What the Reform Act of 1832 did do, might have done, and failed to do has been the subject of great debate.Footnote 2 The story of how the franchise was peacefully extended to more and more British subjects has been told as the Whig narrative of liberalism triumphing over oligarchy and corruption and as the reassertion of the ancient constitutional rights of freeborn Englishmen, the culmination of an assault on religious and economic tyranny at the hands of the aristocracy. That interpretation has been attacked. Norman Gash claimed that “there was scarcely a feature of the old unreformed system that could not be found in existence after 1832,” and several scholarly examinations have refuted the notion that the bill brought the middle classes onto the political stage on equal footing with the landed classes.Footnote 3 Still others have shown that the Reform Act was lost potential, a step backward as party machinery displaced the gains made in the public sphere in the eighteenth century. James Vernon has argued that the Reform Bill actually privatized politics, limiting the people's role in the election rituals and public stage much more than had been the case before 1832.Footnote 4 Historians have also debated the bill's effect on those who were enfranchised and in some cases disenfranchised. John Phillips and Frank O’Gorman argued that the unreformed electorate was assertive, rather than deferential, and played a significant role in the political life of the unenfranchised as well as those with the vote. Both scholars, joined by Philip Salmon, agreed that the Reform Act was significant in replacing wider, nonpartisan participation in elections with voter participation mobilized by emergent national parties.Footnote 5 My own work has argued that extraparliamentary political organization supporting the Reform Bill, namely, the Political Union movement, firmly injected popular opinion into national political action.Footnote 6 What is certain is that the Reform Act “represented an important shift in the popular conception of the vote.”Footnote 7

One of the key areas for debate was whether rate (tax) paying or property holding should be the primary criteria for the suffrage. This was traditionally referred to as the “scot and lot” franchise. In some boroughs, men could qualify for the vote as heads of household who paid local taxes or rates. Eighteenth-century reformers wanted to extend this principle, arguing that respectable taxpayers deserved the vote; this was known as household suffrage. The rhetoric of the respectable taxpayer deserving the vote emerged during the eighteenth-century reform debates and was certainly raised again in the 1867 reform campaign, but little has been said about it at the time of the first reform measure. Instead, work on the 1832 reform campaign has stressed the link between property ownership and the vote, obscuring evidence that several politicians seeking passage of a reform bill strongly argued that the vote should be extended to heads of households who were ratepayers, rather than limiting it to those owning or renting property valued at £10 per annum. While the bill's intent was to expand the electorate, O’Gorman has shown that the 1832 Reform Bill actually reduced the number of electors in scot and lot boroughs, because inflation raised property values in many manufacturing areas, leaving fewer who met the property qualification and who could afford the rates required on the houses. “Ancient rights voters,” as he calls them, dwindled from 1832 through the 1860s. Electoral rituals, such as chairing, when crowds hoisted candidates on a chair and paraded them through town, faded. In their place came activities such as canvasing and registration handled by new organizations such as the Reform Club.Footnote 8

Although these men did not succeed in persuading the Whigs to embrace this criterion of ancient voting rights tied to rate-paying, it is significant that the argument was raised and seriously debated in 1832, and historians have not discussed this. The development of the larger constitutional narrative is enriched by a history of the discussions surrounding rate-paying household suffrage that went on outside of Whig cabinet meetings and the halls of Parliament.Footnote 9 The debates about the basis of the franchise sought to replace a form in use since the 1670s, which allowed for forty counties to return two MPs based on a 40s. freehold franchise and 196 boroughs to return two MPs each.Footnote 10 Five boroughs returned one member each, while London and three others returned four members. Oxford and Cambridge Universities returned two representatives, making the total number 489 members from England. The form did not require a uniform qualification for the borough franchise in the way that it did in the counties. Borough franchise fell into four main categories. Freeman boroughs, based on property ownership, accounted for nearly half of them. Corporation boroughs were restricted based on the aristocratic oligarchy in power, and burgage boroughs maintained franchise rights in perpetuity through specifically named properties. Householder boroughs were the final group. The head of household could qualify for the vote, if he could pay the medieval equivalent of being obligated to “pay scot and bear lot.”Footnote 11 From the seventeenth century on, this meant taxpayers, or those paying poor rates, could vote through a system of representation known as the scot and lot franchise. On 1 March 1831, when the Reform Bill was presented, there were thirty-seven scot and lot boroughs in the English electoral system. When the Reform Bill passed in 1832, those boroughs that had had the scot and lot franchise were among the fifty-six boroughs that were abolished and among the thirty boroughs that lost one of their MPs. The seats were redistributed between new boroughs and existing counties in England.

The Reform Bill debate presented the opportunity to consider exactly who was entitled to suffrage in England and how the framers of the Reform Bill arrived at that interpretation of the English constitution. That discussion, in spite of efforts to the contrary, rejected household suffrage and scot and lot as the best means to protect the perceived rights of the ancient English constitution and opted instead to establish uniform property requirements for the vote in the boroughs. The bill stated that all householders with property valued at £10 per annum could vote.

During the debate over the bill, Lords Durham and Althorp presented the idea of scot and lot rate-paying household suffrage to the Whig cabinet and in the Committee of Four, which had been appointed by Lord Grey to draft the Reform Bill. Neither Durham nor Althorp, though committed to reform, were committed to rate-paying as a uniform criteria for voting; instead, the chief adherents of scot and lot rate-paying suffrage were Charles Tennyson and Joseph Parkes.

Tennyson, MP for Stamford, and Parkes, a Birmingham solicitor and election manager, sought to extend the requirements of the franchise and to reshape the initial Reform Bill away from a strict property qualification toward household suffrage with taxation as a requirement for suffrage, all the while emphasizing taxpaying as a reflection of the moral rather than financial conditions of the elector. For them, suffrage needed to reflect the new industrial and urban world, its changing rental values, and the frequent changes in tenancy that might, the two feared, create an elector who could meet the financial requirements associated with the privilege of suffrage but failed in the moral requirements of “sober conduct” and propriety. Tennyson and Parkes argued that suffrage rights should be expanded on the basis of taxpaying and moral character, as the ancient practice of scot and lot voting always reflected. This principle, they believed, would be superior to a uniform property valuation in safeguarding the rights of the ancient English constitution. This reflected a well-established line of reasoning in the parliamentary reform movement, but one more appreciated by radicals and men of the emerging middle class rather than the landed elites that dominated the Whig government. Though not widely reflected in public opinion, the popular press, or extraparliamentary political movements at the time, the links among moral character, taxpaying, and suffrage drew upon roots in past English constitutional discussions and set an important precedent for later debates. From the Levellers’ argument that “all those who have any permanent interest in the kingdom” should have the franchise “to the Rump Parliament's proposal that the distribution of parliamentary representation should be related to the tax burden,” reformers believed that parliament should represent property.Footnote 12 John Locke's followers clearly defended what they saw as the natural order, that all men with property had the right to representation in order to protect it.Footnote 13

