The many lives of corruption: The reform of public life in modern Britain, <i>c.</i> 1750–1950 9781526150042

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THE MANY LIVES OF CORRUPTION The reform of public life in modern Britain c. 1750–1950

EDITED BY IAN CAWOOD AND TOM CROOK

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The many lives of corruption

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The many lives of corruption The reform of public life in modern Britain, c. 1750–1950 Edited by Ian Cawood and Tom Crook

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5003 5 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover credit: ‘Election Squibs & Crackers – No. 2 – How To Get Made An MP!!!’ by William Heath, hand-coloured etching, published by Thomas McLean, 19 July 1830 © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements

vii x

  Introduction: corruption and the reform of public life in modern Britain1 Ian Cawood and Tom Crook   1 Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment: a reconsideration34 Craig Smith   2 From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’: corruption and the police, c. 1750–191054 Francis Dodsworth   3 ‘A new tide of corruption’: economical reform and the regulation of the East India Company, 1765–8475 Ben Gilding   4 ‘A monster in politics’: corruption and economical reform in Jamaica, 1783–9196 Aaron Graham   5 Corrupt practices and the reform of voting behaviour in Britain, France and the United States, c. 1789–1914115 Malcolm Crook   6 Corruption, despotism and the Colonial Office, c. 1820–50136 Alex Middleton

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  7 The ‘most difficult’ subject for legislation: parliament and electoral corruption in the nineteenth century156 Kathryn Rix

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  8 Politics, patronage or public service? Conservatives at the Foreign Office, 1858–9177 Geoffrey Hicks   9 Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests: reforming endowments200 H. S. Jones 10 After Old Corruption: Westminster scandals and the problem of corruption, c. 1880–1914220 Tom Crook 11 Socialism and corruption: Conservative responses to nationalisation and Poplarism, 1900–40239 Liam Ryan 12 Civic corruption in the twentieth century: the case of Belfast and Glasgow, c. 1920–70259 Peter Jones   Epilogue: the British way in corruption279 Ian Cawood and Tom Crook Index

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Contributors

Ian Cawood is Associate Professor of Modern British Political and Religious History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of The Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912: A History (I B Tauris, 2012), and co-editor of Joseph Chamberlain: Imperial Statesman, National Leader, Local Icon (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Print, Politics and the Provincial Press (Peter Lang, 2019). Malcolm Crook is Emeritus Professor of French History at Keele University, where he spent his academic career. A specialist in the history of France during the Revolution and under Napoleon, he has more recently shifted his attention to the history of voting, not just in France but also further afield. His major publications comprise Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and How the French Learned to Vote (Oxford University Press, 2021). Tom Crook is Reader in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University. His recent books include Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, c. 1830–1910 (University of California Press, 2016). He is currently working on a history of political corruption since 1780, provisionally entitled Impossible Purity: The Corruption of Public Life in Modern Britain. Francis Dodsworth is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Kingston University London. He has published widely on the history of crime, policing and protection. His most recent book is The Security Society: History, Patriarchy, Protection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Ben Gilding is the Don King Junior Research Fellow in History at New College, Oxford. He recently completed his PhD dissertation on the British state’s early attempts to reform the East India Company, between 1773 and 1784. He has published several articles on the various intersections between domestic and imperial politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, and is currently working to turn his dissertation into a monograph. Aaron Graham is a Lecturer in Early Modern British Economic History at University College London. He has previously been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. His books include Corruption, Party and Government in Britain, 1702–13 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Bills of Union: Money, Empire and Ambitions in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British Atlantic (Palgrave, 2021). He is currently writing a study of the colonial fiscal-military state in Jamaica between 1770 and 1840. Geoffrey Hicks is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History, University of East Anglia. He has published widely on political history and foreign policy. Among his publications are Peace, War and Party Politics: The Conservatives and Europe, 1846–59 (Manchester University Press, 2007) and (as lead editor) Documents on Conservative Foreign Policy, 1852–1878 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Peter Jones is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. He has published widely on the history of corruption in urban societies, and his key publications include From Virtue to Venality: Corruption in the City (Manchester University Press, 2013). Stuart Jones is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Manchester. His books include Victorian Political Thought (Palgrave, 2000), Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and an edited collection of essays (with Julian Wright) on Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France (Palgrave,

Contributors

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2012). He is now working on an intellectual biography of James Bryce for Princeton University Press. Alex Middleton is College Lecturer in Modern British History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. His research centres on British politics and political ideas, c. 1780–1920, in their international contexts. He is currently finalising his first monograph, on English Liberalism and imperial government, 1820–60. Kathryn Rix is Assistant Editor of the House of Commons, 1832– 1945 project at the History of Parliament Trust, where she is currently working on the 1832–68 period. She has written extensively on nineteenth-century parliamentary and electoral politics. Her book Parties, Agents and Electoral Culture in England, 1880–1910 (Boydell & Brewer/Royal Historical Society) was published in 2016. Liam Ryan teaches at the University of Bristol. His work has been published in Historical Research and Socialist History. He is currently writing a book about the history of anti-socialism in early twentieth-century Britain for Manchester University Press. Craig Smith is the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (Routledge, 2006) and Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is book-review editor of the Adam Smith Review.

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Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to the authors of the chapters and to all who participated in the conference from which the volume derives, ‘From Old Corruption to the New Corruption: Public Life and Public Service in Britain, c. 1780–1940’, held at Oxford Brookes University in January 2019. We are especially grateful to our two keynote speakers, Professor Angus Hawkins and Dr Kathryn Rix, and for the funding we received from the British Academy, Oxford Brookes University and the Economic History Society. We would like to thank Anneliese Dodds MP, Robert Barrington, Rosemary Carter, Andrew Feinstein and Oonagh Gay for giving their time to reflect on the conference’s relevance for the present day in the final plenary session. We are also grateful to the staff at Oxford Brookes University, Newman University and Keble College, Oxford, who supported the conference with patience and enthusiasm, and our postgraduate students James Brennan and Sarah Slator, who provided invaluable administrative assistance. We must finally acknowledge the immense contribution of Professor Hawkins. In addition to giving the keynote address which opened the conference and set the agenda for all that followed, he generously offered the facilities of the Senior Common Room at Keble College for the conference dinner. Both socially and intellectually, he was the central figure of the event. Angus’s recent death has robbed us all of a wonderful colleague and friend and we respectfully dedicate this volume to his memory.

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Introduction: corruption and the reform of public life in modern Britain Ian Cawood and Tom Crook

In the early twenty-first century, after more than two and a half centuries of reform and promises of a cleaner, purer future, the corruption of public life in Britain remains a matter of widespread concern. The current Conservative administration has been plagued from the start by accusations of ‘cronyism’ and ‘constitutional vandalism’. Only a decade or so ago the ‘expenses scandal’ erupted, heaping shame on the world of Westminster and resulting in the criminal prosecution of eight MPs.1 There is no shortage, too, of recent instances of administrative, municipal and electoral corruption, culminating in current anxieties regarding political lobbyists and the use of ‘dark money’ to fund internet-based campaigning.2 No one disputes that more must be done to clean up government and the work of all those who, in some form or another, high or low, elected or appointed, serve the public. For those interested in securing lasting reform, however, still more striking, and arguably a good deal more disturbing, is the absence of any consensus on quite how bad things really are. From the perspective of global institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, Britain in fact is relatively clean and among the world-leaders in ‘good governance’.3 Since the mid-1990s, the leading anticorruption watchdog, Transparency International (TI), has consistently ranked Britain either within or just outside the top ten of the world’s least corrupt countries, according to its own points-based index. This is a reflection, so it is argued, not just of Britain’s historic record as a successful state-building enterprise, but of recent reforms as well, among them the wave of regulatory innovations kickstarted by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, set up in 1994 under the chairmanship of Lord Nolan.4 The result is a regime

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The many lives of corruption

of ethical regulation that is regarded, quite rightly, as one of the most robust in the world. Consult other voices and the picture is altogether different. Public opinion is one such voice. As advocates of the ‘Nolan agenda’ and its various successors lament, for all the significant reforms that have been introduced, surveys show that public confidence in the probity of public office-holders has continued to plummet, reaching all-time lows.5 Professionals, journalists and academics also offer radically different assessments. This has included attacking the accuracy of the kind of ‘corruption audits’ carried out by organisations like TI.6 More common are investigative approaches that work by amassing damning evidence. A recent instance is the book How Corrupt is Britain?, containing essays by left-leaning journalists, lawyers and criminologists, which is scathing, arguing that, under the ‘market state’ of neoliberalism, corruption has become systemic, infecting British public life just as much as the corporate and banking sectors with which it is so intimately entangled.7 It even speculates that Britain might be entering an era of ‘turbo-­corruption’, where corruption is so endemic, so normal, it simply escapes notice.8 The aim of this volume is to begin the task of rewriting the history of corruption and the reform of public life in modern Britain. We begin in the present and with these discordant perspectives because they help to introduce one of the book’s core critical assumptions: that the corruption of public life is a protean, mutable phenomenon that has resisted any sort of closure – that to write its history is to grapple with both successful and enduring moments of reform, and with its multiple meanings and capacity for reinvention and relocation. This is not the usual way to write the history of corruption in Britain. It is partly inspired, as we detail below, by recent work that has re-engaged the intellectual history of ‘corruption’, which this volume builds on and challenges; and it challenges most of all the idea that the transition to modern forms of statecraft and democratic accountability was accompanied by a linear process of refinement and reduction in the meanings and politics of corruption. This is but one aspect, however, of the more expansive conceptualisation of the history of corruption that this book seeks to advance. The other is reflected in the scope of the volume, which ranges

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across a variety of domains of reform – administrative, electoral and political, domestic and imperial – from the mid-eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth. All can agree that the multiple anticorruption efforts waged during this time formed one of the key motors of the emergence of a modern, democratic state in Britain; but though voluminous, the existing historiography is altogether episodic and scattered, often analysing only one aspect of corruption, whether administrative, electoral or political, over a relatively short period of time.9 The result is that what for this volume is the most important historic quality of corruption – the variable nature of corruption, its many lives, as it were – has remained obscure. For one thing, it has hampered our ability to appreciate how understandings of ‘corruption’, and the politics surrounding them, have mutated in step with the successes and limitations of reform. It has hampered, too, our ability to situate what remains, without doubt, the best-known feature of this period – the demise of so-called ‘Old Corruption’ – in a richer, more comprehensive context, and to think again about how and where this took place, and what came after. In sum, the aim of this volume is not to assess whether, overall, we might speak of a process of progressive reform or, conversely, one of decline and decay. Rather, it is to establish a different line of analysis and ask how, where, why and under what conditions corruption has featured as a recurrent problem in the history of modern Britain, and especially in the reform of its governing values and institutions. This introduction outlines how the chapters that follow develop different aspects of this history, and it does so in a way designed to help readers new to this topic navigate what has become a complex field of study. We turn first to the need to reappraise a key question: what is ‘corruption’ and what makes it modern?

Modernity and ‘corruption’ We might begin with two claims about which there has long been broad agreement. The first is that the meaning of ‘corruption’ is historical and has changed over time, carrying with it different norms and expectations of what constitutes probity and legitimacy.

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The many lives of corruption

Writing more than fifty years ago, Joel Hurstfield urged historians of corruption to avoid the dangers of ‘anachronism [and] of judging one age by the standards of another’.10 Hurstfield was an e­arly modernist, but plenty of modern historians have endorsed this basic rule of thumb.11 The second, which is more historical and specific to Britain – although roughly the same periodisation seems to apply to other major European states – is that an ‘age of reform’ that began around the 1770s and ended in the 1850s witnessed a wide-ranging assault on ‘corruption’, laying the foundations for a modern understanding of political and administrative integrity, based on the values of efficiency, accountability and fairness, and the disinterested pursuit of the public good.12 Although the process of reform still had a long way to go, the dominant view is that an irreversible threshold was passed.13 It was at this point Britain left behind the worst excesses of what the prolific radical journalist William Cobbett famously dubbed ‘Old Corruption’, or more commonly ‘the System’ or ‘the Thing’: a vast and murky nexus of elite privilege, nepotism, patronage and wealth extraction, whose key elements included the royal court, judiciary and military, the Anglican Church, imperial trading monopolies, the banking sector, parliament, municipal corporations and all manner of fiscal impositions.14 We return below to the key areas of reform. The point is simply that few disagree that a core part of what used to be called the ‘modernisation’ of Britain’s governing institutions and values that began at this juncture inhered in a redefinition of ‘corruption’. Practices and principles once assumed to be legitimate or at least tolerable were henceforth critiqued as corrupt – as immoral, unjust and even illegal – and were reformed and remade in the process, however slowly and unevenly. The examples are well known. Public office was redefined as a public trust rather than as the private possession of the office-holder.15 Formerly considered an appropriate means of recruiting elite administrators, personal patronage became an anathema and was slowly replaced by considerations of professional merit.16 Openly indulged, customary forms of electoral ‘influence’, such as treating and intimidation, were refashioned as malign forms of partisan manipulation, corrupting an individual elector’s right to vote as he saw fit.17 In short, new and recognisably modern standards and ideals evolved; and indeed they did so just as the

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term ‘reform’ assumed its modern meaning – as practical, future-­ oriented change – and as ‘public life’ gained currency as a way of referring to the public role of office-holders (as distinct from their private, familial affairs) and the work of governing in all its facets, local and central, official and voluntary.18 Such are the two principal points of broad consensus that define the history of corruption and the reform of public life in modern Britain. If the first reflects long-established historicist sensibilities among historians of corruption, the second reflects a more general disciplinary agreement that the period roughly from 1770 to 1850 witnessed the birth of a ‘modern world’, characterised, in the British case, not only by the first shoots of democratisation and bureaucratic rationalisation, but also by unprecedented demographic growth and urbanisation, the assumption of global-imperial dominance and the development of more advanced forms of financial, industrial and commercial capitalism.19 It is not the intention of this volume to dispute either of these facets of the existing historiography. It shares the concern to avoid anachronistic assessments of the past, and it endorses the formative importance of the ‘age of reform’, which was clearly central, as a number of the chapters suggest, in particular those by Francis Dodsworth, Ben Gilding, Aaron Graham and Alex Middleton. Yet there is much that remains to be interrogated anew and more precisely. Chief here is the question of what we mean by ‘corruption’ and how this was refashioned from roughly 1770 onwards with the advent of modern ideals and practices of public service and accountability. Put simply, what changed and to what extent, and what of earlier conceptions? These questions have not been entirely neglected by historians, at least in relation to particular moments and areas of reform; but they have failed to attract any significant revisionist or long-term summative literature, unlike so many other areas of modern British historiography. Of the thirty-two chapters contained in the recent Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000, for instance, not one is dedicated to corruption and the abuse of public office. Other recent collections, though also of ambitious scope and range, consider the subject only in passing, across a handful of chapters, but not in a pointed fashion.20 One reason for this, perhaps, is that ‘corruption’ is such a notoriously pliable term, open to multiple applications. Actions, agents,

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The many lives of corruption

institutions and even entire societies: all might be, and have been, characterised as ‘corrupt’, and often quite loosely. The chapters in this volume certainly suggest that the uses of ‘corruption’ in Britain remained varied both during and after the ‘age of reform’. As a whole, it cautions against narratives which suggest a process of definitional decluttering, even if there have clearly been long-term shifts in its predominant conceptualisation and usage. ‘Corruption’ is no different in this respect to other highly contested keywords that make up the grammar of modern public debate such as ‘the state’ and ‘liberty’. This slipperiness is worth dwelling on, not least because it helps to explain its remarkable longevity as a term of critique, which the British case clearly bears out. It is recent work in political philosophy and the social sciences, however, that most illuminates what is at stake in the case of ‘corruption’, and in particular lively debates about how the term should be defined for the purposes of wide-ranging historical and global study. An especially pithy, social-scientific instance, and one sometimes described as ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’, is ‘the abuse of public power for private gain’ (which is also, incidentally, the one favoured by global institutions such as the World Bank).21 Others include Bo Rothstein and Aiysha Varraich’s self-consciously ‘universal’ definition based on notions of social injustice and the unjust distribution of public offices and goods.22 Yet all of these attempts have been critiqued on grounds that will be readily appreciated by historians: simply that corruption is a culturally and historically specific phenomenon, embedded in all sorts of assumptions, specific to time and place, about the distribution and use of power, relations of obligation and reciprocity between classes and ethnic groups and of course the precise nature of the ‘public’ and ‘private’. The other danger, however, as political philosophers have argued, is that emphasising corruption’s socio-historical specificity risks obscuring some core semantic and conceptual elements of commonality and continuity that do in fact cut across time periods and cultures (besides, we might add, the risk of an analytically debilitating relativism). One of these elements relates to the principal meaning of the word, which, in a variety of cultures – including those of classical and Christian Europe – has always denoted a process of decay and a falling away from an ideal or natural state. It is, essentially, an organic metaphor. As the political theorist Mark Philp has

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argued, ‘the term corruption is not in itself problematic. As the OED reiterates throughout its entries on the term, it is rooted in the sense of a thing being changed from its naturally sound condition into something unsound, impure, debased, infected, tainted, adulterated, depraved, perverted, etc.’ Philp is acutely aware that the problems begin when the term is applied to particular fields of activity, not least politics, simply because of the absence of any normative agreement on what constitutes the ideal state of affairs: ‘Definitional problems are legion because there is hardly a general consensus on the “naturally sound condition of politics”.’23 Yet this should not preclude recognising another key element of historical continuity: namely, that even when applied to matters of governing and statecraft, corruption has always referred to unjust and immoral abuses of power, whereby the interests of the collective (or the whole) are usurped and undermined by the interests of a particular group or individual (or part).24 As Philp suggests, and as Robert Sparling has recently argued, within the Western tradition of political philosophy at least, stretching from the ancient Greeks through to the present, just this sense of distortion has consistently furnished the basic premise for identifying corruption. The assumption has long been that the function of public office and political order is to serve the public interest or good, and that this function is subverted (or corrupted) when positions of public authority are used to further the personal and sectional interests of particular office-holders or their supporters.25 To give one practical example, the bribery of public officials has always been, in one form or other, recognised as corrupt.26 Put another way, for all its variable cultural-political articulation, which is indeed extraordinary, we should recognise that the problem of corruption has long possessed something like a generic form or shape. It is for this reason, in an account that stretches from the princely advice of Erasmus through to the pioneering sociological work of Max Weber, that Sparling speaks of ‘family resemblances’ between ‘corruption discourses’ over time, even if ‘the manner in which the concept is deployed varies radically’.27 This normative dimension – its relation to some kind of vision of how public office should be wielded – helps to explain why the term has proved such an enduring point of reference. It is no surprise that it has extended into the modern era of party-based ideologies

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The many lives of corruption

(of conservatism, liberalism, socialism and so on) and organised, party-based conflict (e.g. between Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties), where it has flourished not in spite of but because of its conceptual fuzziness. All of the chapters here engage to some degree with the politics of corruption, with those by Geoffrey Hicks, Stuart Jones, Tom Crook and Liam Ryan dealing especially with the party politics of corruption. But there remains the question of how and to what extent the conceptions that became current after roughly 1780 differed from those that had prevailed in the preceding centuries, during the medieval and early-modern periods. Work on this front is both abundant and long-standing, and for our purposes the key aspect is the renewed attention paid by intellectual historians to corruption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Building on the outstanding contributions of J. G. A. Pocock, it presents a picture of an early-modern Britain awash with competing and complementary conceptions of corruption, amply bearing out the vitality of the Western tradition that Philp and Sparling speak of.28 Some of these conceptions, as Pocock insisted, were associated with the oppositional Country ideology – or Old Whig and Commonwealth – that developed from roughly the 1660s as a critique of Crown patronage and an expanding professional army, as well as a system of public credit and national debt (including a newly founded Bank of England) that helped Britain become a major European war machine. This drew on, and in many ways Anglicised, European traditions of classical republicanism and civic humanism, stretching back to Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero, and, more immediately, the Florentine Renaissance. Its core ingredients were a belief in a ‘mixed constitution’ that upheld the integrity of the King, Lords and Commons and protected against ‘tyranny’, and the political virtues of independent proprietors (ideally landowners, but also small-holders) as against the growing numbers of rentiers, government placemen and stock-jobbing speculators. Other variants were principally religious, and more especially Protestant, where the term was used theologically to denote sin and the fallen (or corrupt) nature of man, and, more politically, to attack the worldly ambitions of the Catholic Church and its Papist sympathisers.29 Finally, as Mark Knights has emphasised, the term was deployed in administrative and judicial contexts, where it applied to embezzlement, extortion and bribery. Classical and Christian

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ideals informed the ethics of public office-holding, but so too, growing out of the common law tradition, did emergent legal conceptions of office as a ‘trust’ wielded on behalf of the public.30 The most striking intervention has been made by Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill, who have sought to recast the long, pre-modern conceptual history of corruption in terms of two dominant ‘discourses’: a ‘degenerative’ one, in which corruption was understood as a widespread social, political and spiritual affliction, and a ‘public office’ discourse, where it referred to moral, and sometimes legal, transgressions by office-holders, commonly for some sort of pecuniary gain.31 Historically, it is Christian theologians and moral reformers that have provided the strongest examples of the former; but, as they suggest, in early-modern Britain, as in classical and medieval Europe, the two were by no means mutually exclusive. Rather, they often overlapped, reinforcing one another. A case in point is the Country critique, which flourished during the ascendancy of Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s. Although it targeted all sorts of personal abuses of office, such as the use of patronage and bribery to secure parliamentary ‘influence’, it also set these within a broader concern with the demoralising effects of standing armies, party-based factions, a new credit-based economy, and the apparent march of ‘luxury’ and ‘commerce’.32 Combined, they amounted to a diffuse process of decay and corruption, presaging the triumph of vice, self-interest and mobile property over a society underpinned by the values of ‘civic virtue’ and the personal ‘independence’ guaranteed by inheritable freehold. Corruption, in short, was akin to a disease that affected the entire body politic: particular abuses were a sign of a deeper malaise. In terms of thinking about questions of periodisation and change, the most significant aspect of this scholarship is that it shows that early-modern Britons were keenly concerned with official abuses of power, however much these concerns might have been embedded in more degenerative (Christian and classical) conceptions of corruption, and indeed contested by counterarguments that appealed to custom and traditional social relations of hierarchical dependence. Crucially, this is also where recent accounts have sought to draw a line between the early modern and the modern: namely, that if a discourse of corruption persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then it did so in a more diminished form, centred on the

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The many lives of corruption

abuse of public office for private financial gain, and shorn of its capacity to be understood as a product of wider, degenerative processes of moral decay. Such conceptions, it is argued, waned partly because they seemed so anachronistic in the context of an imperial state whose wealth and security was increasingly dependent on the very factors (such as paper credit and the national debt) they saw as so ruinous; but another key factor was the development of liberal currents of thought, rooted in earlier Court-based arguments and culminating in the Scottish Enlightenment, that saw commerce and industry, the growth of social complexity and the institutional accommodation of multiple interest groups as part of a process of ‘civilisational development’ and ‘progress’.33 As Buchan and Hill conclude, before invoking the reformist aspirations that targeted Old Corruption and that flourished from the 1780s in Britain, ‘corruption was always a capacious term incorporating a range of discursive possibilities, right up until the end of the eighteenth century, when it finally became narrowed and refined … As the charge of degenerative corruption lost its force, the contours of public office corruption sharpened.’34 It is this aspect of the scholarship that requires rethinking, however, as the present volume suggests. Put bluntly, there was no decisive conceptual rupture, or even transition, at this end-of-century juncture, or indeed any other. This is not to deny that aspects of earlier degenerative critiques lost their force. Austere Christian doctrines of original sin and human corruption, for instance, gradually softened over the course of the nineteenth century, to the point of becoming essentially secular according to some.35 Equally, we should certainly speak of a ‘sharpening’ of public-office-based conceptions. A notable development in this respect, as the chapters by Tom Crook and Peter Jones demonstrate, was a focus on personal ‘conflicts of interest’ among MPs, ministers and councillors, which became especially pronounced and more articulate from the 1880s.36 More broadly, the chapters that follow describe a diffuse and growing investment in institutional arrangements and regulations designed to ensure that the pursuit of the public good was not contaminated by private and/or partisan interests. ‘Reform’ often entailed just this. We see this, for instance, in the reform of distant colonies and imperial trading companies, as the chapters by Aaron Graham and Ben Gilding suggest, and in the very different and

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more popular arena of electoral reform, with the development, as Malcolm Crook and Kathryn Rix detail, of a highly rule-bound culture of campaigning and polling. These developments help to delineate something like the modern form of the problem as it emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the relative emphasis given to matters of institutional design and the governance of personal conduct. Yet, as the chapters contained here suggest, as indeed does much work beyond, degenerative conceptions remained very much alive, accompanying and mixing with more developed office-based ones, and playing a crucial part in what was a highly uneven, conflictual and scruple-ridden process of reform. The interweaving of these conceptual currents was already apparent in the Scottish Enlightenment, which Craig Smith re-examines in this volume. Nascent forms of commercial liberalism were always tempered by more sceptical voices, inspired partly by civic republican traditions and partly, as Smith emphasises, by contemporary concerns about rank and the moral formation of the ruling elites. The nineteenth century furnishes still more examples, as an abundant, if scattered, body of work attests. A complex moral politics, for instance, developed around Britain’s emergence as the world’s leading capitalist-­imperial power and champion of ‘free trade’, something otherwise seen as a key symbol of the demise of Old Corruption and its ‘aristocratic monopolies’. As Anthony Howe and Frank Trentmann have shown, free trade itself was as much a moral crusade as an economic doctrine.37 From its initial triumph at mid-century, with the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) and Navigation Acts (1849), right through to its demise in the interwar period, Liberal and radical advocates consistently highlighted the wider corrupting and degenerative effects of protectionism, among them new forms of parasitical elite privilege and even state-sponsored militarism. More broadly, there remained profound anxieties regarding what G. R. Searle has termed the ‘morality of the market’.38 This was more than aristocratic snobbishness, though this ran deep in a society still dominated, politically at least, by landed families. Chief among the sources of disquiet was that capitalism, and especially its commercial and financial variants, was fomenting the rise of a new ‘oligarchy’ (a classical term still widely used) in the shape of ‘plutocracy’. The latter term first gained currency as part of a Tory

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The many lives of corruption

critique of the commercial classes behind the anti-Corn Law agitations and it was eventually used across the political spectrum, peaking in the Edwardian period when it was quite indiscriminately used to attack the corrupting influence of ‘new money’ in all its forms on public life.39 It is not, it might be emphasised, that these conceptions negated more refined, office-based ones. Rather, much as in preceding centuries, they overlapped, often, if not always, amplifying one another. We see this especially in Tom Crook’s chapter, which deals with a series of Westminster corruption scandals in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Although they centred on abuses of public office for private and partisan gain, the scandals were also read as symptoms of deeper societal decay and the nefarious power of financial capital. The reform of the administrative state in its various guises forms another site of capacious conceptualisation. For one thing, there were some quite direct lines of continuity with preceding centuries that endured deep into the nineteenth. Historians have long noted how the radical, and later Chartist, assault on the ‘parasitical’, tax-hungry state of Old Corruption revitalised the language and concerns of earlier Commonwealth and Country critiques.40 The chapters that follow explore more neglected instances of this. Francis Dodsworth’s contribution demonstrates how the development of the ‘new police’ from the 1820s provoked a fierce reaction among radicals, Tories and ratepayers, who, recalling earlier degenerative concerns, cast it as a ‘centralised’, quasi-militarised assault on the ‘ancient liberties’ of Englishmen. As Dodsworth suggests, this diagnosis competed with, and was ultimately supplanted by, broadly liberal, pro-reform arguments cast in institutional, officebased terms; but elsewhere they worked together, including in relation to the administration of the empire. As Middleton’s chapter on the early Victorian critique of the corruption of the Colonial Office demonstrates, concerns about a lack of ministerial and parliamentary accountability were complemented by arguments that revived long-standing Country tropes of ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’ in which, ultimately, it was the health of Britain’s own polity that was at stake. The critique of the Office was so devastating precisely because it mobilised such a rich repertoire of lines of attack, old and new. To be sure, these particular elements of continuity petered out as the state was reformed along liberal lines, eventually adopting in

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the early twentieth century an enlarged, social-democratic conception of the public good. Yet we should once more be sceptical about any diminution in the capacious moral meanings of ‘corruption’. As historians have argued, the emergence of a more muscular and bureaucratic welfare state was also complicated by a renewed investment in the importance of civil society and citizenship.41 Even if articulated in a novel language of ‘character’ rather than ‘virtue’, the promotion of ‘good citizenship’ remained at its core ethically ambitious, encouraging self-mastery, civic activism and neighbourliness; and if not in all forms anti-statist, it was profoundly concerned with the demoralising effects of the bureaucratisation of welfare, drawing on Christian and classical sources for inspiration, among others.42 The manifestations are many, from countless Victorian pastoral initiatives (such as the Charity Organisation Society, established in 1869) through to the interwar promotion of ‘civics’ (such as the Association for Education in Citizenship, established in 1934). Political parties too voiced their misgivings: as Liam Ryan argues in this volume, a key ingredient in the strident anti-socialism of the Edwardian and interwar Conservative Party was a sense of the morally corrosive, corrupting effects of public ownership and welfare-based political appeals. Above all, it was the very nature of public office and political authority, and what it demanded of its holders, where we find the most striking elements of conceptual continuity and reworking. Crucially, the age-old quality of ‘independence’ and the ability to act in a detached, disinterested fashion, free of ties or constraints, remained a highly prized attribute for all those who sought to participate in public life. An exemplary instance explored by Stuart Jones in this volume is Gladstonian Liberalism. Gladstone himself, like others in the governing classes, embraced a lofty, elite-based conception of public service informed by strong civic humanist convictions, while the popular variant of liberalism he spearheaded was animated by a desire to ensure that the nation’s institutions were insulated from the demoralising influence of narrow, classbased interests.43 More generally, resistance to ‘democracy’ was widespread and couched in these terms, reflecting conceptions of the franchise as a form of public office or trust. The periodic debates regarding its extension amply attest to this. Until the 1884 Reform Act, degenerative conceptions loomed large in debates

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The many lives of corruption

suffused with competing notions of parliamentary representation and what sorts of qualifications guaranteed an ‘independent’ electorate (e.g. relating to property, moral fitness and gender). Perhaps the greatest echo of earlier anxieties was the common refrain, voiced by Tories and Liberals alike, that universal male suffrage would distort Britain’s carefully nurtured ‘mixed constitution’ and introduce a new form of ‘despotism’: the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and partial, ‘class legislation’ – a concern indeed that would appear again in early twentieth-century Conservative critiques of socialism, as Ryan shows.44 But no measure of parliamentary reform was without principled counterarguments that raised fears of corruption in some form. As Malcolm Crook notes in his chapter, the secret ballot, which was introduced in 1872 as a means of ‘purifying’ elections, was even opposed by some radicals on the grounds that it corrupted the electorate by encouraging a privatised, self-interested conception of the vote. Few, if any, radicals or socialists seem to have opposed the payment of MPs; but its adoption was resisted until 1911, principally by Conservatives, who feared it would introduce the corrupting taint of professionalised money-grubbing into a public duty that was best and most honourably discharged voluntarily.45 Ultimately, the distinction between degenerative and office-based conceptions may require rethinking entirely. The present volume offers no alternative schema of its own. What it does urge is more precision when it comes to specifying how and to what extent ‘corruption’ was redefined during and after the ‘age of reform’, conscious both of its historically variable conceptualisation and of its enduring capacity to signify moral failure and the subversion of the public good. At the very least, that these two conceptions remained entangled, even as office-based ones assumed a more defined institutional and ethical form, suggests a history of multiple, overlapping reworkings rather than decisive ruptures. Rethinking historical questions of meaning and definition, however, forms only one half of the contribution this volume seeks to make. The other is shedding new light on the nature of reform and working towards a more integrated, long-term appreciation of how corruption has animated and undermined public life in modern Britain. For this is the other key aspect that the existing scholarship has obscured by virtue of its scattered and episodic character: a sense of

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the bigger, if clearly complex, picture of the successes and limitations of reform, or what in fact amounted to series of reforms – of when and where they took place, and what facilitated and frustrated them. The chapters that follow help to rethink three key areas and we now deal with each in turn.

Old Corruption and the liberal-imperial state One of these is the dismantling of a state that was at once fiscal-­ military and Anglican, propertied and patronage-based, and geared towards securing the ‘influence of the Crown’ at home and imperial expansion abroad – the state of Old Corruption, in short. It was this state that radicals would lambast so vividly during the ‘age of reform’ and that was anatomised at great length in John Wade’s much quoted Extraordinary Black Book, first published in 1819 and updated numerous times thereafter. The practices they attacked included the elite enjoyment of sinecures and pensions; the defence of Anglican ecclesiastical and financial privileges; the distribution of lucrative offices to loyal MPs; a series of commercial and monetary policies that bloated the national debt and served the interests of large landowners, imperial trading companies and City financiers; and an indirect-tax regime that obliged ‘the people’ to pay a disproportionate share of the nation’s fiscal burden. And it was a state that by mid-century had been replaced by one that historians now call ‘liberal’, as it assumed a leaner, more disinterested form at home, and a more expansive, if still scattered, presence around the world.46 The fruits of the many reforms that went into the making of this new liberal formation are well known.47 By the mid-1830s, the number of unregulated sinecures in central government had fallen to just ten, from roughly 600 in 1780; by the 1850s, strict terms of service, payment and superannuation applied to almost all centrally appointed posts. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored privileges of the Church of England were eroded, which included the lifting, in 1828 and 1829, of political disqualifications relating to Dissenters and then Catholics. More broadly, public spending was cut, as balanced budgets and ‘sound money’ were pursued (e.g. convertibility to gold was restored in 1819); the tax burden was reduced and rebalanced

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The many lives of corruption

towards direct taxes, so that it fell more fairly on the rich (e.g. the income tax was reintroduced in 1842); and the cause of free trade was embraced. Finally, the governance of empire was reformed, as part of the emergence of so-called ‘liberal imperialism’. The most iconic of the corrupt practices associated with empire, the slave trade, was abolished in 1807, followed by slavery in 1833.48 Specific companies and territories were also reformed, notably, for it was by far the most potent symbol of the rottenness of empire, the East India Company.49 This is a crude sketch, and a number of key interventions in recent decades have greatly enriched our sense of both the state that was reformed and the process of reform. The work of John Brewer has been especially important in terms of understanding the actual functioning (the ‘sinews’) of what became Britain’s globe-trotting, fiscal-military state.50 Clearly, as something like the Country critique described above attests, its gestation aroused considerable opposition, and already by the 1690s there was active parliamentary scrutiny of fiscal and military matters.51 Yet, equally, as Brewer’s account suggests, the fiscal-military state was by no means awash with corrupt practices and idling aristocrats, certainly not to the extent that was once assumed by an earlier generation of historians.52 Quite the contrary, there were areas of highly developed bureaucratic routine and hierarchy, as in the all-important Excise Office, whose total number of employees grew from over 1,000 in the 1690s to almost 5,000 by the 1780s. This same state of course was also highly effective in military terms, and what Brewer’s account also helps to illuminate is the shifting purchase of reforming initiatives. It is no coincidence that the first successful critique – the elite-based movement for ‘economical reform’ – began amid Britain’s poor performance in the American War of Independence (1775–83), straining whatever tolerance might have existed before for pockets of corruption. It is no coincidence, too, that reformist initiatives were taken up with renewed vigour in the decades after 1815, when Britain had less need of a costly war machine. Values mattered, however, and part of what drove the process of reform was a new commitment to public service by ministerial elites and MPs. It is Philip Harling’s work that has done most to recover these values, at least on the domestic front, which were just

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as rich as the currents of thought – for example, Paineite constitutionalism, Owenite socialism and Benthamite utilitarianism – that historians have long recognised animated ‘outdoor’ and parliamentary radicalism.53 This is not to diminish the importance of this sort of political pressure, which clearly helped to overcome resistance among mostly Pittite and Tory ministers; but, as Harling argues, if the elites sought to accommodate, and thereby neuter, radical demands by pursing a course of ‘practical’, administrative reform – as opposed to ‘parliamentary reform’ – they did so partly for reasons of principle.54 A resurgent Christian evangelicalism was one important spur, just as it was in relation to the anti-slavery movement, rebooting the equation of corruption with sin, and fostering a more ascetic ethics of public office-holding, especially among liberal Tories such as Peel. Likewise, different forms of political economy fed into the desire for retrenchment, while the Whig contributions to reform built on a long-established aversion to Crown-based patronage, which now mixed with a renewed sense of patrician obligation, as well as a modicum of utilitarian sentiment derived from radical MPs. At the same time, ‘public opinion’ emerged as a recognised source of authority, sharpening the sense that public office had to be exercised in a way that was open and accountable, even if ‘democracy’ remained a source of elite suspicion.55 This furnishes another context in which the chapter by Smith might be read, suggesting, as it does, that the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular the elite pedagogy developed by Adam Ferguson at Edinburgh University, played a formative role in the emergence of this liberal ethos of public service. As Smith argues, Ferguson’s antidote to the corruption of eighteenth-century society was not a more active citizenry, but the creation of a new caste of gentlemanly governors, committed to the public good but also comfortable with the realities of commercial society and limited suffrage. But there are two aspects in particular of the administrative reform of the British state that the present volume helps to rethink. One is the imperial dimension, something explored in a triplet of chapters here, but much neglected in the existing historiography. Aaron Graham’s examines a short-lived process of ‘economical reform’ in colonial Jamaica, whose finances had been

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The many lives of corruption

adversely affected by the war with America. As Graham suggests, the aims were similar to those of its British counterpart: namely, imposing financial accountability and removing corruption in the administration of taxes. The proposed reforms, however, were only partly realised, owing to objections, born of Country Whig-inspired sentiments, that they secured efficiency at the expense of local vestry control over revenue collection. Further proposals to professionalise the judiciary foundered for similar reasons, amid concerns about costs, as well as fears that the measures would corrupt the independence of the island’s own system of justice. As the case of Jamaica in the 1780s and 1790s suggests, the process of rooting out administrative corruption in the colonial sphere could be just as intricate and politicised as in Britain. Yet, as the chapters by Ben Gilding and Alex Middleton demonstrate, imperial and metropolitan corruption were also intimately, and indeed administratively, entwined. Gilding examines the genesis of this problem in the notoriously rapacious East India Company during the 1760s and 1770s. As he argues, although much scholarship has dwelled on the sensational trial of Warren Hastings (1788–95) and the phenomenon of ‘nabobs’, these might be seen as secondary to the more profound structural transformation that was wrought during these decades. Ironically, the British state, in seeking to reform the Company’s governance, also became deeply implicated in how it functioned, creating a byzantine, quasi-imperial entity that blurred the distinction between private and public interests and making it a direct threat to the integrity of the British constitution – anxieties about corruption that found an immediate home in the ‘economical reform’ movement, as Gilding suggests. Of course, this hybrid, Company–state arrangement would continue to evolve, culminating – and ending – with assumption of direct Crown rule over India in 1858. In the meantime, as Middleton details, it was the Colonial Office, formed in 1801 with responsibility for managing the affairs of the rest of the empire, that emerged as the principal locus of these kinds of concerns. As Middleton suggests, few other offices of state were vilified so intensely during the 1830s and 1840s. The core reason was the absence of accountability, not just in the Office itself, where the permanent officials enjoyed considerable power, but in relation to Britain’s distant colonies, which offered

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unrivalled opportunities for the exercise of government patronage and the enjoyment of perquisites. It was a reputation that would persist until the mid-1850s, when a confluence of factors – changes of personnel, a reorganisation and a general diminution of domestic political tensions – transformed the image of the Office into one of probity and competence. The other aspect of administrative reform that this volume helps to rethink concerns just this: how reform played out during mid-­ century, the moment when the British state is thought to have been purified of the worst manifestations of Old Corruption. That certain elements persisted is widely recognised. Most of all, nepotism and patronage remained a feature of central administrative appointments. Although ‘open competition’ via examination had first been promoted in the 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan report, which aimed to engineer a new gentlemanly class of non-partisan administrators, it was not until the 1870s that it was widely practised.56 The slow pace of reform at the apex of the state is sometimes put down to official inertia; but as Geoffrey Hicks’s chapter suggests, exploring the case of the Foreign Office during Lord Derby’s brief Conservative administration of 1858–9, resistance to the Northcote–Trevelyan agenda was also born of a principled, if ultimately political, attachment to the merits of party-based patronage and social breeding. As Hicks suggests, the then Foreign Secretary, Malmesbury, though not averse to the use of exams per se, remained firmly wedded to an older culture of aristocratic service that saw diplomatic work as best performed by those from landed backgrounds. Conversely, the chapter by Stuart Jones opens up an entirely neglected aspect of mid-century institutional reform: the regulation of charitable endowments, which formed a key aspect of Gladstonian Liberalism’s assault on the potential of private privilege to corrupt the pursuit of the public good. As Jones argues, focusing on the genesis of the controversial 1869 Endowed Schools Act, the core issue was precisely the status of charitable endowments; and whereas for Liberals and Radicals they were clearly public, since they served a public purpose, for Conservatives they remained essentially private. Yet here, too, reform had its limits: Disraeli’s subsequent administration reversed aspects of the 1869 Act; an attempt to assert public control over the endowments of the City livery companies in the 1880s

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The many lives of corruption

proved fruitless; and then the issue paled, as the public expenditure of an emergent welfare state began to dwarf the endowments’ monetary value.

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Elections and the civic life of corruption The making of a cleaner state was thus a matter of accumulation and combination: a piecing together of varied, more or less successful reforming initiatives, each with quite specific aims. The same applies to our second area of public life: the more popular realm of elections and local government. This too was part of the expansive radical definition of Old Corruption. Both ‘closed’, co-opting municipal councils and the lack of parliamentary representation for working men were presented as ‘oligarchic’ bulwarks, allowing the elite to monopolise power for their own parasitic ends. Developing from the 1770s, before culminating in the Chartist agitation of the 1830s and 1840s, it was the latter that became the defining feature of the radical diagnosis of corruption: that only ‘parliamentary reform’ – whose elements included the abolition of rotten boroughs, the adoption of the secret ballot and the payment of MPs and, above all, the introduction of universal male suffrage – would put an end to the systemic abuses suffered by the mass of hardworking Britons. As Gareth Stedman Jones long ago argued, this populist and essentially constitutional critique of corruption lost its force around mid-century, primarily because of the liberal reforms to the state noted above, which at the same time helped to channel radicalism into the more respectable forces of parliamentary liberalism.57 Eventually, however, in a story much recounted, almost all of the Chartists’ demands, and many more besides, were introduced as part of Britain’s peculiar pathway to a modern democratic state and the eventual granting of universal suffrage in the interwar period. If there is an aspect of this process that might be highlighted here it is that corruption – and bribery especially – was attacked aggressively in statutory terms, displacing the long-standing use of more pliant common law resources. Indeed, in contrast to the Westminster world of MPs and ministers, which remained content with essentially unofficial codes of conduct, the electoral and municipal realms were distinguished by the use of statute as a means of

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regulation. Building on the Whigs’ 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, which had earlier sought to proscribe conflicts of interest among councillors, the 1889 Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act specifically criminalised attempts to bribe councillors and employees of local authorities.58 Still more exacting was the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act relating to elections, which built on an act of 1854. Among other things, it increased the penalties for bribery and, strikingly, placed strict limits on the amount of money candidates could spend at elections. More broadly, a great body of statute law reorganised the functioning of local government, allowing it to expand in areas such as public health, the poor law and policing, while exposing it to central inspection and demanding more rigorous accounting, contracting and recruitment practices.59 Ultimately, these various initiatives had a significant impact, diffusing and in many ways provincialising a process of reform that had first taken root in the central state. Electoral corruption was largely eradicated, with the twentieth century witnessing a marked reduction in the number of petitions alleging malpractice; and although local government remained blighted by corruption, when and where it was suspected or detected the individuals in question were dealt with according to some kind of rule-bound process (such as criminal prosecution or formal sanction).60 But this was a highly uneven process and it was no less richly contested than the reform of the state. Ideologically, all sorts of perspectives developed, mobilising the multiple conceptions of ‘corruption’ discussed above. One could argue, for instance, as many mid-century Whigs and Liberals did, that democracy threatened a peculiar kind of constitutional degeneration, while condemning the corruption that existed under limited suffrage on the more narrow grounds that it undermined the procedural fairness of elections. Still in the interwar period we find a complex mix of perspectives: as Liam Ryan’s chapter here argues, though direct cash bribery was now widely censured, Conservatives drew on long-standing degenerative understandings to argue that Labour poor law guardians were indulging in electoral ‘bribery’ by promising enhanced benefits to the unemployed (so-called ‘Poplarism’). At the same time, reform in this area entailed confronting a set of popular practices and social norms that had endured for centuries and that were hardwired into the hierarchical, propertied nature of

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The many lives of corruption

authority and the bonds of reciprocity that defined relations between classes. These animated the culture of unreformed boroughs, where communal loyalties dictated the distribution of offices and contracts among freemen and their dependents, just as much as they did the culture of unreformed elections.61 As Frank O’Gorman has shown, practices such as treating and hiring an array of helpers (such as canvassers and musicians) were part of the rugged, ritualised drama of a contest, where the exercise of ‘influence’ and displays of largesse by patrons and candidates were considered a legitimate means of currying support and affirming their bond with the community.62 Even bribery might be tolerated according to the peculiar moral code that governed elections. When it eventually came, in the 1880s, the use of strict statutory codes with severe penalties reflected just this: the need for definitional clarity – for legal resources that clearly rendered ‘corrupt’ a set of practices that were still seen by many as legitimate expressions of communal patronage and hospitality. They were certainly successful in this, but, as Jon Lawrence has suggested, elections remained ill disciplined and rowdy affairs long into the twentieth century, retaining at least some sense of the special license for misrule that had been so prevalent earlier.63 None of the chapters that follow contest the general, long-term significance of reform in this arena. What they do illuminate, however, are the social and practical dimensions of reform and here they make two key interventions. One of these concerns the role of administrative and financial pressures. These have long been recognised as facilitating the reform of municipal boroughs in the early nineteenth century, when the problems generated by rapid urbanisation (such as growing crime and pollution) helped to focus minds on the efficiency of existing institutions, rendering arguments about their corruption more compelling.64 Historians have been less inclined to grant these sorts of factors a central role in understanding electoral reform, but they deserve just such a place, as Malcolm Crook and Kathryn Rix argue. Crook does so as part of a comparative analysis of Britain, France and the US. As he suggests, in all three cases the problem of electoral corruption assumed a more urgent and precise form as a result of enlarged franchises and growing party competition. Solutions were sought as much to discipline voters and empower parties as to purify the electoral process: part of the appeal of the secret ballot in Britain, he notes, was that it

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promised more ‘tranquil’ elections. Rix, by contrast, focuses on the factors that frustrated reform, looking at how the problem of electoral corruption played out in parliament. As she argues, the issue consumed far more time in the Commons than is commonly recognised, as MPs wrestled with a surfeit of possible sanctions and solutions, as well as the enormous burden of having to consider hundreds of petitions alleging corruption. Self-interest complicated matters too: some MPs feared introducing legislation that might ensnare even the more scrupulous among them. Yet, as Rix suggests, it was MPs’ self-interest that finally broke the logjam: though partly born of moral outrage at still endemic corruption, the landmark 1883 Act was principally a product of growing unease at the financial resources required by candidates in order to ‘influence’ an enlarged, post-1867 electorate. The other key intervention concerns the broader trajectory of reform at this level and more especially the reinvention of the social forms of corruption. As the chapters by Francis Dodsworth and Peter Jones suggest, although we can speak of the gradual erosion of those customary relations that had sustained the culture of unreformed elections and boroughs, this should not obscure the way new communal variants of corruption came to inhabit the reformed civic landscape that followed. The ‘new police’ formed one such site. As Dodsworth argues, while the new forces were designed to be purer and more efficient than the ‘old’, their more autonomous, professional mode of organisation also opened up the danger of a new kind of institutionalised corruption. It is clear from a number of scandals that this is precisely what happened: that is, corruption became embedded in the everyday routines and relations – the organisational culture – of local forces, extending beyond one or two errant officers and thriving on the novel powers and authority the police enjoyed. The police also feature in Jones’s analysis of the corruption that plagued the municipal governance of twentieth-­ century Belfast and Glasgow, where he depicts a more popular and pervasive form of corruption. As he argues, if in these two cities public office was abused on a scale unmatched elsewhere in the British Isles, this can only partly be accounted for in terms of the lax morals of councillors and officials. We also need to attend to their peculiarly fractious urban societies, born of intense poverty and fierce sectarian and party-political attachments, and given novel

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The many lives of corruption

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impetus by the onset of universal suffrage. In both cities the result was an environment that was corrosive of any shared sense of the importance of probity in public life. What evolved instead, if only quietly within particular communities and parties, was a sense of public office as a means of maintaining group loyalties and clannish networks.

Parties and the politics of corruption This brings us to our third and final area of public life: parties and the politics of corruption. It is certainly true that party animus has long animated the problem of corruption, if only because of the negative charge attached to the term and its uses as a means of undermining – or ‘smearing’ – the moral authority of opponents. From the religious and dynastic struggles of the seventeenth century through to the twentieth-century ‘mass’ politics of the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties, there is no shortage of reforms or scandals where the disingenuous hand of party-political motivation might be discerned. Equally, however, the very idea and practice of party-based politics is historical and indeed central to the way ‘corruption’ has been refashioned over the centuries. On the one hand, it was only during the late eighteenth century that the likes of Edmund Burke and Charles Fox began to offer the first reasoned defences of party politics and the legitimacy of opposition, loosening their association with ‘faction’ and intrigue, and revising their status as a source and symptom of corruption, whether understood narrowly or otherwise.65 Even then the respectability of party was a long time in the making. Although the term ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ gained currency in the 1820s, signalling a new appreciation of the utility and morality of parties, the early and mid-Victorians remained instinctively suspicious and it was not until the 1880s that parties finally triumphed as the basis of parliamentary authority and, in turn, government, marking another watershed in the functioning of public life.66 On the other hand, the emergence of organised parties was another ingredient in the demise of Old Corruption. This is partly because they provided a further source of accountability, enhancing the ability of parliament to scrutinise the executive and augmenting

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the work of a rapidly expanding newspaper press (over 1,000 new titles were established between 1800 and 1860, compared to only eighty-five between 1665 and 1800).67 Above all, it was because parties provided a means of putting together parliamentary majorities that did not depend on Crown patronage and placemen. Estimates suggest that the number of office-holding MPs (placemen) decreased from roughly 130 in 1790 to 60 in 1830, as prime ministers increasingly looked to the Commons for their executive authority and, in turn, they, as those who commanded the confidence of the House, came to determine the distribution of ministerial posts.68 This too was by no means a linear process, and the Lords and monarchy continued to enjoy considerable power; but by the 1860s, as Walter Bagehot famously observed, the real ‘business’ of governing was undertaken by the cabinet, which bound together the executive and a legislature dominated by parties.69 A similar process occurred at the local level. After 1835, customary ties of elite patronage were gradually displaced by the social and political bonds of elected parties, just as councillors were subject to growing scrutiny from the press and, from the 1880s, the ‘committee system’ of internal, party-based accountability. First theorised with any rigour by Jeremy Bentham in the 1820s, the edifying effects of party-based ‘publicity’ became axiomatic.70 As Herbert Morrison argued in the interwar period, when acting as Labour leader of the London County Council, nothing was more conducive to ‘purity of administration’ than the ‘party system’ and an ‘organised opposition’.71 Combined, these two crucial developments fuelled another: the growing party-politicisation of corruption. As noted above, this helps to explain why the term ‘corruption’ proved so capacious and it helps to explain, too, the uneven nature of reform, which always developed in the grip of party-based antagonisms. The chapters here furnish abundant examples of this, complementing a large literature dedicated to unpacking the party-political intricacies of particular measures. But what is also clear is that, beyond particular measures and moments of reform, parties and party-based conflict also became part of the problem of corruption – another vector of its reinvention and relocation. Most obviously, parties emerged as agents of patronage and graft, abusing their enhanced control over public resources to help further their own interests and those of

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The many lives of corruption

their supporters. This clearly occurred at the municipal level, as Peter Jones’s chapter here demonstrates, but analogous problems emerged within the world of Westminster. As G. R. Searle has detailed, the powers of patronage that passed from the Crown to parties, notably in relation to the granting of honours, became an object of suspicion and scandal at the turn of the century, amid claims (some well founded) that titles were being directly exchanged for party donations.72 Legislation was passed in 1925 that criminalised the sale of honours, but the system itself – the ‘honours system’ – remained; still today this particular form of party-based patronage, authorised ultimately by prime ministers, continues to inspire accusations of corruption and cronyism. Equally, as Tom Crook’s chapter suggests, the culture of intense publicity that accompanied the growth of the press and the advent of ‘government by party’ after the 1880s degraded as much as it enhanced the probity of public life, breeding a new politics of corruption where the line between legitimate concerns and cynical, partisan ‘mud-slinging’ became difficult to hold. This culture no doubt stimulated a novel focus on personal ‘conflicts of interest’ between the public duties of ministers and MPs and their private, normally financial, concerns. Although MPs and ministers remained effectively their own regulators, reflecting their time-honoured ‘privileges’ as parliamentarians, conventions governing the conduct of MPs and ad hoc ministerial codes were tightened, beginning with Gladstone’s decree in 1892 that all cabinet members should resign any shareholdings in public companies. We see here indeed the first stirrings of a regulatory imperative that would lead in time to the introduction of a ‘register of interests’ for MPs (1974), published ‘ministerial codes’ (1997) and even, in a significant erosion of parliamentary privilege, the establishment of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (2009).73 Yet, as Crook argues, the same democratic, party-based pressures that served to refine and elevate standards also stimulated the exchange of highly politicised, and often speculative, claims and counterclaims regarding the personal behaviour or circumstances of MPs and ministers, when and where they were identified as problematic, or just potentially problematic. The play of partisan interests became impossible to disentangle from the very act of questioning or defending the behaviour or financial arrangements of those under

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scrutiny, serving to complicate the whole problem of whether or not anything corrupt had really taken place. In other words, it became impossible to banish the spectre of cynical, partisan posturing and double standards – of ‘muck-raking’ and ‘whitewashing’ – meaning that corruption scandals, regardless of whether they led to any resignations or sackings, were always corrosive of public trust in party politics and the political classes per se. In another twist that complicates narratives of cumulative progress, greater publicity and scrutiny bred public contempt just as much as confidence: a sense that politics was a dirty, self-interested business.

Conclusion Overall, then, it is the long nineteenth century that most preoccupies the present volume and where it seeks to apply the most revisionist pressure. But as we elaborate in the epilogue, the volume also affords a means of rethinking what came after, in the twentieth century. A number of the chapters, in particular those by Dodsworth, Tom Crook and Ryan, help to sketch the contours of what we tentatively call the New Corruption of the twentieth century, based conceptually on ‘the state’ as the mediator of public and private interests, and more practically on the regulation of ‘conflicts of interest’ and the search for mechanisms of institutional transparency and independent oversight. This remains, however, an area where further research is required, especially in the context of the post-war period and beyond, which has received nothing like the historical scrutiny lavished on the life and death of Old Corruption. Already political scientists are beginning to speak of the emergence of a ‘post-Nolan’ environment of moral laxity, forged in the tumult of Brexit and the demands of the Covid-19 pandemic, with ministers acting with only scant regard for established codes of conduct and the independence of the civil service and judiciary.74 Yet the very genesis and novelty of the Nolan reforms, which were set in motion in 1994, still await proper historical scrutiny, not least in relation to how the problem of corruption developed in the 1970s, when the Poulson scandal erupted, and afterwards, during the 1980s, amid the Thatcherite remodelling of the state.75 To date, the bigger transformations and historical trajectories that inform

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the present and recent past have only been gestured towards, not delineated with any precision. The other area ripe for further research and rethinking is the question of the historic peculiarities of the British case. This too is something we explore in the epilogue, mindful that the present volume contains only one comparative chapter (Malcolm Crook’s). This particular field of comparative analysis is presently dominated by accounts authored by social and political scientists, which present Britain as one Western European ‘model’ of successful state building among others. As we suggest, though this work usefully situates the development of a central administrative state in Britain in a comparative context, there is much that it omits and neglects. Most egregiously of all, it fails to integrate the British Empire into the British story and the interrelations of metropolitan and colonial forms of corruption. But it also neglects what has been central to the present volume: namely, the politics of corruption and the abundant and varied ways it has been conceived and diagnosed over time. As we argue, this politics is not an incidental feature of corruption. Rather, it is constitutive and it clearly has analogues in other Western states, such as France and the US. It both drives reform and highlights its limitations. The discordant perspectives with which we opened this introduction are not an anomaly. They are the latest manifestation of a rich history of asking basic questions about the nature and administration of the public good and, ultimately, inequalities in the distribution of power.

Notes   1 Recent accounts include M. Williams, Parliament Ltd: A Journey to the Dark Heart of British Politics (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016) and P. Geoghegan, Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics (London: Head of Zeus, 2020).   2 B. Worthy, ‘How transparent and free from corruption is UK government?’, in P. Dunleavy, A. Park and R. Taylor (eds), The UK’s Changing Democracy: The 2018 Democratic Audit (London: LSE Press, 2018), pp. 237–55.   3 On the globalised anticorruption industry see J. R. Wedel, ‘Rethinking Corruption in an Age of Ambiguity’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8:1 (2012), 453–98.

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  4 D. Hine and G. Peele, The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).   5 P. Bew, ‘The Committee on Standards in Public Life: Twenty Years of the Nolan Principles, 1995–2015’, Political Quarterly, 86:3 (2015), 411–18.   6 P. M. Heywood and J. Rose, ‘“Close but No Cigar”: The Measurement of Corruption’, Journal of Public Policy, 34:3 (2014), 507–29.   7 D. Whyte (ed.), How Corrupt is Britain? (London: Pluto Press, 2015).   8 Whyte, ‘Introduction: a very British corruption’, in ibid., p. 5.   9 The few accounts that do seek to offer general histories are also somewhat idiosyncratic in their coverage. A. Doig, Corruption and Misconduct in Contemporary British Politics (London: Pelican, 1984) and D. Marquand, Decline of the Public: The Hollowing Out of Citizenship (Oxford: Polity, 2004). 10 J. Hurstfield, ‘Political Corruption in Modern England: The Historian’s Problem’, History, 52:174 (1967), 32. 11 Early examples include W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, Past & Present, 101 (1983), 55–86 and F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 12 On other Western states at this juncture see S. Tiihonen (ed.), The History of Corruption in Central Government (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2003) and R. Kroeze, A. Vitória and G. Geltner (eds), Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), part 4. 13 This basic premise features in multiple accounts. See E. J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001) and P. Harling, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Recent work, it should be emphasised, has rightly highlighted the existence of reformist impulses prior to the 1770s; but the consensus remains that they became more pronounced, multiple and cumulatively significant after this point. For earlier anticorruption initiatives see especially M. Knights, ‘Anticorruption in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Britain’, in Kroeze, Vitória and Geltner (eds), Anticorruption in History, pp. 181–95. 14 K. Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 4. 15 See especially G. E. Aylmer, ‘From Office-Holding to Civil Service: The Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (1980), 91–108.

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16 See N. Chester, The English Administrative System, 1780–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 17 See C. O’Leary, The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections, 1868–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 18 J. Innes, ‘“Reform” in English public life: the fortunes of a word’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780– 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 71–97; P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. vi. 19 For example, C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); J. Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 20 D. Brown, R. Crowcroft and G. Pentland (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); D. Craig and J. Thompson (eds), Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 21 Useful overviews include O. Kurer, ‘Definitions of corruption’, in P. Heywood (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 30–41 and the chapters in part 1 of A. J. Heidenheimer and M. Johnston (eds), Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, 3rd edn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 22 B. Rothstein and A. Varraich, Making Sense of Corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 23 M. Philp, ‘Conceptualizing political corruption’, in Heidenheimer and Johnston (eds), Political Corruption, p. 51. 24 See also on this point Rothstein and Varraich, Making Sense of Corruption, pp. 45–57. 25 M. Philp, ‘The definition of political corruption’, in Heywood (ed.), Routledge Handbook, pp. 19–21. 26 J. T. Noonan, Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea (Oakwood, CA: University of California Press, 1987). 27 R. A. Sparling, Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State Press, 2019), p. 6. 28 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); and among others see S. Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and R. K. Matthews (ed.), Virtue, Corruption, and Self-interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1994).

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29 M. Knights, ‘Religion, anti-popery and corruption’, in M. J. Braddick and P. Withington (eds), Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), pp. 185–93. 30 Knights, ‘Anticorruption in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’, pp. 191–4. 31 B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 32 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Buchan and Hill, Intellectual History. 33 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 34 Buchan and Hill, Intellectual History, p. 171. 35 D. Erdozain, ‘The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62:1 (2011), 59–88. 36 Of course, in some respects, the idea of ‘conflicts of interests’ goes to the heart of conceptions of corruption, in all periods; but it is significant, as Tom Crook’s chapter here argues, that a discourse of ‘conflicts’ became more current from the 1880s. For an excavation of its historical roots in the British context see D. C. M. Platt, ‘The Commercial and Industrial Interests of Ministers of the Crown’, Political Studies, 9:3 (1961), 267–90. 37 A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 38 G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 39 J. Parry, ‘1867 and the Rule of Wealth’, Parliamentary History, 36:1 (2017), 46–63; G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 40 J. Brewer, ‘English radicalism in the age of George III’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 323–67; G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–178. 41 See especially H. S. Jones, ‘The civic moment in British social thought: civil society and the ethics of citizenship, c. 1880–1914’, in L. Goldman (ed.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 29–43. 42 S. Collini, ‘The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 35 (1985), 29–50.

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43 D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 44 R. Saunders, ‘Democracy’, in Craig and Thompson (eds), Languages of Politics, pp. 142–67; A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 13–14, 224–6. 45 W. B. Gwyn, Democracy and the Cost of Politics in Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1962), chap. 8. 46 P. Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); P. Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 47 A useful summary is Harling, Modern British State, chap. 3. 48 R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), chaps 4, 7 and 11; M. Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (New York: Walker Publishing, 2011), pp. 296–310. 49 N. B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). 50 J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 51 J. Hoppit, ‘Checking the Leviathan, 1688–1832’, in P. O’Brien and D. Winch (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 267–94. 52 Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. 66–8, 79. 53 The classic study is E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). See also Gilmartin, Print Politics, and I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 54 P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 55 Saunders, ‘Democracy’, pp. 142–67; J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 56 J. M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), pp. 31–42. 57 Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’. 58 On municipal corruption more broadly see J. Moore and J. Smith (eds), Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780–1950 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007) and P. Jones, From Virtue to Venality: Corruption in the City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

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59 C. Bellamy, Administering Central-Local Relations, 1871–1919: The Local Government Board in Its Fiscal and Cultural Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), chap. 5. 60 A. Doig, Corruption and Misconduct, chap. 6; Jones, From Virtue to Venality. 61 N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 62 F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past & Present, 135 (1992), 79–115. 63 J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 64 D. Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (London: St Martin’s Press, 1979). 65 J. A. W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972). 66 T. A. Jenkins, Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 67 Lawrence, Electing Our Masters, pp. 37–8. 68 Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, pp. 66–7. 69 W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867). 70 J. R. Bruno, ‘Vigilance and Confidence: Jeremy Bentham, Publicity, and the Dialectic of Political Trust and Distrust’, American Political Science Review, 111:2 (2017), 295–307. 71 H. Morrison, How Greater London is Governed (London: L. Dickson, 1935), pp. 67–8. 72 Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930, chaps 4, 7 and 15. 73 Hine and Peele, Regulation of Standards, chaps 4, 5 and 7. 74 For example, A. Leighton, ‘Brexit, Cabinet Norms and the Ministerial Code: Are We Living in a Post-Nolan Era?’ Political Quarterly, 91:1 (2020), 125–33. 75 This is not to overlook the excellent work of Alan Doig, though this does little to address the deeper historical context. See A. Doig and J. Wilson, ‘Untangling the Threads of Sleaze: The Slide into Nolan’, Parliamentary Affairs, 48:4 (1995), 562–78 and A. Doig, ‘From Lynskey to Nolan: The Corruption of British Politics and Public Service?’ Journal of Law and Society, 23:1 (1996), 36–56.

1

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment: a reconsideration Craig Smith

Since the 1970s the Scottish Enlightenment has become the subject of study across a range of branches of intellectual history. The development of this scholarship occurred alongside the moves in the history of political thought that stressed the need to recover the republican or civic humanist vocabulary of politics that had been obscured by an excessive focus on the natural law tradition and the tendency to read early-modern thinkers as precursors of liberalism. The chief proponent of this agenda was J. G. A. Pocock.1 In Pocock’s own work, and in the work of those influenced by and reacting to him, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were understood as grappling with the shift from republican to liberal conceptual languages. Among the tensions that are identified in this literature is that of older, classical ideas of citizen virtue and commitment to community coming into contact with the more individualistic conceptual universe of political economy. A large literature, including work by John Robertson, Richard B. Sher and David Allan, has developed that stresses the tensions in the social and political thought of the period and places thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson on a spectrum ranging between civic republicanism and commercial liberalism.2 In a celebrated collection of essays on the issue Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff referred to this as the tension between ‘Wealth and Virtue’. The aim of this chapter is to reassess the usefulness of this approach as a lens for interpreting the thought of the period. It seeks to do this by focusing on the account of virtue and corruption that has been developed as part of the ‘Wealth and Virtue’ approach to the social and political thought of eighteenth-century Scotland. More particularly, it seeks to do this by examining the member of

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 35 the Scottish Enlightenment who is often held to be most worried by the possible corruption of commercial modernity: Adam Ferguson. Adam Ferguson was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh during the central years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson is often seen as the foremost Scottish sceptic of commerce, whose analysis of corruption serves as a foil for Hume and Smith’s more optimistic view.3 Pocock himself refers to Ferguson as the ‘most Machiavellian’ of the Scottish writers.4 This has led to Ferguson’s reputation as a nostalgic moralist, a backward-looking defender of the ideal of the virtuous citizen and a critic of eighteenth-century British politics.5 However, such readings often fail to consider the fact that across his writings Ferguson was broadly favourable towards commerce and had a developed theory of public service and education that he regarded as a suitable palliative for the corruption of eighteenth-century Britain. By grasping this fact about Ferguson we get a very different view of him from that encouraged by the sliding scale of republicanism and liberalism that has been so influential on the historiography of the period. The chapter begins by briefly surveying the literature on Ferguson and the civic tradition’s analysis of corruption. It then demonstrates that Ferguson’s understanding of, and concerns about, corruption were not identical with that tradition. It argues that he was comfortable with limited political participation, accepted the reality of the politics of sinecure and was a supporter of commercial society. Ferguson’s response to corruption was not to bemoan the absence of citizen assemblies, but rather to educate the gentleman class who would manage the new British institutions.

Wealth and virtue As the introduction to this volume has demonstrated, J. G. A. Pocock’s analysis of the concern with corruption in early-modern political thinking has become one of the dominant frameworks for our understanding of the concept. The Scottish Enlightenment is understood as a pivotal point for the republican tradition that Pocock and his followers sought to recover.6 It is pivotal because it represents the ‘limits’ of the tradition, to borrow a term from John

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Robertson.7 In such discussions Adam Ferguson is often portrayed as an outlier whose Highland upbringing and preoccupations with the need for a citizen militia mark him out from the Lowland and more commercially minded David Hume and Adam Smith.8 More often than not such readings are underscored by discussions of Ferguson’s concerns about the impact of the division of labour (so influential on Karl Marx), and his fascination with Rome and the impact of empire and luxury upon it. Read through such a lens Ferguson seems to fit comfortably alongside those who regard corruption as a decline or degeneration, or in the work of Rousseau as a loss of innocence, that came with civilisation. The fact that the final sections of his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) provide a conjectural history of the corruption and dissolution of civil societies accounts for Pocock reading Ferguson as sceptical about commercial society.9 I have argued elsewhere that there are a number of reasons to be wary of this interpretation of Ferguson’s views on corruption.10 The chief of these is that they are almost always based solely upon the Essay and ignore the discussions of commercial modernity and corruption elsewhere in Ferguson’s work. Of Ferguson’s other published works The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) and Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1756) are often taken to confirm his civic republican credentials as they outline the corruption of the Roman republic and defend the need for active citizen soldiers in Hanoverian Britain.11 However, this literature pays far less attention to the three books based on his Edinburgh lectures: Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy (1766), the widely read and translated Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) and his own confessed final statement of his views, Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792).12 The Ferguson revealed in these books and in his correspondence is indeed a man preoccupied by corruption, but he is not one who fits easily into a reading that stresses republicanism in either its ancient, Florentine or commonwealth forms. This is underlined by some of his other publications, perhaps most notably his contribution to the pamphlet war surrounding the American crisis, Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr Price (1776), where Ferguson roundly criticises Price’s notion of liberty as self-government and

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 37 instead advances a thoroughly modern, ‘negative’ conception of liberty under the rule of law.13 Moreover, the Ferguson found in these books is far less hostile to commerce, and far more Smithian in his view of the economy. Indeed, this is also something found in the Essay, where he explicitly argues that ‘private interest is a better patron of commerce and plenty, than the refinements of state’.14 Perhaps the greatest challenge to the reading of Ferguson as sceptical about commerce is his letter to Adam Smith on the publication of the Wealth of Nations. In it he says that he is willing to take Smith’s side on everything in the book except his attack on the citizen militia. This is often taken as confirmation of Ferguson’s distance from Smith on commerce.15 But this is a misreading, and one brought about by the lens of civic republicanism. Ferguson is agreeing with everything apart from Smith’s critique of the militia as a fighting force. But Smith accepts the usefulness of the militia as a civic defence force, and Ferguson accepts that a militia must be combined with a standing army, so the difference between the two is next to meaningless in terms of the substance of what they advocate: both support a standing army coupled with a militia.16 The reason for this misunderstanding of Ferguson is that we are not reading him; rather, we are reading him as a context for others. Read within his own system, and his own understanding of what that was, a different Ferguson, and a different analyst of corruption, emerges. The argument here is that Ferguson has a coherent, lifelong, academic and practical project that is focused on the problem of corruption in his own society, and that reading him through the civic analysis of corruption leaves a misleading impression of his thinking and its novelty.

