Unreformed House of Commons - End of The Unreformed House

End of The Unreformed House

The issue which finally brought the reform issue to a head was Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which removed barriers to Roman Catholics being elected to the House of Commons. Many Anglican conservatives came to favour a wider franchise, particularly the enfranchisement of the heavily Protestant cities of northern England, Wales and Scotland as a means of reducing Catholic influence and safeguarding British rule in Ireland. This finally led the conservative Whigs to support a moderate reform.

It is a paradox of the old system that when the political class finally decided to accept reform, the electoral system they had denounced for decades as unrepresentative readily allowed them to do so. At the August 1830 election, the Tory administration of the Duke of Wellington lost 40 to 50 seats to the Whigs. On one estimate, of the 250 constituencies in which there was any kind of broad-based electorate, the Tories won in only about eighty. This setback led to Wellington's resignation in November and Earl Grey formed a ministry pledged to reform.

When Grey's reform bill was narrowly defeated, he was granted a dissolution of parliament and sought a fresh mandate in April 1831. At this election the Whigs won a landslide. In 35 of the 40 English counties they won both seats and in the boroughs where electors were able to decide they made an almost clean sweep. Of the 230 seats the Tories held after that election, most were in rotten or "closed" boroughs or else in Scotland, which had almost no broad-based electorates. By one reckoning, the Tories could claim to represent only 50,000 voters, while the four Whig members for Yorkshire alone represented 100,000 voters. Faced with this decisive verdict, the House of Lords and the King gave way and the Great Reform Act was passed.

The Reform Act extended the franchise only slightly (from about 500,000 to about 750,000 voters). It took the first step towards reform: disfranchising the rotten boroughs (56 boroughs were abolished, while another 30 were reduced from two members to one), giving seats to fifty new boroughs and additional seats to the more populous counties, reforming the electoral system in Scotland and introducing a uniform borough franchise. Although the new arrangements were still a far cry from universal suffrage, the Great Reform Act was the decisive step in ending the old system.