British General Election Campaigns 1830–2019 E-Book

Iain Dale

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1175

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This remarkable book, edited by one of the UK's leading political commentators, takes us on a deep dive into nearly 200 years of British political history through its most dramatic expression: the general election. The British general election is the linchpin of our liberal democracy, and its results are often fundamental to how we live. With the next general election on the horizon, now is the perfect time to consider those that came before. From the general election of 1830, in which electoral reform was the centrepiece, to the so-called Brexit election of 2019, Iain Dale delivers a showcase of all 50 general election campaigns, with an essay for each of them penned by key political writers, including John Curtice, Julia Langdon, Simon Heffer, Peter Snow, Sue Cameron, Vernon Bogdanor, Adam Boulton and many others. If you want to get to the heart of British politics and democracy, there is no greater guide than this meticulously researched, insightful and engaging collection.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to the memory of two women who taught me more about election campaigning than anyone else. Phyllis Reeve and Audrey Barker were Conservative Party agents in Norwich South and Norwich North in the 1980s and prior to that had served all over the country. Neither suffered fools gladly. They tolerated candidates merely as ‘legal necessities’ but had hearts of gold and were always generous with their time and well-meant advice to twenty-something political upstarts like me. I treasure the memories of working with them.

BOOKS BY IAIN DALE

The Honourable Ladies

The Prime Ministers

The Presidents

Kings and Queens

The Dictators

On This Day in Politics

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Biteback Publishing Ltd, London

Selection and editorial apparatus copyright © Iain Dale 2024

Copyright in the individual essays resides with the named authors.

Iain Dale has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the editor of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher would be glad to hear from them.

ISBN 978-1-78590-845-3

CONTENTS

Preface – Iain Dale

Seats, Electorate, Candidates and Turnout 1830–2019

MPs Elected for the Three Main Parties 1830–2019

Vote Share by Party 1830–2019

1.     1830 – Gordon Pentland

2.     1831 – Connor Hand

3.     1832 – Alun Evans

4.     1835 – Edward Young

5.     1837 – Nan Sloane

6.     1841 – Richard A. Gaunt

7.     1847 – David Walsh

8.     1852 – Nigel Fletcher

9.     1857 – Alex Noonan

10.   1859 – Matthew Cole

11.   1865 – Charles Pitt

12.   1868 – Ian Cawood

13.   1874 – Robert Buckland

14.   1880 – Kathryn Rix

15.   1885 – Luke Blaxill

16.   1886 – Robert Saunders

17.   1892 – Leo McKinstry

18.   1895 – Pippa Catterall

19.   1900 – Mark Fox

20.   1906 – Duncan Brack

21.   1910 (January) – David Laws

22.   1910 (December) – David Laws

23.   1918 – Damian Collins

24.   1922 – Jack Brown

25.   1923 – Alistair Lexden

26.   1924 – Robert Waller

27.   1929 – Rosie Campbell

28.   1931 – Andrew Thorpe

29.   1935 – John Barnes

30.   1945 – Julia Langdon

31.   1950 – Sue Cameron

32.   1951 – Vernon Bogdanor

33.   1955 – Philip Norton

34.   1959 – Iain Dale

35.   1964 – Nick Thomas-Symonds

36.   1966 – Peter Kellner

37.   1970 – Michael Crick

38.   1974 (February) – Lewis Baston

39.   1974 (October) – Michael McManus

40.   1979 – Simon Heffer

41.   1983 – Peter Snow

42.   1987 – Simon Burns

43.   1992 – Peter Riddell

44.   1997 – John Curtice

45.   2001 – Alia Middleton

46.   2005 – Robert Ford

47.   2010 – Adam Boulton

48.   2015 – Philip Cowley

49.   2017 – Stephen Parkinson

50.   2019 – Tim Bale

How Candidates Campaign in Modern-Day General Elections – Sofia Collignon and Wolfgang Rüdig

PREFACE

Given the title of this book, you might imagine it is a book entirely aimed at political geeks. You’d be wrong. Elections are at the heart of our democracy and to understand the history of Britain over the past two hundred years, you have to understand the electoral politics of the country.

I love elections. I love them so much that I’ve played most of the roles integral to the running and coverage of elections. I’ve delivered election leaflets, put up posterboards, canvassed voters, been an election agent, a candidate’s aide, a campaign manager, been a (losing) candidate, ‘knocked up’ voters on polling day, driven voters to the polling station, attended four general election counts, hosted general election debates, interviewed election candidates and hosted four eight-hour general election night shows on LBC Radio. The only thing I haven’t done is ever won an election. A minor omission.

General election nights are the equivalent of Christmas Day for lovers of the electoral process. Everyone becomes an armchair expert and thinks they are ideally placed to predict the result. And that’s the great thing about democracy: you rarely can. Yes, we have more tools nowadays to enable us to make an educated guess, but in the end, no one can be 100 per cent sure. In 1970, when I was seven years old, Ted Heath defied the pollsters and won the June election with a majority of thirty. Harold Wilson suddenly became ‘Yesterday’s Man’. I remember being at the count in Norwich North in 1992 when David Amess’s victory in Basildon heralded a majority of twenty-one for John Major. I remember this election well, as it was the only election I had put a bet on. I’d never been in a betting shop before, so I asked my friend Tim to put the bet on for me. I bet £20 at 80/1 on a Conservative majority of between twenty and twenty-two. I was set to win £1,600, which was a lot of money in 1992. What a shame Tim forgot to put the bet on.

In that same election, our candidate, the sitting MP for Norwich North Patrick Thompson, took part in an election phone-in on BBC Radio Norfolk. He returned to the campaign office full of beans. ‘I think that went really well,’ he exclaimed. His entire campaign team fell about laughing, given that every question which made it to air had emanated from our office. Patrick was horrified. In a similar vein, we put out a leaflet on red paper headlined ‘A Few Things About Your Labour Candidate You Ought to Know’. It was the sort of thing Liberal Democrat campaigns put out routinely. We felt very naughty, as the leaflet sought to explain the Labour candidate’s extreme leftwing past. We put out only fifty of the leaflets as we knew it would be picked up by the local paper. Sure enough, it made the front page of the Eastern Evening News two days before polling day. We won by 266 votes. The election agent, Deborah Slattery, and I maintain that the leaflet made all the difference. The Labour candidate later told me that he knew he was toast the moment he saw it. Patrick Thompson, to this day, reckons his majority would have been far bigger had we not indulged in the ‘black arts’. We will never know.

