The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the rotten boroughs it swept away
Before 1832, the rotten borough of Gatton had just 7 voters, while booming Birmingham had no seat at all. Old Sarum, the most notorious case, kept 13 burgage plots so a patron could conjure up electors whenever needed. Earl Grey's Whig government set out to redraw that lopsided map.
After union with Ireland took effect on 1 January 1801, the Commons held 658 members, 513 of them for England and Wales. They sat for either counties or boroughs. County voting had rested since statutes of 1430 and 1432 on the forty-shilling freehold, a threshold never adjusted for inflation. Boroughs were chaos. Some let only corporation members vote, some any taxpayer paying scot and lot, and so-called potwalloper boroughs admitted any man with a hearth big enough to boil a pot. Westminster had around 12,000 electors, while Dunwich had 32 and Camelford 25.
Wealthy patrons owned many seats outright. The Duke of Norfolk controlled eleven constituencies and the Earl of Lonsdale nine. Fear of the French Revolution after 1789 froze reform for decades, although Grey himself helped found the Society of the Friends of the People in 1792. In 1819 Birmingham reformers chose their own unofficial representative, and a similar Manchester meeting drew somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 people before yeomanry broke it up, leaving eighteen dead. Even a modest 1820 plan by Lord John Russell to hand the corrupt Cornish borough of Grampound's seats to Leeds was watered down by the Lords.
The Act eventually passed under Grey set uniform property rules, extending the vote to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers and every householder paying £10 or more in yearly rent, and it shifted seats toward growing towns. It also wrote into law, for the first time, that a voter must be male, closing off the rare earlier cases of women voting through property.
Parallel acts covered Scotland and Ireland. The Scottish measure was the most dramatic, multiplying its electorate by 13, from 5,000 to 65,000. The 1832 Act stood until the Representation of the People Act 1948 repealed it.
Source: Reform Act 1832
