Chronology and voting data

The rest of this book examines the redrawing of England’s electoral map in 1832 and its electoral and political consequences. It identifies six types of constituency in England’s reformed electoral system (Table C.1). Chapter 5 focuses on two constituency types: ancient boroughs whose boundaries were extended to include their modern town and space for its future growth (modern town), and those whose parliamentary limits remained unchanged (unchanged borough). Chapter 6 explores a group of boroughs extended into their surrounding parish, or parishes, to ensure they contained 300 £10 householder voters after 1832 (multiple parish).¹ Chapter 7 discusses England’s new boroughs (new borough), and the final chapter assesses the construction of England’s reformed county map – where most counties were divided into two new geographic entities (divided county) and a small number remained unchanged (unchanged county). Each chapter scrutinises the consistency with which the boundary commission employed Drummond’s ‘scientific’ framework for establishing boundaries (see Chapters 3 and 4), and the role of the cabinet, parliamentarians and the public in effecting changes to these proposals once they were published. The chapters then provide a broad analysis of the electoral and political impact of England’s reformed electoral map between the first and second Reform Acts. This analysis draws from a newly developed dataset of electoral statistics, party labels and Commons voting records between 1832 and 1868, pre-existing constituency histories – including draft articles in the History of Parliament’s forthcoming Commons 1832–1868 – and newly completed case studies of constituencies that have not received historical treatment elsewhere.² Due to its complexity, and because it informs the analysis of all four chapters, the voting data is presented in this preliminary section to the second half of this book with a contextual explanation and guide to reading it.

Table C.1: England’s reformed constituency system and its boundary changes in 1832.

It is important to note that the local surveys, boundary proposals and policy decisions discussed in the following chapters were made between late August 1831, when the first visits to England’s boroughs were completed by the boundary commission, and the enactment of the 1832 Boundary Act for England and Wales on 11 July 1832. This work of electoral reform took place in three phases. The first was the compilation of initial proposals for England’s reformed constituency system between August and December 1831 outlined in the previous two chapters. The second was the preparation of boundary proposals for parliamentary review, which took place between late October 1831 and February 1832. The government had initially proposed that this work would be completed by a parliamentary commission. However, after the rejection of the second reform bill by the Lords in October 1831, and because of the unexpected speed with which the commission had completed its initial work, their proposals were subjected to full legislative review via a boundary bill. This coincided with the establishment of a small ‘sitting committee’ of the commission on 28 October in London, which consisted of Drummond, the Whig MP for Staffordshire, Edward Littleton, and the hydrographer of the navy, Francis Beaufort.³ This sitting committee reviewed every boundary proposal and maintained communication with the cabinet, who approved, or in a handful of cases, overrode individual proposals. The decisions of the sitting committee were published in the first draft of the boundary bill for England and Wales, introduced in the Commons on 16 February 1832. The final phase consisted of a parliamentary and public review of the commission’s proposals and their enactment by July 1832 via the 1832 Boundary Act for England and Wales and several clauses of the 1832 Reform Act for England and Wales. As the government had deliberately rejected the idea of public hearings to discuss boundary reform, parliamentary debate, local petitioning and private discussions between parliamentarians provided a means of ensuring that England’s reformed electoral map was agreed to, at least in part, via negotiated settlement.

The voting data used in this book draw from an analysis of over fifty votes in the Commons between 1833 and 1868 including twenty-four major divisions, and thirty-four votes on three policy issues: the corn laws, the ballot and the abolition of the compulsory church rate in England and Wales.⁴ The first and largest group of votes is a set of divisions and confidence votes that made, and broke, the fifteen different ministries that governed the UK between the passage of the 1832 reform legislation and the dissolution of parliament in 1868.⁵ These votes are detailed in Table C.2, which provides attendance records for each division; the UK and English percentage of support for Whig-Liberal administrations (or opposition to Conservative administrations) in each vote; and the numeric size of the pro-Whig-Liberal majority (or minority) for each vote.

Graphs C.1 and C.2 and their accompanying data tables (Tables C.3–C.4) provide a breakdown of these votes according to the type of boundary change that took place in England’s constituencies after 1832. Graph C.1 and Table C.3 compare the votes of MPs representing the four different types of borough (multiple parish, modern town, unchanged borough and new borough) in the reformed electoral system. Graph C.2 and Table C.4 compare the votes of MPs representing divided counties with those for unchanged counties and the English boroughs as a whole. The bars in each graph indicate the number of seats each type of constituency contributed to the overall vote in each division. A positive bar reflects a Whig-Liberal majority in any vote, and a negative bar reflects a Conservative majority. The lines indicate the percentage of Whig-Liberal support in each division for all MPs in attendance.

It will be useful to take Peel’s successful no confidence motion in the Whig Melbourne administration of 4 June 1841 as an example of how to read this data. Table C.2 confirms the vote had a 98.7 per cent attendance rate, with 49.9 per cent of UK MPs present (a minority of 1) and 45.8 per cent of English MPs present (a minority of 39) supporting Melbourne. Graph C.1 and Table C.3 reveal that among new borough MPs (denoted by a yellow bar) a majority of twenty-five supported the Melbourne administration. This amounted to 70.5 per cent of new borough MPs attending the division (denoted by a yellow line). By contrast only 45.5 per cent of MPs in attendance who represented multiple parish boroughs (denoted by a green line) were willing to support the Melbourne administration, meaning that this group of boroughs contributed a minority of seven votes to the overall total (denoted by a green bar).

