The 1867 reform act was one of the most remarkable pieces of legislation of the Victorian period. It doubled the electorate in England and Wales and propelled the British electoral system into the age of mass politics: the age of the caucus, the Primrose League, and the Midlothian campaign. It marked the close of an extraordinary period of constitutional debate: two decades in which seven different governments had committed themselves to reform and six had introduced legislation. Reform had been a major issue in three consecutive general elections, and was central to the struggle for power both within and between parties.Footnote 1
Of the five reform acts which shaped the modern electoral system, the second is perhaps the most perplexing. A year before its passage, the Liberal government of Lord Russell and W. E. Gladstone had proposed a modest enfranchisement of about 400,000 people, a measure very much in the mould of previous proposals in 1852, 1854, and 1860. It had been condemned by the Conservative leadership as ‘a gross and indiscriminate’ proceeding that would ‘extinguish the Conservative party’, and had been defeated with the help of a ‘Cave’ of Liberal rebels who found it ‘fraught with danger to the State’.Footnote 2 Yet in 1867, the same parliament enfranchised almost a million new voters without so much as a division on the second or third readings. The work of a Conservative government, the bill was passed with the assistance of the very Liberals who had brought down the 1866 bill, who bade it safe passage through the Lords ‘in a kindly spirit towards that class of the people who are about to be enfranchised’.Footnote 3
Not surprisingly, few writers have seen much connection between the act itself and the measures that preceded it. The reform debate between 1848 and 1867 has been dismissed as ‘a corpse’, ‘rich only in the ability to irritate and to bore’; a rhetorical ‘humbug’ that proved ‘sadly ineffectual’ in shaping legislation.Footnote 4 Most historians agree that the reform bills of the 1850s and 1860s were a means of shoring up precarious majorities, a product of the contest between Palmerston and Russell and the breakdown in party alignment after 1846.Footnote 5 In a fascinating survey of electoral statements, Kristin Zimmerman has extended this analysis to the backbenches, accusing MPs of promising reform to their constituents while ‘following a policy of delay in parliament’.Footnote 6 As St Augustine might have put it, ‘Give us reform, Lord John – but not yet.’
Accounts of 1867 fall into two main schools. The first privileges the role of popular agitation, organized and articulated by the Reform League. In G. M. Trevelyan's words, the Tories ‘were afraid’.Footnote 7 The second puts more emphasis on a crisis of party and the rivalry between W. E. Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. For Maurice Cowling, what happened in 1867 was neither a collision of ideas nor an exercise in popular politics, but ‘an incident in the history of party’. The origins of the bill lay in a struggle for supremacy at Westminster, the ‘closed world in which decisions were taken’, producing a sequence of events which was ‘unintelligible if its significance is supposed to lie in differences of fundamental opinion or disputes about fundamental principle’. Historians who asked what Gladstone or Disraeli thought about reform were putting the wrong question: what mattered was their position as candidates for power.Footnote 8
For all their obvious differences, these approaches share two basic ideas: that the second reform act owed nothing of significance to earlier reform debates; and that the shaping of that measure within parliament was only marginally influenced by ideas or points of principle. Yet reform was hardly virgin soil in 1867, and MPs could not help but approach the issue with a whole set of preconceived opinions and public commitments. The constitution occupied an extraordinary place in the political culture of Victorian Britain. A remarkable number of front-rank statesmen had written constitutional treatises of some weight: Russell's History of English government; Gladstone's The state in its relations with the church; Disraeli's Vindication of the English constitution. It was the age of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill's Considerations on representative government, and Walter Bagehot's English constitution.Footnote 9 Reform had been debated in parliament in almost every year since 1848, and the legacy of these debates could not be simply wished away. Gladstone acknowledged that the redistribution of seats in 1866 was constrained by his defence of small boroughs seven years earlier; and when the Liberal ‘tea-room’ revolted in 1867, an observer commented that ‘they remember the policy of 1859, and what it led to’.Footnote 10
Yet even historians of ideas have shown little interest in earlier reform debates. Like Cowling, Gertrude Himmelfarb saw the events of 1867 as a ‘miserable auction’ for control of the House of Commons. Disraeli's success, she argued, stemmed from his belief that radical political arrangements could be contained by a conservative social structure, generating a confidence in community that she deemed fundamentally Conservative. In this competitive environment, it was Gladstone who blinked first because he lacked the ‘Conservative's faith in the eternal verities of human nature and society’.Footnote 11 Yet Himmelfarb made no attempt to test these claims against earlier debates, and so could not explain why the Conservatives had opposed almost every previous reform proposal. Nor did she explore why the bill took the particular form it did, or why some concessions were resisted with greater determination than others.