Ferguson’s anti-republicanism The proper context for Ferguson in the history of political thought is one in which the chaos of seventeenth- and early eighteenth­century Britain has been overcome. This is especially true in Scotland, where the more extreme forms of republicanism associated with the Popular party in the Church of Scotland are the last place a man like Ferguson would look for inspiration. Ferguson was a central figure in the Moderate, or enlightened, faction in the Church

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of Scotland. He supported patronage in the Kirk against the Popular faction’s demand for congregational elections, but was equally opposed to the Jacobite rebellion. For Ferguson the Union of Parliaments and the Hanoverian succession represented an opportunity to reform a corrupt political order in Scotland, an order which had made life precarious for people like him. The old Scottish forms of dependence and predatory behaviour by the nobility would be swept away, and a new, less oppressive and less corrupt order would take its place. This new system was itself based on a complex web of patronage and dependence, but crucially it operated under the rule of law. Ferguson’s own career is a fine example of the skilful playing of the game of place and patronage. Throughout his long career he maintained close relations with Lord Milton, patronage agent for the 3rd Duke of Argyll, and later with Henry Dundas, who managed Scotland in the government interest. His early career, nearly ten years as a military chaplain to the Black Watch (1745–54), was supported by his family’s connection with the Duke of Atholl. He was at various points Keeper of the Faculty of Advocate’s Library (1757–8), tutor to the sons of Lord Bute (1758–9), a tutor to the 5th Earl of Chesterfield (1774–5), Secretary of the Carlisle Commission (1778–9) and holder of three professorships at the University of Edinburgh: in Natural Philosophy (1759–64), Moral Philosophy and Pneumatics (1764–85) and, by way of a sinecure, Mathematics (1785–1816). His activities included being a regular member of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland acting in the interests of the Moderate faction (1762–91), being active in parliamentary campaigning and the distribution of place and money that went along with that (particularly in the 1780 election in the Perth Burghs, though he is unlikely to have had a vote of his own given the highly restricted franchise in Scotland) and pamphlet writing in the government cause during the American crisis. Ferguson was an ambitious man and his correspondence is filled with letters seeking to advance his own career, putting himself forward as a potential governor for West Florida (1766), canvassing for the Principalship of Edinburgh University (1762) and seeking to place his sons in secure military positions. Ironically, given the republican reading of him, he even sought to buy one son out of militia service so that he could take a more lucrative professional commission elsewhere.17

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 39 Ferguson knew how the world worked, and he knew how to navigate the world of patronage and limited participation that characterised Enlightenment Edinburgh. He lived in the age of Old Corruption as it developed into commercial Britain – a world of patronage, sinecure, place and purchased office.18 Ferguson’s experience of politics clearly showed him that there remained ample scope for the corruption of the new British system, that the settlement was fragile and that something had to be done to remedy this. Unlike his friend Adam Smith, who saw corruption reflected in the political economy of trading monopolies and nascent imperialism, Ferguson saw it as a broader danger across the whole conduct of public life. Crucially, his conceptions of corruption and of public life extended beyond the classical notion of the citizen in the assembly who abandons the public good in favour of profit.

Ferguson’s analysis of corruption We now come to the question of just what Ferguson understood by ‘corruption’. Ferguson’s analysis of corruption is most forcefully apparent in the Essay, where we must take some care in separating out the exaggerated rhetoric of his occasionally florid prose from the substance of his account of the nature and causes of corruption. Throughout the Essay Ferguson is alarmed by the danger of a ‘fatal dissolution of manners’ that arises when ‘the desire of profit stifles the love of perfection’, believing that this would result in a lack of ‘calls to attend’ to the public good.19 The worry is that individuals would become self-absorbed and that this would ‘weaken the bands of society’.20 It is these passages that form the basis for the civic republican reading of Ferguson as sceptical about commerce. The first point to make here is that Ferguson departs quite significantly from the stock moralised account of the corruption of a poor but virtuous Rome by luxury. Compared to a writer like Tobias Smollett, Ferguson’s discussion of luxury is far from the crude and old-fashioned ‘ills of luxury’ argument levelled at the increasing wealth of commercial Britain. When Ferguson discusses luxury, necessity and commerce in the Essay he is absolutely clear that luxury is relative to the level of development of the society.21 Corruption comes not from the goods but from the attitude to

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them. All societies have luxuries and it is fruitless nostalgia to attack the luxury of the present day by appealing to the standards of the past. Crucially, this means that commercial societies are not the only societies that can develop an unhealthy attitude to luxury. Ferguson’s argument is not, put crudely, that because commerce creates more luxury it is thus more open to corruption, nor is it that a return to the politics of the old republic is desirable. He had already accepted Hume’s observation that ancient citizen equality was bought at the price of slavery.22 The problem is not luxury, nor is it commerce, but rather an attitude to luxury, and a very specific attitude that can arise in any society. The problem is luxury becoming the ‘principal object’ of our behaviour to the exclusion of other motivations.23 It is worth citing him in full: It appears, therefore, that although the mere use of materials which constitute luxury, may be distinguished from actual vice; yet nations under a high state of commercial arts, are exposed to corruption, by their admitting wealth, unsupported by personal elevation and virtue, as the great foundation of distinction, and by having their attention turned on the side of interest, as the road to consideration and honour.24

The problem is not wealth or economic activity; it is the absence of calls to other areas of public life. The chief manifestation of this problem lies not in the fact that we enjoy comfort; rather, it arises when we mistake the possession of wealth for the true basis of rank, and when we see the accumulation of wealth as the only route to success. For Ferguson this crowds out the notions of public service and other notions of rank that arise from service, whether military, political or religious. Where wealth supported by merit and virtue exists, the problem of corruption is not pressing. In his most civic republican passages Ferguson returns again and again to the idea that the real danger facing any political society occurs when the characters of statesman and warrior are separated into different classes.25 Reading beyond the Essay and across Ferguson’s career we find that the problem is when wealth is the sole criterion of rank to the exclusion of public service. But we must also add to this that his conception of corruption also applies when military rank is the sole criterion of social rank. When military

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 41 service becomes the only route to rank and preferment the door to military despotism is opened.26 Both of these arguments appear in his analysis of the fall of the Roman republic and in his discussion of Revolutionary France.27 In both cases he develops a class analysis that indicates the danger of a combination of wealth, military expansion and the improperly managed admission of the poor into the political system. The problem, the central political issue for Ferguson, is not primarily about gain or empire or luxury: it is a class analysis of the unbalancing of the Roman constitution. Should wealth or military success come to be the dominant notion of rank, then the fragile balance of the British constitution may fall prey to similar corruption. Corruption opens the way for the demagogue, whether that demagogue is a pretender to the Crown or a rabble rouser manipulating the mob of London. Ferguson is absolutely consistent on this throughout his career, from his first publication, the Ersh Sermon, to his final manuscript essays.28 Corruption exists when either wealth or military rank becomes the only metric for success and status. Ferguson’s answer was indeed grounded in notions of honour, public duty and participation, but his conception of these was not based on looking back to Athens or Rome. This is not the active citizen of Pocock’s civic republicanism; Ferguson is not interested in that. He is interested in how to deal with the problems of Britain, a country where the brief experiment with republicanism had collapsed into personal rule, and where the mantle of the republic was borne by precisely those elements in the British polity whom Ferguson viewed with distaste. As he puts it: ‘The idea of men in any society, great or small, having ever assembled upon a foot of absolute equality, and without exclusion of any individual, to dispose of their government is altogether visionary and unknown in nature.’29 Samuel Fleischacker’s recent analysis of Ferguson’s account of corruption in the Essay focuses on the civic nature of the corruption that Ferguson identifies.30 The problem is one where wealth becomes the criterion of rank and the motivation of citizens becomes the pursuit of wealth rather than the service of the republic. Fleischacker helpfully points out that Ferguson’s chief concern here is not so much with institutions that might prevent this as it is with the motivations of the citizens. As Fleischacker notes, for all of his discussion of participation, Ferguson was no democrat, and his

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interest in character and motivation gives his analysis of corruption a particular focus. In the Essay Ferguson argues that ‘as many members as possible, of every community, may be admitted to a share of its defence and its government’.31 While this sounds like a call for the idealised republic of old, in the Principles we find this qualified: And we may now also assume that forms of government may be estimated, not only by the actual wisdom or goodness of their administration, but likewise by the numbers who are made to participate in the service or government of their country, and by the diffusion of political deliberation and function to the greatest extent that is consistent with the wisdom of its administration.32

While Ferguson recognised that countries of the size of Britain could not practicably allow participation for all, he goes beyond this and is quite explicit that even were that to be possible it would be undesirable. Extending participation was strictly limited for Ferguson and applied only to those of the right social and educational background.33 As he put it in a letter to William Pulteney, the aim was to ensure that ‘our present gamblers for Power are made to feel that they cannot rise upon the shoulders of the Mob … [and to] … try whether a neutral Interest can be formed by men of Property and Family to Ward off the Evils with which the constitution is threatened in the Ishue of a contest between Mobs and Military Power’.34 This leads us to an important feature of Ferguson’s thinking that is often obscured by the civic republican reading: his acceptance of the inevitability of rank. As he puts it: ‘It is impossible, without violating the principles of human nature, to prevent some permanent distinction of ranks.’35 The problem is not rank: it is a misplaced sense of rank that confuses it solely with wealth or military service. Ferguson’s central political observation is that a successful political system must be set up in such a way as to ensure that the manner in which people get what they want – whether wealth, fame, status or preferment – is linked to public service, and functions in such a way that it does not favour any one route to that. Fleischacker goes on to suggest that one of the ways in which Ferguson differs from Adam Smith is that the latter sees education as a cure for the ills of the division of labour, for which the former

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 43 explicitly ‘rebukes’ Smith, seeing the lack of education among the poor as a different problem from their lack of virtue. 36 However, as we noted above, Ferguson’s conception of the participant element in society is not extended to the poor, but rather to the emerging middle classes; and it is the education of this class that can serve as a response to corruption. Ferguson believed in rank, and his Whiggism was one that saw the extension of participation in the business of society to the emerging middle class but no further. The poor were there to be managed, and to extend political participation to them was to invite mob rule and dangerous democracy.37 This was not a call for an aristocracy; rather, it was an admission that in the future Britain would be run by the middle class.38 Ferguson’s writings are littered with praise for the active life, where the vigour of human character reveals itself in trouble and contention.39 So how do we understand these calls for action when taken in the context of a view of politics that restricts the scope for political participation? The answer is to be found in Ferguson’s expansion of the idea of the public. In Fleischacker’s argument this has the potential to become an argument for increasing the realm of politics to encourage greater citizen commitment to society. But this seems wide of the mark for any beyond the small group that Ferguson was willing to admit to the franchise. Ferguson does not expand the public by increasing the political; he expands the public by understanding all of the business of life as social, and as an arena for public spirited action. The minister in the pulpit, the soldier in the camp, the professor in the university, the merchant in the market: all of these are engaged in the business of social life and all of them have a necessary role to play. The key for Ferguson is making sure that these individuals have the right motivations and the right sense of their duty to the rest of society. Each individual has a role to play and needs a sense of how to play it well. Ferguson was not in favour of a radical expansion of the franchise, nor was he in favour of a radical expansion of the areas of public life conducted through the representative institutions of parliament. The role of parliament was chiefly as a check on the revenue raising of the executive. Ferguson, like his peers, did not see it as a body primarily concerned with passing legislation to govern society. Who took part in politics and what was considered political was strictly limited. Instead, he wanted to ensure that those who found

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themselves in positions of influence in society had the right character to play their role in maintaining the system as a whole regardless of their role in the formal political process. Ferguson is best understood not as among the last of the old republicans but as among the first of the moderns, replacing the old analysis of corruption and its sources with a new one. The answer that he arrives at is similar in many ways to that given by Aristotle and Cicero: that we must shape character through education; but the education and the virtues promoted by Ferguson were designed for commercial modernity not the old republic.

Ferguson’s cure for corruption Ferguson’s reputation for pessimism about commercial society arises from a career-long concern with and recognition of the fragility of the British settlement, and the fragility of civilisation itself. Ferguson is aware that the response demanded by the tensions that lead to corruption cannot purely rely on the institutions of the British constitution. The fragile balance between the various elements of the constitution is what he is seeking to preserve. Whatever the answer might be, it cannot be backward-looking, as the problem is new. The answer for Athens or Rome or Florence cannot be the answer for Britain: size and the absence of slavery confirm that. Participation in public life cannot be like that in the idealised accounts of the ancient republics. Whatever Ferguson was going to come up with it was not going to be a nostalgic rearguard, looking for the re-creation of the virtuous citizens of old. Instead, it had to be a forward-looking plan that would work for Hanoverian Britain. Most of the civic republican readings of Ferguson stress his support for a citizen militia as one of his chief responses to the threat of corruption. While there is certainly some truth to this in the discussion of statesmen and warriors in the Essay and elsewhere, the militia was only one route to public participation. Ferguson’s defence of the militia in the pamphlet where he develops it in its most detailed form is very clear and it does not rely on the promotion of virtue. Ferguson’s arguments about the militia are militaryrather than virtue-based: he saw a militia as an effective military

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 45 response to an attack on the homeland.40 Moreover, Ferguson is absolutely clear that the rabble are to have no place in the militia.41 The militia is to have a system of rank based on the system of rank in society and open to ‘the most deserving of our people’.42 Ferguson’s argument is that a militia so constituted would form a part of the essential defence of the nation and serve as a means to keep the skills of the statesman and warrior spread through those ranks where they were necessary, a point he reinforces when he suggests that service in parliament should be conditional on militia service. A militia can certainly form part of the response to corruption, but it cannot on its own be enough. We can get further purchase on this if we consider Ferguson’s views on the vulgar. He applies the term not to the poor but to those with ‘false notions of rank’, especially those who mistake wealth for honour.43 The solution to the threat that corruption poses to the political order lies in ensuring that proper notions of rank and public duty are held by those in positions of influence in society. In previous republican writing the idea of the gentleman was that of the independent landowning citizen: that class, however divided by wealth, lived in legal equality, and the more naïvely idealistic of its proponents really saw each other as equals. But for Ferguson, being a gentleman was a question of character and upbringing, a matter of manners; and neither wealth nor political participation replaced this. Indeed, in the case of eighteenth-century Scotland, most of Ferguson’s gentlemanly peers were comfortably off but not wealthy, and would not have had a vote, never mind a place in parliament. They would, however, have had careers as lawyers, ministers, soldiers, civil servants and professors. Ferguson’s solution to the problem of corruption facing Britain, and the novelty of his analysis, was his realisation that Britain was going to be governed by the newly emerging middle classes. They would provide the personnel for the public institutions that would structure society, personnel who would have far greater scope to influence the direction of that society than any MP. If the constitution were to be preserved, the mob kept in its place and potential demagogues frustrated, then those active in Ferguson’s wider notion of public life had to have the right character and see their road to preferment as service to the existing order. It is here that Ferguson comes in. Ferguson’s position as Professor of Moral Philosophy

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gave him a unique position in the Scottish education system. Moral philosophy was a compulsory part of the generalist curriculum of the Scottish universities, and central to Ferguson’s sense of himself was his recognition that here was where he could play his part in putting a stop to corruption.44 I have argued elsewhere that the correct way to understand Ferguson’s sense of his intellectual project is to see it as an attempt to create a moral philosophy based on the solid evidence of moral science deployed as a moral pedagogy to form the education of a new public service middle class.45 The empirical study of civilisation that is so characteristic of the Scottish Enlightenment was to provide a secure basis for understanding the human social condition (and doing so meant the obvious observation that modern nations were not ancient republics). Once we have reliable knowledge of human nature and social practices in different types of society we will be in a position to create a normative moral philosophy for the sorts of people we actually are. The construction of a normative moral philosophy informed by the empirical study of human nature and society involves the recognition that this cannot be prescriptive for all situations. Instead, the professor must provide his students with good principles, strong character and a conceptual vocabulary for thinking through the problems they will come across in their particular circumstances. Ferguson’s aim, his answer to the problem of corruption, was to create a moral pedagogy that would see the character of the rising middle classes shaped to act in any situation. In short, Ferguson recognised that the future stability of Britain depended on this generalist education. His aim, to quote Richard Sher, was the ‘training of virtuous Christian gentlemen and good British citizens’.46 Throughout his writings Ferguson is clear that character is the true measure of rank. In the Analysis, character is defined as ‘the ground of estimation, and may raise or sink a man to the Rank in which they are qualified to act’.47 Behaviour is the ‘extended expression’ of character and humans are social creatures who pass judgement on each other.48 As an educator Ferguson saw it as his duty to diffuse ‘Public Spirit’, understood as: ‘1. A faithful discharge of any office intrusted for the public good’, and ‘2. A continual preference of public safety, and public good, to separate interests, or partial considerations.’49 Once this is understood we find that

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 47 Ferguson knew what he was doing in response to the danger of corruption, and that what he was doing was central to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was ideally placed to develop this strategy. His class size was over 100 at one point, and he held the chair for twenty-one years, so he participated in shaping the character of generations of gentlemen and gave them the moral language through which they would negotiate their careers.50 As these gentlemen spread out through the institutions of Scotland, Britain and the nascent empire, they took with them a very particular shared educational background. Moreover, Ferguson’s influence would reach down the generations and impact on the form of moral philosophy in a way that would shape the discipline and the Edinburgh chair well into the nineteenth century. The vision of a generalist education with a strong focus on practical moral judgement that came to dominate the Scottish idea of education in the teaching of those, such as Dugald Stewart, who would follow him married intellectual rigour with a strong moral compass and a predilection for gradual reform of existing institutions. Ferguson may not enjoy the fame among philosophers that is enjoyed by his friends Hume and Smith, but once we understand that he had a slightly different conception of his role then we see that he was extremely successful on his own terms. Ferguson’s project was the education of a virtuous and capable middle class to administer the new commercial society developing in Britain.51 It went beyond the military and political participation of civic republicanism because it involved the creation of a notion of public service that spread itself through all the business of social life. As he put it, society itself was the school and he was merely preparing his students for a life of moral decisions and moral learning. Morality is practical and such an education should recognise the need for discretion and learning by doing.52 We find a nice confirmation of the pedagogical focus of Ferguson’s teaching in a letter to his old professor sent by Sir John MacPherson. MacPherson was in the service of the East India Company, briefly rising to the position of Governor General following Warren Hastings’ resignation (1785–6). In the letter he suggests that his own life experience confirmed what he saw as the chief lessons of Ferguson’s pedagogy:

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1st That the pursuits of an active mind are its greatest happiness, when they are directed to good objects, which unite our own happiness with that of our friends and the general advantages of society. 2d I have likewise experienced, that he who has not been in contact with his fellow creatures knows but half of the human heart. But such are the necessary taxes of occupation, of business, and perhaps of life. 3d That all that rests with us individually, is to act our own parts to the best of our ability, and to endeavour to do good for its own sake, independent of events, disappointments, or sufferings.53

Given the later details of MacPherson’s career, both as a manager of Indian finances and as an MP unseated for bribery (1788), we might wonder how successful Ferguson’s system was in ensuring his students were prepared for a virtuous life. But, then again, as we noted above, Ferguson was nothing if not comfortably adept at recognising the reality of the politics of place and sinecure that dominated eighteenth-century Britain, and he would have recognised the successes of his student in this regard. Moreover, Ferguson’s pedagogical legacy was the development of an ethos of public service that would continue to evolve in the hands of his successors in the Edinburgh chair, and come to form the basis of the reforming nineteenth-century Whiggism centred on the Edinburgh Review.

Conclusion To be clear, then, Adam Ferguson was a theorist of modern corruption not Old Corruption. In his hands the language of republicanism is transformed for the new reality of Hanoverian Britain. Ferguson was among the first to see that the solution to the problems of the developing British polity was the creation of a group of virtuous generalists drawn from the emerging middle classes. Such a group, properly educated, would manage the public life of the nation, exerting their personal talents for moderate financial recompense, but ample honour and esteem. For such men public honour and satisfaction come from a job well done. This group was not a static class based on birth or wealth, but rather one open to the talented and educated. Donald Winch has described this as part of the ‘system of the North’, typified by those educated under Dugald Stewart, including Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Francis Horne and Sydney Smith.54

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 49 The public service that provides the route to honour is not necessarily ‘politics’. This is not the active citizen of the ancient republic. It is a call for the incorporation of the new middle-class professions and their activities into the sense of the public. Ferguson is among the first to realise that there is a political function to the rise of the non-political and that, while institutionalised politics played a restricted role in the public life of eighteenth-century Britain, all of those who embarked on ‘respectable public careers’ in the professions could play a part in preserving and reforming the system. 55 The character that they acquired from their education allowed them to take their place and play their part. As Winch notes, citing Walter Bagehot, Edinburgh Whiggism is ‘not a creed, it is a character’.56 Ferguson’s students were able to act well in whatever circumstances they found themselves and to drive forward reform precisely because they were not wedded to an ideology. From the moral philosophy chair at Edinburgh, Ferguson created a school for the education of the reformers who would carry forward the agenda that transformed the political understanding of corruption in Britain. What was the norm in public life when Ferguson made his career would come to be viewed as immoral and something to be remedied by nineteenth-century reformers; but the character of their reforms was gradualist and not revolutionary, and the legacy of Ferguson’s educational philosophy in Edinburgh surely played a role in shaping that.

Notes  1 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Cambridge paradigms and Scottish philosophers: a study of the relations between the civic humanist and civil jurisprudential interpretations of eighteenth-century thought’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 235–52.  2 J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985); R. B. Sher, ‘Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and the Problem of National Defence’, Journal of Modern History, 61:2 (1989), 240–68; D. Allan, Adam Ferguson (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Scottish and Irish Studies, 2006).

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  3 H. Mizuta, ‘Two Adams in the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson on Progress’, Studies in Voltaire, 191 (1981), 182–99.  4 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 499.  5 See inter alia D. Forbes, ‘Introduction’, in A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767], ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. xii–xli; M. Geuna, ‘Republicanism and commercial society in the Scottish Enlightenment: the case of Adam Ferguson’, in M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2, pp. 177–95; and, F. Oz-Salzberger ‘Introduction’, in A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767], ed. F. Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).   6 A point also made in B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).  7 J. Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Hont and Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, pp. 137–78.   8 For contrasting views of the significance of Ferguson’s Highland origins see M. Fry, ‘Ferguson the Highlander’, in E. Heath and V. Merolle (eds), Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 9–24 and J. D. Brewer, ‘Putting Adam Ferguson in His Place’, British Journal of Sociology, 58:1 (2007), 105–22.  9 A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 10 C. Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 11 A. Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic [1783] (New York: J. C. Derby, 1856); Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1756). For his views on ancient Rome see I. McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 12 A. Ferguson, Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1766); Institutes of Moral Philosophy [1769] (London: Routledge, 1994); Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols [1792] (New York: AMS Press, 1973). 13 A. Ferguson, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr Price (London: T. Cadell, 1776). 14 Ferguson, Essay [1767] (1995), p. 139. 15 Ferguson to Smith, 18 April 1776. E. Campbell Mossner and I. Simpson Ross (eds), The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 193–4.

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Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 51 16 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 17 J. B. Fagg, ‘Introduction’, in V. Merolle (ed.), The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, 2 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 1, pp. xx–cxvii. For details of his attempts to advance his sons’ careers see pp. lxxxviii–xcv. 18 For a discussion on patronage in eighteenth-century Scottish universities see R. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 19 Ferguson, Essay [1767] (1995), pp. 206, 237, 238. 20 Ibid., p. 182. 21 For example, ibid., pp. 12, 137–8. 22 Compare ibid., pp. 152–5 and D. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary [1758], ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 383. 23 Ferguson, Essay [1767] (1995), p. 234. 24 Ibid., p. 241. Ferguson’s point is exactly the same as that made by Hume in his attack on vicious luxury. Hume, Essays, p. 279. 25 The locutions ‘Statesmen’ and ‘Warriors’ pervade Ferguson’s writings. For example, Essay [1767] (1995), pp. 84, 180, 217; Roman Republic, pp. 127, 450; Principles, 2, p. 334. 26 Ferguson’s account of the fall of the Republic is deeply influenced by Montesquieu’s, but his political views are also shaped by Montesquieu’s more general methodological approach and his discussion of the balanced nature of the British constitution. For analysis of Ferguson’s debt to Montesquieu see A. Broadie, Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with France (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2012). 27 A. Ferguson, The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. V. Merolle (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006). 28 A. Ferguson, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s First Highland Regiment of Foot (London: A. Miller, 1746). 29 Ferguson, Principles, 1, p. 262. 30 S. Fleischacker, ‘“Dismembering the Human Character”: Adam Ferguson’s Conception of Corruption’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 35:2 (2018), 54–72. 31 Ferguson, Essay [1767] (1995), p. 225. 32 Ferguson, Principles, 2, p. 509. 33 For further discussion see Smith, Adam Ferguson, pp. 149–86. 34 Merolle (ed.), Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, 1, p. 88. 35 Ferguson, Principles, 2, p. 463.

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36 Fleischacker, ‘“Dismembering the Human Character”’, p. 67. 37 I depart slightly here from the reading of Iain McDaniel, who argues that Ferguson saw the lesson of Rome being the need for a military aristocracy to create a ‘military-civil union and the forging of a publicservice elite’ because I think that Ferguson has something much wider than this in mind. McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, p. 176. 38 Two important recent articles have helped to clarify Ferguson’s hostility to democracy and his ambivalence about the benefits of factional disputes: Y. Elazar, ‘Adam Ferguson on Modern Liberty and the Absurdity of Democracy’, History of Political Thought, 35:4 (2014), 768–87 and M. Skjönsberg, ‘Adam Ferguson on Partisanship, Party Conflict, and Popular Participation’, Modern Intellectual History, 16:1 (2019), 1–28. 39 C. Smith, ‘Ferguson and the active genius of mankind’, in E. Heath and V. Merolle (eds), Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), pp. 157–70. 40 D. Raynor, ‘Ferguson’s reflections previous to the establishment of a militia’, in Heath and Merolle (eds), Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, pp. 65–72. 41 Ferguson, Militia, p. 34. 42 Ibid., p. 53. 43 Ferguson, Principles, 2, p. 100. 44 See the celebrated discussion by G. Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, revised edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 45 Smith, Adam Ferguson. 46 For a discussion of Ferguson’s pedagogy in the context of eighteenthcentury Scottish universities see R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), pp. 166–8, 314 and N. Phillipson, ‘The pursuit of virtue in Scottish university education’, in N. Phillipson (ed.), Universities, Society and the Future (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), pp. 87–109. 47 Ferguson, Analysis, p. 39. 48 Ibid. 49 Ferguson, Institutes, p. 251. 50 Sher, Church and University, p. 35. 51 For a recent discussion of Ferguson’s educational conception of philosophy see G. Graham, ‘Adam Ferguson as a Moral Philosopher’, Philosophy, 88:4 (2013), 511–25. 52 T. Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

Public spirit and corruption in the Scottish Enlightenment 53

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53 Merolle (ed.), Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, 2, p. 241. 54 S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 1. 55 D. Kettler, Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2005), p. 7. 56 Collini, Winch and Burrow, Noble Science, p. 49.

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From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’: corruption and the police, c. 1750–1910 Francis Dodsworth

The distinction between the conduct of a handful of malign, ­negligent individuals, on the one hand, and deeper, more systemic defects of professional culture and organisation, on the other, has formed one of the dominant means of posing the problem of police corruption and malpractice for a century and more. Today, the most common metaphor used to express this distinction is that of ‘bad’ or ‘rotten apples’ versus ‘a diseased orchard’ or ‘system’.1 Witnesses to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, for instance, which reported in 1999, used precisely this language when appraising the extent of racism within the police; and countless newspaper opinion pieces in recent years have relied on the same tropes when commenting on cases of corruption and abuses of power.2 But though these and kindred images (such as ‘black sheep’) have not always been drawn upon, the same basic question has been posed time and again since the late nineteenth century: is the misconduct in question confined to a few errant officers, or is it more widespread and systemic? Historians have been especially concerned to recover the political and institutional uses of this way of understanding corruption. A notable instance is Clive Emsley’s analysis of the Goddard affair of 1929, which centred on Sergeant Goddard of the Metropolitan Police’s ‘C’ Division and the receipt of bribes from Soho nightclub owners. As Emsley argues, in this case the trope of the ‘bad apple’ helped to absolve the force of institutional failings, displacing responsibility on to aberrant individuals – Goddard himself, ‘unsavoury foreigners’ and ‘women of doubtful reputation’ – despite there being clear evidence of a wider culture of misconduct.3 John Carter Wood has developed this kind of analysis further, focusing on the party politics of the Goddard affair, as well as other scandals

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From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’

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at the time that involved perjury and the use of excessive force. Crudely, whereas the Conservative Party and Conservative-­ supporting newspapers tended to heap blame on individual officers, those to the political left were much more inclined to point to ‘systemic failings’ and urge wide-ranging reforms. In the event the Labour Party did little to reform the police when in government between 1929 and 1931. Yet, as Chris Williams has argued, later in the century significant reforms did follow from these kinds of systemic diagnoses.4 In particular, two high-profile corruption scandals in Brighton and Nottingham during the late 1950s were seized upon by Conservative ministers and Home Office officials as symptoms of a deeper organisational malaise. As Williams puts it, they were used as a ‘wedge’ to attack the status quo, justify the formation of a royal commission and, ultimately, pass the 1964 Police Act. The act was one of the most significant of the twentieth century, drastically diminishing the oversight powers of local watch committees and triggering a major reorganisation of existing borough and county forces. This work has been important in qualifying the standard account of the rise and fall of police legitimacy in Britain, which tends to see the mid-twentieth century as a high point in public support for the police, before a dramatic loss of confidence in the wake of the great corruption scandals of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably those surrounding the Obscene Publications Squad and the Flying Squad.5 Evidently the story of police probity and public trust is much more uneven than this. There has been much less reflection, however, on the historical novelty of this way of framing the problem of police corruption, and why, when and how it came into being as a crucial means of arguing for or against reform. Indeed, histories of nineteenth-century policing have similarly neglected the subject, touching on it only incidentally. Yet it hardly needs stating that conceptions of ‘corruption’ are profoundly historical; and in any case, as work on the late eighteenth century suggests, the problem of corruption has long been central to discussions about policing, forming a key reference point during the period when the modern police idea first took shape as a system for the ‘mechanisation’ of virtue.6 How, then, if at all, did the problem of ‘corruption’ change in the context of policing as it underwent significant transformations – where might we locate the roots of our present ways of posing the problem?

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The chapter explores this subject from the emergence of the first systematic attempts to reform policing in the 1750s, through to the birth and institutionalisation of the ‘new police’ during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. As we shall see, central to this process of reform was the argument that new forms of organisational ‘system’ would overcome the corruption and inefficiency of what became known as the ‘old police’, and it is here where we can discern the roots of our contemporary forms of critique.7 Yet, at this point, the problem was still entangled with inherited, more degenerative conceptions of corruption. Only with the advent of the ‘new police’ from the 1830s did the form of debate change decisively, coming to focus instead on the potentially corrupting aspects of institutionalisation itself and the effectiveness of organisational controls for preventing it. Ultimately, as a number of scandals from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods suggest, though the problem of corruption was now posed in narrower, office-based terms, it could appear just as entrenched and opaque as it had been under the ‘old police’.

Corruption and the reform of the ‘old police’ ‘Corruption’ was central to the debates about police reform which began in the 1750s and that led eventually, amid much resistance, to the formation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 and the reform of borough and county forces in the following decades. Broadly speaking, ‘corruption’ had a dual, and often overlapping, resonance at this juncture.8 In the first place, ‘corruption’ was mobilised as an organic metaphor for widespread moral degeneration, social change and tyrannical government, and was part of a variety of arguments about the decay of the ‘ancient’ or ‘mixed constitution’ and its perversion through excessive government patronage and new forms of commerce. In the second, it referred to the more specific, institutional and office-based problem of individual malpractice, bribery and embezzlement. Crucially, the organisational reform of policing was put forward by a number of reformers as a solution to both of these problems; but it was also, as we shall see, contested in these terms as well. The framing of the body politic as corrupted by ‘luxury’ and executive political manipulation and ‘tyranny’ is, of course, one of

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the most prominent features of political argument in the eighteenth century, and has been the subject of considerable historiographical debate.9 In general, the critical discourse of ‘virtue and commerce’ is identified with the Country Whig analyses of the early eighteenthcentury Court Whig governments, particularly their personal profit from office-holding and their use of patronage to control parliament. Both of these practices were stigmatised as ‘corrupt’, in all senses of the term, drawing eclectically on classical and Christian sources. From the mid-century, however, Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate from 1748 until 1754, creatively reconfigured these understandings of corruption in support of a reformed vision of policing: the formation of a group of ‘thief-takers’ directed by himself from his Bow Street magistrate’s office.10 His key intervention, as outlined in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), was to locate the sources of the ‘corruption’ of the body politic not in the exercise of executive power and patronage, but in the changing ‘Manners, Habits and Customs of the people’ that derived from ‘Trade’ and ‘Commerce’.11 Quoting Cicero and Juvenal, he argued that the central cause of crime was ‘the vast Torrent of Luxury which of late Years hath poured itself into this Nation’.12 In particular, he located it in the desire of the ‘Commonalty’ to ape the habits of their ‘Betters’ and the vice and crime required to support this new aspiration, and in the corresponding neglect by these ‘Betters’ of their supervisory duties and pastoral obligations over those beneath them. Fielding’s redefinition of the problem aimed to legitimise his quest for government patronage and preferment for his new idea. And it paid off: his thief-takers were soon supported by an annual government grant and they have been identified as England’s first detective force.13 After Fielding’s death, in 1754, his half-brother, John, developed the force that became known as the Bow Street Runners, building up significant expertise in detection, compiling the first set of criminal records in London, and later adding foot and mounted patrols for the deterrence of highwaymen and footpads.14 The result was a new body of paid, semi-official thief-takers and the establishment of Bow Street magistrate’s office as the centre of detection and day-to-day justice in Middlesex and Westminster. What some historians present as the first shoots of modern police reform thus turned upon a novel deployment of

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existing understandings of corruption, one where payment for the more efficient provision of justice and policing was seen as a solution to the problem of widespread moral decay. The Fieldings’ scheme, however, although admired by some, was also contested. The principal problem was that metropolitan magistrates and thief-takers were, and would remain, the target of accusations of corruption in the more narrow sense of personal misconduct in office. So-called ‘trading justices’ – justices of the peace, or magistrates, who made a living from their role through the fees and rewards that were available as incentives in the criminal justice system – were deemed especially problematic. The very term suggested the pursuit of self-interest over the public good.15 Henry Fielding’s predecessor at Bow Street, Sir Thomas De Veil, is supposed to have boasted he made £1,000 a year from his role and he seems to have gained some notoriety for his expensive lifestyle and pursuit of political and personal connections.16 At the same time, following the much publicised crimes of Jonathan Wild in the 1720s and the McDaniel gang in the 1750s, thief-taking developed a bad reputation. Both Wild and McDaniel presented themselves as thief-takers acting in the public interest, while simultaneously running the criminal gangs responsible for many of the offences which they later claimed to have discovered.17 The Fieldings thus had to work hard to counter the corrupt image of these agents and present their own officers as a force for the public good. In London, a parliamentary act of 1792 went some way towards advancing reform and enhancing the reputation of thief-taking and the administration of justice. The Middlesex Justices Act, as it was known, created seven police offices along the lines of the Bow Street office developed by the Fieldings, each home to a set of salaried constables and clerks and three salaried, ‘stipendiary’ magistrates, thereby putting an end to trading justices. Yet, both within and beyond London, the question of reforming the police remained urgent, not least because of growing urbanisation and what was felt to be rising levels of crime; and ‘corruption’, understood in both senses outlined above, continued to feature in the debates. On the one hand, reformed policing continued to be viewed as a means of arresting the ‘corruption of morals’ that seemed to accompany the growth of urban-industrial society. This dovetailed with the outlook and energies of an increasingly strident evangelical lobby; and

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though evangelicals were often critical of policing for being all too lax in this respect, it was taken for granted that the police had a role to play in supressing a multitude of ‘vices’, especially gambling, drinking and prostitution, among the poor.18 On the other hand, established forms of parish-based policing continued to attract criticism on account of the venality of constables and watchmen, and abuses such as profiting from crimes and taking payments to overlook offences. Developing the organisational premise that the Fieldings had first articulated and put into effect, this criticism pored ever more intensely over the local administration of justice, the local patronage relations that oversaw the appointment of watchmen and constables, and practical matters such as pay and mechanisms of oversight. As before, policing in London was subject to especially intense scrutiny, including by MPs and select committees. A succession of inquiries in 1818, 1822 and 1828 detailed a suite of common corrupt offences, chief among them the payment of ‘hush money’ by publicans and keepers of ‘disorderly houses’ (brothels).19 At the same time, these offences were presented as part of a broader set of organisational failures, such as low or non-existent pay, lack of accountability, confused lines of communication and the recruitment of poor calibre candidates. Outside London, as David Churchill has suggested, a similar ‘reforming impulse’ presided over the policing of major provincial cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, and they too were subject to searching critiques that associated corruption with a variety of organisational defects.20 In Manchester, for instance, where a night watch had been formed in 1792 under the auspices of a new Police Commission, critics included councillors, clergymen and local newspapers. In 1826, the journalist and founder of the Manchester Guardian, Jeremiah Garnett, linked the corruption of some watchmen to the cosy relations they enjoyed with the commissioners. He noted that ‘the same individuals were always placed on the same rounds, so that they were accessible to corruption … [and] the greatest facilities were afforded them for conniving at robberies’. The core problem was the lack of proper mechanisms of accountability. In theory, the commissioners were to directly supervise the men in their district. In practice, they rarely did, and if a watchman knew a disciplinary case was pending at one of the

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regular Friday night meetings of commissioners, he would try to ensure that sympathetic commissioners would attend and out-vote those more actively engaged in maintaining discipline. ‘From these defective modes of inspecting and controlling the watchmen, many evils and much remiss conduct might a priori be expected.’21 As has been richly documented, the 1830s through to the 1850s witnessed further scrutiny of this sort – in the 1830s alone, a select committee on the new Metropolitan Police force (Met) (1834) and royal commissions on municipal corporations (1833–5) and county policing (1836–9) – and constituted another step towards the advent of the ‘new police’ on a national scale.22 We return below to the key features of the culture of policing that had begun to emerge by the 1860s. The point for the moment is that the problem of ‘corruption’ continued to function as a crucial, if contested, point of reference in the complex politics that developed around police reform during these crucial and fractious decades. Crudely, stemming from an expansive liberal ethos of reform, born of the liberal Toryism of the 1820s and the Whiggish liberalism of the 1830s, advocates of police reorganisation increasingly positioned themselves as part of a broader critique of inherited institutions that were at once inefficient, arbitrary, unaccountable and corrupt.23 Although the term had been used before, there was a novel emphasis on ‘system’ and in two senses especially: the systemic (i.e. widespread, deep-rooted) nature of the problems with the ‘old’ culture of policing, as it was now distinguished, and the systematic (i.e. efficient, uniform) ambitions of the ‘new’.24 It was not just leading advocates of police reform, such as Robert Peel and Edwin Chadwick, who spoke of ‘systems’ in this respect.25 So did local agents: in 1836, Whig councillors in Leeds resolved to reform their day and night watches ‘on the System of the Metropolitan Police’, which ‘was the best as regards Economy and Utility’.26 Even radicals of a more utilitarian bent shared this view. A notable instance is John Wade, author of the great Black Book, who published a lengthy tract in 1829 which collated and commented upon masses of damning evidence gathered elsewhere. ‘The existing system is both corrupt and inefficient’, he declared, urging the kind of ‘uniform’, ‘consolidated’ organisation that Peel would introduce.27 Significantly, the logic of this enlarged, systemic diagnosis meant that opponents were readily dismissed as part of the problem

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and, more particularly, as having a vested interest in a system which, as such, encompassed a general set of behavioural norms and expectations. As the pro-reform Observer noted in 1829, reporting on the recent Metropolitan Police Act, the new measures ‘are very naturally raising an outcry among that numerous class of persons who, in one way or another, profited by the abuses which rendered the Metropolis, as to its day and night police, almost the worst regulated town in the civilised world’. Who, the paper asked, reading the reports of police activity, would not conclude that ‘the whole system, especially of the night-watch, was radically wrong?’28 Both the problem and the solution to police corruption were thus cast in organisational, systemic terms, reducing questions of individual probity to those of institutional design and discipline. Yet police reform remained vulnerable to the charge of ‘corruption’, and these same decades also witnessed a remarkable, if distinctive, resurgence of the degenerative critique that had been used to justify police reform in the first place, dating back to the Fieldings. It was articulated by a varied constituency, comprising working-class radicals, urban ratepayers and elements of Tory opinion, and it turned on a series of very real objections. Among them were that reform entailed wresting control over policing from parishes and the immediate oversight of local residents; that the new police required higher local taxes; and that the police would be used to quell popular dissent, much as local militias had in earlier decades. As Robert Storch long ago argued, all of these elements were pressed into a critique which meant that the new police were seen by some as an intrinsically political imposition, part of a wider structure of oppression and corruption, and a pervasive process of constitutional decay.29 This too included reference to ‘systems’, making for a moment of stark polarisation: if, for reformers, the old police was systemically corrupt, for opponents the same was true of the new. In particular, opponents developed the political and constitutional aspects of degenerative arguments, whereby the new police were seen as agents of ‘tyranny’ and ‘jobbery’, intent on repressing the ancient liberties of ‘freeborn Englishmen’. Inherited fears of the corrupting effects of standing armies and an over-mighty executive loomed large. The work of the radical lawyer Joshua Toulmin Smith in the 1840s and 1850s represents, arguably, the most considered instance of this critique. For Smith, the new police, like the new

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poor law and sanitary reform, was a part of a tide of Whig-led measures of ‘centralization’ that stripped Englishmen of their ancient liberties and stuffed government with salaried ‘functionaries’ and corrupt ‘jobbers’ (Chadwick was a particular figure of hate).30 This, however, was but a more refined manifestation of a critique that had been mounted since 1829 and that had intensified with the ambitions of reform, as it moved on to boroughs and then counties, as well as the ambitions (and drama) of radical agitation. ‘Despotism’ was frequently charged, amid suggestions the new police amounted to a ‘spy-system’, akin to the militarised gens d’arme of France, and cynical speculation that reform was born of a desire to line the pockets of ministers and officials. As one metropolitan vestryman put in 1830, having argued that ‘the parishes ought to be left free to appoint their own police’: ‘The new system … [is] a rank job, got up for no other purpose than to throw additional patronage into the hands of government, and afford places and pensions to the rotten borough mongers.’31 The same sentiments were voiced by trade unionists and Chartists, many of whom were victims of police brutality and espionage. The rhetoric was striking. In 1839, the leading radical daily, the Northern Star, quoted in full an editorial in the Tory-supporting Morning Herald, which feared that the reform of rural policing would introduce the ‘root of tyranny … into the soil of ancient freedom, and its pestilent branches may cover with its noxious shade a land consecrated by the immortal triumphs of constitutional principle’.32

Corruption and the ‘new police’ The strength and popularity of this critique partly explains why reform proceeded in such a sluggish and fragmentary fashion beyond London. Ultimately, however, by the 1860s, following the 1856 County and Borough Police Act, the new police was a national institutional reality. It was characterised by a culture of organisation which, if not entirely novel, was strikingly more hierarchical, disciplined and professional compared to the old.33 Various elements of the new system broke with those of the old that were seen, by reformers at least, to have bred corruption. New forms of institutional oversight were instituted, displacing the oligarchic,

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parochial patronage that had prevailed earlier. The Met was directly responsible to the Home Office, county forces to county magistrates (and, after 1888, elected councillors) and borough forces to ‘watch committees’ composed of elected councillors. From 1856, county and borough forces were subject to annual inspections by Home Office officials tasked with assessing their ‘efficiency’. Meanwhile, within local forces, a battery of disciplinary mechanisms and organisational principles was introduced to secure greater accountability and probity and, ultimately, crime-preventing proficiency on the part of individual officers. Among these were uniform pay; a partitioned structure of policing areas into divisions, sections and beats; and a hierarchy of inspectors, sergeants and constables under a superintendent in each division, and a chief constable in each force (or chief commissioner for the Met). Archiving was critical. Constables, for instance, were expected to maintain notebooks relating to their work; files were kept by superiors relating to performance and levels of diligence.34 Thus, as the number of police officers increased – from roughly 20,000 in England and Wales in 1860 to over 54,000 by 1910 – so policing became more bureaucratic and rooted in official paperwork, routine inspections and ad hoc inquiries, all of which, at least in theory, secured both public accountability and disciplinary efficiency. The problem of corruption was refashioned accordingly and became principally one of organisational culture and the abuse of office, where questions regarding the extent of corruption – quite how confined or not it was to a few individuals – were intimately bound up with questions regarding the institutional dynamics of the police, including its ability to police itself. As suggested above, key aspects of this form of critique were clearly apparent before. Yet if the problem was by no means reinvented around mid-century, it was significantly reconfigured, and in two respects especially. First, the links between policing and ‘corruption’ conceived in more expansive, degenerative terms became more and more tenuous. Although the police continued to be viewed by evangelicals as key, if unreliable, allies in the battle for ‘social purity’, the charge of ‘corruption’ in this context lost much of its earlier theological significance. Campaigns against ‘sins’ such as gambling and drinking were secularised, as Dominic Erdozain has argued, as evangelicals intensified their efforts but in the process came to resemble other,

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entirely worldly agents of social reform, the police included.35 Likewise, earlier charges that the new police were, by their very nature, a political menace, one that threatened constitutional decay and upheaval, faded following the collapse of the radical platform in the 1850s.36 Instead, as the legitimacy of the new police per se was gradually, if sometimes grudgingly, accepted on a popular level, opposition came to focus on the abuse of particular powers, especially those of arrest and surveillance. MPs and ministers were occasionally exercised by abuses of this sort, but they also attracted the attention of pressure groups such as the Personal Rights Association, established in 1871.37 Second, as degenerative conceptions of corruption waned, new elements were added to the formulation of the problem in organisational terms. In particular, the police were attributed with vested, institutional interests of their own. The upshot was that the public was not always assured that the police would acknowledge or act upon systemic failings, given the reputational damage that would ensue and all the uncomfortable work (such as dismissals and reorganisations) that might be required to root out the problem. This built on earlier accusations of ‘jobbery’, but it also reflected the development of the police as a complex institutional entity. Not only did it employ thousands of salaried staff, endowed with the same professional identity; its inner, day-to-day workings, as with any large-scale organisation, were entirely obscure to the outside world, despite the requirements of public accountability. To be sure, the police were not averse to acting on individual cases of corruption and other forms of misconduct (such as drunkenness and assault). Dismissals were made on these grounds and the police were unable to deny instances of misconduct when they became a matter of public record, as they frequently did. During the period 1842 to 1852, for instance, almost 1,000 Met officers were prosecuted for misconduct, resulting in over 240 convictions (including a handful for bribery); and such cases were often covered in the local press. Similarly, in 1855 and 1887, following large public demonstrations in London, successful and much publicised prosecutions were brought against a handful of Met officers for the use of excessive force.38 Nonetheless, when a case of corruption was revealed, or alleged, a common set of questions was raised not just about the true extent of the problem and what should be done about it, but

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also about the rigour and fairness of any investigations and subsequent actions. Public suspicions that the police or those connected with them were not being entirely honest, or might not act with sufficient force to put things right, were a constitutive part of how the problem of corruption was now posed. The combination of these concerns is amply manifest in the biggest police corruption scandal of the time, the ‘turf fraud scandal’ of 1877.39 It centred on the Detective Branch of the Met, which had been established in 1842, replacing the Bow Street Runners. It began with the discovery that a criminal gang had set up an elaborate fraud swindling considerable sums of money from horse-racing punters, including one Madame De Goncourt of a sizeable £10,000. During the course of the investigation it was noticed that the gang were repeatedly able to avoid arrest while on the run, and that once they had finally been arrested they had planned their escape with the aid of the ground plans of the police court where they were held. All of this suggested inside assistance, and a formal prosecution began in July, which eventually found that three long-serving officers plus an accomplice were guilty of receiving bribes and perverting the course of justice. The case was closely followed by the public from the start. The highly charged constitutional rhetoric of the 1830s and 1840s was entirely absent, even in radical papers.40 Indeed, the police were praised for seeking to prosecute the offenders; and although there was considerable disappointment that the guilty parties could not be given harsher sentences, no one called for the abolition of the detective branch. As The Times put it, for all the damage that had been done, it was unquestionable that ‘a detective department is a necessary adjunct to every modern police system’.41 Nonetheless, the outrage was intense and it was frequently suggested that the case only confirmed the worst suspicions of the public that corruption was widespread. Even as the court case began, the Observer, echoing other newspapers, suggested that it was ‘the police force as a whole that is on trial’, before invoking a slew of minor corruption cases that had arisen in recent years. It was not unreasonable to conclude that ‘the force as a whole is demoralised and untrustworthy’.42 Once the verdicts were reached the assessments were just as brutal – the Standard spoke of a ‘widely-spread disease’ and wondered how far the corruption went – and although the Met had

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already agreed to an inquiry, it was feared that the force would carry on as before.43 Some, like Lloyd’s Weekly, urged ‘thorough reform’ of both the Met and provincial forces; others, more modestly, urged that it was time to pay detectives better salaries so they would be less open to bribery.44 Most agreed, however, that the detective department should be subject to substantive reform: or as the Daily Telegraph put it, that the ‘inquiry into the existing condition and organisation of the Metropolitan Police may lead to that thorough and radical reform of Scotland-yard which, it is obvious, has long been needed’.45 In the event, significant reforms were undertaken, and in the following April the department was replaced with a new Central Investigation Department (CID), headed by a Director of Criminal Investigations, who reported directly to the Home Secretary. Other cases or allegations of corruption were resolved much less decisively. These could be relatively minor affairs. In 1887, during a Commons debate on the wrongful arrest of women by Met officers, which had been prompted by complaints from the Personal Rights Association, the Liberal Unionist MP William Caine alleged that ‘systematic blackmail’ was commonly practised.46 He stated that he had spoken to thirty women on Clapham Common who had told him that it was routine practice for officers to demand a nightly payment of sixpence so they could solicit clients. Developing his claims in the Pall Mall Gazette a few days later, he suggested it was ‘simply ridiculous for the Home Secretary and the police to deny that this system of black mailing prevails’.47 It was sufficiently stinging to prompt the Chief Commissioner of the Met, Charles Warren, to order an internal inquiry by the Assistant Commissioner of CID. Some six months later it was announced that the inquiry had found not a ‘tittle of proof’ in the allegations, and it came with a criticism of Caine for failing to provide any evidence when invited to do so.48 Yet, as Caine responded publicly in The Times, he had not been permitted to see the contents of the inquiry (which he dismissed as ‘an inquiry conducted by the police of others within the same force’); and it was, in any case, incredibly difficult to obtain evidence against the police from women who were entirely at their mercy.49 He thus refused to retract the allegations, noting only that the policing of the Common had improved in recent months – and that was the end of the matter.

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There were, however, more significant instances where matters were brought to a close in a messy and contested fashion. The most notable concerns the Manchester police force and its watch committee, and constitutes the biggest provincial scandal of the late Victorian period.50 At the centre of the affair, which erupted in 1897, was Superintendent Bannister, who had command of the city’s ‘D’ division, comprising more than 200 men. He was promoted to the role in 1882 at the direction of the watch committee and against the express wishes of the new Chief Constable, Malcolm Wood. It became, so it was later suggested, an open secret that Bannister had friendly relations with the owners of the disorderly houses and pubs in his division and, with the help of senior colleagues and officers, protected them from prosecution. An earlier inquiry by the watch committee in 1893 only reprimanded Bannister, despite the Chief Constable and some members of the committee urging his dismissal; but by 1896 rumours about his behaviour and that of colleagues were once more rampant, and this time, following much acrimony on the watch committee, it was agreed that the council would ask the Home Office to convene a judge-led inquiry to examine Bannister’s behaviour. Bannister quickly resigned, but the inquiry, which reported in July, received a mass of damning evidence, indicating, among other things, Bannister’s ability to manipulate junior colleagues, widespread ill discipline within the division, an all too aloof Chief Constable and lax oversight on the part of the watch committee, some of whom had interests in the drink trade. Ultimately, the consequences were far-reaching. Wood resigned; almost forty members of ‘D’ division either resigned or were dismissed; and the composition of the watch committee changed significantly. Yet none of this was at the behest or prodding of the official report, which explicitly exonerated both the Chief Constable and the watch committee, and suggested that, in general, ‘D’ division was in a ‘sound condition’. Instead, Bannister was presented as the source of all the corruption. ‘There can be no doubt,’ it concluded, ‘the fact of the superintendent, having turned out to be a thoroughly bad and unscrupulous man, has been the cause of all the trouble.’51 What prompted the personnel changes was the outraged civic reaction, which was clearly based on a more systemic reading of the evidence, most of all that the watch committee had been complicit. On the one hand, the council effectively declared no

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confidence in the committee by declining its response to the inquiry, pending the formation of a new committee after upcoming municipal elections in November (in which the scandal featured heavily).52 On the other, there was considerable pressure from without, as ratepayers voiced their objections. In September, one of many public meetings on the scandal formally resolved that the official report, contrary to its own conclusions, ‘establishes the fact that there has been serious mismanagement of the police force, that the responsibility for this mismanagement rests with the [watch] committee’, and that the committee had failed to ‘appreciate the gravity of its position, and arouses apprehension in the public mind of further and unrevealed irregularities’.53 To be sure, in addition to the sackings and resignations, modest organisational changes were made; but evidently the reputational damage was immense, and the bungled response did not entirely extinguish public concerns about the integrity of the police and its overall management. Different again was a royal commission inquiry into the Met’s policing of ‘drunkenness, disorder and solicitation’, which began in 1906.54 The immediate cause was two controversial arrests that had prompted some difficult parliamentary questions for the Home Secretary; but it was also felt that something needed to be done to address more general concerns and the increasingly critical scrutiny exercised by the press and members of the public, notably the Police and Public Vigilance Society. Formed in 1902, the Society was run by the radical activist James Timewell and was designed to publicise police misconduct and advise private complainants. Timewell himself published pamphlets detailing instances of abuses, the first of which had appeared in 1898.55 The royal commission reported in 1908, having heard from almost 300 witnesses, and offered general commentary and statistics regarding police conduct and complaints, as well as specific comments relating to the nineteen cases (out of a possible 500 or so) it had examined in detail. In conclusion, the report conceded that ‘occasionally constables have been guilty of misconduct’, but this, it suggested, was inevitable, given a force of 17,000 officers, and it was ‘unreasonable’ to expect otherwise. Overall, it had ‘no hesitation’ in stating that ‘the Metropolitan Police force, as a whole, discharge their duties with … honesty, discretion and efficiency’.56 It was a line that was developed throughout the report, including in relation to

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corrupt practices. It found no evidence of ‘any widespread and systematic bribery of the Police by prostitutes in any part of London’, suggesting it was limited to only ‘isolated individuals’ and ‘infrequent cases’. Precisely the same was said of bribery by bookmakers: though some officers may have been guilty of this, there was no evidence it had been ‘carried on according to any organised system’.57 The dominant reaction was to welcome the report as an authoritative rebuke to those who had questioned the integrity of the police. ‘The Force Vindicated’ was the headline in The Times.58 Speaking in the Commons, the Home Secretary hailed ‘the careful and decisive report’, calling it ‘a splendid tribute’ to the Metropolitan Police.59 Not everyone, however, swallowed the official line that the problems were isolated instances, rather than systemic and organisational. In two pamphlets published in 1909 and 1911 – one of which was subtitled ‘Evidence Suppressed’ – Timewell detailed his objections to the work of the commissioners, suggesting that they had been selective in their choice of cases to examine in detail, deliberately omitting more credible and damaging ones.60 Decidedly more damning was the critique of the radical Liberal MP and barrister Llewellyn Atherley-Jones, who made two key points in parliament and the press.61 The first was simply that the evidence did in fact suggest that problems were widespread. Of the nineteen public complaints the commission had looked at in detail, he noted, some seven were judged to be ‘well-founded’ and a further two had given cause to censure officers – surely, he suggested, an alarmingly high proportion. Second, he argued that members of the public were not afforded adequate protection and it was wrong of the report to suggest that they should have ‘confidence’ in how the police worked. In cases where a member of the public had been charged, magistrates in police courts, he suggested, invariably took the side of the officer, while complaints against the police, as the report detailed, were dealt with entirely by the police and were not subject to independent assessment. Ultimately, in this case, criticism of the official findings was relatively muted and the 1906–8 commission prompted no major changes of personnel or organisation (only a handful of disciplinary cases and sackings followed – some thirteen in total). It exemplifies, nonetheless, one of the defining features of how the problem of corruption had been reconfigured

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with the advent of the new police: namely, the intimate relationship it bore to the fairness and rigour of institutional mechanisms of accountability.

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Conclusion The argument advanced above certainly complements the work discussed in the introduction to this chapter, which challenges narratives of a dramatic loss of public confidence in the probity of the police during the 1960s and 1970s. What we find instead is a perpetual ebb and flow of debate around police probity and conduct, stretching back to the very genesis of reform in the late eighteenth century. The spectre of corruption, it seems, has always haunted the police in Britain. But if we might speak of continuity in this respect – of a long-running thread of public suspicion, coalescing now and then around specific individuals, forces and scandals – the argument here is that we should also insist on change, and in particular in relation to the kind of ‘corruption’ at stake. Simply put, as the police gradually morphed from the ‘old’ into the ‘new’, so the problem of corruption assumed a new form, acquiring a novel organisational density and complexity. This makes for an ironic trajectory in many respects. As we have seen, advocates of the ‘new police’ presented organisational ‘system’ and systematic forms of professional reward, hierarchy and accountability as a means of overcoming the corruption of the ‘old’. Yet it was precisely these solutions that furnished the conditions for the corruption that followed, once the new police had become an institutional reality. In short, they meant that corruption might become institutionally systemic and that professional interests might compromise any formal investigations or remedial actions; and as some of the scandals examined above suggest, these possibilities were not only sensed at the time but realised. This aspect of the argument is worth emphasising, for it helps to clarify the change that took place. What changed during the second half of the nineteenth century was not the individual probity or moral capacity of the officers who made up the police – which in any case is difficult to recover with any accuracy – but the institutional and conceptual environment in which this

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operated. One became inscribed in the other, so that when and where corruption was suspected or proven it was invariably met by a particular way of framing the problem, and either calls for, or denials of the need for, substantive organisational reform. Of course, the problem has evolved since the Edwardian period. Particular idioms have come and gone, as the introduction noted, and there have been multiple organisational developments. Most notably, perhaps, since the 1960s the handling of complaints and investigations has formed a consistent target of reformist pressure, resulting in a succession of bodies that have progressively wrenched control of these processes from the police in a bid to enhance public trust: the Police Complaints Board (1977), the Police Complaints Authority (1985), the Independent Police Complaints Commission (2004) and, most recently, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (2018).62 But none of these have fundamentally altered the basic structure of the problem as it emerged in the late Victorian period, only developed it in peculiar and contingent ways. The assumption that police corruption and malpractice might be explained according to a sliding scale of individual versus institutional culpability, and should be solved accordingly, with more or less decisive organisational remedies, has remained in place, amid a seemingly endless cycle of what L. W. Sherman once dubbed ‘scandal and reform’.63

Notes The author would like to thank the editors, and especially Tom Crook, for help in preparing the final version of this chapter.  1 H. S. Cohen and M. Feldberg, Power and Restraint: The Moral Dimension of Police Work (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 10–11.  2 The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, PP 1998–99 [Cm 4262], pp. 22, 24, 35; and see O. Jones, ‘The Met’s Problem Isn’t Bad Apples, It’s the Whole Barrel. Abolish It’, Guardian (9 March 2014) and M. Parris, ‘Something Is Rotten in the State of Our Police’, The Times (27 December 2017).   3 J. Carter Wood, ‘Press, Politics and the “Police and Public” Debates in Late 1920s Britain’, Crime, History & Societies, 16:1 (2012), 75–98.

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  4 C. Williams, ‘Rotten boroughs? How the towns of England and Wales lost their police forces in 1964’, in J. Moore and J. Smith (eds), Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 155–73.  5 The classic account of the rise and fall of public confidence in the British police is R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).   6 F. Dodsworth, ‘Commerce, Temptation and the Corruption of the Body Politic, from Fielding to Colquhoun’, British Journal of Criminology, 47:3 (2007), 439–54; F. Dodsworth, ‘The Idea of Police in EighteenthCentury England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780– 1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69:4 (2008), 583–604.  7 F. Dodsworth, The Security Society: History, Patriarchy, Protection (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 151–72.   8 B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 5.  9 The classic account remains J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 10 Dodsworth, Security Society, pp. 143–51. 11 H. Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, with some Proposals for Remedying this Growing Evil (London: A. Millar, 1751), pp. xvii–xviii. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 J. M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 14 Ibid., chaps 3–4. 15 N. Landau, ‘The trading justice’s trade’, in N. Landau (ed.), Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 46–70. 16 Dodsworth, Security Society, pp. 137–43. 17 C. Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 18. 18 Notably, the evangelical Society for the Suppression of Vice took a keen interest in policing. See the Society’s The Constable’s Assistant (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1807), which went through two further editions. 19 Beattie, First English Detectives, pp. 235–42. 20 D. Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 34–6.

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21 ‘Meeting of Commissioners of Police’, Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer (2 December 1826), p. 2. 22 D. Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), chap. 2. 23 J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), parts 1 and 2. 24 Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life, pp. 36–9. 25 E. Chadwick, ‘Preventive Police’, London Review, 1 (1829), 252–308; Hansard, 15 April 1829, vol. 21, cols 868–81. 26 Quoted in Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life, p. 38. 27 J. Wade, A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1829), p. iv. 28 ‘Police of the Metropolis’, Observer (23 August 1829), p. 2. 29 R. D. Storch, ‘The Plague of Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840–1857’, International Review of Social History, 20:1 (1975), 61–90. 30 See especially J. Toulmin Smith, Local Self-government and Centralization (London: John Chapman, 1851) and The Parish (London: S. Sweet, 1854). 31 ‘The New Police Rate’, Standard (11 September 1830). 32 ‘Rural Police’, Northern Star (25 May 1839), p. 7. 33 Emsley, English Police, chaps 2–4; Taylor, New Police. 34 C. A. Williams, Police Control Systems in Britain, 1775–1975: From Parish Constable to National Computer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 90–109. 35 D. Erdozain, ‘The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62:1 (2011), 59–88. 36 Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life, pp. 226–30. 37 A. Johansen, ‘Defending the Individual: The Personal Rights Association and the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1871–1916’, European Review of History, 20:4 (2013), 559–79. 38 G. Smith, Wrong Side of the Law: Complaints against Metropolitan Police, 1829–1964 (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2020), chap. 2. 39 The most thorough account remains J. Meiklejohn, The Trial of the Detectives (London: G. Bles, 1929). 40 ‘Detectives in the Dock’, Reynolds’s Newspaper (22 July 1877), p. 5. 41 The Times (22 November 1877), p. 9. 42 ‘Topics of the Day’, Observer (22 July 1877). 43 Standard (21 November 1877), p. 5. 44 ‘Detectives Detected’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (25 November 1877), p. 1.

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45 Quoted in ‘The Trial of the Detectives’, Pall Mall Gazette (21 November 1877), p. 2. 46 Hansard, 5 July 1887, vol. 316, cols 1813–14. 47 W. S. Caine, ‘Blackmailing Bobbies on Clapham Common’, Pall Mall Gazette (9 July 1887), p. 1. 48 ‘The Charges against the Metropolitan Police’, The Times (6 February 1888), p. 7. 49 ‘Mr Caine and the Metropolitan Police’, The Times (8 February 1888), p. 6. 50 The most thorough account is D. Daniels, ‘Watching and Policing in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1900’ (PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2018), chap. 4. 51 ‘The Manchester Police Enquiry: Home Office Report’, Manchester Guardian (20 July 1897), p. 12. 52 Daniels, ‘Watching and Policing’, pp. 241–67. 53 ‘Watch Committee Condemned’, Cheshire Observer (18 September 1897), p. 2. 54 The most thorough account is Smith, Wrong Side of the Law, chap. 3. 55 For background see A. Johansen, ‘Keeping up Appearances: Police Rhetoric, Public Trust and “Police Scandal” in London and Berlin, 1880–1914’, Crime, History & Societies, 15:1 (2011), 59–83. 56 Report of the Royal Commission upon the Duties of the Metropolitan Police Along with Appendices, PP 1908 [Cd. 4156], p. 101. 57 Ibid., 130–1. 58 The Times (1 July 1908), p. 15. 59 Hansard, 6 July 1908, vol. 191, col. 1246. 60 J. Timewell, The Royal Commission on the Metropolitan Police (London, 1909); The Royal Commission on the Metropolitan Police: Evidence Suppressed (London, 1911). 61 Hansard, 29 July 1908, vol. 193, cols 1592–1604; L. Atherley-Jones, ‘The Police Commission’, The Times (11 August 1908), p. 2. 62 G. Smith, ‘A Most Enduring Problem: Police Complaints Reform in England and Wales’, Journal of Social Policy, 35:1 (2005), 121–41. 63 L. W. Sherman, Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

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3 ‘A new tide of corruption’: economical reform and the regulation of the East India Company, 1765–84 Ben Gilding

The early 1760s marked a watershed in contemporary discussions of corruption in British politics. When a young and determined George III acceded to the throne in 1760, he brought with him plans to break the perceived stranglehold of the ‘Whig oligarchy’ and to restore a more active role for the Crown within the British constitution. This view, and the actions he took to bring it to pass, provided those in opposition to the king’s government with a pervasive critique against the burgeoning and overbearing influence of the Crown, which was said to be subverting the delicate, ‘mixed’ constitutional balance between King, Lords and Commons held so dear by eighteenth-century Britons. Contemporaries disagreed fundamentally over whether the King was restoring the Crown to its proper constitutional status or whether he was pursuing dangerous innovations, aimed at augmenting his own power through the corruption of parliament. The end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 added an imperial dimension to this process. The consequent Peace of Paris secured a considerable expansion of Britain’s overseas possessions and prompted successive ministers to engage in programmes of imperial consolidation and reform to raise the revenues necessary to service the national debt and support the increased military force deemed vital for the security of the empire. These actions stoked fears, among colonists and metropolitan Britons alike, that George III and his ministers were attempting to utilise imperial revenues to enhance the status of the Crown. The impact of British attempts to tax the American colonies is well known, and deep connections have been revealed between the

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lack of British success in the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) and the growth of the economical reform movement at home.1 However, the key role played by the East India Company in these political and constitutional debates has received far less attention and forms the subject of this chapter. As we shall see, the Company’s acquisition of substantial territories and revenues in Bengal between 1757 and 1765 raised serious questions not only about their sovereignty, but also concerning the Company’s relationship with the British state. As these questions remained unresolved into the 1770s, debates concerning the future of the Company became intimately intertwined with the domestic movements for economical reform and anticorruption in ways that have been neglected by historians. In particular, this chapter argues that revelations of the corrupt practices of East India Company employees both in Britain and India, as well as the subsequent attempts to curb them, were crucial factors in the Company’s metamorphosis from a monopoly trading corporation into a quasi-independent imperial agency between 1765 and 1784. As the Company’s affairs became more closely identified with those of the British state during the 1770s and 1780s, corrupt practices such as embezzlement or nepotism, which were previously seen as private acts against the Company, were increasingly recognised as being injurious to the ‘public’, or ‘national’, interests involved in the imperial project. It was in the context of this increasing correlation between the Company’s ‘private’ interests and British ‘public’ interest that the imperial patronage networks fostered by the Company’s territorial acquisitions excited the fears of contemporary politicians and commentators that the Company could be used as a vehicle for increasing the influence of the Crown and overturning the much revered British constitutional equipoise. Tracing the Company’s transition from a predominantly private enterprise to what was virtually a department of the British state offers a unique prism through which to unpack contemporary understandings of corruption and to analyse how these shaped, and were shaped by, perceptions of the place of the Company within the British imperial apparatus and the domestic constitution. One can hardly study the history of the British East India Company in any depth without stumbling upon accusations of, or complaints about, corruption. ‘Company corruption’, however, manifested itself in a variety of ways, and certain high-profile

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aspects of it have received the majority of scholarly attention. In particular, the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the Company’s first Governor-General of Bengal, continues to be the subject of regular studies.2 However, the extent to which such work helps us to understand the role of corruption in shaping attempts to reform the East India Company is undermined by two key factors. First, the Hastings trial took place several years after the passage of Pitt’s crucial reform legislation in 1784 and did not itself result in any fundamental alteration in the relationship between the Company and the British state. Second, the articles of impeachment were based on ageing accusations, many of which were over a decade old, even at the beginning of the seven-year-long trial. By the time of Hastings’ acquittal in 1795, his successor, Earl Cornwallis, had initiated a process of administrative and governmental reform in British India, which, alongside the provisions of Pitt’s India Act of 1784, rendered the judgement in Hastings’ trial of little importance for British imperial policymaking. It was not, as it has sometimes been characterised, a decisive turning point in the development of British imperial interests in India.3 Instead, this chapter highlights the ways in which attempts to curb corruption within the Company after 1766 became embroiled in domestic constitutional debates. This entanglement, long before the Hastings trial, drew the attention of the British public to the intricacies of Company corruption and the ways in which it had become enmeshed within the more unsavoury machinations of domestic politics. Studies of ‘nabobs’ and ‘nabobism’, such as those by Tillman Nechtman, have drawn attention to the ways in which the British public engaged in widespread criticism of the purportedly ostentatious activities, lavish lifestyles and luxurious habits of Company employees who returned to Britain vastly enriched from the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, it was the very fact of their returning home, having supposedly been both physically and morally corrupted by the climate and luxuries of South Asia, that made ‘nabobs’ such frequent targets of British satirists, playwrights and politicians.4 Most discussions of the metropolitan aspects of corruption in the East India Company have focused on the vilification of such figures as served overseas. A considerably smaller amount of attention has been given to the less sensational, less exotic but arguably far more constitutionally dangerous practices by which the Company’s managers in Britain (its stockholders and directors) became caught up in the attempts of the British state to manage the reform of the

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Company and its newly acquired territorial dominions. These attempts to reform the Company, in turn, were embedded within pre-existing domestic political and constitutional conflicts in which the issue of corruption was a central feature. Just as studies of corruption in the East India Company have placed less emphasis on its metropolitan dimensions than the activities of its employees overseas, works on domestic politics and political corruption in the late eighteenth century have tended either to marginalise or ignore the role of the Company.5 Highlighting the movements against Old Corruption, they have shed light on debates concerning the burgeoning influence of the Crown, as well as on parliamentary and economical reform, almost exclusively in their metropolitan dimensions. Influential articles by W. D. Rubinstein and Philip Harling analyse the scope and practice of Old Corruption with scarcely a mention of the East India Company.6 Both authors also see the ‘waning of Old Corruption’ beginning around 1780, whereas the consideration of East India reform might well bring forward the commencement of this process by more than a decade. Indeed, if Mark Knights is correct in noting that anticorruption occurs in ‘waves’, then the rhetoric surrounding the Company can be seen as a harbinger of the reform movements of the following decade.7 While many scholars have rightly identified the threat to the British constitution posed by Fox’s India Bill in 1783, few have seen it as marking the climax of a long-term political and constitutional debate over the disposal of the East India Company’s patronage, stretching back at least as far as 1766.8 What is more, the resolution of this problem was crucial to defining the Company’s place within the British Empire. Examining the metropolitan dimensions of corruption in the East India Company helps to elucidate the ways in which eighteenth-century Britons viewed corrupt practices in public and private positions of trust.