Table C.2: Major Commons votes and confidence divisions 1833–68.

Table C.3: Support for Whig-Liberal administrations in English boroughs according to 1832 boundary changes, 1832–68. (seat count and percentage support).

Table C.4: Support for Whig-Liberal administrations in English counties and boroughs, 1832–68 (seat count and percentage support).

Graphs C.3–C.8 use the same template to provide a breakdown of voting by boundary change type between 1832 and 1868 in three specific policy areas – free trade in corn, the ballot and the abolition of English and Welsh church rates. These votes were chosen as they offer a basic indicator as to the economic, political and religious fault-lines in the Commons between 1832 and 1868, and because they were discussed and voted on consistently across successive parliaments. All three policy demands started the period as radical causes but experienced differing fortunes.

Initially a demand of radicals, most reformers and some Whigs during the 1830s, the corn laws were repealed by Peel’s Conservative ministry in 1846, following several years of extra-parliamentary campaigning by the Anti-Corn Law League, and counter-campaigning by protectionist societies, as well as famine in Ireland (Graphs C.3 and C.4 and Tables C.5 and C.6). Following repeal, protectionist MPs, seeking the reinstatement of the corn laws, were returned in large numbers at the 1847 and 1852 elections, but the primacy of free trade as a commercial policy was ultimately established by a series of votes during November and December 1852, which contributed to the eventual resignation of the protectionist-backed Derby ministry.

The Nonconformist demand for the abolition of compulsory church rates (Graphs C.5 and C.6 and Tables C.7 and C.8) in England and Wales was another issue that was voted on regularly throughout the entire period. Although Commons majorities could generally be secured for the abolition of church rates from 1856, a successful Conservative rearguard campaign in favour of their retention (and opposition to their abolition in the House of Lords), meant the compulsory church rate remained in place until 1868. While local custom meant that the enforcement of a compulsory church rate in England and Wales was effectively abolished in many areas prior to 1868, the church rate issue became a defining cause for most Whig-Liberals who saw abolition as a core requirement of religious freedom in a future, secular liberal state. For most Conservatives (and many moderate Whigs even until 1868) the defence of the church rate was seen as essential to warding off future disestablishment and maintaining the Anglican state.⁶

The introduction of the ballot (Graphs C.7 and C.8 and Tables C.9 and C.10), or secret voting, at parliamentary elections (eventually introduced in 1872) was a consistent demand of radicals, most reformers and some Whigs and Liberals throughout the period. As a public campaign (which held that secret voting would eliminate corrupt practices and illegitimate influence in elections), the ballot probably reached its popular zenith in the aftermath of the 1837 election. Fading as a popular single-issue during the 1840s, it was revived as a demand of radicals and some Liberals in the 1850s. However, as one historian has stated, by the 1860s the campaign for the ballot appeared to have ‘succumbed to the forces of neglect and indifference’, as well as the general acceptance (even among some advanced Liberals) that voting was a public rather than a private act.⁷

Table C.5: Support for corn law reform in English boroughs, 1834–52 (seat count and percentage support).

Table C.6: Support for corn law reform in English boroughs and counties, 1834–52.

Each of these confidence and policy votes has been used to compile two final graphs that provide a general indication of the partisanship of each type of constituency between 1832 and 1868. Graph C.9 and Table C.11 offer an overview of the average vote contribution of each type of English constituency in major confidence and policy divisions during the period.⁸ While the graph does not reflect how voting habits of MPs representing these constituencies changed over time, for most categories of constituency it offers a fairly accurate indicator as to how their MPs would have voted in a division on each issue during the period. It reveals that the counties and multiple parish boroughs, for instance, provided the primary source of support for Conservative governments and the policy status quo throughout the period, while new borough MPs were the most important sources of support for Whig-Liberal governments and small ‘l’ liberal policy reforms.

Graph C.10 and Table C.12 indicate the average vote contribution that each English constituency type would have delivered on all four policy areas, if each type of constituency had returned 100 members to Parliament. This data is useful for comparing how partisan each constituency type was. While the university seats only returned four members, these MPs were by far the most conservative (with a small ‘c’) type of MP. MPs for unchanged counties were fractionally more conservative than those for the divided counties, and those that represented multiple parish boroughs were moderately conservative. New boroughs returned by far the most liberal members, while all other ancient borough MPs as a cohort were moderately liberal.

Table C.7: Support for the abolition of church rates in English boroughs, 1834–66 (seat count and percentage support).

Table C.8: Support for abolition of church rates in English boroughs and counties, 1834–66.

Table C.9: Support for the ballot in English boroughs, 1833–66 (seat count and percentage support).

Table C.10: Support for the ballot in English boroughs and counties, 1833–66.

Table C.11: Average vote contribution of each English constituency type, 1832–68.

Table C.12: Relative vote contribution of each English constituency type, 1832–68 (if each returned 100 MPs).