This article reconnects the political crisis of 1866–7 with the two decades of debate that preceded it. It argues for a reimagining of reform as a real and meaningful collision of ideas, and for a shift in emphasis away from reform in the abstract and towards the details of particular reform bills. The fundamental problem throughout this period was not that some wanted reform while others did not, but that there was no consensus on the kind of reform that should be passed. Depending on who was enfranchised and where, reform could turn a rural constituency into an industrial one or swamp a manufacturing town with agricultural votes. It could alter the balance between town and country or church and chapel, and swing a constituency from one party to another. Liberals complained that the Tory bill of 1859 would ‘virtually place the borough representation in [Tory] hands’; the Conservative leader, Lord Derby, expected the 1866 bill to ‘extinguish the Conservative party for the next 20 years’.Footnote 12 The attempt to divide MPs into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ reformers is thus almost entirely misconceived. We cannot assume that an MP who supported reform on the hustings, but opposed a bill in parliament, was either insincere or inconsistent. Reform bills could only be judged on their details, since it was these that determined the kind of electorate they would produce.Footnote 13
I
Between 1848 and 1851, reform was chiefly associated with a group of parliamentary radicals led by Joseph Hume and Sir Joshua Walmsley. The new reform movement was closely associated with the Anti-Corn Law League: it was launched from the League headquarters in Manchester, was staffed by corn law warriors, and was animated by the same hostility to the landed aristocracy.Footnote 14 Radicals looked to reform, in the words of a pamphlet by Alexander Mackay, to deal ‘an irrevocable blow to the inordinate power … [of] the aristocracy’, mobilizing in its place ‘the superior activity and intelligence of the town population’.Footnote 15 As Richard Cobden told MPs in a reform debate in July, ‘You have had your government of aristocracy and tradition; and the worst thing in this country has been its government.’Footnote 16 A reform pamphlet by Edward Miall spoke of ‘besieging the aristocracy’, while J. A. Roebuck hoped that reform would redress ‘the extraordinary and paramount influence’ of the ‘hereditary nobility’.Footnote 17
The centrepiece of the campaign was a bill tabled by Hume in June, designed to strike at the very foundations of the landed constitution. Secret ballot would release electors from the fear of their landlords; household suffrage and triennial parliaments would strain the capacity of the most corrupt patrons; and, above all, a massive redistribution of seats would transfer power away from the agricultural interest to the great industrial and commercial towns. Mackay's plan, which was widely discussed in parliament, created 124 urban seats and allocated 40 MPs to London alone. Not a single constituency, he boasted, would remain entirely agricultural.Footnote 18
Support for reform was boosted by a Protectionist revival in the county constituencies. When the fall of the government seemed possible in 1849, Protectionists found themselves ‘threatened with a renewal of the corn law battle: and … with an agitation of free traders for an extension of the suffrage’. Edward Stanley feared that the success of Protectionist candidates at by-elections would ‘force on the new Reform Bill’, echoing the observation of The Times that ‘the greater the chance of a temporary success to the Protectionist party, the greater the probability of a Parliamentary reform which will demolish the landed interest as a political party’.Footnote 19 Stanley's fears were borne out in 1851, when the radical MP for East Surrey, Peter Locke King, tabled a bill to extend the county franchise. King warned MPs that ‘the great cause of free trade was in danger’, while Cobden foresaw ‘great peril’ if ‘all the counties … send up men to vote in Parliament for dear bread’.Footnote 20 Such concerns found resonance among the Whigs, too, with Russell writing privately that the reform act ‘was hardly fitted to bear the strain of an election upon the price of bread’. Russell used the debate on King's proposals to promise a reform bill of his own, and warned the House of the danger to the ‘free trade policy’ of handing the county seats ‘over to the hon. Member for Buckinghamshire [Disraeli]’.Footnote 21
This was crucial in shaping Conservative responses to reform. The Tories were not being asked to give their views on reform in the abstract, but to respond to a movement expressly designed to exclude them from office. Commenting on Hume's proposals in 1848, the Standard complained that it was ‘the free trade principle’ which was ‘the motive for the threatened agitation’, while the Morning Herald identified the new reformers as ‘the successors of the Anti-Corn Law League’.Footnote 22 Both Disraeli and the Protectionist whip, Charles Newdegate, made the same connection in parliament.Footnote 23 It was this that Disraeli had in mind in 1851, when he predicted ‘the swamping of the agricultural constituencies, and the permanent defeat of the Conservative party’, or when he joked that the 1854 bill would enfranchise every town with a statue of Peel.Footnote 24
The problem was not that Tories were hostile to reform, but that reformers were hostile to the Tories. As William Bentinck, a Conservative backbencher, observed in 1859,
He could not understand how any man could get up in that House and say he was opposed to all Reform, unless he was an avowed supporter of the Act of 1832. Now, he had always looked upon that Bill as one of the most one-sided, unjust, and iniquitous measures that had ever disgraced the British Legislature.Footnote 25
There was never a shortage of Tories willing to propose alternative arrangements, but sheer parliamentary arithmetic made it unlikely that anything favourable to the Conservative interest could pass. As Disraeli told Derby in 1851, ‘The time is gone by when we [could] carry any distribution [which would] more favour the land.’ The priority now was ‘to prevent a distribution favourable to the opposing interest’.Footnote 26
This was best achieved by exploiting division on the Liberal benches. Russell had discovered in 1852 how hard it was to achieve consensus, having failed to win radical support for his own reform bill. Russell had little love for the commercial and industrial classes championed by Cobden and Hume, considering the great urban constituencies ‘the worst of all hands’ in which to place a preponderance, because ‘their notions of government vary with every breath of prosperity or adverse fortune’.Footnote 27 He ignored radical demands for secret ballot and triennial parliaments, substituted for household suffrage a much more modest extension to £5 householders, and allocated not a single additional seat to the towns or cities. Instead, the smallest boroughs were to be padded out from the surrounding countryside, a change that might actually strengthen the influence of landed proprietors. The bill was an attempt to renovate the aristocratic constitution, not to overthrow it, and the radicals made no attempt to save the bill when the government fell in February.