Politics, particularly electoral politics, is inevitably very tribal. The joy of canvassing sessions is that talking to voters always results in having funny anecdotes. I remember in 1983 talking to a voter on a council estate in Norwich who said, ‘I’ve half a mind to vote SDP.’ I instantly shot back: ‘Half a mind is all you need, I suppose.’ Cue the door being slammed in my face. The same thing happened a few minutes later when I knocked on another door and the voter bemoaned her lot in life and how it was all Margaret Thatcher’s fault. ‘I haven’t got a penny left at the end of the week,’ she said. My fellow canvasser put his head round the door and said, ‘Nice new TV and video recorder you’ve got there.’ I put her down as a possible.

My favourite anecdote from the campaign in which I was an actual parliamentary candidate in 2005 will stay with me for ever. We were canvassing on an estate in the North Norfolk village of Trimingham. A lady opened the door, dressed in shorts and a vest, showing off her bare arms replete with Meatloaf tattoos. I started my spiel and mentioned a policy with which she enthusiastically agreed. ‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ she roared. I instantly replied: ‘It must have been while you were kissing me.’ We both broke down in fits of giggles and she said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve got my vote.’ If only they were all that easy.

On election night, I turned up at Cromer High School to witness the votes being counted. I knew I was going to lose but initially candidatitis set in and I saw the piles of votes with a X by my name showing me in the lead. It didn’t last. I turned a Lib Dem majority of 483 into a Lib Dem majority of 10,600. It was devastating, but it was one of the proudest moments of my life when I delivered a gracious concession speech, which I got through without breaking down in tears. It was only when Norman Lamb, my gracious opponent, put his arm around my shoulders that a few tears slipped out. Perhaps only a fellow candidate who has been through it before could understand. After the count, I had to go to a party at the house of one of our party workers. I got in the passenger seat alongside my partner and spent the short journey howling my eyes out.

The next day’s Eastern Daily Press had a picture of me at the count watching a portable TV, ostensibly being comforted by a clown, one of the fringe candidates. In this case, a picture did not tell a thousand stories. We had just seen Justine Greening winning the marginal seat of Putney.

And that was my last election, apart from a couple of canvassing sessions in 2010 to help two friends who were standing. Since then, I have covered four election campaigns as a broadcaster, interviewing candidates and co-hosting each election night show on LBC Radio.

I tell you all this to explain why I decided to edit a book on the past fifty general election campaigns going back to 1830. It’s the fourth book in this series, which started in 2020 with The Prime Ministers, followed by The Presidents in 2021 and Kings and Queens in 2023. In each book, I have matched a group of contributors with a Prime Minister, President, monarch or, in this case, general election campaign. I thought this book might be more difficult than the others to find contributors for, especially for the nineteenth-century elections, but I needn’t have worried.

Their remit was simple. To explain the background to the election, who the main political personalities were, which issues dominated the campaign, the campaigning methods, the key moments from the campaign and to interpret the results and analyse their short- and long-term implications.

Obviously, some elections were more significant than others. James Callaghan observed in 1979 that there are some times in political history when the tides change and there’s nothing anyone can do to hold back the tide of political change. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was the beneficiary. In 1906, it was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. In 1945, it was Clement Attlee. Of the fifty elections covered in this book, I estimate that there are fewer than ten that would fall into this category. We know quite a lot about all of those, but the delight of this book is that you learn about elections that you didn’t realise had even happened. Each election is unique and in even the most obscure election there are delights to behold.

Despite there being fifty essays, most of them are written in a similar style. The exception is the essay for 2017, which is written by Stephen (now Lord) Parkinson, who at the time the election was called was Theresa May’s political secretary. I think it is one of the standout essays in the book, even if it is very different from the rest. In these pages, Sir Simon Burns writes about the 1987 election, in which he won his Chelmsford seat for the first time. Harold Wilson’s biographer Nick Thomas-Symonds writes about his first victory in 1964, while a former Lib Dem Cabinet minister writes about the two crucial 1910 elections. Historians include Simon Heffer, writing about the Thatcher victory of 1979, Leo McKinstry on 1892, Lord Lexden on 1923, Andrew Thorpe on 1931 (on which he has written an entire book), Sir Vernon Bogdanor on 1951 and Lord Norton on 1955. We have a stellar range of political academics and journalists including Peter Snow (1983), Sir John Curtice (1997), Sir Peter Riddell (1992), Adam Boulton (2010), Philip Cowley (2015), Julia Langdon (1945), Sue Cameron (1950), Michael Crick (1970) and Tim Bale (2019).

Every effort has been made to ensure that the electoral statistics presented in this book are accurate. This has been done by relying on a number of excellent sources, notably Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher’s 1832–2010 edition of Fred Craig’s British Electoral Facts, Brian Walker’s Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1918–1992, the House of Commons Library and House of Commons Information Office along with Election Demon (archived), the Electoral Commission and Wikipedia. In the case of disagreement between sources, where possible this book has sided with the statistics presented by the House of Commons Library, which are often in line with British Electoral Facts.

For clarity, for the elections up to 1950, total votes cast and party vote counts have been adjusted, drawing on the work of the Election Demon website, in an attempt to deal with the presence of multi-member constituencies where individual votes voted more than once. Prior to 1885, due to a lack of sources, such adjustments are not possible, meaning that the figures are a true ‘total votes cast’ number not a ‘voted’ figure. Beyond 1950, after the abolition of multi-member constituencies, the ‘voted’ figure simply represents the number of people who voted, meaning that the turnout percentage and the electorate and voted figures largely align, which may not be the case for the elections before 1950.

Equally, there is disagreement within this book’s sources on whether the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NI Labour) should be kept as part of the national Labour Party vote. In line with the works of Craig, this book has decided to provide a separate NI Labour total but include it within total Labour figures. For vote share percentages given at the start of each chapter for elections after the 1970s, all percentages provided for Northern Ireland parties relate to vote share in Northern Ireland.

