The Fabric of the HouseIn addition to the works cited in the footnotes, this chapter draws on C. Wilkinson, 'The Practice and Procedure of the House of Commons c.1784-1832' (Aberystwyth Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998).

The House of Commons destroyed by fire, 16 Oct. 1834, was a four-storey building, situated close to the House of Lords, among the rambling assortment of offices, law courts, kitchens, printer’s shops, store rooms, official residences, inns and general housing that comprised the Palace of Westminster. H.M. Colvin, History of the King’s Works: vi. 1782-1851 (1973), pp. 525-32; O. C. Williams, Lamb’s Friend the Census Taker: Life and Letters of John Rickman (1911), pp. 123-6. The ground floor, a vaulted stone crypt and sometime dining room, supported a complex network of chambers, staircases and galleries on three upper floors constructed almost entirely of timber and plaster, that made them, as the architect Sir John Soane cautioned in 1828, a clear fire hazard. Sir J. Soane, Designs for Public Buildings (1828). Access to the building was by a great wooden door in Parliament Street, from which, past the doorkeeper and various cloakrooms, a stone staircase led up to the Members’ lobby on the first floor. Beyond it was a two-storey debating chamber, some 15 metres by ten in area and ten metres high, created from the old St. Stephen’s chapel, remodelled in 1707 by Sir Christopher Wren. To enter the chamber, Members had to pass the bar of the House. The focal point of the chamber was the Speaker’s chair on its dais and the raised leather-clad cross-benches to either side of it. In front of the Speaker and central to the chamber was a large table, where the mace was placed when the House was in session and two clerks sat recording proceedings. Like the Speaker, they wore black swallow-tailed coats, white shirts, breeches and stock and had their hair in piglets or covered by a wig. Galleries were fixed to three walls. The gallery opposite the Speaker was for strangers, who were admitted by order of a Member or on payment of a fee to the doorkeeper. There were places for 120, but at least 40 back row seats were hired by newspaper proprietors at three guineas a session and reserved for reporters, who took notes. The reporters had their own door to the gallery and access to a small rest room nearby. The galleries on either side of the House were for Members, although it was generally understood that those sitting there did not intend participating in debate. Additional doors and stairways had been added to the galleries in 1818 to speed up Members’ exit for divisions. Those due to or hoping to speak or present petitions sat on the benches below, within eye-range of the Speaker, government supporters to his right and opposition to his left. Visiting dignitaries sometimes sat in what were regarded as the more ‘neutral’ areas under the strangers’ gallery, to the left and right of the bar. Even so, and allowing little movement, there was seating for no more than 348 of the 658 Members. J. Grant, Random Recollections of the House of Commons From the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835 (1837), p. 4; Colvin, 530; C. Wilkinson, ‘Politics and Topography of the Old House of Commons, 1783-1834’, PH, xxi (2002), pp. 141-52; NLW, Ormathwaite mss FG1/5, p. 120; Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/RO/1/129, parliamentary diary of Henry Grey Bennet, 9 May 1821; PP (1833), xii. 283, 288-9. Despite the installation in 1819 of a new heating and ventilation system, conditions in the chamber remained grim. The reporter James Grant recalled:

When an important debate occurred, but especially when that debate was preceded by a call of the House [to maximize attendance] the Members were really to be pitied. They were literally crammed together, and the heat of the House rendered it in some degree a second edition of the black hole of Calcutta … Many, not being able to get even standing room, were obliged to lounge in the refreshment apartments adjoining St. Stephen’s until the division, when they rushed to the voting room in as much haste as if the place they had quitted had been on fire. Grant, 2.

Places were customarily left for members of the government and opposition front benches and a handful of distinguished Members. Otherwise, attendance at prayers was the only permitted means of reserving a seat, although the practice of pinning names onto the benches to indicate an intention to be present at prayers was tolerated. T. Erskine May, Treatise Upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament (1844), pp. 146-7; Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), iv. 648-50. At the opening of a new Parliament, the Members for the City of London were also permitted to sit on the treasury or privy councillors’ bench. Some coveted particular locations in the chamber: Joseph Hume became ‘an animated fixture’ near a post by the gallery, and Sir John Benn Walsh initially chose his father’s old seat ‘on the left hand in entering under the gallery’. Others, arriving later, relied on friends and partisans making way for them, as Lord Grey’s heir Lord Howick did for the debate on Catholic emancipation, 5 Mar. 1829. Grant, 6; Ormathwaite mss FG1/5, p. 120; Grey mss GRE/C2/4-5, Howick jnl. 5 Feb. 1829. Members might secure admission for and sit with their male guests in the strangers’ gallery or behind the bar on the ‘neutral’ benches. Thus George Anson was able to consult and secure immediate approval for his stance on shipping from the mayor of Great Yarmouth, 7 May 1827. Nottingham Univ. Lib. Denison diary, 7 May [1827]. A snap division (which required strangers to be cleared from the gallery) could wreck such hospitality, so to reserve good gallery seats vacated by his brother and a leading constituent during the division on 11 June 1824, the Shrewsbury Member Panton Corbett and his colleague Sir Edward Owen occupied them themselves. Salop Archives, Longnor mss, Plymley diary 1066/133 [14], 20 June 1824. Women (up to 14 at a time) were only permitted to view proceedings by looking down from the attic space above the chamber, ‘seeing nothing and hearing imperfectly through the holes of the ceiling ventilators’. The Times, 14 Feb. 1829. Maria Edgeworth, a guest of Samuel Charles Whitbread and his mother, described the scene there in 1822:

Below kitcats of Gothic chapel windows stopped up appear on each side above the floor: above roof-beams. One lantern with one farthing candle, in a tin candlestick, all the light. In the middle of the garrett is what seemed like a sentry box of deal boards and old chairs placed around it: on these we got and stood and peeped over the top of the boards. Saw the large chandelier with lights blazing, immediately below: a grating of iron across veiled the light so that we could look down and beyond it: we saw half the table with the mace lying on it and papers, and by peeping hard two figures of clerks at the further end, but no eye could see the Speaker or his chair—only his feet; his voice and terrible ‘ORDER’ was soon heard. We could see part of the treasury bench and opposition in their places,—the tops of their heads, profiles and gestures perfectly. J.C. Hare, Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (1894), ii. 66-67.

Beyond the chamber, accommodation in the committee rooms upstairs and in the Members’ library, created from one of them in 1818, was similarly inadequate. PP (1825), v. 7 and app. 2; (1826), iii. 45; (1833), xii. 487-573. A select committee in 1825 reported an incident when four public and 30 private bill committees had been scheduled to meet on a single day—19 of them in a single room. Only five rooms, of a possible 11, were fit for use. The report added that it had become a habit to use the long gallery, where Members were customarily sworn in, the smoking room, the Members’ waiting room and the chamber itself for committee purposes. It recommended adding ten new rooms to cope with the expansion in business, especially in private bill legislation. Ibid. (1825), v. 7. Although by 1832 21 committee rooms were listed, six of them had already been taken over for other purposes, another was inadequately lit, and one had been demolished. Meanwhile, the new library erected in 1827 was unsustainably small, at 18 metres by eight, and awkwardly placed because the clerk of the House John Henry Ley had refused to give up part of his residence to accommodate Soane’s grander designs. It could not, as had been envisaged, hold the resources necessary to satisfy Members’ requests for returns, accounts and other information. Ibid. (1826), iii. 45; (1830), iv. 35-43; (1831-2), v. 245-53; (1833), xii. 491.

Several well-known architects and a select committee chaired in 1831 by Frederick Trench reassessed the accommodation problems and reported that the House had ceased to be viable in its current state. However, faced with a combination of nostalgia, inertia, fears of spending and a lack of consensus for change, they issued only resolutions of future intent. Ibid. (1833), xii. 465-86. Architects experimented with various plans, including proposals for a circular or octagonal debating chamber; and after discussing the subject in March 1833 the Commons committed itself to further investigation. Fears voiced by the Whig Philip Henry Howard that the acoustic advantages of the old House would be lost gained sway; and the Tory Sir Robert Inglis, who had chaired the 1832 select committee on the library, struck a common chord when he stated that change was unnecessary:

He did not mean … to say, that there was sufficient accommodation for full Houses … but these only occurred two or three times in the course of a session … For the remainder of the year’s business this House was better adapted than any building he knew. There were most important matters discussed when only 150 or 200 Members were present, and this number the House could accommodate excellently. Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), xvi. 375.

Thirty-three experienced pre-1832 Members were appointed to the 1833 select committee and two more were called as witnesses. One of them, the Tory John Wilson Croker, promoted a scheme for a new House at St. James’s Palace, near the gentlemen’s clubs. He complained that at Westminster

there is no proper access for Members, although we have had the misfortune to see the prime minister [Spencer Perceval] … murdered in the lobby, and on several occasions, Members have been personally insulted in going to the House. A Member who does his duty in Parliament is sometimes liable to offend individuals. He must pass every day of his life up a series of dark tortuous passages, where any individual who wishes to insult him may have the certain and easy opportunity for doing so. I therefore think that whatever you may do with the House of Commons itself, it would not be fit to leave the present approaches and adjacent buildings in the state in which they are. In short, though the present House may be inadequate to the due accommodation of Members, it will hardly be denied that it is the least objectionable part of the whole vicinity. PP (1833), xii. 545.

He added that wherever the House was located, the days when Members ‘came and sat a few hours in their seats, heard the debate, voted and went away in reasonable time’ had passed:

Now a Member … who attends his duty closely spends 12 hours a day in the House, to say nothing of committees. It therefore becomes important that he should have the convenience of this library and a room above stairs for the same purposes as that which is now called the smoking room, where they can write by day and occasionally retire in the evening and which ought to communicate immediately with the lobby: And perhaps over that would be the best place for the refreshment rooms, which are now at an inconvenient distance. Ibid. 550.

Members who wanted the existing House extended and refurbished could not agree whether the library and clerk’s house should be demolished to accommodate this. It remained a contentious issue until the fire decided matters. Ibid. 465-485; 486-599. Croker and Rigby Wason testified in 1833. The Members appointed to the 1833 select committee are named on p. 488.

 

The Officers of the House

The principal officer was the House’s elected chairman, the Speaker. Thomas Erskine May, later the clerk of the House, wrote in 1844 that

the duties of the Speaker of the House of Commons are as various as they are important. He presides over the deliberations of the House and enforces the observance of all rules for preserving order in its proceedings; he puts all questions … declares the determination of the House …. [and] issues warrants … When he enters or leaves the House, the mace is borne before him by the serjeant-at-arms; when he is in the chair, it is laid upon the table; and … [it] accompanies him upon all state occasions.  Erskine May, 154.

The Speaker’s official residence in Palace Yard had been provided with a state dining room and private access to the House. With his accommodation, he received an annual salary of £6,000 a year and up to £2,400 per Parliament in plate and emoluments. PP (1833), xii. 181-2, 382-3. Long sessions and sittings made the post a physically taxing one, for in addition to maintaining order in the chamber, ruling on procedures and guarding privileges, the Speaker was the general trouble-shooter of the House, responsible for judging and responding to the mood of its Members, some of whom he entertained at lavish weekly dinners.

The post was held from 1817 until the dissolution of 1834 by one of the Members for Scarborough, Charles Manners Sutton. The contenders, should he vacate, were James Abercromby, Henry Goulburn, Edward John Littleton and Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, for whom Manners Sutton refused to make way in 1822 by going to India as governor-general. Manners Sutton himself briefly jeopardized his position that year by considering standing at the Cambridge University by-election, and he thought about taking ministerial office (perhaps the premiership) in the duke of Wellington’s aborted May 1832 reform ministry; but these incidents detracted little from his efforts to improve the private bill office, cleanse committees of nepotism and ensure that each new intake of Members adhered to the conventions of the House; his reprimands and interventions in debate were most frequent at the start of each Parliament. The Speaker’s department was small and personal, for it consisted only of the Speaker, his secretary Edward Phillips and his chaplain. See Williams, Rickman Letters, 77-79

Subordinate to the Speaker were the departments of the serjeant-at-arms, Henry Seymour (a crown servant on permanent secondment to the Commons since 1812), and of the clerk of the House. In 1820 the latter was John Hatsell, the author of four volumes on Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons. He died in October that year, and was succeeded by John Henry Ley (d. 1850). PP (1821), iv. 45; (1833), xii. 193. Erskine May wrote in 1844:

The clerk of the House is appointed by the crown for life, by letters patent. The clerk assistants are appointed by him and sit at the table of the House at his right hand … [The clerk] is sworn ‘to make true entries, remembrances, and journals of the things done and passed in the House of Commons’; he signs all orders of the House, endorses the bills, and reads whatever is required to be read in the House. He is also responsible for the due conduct of all matters connected with the business of the House, in several official departments under his control. Erskine May, 157. See also 136, 139, 149, 154.

