Dorset, a predominantly rural county, had long been politically moribund, but it was notable for staging, during the reform crisis of 1831, one of the most nationally significant by-elections in this period. Administratively, it was split into nine divisions, while Poole, the most prosperous borough, was technically a county in its own right, although its freeholders were allowed to vote in county elections. With a population of 159,000 in 1831, Dorset had few large settlements, and most of these were its parliamentary boroughs, which (Shaftesbury excepted) lay on or near the sea and derived their prosperity from maritime trade and related activities. The other principal market towns, which also had small manufacturing interests, included Beaminster (sail cloth) and Cerne Abbas (gloves) in the west, Sherborne and Stalbridge (silks) in the north-west, Gillingham and Sturminster Newton (various types of cloth) in the north, Blandford Forum (shirt buttons) in the centre and Wimborne Minster (knitted worsted stockings) in the east. Despite objections from various places, it was agreed in 1825 that the quarter sessions would be held only in the quiet county town of Dorchester.
No peer had an overriding interest, and the freeholders were ‘principally composed of country gentlemen of small fortunes, very much inclined to Toryism, and "the existing order of things"’. As one typical exemplar wrote in relation to the infrequency of county meetings: ‘though in this quiet county we have I hope no chance of any troublesome people, it is as well not to call the county together more often than is absolutely necessary’.
Bankes received letters of support from Anglesey, Digby, Rivers, the bishop of Bristol and the Rev. William England, archdeacon of Dorset, as well as many country gentlemen, including Robert Williams of Bridehead, who occupied a seat on his own interest for Dorchester. Several Whigs wrote to Bankes in his favour, but they and even some of the Tories gave their promises only ‘if Mr. Portman is not up’, as it was put by the veteran Whig John Calcraft of Rempstone, the proprietor of and Member for Wareham.
This by-election revealed several aspects of the nature of electoral politics in Dorset, including the accepted practice that the other county Member should observe ‘a most perfect neutrality’, as Pitt put it.
as your county is so strongly impregnated with Toryism, our language upon politics should be as general as possible: the main ground to be taken, being the desire to maintain the fair independence of the county against ministerialist influence and any compromise over the rights of the freeholders in general.
Grosvenor mss 9/11/43; 110/3.
So it was ironic that Portman proved to be not only pro-Catholic but also steadily Whig in the House. Another key element in his triumph was that his supporters (and Bankes specifically singled out the Shaftesbury attorney Charles Bowles of Barton Hill House in this respect) rapidly established an association of committees throughout the county. Added to this was Bankes’s known indifference to the poorer voters, and at Portman’s election dinner, Bowles claimed that Bankes had lost so much support because he had scorned to court the ordinary freeholders.
In the end, Grosvenor had given his support to Portman, and although, with his growing properties and by this act of expedient deference, he was deemed to have established the basis of a substantial future interest in the county, he does not appear to have renewed his attempt on the representation. One of his Shaftesbury agents argued that ‘from the disposition so generally evinced I am sure that whenever old Pitt goes Mr. Robert Grosvenor may be his successor as easily as any gentleman named by the noble lord will succeed him here’.
In December 1825, Pitt informed Henry Bankes that his friends, including Shaftesbury, agreed that he should resign on the eve of the session, ‘as being the most beneficial for your interest as well as for that of Portman’. Bankes’s elder son William Bankes* of Soughton Hall, Flintshire, who had already heard of this plan, warned his father against it, because of ‘a sort of menace that Calcraft still holds out ... that you will not succeed to that seat without opposition’. He concluded that
unless it can be known that Calcraft has dropped this tone altogether it is better not to try the experiment for the sake of only getting the seat a few months earlier. At a dissolution Portman’s friends will for his sake take care that the election shall pass off quietly, but if the seat is thrown open at this time he will run no risk whatever from your being wantonly put to ever so much expense and trouble.
Bankes mss, W.J. to H. Bankes, 22 Dec., Pitt to same, 23 Dec. 1825.
