Westmorland

Economic and social profile

One of the three smallest English counties, Westmorland consisted largely of ‘lofty mountains, naked hills, barren moors, and lakes’.The other two were Rutland and Huntingdon: N. Gash, Politics in the age of Peel (1953), 43; Dod’s electoral facts, impartially stated, ed. H.J. Hanham (1972), 335. Territorially, the earl of Lonsdale was the largest landowner with 39,299 acres, more than double anyone else’s holding and eight per cent of the county’s total acreage.Return of owners of land (1874), ii. 484. Agriculture dominated the local economy, employing 36 per cent of the male workforce in 1851. Less than one-third of the county’s population lived in the principal market towns of Kendal, Appleby and Kirkby Stephen. Westmorland’s population, in contrast to the national increase, grew only modestly in this period. Mainly because of its peripheral location, local crafts and industries, such as linen, flax, tanning and carpet manufacture, were seriously affected by outside competition, resulting in de-industrialisation and increased migration.M.E. Shepherd, From Hellgill to Bridge End: aspects of economic and social change in the Upper Eden Valley 1840-95 (2003), 39-44. Following the cotton famine of the 1860s, Westmorland’s and Kendal’s woollen and cotton industries failed to recover. The county and assize town of Appleby, Westmorland’s only parliamentary borough before its abolition in 1832, had been eclipsed in size and importance by Kendal, which became a noted centre of shoe manufacturing, led by the firm of Somerwell.J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-twentieth century (1981), 23. To ward off decline, the communities of Kendal, Appleby and Kirkby Stephen agitated for an inland railway, and they were backed by the earls of Lonsdale, who envisaged a main line traversing their vast Westmorland estates.Ibid., 35-7; Westmorland Gazette, 4 Apr. 1857. This was realised in 1846 with the opening of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, which was connected to the Kendal and Windermere line the following year. Though strongly supported by the two towns’ inhabitants, the latter line was opposed by the poet William Wordsworth, who outlined his opposition in a series of letters to the Morning Post, and most famously in his sonnet ‘On the projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’ (12 Oct. 1844).Morning Post, 11 Dec. 1844.

Electoral history

The representation of Westmorland was completely dominated by the Lowther family, headed by the Tory first earl of Lonsdale (1757-1844), one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom, who controlled nine seats in Parliament.A.N. Connell, ‘The domination of Lowtherism and Toryism in Westmorland parliamentary elections, 1818-1895’, Northern History, XLV (Sept. 2008), 295-321; H. Owen, The Lowther family: eight hundred years of a family of ancient gentry and worship (1990), 388-401. His two sons, William, viscount Lowther, and Colonel Henry Cecil Lowther, had held the county’s two seats in the ‘Yellow’ interest from 1818 until 1831, when the family’s implacable opposition to reform undermined its position, allowing the return of a Reformer, Alexander Nowell, and leaving the elder brother, viscount Lowther, to seek refuge at Cumberland, and then Dulwich the following year.HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 145-53. The 1832 Reform Act, which made provision for Westmorland to poll at Ambleside, Kendal, Kirby Lonsdale, Kirkby Stephen, and the election town of Appleby, made no changes to the boundaries, but the ‘Chandos clause’ boosted the Lowther interest by enfranchising the tenants of land worth £50 a year.Connell, ‘Lowtherism and Toryism’, 299. In 1860 1,134 out of Westmorland’s 4,214 voters were £50 occupying tenants: PP 1860 (277), lv. 93. Meanwhile, the enfranchisement of Kendal, referred to by the Yellows as a ‘radical-ridden borough’, was perceived by the Liberals, known as the ‘Blues’, to have diminished their chances of retaining their county seat at the 1832 general election.HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 152. In 1852 330 out of the county’s 4,074 voters were registered for property in Kendal: PP 1852 (4), xlii. 307. This figure had fallen by 1858 when 276 out of 4,168 voters were registered for property in Kendal: PP 1857-58 (108), xlvi. 577.