North’s Regulating Act and the genesis of East India Company reform Between the union of the rival East India Companies in the midst of the ‘rage of party’ (c. 1702–9) and their acquisition of substantial territories in Bengal (1757–65), the Company’s affairs hardly

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caused a stir in British domestic politics. Its presence on the Indian subcontinent at this time was largely confined to coastal trading enclaves, or ‘factories’, established with the permission and under the sufferance of local Indian authorities. While recent research has highlighted the Company’s political and judicial functions within these settlements, it remains the case that the acquisition of the diwani (or revenue-collection rights) in the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 marked a considerable shift in the Company’s transformation from a mercantile corporation into an imperial power in its own right.9 The increase of the Company’s Indian territories and revenues as a consequence of Clive’s victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757 first began to draw the attention of the British public to the political and speculative battles at East India House, the Company’s London headquarters. It was in this arena that those who held £500 or more of East India stock debated the Company’s policies and elected its twenty-four directors on an annual rotation. Meetings of stockholders which were once relatively quiet and elections of directors that went almost uncontested were soon replaced by factional strife. Huge investments of capital were sought to secure additional votes, as rivals vied for a share of the fabled riches of Bengal. Such campaigns quickly became political, as the City interests of the Bute and Grenville administrations drew them into utilising the vast sums of the Paymaster of the Forces to purchase, split and distribute large stockholdings among government supporters and thereby ‘create’ votes on behalf of rival factions within the Company. It was in the context of this government support that the recently ennobled Lord Clive returned to Bengal and negotiated the Company’s acquisition of the diwani rights in 1765 and therefore de facto if not de jure sovereignty over Bengal. The Company’s acquisition of substantial territories on the Indian subcontinent came at precisely the time when British governments, increasingly preoccupied with paying down the national debt, had faced a serious rebuff to their attempts to raise taxation from their colonies on the North American mainland. The shortlived Rockingham administration (1765–6) had repealed Grenville’s stamp duties and had thereby all but given up the prospect of raising direct revenue from that quarter. Their successors in the Chatham administration (1766–8) were left with the problem of reducing the national debt while possessing seemingly far fewer

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means to do so. Their loss of a critical vote to continue the land tax at the wartime rate of four shillings in the pound only compounded the ministry’s already acute financial problems. This desperate search for additional revenues resulted not only in the formulation of the infamous Townshend Duties, which escalated the conflict with the American colonies, but also led to the first legislative investigations and encroachments into the East India Company’s affairs, in 1766–7. When Lord Clive wrote back to Britain concerning the Company’s acquisition of the diwani rights of Bengal, he made bold and exaggerated claims about the value of the revenues and, intentionally or not, seriously underestimated the expense of maintaining them. These inflated accounts not only led to increased speculation in India stock among those who Clive fed with insider knowledge before the acquisitions were made public, but they also drew the attention of parliamentarians, who began to view with considerable envy the vastly increased revenues of the Company.10 William Beckford, upon whom Chatham devolved the responsibility of raising the question of the East India Company’s newly acquired territories in parliament, set the tone when he called upon his fellow MPs to ‘[l]ook to the rising sun … your Treasury coffers are to be filled from the East, not from the West’.11 With such prospects in view, the Commons resolved itself into a committee of the whole house ‘to inquire into the State and Condition of the East India Company’ in March 1767.12 This first parliamentary inquiry raised complex questions about the Company’s new quasi-imperial status, which was a sufficient impetus for the Company and the Chatham administration to reach a new kind of arrangement. The agreement was deliberately narrow in scope and has been rightfully characterised by P. J. Marshall as little more than ‘a predatory raid on the Company’s new riches’.13 Indeed, the key features of the agreement, embodied in legislation passed in May and June of 1767, were a limiting of the dividends of the Company’s stockholders to 10 per cent and a requirement that the Company pay £400,000 annually to the state. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Chatham administration’s Indian policy, however, was its temporary nature. This set an important precedent for the future relationship between the Company and the British state by requiring the frequent revisiting of East India

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affairs by parliament, which thereby helped to reinforce the notion that parliament had jurisdiction over the Company’s activities. Moreover, by sidestepping the question of sovereignty, and therefore leaving the nature of the relationship between the East India Company and the British state unresolved, the Chatham administration’s intervention further complicated the distinction between public and private interest inherent in the Company’s affairs. Henceforth, in addition to holding its monopoly over British trade to the East Indies at the will of parliament, the Company’s future right to its territories and revenues on the Indian subcontinent was dependent upon a temporary agreement with the Treasury. The problematic nature of this distinction (or lack thereof) between public and private interests, however, was only truly revealed when the Company faced a financial crisis in 1772–3 and announced that it would be unable to meet its annual contribution to the British exchequer. It was a pan-European credit crisis, the increasing allegations of corruption and maladministration by Company employees posted overseas and the Company’s abject failure to reform its own affairs and bring its finances into order that resulted in the far more dramatic intervention of Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773. This legislation continued to sidestep the question of sovereignty over the Company’s territories in India and instead focused on circumscribing various corrupt practices which had become increasingly associated with the Company’s governance both at home and overseas. The most prominent charges of corruption were levelled personally against Lord Clive, who was accused by John Burgoyne’s parliamentary select committee in 1773 of presiding over ‘the most atrocious abuses that ever stained the name of civil government’ in the accumulation of his vast personal fortune.14 The most heinous of these charges involved inciting violent revolutions among the Indian powers and extorting enormous personal gifts from them in exchange for the Company’s military assistance. However, the Company’s internal attempts to curb corrupt practices, such as the deployment of supervisory commissioners with extraordinary powers and huge salaries, were widely viewed by critics as ‘nothing but a wretched jobb’.15 The North administration therefore took it upon itself to impose reforms upon a Company that was either unwilling or unable to apply an effective remedy of its own.

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In this way, the Regulating Act was an ambitious attempt to redress not only the ‘enormities of the east’, as revealed by the Burgoyne Committee’s investigations into the conduct of Lord Clive, but also the so-called ‘petty larcenies of Leadenhall [street]’, the corrupt core of the Company’s metropolitan operations that inhibited meaningful reform.16 When the Company’s corruption was seen as having prevented the British public from receiving its share of the Bengal revenues, previously internal accusations of peculation and fraud began to acquire a distinctly ‘national’ character. Thus the Chatham administration’s India policy, by rendering the British state’s receipt of a substantial annual revenue dependent upon the Company’s financial success, eventually drew parliament to consider unprecedented interventions into what was hitherto considered to be the private prerogative of stockholders. Ostensibly, North’s Regulating Act maintained much of the Company’s corporate independence. However, it also imposed a series of reforms on the metropolitan and overseas aspects of the Company’s governance in an effort both to curb corrupt practices and to provide the ministry with the means to influence the direction of Company policy. One of the most important provisions of the Regulating Act – and one which exhibits both of these features of North’s East India reforms – was the creation of the Supreme Council in Calcutta. The new body, consisting of a Governor-­ General and four councillors, was substantially reduced from the former presidency councils and its members were forced to convene in Calcutta, whereas they had previously served in the Company’s chief trading posts throughout the province of Bengal. The relocation of the councillors to Calcutta not only consolidated the executive government of the province; it also effectively cut off a substantial means of profiteering through individual private trade, which was seen as heavily prejudicial to the Company’s interests. To reinforce this measure, the Regulating Act also prohibited the councillors from receiving gifts from Indian rulers and explicitly forbade them from engaging in private trade, while compensating them for the potential loss of both of these revenue streams by the bestowal of considerable salaries at the Company’s expense. Previously, the Company had paid ludicrously low salaries to its employees with the proviso that they would be permitted to engage in the ‘country trade’ (i.e. the trade within India, as opposed to that between

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Britain and India, over which the Company held a monopoly). Those lower down the Company’s hierarchy were still permitted to trade on their own account to supplement their salaries, but their activities would be closely monitored by a Supreme Court of Judicature, staffed by Crown-appointed justices, whose salaries were also to be defrayed from the Company’s Indian revenues. The Company’s operations overseas were thus reformed with the intention not only to increase their accountability but also to limit the opportunities for a variety of corrupt practices such as bribery and embezzlement. At the same time, these changes in the executive government of Bengal provided the North administration with its opening to reform the Company’s constitution and to increase the opportunities for the British government to influence its management and governance, including policy on the ground in India. While establishing the new Supreme Council, North ensured that its initial membership would be determined by parliament and thereby, in effect, the ministry. Due to the intricacies of the Company’s government in India, it was deemed prudent for two of the five members to be selected from the Company’s existing servants in India. They therefore appointed Warren Hastings as the first Governor-General of Bengal. The Company had only appointed Hastings as Governor the previous year and he was thus relatively free from association with the Company’s prior failings in Bengal. Moreover, he had earned a reputation for loyal and dedicated service. They also appointed the questionable but well-connected former Company chief at Dhaka, Richard Barwell, whose career was later mired by accusations of corrupt practices at this station. More importantly for the purposes of government control over the Company’s operations, they appointed three relative strangers to Indian governance from among those believed to be supporters of the administration. The appointees, General Clavering, Colonel Monson and Philip Francis, could form a majority in council capable of overruling a recalcitrant Governor-General, who was only primus inter pares. Although the new councillors would be paid by the East India Company, their position and appointments were explicitly legislative in origin, thereby considerably blurring the distinction between public and private office-holding in the highest echelons of the Company’s service. The Regulating Act, then, was intended to provide the British

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government with the means – however indirectly – to dictate policy on the ground in India. North’s reforms also had aims much closer to home. The Regulating Act was designed to furnish ministers with the ability to direct the Company’s metropolitan management and therefore to influence the general lines of policy sent to its overseas servants. Perhaps even more importantly, it also sought to provide government with access to the Company’s valuable patronage. To achieve these ends, the act increased the amount of stock that qualified an individual for a vote in the Company’s General Court of Proprietors from £500 to £1,000, thereby disenfranchising over 1,200 stockholders from the Company’s major decision-making body. Furthermore, it increased the duration of the terms of the Company’s directors from one to four years, with only six being up for election each year. These moves undoubtedly provided a much needed element of stability to the Company’s operations. On the other hand, they were heavily criticised by opposition politicians for rendering both the General Court and Court of Directors more easily manageable by the Treasury, thereby threatening the very independence of the Company. Although these claims were no doubt exaggerated by the heat of opposition politics, the North administration certainly did take advantage of the circumstances created by their reforms to develop a ministerial interest in the Company’s governing bodies, and it did so through the judicious distribution of government contracts and other forms of political patronage. One of the reasons the North administration was forced to resort to these kinds of underhand and indirect methods of managing the East India Company – as opposed to simply dissolving the Company and annexing its Indian territories – was the reverence with which eighteenth-century parliamentarians treated the issue of property rights, and particularly those held by charter. Despite the fact that after 1767 parliament repeatedly passed the measures of successive administrations that encroached upon the Company’s charters and altered its constitution, they almost invariably did so amid a storm of controversy, and they always stopped short of abrogating its chartered rights or making an explicit legislative declaration on the sovereignty of the territories and revenues of Bengal. To the ‘propertied mind’ of eighteenth-century Britons, as Paul

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Langford termed it, interfering in the chartered rights of a corporation to hold and dispose of its property could only be justified by the most extreme state necessity.17 The parliamentary opposition to the Indian reforms of the Chatham and North ministries took advantage of such sentiments in its speeches and publications, arguing that such legislation implied that the Company’s territories in India belonged to the public, a move which they argued was ‘highly dangerous to the property of the subject and extremely unbecoming the justice and dignity of [parliament]’.18 These views were widely shared not only among the Company’s stockholders but also in the wider mercantile and corporate community. The City of London, for example, petitioned against North’s Regulating Act, citing it as ‘a direct and dangerous attack on the liberties of the people, and will, if passed into a law, prove of the most fatal consequences to the security of property in general, and particularly the franchises of every corporate body in this kingdom’.19 Such pressure, from both inside and outside parliament, as well as the North ministry’s genuine desire to reach an agreement with the Company in order to effect necessary reforms without assuming responsibility, contributed to the relative moderation of the 1773 Regulating Act. While it was a highly innovative piece of imperial legislation, the unwillingness to be seen to have encroached too far upon the Company’s corporate independence rendered North’s India reforms inadequate for the purpose of realising thoroughgoing reform of the Company. Moreover, by closing the door to some corrupt practices within the Company, it opened the door to many others of a more public nature in Britain.

Contracts and corruption: the East India Company and economical reform Placed in the context of the growing belief that the influence of the Crown had already been increased to a dangerous degree since the accession of George III, a view most eloquently expounded in Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the prospect of the Crown’s assumption of the patronage of the East India Company would cause grave anxieties for the maintenance of domestic

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constitutional equipoise. Among the great problems of British domestic politics in the two decades following the Company’s acquisition of the diwani rights of Bengal was how to incorporate the Company into the domestic constitutional apparatus without severely undermining its foundations as settled in the wake of the Revolution of 1688. Indeed, on the eve of the debates on North’s Regulating Act, Burke, with characteristic magniloquence, asked his fellow parliamentarians to imagine what would ‘become of us, if Bengal, if the Ganges pour in a new tide of corruption?’20 There is a certain irony, then, in noting that the efforts of opponents to prevent the North administration’s wholesale seizure of the East India Company actually resulted in the ministry being forced to utilise the pensions, sinecures and contracts which were seen to be the very basis of the Crown’s corrupt influence over parliament. North’s Regulating Act was intended to mark the beginning of a process of reform through regular parliamentary supervision. However, the spiralling conflict of the American War not only absorbed an increasing amount of ministerial and parliamentary attention, but it also drove North himself into often debilitating bouts of depression. As a result, the Company was not subjected to the routine parliamentary oversight initially intended. Yet it would be wrong to conceive of the period between the 1773 Regulating Act and the resumption of parliamentary investigations into the Company’s affairs in 1781 as one in which the Company was absent from British politics. In fact, the decade in which the Regulating Act governed the relations between the Company and the British state resulted in the consolidation of the Company’s affairs as a central component of contemporary constitutional discourse. The American War, while it drew attention away from East India affairs, also had the effect of entrenching the belief that the opulence of the East Indies could prove to be the ‘salvation’ of Britain. Many commentators began to see the Company’s empire as a compensation for the expected loss of British dominions in the west.21 On a more sinister note, others feared that the ministry might take the opportunity to compensate for the patronage that they were expected to lose through the secession of a large portion of their western empire by reserving for themselves the seemingly boundless opportunities of the east.22 This line of argument, along with the tangible evidence that the ministry was, at least to some degree,

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pursuing this end, resulted in the Company, its patronage and its revenues becoming increasingly entangled in the broader movement for economical reform. From the late 1770s, the economical reform movement galvanised political opposition to North’s ministry around a relatively moderate but broadly popular political programme designed to curb corruption through the retrenchment of public spending. Its first manifestations can be seen in Philip Jennings Clerke’s 1778 bill to exclude government contractors from the House of Commons, an issue which later became strongly associated with the government’s attempts to control the East India Company. The reform movement was galvanised in particular by Christopher Wyvill’s formation of an association of Yorkshire landowners, who petitioned parliament to reduce corruption through a greater scrutiny of the government’s distribution of sinecures, pensions and exorbitant salaries. Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association and its petition were emulated across the country, resulting in the submission of over forty petitions signed by ‘upwards of 60,000’ people.23 A parallel, albeit more moderate, movement was taken up in parliament, culminating in the passage of John Dunning’s famous motion on 6 April 1780 ‘that the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’.24 Although its legislative achievements were limited until the fall of North’s ministry in 1782, the economical reform movement served as a focal point for parliamentary and extra-­ parliamentary opposition. Significantly, for the purposes of this chapter, two of the major issues raised by Dunning in his celebrated speech on economical reform overlapped considerably with debates on the East India Company: ‘setting limits or paring down the increased, dangerous and alarming influence of the crown, and an œconomical expenditure of public money’.25 While the early relationship between the British state and the Company after the battle of Plassey did include mutually beneficial patronage arrangements, the passage of North’s Regulating Act in 1773 systematised these symbiotic relationships. New opportunities for corruption were created in direct correlation to the North administration’s intensifying attempts to secure a ministerial grip on the reins of the Company’s power both at home and abroad. Even those who had initially supported North’s India reforms, such as Isaac Barré, began to complain that John Robinson, North’s

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Treasury Secretary, ‘had nothing to do but to go with the least hint or intimation that such promotions would be agreeable to the treasury, [and] they are obeyed’.26 North was even forced to admit that ‘[h]is situation … as a minister, gave him a sort of relationship to the Company’, and that he had ‘sometimes recommended, and his friends had sometimes been obliged’ with positions in the Company’s service. He always steadfastly denied, however, that he controlled the Company’s patronage.27 Nonetheless, even those within the Company remained convinced that ‘ministerial Interest … is now the only Mode of getting preferment’.28 When Dunning rose in the House of Commons in April 1780 to denounce the growing influence of the Crown, he specifically emphasised the corrupt practices connecting the North ministry and the East India Company. He remarked that the Company’s patronage had become a ‘great source of influence … Directors were made contractors, and contractors directors, to serve the purposes of ministers.’29 For the politically astute, particularly those associated with the opposition in parliament and East India House, these were not new revelations of corruption. As early as 1776, newspapers were reporting that six contracts, each worth a reported £7,500 per year, were ‘lavished upon as many directors’ and that two among those directors were designated to replace Hastings and Barwell in the Bengal Supreme Council, both of whom were seen as having thwarted the administration’s attempts to manage the Company’s overseas affairs. It seemed to contemporaries, therefore, that ‘Reformation in the East [was] to be commenced by Corruption in England’.30 Accusations branding individual Company directors as ‘ministerial’ were not merely barbs to smear the reputations of rival directorial candidates. Such characterisations became an integral part of the Company’s internal power struggles between those who supported the independence of the Company (and thereby Warren Hastings and Richard Barwell’s presence in the Supreme Council) and those who wanted to replace them with candidates more willing to pursue the government’s policies of reform. In many ways, it could be characterised as a struggle between those who wished to maintain the older forms of Company corruption and those who sought to gain from the increased public interference and the novel avenues of patronage opened up by North’s Regulating Act.

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When reporting the results of the Company’s election of directors to Warren Hastings in 1777, George Vansittart, one of Hastings’ well-connected and influential partisans among the stockholders, noted that ‘Wombwell is Chairman & Devaynes Deputy, both ministerial men enjoying government contracts.’31 Such an outcome was indicative of the success of the government’s measures in amassing a controlling interest in the Company’s Court of Directors. This success is further highlighted by the complaints that the inclusion of so many contractors and their ministerial abettors on the so-called ‘house’ list of directorial candidates (as opposed to the opposition ‘proprietors’ list) was ‘unconstitutional and insulting’ to the Company’s independence.32 George Wombwell was singled out, both at East India House and in parliament, as an example of the extent to which ministerial and company corruption had become intertwined with the process of East India reform. His notorious contracts for victualling troops in North America and Gibraltar during the American Revolutionary War were seen as emblematic of the need to reform the system of contracting to better serve the public interest. His notoriety even extended to the level of graphic satire. One print depicted his lack of integrity as a Company director, his disdain for the Royal Navy and, on a related note, his complete dependence on the Earl of Sandwich, the controversial First Lord of the Admiralty.33 Wombwell was a crucial element of Sandwich’s extensive personal interest at East India House, which, during North’s tenure in office, he placed entirely at the disposal of the administration. In developing this ‘political citadel’, as the memorialist Nathaniel Wraxall termed it, Sandwich effectively extended his expertise in parliamentary management and ‘borough-mongering’ to cultivate a loyal following among the Company’s stockholders, of whom Wombwell was one of the most prominent.34 To secure his continued loyalty and as a reward for his services, Wombwell was not only offered the above-mentioned victualling contracts but was also returned as an MP for Sandwich’s pocket borough of Huntingdon and created a baronet in 1778. In return, he was expected to provide a steady vote for the administration in the Commons, to promote the government’s policies in the Company’s Court of Directors and to provide ministers with access to the Company’s patronage. Sandwich’s parliamentary and Company interests were inextricably intertwined.

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Wombwell’s concurrent roles of contractor, MP and Company director exposed him to ridicule during the height of the economical reform movement in April 1780, when he not only opposed the bills designed to exclude the holders of government contracts from the House of Commons but also objected to the idea of putting contracts up for bidding. He argued that the public would not benefit from placing contracts up for bidding because, in his experience in trying such a method in the East India Company, ‘[m]en inadequate to the accomplishment of the contracts, would at all times bid lower than men of ability and reputation, and they would do much more injury by serving the public badly, than the difference of the expence’.35 It was pointed out in rebuttal that Wombwell was himself a contractor and therefore ought to be standing on trial at the bar of the House rather than occupying one of its seats.36 Attacks on contracts such as those held by Wombwell were incorporated into the broader opposition narrative that Lord North was attempting to utilise the ‘power, riches, and patronage of the Company’ to support the war in America. The ‘nabobs of Leadenhall-street’, declared the Earl of Shelburne, ‘not content in the pillage of the East’, were now ‘plunging us into a war to enable them to pillage the West’. The contracts, it was argued, solidified their support by ensuring that the recipients had a vested financial interest in continuing the war.37 However, such opposition, rhetorically powerful as it may have been, did not succeed until the fall of North’s ministry. By the time Clerke’s Act excluding contractors from the Commons passed in 1782, Sir George Wombwell had died. Many of his fellow contractor MPs chose to give up their contracts rather than lose their seats in parliament, thereby reinforcing the belief in the political nature of their dispensation.38 The East India Company also had an additional, albeit more indirect, impact on the economical reform movement by the manner in which debates concerning its reform intersected with attempts to curtail wasteful expenditure and the abolition of sinecures. As Huw Bowen pointed out, the Company’s managers in Britain consistently sent out instructions to India urging their overseas servants to practise economy and retrenchment in terms which anticipated much of the lexicon of economical reformers and the later Commissioners of Public Accounts.39 By the early 1780s, however, when the economical reform movement was at its height, the East India

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Company, and particularly its relationship with the British state, appeared to encapsulate the very antithesis of such reforming ideals. Indeed, the Company was widely perceived as being the vehicle through which all the benefits of economical reform could actually be undone. Opposition politicians in the late 1770s began to accuse North’s administration of ignoring the public’s £400,000 annual stake in the Company’s Indian revenues so that they could continue to reap the benefits of its patronage. Ministers were called to account for failing to take advantage of the ‘public’ stake in the Company’s revenues to reduce the burdens on the British taxpayer, and they were accused of ‘shamefully wast[ing] and mis-spen[ding]’ it to reinforce their parliamentary majority.40 Lord Shelburne, who had reluctantly supported North’s Regulating Act, now argued that ‘[m]inisters and directors had secretly joined in a confederacy to prostitute the interests … of the proprietors … [and] the public’.41 Furthermore, when several pieces of economical legislation were passed in 1782, including Burke’s Act, which resulted in the abolition of numerous public offices, and Crewe’s Act, which disqualified customs and excise officers from voting in parliamentary elections, it was widely believed that future ministries would be denied the influence necessary to form stable majorities in parliament. The political chaos in the years following the fall of North’s ministry only heightened such fears. Indeed, many contemporaries believed that the economical legislation forced ministers to seek alternative sources of patronage, such as that possessed by the East India Company. Thus, the success – or the perceived success – of the economical reform movement, by depriving ministers of some of the crucial means by which they had hoped to gain a foothold in the management of the Company, heavily influenced the very different reform proposals of Fox and Pitt in 1783–4.

Conclusion It is important to keep in mind, however, the limitations of Lord North’s East India reforms. The measures certainly granted ministers leverage in the Company’s affairs, but this control was very far from complete, as the failure to secure the removal of Warren Hastings in 1776 demonstrated. The ‘ministerial’ majority in the

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Bengal Supreme Council was wiped out by death and disease, and its influence among directors in London was nullified by the numerous supporters of Hastings among the stockholders, who became known as the ‘Indian’ interest. In spite of all the efforts of the Treasury to engineer a sympathetic set of directors, the MP Charles Jenkinson, whose research underpinned North’s India reforms, rightly pointed out that ‘when the whole body of Indians join the opposition against government … it will always be defeated’.42 Indeed, to secure any substantial control over the Company the North administration was forced to form an alliance with the so-called ‘Indians’. Furthermore, in spite of the North ministry’s attempts to restrain corrupt practices within the Company, by the 1780s it was once again teetering on the edge of financial ruin. The Regulating Act, the chief aim of which had been to secure the Company’s finances by reducing the opportunities for corruption and enabling the British government to guide Company policy, was thus largely a failure. Nonetheless, the experience of the first decade of parliamentary intervention into the East India Company’s affairs was transformative. As we have seen, the opportunities created by North’s East India reforms in the 1770s fostered the crystallisation of a new set of entangled relations between – and understandings of – metropolitan and imperial corruption. By 1783, few argued against the necessity of radical parliamentary intervention. The question was what form such intervention ought to take. Over a decade of opposition rhetoric, accentuating the threat that the growing power of the East India Company posed to domestic constitutional equipoise, dramatically influenced the rival reform proposals of Fox and Pitt in 1783–4 and thereby the subsequent trajectory of Company–state relations for decades to come. Fox’s notorious India Bill tried desperately to prevent the Company’s affairs from being absorbed by the Crown and in so doing would have vested them in a parliamentary body composed of his own supporters. Despite – or rather because – of the explicit efforts of Fox and Burke to prevent the reform of the Company from providing the Crown with boundless patronage, they were accused of attempting to create a ‘fourth estate’ which would render Fox and his party independent of the Crown and would, its critics feared, provide them with a guaranteed parliamentary majority.43 Although it

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passed the Commons, Fox’s bill was controversially rejected by the Lords at the request of the King, resulting in the downfall of his ministry. Pitt, who was tasked with forming a new administration in its wake, had pledged to bring in a bill to reform the Company that was ‘not subject to these objections … [or] charged with this violence’.44 Instead, Pitt argued that ‘he would trust [the patronage] with no political set of men whatever. Let it be in India’, he urged, where ‘it would be free from corruption’ – corruption, that is, in a very metropolitan sense of the term.45 Regardless of his rhetoric, however, Pitt’s India Act was a shrewd improvement on North’s reforms, based on a decade of harsh experience and disappointment. It stripped the Company’s stockholders of their political power and tightened the bonds between the ministry and the Company’s directors through the creation of a new Crown-appointed Board of Control, with ultimate political, military and diplomatic authority over British interests in India. Company corruption, of course, remained, but it was no longer seen to pose a substantial threat to the British constitution. Returning to Burke’s metaphor of the much feared ‘tide of corruption’, Pitt’s reforms sought to prevent it ever leaving the shores of the subcontinent.

Notes   1 E. A. Reitan, Politics, Finance, and the People: Economical Reform in England in the Age of the American Revolution, 1770–92 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).   2 The best account of Hastings’ impeachment remains P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).   3 For example, N. B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).   4 T. W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 90.   5 For works that highlight the domestic aspects of corruption in the East India Company see L. Sutherland, The East India Company in ­Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) and G. K. McGilvary, Guardian of the East India Company: The Life of Laurence Sulivan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

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  6 W. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, Past & Present, 101 (1983), 55–86; P. Harling, ‘Rethinking “Old Corruption”’, Past & Present, 147 (1995), 127–58.  7 M. Knights, ‘Anticorruption in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’, in R. Kroeze, A. Vitória and G. Geltner (eds), Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 181.   8 For an elucidation of this process of East India Company reform see B. Gilding, ‘British Politics, Imperial Ideology, and East India Company Reform, 1773–1784’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019), pp. 27–148.   9 For an emphasis on the early political dimensions of the Company’s presence in India see P. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10 H. V. Bowen, ‘Lord Clive and Speculation in East India Company Stock, 1766’, Historical Journal, 30:4 (1987), 905–20. 11 G. Colebrooke, Retrospection: Or Reminiscences Addressed to My Son Henry Thomas Colebrooke, 2 vols (London: Bradbury, Agnew and Co., 1898), 1, p. 108. 12 S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 31 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975), pp. 173, 208. 13 P. J. Marshall, Problems of Empire: Britain and India, 1757–1813 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968), p. 30. 14 Speech of John Burgoyne in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History [hereafter CPH], xvii, cols 453–4. 15 For example, Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (19 August 1772); London Evening Post (22 August 1772); A Letter to the Proprietors of East-India-Stock, on the Subject of Sending Supervisors with Extraordinary Powers to India (London: S. Bladon, 1772). 16 Speech of John Burgoyne in CPH, xvii, col. 535. Leadenhall Street was the location of East India House. 17 P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 1. On state necessity see the letters signed Thomas Northcote in Public Advertiser (11 December 1783) and (11 February 1784). 18 Lords protest of 26 June 1767, in CPH, xvi, col. 358. 19 ‘The humble petition of the Lord-Mayor, Aldermen, and Commons of the City of London in Common-Council Assembled’, in CPH, xvii, col. 889. 20 Ibid., col. 672.

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21 For example, St James’s Chronicle (6 November 1781); London Packet (29 July 1782); Thomas Graham to Warren Hastings, 24 June 1782 in National Records of Scotland [hereafter NRS], Kinross MSS, GD29/2140. 22 Alexander Macaulay to Lord Lewisham, 17 March 1783 in HMC Dartmouth, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1887–97), 3, pp. 265–6; H. Wheatley (ed.), Wraxall Memoirs, 5 vols (London, 1884), 3, p. 3. 23 I. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 97, 122. 24 CPH, xxi, col. 347. 25 Ibid., cols 340–1. 26 CPH, xvii, col. 1339. For evidence of this Treasury management see Lord North to John Robinson, 6 April 1776 in Eridge Park, Robinson Papers, 102. 27 CPH, xx, cols 658–9. 28 William Dalrymple to John Graham, 20 November 1775 in NRS, Kinross MSS, GD29/2127. 29 The New Annual Register … For the Year 1780 (London: G. Robinson, 1781), p. 250. 30 Public Advertiser (17 July 1776). 31 George Vansittart to Warren Hastings, 21 April 1777 in British Library [hereafter BL], Hastings Papers, Add. MS. 29138, f. 342. 32 Public Advertiser (11 April 1780). 33 ‘A Scene in Leadenhall Street, Humbly Inscribed to Sir George Wombwell Baronet, by the Engraver’, 29 March 1780, British Museum Satires 5655. 34 Sutherland, East India Company, pp. 124–5, 277–8. 35 CPH, xix, cols 1096–7. 36 Ibid., col. 1097. 37 Ibid., col. 184. 38 Reitan, Politics, Finance, and the People, p. 103. 39 H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 198. 40 CPH, xxi, col. 1348. 41 Ibid., cols 1327–8. 42 Charles Jenkinson to Sir John Clavering, 13 December 1776 in BL, Francis Papers, IOR MSS Eur E16, 37. 43 CPH, xxiv, col. 1327. 44 CPH, xxiii, col. 1406. 45 CPH, xxiv, cols 1089–91.

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‘A monster in politics’: corruption and economical reform in Jamaica, 1783–91 Aaron Graham

Between 1781 and 1793 the British government embarked on a programme of what contemporaries called ‘economical reform’, which aimed to address problems of political and administrative corruption revealed by successive defeats in the American Revolutionary War. It triggered a process that would, arguably, root out entrenched, Old Corruption from the British political system by the mid-nineteenth century. The underlying factors for its success have been debated, and one of the suggestions is that the campaign was no mere bureaucratic exercise, but involved a series of dialogues between popular demands, political practicalities and administrative realities that made for effective, long-term change. Focusing on a comparable process of economical reform undertaken at the same time but on a smaller scale in Jamaica during the 1780s, this chapter shines some much needed light on the experience of anticorruption initiatives in colonial settings, and contributes to the wider literature by reinforcing the importance of the interplay between political support and administrative direction. As we shall see, reforms in Jamaica lacking such support failed, but where that support existed, it had to be channelled in productive directions, since the political ideology – Old or Country Whiggism – that gave the movement its edge could work both for and against effective change. The experience of Jamaica, for all the differences in its society and economy, also shared some important similarities with Britain and helps to clarify what enabled and inhibited successful programmes of anticorruption reform at this critical juncture for the British imperial state.

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Economical reform in Britain and Jamaica The significance of the episode of economical reform in Britain in the 1780s for studies of anticorruption lies in its importance as an example of a successful campaign that inspired subsequent waves of reform and helped to create a more professional civil service.1 Between 1781 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars with France in 1793, the British state cut back on excessive government bureaucracy, began a purge of sinecures and other unproductive offices, started to replace a system of fees and gratuities with uniform salaries and checked the influence of both the executive and the legislature in appointments and promotions within the British civil service.2 It is one of the episodes most frequently cited in historical surveys of British corruption and anticorruption. However, as Eckhart Hellmuth has noted, ‘[it] did not arise simply out of the logic of intra-bureaucratic rationality, but … was also set in motion by political pressure from outside’, specifically by a popular movement for reform arising out of the humiliating experience of defeat in the American Revolutionary War and firmly convinced of the wasteful and extravagant habits of government.3 The comparison proposed by this chapter makes sense because the political system of Jamaica was deliberately modelled on that of Britain, as were those of other colonies in the British Atlantic. Legislative authority was vested in an elected house of assembly and an appointed council, corresponding to the houses of Commons and Lords.4 The Governor was a viceroy who represented the Crown and its ministers, and, at least in principle, exercised its prerogative powers and wishes by appointing judges and other royal officials. Technically, the sole role of the assembly was to pass legislation and approve taxation, but, as in Britain, it had made use of these powers over the course of the eighteenth century to obtain for itself a role in the government of the island, with its various standing committees exercising administrative power and overseeing key officials, such as the island’s Receiver-General, or treasurer.5 Jamaica’s legislature was becoming increasingly active by this period, passing a large amount of legislation, and taxation and spending were also rising to unprecedented levels, mirroring the expansion of British

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legislation and state formation in this period and providing unscrupulous colonial officials with similar opportunities for corruption.6 Moreover, politicians and the broader public in both Britain and Jamaica shared a common set of ideological assumptions about the nature and purpose of politics and the state. Notwithstanding the increasing influence in Britain of Enlightenment political thought, this was a form of the Old or Country Whig ideology which had developed in England in the seventeenth century out of a fusion of medieval English legal theory and the Renaissance recovery of classical republican thought, and it later lay behind demands for economical reform in Britain.7 These theories stressed the importance of civic virtue and the figure of the impartial, independent gentleman as a bulwark against tyrannical rulers who threatened the liberty and property of the nation. Sinecures and salaries served to undermine the independence of such gentlemen by making them dependent on the ruler, and the purging of such corruption from the body politic by abolishing such inducements and restricting waste and inefficiency within the administration was therefore a necessary part of the political process. Bernard Bailyn and others have shown that colonists in North America embraced a heightened version of this in the eighteenth century, which helped to shape their reactions to the British imperial state in the 1760s and 1770s; and Jack Greene and Andrew O’Shaughnessy have demonstrated that this extended to the colonists of Jamaica and the West Indies as well.8 Few sources exemplify this better than The History of Jamaica of 1774, written by the Jamaican planter and politician Edward Long, who wore his strong political convictions on his sleeve.9 He emphasised, for example, the potential for limitless corruption among governors if they were not checked by an assembly. ‘[If] men of narrow souls and mean prejudices … joined with a corrupt heart and a selfish, servile turn of mind’ were appointed, he wrote, ‘they must necessarily be prompted to exercise every species of wanton caprice and oppressive and arbitrary measures, descending at the same time to the lowest practices of venality and dishonour’.10 The assembly of the island should be wholly comprised of independent freeholders, ‘to give the people of the colony that protection against arbitrary power which nothing but a free and independent assembly can give’.11 This did not mean that Long or other planters were blind to the need for administrative efficiency or an active colonial

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state, but it did mean that such reforms had to be carefully managed to prevent those governors using them to exercise corruption and despotism, thereby reducing Jamaican colonists to slavery. Such concerns now appear almost hypocritically self-serving, especially given the brutal and dehumanising mastery which Long and other planters exercised over the tens or hundreds of thousands of slaves under their control; but they were nevertheless important since they shaped how the public in Jamaica conceived of the campaign against corruption in the 1780s, and could work both for and against the cause of reform. This campaign appeared necessary after 1783 because the American Revolutionary War had provided a brutal lesson in the inadequacies of existing administrative and political arrangements in the Jamaican state as well as the British. Although the island was not much affected by the conflict until the French and Spanish entered the war in 1778 and 1779 respectively, the next few years were harrowing.12 Spending rose from about J£60,000 in 1774 to a peak of J£240,000 in 1782 as the island poured money into the construction of fortifications to protect against invasion.13 Taxes rose to compensate, from about 1 per cent of national income in 1774 to up to 8 per cent in 1782, creating new opportunities for corruption as governors and officials channelled this tidal wave of revenue. Even this was not enough, and by 1786 the island was forced to go into debt by issuing ‘certificates’ to creditors for about J£115,000 that carried 10 per cent interest, making it impossible to cut taxes back to their previous levels after the end of the war in 1783. These stabilised at about J£120,000 during the 1780s, roughly 2 per cent of national income, and seemed to present new opportunities for corruption by taking away individual property and giving it to a class of officials subject to the control of the Governor and council. Reforms were necessary in order to prevent these new elements of the colonial state from corrupting local politics, leading to a campaign for changes that mirrored the economical reforms taking place in Britain at exactly the same time. These could and did take place because the Jamaican political system gave a certain degree of political freedom to the narrow white male elite of the island, which numbered about 1,500 people out of roughly 250,000 in the 1780s.14 Besides voting for members of the assembly, individuals could petition the assembly directly on

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matters of concern, as could the twenty or so parish vestries which made up the local government of the island.15 Vestries and meetings of freeholders also occasionally instructed their members in the assembly how to vote on key issues. The burgeoning public sphere of the island represented another opportunity for people to make their voices heard, both by reprinting these petitions and instructions and by reporting the proceedings of the assembly, enabling informed debate.16 All of these sources can be used to reconstruct the process of economical reform – though the term was never explicitly called that – in Jamaica during the 1780s. As in Britain, political power underpinned the reforms, and proposals which lacked popular support fell by the wayside; but the process was also shaped by the animating assumptions of the Country Whig ideology, which in some cases led supporters to block reforms that promised administrative efficiencies at the expense of political accountability.

The Receiver-General’s Office Among the loudest demands made in Jamaica after 1783 was for reforms that would relieve the growing weight of taxation or equalise its burdens and force the house to exercise greater control over its spending. For example, in October 1786 the vestry of St Andrew’s told their representatives that ‘the present distressed state of the island requires and calls aloud for the utmost frugality and economy of its public treasures’.17 Consequently, they were not to vote any taxes except for ‘the payment of the contingencies and services of the island, its just debts and [the] support of its public credit … [as] the present distressing times will not allow of the public money to be voted and granted away in acts of benevolence or compliment’. As in Britain, the reality of the 1780s was widespread popular demand for economy and restraint in public spending and taxation. In Britain, the initial response to these demands was the formation of a Commission for Examining the Public Accounts between 1780 and 1787, drawn from the worlds of politics and commerce and charged with a business-like inquiry into waste in public administration.18 In Jamaica, the assembly similarly voted powers in 1784 to the members of the Commission of Public Accounts, a standing

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committee of the assembly on financial matters that had first been formed in the 1730s to gather the information necessary to assess the current status of public finances and make recommendations for reform.19 Although on a much smaller scale than its British counterpart, which assembled a large clerical staff to cope with the immense volumes of paper which descended on the office, the commissioners in Jamaica developed their own bureaucracy, hiring a secretary and clerks and a permanent office.20 ‘After the needful arrangements of office and forms of proceeding were settled,’ they reported in 1787, ‘we agreed upon certain standing rules and orders for the greater uniformity and regularity of business.’21 They then embarked on a detailed study of the Jamaican state focused on the Receiver-General and his office, the state of the public debt and the heavy burden of taxation in the island. Among the problems the commissioners found was that the public accounts were entirely confused and utterly incomprehensible. Despite repeated instructions to the Receiver-General since 1774 to maintain very clear distinctions in his accounts between the various funds under his control, and to draw them together into a summary account that showed his overall financial position, neither had been done. ‘The perplexed and irregular manner in which the public accounts have been hitherto kept’ meant that it was not clear whether the island was raising enough money to cover its expenditures, while the same problems meant that the commissioners could not establish the real size of the public debt or to whom it was owed.22 They also lacked the necessary legal powers to require the Receiver-General to provide the specific accounts. Most seriously, they found that the Receiver-General was himself unaware of the real state of finances, due to the practice of breaking down accounts into separate funds: ‘indeed, we do not find that a due knowledge and accurate representation of them have ever been required’, they concluded, ‘nor hath it been customary … to prepare or offer any account of the actual receipts and yearly produce of the taxes’. Without such oversight, the Receiver-General could neither take a strategic view of income and expenditure nor police the activities of his subordinates. ‘We conceive it possible,’ they were forced to conclude, ‘[even] for a man of wealth, honour and integrity [like the Receiver-General] to be imposed upon either by the designs or the incapacity of his dependents in office, and to be kept in ignorance

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of the real state of the public accounts.’23 The problem was therefore wider than the inefficiency or malfeasance of an individual, and bringing colonial taxation under control would mean reforming the system. Similar issues in Britain led the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts to recommend in 1787 that the various separate funds be amalgamated into a single Consolidated Fund, ‘into which shall flow every stream of the public revenue, and from which shall issue the supply for every service’.24 Apparently independently, the Commissioners of Public Accounts in Jamaica reached much the same conclusion, arguing that the laws on the books requiring a general account of public cash should be enforced and all funds ‘constitute and be considered as one general cash, and be applied indiscriminately to every service’.25 In Britain, the commissioners also made several recommendations for the reform of auditing and accounting, including the replacement of existing audit mechanisms with five Commissioners of Audit, with enhanced powers to clear the backlog of accounts.26 The commissioners in Jamaica were equally uncompromising. ‘Neither the practice of office nor the individual and personal interest of the officer should be permitted to subsist in opposition to the public,’ they argued, ‘and we are of opinion that such a control should be established upon all public receipts and payments as morally to prevent the possibility of collusion or abuse.’27 This included enhanced powers for the Commissioners of Public Accounts to examine and sign off the Receiver-General’s accounts quarterly, as well as a full audit of his books going back as far as 1778.28 By 1788, these measures were in operation, allowing the commissioners to turn their attention elsewhere. Economical reform in Jamaica therefore resulted in a suite of accounting measures for the improvement of its central financial infrastructure resembling the paradigmatic changes adopted in Britain, demonstrating the similar nature of the problems each legislature faced. The small size of Jamaica and the close connection between the assembly and the administration show with even greater clarity than in Britain the crucial importance of popular pressure in pushing forward the initial examination of these problems and in shaping the solutions which emerged. Financial reform was undertaken in the face of prolonged political agitation from

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below, which required members to identify why levels of taxation were so high, and then how measures might help the assembly to exercise tighter control over spending. The solutions were economical in both senses of the word, enabling financial restraint but also requiring only a minimal increase in the size of the colonial state, and they thus sat well with constituents concerned about increases in taxes. They also fell most heavily on the Receiver-General, who was usually either a British appointee or an ambitious Jamaican official renting the office from its British proprietor, and who therefore usually squeezed it for fees and bribes as a source of profit rather than treating it as a public trust.29 These reforms in Jamaica thus emerged once popular demands for reform were guided along newer channels of financial practice.

Taxes and the collecting constables Besides the large overhang of public debt at the end of the war, the island found itself in 1783 with considerable arrears of taxation and in some cases grave doubts about the impartiality and efficiency of those collecting them. The assessment of taxes was in the hands of local vestries, and collection was the responsibility of the collecting constables employed by each parish, who then sent their monies to the Receiver-General at regular intervals and took legal action against defaulters, who were unable or unwilling to pay.30 The key records within this tax system were the ‘rolls’, or lists of assessments for each tax produced by each vestry, which informed the collecting constable how much to collect and the Receiver-General how much to expect, calculated on the basis of the ‘givings-in’ submitted annually by each estate. Defaulters were transferred to the ‘arrearage rolls’, which were also forwarded to the Receiver-General and the collecting constables. As the commissioners turned their attention to the public debt, it became clear that measures were needed to address corruption there, too. ‘It will appear essentially requisite to adopt some effectual means of forwarding the collection of the funds,’ they reported, ‘… in this situation the necessity of bringing forward every latent resource in aid of the public funds renders it incumbent on them to point them out, wherever their enquiries have discovered a prospect of deriving advantage from them.’31

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It is difficult to judge whether or not their concerns were justified. Similar accusations were made in England throughout the long eighteenth century against land-tax commissioners and collectors, for instance, and against the small corps of officials who remitted the funds to London.32 In Jamaica, a governor had complained as long ago as 1754 of the ‘peculiar methods’ used to raise money in the island, particularly the widespread abuse of their powers by vestrymen who also sat in the assembly, and proposed a bill ‘to prevent this kind of partiality and influence’ by banning them from sitting there.33 However, since it was interpreted as a political attack upon the colonists intended to force his opponents out of the assembly, it was rejected. Edward Long noted in 1774 that the present system enabled about J£60,000 in public and parochial taxes to be collected cheaply for only about J£2,500, ‘a circumstance very favourable to the planters, on whom the burthen principally rests’.34 Since it also ensured that the collecting constables remained accountable to – and under the thumb of – the planters who controlled both local and colonial government, this acted as a further disincentive for reform. In the relatively easy conditions of the 1760s and 1770s, while spending remained low and the security of the island seemed assured, planters may well have been ready to accept a degree of inefficiency in the collection of taxes, particularly since the alternative was to accept a greater degree of oversight and control by the imperial government. By 1783, however, the situation looked different. With an enormous debt to pay off, such inefficiency seemed a luxury that the colonial state could no longer afford. The arrears had risen from around J£53,000 in 1776–7 to nearly J£145,000 in 1784–5, over twice as much as the taxes voted for that year and more than sufficient to pay off the public debt.35 As the commissioners overhauled the Receiver-General’s Office and established the real financial position of the colony, they began to recognise, as the Governor had done in 1754, that the issue needed attention. ‘The evil which under this establishment most sensibly affects the public and excites the general clamour is the partial collection of the taxes and the immense sums appearing due to the public as a result of it,’ they noted in December 1787, ‘[and is] an evil which calls aloud for the immediate and effectual interposition of the assembly.’36 Since much of the 1788 session was occupied with re-examining the

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public debt, it was only in late 1789 that the commissioners were able to give their full attention to the revenue system and to diagnose the main problem as the influence that the parish vestries, rather than the Receiver-General or the assembly, exercised over the collecting constables.37 This interim report formed the basis for the final report of the Commissioners of Public Accounts in December 1790, which noted that over J£100,000 in arrears was still outstanding, ‘merely for want of that efficiency in the laws, which the commissioners have before represented and think it their duty again to submit to the serious consideration of the house’.38 Further examination had shown that there was a serious lack of consistency in the regulations under which different parishes were to assess public taxes, which prevented the efficient collection of revenues even when parishes were supportive. ‘Independent of these circumstances, the justices and vestries of the different parishes are not in general sufficiently attentive to the execution of the laws for raising the taxes,’ as a result of which the assessment of taxes was still frequently incomplete, and the collecting constables remained dependent on the vestries, ‘[so] it frequently happens that they are deterred from exerting their power to enforce payments by the influence of those who are instrumental in their appointment.’39 The commissioners therefore proposed to tackle the root of the problem by moving the appointment of collecting constables from the vestries to the Receiver-General, who would then be superintended by the commissioners of accounts, while a committee of the assembly would bring in a standing bill containing all the regulations usually inserted into the individual money bills, providing a standardised and uniform set of procedures for collecting taxation. ‘By such means the duty and proceedings of all magistrates, vestries and public officers relative to the givings-in,’ they concluded hopefully, ‘assessment, collection and payment of public taxes will be regulated, ascertained and established.’ Like the proposed reforms of the Receiver-General’s Office, these changes were economical in both senses of the word, seeking to lower the costs of administration and increase its yield while cutting back on political corruption in the system. They failed in this case, however, because they were not what their constituents wanted and offended Country Whig sentiments that strongly opposed the principle of public officers not being accountable to their

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constituents. Although parishes approved measures intended to close loopholes in the tax law – the Kingston vestry, for example, lobbied hard in this period for the assembly to close a loophole which allowed temporary residents to escape parish and island taxes – they were much less willing to give up control over their own parish officers, particularly while the assembly continued its unchecked spending.40 As the vestry of St George’s parish noted in 1813, when the reform was finally achieved, this was ‘depriving them of an important privilege [that] this vestry cannot in justice to their constituents pass over in silence’.41 But for the moment, without political support, the reforms stalled. As the era of economical reform in Jamaica petered out in March 1792, the commissioners of accounts noted that they ‘have had further experience of the defects of the present regulations established for the collection and payment into office of the public taxes’.42 However, their only remedies now were to advertise publicly and threaten legal measures against all defaulters, ‘[but] the commissioners cannot entertain any sanguine expectations of the effect of this advertisement’. Economical reform failed in this instance, not because its solutions were ineffective but because they were unpopular with the small segment of the Jamaican public capable of wielding political influence, and trespassed on important and long-standing political arrangements.

Judges and judicial salaries The third area of attempted reform during this period in Jamaica even more fully exemplifies this point, since it saw public pressure in Jamaica block measures that were widely regarded as a necessary antidote to corruption, but which were also seen, at least through the lens of Old Whig ideology, as fundamentally corrupt in their intent. These were proposals to raise the salaries of judges in the most important of the island’s courts, in order to increase the standards of legal practice by attracting people who had trained in law in Britain. Recent work on corruption has emphasised how the inadequate remuneration of officials can lead to bribe-taking, backhanders and inefficiency, and that making officials dependent on fees or fines can compromise their loyalty to the public interest.43 However, key elements within the Jamaican public during the

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period of economical reform, informed by their Old Whig convictions, argued that the proposals, by creating a tribe of dependent placemen, would shift judicial power away from planters and into the hands of the executive. They therefore lobbied in order to preserve an inefficient, but accountable, judiciary. The independence of the judiciary was a long-standing concern of Jamaican planters and merchants and had been evident from the late seventeenth century. By the 1770s the court structure of the island included a range of local tribunals and slave courts that were staffed mainly by unpaid magistrates drawn from the local white elite.44 The higher courts included the Court of Vice Admiralty and its single professional judge, which handled maritime law, and the Grand Court under the Chief Justice, assisted by a bench of unpaid assistant justices. He was paid only about J£120 per year, with the balance made up by fines and fees.45 ‘His post is of great trust and of the utmost consequence to the well-being of the colony,’ Long noted in 1774, ‘… he should be entirely free in his mind and independent in his circumstances, that he may administer justice without fear or favour.’46 To give effect to this, though, he did not propose raising the salary of the post to attract independent men educated in the law, not least because Jamaican law was not amenable to the pettifogging practices of England. ‘The bulk of our island laws were for the most part framed by persons not educated in the practice of the law,’ he said, ‘but by plain well-meaning planters … so we find them, or at least many of them, so loosely worded as not to bear the nice and subtle distinctions attended to by the gentlemen of the long robe.’47 The elimination of corruption for Long thus did not lie in using a large salary to lure to Jamaica a qualified professional – ‘a mere hackneyed lawyer’ – but in appointing planters and local gentlemen who could interpret the law with reference to its spirit rather than its letter, and ‘[admit] some little proportion of equity and common sense to qualify that obstinate rigour and abracadabra of downright legal jargon’.48 Long articulated a traditional Country Whig critique of the needless and unjust pedantry of the English common law and urged other measures to maintain the political independence of the office.49 For example, English judges since the Act of Settlement in 1701 had held their offices on good behaviour (quamdiu se bene gesserint) and could therefore not be removed at the whim of the

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executive, but only on the address of both houses of parliament. By contrast, the Chief Justice and other judges in Jamaica held their office at pleasure (durante bene placito), turning the office into an instrument of patronage that could then be exploited by governors for political ends. ‘I can call to mind more than one Chief Justice displaced by an imperious governor,’ noted Long, ‘for no other cause than he having voted in assembly according to their conscience.’50 He thus argued for the Chief Justice to hold his office on good behaviour and even to be banned from sitting in the council or assembly, otherwise he would be ‘liable to have his judgement warped by influence or his passions heated by the cabals and wrangling of party’. Cutting down the numbers of assistant judges from the hundred or so in 1774 by restricting them to a few gentlemen of good character would further raise the standing of the law, while also acting as a check upon the Chief Justice overawing judges of much lesser status.51 To avoid the problem of partiality in local appointees, Long offered no solution, beyond a pious hope that such appointees would rise to the occasion: an oversight which reinforces how far he and other planters were not concerned about the administrative character of the office but about keeping its political power out of the corrupting hands of the executive. To be clear, Long and others were not opposed to the principle of judicial salaries. Discussing the Vice Admiralty Court, Long noted that the judge and officers there were dependent upon fees and fines for their remuneration, ‘which may prompt them to make every advantage possible of their several departments … in a seat to which bribes may approach with secrecy and be received with impunity’.52 The solution was a moderate but reliable salary, which the judge would undoubtedly prefer over the risks and obloquy of the profits of bribes, and which would result in a court ‘much better constituted for the ends of impartial justice’. As a former judge of the Vice Admiralty Court himself, Long was undoubtedly writing from a position of both experience and bias, but his comments help to reinforce the case that neither he nor others were opposed to judicial salaries in principle, and even recognised them as an effective safeguard against partiality and corruption. However, such considerations were secondary to that of constraining the political power of the executive to override law and corrupt the fundamental constitution of the state. Some degree of judicial inefficiency was an

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acceptable trade-off in order to prevent such an outcome, especially when the law that the Chief Justice would be interpreting did not call for the hair-splitting technical expertise – ‘a vain parade and ostentation of regular lawyership’ – which Long claimed he had often observed as a student at Gray’s Inn during the 1750s.53 As a result, efforts to introduce a bill for judicial salaries were defeated in 1782, 1783 and 1785, the last by a flurry of petitions from individual parishes which show clear evidence of being part of a coordinated political campaign.54 Multiple meetings of the freeholders submitted petitions against the proposed bill, which aimed to ‘load this island with accumulated expenses, unheard-of in former ages … [and] more than can be afforded by this miserable and exhausted country, already drained by every act of ministerial oppression’.55 Echoing Long’s concerns, parishes complained in almost identical language that the proposal would introduce political corruption into the assembly and result in the judges being more concerned about their salary than justice. It was also suggested that it would be profoundly inequitable, since neither jurymen nor vestrymen expected to be compensated for their own public service.56 Such complaints were often joined with vocal support for a place bill that would exclude persons holding government office from the assembly, including the judges themselves if the salary bill was passed. To allow the unchecked exercise of government patronage would corrupt the system and turn the assembly into a tyrant itself. ‘It is a monster in politics, equally dreadful as the wicked system of a Spanish inquisition, to which alone it can be compared,’ several noted, arguing that it would ‘destroy and annihilate that beautiful symmetry of our inestimable constitution, which depends upon the freedom and independence of the representative body of the people.’57 Indeed, resistance to the professionalisation of the judiciary remained a consistent element in Jamaican politics into the early nineteenth century. Similar proposals were defeated in 1796 and 1797, and although the imperial government rejected a compromise in 1801 to raise the salary of the Chief Justice but require him to have practised in Jamaica for at least three years, they had to accept this compromise in 1804.58 After a substantial report by the assembly itself in 1809 listing the problems arising from absenteeism and the lack of professional training, the assembly eventually agreed to

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provide salaries to the senior assistant judges of the assize courts in the island and to raise their salaries; but it also insisted that the Chief Justice had to serve for five years as an assistant judge in order to be eligible for the enhanced salary, which was raised to J£5,600 in 1818.59 Reform therefore came about only several decades after the moment of economical reform and hedged with conditions intended to preserve the independence of the higher judiciary from the Governor. Measures to introduce more professional standards into the administration of justice in Jamaica were stymied by political opposition, demonstrating the power of public support, which this time was exercised against anticorruption reforms.

Conclusion The experience of economical reform in Jamaica during the 1780s helps to support existing interpretations of the process in Britain, which stress not only the role of administrative expertise in anticorruption initiatives but also the crucial importance of real political support. In both places this was exercised through a legislature that was relatively open to the upper levels of the political elite, who were demanding reforms intended to root out waste and corruption in the wake of military defeat. Where and when this political pressure was willing to be guided by technical expertise, it succeeded in implementing measures that were recognisably ‘modern’ in their intent, such as the creation of clear and transparent financial mechanisms and auditing structures that enabled budgetary management and political oversight. Where political pressure was lacking, or when technical expertise clashed with deeply held principles, technical solutions stood much less chance of being adopted. In Jamaica, paranoid concerns evinced by Old Whig ideology about the exercise of tyrannical and unaccountable power, so visible in Long’s writings, meant that the public resisted efforts to raise the standards of the judiciary and revenue service by isolating them from local pressures. In Britain, because the reformers attacked Old Corruption and the machine politics created by abuses of patronage by successive ministries, they devoted a disproportionate amount of time to the removal of sinecures and the regulation of fees, despite

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these accounting for only a small proportion by value of the money spent – or misspent – by the state.60 The relative success of economical reform in effecting change in Jamaica and Britain, then, was not the result of either bureaucratic leadership or political support, but rather of provisional and highly unstable combinations of the two.

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Notes   1 See in particular P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), especially pp. 31–54, and E. A. Reitan, Politics, Finance, and the People: Economical Reform in England in the Age of the American Revolution, 1770–92 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  2 J. Breihan, ‘William Pitt and the Commission on Fees, 1785–1801’, Historical Journal, 27:1 (1984), 59–81; J. Torrance, ‘Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation: The Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, 1780–1787’, Past & Present, 78 (1978), 56–81.  3 E. Hellmuth, ‘Why does corruption matter? Reforms and reform movements in Britain and Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century’, in T. C. W. Blanning and P. Wende (eds), Reform in Great Britain and Germany, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 22.   4 E. Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 40–59; C. Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), pp. 60–2.   5 F. G. Spurdle, Early West Indian Government: Showing the Progress of Government in Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, 1660– 1783 (Palmerston North, New Zealand: author, 1962), pp. 7–27, 50–75.  6 A. Graham, ‘The Colonial Sinews of Imperial Power: The Political Economy of Jamaican Taxation, 1768–1838’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45:2 (2017), 188–209; A. Graham, ‘Jamaican Legislation and the Transatlantic Constitution, 1664–1839’, Historical Journal, 61:2 (2018), 327–55. For Britain see J. Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal 39:1 (1996), 109–31 and P. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 41:1 (1988), 1–32.   7 See note 1.  8 B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); J. P. Greene, ‘“Of

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liberty and the colonies”: a case-study of constitutional conflict in the mid eighteenth-century British American empire’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 21–102; A. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 81–126.  9 K. Morgan, ‘Long, Edward (1734–1813)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16964, accessed 14 November 2019. 10 E. Long, The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, 3 vols (London, 1774), 1, p. 42. 11 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 12 O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, pp. 160–84. 13 Graham, ‘Colonial Sinews’, 199. All figures are given in Jamaican currency (J£), approximately J£140 per J£100 sterling. 14 Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, pp. 62–4; Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 47–9. 15 A. Graham, ‘The Principle of Representation in Jamaica and the British Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, 1768–1807’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 40:1 (2020), 1–20; Graham, ‘Jamaican Legislation’, 333–4. 16 Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 31–9; A. Lewis, ‘“An Incendiary Press”: British West Indian Newspapers during the Struggle for Abolition’, Slavery & Abolition, 16:3 (1995), 346–61; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, pp. 40–1. 17 Jamaica Archives and Records Department, Spanish Town, Jamaica [hereafter JA], 2/6/40 (St Andrew’s Vestry, Minutes, 1781–7), pp. 239–40. 18 See note 1. 19 Journals of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, 14 vols (Kingston, Jamaica, 1808–26) [hereafter Journals], 8, p. 91. 20 Ibid., 8, p. 323. For the British commission see Torrance, ‘Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation’. 21 Journals, 8, p. 323. 22 Ibid., 8, pp. 323–4. 23 Ibid., 8, p. 325. 24 Reitan, Politics, Finance, p. 181. 25 Journals, 8, p. 326. 26 J. E. D. Binney, British Public Finance and Administration, 1774–92 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 7–19, 189–208, 244–54; Harling, Waning, pp. 74–8, 133–4.

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27 Journals, 8, p. 326. 28 Ibid., 8, pp. 326–7. 29 Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 13–15. 30 Ibid., pp. 22, 42; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, p. 55. 31 Journals, 8, pp. 470–1. 32 W. R. Ward, The English Land Tax in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 22, 42–51. 33 National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew [hereafter TNA], CO 137/27, ff. 17r–v. 34 Long, History, 1, p. 67. 35 Journals, 8, pp. 221, 350, 448, 483; 9, pp. 162, 254, 357. 36 Ibid., 8, p. 326. 37 Ibid., 8, pp. 472–3, 533–4. 38 Ibid., 8, p. 608. 39 Ibid., 8, p. 609. 40 JA, 2/6/6 (Kingston Vestry, Minutes, 1781–6), ff. 80v, 113r, 114r, 121v, 159v–160r. 41 JA, 2/18/1 (St George’s Vestry, Minutes, 1801–16), entry for 17 April 1813. 42 Journals, 9, pp. 109–10. 43 For a recent survey of this topic see J. M. Anderson and E. Heiland, ‘How Much Should Judges Be Paid? An Empirical Study on the Effect of Judicial Pay on the State Bench’, Stanford Law Review, 64:5 (2012), 1277–341. 44 Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 16–18; A. L. Murray, ‘The Constitutional Development of Jamaica, 1774–1815’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1956), pp. 195–8. 45 Murray, ‘Constitutional Development’, pp. 198–202. By comparison, the Governor received a salary of J£8,000 per year. The Attorney General had a salary of J£400 per year, but the value of his office was reckoned to be double that: Clements Library, Ann Arbor, MI [hereafter CL], Strachey MS vol. 2, pp. 48, 52, 53. 46 Long, History, 1, pp. 70–1. 47 Ibid., 1, p. 71. 48 Ibid., 1, pp. 72–3. 49 For the Country Whig tradition of legal reform see G. B. Warden, ‘Law Reform in England and New England, 1620 to 1660’, William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 668–90. For views of judicial corruption see W. Prest, ‘Judicial Corruption in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 133 (1991), 67–95. 50 Long, History, 1, 71. 51 Ibid., 1, p. 74.

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52 Ibid., 1, pp. 77–9. It was estimated in 1774 that the office of judge was worth J£1,200 per annum, that of the Register, or Registrar, about J£1,200, the Advocate General about J£1,500 and even the Marshall about J£800. CL, Strachey MS vol. 2, 49. 53 Ibid., 1, p. 73. 54 Murray, ‘Constitutional Development’, p. 202; Journals, 8, pp. 109, 113–14, 118–19, 122, 123, 129, 135. 55 Journals, 8, p. 109. 56 This was therefore an appeal to the ‘unacknowledged republic’ of amateur officeholders. M. Goldie, ‘The unacknowledged republic: officeholding in early modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 153–94. 57 Journals, 8, pp. 109, 119, 129. 58 45 Geo. III c. 17 and 47 Geo. III c. 13 in The Laws of Jamaica, 7 vols (St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1802–24), 5, pp. 6, 74–5; Murray, ‘Constitutional Development’, pp. 202–5. 59 51 Geo III c. 27 in Laws of Jamaica, 6, pp. 75–8. 60 Breihan, ‘William Pitt and the Commission on Fees’, 59–81.

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5 Corrupt practices and the reform of voting behaviour in Britain, France and the United States, c. 1789–1914 Malcolm Crook

This chapter provides a comparative study of electoral corruption and reform in three major Western states during the long nineteenth century: France and the United States as well as Britain. Comparative historical analysis of this sort is seldom undertaken.1 National histories abound, though in recent years there has been growing, if still limited, recognition of the transnational dimensions of electoral reform.2 Few historians, however, have attempted to apply any direct critical pressure to the question of quite how peculiar these national trajectories were, and what, if any, commonalities might be found. The overall picture which emerges from the existing literature is that each country – including the three under scrutiny here – combated electoral corruption in ways that were highly complex, contested and contingent, in keeping with their distinctive political cultures.3 By contrast, political scientists have proved more willing to explore transformations of electoral culture in general terms. Yet only limited attention has been paid to the history of corrupt electoral practices, and even then their reform is often seen as part of broader, linear processes of democratic modernisation, to the neglect of the kind of intricacies and specificities highlighted by historians. Most notably, scant attention has been paid to the shifting and contested meanings of ‘corruption’ and what constituted ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ electioneering.4 The comparative analysis offered here seeks to acknowledge the peculiarities of electoral corruption and its reform in Britain, France and the US, while also arguing for a series of fundamental similarities. Of course, in retrospect, we might say that the most important point of commonality was that in each case reform helped to

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decisively remake electoral culture, at once civilising and individualising the process of polling and rendering elections freer and fairer. Although in the case of the US forms of malpractice would persist up to the present – notably the manipulation of voter-­ registration procedures – it makes sense to speak of the cumulative, long-term success of electoral anticorruption measures over the long nineteenth century. In all three instances the direct bribery of voters was largely abated if not entirely eliminated, while polling was transformed from a communal and often unruly occasion to a highly rule-bound, secret and individual act. The key elements indeed are well known and all attest to the way in which the problem of electoral ‘corruption’ was refashioned in more modern, office-based terms – or as Lisa Hill and Bruce Buchan have put it, as ‘a matter of rules, boundaries, personal probity and appropriate organisation’.5 France and the US practised partly secure balloting from the late eighteenth century onwards, eventually making it fully secret in 1914 in France, and from the 1880s in the US on a state-by-state basis. Britain embraced a fully secret ballot in 1872, drawing on Australian practices. Meanwhile, in each case we also find legislative interventions that, over time, more tightly defined and proscribed what constituted ‘corrupt practices’. In Britain, key pieces of legislation included the 1854 Corrupt Practices Act, which distinguished between ‘bribery’, ‘treating’ and ‘undue influence’. A more comprehensive act followed in 1883, which set limits to campaign spending. In France, developing regulations that dated from the 1790s, a comprehensive electoral law was passed in 1849, which clearly defined bribery, treating and intimidation as actes de corruption and prescribed strong penalties for offenders. Similarly, in the US, statelevel regulations dating from the revolutionary period were progressively refined during the course of the century, culminating in a wave of further measures targeting electoral expenditure in the 1890s, before the first federal laws were passed in the following decades. Yet to privilege the endpoint of electoral reform, as many political scientists do, and even to speak of some kind of convergence towards modern democratic norms, obscures the complexities and contingencies of the process of reform. As (national) historians have emphasised, there was nothing inevitable about what transpired,

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and no straightforward or linear relationship between democratisation and electoral integrity. The argument in this chapter, however, is that it is precisely here where some key points of commonality might be located, not only in the general form of the measures enacted, but also in the underlying dynamics of reform: the pressures that drove it, the resistance it provoked and the forms of corruption it encountered. In all three cases, standards of ‘corruption’ remained mutable amid the persistence of customary forms of electoral morality, while reform was the product of multiple factors, among them the organisational challenges of enlarged franchises and considerations of partisan gain and financial cost. In other words, though each country pursued a distinctive trajectory towards purer elections, comprised of different electoral systems and moments of reform, we can nonetheless speak of a common set of problems and forces that shaped these trajectories. In terms of the present volume, the key benefit of this reading is that it helps to reappraise the peculiarities of the British case – a point made in the conclusion.

