Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T22:04:44.012Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IV. The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities (1830–2)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

Asa Briggs
Get access

Extract

Many of the most important political changes of the nineteenth century have been studied exclusively from the standpoint of London. Clear-sighted contemporaries have been long aware of the consequent misrepresentation. ‘Londoners are the lapidaries of the nation’, wrote Holyoake, ‘they polish the diamond found in the counties, and sometimes if no one challenges them, they take credit for the jewel.’ Only too often no one has challenged them. The result has been not so much a failure to render credit where credit is due as a failure to understand the mainsprings of national political action. It is only when the local element has obtruded unmistakably, as in the story of Chartism, that it has been examined with care. Where it has not obtruded, historians have often been more willing to accept things as they seemed from the standpoint of the capital rather than to investigate them as they arose.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , 1952 , pp. 293 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1952

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Holyoake, G. J., Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life, i (1892), p. 42Google Scholar.

2 Newcastle Public Library, Outlines of a Plan for a Northern Political Union (1831).

3 Birmingham Public Library, Report of the Proceedings [of the Birmingham Political Union], 7 May 1832.

4 The Political Register, 22 June 1833.

5 Report of the Proceedings, 17 May 1830.

6 Hansard, XLI, p. 1097.

7 E.g. The Bradford and Wakefield Chronicle and General Advertiser, 6 August 1825: ‘It would be the very height of absurdity for the representative of such a county as Yorkshire to know nothing of woollen manufacture, to be ignorant of what might augment or what might diminish the staple trade of his constituents; so in a farming district it would be a palpable piece of folly to choose a representative whose knowledge of agriculture was confined to the distinguishing of oats from barley or peas from beans.’

8 As early as 1692 it was because of the action of Newdegate, the member for Warwick, that Birmingham secured its first big gun contract. In 1780 the ‘Manufacturers of Birmingham’ sent a petition to the Earl of Dartmouth claiming that ‘the various commercial regulations, so frequently made by the legislature, affect the trade and manufacturers of this city very much and render it an object of great importance to its inhabitants that gentlemen may, if possible, be chosen for the county who are connected with the people, and not entirely uninformed of the particulars in which their interests consist’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 13th Rep., Appendix, Part 1, p. 253; Victoria County History of Warwickshire, 11, p. 227). In 1812, during the Orders-in-Council crisis, Aris's Gazette (7 October 1812), attacked Mordaunt, the Warwickshire Member, for ‘his great inattention upon various occasions when applications have been made to him on subjects of great commercial interest to this town’. It was during this crisis that Thomas Attwood first came to the forefront in local politics.

9 The Bridgnorth Poll Book for 1826 shows thirty-one Birmingham, one West Bromwich and two Handsworth voters at Bridgnorth, where the franchise was open to freemen within and without the borough. In 1818 The Wolverhampton Chronicle (10 June 1818) reported a meeting of Bridgnorth electors resident in Birmingham, which recommended the choice of the tory candidate, ‘being persuaded that the interests of the town of Birmingham are materially connected with the proper representation of the Borough of Bridgnorth from whose members they have for many years received on all occasions, when called for, the most important services’. At the election of 1830, £357 was paid by the two Whitmore candidates for the conveyance of voters from Birmingham to Bridgnorth and their return.

10 County members, like Stanley in Lancashire and Stuart Wortley in Yorkshire, were frequently used to press local interests, although as early as 1639 petitioners in Leeds had complained that there were no local burgesses ‘to have voice upon any occasions arising touching abuses in the matter of cloathing’ or to deal with ‘the conveniences or inconveniences of laws relating to cloth’ (Heaton, H., The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (1920), p. 226Google Scholar).