Under an Act of 1812, he received £3,500 annually and the use of an official residence for his labours. He was responsible for the papers and accounts presented to the House and those already tabled. He was assisted in the chamber by the two other clerks at the table (from 1820 the clerk assistant John Rickman and the second clerk William Ley). The clerk assistant, and not the clerk, officiated in committees of the whole House. O.C. Williams, Clerical Organisation of the House of Commons (1954), pp. 122-4. The clerk of the House oversaw the fees office, the committee office, the committee of privileges, the ingrossing office, the private bill office, the provision of clerical services for election committees and the production of each session’s Journal and printed papers. Each subordinate department had its own principal and personnel—a staff of 36 clerks with combined earnings in 1832 of almost £27,600, excluding the librarian, the short-hand writers responsible for recording election and select committee proceedings, and several printers contracted to record and publicize the House’s work. Ibid. app. X; PP (1821), iv. 56.

The lesser clerks boosted their earnings through fees and gratuities, and by acting in a private capacity as parliamentary agents, although clerks in the private bill office, established in 1811, were specifically barred from undertaking outside work. See also on this point, D.L. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents: A History (1979), pp. 44-46, 78. The ingrossing office clerk Sir Edward Stracey was a sinecurist. His appointment predated that of John Henry Ley, who criticized his position before the select committee on the establishment of the House in 1833. Ley, however, defended the customary practice of reserving the four principal committee clerkships (those of the ‘clerks without doors’) requiring minimal attendance, for old clerks, in lieu of retirement allowances. Asked why there were eight acting clerks and to comment on their agency work, he replied:

I say they ought not to act as party agents in any contested business, and mix themselves up in contests: certainly not when they attend as committee clerks; that is forbidden. I think they have enough to do without private business; but I do not see any objection to each of them having four or five private bills under their superintendence, if they do not neglect their other duties.  PP (1831-2), xxxvi. 391-403; (1833), xii. 158-9, 195-207; Williams, Clerical Organization, app. X. The ‘old’ clerks were Stracey, John and Arthur Benson, John Dorrington, George Whittam, who retired as clerk of the journals in 1827, Samuel Gunnell, the former parliamentary agent to the Irish office, and, from 1831, William Grant Rose. Their posts were abolished in 1835, on the recommendation of the 1833 committee.

The 1833 committee focussed on reducing salaries, emoluments, general administrative costs, sinecures and jobbing, although its recommendations were only very partially carried into effect. Ibid. (1833), xii. 179-465; Williams, Clerical Organisation, 240-57.

The number of documents ordered to be printed by the Commons rose precipitately. From 1810 the practices of the Commons’ printers, and the cost and quality of their work, were reviewed regularly at the behest of cost-cutting radicals and others who wanted to make the stationery office responsible for all printing. Since 1791 Hansard’s, which in 1828 passed from Luke Hansard to his sons, had undertaken most Commons business, printing bills, parliamentary papers and the Journal on presses and lettersets specially adapted for this work. The Votes, a summary of the day’s proceedings drafted each evening by the journal office was, however, sent to John Bellamy Nichols to be printed overnight, with the order paper and bills, papers and petitions, ready for distribution to Members next morning. Both firms regularly revised their production methods to boost efficiency; nevertheless, Hume led a campaign against their position. The Hansards, especially, had to justify their production methods and costs before select committees on printing and stationery (1822, 1828, 1833), committee rooms (1825), the library (1825, 1830), printers’ patents (1831-2), public petitioning (1832) and the establishment of the House (1833). PP (1822), iv; (1825), v.; (1828), iv; (1831-2), xviii and app. A; Luke Graves Hansard: His Diary, 1814-1841 ed. P. and G. Ford (1962), introduction, 90-103, and app. II. Hume’s ally, Henry Constantine Jennings, had published Abuses in Public Printing targeting the Hansards and calling for a national department of printing. Commenting in his diary on the activities of Hume, whose radical allies met daily at the Charing Cross tailor Francis Place’s premises to scrutinize the numerous returns he ordered for evidence of wrongdoing and overspending, Luke Graves Hansard observed, 29 June 1821:

Hume attacked the making out of and copying the Journals, calling it an useless expense. The Speaker gave a good explanation; and the chancellor of the exchequer said the business could not be in a better department, and although [the attack] was coupled with the early printing, it was understood to apply to us. This attack has set all the officers of the House against him; and Mr. Rickman expresses a strong hope that we may be able to prosecute Jennings and his myrmidon for conspiracy, in which plan he is well disposed to assist. Hansard Diary, 22. Until 1835 two vellum handwritten copies of the Journals were copied from the printed ones.

The Hansards lobbied behind the scenes throughout and the committee rallied behind the current printers, doing so again in 1825 and 1828. Ibid. 24-37. But by 1831 Luke Hansard feared that his firm might become a casualty of reform. Hume was using the newspaper John Bull to undermine it and ensured that it was reinvestigated by a select committee, as holders of a king’s patent. The committee demanded all of its account books, which Hansard, unlike Nichols, refused on commercial grounds. Rickman and the Speaker came to their defence on that occasion and again in 1833, when Parliament’s demand for printing appeared to be robust enough to offer employment to competitors without reducing current contracts. Ibid. 65-90. Nevertheless, Luke Hansard, hit by the ending of Members’ entitlement to complete sets of the Journal, expected worse to come: on 1 Aug. 1833 he complained in his diary that although

the resolutions of the committee on H.C. officers [fees] take no other notice of the printing, than by referring to and approving of [the stationery office clerk John] Church’s plan for compressed printing … those of the document committee make ample amends. They place the whole printing under the superintendence of the stationery office! And propose that the reports should be done in 8v. size! The effects of these will be to us most terrible! It would seem as if these plans were contrived to effect our ruin by indirect though certain means. Hansard Diary, 106.

The serjeant-at-arms was responsible for security and maintaining order in the House, and was also its housekeeper. He had to be in the House at all times during its sitting and was responsible with his subordinates, the doorkeepers, messengers, watchmen, porters and walkmen, for ensuring that strangers were cleared from the chamber, lobby and galleries for all divisions. He arranged the delivery of the daily Vote bundle to each Member, supplied them with copies of Acts (almost) on demand and was the sole official vendor of parliamentary papers. He transferred documents between the House and courts of law during proceedings concerning Grampound, Limerick, Liverpool, Penryn and East Retford. He was instrumental, with the Speaker’s secretary, in ensuring the attendance of witnesses for examination by select committees and election committees, and he arrested defaulters. Acting on the Speaker’s warrants, he detained Members and strangers in breach of the House’s rules and transferred offenders to Newgate prison or the Tower as required. These cases included the post-Peterloo imprisonment of Sir Francis Burdett and John Cam Hobhouse in 1820, the prosecution that year of the bankrupt Christopher Burton, and the arrest in May 1821 of the printers of John Bull, found guilty of libelling Grey Bennet. The serjeant detained Robert Gourlay, who assaulted Henry Brougham in the lobby in 1824 and was deemed insane, and also the Hansards’ adversary Jennings, who in 1827 wrote three letters to Robert Peel threatening to contradict his speeches from the gallery. In 1830 and 1831 William Clifford and Jacob Alexander were arrested and fined for shouting from the gallery. The serjeant’s officers failed to track down the ruined banker and Member for Leominster Rowland Stephenson in January 1829 before he fled to the United States for life. Within the chamber, the serjeant was summoned if a fight broke out or a duel was threatened. He took both Brougham and George Canning into custody on 17 Apr. 1823 to ‘cool off’ for this reason, while the Speaker and their friends concocted a compromise. Members were liable to arrest as a matter of course for failing to attend a call of the House. Strangers wandering about in the House were frequently seized and brought to the bar to be reprimanded.

Seymour received an annual salary of £2,500 and a £500 accommodation allowance for his pains. The deputy housekeeper John Bellamy, the catering manager of the House, who also had responsibility for certain porters, firelighters and the maintenance of the ventilator, was paid an £800 salary and £200 towards his accommodation. Other staff did well out of small fees and gratuities. According to Charles Wynne Griffith Wynne’s record of his parliamentary outgoings from 1830-2, at the start of each session he ‘paid, £2 2s. 6s. to the vote office; £2 2s. [to the] messengers; £1 1s. [to the] lower door [keepers]; £1 1s. [to use] the Members’ room; 5s. [to the] porter and £2 2s. [to the] door keeper, Total £9 3s. 6d.’, thereafter £4 9s. monthly to the ‘messengers, doorkeepers, waiting room, etc. House of Commons’. NLW, Voelas and Cefnamlwch mss, Voelas D20, D21. The 1833 Committee exposed and criticized the nepotism and petty extortions rampant within the serjeant’s department. To combat it, they suggested paying salaries to the doorkeepers, waiting room attendants and porters. PP (1833), xii. 179-416; CJ, lxxv. 384; lxxvi. 335; lxxix. 483; lxxxii. 327, 351, 395, 399, 473, 561, 582; lxxiii. 122; lxxxv. 461, 465; lxxxvi. 323; Grant, 54.

 

The Opening of the Session and the Address

When they first assembled after a general election, Members took their oaths before the lord steward and were summoned to the Lords by Black Rod for the official opening ceremony, whence they returned to the Commons to elect the Speaker, who gave a short speech before his proposers conducted him to the chair. According to one source, Manners Sutton delivered his 1830 speech with a

laboured solemnity … and a sort of theatrical chopping of the voice in parts, which seemed intended to mark feeling. His language was good and free from hesitation; but these peculiarities gave him a sort of John Kemble air, something constrained and artificial, not quite in accordance with natural dignity.

The leader of the House thanked the Speaker and proposed an adjournment until the address from the throne was to be read, and an opposition spokesman seconded. During the intervening days, more Members took their oaths, this time before the Speaker, while party strength was gauged and tactics discussed at pre-session dinners, levées and meetings. Ormathwaite mss FG1/5, pp. 120-2; NLW, Coedymaen mss, bdle. 29, Williams Wynn to Phillimore, 25 March 1820; Brougham mss, Ellice to Brougham, 17 May 1831. Circulars and summonses from the leader of the House, three or four party leaders, patrons and whippers-in were also despatched—mostly under Members’ franks from the Commons post office. Leaders of the House in this period are listed in Appendix III. The chief whips were the non-financial (patronage) secretaries to the treasury: Charles Arbuthnot, until Feb. 1823; Stephen Rumbold Lushington, Feb. 1823-Apr. 1827; Joseph Planta, Apr. 1827-Nov. 1830; Edward Ellice, Nov. 1830-Aug. 1832; and Charles Wood, Aug. 1832-Dec. 1834. John Herries, George Dawson and Lord Lowther assisted the Tory whipper-in William Holmes. Lord Duncannon assisted with the management of the Whigs throughout. Sir James Robert George Graham did so, 1830-32.

A few days later, Black Rod would summon the House to the Lords for the king’s speech. Later the same day the House would agree a set of sessional orders, among them the deadlines a fortnight or so into the session (subject to later adjustment) for the presentation of election petitions and petitions for private bills. General Index to the Journals of the House of Commons, 1820-1837, p. 294. Each session would normally begin in early February, and break for a fortnight’s Easter holiday and a week at Whitsun. Ibid. 582. Pre-Christmas sessions in 1826, 1830 and 1831 made substantial differences to scheduling. CJ, lxxxii. 121; lxxxvi. 205; lxxxvii. 33.

