Behind The Headlines
On 7 June the Great Reform Act became law, ending over a year of turmoil featuring uprisings in Bristol, Derby, Dorset, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset and Worcester.
The major events of 1830–1839
The Act was aimed at making the electoral system fairer, because there were numerous abuses in an absurdly unrepresentative system. The most commonly cited were those of the ‘rotten borough’ Old Sarum, the uninhabited site of an Iron Age fort, which had two Members of Parliament while the 30,000-strong industrial powerhouse Manchester had none.
In parliamentary terms the old order was represented by the Tory prime minster Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington. He declared the country’s “full confidence” in the old system, shortly before the House of Commons ousted him in favour of the Whig leader Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey.
Grey took the Bill through the House of Commons, then was forced to go to an election which he won. He took the Bill through again, only for it to be blocked by the House of Lords. With the country in uproar, the king finally agreed to create as many new peers as would be necessary to pass the Bill and the peers stopped their obstruction.
Once passed, the Act signalled a shift in power between the old landowning class and the new money-making middle class of the industrial cities. Similar Acts were passed to reform the electoral systems in Scotland and Ireland. In the reform, 143 seats were taken from unrepresentative boroughs and awarded to counties and towns. The franchise in towns was set at £10, which meant a voter had to live in a property with an annual rental value of that amount. This excluded the working class, who felt resentful that the extravagant claims made by pro-reform advocates had come to nothing for them.
Working-class radicals therefore began agitating for their own reform. On 21 May 1838 the People’s Charter was launched with a mass meeting on Glasgow Green calling for a vote for every man. An early version had included women, but that was considered too radical to be feasible.