Britain goes to the polls: election day, 1807

With election day finally here, our regular columnist Alan Crosby takes a look at the very different choices on offer for voters 200 years ago

Thursday 6 May 2010
Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian
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The election looms – less than 48 hours to go, as I write this. I’ve already voted, as I won’t be home on Thursday, and so got a postal vote. That’s one of the many differences between elections in the early 21st century and those, say, two hundred years ago.

I was looking at some posters and handbills for the 1807 election in Preston, the city where I live, and the contrasts are remarkable. Preston was, with Westminster, one of the two most democratic constituencies in Britain before the Great Reform Act of 1832 – in this town almost all adult males, even those who were poor working class people, had the vote. That meant that it was essential for candidates to canvass the electors, and promote their cause.

The 1807 election was fiercely-contested. Not only were there two ‘establishment’ candidates, Lord Stanley (son of the 12th earl of Derby, whose influence was dominant in the town) for the Whigs, and Samuel Horrocks (owner of many of Preston’s very lucrative cotton mills) for the Tories, but there was also a radical independent candidate, Colonel Hanson.

His opponents lost no opportunity to denigrate Hanson, their language making their modern successors seem tame and polite by comparison. He was accused of ‘WILFUL AND CORRUPT PERJURY’, and his supporters were mocked ("a shoemaker... and an auctioneer").

If Hanson were elected, Stanley and Horrocks proclaimed, "What wonderful deed will [he] perform? Will he cause our Manufactures to advance? Will he raise Wages? Will he cause a reduction in Taxes? Will he cause Peace [for this was in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars]? Will he be the Means of Trade flourishing?". Unsurprisingly, they declared that "Not one of these Things will he effect for you".

The result was a foregone conclusion, for Hanson finished more than 600 votes behind, but only three votes separated Stanley and Horrocks. The irony is that ten years before, when the candidates were Lord Stanley (then aged only 21) and Samuel’s elder brother John Horrocks (founder of the family cotton empire), the two families were bitter enemies, fighting a spectacularly expensive and vitriolic campaign which almost bankrupted both.

So vicious and costly had it been that in the elections of 1802 and 1806 the erstwhile enemies formed a coalition and were returned unopposed. The Whigs and the Tories stitched it up between them – hence their fury in 1807 when Hanson had the impertinence to upset the cosy arrangement. I wish the election leaflets put through my door this time had been even half as interesting!