The address in reply to the king’s speech was the first main item of business each session. The king’s speech surveyed the current international and national situation and outlined the issues and legislative business which the government proposed to attend to that session. General Index to the Journals of the House of Commons, 1820-1837, p. 199; CJ, lxxv. 111, 119; lxxvi. 6-8. Parl. Deb. (ser. 2), viii. 37-44, 87; x. 4-53; xvi. 26-31; xviii. 35-67; xx. 47-58; xxii, 59-69, 120-3; (ser. 3), i. 55-127; iv. 169, 185; ix. 37-46. The cabinet would select and school two of their supporters who would commend it to the Commons, and move a motion that an address be presented in response and outlining its content. Once the motion was agreed, the House would appoint a committee to draft a reply. Critical speeches and suggestions for amendment were common. Moving or seconding the address was a trial of an individual Member’s oratory that also signalled his family or patron’s allegiance to government. This enhanced its significance. The movers and seconders were: 1820, Sir Edward Knatchbull and Robert John Wilmot (Horton); 1821, George Bankes and James Browne; 1822, Robert Henry Clive and William Duncombe; 1823, William Lacon Childe and James Beckford Wildman; 1824, Rowland Hill and James Daly; 1825, Lord Francis Leveson Gower and Alderman William Thompson; 1826, John Stuart Wortley and Thomas Greene; 1826-7, Henry Thomas Liddell and George Allanson Winn; 1828, Charles Cecil Cope Jenkinson and Robert Grant; 1829, Lord Clive and Lord Corry; 1830, Lord Darlington and William Ward; 1830-1, Lord Grimston and Robert Adam Dundas; 1831, Charles Anderson Worsley Pelham and Sir John Vanden Bempde Johnstone; 1831-2, Lord Cavendish and Sir Francis Vincent. See also J.C. Sainty, ‘Movers and Seconders of the Address in Reply to the Speech in the Commons and the Lords, 1715-1831’, PH, xxv (2006), pp. 245-62. Proposers in military uniform meant possible war. Add. 38744, f. 66. The addresses for 1820 and 1821 were moved by leading Tory agriculturists. Queen Caroline’s supporters were clamouring for attention in 1821, when the seconder’s speech disintegrated into an unintelligible embarrassment. The Times, 28 Apr. 1820, 6 Feb. 1821. Breaching the convention, another seconder, Daly in 1824, set tongues wagging and was loudly cheered for a speech twice a long as that of the proposer Rowland Hill, whose widowed mother fretted over his quiet delivery. Salop Archives, Bygott mss 731/11/88-89; E. Sidney, Life of Lord Hill (1845), p. 330; The Times, 4 Feb. 1824. On 5 Feb. 1822 both sides of the House were embarrassed by the conduct of Hume, whose radical amendment Brougham failed to stifle with a moderate one phrased to appeal to disaffected Tories. Waving the chancellor Nicholas Vansittart’s budget statement of 21 June 1821 in his face, Hume complained of government inaction on agricultural distress, accused them of greed, and launched the radical Whigs’ long campaign to abolish the £5,000,000 sinking fund to which Vansittart had referred. Hume’s amendment (defeated by 186-30) called for stringent economies and massive tax reductions financed from the sinking fund. Opposing it, Frederick Robinson, as president of the board of trade, explained that the proposal ‘went, with one sweeping censure, to condemn a whole system of finance as fallacious’. CJ, lxxvii. 4-5. Canning faced the House for the first time as leader and foreign secretary in 1823, when the address (which he missed, as he was standing for re-election) announced reforms in trade and finance policy planned by William Huskisson and Robinson, respectively president of the board of trade and chancellor of the exchequer. The diplomatic situation (French intervention in ‘liberal’ Spain) also had to be referred to and this, together with a controversy whipped up by Hume over the recent appointment of Lord Beresford as lieutenant-general of the ordnance, determined the choice of a mover. Hill was passed over, ‘as a soldier’, yet the Shropshire squire substituted for him deliberately wore militia dress. In fact the Whig hierarchy intended little personal opposition to Canning. His Whig nephew Lord Titchfield declined to move a critical amendment, and Hume’s was stifled for a week. Arbuthnot Corresp. 43; Add 51574, Abercromby to Holland, 29 Dec. 1822; Bessborough mss, Brougham to Duncannon [23 Jan. 1823]. Spats over reciprocity and according diplomatic recognition to the South American republics (1824, 1825), Catholic emancipation (1825), and the ministry’s policy on corn (1826) were not pursued to a division. The first address of the new Parliament was moved in November 1826 by Canning’s private secretary, making his maiden speech, and radical resolutions criticizing the government policies on corn and Ireland were defeated by 170-24 and 135-58. Grey mss GRE/B24/2/81 (Howick to Grey, 27 Nov. 1826). The brief Canning ministry was not in office at the start of a session. Neither was Lord Goderich’s (as Robinson had become), and their address, which William Bingham Baring (Alexander’s heir) was to present, was never delivered. Signalling an anti-Catholic stance and return to old Toryism, the new Wellington ministry entrusted its 1828 address to Lord Liverpool’s half-brother Cecil Jenkinson, and concentrated on stifling unwelcome discussions on the battle of Navarino and the pacification of Greece. Lansdowne mss, Beckett to Lowther, 26 Jan. 1828. The probable concession of Catholic emancipation in 1829 was announced by Lord Clive, a brother-in-law of the new Irish viceroy, the duke of Northumberland (an anti-Catholic hitherto). Others had refused the honour, and Clive also prevaricated pending ‘permission’ from Northumberland. Another factor causing Clive unease, as he pointed out to Peel, was that he had already moved the address in 1812 and his brother had done so in 1822. Powis mss (History of Parliament Aspinall transcripts), Peel to Clive, 28 Jan.; Denison diary, 5 Feb.; The Times, 6 Feb. 1829; N. Gash, Mr. Secretary Peel, (1961), p. 558. Clive feared an erosion of Powis’s ‘independence’. The 1830 address, which controversially mentioned agricultural distress as ‘general’ and did not refer to the adverse impact of the recent economic downturn in certain districts, was entrusted to the marquess of Cleveland’s heir, a recent recruit to the government’s ranks, and seconded by a director of the Bank of England. The critical debate it generated set the tone for the session, although the concerted attempt at amendment, proposed by disaffected Ultras bitter at the concession of Catholic emancipation, failed by 158-105, 4 Feb., and 96-11 when the draft reply was reported, 5 Feb. CJ, lxxxv. 3-6; Williams, Rickman Letters, 251; A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815-1830 (Oxford, 1967), pp. 224-48. The address moved on 2 Nov. 1830 failed to mention reform and the speeches commending it were unusually brief. Amendments suggested attributing the speech to the government, not the king, and proposed parliamentary reform. The latter was deliberately not pursued to a premature division. CJ, lxxxvi. 9-13. See Sir James Robert George GRAHAM and Henry BROUGHAM. Reform dominated the Grey ministry’s addresses and they deliberately selected young aristocrats to propose them. The first, on 21 June 1831, was opposed by the radical Henry Hunt as defective on reform and because it failed to condemn outright ‘Russian tyranny’ against the Poles. Hunt also complained of the heavy-handed suppression of recent domestic (reform) rioting. The anti-reformer Walsh thought the occasion

very badly managed. None of the great points were dwelt upon. The state of Europe, the squadron at Spithead, the riots at the elections, the subsequent disturbances, the connection between them. Instead of handling these in a masterly manner, the whole of the debate was taken up with little petty frivolous personalities, which it was quite right to bring forward, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Ormathwaite mss G38, f. 59.

The address of 6 Dec. 1831 was the only one to be amended in this period. It had, as Lord Ellenborough explained, ‘been carelessly converted from the speech, and made us appear to expect the king of Holland would accede to a treaty of which we know nothing’. Three Diaries, 161; CJ, lxxxvii. 3-5.

 

Supply

The address-in-reply to the king’s speech always included a promise of supply, and soon after its adoption the House would resolve itself into committee of supply, one of the two committees of the whole House which dealt with government income and expenditure. The committee of supply determined expenditure; the committee of ways and means decided how to finance it. In practice, this permitted all manner of issues to be raised in both committees. The same man chaired both committees. He received an annual salary of £1,200, and officiated for several sessions. P.D.G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (1971), pp. 73-88; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 473. See Appendix II for chairmen of the committees of supply and ways and means.

Under a resolution of February 1821, the government’s military estimates had to be presented within ten days of the committee of supply beginning to meet (civil estimates were presented later in the session). The committee considered the estimates in detail. Once they had approved them, their resolutions were reported to the House and a day fixed for the House to resolve itself into the committee of ways and means. Erskine May, 326-9. The committee of ways and means then originated, on the basis of the proposals made by the chancellor of the exchequer in his budget, the revenue-raising measures for the ensuing year. They also voted money out of the consolidated fund to meet the sums agreed on by the committee of supply. In addition to the estimates voted through the committee of supply and the House, there were other services and permanent charges on the revenue authorized by statute. These included public salaries, certain civil list costs and interest accruing to the national debt—a political and legislative minefield which the Liverpool government strove to untangle, 1823-7. These did not require additional statutory authorization, but estimates-based spending did, through specific Acts of Parliament (consolidated fund bills or Appropriation Acts) based on the resolutions of the committee of ways and means.

The budget was postponed briefly or introduced when work on the estimates was still incomplete in 1822, 1826 and 1828, which provoked opposition taunts and challenges. The Wellington ministry’s 1830 budget was deliberately brought forward to pre-empt Edward Davies Davenport’s state of the nation motion, and it proposed some of the tax reductions on beer, cider, leather and the four per cents that the Whigs, Ultras and radicals were calling for. Hume and his allies conducted a war of attrition against ministers on supply and ways and means, 1820-22, with diminishing assistance from the mainstream Whigs. Hume’s ally Grey Bennet, a ‘Mountain’ Whig, delighted in his diary for the 1821 session to see the government so annoyed and ‘evidently very sore at the mode of procedure we have recently adopted’. He hoped by it ‘not only [to] make the lives of the ministers miserable, but work a great reform in all the different departments’. Grey Bennet diary, 121-2 and passim. Their harrying yielded returns of Members and others in receipt of establishment pensions and the publication of more detailed estimates. PP (1822), iv. 41-60; see for example Parl. Deb. (ser. 2), vi. 69-70. At the end of the 1822 session the Whig moderate Sir Robert Heron complained that Hume’s ‘eternal interference on every question and the many tedious hours he occupied in attempting trifling savings only disgusted many from attending and prevented more important questions being brought forward’. Heron, Notes, 133. Rickman (revealing his personal political allegiance) also described the situation in July 1822, shortly after the budget:

The opps. have at this moment an unquestionable and practical veto, somewhat acquired by insolence and perseverance, more by the liberality (God help the word) of the administration, who act too without concert and in disgust (natural enough) of the degraded state in which they collectively feel themselves. Do you not observe that we have been doing nothing for more than two months, that is, nothing but listening to opposition speeches, and resisting their motions? Defensive war must be successful in the sequel: already the friends of government are gone to their country seats, and a compact squadron of radicals prevent all business by clamour, or on pretence of a late hour, or the absence of somebody who takes interest in the proper business of the evening. In fact half the supplies of the year and the most disputable are not yet granted, nor have the govt. been able to go into the committee of supply since Easter, though it has been specially appointed, and notices of motions in it given by the treasury oftener than once a week. But the opps. have a complete veto. Williams, Rickman Letters, 220.

As a result of the pressure, a number of select committees were appointed to inquire into the public finances. Vansittart regulated public pensions (3 Geo. IV, c. 113) and conceded a public accounts committee to review expenditure in 1822. Lord Althorp, whose first budget was a controversial flop, appointed another such committee in 1831 and revived it after the general election that year; it reported, 4 Aug. 1832. CJ, lxxvii. 186; lxxxvi. 262, 565; lxxxvii. 556; PP (1822) iv. 293-399. Greater influence was however briefly wielded by the 1828 finance committee, chaired by the Irish Whig, Sir Henry Parnell. Acting on its recommendations, set out in Parnell’s four reports, Goulburn as chancellor, 1828-30, abolished the sinking fund, instigated the process of defraying public pension costs through contributory superannuation schemes, and released funds for colonial investment, including the Canadian waterways navigation scheme. Even more contentiously, the ministry defrayed much of the cost of refurbishing the royal family’s residences. PP (1828), v. 1-667.