11 Carefully organized economic pressure was applied in Manchester in 1774 against the fustian tax, and in Manchester and Birmingham in the 1780's. See Bowden, Witt, Industrial Society in England towards the end of the Eighteenth Century (1925)Google Scholar and Redford, A., Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade (1934)Google Scholar. In the 1820's the avowedly non-political Chamber of Commerce in Manchester memorialized the Board of Trade, sent letters to ministers and petitioned Parliament. As markets widened and problems increased in range, economic pressure seemed inadequate. Richard Fryer put the issue clearly in Wolverhampton: ‘Fifty years ago, we were not in that need of Representatives, which we are at present, as we then manufactured nearly exclusively for home consumption, and the commercial and manufacturing districts were then identified with each other; where one flourished, both flourished. But the face of affairs is now widely changed-we now manufacture for the whole world, and if we have not members to promote and extend our commerce, the era of our commercial greatness is at an end’ (Reports of the Principal Staffordshire Reform Meetings, 14 May 1832).

12 James Ogden, A Description of Manchester by a Native of the Town, reprinted in Manchester, A Hundred Years Ago (Manchester, 1877), p. 93Google Scholar.

13 Yonge, C. D., The Life of Lord Liverpool, iii (1868), pp. 137–8Google Scholar. Cf. The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, ed. Francis Bamford and the Duke of Wellington, ii (1951), p. 173Google Scholar.

14 Burke's defence of virtual representation had specifically mentioned Birmingham. ‘Is Warwick or Stafford’, he asked in 1782, ‘more opulent, happy or free than Newcastle, or than Birmingham?’ (Works, VI, pp. 149–50). In 1817 a Manchester pamphlet stressed the same line of argument: ‘Every Member of Parliament is a Representative of the People at large, and the members of Newton, near Warrington, where there are only 20 electors, as much represent me as the members of Lancashire, where they may be 20,000 electors’ (The Speech of John R., Schoolmaster, residing at a Village near Manchester (1817), p. 5).

15 The Manchester Guardian, 19 May 1827.

16 Ibid. 27 April 1827.

17 Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 27 May 1827.

18 Aris's Birmingham Gazette, 25 June 1827, advocated reform as a ‘boon calculated to confer most important benefits on the town’.

19 Manchester Central Library, Manchester Representation Committee, Minutes, 12 November 1827.

20 The Manchester Guardian, 8 December 1827.

21 Hansard, N.S. xviii, p. 684.

22 Report of the Proceedings, 17 May 1830.

23 Smith, W. Hawkes, Birmingham and its Vicinity as a Manufacturing and Commercial District (1836). p. 16Google Scholar.

24 Faucher, L., Études [sur l'Angleterre] (1856 ed.), I, p. 495Google Scholar.

25 See my article, ‘Thomas Attwood and t h e Economic Background of the Birmingham Political Union’ in The Cambridge Historical Journal, ix, no. 2 (1948)Google Scholar.

26 Furthermore, if before 1830 ‘the rights and interests of the industrious classes in the community had been represented in Parliament…the cause of the distress would have been ascertained, and the proper remedy would have been applied without delay’ (Report of the Proceedings, 25 January 1830). This was a very dubious link in Attwood's chain of argument.

27 Report of the Proceedings, 17 May 1830.

28 During the first phase of the Political Union, he professed himself a tory. ‘The whigs had done nothing to forward the cause of public liberty. He had never belonged to that party—he was always a tory, and a real friend to the privileges of the People…’ (Report of the Proceedings, 25 January 1830).

29 Many of the whigs were lukewarm or even hostile to the Political Union. As late as October 1831, a resolution (at a whig meeting) thanking Attwood and the Political Union was withdrawn on the grounds that ‘it would create disunion’. (Report of the Town's Meeting, 20 October 1831).

30 Report of the Proceedings, 13 December 1830.

31 Ibid., 25 January 1830.

32 Ibid., 20 May 1833. He went on to say that ‘he detested party men of all kinds; but of the two give him tories rather than whigs, not that he should be satisfied with them when he had got them’.

33 The Birmingham Journal, 10 January 1835.

34 Report of the Proceedings, 17 May 1830. Bibb was later Treasurer of the West Bromwich Political Union.

35 The Substance of the Extraordinary Proceedings of the Birmingham Political Council, 3 July 1832.

36 Edmonds, who might have been a rival to Attwood, did indeed announce in March 1832 that he would stand for Parliament (H.O. 52/20, The Poor Man's Paper, printed by J. Russell).