Russell's next bill in 1854 contained a more extensive redistribution, taking sixty two seats from the smallest boroughs and distributing them between the counties and larger towns. He did so with some reluctance, in response to pressure from Peelites in the cabinet. Possessing few small boroughs of their own, the Peelites were markedly unsentimental in sweeping them away, reasoning that the opprobrium they attracted for corrupt practices made them more of a liability than a source of strength. Coupled with a £10 county franchise – again under Peelite pressure – this secured the bill a more favourable response from the radicals. But Russell now found himself at loggerheads with many Whigs and moderate Liberals, who were questioning ever more vociferously whether reform was still necessary with the passing of the Protectionist threat.
It was only natural that many Liberals should have been sceptical about further reform. It was they who had made the reform act and who had most to lose from its amendment. Any change in the borough franchise would affect far more Liberals than Tories, and of the twenty-nine small boroughs earmarked for extinction in 1854, nearly two-thirds were held by Whigs, Liberals, or their Peelite allies.Footnote 28 But there was also an intellectual case against change, put most forcefully in a pair of articles by W. R. Greg, published in the Whiggish Edinburgh Review in 1852. Greg considered the 1832 reform one of the great achievements of the age. It had broken the grip of the crown and rooted the authority of parliament in an educated and independent public opinion. It had located power in ‘the middle ranks’ of society: ‘the intelligent, cultivated, and propertied people below the ranks of the aristocracy and gentry, but above that of the labouring poor’.Footnote 29 Too prosperous to be corrupted, too intelligent to be deceived, too diverse to be self-interested, the ‘middle ranks’ were not a class in themselves but the point at which all classes intersected. Sensitive to every interest but beholden to none, they had secured a parliament that ‘never turned a deaf ear to the demands of public opinion’.Footnote 30
Public opinion did not necessarily mean the will of the masses. In a famous treatise on The rise, progress, and present state of public opinion, William Mackinnon defined it as ‘that sentiment … which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community’; and ‘gradually … adopted by nearly all persons of any education’.Footnote 31 This sense of public opinion as intelligent opinion was a commonplace. The liberal historian, Homersham Cox, described it as ‘the experience and deliberate judgement of mankind’; Robert Lowe called it ‘the deliberate will of the enlightened majority’. Bagehot even argued that the ‘working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion’, which meant that ‘their want of influence in Parliament does not impair [its] coincidence … with public opinion’.Footnote 32 It followed that a reform which extended the franchise to corrupt, ignorant, or dependent voters would constitute, in Greg's words, ‘a reversal of, a reaction from, a direct antagonist to, the policy of the first Reform Bill’.Footnote 33 By locating power in an ignorant and self-interested class, it would make parliament less susceptible to public opinion, not more.
This did not mean that the working classes should have no share in the franchise, but only that they could not be permitted to overwhelm it. It was generally agreed that every class and every interest should have a voice in parliament, and in this respect, enfranchising the working classes in the 1850s was like enfranchising Manchester and Birmingham in 1832: it added one more piece to the matrix of the representation. The difficulty was the sheer size and ubiquity of that class, which meant that any franchise to which they could realistically aspire risked swamping every other interest. This would not be the extension of representative government but its negation, replacing Britain's mixed government with the exclusive rule of a single class.
Russell's bills sought to guard against this by establishing a ‘fixed line’, a borough qualification set at £5, £6, or £7, supported by statistics showing the share of new voters to be admitted. Yet such figures were largely speculative and vulnerable to the effects of inflation. The fixed line seemed to offer no security against further reductions and no ‘principle’ by which the proposed settlement could be defended. As one Liberal observed in 1860, ‘I can see a principle for universal suffrage, but I can see no principle for stopping at £6.’ Another protested that £6 did ‘not coincide with any natural division of society’ and erected no ‘barriers … to reduce the pressure which encroaches on it’.Footnote 34 It was no coincidence that in 1859 and 1860, when it was widely assumed that reform was inevitable, there was a surge of interest in proportional representation, driven by Liberals like Mill, Bagehot, and Thomas Hare.Footnote 35
Reform, then, fractured along several different fault-lines: the distribution of seats between town and country; the level of the borough franchise; and the principles on which it should be established. To these must be added the nature and extent of the county franchise.Footnote 36 First proposed by Locke King in 1851, the £10 county franchise was usually considered a Liberal measure, a means of urbanizing the county constituencies. The largest number of £10 voters would be found in unrepresented towns like Blackburn and Middlesbrough, and the Liberal bill of 1860 stipulated that a £10 holding would only qualify if it included either a dwelling house or a building worth £5 or more. Solely agricultural land would be strictly excluded. Designed to prevent the manufacture of agricultural votes, it would ensure that the franchise acted mainly in towns, undermining the Conservative vote in those seats that had become their heartlands.
