Cato V, Part VI: Freeman, Pot Wallopers, and the Unreformed House of Commons

Having thus far explored the nature of political corruption as George Clinton would have known it in late 18^th century America and found little to suggest that anything he experienced directly would have led him to believe – as he seemed to state in the text of Cato V – that larger legislatures were more secure from corruption than small ones, it would accordingly appear necessary to turn elsewhere in search of potential explanations. Specifically, recalling Clinton’s citation of “the history of representation in England” in the seventh and last paragraph of the aforementioned essay, it would seem at least possible that the Parliament of Great Britain served as a source of inspiration for this provocative claim. Its numbers, after all, far exceeded those of the proposed House of Representatives, and indeed of any of the legislatures of the various American states. Perhaps Clinton saw in this a viable model to be emulated.

As has been already been demonstrated, however, the House of Commons was not less corrupt for its size than either Congress or the New York State Legislature. On the contrary, it was substantially more corrupt than either of these bodies. The primary reason for this should be fairly obvious. Though the House of Commons contained a substantially greater number of representatives per constituent than any comparable body in the United States – thereby presumably creating significant barriers against a theoretical campaign of coordinated influence – said individuals were generally selected on something less than a rigorously democratic basis. Based on the electoral qualifications in place in a given constituency – county or borough, freeman or scot and lot, corporation or householder – the actual number of electors could vary considerably, the effects of which ranging from mild to quite severe. In a county constituency, for example, the franchise belonged to all adult males who could claim ownership of property valued at a minimum of two pounds per year according to the land tax rolls. As the value of the pound decreased over time, this basic qualification – established in 1430 and left unchanged for some four hundred years – allowed more and more people in county ridings to claim the right to vote. By the time of the Great Reform Act (1832), the total number of county electors in England accordingly stood at about one hundred and ninety thousand. Granting that, in spite of this relatively robust electorate, elections in county seats often went uncontested – and indeed often resulted in the same handful of landed families possessing seats in Parliament for generations – this was as much a matter of culture as it was a question of design. County elections in otherwise sleepy districts could often be fiercely fought during moments of particularly intense partisan strife, and certain ridings in particular – Middlesex being the most obvious, containing as it did a large portion of suburban London – were more often than not the sites of rigorous contests involving a large and exceptionally engaged electorate.

Borough seats, on the other hand, were among some of the most corrupt in the entire unreformed House of Commons owning to a combination of their static boundaries and narrow qualifications. Freeman boroughs were theoretically the most democratic, the requirements of freeman status being determined on a district-by-district basis. The City of London, for example, averaged about seven thousand freemen over the course of the 18^th century, and about a quarter of the nearly one hundred that remained identified at least one thousand electors each. Elections in these constituencies were almost always contested, with campaigns that pivoted on relevant political issues rather than the local popularity of the candidates in question or the ability of a given patron to purchase the loyalty of the voters. Many more freeman boroughs, however, counted less than two hundred electors in total and were almost entirely under the influence of a single wealthy beneficiary or local landed family. Scot and lot boroughs – so named for the local tax one paid in order to qualify to vote – were similar to freeman boroughs in the wide range of democratic quality that they respectively occupied. On one end of the spectrum was the London riding of Westminster whose electors ranged from eight thousand to twelve thousand over the course of the 18^th century. Westminster had one of the largest voting populations in all of contemporary Britain, almost always witnessed contested elections, and became a hotbed of radical politics in the 1770s and 1780s. And then there was Gatton, in Surrey, whose total voting population at one point fell as low as two. Since the constituency continued to elect two MPs until its abolition in 1832, this meant that for a time during its almost four hundred year history each Member of Parliament for Gatton represented exactly one person.

  Corporation boroughs – of which, in the unreformed House of Commons, there were twenty-seven in total – removed even the illusion of popular participation in the democratic process (such as it was) by restricting the franchise solely to members of the local governing authority. None of the relevant borough councils contained more than sixty members, many contained far fewer, and the majority eventually found themselves in the pocket of some wealthy patron or other whose political aspirations could very easily be served by putting a little money in the pockets of a few dozen local officials. Susceptible as these kinds of constituencies might have been to corruption, however, the burgage boroughs were arguably worse. In districts such as these, the electorate was comprised of the owners of specifically designated properties – a house, a farm, or even an empty field where something of value used to be – whether they actually resided in area or not. Certain burgage boroughs accordingly became notorious for sending MPs to Westminster whose formal constituencies contained no living human beings. In addition, because the franchise in such constituencies was tied very directly to property ownership – in a one-to-one fashion, in fact – a single, non-resident individual could conceivably purchase all of the relevant properties and cast every vote themselves. The burgage borough of Old Sarum very much typified this kind of arrangement. Though once the site of a cathedral, a supporting town, and even a royal palace, the prominence of Old Saurm was eventually displaced by the emergence of the town of Salisbury and its buildings were eventually pillaged for much-needed materials. By 1322 it had already fallen into severe neglect; by the 18^th century it was an uninhabited hillside essentially owned by the Pitt family.

