Simon Schama’s history of British elections

If, as pundits claim, Thursday’s election is done and dusted before the voters even get to the polling stations, is there a risk of the excitement turning into anticlimax? That’s not going to happen. For general elections, landslide or razor’s edge, are the great defining moments of British history. They are, so the British like to think, what they do instead of revolutions and civil wars. 

True, there was that unfortunate blip in the 17th century. But then, had Charles I seen reason and abided by the Triennial Act of 1641, requiring parliaments to be called at least once every three years, he might have saved his head and spared the country a blood-soaked trauma. Charles II was no keener than his father on the regularity of parliaments, regarding them as tiresome constraints on his royal prerogative. It was in his reign, in 1681, that the shortest parliament ever — one week — sat in Oxford before being dispatched by royal dissolution. It took the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 before the Triennial Act was revived in 1694, and with it an irreversible shift in sovereignty.

Thereafter, constitutional smugness set in. “Whig history” written by the likes of Thomas Babington Macaulay celebrated the exceptional devotion of the English to representative assemblies, so superior, he imagined, to the vicious absolutism of continental rulers. But self-congratulatory as that wishfully thought version of British history might be, it’s not without a nugget of truth. However minuscule the franchise, uncertain in their term, and timid in self-assertion, parliaments have existed in England since the 13th century.

Political Britain, then, is parliamentary Britain, and elections, whether feverishly exciting or numbingly dull, beat through the national bloodstream. This time, the electoral pulse is quickening in expectation of a bracing comeuppance, delivered to the Conservatives whose entitlement to being treated as the natural party of government has expired.

Polling days were momentous enough to suggest themselves as subjects for two geniuses shaping British art: William Hogarth and JMW Turner

There have been such elections before — when the Conservative victors of the Khaki Election of 1900 were spectacularly demolished in the Liberal landslide of 1906; and when, notwithstanding his warning that socialism would extinguish the liberties of Britain, Churchill’s party was trounced by Labour in 1945. But there is a whiff of Schadenfreude about this one, the uncertainty only in the degree of humiliation to be meted out; the anticipated TV spectacles of a procession of cabinet ministers sucking it up as someone else smiles at the returning officer’s declaration.

If you’re a Tory, history offers a crumb of hope. The massive Liberal majority of 1906 vanished in the next election just four years later; the postwar Attlee government, though one of the great remodellers of the British state, lasted just six years. Unless Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair is its victor, British democracy is mostly swings and roundabouts, or so the Conservatives had better hope.

Continuity, though, ought not to be confused with universal reverence. For all those in the Victorian era extolling elections as the majesty of the people expressed at the ballot box (minus the female half of the country), there have been plenty of others, especially in the 18th century, who wrote them off as a carnival of crooks and clowns.

However impure the process, polling days were momentous enough in the life of the strapping, greedy thing that was Britain on the up and up to suggest themselves, in sharply contrasting styles, one satirical, the other romantic, as subjects for two geniuses shaping British art: William Hogarth and JMW Turner.

Neither Hogarth’s four paintings “The Humours of an Election” (later engraved), nor Turner’s mystical-sacerdotal watercolour of a politician speechifying to an urban throng, can be relied on for documentary accuracy. But both were set in actual elections: Hogarth’s (albeit thinly disguised as the constituency of “Guzzledown”) was the brutally contested Oxfordshire election of 1754; Turner’s the Northamptonshire election of 1830. One took place in the scandalously venal heyday of “Old Corruption”; the other (significantly for Turner, one of whose patrons was the radical Walter Fawkes) at the moment when a national vote might decide its demise.

Hogarth sold his paintings privately to his good friend, the actor David Garrick, who would have had no trouble recognising election days as a species of theatrical entertainment featuring the half-witted, the half-conscious and the half-dead. Without the benefit of the secret ballot (introduced as late as 1872), voters were available on polling day for late persuasion, whether by the diversion of band music (also useful for drowning out the speeches of opponents), bottomless tanks of ale or less subtle methods announced by the arrival of mounted men bearing wooden clubs. 

Hogarth’s “An Election Entertainment”, set in a tavern, includes, among other figures, a corpulent mayor passed out from a monstrous surfeit of oysters. The milksop Whig candidate wears a smirk of embarrassment as he resigns himself to the clutches of a heavyweight matron, while in the foreground a figure is thrown on his back by a brickbat launched through the open window. The assailant evidently belongs to the street mob seen in the background, and a closer look tells you why the brick was thrown. The crowd is bearing an effigy of a Jew, seen in profile, around whose neck has been hung a placard proclaiming “No Jews”. And since Hogarth knew he could rely on the popularity of Judeophobia, his second plate, “Canvassing for Votes”, features a Jewish pedlar as the instrument of corruption, displaying the baubles a candidate offers to women in exchange for the favour of their husbands’ or relatives’ votes.

