A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The capital that radicals were able to make out of the Queen Caroline affair was short-lived. The Queen herself had no real commitment to reform, and the public, it seemed, quickly lost interest in her case once it became clear that the King would not be able to divorce her. Caroline’s triumph soon turned into humiliation. She was refused entry to George IV’s coronation on 21 July 1821 and, on being turned away from the Abbey, was jeered by the assembled crowd. A fortnight later she was taken seriously ill, and died on 7 August. Briefly, the Queen’s ‘trial’ had allowed radical writers and politicians to focus on familiar unifying themes: corruption and waste, as personified in the body of the dissolute King himself. In some ultra-radical circles, this had extended to arguments for doing away with the King altogether. However, following the ‘trial’ episode, the divisions between metropolitan radicals became more and more pronounced. Carlile and Hunt publicly traded shots, Carlile even repudiating the label ‘radical’:

  It is my intention to call upon every man who stiles himself a Reformer to come up to the Political Principles of Thomas Paine, as laid down in the Second Part of his ‘Rights of Man’. I know they are secretly admired by you all. I shall call upon you to substitute the word Republican for the unmeaning and hacknied word Radical … The boasted white hat [Hunt] teaches no useful principles. We will disavow all badges, and resort to the declaration of some well-defined and well understood principles. Badges are too often the converts of treachery.12

  Hunt, for his part, was increasingly turning his attention to business ventures, albeit ones with a radical tinge. He manufactured a ‘radical Breakfast powder’, a nutritious start to the day which had the benefit of being untaxed and therefore contributed nothing to the propping-up of ‘Old Corruption’. He also produced shoe-blacking adorned with the slogan ‘Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Ballot’. Burdett, who had been imprisoned for his condemnation of the actions of the yeomanry at Peterloo, directed his political efforts away from the cause of constitutional reform and towards Catholic emancipation. Cartwright, now into his eighties, was busying himself writing his last political will and testament, another lengthy exposition of England’s ‘Saxon’ liberties, The English Constitution Produced and Illustrated (1823). The similarly aged Thomas Jefferson wrote to Cartwright to congratulate him on his work, joking that they would soon have an eternity to discuss political reform together; Cartwright died on 23 September 1824. Some radicals rejected reform altogether. The publisher William Hone moved away from controversial works to focus on collections of folklore and natural history. Formerly a deist, in the 1830s he converted to evangelical Christianity.

  Increasingly concerned about the ‘despotism’ of the Tory administration and worried that without a change in the franchise they would never be able to retake power, some elements of the Whig Party did eventually move to a more committed attachment to limited electoral reform. J. G. Lambton, later Lord Privy Seal, wrote to his father-in-law Lord Grey that it was ‘insanity to think that we have any chance of turning the Ministers out while the House of Commons is constituted as it is’.13 In 1819, Lord John Russell successfully moved for the disenfranchisement of the rotten borough of Grampound, Cornwall. In 1821, he put forward proposals for limited reform that were rejected by the narrow margin of only 155 to 124, and the following year he presented a bolder scheme whereby 100 new members, 60 representing counties and 40 representing large towns, would be added to the House, while each of the 100 smallest boroughs would lose one of its two members. By this point, two leading Whig politicians, the Dukes of Devonshire and Grafton, had already declared their support for reform. Aside from the threat of government tyranny, the weakening of the cause of universal suffrage suggested that advocating reform would no longer mean opening the door for more radical constitutional change.

  Some of the arguments for limited reform in the 1820s were informed by the emerging political philosophy of utilitarianism, epitomised in the thought of Jeremy Bentham, who believed that the first principle of government should be to pursue the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. As he also believed that individuals were essentially self-interested, democratic reform was important in making the country’s governors accountable to the will of the majority. In his early, unpublished writings on reform from the 1790s, Bentham had, in fact, advocated a very extensive expansion of the franchise, even suggesting that women and former slaves should enjoy the vote: ‘As to the Negro and the Woman, were they by some strange accident to overcome the body of prejudice which combats their admission with so much force, there could not be a stronger proof of a degree of merit superior to any that was to be found among whites and among men.’14 In his Plan for Parliamentary Reform, written in 1809 and published in 1817, Bentham continued to argue for a broader franchise than most Whigs in Parliament would have been prepared to accept. He advocated annual parliaments, the secret ballot and a franchise of all literate males. He conceded that many women too were now literate, but still did not advocate their enfranchisement as it would have been too controversial at the time.

