshaken by the difficulties of the previous year, tried to oblige, issuing a proclamation that ‘the use of the Park for the purpose of holding such meeting is not permitted, and interferes with the object for which Her Majesty has been pleased to open the Park for the general enjoyment of her people’.79 People were ‘warned and admonished to abstain from attending’. The police served copies of Walpole’s notice on leaders of the League when they met their rank and file in Bouverie Street that evening. Beales ignored it, and made his own statement imploring the working men of England to ‘come as loyal, peaceful and orderly citizens, enemies of all riot and tumult, but unalterably fixed and resolved in demanding and insisting upon what you are entitled to’. Bradlaugh, who was also present, made the same point only more colourfully, threatening that ‘if violence were used he would be among the first to meet that violence.’
Walpole’s proclamation was posted all over London, and torn down almost immediately. Leaguers put up a statement by Beales in its place. A retreat began. The government announced it had been wrong to close the gates in 1866: but those who went into the park on Monday 6 May did so at their own risk. The police were told to discriminate between those who attended to ‘look on’ and those ‘roughs’ who wished to cause trouble. However, it was also announced that anyone who continued to address the crowd after being warned to stop would be arrested and removed from the park. Mayne said he would be taking 5,000 police to the park, and that force would be used if necessary. The Household Division, in nearby barracks, would be on standby, and extra troops were ordered to the metropolis. That was the situation on the Saturday before the protest; but on the Monday morning The Times reported that ‘the public will hear with surprise, and perhaps, also, with no little discontent, that the Government has at the last moment resolved to permit the Hyde Park demonstration, and, as long as peace is preserved, not to interfere with any of the speakers, the processions, or the crowds that may enter the enclosure.’80 It had, the paper continued, been discovered that the protest was ‘perfectly legal, and that the authorities had no right to interfere’. There had also promised to be an almighty confrontation if Walpole had not backed down. Although the League had many thousands of followers, there were signs that many Londoners were ready to come out and support the government, which it was widely believed was doing its best to secure change. People had been sworn in as special constables on the Saturday, before the ban was rescinded, and an estimated 12–15,000 were to be sworn in on the Monday, all armed with staves. Cavalry had also been brought up to London. Before executing his U-turn on the Saturday, Walpole had gratefully received a petition signed by 16,000 Londoners, deploring the League’s plan to go ahead with the meeting.
‘The credit,’ The Times wrote, ‘of standing firmly to their purpose certainly remains with the reform league. How Mr Walpole will account to the country for having caused so much agitation, and even alarm – for having persevered in his resolution up to the last moment, and only at the last moment found out that he was acting illegally, is a matter for himself to consider. That his whole policy in the matter will cause deep disgust can scarcely be doubted.’ Walpole took the hint and, humiliated and mentally fragile, resigned as Home Secretary, though not before the Commons passed a Royal Parks Bill to make it legal to ban such meetings as the League’s. Derby wanted him to remain as Home Secretary, but Walpole’s wife insisted he resign, for the sake of his mental health.81 He became minister without portfolio, his career terminally damaged. The protest ‘passed off with the quietness and good order of a temperance meeting’.82 It was, said The Times’s correspondent, like ‘a great fair’ with ‘acrobats, cardsharpers, ballad singers without number, who howled forth such mongrel verses about Reform and Walpole as made one wish more ardently than ever for a settlement of this tedious question.’ Five people were arrested, three for picking pockets and two for gambling: but the government had had a warning.
