Cumberland East

Economic and social profile

A maritime Lakeland county separated from Scotland by the Solway Firth, Cumberland comprised 974,720 acres, of which nearly a quarter was mountain and lake.1Dod’s electoral facts, impartially stated, ed. H.J. Hanham (1972), 76-7. Agriculture was the most important single industry: the 1851 census revealed that well over twenty per cent of the occupied regional population earned a living on the land.2J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-twentieth century (1981), 55. The eastern division contained the principal market towns and agricultural centres of Alston, Brampton, Dalston, Hesket, Kirkoswald, Longtown, Penrith and Wigton. Carlisle, the election town, was home to an important cotton industry, with approximately one-fifth of its population employed as weavers.3C.F. Barnes, ‘The trade union and radical activities of the Carlisle handloom weavers’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 78 (1978), 157. Rich in mineral resources, Alston contained the majority of the region’s lead mines, while Dalston was home to an important iron foundry. The principal area for the production of oats and barley was Leath ward, in the south-east corner of the county, where the majority of the land comprised small individual farms owned by the yeomen, who were noted for their fierce independence from aristocratic influence, although their number declined throughout the century. 4D. Uttley, ‘The decline of the Cumbrian Yeoman. Fact or Fiction’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 7 (2007), 121-33. The Newcastle and Carlisle railway, the first line to cross from the east coast to the west coast of Britain, opened in 1838 and the Lancaster and Carlisle railway opened in 1846, with the latter being leased to the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) in 1859.5P. Robinson, ‘The Railway city’ in M. Brennand and K.J. Stringer (eds.), The making of Carlisle: from the Romans to Railways (2011), 177. The South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway, which crossed the Pennines, was linked to Penrith by the Eden Valley Railway in 1862.

Electoral history

Although a region of great landowners, the county of Cumberland was also noted for having numerous smaller farmers, known as ‘statesmen’.6HP Commons, 1820-1832, ii. 208; J.D. Marshall, ‘Statesmen in Cumbria’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 72 (1972), 248-73. In the pre-Reform era, the county’s politics had been dominated by the dukes of Norfolk and Portland and the earls of Carlisle, who, with the support of the Whig gentry, the ‘Blues’, successfully outmanoeuvred the influence of the Lowther family and their supporters, the ‘Yellows’. In 1774 James Lowther, the first earl of Lonsdale and one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom, had arranged a compromise with the aristocratic leaders of the Blues to ensure dual representation, but by 1819 dissatisfaction with the sitting Members as absentees was mounting amongst the Blue statesmen, who thereafter became an active, though not always united, political force, securing the return of John Curwen of Workington in 1820 and Sir James Robert George Graham of Netherby in 1829.7HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 88-91; HP Commons, 1820-1832, ii. 208-219. Shared representation was maintained, though, until 1831 when Graham was returned alongside Curwen’s nephew, the Reformer William Blamire, who subsequently celebrated ‘the force of public opinion in destroying the magic spell of wealth and unconstitutional influence’.8Quoted in E.J. Evans, ‘Blamire, William (1790-1862)’, Oxf. DNB., www.oxforddnb.com. The Reform Act’s creation of a second county division had been strenuously opposed by Blaimire, who, in a coded attack on the Lowther interest, had warned that it ‘would have a most injurious effect upon the freedom of election in that county’.9Hansard, 11 Aug. 1831, vol. 5, c. 1248. The boundary commissioners, however, confirmed the division of the county, separating the more agricultural east from the west, which contained the county’s ports and coal mining towns.10PP 1831-2 (141), xxxviii. 89.

With the chief part of Lonsdale’s property located in the west of the county, the dukes of Norfolk, represented in the constituency by their kinsmen the Catholic Howards of Corby, along with the earls of Carlisle, were the principal landowners in the eastern division, although it was noted that ‘out of a constituency of more than 4,000 electors, there are not more than 700 who can even be suspected to be under aristocratic influence’.11Dod’s electoral facts, 76-7; Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, 110; Morning Chronicle, 31 Dec. 1834. The statesmen, therefore, became an increasing source of political power. They included the families of Aglionby of the Nunnery, Brougham of Scales Hall and Brougham, Crackenthorpe of Bank Hall and Newbiggin, Lawson of Brayton and Marshall of Hallsteads. Generally Liberal in their sympathies, they secured the complete hegemony of the Blues in this period, although the Lowthers, backed by the Yellow Musgraves of Hayton Castle and Hasell of Dalemain, got up opposition on three occasions. Fierce party loyalties were further fostered by the Blue Carlisle Journal (estimated weekly circulation 2,216 in 1841) and the Yellow Carlisle Patriot (962).12Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, Appendix 2, p. 243. As an agricultural constituency where ties to the land were essentially a prerequisite for standing, all the candidates in this period were native to the county.