In 1852, Derby had condemned the £10 county franchise as ‘destruction’, and two years later Disraeli's newspaper, the Press, called it ‘the death warrant of the English Constitution’.Footnote 37 The two leaders had even discussed a plan to give every £10 householder in the country a vote for their nearest borough, an index of their anxiety to keep these voters out of the county seats.Footnote 38 But when a Conservative reform bill was introduced in 1859, the £10 county franchise was the centrepiece of the measure. It was surrounded, however, with a series of arrangements designed to counter its ill-effects. No building was required, entirely agricultural land could qualify, and there were no securities against fictitious votes. The largest unrepresented towns were to be taken out of the counties and erected into separate constituencies, while a boundary commission was instructed to clear the suburbs out of the counties. Most importantly of all, nearly 100,000 freeholders whose property lay within a borough – about a fifth of the entire county constituency – were to have their votes transferred from the counties to the boroughs. The author of this proposal calculated that it ‘would be all in favour of the Conservative Cause’, and Derby hailed the idea as ‘the most Conservative provision in the Bill’.Footnote 39
The reform bills of 1859 and 1860 demonstrate how small details could entirely alter the practical effect of a measure. While both contained the same basic franchise, their effect on the county electorate would have been quite different. One would have strengthened the landed interest, whilst the other would have weakened it, so that those who supported one were almost obliged to oppose the other. The numbers enfranchised were therefore always less important than the type of people and their location. It is worth stressing that the Liberal insistence on a building was a disfranchising provision, expressly designed to exclude a certain type of voter. When the Tories overturned a similar provision in 1866, they could legitimately claim to be enlarging the enfranchisement; yet outraged Liberals protested that the concession ‘struck a fatal blow at the utility of the Bill’ by facilitating the manufacture of corrupt and dependent votes. Seventy-four MPs defied Gladstone by dividing against the change, while the leading radical, John Bright, absented himself from the House.Footnote 40
Most observers had expected the 1860 bill to enjoy a ‘comparatively easy’ passage, owing to the ‘concurrence of opinion’ that a reform bill must pass.Footnote 41 Every major leader had been committed to a bill, and even Palmerston, so often an obstacle to reform, had concluded that Liberal reunion was impossible ‘until the Two Questions of Parliamentary Reform and Church Rates are disposed of’.Footnote 42 That these expectations were disappointed was not the work of ‘anti-reformers’, but the product of a failure to agree either what kind of reform was desirable, or what mechanism would best achieve it. As the former home secretary, Spencer Walpole, wryly observed, MPs had reached the extraordinary position ‘where everybody says that something must be done, but nobody knows what that something is to be’.Footnote 43
II
After the failure of the 1860 reform bill and the budget crisis of 1861, politics came increasingly to resemble a state of suspended animation. Palmerston was not expected to outlive the parliament, and speculation turned to possible successors and the new politics that would emerge after his death. As the independent Liberal, Edward Horsman, put it in 1861:
The present state of things in Parliament is altogether temporary and provisional. People know that it cannot last, that natural causes must soon bring it to an end … The day is not far distant when a new conflict of opinions must begin, and every earnest politician will have to buckle on his armour.Footnote 44
Palmerston's death in October 1865 marked a political epoch, just as Lord Liverpool's had done in 1827. It forced a party whose policy had increasingly been to postpone all questions of policy to determine its future direction. Any new leader must, however reluctantly, represent a choice of some kind, even if that choice was to maintain as its permanent policy the inactivity that had been provisional under Palmerston. Gladstone was merely stating the obvious when he concluded that ‘any Government now to be formed cannot be wholly a continuation, it must be in some degree a new commencement’.Footnote 45 In these circumstances, Russell's decision to introduce a new reform bill assumed a symbolic importance. It is probable that Palmerston, too, would have proposed reform in 1866, if only because the Liberal majority returned in 1865 removed the pretext on which the 1860 bill had been abandoned.Footnote 46 Nonetheless, by making reform the first priority of his government, and by discussing it at his first cabinet, Russell appeared to be making a very visible break with the Palmerstonian legacy. As a result, the reform bill became a battle for the future not just of the constitution, but of the Liberal party itself.
This was central to the actions of the so-called ‘adullamites’, the Liberal rebels who brought down the 1866 bill.Footnote 47 The adullamites have commonly been seen as ‘aristocrats of the Whig decadence’, men whose ‘habits of thought’ were ‘practically Tory’; yet far from lapsing into Toryism, the adullamites were convinced that they, not the government, represented the authentic voice of Liberal tradition.Footnote 48 Their most prominent spokesman was the MP for Calne, Robert Lowe. The rhetorical struggle between Lowe and Gladstone was one of the great parliamentary contests of the century, and was structured around different conceptions of Liberal identity and of class.
