The political compromise of 1812 remained undisturbed in 1820 when the sitting Members, Lord Palmerston, secretary at war and a Johnian, and the Whig John Smyth of Trinity, nephew of the 4th duke of Grafton, a former Member, were unopposed. Reports that Palmerston was to be called to the Lords and replaced by either Charles Manners Sutton, Speaker of the Commons, or Charles John Shore, son of the 1st Lord Teignmouth, were soon discounted. Smyth was ‘not well enough to come down in person’.
The Catholic question had long been a lively issue in the university. In 1822, the 5th earl of Essex asserted that Cambridge was ‘more liberal than Oxford, and the Lady of Babylon is not so much dreaded on the banks of the Cam as she is on those of the Isis’. Yet the bishop of Bristol, writing at the same time, was aware that ‘on this point a very material change has taken place in the university; ten years ago the majority of the junior members of the senate were in favour of the Catholics; now they are directly the reverse’.
While some Whigs in and outside Cambridge had promised to support Hervey, others were keen to have a candidate of their own, especially as the government interest seemed to be in disarray. James Scarlett of Trinity, Lord Fitzwilliam’s Member for Peterborough, and a lawyer of some eminence, duly declared his candidature, 30 Oct., and confirmed it, 4 Nov. 1822, after the Speaker’s retirement.
there may be an ill-judged hesitation among some of the friends of government, and in others a coolness, natural perhaps but perfectly absurd, in supporting a candidate, not the first object of their choice, although that object can no longer be in view.
Liverpool continued to do all he could for Hervey, particularly with the clerical hierarchy; he
reminded Bristol that
my peculiar situation obliges me to caution. I must interfere through great interests. Every individual clergyman to whom I may apply will build upon it a claim for preferment within the next six months. This can happen to no other minister, unless it is the chancellor.
While Liverpool believed that Hervey’s ‘prospects as to the resident voters’ had been greatly improved by the withdrawal of the Speaker, he told Bristol, as did others, that Hervey’s lack of a London committee was a serious handicap; this deficiency was remedied.
We are doing what we can for Scarlett, but it is difficult to deal with the high church Tories of Cambridge, who are very averse to Whigs and Saints. They seem likely to give an unwilling support to Lord Hervey at present, and reserve themselves for the Speaker at the next general election.
Four days later he mentioned to her his regret that Serjeant John Lens of St. John’s and Downing, counsel for the university, had not made it known a fortnight earlier that he ‘would very willingly be a candidate’.
The intervention of Bankes, whose ‘colloquial facility’, as Shore put it, ‘proved very serviceable to him on his canvass’ of the residents, created even more confusion as to where the government interest lay. Mrs. Arbuthnot got into ‘a great scrape’ with her husband, the secretary to the treasury, by canvassing for Bankes, whom she admired personally; and Lowther reported that
however Lord Liverpool is trying to support [Hervey], many of his friends will not move; others give a cold support, saying they only do it on the ground that of the three [Tory] candidates he will be the easiest removed at a general election.
Bankes’s father, Member for Corfe Castle, told Colchester that his son’s showing would be at least ‘creditable’, and complained that Liverpool’s conduct did him no honour by ‘bringing his sincerity upon the Roman Catholic claims into question’.
The treasury has at last sent out its letters in favour of Lord Hervey, who seems at present to have the fairest chance. It is not improbable that Grant may retire in favour of Lord Hervey, who is considered as a sort of Saint. He has played his cards very ill in not coming to some understanding with us at an earlier period of the canvass. The Whigs and Saints together might have done a great deal towards defeating the intolerant interest.
Grant did withdraw that day, publicly admitting that he had no hope; Shore thought he had ‘injured his cause by blowing hot and cold’ on the Catholic question.
The anti-Catholic party in the government were jubilant at the result which, in the view of Peel’s brother-in-law George Dawson*, ‘proves the strength of Protestant feeling and the weakness of Whig politics in the university’.
