Westminster, the most prestigious borough constituency in the United Kingdom, was, in the words of its most recent historians, ‘the hegemonic centre of political, professional, consumerist and cultural life’.
By the time the death of George III in late January 1820 precipitated a dissolution, Burdett, Hobhouse and the reformers were in an advantageous position. Burdett’s written denunciation of the authorities as ‘bloody Neros’ immediately after the Peterloo massacre enabled him to regain the leadership of metropolitan radicalism, the more so as the government served him with an ex-officio information for seditious libel. Hobhouse had also become a radical martyr, having been committed to Newgate prison in December for a breach of privilege in his pamphlet A Trifling Mistake. The mob orator Henry Hunt*, who, with the rural radical and journalist William Cobbett†, had latterly been denouncing Burdett, Place and the Westminster committee as a self-appointed and dictatorial ‘Rump’, was out of harm’s way in gaol after his arrest at Peterloo. The capture and exposure of the Cato Street conspirators, 23 Feb., a few days before the dissolution, further cowed the extremists. In addition, the outcome of the important Westminster test case of Cullen v. Morris, in which the high bailiff’s arbitrary right to disqualify electors who had not paid their rates was challenged, was in favour of the reformers, and henceforth householder claimants could only be rejected if they had refused to pay.
The reformers considered a plan to organize a triumphant procession from Newgate when Hobhouse was released on the day of dissolution, but this was abandoned. They went ahead with a scheme for a public dinner in his honour, though it was postponed to take place several days after his liberation. Hobhouse suggested naming a dozen advanced Whig or radical Members of Parliament, including Kinnaird, Wilson, Joseph Hume, David Ricardo and the City Members Matthew Wood and Robert Waithman as stewards, thinking that such a move might yet deter Lamb. Place liked the idea in principle, but thought it unlikely that many of those proposed would agree to be named. He assured Hobhouse that he was doing what he could to expedite affairs, but lamented the absence of ‘one man of leisure who will give his mind to the thing with a few others who would occasionally supply small sums of money and who would not opposes and vex him’. He reckoned that neither he nor Brooks was now able to devote all their attention and energies to the management of an election, though in the event he worked himself into the ground. He remained optimistic of success. He was somewhat concerned about how to defray the ‘probable expenses’ of the election, which he estimated at a maximum of £1,670, especially as he and Brooks between them were still liable for about £440 arising out of the 1818 and 1819 elections; and he asked Hobhouse and Burdett for a contribution. Hobhouse guessed that his share would amount to £800, and noted that it was important that the payments should be made ‘without the fact being generally known’: ‘For although these expenses are wholly for legal objects and although it is nothing wrong for the candidates to disburse them, yet as it has been the usage to do otherwise in Westminster, it is for the public good that the transaction should remain a secret’. He asked his father to raise a loan for him, but his father gave him a gift of £500. In the week before his release on 28 Feb., Place oversaw the appointment of a general committee, which included John Richter, drawn from delegates from the parish committees, and the issuing and publication of formal invitations to Burdett and Hobhouse to stand as champions of reform, and their addresses of acceptance. Place now received ‘from every quarter ... the most gratifying intelligence’.
Everything passed off most agreeably. No individual great folks there, but a great many strangers, all most respectable. This dinner gave an auspicious prospect of the event of the ensuing election.
Add. 27843, f. 60; 56541, f. 9; Broughton, ii. 121-2; The Times, 3 Mar.; Morning Post, 3 Mar. 1820.
Next day he found the general committee ‘in great activity, and assisted by more friends than usual’, and during the following days he canvassed in person, chiefly in Pimlico and Chelsea, and visited parish committees in the evenings.
