History of Parliament Online

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The period 1820-32 encompasses four Parliaments and the general elections of 1820, 1826, 1830 and 1831. It covers the latter part of the Tory ministry of Lord Liverpool, the brief and unsuccessful Canning and Goderich administrations, the premiership of the Duke of Wellington and the first half of Lord Grey’s coalition government of 1830-4. Among the major issues of the times were the Queen Caroline affair, agricultural distress, the Whig campaign for economies and legal reforms, debates on financial and commercial policy, the emergence of liberal Toryism, colonial slavery, repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. These years saw further developments in the history of party: most Members held some sort of allegiance to one of the two main groups of Whigs and Tories, but there were also Grenvillites, Canningites, O’Connellites and Radicals, as well as genuinely independent and comp-letely inactive individuals. The Section ends with the passage of the first Reform Act, which marks a major watershed in the representative history of Britain.

This section of the History, containing biographies of 1,367 Members of Parliament and articles covering 383 constituencies, is now being prepared for the press. Publication is expected at the end of 2009.