The conservative defence of the unreformed electoral system

The principal argument in favour of the unreformed electoral system had been that it provided for a balanced representation of the political nation’s varied interests in the House of Commons.⁹ This theory had developed from the practical realities of early eighteenth-century government for court Whigs such as Robert Walpole and Henry Pelham, who recognised that England was becoming a commercial nation, and that the profits of the landed classes – the landed interest – were dependent on the success of merchants – the commercial (or trading) interest.¹⁰ They also accepted the need to defend the interests of legitimate financiers – the monied interest – to fund wars and preserve economic and political stability.¹¹ While the accepted means of affording representation to the monied interest was less clear, court Whig thought had started to rationalise the electoral system on the basis that it provided representation to landed property through knights of the shire returned by the counties, and to commercial property (and also, informally, financial property) through citizens and burgesses returned by the boroughs.¹² This rationale was contested by the country Tories and Whigs, who disputed the representative claims of the monied interest on account of the latter’s dependence on the court.¹³

By the end of the eighteenth century, this practical understanding of interest representation had been incorporated into a more complex theoretical defence of the electoral system based around virtual representation. The 1765 Stamp Act – an attempt to collect direct taxes from Britain’s North American colonies – provided the initial focal point for this development. The Act provoked widespread protest from American colonists, who were unwilling to consent to taxation from Westminster unless they were provided with direct representation in parliament.¹⁴ In response, supporters of the status quo reformulated an argument made in the seventeenth century by the Whig MP Algernon Sidney. Namely that an MP was not supposed to act as a representative for the specific needs of his locality, but as a representative for the interests of the entire nation.¹⁵ On this basis, contemporaries contended that the electoral system returned such a diverse composition of MPs – due to their varied property holdings, economic and occupational backgrounds and formal links to their constituency – that all geographic areas and economic interests were virtually represented in the Commons.¹⁶

As Paul Langford has demonstrated, when England’s legislative interests are considered, virtual representation was reasonably faithful to the practical operation of the eighteenth-century Commons. Most of the English population lived within a few miles of property owned by an MP, and the interests of unrepresented towns were met by MPs with business or property links to those towns, as well as county MPs. Even most borough MPs who had bought their seats generally attended to their constituency’s interests. For the American colonies, however, virtual representation stood on thin ground, as few MPs had any visible links to America.¹⁷ This theory was further complicated towards the end of the century by the contention of anti-reformers that the Commons needed to ensure the stability of the mixed constitution by providing representation for the nation’s three broad political interests – the monarchy, the aristocracy and the democracy. This argument developed out of a perception that the executive power of the Commons had increased at the expense of the Lords and the crown. In order to maintain cordial relations between the three branches of the constitution without formally increasing the powers of the Lords or the monarch, it was contended that the aristocracy and the crown needed to maintain some influence, through patronage, in the Commons.¹⁸

As virtual representation required MPs to act as representatives of the national interest, and because many MPs had links to a variety of social, economic and political interests, it was never the case that constituencies were assigned formal functions by proponents of the electoral system. As discussed above, the unreformed electoral system’s ‘absence of symmetry’ was understood as one of its strengths.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the need to defend the electoral system against domestic reformers from the 1770s did lead to the loose association of particular constituencies with certain socio-economic and political interests. Of the interest categories that were commonly employed during the eighteenth century, the landed interest was seen to be the most important. This was because contemporaries ascribed two meanings to the term. First, the landed interest could be used to describe MPs that represented the varied concerns of land and agriculture. In reality, as Julian Hoppit has shown, the landed interest, in this sense, should not be thought of as a coherent national interest group unless a common cause such as the land tax or the corn laws was found to unite the varied representatives of agriculture.²⁰ Second, the landed interest was used to describe large landowners, who, due to their property and wealth were believed to be the men best equipped to ensure that the Commons could legislate in the national interest. This idea, which had evolved from the country party ideology of the late seventeenth century, claimed that due to their property holdings and wealth, the landed interest held the greatest stake in the well-being of the country and were the only men with sufficient education, time and financial independence to ensure its disinterested governance.²¹

The counties were seen to be the natural power base for the landed interest, but as Robert Jenkinson, later the second earl of Liverpool and Tory prime minister between 1812 and 1827, explained during the debate on Charles Grey’s (later the second Earl Grey) 1793 motion for reform, it was also accepted that many large boroughs returned members for the landed interest. Jenkinson attributed this to the cost and status of county and large borough elections, and the necessity for successful candidates in both to have extensive local connections as well as ‘considerable property’.²² It was also observed by the MP for Stockbridge, John Luttrell, when defending the existing electoral system against the younger Pitt’s Yorkshire Association-inspired 1783 proposals to add up to 100 county members to the Commons, that additional representatives for the landed interest were not required as the wider borough system, due to its £300 a year property qualification, ensured that landowners enjoyed extensive opportunities to secure representation. By contrast, and in keeping with the activities of the Yorkshire Association over the previous four years, Pitt had urged the necessity of a massive increase in county MPs on account of their status as the class of men ‘least liable to the seduction of corrupt influence’, most able to act as a check on government extravagance and best placed to ensure that ‘the interests of the representatives and the represented were the same’.²³ This 1783 debate also revealed a populist strain in the conservative defence of the constitution. Both Luttrell, and the former prime minister, Lord North, argued that because of its wide representation, the landed interest was already perfectly balanced against the representation of the commercial and monied interests.²⁴ Both warned that by increasing the representation of county members, Pitt’s proposals would lead to a dangerous increase in the parliamentary influence of the aristocracy over the crown and the people (the democracy). In doing so, they equated the landed interest with the aristocracy, and the commercial interest with that of the people.²⁵

The other primary interest grouping believed to require Commons representation was the commercial interest. What contemporaries meant by the commercial interest is harder to define, as some like North, were happy to delineate it from the monied and landed interest, while others like Jenkinson, provided a wider definition of commercial which incorporated merchants, bankers, colonists and manufacturers. This difficulty in definition derived from the earlier distinction drawn by the court and country party between the validity of commercial and monied men, but also from the wide eighteenth-century definition of ‘merchant’ and the interconnection between MPs engaged in both commerce and finance. As John Brooke has demonstrated, ‘merchant’ in the eighteenth-century sense could mean ‘at one extreme small shopkeepers and at the other, wholesalers, exporters, bankers, and financiers’.²⁶ In this regard, the commercial interest might include the petitioners from the silk, woollen and linen interests (which could include manufacturers, merchants and labourers), who from the late seventeenth century had sought to capitalise on their collective identities as an ‘interest’ to gain influence over trade duties and tariffs.²⁷ This fluidity in the definition of ‘commercial’ was exacerbated by the fact that many of the upwards of sixty men per parliament between 1754 and 1790 who had connections with commerce, broadly defined, also had links to the landed and professional interests.²⁸ While no small shopkeepers were elected during the period, all other categories identified by Brooke did gain some representation in the Commons, and Gerrit Judd’s separate analysis reveals that 897 MPs (or one-sixth of the total of 5,034 MPs between 1734 and 1832) were associated with some form of commercial interest. These men constituted one in nine MPs prior to 1761. By 1832 they had increased to one in four, dispersed fairly evenly between the interests of banking, domestic trade and the colonies.²⁹ In addition, contemporaries also started referring to the geographic and business interests of towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds when employing the term commercial interest. Manufacturers connected to these towns tended to be subsumed into the commercial interest category, and it was only towards the beginning of the nineteenth century that the ‘manufacturing interest’ began to be consistently employed as a separate interest category.³⁰

This fluidity in definition transferred to understandings of how the commercial interest secured representation. A binary distinction of counties providing for the landed interest and boroughs providing for the commercial interest was often employed, but this did not account for the comparatively smaller number of commercial MPs. Some acknowledged that county MPs with links through property to commercial enterprise represented the commercial interest. In 1792, Jenkinson identified another, more precise means for how the commercial interest gained representation. He suggested that ‘commercial towns’, that is boroughs with a medium-sized electorate below that of a large town but above that of a nomination borough which tended to return the ‘professional interest’, were best fitted to provide representation for his wide definition of the commercial interest.³¹ There was probably some truth to Jenkinson’s observation, as by the end of the century provincial commercial men were regularly returned for medium-sized boroughs such as Canterbury or Cambridge, as well as the commercial ports of Bristol and Liverpool.³²

There was another component of the commercial interest (broadly defined) that became associated with a particular type of constituency – men who had lived and made their wealth in the East or West Indies and bought their way into parliament via small boroughs with a popular franchise. During the second half of the eighteenth century these boroughs became associated with the much-vilified nabobs – men who had made their fortunes in India before buying their way into parliament.³³ Historians have observed that, in real terms, the eighteenth-century controversy surrounding nabobs entering the Commons was exaggerated, given that they only amounted to, on average, twenty MPs per parliament between 1768 and 1831.³⁴ Furthermore, by the 1820s MPs associated with the East India interest were outnumbered by the over thirty MPs per parliament whose wealth derived primarily from the slave plantations of the Caribbean.³⁵ Supporters of the electoral system argued that, while regrettable, small boroughs allowed for the commercial interests of the East and West Indies, and by extension Britain’s wider imperial interests, to gain parliamentary representation. Accordingly, Francis Bassett, MP for Penryn, reasoned in 1783 that due to their long residence abroad, men associated with ‘the interests of Jamaica or Bengal’ required small boroughs as they did not have the necessary local connections in England to secure election without financial assistance.³⁶ In reality, East and West Indian merchants were supported by a much larger cast of MPs with economic interests in either the East India Company, or the West Indies as absentee landlords and slave-owners. Nicholas Draper, for instance, has recorded at least eighty MPs per parliament during the 1820s that had ‘recognizable linkages with the slave economy’ of the Caribbean.³⁷ As discussed below, parliamentary attempts to abolish the transatlantic slave trade from 1787 and the campaign to abolish slavery from 1823 meant that by the end of the eighteenth century, the pro-slavery, West India interest had supplanted the East India interest as the most vocal of these colonial lobby groups in the Commons.³⁸