Given the number of electoral statistics presented in this book, it is inevitable that some errors may have crept in. If you notice any, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected] so they may be corrected in future editions.

I’d like to thank my researcher Alex Puffette for his hard work in compiling the electoral statistics at the beginning of each chapter, and for his wise counsel.

Iain Dale

Tunbridge Wells

January 2024

SEATS, ELECTORATE, CANDIDATES AND TURNOUT 1830–2019

__________

* Figures are not available for elections that occurred before the Great Reform Act of 1832.

MPS ELECTED FOR THE THREE MAIN PARTIES 1830–2019

Election

Conservative

Labour

Liberal*

1830†

–

–

–

1831†

–

–

–

1832

175

–

441

1835

273

–

385

1837

314

–

344

1841

367

–

271

1847

325

–

292

1852

330

–

324

1857

264

–

377

1859

298

–

356

1865

289

–

369

1868

271

–

387

1874

350

–

242

1880

237

–

352

1885

247

–

319

1886

393

–

192

1892

314

–

272

1895

411

–

177

1900

402

2

183

1906

157

29

399

__________

* Note that before the 1850s, ‘Liberals’ were ‘Whigs’.

† Figures are not available for elections that occurred before the Great Reform Act of 1832.

1910 (January)

272

40

274

1910 (December)

271

42

272

1918

379

57

127

1922

344

142

62

1923

258

191

158

1924

412

151

40

1929

260

287

59

1931

470

46

35

1935

387

154

33

1945

197

393

12

1950

298

315

9

1951

321

295

6

1955

345

277

6

1959

365

258

6

1964

304

317

9

1966

253

364

12

1970

330

288

6

1974 (February)

297

301

14

1974 (October)

277

319

13

1979

339

269

11

1983

397

209

23*

1987

376

229

22*

1992

336

271

20

1997

165

419

46

2001

166

412

52

2005

198

355

62

2010

306

258

57

2015

330

232

8

2017

317

262

12

2019

365

202

11

__________

* Note in 1983 and 1987, the figure for the Liberals includes the SDP too, as they fought as the SDP–Liberal Alliance.

VOTE SHARE BY PARTY 1830–2019

__________

* Note that before the 1850s, ‘Liberals’ were ‘Whigs’.

† Figures are not available for elections that occurred before the Great Reform Act of 1832.

__________

* Note in 1983 and 1987, the figure for the Liberals includes the SDP too, as they fought as the SDP–Liberal Alliance.

1

1830

GORDON PENTLAND

Dissolution: 24 July 1830

Polling day: 29 July–1 September 1830

Seats contested: 658

Prime Minister on polling day: Duke of Wellington

Main party leaders: Tory – Duke of Wellington; Whig – Marquess of Lansdowne; Ultra-Tories – Sir Edward Knatchbull

Party performance:

Party

Seats won

Tory

250

Whig

196

Ultra-Tories

60

Result: Hung parliament

The election of 1830 was triggered by the demise of the Crown. This ensured that it had a long prelude. The unofficial starting gun was fired by the death of George IV on 26 June and the formal dissolution followed on 24 July. For months previously, however, ministers and courtiers had been observing the king’s rapid and undignified decline in the knowledge that death must be followed swiftly by dissolution and election. By the spring of 1830, spates of debilitating breathlessness and heroic quantities of laudanum had become the norm for a grotesquely obese king surrounded by a bevy of doctors and apothecaries. His Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, offered a slightly horrified account of the king’s breakfast in April:

What do you think of His breakfast yesterday morning for an Invalid? A Pigeon and Beek Steak Pie, of which he ate two Pigeons and three Beefsteaks, Three parts of a Bottle of Moselle, a Glass of dry Champagne, two Glasses of Port and a Glass of Brandy! He had taken Laudanum the night before, again before this breakfast, again last night and again this Morning!

With this approach to the most important meal of the day, it is some surprise that the king survived until June.

The 1830 election was not an especially welcome development for the exhausted and somewhat threadbare ministry of the Duke of Wellington. His was the latest manifestation of the broadly Tory governments which had been in power, with only a very brief hiatus, since Pitt the Younger’s first government in the 1780s. By 1830, the sorrows for Wellington’s ministry were coming in battalions. Most existentially, its constituency of support both inside and outside of Parliament had been ruinously split by the resolution of an explosive issue which had been carefully contained since the beginning of the century. The question of whether Catholics in Great Britain and, more critically, in Ireland should be granted equivalent civil and religious liberties to their Protestant countrymen was a running sore in the Tory Party after the Anglo-Irish Union. It had been resolved by Wellington in favour of the Catholics in 1829 in a series of measures which came to be known collectively as Catholic emancipation. But this was no act of far-seeing and liberal statesmanship. Rather it was a tactical withdrawal, the prudent act of a military commander who diagnosed his own defeat at the hands of the superhuman organisational and electoral efforts of Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association. And it was passed in the teeth of fierce and militant opposition from large parts of the populations of England and Scotland, significant sections of both Houses of Parliament and the king himself.

As a result, diehard Tories or ‘ultras’ – those who viewed emancipation as a sell-out to Rome and European-style absolutism and a betrayal of British liberties – vilified Wellington and his Home Secretary and chief in the Commons, Robert Peel, as ‘rats’. The resulting fractures, compounding those which had developed in the instability since the political retirement of Lord Liverpool in 1827 (following a stroke), made for a complex and fluid political situation. Spiteful and passionate recriminations by electors and candidates over Catholic emancipation and urgent cries of the ‘Church in Danger’ became animating issues of the election in many places. The great moral and political questions involved in Catholic emancipation also rolled the pitch for other liberal causes. The huge and long-running question of the abolition of slavery within the British Empire tracked the Catholic issue and played a prominent role in many constituencies across the UK.

With the bitter feuds birthed by the Catholic question still well and truly live, even if ministers had enjoyed sovereignty over the timing of the election, they almost certainly would not have selected 1830. They were denuded of front-rank debating talent in the House of Commons, where Peel held the floor almost alone. Even in the House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington, an indifferent speaker, faced an increasingly fractious and hostile upper chamber. One of Wellington’s close correspondents, Dorothea von Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, was unequivocal before the king’s death: ‘the position of the government is precarious.’