Bankes must have been reassured on this point, for he met with no opposition at the by-election in February 1826, when he was nominated by Frampton and Sturt, and, as he wrote in his diary
had the satisfaction of being returned with perfect unanimity, and apparently to the contentment and with the approbation of a numerous body of freeholders of the highest and the middle classes who attended. The trouble which it occasioned was personally very trifling as I scarcely canvassed anyone, or moved from home upon that account ... the expense also was very moderate by the good management and methodical arrangements of my friends at Dorchester ... so that this object of my long pursuit, which had been sought with so much anxiety, vexation and charge, fell at last, as it were of itself, unexpectedly into my hands, and when every approach to it seemed beyond all reasonable hope.
Dorset Co. Chron. 9, 16, 23 Feb. 1826; Bankes jnl. 156.
As was widely foreseen, at the general election in June 1826 Portman, proposed by Smith and Sir Richard Carr Glyn† of Gaunts, and Bankes, nominated by Frampton and Sturt, were returned unopposed. The Members acknowledged their political differences, but put on a show of amicability at their joint election dinner.
Petitions from the owners and occupiers of land against revision of the corn laws were brought up in the Commons, 15 Feb., and in the Lords, 19 Feb. 1827.
As expected, there was no alteration in the representation at the peaceful general election of 1830, when Portman, boasting of his ‘integrity and diligence’, was proposed by Glyn and Sir Edward Baker Baker of Ranston House, and Henry Bankes, insisting on his ‘constitutional principles’, was again nominated by Frampton and Sturt.
Portman, like Bankes, offered again at the general election of 1831, although he may already have wanted to withdraw from Dorset as Edward Littleton, Member for Staffordshire, had written to him on 7 Apr. to express his hope that ‘you will succeed in getting your neck out of the noose of county representation’.
Initially, the parties had hoped for another uncontested election; for example, Digby countenanced Portman’s return and Smith was willing to see Bankes re-elected.
I found today in Sherborne that many of my loyal soldiers are so annoyed at my endeavours for Mr. Bankes that, I am told, many mean to resign. This, to say the least, speaks volumes for their disappointment, and the speedy evaporation of their loyalty.
Ffooks mss KY93, Goodden to Fooks, Wed. [n.d.]; O’Gorman, 100.
Nevertheless, Bankes clearly found this necessary because ‘associations had been formed in several of the large towns, beginning with Poole and Blandford, by the activity of the sectarians of all descriptions, for counteracting my re-election’.
Although Calcraft only put up £1,000 and had to open a subscription because his party were said to ‘want money to pay agents’, he reaped the benefit of his local popularity, particularly for his role in the abolition of the salt tax in the early 1820s. Bankes, who detailed Calcraft’s faults of private character and ‘shameless inconsistency’ over reform, noted bitterly in his journal that ‘in this time of excitement, which was indeed excessive and nearly universal among the lower orders, reform covered a multitude of sins’.
reformers are in high spirits, declaring that they have with them the whole of the intelligence of Dorsetshire, and that they are only opposed by an oligarchy of squireens and parsons, whose passions and prejudices will induce them, notwithstanding the hopelessness of success, to fight the battle of this veteran champion of their order, as long as the purse of the Charles Street gang remains unexhausted, but not one moment longer. They are using all kinds of dirty tricks to intimidate the poorer voters, but hitherto in vain.
Ffooks mss KY93, addresses; The Times, 11 May 1831.
Since Bankes refused to oblige his opponents by withdrawing, a contest began on 10 May 1831, when the three candidates were proposed by the same sponsors and Bankes, the show of hands going against him, demanded a poll. Portman, who told the electors to ‘do as you please’ as to their second votes, led on all six days, during which Bankes and Calcraft exchanged allegations about obstructions given and objections made to each others’ voters, and the Shaftesbury printer and controversialist John Rutter enlivened the proceedings with his views on reform. Bankes blamed his first day failure on his agents, who thereafter made frantic efforts to increase his numbers, but he only polled more than Calcraft (and then only 15) on the fourth day, when he was already over 100 adrift. He admitted that ‘when things begin ill, it is difficult to retrieve them, and a first impression has often a decisive effect’, but was persuaded, by his son George and others, to keep the poll open an extra day.