The final interest category requiring representation was the professional, or official interest – lawyers, naval officers and army officers. These were men of business – such as the two Pitts, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox – that contemporaries contended were necessary to ensure the successful administration of government, but who required the patronage of a borough owner to be returned to parliament.³⁹ Perhaps self-interestedly then, Burke identified the need for the representation of professional interests as early as 1770, and in the same year the elder Pitt, then Lord Chatham, defended small boroughs with no discernible electorate when proposing an increase in county seats.⁴⁰ Importantly, the necessity for men of business to be returned to the Commons provided anti-reformers with a defence of the nomination borough. Again, it was Jenkinson, in 1792, who provided the most cogent rationale. Country gentlemen, or the landed interest, he contended, were too independent and busy with their estates to want to occupy themselves with the business of government, as were members for the commercial interest, who were too preoccupied with business and tended to enter parliament at too old an age to develop the expertise necessary for executive power. Furthermore, professional men acted as necessary mediators between the representatives of the landed and commercial interests. In doing so, he praised their recent influence in preventing either the landed or commercial interest from controlling corn law policy, and thus preventing ‘corn from either becoming so dear as to distress the poor, or from becoming so cheap as to affect agriculture’.⁴¹

By the end of the eighteenth century these arguments had contributed to a conservative defence of the constitution that celebrated the practical efficiency of the representative system against the theoretical complaints of reformers. No other system, it was argued, could provide for as balanced a representation of the nation’s varied interests in the Commons, and thus such good government. The apparent virtue of the existing representative system was underlined by the lack of extra-parliamentary petitioning from unrepresented towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, and the general prosperity of the nation in contrast to its European neighbours.⁴² Anti-reformers continued to make this argument in defence of the ancient electoral system throughout debates on the reform bill between 1831 and 1832.⁴³ However, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century a subtle, but important shift in the categories of interest that were discussed in parliament took place. These shifts, as well as an explosion in the frequency with which the nation’s interests were discussed during the 1820s, provided Whig reformers with a means of challenging the eighteenth-century defence of the electoral system on its own terms.

The shifting parliamentary language of interests, 1774–1832

This section uses a linguistic analysis of parliamentary debates to explore shifts in the types of interest discussed by parliamentarians between 1774 and 1868, with a particular focus on the period preceding the 1832 reform legislation. The primary analysis was completed using the text-mining tool CasualConc and is based on a new corpus of Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates between 1774 and 1803 and Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates between 1803 and 1868.⁴⁴ The analysis has been supplemented with a categorisation of speakers and debate topics between 1803 and 1832, completed on a complementary dataset extracted from the Hansard at Huddersfield web resource.⁴⁵ The analysis was completed to help answer several questions about the parliamentary discussion of interests. Namely, what interest groups did parliamentarians discuss prior to the introduction of the 1832 reform legislation, how often did they discuss them and in what policy contexts? Did the meaning of interest categories, and the context in which they were debated, change over time? And finally, were ‘interests’ a universal aspect of political language, or was discussion about particular interests restricted to parliamentarians concerned with specific policy areas?

This analysis does not claim to provide an exact indicator as to the frequency with which individual terms were referred to in parliament: no textual analysis using the sources available to historians could. Cobbett and Hansard did not publish every parliamentary debate (particularly prior to 1803 when only major debates were recorded in Cobbett, a practice that only decreased gradually in Hansard); speeches were not required to be recorded verbatim; and short-hand techniques and the physical environments used by parliamentary reporters were still embryonic.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, steps have been taken to ensure this analysis is as accurate as possible. First, 1774 has been taken as a starting point as the coverage of debates for the preceding parliaments is not extensive enough – three volumes of Cobbett cover the period 1753–74, whereas the 1774–80 parliament is covered by over four volumes. Second, the smaller coverage of debates in the earlier period (the 1774 corpus contains 53,267 words per month, the 1865 corpus 682,628) has been compensated for by providing a relative figure for how often a term was recorded in parliament. This figure is based on the frequency that a term was used in relation to the word count of that parliament’s corpus and uses the average word count per day for the period 1830–68 as a base line for the frequency of a phrase being recorded once a day.⁴⁷ Third, the data has been compiled using ‘concordance’, ‘cluster’ and ‘collocation’ analyses for the words ‘interest’ and ‘interests’. This means that instead of just completing a search for the ‘manufacturing interest’, phrases that were commonly used together such as ‘the commercial, manufacturing and landed interests’ have been counted. The use of concordance and collocation techniques also ensured that variations in how reporters recorded an interest category have been taken into account. For example, this allowed phrases such as ‘the interests of the West Indian colonists’ or the ‘interests of agriculturists’ to be counted in the categories of ‘West Indian interest’ and ‘agricultural interest’ respectively. And, finally, manual checks have been completed on phrases that contained different uses of the word ‘interest’. For example, when parliamentarians referred to the monetary interest rate made on a product by stating ‘banking interest’ or the rate of ‘East Indian interest’, neither were counted in the respective categories.⁴⁸

Table 1.1 and Graph 1.1 list the eleven most discussed interest groups in each parliament between 1774 and 1868 and the changing frequency with which parliamentarians referred to each interest.⁴⁹ In order of their overall use throughout the period these interests were the: commercial interest; landed interest; agricultural interest; manufacturing interest; Church interest; shipping interest; West India interest; colonial interest; East India interest; monied interest; and Catholic interest (with discussion of the latter four categories being minimal).⁵⁰ The analysis reveals a substantial growth in the parliamentary discussion of interests in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, particularly from 1820. This discussion peaked during the 1826 and 1830 parliaments, when MPs and peers were reported to have mentioned one of the eleven primary interest groupings, on average, between seven or eight times a day. After the 1832 Reform Act interests continued to be discussed up to four to six times a day before reducing to pre-1820 levels from 1852. To provide some perspective, the general interest phrases of the ‘national interest’ and the ‘interest(s) of empire’ were recorded around once or twice a fortnight throughout the entire period (with the latter category experiencing some notable jumps during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars).

In the three decades before the 1832 Reform Act this language of interests was employed by an increasing number of parliamentarians from across the political spectrum. Forty-nine parliamentarians (41 MPs and 8 peers) mentioned one of the main interest categories identified above during the 1802–6 parliament. During the 1820–26 parliament this had increased to 213 parliamentarians (170 MPs and 43 peers). During the much shorter 1831–2 parliament, 201 different speakers (162 MPs, 39 peers) mentioned an interest. As Table 1.2 reveals, around two to three speakers mentioned an interest for each month of the 1802, 1806, 1807 and 1812 parliaments, five to seven speakers for each month of the 1818, 1820 and 1826 parliaments, and around fifteen to seventeen speakers for each month of the 1830 and 1831 parliaments. Table 1.3, which lists the five speakers who mentioned interests most frequently during each parliament between 1820 and 1832, indicates how widespread the language of interests was. Interests were discussed by the most vocal government ministers of the period (both Whig and Tory) as well as those in charge of setting economic policy at the board of trade, but also by radical MPs such as Joseph Hume and Francis Burdett, leading members of the Whig opposition during the 1820s, as well as some of the most vocal anti-reformers in both the Commons and the Lords between 1830 and 1832.

Table 1.2: Number of parliamentarians to mention an ‘interest’ per parliament, 1802–32.

Table 1.3: Five speakers that mentioned interests the most per parliament, 1820–32.

The two interests that remained a consistent aspect of parliamentary discussion throughout the entire period were the commercial and the landed interest. The landed interest was deployed broadly to signify the interests of those connected with the land – landowners, farmers and agricultural labourers. On a second level it was used to denote the financial interests of landed property – in contrast to financial or commercial property – and on a third, a category of parliamentarians whose financial independence and aristocratic upbringing led them to believe they were the best suited to governing the country. It was the first, broad, meaning of the term that was deployed most frequently, and from which the more factional notion of the ‘agricultural interest’ developed by the 1820s. The terms ‘landed’ and ‘agricultural interest’ were often interchangeable throughout the period, depending on who was speaking, and which reporter was recording them, as later sections of this chapter demonstrate. As a result, debates that led to a rise in discussion of the agricultural interest also contributed to increased discussion of the landed interest.

The first time that the agricultural interest, rather than just the landed interest, was referred to with any consistency was during debates over successive sugar distillation bills between 1808 and 1811, which proposed to afford a level of temporary tariff protection to West Indian plantation owners by placing restrictions on the use of British grain. Those opposed to the idea argued that the proposals would punish British farmers – the agricultural interest – while rewarding the speculation of West Indian planters.⁵¹ From 1814 reference to the agricultural interest increased steadily due to the debates that preceded the passage of the 1815 Importation Act (the corn laws), during which the agricultural interest came to be defined as landowners, farmers and agricultural labourers in need of protection from cheap foreign corn, usually in contrast to consumers or workers associated with the manufacturing or commercial interests that, opponents of the bill argued, might suffer from higher bread prices. This was a debate that defined British politics over the subsequent three decades, and prompted continued reference to the agricultural and landed interest, particularly surrounding the corn law reforms of 1822 and 1828.⁵² As indicated in Table 1.4, reference to the agricultural interest was compounded by agricultural distress during the winters of 1819–20, 1821–2, 1825–6 and 1829–30, when calls for some form of legislative relief – via increased protection, or currency reform – for agricultural districts hit by poor harvests were discussed, in particular, during debates over the 1819, 1822, 1826 and 1830 King’s speeches and budgets.⁵³ Debate on distress also prompted an increased deployment of the more specific definition of the landed interest that denoted the wealth of landed property. This was due to complaints from landowners about the poor laws and land tax during periods of distress – the beneficiaries of which were often considered to be farmers and agricultural labourers.⁵⁴ However, it was fundholders (who were sometimes referred to as the ‘funded interest’ but usually the monied interest) who became the target of the landed interest’s grievances in these instances, arguing that those that profited from holding funds in the national debt should be required to make payments to the poor rates.⁵⁵

Like the landed interest, the commercial interest was often used by politicians, and recorded by reporters, interchangeably with subsidiary interest categories – the manufacturing interest, the shipping interest and sometimes the West India or East India interest, particularly when these interests could be defined against the landed or agricultural interest. However, by the 1820s these interests were being discussed frequently in their own right, as certain commercial sectors made their own legislative demands.