How property should be defined, however, changed over the course of the century, making the argument for propertied representation more complex to define and defend. By the middle of the eighteenth century, commercial interests competed with landed interests in asserting which virtues were best associated with property ownership: inheritance and class or industry and propriety. In addition, inconsistencies in the methods of borough qualification made any justification untenable. Despite the 40s. freeholder qualification and an oath from freeholder electors, the property qualification for electors became so fuzzy and inconsistent from county to county and land market to land market that some means of redress was necessary. Problems existed in scot and lot boroughs as well. Taxes could be paid by landlords to secure the vote for tenants, which they, in turn, would cast for the landlords’ chosen parliamentary candidates. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century, the scot and lot borough of Southampton had 500 electors while another, Portsmouth, four times larger in population, had only 100 electors.Footnote 14

Angered by what they saw as Old Corruption, reformers started to demand reform in the composition of the electorate and parliamentary representation to reflect earnestness, hard work, and morality rather than property. In the 1760s, radicals and reformers argued that virtuous and moral conduct could be reflected in something other than property ownership. Eighteenth-century reformers James Burgh and James Almon contended that the ancient constitution allowed all taxpaying householders to vote.Footnote 15 Tied to the “no taxation without representation” argument in the American colonies, a new criterion for the franchise was offered, which suggested that one could deserve political representation based on civic virtue in the form of taxes as opposed to property ownership alone. Major John Cartwright's Take Your Choice contended that universal manhood suffrage was more reflective of the goals of the “ancient constitution” of England since defense of the country, rather than economic independence, was stressed as the criteria for citizenship.Footnote 16

Thomas Paine ended the century with arguments that the suffrage should be based on reason and natural law alone, but a significant number of radicals embraced a far less contemporary argument for awarding suffrage. While there was disagreement as to the moral principles and behavior that should be associated with the franchise, not to mention how much property and the type of property that was necessary to attain the vote, reformers generally agreed that the intent of the ancient constitution was to enfranchise the male head of a household with some economic independence.Footnote 17

The arguments now shifted to whether paying taxes demonstrated enough independence to be an elector. In 1809, Sir Francis Burdett called for freeholders, householders, and poor-rate payers to be granted the vote in an extension of suffrage qualifications, a position rejected by most radicals.Footnote 18 William Roscoe, a prominent Liverpool banker and abolitionist, argued that the vote should be extended “to all who, as householders, are heads of families, and contribute to the exigencies of the state, as well as to some other descriptions of the community.”Footnote 19 Percy Bysshe Shelley made the case in 1817 that “none but those who register their names as paying a certain small sum in direct taxes ought, at present, to send Members to Parliament,” as a means to safeguard against putting “power in the hands of men who have been rendered brutal and torpid and ferocious by ages of slavery.”Footnote 20 Henry Hunt and William Cobbett attacked the tyranny of any political system that did not allow for the legislative representation of those it taxed.Footnote 21

Speaking directly to this issue, the reformers of Fawdon questioned the limitation of suffrage based on householder and taxpaying status in an 1819 pamphlet. “Why should only householders have votes? Does not every man who labours contribute to support the state. … And is not the life, the labour, and the family of the poor cottager, or the occupier of a single room as dear to him, as they are to those who pay direct taxes? Why then is any man to be deprived of his rights?”Footnote 22 At a meeting in Leeds that year, reformers argued that an “Elective Franchise” should “be extended to all persons, who are called upon to contribute, either by taxes or servitude, to the support and protestion of the State.”Footnote 23 A fixed household rent should never be the standard of qualification for the vote, they contended, because it did not allow for the reward of values such as individual achievement and reward, nor did it account for moral respectability.

Utilitarian arguments made by Jeremy Bentham, among others, followed in the 1820s and articulated the wisdom of parliamentary reform that would redistribute seats to better represent the commercial and manufacturing interests, thereby making government more efficient and effective in dealing with economic and social change. Reflecting the interest in giving the manufacturing centers (and, therefore, manufacturers) the vote, the Utilitarians appreciated the argument that household suffrage and taxes were reliable measures of responsibility and civic duty.Footnote 24

Tennyson and Parkes were both reformers influenced by such views. Parkes, born and raised in Warwick, left the University of Glasgow with a degree in law to practice in a London solicitors firm. There, he joined a group of men devoted to Utilitarian principles and the teachings of Jeremy Bentham and became friends with George Grote, Sir William Molesworth, Joseph Hume, and Francis Place.Footnote 25 Upon his return to Birmingham in 1822, following the collapse of his father's once prosperous manufacturing company, Parkes became a solicitor; married Elizabeth Priestley, granddaughter of Dr. Joseph Priestley, in 1824 (whom he met at the new Meeting House Unitarian congregation); and got involved in the Birmingham Radical community. He helped organize the Mechanics Institute and represented the Birmingham and Liverpool Railroad subscribers in fighting the blockage of the railroad. He believed “that there is no exception to the great principle of free trade.”Footnote 26 Parkes also turned to managing elections for reformers standing for Parliament. He secured his local reputation in 1826 when he successfully sued on behalf of the defeated Whig parliamentary candidate, demonstrating that bribery had occurred during the election. He won a writ of mandamus, requiring that the election results be nullified and a new election called.Footnote 27

In the mid-1820s, Tennyson, a Lincolnshire landowner and descendant of Edward IV, used the services of Parkes as his election agent when he stood for Warwickshire in the 1826.Footnote 28 Sharing a belief that the interests of business and cities such as Birmingham were excluded from existing political structures, the two embarked on organizing the Radical community in Birmingham. With the support of the London radicals, they drafted a plan for redistributing parliamentary seats and giving Birmingham representation. The opportunity came in 1828, when the proposed disfranchisement of the Nottingham borough of East Retford came before the House of Commons. Tennyson introduced the East Retford Bill, which called for those seats to be transferred to Birmingham, as well as a uniform property value as the criteria for voting to be established in a newly enfranchised Birmingham. This bill ended lengthy discussions as to whether or not Birmingham should grant the franchise according to scot and lot requirements (household property value and the payment of all rates before voting). The two men recognized that the payment of rates secured the franchise in the hands of respectable men who were hardworking and financially independent. But they also feared that under such a system, particularly in a city, landlords might pay those rates on behalf of their tenants, thereby obligating the latter to vote for particular candidates so as not to jeopardize their status as either new electors or tenants. Without a rate-paying requirement for the vote, however, there was the real possibility that new electors would default on their taxes. In the city of Birmingham, this presented different problems than in smaller boroughs, and Tennyson argued that while some electors might default on rates prior to an election, “this was a minor evil” compared to disenfranchisement or the “payment of rates on behalf of a tenant immediately before an election.”Footnote 29 Birmingham was to be divided into scot and lot boroughs.

