The canvass aimed to get the vote out, but also linked candidates to communities [25-minute read] Canvassing was, according to David Eastwood, ‘the critical electoral institution of later-Hanoverian England’, or, as Frank O’Gorman has argued, the ‘critical point of contact’ between the electoral system and the voters prior to Reform.[1] Canvasses were organized by local […]
Though excluded from the franchise, women found many ways to influence the vote [20-minute read] Five months before the 1768 general election, Lord Breadalbane complained to his daughter, Marchioness Grey, that the ‘Rage of Electioneering’ had already infected Scotland, and that the ‘epidemical Madness’ of the upcoming elections was more virulent than ever. At the […]
Robin Eagles asks why certain elections were contested, while others were not [20-minute read] In May 1741 the Nottinghamshire gentlewoman Gertrude Savile (sister of Sir George Savile, bt. MP for Yorkshire), commented with relief on the conclusion of the recent elections. She reported: Great struggles and mob[b]ing in several places espeshily [sic] Westminster, yet thank […]
Mark Knights discusses attitudes to bribery and patronage in 18th-century elections [30-minute read] The corruption of electoral politics took two forms: one, of the process of an election itself, and the other, more endemically, of the electoral system as a whole, particularly relating to the prevalence of ‘rotten boroughs’ which enabled the wealthy, the influential […]
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