 

Legislation

Between 1820 and 1832, 1,318 public and 2,488 local and personal bills were enacted, including a steady stream from Ireland. Some public bills of major significance were enacted. The Reciprocities Duties Act (4 Geo. IV, c. 77) permitted reciprocal trading concessions in breach of the Navigation Act and was the foundation for Huskisson’s subsequent policies. In over a dozen bills Peel consolidated and simplified the administration of the criminal laws and established a police force for the capital. 4 Geo. IV, cc. 46-48, 52-54, 64; 5 Geo. IV, c. 85; 6 Geo. IV, cc. 22, 23; 6 Geo. IV, c. 50; 7 Geo. IV, c. 64; 7 & 8 Geo. IV, cc. 27-31; 9 Geo. IV, cc. 31, 32; 10 Geo. IV, c. 44. Huskisson had the difficult and embarrassing task in 1825 of clawing back privileges restored to workers when the combination laws were repealed by a measure entrusted in 1824 to Hume. 5 Geo. IV, cc. 95, 97; 6 Geo. IV, c. 129. Henry Home Drummond and the lord advocate Sir William Rae carried consolidating legislation for Scotland; 3 Geo. IV, c. 91; 4 Geo. IV, c. 97; 6 Geo. IV, cc. 22, 24; 7 Geo. IV, cc. 8, 19; 7 & 8 Geo. IV, c. 20; 9 Geo. IV, cc. 29, 58; 10 Geo. IV, cc. 19, 55; 11 Geo. IV & 1 Gul. IV, c. 69. and steps were taken to impose the English fee structure and regulations on the Irish courts and exchequer. 1 Geo. IV, c. 28. The Test and Corporation Acts were repealed (1828), Catholic emancipation conceded (1829), and the parliamentary reform bills for the three kingdoms that dominated proceedings from 1830 to 1832 became law. 9 Geo. IV, c. 17; 10 Geo. IV. c. 7; 2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 45; 2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 65; 2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 88.

Public bills originated in a motion for leave to bring in a bill. Bills on religion and trade could, under standing orders of 1703 and 1773, only be brought in following consideration in committee of the whole House. G. Bramwell, The Manner of Proceeding upon Bills in the House of Commons (1833), p. 62. Hence legislation, much of it abortive, for Catholic relief (1821, 1822, 1823, 1825, 1827), and for Catholic emancipation in 1829, could only be introduced on the resolution of a committee, and any bill for repeal of the Test Acts relating to the rights of Dissenters was similarly constrained. On 26 Feb. 1828, contrary to the agreed policy of Wellington’s new cabinet, the Commons carried a resolution referring the issue to a committee of the whole House. Perceiving the futility of further opposition, the duke waived it. The Commons’ support for the measure and the Dissenters’ strong petitioning campaign then became tools to assist its passage in the Lords. Erskine May , 273; R.W. Davis, ‘The House of Lords, the Whigs and Catholic Emancipation, 1806-29’, PH, xviii (1999), pp. 23-43.

The first reading of a government bill was usually a matter of routine and rarely challenged by forcing a division. Following presentation and first reading, public bills were normally printed. At a bill’s second reading, its general principles were discussed; if it was carried it went into a committee, for scrutiny clause by clause. On public bills, this took place in a committee of the whole House. On completion of the committee stage, the bill was reported to the House, when the amendments could be further debated. The bill was then ingrossed and the third reading moved, when further amendments could be made. If carried at this stage, it progressed to the Lords. If the Lords amended the bill, the Commons might accept the changes and return it for royal assent, or, if they disagreed, they drew up reasons for their disagreement as the basis for a conference between committees (or managers) appointed by either House. It was the privilege of the Lords to name a time and place for the conference. A. Hammond, A Summary Treatise on the Practice and Proceedings in Parliament: The Passing of Public and Private Bills and the Law of Elections (1825), p. 44. Only the spring guns bill was rejected after its third reading, 29 June 1825 (CJ, lxxx. 617).

Legislation enacted, 1820-32 Table based on PP (1834), lvii. 281.

Acts of Parliament
 

Public

Local and Personal

Year          

Eng. and Wales             

Scot.         

Scot. and Ire. 

  GB                                                                          

GB and Ire.    

Ire.   

Total     Public       

Eng. and Wales   

Scot.   

Eng. and Scot.   

GB and Ire.   

Ire.   

Total Local

and

   Personal                          

Gross Yearly Total

1820

18

3

1

49

25

23

119

132

14

  

7

5

158

277

1821

37

4

  

24     

33

25

123

169

12

1

1

4

187

310

1822

28

    10       

  

16

46

27

127

136

14

  

7

4

161

288

1823

12

9

1

7

48

23

100

147

19

  

5

5

167

267

1824

37

6

  

9

42

21

115

178

22

  

1

12

213

328

1825

35

15

1

4

61

18

134

251

18

  

6

7

282

416

1826

23

4

  

5

29

18

79

171

23

  

3

4

201

280

1827

19

3

  

3

34

16

75

155

18

1

5

5

184

259

1828

22

5

  

3

49

16

95

150

14

  

5

6

175

270

1829

14

5

1

  

29

14

63

166

25

  

7

7

205

268

1830

21

2

  

4

38

10

75

163

24

  

5

12

204

279

1831 (i)

6

1

    

18

2

27

77

2

  

1

  

80

107

1831 (ii)

18

2

  

4

22

14

60

82

18

  

7

7

114

174

1832

30

11

1

4

52

29

126

132

14

1

5

5

157

283

Totals

  

1,318

  

2,488

3,806

 

Legislation for the benefit of individuals, public companies or corporations, parishes, cities, counties or specific localities (as opposed to measures which applied more generally) were treated as private bills. The bulk of these were classed as local and personal. Local acts included inclosure bills, drainage bills, road bills, navigation bills, bills for building bridges, churches, piers, workhouses and prisons, for making docks and harbours, or for improving cities, towns or fisheries in particular places; personal bills included naturalization bills, name bills, divorce bills, estate bills, and all bills affecting any corporation, company or institution. Erskine May, 383; Bramwell, 10-11. As the table reveals, between 1820 and 1832 almost twice as many private bills were enacted as public ones. Hammond, 52; PP (1834), xlviii. 281. In 1832, 191 petitions for private bills were received and 157 of them were enacted: 49 road bills, 34 estate, divorce or naturalization bills, 22 for urban paving, 18 for railways and ancillary works, 10 for inclosures, five for gasworks, four for drainage, four for bridges and ferries and 11 ‘miscellaneous’. PP (1833), xii. 437, 463.

Private bills were processed by the private bill office established in 1811. A complex set of standing orders governed the proceedings on private bills, because, as Erskine May said, ‘a bill for the particular benefit of certain persons may be injurious to others; and to discriminate between the conflicting interests of different parties, involves the exercise of judicial inquiry and determination’. Erskine May, 384. Private bills originated in petitions to the House, each of which was referred to a committee appointed from lists of Members from the locality concerned and Members from outside the area. A private bill could not be introduced without confirmation that the standing orders had been complied with, and the committee’s function was to establish whether this was so, and report its conclusions to the House. The number of disputed and contested bills and therefore allegations of non-compliance increased during the period. Initially the House itself would consider the report of the committees, hear the parties at the bar of the House, and determine whether the bill could proceed. This happened four times in 1820, 12 in 1821, eight in 1822 and 17 in 1823, when 47 bills were contested. In 1824, however, a standing order committee was appointed for this purpose, which became sessional. PP (1824), vi. 507-9; F. Clifford, Private Bill Legislation, 2 vols. (1885-7), i. 47-50, ii. 828-9; O.C. Williams, History of Private Bill Procedure, 2 vols. (1948), i. 46-49. Further proceedings on private bills could involve the hearing of counsel and witnesses and (unlike public bills) commitment to select committees. The latter were frequently seen as unsatisfactory by petitioners for private bills. A select committee chaired by Littleton reported in June 1825 that the most frequent grounds of complaint had been

that protracted and expensive investigations have been attended solely by Members, whose constituents were locally interested in the results; or, in some cases, by Members who have themselves had an individual interest in the subject of bills; while it has not infrequently happened that the final decision on clauses and on the reports have, at the very close of committees, been settled by numerous other Members, who, from their absences, have been ignorant of the information obtained during the earlier stages of the proceedings. PP (1825), v. 103-6.

To remedy this, an attempt was made to make private bill committees more fairly balanced between Members from distant constituencies as well as those more immediately affected by the bill, through lists drawn up for each county and issued by the Speaker in 1827; an appeals procedure was also established against the decisions of private bill committees. Ibid. (1826-7), xx. 601-45. As a result there was a drop in the number of bills rejected. Ibid. (1829), xxi. 53. Problems, however, persisted. In 1832, for example, rival bills were presented for the creation of docks in Sunderland. When one of them was lost because of the votes of Members who had not been present earlier during its proceedings, the agents retaliated by publishing the details (including the committee division lists). For this they were found to be in breach of parliamentary privilege. Durham Chron. 6, 13, 20 Apr. 1832; CJ, lxxxvii. 202-3, 210-11.

Over the period the nature of private bills changed. The number of inclosure bills passed declined from 40 in 1820 to 11 in 1832, but the speculative boom of 1824-5 and legislating for such large-scale enterprises as the Liverpool-Manchester railway (1825-6) and the later London-Birmingham scheme placed intense pressure on the system. Clifford, i. apps. Additionally, the king’s bench ruling of 6 Feb. 1825 in the Joseph v. Pebrer case that the Equitable Loan Banking Company was illegal under the Bubble Act of 1720 had an immediate impact. The Commons received 438 petitions in the 1825 session alone from established and speculatively floated joint-stock organizations for protective ‘chartered company’ status. Two-hundred-and-eighty-six bills granting it were enacted in 1825. Despite Huskisson and lord chancellor Eldon’s objections, the Bubble Act was repealed that year (6 Geo. IV, c. 91), after the government took over a motion to this effect initiated by the backbencher Peter Moore. Moore, a leading director of the Equitable, who had given his name as a director and shareholder to several ‘bubble’ companies, was one of many Members ‘either manipulating for, or being manipulated by, powerful interest groups’, who faced financial ruin when the ‘bubble’ burst. Discussions in 1826-7 on the Arigna Mining Company, the Welch Slate Company, the Welch Iron and Coal Company and the Cornwall and Devon Mining Company (founded in 1825 to exploit the duke of Cleveland’s mineral rights) embarrassed cabinet members who were shareholders. R. Harris, ‘Political economy, interest groups, legal institutions, and the repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825’, EcHR, l (1997), pp. 675-96; H. English, Complete View of Joint-Stock Companies (1827).

 

Committees

The anachronistic grand or standing committees were still formally appointed on the first day of the session to meet weekly: religion on Tuesdays, grievances on Thursdays, trade on Fridays, and courts of justice on Saturdays. They ceased to be appointed from the beginning of the session of 1833. The committee of privileges was also named early and ordered to meet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Questions posed to witnesses before the 1833 select committee on the establishment of the House indicate that some also regarded this committee as potentially obsolete. CJ, lxxxv. 109-11; PP (1833), xii. passim. Requests were rejected in 1821, 1826 and 1830 for wide-ranging inquiry by a committee on the state of the nation, ‘an ad hoc institution periodically created [since 1689] by the initiative of opposition Members on the pretext that government policy had produced exceptional discontent or disaster’. Thomas, 269; CJ, lxxvi. 306; lxxxi. 323; lxxxv. 222. Hume’s motions failed without division, 4 May 1821, and by 152-51, 4 May 1826. Davenport’s was rejected by 255-87 after a week’s debate, 23 Mar. 1830. See also HP Commons, 1690-1715, i. 395.

Select committees could be appointed to consider or inquire into any matter, and to report their opinions, for the information of the House. Some (including election committees under the 1770 Grenville Act) were chosen by ballot—a procedure that could take up to three hours, in which Members were called in the same order as the call of the House to place their lists of names into glass receivers on the table in front of the Speaker. Thomas, 266-7. Ministers occasionally circulated lists of names and ensured that certain Members attended the ballot, for example when the 1828 finance committee was appointed. Care was also taken concerning the composition of select committees concerning Ireland, the three on the East India Company’s trade monopoly, 1830-2 (a source annually of £3,000,000 in revenue), the West Indies and colonial slavery, 1831-2, and the secret committee on the Bank of England’s charter appointed in May 1832. Most committees had a quorum of only five and attendance rates were generally low, but sometimes a crucial division would be attended en masse by members absent hitherto. Their chairmen were often vetted by the leader of the House and government whips. Grey mss, Ellice to Grey, 6, 11 Mar. 1832.

Select committees were appointed on some 500 issues during the period. Reports from some of them contributed to the enactment of the 1829 metropolitan police bill and a raft of social measures improving conditions in factories and prisons and the treatment of lunatics and pauper emigrants; but most of these measures were neutered or watered down severely. For example, Hobhouse’s Factory Act (1 & 2 Gul. IV, c. 39); Robert Gordon’s Madhouse Regulating Act (10 Geo. IV, c. 18), and legislation introduced by Sir James Mackintosh (11 Geo. IV & 1 Gul. IV, c. 66) and William Ewart (2 & 3 Gul. IV, c. 62) to reduce the number of capital offences. Increasingly, however, as for Ireland in the early 1820s, See Croker Pprs. i. 208, for Herries’s manipulation of the Irish revenue commission. the consideration of such major issues as the administration of justice was referred to nominated commissions briefed by ministers or departments, and their reports tended to be selectively based on an unwieldy body of evidence which few Members had the time or inclination to fathom. D. Eastwood, ‘Men, Morals, and the Machinery of Social Legislation, 1790-1840’, PH xiii (1994), 190-205; M. Escott, ‘How Wales lost its Judicature: the Making of the 1830 Act for the Abolition of the Court of Great Sessions’, Trans. Hon. Soc. of Cymmrodorion (2006), pp. 134-59.

