Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 9
There were two types of MP. Some represented the shires – such as Yorkshire or Middlesex. There were two MPs for each shire in England, and one in the other countries of the United Kingdom. In order to vote, people had to own (not rent) land, on which they paid at least £2 a year in land tax. This qualification was first set in the middle of the fifteenth century, and inflation had increased the number of people who qualified. As it was not people who were being represented, it was not considered a problem that some shire seats had four times as many voters as others.
Most MPs represented boroughs – mostly towns that had been granted a royal charter in medieval times. Voting rights varied massively between different boroughs. The householder boroughs had the largest electorate. All men who did not receive poor relief had the vote. There were only twelve of these constituencies, but they could still be controlled by families, or the electors could be bribed. The electorate was still not very big – Northampton, one of the largest, was just over 1,000. There were another six where nearly all adult males had the vote, but these were small towns, so the number of actual voters was still small.
About one hundred seats were controlled by the freemen of the borough. Some of these did allow a proper election but most were under the control of the corporation – a form of unelected local council.
There were thirty-seven boroughs in which the franchise was restricted to those paying ‘scot and lot’, a form of local taxation. Some, like Westminster, the biggest constituency in the country, had 12,000 voters but most had far fewer. Gatton in Surrey had two, and most others numbered their voters in the hundreds.
There were twenty-seven boroughs where the unelected members of the local corporation had the only votes. There were few contested elections here, as seats would be distributed by agreement of the borough’s most influential families.
In burgage boroughs, only those who owned a particular property or plot of land could vote. These were the most open to corruption as one person could buy up enough of the property to buy the election. Most were therefore uncontested, and instead of elections, the aristocratic class nominated their family, friends and supporters to be the members of parliament.
The General Election of 1818 produced a victory with a reduced majority for Lord Liverpool’s government. The election took a month, although the hustings, where people voted, were not open every day during that period. There were 113,000 eligible voters in the whole country. Because most of the constituencies were already under the control of rich families, 260 of the 380 seats were uncontested, so even most of the qualified voters did not vote. However, this was, by historic terms, a very active election; it was the largest number of seats contested since 1734, which shows how little voting usually took place.
There was little election fever in Old Sarum, a deserted hill in Wiltshire, and a burgage borough in which only the ownership of property mattered – a good thing really, as the resident population was zero. It had been purchased in 1802 by the Earl of Caledon for £60,000, and he then used it to advance his own political interests. On earlier occasions he had given the seat to a government nominee in the hope of favourable treatment. In 1818 both of the successful candidates were his relatives and political allies. At the same time, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham had no MPs of their own.
How could this be justified? In March 1818, the Reverend Robert Fellows gave it a go. The duty of government was the public good, he argued; a vital part of the public good was the protection of property and prosperity. Giving the vote to the poor ‘dependent population’ would mean that those without property would decide what happened to wealth. As they were poor, they could not be wise or impartial. So it wasn’t a problem that six people chose two MPs in Old Sarum in 1818. What would happen if there was universal suffrage, the vote for all men? Fellowes was gloomy about the prospect, and used the three infamous ‘rotten borough’ as examples:
The boroughs of Old Sarum, St Mawe’s and Higham Ferrers would be transferred from their ancient possessors or from persons of high family and generous sentiments to be revived in forms of aggravated corruption and depravity in the district of some overgrown capitalist or occupier who had some hundreds of the dependent population at his beck.
Six or seven voters at Old Sarum may be thought too little to send two members to parliament but what is the difference as to the result whether the representative be nominated by two or three voters or by two or three thousand more than nine hundred out of each thousand of whom have no will of their own but are mere puppets.
Wisdom was not to be found in numbers. The ideal voter was the independently rich, as they could not be bought for money. It would be 200 years before MPs were paid a salary, and in the Regency period MPs had to have a substantial property qualification in order to stand.
The establishment view was that the ancient and randomly organised system provided virtual representation through the collective intelligence of the elite. Thomas Oldfield, who wrote a book, A key to the House of Commons, describing in detail the corruption of the 1818 election in each constituency, wondered why those who believed fervently in virtual representation were not content with virtual taxation as well; a properly representative parliament would not need the protection of a ring of soldiers when passing the Corn Law; and would not have done such a partisan thing in any case.1
There was a slightly more exciting election in Brecon, a Welsh borough returning one MP. It was not the result that made it exciting, but the fact that it was the first contested election since 1740. The Morgan family of Tredegar controlled the fifteen members of the corporation, who in turn elected seven voting freeman in a seat that contained 4,000 adults. In 1818 Walter Wilkins stood against the nominated George Gould Morgan and, predictably, lost seven to zero.2
In the growing industrial city of Manchester, some people could vote in the 1818 election, albeit not in the city itself. Manchester had been a much smaller place a few centuries earlier when the borough seats were created, so they had no direct representation in parliament – Manchester was represented by the Lancashire county constituency. Any voters, therefore, needed to meet the 40 shilling freeholder qualification – they needed to be a landowner; there were many traders and business people who did not meet this target and who would certainly have had a vote if Manchester had been a borough. Instead, affluent and entrepreneurial Mancunians had to travel to the county town of Lancaster to cast their vote.