Bankes was principally brought in by the interest of the country clergymen, who came up from all parts of England to vote for the anti-Catholic candidate. Undoubtedly all this was the operation of principle ... because all the government influence was exerted for Hervey. ... The highest of our Cambridge high-church men ... all went for Hervey ... If Lord Liverpool supported a relation, though favourable to Catholic concession, they ought not to have left their avowed principles to follow him. The Whig candidate was not a popular one, and was not heartily supported by the staunch men of his own party.
J.W. Clark and T.M. Hughes, Life and Letters of Sedgwick, i. 258-9.
The marquess of Lansdowne, a former Member, considered it ‘a great misfortune that Lens was not induced to turn his thoughts to it previous to the event’: it was ‘another instance of the way in which Whigs fail and will continue to fail in their objects for want of forethought and any rational system of communication’.
The cry of ‘No Popery’ has been revived and kept up with astonishing success ... Bankes is an excellent canvasser, and has done great things by his good humour, and pleasant stories about Africa and the East. Lord Hervey acted very honourably in resisting the proposal urged upon him by many of his friends, to declare against the Catholics. Had he done this, he would have been supported by the whole High Church party, and Bankes would not have been heard of. Our friends are come very gallantly from great distances with great cheerfulness and spirit ... We bear our misfortunes with great good temper, and are not at all heart broken. Our strength is in the young lawyers, most distinguished for their talents and independence; and they seem determined to prepare for another contest ... however we fail in numbers; but I have never known the Cambridge Whig party so respectable or unanimous as at the present.
G. Pryme, Autobiog. Recollections, 141-2; Add. 51659.
A gloating Colchester noted that ‘the common talk of London since the election’ was that Palmerston, a pro-Catholic, would be in danger at the next general election. For his own part Palmerston, though ‘surprised by the result’, was not too dismayed:
This certainly shows that Protestantism is very rife at Cambridge, but still I do not see with what face people who have year after year promised me support knowing my sentiments on the Catholic question can all of a sudden turn round and leave me because a Protestant enters the field against me; but, however, one must take one’s chance and let things come as they will. The diminution of Protestant feeling which I had observed was among the residents, but as 900 people voted the residents of course formed but a small part of the pollers, and the non-resident clergy are all of them Protestants.
When he visited St. John’s for ‘combination room festivities’ at Christmas 1822 he found ‘Protestantism abroad certainly’, but was ‘under no apprehensions as to its results’, for his supporters were staunch. Bankes, who was soon afterwards the subject of scandal over his crim. con. with Lady Buckinghamshire, was also ‘feasting with his constituents’, and Robert Grant was supposed to be intent on standing next time.
Manners Sutton confirmed his intention of not standing in late August 1825. A few weeks later Hobhouse was told by Sedgwick that Whigs ‘were, even in Trinity, fast declining into a minority, and the anti-liberals particularly amongst the juniors getting uppermost’; Bankes, it was thought, was ‘pretty sure of coming in’.
Palmerston, who canvassed in Cambridge in early December, initially did ‘not feel much apprehension as to the result’, being ‘sure of a great many Protestants, from a coincidence of opinion on other questions, and of many Whigs, from an agreement on the Catholic question’: if, as seemed likely, there was no Whig candidate, he expected to ‘have all the Whig interest at Cambridge’. Pleased by his friendly reception, especially in St. John’s and Trinity, he noted that ‘Bankes has certainly lost ground very much’, that Copley, who had a reputation as a political turncoat, was ‘unpopular with the Whigs’ and that Goulburn was ‘not much talked of’. Nor could he envisage the two latter both going to the poll, as they were of the same ‘college, politics and Protestantism’. He assembled a ‘nominal’ committee ‘in order to have people engaged’, but deemed it ‘useless to go through all the manual exercise of a contest now’.
