The Age of George III

I am happy that you are using this web site and hope that you found it useful. Unfortunately, the cost of making this material freely available is increasing, so if you have found the site useful and would like to contribute towards its continuation, I would greatly appreciate it. Click the button to go to Paypal and make a donation.

Parliament and Parliamentary Representation

The House of Lords

This House comprised Lords Spiritual (the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and some Bishops) and Lords Temporal (Dukes, Earls and so on). The number of peers was about 220 although there was no fixed number of seats in the Lords. The House of Lords was the highest Court of Appeal in Britain. Many of the Ministers of the Crown were appointed from the House of Lords - for example, the second Marquis of Rockingham, the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Bute.

Peers had a great deal of influence in the provinces since they were all great landowners. They dominated local politics and local government.

The House of Commons

The 1716 Septennial Act made general elections compulsory every seven years although if only one candidate stood for election, there would be no contest.

Until 1801 there were 558 MPs. Of these

• 45 represented Scottish constituencies
• 24 represented Welsh constituencies
• 489 represented English constituencies

All together, there were 314 constituencies, of which 245 were in England. These were divided into forty county constituencies and 203 boroughs. Some boroughs had two MPs, others had only one. Oxford and Cambridge Universities each had one MP. Ireland had its own parliament until the 1801 Act of Union, after which it sent one hundred MPs to Westminster.

There was no uniformity in the distribution on English constituencies. At least two-thirds of MPs represented constituencies in the south of England (i.e. below the Wash/Severn line) as the map shows. Although this distribution had been adequate when it was decided upon initially, by the 1760s it was becoming inadequate. By the 1820s it did not reflect the distribution of either population or new wealth. The industrial revolution had created huge industrial towns that had no parliamentary voice.

By the 1780s, in Cornwall and Devon, 1050 people voted for 53 MPs but growing northern industrial towns had no representation. For example, in 1831, Manchester had a population of a quarter of a million but no MP. Each county had two MPs, regardless of the size of the county. Yorkshire had 20,000 voters of whom half lived in the West Riding.

There were two types of MP:

• County MPs. These men had to own land worth £600 p.a. and usually were from the great landed families of the country
• Borough MPs. These men had to own land worth £300 p.a. Often they were local squires, landed gentry or the sons of the aristocracy.

MPs were almost always from the nobility or landed gentry.

Voting qualifications

1. The County Franchise: each elector had to own land worth 40 shillings, freehold. This had been a national standard since 1429/30 but because of devaluation and increased wealth, the number of electors had increased. Also, if a man was a tenant of land worth 40 shillings freehold, he was allowed to vote. This meant that many tenant farmers had to vote the way the landowner told them.
2. The Borough Franchise had no uniformity whatsoever because the system had grown haphazardly. There were 203 boroughs with 402 MPs between them. A number of different types of borough franchise can be identified:

• Open boroughs: here, all males in the constituency at the time of the election could vote, whether they lived there or not. Preston in Lancashire was an open borough.
• Potwalloper borough: all male householders and lodgers could vote. The term refers to anyone who had a hearth on which to boil (wallop) a cauldron (pot). At the extremes of this type of borough were Northampton with a thousand voters and St Germans with only twenty. In these boroughs, many of the working classes qualified. This franchise was abolished by the Act of 1832, but the existing potwallopers were allowed, under certain conditions, to continue voting for the rest of their lives.
• Scot and Lot boroughs: here all male ratepayers could vote. The Scot and Lot taxes came from Anglo-Saxon times (if a person did not have to pay the Scot tax, he 'got off scot free'). Both Westminster (with 20,000 voters) and Gatten (with two voters) were Scot and Lot boroughs.
Old S
• Burgage boroughs. There were 29 of these in the country and it was the property that carried the vote. To be able to vote in a Burgage borough, a man had to own the property. This type of borough often became a Pocket Borough because one person would buy the majority of the burgages. Malton in Yorkshire had 300 voters although most of the properties belonged to the Marquis of Rockingham and his heirs the Earls Fitzwilliam. Old Sarum, which belonged to the Pitt family, had seven voters.
• Freeman boroughs were constituencies where all freemen - not necessarily resident - could vote. Usually these boroughs had a restricted electorate because a man had to be made a Freeman of the Borough. London had 7,000 voters but at the other extreme, Camelford had only twenty.
• Corporation Boroughs. There were 27 of these in the country, none with an electorate of more than sixty; of these, fifteen were pocket boroughs. The town's Corporation usually chose the MP and elections were rarely held.
• Pocket/Nomination boroughs. These were owned by the great landowners who chosethe MP. There were no elections at all in this type of borough. Examples of Pocket Boroughs are Malton in Yorkshire and Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire (both owned by Rockingham and then the Fitzwilliams) and Boroughbridge and Aldborough in Yorkshire (both owned by the Dukes of Newcastle).
• Rotten/Decayed boroughs. Ownership of the borough or part of it, gave the right to vote. The borough no longer had a population and often did not exist. The two most extreme examples are Old Sarum and Dunwich. Old Sarum originally had been the site of Salisbury but the settlement had moved; there were few people left in Old Sarum but they still had two MPs. Dunwich also had two MPs but the town had disappeared completely. It had been in East Anglia but because of land erosion had disappeared into the North Sea.