Bedfordshire was a chiefly agricultural county, with centres of lace, straw and thread manufacture in Bedford, Dunstable, Luton and Market Street.
The Whigs in Bedfordshire are not amongst the gentry but amongst the middle classes and more particularly the Dissenters. If they can be brought to act together as a compact body, the Tory party would never be able to resist their force, but they must have a leader, and ... you are peculiarly fitted for that office. You are extremely popular amongst the Dissenters from your constantly advocating both in and out of Parliament the principles of civil and religious liberty ... I want you to infuse a little life and vigour into our dull and stupid county.
Holland, a metropolitan Whig, was not the man for this sort of activity, and six weeks later Bedford concluded that it was probably best to ‘let things remain as they are for the present without attempting to make any stir till towards another general election if circumstances should then warrant an attempt to regain a Whig Member’.
At the dissolution in 1820 there was speculation that Samuel Crawley* of Stockwood, Member for Honiton, and an independent supporter of government, would start, or that Whitbread’s son William Henry might transfer from the borough seat and stand on the Whig interest.
Osborn’s supporter, the Rev. Robert Beechcroft of Blunham, who attended the Chicksands meeting, told Lady De Grey, 10 Mar. 1820:
The returns from all quarters were laid before us, and if there be any truth in agents, the prospect of success seems very great, I might almost use the word certain. There is to be system, and as far as [is] possible in such cases, economy. Lord T[avistock] disclaims anything like union with Mr. P[ym]. We shall wait with anxiety for Wednesday morning [15 Mar.], when we will see Bedford in an even greater bustle than we witnessed in 1807.
The duke of Bedford, anticipating no more than a three-day poll, instructed one of the Woburn agents to ‘send off the London voters as soon as you can’.
under these circumstances ... the contest had assumed a new form, and a bond of union would be speedily formed between the country gentlemen, the yeomanry, and the independent freeholder, whose 40s. vote was as valid as that presented on the rent roll of the squire; and that union, so cemented, must finally triumph over the efforts of this monstrous coalition.
The squabble rumbled on in the local press, Tavistock wrote ‘an indignant letter’ to Osborn ‘on the baseness of his conduct’ and his father had his London agent persuade the editor of The Times to concoct a brief article in support of his address refuting Osborn’s accusations.
Of the 2,460 electors polled (100 had their claims rejected), 1,458 (59 per cent) supported Tavistock, 1,308 (53) Pym and 1,214 (49) Osborn . Tavistock and Pym shared 1,130 votes, which formed 76 per cent and 86 per cent of their respective totals. Each received only 58 plumpers. Osborn had 824 (69 per cent of his total), and shared 270 with Tavistock (22 per cent of his total and 11 per cent of those who voted) and 120 with Pym ( nine and five per cent respectively). Thus 2,070 voters (84 per cent of the total) cast party votes, in the proportions of 51 per cent Whig and 33 Tory. The territorial distribution of votes within the county was thoroughly predictable. Non-residents amounted to 488 (19 per cent) of those who polled, with the largest numbers coming from Hertfordshire (131), London (84), Huntingdonshire (76) and Buckinghamshire (62). Overall, they voted for the three candidates in proportions almost identical to those into which the electorate as a whole divided themselves: 58 per cent for Tavistock, 54 for Pym and 47 for Osborn. The latter did slightly better among the London voters (51 per cent), but Pym received an equal level of support and Tavistock had the backing of 57 per cent.
The abandonment of the bill of pains and penalties was widely celebrated in Bedfordshire at the end of 1820.
In the autumn of 1825, when a dissolution was expected, Ongley and Thomas Potter Macqueen were mentioned as potential Tory candidates, but it was the latter who declared his hand, as a supporter of government and an opponent of Catholic claims. Tavistock had announced in the Commons, 27 June 1821, that having been disgusted by the drunken excesses of many electors at the 1820 election, he would never again spend a shilling to obtain a seat. Accordingly, on 17 Oct. 1825 he published an address stating that in an attempt to effect ‘an important reform in the mode of electing your representatives’, he would not canvass, solicit votes or pay for entertainments and the conveyance of voters to the poll: it was up to the electors to choose or reject him on the basis of his political principles. He and his father were excited by this bid to promote a moral reform in electoral politics (abstention from a canvass also suited Tavistock for practical reasons, for his health was often unreliable), though the more cynical and world-weary George Tierney* thought it might end in tears.
In the course of the summer I received strong encouragement to stand ... not merely from Mr. [Frederick] Robinson* and Lord Grantham, but from more than one Whig. And if the dissolution had taken place in September I have now reason to think that I would have had little difficulty in succeeding. Things, however, have greatly changed ... I have waited to be asked to stand, till another candidate has appeared, on my general politics, who proposed to spend £30,000. Our Tory horse will not carry double, and probably both will be thrown if two attempt to ride together. Mr. Macqueen has infinitely more wealth than I have. As he is already in the field and as I have not yet asked for a single vote ... he has a great and perhaps an irrecoverable advantage over me.
