Summary: The 1832 Reform Act was a turning point in British history and set Britain on the path to democracy, even though it fell short of true representation. It abolished “rotten boroughs,” redistributed seats, and expanded the electorate to include middle-class men, while still excluding most working-class men and all women. The Act followed decades of public pressure, reform campaigns, and mass unrest, with the Whigs ultimately embracing the cause of Reform. The Act laid the groundwork for further democratic changes but retained a property-based franchise. It did not create democracy but marked a turning point toward a more inclusive, albeit limited, political system.

Enter Charles Lennox, 3^rd Duke of Richmond

In 1780, an aristocrat stood up in the House of Lords to introduce a bill which he hoped that his fellow lords would support. It was a radical bill for its day. The preamble declared:

1. That the Government of this Realm, and the making of laws for the same, ought to be lodged in the hands of King, Lords of Parliament, and Representatives of the whole Body of the Freemen of this Realm.
2. That EVERY MAN of the commonalty (excepting infants, insane persons and criminals) is of common right, and by the laws of God, a FREE MAN, and entitled to the full enjoyment of liberty.
3. That Liberty or Freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointing those who frame the Laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man‘s life, property, and peace. For, the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the POOR man has an equal right, but more need, to have Representatives in the legislature, than the rich one.^[1]

The man was Charles Lennox, 3^rd Duke of Richmond, and the bill that he presented was the draft of a constitution for the British people. Given that all men should have a right to have a say in the government, the Bill further proposed:

1. A vote for all people over twenty-one years old
2. Annual elections
3. The creation of 558 constituencies containing an equal number of electors.

The bill was radical because, at this point in British history, the right to vote in general elections was limited in most (but not all) constituencies to people who possessed freehold property worth over £2. The Duke of Richmond’s bill which he presented to the House of Lords back in 1780 was also republished in penny papers but his fellow lords swiftly rejected it. Nevertheless, pro-democracy activists continued to campaign for universal suffrage into the 1830s.

The people in attendance at public parliamentary reform meetings were not only working class. The crowd was composed also of the middle classes too whose interests, many felt, were unrepresented in parliament. Much of this was related to the mode in which MPs were elected.

Qualifications for the Franchise in the Unreformed Parliament

There were two types of parliamentary constituencies: boroughs and counties. Since medieval times counties were entitled to send two “Knights of the Shire” (MPs) to parliament. Within counties there might also be boroughs, which also sent MPs to parliament. Boroughs were ancient constituencies which had probably been important economic and political hubs in times gone by but which, by the nineteenth century, were either in decline or no longer as economically important as neighbouring towns which were not classified as boroughs. Thus, Yorkshire—comprising what is now the north, south, east, and west ridings—was a single county constituency. Yet within that country constituency there were boroughs such as Kingston-Upon-Hull which also returned two MPs.

The franchise qualifications, dictating who could and could not vote, in the counties and boroughs were not uniform across the country. The different franchise qualifications which existed until 1832 were as follows:

• “scot and lot” boroughs, where any rate payer could vote;
• “potwalloper” boroughs, where the male heads of households could vote as long as they had a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron, and where any male, who wasn’t a pauper, could vote after six months’ residency;
• burgage boroughs, where those who held manorial land could vote, and could pass on their right to vote to their descendants;

On occasion, those who were admitted as ‘freemen’ in any city could also vote, oftentimes despite having no property, after twelvemonths’ residence in the area. But in the majority of boroughs voting rights were based upon the 40 shilling freehold property qualification, which meant that the number of electors was very small: 76 out of 204 boroughs in England had an electorate of less than 100 voters and 44 of these had fewer 50 electors.[2]

See also my post: How Eighteenth-Century Governments Worked.

The Rotten Boroughs

Some of the boroughs were, in fact, described as “rotten.” Rotten Boroughs were constituencies where there were only a handful of voters but which returned more than one MP to parliament. The most notorious of these was Old Sarum in Wiltshire; in 1295 the place was a small town but by 1801 nobody lived there and it was nothing but a field—yet it returned two MPs to parliament. A contemporary observer described polling day at Old Sarum during the General Election of 1802:

This election for the borough of Old Sarum was held in a temporary booth erected in a cornfield, under a tree which marked the former boundary of the old town, not a vestige of which has been standing in the memory of man, the several burgages which give the right of voting, being now without a dwelling for a human being. Mr Dean, the bailiff of the borough having read the precept for the election … There were five electors present at this election.[3]

The Pocket Boroughs

“Pocket boroughs” were likewise detested by reformers. These were boroughs where an aristocrat might own the majority of burgage tenements and therefore “own” the borough. Through such means the majority landowner was able to exercise a considerable degree of influence over whom his electors voted for. Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire was one such pocket borough that was “owned” by the one-time prime minister, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, in the eighteenth century wherein he dictated to the town’s 65 electors which way he wanted them to vote. The Duke of Newcastle would know how “his” constituents voted because voting was not secret but was conducted in the open; a voter would enter the booth and declare to the onlookers who he was voting for, and his decision was then recorded in the register.