The problem of corruption was not clearly correctable to the men at this point, but they struggled with a solution to the problem that rate-paying, while an additional financial burden to some newly enfranchised, was still a measure of financial stability and civic responsibility that they envisioned should be tied to suffrage. That the failure to meet rate-paying requirements might open another avenue for corruption and political influence among the landed or commercial wealthy was an issue that required a thoughtful solution. When the Commons rejected the bill, they gained time to figure out a better solution. Parkes was not discouraged, and he reminded Tennyson that, “we must not throw away strength in the intermediate time, or open the batteries till the enemies approach next session. I think all that has happened is the parentage of a great national question.”Footnote 30

The great national question was, of course, in the hands of the Whigs after 1830. Parkes and Tennyson were confident that the leaders of the party would hear their ideas on suffrage and parliamentary reform. They eagerly awaited the opportunity to share these arguments with the Whigs following their formation of a government and Lord Grey's appointment of a Committee of Four to draft the long-awaited parliamentary reform legislation. The “leader” of the Committee of Four, Lord Durham, recommended that the Whig Reform Bill establish a uniform £20 franchise for all householders and resident freemen in the boroughs, eliminating all other criteria for voting. The rejection of this proposal by others in the committee has received significant historical attention.Footnote 31 The property qualification of £10 was substituted in its place. Durham gave up this fight in the belief that the government would eliminate the franchise for existing freeholders, whether or not they fell below the newly adopted property qualification established by the bill. Seats were to be taken from rotten boroughs and given to counties and disenfranchised towns.Footnote 32 Copyholders and leaseholders would be added to the country electorate. Polling places would be established in each district throughout the county. Sir James Graham created a system for voter registration in both counties and boroughs. Voting qualifications in the boroughs were the biggest problem for the committee. The case was made for a higher voter qualification for new boroughs in that the committee believed that it insured independence in the new London boroughs. (House values were based upon figures that represented contemporary estimates of the minimum amount of property that would allow voter independence.)Footnote 33 The lower rate in old boroughs would protect smaller constituencies with the fewest number of voters. Voters would keep their votes if they were residents.

In January 1831, the cabinet, receiving the committee's report, rejected several provisions of the proposed bill. The attorney general advised that no borough should fall below 300 electors and that boundaries of smaller boroughs should be expanded until they reached 300.Footnote 34 Borough electors meeting this qualification were, the Whigs believed, potentially propertied, independent, but also sufficiently deferential to accepted political leaders who had knowledge and experience on their side. They also were well aware that the number of householders enfranchised by the bill depended on house or prevailing rents and would differ significantly from borough to borough. In London, artisans would vote, and in other places a significant percentage of intelligent middle-class men would remain disenfranchised. The cabinet determined that scot and lot boroughs would be subject to the same criteria as freeholder boroughs, falling on Schedules A and B, which were lists of boroughs that would lose both MP's representation (fifty boroughs) or one of two MPs (another fifty), respectively. Tax rates, tied to property and rental values, would be accepted, as they always had been, by electors and parliamentarians alike. The bill would be fair, and the discussions between cabinet members seemed to reflect that principle.Footnote 35

Hearing the direction of the cabinet discussions, Tennyson tried to convince Durham that he should reject uniform property qualifications and persuade his colleagues to do the same. He contended, “The object of the franchise … devised is to form a constituency, which while it does not exclude any class of society on the mere ground of poverty, avoids the inconveniences of great numbers, and carries with it a security for the respectable conduct and good condition of those who compose it, whatever may be their grade in the community.”Footnote 36 The solution to all problems associated with the vote, he believed, was to adopt a householders' franchise, giving the vote to those who had resided for three years and “would therefore in most cases be fathers of families.”Footnote 37 In addition to being householders, all electors would have to be ratepayers, at least regular parochial ratepayers, and potential voters would have to give proof of “industrious habits and sober conduct for that period—and thus as it were earned and merited his franchise, while the object of gaining it would be a strong incentive to industry and give a moral impulsion to the community.”Footnote 38

This was a considerably more radical proposal and one that differed dramatically from the government’s. First, it proposed a residency requirement but did not create any fixed value for the property occupied. This is what Tennyson defended as “political justice.” He wrote Durham, “The wealth of the country is produced by the lower classes.” “They bear their share of all imports. They, in fact, pay the bulk of them including the indirect taxes. It may be said that by their labor they produce the whole. Their personal and political rights are as valuable and as dear to them as the higher classes consider theirs, and rely upon it the times are such that the principles of Government and of political justice will now be freely and closely considered by the mass of the people.”Footnote 39 Not only should there be no fixed value, argued Tennyson, but even residency requirements should be made more flexible, dependent upon “the circumstances of the community to which it is applied.”Footnote 40

Household suffrage, he argued, should reflect “the principle of admitting all who answer a description common both to rich and poor (such as `Householders')—taking care that only such shall exercise it as give evidence of some stable position and permanent interest in the community, and some continued previous contribution to its public consider itself included in the scheme of representation, (and so it would be in fact,) without any danger of the interests of property.”Footnote 41 Thus, the injustice, as Tennyson saw it, would exist for those respectable and hardworking tenants who needed more time or more flexibility to adapt to the new timetable of rate-paying. “The poorer the householder,” bemoaned Tennyson, “the less the probability that he [the elector] would gain, or keep his franchise, but the greater his desert if he did, for although regular payments of a series of rates would be no evidence of desert on the part of the rich, it would, on the part of the poor, demonstrate their anxiety to acquire, and afterwards to maintain the franchise.”Footnote 42 This was not in the interests of householders and was not, in Tennyson's mind, what the Reform Bill had intended.

Flexibility in deadlines was also essential, as far as Tennyson was concerned, if rate-paying and registration fees were to be required for new electors. For instance, if there was a directive to “rate the owner alone for house let at and under £12 per annum, where the letting is for less than a year or the Rent payable at a shorter period than three months,” this would keep numbers of potential electors in check and allow a landlord without “sufficient confidence in his tenants” to still let his houses without concern that the rates would fall significantly into arrears.Footnote 43 Tennyson was also concerned that rate-makers, prior to an election, would be susceptible to party pressure and “unduly admit or exclude member who approached the line of either side.” In contrast, a franchise based upon “pecuniary rate-able value” allowed for the variations of monetary value to “continually alter the relation of such a franchise to the state of society and might change its character altogether.”Footnote 44 Tennyson thought that “political justice” included concepts such as equity and morality, and the Reform Bill should include these qualities if it was to reflect the concepts of the ancient English constitution.

And property values, not the payment of taxes, were the only way to evaluate those qualities in potential electors. Tennyson pointed out that there were, and always had been, numerous ways in which large property owners avoided the payment of their own taxes and equally numerous ways in which the poorer citizen's payment of those taxes for his landlord compromised a worker's ability to let a property at a value sufficient to meet any particular fixed value. The value of the work that it took to pay the rent or the rates was, in Tennyson's mind, what produced responsible electors, and it was wrongly omitted from the equation that set qualifications for the franchise.