I am hardly yet reconciled to my position as a committee man in the interests of a Tory and a king’s minister. But these are evil days, in which we do not fight so much for honour as contend against disgrace ... Many of the liberal party appear to take little interest in the contest, partly because they cannot have a candidate exactly after their own hearts, and partly under a mistaken notion that Lord Palmerston’s seat is quite safe. Now I wish to observe in the first place that although Lord Palmerston’s chance is good yet his seat is by no means secure without the greatest exertions of those who support him. In the next place, if he go out it will be entirely in consequence of his vote on the Catholic question. A defeat will be a complete triumph for the No Popery faction: it will consolidate their interests, and the pride of it will ring through every corner of the kingdom. If the Catholic question be an important question, it is important for us to defeat the country parsons and the bigots who at this moment are dishonouring the land we live in.
Althorp wrote in the same terms to Lord Milton*, 22 Jan. 1826.
Palmerston admitted to Henslow, 16 Jan. 1826, that he had had ‘some difficulty in organizing a committee’ in London, as most of his personal friends were out of town, and he ‘did not like to begin with a committee entirely strangers and chiefly opposition men’. On the other hand, he had the previous day overruled an objection by Sulivan to the inclusion of a leading Whig on the London committee:
Without a committee I am defeated and ... nothing but the cordial and active assistance of the Whigs can effectively aid me even by means of a committee. My desire to succeed is, I confess, increased by the wish to frustrate an underhand Protestant cabal, and on this occasion those who support me are my friends be they Whig or Tory; and if you want people to help you, you do not go the best way to work by showing that you receive their aid distrustfully or reluctantly.
At the end of January 1826, after an incident during the canvass, Palmerston had an exchange of letters with Copley, who assured him that he was only seeking to turn out Bankes. Palmerston, swallowing his anger, made a civil reply.
While it had been the custom since at least 1806 for candidates to pay the travelling expenses of their non-resident supporters, Bankes had apparently spent lavishly on this in 1822, causing Hervey and Scarlett to be swindled. As matters threatened to be even worse at the impending election a group of residents, led by Henslow and John Lamb, master of Corpus and a member of Goulburn’s committee, began in February 1826 an attempt to avoid needless expenditure by persuading the candidates to agree to ‘conduct their plans for facilitating the arrival of out-voters, and providing for their accommodation in Cambridge, upon one common footing; and above all by refusing to pay the expenses of any who might come to poll’. Henslow, Lamb and John Griffith of Emmanuel, one of Copley’s committee, met and invited William French, master of Jesus and chairman of Bankes’s committee, to confer with them. French did so, but declined on behalf of the committee to discuss the subject further, on the ground that the campaign was too far advanced. The other three concocted a declaration of the intention of Copley, Goulburn and Palmerston not to pay expenses and to ‘unite in counteracting any obstructions which might accidentally arise to out-voters upon the different lines of road, from the private arrangements’ of Bankes’s committee, whose refusal to co-operate was emphasized. This, however, was unacceptable to Copley’s London committee, who suggested a ‘public declaration of the university’, but declined further collaboration. Rather than allow the matter to lapse, Henslow and Lamb, acting as individual members of the university, drew up a public recommendation that the practice be discontinued; it was eventually signed by the heads of seven colleges, ten professors and over 80 senior residents. In a bid to secure ‘an unanimous and explicit declaration’ against the practice from all four candidates, they detailed these proceedings in their Remarks, published in early April 1826. This drew a rejoinder from ‘A Non-Resident Master of Arts’ in the form of Observations, in which Henslow and Lamb were accused of exaggerating the scale of the problem and of seeking in effect to deprive the non-residents (who constituted four-fifths of an electorate currently put at 1,850) of the franchise. At the end of April 1826 Henslow and Lamb issued a Letter admitting the failure of their endeavours to secure an agreement from all four candidates, and appending extracts from the replies to their appeal in Remarks: Palmerston, Copley and Goulburn had paid lip service to their willingness to unite with the others in effecting the residents’ wishes, while Bankes had stood by his committee’s judgement that it was far too late in the day.