Burdett and Hobhouse shared 4,692 votes (88 and 96 per cent of their respective totals). Lamb’s 3,763 plumpers made up 85 per cent of his total. There were 608 splits (seven per cent of those who voted) for Burdett and Lamb (14 per cent of Lamb’s total). Only 27 of the 9,280 men who voted plumped for Burdett, and 125 for Hobhouse, while 65 split for Lamb and Hobhouse. The voters polled for Burdett, Hobhouse and Lamb in the proportions of 57, 53 and 48 per cent respectively. The only parishes in which Burdett fared worse than average were St. Martin (54 per cent) and, notably, wealthy St. George (37), which was Lamb’s stronghold: he received a vote from 70 per cent of the voters there and 61 per cent of them plumped for him. Lamb also exceeded his average in St. Margaret (50 per cent), but this parish was very closely divided. Burdett and Hobhouse drew their strongest support from St. Anne (81 and 68 per cent respectively), St. Martin (67 and 64), St. Paul (64 and 54) and St. Clement (61 and 58). Lamb received a vote from 65 per cent of those who polled for the more prosperous and fashionable western parishes of St. George, St. James and St. Margaret. The parishes of St. George, St. James, St. Margaret and St. Martin supplied 74 per cent of those who polled.
We lost the Westminster election, certainly with a majority of good votes, and I believe with a majority of all the persons who could pretend to have any votes at all, and we lost it for causes which it was very difficult if not impossible to counteract. In the first place and mainly we lost it for want of personal exertion in canvass, etc. The general election had taken everybody out of town ... Secondly we lost it from the temper and conduct of the high bailiff ... [who] admitted almost everything that was offered for Burdett and Hobhouse ... Thirdly we lost it from the neutrality of the whole government and the absolute hostility of many connected with it ... Fourthly, we lost it from want of money and mismanagement in our committee ... The Whigs were upon the whole cool and seemed anxious to get rid of a business into which they had only been stimulated by irritation and which they found very burdensome.
Panshanger mss F 78.
The postponed chairing of Burdett and Hobhouse took place on 6 Apr., when, in pouring rain, they were accompanied by an elaborate procession of bands, parochial committees and electors along a crowd-lined route from Sloane Street to the Crown and Anchor. At the dinner there, they congratulated the independent electors of Westminster and advocated reform and as the only cure for the country’s problems.
On 5 July 1820 inhabitant householders of St. George petitioned the Commons against the ‘secret combination’ of the New River, Chelsea and Grand Junction Water Companies in establishing a monopoly in the supply of water to the metropolis; and a similar petition was presented from the householders of St. James, 2 Mar. 1821.
Burdett, whose parliamentary attendance in this period was spasmodic, was beyond Place’s control, but he had hopes, which were fairly soon disappointed, of coaching and directing Hobhouse and turning him into an efficient and effective constituency Member. Both Members attended and addressed a Westminster inhabitants’ meeting in Covent Garden which adopted an address of support for Queen Caroline, 4 July 1820; they and the high bailiff, Morris, presented it to her in person on the 6th. Hobhouse alone was present at similar meetings of the ladies of London, Westminster and Southwark, 26 Sept., and parish meetings of St. James and St. Paul, 27 Nov., following the government’s abandonment of her prosecution.
As ... Hobhouse objects to radical reform as a toast, he of course will not make a radical reform speech. If the toast be an insult, so will be the speech ... Oh dear, our Members, our radical reform Members, are to talk poor drivelling party stuff to please the Whigs, while other [radical] Members not our number come to the dinner on purpose to talk ... boldly ... of radical reform, and thus leave our Members, or at least one of them, far behind ... If you permit yourself to be cajoled tomorrow, you will strongly repent it.
In the event, not many Whigs were in the score of Members who attended. Tavistock stayed away, thinking, according to Hobhouse, ‘it better not to appear just now as a partisan of Burdett’. No toast to ‘radical reform’ was proposed, but several were to the visiting Members and the reformers of their respective areas of influence. To Hobhouse’s ‘surprise’, the Whig Lord Ebrington*, son of Earl Fortescue, gave his health and ‘prefaced it with a handsome encomium, owning he had opposed me in Westminster, had been in error and would never be in error again and trusted Westminster would never be divided again’. Hobhouse replied in equally conciliatory terms, and surmised privately that ‘this meeting will prevent a Whig candidate except under circumstances not now to be foreseen’ and might ‘also assist Tavistock’s project’ for Burdett. This, however, ended in smoke a week later.
