, 1808) The House of Commons consisted entirely of men, increasingly of great wealth only, and
from 1688 until reform entirely of
Anglicans, except in Scotland. Women could neither vote nor stand for election. Members were not paid, which meant that only men of wealth could represent their counties or boroughs. Candidates had to be electors, which meant that in most places they had to have land, mills or businesses. Virtually all members representing county seats were
landed gentry. Many were relatives or dependants of
peers. Others were
squires with little or no blood relation to other members. These independent country gentlemen were often the chief source of opposition to government and royal edict, since they had little motivation to gain government favour through their votes. Boroughs also sometimes selected local squires, but more were merchants or urban professionals such as lawyers. A large number of borough members were sponsored into office by the government and thus gave it support: these
cronies were known as "
placemen", and it was a long-standing objective of parliamentary reformers to eliminate them in the House of Commons. Some were men of little means, in debt or insolvent, who agreed to become placemen for government funds. All 18th century governments depended on this corrupt element to maintain their majorities. Some boroughs were under the control of particular ministers or government departments. Thus those representing the
Cinque Ports were, by custom, dependants of the
Admiralty and spoke for the interests of the
Royal Navy. There was no direct religious restriction on the right to vote. In practice most Catholics were prevented between the reign of
Elizabeth I and the
Papists Act 1778, as they could not own or inherit land, making them unable to meet the property requirement. Prominent "
recusant" Catholic families such as that of the Duke of Norfolk, until this rule became redundant, circumvented this. Even after 1778, eligibility for election to the House was restricted by the fact that members had to take an Anglican oath to take their seats. This excluded
Catholics, non-Anglican
Protestants (
English Dissenters),
Jews and
atheists (This restriction did not apply to
Presbyterians in
Scotland, where the
Church of Scotland was the established church.). It is a widely held view that the quality of members of the Commons declined over the 250 years before its reform in 1832. This view was one of the stimulants for reform.
Sir John Neale could say of the county members in the reign of Elizabeth I: "It was not sufficient for candidates to belong to the more substantial families ... They usually had to show some initiative and will." In the boroughs, he wrote, "competition tended to eliminate the less vigorous, less intelligent and unambitious." This would not be accepted as a description of the situation in the reign of
George III, when it was frequently said that the Commons was full of lazy time-servers, talentless dependants of peers, and corrupt placemen and government agents. The numerical dominance of country gentlemen pervaded. In 1584 they comprised 240 members in a House of 460. Two hundred years later this proportion had hardly changed, even though the social composition of Britain had changed greatly. The proportion of non-affiliated by blood members declined; sons or close relatives of peers rose at least fourfold. In 1584 only 24 members were sons of peers; by the end of the 18th century this number had risen to about 130 (out of 659, i.e. 19.7%), a fourfold rise in percentage. In the 18th century about 50 members held ministerial or similar government offices. These included some whom today would be career civil servants: the Secretary of the Admiralty, for example. Other members were given ceremonial court appointments, usually
sinecures, as a means of ensuring their loyalty. These included such archaic posts as eight
Clerks of the Green Cloth and a dozen
Grooms of the Bedchamber, aside from clerkships in government departments, posts which usually involved no actual work. This was not necessarily regarded as corrupt – in an age when Members received neither payments nor pensions, a sinecure was regarded as a legitimate reward for service, but it also served to keep the recipient loyal. More clearly corrupt was the payment of secret pensions to Members by the Treasury. In 1762 sixteen Members were thus secretly in the pay of the government. Opposition rhetoric at the time, however, tended to exaggerate the corruption of the 18th century House of Commons and the extent to which governments controlled the House by corrupt means. John Brooke's studies of division lists led him to comment: "The majority of Members voting with Government held no office and did so through honest conviction." The lists show, he said, "that Members were given office because they voted with Government, not that they voted with Government in order to obtain office." As he points out, at a time when there were no formal political parties and hence no party discipline in the House, governments had to resort to other expedients to secure a majority and allow the
continuity of government.
