The House of Commons is the lower house and de facto primary chamber of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the upper house, the House of Lords, it meets in the Palace of Westminster.
The Whigs were a political faction and then a political party in the parliaments of England, Scotland, Great Britain, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the new Liberal Party in the 1850s, though some Whig aristocrats left the Liberal Party in 1885 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Liberals' rival, the modern day Conservative Party, in 1912.
The Representation of the People Act 1832 was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced major changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. It abolished tiny districts, gave representation to cities, gave the vote to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more, and some lodgers. Only qualifying men were able to vote; the Act introduced the first explicit statutory bar to women voting, by defining a voter as a male person.
Edward Baines (1774–1848) was the editor and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury,, politician, and author of historical and geographic works of reference. On his death in 1848, the Leeds Intelligencer described his as "one who has earned for himself an indisputable title to be numbered among the notable men of Leeds".
John Arthur Roebuck, British politician, was born at Madras, in India. He was raised in Canada, and moved to England in 1824, and became intimate with the leading radical and utilitarian reformers. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Bath from 1832 to 1847, and MP for the Sheffield constituency from 1849. He took up the general attitude of hostility to the government of the day, whatever it was, which he retained throughout his life. He twice came to public prominence: in 1838, when, although at the time without a seat in parliament, he appeared at the bar of the Commons to protest, in the name of the Canadian Assembly, against the suspension of the Canadian constitution; and in 1855, when, having overthrown Lord Aberdeen's ministry by carrying a resolution for the appointment of a committee of inquiry into the mismanagement in the Crimean War, he presided over its proceedings.
The Speaker of the House of Commons is the chief officer and highest authority of the House of Commons, the lower house and primary chamber of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The current speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was elected Speaker on 4 November 2019, following the retirement of John Bercow. Hoyle began his first full parliamentary term in the role on 17 December 2019, having unanimously been re-elected after the 2019 general election.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the presiding officer of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Parliament of Australia. The presiding officer in the upper house is the President of the Senate. The office of Speaker was created by section 35 of the Constitution of Australia. The authors of the Constitution intended that the House of Representatives should as nearly as possible be modelled on the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
Charles Manners-Sutton, 1st Viscount Canterbury, was a British Tory politician who served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1817 to 1835.
James Abercromby, 1st Baron Dunfermline, was a British barrister and Whig politician. He served as Speaker of the House of Commons between 1835 and 1839.
In the 1841 United Kingdom general election, there was a big swing as Sir Robert Peel's Conservatives took control of the House of Commons. Melbourne's Whigs had seen their support in the Commons erode over the previous years. Whilst Melbourne enjoyed the firm support of the young Queen Victoria, his ministry had seen increasing defeats in the Commons, culminating in the defeat of the government's budget in May 1841 by 36 votes, and by 1 vote in a 4 June 1841 vote of no confidence put forward by Peel. According to precedent, Melbourne's defeat required his resignation. However, the cabinet decided to ask for a dissolution, which was opposed by Melbourne personally, but he came to accept the wishes of the ministers. Melbourne requested the Queen dissolve Parliament, leading to an election. The Queen thus prorogued Parliament on 22 June.
The 1832 United Kingdom general election, the first after the Reform Act, saw the Whigs win a large majority, with the Tories winning less than 30% of the vote.
Edward John Littleton, 1st Baron Hatherton PC, FRS, was a British politician from the extended Littleton/Lyttelton family, of first the Canningite Tories and later the Whigs. He had a long political career, active in each of the Houses of Parliament in turn over a period of forty years. He was closely involved in a number of major reforms, particularly Catholic Emancipation, the Truck Act of 1831, the Parliamentary Boundaries Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. Throughout his career he was actively concerned with the Irish question and he was Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1833 and 1834.
The Derby Dilly was a name given to a group of dissident Whigs who split from the main party under the leadership of Edward, Lord Stanley on the issue of the reorganisation of the Church of Ireland in 1834. Stanley and three others resigned from the cabinet of Lord Grey on this particular issue but other factors included their fear that the Whigs were appeasing their radical and Irish allies with further reforms.
John Fielden was a British industrialist and Radical Member of Parliament for Oldham (1832–1847).
William Sharman Crawford (1780–1861) was an Irish landowner who, in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, championed a democratic franchise, a devolved legislature for Ireland, and the interests of the Irish tenant farmer. As a Radical representing first, with Daniel O'Connell's endorsement, Dundalk (1835-1837) and then, with the support of Chartists, the English constituency of Rochdale (1841–1852) he introduced bills to codify and extend in Ireland the Ulster tenant right. In his last electoral contest, standing on the platform of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League in 1852 he failed to unseat the Conservative and Orange party in Down, his native county.
Michael Thomas Sadler was a British Tory Member of Parliament (MP) whose Evangelical Anglicanism and prior experience as a Poor Law administrator in Leeds led him to oppose Malthusian theories of population and their use to decry state provision for the poor.
Richard Sanderson was a British merchant, banker, and Conservative and Tory politician.
The 1817 election of the Speaker of the House of Commons occurred on 2 June 1817.
The 1835 election of the Speaker of the House of Commons occurred on 19 February 1835.