  But it was in the much watered-down form of James Mill’s Essay on Government (1820) that Bentham’s ideas reached their greatest audience. Here, the franchise was limited to male taxpayers over the age of forty, a form of suffrage which would give prominence to the middle classes, ‘the wisest part of the community’. Although utilitarianism essentially rejected both the idea of innate natural rights (an insupportable fiction, according to Bentham) and the notion of an ‘ancient constitution’, he appeared quite prepared to allow his ideas to be popularised in radical periodicals such as John Wade’s Gorgon, which he helped to fund, and Wooler’s Black Dwarf.15 Bentham was equally willing to allow authors to intersperse borrowings from his texts with references to Anglo-Saxon liberties. He collaborated with John Cartwright on works that bore the latter’s trademark faith in the rights gifted by the ‘ancient constitution’.16 Even Bentham’s intellectual disciple, Francis Place, spent considerable time researching parliamentary history, believing that many were ‘led more by authority than by reason’.17

  Bentham’s political philosophy was attractive to respectable reformers: he was not an advocate of direct, participatory democracy like Henry Hunt. For Bentham, the role of a free press and a broadened franchise was to give vent to public opinion, which would act as an important check on governmental corruption.18 Wade’s periodical, in particular, emphasised Bentham’s belief in the essentially parasitic nature of the landowning class – ‘they are in a word, idlers not labourers, not the many but the few’.19 These arguments appealed to middle-class, pro-reform merchants and industrialists such as Archibald Prentice, who promoted a bowdlerised version of Bentham’s beliefs in his Manchester Gazette.20 Benthamite arguments also fitted in with the dominance of Ricardian economic ideas, which claimed that it was vital to support trade and manufacturing to avoid the stagnation that was an ‘inevitable’ feature of primarily agricultural societies.21

  One significant impact of so-called ‘philosophical radicalism’ – indeed, perhaps the only meaningful victory for radicalism as a whole during the 1820s – can be attributed to the eventually successful campaign to repeal the Combination Acts. Orchestrated by the radical MP Joseph Hume inside Parliament and by Francis Place without, the campaign was not an attempt to reassert the right of working people to form trade unions (which may explain why Hume and Place were ultimately successful). In fact, the Benthamite Place viewed unions as a social evil, like employers’ cartels an unnecessary and damaging interference in the operation of the free market. He had argued in favour of the repeal of the paternalistic Tudor labour legislation, noting in the Statesman on 8 March 1815 that

  among the many calamitous circumstances arising from the want of a real Representation of the People … is to be reckoned the evil of excessive Legislation; or, in other words, the interference of Parliament in matters which cannot advantageously be regulated by law, and in which,
therefore, the exertions of individuals ought to be left free and unrestrained.22

  Place’s antipathy to unions was revealed fully in an 1825 letter to Burdett:

  Combinations will soon cease to exist. Men have been kept together for long periods only by the oppression of the laws; these being repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements them into masses, and they will fall to pieces … He knows nothing of the working people who can suppose that, when left at liberty to act for themselves, without being driven into permanent associations by the oppression of the laws, they will continue to contribute money for distant and doubtful experiments, for uncertain and precarious benefits.23

  Nonetheless, the work of Place and Hume allowed union organisers, most prominently John Gast, to begin working openly again for a general combination of trade organisations. By the late 1820s, Gast had established the first trade union paper, the Trades’ Newspaper, and successfully defended attacks on local friendly societies, which in turn helped provide the foundation for the new ‘cooperative movement’. At this stage, however, the ‘guild socialism’ of Robert Owen, the intellectual founder of the cooperative movement, remained anathema to most radicals, popular or otherwise. Owen, a Lanark mill owner who had introduced fairer working practices into his firm, including shops where employees gained a share of the profits, was viewed as a threat to individual self-reliance. T. J. Wooler described Owen’s plans for self-supporting communities established on the cooperative principle as an assault upon ‘those proud feelings of self-reliance and estimation, which in a sound and healthy state of things constitute the support of free states’.24 For most radicals, including the surviving Spenceans like Thomas Preston, social evils remained the creation of excessive taxation and the corrupt oligarchy that fed off it: they were not products of industrial capitalism itself.