Lowe was an enthusiast for the 1832 reform, which he had defended as a student in the Oxford Union. He had spent the 1840s in Australia, winning election as a popular radical, and was first returned to the British parliament in 1852.Footnote 49 He soon became known as ‘a dangerous man’, ‘full of the wildest theories’, whose ‘favourite maxim’, according to Russell, was ‘la propriété c'est le vol’.Footnote 50 He held aristocracy in contempt and wished to diminish the political power of the land by extending the county franchise.Footnote 51 He later became chancellor and home secretary in Gladstone's first ministry. Lowe insisted that he opposed the 1866 bill ‘because I am a Liberal’. A Whig who asked ‘when [he] should come back to them’ received the proud rebuke, ‘when you come back to yourselves’.Footnote 52 It was the government, he insisted, that was abandoning Liberal principles, while Lowe and his allies remained ‘precisely what we have been’.Footnote 53
Lowe was a utilitarian, a free trader, and an intellectual, for whom Liberal principles meant intelligent and disinterested government, free from corruption and independent of any one class, pursuing enlightened policies of peace, retrenchment, and free trade. Like Greg, he celebrated the 1832 reform because it had vested power in the middle orders, uniting governors of intelligence and integrity with a prosperous and contented people. Legislation was not ‘a matter of good will’, but required specialist knowledge: ‘I cannot blow a glass bottle because it would be my interest to do so, nor discern political truth merely because I shall suffer if I am wrong.’Footnote 54 Reminding MPs of the violence and corruption that plagued elections, he posed a question that quickly became notorious:
If you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimidated; or if … you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?Footnote 55
This was the voice of painful experience. At one election, Lowe had been almost killed by a mob; at another, a police station had been burnt down by rioters.Footnote 56 He mocked those who looked to a more virtuous class below the ten-pounders, and calculated that the bill would produce a working-class majority in more than half the boroughs of England and Wales.Footnote 57 This would only be the beginning, for there was not a single argument for a £7 franchise which would not equally justify £6, £5, or even £4.Footnote 58 Lowe took for granted that all those he identified as working class would vote as a unit. ‘Once give the men votes, and the machinery is ready to launch those votes in one compact mass upon the institutions and property of this country.’Footnote 59 Any system that sought to provide a fair representation of the country should therefore have as its first priority the ‘keeping a just balance of classes’.Footnote 60
For Gladstone, by contrast, the extension of the franchise was part of the process by which class was dissolved. If the working classes were admitted freely and in a spirit of trust, there was ‘not a rag of proof’ that they would vote together. Indeed, working men would only think of themselves as a class if their superiors marked them out as such: ‘you will never have one class combining against other classes … except when excluded from the franchise’.Footnote 61 The young Gladstone had been staunchly opposed to the 1832 reform, but he had become increasingly convinced of its social and moral benefits, which had ‘placed the constitution in an harmonious contact’ with the people and ‘strengthened the foundations of the Throne’.Footnote 62 In 1859, Gladstone had told MPs that they should approach reform ‘in a spirit of trust towards the people’.Footnote 63 He frequently contrasted the harmony of the 1860s with the class antagonism of his youth, claiming that England was ‘reaping the reward’ of ‘the age in which we live … the age of extended franchises, the age of warmer loyalty and more firmly established order’.Footnote 64 This was government on ‘Liberal principles’, which he defined in 1865 as ‘trust in the people only relieved by prudence’; contrasted with the Tory principle of ‘mistrust in the people only relieved by fear’.Footnote 65 As a result, England was undergoing ‘the most blessed of all social processes; … the process which unites together not the interests only but the feelings of all the several classes of the community, and which throws back into the shadows of oblivion those discords by which they were kept apart’.Footnote 66
Gladstone and Lowe were both committed to an ideal of liberal government, but were talking about very different entities. Lowe was defending a legislative machine, Gladstone a relationship between government and governed. For Lowe, reducing the borough franchise meant abandoning a system that had worked supremely well; for Gladstone, it was this very refusal to reform which constituted a breach with liberal practice. Gladstone was describing a moral contract, by which the improving condition of the people would be met ‘by a reasonable extension, at fitting times, and among selected portions of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can justly be conferred upon them’.Footnote 67 No reform bill could be final, for the improvement of the people knew no fixed limits. Nor should it try to balance out classes, for reform was part of the process by which class was dissolved.
Lowe was not alone in thinking that the Liberal party itself was at stake in the 1866 debates. Lord Elcho argued that the adullamites offered the only hope ‘of saving … the moderate Liberal party’, while Samuel Laing projected himself as a spokesman for ‘moderate Liberals who had been accustomed to follow … Lord Palmerston’. Horsman complained that Bright had become ‘the director and dictator of the Liberal party’, while William Gregory – a keen Gladstonian on Irish and financial policy – lamented that ‘the old constitutional Whig party’ was ‘utterly ignored, and the state policy … steered by the advice of [the radicals]’.Footnote 68
Throughout 1866, Gladstone was besieged with demands for statistics, on the number of new voters, their location, their share of the vote, and the constituencies they would control. For those who thought like Lowe, this information was essential to calculate the balance of representation between classes. But for Gladstone, MPs were acting ‘on a principle which I consider mischievous and untrue’; they were treating the new electors like ‘an invading army’, a ‘Trojan horse … filled with armed men, bent upon ruin, plunder, and conflagration’.Footnote 69 As Gladstone had said in 1864, the instinct of the working classes was ‘to follow their superiors, to confide in them, to trust them’. They would only ‘alter their conduct, and … band together as a class’, through ‘resentment at exclusion, and a sense of injustice’.Footnote 70
Since Gladstone was relatively unconcerned with the balance of classes, he never appreciated the importance so many of his backbenchers placed on the distribution of seats. The government had decided to postpone redistribution until after the franchise bill, but for many MPs it was simply not possible to make a judgement about the franchise without knowing where the new votes would be exercised. A large enfranchisement in the great towns meant little until it was established how those towns were to be divided and how many members they were to elect. As Gregory observed, the franchise alone was ‘only an outline’; the distribution would determine ‘whether it should be an angel or a monster’.Footnote 71 Suspicion was rife that ministers intended to dissolve on the new franchise before settling the distribution, enabling them to drive through a more extensive measure than would otherwise be possible.Footnote 72 Hence, when Lord Grosvenor moved that it was ‘inexpedient’ to settle the franchise in isolation from the distribution, ministers came within five votes of defeat, forcing them to cobble together a botched redistribution that began to unravel almost as soon as it was tabled.