Summary of the constituencies (1802) English county members England had been divided into
counties (or
shires) since
Anglo-Saxon times. These formed the cornerstone of representation, from 1265. Two
knights of the shire were chosen to represent each. Before 1536 England
had 39 (see list below), thus electing 78 "knights". These "knights" were local landowners who could enjoy
courtesy style peerages from their living father or grandfather but lacked a proper
peerage (in which case they would be members of the
House of Lords). Since
Wales was formally annexed to England in 1536, each of the 12 Welsh counties elected one "knight".
Monmouthshire, part of the
Welsh Marches, became an English county, electing two members, thus making for 92 county members.
English borough members in Wiltshire, an uninhabited hill that
elected two Members of Parliament.
Old Sarum by
John Constable, 1834. Even in medieval times a significant proportion of the King's revenue came from taxes paid by people living in towns, and thus the House of Commons had representatives of
boroughs as well as counties from an early date. A borough was a town which usually, but not always, had a
royal charter giving it the right to elect two members (known as
burgesses) to the House of Commons, though some very ancient boroughs were acknowledged as having prescriptive rights. Five English boroughs elected only one member, while two boroughs – the
City of London and the double borough of
Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in
Dorset – elected four members each. From the 16th century 12 boroughs in Wales elected one member each. Mediaeval kings could and did grant and revoke charters at their pleasure, often to create seats in the House for their supporters, and frequently regardless of the size or importance of the town. Thus there were "
rotten boroughs" (boroughs with very few voters) from very early times, but they increased in number over the years as many old towns lost population. The two most famous examples were
Old Sarum, which by the 18th century had no residents at all, and
Dunwich in
Suffolk, most of which had fallen into the sea. The number of English boroughs fluctuated over time, until the last new borough charter was issued in 1674. From then on the number was fixed at 203, electing 405 members (see list below). The franchise for borough seats varied enormously. In some boroughs, virtually all adult homeowners could vote. In others, only a handful of landowners could vote. In others, the default maintained, members were chosen by its
corporation (council), usually elected by a small group of property owners. The types of borough franchise were as follows: ;Householder boroughs: :These were commonly known as "
potwalloper" boroughs, because (it was said) anyone who owned a hearth which could boil a pot could vote. In these boroughs all resident male householders who were not receiving alms or poor relief could vote. There were about 12 of these boroughs, In a small burgage borough, a patron who bought all the burgages had absolute control. At election time he would simply
convey the burgages to his relatives and friends, and thereby in effect nominate two members of Parliament. These boroughs included the notorious Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. As a result, these boroughs were rarely contested, and even more rarely successfully contested. ;Freeholder boroughs: :In the remaining six boroughs, the right to vote was held by all
freeholders. This was in theory quite democratic, but since they were all small towns none of them had electorates larger than 300 even in 1831. It is not possible to calculate the size of the borough electorate with any accuracy, since many boroughs were rarely contested, and no records were made of eligible voters unless there was a contest. As well, many people owned property in more than one borough and could thus vote more than once (this was called
plural voting). The total English electorate is thought to have increased from about 338,000 in the late eighteenth century to some 439,000 at the time of the Reform Act, (or perhaps about 10% of adult males). Of that total, around 45% - 188,000, or slightly less - were in 1831 eligible borough voters. There was no secret ballot. Until the
Ballot Act 1872, the voter openly declared his vote at the
hustings, a public occasion, where it was recorded. That meant that the patron who dominated a borough knew how the qualified electors had voted. Even if the franchise was broad, as in a potwalloper or scot and lot borough, a small electorate could be controlled by a combination of patronage, bribes and threats. The relatively democratic constituencies combined a broad franchise with a numerous electorate.
University members The two ancient universities of
Cambridge and
Oxford elected two members each from 1603. The franchise was restricted to holders of doctoral and master's degrees, which excluded the great bulk of graduates (mostly Anglican clergy) holding bachelor's degrees. Both universities had about 500 electors in the 18th century, rising to 800 by 1832, but at most elections a much smaller number actually voted. After the Act of Union of 1801,
Dublin University also elected one member.