Gladstone might have removed himself temporarily from the fray, but other Liberals, sensing the government’s vulnerability, proposed amendments. So determined was Disraeli to get the bill through that he accepted them. One was a lodger franchise; another the reduction of the county franchise to a £12 rental qualification, and to all those owning property worth just £5 a year. Disraeli abandoned ‘fancy franchises’ that would have given extra votes to university graduates and professional men, which had been an attempt to appease hard-line Tories. The residential qualification was reduced from two years to one. One of the most contentious matters – the ‘compound franchise’, which would allow the vote to those who had their rates paid for them by landlords out of their rents – was also granted. This enfranchised another half-million tenants in urban Britain. Disraeli, conscious his party was in a minority, had done superbly to get his bill through: but only because of the enormous sacrifices of principle, and the reverses of position, he had chosen to make. The electorate was doubled. In the boroughs the working-class vote was five times larger than it had been, and comprised more than half of the electorate in those places.83
Eight boroughs in the industrial north were given an MP; as was Gravesend, in Kent. By the end of the process, all who paid rates in person in boroughs were given the vote, as Gladstone had wished. He had become a temporarily divisive figure among Liberals, and knew it. He told his diary on 15 July that he had decided ‘at the last moment’ not to speak on the third reading of the Reform Bill ‘for fear of doing mischief on our own side’.84 Derby then had to warn Conservative peers – who formed a majority in the Lords – of the dangers of their not passing it. One, Earl Grey, had given notice he would seek further amendments, which had terrified Derby. He warned his peers that not only would he be forced to resign, but the party would be back where it had been after the Corn Laws debacle: out of touch and irrelevant. His colleagues heeded him, and he steered the bill to a second reading, unamended. There were only minor changes during the committee stage, made in Derby’s absence while he was sick. However he returned, ill with gout and rheumatism, to take the third reading – the last step before the Royal Assent – on 6 August.
This was a momentous occasion, and Derby’s speech reflected it. The background against which he spoke – though he did not explicitly say so – was troubled. A quarter of a million men, many considered by parliamentarians of all parties to be uneducated and unfit for the franchise, were about to be given the vote. The country had witnessed great unrest; the Queen was unpopular, with stirrings of republicanism evident because of her refusal to engage in public duties except on rare occasions, while receiving vast sums from the Civil List. Derby said he hoped that ‘in the adoption of this Bill we may find the means of putting a stop to the continued agitation of a question which, as long as it remained unsettled, only stood in the way of all useful legislation.’85
Then, in a borrowed phrase that has passed into legend (it had been used several times in the debates in 1866, notably by some of the Adullamites) he ruminated that ‘no doubt we are making a great experiment and “taking a leap in the dark”, but I have the greatest confidence in the sound sense of my fellow countrymen, and I entertain a strong hope that the extended franchise which we are now conferring upon them will be the means of placing the institutions of this country on a firmer basis, and that the passing of this measure will tend to increase the loyalty and contentment of a great portion of Her Majesty’s subjects.’ Benjamin Jowett had written from Oxford to a friend, just before the passing of the bill, to anticipate ‘the exultation of the Jew, who has revenged all his personal wrongs, triumphed over the virtue of Gladstone, made himself an historical name, and really done a great service (not taking into account the means). He has got his pound of flesh out of these Tory magnates, who have scoffed at him.’86
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They scoffed no more. In November, three months after the bill had passed and eight months after the Cabinet resignations, Cardwell had Cranborne and his wife to stay. He reported that ‘he and Lady C are as bitter against Dizzy as you or I could be. He is desirous to see the formation of a Government, in which the strong Liberals shall be included, that the proper weight of responsibility might be thrown upon them; thinks it will be our business to raise the question of further redistribution; and does not intend for his own part to interfere any more in Reform discussions.’87 By that time Cranborne had written an article in the Quarterly Review setting out, with candour, his feelings: it was entitled ‘The Conservative Surrender’. Disraeli knew Cranborne’s clout in the party, and when he succeeded Derby as Prime Minister in February 1868 – ‘a proud thing for a man “risen from the people” to have obtained!’ the Queen told her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia – he asked Northcote to sound him out about rejoining the Cabinet.88 Cranborne advised Northcote: ‘I told him I had the greatest respect for every member of the Government except one – but that I did not think my honour was safe in the hands of that one.’89 The bitterness between the Conservative party’s new Prime Minister and the man who would eventually succeed him had years yet to run.