Pressures for reform Although the nineteenth century is often regarded as the high watermark of electoral corruption in all three countries, it was also the age when contemporaries began to successfully tackle what had long been regarded by many as acceptable conduct. There was no doubt a relation between the two: as standards changed and thresholds of tolerance were lowered, corruption was more carefully defined and proscribed. Perceptions of corruption were certainly sharpened by the advent of more individualised conceptions of the franchise, which emphasised the right of each and every elector to vote without undue interference. In France, as early as the Revolution of 1789 voters were required to swear the following oath as they cast their handwritten ballot papers: ‘I swear to name [on a paper] only those whom I have consciously chosen as the most worthy of public office, without having been influenced by gifts, promises, requests or threats.’6 Similar conceptions appeared in the US as it emerged as an independent republic. From the 1780s the use of ballot papers was judged more conducive to ‘preserving the liberty and equal freedom of the people’, compared to the British-style

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viva voce polling that had prevailed during the colonial period.7 In Britain, too, we might point to the growth of these sentiments. Amid the first sustained debates on secret balloting in the 1830s, advocates of the measure promoted it as a means of ensuring that the elector could vote in line with his ‘individual conscience’, free from the ‘tyrannical’ intimidation and bribery that came with open polling.8 Yet the role of these cultural values should be carefully qualified. We will return below to their contested status; but we also need to understand the purchase they exercised in the context of at least two further – and more organisational – factors. One is simply the marked growth of franchises.9 The mass male franchise of the French Revolution was heavily restricted after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, but then reinstated with the advent of the Second Republic in 1848, and it survived thereafter as universal male suffrage became a cornerstone of the Third Republic. The American Constitution made no reference to the right to vote, so electoral legislation was essentially a devolved, local matter, and generalisation is difficult; but a wide (if not always universal) male franchise existed in most states for much of the nineteenth century. In Britain, the electorate increased intermittently from 1832, and in 1918 universal manhood suffrage eventually arrived, together with the franchise for females aged over thirty. On the eve of the First World War, the electorate in France totalled 11,000,000, in the US roughly 25,000,000 (though this calculation is based on the voting-age population, since registration arrangements were rather different across the Atlantic) and in Britain 7,000,000. These figures represent respectively 28, 25 and 16 per cent of their inhabitants. The overall increase in the number of potential voters in these three countries during the second half of the nineteenth century may be put at over 30,000,000, or around 500 per cent. The other key factor is the growth of electoral competition and the increasing frequency of polling. This was most dramatically the case in the US, where elections were conducted on a quadrennial basis at the federal level, for the presidency and Congress, in addition to the state and local levels, where numerous positions were to be filled. In most American communities there were elections once a year. In France, though the frequency of polling varied considerably between the Revolutionary decade and the Second

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Empire, under the Third Republic voters were summoned to the polls almost as often as their US counterparts, for at least one round of voting in a two-round electoral system. Terms of parliamentary office were longer in Britain (at most seven years), so general elections were relatively fewer, but even here more elections were contested. After 1834 and 1835 respectively, elections to poor law boards and municipal councils took place every year, while the number of uncontested parliamentary seats gradually, if unevenly, diminished during the second half of the century, before almost entirely disappearing during the interwar period. This general development was also a reflection of increasing levels of partisan organisation, which grew fiercer everywhere, with a whole range of actors, from party agents and canvassers to bill-stickers and distributors of ballot papers, desperately seeking to ensure success for greater numbers of candidates. Combined, these two factors rendered the need for stringent procedural regulations more urgent, regardless of how ‘corruption’ was defined. Finding ways to efficiently handle millions of new electors and enabling them to vote freely was vital in securing an accurate expression of the ‘general will’ (to use a French republican formulation). In terms of the logistics of voting, the key change in Britain and to a much lesser degree in the US and France was the switch to fully secret balloting; but in all cases, this reform was preceded by various measures designed to render elections more orderly and less time-consuming.10 In Britain, polling districts were introduced after 1832, while the duration of a parliamentary poll was curtailed. Whereas earlier they might have lasted a week or more, by 1853 they had been reduced to one day. In the US, where elections generally took place over one or two days, the use of printed ballot papers, or ‘tickets’, ballot boxes and ‘voting windows’ in the side of buildings had become standard practice by mid-century, replacing a variety of other ad hoc technologies and practices, including oral voting.11 In 1848, the French abandoned the practice, formalised during the 1790s, of canvassing and voting in closed, small-scale electoral assemblies (assemblées électorales), where the ballot papers were composed by hand. After 1848, more anonymous polling stations (bureaux de vote) became the norm, as did pre-­prepared, and often printed, ballot papers, much like in the US. The point is that in all three countries, the growing idealisation

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of the voter as an individual, autonomous agent, who should vote as he saw fit, was but one pressure among many for reform. The quest for cleaner elections was intimately bound up with the logistical demands of administering mass franchises.

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Forms of corruption Crucially, the combination of these two factors also meant that, in the short to medium term, the scale of corruption vastly increased, at least as defined according to emergent standards shared by those in favour of reform. Mid-century efforts to combat the phenomenon – such as the French and British acts of 1849 and 1854 noted above, and various state-based measures in the US regulating ballot papers and their receptacles – proved altogether ineffective. We should certainly acknowledge some peculiarities in this respect. In France, for instance, all regimes were prone to indicating their electoral preferences, though the practice of ‘official candidatures’ was conducted quite openly during the Second Empire (1852–70), when administrative support and intimidation were employed to assist government-endorsed candidates against their competitors.12 Clerical ‘meddling’ on the part of the Catholic clergy was also widely practised in France, unlike in the US and Britain (though it was present in Ireland).13 More examples might be given, and, ultimately, different forms of corruption were enacted with varying degrees of ingenuity and intensity in each country (not to mention region, town and city). Yet it is striking that in each case we find the same generic forms of corruption, however differently they might have been expressed and experienced. Among other things, this reflected the sheer novelty of regular, mass elections in societies characterised by profound inequalities of wealth and status, and only limited literacy. One common practice condemned as corrupt was ‘treating’ – or the rastel as it was called in France – which referred to the provision of food and beverages at the candidate’s expense. This was part of a broader culture of largesse that would briefly erupt during elections, whereby electors would expect at least a modicum of hospitality from those seeking their votes. Then as now, elections were regarded as a form of entertainment, though the atmosphere in the

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nineteenth century was decidedly more exuberant compared to today. In Britain especially they were highly ritualised occasions.14 Treating in the form of election dinners, breakfasts and picnics was but one festive practice among many that marked an election, which began with the ceremonial entrance of the candidates and ended with the ‘chairing’ of the victors. Music and the use of coloured ribbons and flags added to the sense of occasion. Speeches delivered from the hustings would be cheered and heckled by unruly crowds, decked out in party colours; canvassing might unfold to the tune of a band. Such elements were considered crucial: in Chester in 1818, the canvassing party for the Whig candidate, Lord Grosvenor, employed some sixty musicians.15 The consumption of alcohol was a prominent feature. Images of those queuing to vote, or milling around the polling place, portray chaotic scenes in Britain and the US, with many of the participants quite evidently the worse for wear. Small amounts of money might be given for use at a nearby pub or hostelry, but it was also common for drink to be dispensed directly to an elector from a common jug or barrel (it seems beer was preferred in Britain, whisky in the US).16 Depictions of electoral intoxication are lacking in republican France, perhaps because the sovereign majesty of the people at the polls was considered too sacrosanct to be represented in this fashion. But there were certainly plenty of references to drunken voters in official commentary and parliamentary debate, not to mention testimony in petitions seeking the annulment of elections as a result. Above all, the surviving accounts of candidates’ expenditure show prodigious amounts being spent on liquid refreshment and hospitality. In a close-run contest in 1898 in the Tarn department, for example, the Marquis de Solages expended approaching half his budget on bar bills accumulated by his agents.17 Another common practice was crude vote-buying, or bribery with cash. This of course is notoriously difficult to quantify precisely, though contemporaries made some efforts. The English borough of Lancaster was disenfranchised (a particularly British way of dealing with the problem) following a by-election in 1865, when, reportedly, two thirds of its voters had accepted bribes or offered to take one.18 In 1890, one American investigator reported that canvassers in Connecticut claimed seventy-five in every 1,000 voters could be bought, while politicians suspected twice as many of selling their

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vote.19 Nonetheless, it seems France suffered the least from electoral bribery, certainly when compared to Britain, which seems to have suffered the most. Writing in 1898, the acute British observer of French political culture John Bodley described it as only a ‘mild’ issue across the Channel, perhaps because constituencies were larger.20 It was, however, by no means entirely absent. The democratic Third Republic witnessed the distribution of hard cash along with other material rewards. According to an inside observer of rural life in Brittany, at election time the regime’s adversaries routinely despatched agents into the countryside, their ‘pockets stuffed with 100-sous coins’ as they distributed anti-republican propaganda and ‘cigars and guin ardent [brandy]’ to peasant voters.21 Money might also be exchanged with a handshake as agents delivered ballot papers to voters at markets, in bars or outside the polling station.22 Similar tactics were used in the US, where they also employed paper ballots distributed near the polling place. In theory, as in France, this endowed the vote with secrecy, but tickets might be distinctive in colour or size and, in any event, distributors were watching closely as they were cast. Some states passed regulations that insisted on anonymous, standardised tickets, but this only prompted the use of tickets of subtly different shades and textures.23 In general, it was party agents, called ‘ward captains’ in the cities, who distributed the money on behalf of a candidate. It was standard practice at the legendary Tammany Hall in New York, where ‘Boss’ Tweed controlled the city’s elections in the mid-nineteenth century.24 Although the French developed similar ploys, Americans seem to have excelled in devising ways of manipulating and falsifying ballot papers. In the absence of systematic voter registration in the US, personation (‘the graveyard ballot’) and repeat voting was often financed by contenders. Other practices included ballot-­ stuffing and, with the connivance of bribed officials, using papers that concealed additional tickets folded inside.25 It was only at the local level in Britain where this sort of paperbased chicanery took place (prior to 1872, municipal and London vestry elections used papers similar to those in the US and France).26 The key elections, and thus those that attracted by far the most bribery, were for parliament, where open voting persisted until the advent of the secret ballot. At Beverley (Yorkshire) in 1865, for

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instance, bribes were disbursed from the Mechanics Hall, where voters who had promised to nominate the Liberal candidate were summoned to be given money through a hole in the library door, so as to protect the identity of the donor.27 At the cost of between £1 and £4 each, some 400 votes were procured in this manner, the great majority of the total that the candidate attracted. Given that the tallies of votes were known prior to the close of polling, one British peculiarity was that electors might demand extra for their votes depending on the closeness of the contest and the price might be considerable. In Stafford in 1826 votes changed hands for as much as £14 (roughly £600 today) as proceedings came to a conclusion, while at Totnes in 1865 the price apparently went up to £200 (roughly £11,000).28 Finally, there was intimidation. Indeed, elections had yet to function as a relatively ‘civilised’ way of deciding who should hold office: far from precluding violence, they often encouraged it. ‘Undue influence’, as it was termed in Britain, might involve obliging voters to consume excessive amounts of alcohol, known as ‘bottling’, before frog-marching or, in some cases, carrying them to the poll. In France in 1848, when rural electors were obliged to travel to the head town in the canton to cast their votes, they sometimes found gangs waiting on the outskirts to accost them, demanding to see their ballot papers, before tearing them up and substituting others if what they were shown did not find approval.29 Such action could put voters off altogether, something that was still happening in 1893, though by then all voting was conducted in the commune: at Brive, in the south-west, a group of thugs known as the Mamelouks allegedly threatened rivals with dire consequences should they appear at the polls.30 In parts of the US, Baltimore being a notorious example, a ‘Wild West’ situation prevailed, with common resort to violence and the drawing of guns. Opponents might be kidnapped and ‘cooped up’, by a variety of hoodlums, in an effort to ensure their electoral participation.31 In all three countries, landlords threatened tenants with eviction, while factory owners might sack employees who failed to follow their instructions regarding who to vote for. There is a well-­ documented case of a Liberal-supporting employer in Ashton-­ under-Lyne (Lancashire) dismissing forty workers for this reason in 1868.32 It was symptomatic that in the same year another mill

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owner issued a placard informing his workers that they could vote for whom they wished. Marching voters to the polls in serried ranks, so-called ‘brigading’, may have been declining by the turn of the twentieth century but, at Roubaix, in north-east France, in 1898 textile workers were still being assembled in bars where they were issued with a ballot paper, and then taken to vote in small groups by foremen.33 Elsewhere, workers deemed hostile to the political preferences of their employers might be obliged to work on polling day in order to prevent them participating. Although in Britain, under open voting, electors might be harassed and interrogated at the polling booth, the experience could be equally uncomfortable in the US and France, and would remain so for as long as ballot papers were obtained outside polling stations.

Contesting ‘corruption’ That we know so much about these practices is because of another common factor: that in all three countries corrupt practices were subject to more intense public scrutiny and condemnation. Never before had electoral corruption been detailed in so much print or subject to so much formal investigation, especially in relation to national elections. In Britain, between 1832 and 1868 over 400 petitions contesting parliamentary outcomes were heard by specially convened committees of MPs. Concerns that the process was unduly political informed the decision to transfer this function to the judiciary in 1868; but up to that point Britain had proceeded in the same way as France and the US, where contested elections were also subject to investigation by elected representatives (an arrangement that would remain in France until the Fifth Republic and which continues to this day in the US, where it is enshrined in the Constitution). In France, reflecting the tradition of two rounds of voting in search of absolute majorities, the process was, ironically, called le troisième tour. Over 200 results were contested under the Third Republic between 1876 and 1914, and more than half were invalidated.34 Similarly, in the US, where election hearings were also highly politicised, the number increased during the second half of the century, before declining thereafter. In total, between the Civil War and the 55th Congress, which met in 1897, some 262 election

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cases were contested, representing an average of nearly fifteen per congressional election.35 Although these investigations were part of the increasingly bitter competition for election, the evidence and opinion they generated no doubt bolstered the case for further reform. Yet amid the growing tide of debate on the subject we also find a crucial reason why reform proved so protracted: simply that a great many contemporaries, of varying social status, regarded ‘corrupt practices’ as entirely legitimate, or at least as something that should be tolerated. So-called ‘customary’ attitudes were the principal source of this. Regarding the vote as a reciprocal transaction between superiors and inferiors was long seen as a natural state of affairs in the nineteenth century, especially on the part of conservatives and liberals in Britain and France. Both parties, the ‘corrupter’ and ‘corrupted’, shared this common mindset. For many people – and this included those who were not voters – electoral festivities were eagerly anticipated and, unlike with the extension of the suffrage, there was little popular pressure for a crackdown on corrupt practices. Treating is a good case in point. British voters expected to get a good ‘soaking’, as they put it, and they were bitterly disappointed if they did not receive one. The same was true of financial rewards: in the 1850s, for example, it was suggested that ‘scores of freemen’ in Hull regarded exchanging votes for a financial reward as a ‘sort of birth right’.36 As one party agent put it when referring to the practices in nearby Beverley, cited above: ‘We do not call it bribery. It is the old customary payment.’37 Similar comments were made in the US: in Connecticut at the end of the nineteenth century it was taken for granted that people would not vote ‘unless there is money in it’.38 Given the distance some had to travel to vote, transport and accommodation costs were also considered legitimate items of electoral expenditure – as simple matters of hospitality, rather than bribery. These costs largely disappeared in France after mid-century, when all elections took place at the communal rather than at the more distant cantonal level, but French voters continued to insist on a modicum of drink. As one official stationed in Brittany asserted in 1878: ‘Unfortunately, in this part of the country, it is a customary expectation that voters are plied with cider and handed cigars. They regard it as their right to receive such largesse, and as the candidate’s duty to provide it.’ He went on to add that ‘these practices

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escape prosecution because the majority of voters are involved’.39 Even if they personally disapproved of such practices, candidates often had little choice but to comply. As an agent in the Tarn admitted in 1898: ‘Sad to say, the use of alcohol has long characterised electoral practice. For many voters it is the sine qua non for obtaining their approval’.40 ‘Intimidation’ was likewise a contested category. For the upper classes what might be perceived as intimidation was simply the outcome of their social standing. The Conservative Prime Minister, Robert Peel, sought to defend landlords from the charge that they acted like ‘tyrants’ during elections. ‘The influence they exercise,’ he argued in the Commons in 1838, ‘is not so much intimidation, as the natural and legitimate influence which is almost inseparable from the relation of landlord to tenant.’41 It was the benign expression of the authority that attached to the ownership of a large estate. The same authority attended the ownership of factories. Members of the family that owned Le Creusot ironworks in eastern France, for instance, provided the national deputies for the local constituency for most of the period from 1842 to 1914; and all seem to have enjoyed the willing support of their workers, who were led to the polls by senior company personnel.42 The sense of deferential reciprocity that attended hierarchical social relations in Britain and France played a more diminished role in the US, reflecting its peculiar historical development. Customary payments for votes certainly evolved and did so in the context of profound socio-economic inequalities: one or two dollars seems to have emerged as the going rate at mid-century.43 But the culture of exchange seems to have been more conditional and cut-throat compared to Britain and France. Instead, it was the broader ‘spoils culture’ of public office, which developed from the 1830s, that lent legitimacy to what some dubbed ‘corrupt practices’. As Jeffrey Broxmeyer has recently argued, voting buying was seen as part and parcel of an entrepreneurial culture of politics (‘electoral capitalism’) in which successful candidates expected to gain financially from personal control over public resources, local patronage and access to markets.44 In a celebrated essay on ‘Money in Elections’ published in 1883, the land reformer Henry George wrote of this, suggesting that the lack of public outrage regarding electoral bribery was symptomatic of how deep ‘the virus of corruption’ had

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infected the country’s political institutions. ‘Here is the root of the spoils system’, he argued: ‘In our elections, which are the foundation of our whole governmental structure, we treat offices as things to be paid for.’45 The problem, he suggested, was not confined to cities such as New York, but extended to sparsely populated states like Nebraska and the established agricultural communities of the South.

Combating corruption These perceptions acted as a brake on successful reform only for so long, however. In all three countries the decades around the turn of the century mark a critical threshold in terms of the evolution of purer elections, presaging the more disciplined and relatively (though not wholly) clean affairs of today, characterised by secrecy and a strict set of regulations surrounding the administration of ballots and campaign spending. It is tempting to regard this period as a belated, if inevitable, moment of triumph for ideals of voter sovereignty and autonomy, which had long been in gestation and were now even more forcefully articulated. French historiography on this subject is especially prone to invoke the ‘moralisation of voting’.46 Indeed, alongside numerous civic manuals, the curriculum for mass education was pressed into service, encouraging the fledgling citizen to shun bribery and – to quote one British primer – ‘vote according to his own true opinion and belief … with no hope of reward’.47 French and American elementary schools imparted the same message: ‘There is nothing more shameful than buying votes,’ declared one French text pitched at children, ‘save for selling one’s own.’48 In each country advocates of reform looked abroad for inspiration in what was also a period of remarkable transnational exchange. Britain’s 1872 Ballot Act combined a series of innovations that had originally appeared in Australia in the mid-1850s: individual polling compartments, standardised papers published at public expense and the opportunity for voters to mark a cross next to the name of their preferred candidate. The British adoption of the Australian model attracted some discussion in France, though ultimately the French adopted the ‘ballot and envelope’ variant in

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1914, complete with curtained isoloir, which had been introduced in Germany during the preceding decade.49 Americans, by contrast, drew extensively on both the Australian and British examples, as various states, beginning with Massachusetts in 1889, began to embrace polling booths and official, uniform papers. By 1892 more than half the states had enacted secret ballot laws, though some Southern states, notably Georgia and South Carolina, failed to follow suit until much later.50 In France, the advent of fully secure voting seems to have put paid to widespread corruption, even if pockets persisted in places. Allegations that ‘moneybags’ were dispensing bribes in small constituencies, notably in the Alpine regions, were still being made until the early 1920s, when the practice of allowing candidates to distribute papers outside the polling place was finally ended.51 By contrast, the secret ballot was decidedly less effective in curbing corruption in Britain and the US. In Britain, bribery persisted, with the 1880 election witnessing record spending by parties, as Kathryn Rix has detailed in this volume. In the US, party agents devised a variety of methods to circumvent the new procedures put in place, including paying voters to abstain. In these two countries the other crucial ingredient was the regulation of electoral expenditure, which, again, was an area of transnational innovation. The British undertook a preparatory survey of legislation in twelve other European countries prior to passing the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act, which, by setting strict limits on expenditure and introducing tougher penalties for wrongdoing, stamped out the worst excesses of bribery.52 This, in turn, provided the template for reformers in the US, where it was described as ‘the ideal standard’ by which to measure American efforts.53 By 1905 some fifteen states had introduced legalisation based (sometimes loosely) on the British example, but these were soon supplanted by federal laws. In 1907 the Tillman Act outlawed corporate donations to election funds, while the Federal Corrupt Practices Act introduced in 1910, and amended in 1911 and 1925, imposed British-style auditing requirements and spending limits, and led to a marked drop in overall campaign expenditure. The French too, it might be noted, also discussed the British measure of 1883 at the time, though it would not be until 1988, more than a hundred years later, that they legislated to place restrictions on campaign finance.54

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In this way, however unevenly across the three countries, the culture of campaigning and polling that had been common at mid-­ century – raucous, communal and venal – had been largely consigned to the past by the outbreak of the Great War. Yet we should be wary of regarding this as the product of a wide-ranging cultural reappraisal of what it meant to vote, based on untrammelled individual choice. The reality was decidedly more complex, and any kind of consensus is better seen as the product, rather than the cause, of reform – as an effect of habituation to the new norms. For one thing, in all three countries, older, more classical conceptions of public conduct and virtuous independence remained in play, undermining the morality of institutions and mechanisms that others presented as crucial to the march of purity. Although similar misgivings were apparent in Britain and the US, the French in particular regarded political parties and partisan electioneering with suspicion, recalling classical anxieties concerning the development of ‘factions’ and the corruption of the unity and virtue of the body politic. Indeed, it was only in 1901 that parties were legally recognised, while declared candidatures for legislative elections had been reluctantly accepted in 1889, but continued to be condemned as a limitation of the voter’s sovereignty.55 Above all, the secret ballot was regarded with ambivalence on the grounds that voting should be enacted openly, in keeping with the status of the franchise as a public trust and privilege. Voting in secret was a contradiction in terms. Such sentiments were more muted in France, but not so in the US and certainly not in Britain where, from the 1830s, the secret ballot was consistently demonised as a technology of dishonesty and selfishness that exercised a form of ‘tyranny’ by encouraging electors to vote in their own private interests rather in than those of their community. Such arguments were readily mocked given the corruption that prevailed under public voting. Yet they were widely and, it seems, sincerely held, and they were by no means the preserve of elites and conservatives. One of the fiercest and most cited opponents of secrecy was the liberal radical John Stuart Mill, who quite pointedly mobilised civic republican conceptions of public conduct: ‘Disguise in all its forms is a badge of slavery’, he wrote in 1859. ‘People will give dishonest or mean votes from lucre and from the interests or prejudices of class or sect, far more readily in secret than in public.’56 Ultimately, what

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carried the secret ballot in Britain in 1872 was not an appeal to matters of principle, but the prospect it offered of quieter, more ‘tranquil’ elections. It was a ‘necessary evil’, as the then Prime Minister, William Gladstone, put it. The introduction of the secret ballot in Britain, however, is not the only instance where considerations other than those of principle and purity played a part. The subsequent 1883 Corrupt Practices Act certainly promised cleaner elections, but it also promised to reduce the cost of elections and save money for hardpressed candidates, something that was crucial to securing support for the measure among MPs.57 A more striking example is the adoption of the secret ballot in the US. As has been argued, many embraced the reform only when it became apparent that the design of ballot papers could be exploited for partisan and ultimately anti-­democratic ends.58 Especially crude was the ‘ballot trickery’ practised in the South, which effectively undid the 15th Amendment (1870) on voting rights for blacks and former slaves. The basic strategy was to make ballot papers difficult to understand, thereby excluding illiterate voters, something that was normally pursued by listing candidates according to the office they were contesting (as opposed to party), or removing any signs of party affiliation (as in Florida, Tennessee and Maryland). Other ruses included using complex Gothic lettering (as in Virginia) and preventing voters from seeking help from officials.59 It was indeed straightforwardly racist. As one Democratic campaign song of the early 1890s went: ‘The Australian ballot works like a charm/It makes them think and scratch/And when a Negro gets a ballot/He has certainly got his match.’60 All this, of course, was of a piece with the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the use of literacy tests to limit access to the franchise – a culture of discrimination that was not fully dismantled until the 1960s.

Conclusion Clearly, the emergence of greater electoral integrity in Britain, France and the US over the long nineteenth century demands a complex explanation, one that incorporates a number of interacting forces and factors. The above account has sought to suggest that

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this complexity can be usefully understood in terms of a series of commonalities that characterised the process of reform, and how the problem of electoral corruption was forged and defined, confronted and contested, and, ultimately, resolved. One point which emerges strongly is the relative weakness of changing cultural and political ideals in driving out corruption. As has been argued, though in all three cases new ideals of voter sovereignty and autonomy played a part, we should be decidedly circumspect in attributing to them any decisive causal significance. It is not just that these ideals were contested by a range of actors and from multiple perspectives. A series of others factors evidently helped both to render the problem more urgent and to make particular reforms seem feasible and desirable. In short, if the culture and morality of elections in all three countries was significantly remade during this stretch of time, assuming something like its modern, present-day form, this was by no means simply the product of shifting cultural and political values. Logistical and organisational factors as well as party-­based considerations were of just as much importance, if not more, at particular junctures. Yet if their pathways to reform were shaped by the same kinds of problems and factors, they were also, as has been suggested, quite peculiar; and in the context of the present volume, we might finally ask what new light the above analysis can shed on the case of Britain. Most significantly, perhaps, it suggests we should reappraise Britain’s reputation for electoral reform. To date, historians have tended to frame their comparative assessments of electoral modernity in terms of the adoption of a democratic franchise, equal constituencies and ‘one man, one vote’, with Britain featuring as a relative laggard, finally securing all of these elements in 1948. By contrast, from the perspective of anticorruption reform, Britain emerges as a relative pioneer, being the first of the three to embrace fully secure secret balloting and substantive, effective regulations relating to election spending. Indeed, the latter functioned as something of a transnational model and attracted considerable attention in the US especially, something that awaits further scrutiny. This suggests, of course, that there is no neat relation between franchise reform and anticorruption reform, and that some nations like Britain might prioritise the latter rather than the former. But it also begs the question why. One can only offer a tentative response for

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the moment, but surely part of the answer is that the problem of bribery was so pronounced in Britain, certainly when compared to France; and this, in turn, can be explained by the relatively small – and uneven – sizes of local electorates until the 1884–5 Reform Act, whereas in the US (from the 1830s) and France (after 1848) they were considerably larger and more uniform. In other words, it was the relative gradualism of franchise and redistribution reform which meant a tipping point was reached more quickly in relation to electoral corruption.

Notes   1 E. Posada-Carbó, ‘Electoral Juggling: A Comparative History of the Corruption of Suffrage in Latin America, 1830–1930’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 32:3 (2000), 611–44 is one exception. See also M. Crook and T. Crook, ‘Contesting “Corruption”: Electoral Morality and the Reform of Voting Practices in Britain and France, c. 1789–1914’, Zeitsprünge: Wahlkorruption in der frühen Neuzeit, 23 (2019), 136–48 for an initial foray into the terrain covered here, minus the US.   2 M. Crook and T. Crook, ‘Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age: The Making and Remaking of the Modern Secret Ballot in Britain, France and the United States, c. 1600–1950’, Past & Present, 212 (2011), 199–237; E. Jaggard, ‘Britain, Australia and the 1872 Ballot Act’, History, 104:360 (2019), 209–27.   3 Recent accounts include T. Campbell, Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742–2004 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005); J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and M. Crook, How the French Learned to Vote: A History of Electoral Practice in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).  4 This neglect is true of the otherwise stimulating F. C. Schaffer (ed.), Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007), and J. Teorell, D. Ziblatt and F. Lehoucq, ‘Introduction: The Causes and Consequences of Secret Ballot Reform’, Comparative Political Studies, 50:5 (2017), 531–54, which offers a tangential perspective on vote-buying and intimidation.   5 B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 169.

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 6 Décret sur la forme du scrutin, 28 May 1790, in S. Aberdam et al., Voter, élire pendant la Révolution française, 1789–1799. Guide pour la recherche, 2nd edn (Paris: CTHS, 2006), p. 200.  7 The Constitutions of the Several Independent States of America (London: J. Stockdale, 1782), p. 59.  8 Hansard, 7 March 1837, vol. 37, cols 28–33.   9 Useful overviews include A. Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, revised edn (New York: Basic Books, 2009); R. Huard, Le Suffrage universel en France, 1848– 1946 (Paris: Aubier, 1991); and A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 10 More detail on these aspects can be found in M. Crook and T. Crook, ‘Ballot Papers and the Practice of Elections: Britain, France and the United States of America, c. 1500–2000’, Historical Research, 88:241 (2015), 530–61. 11 It might be noted, however, that oral voting died hard in some states, such as in Texas up to 1848, Virginia up to 1867 and Oregon up to 1872. 12 C. Voilliot, La Candidature officielle. Une pratique d’État de la Restauration à la Troisième République (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), pp. 123–34. 13 R. Price, The Church and the State in France, 1789–1870: ‘Fear of God is the Basis of Social Order’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 75–82. 14 F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past & Present, 135 (1992), 79–115. 15 Ibid., 84. 16 R. F. Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 192–4. 17 R. Trempé, ‘Une campagne électorale étudiée d’après les archives privées’, Actes du 82e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: CTHS, 1958), pp. 484–6. 18 Royal Commission to inquire into Existence of Corrupt Practices at last Election for Borough of Lancaster, PP 1867 [3777], vol. XXXVII, p. xx. 19 J. J. McCook, ‘The alarming proportion of venal voters in Connecticut’, in A. J. Heidenheimer (ed.), Political Corruption: Readings in Comparative Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 412–13. 20 J. E. C. Bodley, France, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 512. 21 J.-M. Déguignet, Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, trans. L. Asher (New York: Seven Stories, 2004), pp. 328–9.

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22 Enquête sur l’élection dans la première circonscription de Guingamp (Côtes-du-Nord), 27 April 1902, Archives nationales [hereafter AN], C7305. 23 S. D. Albright, The American Ballot (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), pp. 20–2. 24 T. Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Liveright, 2014), pp. 65–7. 25 R. G. Saltman, The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 92–4. 26 Crook and Crook, ‘Ballot Papers and the Practice of Elections’, 539– 40. 27 Royal Commission to inquire into Existence of Corrupt Practices at Elections for MPs for the Borough of Beverley, PP 1870 [C. 15], vol. XXIX, pp. xvii–xviii. 28 Select Committee on Preventing Bribery, Corruption and Intimidation at Elections, PP 1835 [547], vol. VIII, pp. 88–9; Royal Commission to inquire into Existence of Corrupt Practices at last Election for Borough of Totnes, PP 1867 [3776], vol. XXIX, p. 160. 29 M. Crook, ‘Universal Suffrage as Counter-revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–1851’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 28:1 (2015), 59. 30 Enquête sur l’élection dans la première circonscription de Brive (Corrèze), 20 April 1893, AN C5573. 31 Bensel, American Ballot Box, pp. 179–83. 32 Select Committee on Parliamentary and Municipal Elections, PP 1868– 69 [352], vol. VIII, pp. 101–3. 33 Huard, Suffrage universel, p. 286. 34 J.-P. Charnay, Les Scrutins politiques en France de 1815 à 1962. Contestations et invalidations (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964), pp. 242–4. 35 J. A. Jenkins, ‘Partisanship and Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives, 1789–2002’, Studies in American Political Development, 18 (2004), 115. 36 Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Existence of Corrupt Practices in the Borough of Kingston-upon-Hull, PP 1854 [1703-I], p. 1825. 37 Royal Commission to inquire into Existence of Corrupt Practices at Elections for MPs for the Borough of Beverley, p. 389. 38 McCook, ‘The alarming proportion of venal voters’, p. 420. 39 Cited in N. Dompnier, ‘La Clef des urnes’ (Thèse de doctorat de science politique, Université de Grenoble II, 2002), p. 176. 40 Cited in Huard, Suffrage universel, p. 290. 41 Hansard, 15 February 1838, vol. 40, col. 1202.

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42 M. Offerlé, ‘Les Schneider en politique’, in Les Schneider, Le Creusot. Une famille, une entreprise, une ville (1836–1960) (Paris: Fayard, 1995), pp. 289–305. 43 Bensel, American Ballot Box, p. 59. 44 J. D. Broxmeyer, Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). 45 H. George, ‘Money in Elections’, North American Review, 136 (1883), 206. 46 A. Garrigou, Le Vote et la vertu. Comment les Français sont devenus électeurs (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1992), pp. 173–5. 47 H. O. Arnold-Forster, The Citizen Reader, 5th edn (London: Cassell, 1886), p. 42. 48 P. Bert, L’Instruction civique à l’école: notions fondamentales (Paris: Picard-Bernheim, 1882), p. 72. 49 M. Crook and T. Crook, ‘The Advent of the Secret Ballot in Britain and France: From Public Assembly to Private Compartment’, History, 92:308 (2007), 462–3. 50 L. E. Fredman, The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1968). 51 Dompnier, ‘Clef des urnes’, pp. 251–2. 52 Reports on the Practice prevailing in certain European Countries in Contests for Election to Representative Legislative Assemblies, PP 1881 [C.2987, C.3061], vol. LXXIV. 53 G. L. Fox, ‘Corrupt Practices and Elections Laws in the United States since 1890’, Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, 2 (1905), 171. 54 Journal Officiel, ‘Proposition de loi ayant pour objet de limiter les dépenses des élections’, Annexe 2452, 12 December 1892, pp. 2529–30. 55 R. Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1996). 56 J. S. Mill, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (London: John W. Parker, 1859), pp. 36–7. 57 See Kathryn Rix’s chapter in this volume. 58 A. Ware, ‘Anti-partism and Party Control of Political Reform in the United States: The Case of the Australian Ballot’, British Journal of Political Science, 30:1 (2000), 1–29. 59 E. C. Evans, A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1917), pp. 42–53. 60 Cited in J. Crowley, ‘Uses and abuses of the secret ballot in the American age of reform’, in R. Bertrand, J.-L. Briquet and P. Pels (eds), Cultures of Voting: The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot (London: Hurst, 2007), p. 59.

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Corruption, despotism and the Colonial Office, c. 1820–50 Alex Middleton

Trust in the British state was at a low ebb in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Denunciations of Old Corruption, institutional sclerosis and unpatriotic leadership became central to the landscape of public politics, at both elite and popular levels.1 Historians have explored the overlapping critiques levelled against the management of domestic and foreign politics during this period, and offered various explanations for the establishment of a new faith in the disinterestedness, competence and public spirit of government by the 1850s.2 None of this work, however, has much to say about criticism of the imperial administration.3 Leaving out the empire is to miss a vital element in the renovation of the image of the state. Attacks on the stewardship of Britain’s overseas possessions during this period were just as determined as attacks on other governmental practices and institutions. A series of reforming campaigns was directed at the Indian administration, which had been associated with dangerous forms of corruption and class interest since the mid-eighteenth century, as Ben Gilding’s contribution to this volume underlines.4 But much of the most vicious invective during the early nineteenth century was reserved for the Colonial Office: that ‘Augean precinct’ and poisonous ‘pest-house’, which incarnated and oversaw a ‘corrupt colonial system’, came to be widely understood as the most ‘rotten and ruinous’ department of all.5 Founded in 1801, and lodged into a cramped building at the far end of Downing Street, ‘the Office’ (as it widely came to be known) had taken over responsibility for the central administration of the rest of Britain’s forty-odd foreign dependencies, previously divided between a number of agencies. It fell under the parliamentary authority of the newly created office of Secretary of State for War

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and the Colonies, not all of the holders of which took a close interest in the second half of their brief, especially during what remained of the French conflict. By the second quarter of the century, the Office employed approximately twenty-five permanent officials (the majority being clerks whose main function was to copy correspondence) to oversee the business of the entire colonial empire.6 Britain’s colonial system was reinvented in the early nineteenth century, as the centralised, protectionist, Anglican framework of 1815 gave way to free trade, religious pluralism and ultimately the concession of responsible self-government to several settler colonies.7 These moves were accompanied and in part driven by expansive domestic debates about how best to govern overseas possessions. Nearly all the participants in these debates were vigorously critical of the status quo, and many organised their arguments around the failings of the Colonial Office, as the linchpin and clearing house for the whole deficient system.8 Pursued mainly by Radicals, humanitarians and abolitionists in the 1810s and 1820s, the assault on the Office made its way firmly into mainstream political discourse after the constitutional crisis of 1828–32, peaking in rhetorical significance at the turn of the 1850s.9 Thereafter, a new equilibrium emerged with remarkable rapidity, and by the time of the Northcote– Trevelyan report in 1854, the Colonial Office was widely seen as a model of administrative probity. For much of the 1850s and 1860s, moreover, the apparatus of government it oversaw became a subject of cross-party patriotic celebration. The early nineteenth-century critique of the Colonial Office was a many-sided phenomenon. Among the most powerful charges urged against the department, however, was that it was uniquely corrupt, and that its corruption posed unique dangers to the British state and nation. This chapter deals with public political argument about Colonial Office corruption, mainly among Radicals, Whigs and Liberals, between the 1820s and the 1850s. It suggests that on a political level dissatisfaction with the system of colonial administration was tied to wider shifts in attitudes towards the trustworthiness of the British state and aristocratic government, and that the imperial theme was in this sense integral to early nineteenth-century debates about Old Corruption and the reform of public life. The chapter also suggests, however, that exploring arguments about the colonial system affords more specific insights into the intellectual

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history of corruption in this period. In particular, the exercise casts light on contemporary ideas about the relations between corruption, parliamentary institutions and public opinion – and, crucially, on thinking about how corruption underpinned hateful forms of despotic rule across the colonial empire.10

Critiques of colonial government, c. 1820–50 There were a number of reasons – personal, political and philosophical – why British politicians and writers adopted hostile stances towards the system of colonial government in the early nineteenth century. Among the strongest was the growth of political unrest across the colonies from the 1820s, brought to Britain’s door by a rising tide of private lobbying, petitioning and public protest.11 Another was the possession of trading, business, financial, professional or colonising interests which the Office did not choose to further. Few decisions made by the colonial department could avoid antagonising someone, and the confusion of principled and personal motives in anti-Office discourse helps explain why sharp observers like the intellectual-in-politics George Cornewall Lewis considered the ‘constant series of attacks on the Colonial Office’ to be ‘founded on no intelligible or consistent view’.12 Different critics of the system denounced it for quite distinct, and in some cases diametrically opposed, reasons: the sheer diversity of the colonial empire and the range of issues with which it could be connected made the cherry-picking of examples eminently possible. Corruption, however, was an issue which appeared in most if not all early nineteenth-century critiques. What made it such a prominent theme was, first, that nearly everyone could agree that it was a political evil; second, that it was a practice on which unwelcome decisions could easily be blamed; and, third, that the eighteenth-­ century association between overseas empire, corrupt power and the corruption of government at home remained highly influential. Developed dissections of the effects of Colonial Office corruption strongly recalled Hanoverian arguments and anxieties.13 Though often mired in specificity and convolution, early nineteenth-century attacks on the management of colonial ­ government can be separated analytically into two main strands.

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First were the narrowly ‘political’, or partisan, critiques. These became considerably more prominent after the Great Reform Act of 1832, one of the many consequences of which was the creation of heightened public expectations (and fears) of government activity. During the 1830s and 1840s, the colonies increasingly came to be understood not just as bastions of geopolitical and commercial power, but also as arenas for the performance of attractive governing values. Moreover, it began to be argued that the policies ministries pursued in their colonies – where their authority was, ostensibly, virtually unlimited – were an index of their most deeply held principles. As a result, attacks on responsible office-holders asserting their power over the empire in the wrong ways coiled tightly around the major political debates of the era: Tories denounced Whigs for the premature conferral of constitutional liberties upon colonial populations not yet prepared for them, while Radicals dismissed the colonies as a paralysed, aristocratic fiefdom which demanded large infusions of popular rights. Corruption mattered here when it could be tied to ministerial behaviour: in the 1830s, for instance, Conservatives launched a vigorous assault on the Whig ministries’ habit of ‘ingenious Colonial jobbing’.14 More important for our purposes, however, were what might be called the ‘systemic’ critiques of the organisation and operation of British colonial government: arguments of a more structural, institutionally focused and carefully elaborated kind. These addressed a large range of issues, including the inherent difficulties of governing over distance, the prevalence of narrow oligarchic regimes across much of the empire, the nullification of the supposed natural rights of Englishmen (and, for some, the rights of native populations) and, most fundamentally, the vast, centralised, inexpert, irresponsible, corrupt authority of the Colonial Office. Historians usually associate interest in these issues with Radical politicians and writers and, in the 1830s and 1840s, with a close-knit group of elite Radicals and Liberals known as the Colonial Reformers.15 Yet although the systemic case against the colonial administration owed a considerable amount to radicalism, large chunks of it came in time to be endorsed across party lines. In the end, only the most hidebound commentators on imperial policy proved unwilling to accept the idea that Britain’s apparatus of colonial rule – both in Downing Street and in its diverse local forms – had fallen short of

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institutional fitness for purpose. The rest of the chapter looks at how arguments about Colonial Office corruption fitted into this picture.

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Corruption and the Colonial Office Old Corruption as it was understood in the first half of the nineteenth century was a tissue of more or less institutionalised customs, conventions and practices. In government it was exhibited mainly in the interested distribution of appointments, pensions, fees, sinecures and reversions to the creatures, connections and co-religionists of ministers and officeholders.16 These pursuits were perceived to run across the departments of state. It came to be widely argued, however, that no department was so disfigured by corrupt practice as the Colonial Office. It was further claimed that corruption in the administration of the colonial empire threatened British governing values and the nation’s global standing. Corrupt power under an irresponsible and despotic system of government it was alleged led inexorably to tyrannical rule. Two basic points underpinned the Radical diagnosis of Colonial Office corruption as a problem of particular severity. The first was that the colonies constituted one of the British state’s largest repositories of patronage. This vast resource covered gubernatorial, administrative, judicial and ecclesiastical roles, not to mention positions on the colonial commissions of inquiry which proliferated in these years.17 In addition, the colonies offered a virtually limitless stock of land, exclusive concessions of various kinds and in some cases healthy quantities of convict labour, all of which could be channelled in self-interested directions. The Radical argument that the imperial project was a cynical aristocratic plot rested in large part on these facts: as the celebrated Extraordinary Black Book of 1832 put it, the colonies were ‘a tremendous burthen on the resources of the mother country, chiefly to provide governorships, secretaryships, registrarships, agencies, and sinecures for the Aristocracy and their connexions’.18 For the young J. S. Mill and his coadjutor George Grote, the vices, prejudices and negligence of Britain’s colonial management were ‘deducible chiefly from the corrupt use which our aristocracy has always proposed to make of the

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colonies for their own patronage and emolument’.19 Mill insisted that in propping up a venal ruling class they were a ‘grand cause of the oppression of the English people’.20 Treating the colonies as props for oligarchic rule at home served to alienate their populations, he argued, and to promote ideas of separation and independence. The difficulty involved in calculating the cost of the colonial establishment and the extent of the stock of colonial patronage meant that estimates of their size varied significantly. So the Colonial Office was held to occupy a privileged place within the apparatus of Old Corruption. The second reason Radicals offered as to why the colonial department was so dangerously corrupt was that there was no informed public opinion to exercise an efficient restraint over the rulers of the empire. It was generally assumed among early nineteenth-century opponents of Old Corruption that the single most effective weapon which could be wielded against it was the systematic vigilance of an enlightened public. But this could not work in the colonies themselves, as public opinion could not function effectively in thinly peopled countries. For J. A. Roebuck, writing on the Canadas in 1835, it was obvious that ‘close and systematic intercourse’ was needed for a public opinion to form: its operation could only be ‘effete’ in a country ‘thinly inhabited only, at dreary intervals … in many parts with no roads at all’.21 And there was no substitute at home. It was an axiom of imperial critique that few in Britain knew or cared much about what went on in the colonies.22 This alleged inattention created a cascade of harmful consequences. Firm political leadership was the first casualty. Radicals argued that the low status of colonial affairs in domestic politics meant that the most able class of politicians treated the positions of colonial secretary and (parliamentary) under-secretary as stepping stones, rather than as objects of desire. So the best men passed through, and mediocrities stuck in place. In addition, the sheer complexity and convolution of colonial affairs defeated all but the most assiduous of the Office’s political masters. The problem was that they lacked hinterland to draw on. While ministers parachuted into the Home or Foreign Offices could reasonably be expected to have acquired some experience with those portfolios in the course of their wider participation in public affairs, colonial policy was, relatively speaking, a black box.

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Parliament had similarly little to offer. While the prospect of a rough ride in the Commons or the Lords usually served to ginger up ministers, this was only occasionally a threat with colonial affairs. Parliamentarians might, in theory, have possessed the authority to stamp their will on the colonial empire in any way they chose; but, except at times of crisis, imperial debates tended to be poorly attended. It was generally agreed that the level of understanding displayed among MPs was depressingly low: Radicals argued that this condition was long-standing, while Tories attributed it specifically to the stripping out of informal colonial representation by the abolition of so many small and nomination boroughs in 1832.23 Whatever the explanation, parliament was not in a position to compensate for inadequate political leadership, to communicate a tone to colonial policy or to keep imperial administrators up to the mark. When it did interfere in the details of colonial government, it did so in an uninformed or partisan manner. All the checks and safeguards by which power was made responsible seemed to fail in the case of the colonial administration. Here then was the crux: real power over the business of the colonies lay in the hands of the permanent staff at the Colonial Office. Given their hard-earned command of precedent, procedure and detail, their nominal superiors could do no more in reality than act as rubber stamps. This meant that unaccountable civil servants exercised irresponsible power over populations cumulatively far larger than that of Britain itself. Lacking sympathy with those they governed, they legislated with no understanding of local needs, conditions and interests. They did so, moreover, in an intensely centralised fashion: every decision taken in or about a colony required the imprimatur of the Office, making governance achingly slow and rigidly authoritarian. On the basis of these arguments, employees of the Colonial Office became some of the highest-profile civil servants of the early nineteenth century. Most famously, the department’s Permanent Under-Secretary during the period 1836–47, and previously its legal advisor, Sir James Stephen (father of Leslie), attracted a tide of Radical opprobrium for his allegedly dictatorial command of the colonial administration.24 Responsible ministers, insisted the Spectator as part of a long-running campaign in favour of colonial reform, were mere instruments in the hands of ‘King STEPHEN’.25 Henry Taylor, who was in charge of the West Indian division of

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the Office, added to a growing storm with the publication of his treatise The Statesman in 1836. His description of the strategies by which officials could pursue a system of vacillation and delay was widely taken to refer to the Colonial Office, and his book was treated as insider evidence of the irresponsibility and corrupt attitudes with which the British colonial system was shot through.26 The idea that colonial secretaries were puppets in the hands of designing officials became popular beyond Radical circles after the middle of the 1830s, and was taken up by Whig diarists and Tory malcontents.27 In the absence of the checks usually afforded by public opinion and parliamentary scrutiny, the distribution of colonial patronage resources could also proceed with uncommon freedom. As the Extraordinary Black Book put it, nominations to posts in the colonies, ‘being out of sight of the English public, were often made without any regard to decency’.28 Critics charged that appointments to colonial offices were arbitrary, self-interested and made with reference less to the welfare of the colonies than to the claims of the applicants. So much was typical across government; but the unusually low status of most imperial offices, and the lack of attention paid to their occupants, meant that in many cases the individuals sent out to serve were egregiously underqualified and unsuitable. As Cornewall Lewis put it in 1837, ‘the scum of England is poured into the colonies: briefless barristers, broken down merchants, ruined debauchees, the offal of every calling and profession are crammed into colonial places’.29 The broader argument was that this Colonial Office underclass, operating from positions of authority, spread appetites for peculation, bribery and venality, from the smallest military stations to the grandest settler colonies. In doing so, they helped to bolster the authority of the selfish, materialistic oligarchies which dominated local politics in many colonies. For these structural reasons, then, the Colonial Office came to be understood as unusually susceptible to corruption, and as unusually forward in pursuing corrupt practices. In line with the wider programmes of economical reform pursued throughout this period, governments did make sporadic efforts to pare back the tangle of colonial corruption: as early as 1814 Lord Liverpool’s government legislated against absenteeism in colonial offices, while supporters of the Whigs in the 1830s boasted about the ministry having

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resigned £400,000 worth of colonial patronage.30 But this did not appease critics of the Colonial Office, who insisted that piecemeal reform would not do, but only fundamental changes to the system of colonial rule.

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Despotism and the Colonial Office Laments about the dictatorship of irresponsible administrators and about the impediments placed in the way of public opinion exercising its salutary cleansing power were everywhere at the centre of arguments against Old Corruption in early nineteenth-century Britain. Suitably adjusted, they could be made to fit the conditions in nearly any branch of government. What further distinguished the developing critique of the Colonial Office, however, was the claim that imperial corruption was a handmaiden to despotic and tyrannical rule. Here, again, there were echoes of the eighteenth century, when Country and Commonwealth opponents of ministerial corruption readily reached for languages of ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’. But there were important differences between the possible impacts of occasional despotism in a highly advanced society like Britain’s and systematic despotism in younger states. More than that, authoritarian government under the umbrella of British authority overseas posed serious dangers to Britain’s own political health. It was easy to make the case that the responsibilities of the Colonial Office dwarfed those of any other branch of British government. The office of Colonial Secretary was widely understood in this period to be, in the words of the prominent Tory writer on colonial affairs Macleod Wylie, ‘the most important, difficult, and responsible post under the Crown’.31 The Colonial Office was responsible for the entire political and social frameworks of some forty British possessions, varying wildly in size, sociology, products and character: from the vast expanses of the Canadas to the tiny military station of Malta; from the complex native culture of Ceylon to the frontier society of the Australian colonies. Most of the British dependencies, however, were understood to be at relatively early stages of political and civilisational development. While mature polities might be able to face down or find ways of counteracting

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the negative effects of corrupt practices in government, ‘new’ or underdeveloped countries lacked the same wherewithal. Corruption, moreover, had the power to distort the character of states still under construction. In poisoning the well at the source, it endangered the colonies’ futures as robust political communities. In particular, it threatened to arrest the growth of the self-governing instincts and appetites which all sections of British opinion were so eager to see develop. Corruption, in this context, promised to set half the globe on the wrong course. It was also closely allied to the way in which the Colonial Office exercised despotic power under the aegis of the British constitution. It was widely accepted in early nineteenth-century Britain that there was a place for absolute rule in the political education of less developed communities, and perhaps even for civilised countries in conditions of extremity: this was the basis of J. S. Mill’s well-known dictum that despotism was ‘a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’.32 Critics of the Colonial Office, however, did not tend to see it as being engaged in rational, considered, directive government in the interests of local populations. Radicals argued that it had, instead, used the tools of corruption to arrogate to itself a massive quantity of irresponsible power, which it was exercising oppressively, turning the colonies into ‘strong holds and asylums of despotism and misrule’.33 The long-serving Tory Colonial Secretary Lord Bathurst was tarred in the Radical press as a ‘tutelary genius of colonial tyranny’ in the 1820s, and foreign critics of British imperial rule (especially French ones) were keen to portray it as tyrannical throughout this period.34 Over time, the designation of the colonial empire as a tyranny came to find support from across the political spectrum. By 1850 even the Conservative-aligned Fraser’s Magazine was describing how systems of rule had been erected in the colonies ‘more despotic in form, and more tyrannical in practice than any which were cherished in the days of the most arbitrary monarchs of England’.35 There were particular problems, moreover, with the conduct of despotism under British auspices. The autocratic states of the Continent, for all their defects, were at least populated by men trained from birth to administer and to sympathise with unfree institutions.36 Britons, however, were not equipped to turn arbitrary

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government to the advantage of their subjects. The reformer Charles Buller, though opposed to despotism everywhere, explained that he despised ‘above all things … despotism in a colony of England’, because British functionaries were temperamentally unfit ‘to administer their power without the aid, as well as the control, of the people’. A British colonial despotism was, therefore, ‘peculiarly inefficient and corrupt’. He argued, moreover, that rendering the government of a colony irresponsible to its people encouraged ‘ignorant and factious intermeddling’ in its administration by the British public and parliament, resulting in ‘a very weak as well as a bad Government’.37 It was widely asserted that these arrangements harmed Britain’s global reputation and its ability to pronounce on international affairs with clean hands: from the Radical Joseph Hume complaining in 1821 that they ‘permitted the name of Great Britain to be coupled with … acts of tyranny and injustice’, to an organisation of colonial reformers insisting thirty years later that the Colonial Office system was ‘irreconcilable with the habits of the English people, and … repugnant to the principles of our constitution’.38 Despotism under the aegis of Britain was bad enough on the level of principle, and its consequences for the colonies themselves were dismaying. Even worse, however, was the possibility that this imperial tyranny might threaten Britain’s own integrity and freedom. Some of the most vigorous critiques of the Colonial Office argued that the department represented an incubus of corruption and despotism at the heart of government, which might extend its tendrils to blacken other parts of the administration if it was not speedily struck down. This point was pressed from the colonies themselves in the 1820s as a means of arresting the attention of the British public, with pamphlets claiming that the unconstitutional, irresponsible, ‘uncontroulable power’ of the Colonial Office, ‘new to the laws and Colonial Policy of these kingdoms’, threatened ‘to subvert the general liberty and the fundamental laws of the Empire’.39 In other words, the authoritarian assumptions which a despotic system of government inevitably inculcated in its administrators and the habits of mind it promoted among the parliamentarians who had to oversee it were threats to the domestic constitutional order.40 Men who thought it natural to rely on corruption as a tool of government overseas, or who saw it as an acceptable necessity,

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were liable to regard it as equally appropriate at home. Here, then, was a pressing domestic reason for reforming a corrupt and tyrannical system of imperial government, over and above the abstract issues and the global responsibilities involved.

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The rehabilitation of the Colonial Office Hostility to the Colonial Office peaked in intensity, public profile and party-political reach at the turn of the 1850s. Under the ambitious stewardship of the Whig Colonial Secretary Earl Grey (1846–52), the department came to be seen as encapsulating the failure to keep up with the wants of the age which hamstrung all branches of Lord John Russell’s government. For the veteran colonial reformer William Molesworth, it was guilty of ‘injudicious appointments, ignorance, negligence, vacillation, breach of faith, and tyranny’.41 For the historian and critic Thomas Carlyle, it span out ‘blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries, stupidities’ into ‘a world-wide jungle of red tape’, combining the evils of despotism with the irritations of democracy.42 For Fraser’s Magazine, it was an institution that pursued only ‘patronage and interference … spoiling every undertaking it meddles with’.43 Shortly after all these claims were made, however, they fell rapidly out of circulation.44 This shift was in part a result of concrete institutional reforms. Herman Merivale, who had acquired a reputation as a serious thinker on colonial matters via a series of lectures to the University of Oxford on colonies and colonisation, was appointed Assistant Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office in 1847, and Permanent Under-Secretary in 1848.45 He was a major player in the partial reorganisation of the department after the budget of 1848, which resulted in the institution of examinations for new entrants. But these internal improvements did not make an immediate mark on the public consciousness, which, while Grey remained in office, was focused on more spectacular political developments. His concession of Westminster-style ‘responsible government’ to certain settler colonies – by which local executives were made dependent on colonial legislatures – was clearly a landmark, but its details were criticised every step of the way. Many vestiges of the ‘old’ colonial system remained in force after 1852, and little was done to improve

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local government in the non-settler dependencies. The sting was drawn from debate about the colonial system less by a logical and sufficient series of practical changes than by broader shifts in the tone and temper of domestic politics.46 The ebbing of social tension, the fall of an exclusive and incapable Whig government and rising economic prosperity at home and in the colonies made further imperial institutional reform seem less pressing.47 The waning of more general anxieties about the corruption and misdirection of state power helped to clear the political smoke around the colonial policy shifts of the 1840s and early 1850s, and made them look considerably more attractive after the fact.48 By the mid-1850s, as a result, a different vision of the colonial empire and Colonial Office had emerged. In 1855 the former Colonial Secretary W. E. Gladstone could describe a transition in British colonial policy ‘from madness and from crime, back to the rules of justice, of reason, of nature, and of common sense’.49 It was widely agreed that the grants of settler self-government had ‘removed the chief causes of discontent’, while the conservative Liberal W. R. Greg was arguing as early as 1853 that the notion that colonial patronage was consciously and systematically distributed for the benefit of the government and the aristocracy was ‘utterly inapplicable’.50 Colonial Office corruption seemed to belong to the past, and commentators looked forward to a future free from jobbing, abuse and oppression. Having spent decades being charged with vacillation, inefficiency and incompetence, the Colonial Office suddenly seemed in advance of other departments in the effectiveness of its reformed, partially competitive mode of selecting civil servants.51 The separation of the Colonial and War departments in 1854 and the establishment of a dedicated Secretary of State for the Colonies further improved the perceived rationality of the imperial apparatus. When a movement for administrative reform blew up again during the Crimean War, resuscitating critiques of aristocratic government as effete, arrogant and narrow, it had virtually nothing to say about the colonial administration.52 The same was true of the anti-centralisation campaign of the 1850s.53 Criticism of Downing Street ‘red tape’ and despotism did not disappear entirely from public discourse, and was pursued into the 1860s by the historian and ‘anti-imperial’ writer Goldwin Smith.54 But even some of the Office’s most

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vigorous critics – like Robert Lowe, who as a leader-writer for The Times had earlier poured vials of invective over the colonial administration – were prepared to admit that its time as a ‘muddling tyrant’ was safely in the past.55 When allegations of corruption re-emerged later on – most spectacularly at the turn of the twentieth century, in relation to the African colonies – they assumed a rather different form, and it was responsible ministers rather than permanent officials who faced the brunt of the assault.56 So the refurbished image of the British state as responsive, disinterested and liberal, which emerged in the 1850s and did so much to condition the character of mid-Victorian politics, applied as much to the institutions of colonial government as it did to those of government at home. At the same time as domestic politics had been (ostensibly) taken out of the hands of a narrow elite and opened up to popular influence, a corrupt, tyrannical and dangerous system of ruling the colonial empire had been overthrown, and the settler colonies brought into line with proper British constitutional doctrines.57 Some, like Disraeli, would come to look back on the colonial reforms of this period as a missed opportunity for imperial consolidation.58 But for the most part, the 1850s narrative stuck: through all the vicissitudes of later nineteenth-century imperial politics, it continued to be argued that the early Victorians had refounded the system of colonial government on a sounder basis.59

Conclusion That there was a crusade against the Colonial Office at a time when so many domestic institutions were coming under scrutiny makes sense. Campaigns around the reform of public life in modern Britain have rarely been complete without some interrogation of the nation’s international and imperial responsibilities – though it is still important to note that, in this case as in others, the colonies clearly mattered more in early nineteenth-century politics than the mainstream political historiography tends to suggest. Critiquing the Office was more than just a pastime for those with pre-existing imperial interests and anxieties. It fits, also, that contemporaries should have reached for the language of ‘corruption’ as part of their attempt to delegitimise the Colonial Office, given its strong

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contemporary purchase and eighteenth-century imperial associations. The department was a fountainhead of the same sorts of corrupt practices and administrative inadequacies found elsewhere in the state. What is most striking and distinctive about this case, however, is how the discourses around corruption were modified in connection with more expansive visions of Britain’s global duties. In most contexts, the fundamental objections to Old Corruption were that it made government expensive, unfair and inefficient. But when channelled through the Colonial Office – a department which was uniquely insulated from parliamentary checks and constitutional responsibility – the stakes were immeasurably higher. Critics argued that the peculation, cronyism and malversation which flowed outward from the Office were poisoning the social and political life of the large portion of the globe under Britain’s tutelage. In the colonial sphere, Old Corruption was portrayed as the handmaiden of a particularly onerous form of despotism. Opposing it was not just about bringing a sectional and self-interested aristocracy within bounds, but about moralising the global projection of British power, and even cleansing a national sin. This junction between arguments about Old Corruption and debates about authoritarian rule in the colonies helps to explain why the transition to settler colonial self-government was celebrated so enthusiastically in the 1850s. It represented not just an administrative convenience, but a disinfection of the British state.

Notes   1 P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); P. Harling, ‘Parliament, the state, and “Old Corruption”: conceptualizing reform, c. 1790–1832’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 98–113; J. Parry, ‘Patriotism’, in D. Craig and J. Thompson (eds), Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 69–92.  2 J. Parry, ‘The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 2011), pp. 164–86; M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, Past & Present 101 (1983), 55–86; A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chaps 2–3, 6; J. Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London: Constable, 1966).  3 Philip Harling did note that the reform of the colonial system must have been an important part of the re-legitimisation of Britain’s aristocratic regime. Harling, Waning of ‘Old Corruption’, p. 5. See also R. Kroeze, P. Damau and F. Monier (eds), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism: A Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).   4 M. H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), chaps 7–10; M. Taylor, ‘Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819– 1833’, in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 285– 308; Z. Laidlaw, ‘“Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 22:2 (2012), 299–324.   5 [J. A. Roebuck], ‘The Canadas and Their Grievances’, London Review, 1:2 (1835), 449; ‘Roebuck on the Colonies’, Fraser’s Magazine, 39:234 (1849), 638; The Times (25 February 1828), p. 2; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (25 February 1849), p. 7.   6 H. L. Hall, The Colonial Office: A History (London: Longmans, 1937); D. M. Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1961).  7 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989); W. P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930); P. Knaplund, James Stephen and the British Colonial System, 1813–1847 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); J. M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (London: Macmillan, 1976); Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815– 45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).  8 Most of what we know about this phenomenon comes from older imperial history. See J. S. Galbraith, ‘Myths of the “Little England” Era’, American Historical Review, 67:1 (1961), 34–48; A. G. L. Shaw, ‘British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 9:1 (1969), 71–95; and G. Martin, ‘“Anti-imperialism” in the

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mid-nineteenth century and the nature of the British Empire, 1820–70’, in R. Hyam and G. Martin (eds), Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 88–120.   9 J. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity, and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 4; A. Middleton, ‘The Second Reform Act and the Politics of Empire’, Parliamentary History, 36:1 (2017), 93–4. 10 Attributions of anonymous articles are from W. E. Houghton (ed.), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–89). 11 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections. 12 G. C. Lewis to Edmund Head, 5 April 1849, in Sir G. Frankland Lewis (ed.), Letters of the Right Hon. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Bart: To Various Friends (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), p. 202. 13 See E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 14 ‘O.Y.’, ‘Notes Written on the Last Day of Thirty-Three’, Fraser’s Magazine, 9:49 (1834), 123. 15 Most notably Charles Buller, William Molesworth and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. See P. Burroughs (ed.), The Colonial Reformers and Canada, 1830–1849: Selections from Documents and Publications of the Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969) and D. A. Haury, The Origins of the Liberal Party and Liberal Imperialism: The Career of Charles Buller, 1806–1848 (New York: Garland, 1987). 16 For the religious point see G. Atkins, Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019). 17 R. M. Martin, Colonial Policy of the British Empire, Part I – Government (London, 1837), p. 38. 18 The Extraordinary Black Book: An Exposition of Abuses in Church and State (London: Effingham Wilson, 1832), p. 379. See also e.g. ‘Thompson’s Southern Africa’, Westminster Review, 9:17 (1828), 40. 19 [J. S Mill and G. Grote], ‘The Statesman’, London and Westminster Review, 5 (1837), 17–18. Much of this drew upon [J. Mill], The Article Colony, Reprinted from the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (London: J. Innes, [1820]), pp. 7–33. 20 [J. S. Mill], ‘The State of the Nation’, London Review, 1:1 (1835), 24. On Mill’s later views see D. Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies’, Political Theory, 38:1 (2010), 34–64. 21 [J. A. Roebuck], ‘Civil Government of Canada’, Westminster Review, 11:21 (1829), 145.

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22 For the continued purchase of this claim see D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 1. 23 M. Taylor, ‘Empire and parliamentary reform: the 1832 Reform Act revisited’, in Burns and Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform, pp. 295–302. 24 P. Knaplund, ‘Mr. Oversecretary Stephen’, Journal of Modern History, 1:1 (1929), 40–66. 25 Spectator (1 April 1837), p. 302. See D. Butterfield, 10,000 Not Out: The History of the Spectator, 1828–2020 (London: Unicorn, 2020), pp. 30–2. 26 H. Taylor, The Statesman (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1836); for example, [W. Macginn], ‘The Statesman’, Fraser’s Magazine, 14:82 (1836), 393. 27 Charles Greville, diary, 12 March 1839, in H. Reeve (ed.), The Greville Memoirs, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 4, p. 180; [F. B. Head], ‘British Policy’, Quarterly Review, 64:128 (1839), 504–5, 486–8. 28 Extraordinary Black Book, p. 159. 29 G. C. Lewis to Edmund Head, 3 October 1837, in Lewis (ed.), Letters of George Cornewall Lewis, p. 90. 30 N. D. McLachlan, ‘Bathurst at the Colonial Office, 1812–27: A Reconnaissance’, Historical Studies, 13:52 (1969), 495; [E. Bulwer-Lytton], ‘Lord Lyndhurst’s Review of the Last Session’, Edinburgh Review, 70:141 (1839), 275. 31 [M. Wylie], ‘Colonial Misgovernment’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 44:277 (1838), 635. 32 J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13–14. 33 ‘Financial Reform’, Westminster Review, 12:24 (1830), 403. 34 Examiner (13 January 1828), p. 17; for example, [A. V. Kirwan], ‘Ledru Rollin’s Decline of England’, Fraser’s Magazine, 42:247 (1850), 74–85. 35 ‘Colonial Reform’, Fraser’s Magazine, 41:243 (1850), 373. 36 B. Porter, ‘“Bureau and Barrack”: Early Victorian Attitudes towards the Continent’, Victorian Studies, 27:4 (1984), 407–33. 37 Hansard, 3 May 1839, vol. 47, cols 834–5. 38 Hansard, 7 June 1821, vol. 5, cols 1133–4; ‘First Address by the Committee, to the Public of Great Britain and the Colonies, Jan. 29, 1850’, in C. B. Adderley, Second Annual Address of the Society for the Reform of Colonial Government (London: John W. Parker, 1851), pp. 10–12. 39 J. C. Jennyns, The Substance of a Remonstrance to the Earl Bathurst, on the Abuses in the Administration of Justice in the Colony of Demerera (London: J. Onwhyn, 1822), pp. i–ii.

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40 M. Taylor, ‘Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19:1 (1991), 1–23. 41 Hansard, 8 February 1850, vol. 108, col. 571. 42 T. Carlyle, ‘Downing Street’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850), pp. 1–3. 43 ‘What Has the British Tax-Payer to Do with Colonial Wars or Constitutions?’, Fraser’s Magazine, 44:263 (1851), 584. 44 W. P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Mid-Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 2; A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 63. 45 H. Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies: Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841, 2 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1841). 46 For the ways in which arguments can be ‘bypassed by a shift of cultural attention’ see S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 5. 47 B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 10; Parry, ‘Institutional reform’. 48 See M. Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past & Present, 166 (2000), 146–80. 49 W. E. Gladstone, ‘Our Colonies’: An Address Delivered to the Members of the Mechanics’ Institute, Chester, on Monday, the 12th November 1855 (London: John W. Parker, 1855), p. 21. 50 ‘Political Register’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 21:245 (1854), 308; [W. R. Greg], ‘Our Colonial Empire, and Our Colonial Policy’, North British Review, 19:38 (1853), 350. For Radical agreement see [J. Chapman], ‘Our Colonial Empire’, Westminster Review, 58:114 (1852), 416. 51 ‘Administrative Reform – the Civil Service’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 78:477 (1855), 122; Hansard, 24 April 1856, vol. 141, col. 1404. 52 See O. Anderson, ‘The Janus Face of Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Radicalism: The Administrative Reform Association of 1855’, Victorian Studies, 8:3 (1965), 231–42 and G. R. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 3. 53 B. Weinstein, ‘“Local Self-Government is True Socialism”: Joshua Toulmin Smith, the State and Character Formation’, English Historical Review, 123:504 (2008), 1193–1228.

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54 G. Smith, The Empire: A Series of Letters Published in ‘The Daily News,’ 1862, 1863 (London: John Henry and James Parker, 1863), pp. 293–7. 55 Robert Lowe to Charles Adderley, 31 December 1861, in W. S. Childe-Pemberton, Life of Lord Norton (Right Hon. Sir Charles Adderley, K.C.M.G., M.P.), 1814–1905, Statesman and Philanthropist (London: John Murray, 1909), p. 178. 56 G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 65–72. 57 Parry, ‘Institutional reform’; P. Harling, ‘Equipoise Regained? Recent Trends in British Political History, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History, 75:4 (2003), 891–2. 58 The Times (25 June 1872), pp. 7–8. 59 [H. Reeve], ‘Lord Broughton’s Recollections of a Long Life’, Edinburgh Review, 133:272 (1871), 317; E. Salmon, ‘The Colonial Empire of 1837’, Fortnightly Review, 61:366 (1897), 862–90.