The Lowther interest enjoyed complete political hegemony in this period and only the 1832 general election was contested. For the Blue-supporting Carlisle Journal:

opposition would have been useless for such is the influence of the House of Lowther in the county, that by its aid Whig, Tory, Chartists or “my Lord’s black servant” if brought forward, and taken by the hand, would be elected in spite of all opposition.Carlisle Journal, 25 Sept. 1841.

Lonsdale crammed the magistracy with his partisans, and enjoyed the close support of the county’s two other major Tory landowners, Daniel Wilson of Dallam Tower, and his kinsmen Edward Hasell of Dalemain, chairman of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway company. A permanent fixture on the election hustings, Hasell usually spoke at far greater length than either of the Lowther brothers, particularly Henry who, due to his ‘extreme diffidence in public speaking’, was known as the ‘silent Colonel’.J.W. Lowther, A Speaker’s commentaries, I (1925), 11.

The Lowthers, however, did not take electoral dominance for granted, with the earl of Lonsdale, according to one contemporary, considering the registration process to be ‘as vitally important to his interests as looking after his own property’.Quoted in Connell, ‘Lowtherism and Toryism’, 299. The Blue cause, meanwhile, enjoyed the support of the Tuftons, earls of Thanet, owners of Appleby Castle and significant estates in the Upper Eden Valley, although the 11^th earl, Henry Tufton, lacked the political nous of his elder brother, the ninth earl, Sackville Tufton, who had been a constant thorn in Lowther’s side prior to his death in 1826.HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 145-53. The most striking moment of Blue opposition in this period occurred in 1852, when a group headed by Charles Howard, MP for Cumberland East, and including Westmorland’s leading Liberal William Crackanthorpe of Newbiggin Hall, climbed Cross Fell in the pouring rain, planted a blue flag and made defiant speeches.Carlisle Journal, 6 Aug. 1852. The most consistent voice of opposition was provided by the Liberal Kendal Mercury and Carlisle Journal, whose editorials doggedly attacked the nature of the Lowther influence. The Westmorland Gazette, inspired by William Wordsworth and financed by the earl of Lonsdale, further fostered partisan rivalries.

Westmorland’s first election of 1832 attracted the only Blue contender of this period. The resident Blues favoured Crackanthorpe, but following his refusal to stand, they settled on John Foster Barham of Appleby, who was the nephew of the 11^th earl of Thanet, and had sat for Stockbridge in the pre-Reform parliament. He stated his support for Grey’s ministry, but in an attempt to broaden his appeal, insisted that he was ‘unfettered and unpledged to party’.Barham’s election poster, 6 Aug. 1832, Papers of John Foster Barham MP, card 235, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Yellow press, however, dismissed ‘his qualifications as a Member for the county’ and suggested that ‘his private character is not what it ought to be’.Westmorland Gazette, 8 Nov., 10 Dec. 1832. Even the Blue hierarchy conceded in private that he had ‘little personal influence’.W. Crackanthorpe to James Brougham, 1 Dec. 1832, Brougham mss. After Crackanthorpe refused to nominate Barham, it was left to William Wybergh of Clifton Hall, a local magistrate, to implore ‘the electors by the magic name of Reform ... to come forward manfully and support him’.Westmorland Gazette, 22 Dec. 1832.