After the 1820 success Place had told Hobhouse that he would ‘never again conduct a Westminster election, nor go out of my own house to assist [in] one’, but he took on the task of trying to settle outstanding debts incurred since then. The attorney Richard Hayward had not been paid for his work in the Cullen v. Morris case, but in 1822 had settled with Hobhouse for a sum of £320 to cover his expenses. After his death in 1824 Place, as one of his co-trustees, had obtained from Hobhouse a sum of £200. In late 1825 Place pursued Kinnaird and Robert Knight* for sums of £50 and £100 promised respectively at the 1820 election, but apparently without success. In the second week of April 1826 he submitted the problem to Burdett and Hobhouse, explaining that all hopes of raising the money by voluntary subscription were now dead, and seeking £96 to settle the 1820 account.
unless you both reply ... and say that referring the business to the electors in their respective parishes is the right way, meetings in the parishes may not be held, for what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and when no particular cause for excitement exists, people are apt to be torpid and this may give encouragement to them and others to produce a crisis.
Hobhouse went to Burdett and composed ‘an address to De Vear and his committee which said that we waited for the expression of the sentiments of Westminster in the parishes, and concluding with a sort of recommendation to reformers not to revive old stories against the Whigs’. Burdett approved, while Kinnaird, to whom Hobhouse showed it, ‘thought no notice need be taken of the resolution’ about the ‘two factions’. Hobhouse then went to Place, who ‘approved the first part of the letter, but decisively condemned the latter sentence, saying that if it stood thus all our reformers would turn on us’. He failed to persuade Place to accompany him to Burdett’s to ‘debate the point’. Hobhouse went alone, and he and Burdett agreed to omit the ‘recommendation’ but ‘still to refer to the electors at large, so as not to commit ourselves with the small meeting at the Crown and Anchor’. He took the new version to Place, who ‘said it would do very well’, and thence to De Vear, who ‘liked the thing’. Thus it was ‘finally determined that we should be satisfied with this line of conduct’. Hobhouse blamed the ‘whole difficulty’ on Kinnaird’s ‘imprudence in not keeping the meeting private as it was intended to be’. At Brooks’s later that day he ‘found my Whig friends had not started at the resolutions’: ‘so far, so good, no thanks, however, to our impracticable friends’. Place’s interpretation of the exchanges of 2 June showed his disillusionment with Burdett and Hobhouse, especially the latter. He recorded that he had called, ‘still greatly agitated’ and ‘dwelt upon the attack on, he called it upon his friends, and said that Burdett complained that he was placed in an awkward situation with the Whigs, whom he had praised, as he should be accused of using one kind of conduct to their faces and another behind their backs’. Place considered their proposed reply to De Vear as ‘absurd in the extreme’, for neither of them appeared to understand that a disclaimer of hostility to the Whigs was ‘not only unnecessary but that it was a declaration that the Whigs were his friends and that the reformers were not’; that ‘the reply if sent would cause every man of them to retire and that it would prevent any parish meetings being held; that in fact it was putting an end to the interference of the electors and inviting a contest’. Eventually, according to Place, Hobhouse got the message, and agreed to omit the reference to the ‘factions’ remark. Reflecting on this episode, Place wrote privately that Burdett and Hobhouse were ‘little if any better than mere drawling Whigs, but the influence of the people in their own affairs was assisted and maintained in 1820, and the fear of the reformers still remains’. He admitted that their ‘leaning ... towards the Whigs’ and ‘their inefficiency in Parliament’ had motivated him to include the reference to ‘factions’ in the resolutions. He considered Hobhouse and Burdett’s revised reply to De Vear ‘a poor spiritless performance’, but let it pass, and it was duly published in the press. Late on 2 June De Vear and Jackson got Place to draw up an advertisement for subscriptions; and when they confessed that ‘they had neither hired a room nor engaged a clerk, nor had anyone joined them’, he advised them to act immediately. He gave instructions to the hired clerk next day, when he reassured a ‘somewhat disconcerted’ Burdett, who lamented that ‘all those who used to be active, all the intelligent men, had either left Westminster or were dead’. Place supervised from home further essential arrangements on 4 and 5 June, with the election scheduled for the 9th.