This presaged a more serious defeat in June, when Lord Dunkellin carried an amendment basing the borough franchise on rating value rather than on gross estimated rental. Dunkellin's amendment has invariably been treated as the occasion, rather than the cause, of the bill's defeat, but it concealed an important disagreement on the nature of reform which helps explain what happened in 1867. It is this that forms the subject of the final section.
III
‘Rating’ and ‘rental’ were different ways of valuing property.Footnote 73 Since 1832, the borough franchise had been based on rental value, the estimated cost of renting the property for a year. The rating value was the amount assessed for local taxation, which was calculated by deducting a certain percentage from the rental value. A house with a rental value of £8 might thus have a rating value of £6. There were good reasons for preferring a franchise based on rating. It would allow the rate-book to act as the electoral register, eliminating the long and expensive quarrels over valuation in the registration courts.Footnote 74 No one would want to be rated too highly and no local authority would want to rate people too low, so both had a disincentive to fraud. More importantly, the right kind of rating qualification seemed to do what Russell's bills did not and to offer a defensible resting-place for the franchise. Under the small tenements act of 1850, tenants rated at less than £6 ceased to pay their own rates. Instead, the landlord took responsibility, a system known as ‘compound householding’. A £6 rating franchise seemed to represent a natural division, admitting those who paid rates for themselves while excluding those who did not.
Dunkellin was not the first to advance this proposal. Over the winter of 1859–60, the former Tory home secretary, Spencer Walpole, had published a pair of articles in the Quarterly Review pressing for a £6 rating franchise in boroughs. Such a franchise, he argued, would confirm the relationship between taxation and representation by rigorously excluding all compounders, whom he considered a ‘corrupt’ and ‘dependent’ class.Footnote 75 Walpole had been warmly supported by Joseph Warner Henley, the former trade secretary, who considered the proposal a ‘manifestly good resting-place, and close on an analogy with the old rating suffrage’.Footnote 76 The pair had offered to help the Liberals carry a rating franchise through the House, and opened negotiations with Palmerston and Russell through Lord Henry Lennox. Despite assurances that Walpole had a ‘large following’ and was ‘generally supported by the Carlton Club’, Russell ignored the offer and set the franchise according to rent, but when Walpole repeated the offer in 1866, Russell duly inserted the proposal into his draft reform.Footnote 77 Observers expected Walpole to carry at least twenty-five MPs across the floor, enough to secure the passage of the bill.Footnote 78
Had the franchise remained in place, the events that followed might have been very different. Instead, the figure was altered at the last moment to £7 rent, which was not only more extensive than £6 rating, but also lacked its neatness of principle. The change was driven through by Gladstone and Russell, largely because of the practical objections to rating. The means by which the rating value was calculated – the amount deducted from the annual rent – varied substantially, from as little as 9 per cent in one parish to over 33 per cent in another. Neighbouring houses with the same rent might be rated entirely differently, depending on the location of the parish boundary. Furthermore, the small tenements act was voluntary: it was parish vestries who decided whether it should be adopted. Tens of thousands of electors might be added to or subtracted from a constituency, simply by imposing or repealing the small tenements act.
To make matters worse, the government also proposed to repeal the requirement in the 1832 reform that every borough elector be registered as a ratepayer. This meant that the bill would enfranchise indiscriminately between full ratepayers and compound householders and would shatter any direct relationship between taxation and registration.Footnote 79 Gladstone disbelieved in any meaningful distinction between the two classes of householders, arguing that the compounder contributed to the rates in no less substantial a fashion than the personal ratepayer. He was also mindful of the politicization of local rates since 1832, and the manner in which both the collection and assessment of rates had been manipulated in the interests of the electoral register.Footnote 80 The decision to admit compounders to the municipal franchise in 1850, however, had been widely blamed for a deterioration in the conduct of local elections, and an inquiry chaired by Earl Grey in 1859 had concluded that ‘actual, direct, and continuous payment of rates should be made the indispensable condition’ of the franchise.Footnote 81
Gladstone privileged the practical objections to rating because he was insensitive to its other attractions. He was interested neither in finality nor in placing a permanent check on the working-class addition. For those who did not share his approach, however, the switch to rent was a fundamental alteration which destroyed the only safeguard against an indiscriminate enfranchisement. The change ended any prospect of a Tory secession, turned Walpole from a potential ally into a determined opponent, upset key members of the cabinet, and alienated Liberal backbenchers. The attorney general, Roundell Palmer, had already told MPs that a rating franchise was ‘the point to which we must ultimately advance’. The Times called rating ‘the great test of permanence, stability, and independence’, while Dunkellin himself stressed that rating offered ‘a barrier, steady and fixed, to the descent to universal suffrage’, because it distinguished between the ‘honest, industrious, thrifty’ man, and the ‘idle, intemperate, careless man’.Footnote 82 This argument resonated even with those who did not otherwise oppose the bill. Lord Edward Clinton, son of Gladstone's old friend, Lord Lincoln, wrote to Gladstone that he had ‘never had any conversation with the “Cave”’, nor any wish ‘to get rid of the Reform Bill, & most decidedly no wish to get rid of the Government’; but that he felt compelled to vote for rating.Footnote 83 Another Liberal confessed that he supported Dunkellin ‘very reluctantly’ because of his ‘bitter and uncompromising hostility’; but professed an ‘honest conviction that rateable value’ was ‘the surest and safest test’. T. P. Crosland, MP for Huddersfield, told his constituents that he would have gladly voted for a lower borough franchise, but that he thought ‘a ratal test much safer than a rental’.Footnote 84
Dunkellin carried his amendment by a majority of eleven, and for the first time since 1832, a ministry resigned over reform. Resignation was a compromise: it spared the Liberals a divisive election, but maintained their commitment to reform.Footnote 85 This commitment was more important than popular agitation in convincing the new Conservative government to tackle the issue. As late as March 1867, Stanley was writing that there was ‘not … much excitement or violence of feeling among the people’, and Disraeli told MPs that reform was necessary even though ‘the horison [sic] is not disturbed at the present’.Footnote 86 With the Liberals committed to a reform bill, the Tories must either follow suit or appear hostile to reform on principle, which was neither accurate nor likely to secure them in office. In any case, taking charge of a bill would enable the Conservatives to set the terms of the redistribution and the county franchise, and to control the qualifying details by which the franchise was surrounded. The key to success lay in the borough franchise, the issue most dear to Liberal hearts. The Tories were committed by their vote on Dunkellin's amendment to a franchise based on rating, but finding an appropriate level for the qualification remained a task of considerable delicacy.