One of the earliest and most explosive contributions to the election was a short anonymous pamphlet which generated a considerable discussion in the press. In ‘The Country without a Government’, Henry Brougham and George Agar-Ellis, two prominent sitting Whig MPs, made efforts to fix some of the themes for elections up and down the country. Alongside discussion of distress and foreign instability, slavery and the looming issue of reform, they foregrounded the overriding question of the Duke of Wellington’s personality. He was presented as a kind of dictator, the ‘sole minister of this great country’, lacking support in the country at large or from able politicians and surrounded by the fawning ‘parasites of both sexes’.

The character and desirability of the hero of Waterloo as chief minister formed another focal point for electoral contests and a rich vein for satirists. Brougham carried this formidable range of themes and his bruising attacks on Wellington into his own contest, which was in many ways the cause célèbre of the entire general election: the county contest for Yorkshire. In the effort to secure two Whig members for this populous county, a bellwether of popular opinion since the eighteenth century, Brougham’s celebrated efforts saw him overcome substantial obstacles to claim a widely reported victory. He became the first non-Yorkshireman elected for the county since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the first lawyer since the government of Oliver Cromwell.

In the event, Wellington’s character as minister played second fiddle to a much more prominent issue. In both Houses of Parliament, the animating theme that looked forwards from the Catholic question and did most to shape the electoral contest was that of distress. The year 1830 had begun with fierce debates about the nature and scale of economic and social challenges across the United Kingdom. These were clearest in the English countryside, from where a majority of the population still sought to eke a living, in several key manufacturing centres and in Ireland. Debate in Parliament revolved around the severity of distress but particularly around its scale. Ministers’ efforts in the King’s Speech to present it as localised and partial were met with incredulity by MPs and journalists, who decried the ‘all-pervading and intolerable distress’ and scoffed at ministers’ misrepresentation of it. Such gloomy prognoses were borne out in the aftermath of the election. The autumn of 1830 witnessed the spectacular eruption of the Swing Riots in large swathes of the English countryside.

Consequently, many of the big talking points driving the election revolved around different solutions for this distress. A change of ministry was one potential source of relief. In addressing electors’ demands, candidates broached ideas of retrenchment and economy and essayed a range of fiscal and monetary reforms. An increasingly popular solution had been prefigured by the foundation of the Birmingham Political Union in December 1829 and by an ultra-Tory motion calling for parliamentary reform in February. How, people asked, could governing institutions lacking in legitimacy and riddled with corruption be expected to pass legislation which protected the established church or dealt effectually with vaulting economic and social tensions? From the beginning of the year, then, parliamentary reform was on the political agenda in a more substantial way than it had been for more than a decade, and it played a prominent role in many electoral contests.

Reform as an issue was oxygenated substantially by international developments during the back end of the election. In Paris, the end of July saw the Trois Glorieuses, a rapid revolution which overthrew the returned Bourbons and Charles X and installed the House of Orléans in the shape of Louis Philippe as a new constitutional monarchy. Revolution in France – as it had before and would again – acted as an incubator for action elsewhere and set rolling a revolutionary wave across much of Europe over the following year. Its impact was, to the great relief of British ministers, too late in most cases to influence electoral results. It did a great deal, however, to supercharge both the latter stages of the elections in large urban constituencies and the sense of what was at stake in interpreting the election’s outcomes.

Overall, the fluidity of the political situation made it challenging to present results. These required a degree of interpretation and rival efforts at political divination came up with widely divergent numbers. The Treasury put a brave face on it and touted an estimated overall gain of twenty seats. A triumphant Brougham, newly minted MP for Yorkshire, went (anonymously) into battle again with another pamphlet, ‘The Result of the General Election’. He scoffed at ministers’ numbers and reversed them. Wellington had lost at least twenty seats following the dissolution, in an electoral context where a new reign and Treasury resources might be expected to boost a sitting government: ‘did ever Minister yet sustain such a signal defeat?’ Brougham was much closer to the mark. When Wellington, Peel and other ministers faced Parliament in October, in the context of ongoing European revolutions, domestic distress and the eruption of the worst and most prolonged rural violence England had ever seen, they did so with diminished support.

As the penultimate ‘unreformed’ election, 1830 displayed many of the most prominent features of Hanoverian electoral culture. The corruption exemplified by East India money and memorably satirised in John Galt’s novel The Member by the figure of Archibald Jobbry, the MP for Frailtown, was fully on show. Indeed, there was widespread belief during the long lead-in to the election that, with the renewal of the East India Company’s charter on the table, even more money flooded the race for parliamentary seats and substantially raised their market price in 1830. The carnivalesque, booze-fuelled and frequently violent dimensions immortalised in William Hogarth’s Humours of an Election series of paintings were alive and kicking. At Bristol, for example, the agitation round the slavery issue coupled with a large itinerant population of sailors and ubiquitous alcohol had predictable outcomes. Rival election mobs sallied forth from the pubs The Rummer and The Bush and made a no-go zone of the city centre on 22 July, when there were twenty-seven hospitalisations.

There was no straight line between the election of 1830 and the momentous measures of parliamentary reform passed two years later. While reform was an issue in the 1830 election, it was far from being the issue and jostled for space with many others, most prominently ‘bread and butter’ questions of material and economic distress. Several aspects of the election, however, did point forwards to the dramatic political context of the next two years. The first was that the election saw a qualified rejection not of a party but of the kind of deferential politics which had marked many electoral contests over the previous century. Men of modest incomes and propertied farmers holding votes used these to reject the traditional electoral authority and influence of the ruling aristocratic elites. Whigs as well as Tories were concerned at this apparent sign of a challenge not to a single party but to the political system as a whole. Second, the result presaged what was as close as it was possible to get to an electoral landslide under the Hanoverian electoral system at the last ‘unreformed’ election in 1831. Finally, the widespread airing of arguments that a whole range of challenges and problems – economic distress, religious disqualifications, inequitable taxation and the holding of other humans as property – were soluble only if fundamental changes were made to the way in which MPs were elected foreshadowed the debates that would engross the United Kingdom over the next two years.

Gordon Pentland is professor of history at Monash University in Melbourne. He has published widely on the political and cultural history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. He is currently working on a new book, The Reform Crisis, 1830–1832.