37 It was set up by extremists who ‘are tired of the Council and their leader’ (H.O. 52/20, Thomas Lee to Melbourne, 25 October 1832). Hetherington visited Birmingham on 29 October and addressed a meeting, where Hunt also was present and Dr Wade was in the Chair. Salt, one of the pioneers of the Political Council, tried to speak, but was howled down by the crowd (Lee to Melbourne, 29 October 1832; The Poor Man's Guardian, 3 November 1832). Although the new Union was of little importance locally it gave rise before the Election of December 1832, to the Committee of Non-Electors, which argued that ‘we, the source of all Property, and the greatest in point of number, are by that Bill (the Reform Bill) denied the exercise of our Elective Rights’ (Declaration of the Committee, August 1832). At the same time it disclaimed any hostility towards the Birmingham Political Union ‘to which association many of us belong’.

38 Report of the Proceedings, 7 May 1832.

39 The Birmingham Journal (27 December 1836) admitted of the currency question, ‘for its complicated and apparently distant nature, there are hardly ten men in the House that understand and take an interest in its discussion; and to the people it is a sealed book altogether’.

40 High prices, according to Charles Jones, one of the leaders of the Birmingham School, showed that trade was prosperous, and that production and consumption were keeping pace with each other. Paper currency had maintained prices high until 1820. ‘The paper currency has now for years past been perfectly assimilated to the wants of the country and has proved itself a most valuable friend, causing almost all ranks and descriptions of men to flourish, and this it has done during the pressure of wars, taxes and changes unparalleled in the history of this country’ (The Saturday Register, 19 February 1820).

41 Attwood had looked expectantly to landowners as soon as he began to write on economic questions. His Observations on Currency, Population and Pauperism (1817) was addressed to Arthur Young. In 1820 he wrote a letter to The Farmer's Journal and in 1821 gave evidence before a Select Committee on Agricultural Distress. In 1827 he was in correspondence with Sir John Sinclair, former President of the Board of Agriculture, and when he visited London in July 1830 he regretted that he had not time to call on Western ‘or any other of my political friends’. From the other side, as late as 1844, Newdegate, the Warwickshire tory squire, told the Commons that the views of the Birmingham economists were almost identical with his own (Hansard, 3rd ser., LXXV, p. 830).

42 Report of the Proceedings, 4 July 1831.

43 Ibid.

44 He wrote to his wife, 27 April 1820, that they were ‘fit for nothing, but dumb sheep, to be shorn at the will of their masters’. In 1831 he claimed ‘that knowing much of the middle and little of the higher and lower orders of society, the middle was the worst of the three…as full of vice as the egg is full of meat…servile to our superiors, arrogant to our inferiors, jealous towards each other, indignant towards all’. Ibid.

45 ‘The great limbs and interests of the country are…starving for the want of money, at the very moment that half the circulation of the kingdom is determined in stagnant masses into what is called the money market, in order to gorge the monied interest.’ Ibid.

46 See S. G. Checkland, ‘The Birmingham Economists, 1815–50’ in The Economic History Review, 2nd series, 1 (1948), no. 1.

47 Brit[ish] Mus[eum] Place MSS., Add. MSS. 27,789 f. 75.

48 The Political Union Register, March 1832.

49 ‘All the other unions look to the Birmingham one’, wrote J. S. Mill, ‘and that looks to its half dozen leaders, who consequently act under the most intense consciousness of moral responsibility’ (Letters of J. S. Mill, I, p. 7, 20 October 1831). A hostile critic commented,’ England is now actually governed by the Political Unions. The Parliament of Birmingham issues edicts’ (The Bristol Riots, by a citizen (1832), p. 26).

50 Brit. Mus. Place MSS. Add. MSS. 27, 789 f. 127.

51 Aris's Gazette, 24 December 1832. ‘Persons of all ranks from the highest to the poorest were to be seen participating in all the delirium of extatic joy’ when Attwood returned to Birmingham after the passing of the Reform Bill (An Account of the Public Entry given by the Inhabitants of Birmingham to Thomas Attwood Esq., 28 May 1832).