The pollbook, taken from the nine divisional manuscript pollbooks (including Poole under the Shaftesbury division) was published that year by Weston, Symonds and Sydenham, the printers of the County Chronicle.
Calcraft’s suicide on 11 Sept. 1831 reopened the representation of Dorset and led to another turbulent contest
threw all Dorsetshire into combustion. He had never been happy since his reception in London, after he had been returned for Dorsetshire. A gloomy melancholy never left him, and he put a period to his existence by cutting his throat ... and instantly the first inquiry made was, who would offer themselves to represent the county?
Jnl. of Mary Frampton, 377-8.
As Henry Bankes was thought certain to stand, ministers, who urged Anglesey to use his influence, hoped for a credible reform candidate, and Sturt (surprisingly, since he had been a stopgap Member for Dorchester on his kinsman Shaftesbury’s interest in 1830), Farquharson, Oglander and Parry Okeden were mentioned. On the 13th it was settled that Ponsonby, the brother of Lord Duncannon*, the government whip, and brother-in-law of Lord Melbourne, the home secretary, should start with government support. He returned to Dorset to begin canvassing, but was evidently a reluctant candidate, as he stated that he would willingly have stood aside for Farquharson.
To the disgust of Tories locally and nationally, Bankes, even when appealed to by Wellington and requisitioned by Encombe and 12 other Members (including Ashley, Best, Peach and Sturt) balked at what was certain to be an expensive contest. His sons William, now Member for Marlborough, whom John Herries* reckoned was ‘most to blame in this’, and George, who had aspirations at Weymouth, also declined.
There was an unusual development just before the by-election began, which itself indicates the extent of partisanship in the county. On 28 Sept. 1831 Portman wrote to Ashley that
if you succeed in exposing Dorsetshire to the reproach of being the weathercock county you will secure to your supporters the pleasure of another election very shortly for I will not condescend to abandon my consistency to please any set of men and under such circumstances I could not duly represent so fickle a set of electors. Besides I do not think that you are now doing the county any service by disturbing its peace, particularly as you avow that you have no sort of wish to establish a permanent interest therein. I should on ordinary occasions wholly abstain from interference, but on the present I think the honour of the county is at stake and if needful I shall exert myself to support the majority of May.
Ashley, who laid the letter before his committee and made its contents public, brushed it aside by replying on the 30th that ‘nothing is more usual in counties than for two colleagues to differ upon subjects of great moment without either of them considering that it is his duty to defer to the other by retiring from his post’.
With the reform bill having just been taken up to the Lords, where both parties knew that it would probably receive a hostile reception, the Dorset by-election, like those in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere, took on great importance as a test of public opinion. Already in the Commons on 6 Aug. 1831 Charles Baring Wall had used his victory in the Weymouth by-election to argue that there had been a ‘reaction’ against reform in Dorset, and in this he was supported by George Bankes, though not by Portman. As the radical Lord Radnor commented to his fellow Wiltshire Whig Lord Suffolk, 12 Sept., ‘Calcraft’s death will give the county of Dorset an opportunity of showing, whether they have relaxed in their wishes for reform. I fear, however, that the battle will be to be fought there on very disadvantageous ground’.
As for the Tories, although some observers thought that Ashley was unlikely to succeed, several magnates were so encouraged by the perceived reaction of the Dorset farmers and small freeholders that they considered that they had a favourable chance of overturning the general election result.
if the Whig candidate Mr. Ponsonby should be outnumbered, it would evince a strong reaction in the sentiments of the public with regard to the question of reform, and afford both confidence and argument to the adversaries of the bill in the House of Lords.
Bankes jnl. 175.
The reformers had been aware that it would be as well to forward as many reform petitions as possible to the Lords, but the Blandford meeting went awry for them when the petition (which was nevertheless presented by Lord Holland, 4 Oct.) was amended to an expression of confidence in the Lords’ use of their own judgement. Lord Ellenborough (who wrongly recorded that this originated in Shaftesbury) was among Tories who lamented that it had not been a county petition, as that would have helped their cause. Yet the leadership of the Tory party were also hopeful of winning the seat, and Ellenborough predicted that ‘if we have a large majority [in the Lords], that is, 40, and if we carry the Dorsetshire election, I think Lord Grey’s resignation very probable’.