Table 1.4: References to ‘agricultural interest’ by debate topic, 1802–32.

The issue of distress, tentative steps towards freer trade from 1819 in a range of manufacturing sectors and the corn laws were primarily responsible for the rise in the use of the term ‘manufacturing interest’. The first major development in this regard came in 1812 after a winter of distress prompted a petitioning campaign from British towns for the removal of the East India Company’s monopoly. The manufacturing interest in this instance was also commonly deployed alongside the shipping interest, and its wider umbrella term the commercial interest, in an array of petitions that called for the opening up of closed colonial markets as a means of increasing profits for domestic manufacturing and port towns.⁵⁶ The manufacturing interest then came to be defined in opposition to the landed and agricultural interest during debates over the corn laws from 1814, as well as tariff reform in various manufacturing sectors, and periods of urban distress in 1819–20, 1825–6 and 1829–30. Certain MPs, often prompted by petitioning, called for the government to legislate in the interests of manufacturers as they were perceived to have done for the agricultural interest in 1815 with the corn laws, either by introducing favourable protective duties for certain industries, introducing currency or banking reform, or reducing or removing protective tariffs on corn.⁵⁷

The rise in the use of the term ‘shipping interest’ followed a similar trajectory, particularly surrounding the distress experienced in port towns in 1811–12, 1825–6 and 1829–30. Unlike the manufacturing interest, the shipping interest also came to be defined in reference to episodic debates over proposed alterations to the navigation laws, which since the seventeenth century had restricted British colonies from trading with other nations. These debates took place at regular intervals from 1806: first, over proposals to allow America to trade with the West Indies, then in 1821 over the timber duties, again in 1823 over the reciprocity of duties bill, and finally in 1826–8 when petitioners from various port towns called for amendments to the navigation laws to support British shipping against foreign competition.⁵⁸

The other interest category that saw a notable rise in its use between 1820 and 1832 was the West India interest. The West India interest had been one of the few categories to appear consistently in parliamentary discussion for a period prior to the 1820s. Its use originated among those seeking to defend West Indian planters during debates over the abolition of the slave trade between 1789 and 1806.⁵⁹ After a lull in its use during the 1810s, reference to the West India interest increased gradually throughout the 1820s and during the 1830 parliament was mentioned around once a day. As a number of historians have demonstrated, the overarching issue that defined the West India ‘interest’ in parliament during the 1820s was the need to defend slavery.⁶⁰ Specific debates over slavery in 1824, 1826 and 1831 do account for some references to the West India interest during the period. However, the chief reason for the rise in the use of the term was discussion from 1821 of the sugar duties, which allowed West Indian planters to pay a lower duty on their slave-grown sugar than East Indian and non-colonial planters.⁶¹ Distress in the West Indies during the early part of 1830, which was accompanied by calls for a reduction of sugar duties for West Indian exporters, then led to a proliferation in the use of the term between 1830 and 1832.

The final interest category that saw a marked increase in its use during the 1820s was the Church interest. The category was usually raised by parliamentarians discussing ‘the interests of the [established] Church’, primarily in opposition to the Catholic Church in Ireland (or the ‘Catholic interest’) but also in reaction to the provision of constitutional rights for Nonconformists. The Church interest was referred to around once a fortnight until the 1826 parliament, when its use proliferated during debates over the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, proposals for Catholic emancipation in 1829, and from 1830 in discussion over tithes in Ireland. Reflecting a wider trend with regard to other interest categories, by the end of the 1820s the Church interest was also being discussed in the context of debates on parliamentary reform.

A breakdown of the types of parliamentary debate where the major interests were discussed between 1802 and 1832 is provided in Table 1.5. As might be expected, between 1806 and 1830 ‘interests’ were discussed primarily during debates on fiscal and monetary policy (particularly protective duties) and domestic distress. This peaked during the 1820 parliament, when over 80 per cent of all recorded mentions of an interest came during debate on these two topics. Between 1826 and 1832, however, the issue of parliamentary reform gradually became the main topic of debate during which ‘interests’ were discussed. This shift took place because increasing numbers of parliamentarians, from across the political spectrum, started to view parliamentary reform – chiefly the redistribution of seats and redrawing of boundaries – as a means of rebalancing the parliamentary representation of the nation’s newly complex, and combative, interests.

Minor reform, interests and the moderate Whig case for reform

Between 1771 and 1804, the boundaries of three parliamentary boroughs were extended into their surrounding hundreds as a punishment for electoral corruption. In 1771 parliament sought to purify the electorate of New Shoreham by adding all 40S. freeholders in the surrounding rape of Bramber to the borough. In 1782 a similar reform took place in Cricklade. By the early nineteenth century contemporaries had accepted that these reforms had placed both boroughs in the control of local country gentlemen.⁶² With this knowledge, in 1804 Lord Grenville and the marquess of Buckingham successfully advocated for a similar extension to the borough of Aylesbury, where they were landowners.⁶³ As John Cannon has suggested, by 1804, debates over Aylesbury revealed that an increasing number of country gentlemen were beginning to realise the benefits of reforming a borough by throwing it into its hundreds. As well as strengthening the representation of the landed interest, it was seen as a means of staving off radical calls for reform.⁶⁴ In 1804, failed opposition to the reform of Aylesbury was based on the argument that, as only 200 of the borough’s 500 potwalloper voters had been proven corrupt, swamping the borough with 40S. freeholders threatened to deprive the innocent majority of their ancient rights.⁶⁵ In contrast with later years, no parliamentarian suggested that it was more appropriate to transfer Aylesbury’s franchise to one of England’s unrepresented towns.⁶⁶

Table 1.5: Discussion of major interests by category of parliamentary debate.

Between 1813 and 1830 debates over proposals to reform Helston, Penryn, Barnstaple, Grampound, East Retford and Evesham revealed a growing desire for an alternative means of dealing with electoral corruption, which addressed calls for the representation of populous towns and re-balanced the representation of the nation’s interests. Ultimately, only two boroughs were reformed. In 1821 Grampound was disfranchised, and its seats were transferred to the county of Yorkshire, while in 1830 East Retford was extended into its surrounding hundred. Debates over both the successful and unsuccessful proposals were nonetheless significant. As well as shaping the language with which contemporaries discussed the representative system, they shifted understandings about the extent to which the borough and county constituency system needed to be amended to accommodate the demographic transformation of the previous half-century and the political and socio-economic tensions of the post-Napoleonic period.

In consecutive years between 1813 and 1816, the Commons approved bills to throw the borough of Helston into its surrounding hundreds, all of which were rejected by the Lords due to a lack of official enquiry into corruption in the borough.⁶⁷ The debates on these failed bills revealed a growing discontent with throwing a borough into its hundreds, not just among those who opposed reform, but importantly, among those in favour of reform. Thomas Brand, a Whig who had proposed his own reform schemes in 1810 and 1812, expressed agreement that Helston should be thrown into its hundreds, but called for the franchise of subsequent Cornish boroughs found guilty of corruption to be transferred to various hundreds in the under-represented Yorkshire.⁶⁸ In the same debate, several MPs also advocated the transfer of Helston’s seats to Yorkshire or ‘some more populous district’. In contrast to later years, however, these suggestions were not legitimised explicitly around the idea that seat redistribution could provide representation to the under-represented manufacturing or commercial interests.⁶⁹

Debate over proposals to reform Penryn, Barnstaple and Grampound between 1819 and 1821 led to the first formal calls for the franchise of corrupt boroughs to be redistributed to England’s three most populous unrepresented towns – Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. It was here that parliamentarians started to appropriate the evolving language of interests into their arguments over minor reform. Those that supported the throwing of Barnstaple and Penryn into their surrounding hundreds started to explicitly formulate the view that minor reform provided a means of stabilising the Commons by increasing the representation of the landed or agricultural interest.⁷⁰ The ‘respected country gentleman’ Nicolson Calvert, MP for Hertford, supported the 1819 Barnstaple bill on this basis, arguing that it provided an opportunity to bolster the ‘agricultural interest’ and ‘landed interest’ (terms he used interchangeably), which he contended only returned twenty MPs.⁷¹ This was because, in his opinion, ‘most of the members from the agricultural counties’ were returned by the influence of the ‘trading interest’ (as Hansard recorded it) or the ‘trading classes’ (according to The Times).⁷² This rationale was based on two concurrent developments. First, the emerging concern among country gentlemen that the cost of county elections and the size of county electorates, which contained large unrepresented town populations, had prevented traditional, agricultural-focused landowners from standing for election in the counties.⁷³ And second, an increase in the number of MPs associated with commercial interests, broadly defined, from one in nine MPs during the middle of the eighteenth century, to one in four by 1818.⁷⁴

In contrast with Calvert, several MPs objected to proposals to extend Penryn and Barnstaple into their surrounding hundreds on the basis that it would provide the landed, or agricultural interest with too much power in the Commons. Alderman Heygate, an independent reformer returned for the Tory interest in Sudbury, opposed throwing Barnstaple into its hundreds on the basis that it reflected a ‘fashionable … preference’ among parliamentarians to increase the powers of the ‘landed interest’ (The Times) or the ‘interests … of agriculture’ (Hansard) at the expense of ‘the trading and commercial interest’ (Hansard) or ‘manufacturing and commercial interest’ (Morning Post).⁷⁵ The radical MP for Colchester, Daniel Whittle Harvey, employed an alternative understanding of the landed interest when opposing the proposals, equating it with the aristocratic, rather than the agricultural interest. He argued that the addition of 800 40S. freeholders from the surrounding countryside into what had previously been a borough elected by 500 freemen was an attempt to reduce the ‘democratic interest’ in the Commons.⁷⁶ By extending Barnstaple into its surrounding hundreds, he contended the borough would be ‘thrown into the power of some few persons of the landed proprietors in the neighbourhood’, which would only serve to increase the power of ‘the aristocracy and landed interest of the country’.⁷⁷ Both Heygate and Harvey opposed the extension of Barnstaple into its hundreds on the basis that it would increase the landed interest’s power; however, one understood the landed interest to be agricultural (in economic competition with the manufacturing and commercial interest) and the other aristocratic (in political competition with the democratic interest).