The Lowther political machine, however, was formidable, and by October 1832 Lonsdale’s agents had ensured that the Yellows dominated the register. With viscount Lowther on a lengthy tour of France and Italy, his younger brother Henry directed the canvass on their father’s behalf. At the nomination, viscount Lowther’s proposer rather generously insisted that ‘he was in a far distant country; but he was not there in idleness and ease, but was watching the operation of the laws and institutions of other countries’, and he was returned in absentia at the top of the poll, apparently without his consent. Following his return to England, he insisted that ‘my object on the close of last session was not to seek election, and thereby be enabled to visit countries I had never seen’. He added that a return to Parliament ‘was not, and could not be in my contemplation’.Lowther was also returned three days later for Cumberland West, again apparently without his knowledge. He eventually opted to sit for Westmorland, explaining that ‘by priority of date the county of Westmorland has the prior claim to my services’: Carlisle Journal, 9 Mar. 1833. His brother Henry came in a comfortable second. At Kendal, the final hours of polling were interrupted by a riot ‘by the Blue or Barham’s mob’, who were reported to have ‘committed serious depredations by breaking the windows of the principal inns’.Westmorland Gazette, 22 Dec. 1832. Analysis of the poll reveals the regional bias of the Lowther vote. Barham topped the poll in his home town of Appleby and in the ‘radical-ridden’ town of Kendal, gaining 46 and 40 per cent of the vote respectively, but in Kirby Lonsdale, home to many of the larger tenants, Barham received only 19 per cent, and in Shap, the district containing the most voters which was dominated by the earl of Lonsdale’s estates, his vote all but disappeared, taking only 7 per cent.W.W. Bean, The parliamentary representation of the six northern counties of England (1890), 603. Dismayed by the result and the manner in which the two Lowther brothers, one of them absent, were returned, Sir James Graham remarked that ‘Westmorland will henceforward be the scorn and derision of all free electors and a schedule A for counties will really appear requisite’.J. Graham to James Brougham, 18 Dec. 1832, Brougham mss.

William IV’s controversial replacement of the Whigs with a Conservative ministry under Peel in November 1834 and viscount Lowther’s subsequent appointment as president of the board of trade re-ignited hostility towards the Lowther interest in the Blue papers. The Kendal Mercury declared:

if the Lowthers be permitted to walk quietly in and out of the representation … as suits their convenience, public spirit will stagnate, the love of independence sink into immoveable despondency, and the rottenness of Appleby appear like purity itself compared with the ruined, close and Tory-ridden county of Westmorland.Kendal Mercury, 20 Dec. 1834.

The Reform Act, the newspaper argued, had been superfluous, as ‘have we not still the two sons of a noble earl thrust upon us by instruments the most venal and vexatious?’Ibid. The 1835 general election did little to change this interpretation, with the resident Blues focusing all their efforts on the borough contest at Kendal, where Barham had been returned in February 1834 following the death of James Brougham.Kendal Chronicle, 18 Jan. 1834. Seeking re-election for the county, viscount Lowther, who insisted that he had taken office not ‘for its own sake’ but because of ‘the necessity ... of cordial union and strenuous co-operation of those whose principles call them to support the established institutions of this country’, declared that ‘Sir Robert Peel and his colleagues would prosecute useful and lasting reforms’.Parliamentary test book (1835), 100; Westmorland Gazette, 17 Jan. 1835. Henry Lowther rekindled his mistrust of the Reform Act, asking ‘what earthly good it had ever done’, and attacked the late Melbourne ministry for ‘hanging on, their only consideration being how to keep their places and feather their nests’.Westmorland Gazette, 17 Jan. 1835. Following their unopposed return, the brothers ‘stepped into two elegant yellow chairs, adorned with garlands, festoons, and flowers’ and were carried through the town.Ibid.

The Lowther brothers were re-elected without opposition two further times. At the 1837 general election, when, despite the lack of a contest, there were a ‘great number of people’ at the nomination, Irish issues dominated the addresses. Viscount Lowther launched a withering attack on Irish church appropriation, claiming that the policy had ‘left open a sore for agitation which has proved the bane of Ireland’, while Henry, who claimed Melbourne’s ministry was held up by ‘O’Connell and his popish tail’, ridiculed ‘the present poor-law-papist government’.Westmorland Gazette, 5 Aug. 1837. At the 1841 general election Henry Lowther continued his assault on the new poor law, criticising the number of commissioners and their expense, while his elder brother spoke out against corn law repeal, warning that ‘rival nations’ would not lower duties on imported British goods.Ibid., 10 July 1841.