Disraeli began consciously to identify the Conservative party not with a sectional interest such as had characterised the old Tories, but with progress.90 The progressive policies that would transform Britain after 1874 did not just continue those of the Gladstone administration; Gladstone’s followed on from Disraeli’s in his short administration of 1868, after he had succeeded Derby as Prime Minister and ‘climbed to the top of the greasy pole’.91 As well as the Reform Act the Conservatives passed the Corrupt Practices Bill, the legislation pursuant to the Clarendon Commission, reform of the railways, the effective nationalisation of the telegraph services under the Post Office, and the abolition of public executions. Disraeli also established the Royal Commission on the Sanitary Laws.
This descent into liberalism outraged Cranborne, now Marquess of Salisbury having succeeded his father earlier in 1868. He wrote to a former constituent shortly after succeeding to his title that the main purpose of the Conservative party at that time seemed to be to keep Disraeli as Prime Minister. ‘If I had a firm confidence in his principles or his honesty, or even if he were identified by birth or property with the Conservative classes in the country – I might in the absence of any definite professions work to maintain him in power. But he is an adventurer: & as I have too good cause to know, he is without principles and honesty.’ Salisbury was right to identify Disraeli’s ‘singular power of intrigue’ as the key to his mastery of the party; and to observe that ‘in an age of singularly reckless statesmen he is I think beyond question the one who is least restrained by fear or scruple.’92
V
The insistence that men cast their votes in public was a relic of the age before 1832. It meant that landlords, employers and others to whom a man might feel he owed either his livelihood or his duty were able to see whom that man voted for. Fear of economic reprisals therefore often meant someone could not vote according to his conscience. The corruption this caused was most famously depicted in The Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens recycling what he had seen with his own eyes in Sudbury in Suffolk in 1834 as the fictional borough of Eatanswill. The nature, and dangers, of an election before the ballot were also well illustrated in the riot that is the key event in Felix Holt. It was not merely that intimidation was rife, but that it was intimidation fuelled by ‘treating’. Even before working men had the franchise, armies of them could be recruited to act as intimidators on behalf of a candidate through the liberal supply of free alcohol in public houses. In Felix Holt, the coming of the election is signified as ‘the time, they say, when a man can get beer for nothing!’93 Even Mr Lyon, the pious dissenting minister, finds something to be said for not having the ballot: ‘To any impartial mind, duly furnished with the principles of public and private rectitude . . . the ballot would be pernicious, and . . . if it were not pernicious it would still be futile.’ He believed it would not stop bribery, and would be ‘shutting the door against those influences whereby the soul of a man and the character of a citizen are duly educated for their great functions.’94
In 1869 a private member’s motion to introduce the ballot – cast in the privacy of a polling booth – was thwarted by the government’s refusal to make time for it. Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, told the Commons he and the government accepted the case for the ballot: but they were unsure what would be ‘the best means . . . for securing tranquillity, freedom, and purity at our municipal and Parliamentary elections.’95 Gladstone reinforced this point. The government accepted the moment had come for secrecy, but felt it needed time to handle the transition to it, because of the anger it would cause to landlords and employers who felt they had a right to know how their tenants and employees voted. An element still considered that, far from preventing bribery and coercion, the ballot would conceal it: and that it was ‘un-English’ for a member of the (recently expanded) electorate not to proclaim for whom he was voting. Richard Cross, who would become one of the century’s great reformers, reflected that ‘I have always myself strongly opposed the ballot, believing that the right to vote was a trust to be exercised openly.’96
Another opponent of the ballot, Lord Claud Hamilton, offered an alternative: ‘Let it be announced publicly that any man guilty of bribery shall be excluded from the pale of society as though he were a swindler or a thief, and they would hear little more upon the subject. Instead of doing this they [the House of Commons] listened with complacency, and perhaps, enjoyment, to the tales of the successful dodges by which bribery had been perpetrated with impunity. As long as they admitted men having the moral stain of corruption into their society, he did not believe in the sincerity of their wish to put down bribery.’97
Another attempt was made in 1870. Edward Leatham, the Liberal MP for Huddersfield who introduced the measure to bring in the ballot, gave numerous examples of intimidation practised across the country by both parties. This took various forms: mobs threatening voters at the poll itself or, slightly more subtly, landlords refusing to renew tenancies for men who did not vote as instructed. Lord Lothian was cited as an example of such a landlord; and, when asked about it, had expressed astonishment that anyone should have expected him to do differently – ‘nor do I see anything which is otherwise than honourable in the course which I have taken.’98 However, the extension of the franchise had created other, more novel opportunities to influence voters. Leatham referred to a report that ‘out of 154 voters employed at the railway works and station at Carlisle, 136 plumped for an eminent railway director, who was a candidate for the city of Carlisle at the last election, and since the political leaning of most of the men was known to be the other way, the inference was drawn that this unanimity of their part was due to the exercise of pressure.’ Publicly, the men denied coercion: privately, they admitted they had defied their principles to keep their jobs. Fear of reprisals was why those who scrutinised polls could find no evidence of intimidation, and why the case for the ballot was so hard to prove.
