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"'We cannot forbear expressing our grief and disappointment, that, notwithstanding your Royal Highness's gracious recommendation of economy at the opening of the last Session of Parliament, your Ministers should have been found opposing every proposition for lessening the national expenditure; and that they should have been able to obtain majorities to support and sanction their conduct, in defiance of your Royal Highness's recommendation and the declared sense of the nation affording another melancholy proof of the corrupt state of the representation, in addition to those facts so often stated, and offered to be proved at the bar of the House of Commons, in a petition presented in 1793, by the Honourable Charles, now Lord Grey, whereby it appeared that the great body of the people were excluded from all share in the election of Members, and that the majority of the Honourable House were returned by the proprietors of rotten boroughs, the influence of the Treasury, and a few powerful families.
The boroughs, which had just been remodelled to serve one turn, might be remodelled again to serve another. By such means the King hoped to obtain a majority in the House of Commons. The Upper House would then be at his mercy. He had undoubtedly by law the power of creating peers without limit: and this power he was fully determined to use.
This argument, though there be more, I shall pitch upon as sufficient to prove: First, that the lower sort of the people had right to session in Parliament during the time of the Teutons. Secondly, that they were qualified to the same by election in their boroughs, and if knights of the shire, as no doubt they are, be as ancient in the counties.
It was a moderate measure to have brought the country to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchised a number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle and lower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but a large number of very small ones were retained, and the representation of the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted.
But her Deputy was instructed to summon a Parliament in Ireland "to make such statutes as were lately made in England /mutatis mutandis/." The Parliament met in Dublin on the 11th of January 1560. According to the returns seventy-six members representing several counties and boroughs were elected.
This increase and shifting of the people put the finishing touch to the incongruities of the old political system, in which vast centres of population teeming with life and throbbing with industry were unrepresented, while members sat in parliament for boroughs so decayed that nothing was left of them but a green mound, a park, or a ruined wall.
Tyburn counted its victims by scores; and as yet no Howard had appeared to reform the inhuman abominations of the prisons. The middle class, though fast rising in importance, was feebly and imperfectly represented in parliament. The boroughs were controlled by the nobility and gentry, or by corporations open to influence or bribery.
* The elections in some places, particularly in York, were transferred from the people to the magistrates, who, by the new charter, were all named by the crown. Sir John Reresby's Memoirs, p. 272. This was in reality nothing different from the king's naming the members. The same act of authority had been employed in all the boroughs of Scotland.
We may thence infer, that the arts in general were much less advanced in England than in France; a greater number of idle servants and retainers lived about the great families; and as these, even in France, were powerful enough to disturb the execution of the laws, we may judge of the authority acquired by the aristocracy in England. Gul. See Brady of Boroughs, p. 3, 4, 5, 6, &c.
In hopes of obtaining greater influence in elections, the ancient right was restored to all the small boroughs; and the counties were allowed no more than their usual members. All the commons, at first, signed without hesitation an engagement not to alter the present government.
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