The King was more than a figurehead, however, and remained a real factor in government. The royal veto, which had last been used to torpedo a public bill in 1708,34 was not a dead letter, and George III threatened to employ it against Catholic emancipation in 1799, a measure Pitt had proposed. He went further, and publicly declared that he would consider as his personal enemy anyone who proposed the measure. In 1801 an exasperated Pitt suggested that he might resign if he were not permitted to introduce Catholic emancipation, and five days later George accepted his resignation.35
Prime ministers continued to depend on the support of the House, but political parties were in their infancy. In rare cases, such as 1784, the nation might divide into two camps upon a constitutional crisis, but for the most part Parliament was composed of shifting political coalitions, and not stable parties. There was still a core of King’s Friends, but Pitt’s economic reforms had reduced George’s influence, and over time the center of political gravity shifted from the King in Windsor to the politicians in Westminster.
REFORM
The Parliament of the eighteenth century was based upon the electoral system of 1660 (with the addition of Scottish seats after the 1707 Act of Union), and reflected where people had lived at that earlier time. During the reign of George III the growing cities of the midlands were greatly underrepresented, while “rotten boroughs” with few inhabitants continued to send disproportionately more members to Parliament. The great County of York, with sixteen thousand voters, was represented by two members—the same number of seats accorded the fifty electors of Thirsk. Similarly, Old Sarum, which had flourished in Norman times, was an uninhabited mound of earth in the nineteenth century; while Dunwich, a thriving capital in the Kingdom of East Anglia, was now almost washed away into the sea. Many of the ridings (or electoral districts) were “pocket boroughs,” smaller districts dominated by one major landowner who effectively controlled its members of Parliament. Seats were bought and sold, noted journalist William Cobbett, and Parliament refused to do anything about it.36
We might wonder how such a seemingly irrational system survived. The greater wonder was the reform movement that swept it away, for the prereform system had an entrenched core of supporters who were its beneficiaries. Privileged bodies have never been in the habit of reforming themselves; in our own times, political incumbents devise powerful obstacles to any threat to dislodge them. Moreover, many of the House’s most distinguished members first came to Parliament from a pocket borough: Fox (while still a minor), Pitt the Younger, Charles Grey, Henry Brougham, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and even the young William Gladstone (on the strength of an antireform speech in the Oxford Union).37 Pitt the Elder served as the member for Old Sarum, as did John Horne Tooke, the parliamentary reformer. For many bright young men, fresh from the Grand Tour (or, in Grey’s case, still on it), the unreformed Parliament provided an entry to politics that a more democratic electorate might well have denied.
Many eighteenth-century Britons thought that their system of “virtual” representation, with its unrepresentative Parliament, served them well—that apart from moments of crisis they were prosperous and well-governed, and the incentives of the great landed families that controlled parliamentary seats were aligned with those of a primarily agricultural country. Given this, they would have agreed with Samuel Johnson that American colonists had no reason to object to taxes imposed by Westminster. The Americans were not directly represented in Parliament, but then neither were most Britons. If virtual representation worked for Birmingham, why not for Boston?
The first proposal for general reform of the electoral system came from John Wilkes in 1776.38 A more democratic system would not, he said, have permitted the ministry to carry on its campaign to subjugate America. “We ought in every thing, as far as we can, to make the theory and the practice of the constitution coincide.”39 A sensible proposal, one might have thought; and yet it was laughed away. “Lord North was very jocular,” according to the reporter (who sadly omitted the jokes),40 and no one else spoke on the subject, which was voted down without a division.
Having once been raised, however, the cause of reform refused to go away. After his landslide victory in the election of 1784, Pitt felt the country at his back, and proposed to buy up the small boroughs from their electors and redistribute the seats to the new, unrepresented cities. Fox objected to compensating the electors, an expense the celebrated wit Sydney Smith later compared to reimbursing highwaymen when their poaching grounds in Finchley Common were enclosed.41 Fox nevertheless voted for the motion, as did reformers such as William Wilberforce; but most Foxites opposed it, as did North’s supporters, and it was defeated 248 to 174.42
There were two more parliamentary attempts at electoral reform before the great reform movement of 1832. In the first, an Irish member introduced a bill for reform in 1790, but by then the French Revolution had made the idea of reform odious to many members. The then secretary of war, William Windham, spoke against the motion, which never came to a vote. “What!” he said, “would he recommend you to repair your house in a hurricane?”43 Two years later, Charles Grey emerged from his devouring affair with the Duchess of Devonshire to take up the cause, replying to Windham in a notice of motion for electoral reform.44 It was precisely when radicals, inspired by the French Revolution, threatened the British constitution that every reasonable cause of complaint should be addressed, he said. Now, however, Pitt spoke out against reform, and Edmund Burke warned of radical Jacobins in their midst. Reform had few friends in the House of Commons, and the matter died on the order table.
The cause of reform thereafter languished for forty years. Grey took his seat in the House of Lords on his father’s death in 1807, and the House of Commons lost its strongest advocate for reform. Ten years later Wellington recalled how Grey’s voice was missed. “Nobody cares a damn for the House of Lords,” he told the diarist Thomas Creevey. “The House of Commons is everything in England, and the House of Lords nothing.”45 Deprived of a sympathetic and energetic audience, Grey became despondent, and in 1810 suggested that parliamentary reform be deferred while the Napoleonic Wars continued.46
With Parliament a dead end, radicals such as William Cobbett agitated for reform through pamphlets and mass meetings. Corresponding societies were formed to promote reform, and were duly suppressed by the government. Horne Tooke was put on trial, and Cobbett himself was imprisoned for two years. Even after Napoleon’s defeat, the example of the French Revolution made reform appear threatening. In The Masque of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined that conservatives would be shamed by the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which Yeomen cavalry, supported by the 15th Hussars (fresh from Waterloo), charged a peaceful assembly of reformers in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester and left a dozen men and women dead. Instead, the principal speaker at the assembly was sentenced to thirty months in prison for sedition, and Parliament made it illegal for more than fifty people to attend a political meeting without the approval of authorities.47
Because Peterloo was a working-class protest, it had failed to excite the sympathy of reformers in Parliament. By 1830, however, the cause of reform had begun to revive. The landed aristocracy who controlled the pocket boroughs no longer seemed to provide a rising middle class with effective virtual representation, particularly when it came to the objections free traders had to the protectionist Corn Laws. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had brought a new kind of Irish MP to Westminster, one whose support would make a crucial difference in the struggle for reform. The excesses of the French Revolution were now forty years in