52 Attwood's Address to the Electors, 29 June 1832.

53 Porter, G. R., Tables of the Revenue, Population etc. of the United Kingdom, II (1836), p. 102Google Scholar.

54 ‘Man’, John Davies told the Mechanics Institution in 1827, ‘must be the architect of his own fame’ (Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 20 October 1827).

55 HO/40/27, The Borough Reeve and Constables to the Home Office, 26 May 1830. Doherty later stated that he had been influenced in his dreams of a large-scale trade union organization by the Catholic Association (Select Committee on Combinations vm (1837–8), Q. 3446).

56 The Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1830.

57 At a meeting in October 1826 a speaker claimed that the purpose of parliamentary reform was ‘to secure the labourer the fruits of his own labour…and to every British subject a full participation in all the privileges and advantages of British citizens’ (Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 28 October 1826).

58 HO/52/18. A Letter from One of the 3730 Electors of Preston to his Fellow Countrymen, enclosed in a letter from Lowe to Melbourne, 3 December 1832. See also Doherty's pamphlet, A Letter to the Members of the National Association for the Protection of Labour (1831).

59 J. P. Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes employed in the CottonManufacture of Manchester, 2nd ed. (1832), p. 26; E. Baines, The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), p. 446.

60 The number of handloom weavers in the cotton industry did not begin to decline until after 1830. Indeed, until that date their numbers probably increased (Chapman, S. J., The Lancashire Cotton Industry (1904), p. 28Google Scholar).

61 Brit. Mus. Place MSS. Add. MSS. 27,792 f. 15.

62 The Manchester Guardian, 12 June 1830.

63 A meeting was held in August at which cautious middle-class merchants like Mark Philips, who later became first Member of Parliament for Manchester, talked for t h e first time of thoroughly ‘purging the House of Commons’, and reforming the present system of representation (The Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1830).

64 The Manchester Gazette and Times, 30 May 1829.

65 The group was always active in local politics, urging the need for cheap government, and allying itself with the important ‘shopocracy’.

66 For instance in 1815 the manufacturers opposed the corn laws, ‘because they believed that raising the price of food would raise the wages of labour, and thus prevent their competition with the manufacturers of other countries’. The same argument was repeated in 1825 by Garnett (A. Prentice, Manchester, pp. 70, 305).

67 Taylor, W. Cooke, [Life and Times of Sir Robert] Peel (1842), p. iiiGoogle Scholar.

68 Cowdray's Manchester Gazette, 25 January 1826.

69 A. Prentice, Manchester, p. 352. Later, after Cobden had made a middle-class working-class alliance seem more effective, the continuity of agitation between 1832 and 1846 was perhaps exaggerated. ‘In other places’, wrote J. Reilly in his History of Manchester in 1861 (11, p. 343), ‘there was a praiseworthy impatience of the absurdity of permitting a mound of earth to send members to Parliament, while great manufacturing and commercial towns, each the centre and market of important districts, sent none; but nowhere more than in Manchester—perhaps nowhere so much—was the attention placed on the end, while endeavouring to obtain the means.’

70 Dunckley, H., The Charter of the Nations (1854), p. 13Google Scholar.

71 Letter from J. Deacon Hume to the Editor of the Morning Chronicle, 12 December 1833.

72 As early as 1822, when Attwood was pleading on behalf of the farmers, The Manchester Guardian was pointing out that if farmers and landlords had come to depend on high prices, it was because they lived without ‘prudent regulation of their personal expenditure, and were too much inclined to rely on the indestructability of their property. Unlike the wise tradesman they had not learned to save in times of prosperity to sustain the losses and disappointments of inevitable depression’ (22 January 1822).

73 Dicey, A. V., Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (2nd ed. 1920), p. 179Google Scholar.

74 Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 25 August 1821.