Tennyson's position against a fixed-rate value was based on earlier arguments about sober conduct, hard work, and moral respectability. But as early as 1831, Tennyson made the argument that the Whigs should “grant the vote to only those with good evidence of his moral qualification for the franchise. … The Elective franchise is by charter or admissible; but [by fixed rateable value] an arbitrary line is drawn which excludes the poor man, and admits the more wealthy merely on the ground of their relative condition. … The poorer citizen replies that on his labor depends the value of that property, and that he has personal Rights and some property also.”Footnote 45

Tennyson made a clear connection between the abuses of landlords, particularly concerning rate-paying, and the absurdity of using that as a factor in granting the vote without taking those abuses into account. In referring to the disenfranchisement of existing freemen who failed to meet the criteria, Tennyson warned, “By other measures of reform, numbers of individuals of the lower class will probably have to be disfranchised, or their voices will be drowned by the addition of numbers from another class. These electors we know, form the chief evil of the representative system. Their venality furnishes the only security for the return to Parliament of persons who have some stake in the country, but yet they do appear to represent the lower orders.”Footnote 46 The true application of “political justice,” therefore, would be to replace those corrupt electors among a particular socioeconomic stratum of electors with another of the same stratum. “Artisans, that is, [are] the bulk of those whom such a franchise as I object to [and] would exclude,” he wrote. “It is in that class, particularly the younger and more energetic portion, which is now imbibing the instruction administered by institutes and other societies of that description, while such means of improvement are for the most part neglected by the master manufacturers and more opulent inhabitants.”Footnote 47 To exclude those whose property was their labor would, to his mind, “risk the peace of the country. It would be the more dangerous because it would be unjust,” and the vote should be the “reward of industry and the means of promoting the national welfare.”Footnote 48

Finally, there was the moral component for qualification as an elector. How a potential voter was to demonstrate “sober conduct” was never explained in the correspondence with Durham. Tennyson, no doubt, believed that sobriety, hard work, church attendance, and education qualified as “sober conduct.” The links among temperance, rate-paying, and moral character were a persuasive combination in extending the vote to more electors. Good conduct was important in order to assure political leaders that an extension of the suffrage would not be squandered on the undeserving.Footnote 49 E. P. Thompson argued that the London reformers in the eighteenth century tried to rescue reform politics from the image of the mob and radical leaders tried to “present an image of sobriety.”Footnote 50 The question of property versus moral character divided the parliamentary reform movement around the turn of the century, but along clearly class lines. Dror Wahrman has already demonstrated that radicals after the Napoleonic wars couched their arguments as the chief reflection of public opinion in connection to the middle class rather than to the working classes, or “people.”Footnote 51 That Tennyson reiterated this argument in 1831 is worth noting, but, like his contemporaries, in the end he stressed economic productivity as the critical factor in determining if someone should gain the vote or not.Footnote 52 Tennyson obviously felt that the middle-class employers and their employees were economically interdependent; together they produced the wealth of the burgeoning nation, and they shared conduct and values. Durham sympathized with some of Tennyson's suggestions and employed similar principles in his work in the Committee of Four. Still, the uniform franchise finally chosen strengthened the men of some property and those who shared some of the concerns of the landlords. Durham's original plans were, to the distress of Parkes and Tennyson, no longer on the table, and the latter wanted justice for middle-class employers and their employees.

As the Reform Bill came out of cabinet deliberations and was presented in Parliament in March 1831, the issue of rate-paying applied to those scot and lot boroughs. Twenty-three of those scot and lot were on the schedule for partial disfranchisement.Footnote 53 But in order to gain votes to pass the bill, an amendment was added requiring that all local and assessed taxes needed to be paid by all electors prior to their voter registration. This became known as clause 27.Footnote 54 Grey and Lord Wharncliffe, leader of the waverers, agreed that this, combined with the £10 franchise, gave added “respectability” to electors. This gave badly needed support to the bill in a bloc of votes from the waverers.

Radicals in and out of Parliament were horrified, believing that it would deprive significant numbers of electors of their right to vote if they could not pay their rates and electoral registration fees in a timely way. The Whigs did not see this as a difficulty. Thirty-seven scot and lot boroughs had long existed in England at the time, and another twelve boroughs had freemen who also had to pay rates.Footnote 55 The government felt that its measure simply carried on an established practice. But the proposed clause 27 added to the burden of potential electors because it required that they would have to qualify and register to vote every year. If all rates were not paid by the July deadline, the electors’ names would be removed from the list.Footnote 56 Tennyson's proposal to Durham called for “regular payments” of rates, not compliance with a deadline, and found the difference of interpretation to be one that would disenfranchise existing voters rather than streamline an existing method of electoral qualification. This proposal deeply troubled him as well as some Radicals in Parliament such as Sir John Hobhouse and Colonel DeLacy Evans, who both spoke against the amendments in the house, though unsuccessfully.Footnote 57

Parkes had his questions, too, but generally praised the Reform Bill's “thorough honesty.” This, he wrote Tennyson, “drowns all objections to the details of the substituted electoral system.”Footnote 58 In assessing popular sentiment, as he understood it, Parkes claimed that there was a “very strong objection that exists against the `scot and lot' being terminated with the lives of the present electors—and I see no reason for limiting our franchise to £10.”Footnote 59 But he readily acknowledged that “every soul unites in the confidence that such a Reformed Parliament as the new Bill will create would fairly from time to time, as occasion required, adapt the Electoral System to the rights of the People.”Footnote 60

Parkes tried to persuade Lord Chancellor Brougham about the ways in which scot and lot would benefit the Whigs and to alleviate concern that the bill was about to enfranchise the wrong sort of people. Using the borough of Bridgwater as his chief example, he argued that there was, in this scot and lot borough, “no house below £10 [that] is rated to the Poor. … Thus the Reform Bill will in no point affect it or create a particle of prejudice.”Footnote 61 But the seat, once the reform occurred, would, potentially, be open to the influence of landowners. The problem of continued corruption, argued Parkes, needed to be taken more seriously by the government.

As the Reform Bill passed the second reading, Grey prepared for the onslaught of additional amendments. The bulk of the changes came from grievances about Schedule A and B, which listed which boroughs were to be disenfranchised. Seven boroughs were removed from Schedule B and allowed to keep both members. Lord Palmerston was the chief advocate of more sweeping changes to prevent a dissolution. He reintroduced the ratepayer qualification back into the Reform Bill discussion. Palmerston proposed a £10 franchise dependent upon poor-rate assessments and an increase in the property qualification in London, restricting the electorate. These two measures would, to some degree, be balanced by granting a form of household suffrage in boroughs with an already existing scot and lot franchise.Footnote 62 There is no evidence that the discussions on the topic amounted to much, and these suggestions were ultimately rejected.

What followed, instead of a drastic change in the conception of the franchise, was the adoption of Gascoyne's amendment in April and an election. Gascoyne's amendment, introduced in April 1831, forbade any reduction in the total numbers of MPs for England and Wales, as had been proposed in Schedules A and B. In essence, it would have obligated the cabinet either to abandon the addition of MPs for Scotland and Ireland or to be embarrassed by adding eight new seats. By late May, with most of the returns in, Parkes was “inclined to think that the Bill will now pass unless its rickety parents overlay it. … I can hardly believe that such a Revolution as the Bill will ultimately occasion can pass without some unforeseen kickups.”Footnote 63 He, of course, was dead-on. Tensions were mounting as rumors flew of further changes to the schedules. Parliament feared violent action by popular organizations. Tories expressed fears that supporting the bill opened the doors of power to artisans and “the new and apparently unstable England of mechanics’ institutes and Brougham's ‘godless academy.’”Footnote 64