  Although Lord Russell’s reform bills were a testimony to the growing impetus behind moderate reform, it was the contingency of Lord Liverpool’s resignation in 1827, as a result of a severe stroke, that opened the path for the ultimate success of limited reform. Following the brief premiership of Canning, the Duke of Wellington’s second ministry – appointed partly on the grounds of political neutrality – succeeded in alienating both liberal and Canningite Tories by refusing to transfer the seats of nearby East Retford to Birmingham, and Tory devotees of the established Church by conceding Catholic emancipation. These developments actually moved some Tories towards reform. The Marquess of Blandford made limited reform proposals in Parliament in February 1830, in the belief that anti-popish sentiment would help shore up the Anglican Church. Conversely, Catholic emancipation (the Catholic Relief Act was passed in April 1829) may have eased Whig anxieties about broadening the franchise: with this secured, they no longer had to worry about the threat of unleashing popular anti-Catholicism.

  Agitation within Parliament was accompanied by extensive reform activity outside, fed by public discontent arising from the severe economic recession that hit the country in 1829–30. After a period of relative stability (if not prosperity) for labourers in the late eighteenth century, the living standards of the lower classes in Britain had gone into a significant decline. If the nation avoided the mass starvation that occurred in Ireland, it was as much by luck as design. The people of mid-Victorian England were nonetheless noticeably undernourished compared to their predecessors: the average height of army recruits fell by some two inches after 1845 and did not recover to former levels until thirty years later.25 The massive increase in the nation’s population (from thirteen million in 1783 to nearly twenty-seven million by 1841) was a result of an increase in the birthrate, not a decline in the horrific levels of infant mortality. In some urban areas, such as Liverpool, the life expectancy of labourers at fifteen was less than half of what it had been for agricultural workers in 1450. In that city, many working families lived in dank cellars into which the effluent from communal privies freely flowed: one family’s bed was reported as precariously positioned over a four-foot ravine filled with human waste.26

  In January 1830, the Birmingham Political Union was established by the wealthy Tory industrialist Thomas Attwood. He strenuously avoided making any public commitment to universal suffrage, but he was successful nonetheless in gathering mass support for his campaign for limited electoral reform: by 1831 he was regularly addressing crowds numbering tens, even hundreds, of thousands. In the July and August 1830 elections after the death of George IV, the government was challenged in many constituencies and failed to strengthen its majority. In southern England, the ‘Captain Swing’ riots, a wave of rick-burning that bore comparison with the Luddite activity of the 1810s, created a very unsettled atmosphere. The government responded harshly against the rioters: Henry Cook of Micheldever in Hampshire, a lad of nineteen, was hanged for knocking the hat off the head of a member of the Barings banking family during an altercation.27

  The weakened Tory government, undermined further by the Prime Minister’s unadvisedly robust rejection of reform, lost a hostile vote on subjecting its civil list to public scrutiny, and Wellington was forced to resign in November 1830, to be replaced by the Whig Lord Grey, who publicly affirmed that reform would be a key priority for his ministry. In March 1831, Lord Russell introduced the first reform bill in the Commons, where, in a packed chamber, it passed its second reading by only one vote. However, the bill was amended in committee with a proviso that, against the wishes of government, retained the original number of MPs.