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7 The ‘most difficult’ subject for legislation: parliament and electoral corruption in the nineteenth century Kathryn Rix

Parliament’s efforts to resolve the problem of corruption at elections have formed a central strand in existing narratives of the evolution of Britain’s representative system during the nineteenth century. The issue permeated debates about parliamentary reform, with the desire to promote electoral purity acting as a key influence on the shape of both the electoral map and the electorate. In disenfranchising and redistributing the seats of notorious rotten boroughs such as Dunwich and Old Sarum, and around fifty more, the 1832 Reform Act did much to clean up the electoral system. The reduction of corruption was also a fundamental aim of the act’s restructuring of the borough franchise, seeking to create a ‘respectable’ and ‘intelligent’ electorate which would eschew venality and resist intimidation.1 The act also took some practical steps which it was hoped would help to diminish the corruption and expense of elections, notably by limiting the polling in each constituency to two days. Yet, as studies of nineteenth-century electoral politics have made clear, the political system after 1832 was far from pure.2 In 1836 the London and Westminster Review bemoaned the fact that while the Reform Act was still in its cradle, ‘the envious goddess of Corruption’ had ‘sent two most deadly serpents, Bribery and Intimidation, to strangle the baby-giant’, meaning that ‘the representative system is utterly defeated’.3 Successive elections saw MPs unseated for corruption, with strong suspicions that the misdeeds exposed by election petitions were merely the tip of the iceberg. In 1866, as MPs again turned their attention to parliamentary reform, inquiries into the venal boroughs of Totnes, Reigate, Great Yarmouth and

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Lancaster revealed the scale of the problem: at Totnes, up to £200 had been offered for a single vote in 1865, while 64 per cent of Lancaster’s voters had been complicit in bribery.4 With MPs soon to undertake another major overhaul of the electoral system, the 1880 election provided further evidence of the persistence of corruption.5 Along with the redistribution of seats and the alterations to the franchise undertaken by the 1832, 1867 and 1884–5 Reform Acts, parliament dealt with the issue of corruption through specific measures directed at tackling electoral malpractice. The key reforms – the 1854 and 1883 Corrupt Practices Acts and the 1872 Ballot Act – are routinely discussed in histories of the nineteenth-century political system. Another significant change came in 1868 with the transfer of jurisdiction over election petitions from the Commons to the judiciary. However, these acts were only part of the picture. Parliament also produced several lesser measures, and efforts were made to pass many more. Yet these have rarely attracted more than a passing mention from historians.6 Failed legislative endeavours have received even less attention, despite the fact that, as Charles Seymour’s 1915 account observed, ‘during the two decades which followed the Reform Act there [were] few subjects so constantly discussed … as the extinction of corrupt practices’.7 The political veteran Lord Lansdowne noted in 1847 that ‘year after year, Parliament after Parliament, during the last century attempts had been made to repress by statute those abominable practices. Some of those acts had been adopted, others had been rejected; but all of them had afforded convincing proof in their progress that of all the subjects for legislation this was most difficult to handle.’8 This chapter aims to provide an overview of these ongoing parliamentary debates about electoral corruption, emphasising that the major reforms which usually punctuate accounts of the representative system’s development were only one element of parliament’s response to this problem. The customary focus on a handful of key dates has tended to overlook the fact that electoral malpractice was a perpetual subject of discussion for MPs and that reform was a gradual, uneven and complex process. Having considered the extent to which this issue occupied the time of the Commons, this chapter analyses why it proved such a thorny question for MPs. Two particular concerns – provision of refreshments

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and conveyance of voters to the poll – are used to explore wider beliefs about the nature of the representative system and how these could serve as an obstacle to aspirations of purity. Finally, reconstructing the broader trajectory of parliamentary discussion of corrupt practices reform helps to highlight the decisive factors which enabled a more comprehensive measure to be passed in 1883.

Exposing and punishing malpractice: the problem of parliamentary time One of the most obvious ways in which parliamentarians had to confront the issue of corruption was dealing with the election petitions which flooded into the Commons after each election until 1868, when the judiciary assumed this task. Following the nine general elections between 1832 and 1865, 613 election petitions were presented. Petitions after by-elections – up to the eve of the 1868 election – added another 133, making 746 in total. A substantial proportion were withdrawn without being heard, but between 1832 and 1868 424 petitions were tried by an election committee, requiring a considerable amount of parliamentary time and resources.9 Until 1839 election committees were composed of eleven MPs. That year saw a major overhaul of the system, after which election committees had seven members; this was reduced to five in 1844. The burden this placed on fellow MPs was noted by Lord Robert Grosvenor, who observed in 1854 that ‘after the last general election they had upwards of fifty Election Committees, and between 250 and 300 gentlemen were employed for a vast number of days endeavouring to settle some of the most perplexing questions possible’.10 Election petitions occupied time not only in the committee rooms, but also in the chamber. The moving of a new writ for a seat where a petition had succeeded could become an opportunity to discuss not only that constituency’s probity, but also broader concerns about corruption and potential remedies. The 1840 debate on the Ludlow writ filled thirty-four columns of Hansard, with Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell among the speakers.11 On other occasions, highly specific situations drew MPs’ attention. The Ipswich petition impinged on parliament’s time for over two months

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following the unseating of its MPs in June 1835. The Commons decided to take action against individuals who had tried to obstruct the petition’s trial, mainly by absconding abroad to avoid giving evidence, or abetting this. Seven men were detained in Newgate prison, for periods ranging from a few days to a few weeks, and were reprimanded at the bar of the House before being released. MPs devoted a staggering amount of effort to this episode, even summoning one man’s medical attendants to testify, and it generated widespread interest: 331 MPs voted in one division during these protracted proceedings, which also saw a select committee appointed.12 Legislation on electoral malpractice took up far more of the Commons’ time after 1832 than the customary focus on the major reforms of 1854, 1868, 1872 and 1883 would suggest. At least twenty other measures dealing with the corruption and expense of parliamentary elections were passed between 1832 and 1885, deploying a variety of approaches to the problem. One of the earliest reforms came in 1835, when the length of the poll was reduced from two days to one in boroughs. Praising this measure, the Radical MP Richard Potter noted that ‘the mischief under the old system was generally done in the night’.13 It was not uncommon for voters to hold out for a larger bribe on the second day of the poll. Curtailing the contest’s length also diminished the window of opportunity for treating and intimidation. The same reform was extended to county elections in 1853. There were several alterations to the election committee system before the Commons surrendered jurisdiction to the judges in 1868. Changes to the size of committees have already been noted, and there were also acts in 1841 and 1848 clarifying procedure. The 1852 Election Commissions Act enabled on-the-spot inquiries in constituencies where an election committee reported that corrupt practices had ‘extensively prevailed’. Following the transfer of jurisdiction in 1868, a further reform in 1879 stipulated that two judges rather than one should try each petition. The 1842 Bribery at Elections Act, introduced by Russell, endeavoured to resolve the problem of parties compromising to withdraw petitions. It also made an important clarification to the law by stating that ‘headmoney’ – payments in some constituencies to every voter who polled for a particular candidate, which some regarded as

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customary and not corrupt – should be classed as bribery. An 1863 Corrupt Practices Act made several minor amendments and there were measures in 1858 and 1880 regarding payments for conveyance of voters to the poll. The ultimate sanction used against corrupt constituencies was disenfranchisement. The stripping of representation from Sudbury (1844) and St Albans (1852) is well known, but less attention has been given to the 1867 Reform Act’s removal of seats from Great Yarmouth, Lancaster, Reigate and Totnes in the light of their electoral misconduct in 1865.14 The same punishment was meted out to Beverley, Bridgwater, Cashel and Sligo in 1870, and to Macclesfield and Sandwich in 1885, making a total of twelve boroughs disenfranchised for corruption between 1833 and 1885. This figure could have been higher, as bills to disenfranchise Stafford and Hertford passed the Commons in 1834.15 Stafford had escaped an election committee after petitions relating to the 1832 contest were dropped, but the Coventry MP, Edward Ellice, instigated an inquiry into its electoral affairs, which uncovered wholesale corruption.16 One of Stafford’s MPs, Rees Gronow, admitted in his memoirs that he had ‘set to work to bribe every man, woman, and child … I engaged numerous agents, opened all the public houses which were not already taken by my opponents, gave suppers every night to my supporters’.17 Despite his loyalties as a Staffordshire resident, Peel was among those who supported Stafford’s disenfranchisement to make it ‘a public example’.18 It was, however, saved by the failure of the Lords to approve this, as was Hertford. A second attempt to disenfranchise Stafford in 1836 also floundered in the upper House.19 In 1834 the Lords stymied another bill sent up by the Commons which sought to reform the corrupt borough of Warwick by extending its boundaries to include Leamington Priors, and also rejected the Commons’ attempt to disenfranchise Liverpool’s freemen, around half of whom had taken a bribe in 1832.20 Great Yarmouth’s freemen did, however, suffer this fate in 1848, although this failed to improve the borough’s morality: in 1865 almost a third of the remaining electors were involved in bribery, prompting its complete disenfranchisement.21 The issue of electoral corruption also appeared in some unexpected pieces of legislation, such as the 1856 Police Act, which contained a clause aimed at preventing police constables from exercising influence at elections.

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This legislative output did not represent the full extent of parliament’s consideration of electoral misconduct, which included several select committees and numerous failed attempts at legislation. Motions on the ballot were brought forward almost annually by George Grote from 1833 and Francis Berkeley from 1848. The indexes to Hansard, the Commons Journal and the Parliamentary Papers indicate that between 1832 and 1885 there was not a single year in which MPs did not consider electoral malpractice in some way, whether in the chamber or the committee rooms. Although Seymour suggested that some of this was merely ‘show’, with MPs needing to be seen to express indignation at practices which they tacitly, if not explicitly, condoned during their election contests, he concluded that there was ‘a semblance of sincerity in the official attempts made against corrupt practices which was not altogether feigned’.22 Given growing pressures on parliamentary time in the mid- to late nineteenth century, as both public and private business expanded, MPs’ willingness to return to this issue again and again demonstrated just how significant it was perceived to be.23 These competing demands on parliamentary time offer one reason why legislating on this complex issue proved so difficult. MPs naturally took a keen interest in measures which would directly affect them, but this did not necessarily make reform any easier – indeed, the reverse was true as MPs’ interventions prolonged discussion. Several of the acts outlined above took more than one session to pass. Reflecting on the extensive debates on the 1854 Corrupt Practices Act – first discussed in 1853 – one Liberal backbencher observed that ‘a bribery Bill was almost sufficient for a Session in itself’.24 The act redefined bribery and treating, created the offence of ‘undue influence’, established a system of election accounts and prohibited various expenses. However, Russell had to abandon plans to accompany it with reform of election petition procedure.25 Introduced into the Commons for the second time in February 1854, the measure was still being discussed in late July, when one MP noted that the bill ‘had been reprinted and put wet into their hands as they came into the House’.26 It sparked a dispute with the Lords, who objected to having to consider it so late in the session. The third reading in the Commons passed by just seven votes and it received royal assent only two days before the prorogation.27 The Conservative backbencher Sir Rainald

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Knightley took advantage of the time-consuming nature of this question to scupper the Liberal ministry’s 1866 parliamentary reform bill, with his instruction that it include ‘provision for the better prevention of bribery and corruption’ intended to fatally overload it. Even after Disraeli shrewdly separated debates on corruption from the wider issue of parliamentary reform in 1867, the pressure on parliamentary time was evident: he was prepared to delay the prorogation in 1868 to ensure that his Election Petitions Act – introduced in April 1867 – received royal assent.28

Detection and deterrence: further difficulties of reform Another quandary for MPs was the wide range of potential options for reform. Faced with the persistence of corruption at the first election after the 1832 Reform Act, MPs had proved willing to apply the remedy of disenfranchisement to particularly venal boroughs, but, as noted above, were thwarted by the Lords. Such measures had the attraction of assigning the blame for electoral immorality to a particular locality or group. However, despite endorsing the often repeated view that freemen were ‘the most incurably corrupt class of electors’, a commentator in 1853 had to admit that the statistics did not support this, since of seventy-two boroughs where bribery had been proved in the previous twenty years, thirty-eight had neither freemen nor other surviving ‘ancient rights’ voters.29 Nor could the finger be pointed only at small and potentially dispensable boroughs: the Commons heard in 1854 that twenty-two of the ­seventy-six constituencies where elections had been declared void in England and Wales since 1832 had more than 1,000 voters, while only twelve had fewer than 500.30 New constituencies were not immune from corruption, with Huddersfield, Rochdale, Tynemouth and Wakefield among the boroughs created in 1832 that saw successful petitions. Disenfranchising a constituency or one class of voters had the obvious disadvantage of punishing the innocent with the guilty. Moreover, as the Spectator observed when the Commons discussed disenfranchising Galway’s freemen in 1858, such proposals were ‘inconsistent with the very spirit of our constitution … In our day, the leaning of opinion is not towards disfranchisement, but in the opposite direction.’31

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However, the Commons sometimes used temporary disenfranchisement as a form of punishment, with corrupt boroughs having their writs suspended for lengthy periods before their vacant seats were filled. Gloucester and Wakefield, whose MPs were unseated in 1859, did not elect new members until February 1862. The Wakefield Herald later claimed that this interruption to the representation had caused ‘stagnation of trade, and loss of commercial status, and depreciation of the value of property’.32 The prospect of even partial short-term disenfranchisement was regarded with concern by constituencies. On 15 March 1853 Blackburn (in petitions from its inhabitants and its mayor and magistrates) and Bridgnorth (in a petition signed by 325 electors) appealed to the Commons to issue their writs, having each had one of their two MPs unseated for corruption. Both requests were granted, although fifty MPs opposed the Bridgnorth writ.33 While temporary suspensions of a constituency’s representation were at the whim of the Commons, there was an attempt to formalise this process. The 1860 select committee on corrupt practices recommended that constituencies where an election commission had found extensive bribery should have their writs suspended for five years.34 The Commons included a clause to this effect in the 1863 Corrupt Practices Act, signalling its desire for greater powers to punish venal constituencies, but it was struck out by the Lords.35 As seen above, this was not the only occasion on which the Lords watered down legislation, and the need to secure the upper House’s backing for reform was another factor which hindered MPs’ efforts to tackle corruption. Another approach was to improve the system of detecting and punishing corruption by reforming the tribunal, which, it was hoped, would have a deterrent effect. Again, reform could be a protracted process, as Matthew Cragoe’s work on Peel’s Controverted Elections Act has shown. Concerns that the partisan composition of election committees had produced unfair decisions after the 1835 election prompted calls for a recasting of the system, created in the rather different political climate of 1770. A select committee in 1836 was followed by a failed bill in 1837. Peel introduced his measure in 1838, which passed in 1839.36 Almost thirty years later, the Commons implemented an alternative rejected by Peel, transferring the trial of petitions to an external body. However, the reluctance with which MPs agreed to surrender jurisdiction to the judges in

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1868 illustrated another difficulty with corrupt practices reform: it was often bound up with other questions, in this case the House’s ‘ancient right and privilege to hold in its hands the power of determining who are its members’.37 The decision to have petitions tried by judges in the constituency rather than at Westminster was motivated partly by the belief that this would enable more searching inquiries than election committees were able to undertake. The commissions appointed from 1852 onwards to investigate constituencies where extensive corruption was suspected had shown the advantages of local inquiries in exposing electoral malpractice. An election committee unseated William Leatham following the 1859 Wakefield election after four cases of bribery were proved. The ensuing commission found that 142 of Wakefield’s 866 electors had been involved in corruption, with the candidates between them spending up to £3,500 on bribery.38 The switch to judicial trial had other benefits, not least in conveying the sense that this was a serious and criminal matter, where not just the MP but the constituency was on trial, and where witnesses had to testify in front of their neighbours, which it was hoped would encourage veracity.39 This shift in moral tone was in contrast with concerns that election committees at Westminster had become ‘a sort of Saturnalia’ for the witnesses, who enjoyed a free trip to London.40 However, the 1868 reform failed to overcome a fundamental obstacle: presenting an election petition remained the key means of uncovering corruption. While it altered the trial’s location, the 1868 Act did little to mitigate the numerous disincentives to petition. First and foremost was the notorious expense, with costs reportedly ‘double that of ordinary legal investigations’. The average cost was estimated at £2,500 in 1860, while in 1902 Moisei Ostrogorski put it at £5,000, which he considered a key reason why ‘corrupt doings rarely see the light’.41 Another deterrent was the uncertain outcome of petitions. Although the judges were generally perceived to be more consistent than election committees, they still produced decisions which contemporaries regarded as capricious, such as the ‘distinctly ludicrous’ conflicting judgements on the 1892 Walsall and Stepney petitions.42 Petitions were often unpopular with the constituency, an important consideration given that a successful petitioner usually needed to win an ensuing by-election. Petitioners

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also had to be sure that their own party had clean hands, or risk recriminatory charges. Finally, there was the fear of temporary or even permanent disenfranchisement.43 Petitions were not, therefore, an accurate guide to the full extent of electoral malpractice, which was another reason why MPs found it so difficult to grapple with the issue.

Double standards and deep pockets: MPs, voters and the issue of expenditure The debates on corrupt practices legislation also presented MPs with the need to confront some uncomfortable truths. Even if they had not been directly involved in malpractice, many MPs were aware that they had handed over large sums of money to cover election costs without inquiring too closely about how this was spent. Testifying to the commission investigating the 1859 Wakefield contest, William Leatham claimed to have been ‘perfectly in the dark as to what has been expended on my election’, but admitted that his suspicions had been aroused by the large sums requested from him.44 George Ward Hunt warned fellow MPs in 1860 that ‘the country would [not] believe that the House were in earnest in wishing to put down bribery, while in their individual capacities they were found using money in a manner which in their collective capacity they stigmatised’.45 MPs might protest that they were the victims of unscrupulous lawyers and agents, described by one Liberal MP as ‘notoriously the highest criminals in the whole transactions of an election’, but they had supplied the funds.46 Yet little disgrace attached even to those MPs most deeply mired in corruption. Despite being unseated for bribery in 1859 and convicted on several counts at York assizes in 1860, Leatham, who escaped punishment after a series of appeals, was readily accepted back into the fold when he returned to the Commons in 1865.47 These lenient attitudes were one reason why The Times considered election committees ‘the softest of tribunals’, where ‘each judge bears in mind that the alleged delinquent is a member and a brother’.48 These double standards had a clear impact on efforts to deal with electoral malpractice. MPs were mindful that they would be deeply affected by whatever reforms they implemented. If the law

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was too strict, even those with the greatest commitment to electoral purity risked being unseated for an inadvertent breach. This explains why the Commons rejected remedies such as Sir John Pakington’s 1849 proposal that each MP declare before taking his seat that ‘so far as his knowledge went, he was himself innocent of any corrupt practices’.49 A similar declaration regarding election expenditure, putting the onus for electoral probity on candidates, was proposed as part of the 1854 Corrupt Practices Act. After passing this clause by a narrow margin, the Commons subsequently abandoned it.50 It is notable that the most significant amendment MPs made to the Gladstone ministry’s 1883 Corrupt Practices Act was to add an ‘equity clause’, under which election judges received discretionary powers to allow members who had endeavoured to secure purity to retain their seats in cases where there had been a corrupt act by an agent which had not affected the election outcome.51 Unlike other areas of legislation, where outside pressure stimulated parliamentary action, there was little public demand for reform other than on the issue of the ballot.52 Despite routine condemnation in the press of the misdeeds exposed by petitions, corruption was, as The Times observed in 1882, ‘a sort of permitted scandal’.53 Frank O’Gorman’s work on electioneering rituals has demonstrated how these ceremonial aspects served to create a separate moral framework which permitted ‘a release of the voting classes from normal social constraints’.54 This helped to circumscribe the violence, intemperance and venality often associated with elections. For much of the nineteenth century, contests were viewed as a financial opportunity for the constituency. Quite apart from those individuals who saw their votes as a marketable commodity, tradesmen, publicans, voters and non-voters sought to benefit from candidates’ munificence by providing various goods and services, or eating, drinking and being conveyed to the poll at their expense. Such expenditure furnished concrete proof of a candidate’s commitment to his would-be constituents and, embedded as it was within election ritual, was not necessarily seen as corrupt or immoral.55 Although some individuals, such as John Stuart Mill at Westminster in 1865, took a stand against excessive expenditure, it was not easy for candidates to eschew these customary demands.56 In the face of these popular attitudes, even MPs supportive of reform warned of the difficulties of making ‘men honest by Act of Parliament’.57

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Although limited in scope in comparison with the 1883 measure, the 1854 Corrupt Practices Act saw MPs grapple tentatively with a question which became central to corrupt practices reform: whether it was possible to draw a dividing line between election expenditure which was legitimate and unobjectionable, and election expenditure which, while not necessarily corrupt in itself, could open the door to corruption and should therefore be prohibited. This act, which has received relatively little attention from historians, is interesting not only for what it included, but also what it omitted.58 Two particular issues illuminate the ways in which arguments about electoral corruption and expenditure were intrinsically connected with wider debates about the nature of the representative system: provision of refreshments and payments for the conveyance of ­voters to the poll. The Attorney-General, Sir Alexander Cockburn, urged MPs in 1854 that the more the Commons convinced electors that the franchise was ‘a trust upon the proper discharge of which the well-being of themselves and their country depended, the more would purity of election be promoted’. However, it was difficult to do this ‘so long as they were paid for their votes in the shape of travelling expenses and refreshments’. He therefore supported Lord Robert Grosvenor’s clause prohibiting any payments for conveyance of voters to the poll or the refreshment of voters between the nomination day and the day after the election ended.59 Grosvenor was MP for Middlesex, one of the largest county seats, where the costs of transporting voters could run into thousands of pounds, but his clause also found favour with borough representatives. William Johnson Fox, who had refused to spend a shilling during his Oldham contests, condemned ‘the refreshment system’ as ‘the great nuisance of elections’, which caused ‘scenes of riot and debauchery’, and asserted that ‘if voters would not come to the poll unless they were brought there and unless they had something given them to eat and drink afterwards, they did not deserve to have the franchise’.60 Such arguments were fuelled by a conception of the relationship between the MP and his constituency far removed from traditional expectations that candidates would open their purses. The veteran Radical Joseph Hume contended that ‘a candidate ought not to be put to the expense of a single shilling in order to ensure his return to Parliament; for he was but

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the servant of the public, and, as a servant, he ought not to be compelled to purchase his employment’.61 In contrast, other MPs pleaded for ‘the poorer class of ­constituents’ whom Grosvenor’s clause would ‘practically disfranchise’, since they could not afford to attend the poll unless candidates facilitated their participation by paying travelling expenses.62 While Cockburn’s conception of the franchise as ‘a duty and a privilege’ led him to conclude that voters should not be recompensed for coming to poll, others took the opposite line, arguing that having ‘undergone much fatigue and inconvenience for the purpose of discharging a public duty’, electors ought at least to be permitted ‘refreshment of some trivial kind’.63 Peel had warned in 1840 that the law might be disregarded ‘if they confounded innocent with guilty acts’, arguing that ‘the habit and disposition of the country was … one of general hospitality’.64 Similar arguments resurfaced in 1854, with Sir John Walsh insisting that in giving a voter ‘moderate refreshment’, candidates ‘had not the slightest idea of corrupting him. It was a practice consecrated by custom, and sanctioned on the ground of hospitality.’65 Such largesse reflected a rather different relationship between MP and constituents than that envisaged by Hume. An alternative solution, which he believed would diminish bribery, had been proposed by Sir Edward Buxton in 1852, when he suggested that candidates in counties should be permitted to provide up to half a crown’s worth of refreshments. While some MPs sympathised with this attempt to control expenditure, others warned that it would ‘open the widest door to corruption’, and Buxton’s bill was defeated on its first reading.66 Concerns about the fine line between innocent hospitality and corrupt treating spurred MPs to action in 1854. Although the Commons rejected Grosvenor’s clause, they included a clause making provision of refreshments to voters on the nomination and polling days illegal. It should, however, be noted that, in keeping with MPs’ reluctance to make the law too strict, this was a watereddown version of Russell’s suggestion that this should constitute bribery and treating, meaning it could have unseated the candidate.67 When it came to paying for conveyances, Russell reasoned that since the Commons did not wish this to be illegal, it should clarify doubts about the law by allowing candidates to pay ‘the actual and reasonable expenses of bringing any voters to the poll’. This clause

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was added, and Grosvenor’s attempt to strike it out at the third reading was decisively defeated.68 Bemoaning that this would ‘legalise bribery’, Sir Joshua Walmsley declared that ‘the history of our legislation on this subject has been a tissue of blunders’.69 The Lords’ rejection of this clause, which was omitted from the final measure, did little to dispel the sense of legislative confusion.70 The law’s uncertain state prompted another reform in 1858, when the Derby ministry’s Corrupt Practices Act made it lawful for candidates to provide conveyance for voters to the poll, offering railway tickets or sending conveyances or cabs, but unlawful to give voters money for travelling costs. Frustrated Liberals tried several times to reverse this, and the 1860 select committee on corrupt practices recommended prohibiting conveyance in boroughs. Fears that permitting such expenditure would increase election costs were realised: candidates spent £100,000 conveying voters in 1865, around one eighth of total expenditure. In 1867 the Liberal backbencher John Hibbert successfully added a clause to the Reform Act prohibiting payments for conveyance in boroughs.71 However, concerns that this law was ‘a dead letter’ prompted the Disraeli ministry to repeal it ahead of the 1880 election, legalising conveyance in all constituencies. Gladstone deplored this measure ‘for the promotion and revival of corrupt practices’ in several election speeches in 1880.72 This serves as a useful reminder that while it might be assumed that corrupt practices legislation always made the law more stringent or tended to curb expenditure, this was not ­necessarily the case. In the wake of the 1880 reform, spending on conveyances rose to £273,000 at that year’s election.73

The 1880 election and a new phase of reform The expenditure on conveyances was just one example of spiralling election costs. As the electorate expanded, and the number of contested elections grew, the financial burden on candidates became ever greater. One provision of the 1854 Act was that candidates should publish their election accounts. While this proved of limited effect in curbing expenditure, since it was generally accepted that the true figures were higher than those declared, it did make the problem more visible to contemporaries. As Table 7.1 indicates,

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Table 7.1  Candidates’ declared election expenditure, 1857–80

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Election 1857 1859 1865 1868 1874 1880

Total (£)

Average per candidate (£)

433,006 403,852 705,429 1,287,122 1,023,566 1,623,537

493 470 765 1,239 948 1,472

Source: F. W. S. Craig, British Electoral Facts, 1832–1987 (Aldershot: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989), p. 60.

costs increased significantly with an enlarged electorate in 1868, when candidates’ combined spending almost doubled in comparison with 1865. It declined in 1874, despite a higher number of contests. However, if contemporaries hoped that the ballot and the abolition of the hustings in 1872 had brought about a new era of electoral purity, they were to be sorely disappointed in 1880. The ballot may have helped to tackle intimidation, but it did little to resolve the problems of bribery and treating. At the same election that saw Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign deploy the platform and the press to appeal to voters on the basis of opinion and reason, eighteen MPs were unseated for corruption. In this respect, considering elections since 1832, 1880 was surpassed only by the 1852 election, which had pushed parliament to address the problem with the 1854 Act, and 1868, when the switch to election judges encouraged an unprecedented number of petitions. The evidence of the petitions and eight ensuing commissions (the highest ever total) provided a vital impetus for reform.74 Introducing a wide-ranging corrupt practices bill in 1881, the Attorney-General, Sir Henry James, observed that ‘we have sat long enough on the bank; but the stream of corruption flows on, and it seems useless to hope that it will cease to flow unless something is done to stop it’.75 James’s measure marked a critical shift in parliament’s approach to tackling electoral malpractice, recognising that there must be a concerted attack on both corruption and expenditure. Candidates had declared expenditure of £1,623,537 in 1880, but estimates of

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the actual amount spent ranged from £2,000,000 to £3,000,000.76 James was not alone in arguing that this lavish expenditure was ‘so near akin to corruption that it was almost the very father of corruption’.77 His act therefore placed strict limits on the amount candidates could spend and outlined exactly what this money could – and could not – be spent on, creating a new class of illegal practices, for which MPs could be unseated. The numbers of committee rooms and paid election workers were restricted and, despite renewed protests about potentially disenfranchising voters, candidates could not make any payments for conveyance to the poll. The penalties for bribery, treating and undue influence were increased.78 MPs’ acceptance of this detailed regulation of electioneering was in contrast with the tentative approach of 1854 and the dismissal in 1867 of backbench efforts to curb election expenditure. Although Hibbert’s clause prohibiting expenditure on conveyances was added to the 1867 Reform Act, to secure its passage he had to concede that it should apply only in boroughs. On the same day, the Commons resoundingly rejected Sir Thomas Lloyd’s attempt to prohibit the use of hotels, public houses and licensed premises as committee rooms at elections, reluctant to countenance such a major change to the culture of electioneering.79 However, by the early 1880s, with election costs set to increase further following the impending extension of the franchise, reform became not only a moral but a financial imperative for MPs. Despite their willingness to act, some of the problems which had hindered earlier legislative efforts re-emerged, notably the considerable pressure this issue placed on parliamentary time. Introduced in 1881 and debated more fully in 1882, James’s measure did not pass until 1883, when it spent twenty-three nights in committee in the Commons, and took up the equivalent of ‘one third of the full time allotted to the Government in the course of an average session’.80 Having highlighted the recent revelations of the 1880 election when he initially proposed his bill, James shrewdly shifted his emphasis when bringing it forward for the third time in 1883, appealing to MPs’ self-interest by offering them the opportunity to relieve themselves of costs ‘which the mere fashion of constituencies had made it imperative upon them to incur’. He asserted that ‘it was to protect themselves from foolish and unnecessary expenditure that the Bill was introduced … to guard themselves not only against absolute

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corruption, but against the fact that candidates were being constantly preyed upon by a class of men who delighted in elections on account of the money they might obtain from the candidates’.81

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Conclusion After more than half a century of piecemeal, limited, rushed or abandoned attempts at reform, the 1883 Act marked a serious and sustained attempt by MPs to tackle the problem of electoral corruption, which had long been a blot on the representative system. This legislative landmark and the other major measures of 1854, 1868 and 1872 cannot be fully understood without locating them within the longer trajectory of nineteenth-century parliamentary debates on electoral malpractice. Corruption was a perennial concern for the Commons and, as their endorsement in 1834 of the disenfranchisement of Stafford and Hertford indicated, MPs were willing to take decisive action against venality well before the first major Corrupt Practices Act twenty years later. In this instance, it was the Lords which scuppered reform, as it would on subsequent occasions. The need to secure the upper House’s consent was not, however, the only obstacle to MPs’ legislative endeavours. There were numerous pressures against corrupt practices reform, which help to explain why it took so long before parliament passed a comprehensive – although still far from perfect – measure in 1883. Given its ramifications for the electoral system’s overall structure – both in terms of the distribution of seats and the question of who should be entrusted with the franchise – and for the interconnected issue of the relationship between candidates and their constituents, it is hardly surprising that MPs found this a difficult issue on which to legislate. This was compounded by pressures on parliamentary time and the wide range of potential remedies for venality. The petitioning system’s inadequacies in uncovering the full extent of corruption were another stumbling block, not least because the need to address these failings diverted energies from other areas of reform. Although it would be wrong to suggest that concerns about corruption were confined to Westminster, it was clearly MPs who had the most to gain from reform, above all by curbing election costs, and there was therefore

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relatively little external pressure for change. For all their lofty pronouncements about electoral purity, it was the desire to protect their pockets from escalating expenditure which proved crucial in concentrating MPs’ minds and sustaining their support over the three parliamentary sessions required to pass the 1883 Act. Despite this, reform remained far from easy. The considerations which had previously impeded legislation – the difficulties of overturning customary expectations about election expenditure; the unwillingness to interfere with the traditional exercise of hospitality and benevolence by candidates; the perceived risks of impeding participation by forcing voters to bear the costs of getting to the poll; and the dangers, even for MPs striving for purity, of making the law too stringent – were all debated at length before the 1883 Act finally passed. In enshrining as its fundamental principle a concept MPs had been grappling with for some time – the need to make a clearcut distinction between legitimate and illegitimate election expenditure – this reform would have a transformative effect on Britain’s electoral culture in the decades that followed.

Notes   1 J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 84–6.   2 Classic accounts include N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (London: Longmans, 1953); H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (London: Longmans, 1959); and W. B. Gwyn, Democracy and the Cost of Politics (London: Athlone Press, 1962).  3 ‘Bribery and Intimidation at Elections’, London and Westminster Review, 25 (1836), 488.   4 K. Rix, ‘The Second Reform Act and the Problem of Electoral Corruption’, Parliamentary History, 36:1 (2017), 69–70.   5 K. Rix, ‘“The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections”? Reassessing the Impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), 67.   6 A notable exception, analysing the 1839 Controverted Elections Act, is M. Cragoe, ‘Sir Robert Peel and the “Moral Authority” of the House of Commons, 1832–41’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 55–77. The fullest discussion of lesser reforms remains C. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

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1915), chap. 8. See also C. O’Leary, The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections, 1868–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 24–5 and Gwyn, Democracy, pp. 48–51.  7 Seymour, Electoral Reform, p. 198.  8 Hansard, 12 July 1847, vol. 94, cols 177–8.   9 Calculated from C. Rallings and M. Thrasher (eds), British Electoral Facts, 1832–1999 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 261. 10 Hansard, 20 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 468. 11 Hansard, 14 May 1840, vol. 54, cols 76–109. 12 Hansard, 10 June 1835, vol. 28, cols 605–20; 26 June 1835, vol. 28, cols 1288–9; 1 July 1835, vol. 29, col. 135; The Times (4 July 1835), p. 3. 13 Manchester Times (22 July 1837), p. 3. 14 Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 69–70. 15 Commons Journal (1834), vol. 89, pp. 157, 203. A measure to disenfranchise Carrickfergus failed to pass the Commons. 16 H. Miller, ‘Stafford’, in P. Salmon and K. Rix (eds), History of Parliament: House of Commons, 1832–1868 (forthcoming). 17 R. H. Gronow, Recollections and Anecdotes (London: Smith, Elder, 1863), p. 190. 18 Hansard, 19 March 1834, vol. 22, col. 453. 19 Miller, ‘Stafford’. 20 H. Miller, ‘Warwick’, in Salmon and Rix (eds), History of Parliament; Hansard, 26 February 1834, vol. 21, col. 851. 21 Hansard, 30 May 1867, vol. 187, col. 1305. 22 Seymour, Electoral Reform, pp. 198–9. 23 R. A. Vieira, Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 1. 24 Hansard, 28 May 1866, vol. 183, col. 1331. 25 Hansard, 10 February 1854, vol. 130, col. 412. 26 Hansard, 21 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 499. 27 Hansard, 28 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 942; 10 August 1854, vol. 135, col. 1501. 28 Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 65–6. 29 W. R. Greg, ‘Parliamentary Purification’, Edinburgh Review, 48 (1853), 595–6. 30 Hansard, 3 April 1854, vol. 132, col. 357. 31 Spectator (24 April 1858), p. 444. 32 Wakefield and West Riding Herald (28 February 1874). 33 Morning Chronicle (16 March 1853), p. 3. 34 Select Committee on Operation and Effect of Corrupt Practices Prevention Act (1854): Report, Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, Index, PP 1860 (329), vol. X, p. 5.

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35 Hansard, 7 May 1863, vol. 170, cols 1289–90. 36 Cragoe, ‘Sir Robert Peel’, 59–60, 66. 37 Hansard, 26 March 1868, vol. 191, col. 298. For a fuller discussion of the 1868 Act see Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 64–81. 38 The Times (28 July 1859), p. 7; Leeds Mercury (11 February 1860), p. 7. 39 Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 72. 40 Hansard, 6 July 1868, vol. 193, col. 729. 41 Select Committee on Operation and Effect of Corrupt Practices, pp. 161, 293; M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1902), 1, p. 480. 42 The Times (27 December 1892), p. 7. 43 Rix, ‘“Elimination”’, 21. 44 Royal Commission to inquire into Existence of Corrupt Practices at Elections for Borough of Wakefield, PP 1860 [2601], vol. XXVIII, pp. 140–2. 45 Hansard, 15 February 1860, vol. 156, cols 1073–4. 46 Hansard, 3 April 1854, vol. 132, col. 338. 47 The Times (20 July 1860), p. 12; Leeds Mercury (17 March 1862), p. 2. 48 The Times (7 March 1868), p. 8. 49 Hansard, 21 February 1849, vol. 102, col. 1047; 25 April 1849, vol. 104, col. 829. 50 Hansard, 21 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 519; 28 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 941. 51 Rix, ‘“Elimination”’, 11–12. 52 Gwyn, Democracy, pp. 76–9. 53 The Times (16 May 1882), p. 9. 54 F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past & Present, 135 (1992), 109. 55 P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 101–15. 56 Hanham, Elections, p. 96. 57 Hansard, 25 April 1849, vol. 104, col. 828. 58 Seymour, Electoral Reform, pp. 227–33 and Gwyn, Democracy, pp. 83–4 offer the best accounts. 59 Hansard, 20 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 476. 60 Hansard, 10 July 1854, vol. 134, col. 1461. 61 Hansard, 8 August 1854, vol. 135, cols 1418–19. 62 Hansard, 10 July 1854, vol. 134, col. 1466. 63 Hansard, 24 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 593; 25 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 700. 64 Hansard, 14 May 1840, vol. 54, col. 96. 65 Hansard, 20 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 476. 66 Hansard, 26 April 1852, vol. 120, cols 1185–92; 7 May 1852, vol. 121, col. 417.

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67 Hansard, 22 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 533; 25 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 704. 68 Hansard, 22 July 1854, vol. 135, cols 528, 533; 28 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 940. 69 Hansard, 28 July 1854, vol. 135, col. 913. 70 Hansard, 8 August 1854, vol. 135, col. 1412. 71 Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 68–9. 72 The Times (13 March 1880), p. 8. 73 S. C. Buxton, ‘The Attorney-General’s Corrupt Practices Bill’, Contemporary Review, 39 (1881), 766. 74 Rix, ‘“Elimination”’, 67. Two of these commissions followed by-­ elections that year. 75 Hansard, 7 January 1881, vol. 257, col. 271. 76 Rix, ‘“Elimination”’, 70. 77 Hansard, 4 June 1883, vol. 279, col. 1697. 78 For a fuller discussion of the 1883 Act, see Rix, ‘“Elimination”’, 65–97. 79 Rix, ‘Second Reform Act’, 68–9. 80 Daily News (14 July 1883), p. 5. 81 Hansard, 4 June 1883, vol. 279, cols 1697–8, 1702.

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8 Politics, patronage or public service? Conservatives at the Foreign Office, 1858–9 Geoffrey Hicks

The history of corruption is far from the smooth, unbroken process of transition from venality to reform that earlier historians suggested.1 The ambiguities of the mid-nineteenth century, as the implications of the Northcote–Trevelyan agenda were just being felt, have rarely received historiographical attention. This is the point where Philip Harling’s account of the demise of Old Corruption ends; there is no equivalent in this period to the work of Aaron Graham on the early eighteenth century or G. R. Searle on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 This lacuna is, perhaps, understandable, given the changes inspired by the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854, but the era occupies an intriguing and largely unexplored hinterland between Old Corruption and late Victorian standards of public probity. The processes of the Foreign Office, meanwhile, rarely attract close consideration. While Zara Steiner and Thomas Otte have illuminated its workings in the later nineteenth century, the mid-Victorian diplomatic service has not been examined in detail since the administrative histories of R. A. Jones.3 Yet the Foreign Office, the government department most resistant to change, presents an ideal lens through which to examine what John Greenaway has described as the ‘tardy process of reform’.4 This chapter focuses on the management of the Foreign Office over the sixteen months from February 1858 to June 1859, the tenure of Lord Derby’s second Conservative administration. It is selected because it provides us with a microcosm of mid-­Victorian tensions, as the practices of the eighteenth century met the administrative reforms of the nineteenth century. The Foreign Secretary, the third Earl of Malmesbury, personified the ambiguity of change. Imbued

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with mid-century notions of efficiency, he saw himself as a reformer, albeit on a minor scale. Yet he also wanted to take advantage of the opportunities available to his party, friends and even his family via control of the Foreign Office’s structures, systems and appointments. This government would be the last in which a foreign secretary would utilise the long-standing convention that the diplomatic service could overtly be reshaped according to the needs of its political masters. Thereafter, direct ministerial interference in appointments on such a scale would cease, although the Foreign Office, together with the Colonial Office, remained suspect in the eyes of radicals, who continued to regard these two departments as the last bastions of aristocratic inefficiency, jobbery and corruption.5 This chapter will consider in detail the awkward balance between public service, patronage and party in an era of administrative reform. It will examine the party-political and cultural framework within which the Conservative Party leadership approached government and, in particular, the management of the Foreign Office. It will explore how one party simultaneously sought to exploit the machinery of government for party advantage while tackling inefficiency – goals that ministers saw as complementary, not conflicting. It will consider three areas on which the Foreign Secretary would focus his attention: the senior diplomatic appointments process, the newly introduced system of examinations and the everyday business of the Foreign Office. Malmesbury took a shamelessly nepotistic approach to the first and subtly subverted the second, while seeking to improve the functioning of the third. Decisions about the personnel, structures and direction of the diplomatic service were made within a highly restrictive elite; the analysis here is consequently focused upon ‘high’ politics and, in particular, on the work of Malmesbury and Derby, the two cabinet members with primary responsibility for foreign affairs. It reveals the extent to which patronage survived the ‘age of reform’, challenging Harling’s premature claim that ‘Peel’s reforms and obvious public-mindedness were … instrumental’ in altering the governing culture in mid-­ century Britain.6 While the Conservatives’ arrangement of the diplomatic service may appear obscure, its very obscurity is in itself revealing. We still know too little about conservative political cultures in midnineteenth-century Britain. Since the revitalisation of British

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political history in the 1990s, liberalism in its many forms has been the subject of extensive historical inquiry.7 The nature and persistence of the conservative landed interest, the ‘country gentlemen’ and women who personified it and the principles that sustained them have been subject to rather less attention.8 The question of corruption and its changing definition represents a useful prism through which to examine conservatism and vice versa in an era replete with tension between the landed and moneyed classes, and between bureaucratic reform and established practice. And if we are fully to appreciate the manner in which administrative change occurred, we need more comprehensive coverage of the era. While the Conservatives’ tenure in office was brief, it provides us with an opportunity to observe how a significant minority of the political class sought to direct the state, and reminds us of the resilience of conservatism in an era of reform.

The Foreign Office and the Northcote–Trevelyan agenda The Foreign Office had always regarded itself as a special case among government departments. Others saw it as such too. This exceptionalism manifested itself in two principal ways: it regarded its staff – diplomats and clerks – as being quite different from civil servants in other departments; and within government, until mid-century, its diplomats were regarded as quasi-political appointments, to be made and unmade at political will. It stiffly resisted change before, during and long after the era of Northcote–­Trevelyan. Charles Middleton has noted that, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, ‘in the case of the Foreign Office, the impact of financial and political changes in the state was considerably less important than in departments such as the Treasury’.9 Jones has gone further: ‘The Foreign Office never regarded itself in the nineteenth century as having anything in common with the other ­Government departments. Their [the FO personnel’s] common outlook tended to be mildly reactionary and they managed on the whole to be the last department to which administrative innovations were applied.’10 The Northcote–Trevelyan agenda took a considerable time to embed itself in the cultural fabric of the UK civil service and did so at varying speeds and consistency from

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department to department. None was slower than the Foreign Office. Nevertheless, it was not immune to reform, nor was it free from the changing expectations that were evident across government in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report, commissioned by ­William Gladstone, was largely written by Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and was published with a supporting letter by Benjamin Jowett, tutor at Balliol College, Oxford. In the wake of the report, an Order in Council of May 1855 had decreed that competitive examinations would be required for entry into the civil service and established a new Civil Service Commission to oversee their administration. The diplomatic service was not subject to the same order, but the winds of change were blowing down the corridors of power. The day after the order was issued, the Whig Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston, promised parliament that the Foreign Office and diplomatic service would also introduce examinations. Consequently, a two-stage exam system was adopted for candidates for entry at the most junior level of the diplomatic service – that of the attaché – and a simpler set of tests for clerkships at the Foreign Office.11 Nevertheless, it was far from a fully ‘open’ competition, as we will see below; and, as Greenaway notes, even when open competition was introduced elsewhere later in the ­century, ‘the Foreign Office and diplomatic services escaped until the eve of the First World War’.12 Moreover, there was an awkward compromise between the professional and the amateur, because candidates for the diplomatic service were still expected to fund themselves for the first five years in the job. This was in keeping with a persistent belief that diplomacy was to be practised by a gentlemanly elite who were performing a different task from mere civil servants. Even the most junior clerks were presumed to require special qualities, as the Permanent Under-Secretary, Edmund ­Hammond, outlined in June 1855: The nature of the employment of Clerks in the Foreign Office is wholly confidential; consequently it is of the utmost importance that in the selection of candidates attention should be paid to circumstances from which a reasonable assurance may be obtained that they possess a high sense of honour. The Foreign Office requires of the clerks great sacrifices of time, of comfort, and of amusement, and that they should take such an interest in the office as to consider its

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credit and reputation as their own. Such a feeling is the mainstay of the Foreign Office, and no person, however great his talents, would be useful or acceptable to the office without it.13

The vagueness of that requirement for a ‘high sense of honour’ was indicative of a departmental culture which throughout the nineteenth century saw itself as performing qualitatively different tasks from the rest of government. This culture perpetuated itself regardless of which political party was in power. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party leadership faced a clear and distinct political challenge which gave added impetus to ministers’ inclinations to resist change in the Foreign Office’s recruitment and appointments process. The Conservatives had neither won a general election nor formed a majority government since their split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. There were very few opportunities for Conservative politicians to get their hands on the levers of power, or to reward supporters who had stuck with them through very difficult times. Despite Northcote–Trevelyan, the exercise of patronage was, as Rodney Lowe has noted, ‘an integral part of the social and political system’.14 The minority governments the Conservatives formed in 1852, 1858 and 1866, all led by the fourteenth Earl of Derby, were the only occasions in mid-century when they could exercise such patronage. In long-established practice, the diplomatic service provided an important service to the governing party in addition to its work abroad. It was accepted that diplomats could be changed, dismissed, recalled or retired, to be replaced by appointees sympathetic to the objectives of the government. Jones has described the way in which in the 1820s and 1830s foreign secretaries ‘looked for personal compatibility in their senior diplomats’, and those diplomats ‘were also required to be supporters of the political views of those who appointed them’.15 Not so much had changed by the 1850s, even though, as Michael Coolican has put it, ‘reform of the British civil service continued to inch along’.16 Inching is the right description. Whatever changes Northcote–Trevelyan had inspired, the Conservatives were not about to abandon their privileges without a rearguard action. There was an obvious political advantage to an overhaul of personnel at the Foreign Office: it offered significant opportunities to reward supporters and potential supporters. On taking office, therefore, Malmesbury began a thorough clear-out of

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the senior diplomatic postings – the more thorough because he had been prevented from making such changes in 1852, when the Conservatives had taken office just after a major reallocation of diplomatic roles. At that time, he had been unable to do much more than tinker with the lower ranks before the government was defeated and replaced by the Aberdeen coalition. His second tenure as Foreign Secretary presented him with the opportunity to refashion the diplomatic service on a grander scale. Underscoring Conservative attempts to reconstruct the diplomatic service – particularly at the entry level – was a belief that the landed classes remained an essential component of good government, that a social elite brought unique skills necessary for diplomacy and that reform should not endanger the opportunities for young men drawn from that class. That such an elite would bring to bear a conservative influence, with a small and large ‘C’, was both explicit and implicit in the party’s direction of the service. As James Thompson has noted in assessing the language of ‘good government’, although administrative competence was ‘a prime concern’ in the mid-Victorian era, this ‘was not uncontested’. Other notions retained potency: ‘The virtues of landed leadership, and the dangers of moneyed rule, were also strongly asserted.’17 In this period, persistent tensions arose from perceived challenges to the influence and status of the landowning class. Conservative concerns extended across a range of social, economic and political issues. At the heart of the controversy over Corn Law repeal in 1846 had been the outrage of the country gentlemen, who had feared a reduction in income from working the land and a driving-down of living standards that would threaten ‘what was perceived to be Britain’s superior social “scale of civilisation”’.18 A generalised concern for the preservation of the existing social order had multiple manifestations, ranging from the proliferation of baronetcies – over which Peel and Derby both fretted – to the decreasing opportunities for ‘gentlemen’ in the civil service.19 For generations of politicians and diplomats, the administration of British foreign policy was thought to be the preserve of a social elite. In keeping with the long-term attitude of the office he temporarily directed, Malmesbury rejected a suggestion by the new body of civil service commissioners that the diplomatic service, after the introduction of examinations, could be treated as a branch of the

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civil service like any other: ‘I think it wholly irrelevant,’ he told the commissioners, ‘to quote cases and their results on other departments; the diplomatic service is a service per se.’ As such, it required its own unique set of recruits: ‘it cannot be open to the whole population’, he protested, ‘or even to that large part of it, from which the “clerks in the Admiralty”, “Excise”, the “Metropolitan”, “Provincial” and various public “officers” are recruited’. He explained that, given the initially unpaid nature of the most junior recruits – the attachés – ‘they must be gentlemen of independent means’, but also that ‘it is indispensable that they should have been accustomed to a society analogous to that in which their future action will be exercised’.20 An independently wealthy landed elite ruled across the continent, so the logic ran, and therefore the British had to draw their diplomats from a similar caste. This logic fitted neatly with Malmesbury’s own political requirements for patronage, thus amplifying the Foreign Office’s habitual resistance to change. No minister would have regarded any of this as corrupt, and yet the clear intention was to perpetuate the practices of the pre-­Northcote–Trevelyan era. Such was the ambiguous nature of the mid-century situation.

Malmesbury and the diplomatic elite When one examines the Conservatives’ handling of senior appointments, one can perceive the glacial pace at which party-political cultures were changing in the wake of reform. Although one can certainly detect Malmesbury’s concern for practical efficiency and desire for reform in his handling of diplomatic appointments, this was not allowed to interfere with his intention to use the appointments system to exploit patronage opportunities for his party’s benefit. The Foreign Secretary embarked on a full-scale attempt to redirect the political sympathies of the diplomatic service while at the same time rewarding Conservative supporters. His reconstruction of the diplomatic service began with its upper ranks, but he immediately encountered an obstacle. He wanted to get rid of the most senior diplomat, the ambassador to France, Earl Cowley, whose Whig sympathies were well known, but Queen Victoria’s intervention protected Cowley.21 Malmesbury was suspicious of his

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politics: ‘He [Cowley] is a most honest and able servant,’ he told Derby, ‘but has his political bias which is against us.’22 He felt that this clouded Cowley’s diplomatic judgement. For instance, on one occasion he received a report from the ambassador shortly after the failure of a Whig attack on the Conservatives in parliament, which Malmesbury presumed that Cowley had supported. His account of France’s Emperor Napoleon III, Malmesbury noted, ‘I look upon as much tainted by the disgust he feels’.23 Nevertheless, the Queen’s support for Cowley could not easily be gainsaid. That, in turn, revealed another Conservative motive for remoulding the diplomatic service. The party leaders suspected that the Palace was partisan in favour of the Whigs. When seeking honours for Conservative diplomats, for example, Malmesbury grumbled to Derby that ‘I fear you will find (as you did when you spoke to H[er] M[ajesty] on the subject of Peerages) a very great reluctance to confer personal honours on members of our Party, while the last Government covered themselves with titles.’24 Such suspicions helped fuel a Conservative desire to share the spoils of power more evenly. Malmesbury had more success with other senior diplomatic posts than with Cowley. At Constantinople, Stratford Canning saved the Foreign Secretary the trouble of having to recall him, instead resigning when Palmerston’s government fell. Stratford was a Tory, but the wrong kind. He and Malmesbury cordially loathed one another, a mutual dislike which dated from several years earlier, when Stratford had been Derby’s choice as foreign secretary on his first, unsuccessful attempt to form a government in 1851, only to be superseded by Malmesbury when the 1852 government had been formed. Stratford had not held back from criticising the man who had displaced him.25 But the objections to Stratford were as much about method: the autocratic ambassador was too inclined to operate his own independent policy and altogether too Palmerstonian for Conservative tastes. He proved a persistent irritant when the Queen decided to send him on a complimentary mission (to bid farewell to the Sultan) in the summer of 1858, ‘interfering’ with the work of his successor, Sir Henry Bulwer.26 The political clear-out continued. At St Petersburg, Lord Wodehouse also submitted a pre-emptive resignation. Though a very different sort of man from Stratford, he knew he was for the

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chop too: formerly a Tory, he had converted to Whiggism and was a rising star who would eventually end up a Liberal foreign secretary under the Earl of Rosebery. After Stratford and Wodehouse had fallen on their swords, Malmesbury disposed of a number of diplomats variously uncongenial to the government. Sir George Hamilton Seymour was retired from Vienna, Lord Normanby was abruptly booted out of Florence and Lord Howden removed from Madrid.27 Malmesbury observed acidly that ‘Howden resigned in 1852 twice and I therefore infer that his recall is agreeable to him.’28 Of the major European posts, the only survivors were Cowley, with his royal protection, Baron Bloomfield – an inoffensive career diplomat who was minister at Berlin – and Lord Howard de Walden at Brussels, who shrewdly changed his political allegiance. This was a diplomatic service whose senior ranks would owe as much to political sensibilities as to competence or experience, however much Northcote–Trevelyan had attempted to rebalance matters. What is as striking as the changes, however, is the relatively non-partisan nature of the replacements in the senior offices; and here we can see the countervailing pressure of changing expectations. This was in part forced by the general lack of talent available to the Conservative Party. As Malmesbury cast around for candidates for diplomatic posts, he lamented that ‘I can find no peers of experience except old Westmorland’, the retired ambassador to Vienna.29 But, more importantly, he was constrained by an expectation that by the late 1850s one could not too obviously spatula in one’s own friends and partisans. The government’s many enemies would be awaiting any opportunity to condemn such practices. In February 1859, for example, an editorial in the Morning Post accused Derby’s government of a return to levels of jobbery and nepotism which it regarded as reminiscent of much earlier administrations. Malmesbury was singled out in the article for choosing military men and ‘gentlemen-at-large’ over career diplomats.30 There were, therefore, limits to permissible nepotism which – mostly – correlated with the bounds of recognised competence. Even when shifting diplomats who were politically uncongenial, Malmesbury felt obliged to fill up most significant roles with men who had appropriate diplomatic experience and levels of seniority – in other words, they were ‘in the line’. These were men whose careers had advanced and flourished under the Whigs, even if some

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had originally been appointed by Conservative governments. Sir John Crampton went to St Petersburg, Bulwer to Constantinople, Andrew Buchanan to Madrid and Richard Lyons (briefly) to Florence. It was a group of competent professional diplomats – some with significant careers ahead of them – but Malmesbury regretted that ‘In the upper grades of the diplomatic service I had no choice – they are all “not of us”.’31 It was an acknowledgement of political realities. ‘Bad appointments were so fatal to the last Government,’ he told Derby, ‘and would be so much worse so to ours that I have taken great pains about them, and if you get the list you will see that I have observed seniority throughout.’32 In his memoirs, he stressed how the new appointments at Vienna, Copenhagen and St Petersburg were ‘all promotions in the line and by seniority’.33 That public declaration was not quite the whole story. Where Malmesbury could advance the interests of friends and supporters, he did. Lord Augustus Loftus, plucked from his role as secretary of legation at Berlin to become minister at Vienna, was a political kindred spirit. A son of the second Marquess of Ely, he was from a solidly Tory family. Loftus’s elder brother, the third Marquess, had briefly served as a Conservative MP, and the Marchioness of Ely (Loftus’s sister-in-law) was a good friend of the Foreign Secretary.34 The new minister in Switzerland was Edward Harris, Malmesbury’s own younger brother, transferred from a less welcome posting to Santiago under the Whigs. He was not a man of notable ability. One of Malmesbury’s colleagues, Lord Stanley, would write on Harris’s retirement many years later that he was ‘no loss to the service: a kindly, goodnatured [sic] sort of man … who did no more than he could help’.35 Viscount Chelsea, who became secretary at the Paris embassy – a plum posting – had been a Conservative MP for years. His qualifications for diplomatic office were pretty thin and his appointment was widely resented.36 Despite the utility of distributing diplomatic patronage for the satisfaction of political supporters, the Conservatives were well aware that there would be consequences if nepotism seemed to encroach too far upon the preserve of formal arrangements for promotion and advancement. By Christmas 1858, Derby was running out of patronage, and when the Earl of Buckinghamshire wrote, seeking a place for his son Lord Hobart, the Prime Minister

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remarked wearily to Malmesbury that ‘unless you can do something for him, I really do not see what prospect we have of being able to help him’.37 He accepted that the Earl ‘deserves very well at our hands in his own account’ but thought ‘his son had no claim’, and Malmesbury warned that he would need time to arrange something, given that ‘our interloper [Chelsea] at present is as much as our weak constitution will support’.38 One offer the Foreign Secretary was forced to make was that of the secretaryship at Brussels to Lord Henry Lennox, a friend of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli. Given the Chelsea experience, however, it was with some trepidation. Malmesbury expected ‘a great deal of grumbling in the line and out of it’.39 Faced with that inconvenience, he planned to use another nepotistic practice to offset the effect of the first: had Lennox’s appointment gone through, he intended to demand in return the patronage of the Chichester constituency wielded by Lennox’s father, the fifth Duke of Richmond.40 Fortunately for all concerned, Lennox turned the Brussels offer down.

Malmesbury and the attachés It was at the bottom end of the diplomatic appointments, where he had far more freedom, that Malmesbury was able to make a greater impact. Again, it is clear that the Northcote–Trevelyan effect was rather limited in the face of a determined minister. Back in 1852 he had appointed twenty-one attachés, and in 1858 he appointed twenty-four. He was proud of his work to tilt the political balance of the Foreign Office: ‘I can conscientiously say,’ he told Derby in a phrase not repeated in his memoirs, that ‘I have not yet named an attaché[,] a consul or a clerk whose belongings and godfathers are not of the right colour.’41 The kinds of young men Malmesbury had in mind were from a rarefied group. Those he selected in 1858 were predominantly from the minor peerage and the baronetage, and/or the sons of diplomats, and officers in – or with connections to – the army or navy (the categories were not, of course, mutually exclusive). To take a few examples from those appointed in the government’s first few months in office: William McMahon was the son of an Irish baronet; Robert Percy Ffrench was similarly from Irish landlord stock; Edmund Phipps (known by his middle name,

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Constantine) – who had the most distinguished career of the 1858 batch – was the grandson of a Tory foreign secretary and nephew of the Keeper of the Queen’s Purse; Frederick North was the son of the sixth Earl of Guilford and a kinsman of his prime-ministerial namesake; and George Lenox-Conyngham was the son of his namesake, the Foreign Office’s chief clerk from 1841 to 1866.42 Shifting the balance of the diplomatic corps required not only selecting appointees ‘of the right colour’; there was another, more subtle, way in which Malmesbury was able to influence the personnel of the Foreign Office, resisting the changes of the 1850s. This was the judicious tweaking of the new system of examinations. The new process was rigorous. However, it was not an ‘open’ one: it followed a candidate’s nomination by the Foreign Secretary. It came in two stages. The first exam required candidates to demonstrate proficiency in eight areas: clarity of writing; spoken French; dictation in English and French; cross-translation of English and French; translation of either German, Latin, Spanish or Italian; précis or abstract writing; geography; and modern history (that is, since 1789). During the five years of unpaid service that would follow, a second examination would be undertaken, testing three areas of knowledge: an oral and written test of the language of the country where the attaché served (or of a different language if that service was in the US or France, as French was in any case compulsory); a report into the ‘general commercial and political relations of their country of residence’; and their understanding of international law.43 Only then would an attaché be paid. It was a significant step on the road towards a professional diplomatic corps. But for Malmesbury it was essential that the gentlemanly nature of the service be preserved, and that reform should not be allowed to go too far in removing gentlemen of independent means and with social position. When it seemed to him that the exams were doing precisely that, he acted to modify them. Alarmed by the failure of certain of his nominees to pass the exams, in the summer of 1858 Malmesbury decided that the Whigs had put in place insuperable hurdles, and that the process must be changed if he was to obtain the service he wanted. The catalyst was the case of one particular young man, Alexander St Clair, who had been rejected in June 1858. Malmesbury instructed Hammond to request a resit for St Clair.44 Although the Civil Service Commission

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(CSC) did reconsider as requested, St Clair’s case prompted Malmesbury to act more definitively with regard to a system which he felt was loaded against his nominees. On 19 July Hammond again wrote to the CSC, this time presenting them with revised regulations which Malmesbury had ordered to be printed.45 The Foreign Secretary focused on three key issues: the question of spelling, the requirement to learn the language of the country in which an attaché served and the timing of examinations. There then ensued a struggle with the CSC, who did their best to challenge him, acknowledging ‘a difficulty in placing their views before Lord Malmesbury upon matters which he appears in point of fact already to have decided’.46 The question of spelling particularly exercised Malmesbury. He objected to spelling being tested not merely by dictation, ‘but by the submission of a paper purposely misspelt[,] which they are expected to correct’, which he thought ‘may easily confuse a clever youth who would generally be found correct in his orthography’.47 He stipulated that henceforth the test should be by dictation alone.48 The commissioners objected, partly on the grounds that Malmesbury had also removed the requirement for ‘a good bold hand, with distinct formed letters’.49 When Derby saw Malmesbury’s proposed reply, the Prime Minister worried that he had gone ‘into the opposite extreme’ to the commissioners and ‘made rather too light of faults of spelling – which certainly must, in this day whatever it might have been in your grandfather’s, be considered as an indication of a deficient education for a gentleman’.50 But Malmesbury nonetheless took a firm line with the CSC: ‘it appears to me that written exercises in English, French, and History must sufficiently test the orthography of the candidate, and that if dictation is added, enough has been done for a science so easily learned as spelling’. On the question of handwriting, he was scathing: ‘The idea of rejecting a clever youth because he does not write with a “good, bold hand with distinct formed letters” appears to be utterly indefensible,’ he declared, ‘and not worthy of further observation.’51 The CSC again protested.52 Nevertheless, Malmesbury seems to have won the battle, and his complaints drove the commissioners to be lenient to his rejected nominees. But this was not really about spelling. It was a proxy for a more fundamental concern: the preservation of a certain class of young

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men in the Foreign Office. Malmesbury made clear his determination to subvert the existing system in order to admit to the service those whom he considered appropriate. He declared that ‘as head of a very important department’ it was his duty to explain what had been ‘the effect of your examination and rejection of the candidates for the diplomatic service’. He presented himself as hamstrung by unreasonable regulations: ‘Within six months you have rejected four young men, who were in my belief competent’, and ‘two of these’ – one being Alexander St Clair – ‘I have no hesitation in saying were remarkable for their general accomplishments and specially for knowledge of languages’. He thought the changed requirements for entry were responsible: ‘for a service which was so much in public favour in 1852, that I had then a list of thirty one candidates for attachéships, I have now only two’. He could not fill the vacancies, he asserted, ‘unless the gentlemen whom you have rejected should be allowed to try again, and succeed’.53 The rejected young men were, naturally, from the same elite as those who had been successful. Along with St Clair, the examiners initially rejected Thomas Thurlow, George Sheffield and Audley Gosling, who all undertook exams in 1858, but for whom certificates were not initially sent and whose appointments came later, in November 1858, July and August 1859 respectively.54 St Clair and Thurlow were both from the Scottish gentry; Thurlow was the son of a baron. Sheffield was the youngest son of a Lincolnshire baronet; Gosling was the son of a naval officer and himself formerly of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. A little later that summer, Arthur Seymour was also rejected; he was the son of Sir George Hamilton Seymour, the former ambassador to Russia and Austria.55 These were the kinds of young men Malmesbury thought were being unjustly denied places in the diplomatic corps. They were only allowed fresh attempts and admission following his intervention.

Malmesbury and the gentlemanly ethos Malmesbury certainly would not have seen this as in any sense ‘corrupt’, but while it was more subtle than previous practices, it was intended to obstruct efforts to make the diplomatic service more meritocratic. The candidates’ failure in the exams had

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demonstrated their limited competence against agreed standards; their desirability as candidates was based purely on the Foreign Secretary’s personal assessment. But preserving the social character of the service was, for him, essential to its overall competence: if appropriate candidates were being prevented from entry, then it was the exams, not the candidates, which were at fault. The requirement for a particular class of young men, in Malmesbury’s analysis, stemmed from the unique nature of diplomatic work. He explained his reasoning to the commissioners: As the first object of a minister [a diplomat] should be to obtain personal influence, their manners, appearance, tact, and temper, ought to be as good as possible; and without these natural gifts, no amount of learning can avail. These qualities cannot be taught, and when believed by the Secretary of State to exist in a candidate, I should much regret to see them count for little, and sacrificed to [because of] the absence of a mechanical and stereotyped class of knowledge, which could easily be acquired hereafter.56

There was no paradox in the fact that Malmesbury’s resistance to change in the diplomatic service was maintained in parallel with his work to improve its efficiency: both efforts arose from the same philosophy of public service. According to his logic, if the right gentlemen were undertaking diplomatic work, then, perforce, diplomacy would be more efficiently executed. The Foreign Secretary’s second criticism of the Whigs’ system of examinations – that relating to the acquisition of a second language – produced a more straightforward reform. Malmesbury thought it inefficient to persist with the requirement in the second stage of exams to speak the language of the country in which an attaché served (or another language if that country was the US or France). Again, he outlined his objections to the commissioners: There is … considerable inconvenience to the service in binding them to the language of the country in which they have resided, because if during the two years it is found desirable to change their post, they firstly complain that their study of the language is interrupted, and I consider that French being a sine quâ non, the candidate should be allowed to select from any other tongues.57

Derby agreed. He thought the Foreign Secretary in his criticisms of the examinations system ‘quite right in the main, and especially in

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not insisting on a knowledge of the language of the country in which the attaché may happen to have been, and the acquisition of which may be utterly worthless’.58 This was practical reform as part of a wider package which the Conservative leadership thought an improvement on the Whig model; the socio-political and the efficient were inextricably intertwined. Malmesbury’s third criticism, of the timing of the second-stage exams, was focused not on efficiency but on fairness. The Whigs’ regulations allowed for five years of unpaid service by attachés, but the Foreign Secretary pointed out that after that lapse of time, ‘most of them have attained the age of twenty four or twenty five years, and if they are rejected they are too old to enter other professions’.59 He proposed, instead, that candidates be eligible for the second examination after two years. The CSC accepted this, although the commissioners quibbled about the terms of that examination.60 While ostensibly about treating candidates fairly, this element of Malmesbury’s critique was also shot through with implicit concern for social order. The young men whose employment prospects he defended were, for the most part, not aristocrats with inherited wealth like his own; they were, rather, gentlemen who required professions and a certain level of income, not mere occupation. They would, he reasoned, be expected to pursue careers and should be entitled to do so. It was, perhaps, also a recognition that many young men who undertook the exams could ill afford five years of unpaid service, however gentlemanly they might be. Whether they remained in the service or not, Malmesbury’s reform reflected an assumption that while money did not make them gentlemen, a gentleman deserved an appropriate income to sustain his status. The remainder of the changes made by the Conservatives at the Foreign Office blended together the practical and the political. Malmesbury had his eye on Foreign Office expenditure, cutting down the number of messengers, of whom, he thought, ‘Clarendon [his predecessor] had got a useless army costing above £30,000 a year.’61 Derby thought this was ‘good work’, observing that ‘the extravagance must have been very great under the late régime’.62 The Prime Minister was also keen to contain expenditure on the new Foreign Office building, designed by George Gilbert Scott, stressing that he would urge ‘the necessity of keeping Mr Scott within due bounds, and not sanctioning anything like the prodigal

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expenditure which has taken place in the Houses of Parliament’.63 On the other hand, where an expansion in business justified expenditure, money was made available. Malmesbury could see that the Parliamentary Under-Secretary, William Vesey Fitzgerald, was struggling to cope with the expanding burden of work in the Foreign Office, and created the new position of assistant under-secretary, which would effectively end up as deputy to the permanent under-secretary.64 This met both administrative and political goals. The man appointed was James Murray, a senior clerk. In September 1858, Malmesbury told Disraeli that ‘I have tried Murray for 5 months and both Fitzgerald and I think him a better man at work than even Hammond[,] with the advantage that he is on our side.’65 He explained to Derby, too, that he thought Murray ‘much the best man and one of our Party’.66

Conclusion Malmesbury’s view of Murray’s appointment stands as a neat metaphor for his overall approach: political and practical advantage were two sides of the same coin. Thus, the Foreign Secretary did not hesitate to stall or end the careers of those diplomats he considered incompetent. He identified, in particular, Sir Thomas Waller, secretary of legation in Brussels since 1837, George Edgcumbe, secretary of legation in Hanover since 1838, and Henry Barron, a paid attaché, who had been in Brussels since 1853.67 Waller was persuaded to retire, and the following year Edgcumbe – whom Malmesbury thought ‘perfectly unfit for any European mission’ – was pensioned off too.68 Barron was ‘a very vulgar and stupid fellow and bears a long reputation at the F.O.’.69 He had upset Malmesbury in 1852 when he had acted ‘entirely at variance with our instructions’ and mishandled a row with Tuscany. Malmesbury failed to get rid of him entirely, but managed to shift him to Lisbon in November 1858. Although he thought the minister in Württemberg, George Jerningham, was ‘unfit to represent anybody but himself’, he was merely moved sideways, to Stockholm.70 It is difficult to tell whether it was the competence of the representatives or their political origins to which Malmesbury objected more. For example, contemplating Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong – notorious for

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the bombardment of Canton in 1856 – he thought him ‘a rogue into the bargain and one of those nominations like [Sir Thomas] Wyse [minister in Athens], wh[ich] are a disgrace to the Whigs’.71 The selection, examination and direction of Foreign Office personnel provides a useful prism through which to consider attitudes to corruption. In an era that, superficially, was dominated by administrative reform, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report certainly did not end all practices we might now regard as corrupt, as Kevin Theakston has explained.72 Of course, the Foreign Office was far from unique in resisting change. The Home Office, for example, did its best to stop Treasury interference in its appointments, and its clerks, too, came from a restrictive social group, yet by the 1860s it had been obliged to submit.73 Neither had its patronage opportunities ever been as extensive or as intertwined with party-political considerations as at the Foreign Office. J. M. Bourne has suggested that in the diplomatic service, too, ‘seniority and merit had by 1860 made significant inroads into influence and connection’, yet an analysis of the Conservatives’ tenure at the Foreign Office in 1858–9 shows that those inroads had been obstructed rather more meaningfully than has often been suggested.74 While noting the persistence of older practices at the Foreign Office, historians have rarely placed them in a party-­ political context or assessed the ‘grey’ nature of administrative change at mid-century. Corruption remained a mutable, ambiguous concept. While Northcote–Trevelyan established a framework within which the business of the state was conducted, there were other widely accepted views of good government which did not fit neatly into the newly emerging model. Conservative Party leaders regarded a social elite as sufficiently essential to government to justify pushing back against the nascent reforms. Like their Whig opponents, they had nakedly party-political objectives in the arrangement of postings, to which they attached as much importance as the principles governing appointments. They saw no paradox in pursuing those objectives while also accepting the necessity for reform, and at the same time preserving the place of a landed elite. Such practices did not attract the levels of opprobrium reserved for Old Corruption, but that did not make them any the less antithetical to the instincts of reformers.

