which return was valid, and its judgment in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred was guided, not according to the rights and wrongs of the case (such considerations being quite out of place in the corrupt legislatures of our early Hanoverian monarchs), but by the politics of the competitors for senatorial honours, and the good things which a subservient member could command from the ministry he served. So, if a Tory corporation made a return when Harley held the helm of State, and with false compass steered to pick up the king “over the water,” the chances were that the franchise would be held to be in the Jacobite mayor, aldermen, and common council; that the bailiff was an imprudent impostor, and that the Whig householders had no voice in the election. A return made by the same authorities in the days of Walpole would have been very rapidly disposed of. It would be held that the householders, and no one but the householders, had the right of voting—provided they sent the ministerial candidates to Westminster. The mayor would be snubbed, and made to give way to the bailiff, who would be installed as the lawful returning officer—so long as he returned a Whig! The Cabinet and the Opposition mustered their forces at the trial (?) of an election petition, as though some important principle of State-craft were in question; and if the ministerial nominee was not declared duly elected, it was a broad hint to his patrons that their reign was over. The fall of Sir Robert Walpole was completed by an adverse majority of one in a disputed return for the borough of Chippenham!
Thus the most hopeless confusion and uncertainty reigned in the boroughs as to the true nature of their franchise. The journals of the House of Commons contain five contradictory resolutions respecting the right of voting in Dorchester, and in other places equal uncertainty prevailed. There was no fixed principle of voting. Hardly any two boroughs had precisely the same franchise. In one it was vested in the corporation alone—in another in the corporation and a select number of burgesses. In a third it was held by all householders. In a fourth the pot-wallers were entitled to it. The holders of burgage tenures formed the electoral body in a fifth. The freemen, including in one instance the husbands of the daughters of freemen, in a sixth.[1] The payers of scot and lot in a seventh; and in an eighth, two or more of the foregoing qualifications in combination, gave the right of voting. The boroughs knew what they were, but could not guess what they might become, when a change of Ministry reversed the position of parties. What they had been formed no precedent for the future, until, in the year 1729, an Act of Parliament was passed, making the last decision of the House of Commons final—no matter how corrupt or wrong that decision might have been.
Thus was the nature of the franchise fixed; but at every contested election vehement disputes arose as to who were entitled to exercise it. It was vested in the freemen—it was vested in the pot-wallers: but who were freemen, pot-wallers, &c., &c.? There was at that time no register of electors, as at present, to be referred to as conclusive evidence of the right of individuals to vote. Loud and angry arguments took place at the polling-places, and conflicting and corrupt decisions were given in Parliament, until an Act, passed through the exertions of Mr. Grenville, taking the jurisdiction of trying election petitions from the House at large, and vesting it in a committee of its members, caused disputed returns to be a little more fairly dealt with.
I will now shortly sketch the nature of the franchises already mentioned. The corporations I have alluded to were the old municipalities—those utterly effete and corrupt communities which were swept away by the Municipal Corporations Act. They were, for the most part, self-elected, and when associated with the “freemen” in the enjoyment of the franchise, were naturally desirous that the number of those entitled to share with them the profits of an election should be as few as decency would permit. They contended that they alone had the right of making freemen, and they made them only by interest or compulsion. It was frequently asserted on the other hand, that all resident householders, paying scot and lot for a year and a day, were freemen, and entitled to vote at the election of members for Parliament. A great contest took place upon this question in the borough of Rye. One committee decided for the inhabitants, and another (upon appeal) for the corporation; and so the franchise remained in the hands of the latter, and those whom they chose to admit—in all about forty-seven individuals—down to the passing of the Reform Bill. Until the right of voting was taken away from revenue and other Government officers, every “freeman” in this borough was in the service of either the Customs, the Excise, or the Post Office. Most of these situations were sinecures, and those who held them were paid by the nation to vote for the Minister. “Freedom” was generally acquired either by birth, apprenticeship, or purchase, and the “freemen,” as a body, formed as corrupt a class as existed in the times of universal corruption.
A “pot-waller,” or “pot-wallopper,” was one who had a right to boil a pot within the borough, and if he had possessed this right for six months preceding an election, and had not been in the receipt of parochial relief, he had a vote. Taunton was a pure pot-walling borough, and one of the most corrupt in the kingdom. It is only very recently that the pot-wallers there have been convinced that they are not entitled—as of right—to a sovereign a-head at every election!
The burgage-tenures which so puzzled Mr. Minkinshaw arose out of the division of the soil of England by the Saxons. The land was divided by lot; and its possessors, for purposes of protection and government, bound themselves to perform- ↑ This privilege was granted by Queen Anne to the people of Bristol, in requital of the hospitality which they had shown her husband, Prince George of Denmark. “She asked them,” says the Spectator, “what privilege she should confer upon them, and they requested this privilege because their women were so ugly!” A lady who could confer a vote in a city where a contested election cost a thousand pounds a day, was not likely to die an old maid. I must add, however, that from personal observation I have come to the conclusion that my fellow-countrywomen on the banks of the Avon are no longer qualified for a renewal of this privilege in Lord John Russell’s new Reform Bill.