In the month before the election the anxieties of the anti-Catholics were betrayed in calls in the press for the weaker of Bankes and Goulburn to drop out. Palmerston remained sure that as ‘Goulburn thinks himself stronger than Bankes ... both will certainly go to the poll’; and so it proved, for a few days before the election Goulburn, who remained confident of making a ‘respectable showing’ and told his wife that ‘the wags and Whigs of Cambridge have designated the four candidates. ... Profligacy, Roguery, Bigotry and Folly’, turned down Bankes’s public request for a decisive comparison of strengths.
Anything like a coalition would tell as much against us as for us. It would disgust the Whigs, who are now most zealous and will certainly come up, and would probably keep them all away ... Copley’s second votes we shall have by individual exchanges, which is the only safe way of getting them ... If you hear me accused of canvassing against him I wish you to say upon my authority that I have certainly from the beginning ... endeavoured to get as many plumpers as possible, and I imagine every other candidate has done the same ... but that I have never in any one instance asked a friend who had promised a second vote to another candidate to withdraw that promise.
Two days before the dissolution, 31 May 1826, Palmerston wrote to Liverpool, whom he considered to have ‘acted as he always does to a friend in personal questions, shabbily, timidly and ill’, to say that if he was defeated, he would resign from the government.
Our travelling arrangements work out very well ... Bankes has been bringing his people up and evidently means to make a push tomorrow. Goulburn is not quite so strong in men up ... I think we shall do well. Bankes looks very downcast and I am sure we shall beat him. We have been negotiating about exchanges with Copley and Goulburn, but not with Bankes.
Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 181-2.
In a departure from customary practice, whereby voters had written their own and their choices’ names on slips of paper and placed them in boxes, the pollbook procedure was adopted. More controversially, on the first day John Bland and Thomas Paynter of Trinity insisted that the bribery oath be administered to every voter. This provoked ‘the greatest indignation’ which, as Palmerston reported, ‘when dinner had roused minds to more than morning calmness ... broke out’ after the vice-chancellor had left the Senate House. There was ‘a tumultuous debate’ around the table, which the indignant Tory Samuel Grove Price* mounted in protest. Brand and Paynter dropped their proposal, and polling was unimpeded for the last hour. At the close, Copley had 319, Palmerston 239, Bankes 222 and Goulburn 203. As he had ‘kept back our votes as much as possible’, Palmerston was more than satisfied.
One thousand-two-hundred and ninety-three voted, of whom 54 per cent (693) belonged to St. John’s (308) and Trinity (385). Palmerston had 142 plumpers, Bankes 55, Copley 25 and Goulburn 16. Bankes shared 310 votes with Copley and Palmerston 252; but Palmerston had an advantage of 165 to 71 in splits with Goulburn. Seventy-two electors divided their votes between Palmerston and Bankes. Palmerston benefited greatly from the division of the anti-Catholic vote between three candidates. Of the 219 who had voted for Scarlett in 1822, 48 (22 per cent) plumped for Palmerston and another 78 (35) gave him split votes; while only 15 (seven) voted flat against him and 78 (36) did not vote. Of Bankes’s 419 supporters in 1822, 231 (55 per cent) stood by him, 86 (21) opposed him and 102 (24) did not vote. Palmerston won the most votes in St. John’s and Trinity, and his lead over Bankes in both (101 and 114 respectively) easily outdid Bankes’s advantage of 93 in the other colleges. Palmerston’s other strongholds were Magdalene, Downing and Jesus. Bankes again did well in Clare, Sidney, Trinity Hall, King’s, Emmanuel and Queens’, and performed better than he did overall in Peterhouse and Caius. Copley was ahead in Peterhouse, Pembroke, Caius, Trinity Hall, Corpus, St. Catharine’s, Jesus, Christ’s and Emmanuel. Six heads of houses cast a vote for Copley, six for Palmerston, eight for Bankes and three for Goulburn: French, Grenville (Magdalene) and Webb (Clare) plumped for Bankes, Wood (St. John’s) for Palmerston and Le Blanc (Trinity Hall) for Copley. Palmerston’s success was ‘looked upon as a great triumph for the Catholics’. Palmerston himself, to whom the outcome was ‘most gratifying and beyond my expectations’, commented:
The number of my majority is most satisfactory, because it makes me feel pretty secure as to the future ... One advantage at Cambridge will be, that party feeling on the Catholic question must abate; for all the Johnians who supported me cannot hold now on this subject the violent language which they formerly did. The Whigs supported me most handsomely, and were indeed my chief and most active friends; and to them and the Johnians I owe my triumph over the No Popery faction behind the government if not in it.