Many voters around the country had to travel long distances on poor quality roads – indeed one of the perks of being an elector was toll-free travel on the turnpikes in order to cast a vote and return home. However, it would have been prudent for voters in Manchester to read the newspaper before starting the journey. They would have discovered that the Lancashire seat had already been divided up between the aristocratic Stanley family, the Earls of Derby, and major landowner Jack Blackburne. There was no contest. In reality, nobody in Manchester had a vote in the 1818 election.
In places where there was a contested election, it was commonplace to provide food and drink to first entertain and then persuade those whose vote was free from the control of a landlord. A wine merchant in Reading had published this advertisement in the local paper:
As there will be a general election shortly, you might perhaps think it is right to provide wines for the occasion; we therefore beg to mention that we can supply you with every kind of white wine.
It was a logical investment. Receiving hospitality was not illegal. All votes were declared openly. A vote was a form of property, and it made perfect sense to sweat your asset at election time. It could work out to be very expensive and it is clear why some people actually bought control of a rotten borough like Old Sarum or Brecon rather than buying the voters. It made economic sense.
Those who wished for parliamentary reform stood in the 1818 election, mostly for borough seats with enough independent voters to give them a chance. On 30 June, the Manchester Mercury bemoaned the character of the
reformers who were standing for election, some of whom, said the newspaper, you would not trust with sixpence, never mind the nation. Henry Hunt was standing for Westminster and the paper reported that ‘it was Gin and Beer all round for his supporters’ and that ‘they meddle little with wines, which they consider rather aristocratic’. It was a common quip of the age that general elections brought in more money for the tax collectors due to candidates buying alcohol to consolidate their support. It is to be hoped that Hunt did not spend as much money as the hostile newspapers reported, as he secured a mere eighty-four votes against his fellow reformer and sworn enemy Sir Francis Burdett who topped the poll with 5,238.
Hunt and Burdett were both meant to be on the same side. However, they disagreed with each other – something that both egotistical men found easy. Burdett wanted a uniform property qualification with a redistribution of seats. Hunt wanted universal suffrage – the vote for all men. Thirteen years later, when parliament was voting on a reform similar to the wishes of Burdett, Hunt was initially opposed to it, as the extension of the voting qualification was so modest.
The mostly biased press reported the 1818 Westminster election in great detail. It had a large electorate of skilled tradesmen, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and artisans who were willing to listen to radical ideas. It also had a large number of disenfranchised rowdy poor who were willing to riot.
It was almost a national campaign, with both sides sending out propaganda to newspapers to try to influence public opinion. Burdett was claimed (by hostile media) to be spending £3,000 a day. Burdett denied it. Money was certainly spent on a ‘rent-a-mob’ by both sides. These supporters were not necessarily voters themselves, but were paid to promote their candidates interests. Their role was to provide a visible presence in the streets, with a music band, banners, and libellous placards about their opponents. The voting took place in public and the mob would try to intimidate any opposition voters, who would cast their vote in public and therefore be vulnerable. Burdett’s supporters did all these things despite him being the most vocal proponent of parliamentary reform. Although apparently playing no part in the proceeding, Burdett seemed to travel every morning from his home in rural Wimbledon to St James to do nothing all day. The hostile press saw him as the mastermind behind the scenes.
There was a lot of mudslinging at the election and not all of it was metaphorical. When Burdett’s opponent, Murray Maxwell, decked out a mock boat full of supporters dressed as patriotic sailors, exploiting Maxwell’s heroic naval career, the boat was ambushed and pelted with mud and worse. Burdett supporters gained possession of the boat, untied the horses that were moving it, and dragged the boat in triumph to the hustings. When it arrived at the hustings they were misidentified as Maxwell supporters and pelted with cabbages. After that misunderstanding the mob broke up the boat into handy weapon-like staves and attacked Maxwell’s headquarters, using the wheels of the carriage as a battering ram. A riot started and the magistrates called out the dragoons. The Riot Act was read and ignored, and the soldiers were pelted with vegetable looted from Covent Garden carts. Disorder lasted all evening, and this was neither the first nor last time that there was violence in this constituency.
So, larger constituencies did not guarantee either more transparency or honesty – often the opposite was true. Some of the enemies of universal suffrage suggested that the so-called ‘democratic’ seats had some of the lowest and most reprehensible people and behaviour, and this was just a hint of the horrors that a more democratic constitution would provide. In the eyes of some, every election would be like Westminster if Hunt had his way, and he would get more than eighty-four votes.
A secret ballot would have ended much of the intimidation at elections. It would also have stopped landlords ordering their tenants to vote for a certain candidate. In contested elections, it would stop people selling their vote for beer and beef. The political establishment opposed the secret ballot – not only was it not English to hide your opinion, but a secret ballot would take away the legitimate influence of the aristocracy. It would also double the amount of corruption because it would enable people to take bribes from both sides. Another argument used was that if a ruffian or a villain was elected, it would be easy to track down those whose judgement was poor enough to vote for him by checking the poll books which listed who each elector voted for.
