The Whigs (1830–41)

After studying this section you should be able to:

• give an account of the Reform Act crisis of 1830–32
• assess the significance of the Act
• assess the importance of the main Whig reforms

The Great Reform Act of 1832

The unreformed parliament had many defects.

• Qualifications for voting were outdated, arbitrary and illogical. In the counties, 40 shilling freeholders had the vote, but in the boroughs there was a wide variety of different qualifications. In some, e.g. many of the corporation boroughs, there were fewer than fifty voters.
• The electorate was tiny – less than half a million.
• The distribution of seats did not match the distribution of population. The South of England was over-represented and the North and Scotland were underrepresented.
• There were many rotten and pocket boroughs. Notorious examples were Old Sarum, Dunwich and Gatton.
• Growing industrial towns such as Manchester were unrepresented.
• There was no secret ballot, leading to bribery and intimidation of voters.

The movement for reform dated back to the eighteenth century. Pitt tried to bring about some limited reforms in 1785 but dropped the idea after the outbreak of the French Revolution. The Tories after the Napoleonic War were strongly opposed to parliamentary reform. The split in the Tory Party over Catholic emancipation opened the way for the Whigs to come to power on the fall of Wellington in 1830. Grey, who had long favoured limited reform, led the new Whig government.

There was fierce opposition to reform from Tories in the Commons and from the Lords. Some of the opposition came from people who would lose out by reform, e.g. members of the House of Lords who were able to nominate MPs for pocket boroughs. But there were also genuine arguments against reform. Some argued that the present system worked perfectly well and did not need to be changed. Pocket boroughs, they said, enabled promising young men to be brought into parliament (e.g. Pitt, who became an MP at 21 and Prime Minister at 24). It is important to understand that the opponents of reform were not acting purely out of self-interest.

They argued that all the important ‘interests’ in the country – e.g. landowners, merchants, the professions

– were represented. Peel argued (correctly) that this would not be the end of reform,

as the Whigs claimed: one reform would lead eventually to another.

The Reform Act crisis, 1830–32.

Three Bills had to be introduced before the Act was finally passed. A general election in 1831 strengthened the supporters of reform. Fear of revolution, strengthened by the 1830 revolution in France and widespread disturbances in England in 1831–32, helped the Whigs to overcome the opposition. In 1832 Grey resigned when the House of Lords rejected the third version of the Bill. Wellington tried to form a government but failed and Grey returned to office with a promise from the King to create enough peers to force it through if necessary. The House of Lords then gave way and the Bill was passed.

The terms of the Reform Act were:

• The vote was given to £10 householders in the boroughs; in the counties the 40 shillings freeholders retained the right to vote and it was also given to £50 leaseholders and £10 copyholders.
• Over 140 seats were redistributed from rotten and pocket boroughs to growing towns and the larger counties.

In many respects the results of the Act were limited. The electorate was still only about 800,000. The working classes were not enfranchised. Constituencies still varied greatly in size. The South of England was still over-represented. MPs were still largely drawn from the landowning class. Bribery continued. But the Act did give many of the middle classes a vote; thereafter governments and political parties had to take more account of their views.

This was the first time parliament had been reformed. Even limited reform was a crucial step towards democracy.

KEY POINT - The Reform Act set a precedent for changing the constitution and opened the way for future reforms of parliament.

The Whig reforms

The most important of the Whig reforms were:

• The abolition of slavery in the British Empire, 1833.
• The Factory Act of 1833 restricted child labour in textile factories (except for silk mills). Children under 9 were not permitted to work. Those aged between 9 and 13 were only allowed to work for eight hours a day and they had to receive two hours’ schooling. Young people aged 14 to 18 were limited to twelve hours a day. For the first time inspectors were appointed to enforce the law but there were only four of them. Nevertheless, this was the first effective Factory Act. There had been previous
  
  Factory Acts but they had not been enforced.
• The first government grant for education (1833) provided £20 000, divided between two religious societies which provided elementary schools (the National Society and the British and Foreign Society). The grant was increased to £30 000 in 1839. The beginnings of the state education system.
• The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (see below).
• The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 reformed local government in the boroughs. Councils were to be elected by ratepayers. They were obliged to set up a police force and were allowed to provide other services such as drainage and street cleaning. Because such services would be a burden on the rates, many boroughs did not use these powers at first. Nevertheless, the Act laid the foundations for later improvements in the administration of urban areas.
• Registration of births, marriages and deaths (1836). This helped the inspectors enforcing the Factory Act.
• Church reforms: the Marriage Act and the Tithe Commutation Act.