Bute promised to support him as ‘a personal friend’, even though they differed on the Catholic question, as he told his cousin, William Stuart, Member for Armagh and son of the late Irish primate, who had recently bought a Bedfordshire estate at Tempsford and had evidently solicited the marquess’s support for an attempt on the county:
I therefore cannot exert myself for him as I would have done for a person of the same opinions, or for a relative like yourself. Still I think it the best way of keeping my interest altogether, which I am of course anxious to do. You know my desire to serve you, but from present circumstances you perceive that it is impossible for me to speak as to the future.
Inglis withdrew himself from contention in December 1825, but three months later he felt he had acted ‘foolishly’ in so doing, as another observer confirmed in May 1826:
When he thought of standing for the county he said that he did not wish to involve it in a violent contest and that it was only in the case of its being the general wish of the country gentlemen that he should stand. Astell wrote him a letter from Macqueen’s house referring to this declaration and calling on him to retire ... Inglis did so, not he says on account of A’s letter but from an apprehension of the expense. His comment on Astell’s conduct was that though he had professed a wish to be guided by the wishes of the country gentlemen he had by no means expressed a determination to be guided by that one of them, delivered too from the very camp of the enemy and by one who resided very little and has very little property in the county. He now regrets that he did not persist and complains of Pym’s not sooner coming to the resolution of retiring.
Beds. RO, Wynne mss WY 999/1; TCD, Jebb mss 6396/238, 245, 246; Bodl. MS. Eng. lett. c. 159, f. 32.
Tavistock believed that Inglis would have beaten Macqueen ‘even without spending money’. Like all the Bedfordshire Whigs, he regarded Macqueen with snobbish contempt, and on 6 Jan. 1826 he told his friend John Cam Hobhouse*:
It seems now that Potter [Macqueen] will have the field here all to himself, but he has been telling a lie about his vote on the Catholic question [he had not in fact voted against it in the current Parliament], and has got into a scrape by it from which he will not easily extricate himself. However, the Tories are so little accustomed to be represented by gentlemen, that they don’t mind these trifles. They have long been crying out against the state of the representation of this county. They have now got what they have so long wished for, and we shall see whether they will improve it either in respectability or independence.
Add. 36461, ff. 385, 400.
It was thought that some leading Tories, including Lady De Grey, were unhappy with Macqueen, and Holland privately told her in December 1825 that if she would put up her liberal Tory nephew Robinson, chancellor of the exchequer, ‘we Whigs might support him’. Apparently Robinson himself made ‘a difficulty upon principle, that a cabinet minister is not independent’. Holland ventured to suggest to his apolitical elder son, Henry Edward Fox*, who was lounging in Rome, that he might stand, aiming to secure respectable Tory support, which, as Lady Holland told him, was essential if a Whig was to come in ‘without incurring immense expense’. Tavistock’s brother Lord John Russell* observed that ‘if Lord Holland had lived a little at Ampthill Henry might have come in on Tavistock’s principle with perfect ease, but as it is it would be difficult, Ld H’s absence having of course made him unpopular in the county’. Fox himself was horrified, and hoped that his father was joking, or, if not, that he would scotch any such notion, which would only arise for ‘the convenience of the Russells, the Whitbreads, the Pyms, or for the laudable diversion of annoying the adverse party’. Holland admitted that his suggestion had been ‘no serious design and still less any proposal’:
At the same time I confess that the opening there for a candidate from my family, makes me a little ashamed of myself for not having cultivated the natural advantages I had and certainly makes me lament your unlucky and I must say perverse view of matters connected with politics, these being the two circumstances combined which prevent both parties in the county from looking to you as an independent Member more gratifying to their vanity and more useful to the interests of the place than Macqueen is likely to be.
Add. 51679, Lord J. Russell to Lady Holland, 16 Jan. 1826; 51749, Holland to Fox, 30 Dec. 1825, 28 Jan., reply, 15 Jan.; 51766, Lady Holland to Fox, 18 Jan. 1826.
Five weeks before the general election of 1826 Bedford told Holland that there were expectations of ‘some disturbance ... in consequence of the increasing disgust at the conduct of Potter Macqueen’, who had been canvassing widely and spending lavishly, but three weeks later he surmised that ‘our respectable candidate will ... walk over’.