Welsh members The twelve Welsh counties (
Monmouthshire was treated as English) elected one member each, on the same franchise as English counties. Since Wales was much poorer than England, however, the county electorates were much smaller. The Welsh county electorate was about 19,000 in 1800. The twelve Welsh boroughs also elected one member each. These were
Haverfordwest and eleven
county towns. (
Merionethshire had no parliamentary borough). In many counties, other towns were sharing in the election of the county town's member. Until the late 18th century all of them, principal or contributory, were very small towns. The franchises for the Welsh boroughs were freemen, scot and lot and corporation, but in practice they were under the control of local patrons and contested elections were rare.
Scottish members The Act of Union of 1707 brought 45 Scottish members to the House of Commons, of which 30 were elected by the 33
Scottish counties, while 15 were elected from the Scottish boroughs (called
burghs in Scotland). The electoral system which had operated in the Scottish Parliament since its creation was preserved for the election of Scotland's representatives at Westminster. Twenty-seven counties elected one member each (this included
Orkney and
Shetland, which were strictly speaking not counties but
fiefs of the Crown, but were treated as if they were a county). The six smallest counties were grouped together into three groups of two (
Buteshire and
Caithness,
Clackmannanshire and
Kinross-shire, and
Nairnshire and
Cromartyshire), with one of each pair electing a member at alternate elections. The Scottish county franchise was even more restrictive than for the English counties. A voter either had to own land worth the equivalent of two pounds sterling "of old extent" – meaning that the land had to have had that value since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in the 13th century – or to hold as a Crown tenant land to the value of 35 pounds sterling. This restricted the franchise to a handful of wealthy landowners, small privileged sets who might not even represent the county's true landed wealth. In most counties there were fewer than 100 voters, and in some even less: in
Sutherlandshire the Duke of Sutherland owned almost the entire county, and all the voters were his tenants, while in Orkney and Shetland there were seven voters in 1759. The total Scottish county electorate was fewer than 3,000 in 1800. The 15 Scottish burghs consisted of the city of
Edinburgh, where the 33 members of the city corporation elected a member, and 14
districts of burghs, each a group of four or five smaller burghs electing one member between them. and by mid-century the government of the day could usually count on a solid phalanx of Scottish supporters. Subsequently, under Pitt,
Henry Dundas, the Scottish agent of the Tory party, had little difficulty in manipulating the Scottish representation in similar fashion, spending government funds and using Indian patronage to ensure that Tories were elected. This was one reason why the Scottish members were unpopular at Westminster, being regarded as corrupt even by the standards of the day, as well as uncouth. On the eve of Reform,
Lord John Russell estimated that a Scottish electorate of some 3,600 would undergo an increase of around 60,000 voters. Later figures suggest an increase from 4,579 to 64,447 voters actually took place. Either way,
G. M. Trevelyan's conclusion seems justified that "The Reform Bill, in England an evolution, in Scotland was a revolution, veiled in the form of law".
Irish members The
Act of Union 1800 brought 100 Irish members to the House of Commons from 1 January 1801. The 32
Irish counties elected two members each, 33 boroughs elected 35 members (each elected one member except
Dublin and
Cork, which elected two), and
Dublin University elected one member. The franchise in the counties was the same as for England, and the total Irish county electorate, at about 220,000 in 1801, was actually larger than the English county electorate (Ireland had a larger population relative to England than it has today, and had a larger rural gentry). The property threshold for county constituencies was significantly raised under the
Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, enacted on the same day that the
Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 permitted Catholics to sit in parliament. In 1801,
Ireland had about one-third of the population of the United Kingdom (5.5 million people lived in Ireland and 10.5 million in
Great Britain) but only 15% of the MPs (100 of 658) were Irish. Of the Irish boroughs, only
Dublin,
Cork,
Kilkenny,
Londonderry and
Waterford had a mass electorate.
Belfast's member was elected by the city corporation and the seat was never contested. The exclusion of Catholics from the House of Commons was of most consequence in Ireland, where 80% of the population were Catholic. At the time of the Act of Union, the Irish were promised that the restriction on Catholics would be lifted but this promise was broken because of the opposition of
George III. This meant that most Irishmen, regardless of wealth, were excluded from politics until
Catholic emancipation was finally achieved in 1829. ==Unrepresented towns==