The entire system was a mess; corrupt and disorganised.

The campaign for universal suffrage, with its various mass meetings up and down the country, was not the only sign of unrest that the government had seen in the 1810s and 1820s. Secret plots against the government were hatched, then foiled, much as what had happened with the Cato Street Conspiracy—a plot to assassinate the whole British cabinet.

There were outright rebellions in some places, although these were not always related to the cause of political reform. Luddite rebels were busy destroying machinery between 1811 and 1816. There was also the Swing Riots: based in Kent and East Anglia and led by the mythical Captain Swing, these rebels were agricultural labourers who targeted the farms and estates of farmers who had introduced threshing machines on to their land. The rebels would destroy the machines and set fire to barns. An attack was usually accompanied with an ominous note to the landowner warning them that they had been targeted for attack.

Lord Liverpool’s Administration

Yet the Tory government of Lord Liverpool seemed, on the face of it, impervious to demands for reform. Liverpool is, on a personal level, a complex figure. It would be too easy to cast him as an enemy of the poor and one of the villains of the Peterloo story, as the recent movie on the events would have people believe. He knew that the nation’s economy was in a parlous state after the Napoleonic Wars and that unemployment was rife. To this end, his government passed the Poor Employment Act (1817) which provided people in poorer counties with employment on public works—an unprecedented intervention into the economy for a Tory government who were operating in what was then a fiscal-military state, not a welfare state.

Yet for many reformers and radicals the solution to the nation’s economic and social woes lay in achieving universal male suffrage.[4] The government and their representatives in the towns disagreed—sometimes with deadly results, as happened during the Peterloo Massacre. In the wake of the Peterloo Massacre the Liverpool government passed the so-called Six Acts which banned “seditious meetings;” prevented unlawful drilling of unofficial militias; allowed the authorities to seize arms and ammunition; increased the speed at which offenders were processed through the courts; toughened the existing Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act; and also imposed further taxes on newspapers and periodicals.

The government’s goal was to prevent the outbreak of revolution but, in fairness to the Liverpool government, these acts were often mere gestures to local magistrates who rarely saw their law enforcement powers increased—England did not as yet have a professional police force and magistrates often had to rely on paid spies and informants, whose information, even Lord Sidmouth recognised, could often be exaggerated. As John W. Derry points out:

“very few actions were taken under the legislation and one recent authority has dismissed them as an irrelevance.”[5]

The Example of Catholic Emancipation

Derry is mostly correct; the quasi-military drilling of radical groups may have been outlawed but nothing stopped campaigners continuing to spread their message. The campaign for Catholic Emancipation, which was finally granted in 1829, proved to reformers that single-issue causes could be won if a national reform association was able to gather the support of the people on the one hand, and put pressure on MPs on the other. New organisations like the London Radical Reform Association, the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, and the National Union of the Working Classes, emerged. William Hone had made great strides in furthering the cause of press freedom.

The General Election of 1830 and the Embrace of Reform by the Whigs

Times were a-changing. The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of two distinct political parties: The Whigs and the Tories. Both parties’ eighteenth-century predecessors had been decidedly against extending the franchise, and it was often lone voices such as the Duke of Richmond, and John Wilkes before him, who pushed the cause of parliamentary reform in parliament.

By the nineteenth century, however, the Whigs came round to the idea that it might be prudent to implement a limited measure of parliamentary reform. The General Election of August 1830 saw the Tories win the election but in November the prominent Whig statesman, Earl Grey, came out publicly in support of parliamentary reform. In response the Tory leader, the Duke of Wellington, affirmed his party’s opposition to any kind of political reform. Wellington’s support in the Commons was very slim and, when the Whig statesman Lord Russell introduced a Reform Bill in March 1831, Wellington’s supporters in both houses killed it off. That might have been the end of the matter were it not for the fact that the public were clamouring for reform.