The results were often contested afterwards. There were election laws and they were regularly broken. No less than 40 of the 120 contested elections were the subject of a petition to the House of Commons after the 1818 election. Thirty-eight of them were declared to have some merit, and some MPs lost their seats.
Manasseh Lopes was one of the victims of the rules in 1818. He was, in the words of his radical opponents, a ‘boroughmonger’. Lopes was involved in manipulating the result in various boroughs, including Westbury, New Romney and Evesham. He had been ejected from Evesham in 1807 for bribery and in 1816 he attempted to buy the borough of Grampound in Cornwall, which became quite significant in the mid-sixteenth century when it was awarded two members of parliament. There were ten boroughs in Cornwall even smaller than Grampound, but none where the voters aggressively sold their votes to the highest bidder.
Lopes had, through an agent, tried to bribe forty-five of the voters and thought that this would be enough with an electorate of sixty. This was not a property transaction – these men had a vote by virtue of their status as freemen of the borough. His agent could not rustle up forty-five, so settled for about forty, whom he met in a hotel in Grampound, where the freemen asked for £50 and settled for £35 a vote. These were loans, claimed the defendant at the later trial, but it became clear that only men with votes were given money.
Lopes was not as discreet as other people who bought and sold seats, and the subterfuge came to the knowledge of an equally ambitious character, John Teed. Armed with a list of bribed electors, Teed attempted not to get justice, but to convince Lopes to share the two Grampound seats in exchange for his silence. Lopes refused. Teed and his supporters then waited until the 1818 election, when they caused a disturbance at the hustings. They used their list of bribed electors to challenge the voter William Allen and demand that he took the bribery oath, which he was not keen on doing because he had been bought for £35. Lopes’s two nominees were elected, and the defeated candidates petitioned the House of Commons on the basis of bribery.
Lopes’s defence tells us a lot about the state of the system. It went like this: if it was bribery, it happened two years before the election and a prosecution after such a lapse of time was unknown. In any case, there was no bribery, as none of the paperwork proved this. Teed himself was by no means an ‘unspotted champion of parliamentary purity’. Teed had been the MP for Grampound in 1808; he had tried to do a deal with Lopes, not tell the authorities. Lopes pointed out that if there was bribery (which of course there hadn’t been) it made the freemen of Grampound look dishonourable. He failed to mention that he had offered Teed £7,800 to make the problem go away after the election.
The jury took less than sixty seconds to find him guilty of bribery. He was later sentenced to a £10,000 fine and a two-year stretch in Exeter gaol. The thirty-five bribed electors were punished with three months in the much less salubrious Bodmin gaol. As Lopes started his sentence in November 1819, the government ordered that the £10,000 fine be paid immediately so that interest could accrue and bring the figure up to £11,000.
In a bad month for Lopes, a House of Commons report concluded that there was sufficient evidence that he had also bribed the freemen electors of Barnstaple, where he stood in 1818. Using the same modus operandi as in Grampound, he gave £3,000 to voters in exchange for their support using a local agent. When he was put on trial later in 1819, Lopes was found not guilty through lack of evidence.
He also had active control of the borough of Westbury, but had done this legally by buying property from their rightful owners, whereas in Grampound and Barnstaple he just seemed to bribe people,
which was illegal. In March 1819, more petitions were presented to the Commons. In Penryn – another borough that Lopes had dabbled in – there was clear evidence of voters being given money. Sir Frances Burdett, a keen reformer, argued: ‘corruption was so generally to be found in all boroughs, that he thought it would be a great injustice to think about disenfranchising Penryn…bribery is as notorious as the sun at noonday’.
The determination to prosecute Lopes while ignoring other people seemed to have a hint of anti-Semitism about it. His Jewish background and the very recent accumulation of his wealth through trade was well known. His conversion to Christianity and his election as MP for New Romsey a few months later were cynically commented on. In 1806 an attorney by the name of Dance received twelve months in Newgate for libelling Lopes with the phrase ‘Jew Baronet’– it clearly seemed to some that there was no such thing as effective Jewish assimilation. In 1819, when discussing Grampound, the radical Leigh Hunt suggested that Lopes’s background might have encouraged his prosecution.
Lopes’s sentence was respited in September 1820 after less than a year, and in November he was elected, legally, to be the MP for Westbury.
Lopes, the ultimate borough monger, may have done more for parliamentary reform than he intended. Grampound lost its two MPs and they were given to the county of Yorkshire although Lord John Russell, the Whig leader, wanted to give the seats to Manchester. In any case, the spell was broken and the constitution was clearly changeable. Eleven years later, in 1831, with the middle classes swelling and cities becoming even more important, Russell became Prime Minister. Once again, the curse of the Regency was maintained. Improvement was coming – just not yet.