2

1831

CONNOR HAND

Dissolution: 23 April 1831

Polling day: 28 April–1 June 1831

Seats contested: 658

Total electorate: Approx. 516,000

Prime Minister on polling day: Earl Grey

Main party leaders: Whig – Earl Grey; Tory – Duke of Wellington

Party performance:

Party

Seats won

Whig

370

Tory

234

Result: Whig majority of 135 seats

The idea of a ‘single-issue’ election is arguably one of the most overused concepts in our political imagination. All too often, the term proves reductive, ignoring or understating a host of issues at the heart of a campaign. The election of 1831, called a mere 222 days after the conclusion of the 1830 contest, is perhaps an exception. This was, for the Tory Party, an electoral annihilation comparable to the defeats of 1906, 1945 and 1997, where the issue of parliamentary reform dominated proceedings across the country. Yet this chapter will demonstrate that this was a remarkable election which went beyond the size of the Whigs’ victory. Fundamentally, it showed that in an age marred by societal change, early industrialisation and upheaval on the Continent, constitutional change could be delivered without revolution. In the process, it also helped to redefine the party political system; local issues, which were typically the chief concern of those eligible to vote, were transcended in a way that had seldom been seen before, laying the ground for the formalised system of political parties we know today.

While the Duke of Wellington had been returned as Prime Minister after the vote of 1830, his victory was, ultimately, pyrrhic. Less than a month after parliament had reconvened, he was ousted, as instability and factionalism within Tory ranks proved insurmountable. The party faced a schism over the decision to grant Catholic emancipation two years prior, which was seen by Ultra-Tories as a betrayal by Wellington and his Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel. This led to the government collapsing after unexpectedly losing a vote on the civil list on 15 November 1830. Stung by a band of newly elected Tory MPs, seventeen of whom voted in line with the opposition, the Iron Duke was defeated by 233 votes to 207 and tendered his resignation in the days that followed.

Succeeding Wellington was Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, who had by then been leading the Whigs in opposition for almost a quarter of a century. His ascendancy owed much to the death of King George IV, who never looked favourably upon Grey, and the accession of William IV, whose greater sympathy towards the Whig leader would prove essential to his premiership and eventual electoral success. Though he had long advocated parliamentary reform, it is striking that in the month he became Prime Minister, Grey underestimated the hunger for political change that would propel him to a landslide victory. During the King’s Speech, for example, Grey’s contemporaries were struck by his ‘slight and almost slighting manner’ when addressing the question of reform, with John Roebuck arguing that he had presented it ‘as a sort of decoration in an opposition speech … because no one believed it to be of import to party success’.

Towards the end of 1830, however, violent disturbances across Britain ensured reform would be at the kernel of Grey’s government’s activity. Sparked by agricultural unrest owing to the mechanisation of farming and stagnant wages, the ‘Captain Swing’ riots saw bands of unemployed labourers smash threshing machines throughout Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. Anarchy was widespread and went beyond the agricultural sector, as textile workers in Lancashire, Staffordshire and the Midlands became increasingly militant under the leadership of John Doherty. By late 1830, his National Association for the Protection of Labour, an early attempt at a national trade union, had amassed 100,000 members in these counties, highlighting the impact of nascent industrialisation and the problems that accompanied it.

This disharmony, along with the aftershocks of the overthrow of Charles X in France, revolution in Belgium and insurrectionary movements in Italy and Spain, crystallised fears among the landed classes about the possibility of revolution in Britain. Attesting to this is an account from December 1830’s edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine, a publication aimed at aristocratic readers, which depicted a scene of near-hysteria in Cambridge following the razing of a local farm, including the sale of ‘1,500 bludgeons … within two days’. According to the diarist Charles Greville, widespread disturbances left London resembling the ‘capital of a country desolated by cruel war or foreign invasion’. This was unprecedented in his lifetime and Greville was stunned by the atmosphere of ‘general agitation’ – agitation driven by the issues of reform and economic strife.

Suppressing disturbances dominated the opening weeks of Grey’s ministry. A syncretic blend of Whigs and Canningites, which included three future Tory Prime Ministers, Grey’s Cabinet swiftly dispensed with violent protests: 200 rioters were initially sentenced to death and around 500 transported to Australia for their involvement. As an unabashed aristocrat, and with a Cabinet that owned more land than any that preceded it, Grey searched desperately for an antidote to revolution. He believed that the answer lay in redistributing political influence to regions that were growing in economic importance.

The First Reform Bill sought to address these iniquities and was introduced to the House of Commons by Lord John Russell on 1 March 1831. Industrialising areas such as Leeds, Manchester, Greenwich and Sheffield were to be allocated two MPs each in a major shake-up of the electoral map. Constituencies with tiny electorates – some with as few as seven voters in the case of Old Sarum in Wiltshire – would be totally disenfranchised to offset this expansion. The ‘rotten boroughs’, often controlled by a single powerful patron, were targeted ruthlessly, while constituencies with an electorate of between 2,000 and 4,000 would also see their allocations halved from two MPs to one. Though it was to formally disenfranchise women for the first time, the act also advocated extending eligibility to people with property amounting to over £10, granting the vote to a sizeable portion of the urban middle class, whose integration into the political establishment was believed to be an important bulwark against revolutionary currents.

While a number of the prerequisites of a modern democratic system were omitted, such as the secret ballot and universal suffrage, many were struck by the bill’s ambition. The Baltic noblewoman Princess Lieven, a confidant of Grey, noted the sense of bemusement in Parliament with the ‘Whigs … astonished, the Radicals delighted [and] the Tories indignant’. The magnitude of the plan, and potential imminence of a general election, was clear to all. Indeed, on the day the bill was unveiled, The Times carried an editorial declaring that a ‘grand crisis’ had been reached, which would culminate in either ‘reform or a dissolution within a few days or hours!’