By the summer, it was out of the question for the Whigs to withdraw the bill, but revisions and the workings of the Ultra-Tories in the House of Lords were taking their toll on supporters. Whig backbenchers were as angry as the bill's opponents when the cabinet introduced the qualifier that all rents needed to be paid in half-year intervals.Footnote 65 The Reform Bill's clause 26 had proposed to disfranchise anyone not having proof of rents and rates paid for at least six months and proof that the property was held “for his [the tenant and ratepayer’s] own use.”Footnote 66 While the intention was to fix the time for an elector to settle all financial payments and prove himself qualified, other interpretations of the phrase “for his own use” seemed too restrictive for some. Between clauses 26 and 27, all new voters would have to maintain their rates for at least six months prior to an election and never let them slip into arrears if they wished to maintain proof that they were regular ratepayers and be eligible to register to vote. Since elections were irregularly scheduled, there was no real motive to lapse in rate payments if one wished to remain an elector. The Whigs saw it as another guarantee to satisfy the bill's detractors that only the most respectable men of means would be brought into the new electorate, but others saw this addition to the bill as an unfair financial demand on those electors who were the most financially vulnerable to inflation in property values and commercial market changes. There was growing concern on all sides as to the bill's viability and desirability. “The result of my reconsideration,” Parkes wrote Tennyson in July, “confirmed me in the conviction that the old Constitutional Franchise of Scot & Lot would have been a much better principle for the new franchise, regulated by your East Retford Bill principle, and altho’ it can scarcely be now substituted, still I think the Government must come to that principle as the only mode of regulating their rent franchise, and limited the weekly Tenants.”Footnote 67

Parkes and Tennyson wholly rejected the government's additional “safeguard” to the amount of rent: the requirement that rates be paid. They accepted that the right to vote should be invested in people of stability and moral virtue, but what was being proposed was merely an artificial barrier. “I think you will fully agree with me in my animadversions on that part of the Bill requiring payment of Rent, Rates, etc.,” Parkes wrote Tennyson. “What Has the right or qualification of an Elector to do with the pecuniary transactions between Landlord and Tenant? That clause rendering payment essential to a vote might with equal wisdom be extended to a punctual payment of our Tailor's or Shoemaker's Bills. … For I know that if a Quarterly or even a Monthly payment clause is substituted for the `unhappy' Half Yearly Clause a Devil of a storm will gather and burst in Manchester, Birmingham, etc.”Footnote 68

Debate on the bill resumed in August to criticism that the measure was disfranchising borough freeholders who were landlords. The cabinet then endorsed an amendment that would limit the freeholder vote in boroughs but protect copyholders’ rights in the countryside.Footnote 69 The debate and negotiations did not touch on scot and lot boroughs, but if freeholders and copyholders were to be redefined in terms of counting qualified electors within the boroughs, the issue of rates, Tennyson and Parkes feared, was not far behind that of rents. They were disturbed by the government's lack of concern that inequalities in locally fixed rents and rates would result in the enfranchisement of someone of “sober conduct” in one part of the country and in the disfranchisement of another such person in different part of the country. Parkes was dismayed that as, “honest as the Government is, the ministry does not know the way. They are now in their most critical plight. The confidence of the people hangs by a hair; and, there is … little prospect of reform but from without. … The country is red hot.”Footnote 70

Parkes had a significant advantage over Tennyson in raising these concerns with the ministry—he had the ear of the government. During the summer of 1831, and increasingly with the upheaval in October following the bill's first defeat, Lord Althorp and his colleagues had grown concerned about the Birmingham Political Union (BPU) and similar organizations around the nation.Footnote 71 The BPU, founded in 1830, was the most recent manifestation of Tory banker Thomas Attwood's extraparliamentary political organization, which he began in 1812. Attwood and Parkes had crossed paths often. Though they differed in their ultimate objectives for reform (Attwood's motivation was currency reform), they had still worked together in 1828 on the East Retford campaign. Parkes found Attwood unable to depart from a single-minded interpretation of parliamentary reform and completely unable to compromise. He hated his posturing and pandering to an audience, and the experience was enough to persuade Parkes that he could not work with Attwood again. As a result, Parkes did not join the BPU when it formed, and he distanced himself from Attwood, publicly and privately, at every opportunity.

Nonetheless, the BPU was perceived by many in government as the leading force of the people in support of the bill. The government needed to work with the organization or at least not alienate it. While the cabinet could not afford to appear as if it was in communication with the BPU—which might be taken as approval—Althorp did establish contact with Parkes, believing him to be, if not a member of the extraparliamentary organization, then at least connected to its leaders. Althorp invited Parkes to serve as a “facilitator” between Lord Grey and Attwood, president of the BPU. As Parkes would describe it to Tennyson, he was in “on the Union secret with Lord Althorp,” as only Parkes and Althorp recognized how much influence they had over Grey and Attwood in both exploiting and curbing the activities of the BPU.Footnote 72 This “secret” relationship allowed Parkes the opportunity freely to express his opinions and advice on the bill and its failings. He did this often, although always with tact, leaving no doubt that he differed in opinion.

Aware the bill needed revision to muster popular support and also aware of the growing strength of the BPU, when Althorp asked for Parkes's opinions on the franchise, Parkes wrote, “I have no hesitation in saying “that if the public are informed on `scot and lot' principle, governed as you propose, it will be most favorably accepted; and further, I am sure that it will remove many real objections of the Anti-Reformers.”Footnote 73 But Parkes went on to show quite clearly that he did not mean to give the bill blanket approval. He explained that, “a ‘scot and lot’ franchise, governed by some real and less objectionable standard than House-rental, seems to me not only the advisable selection of an ancient constitutional principle, but also as affording the best practical mode. I have no doubt of being able, especially with all the valuable aid of the Parliamentary Representation Returns, to shew [sic] the superiority over the £10 franchise.”Footnote 74

But the mere whisper that Parkes was working with the government prompted criticism from a number of his friends, which Parkes addressed in his writings to them. To George Grote he warned, “Our support of that ministry [the Whig] is our only chance for a peaceable reform. We must stick to it, till the Cabinet commits an overt act of treachery or of fatal folly … society and freedom will now progress or remain stationary for twenty perhaps fifty years, if we fail in this one memorable opportunity of obtaining our rights.”Footnote 75 He defended his actions to Francis Place, writing the radical leader that “you are, I am sure, well aware that I do all I can.”Footnote 76 Parkes believed this, of course. He truly felt that if the Whigs backed down from the bill, the cause of reform would be lost. It made his work negotiating with Althorp and Attwood all the more serious.