Throughout the full 15 days of the by-election, which began at Poundbury on 30 Sept. 1831, the reaction question dominated the debates.
In addition to reform, several related issues emerged on the hustings. Not only was the reform bill seen as a general attack on the existing constitution, but the landowners believed themselves threatened by the loss of the borough seats (which would not be outweighed by the additional county seat) and feared that a reformed Parliament would undermine the corn laws. Ponsonby, who insisted that he was an agriculturist and deplored the attempt to divide the urban and rural interests, was heavily criticized for voting (with ministers and, incidentally, Portman) against Lord Chandos’s amendment to enfranchise £50 tenants-at-will; and, although he came from a noble family, he made a very ill-judged attack on the aristocracy on the sixth day of the contest, which Ashley turned against him. It was also not forgotten that he was Irish in origin and had only established himself in Dorset during the previous decade, so that in spite of Ponsonby’s being a resident of reasonably prosperous means, it was Ashley, the penurious heir to a peerage, who was able to pose as the pattern of an independent English country gentleman. Not surprisingly, most of the gentry voted for Ashley. His intellectual conversion to the cause of Catholic emancipation in the late 1820s was conveniently forgotten by his supporters, who contrived to represent Ponsonby, who had also voted for emancipation, and the reformers generally, as the enemies of the established church. This was brought home to Ilchester by the Tory votes of two of his brothers-in-law: the Rev. Townshend Selwyn, vicar of Melbury Bubb, who, on learning of Ilchester’s displeasure, repented of his having been ‘hurried off to Dorchester with my eyes shut fast asleep’ to vote for Ashley; and the Rev. Edward Murray, rector of Winterbourne Monkton, who only reluctantly resigned from Ashley’s committee under pressure from Ilchester, but insisted that the contest took ‘a great deal too much the appearance of an attack upon the church, to justify any clergyman in being passive’.
The connections and character of the candidates greatly affected their fortunes, sometimes unfairly so. Ponsonby’s having rebuilt one of the churches in Poole counted for nothing when it was known that he was constructing a Catholic chapel at Canford for his wife, even though she, the daughter of the 5th earl of Shaftesbury, was Ashley’s first cousin. By contrast, Ashley’s wife was Melbourne’s niece and the daughter of the Whig society hostess Lady Cowper (probably with the Canningite foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston*). She, who had become an ardent Tory, lodged with the Framptons during the contest, appeared beside her husband and was considered an asset to his campaign.
The excitement increased on the second day, 1 Oct. 1831,
this contest is of the greatest importance. The letters from every department of the government received here this morning say (at least imply) that the bill depends on Dorsetshire. The Lords are looking to us for the present expression of public opinion.
SDHS acc. 3397, f. 18.
The Upper House would undoubtedly, in any case, have rejected the bill, as happened in the early hours of 8 Oct. 1831; but the reaction which the by-election was perceived to have revealed probably contributed to the size of the majority against the second reading.