If the Liberals had proposed a £6 rating franchise in 1860 or 1866, a majority could almost certainly have been assembled for the proposal. The Liberal leaders would have been committed to it and the Tories compelled by defections to acquiesce. The fierce parliamentary contests of 1866, however, had shifted opinion. There was a growing desire to do away with any figure, on the basis that there would always be people willing to contest for a lower one. According to this argument, the best chance of a settlement lay in eliminating such figures altogether and simply enfranchising anyone who paid rates, at whatever value. In areas where the small tenements act was operative, the enfranchisement would be identical to a £6 rating franchise; in parishes where it was not, it would offer a more defensible principle. In both cases it would draw a clear line between those who were entitled to the vote and those who were not, while the compounder would be permanently excluded.
Rated household suffrage was not Disraeli's idea. In June 1866, the Standard had argued ‘that every man who had personally paid rates for two years in any borough should be entitled to the franchise. If the “compound” ratepayer desires the suffrage he can obtain it by paying the rates himself, and deducting them from the rent.’Footnote 87 Sir Stafford Northcote told Disraeli in January that ‘we shall find no stand-point short of household suffrage’; but ‘that if we go boldly down to this point we shall have a fair chance of coupling the concession with conditions which would make it safe’.Footnote 88 It was the colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon – one of the few who ultimately opposed the bill – who first proposed household suffrage in cabinet, ‘in order to get a ledge on which to rest’. An ‘arbitrary reduction’ of the qualification would be ‘of all measures the most fatal’.Footnote 89
The safeguards most commonly discussed were a two-year residence and plural voting, but it would be wrong to suggest that household suffrage was only acceptable as long as it was neutered by such provisions. Increasingly, rating itself was seen as the best protection against a democratic franchise. Dudley Baxter, Disraeli's statistician, argued that rating would disqualify over a third of all households by ‘permanently excluding the least trustworthy class’.Footnote 90 Stephen Graves, the Tory MP for Liverpool, assured Disraeli that rating excluded all the undesirables and was ‘better than any money qualification’. Walpole agreed, telling Disraeli ‘that fighting about £1 or £2 [was] ridiculous, & probably will give us a worse constituency’.Footnote 91
The level of support for this approach became clear in February 1867, when a rebellion by three ministers brought back the old fixed lines of £6 and £20, the so-called ‘ten minute bill’. Not a single Conservative spoke in support, while it was the very Liberals who had destroyed the 1866 bill who were loudest in demanding household suffrage. With the exception of Lowe, all the leading adullamites approved a letter to Derby warning that ‘there is no standing point between the present qualification & Household Suffrage’. Speaking for the adullamites in the Commons, Samuel Laing urged Disraeli to adopt ‘at once a household rating franchise’.Footnote 92 Two meetings at the Carlton Club showed ‘a general disposition’ for household suffrage, and even Bright was struck by ‘how far [the Tories] were willing to go’.Footnote 93 The Standard declared rated household suffrage the ‘only possible basis of a satisfactory scheme’, Malmesbury told Derby that he had ‘always preferred household suffrage’, and Buckingham urged Derby to reconstruct his government without the dissentients.Footnote 94 By no means reluctantly, Derby agreed to what was a collective demand.
The rated household suffrage they were discussing was not, of course, the suffrage that finally reached the statute book. The bill that Disraeli introduced in March contained three safeguards: double votes for the wealthy; a two-year residence requirement; and the exclusion of all compound householders. In this form, it would have enfranchised around 20,000 fewer voters than the 1866 bill. Yet it is striking that only the last of these restrictions was maintained with any conviction. Dual voting had been publicly abandoned by Disraeli before the bill was introduced, and only eighty-one MPs voted against the halving of the residence requirement to twelve months. Rating, by contrast, was defended tenaciously. There was a seductive logic to claims of a moral distinction between compounders and personal ratepayers. As one Tory put it, ‘if persons evaded the responsibility of paying their rates, he did not see why the State need go out of its way to give them a vote’.Footnote 95The Times demanded that enfranchisement ‘cease where personal responsibility ends’, and a new adullamite newspaper, the Day, called personal rating ‘the chemical test which separates the gold from the dross’.Footnote 96 Gladstone's attempts to persuade MPs that compounders did pay rates through their rent, and that it was not the compounder's fault if a parish vestry imposed the small tenements act, missed the point. What was at issue was not the contribution to public funds, but the characteristics which ratepaying was supposed to induce. If a man was responsible for his own rates, he had to manage his money and save the correct amount; he ‘had an interest in keeping down the rates’.Footnote 97 The compounder might contribute to the rates, but he was not a ratepayer.