 

The Timing of Business

Business was divided into notices of motion and orders of the day. Notices of motion were debatable introductions of new business; orders of the day were further stages of business which had already been introduced, and so included most stages of bills and committees of supply and ways and means. A large proportion of government business was comprised in orders of the day, but it also included business—particularly bills—promoted by private Members. Before 1811 it was normal to deal with notices of motion first, then orders of the day. In 1811, however, the House had agreed to reverse the order on Mondays and Fridays, effectively giving precedence on those days to orders of the day. Each session, the House passed sessional orders to continue this practice. Though see P. Fraser, ‘The Growth of Ministerial Control in the 19th-century House of Commons’, EHR, lxxv (1960), pp. 449-50 on the persistence of the idea that Members might move motions without notice on order days when there was sufficient general support for them within the House. Although orders of the day were not exclusively government business, in practice the government soon dominated them, and managed to ensure that orders relating to its own business were dealt with before orders relating to private Members’ business, irrespective of the order in which they had been put onto the order book, the running list of business set down for any particular day. Order days soon became, in effect, government days. On notice days, Members who did not have specific business to transact tended to stay away.

Committees would meet before the sitting of the House, normally at 12 noon. The House itself would sit for prayers just before 4pm, and deal initially with private business and petitions before proceeding to public business—notices or orders—at 5pm. See The Parliamentary Pocket Companion for 1835 (Dod’s Parliamentary Companion), 79. Formally, however, the House was adjourned to 10am, when prayers were supposed to take place; but if 40 Members were not present at that time, business would be suspended until a sufficient number was present. See Erskine May, 151. It was a routine conducive to late nights and a subject of regular complaint. Peter Moore’s adjournment motions to ‘arrest all business after midnight’, 11, 14, 18, 25 May 1821, 11, 29 Mar. 1822, may well have derived more from his wish to delay the estimates than his desire to go home, but Canning and Charles Williams Wynn also noted that sittings, if not sessions, were getting longer. Bagot, Canning and Friends, ii. 178-80; NLW ms 4816 D, f. 123. As Joseph Hume complained, lengthy dinners outside the Palace of Westminster, at clubs and private houses helped to make sittings later. Michael Angelo Taylor, the diminutive Member for Durham, boasted in 1827 that he had dined the Whigs, who made his Whitehall house their rendezvous, ‘for eight and thirty years at an expense of above £30,000’. Creevey Pprs. i. 211; ii. 65, 89-91, 105, 116. (Dinner—‘steaks, veal pie, mutton chops to any extent with tarts, salads, pickles, beer toasted cheese etc.,’—could alternatively be bought from the housekeeper, Bellamy, for 5s. 6d. excluding wine, and eaten in the Members’ smoking room or coffee room, but many thought this extortionate.) PP (1833), xii. 261, 277-8, 291. Few considered making major speeches while Members were at dinner. Charles Williams Wynn observed in 1824 that

a lamentable effect of the uninterrupted course of late nights, which for some years past has pervaded the whole of the session, makes it almost impossible for us to secure any attendance between half past six and nine. Plenty of Members will sacrifice their consciences, but very few their dinners. NLW ms 4816 D, f. 123.

Contested government business, and the demand from Members to promote the affairs and concerns of their constituents, often through petitioning, put an enormous strain on the time of the House. Controlling the pressure of petitions and ensuring that the need of the government to secure its business was met on the one hand while continuing to allow private Members some time on the other were already key issues in the management of the House. See G. W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: the cabinet and the development of political parties in Victorian England (1987), pp. 46-51. By 1830 (after a session which, Hume said, made plain ‘the necessity of making some alteration in our mode of proceeding’) the government was looking for new ways to expedite business. On 3 Nov. 1830 Sir Robert Peel as leader warned the House that its hours would have to be adjusted owing to the pressure of business. Unwilling to sacrifice the morning sittings of committees, he proposed, with the agreement of the Speaker, that the time at which the House began its daily sitting should be brought forward by an hour, to 3pm. Hume’s suggestion that ‘besides sitting an additional hour each day [the House] should also make Wednesdays and Saturdays days of business’ (i.e., order days) was shouted down. His other ideas were for a dinner hour from five to six and to end public business at midnight. Daniel O’Connell wanted the House to conclude its business in three whole days leaving the other three for committees, with daily adjournments at 11pm. Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), i. 130-43. Following the general election of 1831, Althorp, as leader of the House, took more determined steps towards increasing government control of business. After an all-night sitting on 12 July 1831 on the reform bill, on the 13th the House agreed to surrender another day—Wednesday—as an order day. Although it was accepted that no precedence would be given to government business on Wednesdays, a week later, on the 21st, Althorp attempted to secure precedence for the reform bill. Although the motion was withdrawn, it helped to produce an agreement to allow progress on the bill. See Cox, Efficient Secret, 47-48; Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), v. 138-46, 559-65. See also Parl. Deb. (ser.3), iv. 89, 648-50, 999.

 

Attendance

On ordinary occasions Members’ attendance was not insisted on, but a House was deemed inquorate if there were fewer than 40 Members present, or 100 if an election committee was to be appointed. Sittings were prevented for this reason on 15 occasions CJ, lxxv. 176; lxxvi. 41; lxxvii. 26; lxxviii. 8; lxxix. 10; lxxx. 18, 174; lxxxi. 318; lxxxii. 9; lxxxiii. 76, 182; lxxxiv. 83; lxxxv. 86; lxxxvii. 19, 182. and curtailed on another 15, when the Speaker was summoned to adjourn proceedings after attendance dwindled. Ibid. lxxv. 334; lxxvi. 29; lxxvii. 70; lxxix. 141, 300, 450, 539; lxxx. 196, 221; lxxxiii. 349; lxxxiv. 372; lxxxvi. 194, 200, 599; lxxxvii. 423. Poor attendance also delayed proceedings on controverted election petitions from Petersfield (1821), Huntingdon (1826) and Cork (1830), precipitating adjournments on each occasion. Ibid. lxxvi. 248; lxxxi. 227; lxxxii. 337; lxxxiii. 162; lxxxv. 99. The only means of boosting attendance was by applying to the Speaker for an order to have the House called over on a particular day, after giving Members prior notice. J. Hatsell Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons, 4 vols. (1818) ii. 96-101; Erskine May, 147; CJ, lxxxii. 236. At the appointed hour the serjeant-at-arms, bearing the mace, patrolled the corridors and precincts of the House to round up Members. The doors were then locked and the Speaker called out Members’ names in the order of their constituencies, starting with the English counties. Members rose and bowed to the Speaker when their names were called and the clerk recorded absentees. Common excuses were accidents, illness, the illness or death of near relations, public service and being in Ireland or abroad. Absentees were listed in the Journal as defaulters, liable for detention, and ordered to attend on another day. There was usually ample allowance for travelling time. Erskine May, 149; CJ, lxxix. 278; lxxx. 130. For failing to attend a call of the House, borough and county Members were fined £8 10s. and £10 13s. 4d. respectively on discharge, with additional daily levies of £1 6s. 8d. for prolonged periods of detention. When the House was counted and called over, 28 Feb. 1825, preparatory to the introduction of a Catholic relief bill, 114 Members were counted and 112 listed as defaulters after the call. Eighty-seven of them attended the next day (1 Mar.) as required and were excused, as were 18 others over the next few days. The explanations offered by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, Lord Tavistock and four others were rejected, 2-3 Mar. The House ordered that they be taken into custody, reprimanded and fined. CJ, lxxx. 129-31, 147, 153, 157. The House was next called over before the concession of Catholic emancipation was considered, 5 Mar. 1829, on an order obtained by one of its leading opponents, the marquess of Chandos, who had rejected his colleagues’ pleas not to enforce it. According to Howick’s journal, ‘the call and excuses, etc., occupied about an hour and a half’. Three call orders were executed during the reform bill crisis, 10 Oct. 1831, 10, 18 May 1832. Ibid. lxxxiv. 106; lxxxvi. 900; lxxxvii. 304, 320. Generally, the objective was to bring independent Members to Westminster at a politically testing time or to bolster support for an important division; then to defer the call to keep Members in town and discharge the order unexecuted. That scheduled for 28 Feb. 1831, the eve of the first reading of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, was discharged; but those obtained by government and opposition for 11 and 15 Mar. were repeatedly deferred to the bill’s committee stage (17, 18, 22 Mar., 18, 21 Apr.). On each occasion a count was taken, and party managers and whippers-in used the information to gauge support. Similar tactics were deployed between the second and third readings of the reintroduced reform bill, and in January and March 1832. Ibid. lxxxvi. 336, 350, 357, 363, 393, 398, 417, 503, 514, 643, 680, 696, 706, 708, 738, 804, 844, 860, 871; lxxxvii. 46, 156, 313. Counts were in any case a regular occurrence in the first session or sessions of a Parliament when there were several election committees to be filled and later when the outcomes of contentious by-elections were tested. Hence the House was counted on 13 days, 2 May-6 July 1820; on 11 days, 13 Feb.-23 May 1821; but only once in 1822, 1824 and 1826; on 22 occasions, 13 Feb.-15 May 1827; but just three times in 1828, twice in 1829, and four times early in 1830. In all there were 92 occasions over the period on which the House was counted. Measured this way, attendance peaked at 305 on 21 June 1820, during the Queen Caroline affair; at 373 on 1 May 1827, when Canning addressed the House as premier, and at 423, 11 Mar. 1831, when the first reform bill was the major issue. Ibid. lxxv. 334; lxxxii, 417; lxxxvi. 363; Howick jnl. 5 Feb. 1829.

Applications to the House for leave of absence in the eighteenth century have been described as an ‘empty formality’. Thomas, 105. Members certainly continued to go abroad for entire sessions, leaving no trace of official permission having been obtained; but like most prolonged absences on account of old age, debility, social scandals and near bankruptcy, these absences were common knowledge. The purpose of obtaining leave, which was granted during the period on about 301 separate occasions to some 465 Members, was to alert patrons, party managers and whippers-in, sometimes retrospectively, to absences deemed necessary for personal and professional reasons, to fulfil public obligations and to compensate for long service on an election committee. A doctor’s confirmation of sickness was rarely required unless a Member took a prominent part on a select committee, or had been summoned as a witness. CJ, lxxv. 350, 367; lxxvi. 257; lxxxii. 304, 307, 356, 369, 407; lxxxv. 109, 377; lxxxvi. 157, 689, 844. Leave was awarded on 31 of the 90 days the House was in session in the 1830-31 Parliament. In 46 cases the stated reasons were the ill health of a Member or the sickness and/or death of a near relation; in 30 attendance was excused to undertake private (18) or public (12) business; three lawyers were released to go the circuit. Thirty-eight Members also received leave for periods ranging from ten days to a month, 22 Nov.-6 Dec. 1830, to return to their `disturbed’ neighbourhoods during the `Swing’ riots. Based on entries of leave granted in CJ, lxxxvi.

 

Petitioning

The number of petitions received from the public and presented to the House rose dramatically during the period. Their use as ‘radical political instruments’ resulted in a increase in the average number received per year from 205 in the five years ending in 1805, to 900 in the five years ending in 1815, and to 4,898 in the five years ending in 1831. C. Leys, ‘Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Political Stud. iii (1955), pp. 45-47; PP (1833), xii. 297. The number of issues covered ranged from 20 to over a hundred. They could contain up to 40,000 signatures from urban areas. An example from Kent contained 81,000 and one from Ireland 168,000, and there were hosts of more sparsely signed ones from obscure communities supporting causes approved by their leaders, from companies, colonies, constituencies, individuals, societies, socio-economic groups and trading interests. Petitions enabled Members to raise matters of concern to their constituents on the floor of the House and provoke often extensive debate. The London Member Robert Waithman stated in 1830 that ‘though he had 13,000 or 14,000 constituents, he could never get an opportunity of speaking, except upon the presentation of petitions’. Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), i. 140.