While he admitted that Liverpool had returned a ‘civil answer’, begging him not to do anything rash, to his threat to resign if beaten, he remained sore at his treatment; and, in retrospect, he identified this episode as ‘the first decided step’ towards his breach with the Tories and gravitation to the Whigs.
He made no move when Copley’s appointment as master of the rolls necessitated his re-election (which cost £14 13s.) in December 1826; but he demanded the earliest possible intimation of any intention to elevate Copley to the Lords.
Immediately afterwards Bankes and Jermyn indicated that they intended to stand at the next opportunity, but Palmerston’s anticipated re-election did not take place, as Canning withdrew his offer of the exchequer.
In late May 1829 Tindal was made lord chief justice of common pleas. George Bankes, who had ‘the support of government’, started immediately. He was tentatively challenged by Edward Alderson of Caius, an accomplished scholar and practising barrister, who endorsed `the present measures of ministers’. Scarlett, who now joined the government as attorney-general, later claimed that he had been offered the university seat ‘with all the interest of government’, but that at the behest of the Fitzwilliams he had agreed to remain Member for Peterborough.
On the first day, when Lamb mischievously questioned Goulburn’s right to vote as ‘a collector of taxes’, Cavendish established a lead of nine. Hobhouse, who arranged a pair in London, noted that Bankes’s committee room there was staffed by ‘several gaunt looking parsons’. Cavendish forged steadily ahead in the next three days and ended with a majority of 148 in a poll of 1,072.
A fortnight after the election Sir James Willoughby Gordon*, the quartermaster-general, pressed on Wellington the pretensions of his son, Henry Percy Gordon of Peterhouse, the senior wrangler of 1827, to stand on a future occasion, but no more was heard of him in this period.
Palmerston was appointed foreign secretary in Grey’s ministry, which Cavendish of course supported, and there was no opposition to his re-election in 1830. The reform bill (which, ironically, did not affect the university’s representative system) alarmed many residents. On 21 Mar. 1831, amid allegations of secrecy and opportunism by ‘a poor timid set of monks’, the senate carried by 91-53 a petition to the Commons against the ‘sudden and sweeping changes’ proposed in the bill, particularly the ‘extension of the elective franchise to great numbers of persons of small property’. An original, uncompromising denunciation of the bill was said to have been considerably modified before its submission. In the House, 22 Mar., before the start of the last day’s debate on the second reading of the reform bill, George Bankes and Peel’s younger brother William Yates Peel, a Johnian, sought to embarrass Palmerston and Cavendish. Palmerston was not present, but Cavendish admitted that a petition ‘against certain provisions of the bill was in existence’. Later, speaking enthusiastically for the measure, he acknowledged the hostility of some of his constituents, but suggested that many welcomed the proposed disfranchisement of rotten boroughs. In Cambridge Sedgwick, Whewell, Henslow, Airy and other liberals, scenting a reactionary opposition to the sitting Members if there was a general election, promoted a declaration of support for them, 23 Mar., which was supposedly signed by some of the instigators of the petition. The 36 signatories included the masters of Caius and Corpus (Davy and Lamb) and seven professors.
At the dissolution which followed the bill’s defeat Goulburn and Peel, who were favourites from the outset, duly presented themselves as supporters of ‘a temperate measure of reform’. Gout prevented Peel from participating in the Cambridge canvass, which took place in the last week of April. A planned meeting of bachelors and undergraduates to address the king against the reform bill was quashed by the authorities.