The General Election of 1831 and the Whigs’ Landslide Victory

A general election was called in 1831, with polling taking place between April and June. The Whigs put themselves forward as champions of moderate reform—the enfranchisement of the middle classes; redistribution of seats; and the abolition of rotten boroughs—and they subsequently won a majority of 136 MPs over the Tories. They lost no time in introducing a second reform bill which passed through the House of Commons but was rejected in the House of Lords, where Wellington’s Tories had a majority.

Outside parliament the atmosphere was febrile. There were riots in Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol; Henry Hunt and other members of the National Union continued their speaking tours—it seemed t that the country was on the verge of a revolution. At first Earl Grey asked the new king, William IV, to simply flood the house with lots of new pro-reform Whig peers, but the king refused. In response, Grey and his cabinet resigned.

Wellington returned to try and form a government but ultimately failed to garner enough support both inside and outside the Commons. This fact is interesting in and of itself because, in the previous century, the king could in theory appoint a prime minister who had little electoral support in the house, but by 1830 it is clear that the king’s ministers had to at least have a majority of MPs behind them.

The Reform Bill is Passed

Grey came back and the reform bill was introduced again. The king had also agreed to swiftly ennoble a number of Whig peers while Wellington simultaneously advised his peers in the Lords to abstain from voting on it rather than block it as they did last time. The bill passed. On its passage the Act was dubbed the “Great Reform Act” for having quelled a brewing revolution, supposedly ending corruption in the elections, and extending voting rights to the people. The self-laudatory preamble of the bill speaks for itself:

Whereas it is expedient to take effectual measures for correcting divers abuses that have long prevailed in the choice of members to serve in the commons’ house of parliament to deprive many inconsiderable places of the right of returning members to grant such privilege to large populous and wealthy towns to increase the number of knights of the shire to extend the elective franchise to many of his majesty’s subjects who have not heretofore enjoyed the same and to diminish the expense of elections.

Freeholders, Leaseholders, and Copyholders

The Representation of the People Act, for so the bill was called, saw the franchise retained by people who owned freehold property worth over 40s but also extended to those who leased property worth over £10, as well as copyholders who paid an annual rent of at least £50 per year (copyhold was hangover from feudal times: this was land held by a manorial tenant which could not be passed on to a family member after a person’s death but reverted back to the manorial lord).

The New Constituencies

The constituency map was also redrawn: towns such as Manchester were enfranchised while some boroughs like Old Sarum lost representation. A total of 401 constituencies were created. Upwards of 650 MPs were still returned to parliament. The disparity between the number of constituencies and the number of MPs is explained by the fact that some smaller constituencies were redesigned so they only returned one MP while in larger boroughs two MPs were still returned. The 1832 Act also specified that men only could vote, leading to women’s complete disenfranchisement when they had, on very rare occasions, been permitted to cast a vote under the old rules which worked only on property value.

Those who lost out

Overall, it is estimated that the number of enfranchised voters rose from 516,000 in 1831 to about 809,000 in 1833. However, many of those who had previously enjoyed the right to vote in Scot and Lot constituencies, and other places where the franchise was universal, actually lost their right to vote. The Victorian Commons website reveals that

In Maldon, for example, the number of electors dropped from over 3,000 in 1831 to just 716 in 1832. This was owing to the Act’s new restrictions on non-resident voters, honorary freemen and freemen created by marriage. Abolishing the votes obtained by marrying a freeman’s daughter was an aspect of the Reform Act which evidently caused all sorts of problems in some boroughs … Taken as a whole, for every three new borough electors enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act, at least one pre-1832 voter was deprived of their voting rights.

Conclusion

Although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century radicals such as Richmond and others had favoured universal male suffrage—which would have seen working men entitled to vote—the Act of 1832 excluded them. It was the exclusion of working men from the franchise that led to the emergence of the first mass working-class political movement: Chartism.

Nevertheless, 1832 was a turning point in our nation’s history. The Act did not bring democracy to Britain but it did set it on a path towards democracy. As G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Wilson write: “The House of Commons had at last been reformed. But it had not been democratised.”[6]

[1] Charles Lennox, The Bill of the Late Duke of Richmond for Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments (London: William Hone, 1817), p. 1.

[2] W. Carpenter, The people’s book, comprising their chartered rights and political wrongs (London, 1831), 2.

[3] Anon. “The General Election of 1802,” The Monthly Review, March 1803, 331.

[4] Anon, “The Magistrates and Inhabitants of Leeds,” The Black Dwarf February 5, 1817, 3.

[5] Derry, Politics in the Age of George III, 142.

[6] G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Wilson, British Working Class Movements: Select Documents (London: MacMillan, 1967), 215.