There never was a contested election in the borough of Great Tattleton that I remember but one, and it took place on what was termed the last appeal to the country in the matter of the Reform Bill. Staid and substantial fathers of families doubtless recollect the strife of parties and opinions which filled those times, and in which themselves took part, with all the bootless haste and fervour of twenty; feeling especially indignant that they were not yet householders, as their incorruptible votes might save the nation. England has floated safely through many a conflict of the old and new since then, and more of the kind are coming; but no event in our national history ever appeared to the denizens of Tattleton of half such magnitude as that contested election. Tattleton was an ancient and respectable borough. It has a railway station now, but looks much as it did at the time of my story—a small, old-fashioned country town, situated among corn and orchard lands in one of the cider-making counties, with a newspaper, a sheriff's court, and sundry quiet shops and alehouses. There is an old church there, with high Gothic windows full of painted glass, quaint carving, strange tombs, and a suit of knightly armour hanging between two tattered banners, which the sexton says were carried some time in the wars. Tradition says also, that there is a fine old painting in fresco, whitewashed over from the Reformation, but of that I know nothing. The town had other antiquities. Its stocks were a marvel of age and efficiency. A ducking-stool for scolds yet remained in the courthouse, beside the beam with which they weighed witches against the Bible; but the oldest thing in Great Tattleton was its charter: a native antiquary demonstrated, that it had been signed by King John the day after Runnymede; and among other superannuated privileges, it conferred on the free burghers the right of trade and toll, ward and gibbet, besides that of electing their own mayor and one loyal commoner, to serve in the king's parliament.
We all believed that Palladium of Tattleton to be kept somewhere in the church, and generations had returned their representatives according to its provisions. But the bounds of the borough were so devious, and the free burghers so thinly scattered among us, that all elections within the memory of man had been quietly managed by the mayor, the town-clerk, and the sheriff. Moreover, an old gateway and two crazy posts had something to do in the business by right of ancient custom. In short, Tattleton was what the advocates of the whole Bill were apt to term a close and sometimes a rotten borough. Its representation had become hereditary—some said, since the Long Parliament—in the Stopford family, who owned at least half the soil, and were supposed to be as old as its charter. One of their ancestors had built the church, another wore the armour and captured the banners that hung in it. The family pew and vault were there; and they had been squires and justices of peace from father to son, dispensing hospitality, work, and law, at their seat of Fern Hall—a great old manor-house, standing deep in a thickly-wooded dell not half a mile from Tattleton. So far as I could learn, the Stopfords had given no ornaments to state or church, but theirs was pre-eminently a safe house. Its martlets were generally fortunate in their connections; and its chiefs had supported the character of moderate reformers, each in his generation. At home, they were lenient magistrates and prudent landlords, never overtaxing their tenantry, and rarely enforcing the game-laws. None of them ever took a first step; but all improvements in the neighbourhood, if once commenced, were certain of their countenance; and in parliament they always voted for any measure of reform which it was evident the people would want no longer.
It was, therefore, in accordance with family principles and practice, that the then reigning squire and M. P., Levison Stopford, Esquire, should take his seat on the ministerial benches, and vote in and out of parliament for the Bill with which all England rang. Levison Stopford did not make brilliant speeches, but he had a fair share of prominence in county business, was a middling landlord, a respectable head of a family, connected by marriage with a Whig peer, the father of a promising son, and, as the newspapers said, four lovely daughters. All these recommendations to public favour could not secure him against division in his native borough. There were Conservatives among us, who clung to the time-honoured institutions of Tattleton, and could not consent to see their ancient privileges, charter, old posts, and all, submerged in those of two adjoining boroughs—Little Tattleton, whose constituency consisted of the beadle, and Lumberdale, to which the earl always nominated his second son; for people already understood, that on the passing of the Bill these three should become one, at least in elections.
Sir Jonas Underwood, of Little Tattleton Park, did not like that prospect—he had been regularly returned by the loyal and independent beadle ever since his majority, a period of some forty years—neither did the Earl of Lumberdale, as the present state of things made his second son's canvass by no means difficult. Both the earl and the baronet possessed some property, and more influence, in our borough, by help of which they warned the loyal Conservatives that their country was in danger, and exhorted Great Tattleton to rush to the rescue. The mayor said, that though he respected birth and breeding, yet, if a country gentleman like Mr Stopford would so far disgrace his family as to vote for a measure which must break down the British constitution, and utterly ruin England in less than twenty years, he, for his own part, felt called upon to oppose him. The town-clerk always said as the mayor did: all the Tories in Tattleton took them for examples, by degrees a party was formed against Stopford on what had hitherto been his own ground; and long before the dissolution, it was known that they intended, as the phrase is, 'to start' Sommerset Cloudesly, Esquire, as an opposing candidate in the Conservative interest.