  Seeking a mandate for Russell’s original bill, Parliament was again dissolved. The general election in the spring of 1831 increased the Whig majority in the House and the reintroduced bill passed its second reading by a majority of 136, only to be rejected by the Lords in October. This affront to the cause of reform led to serious rioting in Derby, Nottingham – where the homes of the Duke of Nottingham and the Earl of Middleton were attacked – and Bristol, where the Bishop’s palace and Lord Mayor’s house were set on fire. There was a palpable sense that the outright rejection of reform would lead to revolution. Some advocates of reform realised this feeling was strategically useful. James Mill wrote, ‘The people … should appear to be ready and impatient to break out into action, without actually breaking out.’28 Mill’s comment echoed the thoughts of his mentor, Bentham, who also believed that the threat of popular violence could be a useful weapon in the battle for reform.29

  As chaos reigned outside Parliament, dissension ruled within. The failure of the bill in the Lords led to the resignation of Grey in May 1832. The King recalled Wellington, but with a commission to form a government committed to some degree of electoral reform, an undertaking that neither the Duke nor his Tory supporters felt able to meet. In the absence of an alternative, Grey returned to office, this time successfully persuading William IV to threaten the creation of new Whig peers if the Lords persisted in obstructing the bill. With success in the Upper House inevitable, the bill eventually passed into law in June 1832.

  Historians remain divided as to whether the Reform Act represents a political or constitutional watershed. The opinions of contemporaries reflected the continuities rather than the changes. The political diarist Charles Greville noted, ‘A Reformed Parliament turns out to be very much like every other Parliament … except that the Whigs have got possession of the power which the Tories have lost.’ John Cam Hobhouse, now a prominent Whig politician, claimed that Grey looked upon reform as ‘a mere trick of state for the preservation of power’. In crude terms, the Reform Act did expand the size of the electorate considerably, from around 400,000 potential electors to 656,000 (about one in five of the adult male population). This was not, though, a staggering advance for democracy, and in fact these male electors constituted a smaller proportion of the population than had enjoyed the vote in 1640.30 What is more, in eliminating the rotten boroughs, the 1832 Reform Act also largely swept away the broadly democratic ratepayer ‘scot and lot’ franchise that had existed in some thirty-seven boroughs, including seats
like Westminster that had been key battlegrounds for radical reformers. By opting for a £10 property qualification instead of a ratepayer franchise, the Reform Act actually disenfranchised large numbers of working-class men. Conversely, it enfranchised so-called ‘opulent serfs’, the £50 ‘tenants-at-will’ whose lack of security of land tenure made them easy targets for manipulation by landowners.

  Numerically, more could vote; but it was more of the wealthy, making the electoral system arguably less ‘democratic’.31 And it was not only men who suffered under the ‘Great’ Reform Act. For the first time, women were explicitly forbidden to vote in national elections and, after 1835, in local elections too. Hitherto, some female property holders had exercised the vote. Now they could not.

  There is no better illustration of the winners and losers under the act than in the contrasting fortunes of Henry Hunt and his Peterloo nemesis, Sir Hugh Hornby Birley, factory owner and leader of the Manchester Yeomanry. In 1830, Hunt had won the seat of Preston, a constituency with a broad ‘potwalloper’ (householder) franchise. As MP, he campaigned on an unashamedly populist, pro-working-class platform, attacking the Whig reform bill’s exclusive, property-based franchise and thereby earning the anger of some fellow radicals. He even presented a petition in favour of female suffrage in the Commons. Partly as a result of this uncompromising stance, Hunt lost his seat at the first elections held under the new system.32 The campaign also ruined his health and his wealth. He suffered a stroke in February 1835 and died soon after. Birley, on the other hand, was one of many wealthy businessmen and industrialists who were Tory in their political sympathies but who increasingly recognised the value of moderate reform as a means of ensuring that trade and manufacturing interests were represented at Westminster. It was through the efforts of Birley and his Tory colleagues that the seats of the two rotten boroughs of Grampound and Penryn were finally transferred to Manchester in 1832. (His son, also named Hugh, would serve as MP for Manchester between 1868 and 1883.) Birley made clear that he did all of this in the cause of business interests, not out of any regret for his actions against the ‘unrepresented people’ at Peterloo in 1819.