News of this defeat caused some disappointment in Dorset, but the Tory paper claimed that when the by-election recommenced, on Monday, 10 Oct. 1831, it ‘did not appear to have caused any great sensation, that result having been so confidently anticipated by both parties’. During the next week, when another 300 electors were polled and Ashley led by daily majorities which fluctuated between seven and 32, great efforts were still made to win in order to provide an endorsement for, or a rejection of, the Lords’ decision. The sheriff had already refused Parry Okeden’s request for an additional assessor to be appointed to deal with the ever increasing number of disputed votes, and arguments about the doubtful legality of the last ones dominated the rest of the proceedings. When the poll closed on 17 Oct., with Ashley finishing only 36 ahead of Ponsonby, this winning margin was outweighed by the more than 12 times as many (451) votes left undecided. Despite Whig calls for a double or special return, the election was declared to be in Ashley’s favour. The sheriff, a Tory, and the assessor, the London barrister Philip Williams, a Whig, almost certainly acted impartially, but it was so close a result that it was bound to be referred to the Commons. As 260 of those left undecided had tendered for Ponsonby and only 191 for Ashley, the reformers naturally claimed that they should have won. Their opponents, of course, argued the opposite case: using the proportions of allowed and rejected votes for the 210 cases of disputed votes already decided in favour of Ashley (175 to 35) and the corresponding 204 for Ponsonby (121 to 83), a handbill entitled The Plain Truth ingeniously suggested that the anti-reformers majority should have been increased by five. This would have made the winning margin 41, the same as the majority in the Lords against the bill, showing the perceived identity of interests between the two events. Although repeated by Read, this was probably the idea of John Sydenham, the editor of the Dorset County Chronicle, whose many strongly anti-reform articles were said to have contributed significantly to Ashley’s success.
Newcastle opined that the anti-reformer’s success in this ‘most extraordinary contest’ was ‘a valuable triumph under the peculiar circumstances of the times’, but, although grateful for the result, Ellenborough feared that ‘unless we are strongly supported in the country, we shall be beaten in the House of Lords when the bill comes up to us again’.
the election was rendered too much a professional question. The union of action was destroyed, and the battle ... became an old-fashioned contest between two candidates, supported by their different agents and partisans.
J. Penny, Dorset Emancipated from Tory Dominion (1832), 24-25.
The fiercely fought by-election certainly saw a high degree of popular participation, including in the public quarrels between the competing party newspapers. A great many squibs, songs and other election handbills, many of them hostile to Ponsonby, circulated for several weeks.
The scale of the divisiveness of the contest can be judged from an analysis of the pollbook, which, taken from the 11 divisional manuscript pollbooks (with two each for Bridport and Dorchester, and including Poole under the Cerne division) was published the following year by Weston, Symonds and Sydenham.
The Tories naturally saw their triumph as the vindication of their claims of a reaction.
although there may be fewer friends to the bill than there were, particularly among the agriculturists, reform is not a whit less popular with the mass of the people in the manufacturing districts, throughout the union, and generally amongst all classes and in all parts of the country.
Greville Mems. ii. 206, 210.
The narrow return of a reformer at the subsequent Cambridgeshire by-election partly counteracted the impression of a reaction, but both contests were unfortunate for ministers, who were wary of exposing themselves to any further tests of their popularity.
In any case, the Dorset election had still to be decided in the Commons, and it was now that finance became a critical issue. No reliable total exists for Ponsonby’s campaign, although one figure put it at £30,000, out of an estimated total of £80,000.
The Dorset committee was chosen amid highly partisan scenes in the Commons, 1 Mar. 1832, and was several times put off because of the illness of the lord advocate, Francis Jeffrey, whom Ashley described as ‘my bitterest enemy’.
the fair and just proposal is what Mr. Portman himself proposed to some of Ashley’s friends, that he should resign his, Mr. Portman’s, seat to William Ponsonby and that the Tory party should bind themselves not to oppose William Ponsonby’s return in Portman’s place and that for the future the county should be always one and one.
Add. 51601.
Yet Dorset opinion was evidently not prepared for such a compromise, and the county Members, reprising their argument over the by-election, clashed in the Commons on 17 May 1832.
The provisions of the reform bill had aroused little comment in respect of the county, although William Bankes had called for the addition of a fourth seat in order to safeguard the agricultural interest, 13 Aug. 1831, and George Bankes had urged the enfranchisement of the Isle of Purbeck (in place of Wareham), 14 Feb., 9 Mar. 1832. Portman made objections to minor changes in the county’s boundaries, 8 June, when ministers made clear that Poole freeholders would be allowed to continue to vote in county elections. On 22 June Portman resisted the Bankeses’ attempts to increase their influence in Wareham, but Wall alleged that the changes were inspired by ministers’ attempts to consolidate the Whig interest.
Number of voters: 3658 in Sept. 1831
Estimated voters: 3,000 to 4,000