The Rise of the Democracy

by Joseph Clayton

The Reform Bill was not carried without much rioting in the country, and some loss of life.

The Duke of Wellington was at the head of the Tory Ministry in 1830; and though he declared in face of an Opposition that was headed by the Whig aristocrats, and included the middle-class manufacturers and the great bulk of the working class in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands, that "no better system (of Parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man" than the unreformed House of Commons, and that he would never bring forward a reform measure himself, and should always feel it his duty to resist such measure when proposed by others, yet, in less than two years after this speech Wellington's resistance had ended, and the Reform Bill was carried into law.

What happened in those two years was this: At the general election in the summer of 1831, the popular cry was "the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill."

"The whole countless multitude of reformers had laid hold of the principle that the most secure and the shortest way of obtaining what they wanted was to obtain representation. The non-electors felt themselves called upon to put forth such power as they had as a means to obtaining the power which they claimed." And the non-electors were enormously successful. For they "combined their will, their knowledge, and their manifest force in political unions, whence they sent forth will, knowledge, and influence over wide districts of the land. And the electors, seeing the importance of the crisis—the unspeakable importance that it should be well conducted—joined these unions."

The Reformers carried the day at the elections, and the new House of Commons passed the second reading of the Bill on July 8th, by 136: 367-231. On September 21st the third reading passed by 345 to 236. Then on the 8th of October the House of Lords threw out the Bill by 199 to 158, and at once fierce riots broke out all over the country, in especial at Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol.

At Derby the jail was stormed. At Nottingham the castle was burned, and of nine men subsequently convicted of riot, three were hanged. At Bristol, the jail, the Mansion House, the Customs House, the Excise Office, and the Bishop's Palace were burned, and twelve lives were lost in three days.

The new session opened in December, and again the Bill was introduced, and this time the second reading had a majority of 162: 324-162. The House of Lords hesitated when the Bill came up to them at the end of March, 1832; allowed the second reading to pass by 184 to 175, and then in Committee struck out those clauses which disfranchised the "rotten" boroughs—uninhabited constituencies like Old Sarum. Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, at once resigned, and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to form a Tory anti-reform Ministry. But the task was beyond him, the temper of the country was impatient of any further postponement of the Bill. Petitions poured in urging Parliament to vote no supplies, and resolutions were passed refusing to pay taxes till the Bill became law.

On Wellington's failure to make a Government, William IV. had to recall Grey, and the Whigs resumed office with an assurance that, if necessary, the King would create sufficient peers favourable to reform, so that the Bill should pass.

The battle was over, the anti-Reformers retired, and on June 4th, 1832, the Reform Bill passed the Lords by 106 to 22, receiving the Royal Assent three days later.

The Whigs protested that the Reform Bill was a final measure, and Sir Francis Burdett, the veteran reformer, was content to vote with the Tories when the Act had become law. But there is no finality in politics, and the Reform Bill was only the removal of a barrier on the road to democracy. The Tories described the Bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the Act of 1832 neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its foes. What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since 1688, to the richer members of the middle class—the big farmers in the country, the prosperous shopkeepers in the towns. The working class was still voteless, and the old democratic franchise of Preston and Westminster was gone from those boroughs.