The 1832 general election confirmed the ascendancy of the Blues in East Cumberland. Edward Williams Hasell of Dalemain, near Penrith, and Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, son of the late Sir Frederick Fletcher Vane, Tory MP for Carlisle 1796-1802, were talked of as potential Conservative candidates, but no Yellow challenge materialised.13W.W. Bean, The parliamentary representation of the six northern counties of England (1890), 9. Graham, the first lord of the admiralty in Grey’s ministry, and Blamire, who in his first Parliament had established a reputation as a staunch defender of the copyholders, stood jointly and were returned without opposition.14HP Commons, 1820-1832, ii. 217.

Although the Yellows failed to put up a candidate at the 1835 general election, Graham’s political loyalties were thoroughly scrutinised by a hostile press and he endured a difficult canvass. His opposition to Melbourne’s Irish tithe proposals and his equivocation over the benefits of the Reform Act disconcerted the Blue statesmen, who feared that he was doing ‘the bidding of Lord Stanley’.15Morning Chronicle, 31 Dec. 1834, 15 Jan. 1835. Reports in the Patriot that the Lowther interest would ‘manfully support’ Graham added fuel to the fire.16Quoted in the Morning Post, 9 Jan., 13 Jan. 1835. However, Graham’s refusal to take a place in Peel’s ministry, which he declared ‘was as bad as he could well imagine’, and his insistence that he remained a reformer, temporarily assuaged the fears of the restive statesmen.17J.T. Ward, Sir James Graham (1967), 145. Blamire, who championed municipal reform, relief to dissenters and the removal of the malt tax, retained the loyalty of the yeomanry, and both men were re-elected without opposition.18Morning Chronicle, 15 Jan. 1835.

Following Blamire’s appointment as chief tithe commissioner in August 1836, the Blue statesmen brought forward William James for the vacancy. James, who had sat for Carlisle, 1820-26 and 1831-35, was an outspoken radical, and his candidature alarmed Graham, who was horrified that the statesmen could support such a zealous advocate of universal suffrage.19Ward, Sir James Graham, 156. Equally offended by the Blues’ choice of nominee, the Patriot questioned the legitimacy of James’s candidature, arguing that as only 680 out of 4,600 electors were canvassed, ‘for anyone to assert after this that Mr James can by any quibble be said to represent East Cumberland would be an idle mockery of common sense’.20Quoted in the Morning Post, 30 Aug. 1836. Despite this hostility, the Lowther interest, which remained focused on the western division, declined to get up a challenge, leaving James, whose nomination speech was described as ‘at once very violent and very dull’, to be returned without a contest.21Morning Post, 5 Sept. 1836.

The 1837 general election at Cumberland was a dramatic affair which captured national attention. In response to Graham’s alliance with the Conservatives in June 1835 and his subsequent votes against Melbourne’s ministry, in April 1837 202 electors in the Brampton district charged him with apostasy and demanded his resignation.22R.S. Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (1871), 268. Graham, who declared that ‘he was not their delegate’, dismissed the protest, describing the Brampton electors as ‘only a small part of the great constituency’, but at a meeting of the leaders of the Blues, chaired by Henry Howard of Greystoke Castle, the party rejected his appeal for support and brought forward Francis Aglionby of the Nunnery, who unsuccessfully contested West Cumberland in 1833 and 1835, to run with James.23Ward, Sir James Graham, 158; Morning Chronicle, 30 June 1837. Graham, in a letter to Stanley, lamented the fact that ‘my own brother-in-law Sir Wilfrid Lawson, votes against me; all my old powerful supporters, the whole weight of the Howard influence, are in active and bitter hostility to me’.24Graham to Lord Stanley, 8 July 1837, quoted in C.S. Parker, Life and letters of Sir James Graham, 1792-1861 (1907), i. 252, He subsequently issued an address stating that ‘I am an independent country gentleman, whose opinions are known, and whose principles have been tried’, but deprived of all his previous support, he had to rely on the Lowther interest, who sent the Conservative agent ‘Billy’ Holmes to assist him.25Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1837; Ward, Sir James Graham, 160.