Inhabitants of London and Westminster and women’s shoemakers petitioned both Houses for repeal of the corn laws in 1827.
In late April 1827 Pitt tried to get up a meeting (in Westminster Hall) to address the king on the change of ministry, but the high bailiff refused permission. On 14 May Pitt and his cronies went ahead in Covent Garden, but as soon as their hustings had been erected a large body of constables took them down. Pitt went to nearby Bow Street magistrates’ court to seek permission for the meeting, but the presiding justice ruled against him. Meanwhile a large crowd had congregated in Covent Garden, where they amused themselves by throwing refuse and cabbage stalks. A little later appeared Hunt and Cobbett, but in front of St. Paul’s church they fell foul of the high constable, who had Hunt arrested and dragged away. After much confusion, Hunt’s ‘blacking wagon’ was parked in Wellington Street, where a meeting of sorts took place. A motion of censure (later embodied in a petition) against the high bailiff was carried, and an address adopted which expressed regret at the king’s appointment to power of Canning, the avowed enemy of reform, of whose administration Burdett had declared his support in the House. Place noted that of the principals, only the ‘crazy’ Pitt and Dr. Andrew Tucker were electors of Westminster. Pitt was subsequently found guilty of assault and fined.
Their support for the sale of beer and anatomy bills and Hobhouse’s misunderstood attempts to promote vestry reform were unpopular with some of their constituents, and there were rumours of opposition at the 1830 general election. Hobhouse removed one potential challenger, Hume, by promoting his successful candidature for Middlesex.
The crowd [was] not great, but the attendance of our friends at the Grand Hotel [was] very full. I hardly missed a man of the old or young Westminster reformers except one or two politicians who have left us on account of our votes for the beer bill ... Of old Cobbett there was no appearance, but we were told that a great many opponents were in the crowd ready to assail us ... So soon as we were on the scaffolding we found that the publicans had been on the alert, for our reception was anything but flattering, at least for us who had been so long accustomed to unanimous applause. There were two or three little knots of malcontents yelling and making faces and occasionally flinging a cabbage which, however, seemed done more in sport than malice ... Burdett was shortly proposed [by Messrs. Lindon and Purse] amidst much confusion, as also was myself by De Vear and another householder [Roberts]. Then Burdett spoke, and certainly was not well received, and not at all heard. Nevertheless the great majority, I think, were for him, and the account in the Courier and other hostile papers as to the confusion and cabbage pelting was very much exaggerated. When I addressed the assembly there was very little if any disturbance, and it is true that the opposition was chiefly directed against my colleague for several reasons besides the vote for the beer bill. As an instance, however, of the folly of these poor fellows, some of them cried out against us for supporting Warburton’s anatomy bill, and some addressed me with ‘No select vestries!!’ ... When I had done speaking the high bailiff read our names to the people, and as no one else was proposed, declared us duly elected. We then withdrew into the church to witness the signing of the return. Some proposed that we should retire by a back way, but I dissented from this and walked to our hotel, amidst the same partial applause as before ... Burdett made light of all this. So did our friends, who said that all had gone off very well. I can’t say I thought so. A good deal of the disturbance was doubtless to be attributed to the disappointment at not raising an opposition, but we cannot in the common sense of the word be called the popular Members for Westminster, and we shall hear of these cabbages in Parliament, that’s certain, and shall never have another unopposed election, that’s equally certain.
