Elections Past & Present

William Hogarth Canvassing for Votes from The Humours of an Election series, 1755

With an upcoming general election and rumblings about voter ID, electoral fraud, proportional representation and lower voting ages, I’ve been inspired to look at how the business of elections has changed and to understand how our Parliament evolved. This vote from Terry Pratchett's Dig seemed to me to be a good summation of recent elections.

"When people are faced with lots of troubles and they don't know what to do, there's always someone ready to say anything, just to get some power,'"

These days, anyone registered to vote (https://www.gov.uk/vote-uk-election) can choose any one of several candidates; they then vote by secret ballot for one MP to represent their constituency. In the 21^st century, there are 650 parliamentary constituencies, each one (roughly) having the same number of voters. The Parliament that is elected will then sit for up to five years. But it wasn’t always this way; early parliaments were only called at the ruler’s request. It might sit for a few weeks, but the Long Parliament sat from 1640 to 1660. Voting for representatives was public and restricted to a few people, and corruption, intimidation, and even violence were frequently part of the process.

How did our Parliament develop?

The earliest parliaments developed in the 13^th century from the council of earls, barons, bishops and other nobility who advised the Norman kings. Initially, Parliament’s role was only to advise, but increasingly, through the 13^th century, power shifted towards Parliament. A key moment in this shift happened in 1254; King Henry III needed money for his wars but the nobles (the bishops and barons) would not commit to raising taxes. As he was away fighting, Queen Eleanor ordered the county sheriffs to send two knights to Parliament to offer assistance. By the 1200s “knight” didn’t mean a soldier but someone who held land from the king in return for payment. So, Eleanor was using the Knights as a source of cash. Despite this, selecting county representatives to attend Parliament set a precedent for all subsequent parliaments.

Relations between Henry III and the nobles continued to decline, and there was considerable political instability. By 1265, the rebel baron Simon de Montfort effectively controlled England. He called a parliament and summoned the knights from the counties (The Knights of the Shire) and also burgesses from selected boroughs[1]. A burgess at this time just meant a free man who rented land in a borough. By the time Edward III became king (1327), parliaments were being held more often, and nobles, Knights of the Shire and burgesses were in attendance. By this time, although the knights were called The Knights of the Shire, they could be any freeholder from the county; they didn’t have to be actual knights. Despite this shift, burgesses were still seen as having lower status than knights. How these representatives were selected varied from place to place, but the electors could also be any freeman (i.e. not a serf).

Whilst the principle of a parliament was now established, it was a long way from anything we would recognise. Even where there was an election rather than just a selection process, we can tell from early legislation that it was rarely a free choice. Predictably, as elections are about power, not only nationally but locally, the landowners and similarly influential people wanted their choice of representative to demonstrate their local control and to (hopefully) enable them to influence the King and his advisors. By 1275, one of the stipulations of The Statute of Westminster was “free and fair elections with no intimidation”. If it was being passed as a statute, it suggests a need for a legal bar to electoral intimidation.

Over the following years, these additional representatives became a permanent feature of parliaments, the knights and the burgesses forming what would eventually become known as the House of Commons. The nobles and bishops became the House of Lords. From the 14^th to the 17th century, being a member of Parliament was a paid role. Knights were paid 4s a day (by their county, not by the king) to attend, but unsurprisingly, the burgesses were paid less.[2]

The Knights and Burgesses who attended Parliament also gained power and influence, making these roles very desirable, so men were prepared to forgo the customary payment for their service to get the position. This access to power led to much scheming and manipulation; in county elections, landlords pressured tenants to select their chosen candidate, and in the boroughs, there were offers from candidates to restore guildhalls and even to pay (in money or in-kind) electors for their vote.[3] There were also incidences of county sheriffs electing themselves rather than issuing the writ for a parliamentary election! These abuses remained an issue, and various statutes concerning free and fair elections continued to be passed during the next 200 years and beyond.

Electing Representatives in the Counties

By the mid-15^th century, the House of Commons had some 270 members (the number varied a little from parliament to parliament). As mentioned before, there was no universal agreement on who the electorate should be, so it varied from place to place, but generally, it was open to all freemen. In a move that might feel a little familiar, in 1429, the House of Commons decided that too many people of low estate (i.e. poor/common people) were electing the Knights of the Shire. So, they passed the beautifully named “What Sort of Men shall be Choosers, and who shall be chosen Knights of the Parliament” Act.