From what I can learn I fear that victory is quite out of the question for us and therefore the only thing is to make as good a fight as we can, taking care to keep Tavistock sufficiently ahead to prevent the Tories from playing any tricks with their second votes, which of course they would be very glad to turn over to Pym if they could with safety to themselves in order to turn out Tavistock. The canvass on the part of friends should however go on for both, but the duke’s immediate agents ought to confine themselves now as they have always done before to asking votes for Tavistock. Whitbread hopes that a good show will be made on today’s poll ... but neither he nor any of the few persons [sic] are at all sanguine as to the final result, for the poll already exhibits considerable defections to the enemy. This however inter nos, for while the fight lasts we must of course put the best face upon it.
Althorp reported that there was ‘much spirit among our friends’, and in the various hundreds supporters of Tavistock and Pym organized themselves to convey voters to the poll without expense. Bedford, who told Hobhouse that ‘their people are sore beyond measure at the ruinous expenses to which they are exposed, whilst ours is really nothing’, hoped that the Russells’ determination to go the full 15 days would ‘finally bring up Tavistock within a very few of Macqueen, if not to the head of the poll’.
Sixty per cent of those who voted supported Macqueen, 50 voted for Tavistock and 41 backed Pym. Seventy four votes were rejected and 55 left undetermined. Macqueen received 1,189 plumpers (78 per cent of his total), while Tavistock and Pym had only 52 and 23 respectively. Macqueen shared 265 votes with Tavistock (17 per cent of his total) and 61 with Pym (4). Tavistock and Pym shared 956 votes, which comprised 75 per cent of the former’s total and 92 per cent of the latter’s. Thus 2,220 (88 per cent) of those voting saw the contest in party terms. Not surprisingly, clergymen overwhelmingly favoured Macqueen: 72 per cent of them cast a vote for him, while only 39 and 28 respectively did so for Tavistock and Pym. (Holland, however, thought that while there was ‘more no popery in this little county than in any, Somersetshire excepted’, the distribution of clerical voted showed that ‘with a friendly ministry’ the majority against relief would be ‘small ... even among the clergy’.)
Macqueen and his leading supporters portrayed theirs as triumph over the electoral tyranny which Woburn and its Whig allies, especially the Whitbreads, had exercised over county and borough for decades. In August they produced a shamelessly partisan account of the election in a History of the Late Contest for the County of Bedford: from the Notes of a Freeholder, which Bedford, predictably, denounced as ‘a most blackguard, impudent and lying performance’. Macqueen had spent heavily and blatantly, and indeed virtually ensured his eventual financial ruin. Four years later Tavistock, who put his own and Pym’s combined costs at £730, ‘including £300 for counsel’, reckoned that Macqueen had spent something in the region of £30,000. Another observer put his costs at ‘upwards of £20,000’.
The principle is established for ever, and if old Pym had run straight I think he might have won ... The public spirit and activity of the people have been beyond all praise. It was a high trial for them as they had been more spoilt in this county than in any other, having had more money spent amongst them, and more attention paid to them.
To a sceptical Holland, he argued that ‘if I had spent £20,000, I would not have polled ten more votes, and if I had tried a limited plan of expenditure, Macqueen would have beat me by giving wine, and opening more houses’. Bedford was sure that ‘his principles must ultimately prevail’ and that ‘the day is not far distant’. Two years later Tavistock reflected that ‘the conduct of our friends in Beds. at the last election proved that public virtue is not extinct among the people’; and on the eve of the 1830 election he informed his friend Lord Milton* that
it is an odd circumstance that at the last election, although Pym was started at the post with me without any preparation, whilst Macqueen had been in undisputed possession of the field for six months, with a host of agents canvassing in every direction and asserting that there would be no opposition to him, yet we lost no ground in the distant parts of the county. Our great loss of strength was in the town of Bedford, where the freeholders had only to walk to the poll at any time of the election between breakfast and dinner, and without requiring either conveyance or refreshment! For the first time in the history of Bedfordshire contests the Tory candidate polled the majority of votes in the town of Bedford. Surely this is an answer to those who maintain that the election was lost by the absurdity of expecting people to come from a distance to vote for me when I would neither feed nor convey them.
Add. 36462, f. 311; 51663, Bedford to Holland, Fri. [July], Thurs. [10 Aug.], 6 Oct.; 51668, same to Lady Holland [2 July]; 51675, Tavistock to Holland, 1 Aug.; 51677, Lord J. Russell to Holland, 23 June [1826]; Russell Letters, ii. 13; Fitzwilliam mss, Tavistock to Milton, 5 July 1830.
