The Days of May was a period of significant social unrest and political tension in the United Kingdom in May 1832, after the Tories [lower-alpha 1] blocked the Third Reform Bill in the House of Lords, which aimed to extend parliamentary representation to the middle and working classes as well as the newly industrialised cities of the English Midlands and the North of England.
The campaign to broaden the electoral franchise had garnered wide and organised national support over the preceding years, led by Thomas Attwood's Birmingham Political Union, which boasted that it "had united two million men peacefully and legally in one grand and determined association to recover the liberty, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country". [1]
While Attwood was careful to keep the unions' activities legal and non-violent, he also encouraged the widespread belief that they were potentially a powerful and independent extra-parliamentary force; he boasted that the nation could be mobilised in an hour. [2] The fall of the bill, and the subsequent resignation of the Whig government of Earl Grey, were met with rioting, campaigns of economic sabotage and threats of armed insurrection that many contemporaries judged to be credible.
The crisis was defused by the reinstatement of Grey's government on 15 May and King William IV's agreement in principle to create enough new peers to build a Whig majority in the Lords which would allow the bill to pass. The Lords backed down in the face of this threat, and the Great Reform Act was passed by Parliament. It received Royal Assent on 7 June 1832.
Historians debate as to how decisive this extra-parliamentary pressure was in securing the passage of the bill, but the period is seen as one of the times when the United Kingdom came closest to a revolution, which could have also led to the end of the monarchy in the manner of France.
Parliamentary representation was limited and haphazard in 18th and early 19th century Britain: in 1780 it was calculated that there were only 214,000 qualified to vote in England and Wales out of a total population of 8 million; and property qualifications varied widely between constituencies. [3] The onset of the Industrial Revolution wrought sweeping social and economic change across the country, but the unchanged electoral system left political structures which failed to reflect the realities of economic power. In 1830, fifty-six rotten boroughs elected two MPs each but had fewer than fifty voters, [4] while Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield, with a combined population of more than 540,000, had not one MP between them. [5]
Reform also had a record of inspiring popular discontent. In 1819 a crowd of 15,000 had gathered at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to symbolically elect Charles Wolseley as the town's "Legislatorial Attorney and Representative" in Westminster; when Manchester followed Birmingham's lead two months later, troops opened fire and killed 15: this event became known as the Peterloo Massacre. [6]
Lord John Russell tried sporadically and unsuccessfully during the 1820s to abolish specific rotten boroughs and transfer representation to larger towns, [7] but the newly elected Whig government headed by Earl Grey in November 1830 was the first to commit to parliamentary reform. [8] Grey formed a committee to draft reform proposals that would be sufficient to quell public opinion and "afford sure ground of resistance to further innovation", [9] but the resulting Reform Bill received only lukewarm support in parliament and further elections were held in May 1831. [10] Newly armed with a majority of over 130 seats, Grey introduced a Second Reform Bill in July 1831, which passed through the House of Commons with a majority of 140, but was defeated in the House of Lords in October amid rioting in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. [11]
By the 1830s the most influential extra-parliamentary support for reform came from the Birmingham Political Union, which had been founded by Thomas Attwood in December 1829 as "a General Political Union between the lower and middle classes of the people" to engineer the political reform that Attwood had come to think necessary to achieve his ultimate goal of currency reform. [12] The unusually small size of the units of production characteristic of the Birmingham economy, coupled with the resulting high degree of social mobility and shared economic interest between Birmingham workers and factory owners, enabled the BPU to attract a broad support across classes [13] and maintain its position of leadership among the hundreds of more fragmented unions that followed its example and formed across the country in 1830 and 1831. [14]
The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen. [15] Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government. [16] The Times called the BPU "the barometer of the reform feeling throughout England", [17] while Attwood himself was dubbed "King Tom" by William Cobbett and described by Francis Place as "the most influential man in England". [18]
On 9 May 1832, after the Great Reform Act had been vetoed by the House of Lords, the then Prime Minister, Earl Grey, handed in his resignation. He was replaced by the Duke of Wellington, a Tory, who opposed the Reform Act. Lord Grey commented that Wellington was a man who "didn't understand the character of the times", referring to the fact that Wellington believed the pressure for change was insignificant and the electoral system was fine as it was.
The news of Grey's resignation was not reported in London on the day it happened, but on 10 May 1832, news reached Birmingham about the situation.
Pro-reform organisations such as the Birmingham Political Union played a major part in the protests; their membership swelled, causing politicians to fear an armed riot. The organised nature of the protests, which encompassed people of many different backgrounds, led to fears among the wealthy that a general uprising was imminent, triggering a rush of gold withdrawals from the Bank of England. Petitions were also presented from around the country. On 15 May, Wellington's position had become untenable, leading to his resignation. Grey was invited to return as Prime Minister and to form a government. The House of Lords subsequently agreed to the Bill after William IV threatened to create new Whig peers to ensure the passage of the Great Reform Act.