This act restricted the county voters to men with a freehold (land) in the county worth 40s a year, i.e. a small group of wealthy men. This qualification remained almost unchanged until the Reform Act of 1832, and even then, it was merely expanded a little. Also, the counties continued to elect Knights of the Shire until 1888. It is worth noting that despite its title, the Act didn’t say women couldn’t vote, though they rarely met the financial qualifications; the restriction on women only appeared in 1832. The Knights of the Shire were not particularly well regarded. According to Gwylim Dodd, one 15^th-century satirist suggested that the Knights “were sitting like a zero in arithmetic; they mark a place but signify nothing.”[4]

Electing Representatives in the Boroughs

I have titled this section Electing Representatives, which is a bit misleading. Often, there was no election, local notables selected a candidate, and there was no opposition. In other areas, there may have been an election, but only a limited number of people actually got to vote. Who got to choose depended on what sort of borough it was. There were various types of boroughs, all of which had different qualifications for the right to vote. These different brorough types include Burgage, Freemen, Scot & Lot and Potwalloper boroughs. However, in almost all of them, the qualifications for voters, were designed to restrict voting to a select group. The only exception was the Potwalloper borough, although there were just 13 of these (out of a total of 203 boroughs); the only qualification to vote in those was that the voter provided their own food, had a fireplace they could cook food on and had a doorway they could control (presumably to rule out shared dwellings and itinerant people).

Over the centuries, the number of counties and boroughs entitled to send representatives increased. By 1601 there were 474 members of the House of Commons. Most of the increase was due to the rise in the number of boroughs empowered to elect representatives. This rise sounds like a good thing: more democracy. No, many of these were given the franchise to give the ruler more power over Parliament. For example, Elizabeth I was being pressured by the House of Lords to marry and produce an heir. To counter this, she gave the franchise to additional boroughs that were under her supporters’ control. This increased number of loyal representatives enabled her to defeat the lords and avoid getting married.

The increased number included a few boroughs that had petitioned for representation such as Fowey in Cornwall. However, most of the boroughs added were places with little or no local population, where either the crown or local aristocracy loyal to the crown, controlled the borough. Boroughs with a tiny population but the right to send representatives to Parliament became known as Rotten Boroughs. Typical examples were places like Old Sarum, a rural location with no residents, and Dunwich, where the town had fallen into the sea, but the place still had the right to two representatives. Boroughs controlled by one person or a single family were known as “Pocket Boroughs”. Meanwhile, many sizeable towns e.g. Newark and Basingstoke still had no representation, having had their requests for representation rejected.

Despite the weighting of Parliament with theoretically loyal representatives, Parliament frequently challenged the monarchy, and many rulers tried to avoid summoning Parliament as much as possible. The ultimate expression of this is the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (aka the Civil War), which arose from the conflict between Charles I (and his belief in his divine right to rule) and Parliament, ( and their belief that they should participate in Government). The term Member of Parliament (MP) is first used during this period. It is worth noting that even Cromwell was surprised that Parliament was not as biddable as he had expected. The period of the Commonwealth was also the first time there was any serious call to extend the franchise. The Levellers were a populist political movement; one of their tenets was universal male suffrage.

From the 16^th century onwards, it was fairly standard for potential representatives to offer to pay their own expenses and costs for attending Parliament. From after the Commonwealth until 1911 MPs it was accepted that being an MP was an unpaid role. Whilst the money had probably never been a significant inducement, it would certainly ensure that representatives were most likely drawn from the wealthier members of society. Also, it had the potential to make corruption more likely, if an MP wasn’t paid to attend, then the temptation to look for other ways to profit from their position would be so much greater. According to an article in the Guardian “Giles Mompesson (Great Bedwyn, 1614 and 1621) was fined, expelled from parliament and told to parade up the Strand “with his face in a horse’s anus” for extortionately abusing his royal monopoly for the licensing of inns and manufacture of gold thread in 1621.”[5]

By the late 17^th century control of the election process was largely in the hands of a minority. (See Blackadder III – episode 1!). The Duke of Newcastle (Prime Minister in the mid-18th century) had control of seven pocket boroughs and had a seat in the House of Lords. This concentration of power increased calls for reform from various political societies such as the London Corresponding Society. However, William Pitt, who owed his election to Rotten and Pocket Boroughs, passed legislation to prevent these sorts of societies from meeting and publishing information. Thus effectively silencing the calls for reform for another 20 years.