As such, although it would be a number of weeks before an election was actually called, the electoral battlelines had been drawn and the parties sharpened their messaging around the definitive issue of the day. Though Wellington continued to lead the Tories, it was Peel who cautioned against the bill’s adoption at the dispatch box, arguing that it would lead to continual constitutional concessions: ‘others will outbid you’, he said, and would offer ‘votes and powers to a million men … quot[ing] your precedent’. Conscious of parliamentary arithmetic, and the perception of the country at large, the Whigs were at pains to stress the permanence of their proposals – a silver bullet to eradicate electoral evils – a dogged insistence that earned Russell the nickname ‘Finality Jack’. Resisting pressures from radicals such as Henry Hunt to leave the door open to further reform down the line proved critical as the bill passed its second reading by the barest of margins – 302 to 301. In the words of the Whig MP T. B. Macaulay, the moment was equivalent to ‘seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House … The jaw of Peel fell; and the face of [the anti-reform MP Horace] Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and [former Tory Chancellor John] Herries looked like Judas taking his neck-cloth off for the last operation.’

With Parliament fractured and tensions evoking biblical comparisons, it is unsurprising that the bill’s progress faltered. General Isaac Gascoyne soon introduced a wrecking amendment to preserve the number of seats allocated to England, which was set to fall disproportionately as part of the efforts to uproot rotten boroughs. ‘The spoliation of English representation’, as Gascoyne described it, raised the spectre of a greater presence of Irish Catholic MPs. Anxieties surrounding the ‘enemy within’, who would serve to undermine Protestant institutions and the constitution, secured the adoption of the amendment, with bleary-eyed MPs passing it at 4.30 a.m. on 20 April (299 to 291). Parliament was now ungovernable for the Whigs; it was necessary to ‘have it the other way’, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, lamented.

Although Sir James’s comments indicate the Whigs’ confidence, securing a contest would ultimately require the king’s consent. This was by no means guaranteed. Perceived instability in Ireland, augmented by an impending trial for sedition of Daniel O’Connell, the leading light in the campaign for Catholic emancipation, threatened to unravel attempts to call an election. Though O’Connell’s trial was cleverly kiboshed by government lawyers, who argued he was being tried under a lapsed statute, the fear of turmoil weighed heavily on the mind of William IV. On top of this, the king was perceptive enough to realise that a contest would essentially be a referendum on a single issue, and therefore mark a significant constitutional departure from previous elections; he agonised over Grey’s request for dissolution and, in spite of these reservations, acquiesced after twenty-four hours of deliberation.

As the king prepared to dissolve Parliament on 22 April, the atmosphere inside the chambers was nothing short of febrile. Sensing an election could be imminent, Peel had started to modify his language, indicating he would be potentially open to a version of reform – just not in the immediate future. Now, though, he launched into a stinging attack against both the Whigs and the king. In an invective halted by the Black Rod just as he ‘seemed to fall into fit’, as the Whig J. C. Hobhouse described it, Peel contended that the Crown had ‘ceased to be an object of interest’ if it was to be so easily swayed by the government. Unbridled hysteria swept through the Tory benches, with scenes drawing comparisons with the French Revolution’s Serment du Jeu de Paume; Sir Henry Hardinge, a former Tory minister and ally of Peel, expressed his belief that gunshots would soon ring around the capital. Tory fears were captured most vividly by the eyewitness George Villiers, whose words were recounted by Greville:

As [I] looked at the King upon the throne with the crown loose upon his head, and the tall grim figure of Lord Grey close beside him with the sword of state in his hand, it was as if the King had got his Executioner by his side and the whole picture was strikingly typical of his and our future destinies.

Less than a week separated these dramatic parliamentary scenes and polls opening. On the face of it, incidents of disorder across the breadth of Britain could have played into the Tories’ electoral strategy. Violence, invariably inflicted by groups sympathetic to reform, was reported in areas such as Aberdeenshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Pembrokeshire, Wigan and Warwick. Clashes were arguably at their most intense in Lanarkshire and Rye in Sussex, where freemen backing anti-reformers faced a level of physical intimidation which almost resulted in one of them being ‘trampled to death’. Elsewhere, aristocratic property was targeted. Upon dissolution, supporters of reform were encouraged to light their houses at night, leaving the unilluminated properties of anti-reformers to be attacked by mobs which, according to accounts from Edinburgh, reached 10,000 in number. Stones crashed through the Duke of Wellington’s London home, the crowd seemingly unconcerned with the personal tragedy that had struck the Tory leader days before, his wife’s passing so recent that her body was yet to be removed from the property.

As the ballot commenced, it is perhaps of little wonder that the man who defeated Napoleon was increasingly fatalistic about both his party’s electoral chances and the inevitability of revolution. The latter presented a challenge for the Whigs. Given they were still navigating an unreformed system, it was crucial that this perception was not shared by the electorate, namely the landed classes whose approval was essential to secure victory. Consequently, their rhetoric appealed to the restoration of calm throughout the nation. Sentiments such as ‘Liberty and Public Order’ were deployed in county seats like Norwich, where the notorious anti-reformer Sir Charles Wetherell was defeated. In Liverpool, meanwhile, newspapers favourable to reform consciously highlighted the respectability of the Whigs’ hustings and meetings, culminating in the symbolically significant defeat of General Gascoyne, whose wrecking amendment had triggered the election.

The Whigs’ ability to communicate this message was aided significantly by the king’s presence at the dissolution of Parliament. Initially, William IV was disinclined to attend in person, owing to his concerns over the constitutional precedent the election would set and potential tumult in Ireland. However, Tories in both Houses committed a major tactical error by attempting to move against dissolution. Enraged at this effort to override his prerogative, the king’s previous reluctance swiftly dissipated, and he demanded to be taken to Parliament with such urgency that he would settle for a hackney coach if the royal stables were not ready. Undoubtedly, his attendance conferred extra legitimacy on the reform movement, as evidenced by an editorial in The Times, which went so far as to call for a monument to King William IV in recognition of his contribution to the cause. The momentum this injected into the Whigs’ campaign was encapsulated by Princess Lieven, who observed that ‘the moment that the country saw that the King lent himself to the measure … there was no way of raising a cry against Reform’. This point was not lost on the Tories, with Hardinge conceding a week into polling that ‘the reform mania … is not to be overcome at this crisis when a k[ing] heads the mob or blindly submits to the dictates of his ministers’. Whig candidates across the land urged the public to cast votes in favour of the ‘Two Bills’ – reform and William – which helped to reassure patrons that their interests were served by backing Grey’s party.

