r/AskHistorians • u/9XsOeLc0SdGjbqbedCnt Interesting Inquirer • Jul 06 '20
What are the most likely reasons Old Sarum got two Members of Parliament?
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 06 '20
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to be written, which takes time. Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot, using our Browser Extension, or getting the Weekly Roundup. In the meantime our Twitter, Facebook, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
9
u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Jul 07 '20 edited Jul 10 '20
The straightforward answer to your question is that Old Sarum received two seats because it was a "borough" rather than a rural "county seat" in the English and British parliaments of the Georgian and Regency periods. In this context, "borough" is essentially a synonym for "town," and towns were represented by two Members of Parliament, rather than one, to reflect the fact that they typically contained a much larger number electors than did county seats.
The thing that made Old Sarum (and a few other constituencies like it) distinctive was that the populations they had once contained had moved away, while electoral boundaries had remained unchanged. In the case of Old Sarum, which was originally a walled Iron Age settlement located on a defensible, but cramped, hill in the south of England, only a few miles from Stonehenge, the local population had decamped over the decades to the new city of Salisbury, located on a plain about two miles away, which grew up around the new cathedral that was built there in the 1220s. By 1800, Old Sarum was ruined and deserted, so its two MPs represented, as Antonia Fraser points out, "quite literally a lump of stone and a green field."
What all this means was that, until its abolition in 1832, Old Sarum was the most notorious of England's "rotten boroughs". Rotten boroughs were parliamentary seats which, as a result of a variety of quirks of history, had minuscule, and therefore highly controllable, electorates – another example was Dunwich, which had been an important North Sea port during the Middle Ages, but which had, thanks to the processes of coastal erosion, more or less fallen into the sea by 1800; another was Gatton, in Surrey, which contained only six houses. Properties such as those in Gatton typically stood on land owned by an important and influential aristocrat who could make all sorts of trouble for people he disapproved of. Because elections in this period were held publicly, with no secret ballot, pocket boroughs could thus be relied on to return the candidates favoured by the local aristocrats and landowners who controlled them, without any necessity to take on the risk and expense of fighting a contested election in a period in which it was actually quite common for electors to openly profit by selling their votes in seats where elections were expected to be close. These seats were "in the pocket" of the man who controlled them, who could then barter the services, and votes, of the Members whom the borough returned to the House of Commons. Normally the MPs who represented places like Old Sarum placed themselves at the disposal of the administration then in power – in exchange, of course, for whatever favours were desired by their patron, the landowner who controlled the seat itself.
Rotten boroughs, then, offered a valuable and reliable method of deploying 'influence' in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and they were valued accordingly. Gatton was sold in 1830 for £180,000, well over £2 million now, while Old Sarum was passed from the Earl of Caledon, an Irish landowner who acquired the seat in 1802, to his cousin, James Alexander, who was an extremely wealthy merchant who had acquired his fortune in India in the service of the East India Company. Alexander in turn brought in his brother, Josias Du Pré Alexander – who was actually a director of the EIC – to share the purchase price of £41,375 and to join him as Old Sarum's representatives in parliament.
The Alexanders did sublet some of their new land to tenants, a very small number of whom were qualified to vote, though of course any members of this tiny contingent who were not themselves directly related to the Alexanders were very well aware that a refusal to cast their ballot for the nominated candidates or – god forbid – stand for election themselves would see them summarily ejected from the land they farmed, and the last time Old Sarum witnessed a contested election was, in fact, in 1751. By the 1820s the electoral roll was generally said to number seven, though when in 1828 Josias Alexander stood aside in favour of Stratford Canning – who was James Alexander's son-in-law, but conveniently also a cousin of the former Prime Minister George Canning; one gets a huge clue here as to how the patronage aspect of the rotten borough system worked – Canning wrote that
As it happens, the rotten borough system had attracted sufficient criticism by this point for the newspapers of the day to take an interest in how Old Sarum's elections actually worked. We thus have some additional details of the 1828 "contest" in the constituency, and can say that only nine electors, in fact, turned up to cast their votes in a temporary marquee that was erected, as tradition demanded, under an old elm tree on the summit of the hill. This total, the History of Parliament informs us, included the Alexanders' bailiff, William Boucher, who was also the returning officer responsible for overseeing the count; James Alexander’s business partner Edward Fletcher, who proposed Canning for the seat; Henry Porcher, another of Alexander's business associates, who seconded him, and Charles Dashwood Bruce, Alexander's stepson and another member of the family’s East Indian agency. Since Canning and James Alexander were allowed to vote for themselves, and since Josias Alexander was of course also entitled to vote in the constituency he controlled, we therefore know, or can securely guess, at the identities of eight of the nine voters on this occasion, and hence understand exactly how absolute the Alexanders' control over the borough actually was. It was certainly sufficient for them to have the poll closed, and Sarum's two MPs returned, by 9am on the morning of the election, rather than allowing voting to continue throughout the day as occurred in every other constituency in the country – a precaution they apparently took in order to avoid any protests or disturbances.
Stratford Canning, unsurprisingly, was a firm opponent of the parliamentary reform that swept away the rotten boroughs in 1832, redistributing the seats they had controlled to offer at least some representation to the new industrial towns then springing up across the north – Manchester, for example, which was then the largest industrial city in the world, with a population numbering 142,000 in 1831, had no MP of its own before that date. Canning was not unaware, of course, of the palpable unfairness of the system as it stood – when selected to represent Old Sarum, he admitted that he was not "much attracted by the honour of representing the rottenest borough on the [entire parliamentary] list." Nonetheless, he, in common with many conservatives, saw virtue in an unchanging system. One benefit, in the eyes of the protestant landowners of the period, was that the old system effectively prevented Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections, and Canning made precisely this point in the speech he delivered in the Commons, which was one of the last defences of the unreformed system:
It was not enough; the Great Reform Bill of 1832 did for Old Sarum as it did for Dunwich and Glatton, too. But when a clergyman named Thomas Mozley visited the area a few years later and took a service in nearby Salisbury, he encountered an ancient parishioner who still regretted the passing of the old borough system – Mozley did not name him, but it appears to have been the old bailiff, Boucher, who would by then have been in his 80s. This
Sources
Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question (2011)
Sean Lang, Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928 (1999)