Believing that he was acquiescing too easily, Tennyson was also critical of Parkes. The state of the bill only made him more determined to persuade the government that a new measure that replaced property qualification with scot and lot was the answer. Tennyson wrote to both Althorp and Durham to that effect, urging that the solution to a myriad of problems facing the government was to scrap the existing bill and put forward a measure similar to Tennyson's own East Retford Bill. The government reform bill, he felt, rejected moral virtue and respectability, which he believed was at the core of the newly emerging class of self-improved workingmen. He feared that the rent and rate schedules would further inflame existing tensions and perceptions of inequalities. He warned the ministers, “The physical power of the country will not see itself perpetually excluded with impunity.”Footnote 77

Tennyson proposed that the vote would be given to householders, in residence for three years, regularly paying all parochial rates. Tennyson provided detailed explanations for why a ratepayer franchise, rather than a property valuation franchise, would be a better course of action. “I retain my objections to the principle of any franchise based on pecuniary value,” he wrote Althorp.Footnote 78 The payment of rates, as described in his East Retford Bill, he contended, would redistribute the vote. He directed Althorp to the Sturges Bourne Act 59 Geo. III. c.12 c. 19 and 23, which allowed landlords, if the vestry agreed, to “be rated instead of the occupiers in respect of houses, let any rent or rate not exceeding £20 nor less than £6 per annum where the letting is for less than a year, or where the rent is made payable at a shorter period than 3 months.”Footnote 79 In other words, landlords who did not have a long-standing relationship with a tenant could opt for a short lease (less than one year) and pay the rates for them, or pay rents for a brand-new tenant (less than three months), but with the intent that the tenant would take over the rate-paying after that initial payment. This, Tennyson believed, should alleviate fears among property owners that the vote might be granted to men who had not proven their “sober conduct.” This, in effect, he argued:

The final word, for Tennyson at any rate, was that “payment of Rates for the last six months of the three years was not to be material to the vote.”Footnote 81

But Parkes, not Tennyson, had a better sense of the country's mind and what was the most practical way to achieve parliamentary reform. He had been right, of course. The country was “red hot.” In spite of Brougham's impassioned speech in the House of Lords on 7 October, that body rejected the Reform Bill. Brougham, on one knee as if in prayer, had assured everyone that the bill would not mean “change and revolution” but would simply abolish some of the greatest abuses in the existing electoral system. He warned the Lords to “rouse not the spirit of a peace-loving but determined people.”Footnote 82 The Lords did not heed his advice, and some “peace-loving people” in Nottingham, Derby, and Bristol rioted following the Reform Bill's defeat.Footnote 83

If Tennyson had expected a positive response from Durham and Althorp to his many recommendations for the Reform Bill, the riots of October distracted the government and guaranteed that he would not receive one. Althorp was, of course, reading Tennyson's letter at the very same time that the BPU was purportedly arming itself—a response to the Tories and the king pressuring Grey to enforce the sedition laws against all Political Unions, whom they erroneously believed were behind the rioting, particularly in Bristol. Dozens of new Political Unions formed throughout the country, a response to the Lords’ defeat of the Reform Bill yet again.Footnote 84 Althorp turned to Parkes in desperation to negotiate with the Political Unions to keep the peace. Reformers believed it essential to impress upon the king and government how much public support there was behind the Whigs and how they risked real popular violence, rather than isolated mob violence, if the government did not do something to assert the will of the people over the will of the hereditary elite. Ultra-Tories were insisting that the government declare the Political Unions illegal under existing sedition acts outlawing organizations with chapters that communicated with one another.Footnote 85 Amid this confusion, Parkes believed that serving as a link between the government and the BPU would strengthen the government's commitment to the bill, while at the same time preventing Attwood from actually making good on his rhetoric to arm the union and force the issue of reform at bayonet point. Parkes would later describe this delicate dance as “keeping a chain and collar round [Thomas] Attwood and the Birmingham Political Union. I can only compare it to a keeper's first month with a dancing bear.”Footnote 86

Listening to Parkes's advice was critical at several levels, all of which mattered deeply to the ministry. Parkes was forthright in detailing to Althorp the ways in which the government “miscalculated their [sic] power of success in the Dissolved Parliament,” namely, to ignore the strength of public opinion and not avail itself of reform proposals by Radicals.Footnote 87 Parkes urged Althorp to propose alterations to the bill in the cabinet, namely, that the issue of land values and a fixed property qualification be taken up more seriously and that the schedules of enfranchisement be reexamined for equity between the new urban voter and the rural freemen voter, whom Parkes feared would still be subject to the influence of landlords. He offered his assistance in utilizing the press to work public opinion in favor or such a change in the government proposal, but Althorp declined to challenge Grey and Russell on the definition of suffrage as already outlined. Parkes advised the government to “package” the bill to the public differently, showcasing it as a reflection of the popular will and casting the House of Lords as standing against the good of the people. He articulated three ways to alter the bill, starting with its form. Enfranchisement should, he suggested, replace disfranchisement in the bill's introduction, thereby “trying to build a pyramid by reversing its form [and preventing] the Government the difficult question and ignominy of withdrawal or on their friends in the House of Commons its rejection or odious adoption.”Footnote 88

Parkes reiterated his dissatisfaction with house rent as the standard of qualification, calling it “most unfortunate, unconstitutional, and ill advised equally with reference to Reformers and Anti-Reformers.”Footnote 89 Limiting the £10 franchise to those rated and paying taxes, he believed, would, in fact, not limit the franchise in any significant degree because in practice it would not be applied to all those intended. For example, landlords of houses let for £10 were, more often than not, paying rates rather than tenants. “The consequence of the proposed restriction,” argued Parkes, “would operate only in words, not in any diminution of numbers.”Footnote 90 But adding the rating to the rent in places with high rents, Parkes contended, “will make the spirit of the £10 franchise more unconstitutional and objectionable. In its spirit it will further sever the interest of labor and property.”Footnote 91

Again, the solution, to Parkes's mind, was a modified scot and lot franchise. “The substitution of a ‘scot and lot’ franchise—securing a given period of payment as a regulator of numbers and aptitude to exercise the right—will allow you a most simple compromise with our opponents,” he assured Althorp.Footnote 92 Additionally, it would bring around opponents of the bill because it would enfranchise relatively few and, thus, preserve the idea of a select electorate. Parkes suggested that all towns with 20,000 inhabitants or more (according to available the 1831 census data) create a scot and lot franchise that would be based on one year's residency and payment of rates. In towns with populations over 20,000, two or three years of consecutive residency and payment of rates would be required. This would assure that only the most stable would be enfranchised and that transients would not be able to affect outcomes of elections. Parkes believed that this would satisfy those who feared that the newly enfranchised would have nothing invested in local concerns, as well as those who feared that corruption would go hand in hand with an expanded electorate in an age of growing mobility. “This would extinguish the objections of all parties,” he mused. “It is a colorable compromise which would also in reality when explained really satisfy the moderate anti-Reformers.”Footnote 93

When Althorp inquired as to what Parkes thought of implications of the rating clause, he replied, “In such a town as Birmingham [where there were] thousands of £10 rent houses [and] where landlords pay rates [the clause] would have little practical effect.”Footnote 94 Parkes saw the problem there as rating. “If you ask me whether if with that addition to the franchise, of rating as necessary, I should consider the bill sacrificed in any essential point by the concession.”Footnote 95 Rating could make an enormous difference as to whether householders could become electors. The added criteria of stable income and security would assure that transient workers and those with tenuous incomes could not attain, and then lose, the vote. That would be disastrous, according to Parkes, and would lead to the kind of unrest seen in October. The riots in Bristol, Nottingham, and Derby reaffirmed, at least in Parkes's and Tennyson's view, that a “simple constitutional franchise of ‘scot and lot’ founded upon a pecuniary rate-able value” would go a long way to maintaining the peace.Footnote 96