To be accepted, a petition had to be addressed ‘to the Honourable the Commons (or knights, citizens and burgesses) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament Assembled’, give the petitioner’s name or names in the form ‘The humble petition of … sheweth…’, and clearly state what was requested (the ‘prayer’). More dealt with public than with individual grievances, and these tended to seek redress through the repeal or amendment of existing legislation. Few public petitions produced immediate action. Petitions for financial compensation were generally refused; but some were accepted that sought compensation for losses contingent on the passing of bills pending in Parliament. Erskine May, 303, 305. During this period, the House confirmed and ruled that a petition could not be received unless it was in English or accompanied by a translation that its presenter could confirm as correct (1821); CJ, lxxvi. 173, 189. free from interlineations or erasures (1822, 1826); Ibid. lxxxii. 263; lxxxvi. 748. and properly signed (1830). Ibid. lxxxv. 541. The signatures of agents on behalf of others were not acceptable (1826-7); Ibid. lxxxii. 118. and no letters, affidavits or any accompanying documents whatsoever could be annexed (1826, 1827). Ibid. lxxxi. 82; lxxxii 41. Such breaches were punishable. Ibid. lxxx. 445, lxxxii. 561, 582; lxxxiv. 187. A petition’s language had to be respectful, temperate and free from offensive imputations upon the character and conduct of Parliament (1822, 1829), Ibid. lxxxii. 589; lxxxiv. 275. the courts of justice, or any legal tribunal or similarly constituted authority (1821, 1823, 1827); Ibid. lxxvi. 92, 105; lxxviii. 431; lxxxii. 589; lxxxiv. 275. and no allusions to intended motions or the debates of either House were permitted (1822, 1827). Ibid. lxxvii. 150; lxxxii. 604. In order to present a petition, a Member would before 10am write his name on a list left in the House. The names were entered into a ballot, managed by the office of the clerk of the fees, John Dorington, for the opportunity to be called by the Speaker to present the petition. If the Member’s name was not drawn, he ‘went down again about this plaguing petition’ the next day, as Howick put it, repeating the ‘irksome procedure’ as necessary on subsequent days. Howick jnl. 13 Feb., 17 Mar. 1829; Ormathwaite mss FG/1/6, pp. 58, 58, 64; Heron, 183; PP (1833), xii. 163-8. Approximately half the petitions received were printed, and all were listed in the Votes and Journal, ‘some three or four petitions sometimes under one number, if similar in form’. PP (1833), xxii. 163-5. The clerk of the journals, John Bull, told the 1833 select committee on House of Commons officers and fees that

great quantities of petitions … (sometimes 300 of a night) upon various subjects … are all put indiscriminately into bags at the table, and sent out … to the Journal office. There they are sorted according to their subjects, and arranged according to the order in which they stand in the minute book. Each petition is looked at carefully, in order to ascertain correctly its title and the nature of the subject to which it relates, and as fast as the titles can be abstracted they are arranged under their respective heads, and the copy is sent in small portions to the press … So the work goes on through the night … in order to ensure the publication of the Votes at the usual time. Ibid. (1833), xii. 297.

Major petitioning campaigns included the agriculturists’ distress petitions of 1820-2, which were referred to select committees; the Dissenters’ well-organized 1827 and 1828 campaigns for repeal of the Test Acts; and the incessant demands from Ireland for Catholic relief, the concession of which in 1829 the Brunwickers, Ultras and Methodists opposed to the last. Campaigns instigated by the Anti-Slavery Society, 1823-33, were strenuously supported by religious congregations, and from 1831 the Nonconformists raised the cry against subsidizing the education of Irish Catholics through the Maynooth College grant. Both opponents of suttee and mercantile interests petitioned against the East India Company’s monopoly. Petitions protesting at the conditions of Hunt’s incarceration at Ilchester gaol from 1820-2, the conduct of colonial governors, and the treatment of the convicted Hampshire `Swing’ rioters Thomas and Caroline Deacle, prosecuted at the instigation of William Bingham Baring, embarrassed Members and targeted ministers.

Petitions received 1820-31Table based on PP (1828), iv. 553; (1833), xii. 153-6, 162. Petition totals per issue are those in ibid. (1822), v. 66-67 (agricultural distress); G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics (Oxford, 1964), pp. 54, 148; Committees for Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts: Minutes, 1786-90 and 1827-8 ed. T.W. Davis (London Rec. Soc. 1978), pp. xx-xxi, 80; or calculated from the indices and General Index to the Journals of the House of Commons, 1820-37. A similar number of petitions to that received in 1826 for abolition of slavery was received in the same year against altering the Scottish currency and banking system.

Session

Petitions presented

Major public petitioning issue(s)

1820

931

Agricultural distress (159 petitions)

1821

1,544

Queen Caroline’s case (214) ; agricultural distress (187)

1822

1,680

Agricultural distress (129+)

1823

1,740

For abolition of colonial slavery (200+)

1824

3,467

For inquiry into the Missionary Smith case (200+)

1825

3,306

Against Catholic relief (400)

1826

2,079

For abolition of colonial slavery (197)

1826-7

4,104

For repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1,200+)

1828

4,074

For repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1,300+)

1829

4,041

Against Catholic emancipation (2000+ by late February)

1830

2,522

Sale of beer bill (233 hostile petitions; 69 favourable);

1830-1

8,961

For abolition of colonial slavery (5,354 )

1831

1,259

For parliamentary reform (730)

Total

39,708

  

Petitioning on this scale increased the cost of producing the Votes, ate into the House’s time for discussing other business and consumed Members’ time in attending on the ballot. It was a regular cause of complaint within the House. A select committee appointed in 1832 and chaired by Sir Robert Peel paved the way for reform. His report rehearsed the problems with presentation:

Taking the average of the session, there are about 12 Members in daily attendance at the ballot … [Ellicombe the ballot clerk] judges, from the conversation of Members, that all beyond the first five despair of having their names called by the Speaker. This testimony, and that of Mr. Strickland and Mr. Sanford, Members of the House, the latter of whom states that he attended at the ballot 14 days in succession before his name was sufficiently advanced on the list to be called by the Speaker, appear conclusive as to the accumulation of petitions not presented, and the necessity of some new arrangement for the purpose of facilitating their presentation. PP (1833), xii. 153-60; Leys, 45-64.

The committee also took evidence on printing and staff costs. The clerk of the Journals told the committee that petitions were arriving at a daily rate of 900, and that his office had endorsed, scheduled and filed over 20,000 of them, and arranged the 10,685 which were printed between 1827 and 1831 into six volumes. Within the last three or four years, he said

the petitions increased so much that I was obliged to make a different arrangement in my office in consequence of the difficulty there was in finding them. I found it necessary to keep a schedule of them during the session so that any petition might be found in the course of a few minutes; and at the end of the session, during the summer, all the petitions are scheduled, indorsed, numbered and put by. PP (1833), xii. 163.

Peel’s committee aimed to reduce the prime parliamentary time and publicity accorded to petitions by passing the responsibility for dealing with them to a select committee managed by the chairman of ways and means and by severely restricting the time allocated for receipt of public petitions by the whole House. In 1833 the House agreed to relegate the hearing of petitions to special morning sittings, although these did not last and a solution was eventually found through an informal understanding between the government and the opposition. Fraser, EHR, lxxv. 444-5, 452.

 

Controverted Elections

A petition alleging a controverted election had to be drawn up or approved by counsel, PP (1833), xii. 326-7. received by the Speaker’s secretary, tabled and classified within a fortnight of a Parliament meeting. When petitions were numerous after general elections (38 in 1820; 42 in 1826-7; 60 in 1830-1; and 20 in 1831), Ibid. the order in which they were to be dealt with was determined by ballot (the names of the constituencies having been placed in a large glass jar). A petition was proceeded with if the necessary recognizances (£300, plus two sureties of £100 payable to the clerks) had been verified by the recognizances clerk (usually the clerk assistant), as required under Williams Wynn’s 1788 Act, and it had not been ruled out of order (as in the case of county Limerick in 1826). Seven petitions received after the 1820 general election were immediately discharged and five deferred ‘for want of recognizances’. Only then could the House refer the petition to an election committee for determination. From this point, the fees charged by the House for the use of its clerks and facilities, summoning witnesses and admitting counsel escalated rapidly, as did the opportunities for the salaried clerks and their hired colleagues for additional earnings as parliamentary agents. PP (1833), xii. 250-54, 282, 294-7, 326-9, 344-5. Under the Controverted Elections Act of 1828 (9 Geo. IV, c. 2) and an additional order of the House that year, the Speaker was required to notify a returning officer of a petition’s presentation and the date scheduled for its consideration, insert a notice in the London Gazette, and ‘give due notice in writing, to be hung up in the lobby of the House of Commons’. Ibid. (1828), iv. 133. The appointment of the election committee could be deferred to allow time for evidence to be gathered. Deferrals also enabled ministers to keep supporters in the House for a particular division, for example on Catholic relief in 1827 and reform in 1831. Nominally at least, election committees and their proceedings were supervised by the grand committee of privileges and elections, which sat throughout the session and to whom the clerk of elections reported. Costs were payable on either side if a petition was found to be frivolous or vexatious, as was the case with the county Mayo and Tregony petitions during the session 1830-1. CJ, lxxxvi. 377, 398. Unlike other proceedings, the inquiries of election committees were not nullified by a prorogation, but adjourned to the next Parliament. Proceedings and legislation concerning certain ‘corrupt’ constituencies lasted several sessions (for example, East Retford, Grampound and Penryn). Election petitions, therefore, were always preserved and printed in the Journal ‘in their entirety’, despite their length, in case the matter should be referred to a court of law and the original be required in evidence. PP (1833), xii. 299.

Strangers were cleared and the doors locked before an election committee was appointed and the names of the Members present were put into the ballot glass. Prior to the 1828 Act, the names of 49 Members were removed and read (afterwards this number was 30). The names of Members serving on select committees, ministers and Members above 60 years of age were discarded, and the counsel for each side nominated a committee member to represent their client. CJ, lxxv. 247. Committees were expected to appoint a chairman and sit as soon as practicable, but summoning witnesses and assembling documentary evidence under the Speaker’s writ took time and money. (The county Westmeath committee was adjourned to Ireland in April 1828 to take evidence.) Ibid. lxxxiii. 244. Non-compliance was a custodial offence. Members tended to feel bored and trapped when ‘detained by an election committee’. Ormathwaite mss FG1/5, pp. 139-44. Howick, counsel for Sir Francis Blake on the March 1827 Berwick-upon-Tweed election committee that voted to unseat John Gladstone, 20 Mar., sent his father the following account of their deliberations after the first five days:

I am just back from the House … the Berwick committee having been compelled to adjourn in consequence of Lord Blandford’s illness … Our progress has been hitherto exceedingly slow, though on Saturday we got on rather better; there could not have been a more unfavourable committee chosen for the petitioners, who have a very strong case. The chairman, Mr. Carew, Member for Wexford, has really no authority whatever, but lets Mr. Frankland Lewis, the nominee on the other side, do just as he pleases, and his experience in the House and plausible manner give him great influence over the other members of the committee, who most of them I think mean to do right, but are unfortunately too easily lathered over by him. I have been once or twice near making a serious complaint of his whispering all the time to those who sit next him. We have already made two or three decisions which were in my opinion completely wrong, but as except in one instance they were on points of very little importance, I did not make much opposition, particularly as it was clear it would have been in vain. Grey mss GRE/B24/2/97-98.

He later pointed out to Grey that there was nothing in Hatsell or the standing orders stating whether the chairman should have a casting vote in an election committee in the event of a tie, which was a likely outcome in the Berwick case. Ibid. GRE/B24/2/101. The House might be interrupted to hear counsel and agents announce the membership of an election committee (1828), or the determination of a committee (1825, 1827, 1829). CJ, lxxv. 305; lxxxii. 210, 369; lxxxiii, 257; lxxxvi. 134.

A new writ and a by-election was necessary when an election was voided. If ‘general and notorious bribery and corruption’ were proved, the House could suspend the issuing of a writ, ‘with a view to further inquiry, and the ultimate disfranchisement of the corrupt constituency by Act of Parliament’. Ibid. lxxxvi. 458, 493; Erskine May, 330, 368. New writs also had to be moved following plural or non-returns and for vacancies created by a Member’s elevation to the Lords, appointment to government office or to the royal household. Contests in these cases were unusual, but not unknown (e.g. Chester and Preston in December 1830). A Member was also formally disqualified from sitting if he was outlawed, became bankrupt, or neglected or refused (as Daniel O’Connell did in 1829) to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. When Robert Grosvenor ‘inadvertently omitted to take the oaths’ on returning to the House following his re-election to it after accepting household office in November 1830, legislation (a personal bill) indemnifying him from payment of the penalty fine of £500 for each day he sat ‘disqualified’ was enacted, and a writ for a second by-election was moved so that he could be promptly re-elected. Retirement was commonly by applications for vacant stewardships of the Chiltern Hundreds or East Hendred. CJ, lxxxvi. 353, 355-6, 359, 363; General Index to the Journals of the House of Commons, 1820-1837, p. 480.

