Rotten Boroughs

It is related . . that Queen Elizabeth . . . was so delighted with some remarkably fine map iconHampshire beer . . . that she forthwith erected Crawley into a borough to send two members to Parliament. . . . And though by the lapse of time, and those mutations which ages produce in empires, cities, and boroughs, Queen's Crawley was no longer so populous a place as it had been . . . – nay, was come down to that condition of borough which used to be denominated rotten–yet, as Sir Pitt Crawley would say with perfect justice in his elegant way, "Rotten! be hanged–it produces me a good fifteen hundred a year. — W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (ch. 7)


The long tradition of Parliament as the "representative body of the people" was largely symbolic (qtd. in Pitkin 248). As Sir Thomas Smith wrote in 1583, "the Parliament of Englande . . . representeth and hath the power of the whole realme, both the head and the bodie. For everie Englishman is entended to be there present, either in person or by procuration. . . . And the consent of the Parliament is taken to be everie man's consent" (qtd. in Pitkin 246). Implied consent could benefit the Crown, as Hanna Pitkin notes: "since everyone was presumed to know the actions of Parliament, ignorance was no excuse for disobedience" (85). Yet it also spawned radical visions of a representative legislature as "an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason and act like them," as John Adams urged in the American Revolutionary period (qtd. in Pitkin 60). With this in mind, in 1787 the fledgling U. S. A. created a bicameral legislature without hereditary titles, linking representation in the lower House to population surveys. In 1789, the French revolution began with a parliamentary crisis, as the "Third Estate" (representing commoners) defied the king by declaring itself to be a National Assembly, seizing power from the nobility and clergy.

In the light of these radical experiments in democracy, the power retained by hereditary landowners in the British government of the early nineteenth century was remarkable. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland continued to be ruled by an hereditary monarchy in tandem with a House of Lords comprised of individuals who were either elevated by the king or inherited the rank from their fathers. Then as now, the only elected Members of Parliament served in the House of Commons. [4] As early as 1641, the House of Commons noted the distinction between "this House, being the Representative Body of the whole Kingdom, and their Lordships, being but as particular Persons, and coming to Parliament in their particular capacity" (qtd. in Pitkin 248).

The difference between the House of Commons and the House of Lords was, moreover, far from crystal-clear in the 1820s, as electoral quirks and an evolving system of patronage ensured a ruling-class monopoly on parliamentary elections. The electoral system hinged on geography and past practice rather than systematic procedures or population surveys. Elites could count upon elections in "rotten" boroughs or "pocket" boroughs where a few electors (often dependent upon their local land-owner) voted in open ballots as their patrons wished. (Borough owners or patrons like the fictional Pitt Crawley of the novel Vanity Fair could "sell" the seats each year for profits. ) In districts with larger numbers of electors, meanwhile, votes could be openly purchased and voters openly punished. [5] Electoral seats were given to young men as gifts, and non-aristocratic M. P. 's were rare enough to attract notice. [6] As Lady Cowper wrote in June 1826, "People think this new Parliament will be a curious one . . . such strange things have turned out. There are three stock-brokers in it, which was never the case . . . before" (qtd. in Brock 24).

Paradoxically, it was the government's effort to share power with a new constituency that revealed for many the "rotten" aspects of such rule. [7] In 1829, Parliament enacted Catholic emancipation (the Roman Catholic Relief Act), which allowed Catholics to serve in Parliament. (See Elsie B. Michie, "On the Sacramental Test Act, the Catholic Relief Act, the Slavery Abolition Act, and the Factory Act". ) Passage of this act was accomplished not due to a widely shared liberal desire for inclusiveness, but because of government fears of civil war in Ireland. By the Acts of Union in 1800, the Irish parliament had been abolished and its representatives sent to join the British parliament in map iconWestminster. These representatives, mostly drawn from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, had to be Anglican (members of the Church of England), although Irish Catholics had been eligible to vote since 1793. In 1828, however, the Catholic Association succeeded in promoting the election of Daniel O'Connell, despite his ineligibility as a Roman Catholic to serve in the House of Commons. Fearful of the new powers of the Catholic Association, which threatened British rule in Ireland, parliamentary leaders sought a compromise: to allow Roman Catholic members like O'Connell to sit in Parliament, while outlawing the Association and raising the property qualification to vote in Ireland.

