page_title: Unreformed House of Commons
section_title: End of the Unreformed House
hierarchical_section_title: Unreformed House of Commons / End of the Unreformed House
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764-1845)
context_page_description: "Unreformed House of Commons" is a name given to the House of Commons of Great Britain and the House of Commons of the United Kingdom before it was reformed by the Reform Act 1832.
  Until the Act of Union of 1707, which united the Kingdoms of Scotland and England to form Great Britain, Scotland had its own Parliament, and the term can be used to refer to the House of Commons of England. From 1707 to 1801 the term refers to the House of Commons of Great Britain. Until the Act of Union of 1800 joining the Kingdom of Ireland to Great Britain, Ireland also had its own Parliament. From 1801 to 1832, therefore, the term refers to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
context_section_description: The issue which brought parliamentary reform to the forefront once more was Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which removed barriers to Roman Catholics being elected to the House of Commons, and which led many Anglican conservatives, the Ultra-Tories in particular, to favour abolition of the rotten boroughs so as to make Parliament more truly representative of (Anglican) county, squire and parson. Similarly, it was the Tory Thomas Attwood who in 1830 founded the Birmingham Political Union to press for reform. The accession of a new, and less hide-bound monarch precipitated a general election, which - galvanized by news of the French Revolution of 1830 with its middle-class power-brokers - produced a swing of some 30 seats against Wellington's Government, which fell to a coalition (including the Ultras) on 15 November.
  Earl Grey formed a ministry pledged to reform. In March 1831, it passed its second reading by a single vote, so closely were forces balanced in the House. When a hostile amendment was passed by eight votes, Grey sought and was granted a dissolution of parliament, asking for a fresh mandate in April 1831. At this election the Whigs won a landslide - a result that, as Elie Halevy put it, "by its condemnation of the existing franchise went near to justify the plea of its Tory defenders". In 35 of the 40 English counties they won both seats and in the boroughs where electors were able to decide they made an almost clean sweep. Of the 230 seats the Tories held after that election, most were in rotten or "closed" boroughs or else in Scotland, which had almost no broad-based electorates. By one reckoning, the Tories could claim to represent only 50,000 voters, while the four Whig members for Yorkshire alone represented 100,000 voters. Despite this decisive verdict, the House of Lords rejected the Second Reform Bill; and a barrage of popular protests and a constitutional crisis followed, before the King's agreement to create the necessary number of new peers to pass the Reform made the Lords eventually give way, and the Great Reform Act was passed.
  The Reform Act extended the franchise from about 435,000 to about 652,000 voters in Great Britain. Setting itself out explicitly as a final settlement of the reform process,, it disfranchised many rotten boroughs (56 boroughs were abolished, while another 30 were reduced from two members to one), gave seats to new boroughs and additional seats to the more populous counties, reformed the electoral system in Scotland, and introduced a uniform borough franchise. While landlord influence, voter deference, corruption, and pocket boroughs could all be found under the new system, and while the new arrangements were still a far cry from universal suffrage even for males (perhaps 1 in 5 of whom could vote in 1833), the Great Reform Act was - at least to Whig historians like G M Trevelyan - the decisive step in ending the old system.
caption: Earl Grey
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