 

Debate

Motions and orders were in principle moved in the order in which they stood on the notice paper or order book, although unopposed motions could be moved without notice, and specific orders might be given precedence over others, normally by the government. See, for example, Parl. Deb. (ser. 3), viii. 707. Directly the mover had spoken, usually at length, and his seconder briefly, others rose to reply. The Speaker indicated who should do so, selecting Members alternately from either side of the chamber and generally giving precedence to ministers over backbenchers. The selection of speakers could be an acutely sensitive matter. Grant, 58-59. Members often complained of being ignored early in their careers by the Speaker, after spending long hours preparing a speech. Grey Bennet diary, 93; Howick jnl. 20 Mar., 2 June 1829; Ormathwaite mss FG/1/5, pp. 127, 142; NAS GD157/3010 (Hepburne Scott). Front-benchers were sometimes even more sensitive on the subject. During an ill-tempered debate on 22 Apr. 1831, the leader of the House (Althorp), the leader of the opposition (Peel) and the radical Sir Francis Burdett stood up and refused to sit down. Althorp would have given way to Burdett, but not to Peel, and the Speaker ruled that the House should decide between Peel and Burdett. CJ, lxxxvi. 517. Peel ‘completely lost his temper’ and produced a torrent of furious, semi-incoherent invective against ministers and their ‘despotic’ reform scheme. He was interrupted by Black Rod’s arrival to summon the House to the Lords to hear Parliament prorogued. Hobhouse recalled how Peel’s

candour, all his moderation, all his trimming, shifty policy disappeared, and he displayed his real vexation, and true feelings of disappointment and rage in a harangue of sound and fury, signifying nothing but his own despair, and hatred of those who had overreached him by calculating on the good sense of the people, and the firmness of the king, with more accuracy than himself. Broughton, Recollections, iv. 105-6.

Before addressing the House, a Member (if he wore one) had to remove his hat. The bulky Hume, whose long, stuttering orations could empty the chamber, made a ceremony of placing his on his seat, and signalled that he was about to stop speaking by reaching his arm out to retrieve it. Grant, 6, 79-80. Speeches from the gangways or behind the clock were not permitted; but, putting common sense first, Manners Sutton waived this rule in a crowded House (22 Apr. 1825). The accepted form of reference or address was by a Member’s constituency, not his name. The Speaker reprimanded a furious Daniel O’Connell (who later retracted) for referring to his adversary John North as the ‘chief calumniator of Ireland’, instead of ‘the Member for Drogheda’, 19 Apr. 1831. It was forbidden to read out speeches. Notes were allowed (Castlereagh regularly jotted down comments while others spoke); but in practice, Members with little experience of the noise and apparent inattention of the House found it difficult to keep to them. No reference could be made to the sovereign or to the Lords’ proceedings; and it was inappropriate, as the Speaker confirmed (6 Mar. 1822), to revive a debate after it had concluded. Nor, as James Johnston discovered when the Speaker ruled him out of order, 8 Dec. 1831, were Members permitted to refer to comments made concerning petitions they had brought up the day before. Except in committee, only the mover had the right to speak more than once. This restriction did not apply to raising points of order, which partly accounts for their frequency. If a Member felt that he had been misunderstood or that a point of order against him was incorrect, he was usually allowed to ‘explain’, and it was also possible to intervene on the pretext of ‘informing the House of a fact’. ‘By right of reply’, the proposer of a motion generally wound up a debate.

Opponents of a motion might simply vote against it, use various procedural devices to prevent it from being put to the House, or attempt to turn it to their own advantage through a deftly drafted amendment. Moving the adjournment of the House or the debate, moving that the orders of the day be read or moving the previous question, had the effect (if the motion was carried) of ending the debate. Moving the previous question enabled the Liverpool ministry to exercise some control over and exploit divisions in the opposition campaign on behalf of Queen Caroline, 23 Jan. 1821. Just over a decade later, on the eve of the second reading of the first reform bill, Althorp moved the previous question to stifle an awkward and untimely Ultra motion accusing The Times of breach of privilege in libelling anti-reform Members (21 Mar. 1831); and he stalled Michael Sadler’s proposal for legislation for the Irish poor (21 Aug. 1831) and Edward Lytton Bulwer’s motion for repealing the ‘taxes on knowledge’ by the same means, 14 June 1832. More spectacularly, a spirited intervention by the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, who threatened its resignation, enabled government to carry the previous question by 239-219 and avoid defeat on the opposition resolution on the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan. 1832. CJ, lxxxvii. 53. However, it was impossible to move the previous question when the House was in committee.

Amendments could be carefully judged to clarify a stance on an issue or to exploit divisions among the backers of a motion. On 15 Apr. 1831 Althorp explained that he opposed Thomas Fowell Buxton’s motion for the immediate abolition of slavery, but would instead support an amendment to it that condemned the failure of the colonial assemblies to honour Canning’s amelioration resolutions of 1823 and threatened commercial reprisals. Motions that had been painstakingly planned and drafted might be suddenly destroyed by a wrecking amendment, as Sir James Graham discovered on 14 May 1830. His much-publicized ‘catch-all’ motion for the revived Whig opposition targeted privy councillors’ emoluments and had been hatched by Littleton and Lord Wellesley. Drafted by Huskisson, who originally had Hume in mind as its proposer, it asked:

That an humble address be presented to His Majesty seeking, that he will be graciously placed to give directions that there be laid before this House, an account of all salaries, profits, pay, fees and emoluments, whether civil or military, from 5th January 1829 to 5th January 1830, held and enjoyed by each of the members of His Majesty’s most honourable privy council: specifying with each name, the total amount received by each individual and distinguishing the various resources from which the same is derived.

Rather than oppose it, the Wellington ministry’s chancellor of the exchequer Goulburn countered it with an amendment broadening the original to read:

That an humble address be presented to His Majesty seeking, that he will be graciously placed to give directions that there be laid before this House, an account of all salaries, profits, pay, fees and emoluments, whether civil or military, held and enjoyed by all persons from 5th January 1829 to 5th January 1830, the total amount of which shall exceed £1,000, specifying with each name the total amount received by each individual and distinguishing the various resources from which the same is derived.

The government carried their amendment (by 231-147). As Hobhouse observed, it was ‘a poor minority’ for opposition ‘on such a question on the eve of a dissolution’. Howick jnl. 13-15 May 1830; Broughton, iv. 21. The amendment proposed by Isaac Gascoyne, by which the Grey ministry’s first reform bill for England and Wales was destroyed, 19 Apr. 1831, had been drafted to appear harmless. Appealing indirectly to anti-Irish, anti-Catholic and anti-Scottish sentiment, it took the form of a resolution ‘that it is the opinion of this House, that the total number of knights, citizens and burgesses returned to Parliament for their part of the United Kingdom called England and Wales, ought not to be diminished’. Its passage not only destroyed the schedules of the English reform bill, making progress on it impossible, but ruined with it the proposals already announced, but not debated, in the bills for Scotland and Ireland. M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), p. 182-8. Motions to appoint select committees were a popular means of drawing attention to an issue and attracting the support of independents on both sides of the House. The government was sometimes forced to concede them. It accepted, for example, Holme Sumner’s proposal of a select committee to consider the petitions on agricultural distress, 31 May 1820, but, by slipping in an amendment (carried by 251-108) confining its remit to the ‘mode of ascertaining average corn prices in the 12 maritime districts, under the provisions of the existing corn laws, and to any frauds which may be committed in violation of any of the provisions of the said laws’, it immediately rendered the committee almost worthless, and deferred attending to the issue until the next two sessions. CJ, lxxv. 259. The success on 22 Apr. 1823 of the second of two investigative opposition motions capitalizing on the ‘violence of Orange feeling’ against the Irish attorney-general William Plunket as the recent prosecutor of the Dublin Orange rioters surprised both sides of the House, although the ensuing inquiry led to little further action. Unusually, investigation was by a committee of the whole House, from which selected Members reported. Buckingham, Mems. Geo. IV, i. 448; Creevey’s Life and Times, 178. A similar motion on 3 June 1823, censuring the lord advocate Rae’s conduct in the Borthwick case, was almost carried. The Wellington ministry’s defeat, 15 Nov. 1830, on Sir Henry Parnell’s amendment for a select committee, instead of a committee of the whole House, to inquire into the civil list (a `very catching motion’ prefaced by a ‘sensible and judicious speech’) CJ, lxxxvi. 84; Ormathwaite mss FG/1/5, p. 133. resulted in its resignation: weakened by the recent general election, the ministry preferred to be defeated on a finance bill than on Brougham’s scheduled motion (drafted as resolutions) for parliamentary reform, which lapsed when he went to the Lords as the Grey ministry’s lord chancellor.

 

Divisions

No procedural change in the conduct of divisions was implemented until 1836, despite suggestions (one idea was that Members should sit in constituency order to facilitate correct identification and counting), and the efforts of Hume and his allies to count placemen’s votes. PP (1833), xxii, 558; Hatherton mss, Dudley to Littleton, 27 July 1823. Hudson Gurney described the latter:

They have two alphabetical lists printed, with columns, one ministerial men, the other opposition, comprising the names of the whole House. There are about 20 names who [sic] are in both lists (mine being one), marked Scotch, Irish, etc., and the ministerial list with marks for placemen and the borough men in italics, but these obnoxious distinctions are omitted in the opposition list, as there quite useless. Gurney diary, 25 June 1830. See also P. Fraser, ‘Party voting in the House of Commons, 1812-1827’, EHR, xcviii (1983), pp. 767-8.

When the House divided, the chamber and lobby were sealed off from the rest of the House on the Speaker’s order. This done, the Speaker repeated the question to be decided and appointed two tellers (either party managers or principal speakers in a debate) for each side. Some 30 per cent of Members told at least one division in this period. Members dividing against a motion had to go to the lobby to be counted, so the advantage of remaining in the chamber rested with the ‘Ayes’, who kept their seats and (unless targeted by Hume) could avoid having their votes publicized. Most division lists for the period named only those leaving the chamber. Members were often locked out or unintentionally absent from divisions. On 18 Apr. 1821 John Lambton missed a snap division on his reform proposals by being at dinner; according to Grey Bennet, he ‘sulked’ for a month afterwards. Grey Bennet diary, 76 On 16 Mar. 1821 colleagues persuaded a Member to vote who had been absent when the question was put. The House resolved that he ‘had no right to vote, and ought not to have been compelled … on that occasion’. CJ, lxxvi. 172; Erskine May, 212; Thomas, 245. On 27 Feb. 1824 it was discovered after the division, but before the tellers reported, that a Member had come into the House and voted after the question was put. The Speaker put the question to him and he voted against it a second time. CJ, lxxix. 106. See also Erskine May, 179.

The Speaker had a casting vote, normally used to ensure that the House had another opportunity to consider an issue (14 June 1821, 1 May 1828), although he used it to throw out the Blackfriars Bridge repair bill without giving a reason, 3 Apr. 1821, and voted for Lord John Russell’s bribery resolutions ‘as a declaratory measure’, 26 May 1826. CJ, lxxvi. 229, 439; lxxxi. 387; lxxxiii. 292. He was narrowly spared from voting when the reform bill was carried at its second reading by a single vote, 22 Mar. 1831, for which several scapegoats were found. Pairing remained common, albeit denigrated. To send a clear message to his doubting constituents, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn withdrew from his pairing arrangement and voted personally for the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831. NLW ms 2797 D, Sir W. to H. Williams Wynn, 18 Dec. 1831. Many arrangements were private ones made for considerable periods of time; Coedymaen mss 217. but the Tory ‘whipper-in’ Holmes, with occasional assistance from Croker and Lord Lowther, regularly arranged pairs at short notice throughout the period, as did Planta on occasion for the Canning and Wellington ministries. Grey’s kinsmen by marriage Duncannon, Ellice (as patronage secretary) and Charles Wood provided this service for the Whigs; but it was only one aspect of a patronage secretary’s work, which, to Ellice’s annoyance, Althorp with his large majority considered superfluous. G.W. Cox, ‘The Origins of Whip Votes in the House of Commons’, PH, xi (1992), p. 278; J. Sainty and G.W. Cox, ‘The Identification of Government Whips in the House of Commons, 1830-1905’, ibid. xvi (1997), p. 339-358; T.A. Jenkins, `The Whips in the Early Victorian House of Commons’, ibid. xix (2000), p. 260.

