electoral efforts to Nottingham, where he was beaten in the poll by Sir John Cam Hobhouse, the sometime Radical friend of Byron and Francis Place, but now shut up in the straitest school of Whiggery as one of the tamest of Cabinet ministers of the Russell Government.
The Chartist cause fared better at the general election of 1847. It was one of the surprises of that election that O'Connor was chosen member for Nottingham while Hobhouse was put at the bottom of the poll.[1] There were a good many other Chartist candidatures, but most of them were not persevered in beyond the public nomination at the hustings, and the inconclusive verdict of the popular show of hands. But the few Chartists who went to the poll did not share the leader's good fortune. Ernest Jones was badly beaten at Halifax,[2] and the nearest approach to a second Chartist victory was at Norwich, where J. H. Parry nearly defeated the Marquis of Douro, the eldest son of the great Duke of Wellington.[3] It was, however, a new thing to have even one Chartist able to voice the party's point of view in the House of Commons, the more so since its representative was the vigorous personality who stood for the cause in the public mind. Even in the heyday of Chartism, it had only been through the benevolence of some sympathetic Radicals, like Thompson and Crawford, that the Chartist standpoint could be indirectly expounded in Parliament.
O'Connor did not make much of his position in Parliament. He talked of bringing in a bill to legalise his Land Company, which the experts had already pronounced to be illegal. But he was as much an Irish Nationalist as he was a Chartist, and the House of Commons after O'Connell's death offered an irresistible temptation to him to revert to the first rôle he had ever played in politics. His chief work in Parliament was now in obstructing and denouncing the Whig ministers' Irish Coercion Bill. It almost looks as if he had ambitions to oust John O'Connell from his uneasy succession to his father as the Irish leader.[4] But his eccentricities were now verging towards insanity, and his language had become extraordinarily
- ↑ The numbers were Walter (of the Times) 1830; O'Connor, 1340, elected; Gisborne, 1089; Hobhouse, 974, not elected (Northern Star, July 31, 1847).
- ↑ Jones only got 279 votes, while the lowest successful candidate obtained 506.
- ↑ The numbers were Peto, 2414; Douro, 1723, elected; Parry, 1648, not elected.
- ↑ Northern Star, December 4, 1847, called J. O'Connell "a lick-spittle spaniel only fit to be kicked." His crime was wishing to keep on terms with the Whig ministry.