In Ashton-under-Lyme 242 people lost their jobs because they voted Conservative rather than Liberal. In Gravesend a Liberal mob had run through the town on polling day smashing the windows of Conservatives. In Ireland things were even worse: hired and armed mobs were a feature at every election in Limerick, and at Sligo the mob was deemed so important that it was organised fifteen months before the election. The law appeared impotent in the face of bribery, and in the face of ‘treating’ – buying drinks for voters, or even giving them huge banquets. However, as Hartington, for the government, said, the deliberations of a select committee (of which Hartington happened to be the chairman), appointed after the previous failed attempt at a Ballot Act, had not been completed. Until they were, the government could not in good faith support a bill with which many ministers had gre
at sympathy. It was agreed to postpone further consideration until May – six weeks later – and promised that, when it was considered, Gladstone would be present.
Hartington, in May, introduced a bill to tackle corrupt practices at elections, and proposed the ballot. He felt, after consideration by his committee, that the ballot would not encourage bribery or personation. This was not a view shared widely. Many MPs believed the inability to detect who had voted for whom was an open invitation to electoral malpractice. It was also argued that if the bill were passed it should be with a clause exempting the universities from the ballot, since there could be no question of any corrupt behaviour among so rarefied an electorate. The bill had its first reading: and at its second a few weeks later Gladstone argued, in the triumph of hope over experience, that the question need not be a party political matter. The government’s Achilles heel, now and in future years, was that the question had not been put to the country at the 1868 election, and there was no proof of a popular mandate for it. The bill went no further.
Resistance continued to be ferocious in 1871, for the reason expressed by Colonel Sir Walter Barttelot, the Tory MP for West Sussex,: why ever couldn’t men ‘be trusted to give their votes freely and independently like Englishmen?’99 Gladstone respected such convictions, but hoped the bill would be considered on its merits rather than on the basis of the imaginary fears of its opponents. The bill went into committee: where Henry James, who in 1873 would become Attorney General, announced that ‘he approached the subject with mingled and varied feeling, for, to his mind, when the Ballot became the law of the land, it would be a day of humiliation, and bitter humiliation to the whole nation; not because there was anything humiliating in recording a vote in secret, but because, by adopting this measure, they as a people, confessed that from causes and conduct which ought to be within their control they were compelled to drive the electors of this country into secrecy, and were unable to permit them to record their votes in an open and public manner.’100 Michael Hicks-Beach, who would twice serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Conservative governments, warned that the ballot would facilitate the creation of ‘an organised system of fraud’.101 He feared mass personation, and he was not sure there were sufficient safeguards against corrupt returning officers. Other MPs feared the ballot would result in most of the MPs returned from Ireland being nationalists: unwittingly making the point that the ballot encouraged genuine democracy. However, William Forster, who piloted the bill through, argued that the logical extension of giving so many more men the vote in 1867 was to give them a free vote.
