The boroughs that were represented in Parliament in the eighteenth century have been classified by Mr. Porritt, in his learned work, in four categories. They were (1) Scot and lot and potwalloper boroughs, (2) Burgage boroughs, (3) Corporation boroughs, and (4) Freemen boroughs.
The Scot and lot boroughs, of which there were 59, ranged from Gatton, with 135 inhabitants, to Westminster and Northampton. On paper they approached most nearly to the old conditions as to the franchise. A uniform qualification of six months residence was established in 1786. In other respects the qualifications in these boroughs varied. In some the franchise depended on the payment of poor rate or church rate: in others the only condition was that the voter had not been a charge on the poor rate. The boroughs of the second of these classes were called potwalloper, because the voter had to prove that he was an inhabitant in the borough, had a family, and boiled a pot there. This potwalloper franchise was a survival from the days when freemen took their meals in public to prove that they did not depend on the table of a lord. In the eighteenth century the potwalloper sometimes put his table in the street to show that he had a vote. But these boroughs, in spite of their wide franchise, fell under the control of the aristocracy almost as completely as the others, for the reason that when the borough itself developed, the Parliamentary borough stood still, and in many cases the inhabitant householders who had the right to vote were the inhabitants of a small and ancient area of the town. All that was necessary in such circumstances in order to acquire the representation of the borough, was to buy the larger part of the property within this area. This was done, for example, at Aldborough and at Steyning.
The Burgage boroughs were 39. They were Parliamentary boroughs in which the right to vote attached exclusively to the possession of burgage properties. The burgage tenants were the owners of land, houses, shops or gardens in certain ancient boroughs. The holders of these sites were originally tenants who discharged their feudal obligations by a money payment, corresponding to the freeholder in the country, who held by soccage. They thus became the men of the township who met in the churchyard or town hall. In many cases residence was unnecessary to the enjoyment of the franchise. The only qualification was the possession of title-deeds to particular parcels of land, or registration in the records of a manor. These title-deeds were called ‘snatch papers,’ from the celerity with which they were transferred at times of election. The burgage property that enfranchised the elector of Old Sarum was a ploughed field. Lord Radnor explained that at Downton he held 99 out of the 100 burgage tenures, and that one of the properties was in the middle of a watercourse. At Richmond, pigeon-lofts and pig-styes conferred the franchise. In some cases, on the other hand, residence was required; at Haslemere, for example, Lord Lonsdale settled a colony of Cumberland miners in order to satisfy this condition. Sometimes the owner of a burgage property had to show that the house was occupied, and one proof of this was the existence of a chimney. In all of these boroughs the aristocracy and other controllers of boroughs worked hard, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to restrict the number of properties that carried the right to vote. The holder of burgage property and the borough patron had a common interest in these restrictions. The burgage boroughs provided a great many cases for the decision of Parliamentary committees, and the borough owners mortgaged their estates under the strain of litigation of this kind. Parliamentary committees had to determine for example whether the Widows’ Row at Petersfield really stood on the foundation of the house which conferred the franchise in the reign of William III. The most successful borough-monger was the patron who had contrived to exclude first the non-burgage owners, and then the majority of the burgage owners, thus reducing his expenses within the narrowest compass.
The Corporation boroughs, or boroughs in which the corporation had acquired by custom the right to elect, independently of the burgesses, were 43. In days when Parliamentary elections were frequent, the inhabitants of many boroughs waived their right of election and delegated it to the corporations. When seats in the House of Commons became more valuable, the corporations were tenacious of this customary monopoly, and frequently sought to have it established by charter. These claims were contested in the seventeenth century, but without much success, and the charters bestowed at this time restricted the franchise to the corporations in order to prevent ‘popular tumult, and to render the elections and other things and the public business of the said borough into certainty and constant order.’ It is easy to trace in these transactions, besides the rapacity of the corporations themselves, the influence of the landed aristocracy who were already beginning to finger these boroughs. There was, indeed, an interval during which the popular attacks met with some success. When Eliot and Hampden were on the Committee of Privileges, some towns, including Warwick, Colchester, and Boston, regained their rights. But the Restoration was fatal to the movement for open boroughs, and though it was hoped that the Revolution, which had been in part provoked by the tricks the Stuarts had played with the boroughs, would bring a more favourable atmosphere, this expectation was defeated. All of these boroughs fell under the rule of a patron, who bribed the members of the corporation with money, with livings or clerkships in the state departments, cadetships in the navy and in India. Croker complained that he had further to dance with the wives and daughters of the corporation at ‘tiresome and foolish’ balls. There was no disguise or mistake about the position. The patron spoke not of ‘my constituents’ but of ‘my corporation.’ The inhabitants outside this little group had no share at all in Parliamentary representation, and neither the patron nor his nominee gave them a single thought. The members of the corporation themselves were often non-resident, and the mayor sometimes never went near the borough from the first day of his magistracy to the last. His office was important, not because it made him responsible for municipal government, but because it made him returning officer. He had to manage the formalities of an election for his patron.