In September 1841 viscount Lowther was summoned to the Lords in his father’s barony before accepting the position of postmaster-general in Peel’s second ministry. William Thompson, the prominent City financier and MP for Sunderland who originated from Kendal, promptly resigned his seat and offered for the vacancy. Thompson, who had begun his political career as a moderate reformer and free trader before moving over to the Conservatives in the mid-1830s, was savaged by the Blue press, with the Carlisle Journal describing him as ‘the tricky and slippery alderman ... whose name has become a by-word and a scorn to every political party in the kingdom, whose opinions are valueless as his character’.Carlisle Journal, 11 Sept. 1841. Although the Blues showed little signs of contesting the seat, strenuous efforts were made to secure Thompson’s return, with the formation of a central election committee, and local branches being established at Kirby Lonsdale, Milnthorpe, Ambleside, Appleby and Kirkby Stephen.Westmorland Gazette, 18 Sept. 1841. At the nomination Thompson confirmed his complete rejection of free trade principles, proclaiming that he would ‘never be a party to any alteration’ of the corn laws, and was returned unopposed.Carlisle Journal, 25 Sept. 1841. The following year he purchased the Underley estates in Kirby Lonsdale, giving him an unassailable presence in the county.

The succession of viscount Lowther to the earldom and the county lord lieutenancy in 1844 did little to interrupt the family’s iron grip on Westmorland’s political affairs. According to the Kendal Mercury:

the representation of Westmorland is so complete a non-entity, and the freeholders have so little say in the matter, that everything connected with it is always shrouded in mystery, until the nominees of a certain noble lord choose to make known the gracious purposes of their master.Kendal Mercury, 24 July 1841.

On the eve of the 1847 general election, with no sign of a Blue challenger, the Mercury stated that ‘we cannot think of the representation of our county without grief and shame’. The paper conceded that ‘Colonel Lowther, without merit or demerit, as a mere Parliamentary Trustee for his family, must be submitted to as a quasi representative’, but it had only contempt for the turncoat Thompson.Ibid., 31 July 1841. At the nomination, Lowther launched a staunch defence of the corn laws, telling the electors that ‘we did not desert you though our leader left us in the lurch’. Thompson echoed these sentiments, stating that Peel had lost his ‘moral courage’ and surrendered himself to the Anti-Corn Law League. Both men defended the navigation laws, a subject particularly dear to Thompson, who believed that if they were repealed, Britain ‘might be affronted, kicked, and buffeted, by foreign nations, but we should have no navy to point to’.Westmorland Gazette, 7 Aug. 1847.

Lowther and Thompson maintained their unwavering opposition to free trade at the 1852 general election, and reflecting his family’s historic mistrust of Catholicism, Lowther stated that he was ‘opposed to all the various encroachments of Romanism upon the Protestant political constitution of the country’. Thompson also attacked ‘all further concessions to popery’, though he insisted that he would ‘support every measure for affording education, based upon religious teaching, to the children of the working classes’.Ibid., 10 July 1852. Local issues also loomed large in the campaign. The proposed building of a lunatic asylum for Westmorland and Cumberland, to be funded out of the county rates, caused a considerable degree of consternation. Significantly, the matter went to the heart of Westmorland’s rural identity, with Lowther arguing that as the ‘lunatics’ came from the manufacturing centres rather than the farming districts, ‘the hardship to which the landed interest is subject in having to contribute to such a rate’ was grossly unfair, given that ‘the manufacturers are realising large fortunes’.Carlisle Journal, 16 July 1852.

Following Thompson’s death in March 1854, his son-in-law, the Anglo-Irish earl of Bective, was brought forward for the vacancy. An uninspiring figure, he admitted that he was ‘very inadequate in experience and knowledge of business to follow my late lamented relative’. Although he was ‘not anxious’ to give a pledge ‘in any way’, he made an efort to reflect the voters’ chief concerns, stating that ‘I shall to the utmost of my power support the landed interest, because I believe it to be the most important to the welfare of the country’.Westmorland Gazette, 8 Apr. 1854. Sensing a possible opportunity, the Kendal Mercury urged Crackanthorpe to come forward.Connell, ‘Lowtherism and Toryism’, 301-2. However, he settled for an ‘ironical’ speech on the hustings following Bective’s return, encouraging the new member to go ‘into the House of Commons not as the delegate of any one single individual, however powerful that man might be, or even of any one party in this county, but ... be the representative of the whole constituency’. He finished his speech by warning Bective that ‘his votes would be strictly scrutinised and his attendance marked’.Westmorland Gazette, 8 Apr. 1854.

