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Updated: May 7, 2025
Gabriel partook of the fish, listening with interest. "But I thought we had no more pocket-boroughs." "It's pockets we rather lack, so many of us. There are plenty of Harshes," Nick Dormer observed. "I don't know what you mean," Lady Agnes said to Nash with considerable majesty.
It put up the price of parliamentary pocket-boroughs, and thus delayed reform; it enabled commercial men to force their way into the House of Lords by the side of landed magnates, and the younger Pitt doubled its numbers in his efforts to win the political support of the moneyed classes; and finally, it affected consciously or unconsciously men's views of the interests of the empire and of the policy to be pursued to serve them.
The Duke's nomination rendered his election in those days of pocket-boroughs a foregone conclusion. As soon as Lord John set foot in England he was greeted with the tidings that he had already been elected member for Tavistock, and so began, at the age of one-and-twenty, a career in the House of Commons which was destined to last for nearly fifty years.
Property meant to fight hard for its privileges, and the great landowners looked upon their pocket-boroughs as a goodly heritage as well as a rightful appanage of rank and wealth. As for the great unrepresented towns, they were regarded as hot-beds of sedition, and therefore the people were to be kept in their place, and that meant without a voice in the affairs of the nation.
Over wide sections, untitled manorial lords, "more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but overbearing," controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists, whom love for the "peculiar institution" rendered callous to national interests.
The parliament, moreover, did not represent the Irish people; Catholics were excluded from it, and until 1793 were denied the vote; sixty seats were in the hands of three families, and a majority of the members were returned by pocket-boroughs.
More than a quarter of a century before the birth of Lord John Russell, who was destined to carry the first Reform Bill through the House of Commons, Lord Chatham had not hesitated to denounce the borough representation of the country as the 'rotten part of our constitution, which, he said, resembled a mortified limb; and he had added the significant words, 'If it does not drop, it must be amputated. He held that it was useless to look for the strength and vigour of the constitution in little pocket-boroughs, and that the nation ought rather to rely on the 'great cities and counties. Fox, in a debate in 1796, declared that peace could never be secured until the Constitution was amended.
The growing enthusiasm for reform, thus stimulated, exercised a decisive effect in all the constituencies except the pocket-boroughs. Brougham was returned without opposition for Yorkshire, and Hume by a large majority for Middlesex, two brothers of Sir Robert Peel lost their seats, and Croker was defeated for Dublin University.
"My dear Nash, you're delightful: don't leave me don't leave me!" Nick cried; while his mother looked at him with an eye that demanded: "Who in the world's this extraordinary person?" "What then did you think pocket-boroughs were?" Peter Sherringham asked. Mr. Nash's facial radiance rested on him. "Why, boroughs that filled your pocket. To do that sort of thing without a bribe c'est trop fort!"
The task of overawing an Irish Parliament indeed was no very difficult one. Two-thirds of its House of Commons consisted of the representatives of wretched villages which were pocket-boroughs of the Crown, while absent peers were forced to entrust their proxies to the Council to be used at its pleasure. But precautions were hardly needed.
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