While suggestions were made during 1819 that Penryn and Barnstaple’s seats should be redistributed to an unrepresented town, these proposals did not appear in draft legislation.⁷⁸ However, in the aftermath of that summer’s reform agitations and the Peterloo Massacre, in December 1819, the Whig MP for Tavistock, Lord John Russell proposed that Grampound’s seats, and all future boroughs proven to be corrupt, be transferred to populous unrepresented towns, and then subsequently the country’s largest counties.⁷⁹ As the Cornish hundreds surrounding Grampound were already littered with boroughs, an alternative recipient for Grampound’s seats had to be identified when the borough was proven to be corrupt.⁸⁰ Russell proposed to transfer Grampound’s seats to Leeds. In contrast with debates over Helston, Barnstaple and Penryn, Russell’s advocacy for the reform of Grampound was structured around an embryonic Whig rationale for reform that relied on constitutional historicism, a call for the rebalancing of interests in the Commons in order that it better represented ‘the people’, and a wealth of statistical information revealing the extent of distortion in the electoral system.⁸¹ Like James Mackintosh, the Whig MP for Knaresborough, who a year earlier had written a significant essay opposing the ‘uniformity’ that would arise from universal suffrage, Russell maintained his support for the ‘mirroring tradition’ of interest representation that underpinned the existing electoral system.⁸² Building on Mackintosh’s vague indication of support for some form of moderate reform, Russell identified how practical reform might be effected within the existing structures of the constitution – an argument designed to appeal more to supporters of the existing representative system than its radical opponents.

In doing so, Russell advised the Commons that until the reign of Charles II, the electoral system had adapted to the rise and decline of England’s towns – the Crown had historically issued writs to towns as they ‘rose into importance’, and removed them when they fell into ‘poverty and insignificance’.⁸³ The cessation of this practice, he continued, had led to the rise of boroughs that were bought and sold by the Treasury to the highest bidder, resulting in a Commons full of men unable, or unwilling, to engage in parliamentary discussion, and who were slavish supporters of Tory ministries and the crown.⁸⁴ Russell warned that unless the historic practice of adaptation was resumed, parliament would deteriorate further, ‘like the temples of Rome in her last days of empire’.⁸⁵ The remedy, as outlined in 1821 in the first edition of his History of the English Constitution, was a ‘new map of representation’ that ensured the nation’s varied interests were ‘vigilantly guarded in the legislature’.⁸⁶ For Russell, to ensure continuing public confidence in the constitution:

the representative body should be the image of the represented: not that it should represent property only, or multitude only, or farmers, or merchants or manufacturers; not that it should govern with the pride of an insulated aristocracy, or be carried to and fro by the breath of transient popularity; but it should unite somewhat of all these things, and blend these various colours into one agreeable picture.⁸⁷

While Russell accepted that the unreformed electoral system provided each interest with some form of representation, in 1819 he warned that the interests most in need of increased representation were those associated with England’s northern and midland manufacturing towns. The ongoing cases of corruption in existing boroughs provided a means of gradually remodelling England’s electoral map – and for Russell, towns like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Halifax and Sheffield were the most deserving recipients. According to Russell, not only had the populations of such towns risen exponentially since the late eighteenth century (for instance, Manchester had risen in population from 23,000 in 1778 to 110,000 by 1819), but more importantly, the contribution of each town’s manufacturing economies to the nation was indisputable. Although these towns shared in the return of county members for Lancashire, Yorkshire or Warwickshire, Russell felt their economic significance made it inappropriate that county MPs provide their sole means of representation. In so arguing, Russell defined the manufacturing interest of a town like Manchester or Leeds. Although county MPs were skilled, they lacked the knowledge:

for stating the grievances and the wants of manufacturers. And when we consider how many questions relating to trade, to the poor-laws, to the laws of combination, and of particular taxes, deeply affect the manufacturers, we cannot but allow the justice of their desire to be represented.⁸⁸

Based on this rationale, Russell made the ideologically important case for the transfer of Grampound’s seats to Leeds in 1819, 1820 and 1821. This argument was reiterated in the first edition of his History and, following the engagement of philosophic Whig thinkers such as Mackintosh, Jeffrey and Creevey, developed into the basis of the Whig rationale for reform by November 1830.⁸⁹

Although Russell’s attempts to transfer Grampound’s seats to Leeds failed, his rationale convinced a number of men, from a range of political backgrounds, over the next decade, that England’s manufacturing districts required representation. MPs did not necessarily have to swallow Russell’s rationale entirely for it to have some impact on their thinking. In 1820 Russell’s use of population data was still too radical for the Surrey MP and advocate of the agricultural interest John Holme Sumner, who argued that ‘the principle of representation should rest upon … property, and not upon that of population, as the modern reformers so clamorously contended’.⁹⁰ However, Sumner conceded that Yorkshire’s manufacturing interests (of which Leeds was a constituent part) required additional representation, and supported a suggestion that Grampound’s seats be used to increase Yorkshire’s representation to four seats. This would mean ‘two members for the West Riding would be returned by the manufacturing interest, while … the members for the other Ridings would be returned by the agricultural or landed interest’.⁹¹

If Sumner’s view signalled a somewhat hesitant acceptance of the need for an increased representation of the manufacturing interests, then the conversion of three men – John Wilson Croker, a Tory cabinet minister who would later be one of the reform bill’s most vehement opponents; the Canningite, John Ward (later the first earl of Dudley), who had hitherto been a consistent opponent of radical and moderate parliamentary reform; and the Whig Viscount Milton, who in 1812 had argued against reform on the basis that ‘the great advantage of the present system was, that there could be found no description of persons in the country who were not represented’ – revealed an even more marked shift in moderate opinion.⁹²

In 1820 Croker, then secretary to the admiralty, sought to halt the prime minister, Liverpool’s attempts to assign Grampound’s seats to Yorkshire instead of Leeds. In contrast with Sumner, who favoured dividing Yorkshire into its manufacturing and agricultural ridings, Liverpool had preferred that Yorkshire, as a whole, elect four MPs. He hoped that, while this would increase the indirect representation of several manufacturing towns in the county, it would also lead to the return of more members from the landed interest.⁹³ According to Croker’s memoirs, he almost persuaded Liverpool’s cabinet to go one step further than Russell, and provide Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield with the seats of corrupt boroughs – a move he hoped would stave off future calls for radical reform.⁹⁴ Croker’s attempts to persuade the cabinet failed, however, and Liverpool’s amendment to Russell’s 1821 bill transferred Grampound’s seats to Yorkshire.⁹⁵

Even though Croker supported the enfranchisement of some towns, he claimed that this stance was consistent with his position as an ‘anti-reformer’.⁹⁶ This view was also held by Ward, who stood to inherit extensive coal and limestone mines in the rapidly industrialising counties of Staffordshire and Worcestershire.⁹⁷ Ward confessed his preference for transferring Grampound’s seats to Leeds, but in doing so sought to disassociate himself entirely from ‘giving a pledge to what was called parliamentary reform’.⁹⁸ When speaking in favour of the enfranchisement of Leeds in 1821, Ward congratulated Russell for his ‘patriotic excavations’⁹⁹ of constitutional precedent and stated that ‘within the last few years, many great interests had grown up in the state’.¹⁰⁰ As a result the ‘great defect in our constitution … [was] that our extensive manufacturing towns were not represented’.¹⁰¹ At various points in this speech, and depending on which record is consulted, Ward referred to manufacturing towns as ‘commercial towns’, with the potential to represent ‘commercial interests’, as well as ‘manufacturing interests’.¹⁰² Like Russell, he maintained that while county members were the most respectable MPs, ‘landed proprietors’ and ‘country gentlemen’ were not ‘the most fitted by habits and education to manage the intricate and complicated business of a manufacturing community’¹⁰³ [or ‘the interests of commerce and manufacture’ (Morning Post), or ‘all those complicated but important commercial details and inquiries’ (The Times)].¹⁰⁴ By framing proposed alterations to the electoral system within the established language of interest balancing, reformers like Russell had provided politicians still opposed to the idea of wholesale parliamentary reform like Ward and Croker with an acceptable means of rationalising ‘practical improvement’ to England’s electoral map.¹⁰⁵

With the case for enfranchising Leeds seemingly convincingly made, it came as a regrettable discovery to another recent convert to the cause in May 1821 that Yorkshire was to gain Grampound’s seats. As Ellis Wasson has shown, the Whig Viscount Milton had remained a vehement supporter of the electoral system until at least 1817. There were multiple reasons for his conversion to reform by 1821, and Wasson has argued that the perception of despotic government policy after 1815, especially in response to Peterloo and the Queen Caroline affair, was pivotal in changing his views.¹⁰⁶ Another major aspect of this conversion was Milton’s eventual acceptance of Russell’s arguments over the need for manufacturing towns to be provided with representation – which as late as 1819, the former still dismissed as ‘too theoretical’.¹⁰⁷ By 1821, though, Milton’s stance had changed. He objected to the Liverpool government’s amendments to the Grampound bill on the basis that it sent a message to the ‘nation at large’ that parliament could only ‘legislate in a manner which operated to the benefit of one interest exclusively’: the landed interest.¹⁰⁸ For Milton, the transfer of Grampound’s seats to Yorkshire was the fourth occasion (New Shoreham, Cricklade and Aylesbury being the others) that parliament had sought to increase the representation of the landed interest, a state of affairs he considered regrettable given that the case for the enfranchisement of Leeds had become so apparent. Milton contended that it was not the duty of parliamentarians, particularly those associated with the landed interest who had historically prided themselves on their ability to legislate disinterestedly, to act in a way that gave one interest ‘undue preponderance’ over another.¹⁰⁹ In doing so, he provided a critique of Liverpool’s actions as motivated by self, rather than national, interest. This foreshadowed the tenor of debate over proposals for minor reform between 1827 and 1830 and the Grey ministry’s reform bill in early 1831.