Graham, in an attempt to place ‘the issue as between radical and constitutional reform’, attacked the legitimacy of a coalition between the moderate Aglionby and the radical James, but the former subsequently issued addresses urging his supporters to give a second vote to the latter.26Graham to Lord Stanley, 30 July 1837, quoted in Parker, Sir James Graham, i. 253; Morning Post, 21 July 1837; Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs, 269. At the nomination, Graham was greeted by a multitude of banners mocking him as ‘the renegade cock of the north’, and ‘amid fights and stone throwing’ he abandoned his speech.27Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs, 270-1. Howard and William Crackenthorpe assailed the ‘Netherby turncoat’, while Thomas Salkeld of Homehill attacked Graham for ‘the hypocritical cant by which he, doubtless, would seek to delude them’.28Morning Chronicle, 5 Aug. 1837. James maintained his radical stance, calling for the abolition of the corn laws, while Aglionby advocated the ballot and shorter parliaments.29Ibid. The result was decisive. Agliony topped the poll and James came in a comfortable second, leaving Graham over 500 votes behind in third place. The unity of the Blue vote was striking, with Aglionby and James receiving 2,085 shared votes (97 per cent of James’s total), while Graham had to largely rely on 1,426 plumpers (89 per cent of his total).30Bean, Parliamentary representation, 9. In addition to losing his old support, Graham, who had spent £4,000 on the contest, had struggled to gain the trust of Yellow voters who, according to Holmes, ‘could not be brought to forget his conduct in 1831’ when he had backed Blamire’s efforts to oust viscount Lowther.31Ward, Sir James Graham, 162. The scale of Graham’s defeat was reinforced by polling district returns: he gained a miserly 15 per cent of the vote in Carlisle, and save for Longtown, which neighboured his home of Netherby, and the lead mining town of Alston, he was defeated in the remaining six districts.32Bean, Parliamentary representation, 9. Graham’s bitterness was manifest the following January, when the Cumberland Conservative Association, which he had joined, held a dinner in his honour. Alluding to his experience of being ‘hunted almost like a dog through the streets of Carlisle’, he described the late election as ‘disgraceful to the free institutions under which we live’.33Quoted in Parker, Sir James Graham, 256.

Following the death of Aglionby in July 1840, the Blues brought forward Charles Howard for the vacant seat. The 5^th son of the earl of Carlisle and brother of Lord Morpeth, Howard, described as ‘a young man of great talent’, was a formidable candidate and despite rumours that the Lowther interest would get up a rival candidature, there was no challenge.34Morning Chronicle, 13 July 1840. Howard, though, endured a turbulent nomination when he was prevented from speaking by the intervention of over one hundred Chartists parading anti-government banners.35Morning Post, 22 July 1840; Newcastle Courant, 24 July 1840. The Chartist movement enjoyed considerable support amongst Carlisle’s non-electors, and the local Female Radical Association was particularly active in collecting women’s signatures for the petitions.36M. Chase, Chartism: a new history (2007), 42. Moreover, the Carlisle Patriot, although aligned with the Yellows, gave sympathetic support to the Chartists, strengthening their ability to permeate the local political consciousness, although their most successful interventions were in borough elections.37Ibid., 242.

The 1841 general election witnessed the emergence of a more confident Yellow party during a campaign that was dominated by the corn laws. At a meeting of the Cumberland Conservative Association at Penrith, it had been decided to get up two candidates for the election, although the initial choices of Hasell, who had been mooted in 1832, and George Head, of the East Cumberland Agricultural Protection Society, both came to nothing, leaving only one Yellow candidate, William Stephenson of Scabely Castle, near Carlisle, in the field. At the nomination Stephenson defended the operation of the corn laws and was vociferously backed by the Chartists, who supported his opposition to the poor law, but at the poll, Howard, who supported a fixed duty, was returned in first place, with James defeating Stephenson by eighty-two votes. Although beaten, Stephenson’s performance was a substantial improvement on Graham’s in 1837. In addition to Alston and Longtown, he topped the poll in the agricultural centres of Kirkoswald, Penrith and Wigton, where support for protection was strong, although he incurred heavy defeats in the more populated districts of Brampton and Carlisle.38Bean, Parliamentary representation, 9-10.