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This was a moment when an older patrimonial culture was still competing with the reformed civic ethos of Trevelyan, Jowett and Gladstone. Their reforms constituted an attempt to free the permanent civil service from the kinds of patronage which Malmesbury and others wished to retain. Corruption is in the eye of the beholder, however, and the Conservatives beheld the landscape of the state with different eyes from those who controlled the Treasury. Ultimately, the Conservatives’ view did not prevail, but it certainly reinforced the ‘exceptional’ status of the Foreign Office in the new Whitehall, helping to retain the gentlemanly culture of the diplomatic service, which persisted long into the twentieth century.

Notes I am grateful for the patience of the editors, and their guidance, in a difficult year; and also to my colleague Thomas Otte, who kindly advised me on some biographical details. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.   1 For example, W. A. Robson, From Patronage to Proficiency in the Public Service (London: Fabian Society, 1922); W. Griffith, The British Civil Service, 1854–1954 (London: HMSO, 1954); E. W. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–1939 (London: Archon, 1965).   2 P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); A. Graham, Corruption, Party and Government in Britain, 1702–13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).   3 Z. S. Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (London: Ashfield, 1986); T. G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); R. A. Jones, The Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office: An Administrative History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); R. A. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd, 1983). See also C. R. Middleton, The Administration of British Foreign Policy, 1782–1846 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977). A brief discussion of changes in the diplomatic service may also be found in J. Parry, ‘The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 171–2.

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  4 J. Greenaway, ‘Celebrating Northcote/Trevelyan: Dispelling the Myths’, Public Policy and Administration, 19:1 (2004), 3.   5 J. M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Arnold, 1986), p. 28; V. Cromwell and Z. S. Steiner, ‘The Foreign Office before 1914: a study in resistance’, in G. Sutherland (ed.), Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 167–94.  6 Harling, Waning of ‘Old Corruption’, p. 262.   7 For example, P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–55 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); J. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); D. Brown, Palmerston: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).   8 For example, A. Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999); G. Hicks, Peace, War and Party Politics: The Conservatives and Europe, 1846–1859 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); A. Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister, The 14th Earl of Derby, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–8); J. Black (ed.), The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679–2014 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); J. Davey, Mary, Countess of Derby and the Politics of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).  9 C. Middleton, ‘John Backhouse and the Origins of the Permanent Undersecretaryship for Foreign Affairs: 1828–1842’, Journal of British Studies, 13:2 (1974), 24. 10 Jones, Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office, p. 41. 11 In administrative terms, the Foreign Office and diplomatic service were, at this stage, different institutions. The Foreign Office comprised a much smaller body of personnel than the wider service: in 1861, for example, in addition to the permanent and assistant under-secretaries,

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there were just thirty-four clerks of varying ranks. These figures are set out in detail in Steiner, Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, p. 4. 12 Greenaway, ‘Celebrating Northcote/Trevelyan’, 3. 13 Hammond to Mann, 25 June 1855, First Report of Her Majesty’s Civil Service Commissioners (London: HMSO, 1856), Appendix II: Correspondence, p. 67. 14 R. Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Volume I (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 22. 15 Jones, British Diplomatic Service, p. 39. 16 Michael Coolican, No Tradesmen and No Women: The Origins of the British Civil Service (London: Biteback, 2018), p. 115. 17 J. Thompson, ‘Good government’, in J. Thompson and D. Craig (eds), Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 39. 18 Gambles, Protection and Politics, p. 217. 19 For Peel’s concerns about baronetcies see Harling, Waning of ‘Old Corruption’, p. 238; for Derby’s, see Hampshire Record Office [hereafter HRO], Malmesbury Papers [hereafter MP], 9M73/20/18, Derby to Malmesbury, 17 August 1858. Derby worried that the honour of a baronetcy ‘has been of late years rather too freely conferred’. 20 National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew [hereafter TNA], CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to Civil Service Commissioners [hereafter CSC], 22 September 1858. 21 For the Foreign Secretary’s plan see Malmesbury to Derby, 23 February 1858, in G. Hicks, J. Charmley and B. Grosvenor (eds), Documents on Conservative Foreign Policy [hereafter DCFP] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 95; for the Queen’s intervention, see Jones, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 46–7. 22 Malmesbury to Derby, 24 May [1858], Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, p. 109. 23 Ibid. 24 Liverpool Record Office [hereafter LRO], Derby Papers [hereafter DP], 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 18 September 1858. 25 For example, Hicks, Peace, War and Party Politics, pp. 132–3. 26 Malmesbury to Derby, 17 October 1858, in Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, p. 127. 27 For example, Jones, British Diplomatic Service, p. 47. 28 Bodleian Library, Hughenden Deposit, 99/2, fos 5–6, Malmesbury to Disraeli, 15 April 1858. 29 LRO, DP, 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 23 February 1858, 30 Morning Post (28 February 1859).

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31 Malmesbury to Derby, 17 December 1858, Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, p. 132. 32 Malmesbury to Derby, 4 April 1858, Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, p. 100. 33 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-minister: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1884), 2, p. 110. 34 See for example: Malmesbury, Memoirs, 2, pp. 153, 178, 264, 267. Jane Loftus (1821–90) was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. 35 Diary, 11 September 1877, in J. Vincent (ed.), Derby Diaries: A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826– 93) between September 1869 and March 1878 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1994), p. 437, fn 66. 36 See Jones, British Diplomatic Service, p. 28. 37 HRO, MP, 9M73/20/44, Derby to Malmesbury, 26 December 1858. 38 Ibid.; LRO, DP, 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 29 March [1858], Malmesbury’s emphasis. 39 LRO, DP, 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 10 September 1858. 40 LRO, DP, 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 18 September 1858. 41 Malmesbury to Derby, 17 December 1858, Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, p. 132. Malmesbury’s emphasis. 42 Sir William Samuel McMahon (1839–1905); Robert Percy Ffrench (1832–96); Sir Edmund Constantine Henry Phipps (1840–1911); Hon. Frederick Henry North (1834–1917); George ‘Gino’ Lenox-Conyngham (d. 1866). 43 Jones, Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office, pp. 43–4. 44 TNA, CSC 2/2, Hammond to CSC, 19 June 1858. 45 TNA, CSC 2/2, Hammond to CSC, 19 July 1858, enclosing Regulations for examination of paid and unpaid attachés, as approved by the Earl of Malmesbury, 15 July 1858. 46 TNA, FO 366/405, fo. 87, J. G. Maitland on behalf of the CSC to Malmesbury, 9 August 1858. 47 TNA, CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to CSC, 22 September 1858. 48 TNA, CSC 2/2, Item 1, Regulations for examination of unpaid attachés, as approved by the Earl of Malmesbury, 15 July 1858. 49 TNA, FO 366/405, fos 90–1, J. G. Maitland on behalf of the CSC to Malmesbury, 9 August 1858. 50 MP, 9M73/20, fo. 30, Derby to Malmesbury, 2 September 1858. 51 TNA, CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to CSC, 22 September 1858. 52 FO 366/405, fos 113–16, CSC to Malmesbury, 13 December 1858. Malmesbury merely acknowledged the letter via the Permanent Under-Secretary: TNA, CSC 2/2, Hammond to CSC, 16 December 1858.

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53 TNA, CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to CSC, 22 September 1858. 54 Thomas John Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, 5th Baron Thurlow (1838–1916); George Sheffield (1836–1898); Sir Audley Charles Gosling (1836–1913). 55 Arthur Henry Seymour (1838–1910). 56 TNA, CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to CSC, 22 September 1858. 57 Ibid. 58 HRO, MP, 9M73/20/30, Derby to Malmesbury, 2 September 1858. 59 TNA, CSC 2/2, Malmesbury to CSC, 22 September 1858. 60 FO 366/405, fo. 117, CSC to Malmesbury, 13 December 1858. 61 LRO, DP, 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 27 September 1858. 62 HRO, MP, 9M73/20/34, Derby to Malmesbury, 20 September 1858. 63 HRO, MP, 9M73/20/44, Derby to Malmesbury, 26 December 1858. 64 K. Neilson and T. G. Otte, The Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1854–1946 (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 11. 65 Hughenden Deposit, 99/2, fo. 19, Malmesbury to Disraeli, 17 September 1858. Author’s emphasis. 66 LRO, DP, 920 DER (14) 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 20 September [1858]. Author’s emphasis. 67 Malmesbury to Derby, 4 April 1858, Hicks, Charmley and Grosvenor (eds), DCFP, pp. 100–1. 68 LRO, DP, 920 DER (14) 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 29 March [1858]. 69 LRO, DP, 920 DER (14) 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 4 April 1858. 70 LRO, DP, 920 DER (14) 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 5 September 1858. 71 LRO, DP, 920 DER (14) 144/2, Malmesbury to Derby, 24 September 1858; Bowring duly retired in July 1859. Wyse had been appointed as minister plenipotentiary to Greece in 1849, where he remained until 1860. 72 K. Theakston, Leadership in Whitehall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 37. 73 J. Pellew, The Home Office, 1848–1914 (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 15–18. 74 Bourne, Patronage and Society, p. 29.

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9 Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests: reforming endowments H. S. Jones

‘The reproach which more than any other attaches to the working of our institutions,’ declared Gladstone in 1874, ‘is that they give far too much scope for the action of local prejudice and selfish interest as against the public welfare. It is the duty of Parliament and of the Government to labour to raise to the uttermost both the energy and the authority of those bodies that are called upon to defend the public interests against the selfish interests of classes and localities.’1 This passage, from a speech in the House of Commons opposing one of the first pieces of legislation brought in by the new Disraeli government, is fundamental in stating a central commitment of Gladstonian Liberalism: a dedication to what it conceived as national institutions and public interests deemed vulnerable to corruption by sectional and local interests. This dimension of Gladstonian Liberalism is overlooked in the literature, which typically highlights Gladstone’s dedication to the cause of the minimal state through financial retrenchment and fiscal rectitude, a cause that appealed to the nonconformist base of the Liberal Party.2 Those were, certainly, authentic expressions of both Gladstone’s own convictions and of the movement that he led, but they were shaped in large measure by a sense that the growth of public expenditure was driven not by the needs of the many but by the sectional interests of the privileged few: the legacy of Old Corruption. In the most authoritative study of Gladstone’s intellectual outlook, David Bebbington has highlighted the civic humanist assumptions that underpinned Gladstone’s belief in the obligations of a leisured and predominantly landed elite.3 As Colin Matthew has stressed, Gladstone saw the Northcote–Trevelyan

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 201 reforms of the civil service as a means to cleanse and hence legitimise the ruling elite, and so ensure that the nineteenth century would be an age of rule by virtue, whereas the eighteenth century had been an age of rule by patronage.4 The advent of a liberal economic order built on free trade and a limited state did not, for Gladstone, mean the ascendancy of private interests, but, on the contrary, freed parliament from the need to bargain with economic interests and provided the framework for a virtuous polity directed at the public good. It was the antithesis of a corrupt society.5

The contest over endowments The dialectics of public good and private interests, of virtue and corruption, thus stood at the centre of Gladstone’s political preoccupations and those of his party, too. One of the most distinctive Liberal principles, declared the Liberal intellectual and Times leader-writer George Brodrick, was ‘the deliberate preference of national interests over all minor interests, whether of classes, of sects, of professions, or of individuals’.6 This description would hardly have been endorsed by Gladstone’s opponents, but the words should be taken seriously. This chapter will trace this ‘deliberate preference’ at work in the context of a set of debates whose salience in Victorian politics has been consistently neglected: namely, those centring on the reform of ancient endowments and endowed institutions. The focus will be less on Gladstone himself than on a network of Liberals who were, in varying degrees, close to Gladstone; but it needs to be stressed that the reform of endowments was a recurrent theme in Gladstone’s career. One of the more controversial episodes in his long tenure of the chancellorship of the exchequer was his attempt in his 1863 budget to tax the income of endowed charities, followed by a rapid retreat in the face of a parliamentary outcry spearheaded by two future prime ministers, Disraeli and Salisbury.7 The proposed tax is sometimes dismissed as a quixotic lapse of judgement.8 But Gladstone saw it as a question of high principle. His defence of the proposal in his speech in committee was something of a tour de force in which he denounced the discreditable motives of death-bed benefactors, maintained that a tax exemption was the equivalent of an exchequer grant and

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wondered why, among the many claims on public expenditure, government should prioritise match-funding the personal whims of the wealthy. This was, judged the Reader, a ‘great speech’, indeed ‘one of the most brilliant efforts that the House of Commons has witnessed for many a day’, and even commentators who thought the proposal wrong-headed recognised that Gladstone had shaken the foundations of the ‘superstitious veneration’ for founders of endowed charities.9 This was far from an isolated incident. Gladstone had a strong and sustained commitment to the reform of endowed institutions through the state’s assertion of the public interest in the ways in which their endowments were used. A case in point was his role – as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also as the university’s MP– in driving the Oxford University Act of 1854 through parliament. The act established executive commissioners to remodel colleges’ statutes and endowments, but in a way that was sympathetic to the survival of the college system. As Colin Matthew remarked, it illustrated Gladstone’s commitment to the use of parliament to allow the regeneration of historic institutions from within, rather than to impose an abstract model from without.10 As his career progressed Gladstone became increasingly alive to the abuses to which endowed institutions were susceptible: in 1876 he told the Political Economy Club that ‘very long observation, and my practice in public affairs, makes me from year to year more sensible of the objections to endowments, and less and less convinced of the countervailing advantages which they confer’.11 At the same time he turned his mind to other abuses in the operation of charities, such as the practice of ‘charity voting’, whereby donors cast votes to select recipients of charity, so exercising powers of patronage that were rarely used for the public good.12 Finally, in his eighty-first year he returned to his criticism of the motivations for testamentary philanthropy.13 The whole question of the legitimacy and prudence of state action to reform the deployment of endowments was a recurrent and highly contested issue in Victorian politics, and it was one that distinguished the Gladstonian Liberal Party sharply from its Conservative opponent. At the heart of this reform programme was a commitment to the public accountability of those foundations and trusts that were responsible for the management of charitable

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 203 endowments. A central conviction underpinning this discourse about endowments was the belief that unreformed endowed institutions contained within themselves the seed of corruption. Endowed institutions thus offer a distinctive lens through which to view Victorian thinking about corruption. The concrete meaning of ‘corruption’ is partly dependent upon the particular historical context, but it always includes the illegitimate intrusion of private interests into the public realm.14 That being so, a deeper conception of the public realm tends to produce a sharper eye for the danger of corruption. Endowed foundations were significant because they occupied a liminal place between public and private spheres. Though they were in many cases ‘private’ corporations – colleges and universities, for instance – whether their property could properly be treated as private was precisely what was at stake in many of the controversies. One way of understanding the endowments debate is therefore to think of it as a consequence of shifting conceptions of the boundary between public and private property: as property which many regarded as private came to be widely regarded as public, forms of individual or institutional behaviour which had once seemed normal and unobjectionable now began to be regarded as corrupt. Those who came to be accused of corruption were often baffled by the charge, since from their perspective they were acting in accordance with wellestablished social norms. First, we need to clarify the Victorian meaning of an ‘endowment’. When the concept is used today, most notably in north American and some British universities, it typically designates all the institution’s accumulated capital, whether or not the capital is expendable, and whether or not there are any particular restrictions on the use of the income.15 But Victorians used the term in a much more restricted sense. J. S. Mill offered the following definition: ‘By a foundation or endowment, is to be understood, money or money’s worth (most commonly land) assigned, in perpetuity or for some long period, for a public purpose: meaning by public, a purpose which, whatever it may be, is not the personal use and enjoyment of an assignable individual or individuals.’16 Mill here highlighted three notable aspects: an endowment is characterised by having a public (or charitable) purpose, being intended to last in perpetuity

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and historically having a strong connection with gifts of land. The kinds of institutions involved included universities, public and grammar schools, parochial charities, the Irish church, English cathedral chapters and the livery companies of the City of London. Practically all were reformed by statutory means – the main exception being the livery companies, which have remained largely untouched by the hand of the legislator. New institutions which benefited from the redeployment of old endowments included girls’ secondary schools, the London polytechnics and the civic colleges that matured into civic universities.17 These were highly controversial issues. Lawrence Goldman has pointed to some of the electoral repercussions in an essay showing how the reform of the governing bodies of endowed schools was instrumental in driving the Anglican middle-class electorate in London away from Liberalism in the general election of 1874.18 Gladstone’s government had passed the Endowed Schools Act in 1869, establishing the Endowed Schools Commissioners, who were given remarkably extensive powers to remodel endowments, secularising governing bodies and diverting endowments to provide funds for the establishment of secondary schools for girls. It was the manner in which the commissioners exercised their powers that alienated Anglican voters, and the incoming Disraeli government gave legislative priority to overturning a key feature of the 1869 Act: the 1875 Endowed Schools Act Amendment Act dissolved the commission, transferring its powers to the Charity Commission. Gladstone regarded this act as a breach of constitutional propriety, since he believed it to be the first instance of one government deliberately setting out to reverse the legislative work of its predecessor.19 The party leaders were explicit about their fundamental disagreement. For Disraeli in 1873, the ‘great and “burning” questions’ that required the existence of ‘a great Constitutional Party’ (the Conservative Party) included not just ‘the attributes of a Constitutional Monarchy’, the recognition of the aristocratic principle and the tenure of landed property, but also ‘the functions of corporations, the sacredness of Endowments’.20 This was the context in which Gladstone was moved (as quoted above) to assert the duty of parliament and government to defend the public interest against sectional interests. A leader in The Times noted in 1869 that ‘the influence of dispositions made

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by private individuals in past ages upon the rights and duties of the present generation’ was an element that ‘enters into half the great political questions of the present day, yet has never been thoroughly analysed’.21

The Schools Inquiry Commission and educational endowments The 1869 Act set out to implement some of the principal recommendations of one of the most important of Victorian royal commissions: the Schools Inquiry Commission, or Taunton Commission, whose report was presented to parliament in 1867 and published in 1868. This investigated all schools that fell between the big nine public schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission, which reported in 1864, and the publicly supported elementary sector that had been the subject of the Newcastle Commission’s report in 1861. Driven by the energy and vision of the Headmaster of Rugby and future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, the Commission interpreted its remit boldly, not least by addressing head-on the lack of provision for the secondary schooling of girls.22 What it saw was that the lack of political support for exchequer grants for secondary schooling meant that adequate secondary education for girls would necessarily depend on a radical remodelling of existing endowments, both those currently deployed for the education of boys only and those currently squandered on other kinds of charitable provisions for the poor. So, although by the time of the commission’s report two of its members, Lord Stanley and Sir Stafford Northcote, were serving in Disraeli’s first cabinet, its work would have been impossible had it not at an early stage repudiated his principle of ‘the sacredness of Endowments’. It is worth dwelling on the membership of the Taunton Commission, first to highlight the strong Gladstonian connections. The point is not simply that the membership was heavily Liberal, though it certainly was.23 It is the more specific one that the personal as well as political affiliations with Gladstone were close. Key members included Lord Lyttelton, who was married to Gladstone’s sister-in-law and was a close friend of Gladstone himself: the two men ­married the Glynne sisters in a double wedding ceremony in

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1839, and Lyttelton would later serve as under-secretary during Gladstone’s tenure of the colonial secretaryship under Peel in 1846.24 Thomas Dyke Acland, a friend from undergraduate days, followed Gladstone from conservatism to liberalism, to the point of supporting him over Home Rule. Even the Conservative members included Northcote, who had begun his political career as Gladstone’s secretary in the 1840s, and the Tractarian Walter Hook, Dean of Chichester, a strong admirer of Gladstone in spite of party allegiance.25 For several of the commissioners and assistant commissioners, the commission was a formative experience which laid the foundation for a longer-term commitment to the struggle for endowment reform of a broadly Gladstonian kind. This was notably true of four of them: Lyttelton, Joshua Fitch, James Bryce and Henry Roby. Lyttelton had previously served on the Clarendon Commission. Alongside Taunton and Temple, he was considered one of the most influential members of the Schools Inquiry Commission, and he wrote the key chapters on the eight largest endowments (including Christ’s Hospital, Manchester Grammar School and King Edward’s Birmingham) and on girls’ schools.26 A staunch believer in endowment reform, he went on to serve (at Gladstone’s insistence) as one of the controversial Endowed Schools Commissioners (1869–74). His son Edward later served on the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education. The schools inspector Joshua Fitch, later Sir Joshua, was the assistant commissioner charged with reporting on schooling in Yorkshire and some other northern counties.27 He was a prominent controversialist on the endowments question in the periodical press and elsewhere – for example, in an influential article on the work of the Taunton Commission in 1869.28 He was a notable activist in the cause of the education of girls and women, in his role in the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women and the Association for Promoting the Application of Endowments to the Education of Women. He was an Assistant Endowed Schools Commissioner from 1869 until the dissolution of the Commission in 1874. The question of educational endowments, and how to put them to better use, was for decades a recurrent preoccupation of his, as is evident from the addresses he gave during a tour of the US in 1888.29

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 207 James Bryce, another assistant commissioner, was the author of the lengthy and important report on Lancashire. Like Fitch, who became a good friend, he wrote a powerful exposition of the principles of endowment reform in 1869.30 Bryce was at the start of a notably many-sided career, which included an Oxford Regius Professorship (to which he was appointed by Gladstone), cabinet office under Gladstone, Rosebery and Campbell-Bannerman, the ambassadorship to Washington and humanitarian campaigning over several decades on behalf of the people of Armenia. Amid this breadth of interests, the reform of endowments nevertheless represents a consistent thread. Like Fitch, he was a vigorous and enthusiastic campaigner for secondary and higher education for girls and women through the redeployment of endowments. Bryce entered parliament as Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets in 1880 and in his first parliament he steered through the Commons the City of London Parochial Charities Act of 1883. Following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Parochial Charities, this hugely complex act empowered the Charity Commission to reappropriate misused or unapplied funds held by charities administered by individual parishes, notably in areas where the residential population had declined.31 A decade later, Bryce chaired another royal commission, on secondary education, which was instructed to ‘have regard to such local sources of revenue from endowment or otherwise as are available or may be made available for this purpose’. 32 The commission’s recommendations on the role that endowments should play in secondary schooling echoed quite closely the principles that Bryce had expounded in 1869, though the commissioners effectively abandoned the hope that endowments, however boldly reordered and however efficiently managed, were sufficient to provide for the needs of secondary and higher education. Henry Roby, Latinist, former fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and former Second Master of Dulwich College, served as Secretary to the Taunton Commission, and drafted two chapters of its final report. W. E. Forster (Minister of Education, and previously a member of the commission) appointed Roby as Secretary of the Endowed Schools Commission instituted under the 1869 Act, and on the resignation in 1872 of the most controversial of the commissioners, Arthur Hobhouse, Roby was appointed to succeed him, until the commission was abolished two years later. He later

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settled in Manchester and succeeded Friedrich Engels as junior partner in the textile firm Ermen and Engels, renamed Ermen and Roby. He served as Gladstonian Liberal MP for Eccles between 1890 and 1895. Like Bryce, he was a Roman lawyer, and Bryce offered to put his name forward to succeed him as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford in 1893. Like both Bryce and Fitch, he worked with Emily Davies in the formation of Girton College, whose constitution he drafted, and following the move to ­Manchester he and his wife were actively involved in the creation of the Manchester High School for Girls.33 Liberals and Radicals did not all share a uniform approach to the problem of endowments, however. There was a ‘radical antiquarian’ position that held that historic endowments, especially those given for the schooling of the poor, had been misappropriated to subsidise the education of the children of the wealthy. Thus Joseph Chamberlain’s Radical Programme (1885) drew attention to the ‘enormous endowments which were left for the education of the poor, the accumulated wealth of which has been for centuries appropriated for higher education’ (meaning for public secondary schools dispensing a classical education).34 A very different stance was taken by Robert Lowe, Gladstone’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer but no close ally. Lowe, a trenchant believer in the most austere forms of utilitarianism and classical economics, deplored endowments because he thought they worked in much the same way as state funding, undermining the bracing disciplines of the market.35 Against these two approaches – the radical antiquarian and the classical liberal – the Gladstonians’ approach was shaped by a strong conception of the public interest and a sense that endowments, properly understood, should be regarded as a form of public property and could be used to foster civic virtue and a commitment to the common good. That conception of what endowments were properly for stood in marked contrast with their analysis of the corrupt state of many endowed foundations.

Endowments and corruption What, then, does the endowments issue have to tell us about understandings of corruption? There were two distinct senses in which

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 209 their critics regarded endowed institutions as actually or potentially likely to fall into corruption. The first rested on the understanding of corruption as illegitimate personal benefit from public office. Here corruption was a personal vice that also degraded the office. The other sense hinged on the failure of institutions to serve public purposes due to the illegitimate admixture of private interests. Here corruption was an institutional vice that entailed the perversion of a foundation from its proper purpose, normally due to moral decay. The old governing bodies of trusts and corporations – usually Anglican, and very often peopled with representatives of old gentry families – were commonly imagined as part of an ancien regime mired in Old Corruption. A common allegation was that they drew illegitimate personal benefit from what was properly conceived as public office. This was the complaint against the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital in Anthony Trollope’s fictional account from the 1850s: the surplus revenues from the original endowment, beyond the sum needed to meet the requirements stipulated in Hiram’s will, had been appropriated by successive wardens.36 More commonly, they used them for purposes which, while still public, could scarcely be said to be maximising public benefit, were misaligned with the broad aim of the foundation and tended to increase the patronage at the disposal of the governors themselves. That was the case with the trust established by William Hulme of Manchester at the end of the seventeenth century to fund four graduate exhibitions at Brasenose College, Oxford, for students from the north-west of England. By the end of the eighteenth century the trust was generating a large surplus and the trustees sought parliamentary approval for new schemes. Some were reasonable extensions of the original scheme: for instance, an increase in the number and value of exhibitions. Others, such as the institution of a lectureship at Brasenose, had a tenuous connection with the north-west. The one that caused the biggest public controversy was the scheme to spend some of the accumulated surplus on the purchase of a number of advowsons (right of patronage to Church of England livings), with the intention that former Hulme exhibitioners should have first refusal of these livings: ‘a gross perversion of the interest of the public in the endowment’, one Radical critic noted.37 Likewise, both Gladstone in 1863 and by the Schools Inquiry Commission cited the case of Christ’s Hospital, by a long way the wealthiest of the endowed

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schools which the commission investigated. Almost all of the five-hundred governors had simply paid a sum of £500 to purchase the right to present children for admission to the school.38 This critique was very commonly used in the contest over educational endowments, in particular by Radicals who wanted to assert that these endowments properly belonged to the people of the locality, and who insisted that it gave the poor of the locality a right to a free education. It was also commonly deployed in the assault on the City of London Corporation which came to a head in the 1870s and 1880s. The Corporation, writes Jose Harris, was ‘regarded by radicals as a living museum of old corruption’, and had largely escaped the ‘age of reform’.39 Modernising Liberals such as Temple, Fitch, Bryce and Hobhouse, however, were sceptical of much of the Radical critique. They did not share the reverence for founders’ intentions, and they believed that to protect the interests of the locality was to entrench one key aspect of the problem: namely, the extremely unequal distribution of endowments and its lack of connection with actual needs. In their educational reforms they set out to divert endowments away from anything that could be construed as elementary schooling, and they strongly disapproved of the use of endowments to provide free education indiscriminately. These Liberals did, nevertheless, invoke arguments around corruption, in particular around institutional corruption. At the heart of their critique of endowments was the premise that institutions would inevitably tend to degenerate into self-serving oligarchies unless they were held accountable through the operation of publicity. There was more than a hint here of the quintessential republican trope that a cycle of growth and decay is a natural condition of human institutions, so that it was vital always to guard against the omnipresent danger of corruption. Fitch wrote in 1888 of ‘the incurable vices that are wont to breed in all foundations … stagnation, corruption, negligence, rigidity, and a fatal incapacity to adapt themselves to the changed circumstances and needs of successive generations’.40 For some Liberals, such as Robert Lowe, only the market mechanism could supply ‘a principle of correction and regeneration’ to counter ‘those seeds of corruption and decay which are incident to all human organisations’.41 But the modernising Liberal

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position was that a principle of correction could be best supplied by an ethic of public service backed, crucially, by public accountability. The importance of accountability to public opinion was underlined by Gladstone in his 1863 budget speech: Endowed institutions laugh at public opinion. There is no public opinion brought to bear upon them. The press knows nothing of their expenditure; Parliament knows nothing of it. It is too much to say that hospitals are managed by angels and archangels, and do not, like the rest of humanity, stand in need of supervision, criticism, and rebuke.42

While Gladstone did not succeed in his attempt to tax the endowed charities, he did effectively make the case for greater accountability: indeed, one reason why he wanted to press the argument that a fiscal exemption was the equivalent of a Treasury grant was that it made the case for that public supervision. ‘When there is a public grant we know what we are about – we let in the light of day. The public becomes a party to the management; it has something to say and has a right to be heard, and arbitrary will is dethroned.’43 Likewise, the Taunton Commission identified one of the conditions that made for a successful endowed school in ‘the active sympathy of a governing body virtually, if not formally, responsible to public opinion’.44 Here the Commission drew directly on Bryce’s report on Lancashire: discussing the ideal number of trustees for an endowed school, Bryce acknowledged that a small governing body made for efficiency, but, on the other hand, he pointed out that where the number of trustees was large ‘there is less likely to be corruption; there is greater accessibility to public opinion, and a better chance of having all sorts of interests, feelings and parties fairly represented’.45 These Gladstonian Liberals held that the renewal or regeneration of endowed foundations depended on the publicity that would flow once their endowments came to be regarded as public property. Bryce insisted on this point in his defence of the work of the Taunton Commission. The history of the endowed schools had shown ‘not indeed, as Mr Lowe would have it, that foundations are necessarily and always pernicious, but that they are pernicious when left to themselves, and that the only way to make them useful is to treat them as so much public money, to be disposed of as public wisdom

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thinks best’. He concluded by reiterating the point: experience showed that ‘charities left to themselves are invariably perverted, and … endowment funds can be turned properly to account only when administered with the same publicity and the same regard to the interest of the whole community wherewith we administer direct grants from the treasury of the State’.46 Conservatives typically did not accept that endowments were public property. In the course of Gladstone’s second government (1880–5), the status of the property of endowed corporations re-emerged as the central issue in the polemics surrounding the Royal Commission on the Livery Companies of the City of London, which reported in 1884. This commission – chaired by Lord Derby, a veteran of the Schools Inquiry Commission – provides the best example of a royal commission which was highly contested, not just in its recommendations but in its very remit and terms of reference. The livery companies had been the subject of sustained attention and often vitriolic attack in the 1870s from London radicals who saw the wealth the companies squandered on lavish hospitality for members as a resource that could be used for the development of education in the capital.47 Gladstone himself drew on these critiques in his Greenwich speech of November 1875: addressing the need for public support for technical education, he urged the City companies to endeavour ‘resolutely and boldly to fulfil the purpose for which they were founded’, which was certainly not ‘the purpose of having dinners once a year, once a quarter, or once a month’.48 Gladstone’s second government moved quickly to establish the Derby Commission when it took office. The companies contested the very legitimacy of the commission, insofar as it claimed the role of investigating their corporate property and not only the trusts which they administered. In the words of Sir William Cotton, Conservative MP for the City of London and the companies’ most outspoken defender on the commission, ‘any interference with the property of the Livery Companies must tend to create mistrust and destroy confidence in all benefit and other societies which tend to inculcate habits of saving and thrift’.49 The radicals, at the opposite extreme, argued that the companies were in their origin public institutions, that they held their endowments as public institutions and that their property should therefore be regarded as public property, to be supervised by the state. This position was forcefully

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 213 propounded on the commission by Joseph Firth, Chairman of the London Municipal Reform League and MP for Chelsea. Another notable London Radical, Charles Bradlaugh, went as far as to argue that the companies had defrauded the people of London of their rightful inheritance: ‘an immediate determination should be put to the devouring dead men’s goods and widows’ houses by hypocritical wine-bibbers’.50 So the question of whether the state had a right to investigate the companies was a deeply divisive issue and one that divided the commission itself. Nine signed the majority report, which asserted that it was ‘obvious that the State has a right at any time to disestablish and disendow the Companies of London, provided the just claims of existing members to compensation be allowed’, although in practice the report’s recommendations were moderate and stopped far short of anything resembling either the dismantling of the companies or their expropriation.51 Three members refused to sign and drew up a minority report. This asserted the core principle that the companies were right to protest against the commission’s procedures, since their corporate property is as much their own, and with as full a right of disposition in the eye of the law, as that of any private individual, and the Crown has no more right to inquire into the mode in which it was acquired and the way in which the income arising from it is spent, than it has to make similar inquiries with respect to the estate or income of a landed gentleman or merchant.52

For the majority, the position of the livery companies vis-à-vis the state was analogous to that of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge: they were public institutions which, morally if not legally, held their property on trust; and the state could quite properly intervene periodically to release them from certain historic constraints and to direct them towards new purposes. For the minority, the position of the companies differed from that of the universities in a very important respect: the endowments of the universities and their colleges had been given for clear public purposes – the advancement of education, religion and learning. Those of the livery companies had been given for the benefit of their current and future members. That defence was by no means unproblematic: since charitable endowments were permitted due to an explicit

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exemption from the statutory prohibition on perpetuities, by what legal right could the City companies’ perpetuities be defended if not on the basis of their destination to serve a public interest? And if the companies’ property could legally be used to serve the interests of their members, by what right was it exempt from taxation? The livery companies, unlike the other corporate bodies that were subject to parliamentary investigation, were remarkably successful in escaping statutory intervention – part of a larger story in which the City Corporation survived the creation of the London County Council in 1888.53 Still, the companies’ exemption from taxation was addressed by the imposition of an annual corporation duty in 1885, intended to serve in lieu of the payment of probate duties.54 Moreover, even before the commission’s work, the companies started to respond to their critics and embarked on a programme of reform from within, ensuring that their endowments were put to public use, notably in support of technical education.55

Conclusion This chapter has drawn attention to a neglected arena in which the battle to cleanse the Victorian state from corruption was fought. Endowed institutions were not part of ‘the state’ as usually understood; but to write the history of the state entails attending to the shifting boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’, and between ‘public’ and ‘private’.56 The drive to reform endowed institutions involved an attempt to subject them to forms of governance and accountability that reflected the public purpose they were supposed to serve. The norms that had previously governed the management of endowments were challenged, and personal and institutional behaviour once regarded as normal – for example, in the livery companies – was now deemed corrupt, or at the very least a perversion of the proper use of public property. Reform of endowments was shaped by a range of Liberal and Radical voices, but this chapter has shown that the reform of endowments was a particular commitment for Gladstone and his allies. Gladstone’s enduring engagement with the problem reminds us that his commitment to retrenchment and a smaller state had little to do with the subservience to the market and the values of the

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 215 private sector that dominate the neoliberal mindset in the twenty-­ first century. The distinctive values of public service were at the heart of the Gladstonian view of politics and the state. Where, finally, do the endowment controversies fit into the longer-term history of the reform of the state? Did the problem of endowments disappear because the endowed corporations were successfully ‘cleansed’, in line with Jonathan Parry’s account of the reasons for the decline of ‘institutional reform’ as a Radical cause?57 Many were cleansed, it is true; but others were not, or only partially. A more important reason is that the value of endowments declined in relation to overall public expenditure and the growing demands for increased spending. The status of endowed institutions aroused such controversy because the combined value of endowments was very significant, judged in relation to the state’s fiscal resources: they formed a very substantial part of the ‘public sector’, broadly understood. By 1880 the combined endowment income of corporate bodies and philanthropic trusts in England and Wales totalled about £12.5 million. That was roughly equal to the combined yield of taxes on land, property and income at the same date for the UK as a whole, and was substantially in excess of total central and local government expenditure on education, science and art, poor relief and hospitals.58 At a time when there was practically no central or local government expenditure on universities or on secondary schools, educational reformers looked to endowment income to provide the basis of a reformed system of secondary and higher education. But by the time the Bryce Commission reported in 1895 it was clear that endowments, however effectively organised and supplemented by fee income, could not supply all the needs of secondary schools.59 In the new social politics of the Edwardian period, neither Chamberlainite tariff reformers nor New Liberals supposed that the reallocation of endowments could do anything to address the problem of old-age poverty, which demanded a major expansion of the fiscal resources of the state. By the interwar period the real value of endowment income had slumped and the state’s power to extract resources from its populace had grown massively, so that both tax revenue and the level of ‘social expenditure’ by central and local government far outstripped endowment income. Hence the reform of endowments came to be regarded as insignificant.

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Notes  1 Hansard, 23 July 1874, vol. 221, cols 567–8. Curiously, this resonant passage has never, to my knowledge, been noticed in the scholarly literature before.   2 For example, K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 48–9, 212–15, 634. The best study of Gladstonian retrenchment remains E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially chap. 2.   3 D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 295–301.   4 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 85.  5 Ibid., 95.   6 G. C. Brodrick, ‘What Are Liberal Principles?’, Fortnightly Review, 19 (1876), 185. The article was reproduced as a pamphlet the following year by the Liberal Central Association.  7 Hansard, 4 May 1863, vol. 170, cols 1128–31 and 30 April 1863, vol. 170, cols 995–7.   8 R. Jenkins, Gladstone (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 241–2.   9 ‘Gladstone and the Philosophy of Benevolence’, Reader (9 May 1863), pp. 447–8; The Times (7 May 1863), p. 10. 10 Matthew, Gladstone, p. 84. 11 Political Economy Club: Revised Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of 31st May 1876, Held in Celebration of the Hundredth Year of the Publication of the “Wealth of Nations” (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1876), p. 41. 12 S. Kanazawa, ‘“To Vote or Not to Vote”: Charity Voting and the Other Side of Subscriber Democracy in Victorian England’, English Historical Review, 131:549 (2016), 353–83; ‘Mr Gladstone on Charities’, Spectator (13 July 1878), p. 884. 13 W. E. Gladstone, ‘Mr Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth”: A Review and a Recommendation’, Nineteenth Century, 28 (November, 1890), 677–93. 14 M. Philp, ‘The definition of political corruption’, in P. M. Heywood (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 17–29. 15 H. Hansmann, ‘Why Do Universities Have Endowments?’, Journal of Legal Studies, 19:1 (1990), 8–19. 16 J. S. Mill, ‘Corporation and church property’ [1833], in Essays on Economics and Society: Part I, ed. J. M. Robson, The Collected Works of

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 217 John Stuart Mill, 33 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 4, p. 197. 17 On this point see S. Fletcher, Feminists and Bureaucrats: A Study in the Development of Girls’ Education in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), notably appendices, pp. 192–217 and H. S. Jones, ‘The English civic universities: endowments and the commemoration of benefactors’, in J. Pellew and L. Goldman (eds), Dethroning Historical Reputations: Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2018), pp. 26–8. 18 L. Goldman, ‘The defection of the middle class: the Endowed Schools Act, the Liberal Party, and the 1874 election’, in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 118–35. 19 Matthew, Gladstone, p. 177. 20 Hansard, 20 March 1873, vol. 214, col. 1944. 21 The Times (17 June 1869), p. 8. The writer was G. C. Brodrick. His leaders are identified in Dung-Mauh Lin, ‘An Intellectual in Victorian Politics: The Educational and Political Ideas of George Charles Brodrick, 1831–1903’ (MLitt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2008). 22 On Temple’s role see S. Green, ‘Archbishop Frederick Temple on meritocracy, liberal education and the idea of a clerisy’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 149–67; but also, for a more nuanced view, see P. Hinchliff, Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 116–18. 23 Fletcher, Feminists and Bureaucrats, p. 19. 24 S. Fletcher, Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttelton’s Daughters (London: Hambledon, 1997), pp. 3, 32. 25 W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Walter Farquhar Hook, D.D., F.R.S. (London: Bentley, 1880), pp. 457–9. 26 P. Stansky, ‘Lyttelton and Thring: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Education’, Victorian Studies, 5:3 (1962), 209; C. Shrosbree, Public Schools and Private Education: The Clarendon Commission, 1861–64, and Public Schools Acts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 94; Fletcher, Victorian Girls, p. 132. 27 A. L. Lilley, Sir Joshua Fitch: An Account of his Life and Work (London: Arnold, 1906), pp. 66–99. 28 J. G. Fitch, ‘Educational Endowments’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 79 (1869), 1–15.

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29 For example, ‘Endowments and their influence on education’, reprinted in J. G. Fitch, Educational Aims and Methods (New York: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 177–214. 30 [J. Bryce], ‘The Worth of Educational Endowments’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 19 (1868–69), 517–24. 31 D. Owen, ‘The City Parochial Charities: The “Dead Hand” in Late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies, 1:2 (1962), 115–35. 32 Royal Commission on Secondary Education: Volume I, PP 1895 [C. 7862], vol. XLIII, pp. iii–iv. 33 C. Stray, ‘Roby, Henry John (1830–1915)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34 The Radical Programme (London: Chapman & Hall, 1885), p. 182. 35 R. Lowe, Middle Class Education: Endowment or Free Trade? (London: Bush, 1868). 36 A. Trollope, The Warden (London: Longman, 1855). 37 E. Edwards, Manchester Worthies and Their Foundations: Or, Six Chapters of Local History: with an Epilogue, by Way of Moral (Manchester: Galt, 1855), pp. 62–7; ‘Hulme’s Charity’, Manchester Guardian (10 December 1868), p. 4. 38 Hansard, 4 May 1863, vol. 169, col. 1092; ‘Mr Gladstone and Christ’s Hospital’, London Review (9 May 1863), 478–9; Royal Commission to Inquire into Education in Schools in England and Wales (Schools Inquiry Commission): Volume I, PP 1867–68 [3966], pp. 478–9. 39 J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870– 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 185. 40 J. G. Fitch, Endowments: An Address Delivered before the College Association of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA: Globe Printing House, 1888). 41 Lowe, Middle Class Education, p. 10. 42 Hansard, 4 May 1863, vol. 170, col. 1097. 43 Ibid., col. 1098. 44 Schools Inquiry Commission: Volume I, p. 435. 45 Schools Inquiry Commission: Volume IX, PP 1867–68 [3966–VIII], p. 436. 46 [Bryce], ‘Worth of Educational Endowments’, 524. 47 Two notable critiques were J. F. B. Firth, Municipal London: Or, London Government as It Is, and London under a Municipal Council (London: Longmans, Green, 1876) and W. Gilbert, The City: An Inquiry into the Corporation, its Livery Companies, and the Administration of their Charities and Endowments (London: Daldy, Isbister, 1877). 48 The Times (12 November 1875), p. 10. 49 Royal Commission to Inquire into the Livery Companies of the City of London: Volume I, PP 1884 [C. 4073], p. 75.

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Gladstonian Liberalism, public service and private interests 219 50 C. Bradlaugh, ‘Twelve Great Companies. How They Stole Their Money, from Whom They Stole It, and How Restitution Is to Be Compelled’, Our Corner (October, 1884), 207. 51 Royal Commission into Livery Companies, p. 42. 52 Ibid., p. 60. On the resistance to reform see P. M. Claus, ‘“Real Liberals” and Conservatives in the City of London, 1846–1886’ (PhD thesis, Open University, 1998). 53 D. Owen, The Government of Victorian London 1855–1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), chap. 11; J. Davis, Reforming London: The London Government Problem, 1855–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chaps 7–8. 54 A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 94. 55 For a very good discussion of the different pressures that drove the Companies in this direction see Claus, ‘“Real Liberals” and Conservatives in the City of London’, chap. 3. 56 S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (eds), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 57 J. Parry, ‘The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 164–86. 58 B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 582, 588, 614. 59 Royal Commission on Secondary Education: Volume I, p. 176.

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10 After Old Corruption: Westminster scandals and the problem of corruption, c. 1880–1914 Tom Crook

Historians have shied away from seeking to measure or assess the extent of corruption among the Westminster elites during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This is not for want of scandal, for the scandals were many, from those surrounding the collapse of imperial banking and mining ventures through to the ‘trading of honours’, the award of armament contracts and the shareholdings and directorships of ministers, MPs and peers. Rather, it is because, ultimately, for all the speculation and insinuation, none of the scandals resulted in the discovery of any actions that all could agree were ‘corrupt’. Even the Marconi scandal (1912–13), the biggest of them all, failed to result in any ministerial resignations. This hardly detracts from their significance, of course. As G. R. Searle long ago argued, however ill defined or precise, proven or disputed, the allegations of corruption that swirled around the world of late Victorian and Edwardian Westminster were a product of often bitterly fought, partisan battles to define proper conduct in public life and to appear on the side of the common good and the national interest.1 Searle’s historiographical premise is exactly right and the point might be amplified: as the Introduction to this volume has suggested, then, now, always, the multiple meanings and contestable applications of ‘corruption’ are impossible to disentangle from political struggles to define the use and abuse of power. Quite where, and how, this remarkable profusion of scandals fits within the broader history of corruption, however, remains unclear. Searle’s otherwise masterful account is largely silent on this question, as are other, more patchy works.2 To be sure, novel contextual factors loom large in the existing literature, among them the waning power of the landed aristocracy, the rise of commercial, financial and

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industrial wealth and the rapacity of the ‘new imperialism’. Beyond this, however, no attempt is made to situate the scandals in relation to what came before, or to analyse what they might tell us about the shifting contours of corruption as a mutable, if persistent, problem of public life. The implicit suggestion seems to be that, with the passing of Old Corruption, established reforming impulses naturally sought out new manifestations of corruption, as if pursuing a linear trajectory of mounting intolerance. Standards were raised; definitions became clearer; and if the problem persisted, it did so because the quest for purity intensified, invariably seizing upon the new possibilities for malfeasance that arose in the novel circumstances of the time; but even if this is the case, it is still not clear where we should look to find evidence for it. This chapter seeks to make up for this neglect and to offer a brief sketch of just this: how the problem of ‘corruption’ mutated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it centred on the conduct of the Westminster elites. The first part sketches what might be called the linear, progressive part of the transformation, whereby the problem was refined and reduced in scope. Crudely, whereas earlier it had principally been conceived as an institutional problem, it now became primarily a matter of the personal probity of ministers, MPs, peers and party agents. The second part of the chapter works in the other direction, arguing that, however much the problem was refined, it remained highly indeterminate. This was partly because particular scandals were read as symptoms of more general, deeper degenerative forces; but it is also because the very same partisan, democratic pressures that helped to focus the problem also served to confuse it, generating intensely politicised, and ultimately unresolved, exchanges about the morality of what had taken place. In sum, if the problem was by no means reinvented at this juncture, it was nonetheless framed and contested, refined and confused, in novel ways. Three corruption scandals are used by way of illustration: the Hooley affair (1898), the Kynoch affair (1900–1) and the Marconi affair.

The refinement of corruption It is not, it should be emphasised, that the meanings of ‘corruption’ changed to any significant degree. In broad terms, it continued to signify the abuse of public office for private financial gain, much as

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it had for centuries; and it remained open to various readings, from those that focused on the details of cases to those that aimed to understand these cases as a product of some kind of degenerative process or force – again, much as it had for centuries.3 Rather, it is that the terms of debate changed: which is to say, the general sense of where corruption was principally located, how it was expressed and what was at stake in its reform. It is in this respect that we might speak of a process of refinement and reduction. In very obvious ways the Westminster corruption scandals of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were novel, centring as they did on two issues that had previously attracted only limited attention: the shareholdings and directorships held by MPs, peers and, most of all, government ministers; and party funding and the award of honours. As historians have suggested, the shifting location of corruption reflected the shifting location of power. On the one hand, it reflected the growing influence and prestige of ‘plutocratic’ forms of joint-stock capitalism and the further consolidation of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre.4 On the other hand, it reflected the advent of so-called ‘government by party’.5 After roughly 1880, partisan discipline was asserted more aggressively within parliament, just as nationally organised parties – Conservative, Liberal, Liberal Unionist and then the Labour Party – emerged as the principal vehicles for the expression of the ‘popular will’ of a mass, if not wholly democratic, electorate. Financially, too, parties became more important. This was largely as a consequence of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act, which began to shift the cost of fighting elections away from local candidates to central party machines, meaning that the latter were faced with the challenge of raising funds and building electoral ‘war chests’. But we can also point towards some more general, long-term shifts in the way the problem was posed. For one thing, it was now understood, first and foremost, as a problem of the personal probity of public office-holders and party agents. To be sure, amid the multiple, criss-crossing currents of reform that engineered the slow death of Old Corruption, it is easy to identify concerns of this sort. Radicals, after all, consistently launched highly personalised attacks on the elite, accusing Tory and Whig ministers, as well as law lords, bankers and churchmen, of nepotism, greed, laziness and profiteering. Equally, the elites themselves, especially from the 1820s, slowly

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but surely came to act with greater integrity. Compared to their predecessors, they worked harder and exercised patronage more lightly, seeking to cultivate what Philip Harling has termed a ‘public service ethos’.6 We might also mention anxieties regarding the conduct of MPs. In 1855, for instance, MPs were required to make a declaration of disinterestedness, local and personal, if they were to sit on committees scrutinising private bill legislation.7 Yet the personal failings of the elite were never at the heart of the abundant analyses that appeared of Old Corruption. Rather, they occupied a subordinate position in diagnoses of corruption that were primarily institutional in nature and that targeted a range of administrative, fiscal and constitutional injustices. The Radical critique was the most comprehensive, emphasising all three of these strands, in contrast to more respectable, ‘indoor’ and elite forms of opinion, which were decidedly more circumspect. Crudely, liberalTories emphasised fiscal retrenchment, Whigs and ‘reformers’ constitutional innovation, though both groups embraced administrative reform, albeit in more activist, social forms in the case of the Whigs and their allies. Nonetheless, for all the differential emphases, the point holds good and is evident in the multiple reforms that eventually took place: the extension of the franchise and the eradication of ‘rotten boroughs’, the abolition of sinecures, the curtailment of the fiscal and administrative privileges of the Anglican Church, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the emergence of a reformed ‘civil service’, among many others. As historians have argued, however idiosyncratic and class-bound the British state remained, its moral prestige was significantly enhanced as a result. By the 1850s, the once strident Radical critique had lost much of its bite, and had been all but extinguished by the 1870s, following the 1867 Reform Act.8 It was in this context that the ethical-personal dimensions of corruption came to the fore, flourishing at precisely the moment when these institutional elements fell away, and focusing, above all, on partisan agents (party officials, ministers, MPs and peers) who might, pending a successful election, control and influence the powers of the state. The key manifestation of this was the novel emphasis placed on personal ‘conflicts of interest’, and in particular conflicts between an office-holder’s ‘private interests’, on the one hand, and his ‘public duties’ and the ‘public interest’, on the

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other – an idiom indeed that seems to have become decidedly more current after 1880. The scandals examined below are testament to this, but practices changed too. A crucial threshold was passed in 1892, when Gladstone decreed that his cabinet ministers should resign any directorships in public companies. To be sure, this was not strictly adhered to, and the principle would lapse entirely under the ministries of Salisbury and Balfour; but it was properly enforced after 1905 under the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.9 Meanwhile, Radical and Liberal MPs called for still stricter standards of conduct (e.g. that Gladstone’s rule should apply to all ministers, of whatever rank); and the vexed question of quite how and when the private financial interests of MPs disbarred them from voting in the Commons was revived during the 1880s, having lain dormant for almost forty years. Some ten debates were held on the subject prior to 1914; and in 1896 a select committee re-examined the matter.10 The growing preoccupation with conflicts of interest might be readily seen alongside parallel efforts to criminalise corruption, and more especially bribery, which resulted in a triplet of statutes passed between 1889 and 1916 that targeted councillors (1889), businessmen (1906) and civil servants (1916).11 All attest to the development of more refined standards of conduct. But this should not detract from a further shift in how the problem was posed at this juncture, at least as it affected the Westminster elites: namely, in what might be called the horizon of reform, and the overall sense of what was at stake. In terms of the struggle against Old Corruption, the general desire was to secure a more neutral, disinterested state.12 Although this came in various forms, from dominant liberalpatrician varieties to more marginal, radical ones, the broad aim was to ensure that narrow, sectional and sectarian interests were no longer embedded in the constitutional and administrative fabric of the nation-state, but instead were subject to fair-minded and balanced representation in parliament. If the overall ethos of reform was, in this sense, at once ambitious and idealistic, it was also practical and hard-headed, seeking demonstrable changes in the way the state worked (such as lower taxes, a more inclusive franchise, etc.). By contrast, just as the problem of corruption was refashioned in more ethical-personal terms after roughly 1880, so, too, did it become less a matter of institutional reform and more one of

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managing the risk of corruption and the appearance of improper conduct among office-holders and party officials. The assumption now was that they were, by virtue of their very status as such, exposed to the danger of corruption, and that, furthermore, even the mere suspicion that personal pecuniary interests were informing public decision-making was profoundly damaging to popular trust in government and parliament. The key manifestation of this was the repeated insistence, which, again, became more pronounced after 1880, that all office-holders should be ‘above suspicion’, a point often made with reference to the second wife of Julius Caesar, whom Caesar divorced not on the grounds that she had committed adultery but because the intrigue surrounding an alleged affair had brought dishonour upon himself. Indeed, what Lloyd George in 1900 dubbed ‘the rule of Caesar’s wife’ became a wellworn maxim of public life.13 Just this sentiment informed the (unofficial) ministerial code that Gladstone pioneered in 1892, and was a core component of the scandals examined below. It even claimed a couple of ministerial casualties: A. J. Mundella in 1894, as President of the Board of Trade, and William Hayes Fisher in 1903, as Financial Secretary to the Treasury. In both cases it was on account of their involvement in companies that had acted improperly, leading to action in the courts; and in both cases, the ministers chose to resign on the grounds that they were at risk of bringing public life into disrepute, even as they protested their innocence (if not carelessness). Once again, we might speak of rising standards, in this case the emergence of a kind of pre-emptive ethical policing that targeted not just actual but also possible and perceived conflicts of interest. Yet it should also be seen as registering a limit in the long-term pursuit of purity, marking the end of the institutional idealism that had informed the dismantling of Old Corruption, and the advent of a more modest culture of reformist aspiration. It would be wrong to call this fatalistic. But it was premised on the exercise of a form of cynical-critical vigilance by parliament and the press, born of a novel sense that politicians and parties were now fated to struggle against speculative suspicions that they were engaged in self-­ interested and possibly corrupt behaviour – hence, precisely, the premium placed on appearing above suspicion. This no doubt reflected the development of a less deferential, more democratic

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polity; but it also reflected a shift in political culture after the 1880s, whereby the articulation of interests, including commercial interests and those of property and labour, was now seen as the very stuff of politics. As Jonathan Parry has argued, writing of ‘the decline of institutional reform’ during the nineteenth century, now that the state had been largely freed from class-based and sectarian interests, they could be pursued more aggressively via parties and the ‘party system’.14 To give but two examples, parliamentary lobbying by special interest groups was now undertaken on a more ambitious basis by national rather than local organisations; and the mid-­ Victorian consensus on the need for fiscal retrenchment gave way to the party-politicised one of fiscal redistribution, amid growing levels of civil spending.15 It is no surprise that politicians and parties now had to work so hard to banish suspicions regarding their probity, for they were now the primary conduits for the assertion of so many different varieties of economic self-interest.

The confusion of corruption We might, then, speak of a process of refinement in the form and location of the problem, even of rising standards, compared to what had come before. Yet, as the three major Westminster scandals examined here attest, none of this made for greater levels of definitional clarity, still less any sort of political or moral consensus regarding what constituted or caused ‘corrupt’ behaviour. Some of the details of these scandals are returned to below; but a summary of their essential features is necessary before turning to the ways in which, amid the new culture of party-based government and cynical vigilance and speculation, they were steeped in a blizzard of competing and highly politicised readings. The first, the Hooley affair, erupted in 1898. Ernest Hooley was the quintessential plutocrat, who made (and lost) millions selling companies during the 1890s, including Dunlop, Schweppes and Bovril. He had long courted the favour of the political classes, appointing a number of MPs and peers to serve as ‘guinea pig’ directors to the many companies he promoted; but it was the light cast on these connections during a bankruptcy case in 1898 that caused such a public stir, culminating in revelations that he had donated £10,000

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to the Conservative Party and handed over a £50,000 cheque in the hope of obtaining a baronetcy. The second, the Kynoch affair, broke in 1900 amid the unfolding embarrassment of the Boer War and revolved around Joseph Chamberlain, then Colonial Secretary, and his family’s business interests. It began with the discovery that Kynoch & Co., a Birmingham-based armaments firm chaired by his brother Arthur had been given a contact by the War Office on favourable terms. It was then revealed that a number of other firms in which Chamberlain’s family held financial interests had benefited from contracts with the War Office, as well as the navy, when his son Austen was acting as Civil Lord of the Admiralty: Hoskins & Sons, which was managed by another of Chamberlain’s sons, Neville, as well as Tubes and Elliot’s Metal Company, in which various family members held shares. The third is the Marconi scandal. It began in 1912 with rumours that key government ministers – Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer; Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney General; and Alexander Murray, the Liberal Chief Whip – had profited from their shareholdings in the British Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, which was then in the process of securing a contract with the Post Office to construct an empire-wide chain of radio stations. The ministers strenuously denied the charge in parliament in October, but it was then established during the course of a subsequent select committee investigation, which reported in June 1913, that they had in fact traded shares in the British company’s American counterpart. All three scandals turned upon a broad understanding of corruption as the abuse of public office, and more especially, in its more refined variant, corruption as a ‘conflict’ of public and private interests. This exact language indeed was widely used at the time and applied, more or less precisely, to the scandals in question. ‘The real point is the wisdom of allowing public servants to have private interests in companies which may tempt them to push those interests at the expense of the public interest’, noted Robert Blatchford’s socialist weekly, the Clarion, of the Kynoch affair.16 Crucially, however, this understanding furnished little more than a very general, and altogether mutable and disputable, normative framework in all three cases. The point is not that no resignations ensued (Murray

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resigned in mid-1912 but ostensibly for other reasons, and he became a peer shortly afterwards). Rather, it is that in all three cases ‘corruption’ remained an indeterminate, multi-perspectival phenomenon, exceeding any definite interpretive closure as such and remaining confused. This is partly because it was possible to read particular instances of questionable (possibly corrupt) behaviour as manifestations of destructive social developments or darker, immoral forces. But it is also because all three scandals were steeped in conflicts regarding whether or not anything corrupt really had taken place, as well as claims and counterclaims regarding the sincerity of those asking questions and those defending the accused. Symptoms, signs, causes: The first of these elements – reading scandals as signs or symptoms, and positing underlying causes – mobilised degenerative understandings of corruption as a process of social disintegration and political subversion. To be sure, these were socio-historical understandings, free of the cosmological and theological assumptions that had underpinned medieval and earlymodern visions of societal decay and moral degeneration.17 They were also hugely varied. Quite how deep the malaise went, and whether it was a matter of general public morality, or something more structural and even conspiratorial, was a moot point. Nonetheless, however indistinctly, they all probed beneath the surface, seeking to make sense of the often complex details of alleged or actual transgressions with reference to underlying forces or processes which were, in some sense, degenerative and corrupt, that sapped or perverted the moral fibre of the governing classes, much as they did society more generally. The Marconi scandal was the source of the most extreme diagnoses, and most of all at the hands of the ‘radical right’, where it was elevated into a sign of social decay and the growing, if hidden, power of plutocratic finance. Two periodicals in particular helped to advance this reading: the National Review, edited by the strident Unionist, pro-imperialist, Tory ‘die-hard’ Leopold Maxse, and Eye-Witness, founded in 1911 and renamed the New Witness in 1912, which was staffed by disillusioned Tories and Liberals, among them Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, who served as editors. Of the two, Maxse’s National Review advanced the more party-­ political reading, suggesting that the affair was part of the broader ruin heaped on the nation by the malign march of what the journal

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called ‘the Radical Plutocracy’ and the murky nexus of wealthy businessmen, ‘cosmopolitan financiers’ and newspaper proprietors who, it suggested, dictated and benefited from Liberal policy and funded the lavish lifestyles of Liberal ministers.18 Still more extreme was the analysis of the New Witness, which offered a powerful brew of conspiracist antisemitism (Isaacs was Jewish, as were other key players), alarmist forecasts of national decline and a profound hostility not just to the Liberal Party but the entire ‘party system’. As early as August 1912, long before any serious revelations had emerged, it suggested that the scandal was ‘the symptom of a disease that is showing itself in twenty other forms upon the skin of England’, having linked it to the nefarious power of financial – and mostly Jewish-owned – capital and the growth of a supine, self-­ interested class of ‘professional politicians’.19 Similar instances abound: in May 1913, invoking much the same factors, it spoke of the ‘disintegration’ and ‘decay’ of the nation and prophesised an impending moment of revolutionary renewal, when England would at last ‘shake itself free from the corrupt and largely alien plutocracy that at present govern us’.20 Radicals and socialists too read the Marconi scandal as a symptom of underlying social developments, in their case as a manifestation of the greed and moral irresponsibility that invariably accompanied an advanced capitalist society; but it was the Kynoch affair that most belonged to the left in this respect, in contrast to those on the right, who seem to have refrained entirely from divining any broader significance in it. The long-standing radical weekly Reynolds’s Newspaper readily made sense of the affair in terms of an established narrative of the stubborn persistence of ‘Class Government’ amid the growth of democracy. The Chamberlain family’s interests in selling armaments, it claimed in December 1900, were part of the growth of a ‘Corrupt Oligarchy’, run by the elites in their own interests. Parliament was awash with paid City directorships, it noted, while cabinet ministers like Chamberlain ensured that if they did not personally profit from office, then their relatives did: ‘All is anti-popular, plutocratic, an affair of families, coteries and cliques.’21 A similar reading was advanced by ­Justice, the weekly organ of the radical left Social Democratic Federation, which read the scandal as a further sign of a wide-­ ranging ‘decadence’ that encompassed unprecedented urban

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sickliness, the humiliations of the Boer War and the parlous state of India. The empire was ‘rotting at its heart’, the nation ‘beginning to decay’.22 The Hooley affair was likewise grist to the mill for those that sensed, however imprecisely, that British society was being undermined by darker forces. In his Efficiency and Empire, published in 1901, the campaigning journalist and leading antisemite Arnold White integrated the affair into an analysis of the ‘degradation of the honours system’, which itself reflected the malign influence of ‘Germans Jews and unsavoury finance’ on public life and a weakness of patriotic purpose in the nation at large.23 For the most part, however, it was read more straightforwardly, partly in moral terms as a sign of growing greed among the elites, and partly in more social and political terms as a manifestation of how the power and prestige of the ‘old’ landed elite was being sapped by the incursions of the ‘new’ wealth of commerce and finance. The Liberal journal, the Speaker, for instance, decried the emergence of a ‘social system which permits the refined gold of patrician prestige to be gilded by a Hooley’, who was nothing but a vulgar interloper, making for a novel alliance of ‘Snobbery and Jobbery’.24 Or, again, according to the National Review, though it was hardly news to City insiders, the affair had brought into the open the growing and ‘corrupting influence of the company monger’, and his rapacious desire for political patronage and the trappings of power. That peers and party managers had colluded with such grasping only attested to their diminishing honour and the development of a form of ‘social rottenness’ within Britain’s governing elite.25 Details, distinctions, transgressions: The assumption made by commentary of this sort was that the personal actions and relations of those at the centre of the scandals attested to some kind of ‘corrupt’ or ‘corrupting’ process or force affecting society. The question was quite what this amounted to. Yet this was to operate only at a particular level of analysis. Another consisted of zooming in, rather than zooming out: which is to say, probing the details of each scandal and determining what, if anything, might be considered ‘corrupt’, and if not, then what sort of transgression had taken place – again, if any. It is not that one form of analysis prevailed over the other. Rather, they coexisted, often in the pages of the same journal, complementing and complicating each other.

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In the case of the Hooley affair, the practice of peers and MPs acting as paid directors and allowing their names (and reputations) to appear on promotional material advertising shares was certainly regarded as distasteful, but it was rarely condemned as corrupt. Some even excused the practice.26 Likewise, even in relation to Hooley’s offer of £50,000 for a baronetcy, the general consensus was that, ultimately, nothing corrupt had taken place, even if all could agree that this particular aspect of the affair was altogether ‘sordid’ and ‘dirty’, and reflected the way the honours system had fallen into public disrepute. This was principally because the cheque had been returned, un-cashed, and no title was forthcoming; but some went further, arguing that success in business and donating to political parties might legitimately be construed as a form of ‘public service’ and thus grounds for the receipt of an honour. As the Spectator argued, Hooley’s real offence was to have acted in such a brazen, cack-handed fashion; but there was nothing in principle wrong or corrupt with awarding titles to men of substantial wealth. What was required was discretion; and in this case the Conservatives had acted with appropriate care when confronted by a clumsy chancer like Hooley.27 The Kynoch affair turned on analogous points of detail, generating conflicting arguments about what kind of misconduct, if any, had been perpetrated. The core charge indeed was not that Chamberlain had acted ‘corruptly’, even though he and his family had financial interests in multiple private companies that benefited from government contracts. No one explicitly suggested that he had sought to intervene in, or influence, the award of particular contracts. Rather, as Lloyd George distilled in a Commons debate in December 1900, it was that Chamberlain had brought his private interests into conflict with his public duties as Colonial Secretary, thereby creating the impression of impropriety and damaging public trust in the probity of government.28 Yet even on this lesser charge opinion was divided. For some the case against Chamberlain in this respect was emphatic, including suggestions that had he been a council officer he would have fallen foul of regulations regarding the possession of private interests in municipal utilities and been forced to resign.29 In reply, his allies in the press and parliament marshalled a variety of points, essentially arguing that any suspicions were entirely unwarranted. Chief among these were that

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Chamberlain had only modest interests in just two of the companies in question, in one case via a trust fund; that he was not responsible for the financial affairs of his family; and that for most of the companies, government contracts accounted for only a fraction of their income. More broadly, it was argued that to insist on such exacting standards would lead to a situation where it was expected that all public officeholders should have no private financial interests at all, which for some was at once unjust, absurd and counter-productive. As Chamberlain himself put it, in a sentiment widely endorsed in the right-wing press, if such a standard were insisted upon ‘no man who is not a pauper’ could ‘safely assume public office in this country’.30 The Marconi scandal was characterised by a similar sprawl of competing assessments. Although the details of the case were pored over from the start, debate regarding the conduct of the ministers came to a head in June 1913, with the conclusion of the select committee inquiry and a two-day debate in the Commons, all of which was covered extensively in the press. The select committee itself failed to reach any consensus, publishing two reports, a Liberalauthored majority report and a Conservative minority report. Both reports cleared the ministers of corruption; but whereas the Liberal report cleared the ministers of any wrongdoing whatsoever, the Conservative report was decidedly more critical. Its key point was that the interests of the two Marconi companies, the British and the American, though legally distinct, as the Liberal report had highlighted, were in practice commercially linked; and that to trade shares in the latter while the government was finalising a lucrative deal with the former was ‘very undesirable’ and should be censured, not least because it had generated the impression of corruption.31 Further arguments, emphases and nuances were developed in the Commons debate. Speaking as prime minister, for instance, Asquith introduced a distinction between what he called ‘rules of obligation’, which proscribed entering into conflicts of interest, and ‘rules of prudence’, which dictated that all efforts should be made to avoid the appearance of such conflicts. Clearly, he suggested, the ministers had not violated the former; and if, as critics suggested, they had violated the latter, then it was important to remember that they had done so ‘with complete innocence’.32 Meanwhile, some Conservative MPs, while distancing themselves from accusations of

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corruption, argued that the greatest impropriety in the whole affair was the failure of the ministers to have been honest from the outset regarding their interests in the American company. As Balfour put it, speaking as leader of the opposition, though they had never lied, their conduct had been characterised by ‘a want of frankness’. The facts had thus emerged only slowly and painfully, and it was this, more than anything, which had proved so damaging to the reputation of the British government.33 The point was widely endorsed, much as it was in the case of the Hooley and Kynoch affairs: even if no corruption had occurred, public life had been tainted and public trust degraded. Mud-slinging, whitewashing, hypocrisy: The final element that should be noted is the way all of the scandals were both understood and critiqued as deeply embedded in party politics and the pursuit of partisan gain. This assumed various forms, from suggestions of ‘mud-slinging’ – a novel American phrase – to accusations of feigned outrage and partisan hypocrisy; but the overall effect was to add a further, cynical twist to the confusion noted above, casting aspersions on the integrity of those who ostensibly professed to care so deeply about the purity of public life. To be sure, allegations and insinuations of corruption and impropriety had long been related to considerations of partisan posturing, stretching back to the Court and Country antagonisms of the eighteenth century. Now, however, amid the ascendancy of party-based discipline and conflict, corruption scandals were consistently defined in such terms from start to finish, forming a core ingredient of what made them so scandalous and so damaging to public life. The charge of partisan hypocrisy was most pronounced in the case of the Hooley affair, and in particular Hooley’s attempt to purchase a baronetcy. As radicals on the left and right were fond of pointing out, although in this instance the Conservatives were in the spotlight, the Liberal Party had little reason to feel superior, given that they too had distributed honours to party donors, some of them entirely dubious (and indeed once in office again after 1905, the Liberals would award titles in record numbers).34 As the MP Henry Labouchere put it, in his journal Truth, ‘But for official Liberalism to abuse Conservatism for selling titles is mere hypocrisy. Both do it’ – or as he put it more proverbially, ‘The pot must not call the kettle black.’35 Only radicals like him, he suggested, had ever

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genuinely opposed the sale of honours. The same point was made on the right, some of whom even used the Tory-centred Hooley revelations to attack the Liberals and reverse the flow of outrage. In a piece in the National Review, presaging his later, more developed critique of ‘Radical Plutocracy’, Maxse suggested that because the Liberal Party was more in need of money than the Conservatives, it had been more readily manipulated by wealthy donors in search of an honour; and Hooley’s cheque, after all, had been returned. The conclusion he drew was brutal: it was ‘one reason why there is no independence, no life and no ideas among the Liberals of today. They have to take their marching orders from semi-educated plutocrats without political convictions.’36 Charges of hypocrisy ultimately turned on a sense that the two major parties were as bad as each other. It was more common, as in the Kynoch and Marconi scandals, for one party to seek to undermine the sincerity of the other. The classic tactic in this respect was to accuse opponents of working via insinuation and failing to abide by common standards of decency – a charge indeed that critical MPs and newspapers often sought to pre-empt by the almost ritual insistence that they were doing nothing of the sort. The entire course of the Kynoch affair was distinguished by attempts on the part of Chamberlain to portray himself as the victim of a partisan assault on his honour. The Commons debate noted above was full of rancorous exchanges of this sort, with Chamberlain accusing Lloyd George of confecting his concerns about ministerial probity as ‘a peg on which to hang a personal attack upon himself’.37 Balfour, then leader of the Commons, was equally ferocious, charging George and his supporters with employing a ‘flimsy pretext’ on which to launch a politically motivated assault on his colleague’s character. He accused them, too, of acting insincerely when they suggested, as they did, quite assiduously, that they had no intention of implying that Chamberlain had acted corruptly. As Balfour pointed out, this had been a key Liberal campaigning tactic in the recent general election (the notoriously nasty ‘Khaki election’ of 1900); that they now professed otherwise only heightened their ‘humiliation’.38 Not for the first or last time, the press reaction was split along party lines. Liberal papers leapt to Lloyd George’s defence, suggesting he had only been asking legitimate questions. Tory papers, by contrast, were outraged, suggesting it was a deplorable instance of ‘Joe-baiting’ and ‘mud-slinging’. The Times was

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especially indignant, accusing Chamberlain’s critics of punching ‘below the belt’ in a debate where ‘party spirit’ had run amok: ‘The attack on Mr Chamberlain was not, as it professed to be, an attempt to assert the abstract principle of purity in public life. It was an endeavour to discredit the character of a statesman who has made himself obnoxious to the opposite party.’39 The same claims and counterclaims distinguished the Marconi affair. The City-based rumours that initiated the scandal were widely thought by Liberals to have been generated by opponents of the government – an impression only confirmed by the way they were amplified in a conspiratorial fashion at the fringes of rightwing opinion. As the scandal developed, it was a matter of common acknowledgement that the select committee conducted its work in a partisan fashion, culminating in the publication of the majority Liberal report and the minority Conservative report. Critics were brutal in their assessment of the former: as the Tory-supporting Saturday Review detailed, in an editorial ironically entitled ‘Cleared!’, it was a manifest attempt to ‘whitewash’ the ministers in question, which had been followed by only more whitewashing by their allies in the Commons.40 But supporters of the government hit back with just as much force, defending the honour of Isaacs and George in particular, and questioning the integrity of those who refused to accept that they had been cleared of any substantive wrongdoing. An editorial in the Manchester Guardian provides an exemplary instance of the way the Liberal press sought to wrest the mantle of moral authority from critics of the government and cast them as the real villains. The minority report, it suggested, had ‘so piled suspicion on to suspicion as to create an instinctive revulsion in favour of the accused’, while the sceptical questioning by some Conservative MPs in the Commons had thrown ‘a flood of light on the attitude of mind in which this whole affair has been approached by certain partisans’: ‘No suspicion is too gross, no method of insinuation too subterranean, to be rejected by their fancy.’41

Conclusion In conclusion, it might be emphasised that the argument of this chapter is by no means entirely at odds with accounts that point to rising standards of public life over the longue durée. One aim has

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been to inject some precision into where we should look for evidence of rising standards following the demise of Old Corruption. Yet it has also sought to argue that although we can and should speak of a process of refinement and reduction, we also need to attend to quite the opposite: a process of confusion, whereby the problem of corruption became politicised in new and more intensely partisan ways, while continuing to attract varying forms of analysis, from those that focused on abuses of office to those that sought to understand these abuses as the product of degenerative forces. It is this latter aspect of the argument that should give us pause before we take comfort in stories of progress and integrate this period into a broader narrative of diminishing corruption. For however much standards might have improved or become more exacting, it is evidently not the case that they stimulated growing clarity, consensus or precision about the nature of ‘corruption’ and how the term should be applied. What still requires more work is the link between these two processes and accounting for how, and why, the problem of corruption developed according to this twofold trajectory. Clearly, as argued above, changes in political culture must form part of the answer, in particular the shift towards more party-driven, ‘mass’ forms of politics. But we might also suggest that more exacting standards played their part in fomenting confusion and dispute. This is most of all the case with what emerged as a core part of the new, post-1880 regime of probity: the premium placed on appearances – the demand that office-holders avoid both actual and perceived conflicts of interest. We might see this, much as it was at the time, as a sensible precaution: a means of preventing any grounds for suspicion and, in turn, bolstering public confidence. Yet it is also clear that the very same prescription, by elevating the danger of appearing corrupt into a legitimate object of anxiety and grounds for criticism – which is to say, into a standard of conduct, however roughly hewn – also opened up a whole new suite of problems and areas of ambiguity. One was the reality of the appearance, so to speak: the question, that is, of when it was reasonable to suggest that a given officeholder, or group of them, had in fact created an impression of impropriety. Another was how to draw the line between principled, critical questioning and cynical, partisan-driven speculation once it was established there was something to go on. But at the time there

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were no clear answers to these questions, only an abundance of politicised and fiercely disputed claims.