The conservative Tory government swiftly passed the Catholic Emancipation Bill, despite its unpopularity with English voters, partly by drawing upon the networks of power and patronage of the borough system. Sir Robert Peel, for example, lost his re-election bid at Oxford in February of 1829 amidst an uproar over the Catholic emancipation bill, which he was sponsoring in the House of Commons. But just in time to introduce the bill, he was nominated and (re-)elected by a total of three voters as a representative for Westbury, where a notorious borough owner had resigned in his favor.

After the passage of Catholic emancipation, Peel and other government leaders were "subjected to much abuse for 'ratting' from their outraged 'protestant' followers" (Brock 54). The Dowager Duchess of Richmond even "decorated her drawing room with stuffed rats named after them and their fellow apostates" (Brock 54). In the aftermath of the act, "anti-Popery" protests in England coalesced around the "rotten" electoral system which had favored Catholic emancipation. Announcing his conversion to Reform in March 1829, for example, the Earl of Winchilsea told the Lords that when he saw "those who were possessed of close boroughs . . . sacrificing their principles, in order that they might be able to patch up fortunes which had been broken and ruined by their vices, he had no hesitation in saying 'let honest people have the representation which these have so grossly abused'" (Brock 55). Anti-Catholic sentiment thus fueled a new coalition for fundamental parliamentary reform.

Catholic emancipation demonstrated not only how rigged elections enabled ministers to flout public opinion, but also how outside groups like the Catholic Association could nonetheless mobilize voters and demand political concessions. In London as well as Leicester, advocates for parliamentary reform sought in 1829 to form "a club or committee, resembling the Catholic Association, to take advantage of every favourable opportunity for working Reform" (qtd. in Brock 58). As the Birmingham Political Union for the Protection of Public Rights proclaimed in December of 1829, the "general distress which now afflicts the country" due to the "gross mismanagement of public affairs" could only be "permanently remedied by an effectual Reform in the Commons map iconHouse of Parliament" (qtd. in Brock 60). Embracing the effort to form a "POLITICAL UNION between the Lower and the Middle Classes of the People," 12 to 15,000 people attended the Birmingham meeting in January 1830, producing a petition signed by 30,000 [original capitalization] (qtd. in Brock 61).

By 1830, events within and far beyond the halls of government conspired to make parliamentary reform not only possible but urgent. As Lord Russell later recalled, "In the western counties, large bodies of . . . idle young men went about destroying thrashing machines, and setting fire to ricks of hay and stacks of corn. At night, the whole atmosphere was lighted up by fires, the work of lawless depredators . . . and the whole framework of society seemed about to yield to force and anarchy" (53). The rural "Swing" riots appeared to echo the revolutionary events of that year in map iconFrance. Leaders of the cosmopolitan Whig party like Lord Charles Grey, who had nearly been tried for treason in 1794 as a "Friend of the People," took notice (Brock 71). As Grey wrote in a letter of March 1830, "the newspapers in their attacks on landowners have destroyed all respect for rank, station, and institutions of government"; by April, aware that the king was fatally ill, he worried that the state of the kingdom was "too like what took place in France before the Revolution" (qtd. in Brock 69).

In May, Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Catholic M. P. , proposed a measure for triennial Parliaments, complete male suffrage, and vote by secret ballot. In response, the Whigs began to circulate their own less radical schemes, with payments to compensate current borough owners. With the death of King George IV in June 1830, William IV ascended to the throne. The new king was neither closely allied with ultra-Tory landowners nor opposed to working with the Whigs. Four days after King George's death, Charles Grey declared to the Lords that the current Tory government had shown itself "incompetent to manage the business of the country" (qtd. in Brock 72). By law, Parliament had to dissolve within six months of the king's death; in the resulting election, the Whigs came to power as part of a coalition devoted to reform, with Lord Grey as Prime Minister.