Days of May - Background

Background

Parliamentary representation was limited and haphazard in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain: in 1780 it was calculated that there were only 214,000 qualified to vote in England and Wales out of a total population of 8 million, and property qualifications varied widely between constituencies. The onset of the industrial revolution wrought sweeping social and economic change across the country, but the unchanging electoral system that continued left political structures increasingly unable to reflect the realities of economic power in the country. In 1830 fifty-six rotten boroughs elected two MPs each but had electorates of fewer than fifty, while Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield, with a combined population of more than 540,000, had not one MP between them.

Reform also had a record of inspiring popular discontent. In 1819 a crowd of 15,000 had gathered at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to symbolically elect Charles Wolsley as the town's "Legislatorial Attorney and Representative" in Westminster; when Manchester followed Birmingham's lead 2 months later troops opened fire and killed 15 in the event that became known as the Peterloo Massacre.

Sporadic unsuccessful attempts to abolish specific rotten boroughs and transfer representation to larger towns were carried out by Lord John Russell throughout the 1820s, but the election of a Whig government headed by Lord Grey in November 1830 was the first occasion when a ministry committed to parliamentary reform took office. Grey formed a committee to draft reform proposals that would be sufficient to quell public opinion and "afford sure ground of resistance to further innovation", but the resulting Reform Bill received only lukewarm support in parliament and further elections were held in May 1831. Newly armed with a majority of over 130 seats Grey introduced a Second Reform Bill in July 1831, which passed through the House of Commons with a majority of 140, but was defeated in the House of Lords in October amid rioting in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol.

By the 1830s the most influential extra-parliamentary support for reform came from the Birmingham Political Union, which had been founded by Thomas Attwood in December 1829 as "a General Political Union between the lower and middle classes of the people" to engineer the political reform that Attwood had come to think necessary to achieve his ultimate goal of currency reform. The unusually small size of the units of production characteristic of the Birmingham economy, coupled with the resulting high degree of social mobility and shared economic interest between Birmingham workers and factory owners, enabled the BPU to attract a broad support across classes and maintain its position of leadership among the hundreds of more fragmented unions that followed its example and formed across the country in 1830 and 1831.

The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen. Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government. The Times called the BPU "the barometer of the reform feeling throughout England", while Attwood himself was dubbed "King Tom" by William Cobbett and described by Francis Place as "the most influential man in England".