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Notes  1 G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).   2 F. Donaldson, The Marconi Scandal (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1963); H. J. Hanham, ‘The Sale of Honours in Late Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 3:3 (1960), 277–89; J. Caplan, The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England (London: Constable, 1978).   3 B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).   4 See especially Searle, Corruption and Caplan, Rise of the Plutocrats.   5 A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), chaps 8 and 9.  6 D. Judge, Representation: Theory and Practice in Britain (London, 1999), p. 102.   7 P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).   8 The classic account is G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–178.   9 D. C. M. Platt, ‘The Commercial and Industrial Interests of Ministers of the Crown’, Political Studies, 9:3 (1961), 273–4. 10 A useful overview is Report from the Select Committee on Members’ Interests (Declaration), PP 1969–70 (57), vol. XIV, pp. 162–4. 11 A. Doig, Corruption and Misconduct in Contemporary British Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), chap. 3. 12 J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London: Yale University Press, 1993); P. Harling, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 78–88. 13 Hansard, 10 December 1900, vol. 88, col. 400. 14 J. Parry, ‘The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 180–6. 15 S. H. Beer, ‘The Representation of Interests in British Government: Historical Background’, American Political Science Review, 51:3 (1957), 643–5; Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, pp. 342–5. 16 Clarion (15 December 1900), p. 5.

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17 Buchan and Hill, Intellectual History, pp. 7–8. 18 For example, ‘The Radical Plutocracy’, National Review (November 1912), pp. 386–400; L. J. Maxse, ‘A Radical “Panama”?’ National Review (February 1913), pp. 1021–38. 19 ‘The Marconi Scandal’, New Witness (8 August 1912), p. 230. 20 ‘What is to Come?’ New Witness (22 May 1913), p. 66. 21 ‘England, a Corrupt Oligarchy’, Reynolds’s Newspaper (16 December 1900), p. 4; ‘Contracts, Crime and Family Jobs’, Reynolds’s Newspaper (16 December 1900), p. 1. 22 ‘The Decadence of England’, Justice (22 December 1900), p. 4. 23 A. White, Efficiency and Empire (London: Methuen, 1901), pp. 55–61. 24 ‘Mr Hooley’s Peers’, Speaker (30 July 1898), pp. 138–9. 25 H. E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Company Scandal: A City View’, National Review (December, 1898), pp. 575–8. 26 For example, ‘The Looker On’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (September, 1898), pp. 447–50. 27 ‘Mr Hooley and his Baronetcy’, Spectator (19 November 1898), pp. 733–4. 28 Hansard, 10 December 1900, vol. 88, cols 397–419. 29 ‘The Law of Public Corruption’, Speaker (19 December 1900), p. 30. 30 Hansard, 10 December 1900, vol. 88, cols 436–7. 31 Report from the Select Committee on Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company, Limited, Agreement, PP 1913 (152), vol. VII, p. xlvi. 32 Hansard, 19 June 1913, vol. 54, cols 557–8. 33 Ibid., cols 564–5. 34 Sydney Stern, who was made Baron Wandsworth in 1895, was the most notorious instance and was often invoked in the context of the Hooley revelations. Searle, Corruption, pp. 85–7, 153–60. 35 ‘Will the Carlton Disgorge?’, Truth (24 November 1898), p. 1298; ‘The Dirty Work of the Party’, Truth (17 November 1898), p. 1230. 36 Leopold Maxse, ‘Stern’, National Review (December 1898), p. 477. 37 Hansard, 10 December 1900, vol. 88, col. 432. 38 Ibid., col. 464. 39 The Times (11 December 1900), p. 9. 40 ‘Cleared!’, Saturday Review (5 July 1913), p. 5. 41 ‘The Right Thing Done’, Manchester Guardian (19 June 1913), p. 8.

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11 Socialism and corruption: Conservative responses to nationalisation and Poplarism, 1900–40 Liam Ryan

In May 1974, an editorial in The Times inveighed against the growing affliction of corruption in British public life.1 Deploring the Poulson affair which had engulfed the career of former Labour council leader T. Dan Smith, the editorial pointed to a wider crisis of public morals. It claimed that ‘in an age of looser morality and softer disciplines’ voters were being governed by a political class who lacked the traditional standards of probity. This decline in public standards was largely attributed to prevailing economic and social conditions; but socialism was singled out for being uniquely corruptive as it encouraged dependence, demoralised the individual and devalued the practice of hard work. The editorial ended by declaring that corruption had been the ‘natural consequence’ of socialism throughout history. The Times’ editorial captured an important element of an emergent neoliberal critique which would eventually assume the peculiar form of Thatcherism in the 1980s: that socialism was morally corrosive and corrupting.2 This chapter situates the charge of socialist corruption within a long-term historical framework, arguing that it was deeply ingrained in traditional Conservative thought and politics. By doing so, it makes a case for paying closer attention to the ideological continuities that underpinned Conservative anti-socialism across the twentieth century.3 Influential New Right politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson were never simply exponents of a worldview derived from Hayekian political economy and public choice theory.4 They consciously, and sometimes unconsciously, reiterated moral sentiments and arguments which had informed Conservative thinking

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and activism long before the establishment of the post-Second World War consensus. The claim that socialism was irredeemably corrupt was a commonly articulated feature of both early twentieth­century Conservative and late twentieth-century Thatcherite opinion.5 This chapter examines the origins of this critique by focusing on two practices which were felt to embody socialist malfeasance: nationalisation and Poplarism. Long before Thatcherites lambasted the entrenched and inefficient nature of public ownership in a social-democratic state, Edwardian and interwar Conservatives had sounded warnings about the stultifying effects that nationalisation would have on the body politic. Nationalised industries, they argued, would be controlled by a corrupt nexus of politicians, ministers and trade unions. Motivated by self-interest, these groups would instigate a vast system of ‘government patronage’ which would invariably ‘open the door to political corruption’.6 Meanwhile, Poplarism, a polemical epithet used by Conservatives to refer to high-spending, left-wing poor law guardians in the 1920s, was decried as a particularly odious and corrupt form of social welfare. Socialists were denounced as being complicit in the demoralisation of unemployed voters, recklessly squandering ‘public money … in order to secure power and place and self-righteous notoriety’.7 Crucially, in advancing these critiques, Conservatives articulated a degenerative understanding of corruption. As the work of Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill has shown, corruption in pre-modern thought was principally understood as a ‘dynamic process of decay or degeneration’ that affected the spiritual, moral and political character of individuals, groups and governments.8 Buchan and Hill contend that this degenerative conception of corruption went into decline during the late eighteenth century, amid the ascendancy of an office-based notion centred on the misuse of public resources for private gain.9 This chapter demonstrates that broad, degenerative conceptions of corruption were still widespread in the twentieth century. In particular, it contends that Conservative attacks on socialist malfeasance developed out of earlier Victorian critiques and reflected both a fear and an acceptance of mass democracy. Conservatives, for instance, commonly argued that Poplarism was tantamount to a vindictive form of bribery which saw corrupt socialist politicians dole out material benefits to newly enfranchised

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working-class electors. Such arguments, however, were also informed by a sense that socialist corruption not only affected elite privileges but also damaged the interests of the nation and the community, now conceived in democratic terms. In this way, moralised, degenerative conceptions of socialist corruption were rooted in a process of adjustment on the part of Conservatives, as they adapted to the demands of universal suffrage and sought to find populist electoral appeals which cut across class divisions. The chapter is divided into two sections: the first examines the Conservative critique of nationalisation; the second investigates the attacks on Poplarism during the 1920s.

The critique of nationalisation Speaking in 1909, the economist D. H. MacGregor declared that corruption was the ‘stock objection to all political action which touches the economic motive at all’.10 This applied especially to nationalisation, he suggested, whose detractors commonly claimed that corruption ‘was the great danger’ of state ownership. MacGregor’s analysis captured a prevalent tendency among early twentieth-century critics of nationalisation. During a 1908 debate on railway nationalisation, the leading Conservative politician Andrew Bonar Law asserted that the public ownership of industry would be hamstrung by the distorting effects of electoral politics.11 Warning that ‘the danger of all governments was corruption’, he went on to note that corruption took many different forms, including the threat posed by state enterprise in a democratic community. Rather than acting in a commercially responsible fashion, public employers would be forced to accede to the demands of employees for higher wages and shorter working hours. This argument was rooted in the idea that nationalised industries would be administrated by politicians ultimately subject to the electoral control of state employees. Railwaymen, for example, would form an ‘organised body in every constituency’, pressuring candidates to serve their sectional interests at the expense of ‘fellow citizens’. The basic contours of this critique echoed earlier Victorian concerns regarding the rationale and proper conduct of public life. In this schema, participation in politics and the public sphere was

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dependent on the possession of manly independence, a category and status derived from property ownership and taxation.12 These material and gendered foundations of citizenship underpinned the desirable cultivation of a ‘disinterested’ public spirit, which served the interests of the entire community, as opposed to selfish, sectional ones.13 A broad spectrum of critics in the nineteenth century, encompassing Tories, Whigs and Liberals, argued that franchise extension threatened to erode the link between independence and citizenship. Shorn of a material stake in society, the dependent state of the working classes made them vulnerable to the machinations of unscrupulous politicians who would court their vote by means of ‘bribery’ in the form of policies which advanced their interests at the expense of others. The old spectre of ‘class legislation’, albeit now enacted ‘on the part of the numerical majority’, as J. S. Mill put it in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), was commonly identified as the great moral danger posed by democracy.14 Robert Lowe declared that political demands for class legislation in favour of working men threatened to establish a self-serving system of horse-trading where votes were bought and sold.15 By the late Victorian period, Conservatives were beginning to connect traditional concerns about the corruption of democracy with the growth of independent labour representation and municipal socialism. In 1892, the Conservative politician Michael HicksBeach insisted that work conducted by the state and local authorities in the field of social reform should be done ‘for the benefit of and at the cost of all classes alike’.16 Giving the working man ‘everything he wanted … out of the pockets of other people’ was denounced as ‘class legislation and bribery of the worst kind’. Early twentieth-century Conservatives built on this inheritance and adapted elements to attack socialist calls for public ownership. Nationalisation did attract a notable degree of non-socialist support and was usually promoted by sympathetic politicians and businessmen as a pragmatic rather than ideological solution to the problems faced by troublesome industries such as coal and the railways. This complexity was recognised by the Conservative writer Edwin Pratt in his 1913 book The Case against Railway Nationalisation.17 Pratt argued that the issue of railway nationalisation was not ‘exclusively a socialist question’, pointing to the fact that the state owned and operated train networks in other countries.

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Nevertheless, the question of railway nationalisation did have special relevance to socialism, having ‘formed a prominent item’ on its programme ‘for three decades’, with the most ‘incessant demands’ for public ownership coming from the Labour Party and trade unions in recent years. Nationalisation, he suggested, would increase the scope for ‘political corruption’ as socialists and organised labour sought ‘more pay and less work’. In a nationalised railway industry, wages and labour conditions would be subject to political oversight, providing a potential motive for MPs ‘to make themselves popular with the masses’. The corruption which stemmed from this state of affairs was not simply about the underhand electoral calculations of politicians and the greed of special-interest groups: it also undermined the principles of representative democracy. Pratt used the example of railway towns such as Crewe, Preston, Derby and Swindon to make this point. In order to get elected, parliamentary candidates running in these constituencies would be forced ‘to secure the concession of the demands put forward by the state’s railway employees’. In effect, they would become the railway workers’ delegate, putting ‘their interests first and the interests of the country next’. Conservatives of a more philosophical bent focused on the perils of nationalisation in a hypothetical socialist state. In A Critical Examination of Socialism, published in 1907, W. H. Mallock reasoned that elected politicians and industrial experts would form the administrative and economic elite in a socialist state.18 Political and economic motives were depicted as being in conflict. The competency of industrial experts, the technocratic organisers of a fully socialised economy, would clash with the concerns and allegiances of politicians, who owed their position to democratic politics and embodied ‘the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the many’. Industrial expertise and innovation would thus be consistently thwarted by the reliance of politicians on the vicissitudes of public opinion, with new ideas rejected ‘if they went beyond what could be apprehended and consciously approved of by the lowest’. The socialist corruption of economic expertise was rooted in a politicised dependence on the shortcomings of mass democracy. The Conservative politician and philosopher Hugh Cecil also ruminated on the corruption that would ensue in a theoretical

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socialist state. In his classic 1912 work, Conservatism, Cecil maintained that the proposed socialist reformation of capitalism would be futile if it did not change human character on an individual level.19 In capitalist systems, economic relations were organised along the lines of self-interest and competition. Cecil claimed that this state of affairs would merely be replicated in a socialist state which ignored the transformation of individual character. Remaining creatures driven by self-interest, people in a socialist polity would ‘still be concerned as under the competitive system’ to get as much as they could. Instead of competition in the marketplace, the motive of self-interest would be actuated through the means of voting and political influence, culminating in an invidious state of corruption which would dwarf any inequity seen under capitalism. An aristocracy of labour, using its political influence, would exploit vulnerable groups with little electoral clout, greedily appropriating the ‘constantly increasing share of reward’. Critiques that focused on the corruption of nationalisation continued to find favour among Conservatives in the interwar period. The credibility of nationalisation had undoubtedly been boosted by the experience of the First World War, with the government assuming direct control of the transport, coal, armaments, iron and engineering industries.20 These measures proved to be relatively fleeting, as Lloyd George’s coalition government largely returned industries to private ownership in the immediate post-war years. Of those industries nationalised during the war, the most politically volatile was coal, largely owing to a history of poor industrial relations and an unusual degree of enmity between owners and workers. Mindful of this reputation and pressured by the ‘Triple Alliance’ of miners’, railwaymen’s and dockers’ unions, the post-war coalition government established the Sankey Commission in 1919 to inquire into the condition of the coal industry. The commission famously recommended nationalisation, a decision which was ultimately ignored by the government. Witnesses called to the commission to support the case against nationalisation, such as the financier Lionel Philips, asserted that ‘political wire-pulling’ and ‘corruption’ would be the inevitable consequences of public ownership.21 Opponents of nationalisation on the commission, which included the former Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour and Tory-supporting coal owners such as Adam Nimmo, also highlighted the dangers of

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political corruption. A state-owned mining industry would inevitably be subservient ‘to the interests of political parties’, rather than being governed, as was proper, by considerations of risk and profit.22 Political interference was portrayed as dampening the ‘imagination, initiative and activity’ needed to sustain a successful industry. Politicians, ultimately answerable to constituents and public opinion in a democratic society, would manipulate the operation of the coal industry, nullifying safeguards intended to stop it from becoming the plaything of partisan forces. The critique of nationalisation was given further impetus by the emergence of the Labour Party as the leading force on the British left in the 1920s. Critics such as Robert Cecil believed that the government controls implemented during the war risked the overt politicisation of economic and industrial issues, with elections conceivably being fought and won over the issue of wage increases.23 This constituted an insidious form of corruption that would ultimately demoralise newly enfranchised working-class voters, encouraging them to believe that voting was about obtaining ‘a rise in wages’. Similarly, the Conservative writer E. T. Good contended in more vituperative terms that nationalisation would encourage the ‘average man’ to vote for ‘a glib-tongued fanatic or clown who makes empty promises of easy work, high pay and abundant good things’.24 Preaching resistance to socialism and communism in a 1928 article in the English Review, the Conservative politician John Gretton stated that nationalisation, alongside the ‘prodigality of the social services’, was anathema to the principles of liberty and freedom, ‘eating economically into the vitals of the community and leading ultimately to waste and corruption’.25 While ideological hostility to public ownership remained undimmed among Conservatives in the 1920s and 1930s, the party in government took a more pragmatic approach to state intervention. Conservative governments set up public enterprises such as the Central Electricity Board (1926) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (1927), and largely supported the establishment of the London Passenger Board in 1933.26 The public corporation model circumvented traditional Conservative concerns regarding the corruption of nationalised industries. In their daily operations, the public corporations were neither directly controlled by politicians nor connected to the demands of electoral politics. Although

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appointed by a minister, the governing bodies of public corporations did not consist of special-interest groups representing capital or labour, and were empowered to operate at a distance from government. Staffed by independent businessmen and public officials chosen for their expertise, these boards were encouraged to make decisions in the wider public interest and to raise capital privately. Nevertheless, this is no way reflected a broader Conservative embrace of nationalisation. As Philip Williamson has noted, the establishment of bodies like the Central Electricity Board was strictly defined as exceptional by Conservative ministers, enacted for practical rather than political reasons, and in circumstances where it was obvious that private enterprise was struggling to fulfil a need.27 Indeed, the legislation establishing the Central Electricity Board was attacked in parliament by Conservative politicians, who denounced its perceived socialist character, and it was ultimately passed despite the misgivings of a reluctant cabinet.28 The prominence of the public corporation model – given that it was not so vulnerable to traditional anti-socialist claims that nationalisation would force politicians to directly serve the sectional interests of enfranchised workers – helped to change the tenor of Conservative corruption arguments. It became increasingly common for Tories to claim that nationalisation was beset by problems of democratic accountability, rhetorically situating distant state authorities and their bureaucracies in opposition to the interests of the people.29 This critique would not be consistently applied by Conservatives until the post-1945 period, as we shall see below in the conclusion; but tentative signs of this approach were emerging in the 1930s. The Municipal Reform Party, allied with the Conservative interest in the capital, criticised the proposed London Passenger Transport Act in 1931 on the grounds that it was not ‘responsible to the people of London even through its municipal authorities’.30 By becoming ‘part and parcel of a huge state combine’, it argued, overseen by a board of management subject to political influence as opposed to popular democratic control, transport would suffer from a deficit of accountability. Conservative claims of corruption, it should be emphasised, never went unchallenged by socialists. Left-wing arguments in favour of nationalisation were framed by a broader understanding that industries such as the mines and railways were public goods

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and that for a select few to extract profits from their operation was a form of corruption.31 Nationalisation would ensure that the community had equitable access to vital national resources such as coal, replacing the corrupting motive of private self-interest with an ethic of public service. Private enterprise was also thought to foster an internal culture of patronage and financial opacity. Albert Emil Davies, a prominent London Fabian, argued that anti-socialist objections to state ownership alleging ‘political corruption’ were entirely illegitimate.32 Compared to the Post Office, a large public body whose dealings could be scrutinised publicly in parliament, the financial affairs of the privately owned railway industry were veiled in secrecy. The railway officialdom earned large undisclosed sums and awarded lucrative positions to favoured protégés, ‘a state of affairs which would not be allowed under the government’. Socialist conceptions of corruption too struck a popular chord. Yet, largely centred on the private ownership of public resources and those who benefited from this ownership, they were also comparatively narrow. Conservative arguments, by contrast, were more expansive, framing corruption in terms of a wider process of social and political degeneration.

Poplarism as corruption The Conservative contention that nationalisation abetted corruption was accompanied by similar attacks on the socialist policy of so-called ‘Poplarism’.33 This latter critique was also rooted in fears of working-class voters and vote-hungry politicians, and again owed much to earlier Victorian modes of thought. The key difference is that the campaign against Poplarism was more chronologically bounded, beginning and ending in the 1920s. It also shifted the emphasis away from nationalised public enterprises and towards the socialist presence in local government. The advance of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century owed much to the importance its politicians and activists placed on capturing the levers of local government, the key site where decisions about unemployment, housing and the poor law were made. Poplarism existed at the militant end of a broader municipal socialist strategy enacted at the local level.

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What was Poplarism? Indelibly associated with the poor London district which bore its name, Poplarism generally denoted an attempt by municipal authorities to provide ‘excessive’ levels of outdoor relief to the able-bodied poor without the performance of an eligibility test.34 This led Conservatives to criticise municipal socialists for deliberately using promises of higher relief to attract votes at poor law elections – money that was funded from the pockets of ratepayers. For Labour poor law guardians, however, Poplarism was a deliberately conceived strategy which sought to ameliorate the effects of the mass unemployment that had become so salient in the 1920s and challenge the inequitable rate burdens placed on deprived areas by county councils. The Rates Rebellion of 1921 was, perhaps, the most visible manifestation of Poplarist defiance, leading to the imprisonment of thirty-six Labour councillors for refusing to collect the centralised rates levied by the London County Council. It is important to note that the Poplarist credo of generous outdoor relief was one which resonated far beyond the capital, usually in areas hit hardest by unemployment: alongside West Ham, socialist poor law guardians in Chester-le-Street and Bedwellty gained a notable degree of Conservative notoriety during the 1920s. As a result of this geographical distribution, Poplarism was construed by Conservatives as an attack on the effective national operation of the poor law and, more broadly, as in the case of the Rates Rebellion, an illegal assault on the forces of law and order. Crucially, Conservatives also indicted Poplarism on the grounds that it was corrupt. Its emergence in the 1920s was commonly linked to the removal of the disqualification of the franchise from those in receipt of poor law relief, as mandated by the 1918 Representation of the People Act. In 1928, the historian F. J. C. Hearnshaw argued that this legislative decision had legitimised the practice of bribery, ushering in a system where ‘lower-grade’ voters were bought off by socialists offering ‘lavish benefits’ funded at public expense.35 This line of attack registered the continuing persistence of Victorian values regarding the moral deficiencies of paupers. According to orthodox exponents of the poor law, pauperism was a form of reliance on the public funds of the community and implied a lack of the moral qualities needed to sustain independence in society.36 Instead of self-reliance and thrift, pauperism fostered subservience and dependency. The servile existence of paupers ensured that they were not

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entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship. Influential thinkers such as J. S. Mill insisted that ‘the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise’.37 People who ‘became dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence’ abdicated their ‘claim to equal rights’. This aversion to pauper enfranchisement was a conventional political opinion in the nineteenth century. Speaking in 1867, Benjamin Disraeli noted that the independent male householder recently enfranchised by the Second Reform Act ‘was a man you could trust in preference to the migratory pauper’.38 Conservative opponents of Poplarism drew upon aspects of this ideological inheritance. In 1926, Reginald Blair, speaking for the Municipal Reform Party, argued that the enfranchisement of paupers was a ‘grave blunder’.39 Exploited by the ‘labour-socialist party’, this legislative decision had instigated ‘a system of corruption’ which was analogous to the ‘open and extensive bribery which prevailed in elections in the good old days’. At the 1928 national Conservative conference, the Camberwell branch called on the government to legislate for the reintroduction of the disqualification clause barring paupers from voting.40 The Camberwell resolution stated that ‘socialists were out to buy votes at all costs, to discourage individual enterprise, and to foster a pauper state’. In the same year, the Conservative MP for Kennington asked the government to consider reintroducing the disqualification clause as a result of the corruption at the elections of boards of guardians.41 The Poplarist mantra of generous outdoor relief was felt to be particularly dangerous because it made pauperism attractive to persons who previously would not have become dependent on the poor law. The Tory MP Kingsley Wood attacked Labour politicians for pioneering a relief policy that ‘literally resulted in the manufacture of pauperism’.42 A 1922 report on ‘Poplar Waste’ asserted that the lavish funds promised by socialist boards discouraged work and motivated people to seek assistance.43 Indeed, Conservatives insisted that socialists cynically manipulated the poor law system, granting relief at the highest level so that employment was less preferable to making a claim off the rates.44 The sum total of these efforts would create a society where demoralisation was endemic and the virtues of responsibility and self-reliance were no longer valued. Socialism, in these respects, was complicit in the corruption of the masses.

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Conservatives claimed to protect the interests of those who were expected to foot the bill for socialist profligacy. The Municipal Reform Party argued that ratepayers were being exploited by extravagant socialist boards in thrall to the logic of Poplarism. Socialist boards of guardians were portrayed as being hostile to commercial and industrial concerns, serving their own self-interest while maliciously burdening others with the cost.45 Indeed, this component of Poplarism was felt to be an important driver of corruption as socialists were dependent on the votes of those who did not contribute to the rate burden and therefore had no incentive to be wary of financial costs. In light of this legitimatisation of profligacy, it was only natural that poor law recipients would further their self-interest, electing politicians who promised the highest levels of relief. There was also an important recognition among some Conservatives that the bribery practised by Poplarist boards was of a different quality to the practices associated with Old Corruption. As one anti-socialist noted in 1927, ‘when democracy was a very limited thing in this country’ corruption had largely been the preserve of groups who had the money to purchase positions of authority.46 By contrast, in an age of universal suffrage, left-wing politicians were currently engaged in more corrosive forms of corruption, paying for ‘votes out of the pockets of the nation’. The invocation of the term ‘nation’ was important here, illustrating that the Conservative critique of Poplarism was not simply about the defence of privileged property owners. Interwar Conservatives widened the scope of older categories such as ‘nation’ and ‘community’ to infer that socialists were opposed to all those who were not poor, unemployed or members of a trade union: that is, the majority of the British population.47 Socialism was depicted as a sectional ideology which ultimately hampered the fairness of democracy.48 Such rhetoric denoted a more expansive conception of Conservatism, not as a party and tradition grounded primarily in the defence of property and the established Church, but one which was cautiously adapting to the demands of mass democracy. This strategy clearly had exclusion built into the core of its vision, ‘othering’ socialists and trade unionists; but it was capacious enough to build a democratic constituency predicated on the votes of women, the middle classes,

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the non-unionised working class and business, industrial and financial elites. Stanley Baldwin was the most important politician associated with this new form of Conservative politics. A three-time prime minister and leader of the party between 1923 and 1937, Baldwin eulogised the individualist character of British democracy as a deliberate counterpoint to the corrupt materialism of class conflict.49 Addressing a Birmingham audience in 1925, he remarked that the ‘power of managing our own affairs in our way is the greatest gift of Englishmen’, helping to guard against the deliberate destruction of the national economy for class benefit.50 Baldwin often contrasted the materialism of socialism with the emphasis Conservatives placed on the development of individual character. He told the Carlton Club in March 1924 that Conservatives valued the ‘spirit of character, the virtues of thrift, hard work and prudence’.51 Individuals were not to utilise these values merely to further their own self-interest but were expected to apply them in their communities and as a means of helping others.52 This moralised form of individualism, grounded on mutually shared responsibilities and duties, was similar to the vision invoked by Margaret Thatcher in her infamous 1987 interview with Woman’s Own magazine. Known to posterity as the moment when Thatcher declared ‘there is no such thing as society’, the content of the interview was more nuanced than this soundbite suggested, stressing the duties and obligations individuals owed to each other.53 The two Conservative governments led by Baldwin in the 1920s rejected pauper disenfranchisement as a means of stopping Poplarism in favour of a dual approach which drastically reduced the powers of socialist boards and fundamentally overhauled the existing framework of the poor law.54 Despite overwhelming support from within the Poor Law Department, the disenfranchisement option was considered too politically risky for a party which claimed to represent the new mass democracy. Instead, Neville Chamberlain, the Minister of Health between 1923 and 1929, eventually passed a series of laws that granted central government the power to suspend and restrict the spending capabilities of local boards. The Board of Guardians (Default) Act in 1926 empowered local authorities to dismiss boards who willingly defied the

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instructions of government. Under this legislative framework, the left-wing boards of West Ham, Chester-le-Street and Bedwellty were suspended and their functions devolved to commissioners who administrated a strict interpretation of the poor law. This reformist zeal culminated in the 1929 Local Government Act, which abolished the system of poor law unions in both England and Wales and transferred their power to local authorities. Different understandings of the meaning of ‘corruption’ were prominent in the parliamentary debate that accompanied the introduction of the 1926 Act.55 Focusing conspicuously on the indiscretions of the West Ham guardians, the word ‘corruption’ was uttered some fifty-two times. Neville Chamberlain introduced the bill by repeating a number of standard Conservative tropes about Poplarism. He claimed that Britain was perhaps the most democratic country in the world, but warned of the dangers which could undermine this reputation and harm the community as a whole. One of the pre-eminent threats, he suggested, lay in a poor law system where ratepayers had no say in the distribution of relief, with the election of boards being dependent on the votes of recipients. This injustice had opened up opportunities for corruption on a vast scale. Reflecting the dominant Conservative understanding of socialist corruption as degenerative, Chamberlain argued that the extravagance of left-wing guardians had instigated a domino effect, as evidenced by cases where numerous applications for relief had been made under the same name and where boards had appointed family members.56 Chamberlain’s definition of corruption, however, was contested by Labour politicians. Will Thorne denied that the West Ham guardians’ relief policies were corrupt, comparing them to the promises that all politicians made to voters at every election. Corruption denoted a state of affairs where a man or women had ‘received a money consideration or perquisites’.57 This line of argument was reiterated by George Lansbury, the Labour figure most prominently associated with Poplarism. Lansbury declared that he believed corruption was bound up with issues of personal benefit and that no ‘single member’ of the West Ham board had derived ‘advantage from membership’.58 The most spirited objections to Chamberlain’s claims of corruption were encapsulated in the speech of Jack Jones, the Labour MP for Silvertown:

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He had some experience of travelling throughout the country, and when I hear the word ‘corruption’ it makes me feel tired. Even in West Ham, before Labour became the dominating political factor, you could not get a job as a school teacher unless you were a member of the Conservative or the Liberal Club, and you could not get a job under our local authority unless you were a member of the Masonic Club. But corruption only begins when the ordinary worker begins to take part in public administration.59

Jones’ barbed comments indicate the sense of frustration which socialists felt at being labelled ‘corrupt’. It constituted a form of hypocritical class snobbery for Tories to accuse socialists of corruption when they gained positions of authority in public administration through nepotism. Yet none of this necessarily undermined the Tory critique. For in contrast to that of their socialist opponents, the Conservative conception of corruption was not primarily predicated on favouritism or individual office-holders benefiting personally and financially at public expense. Rather, Tories contended that Poplarism would destroy the instincts of independence which had formed the historical basis of national prosperity. The corruption of socialist guardians was a moral issue in the Conservative mind, influenced by conventional poor law precepts and a sense that mass democracy was vulnerable to exploitation. The Conservative critique of Poplarism thus registered unease with universal suffrage; but it also functioned as a defence of morally bound democratic norms. In this schema, socialists were complicit in the subversion of British democracy because they catered to the interests of a sectional minority rather than the community and the nation at large.

Conclusion The two themes examined in this chapter met with different fates in the post-1945 period. On the one hand, the association of nationalisation with corruption would continue as a prevalent feature of Conservative politics but largely shorn of its wariness of democracy and working-class electors. This change reflected the importance of the public corporation model in the post-war mixed economy and also the practical need for Conservatives to develop populist appeals in a social-democratic era when the ‘ordinary’ worker had gained a

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position of special prominence. Tories now asserted that the lack of democratic accountability in nationalised industries emboldened corruption, placing excessive power in the hands of government ministers and the leadership of the trade unions. A 1947 statement of the Conservatives’ industrial policy committee argued that Labour’s nationalisation agenda conferred on ministers a most undesirable extension of patronage.60 Conservatives would ‘curb these opportunities for political pressure and jobbery’ by institutionalising mechanisms of democratic accountability, establishing consumer councils and increasing parliamentary oversight of the nationalised industries. Similarly, in the same year Harold Macmillan told a meeting in Shropshire that the industries recently placed under public ownership by Labour were plagued by favouritism.61 He provocatively asserted that ‘not since the corrupt days of the 18th century’ had there been such dishonesty, with the best jobs being awarded to ‘superannuated trade union leaders or grossly incompetent ministers’. This critique would remain largely stable until the radicalisation of Conservative opinion in the 1970s. Influenced by perceptions of British economic decline and the stagflation crisis, increasing numbers of Conservatives began to reject the intellectual rationale for nationalisation as opposed to the previous policy of merely restricting its expansion in the wider economy. As part of this wider ideological assault, Thatcherite politicians blended older anticorruption arguments with insights gleaned from public choice theory.62 In her public speeches, Margaret Thatcher claimed that nationalisation facilitated ‘corruption’ because it placed power in the hands of officials with ‘accountability to nobody’.63 But she could also assert in more overtly public-choice-inspired terms that the bureaucracies of nationalised industries tended to enact self-serving polices which promoted their own expansion, eroding their efficiency and independence.64 This blending of older and newer ideological aspects in the language of the New Right lends credibility to interpretations which stress that neoliberal ideas found a receptive audience among late twentieth-century Tories largely because they echoed sentiments that were already present in Conservative political thought.65 Opposition to Poplarism, on the other hand, faded after the passage of the late 1920s legislation that abolished the poor law boards. The memory of Poplarism, however, remained a source of

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inspiration for radical municipal socialists and was also invoked prominently by their critics in the fractious political debates surrounding local government reform in the 1980s. Conservative-­ supporting newspapers argued that the policies of the Labour-­ controlled Greater London Council constituted Poplarism in ‘modern guise’: a form of ‘socialist philanthropy’ funded ‘at the ratepayers expense’.66 But instead of paupers, corrupt socialist councillors in the capital were now recklessly using public funds to purchase the loyalty of minorities, feminists, lesbians and peace protestors. This venal procurement of votes was referenced by influential Conservative politicians committed to systemically curbing the powers of local government. Nicholas Ridley, the cabinet minister responsible for introducing the poll tax, contended that municipal socialists paid ‘grants out of ratepayers’ money’ to groups representing the interests of ethnic minorities and homosexuals on the understanding that they ‘would become dependent and vote for the council’.67 The assertion that socialists had a vested political interest in producing conditions of dependence echoed earlier accusations levelled at the proponents of Poplarism in the 1920s. Both positive and negative memories of Poplarism continued to inform perspectives on local government in the 1980s, a politics of historical memory that would benefit from more sustained scholarly attention.

Notes   1 ‘The Causes of Corruption’, The Times (11 May 1974), p. 15.  2 On the morality of Thatcherism see F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neoliberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy’, Historical Journal, 55:2 (2012), 497–520 and M. Grimley, ‘Thatcherism, morality and religion’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders (eds), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 78–94.  3 For works that examine Conservative continuities see J. Freeman, ‘Reconsidering “Set the People Free”: Neoliberalism and Freedom Rhetoric in Churchill’s Conservative Party’, Twentieth Century British History, 29:4 (2018), 522–46 and K. Kowol, ‘Renaissance on the Right? New Directions in the History of the Post-War Conservative Party’, Twentieth Century British History, 27:2 (2016), 290–304.

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  4 See D. Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) and N. Thompson, ‘Hollowing Out the State: Public Choice Theory and the Critique of Keynesian Social Democracy’, Contemporary British History, 22:3 (2008), 355–82.   5 For Thatcherite claims of socialist corruption see K. Joseph, ‘Corporatism and Liberty Do Not Go Together’, The Times (17 May 1976), p. 14; N. Lawson, ‘Economy: The New Conservatism (Lecture to the Bow Group)’ (4 August 1980), www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109505, accessed 5 December 2019; and M. Thatcher, ‘Speech to Finchley Conservatives (admits to being an “Iron Lady”)’ (31 January 1976), www. margaretthatcher.org/document/102947, accessed 5 December 2019.   6 ‘Sir G. Gibb on Railway Nationalization’, The Times (11 November 1908), p. 11.   7 ‘Conservative Ideals’, The Times (8 March 1924), p. 11.   8 B. Buchan and L. Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 6.  9 Ibid., p. 155. 10 D. H. MacGregor, ‘Universities and Public Service’, Saint George, 46:12 (1909), 66–7. 11 ‘House of Commons’, The Times (12 February 1908), p. 8. 12 M. Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 12–13. 13 On independence and public spirit see J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Henry Holt, 1873), p. 139. 14 Ibid., p. 144. 15 R. Lowe, Speeches and Letters on Reform: With a Preface (London: Robert John Bush, 1867), p. 7. 16 ‘M. Hicks-Beach at Bedford’, The Times (16 June 1892), p. 10. 17 E. A. Pratt, The Case against Railway Nationalisation (London: Collins, 1913), pp. 14, 100, 102, 113–21. 18 W. H. Mallock, A Critical Examination of Socialism (London: John Murray, 1908), pp. 75–82. 19 H. Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), pp. 92–5. 20 D. Ritschel, The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 24. 21 Coal Industry Commission: Vol. II, Reports and Minutes of Evidence on the Second Stage of the Inquiry, PP 1919 [Cmd. 360], vol. XII, p. 1137. 22 Ibid., pp. xv–xvi. 23 ‘Poison of Class Hatred’, The Times (19 January 1920), p. 7. 24 E. T. Good, ‘The Menace and Meaning of Nationalisation’, English Review, 40 (1924), 133.

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25 J. Gretton, ‘Conservative Policy’, English Review, 46 (1924), 274. 26 R. Millward, ‘Industrial organisation and economic factors in nationalisation’, in R. Millward and J. Singleton (eds), The Political Economy of Nationalisation in Britain, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–13; L. Hannah, ‘A failed experiment: the state ownership of industry’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume III: Structural Change and Growth, 1939–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 91–2. 27 P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 174. 28 Hansard, 29 Mar 1926, vol. 193, cols 1734–5; Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, p. 174. 29 For a historical account relating to Tory perceptions of bureaucracy see J. Greenaway, ‘British Conservatism and Bureaucracy’, History of Political Thought, 13:1 (1992), 129–60. 30 ‘London Transport Bill’, The Times (23 March 1931), p. 9. 31 G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 200. For this argument see Sidney Webb’s contribution to the Sankey Commission. Coal Industry Commission, p. 495. 32 A. E. Davies, The Nationalization of Railways (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908), pp. 103–4. 33 For a recent account of Conservative opposition to Poplarism see D. Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 135–8, 157–8. 34 P. A. Ryan, ‘“Poplarism”, 1894–1930’, in P. Thane (ed.), The Origins of British Social Policy (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 56–83. 35 F. J. C. Hearnshaw, A Survey of Socialism (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 400–1. 36 C. S. Loch, ‘Statistics of Population and Pauperism in England and Wales, 1861–1901’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 69:2 (1906), 289. 37 Mill, Considerations, pp. 177–8. 38 ‘Mr Disraeli in Edinburgh’, Examiner (2 November 1867), p. 697. 39 ‘Campaign against Socialism’, The Times (4 May 1926), p. 6. 40 ‘Unionist Party Organization’, The Times (29 February 1928), p. 18. 41 ‘House of Commons’, The Times (29 March 1928), p. 8. 42 ‘Report on Poplar Waste’, The Times (19 May 1922), p. 7. 43 Ibid.

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44 ‘The Election of Guardians’, The Times (3 April 1925), p. 8. 45 ‘Ratepayers’ “Strike” at Poplar’, The Times (12 October 1923), p. 7. 46 Hansard, 15 June 1927, vol. 207, col. 1056. 47 A similar point is made in J. Lawrence, ‘Labour and the politics of class, 1900–1940’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 246. 48 For socialism as a sectional force see R. McKibbin, ‘Class and conventional wisdom: the Conservative Party and the “public” in inter-war Britain’, in R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 259–94. 49 Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, pp. 215–17. 50 S. Baldwin, On England, and Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan, 1926), p. 39. 51 ‘The Conservative Outlook’, The Times (20 March 1924), p. 11. 52 Baldwin, England, p. 225. 53 ‘Aids, education and the year 2000!’, Woman’s Own (31 October 1987), pp. 8–10. 54 Ryan, ‘“Poplarism”’, pp. 77–9. 55 Hansard, 5 July 1926, vol. 197, cols 1640–1763. 56 Ibid., cols 1640–8. 57 Ibid., col. 1679. 58 Ibid., cols 1698–9. 59 Ibid., col. 1686. 60 ‘Conservative Plan for Workers’ Charter’, The Times (12 May 1947), p. 4. 61 ‘Macmillan Charges “Corruption”’, Daily Mail (27 June 1947), p. 5. 62 On the diverse ideological influences of Thatcherism see SutcliffeBraithwaite, ‘Neoliberalism and Morality’. 63 Thatcher, ‘Speech to Finchley Conservatives’. 64 M. Thatcher, ‘Speech to Leicester Conservative Businessmen’ (1 December 1975), www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102815, accessed 10 December 2019. 65 B. Jackson, ‘Currents of Neo-Liberalism: British Political Ideologies and the New Right’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 837. 66 ‘The Acceptable Face of Socialism’, The Times (14 February 1983), p. 8. 67 N. Ridley, My Style of Government: The Thatcher Years (London: Hutchinson, 1991), p. 80.

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12 Civic corruption in the twentieth century: the case of Belfast and Glasgow, c. 1920–70 Peter Jones

When it comes to studying corruption in municipal government, historians of modern Britain have generally focused on particular ‘scandals’ and ‘affairs’. The examples are many, from that of Samuel Hunter, the manager of Salford Corporation gasworks, who took innumerable bribes from contractors in the 1870s and 1880s, through to the ‘homes for votes’ gerrymandering scandal in Tory-controlled Westminster in the late 1980s.1 The two that have attracted the most attention, however, are the corruption scandals that afflicted the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) in the 1880s and the Poulson affair of the 1970s.2 The former involved secret payments to officials in relation to the leasing of valuable real estate on what would become Shaftesbury Avenue in the city’s West End. The latter centred on the architect and businessman John Poulson, and the clientelism networks he created to secure lucrative contracts, notably for urban renewal projects in the North East, where he was aided by T. Dan Smith, a prominent Labour figure in the region and former leader of Newcastle city council. These have received attention for good reason. The MBW scandals directly led to the first statutory criminalisation of bribery between councillors, officials and clients in the shape of the 1889 Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act. Further statutes targeting bribery followed in 1906 and 1916. The Poulson affair, besides implicating a prominent Conservative cabinet minister, Reginald Maudling, and a senior civil servant, George Pottinger, led to public outrage and two official inquiries: a prime ministerial committee inquiry on conduct in local government, chaired by Lord Redcliffe-Maude (1973–4), and a more substantial royal commission on standards in public life, chaired by Lord

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Salmon (1974–6). No legislation followed, as critics have pointed out, but not since the early Victorian period had the ‘purity’ of local administration been subject to such searching investigation and analysis.3 Such scandals have been seen as a product of multiple factors, among them personal greed and lax morals, confused understandings of ‘corruption’ on the part of key players and insufficiently robust cultures of administrative accountability. Yet the attention lavished on high-profile scandals and the actions of individuals, or groups of individuals, has not been without some costs. In particular, it has obscured the existence of endemic, durable and, in some respects, more mundane and communal forms of civic corruption, born of peculiarly fractious and divided urban societies. This chapter examines two cities where corruption assumed this more diffuse, socially embedded form: Belfast and Glasgow, from roughly the 1920s to the 1960s. Arguably, they were the most corrupt cities in the UK during the mid-twentieth century; but they certainly shed light on how social and political antagonisms – in both cases profoundly etched with sectarianism – as well as poverty and economic dislocation can undermine civic trust and probity and foster forms of corruption rooted in group loyalty and party faction. The chapter examines each city in turn, before discussing their commonalties and differences in the conclusion. First, however, we will examine the distinctive qualities of Belfast and Glasgow.

Municipal reform and the peculiarities of Belfast and Glasgow In May 1935, the Bishop of Manchester wrote to his clergy requesting that they remember the centenary of the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act in their forthcoming services. He suggested, in a spirit of celebration rather than lamentation, that the act marked the ‘beginning of a revolution in our civic life’.4 Harold Laski’s celebratory collection, A Century of Municipal Progress (1935), expressed similar sentiments, offering a history of growing civic responsibilities and rising standards of administration.5 In retrospect, given the scandals to come, such appraisals might be

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dismissed as unduly positive or even naïve. Yet progress had been made: that corruption persisted – that it was specified, exposed, condemned – was partly because of the development of higher standards and expectations, not lower ones, and a more inclusive and critical civic arena. The 1835 Act, sponsored by the Whigs and their parliamentary allies, inaugurated the demise of the narrow, oligarchic and often Anglican-dominated corporations that featured in the radical critique of Old Corruption. The municipal franchise was modestly expanded, and during the interwar period it was rendered fully democratic. Slowly but surely, municipal elections were subject to anticorruption measures: the 1835 Act introduced the use of ballot papers and from 1872 they were cast in secret. The 1835 Act also began regulating what would later become known as ‘conflicts of interest’, culminating in the 1933 Local Government Act, which proscribed councillors from taking part in or voting on matters in which they had any sort of pecuniary interest, however indirect.6 We might note as well the development of a vigorous culture of press scrutiny: the scandals at the MBW were first identified in a series of stories in the Financial News.7 Glasgow and Belfast were not exempt from these processes. Municipal reform in Scotland and Ireland pursued a similar, if often legally distinct, trajectory of growing enfranchisement, regulation and accountability.8 Both countries, for instance, were subject to the 1872 Ballot Act and 1883 Corrupt Practices Act, as well as the triplet of bribery acts (1889, 1906 and 1916) noted above. Crucially, like other major urban councils of the time, the corporations of Glasgow and Belfast expanded their sphere of municipal responsibilities over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As historians have suggested, one important spur to the development of more refined anticorruption regulations was the growing power and resources placed in the hands of elected councillors and local officials.9 Glasgow was the more ambitious of the two cities and by the interwar period its corporation was second only to London County Council in terms of its number of employees.10 But, as elsewhere, both became home to an expansive array of municipal responsibilities managed and overseen by a series of committees chaired by councillors: among others, water and gas supplies; parks, trams and buses; the licensing of markets, pubs and cabs; and housing.

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Glasgow and Belfast developed much the same institutional structures and enjoyed many of the same powers as other UK cities. What made them distinctive was their social, ethnic and economic make-up, setting them apart from all other major cities, with the exception of Liverpool. Historically, both cities were part of a maritime region on the eastern rim of the Atlantic trade nexus, and both prospered from the traffic of slaves, tobacco, sugar and cotton. They prospered again during the second industrial revolution. Each developed their own particular strengths in this respect, such as linen manufacture in Belfast and industrial chemistry in Glasgow; but common to both were expansive portside economies, comprising warehousing and, most of all, shipbuilding, supported by extensive networks of mercantile and financial expertise. Both were, by far, the leading industrial and commercial centres in their respective regions, something that also made them peculiarly sensitive to dislocations in the global economy, such as those that followed the two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the unemployment rate of adult males in Glasgow and Belfast rocketed above 25 per cent.11 They were also the most populous and the most marked by inequalities of wealth. Both contained inner-city areas of intense poverty, which were among the worst in the British Isles. Above all, they were uniquely divided and fractious cities. In Glasgow, this was not without secular aspects. During the early twentieth century, left-wing radicalism and militant labourism flourished in the city to an extent unmatched elsewhere in Britain. A series of confrontational strikes in the 1910s gave rise to the popular image of revolutionary ‘Red Clydeside’.12 At the municipal ballot box, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Labour Party began to make inroads, with the latter eventually taking control of the council in 1933. But it was religion, and more especially the sectarian Protestant–Catholic axis, that did most to shape – and fracture – the social and civic life of each city. In Glasgow, the city’s Catholics, who amounted to roughly a quarter of the population, were overwhelmingly of Irish descent and instinctively identified with Irish nationalism. They were confronted by a Protestant majority and a nexus of Masonic and Orange lodges and partisan pubs that equally identified with Ulster loyalism.13 Discrimination in the labour market and gang rivalry were the result. In Belfast,

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where Catholics, too, were in the minority and identified overwhelmingly with Irish nationalism, sectarianism cut deeper still. The manifestations were many: separate schools, social clubs and civic organisations for each community; zones of almost complete residential segregation (most notoriously in West Belfast, along the Shankill Road and Falls Road); sectarian violence and gang rivalry; and systemic economic discrimination, as evident elsewhere in Ireland and then Northern Ireland, following Partition in 1921. Until the 1970s, Protestants dominated the higher professions and superior positions within occupations, while Catholics always formed a majority of the unemployed, despite making up less than one third of the economically active population.14 Such was, and remains, the depth and bitterness of division in Belfast that some scholars have looked far beyond the UK for useful comparisons – to cities such as Mostar, Nicosia and Beirut.15 It is not that the unusually divided socio-economic and sectarian composition of Belfast and Glasgow necessarily bred corruption. Rather, their peculiarly fractious social and ethnic dynamics furnished conditions that were conducive to corruption. In particular, they made for a pervasive lack of civic trust among different classes and communities. They deprived each city of that shared, collective investment in civic institutions and processes that political scientists have suggested is vital for the development of ‘good governance’.16 Instead, as one historian has put it, a ‘moral economy of loyalty’ developed in which everyday living and surviving was inextricably linked to group allegiances and communal networks.17 The flipside of this was a narrow and partisan view of political legitimacy that was corrosive of probity.

Belfast and Protestant oligarchy This was particularly true of Belfast, where public life was almost entirely grounded in the competing claims of the two communities and an omnipresent siege mentality on both sides. This had developed, of course, out of a much longer history of conflict that stretched back to the English suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union. But the period from the 1880s, and still more from the early 1900s, witnessed a hardening of positions on

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all sides, amid the ultimate failure of Home Rule, the radicalisation of the Nationalist cause and the emergence of Ulster Unionism as a strident political force. Following Partition, the Protestant elite aggressively consolidated its hold on power in the new territory of Northern Ireland. Although it still returned MPs to Westminster, it was also equipped with its own administrative apparatus and parliament at Stormont; and as one historian has put it, the so-called ‘Stormont regime’ effectively functioned as a ‘one-party state’ until its demise in 1969.18 There was remarkable political inertia. From 1921 to 1963, Northern Ireland had only three prime ministers, all of them Unionist, with two serving twenty-year terms. In 1940, five out of the then seven cabinet ministers had been in place continuously since 1921. Belfast Corporation was similarly oligarchic: between 1915 and 1946, the position of Lord Mayor, though subject to annual election by councillors, was occupied by only four Unionist figures, one of whom, Sir Crawford McCullagh, was in office for a third of this period. This was partly by design, as a neurotic Unionist political class, gripped by a fear of Catholic irredentism and British betrayal, deliberately unpicked what had been intended as a pluralistic constitutional settlement under the conditions of the Treaty of 1921. Notably, proportional representation, which had been specifically designed to give Catholics a significant voice in government, was abolished in favour of the British first-past-the-post system, initially for local elections in 1922 and then for elections to Stormont in 1929. Altering voting systems does not necessarily count as corruption, though in this case it was clearly designed to uphold the sectional interests of one part of society over another; but there was also resort to ‘gerrymandering’, which some at the time (and many since) certainly considered corrupt. The most spectacular instances occurred in Derry, where a large Catholic majority on the ground was turned into a 12–8 Unionist majority on the council, and the city’s parliamentary seat at Stormont was cut in two and redrawn so as to return a Nationalist member and a Unionist member. The Northern Ireland Labour Party had no doubt that such ‘barefaced’ gerrymandering constituted a ‘corrupt and mischievous scheme’.19 In these circumstances, there was little respect for the procedural integrity of elections in Belfast, as elsewhere in the province. Already practised widely prior to Partition, personation became rampant and was deployed on both sides. The local saying ‘vote early and

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vote often’ had real application. Women, apparently, were especially adept at this particular form of corruption, with their casual employment status and ability to work from home allowing them to vote at various polling stations throughout the day. In some areas, the proximity of polling stations to second-hand clothing shops was readily exploited, enabling the use of forms of disguise such as hats and overcoats. As Robert Getgood of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and MP for Belfast Old Park Division claimed in 1946: ‘I have seen with my own eyes an old woman going to one of these [second-hand stores], taking off her hat, taking out her teeth, and going back again to vote.’20 In the 1951 general election eight women were charged with personation in the West Belfast constituency. All were mill workers and weavers. When arrested, Elizabeth Brennan, the leader of the group, retorted ‘there are thousands doing it today as well as me’.21 The persistence of personation prompted much debate at Stormont regarding the desirability of asking voters to produce some form of identification (which was eventually introduced in 1985). In addition, the police might interfere with ballot boxes as they were transported to the venue of the count, where, in any case, they might be subject to manipulation at the direction of returning officers. The former was a particular complaint of Catholics: in contrast to the Royal Ireland Constabulary, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), formed in 1922, was almost exclusively Protestant.22 Other examples included keeping polling stations open beyond their official closing time and the use of proscribed means of conveying electors: in the 1945 general election Protestant loyalists in Belfast provided 200 horse-drawn carriages to help get out their vote. In another echo of earlier corrupt practices, voters were intimidated. Even Protestants who could vote were subject to intimidation as part of the moral economy of loyalty. The Labour MP for Belfast Pottinger, Jack Beattie, drew attention to the issue of intimidation when he reported at Stormont that one of his constituents had ‘received a letter from the Duncairn Orange Lodge inviting him to attend a meeting to declare his voting intentions. The envelope containing the invitation bore the symbols of a horse, William of Orange and a Skull and Cross Bones.’23 Municipal administration in Belfast was characterised by a similar disregard for basic codes of probity and accountability, despite successive Unionist mayors and councillors often boldly

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asserting the opposite. The corporation was beset by a series of scandals and inquiries during the mid-twentieth century, though with little consequence in terms of securing genuine reform and change. Its record in relation to council house building was especially contested. In the 1920s, when Crawford McCullagh was chairman of the housing committee, concerns about maladministration culminated in a public inquiry led by Robert Megaw, KC. Published in 1926, the subsequent two-volume report disclosed varying degrees of corrupt malpractice, among them the maintenance of irregular accounts, the purchase of sub-standard materials and the award of contracts to certain firms without observing due tendering processes.24 It was even disclosed that some members and officials of the housing committee, and even the city solicitor, had a financial interest in a number of the sites bought for redevelopment. To make matters worse, some of the members acted with ‘bias and impropriety in dealing with [his] investigation’, failing to provide documents and testimony.25 In this case, the abuse of entrusted power through patronage and clientelism was clear, yet the oligarchic nature of rule, coupled with a fractured civic culture, made enacting any lasting reform very difficult. In 1927, for instance, Sir William Turner, the Lord Mayor, reluctantly persuaded the corporation to establish a special economy committee to investigate municipal wages and salaries with a view to making savings; but the fact that the electoral ward committees of the Unionist Party were dominated by municipal employees paralysed the corporation’s plan. The economy committee exhorted spending committees to come forward with their own savings, but these came to nothing because of Unionist filibustering tactics. Despite this, Turner still claimed that ‘Belfast was as well managed as most cities on the other side of the [Irish] Channel, and better than many.’26 The savings plan was still being debated in 1928 when the corporation commissioned Arthur Collins, Financial Controller of the Audit Commission, to investigate. This time Nationalists sought to wreck the process, claiming that the recommendations would act ‘unfairly against the nationalist minority’ and that they would be ‘a charter for corruption’.27 To be sure, there were critics of the corporation within Unionism, which of course was by no means a monolithic political force. In 1941 another scandal came to light, concerning improvements to

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the Whiteabbey Sanatorium, which the council managed, with complaints of irregularities in respect of land purchases and tendering processes for building work. Although a subsequent inquiry was largely silent on the matter of corruption, this was not true of John Nixon, an Independent Unionist and MP for Belfast Woodvale.28 A hard-line Unionist and former RUC inspector, he emerged as one of the leading critics of the corporation over the issue, accusing it of conduct that was ‘corrupt and dangerous’.29 In general, however, in such a low-trust environment, where competing factions and communities naturally thought the worst of each other, corruption was seen as part and parcel of getting by – as one means among others by which people sustained their lives and livelihoods – and it reached deep into the social structure. Access to public goods, principally council houses and health care, was a focal point for corrupt behaviour among citizens and officials. Bribing housing officials seems to have been common, while applicants were not beyond borrowing children from friends or neighbours when attending a meeting at the housing department to give credence to the urgency of their application.30 The post-war case of Ann Copeland, which concerned access to housing, illuminates the complexities of corruption as they existed at the level of everyday life and the bitter group dynamics that accompanied them. The Blitz of Belfast in 1941 wrought significant damage to the city’s housing stock. The corporation’s record on council house building between 1922 and 1939 had been poor and the effects of bombing compounded an already dire situation.31 The working-class population was already in a poor state of health and, as elsewhere in Northern Ireland, subject to a high incidence of tuberculosis. The corporation sought to ration public housing by prioritising certain groups: those who had served in the war (which de facto gave priority to Protestants) and those who were suffering from tuberculosis. This was not only a simple matter of inadequate supply and excessive demand. Sectarian tensions drove the separate groups to seek locations with neighbours of their ‘own persuasion’. It was in this environment that Copeland, who lived on the Protestant frontier of Newtownards Road in the east of the city, was arrested and charged with corruption. Her scheme was exposed by two Labour councillors, T. O’Sullivan and Leo Presley, as part of

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their local election campaign in May 1953. Copeland claimed that she had influence at City Hall and that she could secure a house for a fee, particularly if applicants had tuberculosis. Presley claimed that the fee was £40 and that she would secure medical certificates from sympathetic doctors. Copeland’s corruption ring was dominated by women: Sarah Madden, Copeland’s niece; Mary Valente; and Meta Donnan, the wife of a prominent Orangeman. Although Copeland was unable to give evidence owing to illness (as she too suffered from tuberculosis), an official inquiry reported that between 1946 and 1953 she and Madden had negotiated with twenty-six people who were seeking a house.32 In all, the two women received £743. Crucially, in contravention of the strict moral economy of loyalty, she had provided the scheme to Protestants and Catholics. The inquiry met for ten days and took evidence from a range of witnesses, including residents living in both (largely Catholic) West Belfast and Protestant East Belfast. The majority lived in frontier locations from which they sought escape. In the event, the inquiry did not produce any significant recommendations. Robert Young, head of the housing department, spent more time in the witness box than anyone else, and the chairman of the inquiry, Bradley McCall, said that he was not entirely satisfied with his account. No charges were made, however. Three doctors, all of whom had provided medical certificates for would-be applicants, also gave evidence; and all three were disciplined by the General Medical Council. As for Copeland, she was subject to the full force of Protestant excoriation and became a victim of the politics of disloyalty. She was demonised in the press and portrayed as a ‘sickly spider weaving a web of corruption’.33 Like the nineteen tenants who had benefited from her scheme, Copeland was also evicted from her home. By contrast, Donnan avoided punishment, no doubt because of her husband’s connections within the Orange Lodge and her own membership of the Pottinger Women’s Unionist Association. She could not, though, avoid opprobrium: she was jeered when she left the courthouse. McCall revealed his partiality when he summarised the case against Copeland’s accomplices: Donnan had been involved in ‘genuine philanthropic activity’, whereas Valente was ‘stupid’ and Madden was a ‘foolish and unhappy woman’.34 It was a case that shone a light on the poor health and housing of Belfast; but it illustrated, above all, systemic

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failures of governance, official partiality and the bitter struggle for space and safety in an acutely divided city.

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Glasgow’s culture of graft Like Belfast, Glasgow was a city of great wealth but also of poverty and ill health, and it was similarly, if less intensely, scarred by sectarian conflict and discrimination; but its political culture was distinctive and developed according to a different trajectory. In the decades prior to the interwar period, when it was governed by a wealthy, cohesive and largely Liberal elite, it had enjoyed a national and international reputation as an exemplar of civic governance and was widely esteemed as the ‘Second City of Empire’. When, in 1888, the American journalist Albert Shaw undertook a tour of major provincial British cities, including Edinburgh, Leicester, Manchester and Nottingham, it was Glasgow that he upheld as a model city, at once progressive and efficient.35 All this changed in the decades after the First World War, as Glasgow developed a reputation for quite the opposite: gang violence, industrial militancy and ‘graft’ – a term for corruption imported from the US, where it referred to the practice of politicians and officials milking their office for personal gain. In party-political terms, the most dramatic development, mirroring national patterns, was the rapid decline of the Liberal Party as a significant civic force and the rise of Labour in its place.36 From 1922, when it won ten of the fifteen seats in contention, Labour dominated Glasgow’s parliamentary representation. At the same time, building on earlier successes, gains were secured at the municipal level. As noted above, the party took control of the council in 1933, making Glasgow one of the first Labour-controlled cities in Britain; and from 1935, the city was home to a long-running succession of Labour Lord Provosts (similar to mayors). The 1918 Representation of People Act played a key role in this, enfranchising the lower-middle and working classes, and greatly enlarging the Irish Catholic vote in particular. Yet the ascendancy of Labour was accompanied by the advent of an unusually fractious and divisive political culture, in stark contrast to what had prevailed before the war. The strength and militancy of

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the labour movement made for problems, not least bitter disputes between Labour councillors and those of the more radical ILP. Anti-socialist forces, in the form of a coalition of Moderates composed of Unionists and Liberals, were galvanised and retained a significant municipal and parliamentary presence.37 Meanwhile, high levels of poverty and unprecedented rates of unemployment – especially in the early 1930s, when the rate peaked at some 33 per cent – exacerbated crime, intensified competition among shopkeepers and tradesmen and increased demand for municipal resources such as housing. Sectarian divisions became more pronounced, partly owing to these economic pressures, but also wider political disputes regarding educational provision for Catholics and the place of the Catholic Church in Scottish life.38 Municipal politics, gang culture and labour-market discrimination: all became more fiercely sectarian. The militant Scottish Protestant League, for instance, enjoyed a brief surge of support in the early 1930s, taking four council seats and almost 25 per cent of the vote in 1933, before fading thereafter owing to internal feuds.39 For good reason, Glasgow developed a reputation as a tough city, something captured in the novel No Mean City (1935), written by the journalist H. Kingsley Long and Alexander McArthur, an unemployed worker, about life in the largely Catholic slum district of the Gorbals. It was in these politically divisive and economically fraught circumstances, with all that this entailed in terms of a pronounced deficit of trust among competing groups and communities, that corruption began to blight civic life. As in Belfast, if not to the same degree, elections were marred by corrupt practices, including the provision of hackney carriages to transport voters and the maladministration of election expenses. The most notorious case occurred in 1936, when the parliamentary agent of the Labour (Scottish Socialist) MP for Dumbarton Burghs, David Kirkwood, was imprisoned for three months for falsifying election accounts.40 The more pervasive problem was bribery and graft on the part of officials, councillors and bailies (akin to aldermen), which afflicted multiple aspects of civic administration. Policing was one area. The policing of street gambling, in particular, was commonly assumed to be rife with corruption; and these suspicions were confirmed in 1937, when a local woman, ‘Aggie the bookmaker’, was imprisoned for seeking to bribe a police officer who had intercepted one of her

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runners.41 Other commonly suspected corrupt relations arose between officers and insurance assessors, whereby the former supplied the latter with information regarding a crime or an accident that could be used in making a claim. In 1938, one long-serving Glaswegian police officer, who was employed in the traffic department, was imprisoned for six months for his involvement in a fraudulent operation of this type.42 Above all, graft afflicted the work of councillors and municipal officers. Although rumours and speculation had long been rife, the problem first surfaced publicly during the late 1920s, when the local press began reporting allegations that members of the licensing bench had been bribed; but it morphed into a full-blown crisis in 1932–3. In 1932 it was revealed that the Labour bailie for the Gorbals and convenor of the markets committee, James Strain, had secured bribes for the letting of stances at the city’s meat market. Strain and a fellow Labour colleague, Alexander Ritchie, were arrested and Strain was later found guilty, fined £50 and barred from public office for three years. A year later, two cases of bribery involving municipal housing officers, William Fairfull and William Forbes, went before the courts. Both were found guilty and imprisoned for soliciting and accepting bribes to help would-be tenants secure new council properties. In Forbes’s case, it was revealed that he was part of a network of agents, which included building-site foremen and councillors, who would recommend potential tenants. In the meantime, as a result of mounting pressure since the late 1920s, capped with the Strain revelations, a government tribunal of inquiry was appointed to examine ‘allegations of bribery and corruption’ in the city’s administration.43 Although fewer witnesses came forward than it had hoped, making it difficult for the tribunal to reach any emphatic conclusions, the report was nonetheless damning, suggesting that there was possibly some truth in the allegations. It found that the administration of drink licenses, housing and markets had all become compromised to some degree. It was especially critical of the administration of markets, where it suggested that Strain’s illegal activities were evidently ‘not an isolated incident of corruption’, but part of a broader culture of graft.44 As contemporary commentators observed, Glasgow’s reputation had suffered a devastating blow, and more scandals would follow. In April 1941 a Labour bailie was charged with having received £120

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to influence a member of the licensing committee. Then, in June, four further councillors (three Labour, one ILP) were arrested: one in relation to receiving a bribe for securing a promotion for an employee in the baths department, the other three (one of whom was Ritchie, who had earlier been implicated in the Strain case), all members of the gas committee, in relation to allegations they had sought kickbacks on a contract with a London manufacturer to supply corporation houses with cookers. All four were found guilty and imprisoned under the 1889 Corruption Act. This too led to an outpouring of condemnation in the council and press, amid suggestions that such conduct was rife. The leader of the Progressives, as the Moderates were now known, even alleged the existence of a ‘permanent organization’ in the city which distinguished between those councillors and magistrates that, in another echo of American parlance, were ‘touchable and are not touchable’.45 No other British city seems to have suffered to quite the same degree as Glasgow, but it would be wrong to conclude that Glasgow’s civic culture was bereft of forces or individuals working against corruption. In some respects, the bitter partisan rivalry that animated Glasgow’s municipal administration encouraged a culture of ruthless exposure (as well as defensive suggestions of scandalmongering and muck-raking). John McGovern, for instance, a leading ILP councillor and MP who had become estranged from Labour, played a key role in agitating for the government tribunal of 1933, burnishing his own and the ILP’s reputation for ethical probity (though his own conduct had been questioned in the past). The Glasgow Evening Times and the Glasgow Herald keenly reported on allegations and court cases, as did the Unionist-supporting Scottish Sunday Express and Daily Record. Likewise, the ModeratesProgressives routinely sought to expose corruption, and indeed were highly critical of the modest efforts made by Labour in the wake of the 1941 scandals to clean up the way the council operated. Able men who had a reputation for probity were also appointed to key official roles. In 1931 Percy Sillitoe was appointed as the city’s new chief constable. He had previously been chief constable in Chesterfield and Sheffield, where he had had notable success breaking gang cultures and maintaining good order during bouts of industrial action; and he proved a moderniser and a reformer in Glasgow, further enhancing his reputation.46

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The dysfunctions that afflicted Glasgow are not easily attributed to a lack of public scrutiny, or capable, clean individuals. They ran deeper than this. The lax morals of some Labour members partly reflected the fact they had grown up in poverty and were accustomed to a world of sharp practice. We should not be entirely surprised that some of them had few scruples about using an unpaid, voluntary public office for private gain and as a means of cementing group loyalties and personal connections. It is telling that in 1932 it was reported that Strain was among the councillors who claimed the largest amount of expenses, second only to another Labour member.47 Equally, the areas where corruption took place were those that were especially fraught owing to a variety of economic pressures and religious sensibilities, all of them overlaid by sectarian tensions. The regulation of the drink trade, for instance, had long been the site of conflict between well-organised religious groups and temperance campaigners, especially of a Protestant sort, and a similarly well-organised and powerful drinks lobby. Meanwhile, competition for business among small traders, such as meat and fish vendors, and, above all, competition for scarce municipal housing stock among the poor, was made all the more intense by the economic deprivation endured by Glasgow in the interwar years. As the government tribunal of 1933 noted, no amount of rule setting or criteria could expunge the need for discretion when it came to allotting these highly prized resources. There was ‘ample scope for and great temptation to bribery’ – and the peculiarly fractious, rugged circumstances of Glasgow, as of Belfast, meant that this scope was more liable to exploitation by both officials and councillors and those they served.48 Never again would Glasgow suffer from quite so much civic corruption or reputational damage. The post-war years, when Labour lost control of the council on two occasions (in 1947–52 and 1968– 70), were relatively clean compared to those of the interwar period. Yet corruption did not entirely perish, culminating in another major scandal in the late 1960s. The context was different, if not the underlying pressures of economic dislocation, poverty and sectarian discrimination. During the post-war years, Glasgow’s industrial decline accelerated further, just as officials sought to resolve the city’s housing crisis, which had been made worse by the Blitz of the Clyde in 1941, through large-scale planning and regional

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redevelopment. The result was new peripheral estates in Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok and further housing developments in Clydebank, Dumbarton and Monklands, but also new opportunities for councillors and property developers to connive kickbacks from the huge contracts that required brokering. Once more, rumours of corruption and graft abounded, but they did not reach a critical mass until 1968, when The Times published claims of a ‘graft syndicate’ in Glasgow and the Clyde region involving councillors and officials trafficking drink licences, planning permissions and other ‘services’.49 Although police investigations and court cases, as well as a long-running council inquiry, found no evidence of a well-organised ‘graft ring’, two councillors were nonetheless found guilty of corruption under the 1889 Act: James Reilly, who was imprisoned for eighteen months for accepting bribes to influence the transfer of council tenancies, and John Paterson, for his corrupt dealings with property companies.50 Further scandals in fact occurred in the mid-1970s and this time involved fraudulent expenses claims and free holidays provided by building contractors.51 Yet by this point the Poulson affair had broken and such transgressions seemed part of a wider culture of malfeasance and lax morals afflicting local government, helping to obscure what was a peculiar trajectory of compromised civic governance.