 

Speeches and Speaking

In April 1830 the former treasury secretary Arbuthnot complained to Lord Cowley:

Everybody is now a talker. There is but little of eloquence, and scarcely any promising young men; but everybody has a word to say, and no one, who has not been present, can have an idea of what fatigue it is to listen for weeks and weeks together to the very dullest of speeches. Arbuthnot Corresp. 134.

Almost 38,000 Commons speeches are recorded in the Parliamentary Debates for this period, some 37,350 of them attributable to 870 named Members rather than to ‘A Member’. Calculated from Parl. Deb. (ser. 2), i-xxv; (ser. 3), i-xiv. When the net is widened to include reports of parliamentary proceedings in the Mirror of Parliament (launched by Henry Winchester and colleagues in 1828), up to 31 stamped London papers and over 200 provincial ones by 1830, often based on second hand reports, the number of reported speeches rises dramatically, and with it additional details of brief interventions, select committees and petitions and their presenters. Newspaper totals based on stamp duty returns (PP (1830), xxv. 349-67; (1831-2), xxxiv. 121-3) and M. Gibbon, ‘Provincial Newspaper Press’, Westminster Rev. xii (1830), pp. 69-103. The Hansards printed 660 ‘speeches’ by Hunt in his short parliamentary career; the Mirror of Parliament records just over 1,000. See also J.W. Osborne, ‘Henry Hunt’s Career in Parliament’, Historian, xxxix (1976), pp. 24-39. Several Members took steps to ensure that the Mirror reached their constituencies in the early 1830s to ward off criticism of inaction and correct reports circulating locally. From late 1830 the Hansards doubled their own coverage of debates, but this remained unofficial and subsidiary to their other work for the House. See Philip Henry HOWARD, Sir Edward KNATCHBULL, Thomas WOOD and LIVERPOOL. A survey of their Parliamentary Debates indicates that the number of speakers remained steady at 62-64 per cent in the Parliaments of 1820 and 1826, although the number of frequent speakers (with over 50 printed speeches a Parliament) dropped from 64 to 45. Speeches by only 40 per cent of Members (including four frequent speakers) were reported in the Parliament of 1830-1, but with increased reporting and a new intake of Members, the number rose to 74 per cent (79 frequent speakers) in the Parliament of 1831-2. Throughout, Hume spoke more often than anyone else. Radicals, like ‘the madman’ John Cressett Pelham, contributed occasional, though brief, prolific outbursts. Alexander Baring was one of several bankers who contributed significantly to debate and the business of the House. Leaders of the House, who combined that role with high cabinet office, were relentlessly busy. The Parliamentary Debates alone print over 170 speeches by Castlereagh, 1820-22; 166 by Canning, 1823-7; 500 by Peel, 1828-30, and 1,044 by Althorp, 1830-2. By contrast, though constantly in the House, patronage secretaries and whippers-in spoke infrequently in debate but became increasingly active as tellers. G.W. Cox, `The Development of Collective Responsibility in the United Kingdom’, PH, xiii (1994), p. 40. Goulburn spoke 190 times as chancellor, Feb.-July 1830 alone, but Vansittart, struggling in the same office, 1820-3, made only 135 reported speeches. Peel, as leader of the opposition, and Goulburn were frequent speakers against the reform legislation, 1831-2.

Speakers’ styles and mannerisms were frequently remarked on. James Grant thought Croker remarkable for his stamina and his effective replies: ‘a more dextrous special pleader … never sat within the walls’, ‘wheeling his body round and round’ to address every part of the House; but he could not enunciate the letter ‘r’. Grant, 98-102. Yet his manner could be offensive. Littleton’s diary describes a stand-off in March 1832, when anti-reformers mocked Ewart with ‘taunts of Toxteth Park’, the large suburb in his Liverpool constituency that his party had refused to enfranchise:

A disgraceful and most ungentlemanly scene took place ... between Croker and Ewart ... in which Croker’s manner was more violent and worse than his language. The chairman put it to him whether it was ‘worth while’ to continue such language to Ewart, on which Croker rejoined, ‘Sir, I agree with you’, and then with a most courteous motion of the hand towards Ewart, said, ‘It is not worth while’. The whole House felt indignant, and [Smith] Stanley insisted on explanations before the parties left the House. Bernal, the chairman [of ways and means], then called not on Croker! but on Ewart! to explain. He must have been asleep. However, the affair was made up. Hatherton diary, 5 Mar. 1832.

Disliking Croker, Rickman referred to him privately as ‘the Grand Castrator’. Williams, Rickman Letters, 203. Hunt’s experience of addressing the masses and ready wit served him well as a novice in the House, and enabled him to overcome his inexperience of procedures and regular rowdy attempts to silence him with bleating, crowing, loud yawning, yelping and coughing—for the last, the easiest to orchestrate and most difficult to overcome, he suggested lozenges; he embarrassed at least one of his detractors by offering him some. Grant, 74-75. Deploying his adversarial skills, Brougham always spoke to great effect, from preference primed with drink and late in debate. He excelled at distilling salient points from the speeches of others, to which he had appeared to be inattentive, into a reasoned rallying cry before the division, deliberately mixing ‘extempore speaking ... [and] more prepared style ... without showing the sentences’. Like Canning, with whom he sparred, he could fill the House: his six-and-three-quarter hour exposition of the defective legal system in February 1828 silenced it and prompted the appointment of a productive investigative commission. Brougham mss, Brougham to Denman [1 Jan. 1831]. On the other hand, his erstwhile collaborator on the Edinburgh Review Francis Jeffrey delivered an embarrassingly dismal maiden speech when he was catapulted into the Commons as lord advocate to steer through the Scottish reform bill. In court and as an editor, Jeffrey was the ‘prince of critics’. Like others, he improved with practice, once he overcame his embarrassment. Grant, 184-8. Sir Charles Wetherell was another able lawyer, but ‘indifferent politician’. Ibid. 96. The star Irish performer was O’Connell, who first impressed the House with his assured performance at the bar, when denied admission, 18 May 1829, despite the recent enactment of Catholic emancipation. Like Hunt, he had a considerable extra-parliamentary following, spoke energetically and could manipulate or sponsor certain newspapers. Charles Williams Wynn was a practised and frequent speaker, but his delivery was marred by speech defects. His speeches nevertheless ‘read well’. Grant recalled:

His voice is more extraordinary than that of any … Member … He often falls into so screeching a tone as to impair the articulation of the word altogether; for he does not pitch his voice at a very high key. He has besides an indescribable sort of lisp …. and is seldom listened to with much attention.

Williams Wynn’s diction was a handicap in his bids to become Speaker and to return to the cabinet after 1828. Colleagues also became accustomed to regional accents. Even Peel’s Midlands one, which he generally masked, reappeared under duress. Ibid. 139 Some Members’ performances could become embarrassing. When Spencer Perceval, the assassinated premier’s son, was scheduled to move an adjournment curtailing the day’s business so that Members could leave early on account of the general fast, 20 Mar. 1832, he assumed the manner of seventeenth-century divine, as Walsh described:

Instead of simply making his adjournment [he] began an address interrupted by long tirades of the wildest description of religious enthusiasm and evidently betraying by his whole manner that he had worked himself up to a pitch of mental aberration. Both sides of the House interfered in the hope of getting him to sit down, but in vain. Most … left the House by degrees after a scene of the greatest confusion and at last Sandon contrived to interrupt him by the parliamentary privilege of moving that the gallery be cleared. It is very melancholy. Ormathwaite mss G42, f. 32.

Many could make a dozen or so creditable speeches a session, especially if they specialized: Robert Gordon on lunacy, Wilmot Horton on emigration, Sadler, who impressed with his maiden speech on the Irish poor, and Robert Slaney on the malt duties and poor labourers. Only rarely could a single speech sway the House. Huskisson did so triumphantly on 7 May 1827, ‘the great night of the shipping’. Canning’s entire liberal economic policy and his own Reciprocity Acts had become the target of a protectionist motion requesting a select committee on the distressed shipping industry, proposed by his fellow Member for Liverpool, Gascoyne. Huskisson prevailed by undermining the statistical base of his rival’s motion and persuading him to withdraw it. Morning Chron. 8 May 1827. Huskisson made another dramatic intervention on 2 June 1828, when, following his controversial sacking from the cabinet over the East Retford disfranchisement bill, he became one of the first men to make an acrimonious resignation speech in the House. Cox, PH, xiii. 32-47.

Whatever its qualities, though, the impact of a speech could depend overwhelmingly on atmosphere and political tension. When the journalist and gallery reporter James Grant sketched the varying atmosphere of the House in his popular Random Recollections, covering both the pre- and post- reform House, he conveyed the vitality and excitement of the parliamentary politics of the period:

The House has a very different appearance at different times. When there is no interesting question before it, its empty seats give it a cheerless aspect: and the extent to which this operates both on speakers and listeners is incredible. It is next to impossible, in such a case, to make a lively or eloquent speech, or even suppose it were both lively and eloquent, it always fails to produce an impression… But when… a question of commanding interest is to be discussed, the House is full soon after the Speaker takes the chair, and continues so, except from eight to ten o’clock, till it either divides or adjourns. There are no sleepers or slumberers then. In the old House there was not sitting room, far less room to recline in a horizontal position… When the House is full it has a very cheerful appearance, and greatly adds to the intrinsic interest of the proceedings. On such occasions, you will sometimes see fifty or sixty Members standing at the bar at the same time. I have often seen it so blocked up that it was with the greatest difficulty a member could make his way either in or out…. In applauding their respective favourites, Hon. Members give full play to their lungs. Their cheers are sometimes deafening in the House, and are often distinctly heard at a great distance from it. Grant, 61-64.

Sittings by session and highest attendance, 1820-32 Based on returns made by the clerk and clerk assistant (PP (1833), xii. 170; (1834), v. 35). Rickman’s return, presented to the 1832 select committee on public petitioning, maximized attendance by failing to allow for absent Members pairing. The figure for sitting hours in the 1820 session was conflated with that for the 1819-20 session of the 1818 parliament and is therefore omitted here. Figures for 1831-2 derive from a return of 1834 by John Henry Ley, and differ by including morning sessions in the hourly totals.

Session

Sitting days           

Sitting hours           

Largest number of Members Present
 

Commence          

 Terminated          

Date            

Division

or ballot                                        

No.

1 Geo. IV

21 Apr. -

23 Nov. 1820

69

-

22 June

Resolution regarding

Queen Caroline

520

1 & 2 Geo. IV                         

23 Jan. -

11 July 1821

104

861½

26 Jan.

Queen’s name in liturgy

524

3 Geo. IV

5 Feb. -

6 Aug. 1822

105

858

30 Apr

Roman Catholic

peers in Parliament

498

4 Geo. IV

4 Feb.

19 July. 1823

96

774¼

24 Apr.

Reform of Parliament

454

5 Geo. IV

3 Feb. -

25 June. 1824

86

622

11 June

Condemnation of

Missionary Smith

344

6 Geo. IV

3 Feb. -

6 July 1825

91

687

1 Mar.

Roman Catholic claims

485

7 Geo. IV

2 Feb. -

31 May 1826

64

457

27 Apr.

Reform of Parliament

454

7 & 8 Geo. IV

14 Nov. 1826 -

7 July 1827

106

645¾

6 Mar.

Roman Catholic claims

553

9 Geo. IV

29 Jan. -

28 July 1828

111

777

26 Feb.

Corporation and

Test Acts repeal

435

10 Geo. IV

5 Feb. -

24 June 1829

79

540

18 Mar.

Roman Catholic relief

bill–2nd reading

531

11 Geo. IV
- 1 Gul. IV

4 Feb. -

23 July 1830

105

856

17 May

Jewish relief bill–2nd reading

398

1 Gul. IV

26 Oct.1830 -

22 Apr. 1831

90

640

22 Mar.

Reform bill–2nd reading

608

I & 2 Gul. IV

14 June 1831 -

20 Oct. 1831

98

918

6 July

Reform bill–2nd reading

603

1 & 2 Gul. IV

6 Dec. 1831 -

16 Aug. 1832

140

1,837

22 Mar.

Reform bill–3rd reading

598

Total

1,344

10,473½

  
Authors
M.M.E.