The East Retford saga: turning the Canningites

Following the hijacking of his 1821 Grampound bill, Russell temporarily changed tack over his gradualist approach towards reform. This was prompted by agitation at county meetings, market dinners and country fairs from late 1821, when radical politicians like William Cobbett called for electoral reform, a reduction in taxes and a suspension in cash payments as a means of preventing future episodes of agricultural distress.¹¹⁰ In response, advanced and moderate Whigs made their alternative case for parliamentary reform at county meetings across the country.¹¹¹ A rapid increase in petitioning for electoral reform followed, which gave Russell the opportunity to introduce an ambitious reform resolution to the Commons in 1822. In it he proposed to partially disfranchise one hundred boroughs, and redistribute sixty of their seats to the counties and forty to unrepresented towns – a move he repeated in 1823.¹¹² This more ambitious reform solution replaced his earlier gradualist proposals, but his justifications for both schemes remained the same.¹¹³ From 1823, county activism waned following two years of agricultural prosperity, which correlated with a rapid decline in reform petitions – only five were received by parliament between January 1824 and the summer of 1827.¹¹⁴ Accordingly, Russell introduced no reform motion in 1824 or 1825, and although he proposed a motion in 1826 his knowledge of its probable rejection re-kindled his focus on gradual redistribution as a means of rebalancing the representation of interests.¹¹⁵ Fresh confirmation in early 1827 of bribery at Penryn and East Retford during the 1826 election provided Russell with the formal opportunity to resurrect his proposals for minor reform.¹¹⁶ The ensuing parliamentary debates, which in the case of East Retford were not resolved until 1830, proved incredibly fractious. They also revealed a widespread desire among parliamentarians to rebalance England’s electoral map.

As outlined above, debate over Russell’s newly proposed reforms took place in a parliament that had become increasingly polarised over protective tariffs and how to respond to repeated bouts of national distress. By the mid-1820s these tensions had led to the proliferation of a newly combative language of interests, as different economic lobby groups – the manufacturing, agricultural, shipping and West India interests – made their case for preferential treatment from the legislature. Significantly, these tensions also began to surface in government as it sought a response to distress in England’s manufacturing towns during the winter of 1826–7 and the accompanying agitation for the repeal of the corn laws – ‘that monstrous monopoly of the landed interest’ as the ‘starving weavers’ of Blackburn termed them in an 1827 petition.¹¹⁷ The extent of distress prompted liberal Tories within the Liverpool, and then Canning cabinet – such as Liverpool, George Canning, William Huskisson and Robert Peel – to advocate a sliding scale for corn duties in 1827.¹¹⁸ With manufacturing districts calling for repeal, and liberal Tories advocating corn law reform, Wellington, then master general of the ordnance, came to be perceived as the national representative of the landed interest and the ‘country Tories’, who were opposed to any change in policy as well as the legislative influence of liberal political economy.¹¹⁹ This perception was cemented when Wellington’s intervention led to the Lords’ rejection of the 1827 corn law bill – a move that also established his status as the enemy of free trade in the radical press.¹²⁰ In 1828 Wellington became prime minister. He took charge of a cabinet divided between liberal-Tory Canningites and traditional Tories. And although his ministry passed a revised corn law bill that year, the perception of a factional divide between the landed and the commercial interests (broadly defined) both outside and inside parliament increasingly came to bear on politicians’ approaches to minor reform.

Following confirmation of corruption during the 1826 election, two minor reform bills relating to Penryn and East Retford were introduced late in the 1827 parliamentary session.¹²¹ Due to the efforts of the Tory MP for Leicestershire, George Legh Keck, it was initially proposed to expand Penryn into its hundreds.¹²² However, during the bill’s third Commons reading, Russell secured an amendment to transfer the borough’s seats to Manchester. Debate over Russell’s amendment revealed a bitter jealousy between advocates of the landed and manufacturing interest, prompting a bemused William Lamb (later second Viscount Melbourne) to bemoan ‘the notion of the landed interest being opposed to the manufacturing … that had sprung up within the last three or four years’.¹²³ Days later, the radical MP for Bletchingley, Charles Tennyson, introduced a separate bill to transfer East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, embracing the Whig rationale for the transference of seats from decayed boroughs to new centres of commerce.¹²⁴ Parliament was prorogued before either bill reached the Lords. However, at the commencement of the 1828 session, Russell and Tennyson announced their intention to reintroduce each proposal.¹²⁵

Tensions between advocates of the landed and commercial interests were also evident in the newly formed cabinet in 1828, who were split over both proposals. Wellington and his allies preferred that both boroughs be thrown into their hundreds, while the liberal-Tory Canningites – Palmerston, Huskisson and Dudley – supported transferring their seats to Manchester and Birmingham.¹²⁶ Croker and the home secretary, Robert Peel (who while a liberal Tory was distanced from the Canningite faction by his historic relationship with Canning), were receptive to the latter option but feared a backlash from Tory electors and country gentlemen, as well as the establishment of a constitutional precedent that required the transfer of all future corrupt borough franchises to unrepresented towns.¹²⁷ A compromise was agreed which aimed to ‘satisfy the agricultural and manufacturing classes’ inside and outside parliament. The cabinet proposed to support the transfer of Penryn’s seats to Manchester so long as East Retford was thrown into its hundred.¹²⁸

Consequently the long-time defender of the agricultural interest, Nicolson Calvert moved an instruction to Tennyson’s East Retford bill that proposed to throw the borough into the hundred of Bassetlaw, in order to provide two seats to the ‘agricultural interest’.¹²⁹ The government’s proposed compromise was approved by the Commons, but opposed by a large minority of Whigs and reformers following an impassioned plea from the Whig MP James Mackintosh for the Commons to seize ‘one of the best opportunities that ever presented itself of sinking the constitution more deeply into the hearts of the people’ by ‘giving to one of our greatest trading interests [Birmingham] that protection which it requires’.¹³⁰ However, within months the government’s proposed compromise was ruined, when it became clear that the Lords would not approve the transfer of Penryn’s seats to Manchester. This did not stop Calvert pressing ahead with his amendment to the separate East Retford bill in a heated debate on 19 May 1828, in which he shamelessly admitted that his proposal was intended to protect the interests of agriculture against persons ‘engaged in manufacture’.¹³¹

The prior knowledge that the Penryn bill was likely to be rejected by the Lords increased tensions in the cabinet. The Canningites confirmed their intention to vote against Calvert, arguing that if one borough was going to be disfranchised its seats had to be transferred to an unrepresented town. Wellington and his fellow traditional Tories, as well as Peel, announced their intention to support Calvert. Calvert’s amendment passed by a slim majority of eighteen, but both Huskisson and Palmerston divided against it. The Canningite rump then resigned from the cabinet – Huskisson, Lamb, Palmerston, Dudley and Grant.¹³² As well as prompting the County Clare by-election that would eventually lead to Catholic emancipation, it signalled that the Canningites en masse (or the ‘liberal’ faction as Palmerston termed them) now conceded the necessity for practical improvement to the electoral system, through the enfranchisement of unrepresented towns.¹³³

In the two debates that followed, the Canningites and Whigs accused the Wellington government of disregarding the national interest, having endorsed the extension of East Retford into its hundreds to increase its electoral support among the landed and agricultural interest. Tensions were exacerbated on 2 June, when the majority in favour of throwing East Retford into its hundred received a surprise increase of 100 votes from hitherto absent government supporters. Tennyson accused the government of turning the question into a party matter, informing the Commons that ‘the [Tory party] tocsin’ had been ‘sounded throughout the country’ and that ministerial supporters had been instructed that ‘the existence of a Tory government’ depended on their provision of support to the bill. Palmerston, too, lamented that party affiliation had prevented the Commons from ‘taking advantage of every case of delinquency, to apply a gradual remedy to the defective state of the representation’. And the moderate Whig Edward Smith Stanley (later fourteenth earl of Derby) regretted that the bill had become ‘a vehicle for the expression of party feeling’. He also revealed that since the departure of the Canningites from the cabinet, he had heard ‘the landed interest declare that they at last looked with confidence to a ministry from which they expected a preference to their interests over those of the manufacturing and commercial classes’.¹³⁴

For Russell the episode established that future electoral reform must not turn the Commons into an adversarial body based around town and country factions. He was convinced that MPs would have consented to Birmingham’s enfranchisement, ‘if it had not been for that jealousy which had sprung up during the last two or three years between the landed and the manufacturing interests’,¹³⁵ a jealousy that he felt ‘originated in a great measure in the discussions on the corn bill’.¹³⁶ In doing so, Russell held out an olive branch to Peel, by suggesting that the latter too maintained a disdain for such division, and would have voted to enfranchise Birmingham if he had been allowed to vote independently of Wellington’s cabinet. Russell informed MPs that agriculture and manufacturing were dependent on each other for their prosperity, and that if the Commons remained divided it would distract the lower chamber from its primary purpose of keeping a check on the power of the monarchy. He hoped that:

the time would shortly arrive, when they should see the members of that House, whether the representatives of manufacturing or agricultural bodies, perform their duties without reference to any such distinction, and join together, as they were bound to join, in performing one of the greatest duties of that House – he meant, keeping a proper control on the expenditure of the crown.¹³⁷

For Russell it was clear that parliamentary reform was vital, not just for ensuring the representation of the nation’s interests, but in order to establish a greater disinterestedness among MPs in order that they did not get distracted from performing their wider constitutional functions.