Conclusion The cases of Belfast and Glasgow, it should be emphasised, exhibit some important differences. In the former, civic corruption prospered in the context of an established oligarchy, albeit one that actively connived to cement its privileged status and monopoly on power, following the trauma of Partition. In the latter, it developed in the context of the ascendancy of a parvenu class of working-class councillors, representing a new municipal (and national) partypolitical force, whose hold on power in any case was not total. When the worst abuses occurred in the interwar period and early 1940s, Glasgow was by no means a one-party fiefdom. The extent of fracture within the culture of the left and the party-political strength of anti-socialist animus from without preclude such a characterisation. Labour became the dominant party, but its grip on

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power was by no means hegemonic. Yet, as has been suggested, the two cities were home to unusually fractious and divided urban societies, rooted in ‘Orange and Green’ sectarianism, stark inequalities of wealth and fiercely antagonistic, confrontational forms of municipal politics. The result was a civic environment that was low on trust and, in turn, low on a desire to abide by, and enforce, rules and processes in a properly disinterested fashion, blind to party attachments and group loyalties: in short, an environment which lacked a functioning civil society. A ‘moral economy of loyalty’, which was especially pronounced in Belfast, dictated otherwise, fostering a culture in which public office and access to public resources might be used to develop and defend these attachments, even infusing this with a kind of alternate, popular legitimacy. It is notable that in each city, whenever official investigations took place, it was lamented that more people did not come forward to offer evidence. Doubtless intimidation played a part in this; but so too, it seems, did strong cultures of communal complicity and collaboration. The characteristics of Belfast and Glasgow were thus distinct, though other cities tell a similar story, most notably Liverpool, which was also home to intense poverty, sectarian politics and relatively high levels of civic graft.52 Useful comparisons can also be drawn with the ‘machine politics’ of ethnically diverse American cities, such as New York in the era of Tammany Hall, which included a significant Irish diaspora after the 1840s.53 But what the two cities examined here clearly indicate is that corruption has a social history and that in order to understand its genesis and durability one needs to retain the analytic apparatus of the urban historian. As noted above, the cases of Belfast and Glasgow have been neglected by historians of twentieth-century corruption, and their study helps to furnish a fuller picture of its many and varied forms amid the march of ever more stringent standards; but it also exposes the limitations of recent work in a more political, intellectual and cultural vein. Although one may argue that corruption is not a fixed concept and that it evolves according to the moral parameters of what a society deems permissible, the cases of Belfast and Glasgow illustrate a key weakness in this line of argument. The acceptable ethical standards of civic governance were set and recognised across the political spectrum after the First World War. Yet these standards had decidedly less purchase in Glasgow and Belfast as a result of

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their peculiar social dynamics and the widespread practice, connivance and acceptance of corrupt behaviour among politicians, officials, businessmen, voters and even some policemen. The standards were higher than ever, perhaps, the product of epochal cultural transformations and novel political ideals. In Belfast and Glasgow, however, urban society was such as to encourage their transgression and even render corruption, for some at least, a legitimate and necessary means of survival.

Notes   1 R. L. Greenall, The Making of Victorian Salford (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2000), pp. 193–208; P. Dimoldenberg, The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, Homes for Votes and Scandal in Britain’s Rottenest Borough (London: Politico, 2006).   2 J. Moore, ‘Corruption and the ethical standards of British public life: national debates and local administration, 1880–1914’, in R. Kroeze, A. Vitória and G. Geltner (eds), Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 267–78; G. C. Clifton, Professionalism, Patronage and Public Service in Victorian London: The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Works (London: Athlone Press, 1992), pp. 142–59; R. Fitzwalter and D. Taylor, Web of Corruption: The Story of J. G. L. Poulson and T. Dan Smith (London: Granada, 1981); P. Jones, From Virtue to Venality: Corruption in the City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).   3 A. Doig, Corruption and Misconduct in Contemporary British Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). See also P. Jones, ‘Re-thinking Corruption in Post-1950 Urban Britain: The Poulson Affair, 1972–76’, Urban History, 39:3 (2012), 510–28.  4 The Times (28 March 1935).   5 H. J. Laski, W. I. Jennings and W. A. Robson, A Century of Municipal Progress: 1835–1935 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935).   6 J. Moore and J. Smith, ‘Corruption and urban governance’, in J. Moore and J. Smith (eds), Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 12–13.  7 Clifton, Professionalism, pp. 147–55.  8 M. Potter, ‘The urban local state in Scotland and Ireland to 1900: parallels and contrasts’, in F. Ferguson and J. McConnell (eds), Ireland

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and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2009), pp. 108–18.   9 Moore and Smith, ‘Corruption and urban governance’, pp. 10–13. 10 I. Maver, ‘Glasgow’s civic government’, in W. H. Fraser and I. Maver (eds), Glasgow, Volume II: 1830 to 1912 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 441–85. 11 A. Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace and Beyond, 2nd edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 346; I. Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 207. 12 K. MacAskill, Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside (London: Biteback, 2019). 13 G. Walker, ‘The Orange Order in Scotland between the Wars’, International Review of Social History, 37:2 (1992), 177–206. 14 C. Townshend, Ireland: The 20th Century (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 192–4. 15 J. Calame and E. Charlesworth, Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 16 See especially B. Rothstein, The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 17 C. J. V. Loughlin, Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty in Belfast, 1921–39: The Moral Economy of Loyalty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 18 Townshend, Ireland, p. 187. 19 Irish Times (2 April 1929). 20 Stormont Papers 30 (25 June 1946), p. 1406. 21 Belfast Newsletter (20 October 1951). 22 C. Ryder, The Fateful Split: Catholics and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (London: Methuen, 2004). 23 Stormont Papers 29 (16 October 1945), pp. 658–9. 24 I. Budge and C. O’Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis – A Study of Belfast Politics, 1613–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 146–7. 25 R. D. Megaw, Report of the Inquiry into the Housing Schemes of the Belfast Corporation (Belfast: HMSO, 1926), p. 137. 26 The Times (24 January 1928). 27 R. J. Lawrence, The Government of Northern Ireland: Public Finance and Public Services, 1921–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 36. 28 Dunlop Inquiry Report (Belfast: HMSO, 1941). 29 Stormont Papers 26 (11 March 1943), p. 247.

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30 C. E. B. Brett, Housing a Divided Community (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1986). 31 Housing in Northern Ireland: Interim Report of the Planning Advisory Board (Committee on Housing) [Cmd. 224] (Belfast: HMSO, 1944). 32 Belfast Corporation, Housing Allocations Inquiry: Inspector’s Report (Belfast: HMSO, 1953). 33 Ibid., para. 47, p. 24. 34 Ibid., para. 29, p. 13. 35 A. Shaw, ‘Glasgow: A Municipal Study’, Century Magazine, 39 (1890), 721–36. 36 J. J. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936: Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000). 37 J. J. Smyth, ‘Resisting Labour: Unionists, Liberals, and Moderates in Glasgow between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 46:2 (2003), 375–401. 38 T. Gallagher, Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace – Religious Tension in Modern Scotland, 1819–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 138–41. 39 Ibid., pp. 150–3. 40 The Times (5 May 1936). 41 Scotsman (28 January 1937). 42 The Times (1 July 1938). 43 Glasgow Tribunal of Inquiry, 1933, PP 1932–33 [Cmd. 4361], vol XII. 44 Ibid., p. 4. 45 Scotsman (28 October 1941). 46 A. Simkins, ‘Sillitoe, Sir Percy Joseph, 1888–1962’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36092, accessed 8 May 2020. 47 Scotsman (26 October 1932). 48 Glasgow Tribunal of Inquiry, p. 6. 49 The Times (14 November 1968). 50 The Times (27 February 1970). 51 The Times (10 Mar 1976); The Times (4 June 1976). 52 See P. J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and A. Jarvis, ‘Corruption and scandal in the port of Liverpool’, in Moore and Smith (eds), Corruption, pp. 81–94. 53 T. Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Liveright, 2014).

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Ian Cawood and Tom Crook

One of the core aims of this volume has been to begin the task of piecing together the bigger picture of how corruption has undermined and exercised public life in modern Britain during and since the ‘age of reform’, through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Conceptually, as an object of thought, as much as practically, as an object of reform, corruption has proved tenaciously problematic and protean. It is tempting no doubt, in the manner of the social scientist, to seek to tame its unruly qualities in this respect and to operate with a single definition, even a ‘universal’ one, captured in a pithy sentence or paragraph. To be sure, as the introduction has suggested, within the Western tradition of political thought, ‘corruption’ has long possessed a core set of (metaphorical) meanings (i.e. of decay and degeneration), and has always referred to the generic problem of the subversion of the public good by the interests and actions of a particular individual, group or class. But the challenge, as this volume sees it, is to work with, rather than against, the grain of the incredibly rich and diverse ways this basic conceptual form has been developed and deployed at particular times and places. It is only by doing so that we can fully appreciate why the corruption of public life has been – and remains – inextricably linked to the public life of corruption: to the ways, that is, it has been persistently debated and discussed, refashioned and redeployed, as the stuff not just of moral and political critique but of popular agitation and partisan politics. The objects of attack and sources of anxiety and scandal certainly changed as Britain entered the ‘age of reform’, and continued to change thereafter, as we have seen; and they were articulated in new idioms and refracted through new ideologies and ideals. But none of this entailed a diminution in

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the politics of corruption and its capacity to provoke varied diagnoses. It is for this reason that the history of the reform of public life must also be a history of more than values and ideas. Affirming the enduring conceptual slipperiness of corruption is not to endorse an intellectual or cultural approach, vital though this is. Quite the contrary: the absence of any intellectual or moral consensus over the precise nature, extent and causes of ‘corruption’ – the room for debate about quite what it is and how it manifests itself, and so on, that has always surrounded the problem – has meant other factors have necessarily played a part in securing the requisite impetus for reform. Striking instances in the present volume include Ben Gilding’s analysis of the first significant attempts to regulate the East India Company (EIC) in the 1760s, which were partly shaped, as he suggests, by the desire to capture more of its revenue for the British state (which, in turn, was linked to the loss of fiscal revenues from the American colonies). Another is Kathryn Rix’s recovery of the parliamentary fortunes of electoral reform during the Victorian period, which ends with the passage of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act: a landmark act, which, as she argues, was principally driven by a desire to curtail the eye-watering amounts of money necessary to contest elections (which, in turn, was linked to the growth of the franchise). Other chapters have highlighted the role played by considerations of public order and administrative efficiency, in particular the chapters by Malcolm Crook and Francis Dodsworth. The broader point, however, is that the capacious qualities of ‘corruption’, understood intellectually or discursively, have at once facilitated and reflected the pressures exerted by a variety of social, political and economic forces. The one aspect helps to explain the other. The lumpy, staggered nature of anticorruption reform can only be fully understood by examining the interplay of both. Of course, these same forces have also frustrated the process of reform. The chapters by Aaron Graham, Geoffrey Hicks and Peter Jones in particular have shown how, in very different contexts and ways, partisan interests and communal attachments have undermined and even neutered new reformist initiatives and institutional norms. As has long been recognised, reform is always at the mercy of those interests and social groups whose relations with, and access to, the public realm it seeks to diminish or reorganise. Piecing

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together the bigger picture, however, suggests that the pursuit of purity in public life has not only been frustrated by the forces of reaction or custom. It suggests that reform itself and its two principal manifestations in the context of modern Britain – a party-based, representative democracy and a professional, bureaucratic state – have served to breathe new life into the problem of corruption, affording new opportunities for partial interests to subvert and infect the workings of public life and the pursuit of the public good. This dynamic might be traced at the intellectual and conceptual level: as Liam Ryan’s chapter suggests, the Edwardian and interwar Conservative Party viewed the democratic, welfare-based statism of the Labour Party as intrinsically liable to corruption, at once reworking Victorian anxieties while anticipating the anti-socialist moralism of Thatcherism. But it can also be traced at the institutional level. As Dodsworth’s analysis of the ‘new police’ suggests, the advent of large-scale, professionalised public organisations worked both ways, raising standards of recruitment and efficiency, while also providing a home for forms of corruption embedded in institutional routines, bureaucratic hierarchies and the exercise of everyday administrative powers. Likewise, as Tom Crook’s chapter demonstrates, the rise of ‘government by party’ from the 1880s at once facilitated the functioning of a more democratic polity and opened up new forms of party-based patronage and ministerial influence. Crucially, in both cases it was impossible to banish the spectre of corruption and the agency of self-interest – professional or partisan – from the very forms of accountability that were supposed to protect against corruption or shine a light on it. The public at least retained a modicum of suspicion for ‘official’ investigations into the police, and harboured still more for party-based scrutiny, which was always susceptible to charges of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘mud-slinging’. In this way we might begin to reappraise the significance of the nineteenth century, which was clearly pivotal. The existing historiography sees it only as a kind of terminus or graveyard: as the place where Old Corruption died. The present volume shares this view, though there is much about its demise that it helps to rethink, as the chapters by Hicks, Alex Middleton and Stuart Jones suggest. But the key point is that we might see the nineteenth century, and more especially its second half, as staging the birth of a new culture

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of corruption: as the place where both the problem and the politics of corruption assumed new dimensions and contours, and in ways that would persist deep into the twentieth century – what we might call the New Corruption. Crudely, we might distinguish between two aspects of this. On the one hand, periodic corruption scandals – and there has never been a decade without – were focused more intensely on matters of individual conduct, the rigour of rules of conduct and the independence of official processes of accountability. Hence the relentless march of reforms seeking to institute just this, culminating in the Nolan-inspired environment of unprecedented transparency and regulatory detail that our public servants inhabit today, replete with multiple ‘independent’ bodies, auditors and watchdogs responsible for handling public complaints and monitoring conduct.1 On the other hand, the politics of corruption became inextricably linked to the politics of ‘the state’, which, as historians have argued, flourished from the 1880s as an object of sophisticated theorisation – and especially its relations with society and the economy – and, in turn, public debate and party-based conflict.2 For all that these debates were technical and philosophical, they were also intensely moral, entailing questions about the ability of the state to realise the public good and act in the interests of all. The result was that all positions in this debate, left and right, proand anti-statist, became vulnerable to the charge of fostering corruption, crushing freedom and advancing particular class interests. We still live amid this politics and there is no better instance than recent journalistic and academic critiques of the ascendancy of ‘neoliberalism’ since the 1980s, which, so it is argued, has allowed the private sector to profit from the state and even ‘capture’ significant sections of it, thereby placing the interests of a few (a global elite of financial capitalists, principally) over those of the majority.3 Thus, while some maintain that Britain remains an essentially upstanding, law-abiding state, others write of ‘the institutional corruption of a nation’ by corporations and a general erosion of civic virtues in the face of the relentless march of market values – or ‘Mammon’s Kingdom’, as one historian has it.4 In time-honoured fashion, particular ministerial, parliamentary or party-based corruption scandals are presented as symptoms of a deeper decay and structural malaise.

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These lines of analysis doubtless require further historical elaboration and scrutiny; but they offer a means of writing a more critical historiography of the shifting manifestations and conceptions of corruption in modern Britain, one that avoids the twin traps of excessively declinist or triumphalist analyses, and instead reckons with its most striking historic quality – the enduring abundance of corruption as a problem of public life and the organisation of the public good. The corollary of such an approach, however, should also be a more critical engagement with the comparative question of the peculiarities of the British case and what might be called the British way in corruption. This is especially needed as historians have once more attended to this in only a patchy fashion.5 More rounded assessments that place Britain in anything like a global context have entirely been monopolised by social and political scientists with a more or less developed interest in the historical record.6 Sometimes seeking policy lessons that might be applied today, especially in the Global South, they also take their bearings from various corruption indices that have been published since the 1990s, where European nations – Britain among them, plus some ex-British colonies (Singapore and Hong Kong) – have always loomed large in the top ten of the cleanest, well-governed states. Crucially, for all the caveats about the historic fragility of institutional norms of good conduct and the rule of law, Britain unfailingly emerges as a ‘model’ of ‘political development’ in one form or another: as an exemplar of one historic pathway, among others, via which some, mostly Western, nations have managed to combine democracy, bureaucracy and administrative and political integrity – or ‘good governance’ – with economic advance and wealth creation. Britain’s only competitors in this respect seem to be smaller European states, notably Denmark. Reminiscent of an older, post-war ‘modernisation’ literature, some of these accounts are unashamedly Eurocentric. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s The Quest for Good Governance, for instance, sees the European experience since roughly 1800, including that of Britain, ‘as almost the only historically successful process of state building’ that has resulted in an enduring institutional intolerance of corruption.7 Even so, for our purposes, these accounts do at least prise open some suggestive comparative coordinates with which to grasp the peculiarities of the British case, most of all in relation to the

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development of permanent, professionalised forms of central administration, which is their principal focus. One of these is the sequencing of reforms and, in particular, the timing of administrative reforms in relation to the advent of more democratic forms of party-based accountability and electoral mobilisation. In this respect, Britain pursued the same broad trajectory as European states such as Prussia/Germany, Denmark and Sweden, which also introduced a permanent, trained, salaried civil service prior to the onset of mass franchises and parties.8 They did so at different times and for different reasons. In Prussia and Denmark a culture of impartial, professionalised bureaucracy initially developed in the eighteenth century under the tutelage of enlightened absolute monarchs – structures of the sort Britain had left behind in the late seventeenth century – and for reasons of court-based politics and military security. Nonetheless, as is emphasised, the effect was the same: the creation of a socially exclusive, upper tier of salaried civil servants, trained in the best schools and universities, prior to the advent of democracy. The result was that the state was better placed to withstand party-based forms of corruption. The significance of this variable is amply illustrated by the case of the US. As is argued, what distinguishes the trajectory of the US is precisely that the sequence of reform pursued by European states like Britain and Prussia was reversed.9 Although the original constitution of 1789 provided significant judicial, electoral and legislative protections against the abuse of public office, it was also designed to prevent the emergence of a strong central (federal) state, or indeed any opportunities for the monopoly of administrative power by one group or faction over another. At first non-elective offices were distributed within a culture of patronage largely restricted to the same East Coast elites – merchants, bankers, planters, lawyers – that had sponsored the revolution. By the 1840s, however, following the advent of universal (white) male suffrage in most states, mass parties had emerged as the key brokers of patronage and the ‘spoils of office’, albeit now on the more democratic basis of party loyalty, rather than social connections. Beginning with the presidency of Andrew Jackson, corruption became endemic at the federal, state and municipal levels, surviving the Civil War and persisting into the Progressive Era (and beyond in cities). It was not until the 1880s that the ‘spoils system’ was subject to any kind of

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statutory intervention: the 1883 Pendleton Act established the US Civil Service Commission and began the task of legally ring-fencing a permanent federal bureaucracy. Similar party-based cultures of clientelism, it might be added, emerged at mid-century in British North America/Canada and colonial Australia and New Zealand; and they too began building permanent civil services towards the end of the century.10 The other key point of comparison is relative degrees of political and social stability and their relation to the pace and durability of reform. Britain’s peculiarity in this respect is that it constructed a non-partisan, administrative state in a way that was, relatively speaking, both gradual and durable. Of course, in Britain this process was certainly informed by serious military and political crises (such as the loss of the American colonies, periodic bursts of radical agitation). Yet it was neither forged in, nor frustrated by, these crises to the same degree it was in mainland Europe, where the impact of military defeat (e.g. of Prussia in 1806) and waves of revolution and reaction (e.g. after 1848 in the German Confederation, the Austrian Empire and Denmark) exerted a more powerful and direct impact.11 France in particular offers a suggestive contrast to Britain. The Revolution of 1789 unleashed a flood of reforms that put paid to the many corruptions of the ancien regime, among them the sale of offices. As William Doyle has noted, ‘venality was among the first institutions of the Old Regime to be abolished, disappearing with feudalism, tithes, judicial fees and a whole range of other things, now deemed “abuses” on the night of 4 August 1789’.12 At the same time, the bases of a modern, rational administrative state were laid, first by the Jacobins and then more fully under Napoleon. Characterised by legal uniformity, centralised chains of command, technical competence and salaried public service, this state was symbolised by a new elite corps of prefects, appointed by the ministry of the interior. The Revolution, however, also marked the start of a century of profound political instability, rendering the emergence of a fully permanent caste of civil servants all but impossible. Each and every political rupture was accompanied by ruthless purges of officialdom. The fate of the prefects is instructive. The return of the Bourbons led to a purge of almost half the Napoleonic prefects; in 1852, with the advent of the Second Empire, roughly a third of those appointed under the previous regime were dismissed.

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Republican regimes were still more sweeping: in 1848, 1870 and 1879 almost the entire prefectoral corps was replaced.13 This is a crude descriptive summary, neglecting the crucial question of quite how we might explain these differences (a causal question much too large and complex to be addressed here). But the key point is that what emerges from these assessments is very much the orthodox (‘Whitehall’) picture of Britain as the home of a peculiarly gradualist, patrician-led process of state building which ultimately allowed for the development of a relatively clean, gentlemanly culture of public life.14 It is a picture, too, that might be considerably enlarged and deepened with reference to facets beyond the central state. Electoral reform is one instance, as Malcolm Crook’s contribution to the present volume suggests. Even though the British electoral system contained all sorts of archaic elements that would not have been tolerated in the US or France – for example, a plethora of franchises, double-member seats and plural voting – Britain was nonetheless the first to introduce measures that successfully stamped out electoral corruption. More broadly, as Jon Lawrence has argued, we might point to the tenacious hold over British public life of paternalist values deep into the twentieth century, at least until the 1960s.15 As he suggests, this extended far beyond the public schools and Oxbridge colleges that provided the breeding ground for most of Britain’s senior civil servants, prime ministers and cabinet members. It was also manifest in the commitment to the electoral representation of communities rather than individuals (which ended only in 1948 with the abolition of university seats and the ‘business vote’); the persistence of patrician styles of leadership and a prudish public morality; and multiple and enduring class biases in the legal, welfare and educational systems. As Lawrence concludes, Britain’s pathway to modernity was, if anything, more ‘conservative’ than ‘liberal’. Either way, it was clearly steeped in a deep distrust of egalitarian sentiments and democratic institutions. In short, the picture of Britain presented by social and political scientists captures some core elements of peculiarity and, at the very least, their work furnishes some useful points of comparison around which this kind of analysis might be developed further by historians. Yet it is also profoundly problematic in two key respects. One of these concerns the empirical scope of these studies. This is more

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than a matter of insufficient attention to nuance and complexity, which is always easy to point out when others are working on a large comparative canvas. Rather, it concerns the failure to confront some key structural aspects of Britain’s emergence as a modern state. By far the most egregious of these omissions is any serious engagement with the British Empire, both as a site of corruption in itself and as a source of corruption in Britain. When and where the empire does feature as part of the British story, it is commonly from the perspective of reform at home. Some accounts note, for instance, how the mid-century Northcote–Trevelyan agenda drew on reformist assumptions and practices first pioneered in colonial India during the 1830s and 1840s, when efforts were made to curb the patronage exercised by the EIC.16 But overall, little, if any, consideration is given to British colonial rule: a striking neglect, given the sheer size and superpower status of the British Empire by the nineteenth century. Clearly a different kind of Britain and a different set of peculiarities emerge once the empire is put back into the picture. Briefly, on the one hand, no other modern nation seems to have developed such a dense and expansive set of interrelations between colonial and metropolitan forms of corruption.17 We see this in the chapters contained in the present volume by Gilding and Middleton, both of which illuminate the entanglement of these forms in the case of the EIC and the Colonial Office. But even where corruption abroad was not the issue, or particular colonial institutions had been reformed, colonialism and the riches it yielded, or promised, fomented corruption at home. Many of the scandals of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods concerned the interests (as shareholders and directors principally) held by MPs and ministers in forms of wealth related in one form or another to colonial business ventures. Other scandals concerned their proximity to ‘plutocratic’ bankers and financiers who sought their patronage and company and who likewise derived their wealth from the empire and related forms of commerce and banking.18 In both scenarios the wealth normally flowed through the City of London, then the biggest financial market in the world. On the other hand, like other European colonial powers, save on a more extensive scale, Britain was party to all sorts of corruption on foreign soil, extending far beyond that which had sustained

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slavery and the EIC, which were abolished in 1833 and 1858. Colonialism certainly bred corruption scandals and scandalous characters, from venal administrators such as Arthur Crawford in Bombay to mercenary entrepreneurs and politicians such as Cecil Rhodes in South Africa; but these were secondary to the more foundational corruption that sustained the British Empire, which is distinguished by its relation to violence.19 Although the acquisition and consolidation of territory was often sealed by treaties and financial settlements with the leaders of the colonised, these were agreements forged in violence or the threat of violence.20 At the same time, the ‘public good’ of the colonised understood from their point of view was entirely eclipsed by the sense of civilisational entitlement and superiority intrinsic to imperialism – which was born indeed of the same broad liberal assumptions that shaped reform at home.21 The British were, in effect, operating in spaces where their partial interests, geopolitical or financial, necessarily constituted the ‘public good’, making for a kind of total corruption – or ‘despotism’, as this was conceived at the time. Between the major conflicts of the Crimean War (1854–6) and the South African War (1899–1902), Britain was involved in no fewer than fifteen colonial wars, including in Persia (1856–7), India (1857–9), China (1858– 60), New Zealand (1860–6), Ethiopia (1867–8), Afghanistan (1878–80), Zululand (1879), Egypt (1882), Burma (1885–6) and Sudan (1884–5), plus many more minor campaigns.22 The juxtaposition is striking, for the same stretch of time witnessed the emergence of a reformed civil service – the culture of which would be transplanted to parts of the empire – and significant legislative crackdowns on electoral (1883) and municipal corruption (1889). The empire, of course, was lost during the post-war period, at the same juncture as the embrace of more egalitarian, social-democratic forms of statecraft at home; but this should furnish only a modicum of relief, given the ways the financial and administrative legacies of British colonialism have facilitated corruption ever since.23 Chief among these, as Vanessa Ogle has recently detailed, is the extensive network of ‘offshore’ banking facilities located in postcolonial remnants such as the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas, which flourished in the wake of British decolonisation, as displaced elites sought safe havens for their wealth and newly liquidated assets.24 Sometimes dubbed a ‘second British Empire’ and with intimate

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links to the City, this network now helps to launder the money of kleptocratic regimes the world over, besides helping global elites engage in large-scale tax avoidance involving truly colossal sums of money (or evasion: the Swiss-style secrecy that pervades the offshore banking industry makes it difficult to tell).25 More might be mentioned in terms of the empirical omissions that characterise the comparative work of social and political scientists. Elite patronage survived longer than is acknowledged, persisting long into the twentieth century in relation to various positions in public life, as Anthony Sampson famously ‘anatomised’ on numerous occasions.26 Still more neglected is Britain’s uniquely entrenched and pervasive culture of state secrecy, which, as David Vincent has argued, was forged during the mid-nineteenth century as part of the reform of the civil service and left largely untouched until the late 1990s.27 The second serious omission, however, is more interpretive: a lack of interest in the capacious qualities of ‘corruption’ and its enduring status as the subject of political dispute and debate – in other words, a lack of interest in precisely what we have sought to foreground in this volume. To be sure, there is recognition that ‘corruption’ has been subject to competing definitions in the past and that the term remains a disputed one among scholars, commentators and the public alike; but this is seen as a methodological problem to be overcome in the present, as a prelude to analysis, rather than – as here – a problem that should be understood as a significant historical variable in itself. The result is not only that the British pathway appears somewhat apolitical and lifeless, devoid of the contested principles and fierce struggles that both frustrated and facilitated reform. More importantly, another crucial axis of comparison is left entirely unexplored. This too is another field ripe for more systematic historical exploration; but what is most striking is that all Western nations, not just Britain, seem to have entered – and exited – the ‘age of reform’ with a varied politics of corruption that mobilised and mixed expansive degenerative and narrower, office-based conceptions. The US is a prime example. As a voluminous literature has detailed, the early US republic was consumed by fears of corruption and dependence that drew on a rich repertoire of classical, renaissance, earlymodern and Enlightenment sources.28 In particular, the revolutionaries feared the kind of corruption which, as they saw it, had

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gripped Britain, where a tyrannical executive had deployed patronage and fomented faction to control the legislature and upset the nation’s ‘mixed constitution’. The very constitutional architecture of the US, underpinned by its doctrine of the separation of powers, is a product of this. But though the traditions of thought that had inspired the Founding Fathers gradually lost their force, ‘corruption’ lost none of its mutable qualities.29 The politics of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were awash with competing, more or less systemic diagnoses, notably populist critiques which attacked the metropolitan elites and the power of big banks, railroad companies and the gold standard, while championing the virtues of rural farmworkers and small-town America. Even more establishment Republican figures developed similar analyses, most famously Theodore Roosevelt, who staked his presidency on ‘cleaning up’ government and finally putting paid to the ‘spoils system’. France furnishes another example. A similar mix of sources that inspired US revolutionaries spurred reformists and radicals during the 1790s, helping them to delineate the sprawling corruption of the ancien regime and generate visions of a new kind of France. The ‘republic of virtue’ championed by Robespierre, the ‘Incorruptible’, drawing on classical ideals and the work of Rousseau, was at the extreme end, but all sought some kind of moral reformation of the state.30 The various regimes that followed were no less steeped in competing conceptions of corruption, culminating in the poisonous, polarised politics of the Third Republic, where, if anything, the problem loomed larger still, partly owing to unresolved issues dating back to the Revolutionary decade.31 Republicans agitated against the corrupting presence of the Catholic Church in the civic life of France (an issue not settled until 1905); but, above all, it was antiparliamentarian groups on the left and right that mobilised degenerative conceptions. Anarchists and communists routinely denounced the systemic corruptions of capitalism. On the far right, parties such as the nationalist, pro-monarchist Action française, whose popularity peaked in the interwar period, promised to rescue France from the moral decadence of the Third Republic and its corrupt class of politicians, who worked only for the benefit of bankers and industrialists – a vision of corruption and national renewal remarkably similar to that of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis.32

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What distinguishes the British case, then, is not the persistence of ‘corruption’ per se as an evolving object of politicisation and competing diagnoses. The differences lie in how this politics developed over time and the particular institutions and issues that were the focus of attack. Considering the above two examples, issues that became central in the US and France – for example, in the US, rural–urban economic cleavages and the lobbying power of big business and finance; in France, Church–state relations and the fundamental legitimacy of parliament – were more marginal in Britain: present but not to the same degree. What seems to have distinguished the politics of corruption in Britain is the relative prominence of two institutions that also helped to make Britain a global superpower: free trade and empire. Championed as a means of ending parasitic aristocratic privilege and mercantile monopolies, the advent of the former at mid-century was part of the demise of Old Corruption; and such sentiments flourished again in the Edwardian period, when its hegemony was threatened by tariff reform.33 Empire was the source of a more complex politics, not least because of its sheer diversity; but its many liberal, radical and socialist critics readily denounced it as an abundant source of corruption, not just abroad but at home.34 We see this in the early Victorian critiques of the Colonial Office, as Middleton’s chapter here has detailed, and these lines of attack persisted into the twentieth century. For all its pioneering economic analysis, J. A. Hobson’s widely read Imperialism (1902) toed an established moral line when he blasted the ‘tyrannical’ practices of colonial rule, while lamenting the corrupting effects of imperial wealth on Britain’s political classes.35 Such lines of analysis could no doubt be pushed further and with reference to more countries; but the essential point is that the capacious mutability of ‘corruption’ is hardly a British phenomenon. What varies is quite what this attaches to; and in Britain, as argued above, it is ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ that seem to have shifted centre-stage in this respect, beginning in the early twentieth century. Yet important though these conceptual variations are, they also need to be understood alongside a crucial institutional development, the time and place of which clearly had a transformative impact on the politics of corruption. This is how, with the advent of ‘mass’ franchises and more democratic representative institutions, parties, the political elites and the press became central to the

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question of corruption in public life and with them a slew of elements that now came into sharp focus: personal conflicts of interest, party donations, electoral spending, party-political patronage, parliamentary lobbying and public contracting. Comparatively speaking, the US was the first to experience this shift, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, with the advent of the spoils system and universal (white) male suffrage. In Britain, as in other major Western European states, such as France and Germany, it occurred from roughly the 1880s. But it seems all representative democracies have experienced the same. Certainly from a comparative perspective it makes for a distinctive feature of the problem as it evolved during the twentieth century, amid further ‘waves of democratisation’. The elements noted above are precisely those which, since the 1990s, global watchdogs and institutions have cast a keen eye upon. This opens up another fertile area of comparative analysis that has yet to be explored historically. What is clear is that from a regulatory perspective the US has been by far the most innovative and activist Western state. Its regulatory firsts are many: a ban on corporate donations to election funds (1907), limits on national election campaign spending (1925) and a compulsory register of congressional lobbyists (1946). Britain, by contrast, has been much slower to act, save for the pioneering 1883 Act, which set local spending limits. National spending limits (2000) and a register of lobbyists (2014), for instance, have been introduced only recently. Other European nations, such as France, Germany and Italy, it might be noted, have been similarly laggard. In other respects, however, the paths of Britain and the US are more closely aligned. Until the mid-twentieth century, the conduct of congressmen in relation to conflicts of interest was governed by informal codes of behaviour, which were internally policed by Congress.36 Only in 1968 was a register of interests introduced, along with published codes of conduct, innovations which closely followed the establishment of standing committees on ethical standards for the Senate (1964) and the House of Representatives (1967). Much the same applied in Britain, where a register was adopted in 1974, along with a supervisory select committee (though a standing committee of the US type would have to wait until the mid-1990s, in the form of the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life).

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This latter feature suggests that the picture of Britain’s political classes as uniquely in thrall to a culture of self-regulation and parliamentary privilege is not entirely accurate. Yet, in many respects, weighing up relative levels of regulation misses much of what is most important here and obscures some striking points of commonality in the politics that has surrounded this particular constellation of problems. Chief among these is the obsessive surveillance – part press-driven, part party-driven – of conflicts of interest and the multifarious relations between money and parties, businessmen and politicians. The US may have pioneered the journalistic practice and politics of ‘muck-raking’, as it became known in 1900, but something strikingly similar developed in Britain around the same time, as well as in France.37 In all three countries the 1880s witnessed the emergence of a novel culture of scandalising exposure whose core ingredients are still recognisable today: dramatic revelations of corruption in the press or parliament; then refutations, confirmations, speculations and further revelations; and then some kind of closure: a resignation or sacking; an official investigation; a commitment to do better – and all staged in a fractious public sphere characterised by partisan conflict, amid suspicions that the scandal is being exploited for political gain. The British examples are many: the Marconi affair, the honours scandals of the Edwardian and interwar eras, the Belcher and Poulson affairs of the post-war period and the ‘cash for questions’ affair and expenses scandal of recent decades, to name only a few. For the moment these must remain only tentative signposts towards a more critical historiography of the peculiarities of the British case. Putting the empire back into the picture is clearly crucial and the one element that should, one hopes, do most to deflate Britain’s ‘model’ credentials. But just as important, as we have suggested, is the necessity of remaining alive to the politics of corruption and its shifting manifestations and definitions. This is necessary not only because it helps to bring a critical perspective to bear on the present by illuminating the peculiarities of our current standards and practices, for better and for worse: both the civic virtues and vices we have left behind in the past. It is also necessary in order to keep alive the politics of corruption in the present and avoid misrepresenting what corruption is. As a number of political theorists have argued, criticising the positivist thrust of social-scientific

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approaches, corruption is fundamentally a matter of politics and inherently disputable, normative visions of the good society and state.38 To seek to reduce corruption to a single set of definitional criteria or measurable, regulatory variables that are somehow neutral and impartial is neither possible nor desirable: impossible, because such attempts must rest on some normative conception of the good society, however implicitly; and undesirable, because it discourages debate on an intrinsically debatable, political phenomenon. By keeping corruption in play as an essentially open site of critique in the past, we can help to preserve its openness in the present – and one benefit of this might be a more ambitious and critical sense of our own civic possibilities.

Notes   1 D. Hine and G. Peele, The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).   2 J. Meadowcroft, Conceptualizing the State: Innovation and Dispute in British Political Thought, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); R. Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain: In and after the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997).   3 G. Monbiot, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London: Pan Macmillan, 2001); D. Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now (London: Penguin, 2015); D. Whyte (ed.), How Corrupt is Britain? (London: Pluto Press, 2015); G. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016).  4 Monbiot, Captive State, p. 5; Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom.   5 Chapters on Britain appear in some historical volumes but do not subject it to any sustained, long-term comparative analysis. See E. Kreike and W. C. Jordan (eds), Corrupt Histories (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006) and R. Kroeze, A. Vitória and G. Geltner (eds), Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  6 Among the more historically minded are J. Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1997); R. Neild, Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution (London: Anthem, 2002); S. Tiihonen (ed.), The History of Corruption in Central Government (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2003); F. Fukuyama, Political

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Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (London: Profile Books, 2014); and A. Mungiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).  7 Mungiu-Pippidi, Quest for Good Governance, p. 58.   8 See especially Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, chap. 4 and B. Rothstein and J. Teorell, ‘Getting to Sweden, Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 38:3 (2015), 238–54.  9 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, chap. 9 and P. E. Arnold, ‘Democracy and corruption in the 19th century United States: parties, “spoils” and political participation’, in Tiihonen (ed.), History of Corruption, pp. 197–211. 10 J. Halligan (ed.), Civil Service Systems in Anglo-American Countries (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003). 11 A useful overview remains E. N. Anderson and P. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967). 12 W. Doyle, ‘Changing notions of public corruption, c. 1770–c. 1850’, in Kreike and Jordan (eds), Corrupt Histories, p. 83. 13 S. Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 159–60. 14 For a robust defence of this culture see B. O’Toole, The Ideal of Public Service: Reflections on the Higher Civil Service in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006). But for a more critical, iconoclastic appraisal see M. Coolican, No Tradesman and No Women: The Origins of the British Civil Service (London: Biteback Publishing, 2018). 15 J. Lawrence, ‘Paternalism, class, and the British path to modernity’, in S. Gunn and J. Vernon (eds), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 147–64. 16 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, pp. 127–9; Neild, Public Corruption, chap. 7. 17 On the economics of these entanglements see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2015, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2016). 18 The best guide remains Searle, Corruption in British Politics. 19 M. D. Metelits, The Arthur Crawford Scandal: Corruption, Governance, and Indian Victims (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019); A. Thomas, Rhodes: The Race for Africa (London: St Martin’s Press, 1997).

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20 J. Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 61–73. 21 A useful review of literature on this theme is A. Sartori, ‘The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission’, Journal of Modern History, 78:3 (2006), 623–42. 22 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, pp. 117–18. 23 This also extends to the way colonialism co-opted and distorted indigenous cultures of patronage. S. Pierce, Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 24 V. Ogle, ‘“Funk Money”: The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event’, Past & Present, 249 (2020), 213–49. 25 O. Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats who Rule the World (London: Profile Books, 2018). 26 For example, A. Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962) and The Essential Anatomy of Britain: Democracy in Crisis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992). 27 D. Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 28 B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967); G. S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 29 An excellent overview is Z. Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 30 C. Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 31 Useful overviews include P. M. Williams, Wars, Plots and Scandals in Post-War France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chap. 1 and Girling, Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy, chap. 3. 32 R. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 33 F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 34 M. Taylor, ‘Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19:1 (1991), 1–23; G. Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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35 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902), pp. 158–61. 36 R. Baker, ‘The history of Congressional ethics’, in B. Jennings and D. Callahan (eds), Representation and Responsibility: Exploring Legislative Ethics (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), pp. 3–27. 37 Williams, Wars, Plots and Scandals, chap. 1; A. Weinberg and L. Weinberg (eds), The Muckrakers (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 38 See especially M. Philp and E. Dávid-Barrett, ‘Realism about Political Corruption’, Annual Review of Political Science, 18 (2015), 387–402 and R. A. Sparling, Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State Press, 2019).

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Index

All UK towns are given within pre-1974 counties, except for Glasgow, London, Belfast and Edinburgh. Literary works can be found under their authors’ names. Abdulmejid I, Sultan 184 Acland, Thomas 206 Act of Settlement (1701) 107 Act of Union (1800) 263 Action française 290 Afghanistan 288 Allahabad, Treaty of (1765) 79 Allan, David 34 American Revolutionary War (1775–83) 76, 89, 97 Aristotle 44 Asquith, Herbert 224 Association for Education in Citizenship 13 Association for Promoting the Application of Endowments to the Education of Women 206 Atherley-Jones, Llewellyn 69 Austria 285 Vienna 185–6 Australia 116, 127–8, 130, 285 Bagehot, Walter 25, 49 Bahamas 288

Baldwin, Stanley 251 Balfour, Arthur 224, 233, 244 Ballot Act (1872) 116, 127, 130, 157, 171, 261 Bank of England 8 Bannister, William 67 Barré, Isaac 87–8 Barron, Henry 193 Barwell, Richard 83 Bathurst, Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst 145 Beattie, Jack 265 Bebbington, David 200 Belcher affair (1948–9) 293 Belfast 23, 259–69, 274–6 Belfast Corporation 261, 264–9 Belfast Pottinger constituency 265 Belfast Woodvale constituency 267 Falls Road 263 Newtownards Road 267 Old Park Division 265 Shankill Road 263 West Belfast constituency 263, 265 Whiteabbey Sanatorium 267

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Index Belloc, Hilaire 228 Bentham, Jeremy 17, 25 Berkeley, Francis 161 Black Watch 38 Blair, Reginald 249 Blatchford, Robert 227 Bloomfield, John, 2nd Baron Bloomfield 185 Board of Guardians (Default) Act (1926) 251 Bodley, John 122 Boer War see Second Boer War (1899–1902) Bonar Law, Andrew 241 Bosnia and Herzegovina Mostar 263 Bovril 226 Bowen, Huw 90 Bowring, Sir John 193–4 Bradlaugh, Charles 213 Brennan, Elizabeth 265 Brewer, John 16 Bribery at Elections Act (1842) 159–60 British Broadcasting Corporation 245 British Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company 227 Brodrick, George 201 Brougham, Henry 49 Brown, David, et al. Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 (2018) 5 Broxmeyer, Jeffrey 126 Brussels 185, 187, 193 Bryce Commission see Royal Commission on Secondary Education (1895) Bryce, James 206–8, 211 Buchan, Bruce 9–10, 240 Buchanan, Andrew 186

299

Buller, Charles 146 Bulwer, Henry 184, 186 Burgoyne, John 81–2 Burke, Edmund 24, 85–6, 91–3 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) 85 Burma 288 Buxton, Sir Edward 168 Cadogan, Henry, Viscount Chelsea 186–7 Caine, William 66 Cambridge, University of Girton College 208 St John’s College 207 Campbell, Archibald, 3rd Duke of Argyll 38 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 207, 224 Canada 141, 144, 285 Canning, Stratford 184 Canton (Guangzhou) 194 Caradoc, John Hobart, 2nd Baron Howden 185 Carlisle Peace Commission (1778) 38 Carlton Club 251 Carlyle, Thomas 147 ‘cash for questions’ affair (1994–7) 293 Catholic Church 8, 15, 120, 262–5, 268–79 Cayman Islands 288 Cecil, Hugh 243–4 Conservatism (1912) 244 Central Electricity Board 245 Chadwick, Edwin 60, 62 Chamberlain, Arthur, 227 Chamberlain, Austen 227 Chamberlain, Joseph 208, 227, 229, 231–2, 234–5 Chamberlain, Neville 227, 252

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Charity Commission 204, 207 Charity Organisation Society 13 Chartism 12, 20, 62, Cheshire Chester 121 Crewe 243 Macclesfield 160 Chesterton, Cecil 228 Chile Santiago 186 China 288 Church of England 4, 15, 209, 223, 250 Church of Ireland 204 Church of Scotland 37–8 Churchill, David 59 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 8, 44, 57 City of London 15, 19–20, 79, 85, 204, 207, 212–14, 222, 229–30, 287–9 City of London Corporation 210, 214 City of London Parochial Charities Act (1883) 207 civil service 27, 179–83, 188–9, 195, 200–1, 284, 288–9 Civil Service Commission 180, 188–9, 285 Clarendon Commission see Royal Commission on the Revenues and Management of Colleges and Schools (1864) Clarion 227 Clavering, General Sir John 83 Clive, Robert, Lord 79–82 Coal Industry Commission (1919) 244 Cobbett, William 4 Cockburn, Alexander 167–8 Collins, Arthur 266 Colonial Office 12, 18–19, 136–55, 178, 227, 231, 287, 291

Commissioners of Audit 102 Committee on Standards in Public Life see Nolan Committee Commons Journal 161 Conservative Party 1, 8, 11–12, 14, 17, 19, 24, 55, 60–2, 126, 139, 143–5, 161–2, 177–95, 202, 206, 212, 222, 226–8, 232–5, 239–55, 259, 281 Constantinople (Istanbul) 184, 186 Controverted Elections Act (1839) 163 Controverted Elections Act (1868) 164 Copeland, Ann 267–8 Corn Laws 11–12, 181–2, 223 Cornewall Lewis, George 138, 143 Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Earl Cornwallis 77 Corrupt Practices Acts (1854) 21, 116, 157, 161, 166–7, 170–2 (1858) 160, 169 (1863) 160, 163 (1883) 21, 128, 130, 157–8, 166–7, 170–2 Cotton, Sir William 212 County and Borough Police Act (1856) 62–3 Cragoe, Matthew 163 Crampton, Sir John 186 Crawford, Arthur 288 Crewe’s Act see Parliament Act (1782) Crimean War 148, 288 Cyprus Nicosia 263 Daily Record 272 Daily Telegraph 66 Davies, Albert Emil 247 Davies, Emily 208

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Index De Goncourt, Madame 65 De Solages, Jérôme-Ludovic-Marie 121 De Veil, Thomas 58 Denmark 283–5 Copenhagen 186 Derby Commission see Royal Commission on the Livery Companies of the City of London (1884) Derbyshire Chesterfield 272 Derby 243 Devaynes, William 89 Devon Totnes 123, 156–7, 160 Disraeli, Benjamin 19, 149, 162, 169, 187, 193, 200–1, 204–5, 249 Diwani rights 79–80, 86 Donnan, Meta 268 Doyle, William 285 Duncairn Orange Lodge 265 Dundas, Henry, Lord Dundas 38 Dunlop 226 Dunning, John 87–8 Durham Chester-le-Street 248, 252 East India Company 16, 18, 47, 75–93, 280, 287–8 Board of Control 93 Court of Directors 84, 89 General Court of Proprietors 84 Supreme Council 82–3, 88 Supreme Court of Judicature 83 Edgcumbe, George 193 Edinburgh 39, 49, 269 Edinburgh Review 48 Edinburgh, University of 17, 35–6, 38, 47–9 Egypt 288

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Elections Commissions Act (1852) 159 Ellice, Edward 160 Ellis, Charles, 6th Baron Howard de Walden 185 Emsley, Clive 55 Endowed Schools Act (1869) 19, 204–5 Endowed Schools Amendment Act (1875) 204 Endowed Schools Commissioners 204, 206 Engels, Friedrich 208 English Review 245 Enlightenment 10–11, 17, 34–49, 98, 289 Erasmus of Rotterdam 7 Erdozain, Dominic 63–4 Ermen and Engels 208 Ermen and Roby Ltd 208 Ethiopia 288 ‘expenses’ scandal (2009) 1, 293 Eye-Witness 228 Fairfull, William 271 Fane, John, 11th Earl of Westmorland 185 Federal Corrupt Practices Act (1910) 128 Ferguson, Adam 17, 34–49 Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy (1766) 36 Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) 36 Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) 36 Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792) 36 Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr Price (1776) 36–7

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The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) 36 Ffrench, Robert 187 Fielding, Henry 57–9, 61 Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) 57 Fielding, John 57–9, 61 Financial News 261 First World War, 118, 180, 244, 262, 269, 275 Firth, Joseph 213 Fisher, William 225 Fitch, Joshua 206–8, 210 Fitzgerald, William Vesey 193 Fleischacker, Thomas 41–3 Fletcher, Andrew, Lord Milton 38 Forbes, William 271 Foreign Office 19, 141, 177–95 Forster, W. E. 207 Fox, Charles 24, 78, 91–3 Fox, William Johnson 167 France 22, 41, 97, 115–32, 183–4, 188, 191, 285–6, 290–3 Brittany 122, 125 Brive 123 Paris 186 Roubaix 124 Tarn (department) 121, 126 Francis, Philip 83 Fraser’s Magazine 145, 147 French Revolution 41, 118, 290 French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) 97 Garnett, Jeremiah 59 Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury 201, 224 General Medical Council 268

George, Henry 126 George III 75, 85 Germany 128, 284, 292 Berlin 185–6 Hanover 193 Württemburg 193 Getgood, Robert 265 Gibraltar 89 Gladstone, William 13, 26, 130, 148, 166, 170, 180, 195, 200–9, 211–12, 214–15, 224–5 Glasgow 260–3, 269–74 Castlemilk 274 Drumchapel 274 Easterhouse 274 Gorbals 270–1 Pollok 274 Glasgow Evening Times 272 Glasgow Herald 272 Glynne, Catherine 205 Glynne, Mary 205 Goddard affair (1929) 54 Goldman, Lawrence 204 Good, E. T. 245 Gordon-Lennox, Charles, 5th Duke of Richmond 187 Gosling, Audley 190 Graham, Aaron 10, 17–18, 177, 280 Greece Athens 41, 194 Greene, Jack 98 Greg, W. R. 148 Grenville, William, 1st Baron Grenville 79 Gretton, John 245 Grey, Henry, 3rd Earl Grey 147 Gronow, Rees 160 Grosvenor, Robert, Earl Grosvenor 121, 158, 167–9 Grote, George 140, 161

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Index Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen 182 Hammond, Edmund 180, 188–9, 193, Hansard 158, 161 Harling, Philip 16–17, 78, 177, 223 Harris, Edward 186 Harris, James, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury 19, 177–8, 181–95 Harris, Jose 210 Hastings, Warren 18, 77, 83, 88–9, 91–2 Hearnshaw, F. J. C. 248 Hellmuth, Eckhardt 97 Hertfordshire Hertford 160, 172 St Albans 160 Hibbert, John 169, 171 Hicks-Beach, Michael 242 Hill, Lisa 9–10, 116, 240 Hobart, Vere, Lord Hobart 186–7 Hobart-Hampden, Augustus, 6th Earl of Buckinghamshire 186–7 Hobhouse, Arthur 207, 210 Hobson, J. A. 291 Imperialism (1902) 291 Home Office 55, 63, 194 Hong Kong 193–4 Hont, Istvan 34 Hook, Walter 206 Hooley affair (1898) 221, 226–7, 230–1, 233–4 Horner, Francis 48 Hoskins & Sons 227 Howe, Anthony 11 Hulme, William 209 Hume, David 34–6, 40, 47, 146 Hume, Joseph 167–8 Hunter, Samuel 259

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Huntingdonshire Huntingdon 89 Hurstfield, Joel 4 Ignatieff, Michael 34 Independent Labour Party 262 Independent Office for Police Conduct 71 India 18, 48, 75–93, 136, 230, 287–8 Bengal 76, 78–80, 82–4, 86, 88, 91–2 Dhaka 83 Bombay (Mumbai) 288 Calcutta (Kolkata) 82 India Act (1784) 93 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 1 Ireland 120, 261, 263 Cashel 160 Galway 162 Sligo 160 Irish Home Rule movement 206, 264 Irish Rebellion (1798) 263 Irish Partition (1921) 263–4, 274 Isaacs, Rufus 227 Italy 292 Florence 44 Rome 36, 39, 41, 44 Tuscany 193 Jackson, Andrew 284 Jamaica 17–18, 96–111 Commission of Public Accounts 90, 100–2, 105 Receiver-General 97, 100–5 James, Sir Henry 170–1 Jeffrey, Francis 48 Jenkinson, Charles 92 Jenkinson, Robert, 2nd Earl of Liverpool 143, 160

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Index

Jennings Clerke, Philip 87 Jerningham, George 193 Johnson Fox, William 167 Jones, Jack 252–3 Jones, R. A. 177, 179, 181 Joseph, Keith 239 Jowett, Benjamin 180, 195 Justice 229 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) 57 Kent Sandwich 160 Kirkwood, David 270 Knightley, Rainald 161–2 Knights, Mark 8, 78 Kynoch affair (1900–1) 221, 227, 229, 231, 233–4 Labouchere, Henry, 1st Baron Taunton 206 Labouchere, Henry 233 Labour Party 8, 21, 24–5, 55, 222, 239, 243, 245, 248–9, 252–5, 259, 262, 269–74, 281 Lanarkshire Monklands 274 Lancashire 207, 211 Ashton-under-Lyne 123 Blackburn 163 Eccles 208 Lancaster 157, 160 Liverpool 59, 160, 262, 275 Manchester 59, 67, 208–9, 269 Manchester Grammar School 206 Manchester High School for Girls 208 Oldham 167 Preston 243 Rochdale 162 Salford 259

Langford, Paul 84–5 Lansbury, George 252 Laski, Harold 260 A Century of Municipal Progress (1935) 260 Lawrence, Jon 22, 286 Lawrence, Stephen 54 Le Creusot 126 Leatham, William 164–5 Lebanon Beirut 263 Leicestershire Leicester 269 Lennox, Lord Henry 187 Lenox-Conyngham, George 188 Liberal Party 8, 11, 13–14, 19, 21, 24, 69, 123, 137, 139, 148, 161–2, 165, 169, 185, 200–15, 222, 224, 227, 228–30, 232–5, 242, 253, 269–70 Liberal Unionist Party 66, 222 livery companies 19–20, 204, 212–4 Lloyd George, David 225, 227, 231, 234, 244 Lloyd, Sir Thomas 171 Lloyd’s Weekly News 66 Local Government Acts (1929) 252 (1933) 261 Loftus, John, 2nd Marquess of Ely 186 Loftus, John, 3rd Marquess of Ely 186 Loftus, Lord Augustus 186 London (excluding the City of London) 41, 57–9, 64, 69, 79, 122, 164, 204, 212–13, 246–55 Bow Street 57–8, 65 Camberwell 249

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Index Chelsea 213 Clapham Common 66 Dulwich College 207 Greater London Council 255 Greenwich 212 Kennington 249 Shaftesbury Avenue 259 Silvertown 252–3 Stepney 164 Tower Hamlets 207 West Ham 248, 252–3 Westminster 57, 166, 259 London and Westminster Review 156 London County Council 25, 214 London Municipal Reform League 213 London Passenger Board 245 Long, Edward 98–9, 104, 107–9 Long, H. Kingsley 270 No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums (1935) 270 Lowe, Robert 149, 208, 210, 242 Lyons, Richard 186 Lyttelton, Edward 206 Lyttelton, George, Lord Lyttelton 205–6 McArthur, Alexander 270 McCall, Bradley 268 McCullagh, Sir Crawford 264, 266 McDaniel, Stephen 58 McGovern, John 272 MacGregor, D. H. 241 McMahon, William 187 Macmillan, Harold 254 MacPherson, John 47–8 Madden, Sarah 268 Mallock, W. H. 243 A Critical Examination of Socialism (1907) 243 Manchester Guardian 59, 235

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Marconi affair (1912–13) 221, 227–30, 232, 235, 293 Marshall, P. J. 80 Marx, Karl 36 Masonic lodges 253, 262 Matthew, Colin 200–2 Maudling, Reginald 259 Maxse, Leopold 228, 234 Megaw Inquiry (1926) 266 Merivale, Herman 147 Metropolitan Board of Works 259, 261 Metropolitan Police 54, 56, 60, 66, 69 Central Intelligence Division (CID) 66 Flying Squad 55 Obscene Publications Unit 55 Metropolitan Police Act (1829) 61 Middlesex 57, 167 Middlesex Justices Act (1792) 58 Middleton, Charles 179 Midlothian campaign (1878–80) 170 Mill, John Stuart 129, 140–1, 145, 166, 203–4, 242, 249 Considerations on Representative Government (1861) 242 Molesworth, William 147 Monmouthshire Bedwellty 248, 252 Monson, Colonel William 83 Montagu, John, 4th Earl of Sandwich 89 Morning Herald 62 Morning Post 185 Morrison, Herbert 25 Mundella, A. J. 225 Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 283 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 21, 260–1

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Municipal Reform Party 246, 249–50 Murray, Alexander 227–8 Murray, James 193 Murray, James, 2nd Duke of Atholl 38 Myanmar see Burma

Labour Party 264–5, 267–8 Stormont Assembly 264–5 Northern Star 62 Northumberland Tynemouth 162 Nottinghamshire Nottingham 55, 269

Napoleon I 118, 285 Napoleon III 184 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) 136 National Review 228, 230, 234 Navigation Acts 11 Nechtman, Tillman 77 New Witness 228–9 New Zealand 285, 288 Newcastle 259 Newcastle Commission see Royal Commission on the State of Popular Education in England (1861) Nimmo, Adam 244 Nixon, John 267 Nolan Committee (Committee on Standards in Public Life) 2, 27, 282, 292 Norfolk Great Yarmouth 156, 160 North, Francis, 6th Earl of Guildford 188 North, Frederick, Lord North 81–93 North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women 206 Northcote, Sir Stafford 205–6 Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854) 19, 137, 177, 179–81, 183, 185, 187, 194, 200–1, 287 Northern Ireland 263–9 Audit Commission 266

O’Gorman, Frank 22, 166 O’Shaugnessy, Andrew 98 O’Sullivan, T. 267 Observer 61, 65 Ogle, Vanessa 288 ‘Old Corruption’ 3–4, 10–12, 15, 20, 24, 27, 39, 48, 78, 96, 110, 136–7, 140–1, 144, 150, 177, 194, 200, 209–10, 221–5, 236, 250, 261, 281, 291 On the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service see Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854) Orange Order 262, 265, 268, 275 Ostrogorski, Moisei 164 Otte, Thomas 177 Oxford, University of 147, 207–8, 213 Balliol College, Oxford 180 Brasenose College, Oxford 209 Oxford University Act (1854) 202 Owen, Robert 17 Paine, Thomas 17 Pakington, Sir John 166 Pall Mall Gazette 66 Parliament Act (1782) 60, 91 Parliamentary and Corrupt Practices Act (1880) 160 Parliamentary Elections Act (1868) 124, 157–9, 162–4, 170, 172

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Index Parry, Jonathan 215, 226 Paterson, John 274 Peel, Robert 17, 60, 126, 158, 160, 163, 168, 178, 182, 206 Pendleton Act (1883) 285 Persia (Iran) 288 Personal Rights Association 64 Perthshire Perth 38 Petty, William, Earl of Shelburne 90–1 Petty-Fitzmaurice, 4th Marquess of Lansdowne 157 Philips, Lionel 244 Philp, Mark 6–7 Phipps, Constantine, 1st Marquess of Normanby 185 Pitt, William, 1st Earl of Chatham 79–82, 85 Pitt, William (the Younger) 17, 77, 91–3 Plassey, Battle of (1757) 79, 87 Pocock, J. G. A. 8, 34–6, 41 Police Act (1964) 55 Police and Public Vigilance Society 68 Police Complaints Authority 71 Police Complaints Board 71 Police Complaints Commission 71 Political Economy Club 202 Polybius 8 ‘Poplarism’ 21, 240–1, 247–55 Portugal Lisbon 193 Post Office 227, 247 Potter, Richard 159 Pottinger, George 259 Poulson, John 27, 239, 259, 274, 293 Pratt, Edwin 242–3 The Case against Railway Nationalisation (1913) 242

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Presley, Leo 267–8 Prevention of Corruption Acts (1906) 224, 259, 261 (1916) 224, 259, 261 Primrose, Archibald, 5th Earl Rosebery 185, 207 Prussia see Germany Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act (1889) 21, 224, 259, 261, 272, 274, 288 Pulteney, William 42 Radical Programme (1885) 208 Reader 202 Redcliffe-Maud, John, Lord Redcliffe-Maud 259 Regulating Act (1773) 78–88, 91–2 Reilly, James 274 Representation of the People Acts (1832) 118–19, 124, 139, 142, 156–62, 170 (1867) 23, 157, 160, 162, 169, 171, 223, 249 (1884) 13, 132, 157 (1918) 118, 248, 269 Reynolds’s Newspaper 229 Rhodes, Cecil 288 Ridley, Nicholas 255 Ritchie, Alexander 271–2 Robertson, John 34–6 Robespierre, Maximilien 290 Robinson, John 87–8 Roby, Henry 206–8 Roebuck, John 141 Roosevelt, Theodore 290 Rothstein, Bo 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36, 290 Royal Commission on the Livery Companies of the City of London (1884) 212 Royal Commission on Parochial Charities (1880) 207

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Royal Commission on Secondary Education (1895) 207 Royal Commission on the Revenues and Management of Colleges and Schools (1864) 205–6 Royal Commission on the State of Popular Education in England (1861) 205 Royal Ireland Constabulary 265 Royal Ulster Constabulary 265 Rubinstein, W. D. 78 Russell, Lord John 147, 158–9, 161, 168 Russia 190 St Petersburg 184, 186 St Clair, Alexander 188–90 Salmon, Cyril, Lord Salmon 259–60 Sampson, Anthony 289 Sankey Commission see Coal Industry Commission (1919) Saturday Review 235 Schools Inquiry Commission (1868) 205–7, 211 Schweppes 226 Scott, George Gilbert 192 Scottish Protestant League 270 Scottish Sunday Express 272 Searle, G. R. 11, 26, 177, 220 Second Boer War (1899–1902) 227, 230 Second Empire (French) 120, 285 Second Republic (French) 118 Second World War 240, 262 Secret Ballot Act (1872) 14, 116, 122, 127, 130, 157, 159, 170, 172, 261 Secret Commissions Act see Prevention of Corruption Act (1906)

Seven Years’ War (1756–63) 75 Seymour, Arthur 190 Seymour, Charles 157, 161 Seymour, George Hamilton 185, 190 Shaw, Albert 269 Sheffield, George 190 Sher, Richard 34, 46 Sherman, Lawrence, W. 71 Shropshire Bridgnorth 163 Ludlow 158 Sillitoe, Percy 272 Singapore 283 Smith, Adam 34–7, 39, 42–3, 47 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) 37 Smith, Goldwin 148 Smith, Sydney 48 Smith, T. Dan 239 Smith-Stanley, Edward, 14th Earl of Derby 19, 169, 178, 181–7, 189, 191–3, 212 Smollett, Tobias 39 Social Democratic Federation 229 Somerset Bridgwater 160 Spain 99 Madrid 185–6 Sparling, Robert 7–8 Speaker 230 Spectator 142, 162, 231 Staffordshire 160 Stafford 123, 160, 172 Walsall 164 Standard 65 Stanhope, Philip, 5th Earl of Chesterfield 38 Stanley, Edward, Lord Stanley 186, 205 Steiner, Zara 177

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Index Stephen, Sir James 142 Stewart, Dugald 47–8 Storch, Robert 61 Strain, James 271–3 Stuart, John, 3rd Earl of Bute 38, 79 Sudan 288 Suffolk Dunwich 156 Sudbury 160 Surrey Reigate 156, 160 Sussex Brighton 55 Chichester 187 Christ’s Hospital 206 Sweden 284 Stockholm 193 Switzerland 186 Tammany Hall 122, 275 Taunton Commission see Schools Inquiry Commission (1868) Taylor, Henry 142–3 Temple, Frederick 205–6, 210 Temple, Henry, 3rd Viscount Palmerston 180, 184 Thatcher, Margaret 27, 239–40, 251, 254, 281 The Times 65–6, 69, 149, 165–6, 201, 204–5, 234–5, 239, 274 Theakston, Kevin 194 Third Republic (French) 118–19, 122, 124, 290 Thompson, James 182 Thorne, Will 252 Thurlow, Thomas 190 Tillman Act (1907) 128 Timewell, James 68–9 Tory party see Conservative Party

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Toulmin Smith, Joshua 61–2 Townshend Duties (1767–8) 80 Transparency International 1 Treasury (HMG) 80–1, 84, 87–8, 92, 179–80, 194–5, 211, 225 Trentmann, Frank 11 Trevelyan, Charles 180, 195 ‘Triple Alliance’ 244 Trollope, Anthony 209 The Warden (1855) 209 Truth 233 Tubes and Elliot’s Metal Company 227 Turner, Sir William 266 Tweed, William ‘Boss’ 122 Ulster Derry (Londonderry) 264 United States Baltimore 123 Connecticut 121, 125 Florida 38, 130 Georgia 128 Maryland 130 Massachusetts 128 Nebraska 127 New York 122, 127, 275 South Carolina 128 Tennessee 130 Virginia 130 US Civil Service Commission 285 US House of Representatives 292 US Senate 292 Valente, Mary 268 Vansittart, George 89 Varraich, Aiysha 6 Victoria I 183 Villiers, George, 4th Earl of Clarendon 192 Vincent, David 289

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Wade, John 15, 60 Black Book (1820) 15, 60 Extraordinary Black Book (1832) 140, 143 Wakefield Herald 163 Waller, Sir Thomas 193 Walmsley, Sir Joshua 169 Walsh, Sir John 168 War Office 227 Ward Hunt, George 165 Warman, Guy, Bishop of Manchester 260 Warren, Charles 66 Warwickshire Birmingham 206, 227, 251 King Edward’s School 206 Coventry 160 Leamington Priors 160 Warwick 160 Watson-Wentworth, Charles 2nd Marquess of Rockingham 79 Weber, Max 7 Wellesley, Henry, 1st Earl Cowley 183–5 West Dunbartonshire Clydebank 274 Dumbarton 274 Whig party 8, 17–18, 21, 43, 48–9, 57, 60, 62, 75, 96, 98, 100, 105–7, 110, 121, 137, 139, 143–4, 147–8, 180, 183–6, 188, 191–2, 194, 222–3, 242, 261 White, Arnold 230

Efficiency and Empire (1901) 230 Whyte, David How Corrupt is Britain? (2015) 2 Wild, Jonathan 58 Williams, Chris 55 Williamson, Philip 246 Wiltshire Old Sarum 156 Swindon 243 Winch, Donald 48–9 Wodehouse, John 2nd Earl Kimberley 184–5 Woman’s Own 251 Wombwell, George 89–90 Wood, John Carter 54 Wood, Kingsley 249 Wood, Malcolm 67 World Bank 1, 6 Wraxall, Nathaniel 89 Wylie, Macleod 144 Wyse, Sir Thomas 194 Wyvill, Christopher 87 Yorkshire Beverley 122–3, 125, 160 Huddersfield 162 Leeds 59–60 Sheffield 272 Wakefield 162–5 Yorkshire Association 87 Young, Robert 268 Zululand 288