Gladstone seriously underestimated the popularity of personal rating. On attempting to remove the bar on compound householders, he was defeated by a majority of twenty-one. It was, he admitted ruefully, ‘a smash’.Footnote 98 Others also failed to erode the distinction. For administrative convenience, compound landlords received a discount on their rates, and the Liberal MP, John Hibbert, proposed that compounders be allowed to vote on paying this reduced sum. Disraeli privately signalled his agreement but was overruled by the Cabinet, where two ministers threatened resignation.Footnote 99 The adullamites, the Day, the Standard, and Conservative backbenchers all opposed the concession, and Hibbert was overwhelmed by a majority of sixty-one.Footnote 100
Hibbert's defeat secured the principle that only householders who paid full rates, in person, would be allowed to vote. But the application of that principle was proving more difficult than expected. If compounding was to offer a meaningful test of character, it had to be possible for compounders to opt out and become personal ratepayers, but disentangling the rate from the rent proved fiendishly complicated. Disraeli initially proposed to allow compounders who opted out to reclaim the rate from their landlords. But should they claim the discounted rate which their landlord paid, or the full rate for which they would themselves be liable? If they could only reclaim the discounted rate, they would suffer a financial penalty which Gladstone rapidly termed ‘the fine’; if they could claim the full rate, the landlord would make a loss. Furthermore, if all the best tenants opted out, landlords would be left only with the bad risks – those who could not or would not pay – and the system would become unworkable.
The deadlock was only broken when Disraeli accepted an amendment from a Liberal backbencher, Grosvenor Hodgkinson, which abolished compounding altogether and obliged everyone to pay their rates in person. Disraeli did this on his own authority, without consulting the cabinet, and without putting the amendment to a vote. He could only do so, however, because he was confident that neither his party nor the House would protest. Indeed, calls had been growing for the abolition of compounding for several months. One Conservative had complained in April that ‘the system of compounding was altogether a mistake … bad in principle – unjust in its effect – and ought to be entirely done away with’.Footnote 101 Joseph Henley called it ‘a device of Old Nick’ that should be ‘swept away altogether’. On behalf of the adullamites, the Day had also called for ‘the repeal … of the Small Tenements Act’.Footnote 102 Disraeli actually tried to limit the effect of the amendment by allowing optional compounding, but there was so little support that he dropped the proposal.Footnote 103
It was hard to see how, on principle, MPs could object. The moral criteria they had praised were inherent in the fact of being a personal ratepayer, not in the type of person who might choose to become one. As soon as the compounder became a personal ratepayer, he had to save his money, regulate his expenditure, and tender the rate on time; and the very large numbers who failed to do so would still be excluded from the franchise. Henley boasted that they had made ‘the most Conservative’ settlement possible:
Were you to take something which was defensible, and which everybody could understand … or were you to take a mere line with regard to which no human being could decide whether a man was fit for the suffrage at £7 or £6, and whether he was unfit at £5? … [The] only mode, and therefore the Conservative mode … is to take in all those who pay their share of the burdens of the State.Footnote 104
Abolishing compounding was not a minor change. It threw into disarray the whole system of local taxation, made rate collection vastly more difficult, and required an amending act restoring the practice in 1869. But something had to give, and, in the end, it was administrative convenience, rather than the principle of the bill.
The result has been aptly described as ‘the most unintentional revolution in the history of British politics’.Footnote 105 No one had foreseen the reform act of 1867, and even in parliament few realized the scale of the enfranchisement they had made possible.Footnote 106 But it was neither coercion nor competition that impelled MPs to abandon the modest enfranchisements of the ‘fixed line’ for the transformative effects of a rating franchise. Nor can the bill be traced, as Himmelfarb asserted, to a Conservative faith in democracy or a confidence in the social order that was careless of merely political arrangements. The whole point of the rating franchise, for many Conservatives, was that it offered a bulwark against democratic encroachments. As the Standard observed in 1866, no franchise ‘confined to bonâ fide ratepayers will ever become … a democracy’.Footnote 107
What shaped the borough franchise was a determination, in the face of severe and conflicting pressures, to find a resting-place and a safeguard against further additions, an aspiration shaped in opposition to the apparently arbitrary and capricious enfranchisements previously offered by Gladstone and Russell. There is no sign that either Conservatives or adullamites would have swapped the second reform act for the bills they had previously rejected, even though those measures would have enfranchised fewer people. for if no one had foreseen the precise shape of the 1867 bill, the shifts, adjustments, and decisions by which it was formed resulted from a desire to protect firmly held convictions and to stave off other, unacceptable changes. It is an irony of history that the desire for selective enfranchisement should have ushered in the age of mass politics; but ideas have rarely drawn their power from conformity with logic, and the work of the historian would be less interesting if they did.