These ugly details date the moment. The previous year, 1753, had seen the passage through parliament of a Jewish Naturalisation Act. A feverishly antisemitic campaign had immediately erupted, featuring broadsides accusing the Jews and the Whig government supporting the bill of conniving at forced circumcision of Christians and (among other demonising fables) a plot to buy St Paul’s and convert it into a synagogue. Such was the uproar that the bill was repealed a year later.    

The last of Hogarth’s series, “Chairing the Member” (an actual custom), is at the same time the most crudely farcical and the most deadly earnest. For all his comic genius, Hogarth was civically minded, a passionate supporter of the London Foundling Hospital who donated art works to the institution. The many moments of collapse that recur in his “Modern Moral Subjects”, of which this is the last, are heavy with humour but also loaded with contempt and grimly sardonic despair. The picture makes a mockery of the Tory member’s triumph, led as he is by a blind fiddler while a flail from his own party’s gladiators strikes the head of one of the chair bearers, causing him to lose his grip. The victor will topple. A monkey grins while riding the back of a dancing bear. Gadarene swine hurtle over a bridge. 

This was the electoral farce that the Whig protagonist of Turner’s “The Northampton Election”, painted eight decades later, promised to make a thing of the past. The year 1830 was not a good one for Turner. Myopic critics had scorned his offerings to the Royal Academy. The July revolution in France had pre-empted another tour in which he could make drawings intended for albums of mass-circulation prints. Instead, he toured the Midlands in the summer, making sketches for a compilation of English views. Witnessing the Northampton campaign (the election itself could last many days or even weeks), he made a watercolour of the victorious candidate’s entry into the city following his re-election to the county seat.

As electoral celebrations go, it was the opposite of Hogarth’s. The victor was John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp and the very embodiment of the liberally minded Whig aristocrats who would stake their survival on reform. The revolution in France in July 1830 had not escaped their attention. There were violent riots in the British countryside.

Althorp, who was briefly both chancellor of the exchequer and Leader of the House, was not a creature of ambition. Every morning while in office, he confided to Lord John Russell, he “wished himself dead”. But he had a keen instinct for the peril of the times. “We come into office in as difficult a time as men ever had to engage with,” he wrote. None of which is to say that his reforming principles — including support for the abolition of slavery and the (failed) emancipation of Jews — were not sincerely held. Turner catches him in his triumphal chair, turning to the crowd that had voted him back, with that familiar gesture of heartfelt gratitude victors can afford.

It is a winter’s day in Northampton. But Turner bathes the scene in glowing Italian light. An air of providential blessing hangs over the proceedings and its hero. The brick-faced tower of All Saints’ Church, the only part to survive a fire, is bleached blond by Turner so that, in keeping with the dome, it turns into an East Midlands campanile. In place of the manic circus of Hogarth’s election, Turner has his crowd of doll-like figures bask contentedly in the festivities, even when their backs are to the champion of reform.

Althorp’s party would push through the Great Reform Act two years later, only after threatening to lean on King William IV to create enough new peers to overcome the resistance of the House of Lords. But their success was not entirely due to the idealism inscribed on the banners seen in Turner’s painting: “The purity of elections is the triumph of law”. The Tories had been badly damaged by a bitter schism over Catholic emancipation, pushed through in 1829 by the Duke of Wellington. 

Had the Iron Duke gone soft? Although he made it clear in an adamant speech that his government would never countenance electoral reform, this was not enough to forestall a revolt of some 60 MPs declaring themselves to be “Ultra-Tories”. It was their defection that forced Wellington’s resignation in November 1830 and replacement by the Whig government of Lord Grey, who would eventually push through the Reform Act of 1832. Perversely, the Ultras believed that the expansion of the franchise would reveal the majority of voters to share their views on the papist threat to the Protestant constitution. Hence, not for the last time, the most reactionary Tories became the saboteurs of their own party.