Although at the time it was claimed that the nation could be mobilised in an hour, commentators disagree on how real the threat of revolution was during the Days of May. Contemporary observers had little doubt: Edward Littleton, then a Whig MP, commented in his diary that the country was "in a state little short of insurrection", [19] while the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith later described a "hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear". [20] As Thomas Creevey observed, this fear was shared by the Queen, whose "fixed impression, is that an English revolution is rapidly approaching, and that her own fate is to be that of Marie Antoinette". [21] Some more modern historians agree: E. P. Thompson wrote that "in the autumn of 1831 and in the 'Days of May' Britain was within an ace of revolution" and Eric Hobsbawm felt that "This period is probably the only one in modern history ... where something not unlike a revolutionary situation might have developed." [22]
The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs became the Liberal Party when it merged with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 over the issue of Irish Home Rule to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, was a British Conservative statesman who twice was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and simultaneously was Chancellor of the Exchequer (1834–1835). He previously was Home Secretary twice. He is regarded as the father of modern British policing, owing to his founding of the Metropolitan Police Service while he was Home Secretary. Peel was one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party.
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 reapportioned constituencies to address the unequal distribution of seats and expanded franchise by broadening and standardising the property qualifications to vote. 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.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a sovereign state in Northwestern Europe that was established by the union in 1801 of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland. The establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 led to the remainder later being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1927.
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell,, known by his courtesy title Lord John Russell before 1861, was a British Whig and Liberal statesman who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1846 to 1852 and again from 1865 to 1866.
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, known as Viscount Howick between 1806 and 1807, was a British Whig politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834. He was a descendant of the House of Grey and the namesake of Earl Grey tea. Grey was a long-time leader of multiple reform movements. During his time as prime minister, his government brought about two notable reforms. The Reform Act 1832 enacted parliamentary reform, greatly increasing the electorate of the House of Commons.
The 1832 United Kingdom general election was the first United Kingdom general election held in the Reformed House of Commons following the Reform Act, which introducing significant changes to the electoral system.
The Radicals were a loose parliamentary political grouping in Great Britain and Ireland in the early to mid-19th century who drew on earlier ideas of radicalism and helped to transform the Whigs into the Liberal Party.
The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising in 1830 by agricultural workers in southern and eastern England in protest of agricultural mechanisation and harsh working conditions. The riots began with the destruction of threshing machines in the Elham Valley area of East Kent in the summer of 1830 and by early December had spread through the whole of southern England and East Anglia. It was to be the largest movement of social unrest in 19th-century England.
The Whig government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that began in November 1830 and ended in November 1834 consisted of two ministries: the Grey ministry and then the first Melbourne ministry.
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, removed the sacramental tests that barred Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It was the culmination of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation which had offered Catholics successive measures of "relief" from the civil and political disabilities imposed by Penal Laws in both Great Britain and in Ireland in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries.
The "unreformed House of Commons" is a name given to the House of Commons of Great Britain before it was reformed by the Reform Act 1832, the Irish Reform Act 1832, and the Scottish Reform Act 1832.
The 1831 United Kingdom general election saw a landslide win by supporters of electoral reform, which was the major election issue. As a result, it was the last unreformed election, as the following Parliament ensured the passage of the Reform Act 1832. Polling was held from 28 April to 1 June 1831. The Whigs won a majority of 136 over the Tories, which was as near to a landslide as the unreformed electoral system could deliver. As the Government obtained a dissolution of Parliament once the new electoral system had been enacted, the resulting Parliament was a short one and there was another election the following year. The election was the first since 1715 to see a victory by a party previously in minority.
The 1830 United Kingdom general election was triggered by the death of King George IV and produced the first parliament of the reign of his successor, King William IV. Fought in the aftermath of the Swing Riots, it saw electoral reform become a major election issue. Polling took place in July and August and the Tories won a plurality over the Whigs, but division among Tory MPs allowed Earl Grey to form an effective government and take the question of electoral reform to the country the following year.
The Birmingham Political Union was a grass roots pressure group in Great Britain during the 1830s. It was founded by Thomas Attwood, a banker interested in monetary reform. Its platform called for extending and redistributing suffrage rights to the working class, of the kind set out in the Reform Bill of March 1831 which when passed became the Reform Act 1832. It included both middle-class and working-class members.
Joseph Parkes was an English political reformer.
The Ultra-Tories were an Anglican faction of British and Irish politics that appeared in the 1820s in opposition to Catholic emancipation. The faction was later called the "extreme right-wing" of British and Irish politics.
The National Political Union was an organisation set up in October 1831, after the rejection of the Reform Bill by the House of Lords, to serve as a pressure group for parliamentary reform: “to support the King and his ministers against a small faction in accomplishing their great measure of Parliamentary Reform”.
The 1831 reform riots occurred after the Second Reform Bill was defeated in Parliament in October 1831. There were civil disturbances in London, Leicester, Yeovil, Sherborne, Exeter, Bath and Worcester and riots at Nottingham, Derby and Bristol. Targets included Nottingham Castle, home of the anti-reform Duke of Newcastle, other private houses and jails. In Bristol, three days of rioting followed the arrival in the city of the anti-reform judge Charles Wetherell; a significant portion of the city centre was burnt, £300,000 of damage inflicted and up to 250 casualties occurred.
The 1831 Bristol riots took place on 29–31 October 1831 and were part of the 1831 reform riots in England. The riots arose after the second Reform Bill was voted down in the House of Lords, stalling efforts at electoral reform. The arrival of the anti-reform judge Charles Wetherell in the city on 29 October led to a protest, which degenerated into a riot. The civic and military authorities were poorly focused and uncoordinated and lost control of the city. Order was restored on the third day by a combination of a posse comitatus of the city's middle-class citizens and military forces.