Debate over Catholic emancipation prevented any progress on the East Retford bill during 1829, and when it was re-introduced in February 1830, the Wellington ministry pressed ahead with their support for throwing the borough into its hundred as a means of appeasing their ultra-Tory supporters following Catholic emancipation.¹³⁸ Commons majorities continued to favour the government and with the support of the Lords, East Retford was finally extended into the hundred of Bassetlaw ahead of the 1830 election, a decision that the cartoonist Robert Seymour blamed on ministerial influence in ‘The three years job settled’ (Figure 1.1). Throughout, the Canningites remained united with the Whigs in opposing the bill and supporting Russell’s contention that the Commons no longer provided for a balanced representation of the nation’s interests. In 1830 Huskisson reiterated that ‘every great interest of the country ought to be represented in that House [the Commons]’¹³⁹ and that it was short-sighted of the factional proponents of the landed interest not to see that their interests were tied up in the prosperity of towns like Birmingham. ‘Without the manufacturing and commercial industry of Lancashire, Warwickshire, and Yorkshire’, he informed MPs, ‘the land of those counties would be worth comparatively little’.¹⁴⁰ This coalition was also united over Russell’s failed February 1830 proposal to enfranchise Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds – a motion he had announced in 1829 when he realised his efforts to transfer East Retford’s seats to Birmingham were futile.¹⁴¹ Huskisson, Palmerston and Melbourne divided in the minority for Russell’s proposal. All three conceded the case for Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds’s representation without the need to wait for other boroughs to be disfranchised – a stance that would have been inconceivable even three years earlier to their erstwhile leader Canning.¹⁴²

Conclusion: the ‘three years job settled’?

Rather than settling the reform issue, the East Retford saga, as well as the debates over minor reform in the post-Napoleonic period, laid the foundations for the coalition of young Whigs, moderate Whigs, grand Whigs and liberal Tories that formed the Grey ministry in November 1830. All of them were committed on one issue: the need to rebalance England’s electoral map so that it better represented the nation’s interests. It was also evident that by November 1830, when he made his infamous declaration against reform, many parliamentarians who Wellington looked to for support had accepted this moderate Whig argument.

In February 1830 Peel provided his coded approval for a major redistribution of forty borough seats to the ‘commercial interest’, so long as it was accompanied by the provision of sixty seats to the ‘landed interest’ via the counties.¹⁴³ Peel’s statement reflected his own awareness that the case for the representation of towns such as Manchester was now undeniable, as well as the strength of the moderate Whig case for reform. By early 1830 parliamentary reform had also become acceptable to a number of ultra-Tories to the political right of Wellington. As Moore has argued, certain ultra-Tories advocated reform because of their discontent with the passage of Catholic emancipation and the continued influence of liberal economic influence in the Wellington ministry. They also came round to reform because of the realisation of the strength of the Whig argument and the perception of an unprecedented rivalry between the nation’s interests during the 1820s. Although ultra-Tory proposals varied, they accepted the need for the enfranchisement of unrepresented towns, while also seeking to increase the number of MPs independent from the influence of party and liberal political economy – which they blamed for successive bouts of distress during the previous decade. As one commentator stated in 1830, successive liberal-Tory governments had brought ‘the great interests of the country into fierce contention … expelled independence from the House of Commons, and converted it into an assembly of devoted adherents to one [liberal] faith’.¹⁴⁴ It was men like Peel and these ultra-Tory county members that the Grey ministry hoped to ‘conciliate’ by grounding their reform bill around a balance between ‘town and country’ in 1831.¹⁴⁵

The increasingly factional post-Napoleonic domestic climate, the new language of interests it evoked and the debates over minor reform from 1819, had prompted a major shift in the majority of political opinion towards an acceptance that the unreformed electoral system, and its eighteenth-century rationale, were no longer fit for purpose. While this shift should not be conflated with support for the extensive reform proposals of the Grey ministry, it is crucial in terms of understanding why Wellington’s unwillingness to countenance reform in November 1830 was perceived as a final confirmation of his inability to govern in the national interest. Unsurprisingly, the rebalancing of interests lay at the heart of the Grey ministry’s reform bill and underpinned their huge redistribution of county and borough seats. However, when Russell introduced the government’s initial plans in March 1831 it quickly became apparent to all sides of political opinion that certain interests – particularly the landed, agricultural and manufacturing interests – stood to profit most from reform. As a result, between 1831 and 1832, the shipping, monied, West India and East India interests all lobbied for more specific forms of representation.¹⁴⁶ In addition, the abolition of rotten boroughs remained a point of concern, not only for anti-reformers, but for some figures in the cabinet, who wanted to retain opportunities for the representation of the professional interest. Opposition to parliamentary reform quickly became a religious controversy in its own right, as the defenders of the Church interest both in parliament and behind the pulpit railed against the reform bill as a ‘satanic’ measure.¹⁴⁷ And as discussed in the next chapter, the perception among radicals and reformers that the landed interest stood to gain too much from proposals to divide the counties almost led to the government’s downfall in September 1831.

These deficiencies in the reform legislation’s interest balancing model did not escape Russell, who remained the cabinet’s most faithful adherent of the interest balancing concept. He made multiple failed proposals for the introduction of additional fancy franchises (pre-existing university representation excepted) during 1831, all of which were rejected by the cabinet. In April he proposed that between twelve and twenty MPs should be chosen by stockholders who earned £100 a year from the public funds; in April, July and November, he advocated ‘a limited number of members for … colonial property’; in July he suggested that several seats might represent the specific interests of ‘landed property’ as distinct from the broader definition of the landed, agricultural interest; and in November, he recommended representation for the legal interest through four seats for the Inns of Court.¹⁴⁸ While all of these proposals failed to gain traction, Russell saw them as consistent with the cabinet’s decision during debates on the second reform bill to appease the naval interest by enfranchising Chatham and the shipping interest by providing representation to Whitby.¹⁴⁹ Russell’s willingness to rationalise seat redistribution so openly on the basis of interest representation even led to mocking from anti-reformers, who, when seeking to understand the enfranchisement of the resort towns of Cheltenham and Brighton derided the government for providing representation to the ‘watering-hole’ interest. This association remained with Brighton until at least the 1860s.¹⁵⁰ In reality, Russell’s failure to make his interest balancing scheme more comprehensive meant the electoral reforms of 1832 focused primarily on providing representation to the landed and commercial interests, via agricultural and manufacturing constituencies. As this book demonstrates, the ultimate irony of the Grey ministry’s rationalisation of their reform legislation as a means of balancing interests was that they created a constituency structure that accentuated, rather than pacified, the confrontation between land and commerce over the following two decades.

Notes

1. 1. In keeping with Cragoe, Culture, Politics and National Identity in Wales, Monmouthshire and Monmouth Boroughs are considered part of Wales.

2. 2. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., ii. (1 Mar. 1831), 1108–9.

3. 3. Hansard, 3, i. (2 Nov. 1830), 52–3.

4. 4. A. Mitchell, ‘The Whigs and Parliamentary Reform Before 1830’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 12 (1965), 22–42; Wasson, ‘Great Whigs’, 434–64.

5. 5. D. Eastwood, ‘Parliament and Locality: Representation and Responsibility in Late-Hanoverian England’, Parliamentary History 17, 1 (1998), 79; Parry, Rise and Fall, 78–87. The exception being J. F. Lively, ‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation in England, 1815–32’ (unpublished University of Cambridge DPhil thesis, 1957), 109–14, 119–20, 127–34.

6. 6. Blaxill, War of Words, 14.

7. 7. P. Loft, ‘Involving the Public: Parliament, Petitioning, and the Language of Interest, 1688–1720’, JBS, 55, 1 (2016), 1–23; P. Loft, ‘Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788’, Parliamentary History, 38, 3 (2019), 342–61; J. Hoppit, ‘Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups in Britain, 1660–1800’, Parliamentary History, 37, 1 (2018), 52–71; Miller, Nation of Petitioners, 229–52.

8. 8. G. Conti, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2019), 13–30.

9. 9. S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), 105–6; Taylor, ‘Interests, Parties and the State’, 52–3, 65; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), 91; Eastwood, ‘Parliament and Locality’, 68–81; A. Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge, 1999), 8–9; Loft, ‘Involving the Public’; Hoppit, ‘Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups’.

10. 10. H. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977), 85–7, 148–52, 167–72, 190–91; D. Hayton, ‘The “Country” Interest in the Party System, 1689–c.1720’, in C. Jones (ed.), Party & Management in Parliament 1660–1784 (Leicester, 1984), 37–86; J. Gunn, ‘ “Interests Will Not Lie”: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, 4 (1968), 551–64.

11. 11. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 85–7.

12. 12. G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1987), 173–82.

13. 13. E. Hargreaves, The National Debt (London, 1930), 73–90; M. Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021), 77–110.

14. 14. P. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 245–65; J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 201–15; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 217.

15. 15. A. Birch, Representation (London, 1971), 37–40; Eastwood, ‘Parliament and Locality’, 70; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 353, footnote 26.

16. 16. Eastwood, ‘Parliament and Locality’; S. Beer, ‘The Representation of Interests in British Government: Historical Background’, American Political Science Review, 51, 3 (1957), 613–50.