(Tavistock’s argument was largely valid. Of the 225 Bedford freeholders who polled, 134 (60 per cent) voted for Macqueen, 124 (55) for Tavistock and 90 (40) for Pym. In 1820 Tavistock had been supported by 71 per cent, Pym by 58 per cent, and Osborn by 43 per cent of the 201 Bedford voters polled. In the more distant hundreds of Biggleswade, Clifton, Flitt and Manshead, Tavistock’s support fell by an average of just under five per cent, Pym’s by almost 13.) There was a notion of petitioning against Macqueen’s return on the grounds of bribery and treating, but Tavistock, taking a cool view of the situation, would have nothing to do with it, as he told Milton:
The Tories are now the strongest party in this county and it must be admitted in fairness that they gave their exclusive support to Macqueen. We have no right to say therefore that he has been returned by the influence of money or corruption alone, and although he got two or three hundred votes by bringing them to the poll, I cannot allow myself to blame the freeholders who sell themselves for a tenth ticket, a part chance or a bottle of wine. The fault of having corrupted them is with Osborn and me, and if I have seen my error only lately it is no wonder that they should not yet be reformed.
The idea was dropped.
There was heavy petitioning against any alteration of the corn laws in 1827, when John Foster of Brickhill, president of the Agricultural Association, was very active against the new corn bill. At the county meeting to petition the Lords, 23 May, Tavistock defended the measure, while Macqueen joined in the general call for greater protection. By voting against the bill when it was rejected by the Lords, Bedford put himself temporarily at odds with his son, but no lasting damage was done.
One of the speakers at the malt tax meeting was Francis Pym junior, who was reported that month to be the Whigs’ choice to oppose Macqueen at the next election.
There was heavy and sustained petitioning for the abolition of slavery from Bedfordshire Dissenters in the new Parliament.
The reformers here ... have been furious against William Stuart. The leaders have been a combined committee of radicals, Methodists and some Tories, but you will be gratified to hear that the majority of people in this neighbourhood have shown their attachment to my interest, in spite of the mania of the moment. The reformers have prepared an address to Mr. Pym junior pledging themselves to vote for him, if he will come forward at the next dissolution as the advocate of parliamentary reform.
Hatfield House mss 2M/Gen.
Pym was reported to have declined to stand at the dissolution following the defeat of the reform bill, when Tavistock and Stuart, the latter claiming to be friendly to ‘moderate’ reform but condemning the measure as ‘a rash experiment’, came forward. The reformers were determined to start a second candidate. There was talk of Holland’s illegitimate son Charles Richard Fox*, and his father reckoned that had he not been engaged to stand for Calne on the Lansdowne interest ‘he might have come in for Bedfordshire free of expense’. The reformers eventually settled on the 69-year-old Peter Payne, the only surviving illegitimate son of Sir Gillies Payne of Tempsford (he styled himself as a baronet, though his right to do so had not been established in law), who lived in Northamptonshire but had long been active in Bedfordshire as a Whig of advanced views.
I am very glad Lord Tavistock is gone down ... His being in the county may be a spur to some who are inclined to think very lightly of the contest, which confidence might soon lose the election, if Mr. Stuart’s cause was not so unpopular. It makes our own people, also our managers, lukewarm in the cause.
Tavistock asked Hobhouse to secure a financial contribution for the Bedfordshire reform cause, as distinct from his own campaign, from the Loyal and Patriotic Fund: ‘they have great odds to contend against, supported by the long purses. They want nothing but money’. Macqueen, perhaps seeking revenge on Stuart, canvassed for his opponent and sent notes on London voters to the reformers’ committee.
I never witnessed so much enthusiasm as was displayed by the people here on the result being made known. Many ran about like madmen. They have had a band of music all round the town even though at this time of night, which was preceded by enormous flambeaux and followed by a most numerous body of the most respectable trades people.
Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 7, 14, 21 May; Burgoyne diary, 4 [May]; Russell mss R3/3677; R 767, Fisher to Brown, 7 May; Add. 52176, Fox to Allen, 5 May [1831].
The election evidently cost Stuart £4,010.
The Lords were petitioned to pass the reform bill from Biggleswade, Leighton Buzzard, Potton and Woburn, 30 Sept., 3 Oct. 1831, and an address deploring the defeat of the measure was sent to the king from Biggleswade.
Bedfordshire received no additional Members by the Reform Act, was unaffected by the Boundary Act and had a registered electorate of 3,966 at the time of the 1832 general election. Tavistock announced his retirement in July, but Stuart and Payne stood their ground. Charles Fox was briefly a theoretical contender, while Crawley, now a Whig, actually offered, but he later stepped aside for Bedford’s sixth son Lord Charles Russell, who, as his father said, was ‘only brought forward as a pis-aller, faute de mieux, against my wishes’. In a hard contest, he narrowly topped the poll from Stuart, who turned out Payne by 200 votes. The Conservatives had at least one Member for the next 48 years (and two in the 1841 Parliament), but the Woburn interest proved durable.
Number of voters: 2546 in 1826
Estimated voters: about 2,800