“It is but too manifest,” he wrote, “that expensive contests have a natural tendency to throw great counties and populous places into the hands of men of immense wealth; just as it has been sometimes found that mankind have sought a refuge from the evils of anarchy, by running into the opposite extreme, and surrendering their liberties.”
In a footnote to a series of satirical epistles, published in 1807, as “The Groans of the Talents,” in six epistles, purporting to be written by ex-ministers to their colleagues, we get a curious, if apocryphal, electioneering anecdote. The putative author of the epistle in question, the Right Hon. W. Windham, and his correspondent, T. W. Coke, were both sufferers from the damaging indiscretion recorded. It is explained how these candidates were supposed (incorrectly according to facts) to have lost their seats for Norfolk. In the general election, 1806, two ladies of the first respectability drove about the county to canvass for Col. Hon. J. Wodehouse (Conservative), and as they were universally respected, their success was proportionably great. Messrs. Coke and Windham were much chagrined at this circumstance; at length, however, the latter gentleman’s inventive genius devised a plan by which he hoped to turn it to their own advantage. Having procured two comely nymphs of light reputation, somewhat resembling in age and appearance the “fair petitioners” they were destined to personate, he arrayed them in similar apparel, and, having procured a carriage which formerly belonged to one of these ladies, they canvassed another part of the county in favour of Messrs. Coke and Windham; the trick, however, was discovered, and so indignant were Col. Wodehouse’s fair friends, that they instigated their husbands and friends to petition parliament against the sheriff’s return. Thus did the means by which Mr. Windham hoped to defeat the Hon. John Wodehouse contribute to the discredit of himself and friend. It must be added, it is hardly credible the Right Hon. W. Windham would be likely to resort to so disreputable an electioneering ruse.
In the days when candidates paid their electors’ travelling expenses (and these ranged high, averaging, for example, from London to Hull, ten pounds apiece for freemen, the recognized tariff), curious manœuvres were resorted to by the “other side;” one of these was to buy off the persons who had the responsibility of delivering these expensive cargoes safe and in good voting order at the end of their expedition. Among these anecdotes, it is related that, when those Berwick freemen who happened to reside in the metropolis—
“were going down by sea, the skippers, to whose tender mercy they were committed, used to be bribed, and have been known in consequence to carry them over to Norway!”
This is the forerunner of the Ipswich story, that the Ipswich freemen, under precisely similar conditions, have occasionally found themselves in Holland; while, on the authority of R. Southey, it had also occurred to electors to find themselves delivered at a port in the Netherlands. The notorious Andrew Robinson Bowes, who was famous for being undeterred by scruples, once stood for Newcastle. A cargo of Newcastle freemen were shipped from London for his opponent, and the master was bribed by Bowes to carry them to Ostend, where they remained till the election was over.
The majesty of the people is adequately represented from a humoristic standpoint by Pugin and Rowlandson, as it might have appeared on its septennial returns in the boisterous eighteenth century. In the view of the most celebrated polling-place of the kingdom, one of the candidates has secured the ears of the adjacent crowd:—
“A man, when once he’s safely chose,
May laugh at all his furious foes,
Nor think of former evil:
Yet good has its attendant ill;
A seat is no bad thing—but still
A contest is the devil.”
Possibly the voices will follow; a show of hands is offered with hearty goodwill; but, put to the test of the poll-book, it would seem that, for the most part, the audience is voteless. However, the polling-places may be recognized, like cattle pens, in front of the hustings, with the attendant officials under the supervision of the high bailiff of Westminster as returning officer. The flags indicate the respective parishes of the district, such as St. Margaret’s, St. James’s, St. Martin in the Fields, etc. Pugin is responsible for the literal exactitude with which the locality is represented; his drawing may be accepted as a faithful view of the customary arrangement of the Covent Garden hustings at the time of the Westminster elections: while Rowlandson has added the life and zest of the subject from actual observation. With the history of the famous contests held on this spot before us, it is noteworthy that the artist has given prominence to one well-known feature, characteristic of Westminster elections for nearly a century, the nomination of an influential naval officer in the Court interest, whose supporters, backed up by a contingent of loyal jack-tars, produced a due effect on the opposition. Rowlandson was quite at home in the scene: he has reproduced the bludgeon-boys, ballad-singers, professional pugilists, marrow-bone-and-cleaver “rough music,” and those vendors of cakes, nuts, fruit, and such small wares as were in request at such times; these itinerant traders found at elections a large mart for their commodities, but the business was at such times conducted at some personal risk, the baskets being overset, the contents scattered, and the owners roughly handled in the course of the attacks, counter-charges, and other party-manœuvres which diversified the proceedings in the vicinity of the hustings.
G. Cruikshank supplied a frontispiece to Fairburn’s “Electors of Westminster,” 1810—a copy of the “Speaker’s Warrant for the Commitment of Sir Francis Burdett to the Tower,” with a burlesque portrait of that privileged functionary, the Speaker, in an enormous wig, surmounted by a miniature hat; the Right Hon. Charles Abbott was further caricatured by the artist as “The Little Man in the Big Wig”—vide “Fuller’s Earth reanimated.”
A burlesque, by George Cruikshank, upon one of the candidates for the City appeared in 1812, under the title of “The Election Hunter;” it consists of a broadside, commencing:—