At the 1847 general election James retired from Parliament, unable to sustain the cost of another contest.39HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 839-44. His replacement, William Marshall of Patterdale Hall, who had stood down as member for Carlisle at the dissolution, had solid radical credentials, although the Conservative press, dismayed that ‘there is no one to be found with public spirit enough to oppose him’ attempted to whip up rumours that he was ‘pronounced by a majority of his own party to be an unfit person in every respect’.40Morning Post, 23 July, 28 July 1847. With no sign of a contest the ‘affair of the election was, perhaps, one of the flattest ever beheld’.41Standard, 7 Aug. 1848. Howard, who praised the effects of corn law repeal but equivocated on the Maynooth grant, and Marshall, who called for a reduction of duties on tea and sugar, were returned unopposed.42Ibid.

Howard and Marshall, however, faced a Conservative challenge at the 1852 general election, when the issue of free trade was prominent in the county’s politics. After again failing to persuade George Head, the county’s leading advocate of a return to some form of agricultural protection, to come forward, the Conservatives put up Thomas Salkeld, who in the 1830s had supported the Blues but had since gone over to the Yellows, probably owning to his opposition to corn law repeal.43Head had declined a ‘numerously-signed’ requisition inviting him to stand: Morning Chronicle, 7 May 1852; Morning Post, 17 May 1852. At the nomination, Salkeld backed Derby, claiming that his ministry would give farmers the necessary level of agricultural protection, and launched a scathing attack on the Manchester School.44Manchester Times, 17 July 1852. Marshall and Howard, in contrast, assiduously championed free trade, and Crackenthorpe, who proposed the latter, dismissed Derby’s ministry as ‘a government without policy, without principle, without experience, and without capacity’.45Ibid. With agriculture reported to be ‘in the ascendant’ in the county, Howard was comfortably re-elected in first place and Marshall came in second, nearly 300 votes ahead of the Conservative challenger. Salkeld had polled well in the agricultural centres of Kirkoswald and Wigton, but like Stephenson in 1841, he fared badly in Carlisle.

Underlining the weakness of the Lowther interest in the eastern division, the Yellows declined to bring forward another candidate until after the Second Reform Act, giving Howard and Marshall a further sixteen uninterrupted years of representing their county.

At the 1857 general election both members, who had voted against Cobden’s motion on Canton, gave their unequivocal support to Palmerston’s foreign policy.46Daily News, 2 Apr. 1857. Moreover, Marshall, who unlike Howard backed the ballot, insisted that ‘it was a mistake to suppose that Lord Palmerston was not a reformer’.47Ibid., 2 Apr. 1857. Both men advocated further parliamentary reform at the 1859 general election, when the only event of note was the appearance on the hustings of William James, who insisted that the necessity of universal suffrage and shorter parliaments no longer existed, and attacked John Bright for his ‘ultra-democratic principles’. George Porter, the chairman of the Carlisle Parliamentary Reform Association, closed the proceedings by stating that he was ‘ashamed’ of James.48Ibid., 4 May 1859. The 1865 election passed without incident, returning the incumbents yet again.

Following the Second Reform Act the electorate increased from 5,455 to 6,694. At the 1868 general election William Nicholson Hodgson, who had sat for Carlisle on four separate occasions, was returned at the head of the poll, becoming the first Conservative to sit for East Cumberland. Howard was returned in second place with Marshall defeated in third. Thereafter the leading political families of the eastern division dominated the representation, which was shared until Hodgson’s death in April 1876, whereupon Edward Stafford Howard, the son of Henry Howard of Greystoke Castle, was elected in his place. In 1885 the county was split into four single-member divisions, with the Howards dominant in the North division and the Lowthers controlling Penrith. Cumberland’s politics are analysed in J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-twentieth century (1981). Robert Ferguson’s Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (1871) also provides a useful, though dated, overview of the region’s parliamentary elections.