75 A. Prentice, Manchester, p. 128. When two Manchester banks proposed to issue notes in 1821, a meeting of local manufacturers and merchants pledged itself not to accept local notes under any circumstances (The Manchester Guardian, 25 April 1821). The local hostility to paper money went back to 1788, when Manchester business men suffered heavily as the result of the failure of a Blackburn firm responsible for an enormous note issue. See Ashton, T. S., ‘The Bill of Exchange and Private Banks in Lancashire, 1790–1830’ in The Economic History Review, xv (1945)Google Scholar.

76 A petition of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, setting out the virtues of a metallic currency, can be found in its Minutes and Proceedings, 11, p. 408, 18 February 1826.

77 The Manchester Guardian, 20 December 1828. The same paper, 25 April 1829, explained carefully that the depression in trade was unaffected by the currency. Cf. The Speech of Thomas Attwood on the Distressed State of The Country, 8 May 1829 (Birmingham, 1829)Google Scholar, which explained local depression entirely in terms of the currency. After The Manchester Guardian commented. unfavourably on this speech (16 May 1829), Attwood wrote. to the newspaper stating his views (20 June 1829). The editor commented that an increase in the volume of currency to stimulate ‘a return to 1825’ could not be achieved without a diminution of its value, a flight of gold overseas, and a financial ‘convulsion’ as in 1826.

78 A. Prentice, Manchester, p. 37. It is clear that the Union existed in secret committee before it announced itself to the public, but it resolved not to call a public meeting until 500 members had been enrolled (The Manchester Guardian, 21 August 1830). The whigs did not join the organization until March 1831, when they were regarded with some suspicion by the more seasoned members.

79 Its activities were ignored by all the Manchester newspapers except The Manchester Times, which Prentice himself edited.

80 The Manchester Times, 4 December 1830.

81 Ibid. 27 November 1830. At the same meeting one working-class critic dismissed Prentice as a ‘saucy Scotsman’.

82 The Poor Man's Guardian, 27 August 1831. It is not clear exactly when this Union was set up, or whether it preceded its London counterpart. Hunt acted as an intermediary in relations between London and Manchester, and visited Lancashire at the invitation of the Working Men's Union in April 1831. His objections to the Reform Bill were echoed by extreme radicals in Manchester, like the one who wrote to The Poor Man's Guardian in April 1832 that the Reform Bill was ‘the most illiberal, the most tyrannical, the most hellish measure that ever could or can be proposed’ (11 April 1832).

83 HO/52/18, Foster to Melbourne, 22 January 1832. Foster claimed (HO/52/13, 27 November 1831) that the members of the Union were ‘men of the lowest description, so much so that the general body of respectable workmen refuse all connection with them’. Yet it had 6000 members at this time, and Foster feared that it would become dangerous if it joined up with Doherty's Union.

84 Brit. Mus. Place MSS. Add. MSS. 27,791 f. 242.

85 Watkin, A., Extracts From His Journal, 1814–56 (ed. A. E. Watkin, 1920), pp. 162–3Google Scholar.

86 See Marshall, L. S., ‘The First Parliamentary Election in Manchester’ in The American Historical Review, April 1942CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 The Manchester Guardian, 9 June 1832, 23 June 1832. The Manchester Guardian had been recommended by Foster to Melbourne in February 1832. ‘I will give directions that you are supplied regularly with the Manchester Guardian, being a newspaper in good circulation, and the one in which there is in general the best information’ (HO/52/18). By contrast the radical Manchester Advertiser characterized its rival as ‘the common heap in which every purse-proud booby shoots his basket of dirt and falsehood…the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst sections of the mill-owners’ (quoted Driver, C., Tory Radical, [The Life of Richard Oastler], (1946), p. 321Google Scholar).

88 The Political Register, 31 December 1831.

89 Ibid. 27 August 1831.

90 The Manchester Guardian, 8 September 1832. This practical approach to the fruits of reform was less effective in its appeal than it might have been, because of fierce rivalry between Cobbett and Hunt. It was Hunt who had been the idol of 1819, and Hunt attacked Cobbett furiously in 1832 before Manchester working-class crowds.