In boroughs that were not Pocket or Rotten Boroughs, bribing the electorate remained a route to election. In 1677 an Act was passed limiting election expenditure on meat and drink to £10 and declared that ‘any other Present, Gift or Reward, or any Promise, Obligation, or Engagement is by this House to be declared Bribery’. [6] It appears to have been ineffective because similar acts were passed in 1696 and 1729. As previously mentioned, bribes could take many forms; in Newport in 1754, the candidate was billed £6,000 for paving the town.[7] In 1802, Sir William Paxton tried to buy the borough seat of Carmarthen, spending over £15,000 on 11,070 breakfasts, 36,901 dinners, 25,275 gallons of ale and 11,068 bottles of spirits[8].

Electoral bribery was so notorious that it was featured in several plays. The first was in 1714, Susannah Centlivre’s “The Gotham Election”, followed by further pieces by Henry Fielding on the subject. The Government’s response was to enact the 1737 Theatre Licensing Act, which gave the Lord Chamberlain the power to censor drama. This Act was not repealed until 1968, though in later years, it seemed more concerned with sex than political satire. Art then became the route to satirising the business of elections, with Hogarth and many others producing illustrations of electoral corruption such as the Hogarth above called Canvassing the Vote and the more scurrilous “A new way to secure a majority; or no dirty work comes amiss” by William Wells.

Even after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, political activities were often murky. Mark Knights, suggests that it wasn’t until the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act that politics was cleaned up. Certainly, Victorian writers such as Dickens and Trollop describe electoral manipulation in their novels. In “Dr Thorne”, Trollope shows an election in which a candidate ensured that the beer houses were open, and his agent described the electorate as “wallowing swine”.[9] In 1870, a House of Commons select committee stated that many voters would not vote unless paid, sometimes in drink tickets rather than cash, and that rioting often took place on polling day. [10]

This led to the Ballot Act 1872, which introduced the secret ballot. This made bribery and intimidation less frequent. Until this Act was passed, all votes were public, either through a show of hands, calling the chosen candidate’s name or marking the voting paper in front of a crowd of jeering or cheering voters, agents and other functionaries. Violence was commonplace; stones, dung and dead cats were thrown at rival voters. Similarly commonplace was the physical prevention of voters from registering their votes[11]. In Pontefract in 1768, one candidate, Sir Roland Winn, entered the Town Hall with his supporters who then prevented any of his rival’s supporters entering and registering their votes.

All this takes place in a world where the proportion of the population that could vote was very small. It has been estimated that the total electorate in 1831 was around 366,000 people, from an adult male population of around 4 million.[12] So, approximately 9% of the male population could vote. If we include women, the percentage of the population that could vote drops to less than 5%. The 1832 Reform Act is often heralded as a significant improvement, and indeed it removed most of the pocket and rotten boroughs and finally gave representations to large industrial towns such as Manchester and Birmingham. But it did little to extend the franchise. For voters, it only increased the number of middle-class men who could vote. The qualification was male householders living in a property worth £10 a year. Most working men were thus still excluded, as were all women. Not until 1867 did some working men get the vote when the qualification was reduced to paying a rent of at least £7 a year. Another Reform Act in 1884 extended the franchise a little but it still meant that only twothirds of the male population could vote in England and Wales and even fewer in Scotland and Ireland.

In 1918, the fourth Reform Act gave all adult men over 21 and women over 30 the right to vote. This increased the size of the electorate from just over 7 million to over 21 million people, approximately 74% of the adult population. It also confirmed that all seats would be voted for on the First-Past-The-Post basis (before this, some constituencies with multiple seats used a proportional representation system). Finally, in 1928, the Equal Franchise Act gave all men and women the same right to vote.

Common History

Search This Blog