17. 17. P. Langford, ‘Property and “Virtual Representation” in Eighteenth-Century England’, HJ, 31, 1 (1998), 83–115; Brewer, Party Ideology, 209–10; J. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London, 1966), 385–404.

18. 18. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 274–77; S. Jenyns, Thoughts on a Parliamentary Reform (London, 1784), 21–6.

19. 19. Hansard, 3, ii. (1 Mar. 1831), 1108–9; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 270–90.

20. 20. J. Hoppit, ‘The Landed Interest and the National Interest, 1660–1800’, in J. Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), 97; J. Hoppit, ‘Petitions, Economic Legislation’, 68–9.

21. 21. Hoppit ‘Landed Interest’, 83–102; Pole, Political Representation, 442–8; Hayton, ‘ “Country” Interest’, 37–86; Anonymous, Thoughts on County Elections Addressed to the Landed Interest of the Country (London, 1812).

22. 22. Cobbett, Parliamentary History, xxx. (6 May 1792), 811–13.

23. 23. Cobbett, xxiii. (6 May 1783), 827–35, 870–71; S. Thompson, ‘Census-Taking, Political Economy and State Formation’ (unpublished University of Cambridge DPhil thesis, 2010) 186–91; I. Christie, ‘The Yorkshire Association, 1780–4: A Study in Political Organization’, HJ, 3, 2 (1960), 158; M. Kilburn, ‘Yorkshire Association’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 22 October 2023].

24. 24. Cobbett, xxiii. (6 May 1783), 853; Cobbett, xxv. (18 Apr. 1785), 461.

25. 25. Cobbett, xxiii. (6 May 1783), 870–71.

26. 26. J. Brooke, ‘The Members’, in L. Namier and J. Brooke (eds.), The House of Commons 1754–1790 (Cambridge, 1985), i. 131.

27. 27. Hoppit, ‘Petitions, Economic Legislation’, 60–62; Loft, ‘Involving the Public’, 1–23; P. Gauci, ‘The Clash of Interests: Commerce and the Politics of Trade in the Age of Anne’, Parliamentary History, 28, 1 (2009), 115–25.

28. 28. Namier and Brooke, Commons 1754–1790, i. 131–8.

29. 29. G. Judd, Members of Parliament, 1734–1832 (New Haven, 1955) 55–73.

30. 30. Cobbett, xxiii. (6 May 1783), 811, 837–8; Cobbett, xxv. (18 Apr. 1785), 461.

31. 31. Cobbett, xxx. (6 May 1793), 811–13, 863, 870–71.

32. 32. Brooke, ‘The Members’, 131–8.

33. 33. Cobbett, xvii. (11 Apr. 1771), 166–9; Cobbett, xxii. (13 Mar. 1782), 1168–70; J. Cannon, ‘Cricklade’, J. Brooke, ‘New Shoreham’, in Namier and Brooke, Commons 1754–1790, i, 396–9, 409–11.

34. 34. Judd, Members of Parliament, 63–5; T. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), 11–14, 92–40; L. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952).

35. 35. Judd, Members of Parliament, 67–9; D. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons, 1820–1832 (Cambridge, 2009), i., 273.

36. 36. F. Bassett, Free Parliaments: or a Vindication of the Parliamentary Constitution of England (London, 1783), 68–9.

37. 37. N. Draper, ‘The Rise of a New Planter Class? Some Countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807–33’, Atlantic Studies, 9, 1 (2012), 75; N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge, 2009), 279–302, 318–22; K. McClelland, ‘Redefining the West India Interest: Politics and the Legacies of Slave-Ownership’, in C. Hall et al. (eds.), Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (Cambridge, 2014), 127–62, 288–97.

38. 38. Judd, Members of Parliament, 67–9; S. Mullen, ‘Henry Dundas: A ‘Great Delayer’ of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Scottish Historical Review, 100, 2 (2021), 218–48; Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (London, 2020); Skjönsberg, Persistence of Party, 247, 272.

39. 39. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 284; Pole, Political Representation, 451–5.

40. 40. Cobbett, xvi. (22 Jan. 1770), 753–4; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 150.

41. 41. Cobbett, xxx. (6 May 1793), 811–13.

42. 42. Cobbett, xxiii. (6 May 1783), 837–8; Cobbett, xxix. (30 Apr. 1792), 1321; Cobbett, xxx. (6 May 1793), 853; Cobbett, xxxiii. (26 May 1797), 681.

43. 43. Beer, ‘Representation of Interests’, 613–32; Lively, ‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation’, 139–45.

44. 44. The Hansard corpus was compiled primarily from open-source XML files http://www.hansard-archive.parliament.uk [accessed 29 Dec. 2021]. Sixteen missing Hansard volumes between 1803 and 1868 and the Cobbett corpus were compiled from digitally available sources and made text-searchable with FineReader. On method see, L. Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 313–41; Blaxill, The War of Words, 21–43.

45. 45. Hansard at Huddersfield Project (2018). ‘Hansard at Huddersfield’. University of Huddersfield https://web.archive.org/web/20230610065846/https://hansard.hud.ac.uk/ [accessed 19 May 2022]. Session data for 1829 were added to this categorisation using CasualConc.

46. 46. D. Wahrman, ‘Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s’, Past and Present, 136, 1 (1992), 83–113; K. Rix, ‘ “Whatever Passed in Parliament Ought to be Communicated to the Public”: Reporting the Proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833–50’, Parliamentary History, 33, 3 (2014), 453–74.

47. 47. For Parliament lengths from 1842: PP1852 (576), xlii. 51. Manual day counts were used between 1830 and 1841. A parliamentary week was considered to be five days.

48. 48. Results that appeared in a debate title, appendices or indexes were excluded.

49. 49. This ‘top ten’ excludes references to general interests such as the ‘national interest’ or ‘interests of the empire’.

50. 50. Occasional references to the ‘mercantile’ and ‘trading’ interest have been collated into the ‘commercial interest’. The ‘farming’ interest has been collated into the ‘agricultural interest’. ‘Planters’ interest’ and ‘slave owners’ interest’ have been collated into ‘West India interest’. These additions do not affect the relative position of each category but have been collated due to their interchangeability in parliamentary reporting.

51. 51. Hansard, xi. (23 June 1808), 998–1001.

52. 52. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–30 (Oxford, 1977), 1–30, 98–169, 269–301.

53. 53. Hansard, 1, xxxix. (25 Feb. 1819), 657; Hansard, 2, vi. (5 Feb. 1822), 3.

54. 54. Hansard, 1, xxxx. (7 June 1819), 967; Hansard, 2, viii. (21 Feb. 1823), 233.

55. 55. Hansard, 2, viii. (14 Feb. 1823), 120–21; Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 273–4.

56. 56. Hansard, 1, xxii. (7 Apr. 1812), 216–21; Hansard, 1, xxii. (23 Apr. 1812), 723–7.

57. 57. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, 173–201, 232–68.

58. 58. Hansard, 1, vii. (22 May 1806), 336–47; Hansard, 2, v. (5 Apr. 1821), 50–64; Hansard, 2, viii. (6 June 1823), 795–802; Hansard, 2, xv. (17 Apr. 1826), 272–5.

59. 59. P. Lipscomp, ‘Party Politics, 1801–1802: George Canning and the Trinidad Question’, HJ, 12, 3 (1969), 442–66; Mullen, ‘Henry Dundas: A ‘Great Delayer’, 218–48.

60. 60. B. Higman, ‘The West India “Interest” in Parliament, 1807–1833’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 13, 49 (1967), 1–19; Draper, Price of Emancipation; McClelland, ‘Redefining the West India Interest’; P. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (New York, 2016); Michael Taylor, ‘Conservative Political Economy and the Problem of Colonial Slavery, 1823–1833’, HJ, 57, 4 (2014), 973–95; Taylor, The Interest.

61. 61. McClelland, ‘Redefining the West India Interest’, in Hall et al. Legacies of British Slave Ownership, 143.

62. 62. Cobbett, xvii. (11 Apr. 1771), 166–9; Cobbett, xvii. (13 Mar. 1772), 1168–70; J. Brooke, ‘New Shoreham’, in Namier and Brooke, Commons, i. 396–9; J. Cannon, ‘Cricklade’, in Namier and Brooke, Commons, i. 409–11.

63. 63. D. Fisher, ‘Aylesbury’, in R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (Cambridge, 1986), ii. 19–22; R. Gibbs, A History of Aylesbury (Aylesbury, 1885), 254–7, 276–7.

64. 64. J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), 148–9.

65. 65. Hansard, 1, ii. (7 May 1804), 388–92.

66. 66. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 149.

67. 67. Hansard, 1, xxviii. (14 July 1814), 701; Hansard, 1, xxix. (18 Feb. 1815), 789–90; Hansard, 1, xxix. (6 Mar. 1815), 5–6; Hansard, 1, xxxiii. (15 Mar. 1816), 296–7; Hansard, 1, xxxiv. (9 May 1816), 408.

68. 68. Hansard, 1, xvii. (10 May 1810), 134–5; Hansard, 1, xxiii. (8 May 1812), 105; Hansard, 1, xxvi. (21 June 1813, c. 805–6; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 162.

69. 69. Hansard, 1, xxvi. (30 June 1813), 990–92; Hansard, 1, xxvi. (2 July 1813), 1082.

70. 70. Cobbett, xxxiii. (26 May 1797), 689; Hansard, 1, xxx. (6 Mar. 1815), 5–6; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 131, 148, 177, 179–80.

71. 71. Hansard, 1, xl. (17 May 1819), 464; D. Fisher, ‘Calvert, Nicolson’, in Fisher, Commons, iv. 519–24.

72. 72. Hansard, 1, xl. (17 May 1819), 464; Morning Post, 3 Apr. 1819; The Times, 18 May 1819.