For Parkes, the missed opportunity of adopting Durham's recommendations for a modified scot and lot in the initial drafting of the bill condemned the government to opposition every way they turned. “Thus it was always an enigma with me,” he ended his letter to Althorp, “how the Cabinet could reject the simple Constitutional franchise of Scot and Lot for the £10 franchise, when the former with a consecutive period of payment (put up to two or three years) would have insured every necessary qualification for so solemn a right … excluding those whom all sensible men of all parties desire to exclude without creating an artificial demarcation between property, labor and right to franchise.”Footnote 97

Perhaps because Althorp agreed that the cabinet had failed to recognize a way to achieve “disfranchisement, enfranchisement, and suffrage,” by fair means, and that violence out of doors was a growing concern, Althorp did suggest to Russell that perhaps the rate-paying requirement was too severe and that an offer of payment of the rates owed should be understood as sufficient and legally equal to the actual payment of the rates themselves. But the only real change incorporated into the revised bill, introduced on 12 December 1831, was a clause granting “compound” householders the option to pay their taxes themselves, allowing them to be named in the rate book.Footnote 98 Even as the government reintroduced the Reform Bill with adjustments to the schedules, Parkes drafted pieces for the Sunday Mail and the Mirror to promote the scot and lot franchise as fair-minded.Footnote 99 These, however, were not reprinted in other publications, so it is safe to say the message was not one widely embraced.

After a significant crisis in May 1832 and fears of a large creation of reform-minded peers, the Reform Bill, with its uniform property qualification, was enacted. Whatever might have been achieved during the two and a half years of the bill's debate, the final law reinforced property as the basis of the suffrage, while making uniform and stringent requirements on new electors to assure their respectable natures. It ended some egregious abuses of power and ignored other problems of potential corruption and influence. The Reform Bill did not limit the post-1832 freeman franchise in boroughs to the existing voters. It did not specifically say that only those freemen who had the vote in 1832 could continue to vote. Rather, it allowed for the creation of new freemen in clause 32 of the bill. It abolished electoral rights of the nonresident freemen and freemen through marriage, but “in respect of birth and servitude,” new resident freemen could be created after 1832.Footnote 100 Voters would be required to register and to make certain that their names appeared on lists of ratepayers (or more often individuals or parties who had an interest made certain) as well as the town clerk's list of freemen. Proof of poor-relief payments by the newly established deadline of 20 July would also be required so that electoral lists would be complete in early August.Footnote 101 And compound householders gained little advantage from clause 30, which gave them an option to pay taxes themselves, so they would be named in the rate book. Compound householders were, effectively, disfranchised from the political process.Footnote 102

With the Reform Bill a fait accompli, the question for Parkes was, “What is to come next?”Footnote 103 Tennyson turned his attention to the issue of triennial parliaments but concentrated much more on maintaining a seat in Parliament. Parkes took another path, determined that municipal reform would receive his attention. Still restrictive and often controlled by corporations, local politics, Parkes considered, were the next battleground in ending electoral corruption and extending the franchise to those whose rate-paying and moral composition entitled it. “No where have the Corporations moral or civil power over the population; and without moral power civil authority must be ineffective,” Parkes wrote Tennyson.Footnote 104 They discussed how municipal reform would achieve advantages for the liberal cause as it rewarded “sober conduct” and “moral responsibility” in new electors. The fact that those corporations to which he was referring “possess and exercise political influence directly adverse to the principles of the present ministry” also mattered a great deal.Footnote 105 Parkes wanted to reassert the morality that came from the spirit of constitutional representation and “the swelling current of Democracy.”Footnote 106 The first task was to aid the Whigs in winning the first election under the new system so that there could be no backsliding.Footnote 107

Parkes began the process of registering new voters on behalf of the Whigs.Footnote 108 While they were returned with a significant majority, voter registrations were far lower than expected, with only one-quarter to three-eighths of those who now met the qualifications actually registering as new electors.Footnote 109 The cost of electoral participation was a potential explanation. Financially, paying all rates by the required date to secure voter registration and making the registration payment, which was a burden on many potential voters, were, in Parkes's mind, still oppressive. Municipal reform was a necessity in order to secure that corporations could not influence or outright control the registration and rate-paying process. Reforming local government so as to secure free elections, particularly for seats on local vestry and Poor Law commissions and all committees that collected or distributed rate-paying, was essential to allow the expanded electorate to keep up with tax payments and remain compliant with the Reform Bill's electoral requirements. Opportunity came in July 1833, when the Whigs rewarded Parkes for his service by appointing him secretary to the Commission on Corporation Reform and Charity Board.Footnote 110 This was his chance to issue a report condemning local corruption, make uniform regulations concerning local politics, and turn that expanded and freer local electorate into qualified parliamentary electors, ready and willing to register and vote for Whig candidates.

But the growing controversy over lay appropriation had proven both embarrassing to and ultimately destructive of party unity, causing the breakup of Grey's government, his retirement, and the dismissal of his government's successor, Lord Melbourne's government, in November, by the king.Footnote 111 General elections were called for January. Parkes added managing several elections to his work on the commission. His disappointment with the election results was stunning, the lessons learned, important. As a Radical reformer, he had served the Whigs as the party in power with the greatest likelihood of ending corruption and the abuse of aristocratic power. He had believed Grey an honest man. He had believed that they were working toward the same goals, even if he had not persuaded the ministers to adopt his ideas in another version of the Reform Bill. “There can be no doubt,” he railed to Tennyson, “in the mind of any informed person, that on the whole, considering the inequitable distribution of the Electoral franchise and the imperfect protection of its exercise, the Reformers have well out of the fire and the wretched mess the Whigs have made of the Liberal Cause by two years of mis-government.”Footnote 112

And the Whigs were in a wretched mess. As early elections of the Reformed Parliament showed, the £10 householder franchise had undermined the Whigs’ ability to control borough voting. The Reform Act's limitation of freeman admissions to only those who qualified “in respect of birth and servitude” and the total disfranchisement of nonresident freemen resulted in a decrease in the size of the borough electorate and, therefore, a more restricted electorate with fewer inclined to vote Whig.Footnote 113 The freemen voters, possessing the required property qualification, were not as economically independent as the Whigs wanted to believe. Parkes knew that they were susceptible to pressures from landowners and other economic forces. He had always feared that the landowners would either pay their registration fees or rates, or both, forcing those “grateful” freeholders to vote as the landlords wished.Footnote 114 In Parkes's mind, the Whigs’ electoral crisis affirmed this. “We committed a great mistake in the [Reform] Bill,” he admitted to Lord Brougham. “It was absurdly foolish, impolitic and hopeless to attack the Freemen Parliamentarily. I always remonstrated against it. … We were clearly fighting a Windmill, and causing unpopularity among a large class of the People.”Footnote 115 His analysis of the vote suggested, too, that those “little towns [which had been] old ‘scot and lot’ [boroughs] have been reduced since 1832 by 15 or 20 percent” and were directly linked with the most recent voting patterns.Footnote 116 Fortunately, Peel's inability to overcome the coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and O’Connellites, in large part orchestrated by Parkes, was enough to force the king to return Melbourne to office in April and give him more time to reform local government. Parkes certainly held out the hope that corporation reform and uniform standards of enfranchisement at that level would “undo” the damage of losing scot and lot voters—the very sort of voters he believed reflected the morals and respectability that would justify electoral reform and vote for Whig candidates.