The Freemen boroughs, of which there were 62, represent in Mr. Porritt’s opinion the extreme divergence from the old franchise. In these boroughs restrictions of different kinds had crept in, a common restriction being that in force at Carlisle, which limited the franchise to the inhabitants who belonged to the trade guild. For some time these restrictions, though they destroyed the ancient significance of ‘freeman’ as a person to be distinguished from the ‘villein,’ did not really destroy the representative character of the electorate. But these boroughs suffered like the others, and even more than the others, from the demoralising effects of the appreciation of the value of seats in Parliament, and as soon as votes commanded money, the corporations had every inducement to keep down the number of voters. In many boroughs there set in a further development that was fatal to the elementary principles of representation: the practice of selling the freedom of the borough to non-residents. There were three classes of buyers: men who wanted to become patrons, men who wanted to become members, and men who wanted to become voters. The making of honorary freemen became a favourite process for securing the control of a borough to the corporation or to a patron. Dunwich, which was a wealthy and famous seaport in the time of Henry II., gradually crumbled into the German Ocean, and in 1816 it was described by Oldfield as consisting of forty-two houses and half a church. This little borough contained in 1670 forty resident freemen, and in that year it largessed its freedom on four hundred non-residents. The same methods were applied at Carlisle, King’s Lynn, East Grinstead, Nottingham, Liverpool, and in many other places. A particularly flagrant case at Durham in 1762, when 215 freemen were made in order to turn an election, after the issue of the writ, led to a petition which resulted in the unseating of the member and the passing of an Act of Parliament in the following year. This Act excluded from the franchise honorary freemen who had been admitted within twelve months of the first day of an election, but it did not touch the rights of ordinary freemen admitted by the corporation. Consequently, when a Parliamentary election was impending or proceeding, new freemen used to swarm into the electorate whenever the corporation or the patron had need of them. At Bristol in 1812 seventeen hundred and twenty freemen, and at Maldon in 1826 a thousand freemen, were so admitted and enfranchised. Generally speaking, corporations seem to have preferred the method of exclusion to that of flooding the electorate with outside creations. On the eve of the Reform Bill, there were six electors at Rye and fourteen at Dunwich. At Launceston, early in the eighteenth century, the members of the corporation systematically refused freedom to all but members of their own party, and the same practices were adopted at East Retford, Ludlow, Plympton, Hastings, and other places. Legal remedies were generally out of reach of the excluded freemen. There were some exceptions to the abuses which prevailed in most of these boroughs, notably the case of the City of London. A special Act of Parliament (1774) made it a condition of the enjoyment of the freemen’s franchise there, that the freeman had not received alms, and that he had been a freeman for twelve calendar months. But in most of these boroughs, by the end of the eighteenth century, the electorate was entirely under the influence of the corporations. Nor was the device of withholding freedom from those qualified by custom, and of bestowing it on those who were only qualified by subservience, the only resource at the command of the borough-mongers. Charities were administered in an electioneering spirit, and recalcitrant voters were sometimes threatened with impressment.
Of the 513 members representing England and Wales in 1832, 415 sat for cities and boroughs. Fifty members were returned by 24 cities, 332 by 166 English boroughs, 5 by single-member boroughs, 16 by the Cinque Ports, and 12 by as many Welsh boroughs. The twelve Welsh counties returned 12 members, and the forty English counties 82, the remaining 4 members being representatives of the Universities.
The county franchise had a much less chequered history than the various franchises in boroughs. Before the reign of Henry VI., every free inhabitant householder, freeholder or non-freeholder, could vote at elections of Knights of the Shire. The Act of 1430 limited the franchise to forty-shilling freeholders. Many controversies raged round this definition, and by the eighteenth century, men were voting in respect of annuities, rent-charges, the dowries of their wives and pews in church. Mr. Porritt traces the faggot voter to the early days of Charles I. Two changes were made in the county franchise between 1430 and 1832. The residential qualification disappears by 1620: in 1702 a tax-paying qualification was introduced under which a property did not carry a vote unless it had been taxed for a year. In 1781 the year was cut down to six months. Great difficulties and irregularities occurred with regard to registration, and a Bill was passed into law in 1784 to establish a public system of registration. The Act, however, was repealed in the next year, in consequence of the agitation against the expense. The county franchise had a democratic appearance but the county constituencies were very largely under territorial sway, and by the middle of the fifteenth century Jack Cade had complained of the pressure of the great families on their tenants. Fox declared that down to 1780 one of the members for Yorkshire had always been elected in Lord Rockingham’s dining-room, and from that time onwards the representation of that county seems to have been a battle of bribes between the Rockinghams, the Fitzwilliams and the Harewoods.