These reforms were intended to satisfy the demands of the new middle-class electors and to tackle the problems of an emerging industrial society. They were much influenced by pressure from radicals (following the ideas of Bentham) and humanitarians. But they were limited and the most important of them, the Poor Law Amendment Act, was immensely unpopular with the working classes.

KEY POINT - The Whig reforms were a major step in adjusting central and local government to the needs of an industrialising society. But they were bitterly disappointing to the working classes, many of whom turned to Chartism in the late 1830s.

The Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834

The Poor Law of 1601 made each parish responsible for its own poor. Poor relief was paid for by a parish rate levied by Overseers of the Poor. In much of the South of England the Poor Law operated on the Speenhamland System, which began in 1795 in Berkshire. Poorly paid agricultural labourers had their wages supplemented according to the size of their families and the price of bread. This kept many families from starvation but its effects were in the end thought to be undesirable. It kept wages low, so that labourers were unable to earn a living wage and never escaped dependence on the Poor Law. Agricultural employers did not need to pay proper wages and were being subsidised by other ratepayers. The cost of the Poor Law escalated: by 1830 it was over £7 million a year. The cost was probably the main spur to reform.

In 1832 a Poor Law Commission was appointed to investigate the problem. It was dominated by Edwin Chadwick. Chadwick was a Utilitarian who followed the ideas of Jeremy Bentham. His aim was to set up a system which would be both efficient and economical. The Commission’s report led to the Poor Law Amendment Act. Utilitarianism aimed for ‘the great happiness of the greatest number’. It influenced many reforms at this time.

• Outdoor relief, i.e. the payment of money to the poor, was abolished, except for the sick and aged. This meant the end of the Speenhamland system.
• For the able-bodied poor, relief was to be provided in workhouses.
• The workhouses were to be run on the principle of ‘less eligibility’. This meant that life in the workhouse should be as unattractive as possible – less attractive than the condition of the poorest labourer outside it. This would ensure that the poor would only come to the workhouse as a last resort.
• Administration of the Poor Law was completely reformed. Parishes were grouped into Poor Law Unions run by elected Boards of Guardians. A central Board of Commissioners was appointed to supervise the whole system. Chadwick was its secretary.

The new Poor Law was successful in reducing costs and was therefore popular with

ratepayers. In the late 1830s the annual cost was about £4.5 million. But it was very

unpopular with the working classes and the humanitarians criticised it as harsh and

cruel. Dickens attacked it in Oliver Twist.

Conditions in the new workhouses were harsh. The original intention of the Act was that there should be separate workhouses for different classes of the poor but this proved too expensive. Instead, families were separated within the workhouses. The work was back-breaking. The food was poor. It seemed to the working classes that the poor were being punished simply for being poor – hence the description of the workhouses as ‘Poor Law Bastilles’. Conditions improved slightly in the 1840s. From 1842 the separation of husbands and wives was ended and parents were allowed to see their children. The Commissioners were replaced by a Poor Law Board under a government minister in 1847 and after this there was a slow improvement in the treatment of children, the sick and the old.

In the industrial north it proved impossible to implement the new system in full because periodic trade recessions caused more widespread unemployment than the workhouses could cope with. There was a recession in 1837–38 and there were attacks on the Guardians and the workhouses. An Anti-Poor Law Movement developed in the North of England. Hostility to the new Poor Law was one of the causes of the rise of the Chartist movement, into which the Anti-Poor Law Movement was absorbed. The new Poor Law was designed to cope with the rural poor of southern England.