That said, while some wealthy landowners offered reform their full-throated support, it was clear to strategists within the party that it would be necessary to be pragmatic in dealing with certain patrons; for this election at least, this meant compromising on their ambition to reduce corruption and ensure electoral integrity. Indeed, this was apparent from the very start of the campaign. Barely twenty-four hours after the election was called, a meeting was arranged at Brooks’s Club, a gentleman’s establishment in London often frequented by the party’s leading lights. In attendance was J. C. Hobhouse, who recalled that over £15,000 – approximately £1.25 million in today’s money – had already been collected through donations and subscriptions, a substantial chunk of which was dedicated to ‘procuring seats for some good men’. Many patrons sensed a final opportunity to exploit the existing system, for example Lord Yarborough, who demanded a minimum of £4,000 for his seats on the Isle of Wight. As Hobhouse noted, ‘[though] this appeared somewhat in contradiction to the principles on which we put forward our political pretensions … we were obliged to fight our opponents with their own weapons, no other mode of warfare would have had the slightest chance of success’.

Other boroughmongers sought not to profiteer as they were implacably opposed to reform and resolved to fight the bill through their nominations. Their resistance, however, was often futile. Many previously powerful patrons – including the Duke of Newcastle in Nottinghamshire, Lord Lonsdale (Cumberland and Westmorland) and the Duke of Beaufort (Gloucestershire) – witnessed the rejection of their anti-reform candidates.

The results for the Tories were therefore shaping up to be about as disastrous as was possible in an unreformed Parliament. Of the English MPs the party returned, 84 per cent represented seats facing disenfranchisement or restructuring, putting them in considerable jeopardy for the 1832 election, following reform’s implementation. The vast majority of these individuals also benefited from running unopposed. Where contests emerged, as was the case in roughly a third of the 380 constituencies, the success of the pro-reform movement was overwhelming. Moreover, owing to the ballot taking place over a number of weeks, victorious candidates would also travel to constituencies where the contest was still ongoing and participate in their hustings, as Devon MP Lord Ebrington did when he addressed the voters of Cornwall, providing reformers with further momentum. Consequently, only Shropshire returned two anti-reform candidates when a vote was forced, and pro-reform MPs won seventy-six of the eighty-two county seats overall.

Pockets of resistance occasionally sprouted, perhaps most ironically in university areas. On the Continent, such regions often served as the epicentre for arguments of political reform and even revolution, but these trends were bucked in the Oxford and Cambridge University seats, with the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Lord Palmerston ejected from the latter owing to his support for the bill.

Despite the disappointment of Palmerston’s ousting, though, much of the early impetus Grey’s party had generated was sustained by the breadth of popular support the bill enjoyed. This found expression through mass gatherings. Even though the proportion of adult males eligible to vote would increase only from 14 per cent to 18 per cent, crowds flocked to counts in unprecedented numbers, particularly in industrialising areas. Dudley and Norwich provide a case in point. Over 20,000 people greeted pro-reform candidates in both these regions, a figure that was still several times the size of their respective electorates even after reform had been achieved, and a procession was organised for the victorious candidates in Bristol.

Nor was such enthusiasm confined to England. Around 50,000 gathered in Glasgow, with the number of contests in Scotland quadrupling and the proportion of pro-reform candidates returned to Parliament soaring to 50 per cent. Even in Breconshire, Wales, where the landed interest was believed to be unconquerable, a contest was forced in the midst of demonstrations in Merthyr which, in the days after the election, culminated in violent clashes in which the red flag was first used as a symbol of working-class resistance.

While the final contest did not conclude until 1 June, it was clear by early May that the Whigs were on course for a resounding victory, with commentators like Greville forecasting a majority of around 140 seats. Although the outcome was inevitable at this point, a crucial development from the 1831 election was best displayed during one of the few ballots that continued until the final days – namely the increasing levels of partisanship across the electorate.

Evidence of this trend had been building through the decline in the number of voters willing to split their ballots between candidates of the two main parties, but the specific circumstances surrounding the contest in Northamptonshire illustrated how local considerations and loyalties were transcended in a way few previously thought possible. Representation in the county had been divided between Grey’s Chancellor, Lord Althorp, and the Tory William Cartwright since 1806. Althorp believed it served both men’s interests not to force a contest because, irrespective of the national mood around the reform question, ‘the two parties in the county were of equal strength’. He assured Cartwright that the Whigs would stand a second candidate only in retaliation to the Tories making the first move. Cries of treachery therefore swept through the constituency when, in spite of Althorp offering his word, the Whigs proposed Lord Milton to run alongside him. Such behaviour was judged to be so egregious that many believed Althorp should step aside to restore his honour. In spite of this controversy, and the conviction in Althorp’s camp that ‘another Whig candidate could not be proposed with any probability of success’, Milton deposed Cartwright after close to two weeks of polling.

In other words, Northamptonshire demonstrated how the election of 1831 challenged the political orthodoxy of the time. Where previously local factors and candidates proved decisive, the electorate had now been polarised over a single issue. This development, alongside the implementation of the Great Reform Act, would have long-term implications. Most notably, it would result in what the historian Jonathan Clark has described as a ‘new age of manifestos, platforms and ever-widening appeals’ in British politics, a trend reflected in Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto three years later and, indeed, in contests throughout this book.

Beyond this, the election had two more enduring consequences. Firstly, it established the precedent that constitutional reform could be achieved through parliamentary means. Far from representing ‘finality’, as the Whigs argued, this principle helped deliver the reforms of 1867, 1884 and 1918, all of which had significant ramifications for future UK elections. Secondly, this poll showed how parliamentary deadlock on a critical constitutional issue could be unlocked through the calling of a snap poll, an idea with which the 2019 voters will be familiar.

The most immediate implication of the Whigs’ victory, though, was the resounding mandate that they now had to implement reform. Though its exact size is disputed, owing to the more informal party structures in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, a reliable indicator of the size of their overall majority was the vote on the Second Reform Bill, which they clinched with a handsome margin of 136 votes. According to this measure, the Whigs gained approximately seventy seats: fifty-one in England, eight in Scotland, seven in Ireland and four in Wales. Wellington’s party was crushed. There would still be battles in the Lords, but the Act’s eventual passage resulted in an expanded electorate and a host of new constituencies when an election was called the following year – the third in a little over twentyfour months.