It is easy to see from this sketch of the manner in which the Parliamentary franchise had been drawn into the hands of patrons and corporations, that the aristocracy had supreme command of Parliament. Control by patrons was growing steadily throughout the eighteenth century. The Society of Friends of the People presented a petition to the House of Commons in 1793, in which it was stated that 157 members were sent to Parliament by 84 individuals, and 150 other members were returned by the recommendation of 70 powerful individuals. The relations of such members to their patrons were described by Fox in 1797, ‘When Gentlemen represent populous towns and cities, then it is a disputed point whether they ought to obey their voice or follow the dictates of their own conscience. But if they represent a noble lord or a noble duke then it becomes no longer a question of doubt, and he is not considered a man of honour who does not implicitly obey the orders of a single constituent.’[1] The petition of the Society of Friends of the People contained some interesting information as to the number of electors in certain constituencies: 90 members were returned by 46 places, in none of which the number of voters exceeded 50, 37 ‘by 19 places in none of which the number of voters exceeds 100, and 52 by 26 in none of which the number of voters exceeded 200. Seventy-five members were returned for 35 places in which it would be to trifle with the patience of your Honourable House to mention any number of voters at all,’ the elections at the places alluded to being notoriously a matter of form.
If the qualifications of voters had changed, so had the qualifications of members. A power that reposed on this basis would have seemed reasonably complete, but the aristocracy took further measures to consolidate its monopoly. In 1710 Parliament passed an Act, to which it gave the prepossessing title ‘An Act for securing the freedom of Parliament, by further qualifying the Members to sit in the House of Commons,’ to exclude all persons who had not a certain estate of land, worth in the case of knights of the shire, £500, and in the case of burgesses, £300. This Act was often evaded by various devices, and the most famous of the statesmen of the eighteenth century sat in Parliament by means of fictitious qualifications, among others Pitt, Burke, Fox and Sheridan. But the Act gave a tone to Parliament, and it was not a dead letter.[2] It had, too, the effect of throwing the ambitious merchant into the landlord class, and of enveloping him in the landlord atmosphere. Selection and assimilation, as De Tocqueville saw, and not exclusion, are the true means of preserving a class monopoly of power. We might, indeed, sum up the contrast between the English and French aristocracy by saying that the English aristocracy understood the advantages of a scientific social frontier, whereas the French were tenacious of a traditional frontier. More effectual in practice than this imposition of a property qualification was the growing practice of throwing on candidates the official expenses of elections. During the eighteenth century these expenses grew rapidly, and various Acts of Parliament, in particular that of 1745, fixed these charges on candidates.
It followed naturally, from a system which made all municipal government merely one aspect of Parliamentary electioneering, that the English towns fell absolutely into the hands of corrupt oligarchies and the patrons on whom they lived. The Tudor kings had conceived the policy of extinguishing their independent life and energies by committing their government to select bodies with power to perpetuate themselves by co-opting new members. The English aristocracy found in the boroughs—with the mass of inhabitants disinherited and all government and power vested in a small body—a state of things not less convenient and accommodating to the new masters of the machine than it had been to the old. The English towns, which three centuries earlier had enjoyed a brisk and vigorous public life, were now in a state of stagnant misgovernment: as the century advanced, they only sank deeper into the slough, and the Report of the Commission of 1835 showed that the number of inhabitants who were allowed any share in public life or government was infinitesimal. In Plymouth, for example, with a population of 75,000, the number of resident freemen was under 300: in Ipswich, with more than 20,000 inhabitants, there were 350 freemen of whom more than 100 were not rated, and some forty were paupers. Municipal government throughout the century was a system not of government but of property. It did not matter to the patron whether Winchester or Colchester had any drains or constables: the patron had to humour the corporation or the freemen, the corporation or the freemen had to keep their bargain with the patron. The patron gave the corporation money and other considerations: the corporation gave the patron control over a seat in Parliament. Neither had to consider the interests or the property of the mass of burgesses. Pitt so far recognised the ownership of Parliamentary boroughs as property, that he proposed in 1785 to compensate the patrons of the boroughs he wished to disenfranchise. Every municipal office was regarded in the same spirit. The endowments and the charities that belonged to the town belonged to a small oligarchy which acknowledged no responsibility to the citizens for its proceedings, and conducted its business in secret. The whole system depended on the patron, who for his part represented the absolute supremacy of the territorial aristocracy to which he belonged. Civic life there was none.