Parkes still had hopes that local reform might correct mistakes made at the parliamentary reform level. He wrote Lord Durham that “the Household Suffrage will be the grand field of battle. I never thought when we began with the Cabinet that we should spoon them with it. … However it is a smasher—a grand point to get a Household suffrage, and a thorough purge of the existing Corporators.”Footnote 117 If municipal reform, taking the form of “a modified popular system was substituted in lieu of the present degenerated one, persons of property and popular influence would lead,—the Government would obtain the best support and property the best security.”Footnote 118 This description certainly echoed Tennyson's sense of respectability and morality linked with property and class. There should be moderate reform. The vote should go to householders who could afford a rent and payment of rates at a level set to assure (and reflect) their level of hard work and respectability—the ancient constitutional right of scot and lot.

The bill that ultimately passed in late 1835 did not achieve this level of reform, though it did, like its 1832 predecessor, clean up the most egregious abuses of power. Parkes sincerely believed that “this Municipal Reform is the life of what the 1832 measures was only the body [sic].”Footnote 119 He wrote his old friend, Francis Place, that the first local elections under the law “closes two and a half years of as much physical and mental work and of as much anxiety and responsibility and trial to integrity and political principle as most young men ever went thro’ in this country.”Footnote 120

For all the self-congratulations that the second bill had done the trick, did Parkes find, in the end, that his municipal reform had accomplished the moderate scot and lot household suffrage that he and Tennyson hoped to bring to a reformed British parliamentary system? The answer was certainly “no.” Elections results were good, but not great, for the Whigs. Local government reform was no “smasher” of existing influences on freemen voters, nor did it afford the expansion of the electorate to any degree, as historians have shown. Estimates have been made that an additional 20–25 percent electors in urban centers faced more restrictions in the electorate than before.Footnote 121

Parkes's belief that municipal reform would finish the job started in 1832 was clearly wrong. Parkes was also wrong in believing that the cause for reform had true friends among the Whigs. The post-1836 Whig governments did little to move the cause of additional parliamentary reform forward. The alliance with the Radicals was tenuous at best. Parkes and Tennyson lost all hope that household suffrage would be introduced by the government, and since household suffrage was still the ultimate goal for Parkes—the one true way to secure a fair, respectable electorate of hardworking and moral voters—he abandoned the party. He openly speculated that perhaps a Peel ministry would be useful, prompting a true collaboration of Radicals and Liberals into a new party organization and campaign for additional parliamentary reform. Such a party would, he believed, “advance further organic changes in the Representation—a more equal division of Constituencies—a Household Suffrage—the Ballot.”Footnote 122 Tennyson, like Parkes, still worked with the Whigs but, ultimately, declared himself a Liberal and joined that party. An MP for years to come, Tennyson became more and more associated with his landed ties as the adoption (in the mid-1830s) of the family name D’Eyncourt indicates. His work toward household suffrage, or any further parliamentary reform for that matter, ground to a halt by the end of 1830s, just as Parkes's work for the Whig party ended. Scot and lot may or may not have made a significant difference in alleviating the problems Parkes faced as an agent and chief electoral manager for the Whigs in the 1835 and 1837 general elections, but it is clear that the fixed £10 valuation did not aid them at the polls. The promise of the Whigs to extend the franchise to many respectable and hardworking Englishmen seemed to have ended.

All this, of course, addresses the question, Did the Reform Act of 1832 move England forward in expanding suffrage rights, or was it really a step backward in the extension of political rights? For thousands of new electors, there was no question that the bill had delivered them the vote. For other thousands who could not pay their rates every six months, or whose scot and lot borough fell on the wrong schedule of the bill, the legislation took away an ancient right that had been exercised for years, perhaps generations. Similarly, municipal reform extended the vote to some and took it away from others. The bill's attempts to end corrupt political practices were successful in most cases, though the new registration and rate-paying deadlines created in 1832 opened new avenues of economic influence at the polls. The Reform Act of 1832 seemed to start the process of parliamentary reform and the expansion of suffrage rights in England, but it became clear fairly quickly that a uniform property qualification did not extend those rights to all whose character, labor, and moral respectability deserved it. Whether it would have faired better in these respects, if household ratepayer suffrage had been granted, is a great unknown.

There is also no way to assess the respectability and moral compass of the post–Reform Bill elector as compared to those from scot and lot boroughs. This moralization of “the people” also has been discussed in the tradition of Gladstonian liberalism, linking citizenship with virtue and character and “the great human heart of this country.”Footnote 123 By the 1850s and 1860s, it was a common theme in reform arguments that citizenship and the vote belonged to those with “self-command, self control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law and regard for superiors.”Footnote 124 What is clear is that the Whigs failed to follow the intelligent advice provided to them by Tennyson and Parkes. Labor was not equated with property, and the fixed property values continued to exclude many possessing the character and education that Tennyson and Parkes believed should have a voice in government.

In that respect, as far as Joseph Parkes and Charles Tennyson were concerned, the Reform Act of 1832 turned out to be validation of their arguments for a different interpretation of enfranchisement and evolution of the English constitution. They understood early on that a modified scot and lot franchise was the most fair and appropriate criteria for attaining the vote in growing manufacturing centers, populated with a self-made, educated, middle-class, and independent artisans and craftsmen and a growing, skilled working class. They saw little doubt that the problems of property value variation, and its corresponding effects, could all have been dealt with, if the Whigs had recognized the fairness and “political justice” in giving the vote to responsible men of “sober conduct” who paid their rents and their rates in a timely fashion. Had Althorp and Russell been able to grasp what Parkes and Tennyson communicated to them in 1831, perhaps the problems of freemen registration and Tory influence in post–Reform Bill elections might not have been as great. Had the financial burdens of paying rates by a set date not made it prohibitive for some reformers to register as new electors, perhaps the Whigs would have faired better in the 1835 elections. Perhaps stronger party support would have made for a stronger Municipal Corporation Reform measure, with, ultimately, a household ratepayer suffrage displacing the uniform property qualification as the criterion for becoming an elector. There is no way of knowing what might have happened in the debates on suffrage rights and qualifications, but it is clear that the differences in the future of English parliamentary reform and the expansion of suffrage rights would have been significantly different and, for the newly emerging commercial and manufacturing society of the nineteenth century, significantly better. The arguments for household suffrage, however, were replaced by the arguments for universal manhood suffrage and the ballot in the 1840s. Though the householder franchise argument was still part of the reform debate later in the century, the issues of class and respectable conduct overshadowed the scot and lot position that paying taxes entitled one to vote. The narrative of the English constitution would be in the writing process for some time to come. Parkes understood this entirely too well. Upon completion of his endless work for reform between 1832 and 1835, and with the satisfaction that the electorate and election process had changed forever in England, Parkes remarked to Francis Place, “Three years are only a moment in the life of a nation.”Footnote 125