91 The Manchester Guardian, 22 December 1832.

92 Cobden to Tait, 3 July 1838. Cobden in his Incorporate Your Borough (1837) held up the example of Birmingham to the wayward reformers of Manchester: ‘Follow the example of the men of Birmingham who are always foremost in the path of reform.’

93 The Manchester Guardian, 29 December 1832.

94 Parsons, E., The Civil, Ecclesiastical, Literary, Commercial and Miscellaneous History of Leeds, Vol. II (1834), p. 203Google Scholar.

95 L. Faucher, Etudes, i, p. 401.

96 Ibid.

97 The Leeds Intelligencer, 20 September 1819.

98 A Petition of Leeds Stuff Operatives, 15 February 1830, presented to Parliament by M. T. Sadler. It had 500 signatures.

99 James, L., History of the Worsted Manufacture in England from the Earliest Times (1857)Google Scholar.

100 L. Faucher, Études, i, p. 384.

101 As the Lancashire squirearchy had been and still was in some areas in 1832. See W. Cooke Taylor, Peel, i, p. 121: ‘The Lancashire squires viewed the manufacturing population with a jealousy which may have been unreasonable, but certainly was not unnatural; they saw persons suddenly becoming their rivals in wealth and influence, by a course of industry and economy, which hereditary principles led t h em to despise; and they feared that these new men would displace the ancient families.’

102 The Leeds Mercury, i July 1826.

103 Baines, E., [Life of Edward] Baines (1859 ed.), p. 133Google Scholar.

104 In face of considerable opposition from loyal Yorkshiremen like Cooke and Vavasour, who wanted a Yorkshireman as candidate, and industrialists, who wanted one of their own order to protect manufacturing interests.

105 The Leeds Intelligencer, 30 July 1829, reports a speech of Sadler at Newark, in which he urged the necessity of securing the support of the working classes on whom national prosperity depended.

106 ‘Mr Sadler is an anti-reformer’, wrote a hostile pamphleteer in 1832, ‘and he hopes by this (Factory) Bill of his to set the master and manufacturers and their men together by the ears, and get quit of the Reform Bill: in this we can tell he will be mistaken. The manufacturers of Lancashire will have a change; they will have their own representatives in the national council.’ Mr Sadler, M.P., His Factory Time Bill and His Party Examined (London, 1832).

107 29 September 1830. This was the first of a series of letters. They are reprinted in C. Driver, Tory Radical.

108 J. Mayhall, Annals of Yorkshire, 1830; The Leeds Intelligencer, 10 February 1831; The Leeds Mercury, 12 February 1831. The Leeds Mercury claimed that a reform petition was signed representing ‘a large proportion of the wealth and respectability of the town’.

109 The Leeds Mercury, i October 1831, described a large town meeting held on Monday, 26 September, at which a reform petition was drawn up which obtained 21,423 signatures in two days.

110 The Leeds Intelligencer, 24 November 1831. Factory reformers continued to be recruited from all parties.

111 C. Driver, Tory Radical, especially Chapter x.

112 The Leeds Intelligencer, 27 September 1819.

113 Ibid.

114 Baines had made his position quite clear as early as 1819, when at a radical meeting on 21st June, addressed by Petre (who strongly attacked the policy of The Leeds Mercury), he rejected the main points in the radical programme one by one. See E. Baines, Baines, p. 87.

115 The Leeds Mercury, 19 September 1829.

116 Cobbett visited Leeds and delivered three lectures in January 1830.

117 There was some support in Yorkshire for the currency views of the Birmingham Political Union. Anti-Peel meetings were held in Huddersfield in December 1829, while at the same time The Birmingham Argus was praising Sadler (September 1829). There was a swing of radical opinion after Cobbett visited the north of England in January 1830 and spoke of ‘the present distress and the means to be adopted to alleviate it’. His vigorous attack on the Birmingham currency doctrines appears to have received considerable local support. Nevertheless, Attwood was writing to The Leeds Patriot (3 March 1832) attacking the ‘deceitful and injurious doctrine of free trade’ and describing the currency as ‘the master-evil’.

