Unreformed House of Commons - Movements For Reform

Movements For Reform

During the English Revolution of the 1640s, the electoral system for the House of Commons was scrapped (and the House of Lords abolished). The revolutionary governments considered various alternative methods of electing a legislature.

At the Putney Debates of 1647, representatives of various factions of the victorious Parliamentary army debated whether to adopt a more democratic franchise. The radicals led by Thomas Rainborough argued for manhood suffrage. The conservatives, led by Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, argued that since the great majority of Englishmen were peasant tenants, if given the vote they would vote as their landlords directed, and this would lead to the restoration of the monarchy.

In the circumstances of the time, this proved a persuasive argument, and proposals for a wider franchise or a redistribution of representation were rejected. But no other acceptable basis could be found for electing the House of Commons, and there was no functioning legislature during most of Cromwell’s regime. The Restoration of 1660 restored the pre-revolutionary system in its entirety.

Following the Restoration there was a long period during which any challenge to the system of representation was equated with republicanism and treason. At the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 there was no attempt to re-open the question. A reform movement began in the mid-18th century. Although the Whig party was ambivalent in its attitude to reform, some Whig leaders like Fox and Earl Grey raised the issue many times, but nothing was achieved in the face of Tory resistance. After 1789 the English reaction against the excesses of the French Revolution stifled all attempts to raise the issue until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Between 1815 and 1832 pressure for reform mounted steadily. The Napoleonic Wars had greatly strengthened the urban middle classes, and their leaders, mainly Dissenting businessmen and editors from northern England, mounted an increasingly vociferous campaign. There was also a radical working-class campaign which demanded manhood suffrage (or even universal suffrage), annual Parliaments and other radical changes but the other reform leaders did not support these demands.

Unable to challenge the system of representation successfully, reformers had to content themselves with bringing in bills to abolish specific particularly corrupt boroughs. The Tories regularly rejected these bills until 1826, where Lord Liverpool's government surprised the reformers by accepting a bill to disfranchise Grampound in Cornwall, when the borough's patron had been convicted of bribery. The reformers, led by Lord John Russell, wanted to transfer Grampound's two seats to Leeds but Liverpool would not accept this precedent. So the seats were given to Yorkshire, which thus elected four county members from 1826 to 1832. A few years later East Retford was also disfranchised but its seats were transferred to the neighbouring hundred of Bassetlaw rather than to one of the new cities.

The grant of additional seats to Yorkshire was a recognition of the pressure for reform coming from the county landowners in those counties which contained the unrepresented cities, such as Yorkshire, who were increasingly finding themselves outvoted in their own counties by urban voters. By the early 19th century Middlesex was more than 60% urban and a dozen other counties were more than 30% urban.

It is important to recognise that few of those who were pushing for reform of the House of Commons were doing so in order to make the political system more democratic. "Democracy" in 1820s Britain was still a term associated with mob rule and the excesses of the French Revolution. Nearly all political actors accepted that the House of Commons should represent interests (that is to say, property), rather than numbers. One of the leading reformers, Lord John Russell, said in 1831: "Elections carried by money, treating and an appeal to low passions will produce such disorder, and such disgust, that an arbitrary monarchy will sooner or later be the consequence. Our object should rather be to place the power of choice in men of property and intelligence… If you place the franchise too low… you run the risk of creating more evils on the one side than you put down on the other."

By the beginning of the 19th century it was widely felt that the House no longer represented property. It represented only a fragment of property; mostly landed property in the counties. Finance and manufacturing capital, the dominant form of property after the industrial revolution, was not represented. This and not a desire for democracy, was why most Whigs and even some Tories turned against the old system during the 1820s.