Perhaps the most problematic borough subtype represented in the 18^th century House of Commons was known alternately by the names “householder” and “pot-walloper.” So called because the franchise was open to every resident male householder who was not actively receiving either alms or poor relief – and could thus be said to at least have access to a hearth and pot – householder boroughs were paradoxically among the most democratic in all of Britain and counted among their number some of the most nakedly corrupt. The problem, by and large, was that householder boroughs tended to be quite small and their electorate quite poor. The borough of Northampton, it was true, counted over one thousand electors as early as the 17^th century, and many others were centered on fairly substantial towns which included among their inhabitants several hundred qualified voters. But more often the pot-wallopers contained less than one hundred total electors whose partisan support tended to be open to negotiation. In some cases this was a matter of individual initiative. At Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1761, for example, one of the victorious candidates opted simply to pay the voters the sum of five pounds each for their backing. In other cases the residents actually banded together to bargain for a higher overall rate, essentially turning the vote into a kind of impromptu auction. While these kinds of practises were perhaps not the norm – the dispensing of large quantities of alcohol was easily the most common means by which electoral loyalty was secured – they nevertheless speak very effectively to the overall character of the householder subtype of borough constituency. They tended to be small, their electors perfectly willing to trade their vote – which would hardly keep them fed if they sought to use it “responsibly,” or else provide them with a night’s supply of beer or cider – and their representatives accordingly both wealthy and unscrupulous.

In light of the fact that the various types of constituencies described above accounted – along with the Welsh county seats, the Scottish county and burgh seats, and the university seats – for the entirety of the composition of the late 18^th century House of Commons, it would seem exceptionally difficult to imagine how it was that someone like George Clinton could possibly have concluded by way of observation that the extensive representation therein served as a practical bulwark against legislative corruption. Clearly, though there were almost six hundred constituencies represented in the contemporary House of Commons, a great many of them were subject to alarming levels of corruption simply on the basis of how their respective elections were held. Some, it bears recalling, were possessed of quite large and robust electorates whose attention tended to be focused on issues rather than personalities, and who consequently showed by their habit of producing very close results that their representation would in the end actually be the product of their evolving interests as a community. Many more, however, contained very small numbers of voters, or voters who were easily purchased, or no voters at all. From these constituencies, one would have been hard pressed to expect the election of anything close to an accurate representation of the needs and desires of the relevant populations. Rather, by way of custom, influence, the dispensing of bribes, and the purchasing of property rights, these seats – absent some kind of wide-ranging reform – would inevitably fall into the hands of the wealthy, the ambitious, and those least concerned with fulfilling the promise embodied specifically by the Bill of Rights (1689) and fundamentally by the concept of representative government. 

Potential for malfeasance is not the same as proof of malfeasance, of course. The fact that a sizable percentage of the five hundred and fifty-eight seats of which the House of Commons was comprised in the late 18^th century were elected as a result of bribery, coercion, or the otherwise unrepresentative nature of certain borough constituencies did not necessarily guarantee that the assembled MPs would proceed to conduct themselves in a similarly corrupt manner. Verification of the unsuitability of the contemporary House of Commons as an example of the positive relationship between the size of a given legislature and its relative resistance to corruption requires some manner of practical evidence. That is to say, notwithstanding the manner by which many of them were chosen, did the MPs who sat in the House of Commons over the course of the 18^th century ever act in a manner that could be said to have betrayed the vulnerability of said body to widespread political corruption? By way of an answer, one instance in particular comes to mind of which an Anglo-American individual adopting the nom de plume Cato in the latter half of the 18^th century was almost certain to have been aware. Cato, as it happened, was the same pseudonym adopted by a pair of British writers active between the 1680s and 1740s named John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (1691-1750) for a series of polemic essays published in the London Journal between the years 1720 and 1723. Cato’s Letters, as they have since become known, formed an essential part of the British “Commonwealth party” tradition whose members, though exiled to the fringes of contemporary political discourse, nonetheless loudly decried the influence of corruption in British politics and advocated civic virtue and republicanism as potential cures for what they believed was then ailing British society. Published over the course of three years, the one hundred and forty-four Letters sought to respond to a great many things, and in the process laid the ideological groundwork for continued radical political agitation both in Britain proper and its colonial periphery. The issue which set Trenchard and Gordon writing in the first place, however, was the collapse of the so-called “South Sea Company” in the autumn of 1720.