118 The Leeds Intelligencer, 3 June 1830. At a meeting of the radicals in May 1831 thanks were expressed to the tory Leeds Intelligencer as well as to the Leeds Patriot.

119 The Leeds Mercury, 1 October 1831.

120 The Leeds Intelligencer, 10 November 1831. Hunt was being a nuisance to the whigs at this time by arguing that the people far from being ‘all run mad with joy’ by the Reform Bill ‘think they are deluded by it’. ‘They thought they were going to get meat or clothes cheaper by it, but when they found it would have none of these effects, they were naturally disappointed at the whole measure’ (Hansard, 3rd Ser., iii, p. 1245). For Tory use of this speech, see The Advantages of Reform as Proposed by the Present Ministers (1831).

121 See Turberville, A. S. and Beckwith, F., Leeds and Parliamentary Reform (The Thoresby Society, 1943), p. 52Google Scholar.

122 E. Baines, Baines, p. 127.

123 As early as August 1829 it had expressed a strong preference for radicals rather than whigs.

124 The Leeds Intelligencer, 15 September 1831.

125 Ibid. 26 July 1832.

126 C. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 200–1. It seems somewhat one-sided to suggest, as does Sir George Otto Trevelyan, that Sadler ‘smarting from the lash of the Edinburgh Review, infused into the contest an amount of personal bitterness that for his own sake might better have been spared’, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1900 ed.), p. 183. The bitterness was not restricted to Sadler.

127 The radicals in July 1832 thought of putting up a candidate of their own, George Wailes, to work alongside Sadler. Turberville and Beckwith, Leeds and Parliamentary Reform, pp. 57–8.

128 The Tables Turned, By an Elector (Leeds, November 1832).

129 Leeds Borough Election Poll (Leeds, 1833)Google Scholar; Marshall 2011, Macaulay 1984, Sadler 1590.

130 C. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 203–4. At the Leeds election of 1834 Sir John Beckett, the tory candidate, said in answer to a question at the hustings, that he would have no difficulty in saying that he did not object to operatives meeting together to prevent wage cuts and to defend social rights (R. L. Hill, Toryism and the People, p. 122).

131 A poster of the Leeds Committee of Operatives during the 1832 Election stressed that while the benefits offered by the Reform Bill were ‘problematical’, unless Sadler's proposals for ‘bettering the condition of the Agricultural and Manufacturing Poor of England and the Poor Irish are its fruits, the lower orders of society cannot be materially benefitted’.

132 Molesworth, W. N., The History of the Reform Bill of 1832 (1865), p. 3Google Scholar.

133 Report of the Proceedings, 30 July 1832. Compare H. Dunckley, The Charter of the Nations, pp. 47–8. In Manchester ‘parliamentary reform was desired chiefly as a means of breaking the landlord's monopoly of the people's food, and bursting the fetters which bound our trade’.

134 Report of the Proceedings, 7 May 1832.

135 When the Commons went into Committee on the First Reform Bill, Russell explained that the ministers proposed as a counter-balance to the ‘pure principle of population’ to give representation to large towns possessed of ‘manufacturing capital and skill’ (Hansard, 3rd Ser., in, p. 1519.) In introducing the Second Reform Bill Russell divided the newly enfranchized boroughs into those representing great interests, like wool, cotton, coal and potteries, and those not immediately representing any interest but perhaps in consequence ‘better qualified to speak and inform the House on great questions of general interest to the community’ (Hansard, 3rd ser., iv, p. 338).

136 It was not only Brougham and Macaulay who wooed the middle classes as ‘the most numerous and by far the most wealthy order in the community’. Grey in 1831 referred to the middle classes ‘who form the real and efficient mass of public opinion and without whom the power of the gentry is nothing’ (Correspondence of King William IV and Earl Grey (1867), 1, p. 376).

137 Richard Fryer, a Wolverhampton reformer, put it very bluntly: ‘All fiddle-de-de about Old Sarum—Stick to the Repeal of the Corn Laws and vote by ballot’ (The Staffordshire Advertiser, 11 December 1830).

138 The Birmingham Journal, 2 June 1832.

139 Ibid. 12 November 1836.