According to The Times, Burdett asserted that ‘the cause of reform appeared to be making great strides’, took Brougham to task for telling the electors of Yorkshire that holding that seat would expose him to ‘much more labour, care and exertion’ than the nomination borough one he might have had and expressed his support for Hume’s Middlesex candidature. Hobhouse proclaimed that ‘the beacons of ... liberty were to be seen blazing in every part of this land, and ... to him it appeared impossible they should ever be extinguished’.
A few Dissenters’ petitions for the abolition of slavery were sent to the 1830 Parliament.
went in procession, attended by all the ... parishes, with banners, etc., and the high constable from Burdett’s house to Covent Garden. We were in an open barouche. All others on foot. A great crowd attending. Our reception very pleasing. Covent Garden absolutely covered with spectators. At one o’clock we ascended the hustings amidst thunders of applause. The rumours of opposition turned out unfounded, indeed no opposition would have been safe. We were chosen and returned thanks. The rain fell in torrents, and whilst I was speaking was so violent as absolutely to drown my periods, but the utmost good humour prevailed throughout the vast assemblage ... Burdett and I retired through the church and returned home in a hackney coach quietly.
Add. 56555, f. 133; Broughton, iv. 109; The Times, 3 May 1831.
The anniversary dinner, 23 May 1831, when there were, Hobhouse thought, ‘about 300 guests’, was carried off ‘with a spirit and effect to be expected from the prospect of an immediate triumph for the cause of which ... Burdett and the Westminster reformers had been the principal, and, for a time, were the only promoters’. At the end of the evening Burdett gave the health of the veteran reformer Thomas Hardy, who ‘expressed, as well he might, his amazement at living to see the king and his ministers propose to do that, for attempting which he had been tried for his life’.
The Waterloo Bridge New Street bill was reintroduced on 23 June and received royal assent on 27 Sept. 1831.
On 31 Jan. 1832 Hobhouse was offered the vacant war secretaryship. He was inclined to accept, but asked for a short time to consider, not least on account of the possible reaction of his leading supporters in Westminster. Grey informed the king that day that Hobhouse probably feared ‘the chance of an opposition’ from ‘Place and the violent party, who are very angry with him for having refused to belong to the [National] Union’. De Vear and Place, whom he saw later on the 31st, had no objections: the former was keen, while the latter ‘hesitated’ at first, but concluded that it was a matter ‘for personal consideration’ and that Hobhouse would be justified in accepting if, as he claimed, he had received assurances that the ministry would carry reform. He decided to accept, and on 1 Feb. told his wife that if there was ‘an attempt at an opposition ... we shall give the rogues a sound beating’. A meeting of electors to issue a formal endorsement of his decision and inviting him to stand for re-election was arranged for that evening, and on 2 Feb. De Vear brought him this resolution. He drafted a formal reply, but before giving it to De Vear submitted it to Althorp, who advised him to strike out a reference to the government’s being ‘able’ to secure reform; this he did. His re-election on 8 Feb 1832, when he was proposed by De Vear, seconded by Pouncey the stationer, of Long Acre, and supported by Burdett, Ebrington, Hume and a few other Members, passed off with ‘very little excitement’. He promised to support his new colleagues as long as they promoted an undiluted reform scheme. Burdett described his appointment and re-election as ‘one grand step towards the success of the reform bill and the final extinction of the boroughmongers’ and was ‘much cheered’. Hobhouse recorded that during his speech ‘one man called out "select vestry"’, and that after the dignitaries had retired into the church an individual mounted the hustings and ‘abused us all amidst hissings and groanings’.
The Boundary Act ratified the inclusion in Westminster of the Duchy liberty.
in inhabitants paying scot and lot
See J. M. Main, ‘Radical Westminster, 1807-1820’, Hist. Stud. xii (1965-7), 186-204; W. Thomas, The Philosphic Radicals, 46-94; C. Harvey, E. M. Green and P. J. Corfield, The Westminster Historical Database and its associated CD-Roms; E. M. Green, ‘Social Structure and Political Allegiance in Westminster, 1774-1820’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1992).
Number of voters: 9280 in 1820
Estimated voters: about 13,000
Population: 182796 (1821); 202460 (1831)