After four decades of Tory governments interrupted only by the shortlived Ministry of All the Talents in 1806-07, it was perhaps a sense of an overdue sea change that drew Charles Dickens and, later, George Eliot to the elections of the 1830s. Neither was blind to the fact that for all the rush of legislation, the Whig governments had fallen short of their promises. Although the Reform Act had increased the franchise by 45 per cent, that merely brought the total of qualified voters up to 813,000 in a nation of 24mn. “I say the Reform Bill is a trick,” says a “man in a flannel shirt” in Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical. “[I]t’s bribing some of the people with votes to make them hold their tongues about giving votes to the rest.” The eponymous hero reinforces that view. “If any working man expects a vote to do for him what it can never do, he’s foolish . . . ”

Dickens complained he would have to endure ‘candidates speaking, men fighting, swearing, drinking, and squabbling . . . all disgracing themselves’

Running through the farce of the Eatanswill election in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and Eliot’s novel set in Treby Magna in “North Loamshire”, although written 30 years apart, is fierce shared scepticism about what, if anything, had actually changed. Immediate liberation of slaves was confined to those under the age of six; anyone older was converted into an “apprentice”. The Factory Act fell short of banning all child labour. And elections could still be a violent circus; Eliot’s polling day ends in mayhem and the death of a hated colliery manager.

Dickens, the 23-year-old cub reporter assigned to a Northamptonshire by-election in 1835 by the editor of the Whig-supporting Morning Chronicle, was a shrewd observer of the capers that continued to taint elections. Managerial tactics at Eatanswill feature the Whig candidate keeping a party of 33 voters paralytically drunk in a coach house until they can be safely released on election day. Perker, the election agent for the Tories, has organised a tea party for the local ladies in which green parasols, costing seven shillings and sixpence, are given away free to ensure the vote of their husbands. And then, in keeping with the rising tide of Victorian sentimentality, there are indispensable children, six of them produced by Perker for the Tory candidate Samuel Slumkey to ask their ages and then to pat on the head. 

“It always has a great effect, that sort of thing . . . ” says Perker. “[I]f you could manage to kiss one of ’em, it would produce a very great impression on the crowd.” To his amazement the candidate performs. “‘He has patted the babies on the head’,” said Mr Perker, trembling with anxiety. A roar of applause that rent the air. ‘He has kissed one of ’em!’ exclaimed the delighted little man. A second roar. ‘He has kissed another . . . He’s kissing them all!’ screamed the enthusiastic little gentleman.”

Despite the perfectly observed comedy, Dickens did not much enjoy this spectacle. From Northampton he wrote to his fiancée Catherine that he had never seen “anything more sickening, and disgusting” and described the local Conservatives as “a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains”. As his editor demanded he had to stay put in Kettering, he would have to endure “bells ringing, candidates speaking, drums sounding, a band of eight trombone (would you believe it?) blowing — men fighting, swearing, drinking, and squabbling — all riotously excited, and all disgracing themselves”. The combination of bloviating hypocrisy, booze-saturated violence and excruciating tedium made him desperate to escape.

Consulting his fellow scriveners for The Morning Post, Morning Advertiser and The Times, Dickens discovered they felt much the same way. Together they found the ready to rent a post-chaise, to be driven by themselves. This was not a good idea. Stopping off at Boughton House, a few miles from Kettering, for a decent meal, the assigned driver, “overcome with potations of ale and egg flip”, crashed the carriage into a “water-splash”. Dickens himself made it on unharmed to Northampton.

Dickens the writer outgrew Dickens the journeyman reporter (although his career as an essayist had barely begun). Even as the humorist of Pickwick — and in common with other strong writers, bold artists and powerful dramatists — he can bring us the human truth of politics denied to run-of-the-mill journalism, trapped in the moment and verbally confined to the numbing drone of party speech. The most ambitious writers move back from close-up to wide angle, to what was once called “Condition of England” vision. Anthony Trollope was just such a chronicler; in our own time there is Alan Hollinghurst, whose The Line of Beauty captures Margaret Thatcher’s Britain more powerfully and truly than any memoir or history.    

Felix Holt: The Radical may not be the best novel Eliot wrote, although I think it much underrated. Its opening pages, in any event, offer just such a vision of Britain, deeply divided into worlds of country and town, on the verge of a profound and irreversible alteration that the rhetoric of politicians barely manages to capture. This the author conveys through the eyes of a coachman taking an opinionated but callow young man back to his family estate. The coachman, whose “view of life had originally been genial, such as became a man who was well warmed within and without, and held a position of easy, undisputed authority”, feels the vanishing of one world and the oncoming force of its replacement through a single irresistibly destructive phenomenon. 

“The recent initiation of railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw the ruined country strewn with shattered limbs . . . ‘Why, every inn on the road would be shut up!’ and at that word the coachman looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss.”

We may not be heading for that abyss, but the agents of unnerving change, the railways of our confusion, are there all right: AI, environmental degradation and the inevitable next pandemic around the corner. Elections are not the best time for the broadcasting of anxiety, so instead we get competing bromides for our many discontents. But out there, somewhere, for sure, there is an artist or a writer at work who will have the gumption and the talent to let us know, in their own particular way, just what this big moment in history truly betokens.

Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor

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