73. 73. Anonymous, County Elections.

74. 74. Judd, Members of Parliament, 56–7, 88–9.

75. 75. Hansard, 1, xxxix. (2 Apr. 1819), 1392; The Times, 3 Apr. 1819; Morning Chronicle, 3 Apr. 1819; Morning Post, 3 Apr. 1819.

76. 76. D. Fisher, ‘Harvey, Daniel’, in Fisher, Commons, v. 522–9.

77. 77. Hansard, 1, xl (17 May 1819), 464; Morning Chronicle, 18 May 1819, 2; Morning Post, 18 May 1819.

78. 78. Hansard, 1, xxxix. (26 Feb. 1819), 714, Hansard, 1, xxxix. (8 Mar. 1819), 906–24; Hansard, 1, xl (17 May 1819), 462; Hansard, 1, lxi. (7 Dec. 1819), 815.

79. 79. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), 1102–3.

80. 80. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 178–9.

81. 81. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), 1096.

82. 82. Conti, Parliament Mirror of the Nation, 18–22; J. Mackintosh, ‘Universal Suffrage’, Edinburgh Review, 31 (1818), 168, 175–6, 180.

83. 83. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), 1094.

84. 84. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), 1093–6, 1100–1101.

85. 85. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), 1093.

86. 86. Lord Russell, History of the English Government and Constitution (London, 1821), 267.

87. 87. Russell, History of the English Government (1821), 251–2.

88. 88. Hansard, 1, xli. (14 Dec. 1819), cc 1097.

89. 89. Russell, History of the English Government (1821), 264–65; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 347; R. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge 1987), 164–70; Conti, Parliament Mirror of the Nation, 20–22.

90. 90. Hansard, 2, i. (19 May 1820), 504.

91. 91. Hansard, 2, i. (19 May 1820), 504.

92. 92. Hansard, 1, xxiii. (8 May 1812), 148–51.

93. 93. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 179.

94. 94. L. Jennings (ed.), The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, i. (London, 1885), 136–7; British Library, Liverpool Papers, Additional MS. [hereafter BL, Add. MS.] 38370, 63–7; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 179.

95. 95. Hansard, 2, v. (21 May 1821), 857.

96. 96. D. Fisher, ‘Croker, John Wilson’, in Fisher, Commons, iv. 798–813; Jennings, Correspondence and Diaries, 136–7.

97. 97. D. Fisher, ‘Ward, Hon. John’, in Fisher, Commons, vii. 640–41.

98. 98. Hansard, 2, iv. (12 Feb. 1821), 589.

99. 99. Hansard, 2, iv. (12 Feb. 1821), 594.

100. 100. The Times, 13 Feb. 1821.

101. 101. Hansard, 2, iv. (12 Feb. 1821), 592.

102. 102. Hansard, 2, iv. (12 Feb. 1821), 592; Morning Post, 13 Feb. 1821.

103. 103. Hansard, 2, iv. (12 Feb. 1821), 592.

104. 104. The Times, 13 Feb. 1821; Morning Post, 13 Feb. 1821.

105. 105. P. Harling, ‘Parliament, the State, and “Old Corruption”: Conceptualizing Reform, c. 1790–1832’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 2003), 98–113; D. Beales, ‘The Idea of Reform in British Politics, 1829–1850’, in T. Blanning and P. Wende (eds.), Reform in Great Britain and Germany, 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1999), 159–74.

106. 106. Wasson, ‘Great Whigs’, 442–50.

107. 107. Wasson, ‘Great Whigs’, 449.

108. 108. The Times, 31 May 1821; Hansard, 2, v. (30 May 1821), 1043.

109. 109. Hansard, 2, v. (30 May 1821), 1043.

110. 110. T. Crosby, English Farmers and the Politics of Protection 1815–1852 (Hassocks, 1977), 57–60; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 271–2.

111. 111. Crosby, Politics of Protection, 60–75; Mitchell, ‘The Whigs and Parliamentary Reform’, 22–42.

112. 112. Hansard, 2, vii. (25 Apr. 1822), 51–139; Hansard, 2, viii. (17 Feb. 1823), v.8, 127; Hansard, 2, viii. (24 Apr. 1823), 1260–87.

113. 113. Russell, History of the English Government (1821), 264–5, removed from Russell, History of the English Government (1823), 358.

114. 114. D. Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660–1846 (London, 1930), 157–79.

115. 115. Hansard, 2, xi. (17 May 1824) 756; Hansard, 2, xv. (7 Apr. 1826), 651–714; Hansard, 2, xvii. (3 May 1827), 543; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 185–6.

116. 116. PP1826 (126) x. 63; Hansard, 2, xv. (28 Apr. 1826), 733; Salmon, ‘ “Reform Should Begin at Home”: English Municipal and Parliamentary Reform, 1818–32’, in C. Jones, P. Salmon and R. Davis (eds.), Partisan Politics, Principles and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–1880 (Edinburgh, 2004), 93–113.

117. 117. Hansard, 2, xvi. (9 Feb. 1827), 412–13.

118. 118. Gordon, Economic Doctrine, 52–66.

119. 119. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–30 (Basingstoke, 1998), 391–402; Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism, 1824–1830 (London, 1979), 96–139; Barnes, Corn Laws, 185–219; Crosby, Politics of Protection, 57–75; Gambles, Protection and Politics, 25–55, 89–116; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 264–74.

120. 120. Hilton, Mad, Bad, 307; Barnes, Corn Laws, 197–201.

121. 121. T. Jenkins, ‘Penryn’, in Fisher, Commons, ii. 176–83.

122. 122. Hansard, 2, xvii. (8 May 1827), 682–4; Hansard, 2, xvii. (18 May 1827), 903–23.

123. 123. The Times, 29 May 1827; Morning Post, 29 May 1827; Morning Chronicle, 29 May 1827; Hansard, 2, xvii. (28 May 1827), 1047.

124. 124. Hansard, 2, xvii. (11 June 1827), 1210–12.

125. 125. Hansard, 2, xviii. (31 Jan. 1828), 83–6; Hansard, 2, xviii. (25 Feb. 1828), 669–76.

126. 126. F. Bamford and Duke of Wellington (eds.), The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820–1832 (London, 1950), ii. 123, 173, 176, 187.

127. 127. Bamford and Wellington, Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, ii. 173; E. Ashley, The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple Viscount Palmerston (London, 1879), i. 253; Jennings, Correspondence and Diaries, 409–11.

128. 128. Jennings, Correspondence and Diaries, 409.

129. 129. Hansard, 2, xviii. (21 Mar. 1828), 1284.

130. 130. Hansard, 2, xviii. (21 Mar. 1828), 1294.

131. 131. Morning Chronicle, 22 Mar. 1828; Mirror of Parliament [hereafter MOP], ii. (21 Mar. 1828), 1559; Hansard, 2, xviii. (21 Mar. 1828), 1280–81.

132. 132. Jennings, Correspondence and Diaries, 420–24; Lord Colchester (ed.), A Political Diary 1820–1830, by Edward Law Lord Ellenborough, i. (London, 1881), 106, 109; Jupp, Eve of Reform, 78–80; Ashley, Life and Correspondence, 254–79.

133. 133. Ashley, Life and Correspondence, 278, 286.

134. 134. Hansard, 2, xix. (27 June 1828), 1533–4, 1538, 1543.

135. 135. The Times, 28 June 1828.

136. 136. Morning Post, 28 June 1828.

137. 137. The Times, 28 June 1828.

138. 138. S. Harratt and S. Farrell, ‘East Retford’, in Fisher, Commons, ii. 800–808.

139. 139. Morning Post, 6 Mar. 1830.

140. 140. Hansard, 2, xxii. (5 Mar. 1830), 1331.

141. 141. Hansard, 2, xxi. (5 May 1829), 1103.

142. 142. Hansard, 2, xvii. (28 May 1827), 1049–50; Hansard, 2, xxii. (11 Feb. 1830), 350.

143. 143. Hansard, 2, xxii. (23 Feb. 1830), 858–915; The Times, 24 Feb. 1830; Morning Chronicle, 24 Feb. 1830.

144. 144. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1830), 647–48; Hansard, 2, xxii. (18 Feb. 1830), 678–726; D. C. Moore, ‘The Other Face of Reform’, Victorian Studies, 5,1 (1961)’, 17–21.

145. 145. Durham University Special Collections, Grey Papers [hereafter DSC, Grey], B50A/6/19, 1–2.

146. 146. Miles Taylor, ‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 2003), 295–311.

147. 147. R. Saunders, ‘God and the Great Reform Act: Preaching against Reform, 1831–32’, Journal of British Studies, 53, 2 (2014), 378–99.

148. 148. National Archives, PRO [hereafter PRO] 30/22/1B, ‘Memorandum on reform bill 4 Apr. 1831’, 30–31; PRO, 30/22/1B, ‘… Russell’s plan for the alteration of the Reform Bill … Nov. 1831’, 64–7; PRO, 30/22/1B, Unnamed memorandum, 193; PRO, 30/22/1B, ‘Various Proposals’, 240; DSC, Grey, B46/1/45, ‘Memorandum on Reform Bill, by Russell, 20 Oct. 1831’, 1–8; DSC, Grey, B46/1/45, Russell to Grey, 20 July 1831; B50A/6/19 1–2; Taylor, ‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform’, 295–311.

149. 149. Parry, Rise and Fall, 83.

150. 150. Hansard, 3, v. (22 July 1831), 215; Kriegel, The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (London, 1977), 85; DSC, Grey, B46/1/54 ‘Paper endorsed by Lord Althorp’, 1–2; P. Salmon, ‘Brighton’, P. Salmon and K. Rix (eds.), The House of Commons 1832–1868, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/research/1832-1868 [accessed 19 May 2022]. For login details to access these draft articles contact psalmon@histparl.ac.uk.