The warning proved to be a hollow one though, as Bective, who attended infrequently and ‘did not profess to be a speaker in the House of Commons’, was re-elected alongside Lowther without a contest at the 1857 general election.Carlisle Journal, 3 Apr. 1857. This was in spite of the efforts of James Atkinson of Winderwath, who, after the result had been declared, came forward to nominate the absent John Thwaites, chairman of the metropolitan board of works, believing that ‘the country gentlemen who advocated the same political opinions as himself ought to have come forward and proposed a good Liberal candidate to oppose the earl of Bective’. The high sheriff, however, dismissed the intervention. Following the announcement of their re-election, Lowther and Bective both criticised Palmerston over his handling of events at Canton, though the latter admitted that the premier had ‘prosecuted the (Crimean) war with a vigour worthy of the energetic character of that great man’.Westmorland Gazette, 4 Apr. 1857.

The 1859 general election was dominated by the issue of parliamentary reform, with both Lowther and Bective having voted for the short-lived Derby ministry’s bill, 31 Mar. 1859. Lowther’s published address rather patronisingly stated that ‘I should be as ready as anyone to promote measures for the real benefit of the working classes, but I do not believe that they would be made better or happier by becoming electors of Members of Parliament’.Carlisle Journal, 15 Apr. 1859. At the nomination he was adamant that ‘the Reform bill of 27 years ago gave licence enough’, while Bective pledged not to support ‘any measure which would swamp the power of the middle classes of this industrial country’.Ibid., 3 May 1859; Westmorland Gazette, 7 May. 1859. Bective reiterated this line at the 1865 general election when he stated that it would be ‘wrong to give a measure of reform to one class to the exclusion of another’ and suggested that Baines’ borough franchise bill would have led to the ‘degrading position’ of ‘universal suffrage’. Echoing these sentiments, Lowther opposed ‘admitting to the franchise such classes which would over flood the country’, though for the first time in the post-Reform era he conceded that he would ‘consider some suitable measure’. Following a nomination that ‘scarcely excited more interest in the town than any ordinary formal meeting’, Bective and Lowther were again re-elected without opposition.Carlisle Journal, 18 July 1865.

Lowther’s death in December 1867, when he was Father of the House, brought to an end 55 years of uninterrupted service as Westmorland’s MP. His third son, William Lowther, a distinguished diplomat, came forward for the vacancy, declaring that ‘I bear a name which has from earliest times been intimately associated with the county of Westmorland’.Westmorland Gazette, 21 Dec. 1867. Acknowledging his superior claims, Crackanthorpe stated that, ‘as a Liberal’ he accepted Lowther’s candidature, ‘as he belonged to the Lowther family, who had large interests in the county of Westmorland; but he and others would have opposed the nomination of any stranger who might have been brought forward under the same auspices’.Lancaster Gazette, 11 Jan. 1868. At the nomination Lowther spoke out against ‘Fenianism’, and confirmed that he would support ‘any measures the government introduced to suppress their lawless proceedings’ as ‘severe maladies require severe remedies’. Drawing on his diplomatic experience he played down the ‘gloomy’ state of foreign affairs and was elected unopposed.The Times, 9 Jan. 1868.

At the 1868 general election Bective and Lowther were returned without opposition and following Bective’s succession to the Irish marquessate of Headfort in December 1870, his son came in unopposed for the vacancy, and was again re-elected without a contest, along with Lowther, in 1874. At the 1880 general election Bective and Lowther saw off the challenge of Sir Henry Tufton, grandson of the 11^th earl of Thanet, an event which brought to an end 48 years of uncontested representation, a length of time matched only by West Cornwall and Sutherland in the post-Reform era.Connell, ‘Lowtherism and Toryism’, 298. The Redistribution Act of 1885 split Westmorland in two by reconstituting Appleby and Kendal as county constituencies. The Conservatives maintained their supremacy in both divisions for the rest of the century.