Sommerset Cloudesly occupied a large but neat brick house on the verge of our town's liberties, with a meadow-like lawn in front, and acres of orchard in the rear. His father had been a small farmer, who bettered his fortune by all manner of money-making speculations—the last of which, a cider-manufactory, and a mill, together with a house he had built, the orchard he had planted, and a handsome strip of landed property, descending to his only son, made him the second man in Tattleton. Sommerset had been what is called carefully educated: ten years of his life had been spent in the house of a clergyman, who received select boarders as part of his own family; five more at a college in Oxford under the direction of a staid tutor; and the residue in a series of fidgets through the house and land left him by his father; for at the time of our story, the worthy cider-maker had long gone to his account.
Sommerset was a tall, thin, genteel-looking man, in his thirtieth year. Motherless, sisterless, and wifeless—strange to say, under such circumstances, he was restless too. It was not a weight of crime that pressed upon his conscience. Cloudesly's life had been as harmless as those of his own apple-trees. It was not inordinate ambition that disturbed his days, for though, like most of us, Sommerset would have rather preferred being a great man, could greatness be easily come at, he lost no labour in its pursuit. Neither was it love that besieged his peace; for, except Miss Lily Prior, old Tom the brewer's daughter, who sat in the same pew at church, Sommerset had never been known to look on one of womankind with attention. Perhaps the carefulness of his education might have done it. Life could not be entirely folded up like a napkin, and put into its proper drawer; and everything annoyed Sommerset Cloudesly. The coming off of his waistcoat button was the destruction of Messina. The world was going to ruin if his horse lost a shoe. Like the idle family in the Eastern tale, he could draw a disturbance from the future also, and many a heart-quake had he regarding what might happen. His Oxford tutor had made him a strong Tory; old Cloudesly had averred, that was the only politics for a gentleman; and though Sommerset believed in all the alarms of his time, his faith being particularly strong for terrors, he had always supposed himself to be somebody. Sir Jonas and the Earl of Lumberdale assured him he was the hope of Tattleton; and, in an evil hour, he consented, in electioneering phrase, to contest the borough.
With his relations, who regarded Sommerset as their top branch, the step was in high favour; and all his friends came out strong in approbation, excepting old Tom Prior. He had been the consulting friend and boon-companion of old Cloudesly forty years before, when the one began to brew beer and the other to make cider. Tom's brewery had not paid him so well as old Cloudesly's apples. He had been the first to establish a business of the kind in Tattleton. There were three there at the time of the election; but the townspeople still knew him familiarly as the brewer, though he had long become a sleeping partner, having saved enough for himself and his old wife to live on in a cottage covered with grape vines, at the end of a long green lane in which the main street of Tattleton dwindled away. There was, besides, a thousand pounds for Lily, the heiress-apparent, moreover, of his interest in the brewery. Tom said 'he had no notion of politics, being entirely given to beer; and who was right about that there Bill he couldn't say, but he never knowed an honest man as made money by a contested election.' Old Mrs Prior always echoed what her husband said, besides knitting a perpetual stocking that was her only occupation; but Tom and his wife were old people now, and in small intimacy with the college-bred young Cloudesly, though they sat in the same church-pew, and some thought their daughter Lily was also a friend to our proposed member. Lily was as pretty a girl as could be found in all Tattleton, which, together with her prospects, rather insured admirers; but Lily took no trouble with any of them, and it was believed that the old folks rather wished she should not be in a hurry.
That was no wonder; for, in this fidgety world, Lily Prior was a treasure. Nothing ever disturbed her. Her hair might go out of curl, or her friends out of humour; her bonnet might take unbecoming fits, as I am told bonnets sometimes do, but her equanimity remained unruffled, and her days were spent in knitting beside her mother in the little oak parlour, taking quiet walks, and hoeing peacefully in her own flower-garden. Spiteful people said, that Lily was beginning to look old-maidish, but I never saw it in her calm face. It was also said—what didn't they say in Great Tattleton?—that her muslin dress and crimped collar were more carefully arranged when Sommerset Cloudesly might be expected to walk that way; but Lily's strongest demonstration was 'Dear me!' and that she said on hearing of his intended contest. A perilous contest it seemed for Sommerset Cloudesly. Stopford was by far the richer and more influential man; the interest of his party, his aristocratic connections, and his individual pride, all determined him to keep his ground; and the generally prudent man had been heard to declare, that he would spend to the last sixpence of his property, rather than see himself unseated by an upstart simpleton.