Connor Hand is a journalist and senior news-gathering producer at LBC Radio, working across numerous shows, including with Iain Dale in the evening, Nick Ferrari at breakfast and Carol Vorderman on Sundays.

3

1832

ALUN EVANS

Dissolution: 3 December 1832

Polling day: 10 December 1832–8 January 1833

Seats contested: 658

Total electorate / Total votes cast / Turnout: 812,938 (605,518 in contested seats) / 827,776 / 70.4 per cent

Candidates (total 1,037): Whig – 636; Tory – 350; Irish Repeal – 51 Prime Minister on polling day: Earl Grey

Main party leaders: Whig – Earl Grey; Tory – Duke of Wellington; Irish Repeal – Daniel O’Connell

Party performance:

Party

Votes

Percentage share

Seats

Whig

554,719

67

441

Tory

241,284

29.2

175

Irish Repeal

31,773

3.8

42

Result: Whig majority of 225 seats

Anybody today coming out of the Monument Metro Station in Newcastle cannot miss the column at the road junction there. But if they look at whom it commemorates, they may not realise the significance of the politician whose statue is on top of the monument. Grey’s Monument was built in 1838 in honour of Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834, and the man responsible for the passage of one of the greatest acts of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom – what became known as the Great Reform Act of 1832. The Act was the first to extend the suffrage (albeit only to men) and create a fairer system of parliamentary constituencies. That process of parliamentary reform eventually led to universal suffrage for all men and women over twenty-one in 1928, although that goal was not fully achieved until 1948 with the abolition of plural voting and the universities’ seats. In 1969, the voting age was lowered to eighteen, thereby defining the scope of the current United Kingdom electorate.

Earl Grey began that process of electoral reform by steering the Third Reform Bill through the Houses of Parliament and then led his Whig government to victory in the subsequent 1832 general election – the first to be fought under the new and enlarged franchise.

The previous two general elections had been held in 1830 and 1831. The 1830 poll had been indecisive, resulting in what would now be termed a hung parliament, whereas the 1831 poll had produced a Whig landslide of 136 seats over the Tories. It therefore gave Grey a majority in the House of Commons supportive of his reform programme. The outcome of the 1832 general election cannot be fully comprehended without a prior analysis and understanding of the campaign during the spring and summer of 1832 that eventually led to the passage of the Reform Act (it only later acquired the title ‘Great’).

However, Grey was not in any traditional sense a radical. He came from an aristocratic Northumberland family and had something of a colourful life, fathering a child by Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, when very young, but his family and he supported the child, who was raised by his parents. He went on to have fifteen other children with his wife, Mary.

Grey was aged sixty-six when he finally became Prime Minister. He had first entered Parliament in 1786, at the age of twenty-two, just three years before the French Revolution, the effects of which affected his thinking. He spent most of the next forty years in opposition. His support for electoral reform was not, though, based upon some vision of liberal progress but more as a means of avoiding revolution. As his biographer E. A. Smith commented, Grey supported reform within the context of ‘the immediate concern he felt at the dangerous state of the country and the need to preserve the aristocratic system of government … Reform was merely a part of this major purpose.’

The two aspects that Grey was concerned to change were, firstly, the very narrow size of the electorate and, secondly, the obvious unfairness of the ‘rotten boroughs’ – those with no or hardly any electors – and the lack of parliamentary representation in other areas. By the early 1830s, there were protests in many of the larger unrepresented new conurbations and demands from the middle classes for change. In 1830 and 1831, there had also been violent uprisings in some rural areas (the so-called Swing Riots) and revolution was once again in the air in Europe when, in 1830, the July Revolution led to the overthrow of the restored French monarchy. Grey was convinced that only reform could reduce or prevent the risk of a similar outcome in Britain.

The death of King George IV in 1830, an implacable opponent of Grey, removed one obstacle to Grey’s ambitions and the Whig victory in the 1831 general election provided the springboard for Grey to introduce the bill to reform the franchise. It had two main elements. First, to rationalise the distribution of parliamentary seats by abolishing fifty-six rotten boroughs and creating 130 new parliamentary seats in sixty-seven new constituencies, especially in the growing towns and cities such as Birmingham and Manchester. Second, to expand the franchise, giving the vote to all male householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more, as well as to a number of middle-class property owners. However, the bill explicitly excluded women from the electoral register, even though some public commentators such as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham had urged it as long ago as 1819. The reform proposals were, in fact, fairly modest and far from radical – but they were, in Grey’s judgement, what could be sufficient to fend off the risk of revolt or worse. There had been further rioting in northern towns and cities in late 1831 and early 1832, with people protesting about the lack of progress in Parliament, and it appeared to Grey that reform was both urgent and essential.

The Third Reform Bill passed easily through the House of Commons with its massive Whig majority. However, it faced major opposition in the House of Lords. The Tory leader, the Duke of Wellington, was implacably opposed to the reform, arguing that there was nothing wrong with the existing system ‘which answered all the good purpose of legislation … to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered in any country’. Grey told the new king, William IV, that if the Lords did not pass the bill, he would seek to create fifty or sixty new peers.

When the bill came to its second reading in the House of Lords on 14 April, Grey himself chose to wind up the debate with what observers called one of his finest speeches. He again alluded to the threat that, if the Lords did not pass the bill, he would create many more peers to force its passage through the Upper House. The threat worked and the bill received a majority of just nine in the House of Lords. Two months later, it received royal assent, after many peers had abstained on its third reading and Wellington, though still opposed, did not have enough votes in the House of Lords to block it any longer.

Grey’s biographer suggested that ‘Britain came nearer to popular revolution during those years [1831 and 1832] than at any others in modern times’. Indeed, it is possible to argue that without the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Chartist movement which emerged a few years later and peaked in the early 1840s might have successfully overthrown the political settlement and even led to some form of revolution, much like those which took place throughout mainland Europe in 1848. That the Great Reform Act had enfranchised a section of the growing middle classes in the new towns and cities of the United Kingdom had helped avert such a possibility and set the pace for future electoral reform, even if it was to be many years until universal suffrage was achieved.