A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days. Joseph Grego
to the Tories, all who were opposed to the “Tackers” of their order must be stigmatized to the public as “Sneakers.”
The Whigs were equally unscrupulous in the audacity of their assertions; the fatally damaging effect of a startling calumny, no matter how improbable, so that it be bold enough, exploded on an opponent by way of surprise—a resource much relied upon when matters looked desperate at these times of unsparing warfare—is illustrated in the next extract:—
“May 15th.—The Lord Woodstock, son of the Earl of Portland, has carried it at Southampton against Fred Tilney, Esq., a loyal and worthy gentleman, which was done by this trick:—that gentleman happening to pay his reckoning in that town with about 70 Loudores, which he had received there, the Whig party immediately gave out he was a French pensioner, which calumny answered their purpose.”
“May 29th.—Since my last, we have had an account of several elections, which I leave to the Gazette to enumerate: only the management of some of them is worth notice, particularly for the county of Worcester, where Sir John Packington and Mr. Bromley carried it gloriously against Mr. Walsh, who was set up by the Dissenters. Sir John Packington had a banner carried before him, whereon was painted a church falling, with this inscription—‘For the Queen and Church, Packington.’ It was observable, that while they were marching through the Foregate-Street, they met the Bishop’s coach, in which was a Non-Con. teacher, going to poll for Capt. Walsh, but the horses (at the sight of the church, as ’twas believed) turned tail, overturned and broke the same, and very much bruised the Holder-Forth’s outward man; and this raised no small admiration that the Bishop’s horses should be afraid of a church.”
The commotion which in the days of Queen Anne was manifested in the public thoroughfares at an electioneering epoch is incidentally pictured by Dean Swift, in his “Journal to Stella:”—
“Oct. 5, 1710.—This morning Delaval came to see me, and went to Kneller’s, who was in town. On the way we met the electors for parliament-men, and the rabble came about our coach, crying, ‘A Colt! A Stanhope! etc.’ We were afraid of a dead cat, or our glasses broken, and so were always of their side.”
Among the lost illustrations of the humours of elections is the ballad, “full of puns,” which Swift mentions having produced on that said Westminster election; for any trace of which we have vainly searched among the political pamphlets and poetical broadsides of the Queen Anne era.
It is Swift who relates the untoward catastrophe which awaited his friend, Richard Steele, the improvident “Tatler,” who, having a design to serve in the last parliament of Queen Anne, resigned his place of Commissioner of the Stamp Office in June, 1713, and was chosen for the borough of Stockbridge, in Hampshire, one of the snug constituencies swept away by the Reform Bill a century or so later. The Dean writes of Dick’s adventures on this errand:—
“There was nothing there to perplex him but the payment of a £300 bond, which lessened the sum he carried down, and which an odd dog of a creditor had intimation of and took this opportunity to recover.”
Steele’s parliamentary career was brief. He had not been long in the House before he contrived to get expelled, and gave deadly offence to the queen, by writing “The Englishman” and “The Crisis” against the Jacobite Tories. With the advent of his “Protestant hero,” George I., Steele secured patronage, knighthood, and a seat in the first parliament, where he sat for the since-notorious Boroughbridge, Yorkshire.
A deeply designed stroke of electioneering policy is credited to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who excelled in the subtle tactics invaluable in these emergencies, which raised her to the level of Wharton in election fame, while promoting the success of her nominees. Lord Grimston happened to oppose her grace’s candidates. Now, Lord Grimston, as is related by Johnson, had written a heavy play, “Love in a Hollow Tree,” having become ashamed of which bantling, he did his best to suppress it:—
“The leaden crown devolved on thee,
Great poet of the hollow tree.”
“But the Duchess of Marlborough had kept one, and when he was against her at an election, she had a new edition of it printed, and prefixed to it, as a frontispiece, an elephant dancing on a rope; to show that his Lordship’s writing comedy was as awkward as an elephant dancing on a rope.”37
It was so much a matter of course that everything in a man’s life should tell against him, if he had the temerity to stand for parliament, that Johnson, when interrogated by Boswell, “whether a certain act of folly would injure a friend of theirs for life?” replied, “It may perhaps, sir, be mentioned at an election,”—the duchess’s feat probably presenting itself to Johnson’s mind at the time.
Hannay, in his sparkling essay on “Electioneering,” also relates the following:—“Mamma,” said a young candidate to his parent in deep confidence, one nomination day, “tell me truly, is there anything against my birth?”—an ingenious precaution in view of eventualities which the youth not imprudently employed to prepare himself for the worst, and that he might not he taken by surprise at the hustings.
The Tories were forced, after their failure to proclaim the Pretender as successor to Queen Anne, to subscribe their loyalty on the accession of George I. This they did with a reservation, as hinted by their opponents, who now held the good things of the administration:—
“Your fathers, like men, who had thoughts of a Heaven,
Took the Oaths in the Sense in which they were given;
But you, like your Brethren the Jesuits, can find
A way to evade all the ties of mankind,
So that nothing but Halters your faction can bind.”
It was not without reasonable suspicions of the Jacobite party that the ministers of George I. deemed it prudent to keep the Commons they had, rather than face a fresh election, since a general mistrust was abroad. From an effusion upon the bell-ringing in 1716, on the anniversary of Queen Anne’s coronation, it appears this tribute of respect to the memory of the late sovereign was regarded as a Tory manifesto:—
“ ’Tis Nancy’s Coronation Day
By whom ye hop’d to bring in play
Young George, the Chevalier.
But Fate, who best disposes things,
And pulls down Queens and sets up Kings,
A better George sent here.”
According to the lyrist, the papists were tired of praying for Walpole’s abrupt end; but the conclusion exhibits the feeling then prevailing—and which was justified by after-events—that the prolonged sessions of parliament under the new Septennial Act offered some defence against the schemes of their opponents; in fact, the tables were turned, and the Whigs of this parliament dreaded the machinations of the Tories, much as the Abhorrers and courtiers detested and feared the Whigs under Charles II.
“But now they utter loud complaints,
And curse all male and female saints,
Walpole still lives, their curb;
And four long years, at least, must come,
Ere French pistoles, and friends to Rome,
Our Liberties disturb.”
The Pretender, whose cause looked hopeful at the time of his “dear sister’s” decease, was treated by the Whig satirists with all the ridicule their pens could command:—
“A FULL AND AMPLE EXPLANATION OF ONE KING JAMES’S DECLARATION.
“Had my dear Sister still been living,
I might have hop’d for (the Crown) of her giving;