St. John’s gets blacker and blacker ... Some of them mean I hear even to plump for Cavendish rather than vote for me. Trinity however are zealous and cordial. Among the residents, 180 in number, I should be beat. All depends on the country clergy, and how and in what numbers they come up. We all however in my committee talk big and confidently, and say to each other who’s afraid.
The same day Cavendish, who had ‘extreme difficulty’ in finding a chairman for his London committee (Babbage agreed to serve again) feared he had ‘lost a great many votes’ and that ‘if I do get in at all, it will be a very sharp run’, though next day he reported that ‘things [are] going on pretty well, better than could have been expected’.
Of the 1,450 who voted, 783 split for Goulburn and Peel and 595 for Palmerston and Cavendish. Cavendish had 21 plumpers, Peel 13, Goulburn nine and Palmerston eight. Only 21 electors split their votes between pro and anti-reform candidates, and of these ten voted for Goulburn and Cavendish. The total anti-reform vote was 805 (56 per cent) and the total pro-reform vote 624 (43). Fifty-four per cent of the voters belonged to St. John’s or Trinity. The anti-reformers, with Peel six ahead of Goulburn, emphatically won the former by more than two to one (67 to 31 per cent); but Trinity, where Cavendish came out ahead, favoured the reformers by 254-202 (55 to 44 per cent). The only other colleges whose voters were more than averagely favourable to reform were Downing, Magdalene, King’s, Christ’s and Peterhouse, and even in the two last, the anti-reformers were narrowly ahead. The latters’ strongholds other than St. John’s were St. Catharine’s, Queens’, Sidney, Trinity Hall and Emmanuel. Eight heads of houses, including Wordsworth, voted for Goulburn and Peel, five for Palmerston and Cavendish and one, Godfrey of Queens’, split for Goulburn and Cavendish. Of the 462 who had voted for George Bankes in 1829, 289 (63 per cent) voted against reform, 42 (nine per cent) for it, and 128 (28) did not vote. The same proportion (173) of Cavendish’s 610 supporters in 1829 did not vote; but only 53 per cent (325) voted for reform in 1831, while as many as 18 per cent (107) deserted to the anti-reformers. Of those who voted for the anti-reformers, 409 (51 per cent) had not voted at all in 1829; but only 257 (41) of the reform supporters fell into this category. Analyses of the vote in the pro-reform press indicated that professors had favoured Palmerston and Cavendish by 15-6, and classical scholars by 13-6, but that the 25 voting senior wranglers had divided almost evenly.
The trouncing of Palmerston and Cavendish by ‘the bigoted monks and friars of Cambridge’, as Thomas Creevey* put it, was the Grey ministry’s only defeat in a large open constituency at the 1831 general election. The consensus of opinion among supporters of the government was that however galling, it was no surprise. Whishaw commented that ‘it is idle to think of liberal politics in an English university’, and that ‘considering how violent the clergy were against the bill, it is wonderful that our minority is so numerous’.
It is a terrible bore to be so defeated at Cambridge after holding it for 20 years, and having weathered even the Catholic question. But they were frightened at parts of our bill, and the stupid phrase which has been invented against us by our opponents, ‘The bill, the whole bill and nothing but the bill’. The laity, of whom there are great numbers amongst the Masters of Arts, were nearly as bad as the clergy. But it must not be supposed that all those who voted against us are adverse to reform; for a great number declared to me that they were for an efficient and substantial reform, though they could not approve of our arrangements for carrying it into execution. But as the king, they said, had asked their opinion upon the bill, they were bound to give it, by voting against me ... I have little doubt, however, of recovering my seat at the next election when the bill and the panic shall have passed.
Lieven-Grey Corresp. ii. 220; Clark and Hughes, i. 376; Add. 51600.
His confidence was woefully misplaced, as he soon realized in August 1832. Goulburn, who remained Member for life, was joined at the subsequent general election by Manners Sutton, and an attempt to put up a reformer collapsed.
in the doctors and masters of arts
Number of voters: 1450 in 1831
Estimated voters: about 2,000 by 1832