Thomas Drummond, the Boundary Commission and the 1832 Reform Act*
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‘One of the best men of business we had ever met’: Thomas Drummond, the boundary commission and the 1832 Reform Act* Martin Spychal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/90/249/543/5603617 by guest on 27 September 2021 Institute of Historical Research/History of Parliament Abstract As one of Britain’s landmark constitutional reforms, the 1832 Reform Act has attracted considerable historical attention. However, only cursory notice has been paid to the extensive work completed by the 1831–2 boundary commission to reform the nation’s parliamentary boundaries. Drawing on previously unused archival material, this article provides the first sustained analysis of the boundary reforms that took place in England’s ancient boroughs in 1832, revealing the significance of Thomas Drummond, a previously obscure royal engineer and chair of the English and Welsh boundary commission, to the ‘Great Reform Act’. As well as revealing the wider importance of parliamentary boundaries to the passage of reform by 1832, Drummond and the boundary commission established significant precedents for the expansion of the reformed British state and future parliamentary reform. On 1 December 1831, as political union activity surrounding the reform bill reached fever pitch and the government of the second Earl Grey was making preparations to introduce its third reform bill of the year, Staffordshire M.P. Edward Littleton sat down for dinner in London with several prominent whigs. Conversation turned to the topic of Thomas Drummond – a royal engineer who since August that year had been supervising the operations of the English and Welsh borough boundary commission as part of the government’s preparations for electoral reform. According to Littleton, those present began to wax lyrical over Drummond’s bureaucratic capacity. All agreed, Littleton recorded, ‘in thinking him one of the best men of business [they] had ever met’ and Sir James Graham reportedly joked that ‘he was sure from Drummond’s talent, and twitch of the nose, that he was [Lord] Brougham’s son’ – the highly gifted, but enigmatic Lord Brougham (and his heavily caricatured nose) being the foremost political celebrity of the day.1 Existing historiography offers little indication of Thomas Drummond’s significance to the 1832 Reform Act, and thus little explanation as to why he had become the subject of such admiration within the cabinet by December 1831.TherearetwoVictorian biographies of Drummond and he has had his own Dictionary of National Biography entry * This article is a revised version of a paper given at the ‘Parliaments, politics and peoples’ seminar, Institute of Historical Research. It was subsequently awarded second place in the 2015 Pollard Prize. The author would like to thank Miles Taylor, Philip Salmon, Kathryn Rix, Paul Readman, Rona Cran, the I.H.R. seminar and the King’s College Modern British History Ph.D. reading group for helpful discussion and comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 Staffordshire Record Office (hereafter S.R.O.), Hatherton papers, D260/M/F/5/26/7, fo. 248, 1 Dec. 1831. VC 2017 The Authors DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12180 Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 249 (August 2017) Historical Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Institute of Historical Research, University of London This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [The copyright line for this article was changed on 25 May 2017 after original online publication.] 544 Thomas Drummond, the boundary commission and the 1832 Reform Act since 1888, although discussion of his legacy has tended to focus on his invention of a portable limelight device (which illuminated the world of nineteenth-century theatre) as well as his tireless efforts as under-secretary for Ireland between 1835 and 1840.2 Comparatively less is known about his work supervising the English and Welsh borough boundary commission for the Grey ministry between August 1831 and September 1832. This is something of an anomaly given that so much historical ink has been spilled over Britain’s first Reform Act. Whereas whig reforms to the poor law and municipal corporations during the eighteen-thirties have become synonymous with the names of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/90/249/543/5603617 by guest on 27 September 2021 Edwin Chadwick and Joseph Parkes, it is unlikely that many reserve a similar place for Drummond in their mental map of 1832. Histories of Britain’s first Reform Act have devoted some attention to Drummond’s part in the remodelling of the disfranchisement schedules for the Grey ministry’s third reform bill. Stephen Thompson’s and Brian Robson’s recent articles on the topic are of particular merit.3 Nevertheless, with the exception of Norman Gash, D. C. Moore and Philip Salmon, little effort has been made to make sense of the boundary commission – in the context of which Drummond’s remodelling needs to be seen. In 1953,Gash provided a brief overview of the boundary changes that accompanied the 1832 Reform Act but called for more research.4 Following this, Moore attempted to incorporate the boundary commission and its proposals into his politics of deference thesis. In doing so, he argued that the intention of the boundary commission had been to design constituencies of an urban or rural character, which would be deferential to the influence of local hierarchical interests.5 However, as Abraham Kriegel astutely identified, Moore’s thesis assumed a level of cabinet collusion and knowledge about the existing electoral system that did not exist in 1832, and, as this article will demonstrate, was based on a misinterpretation of the commission’s aims, as well as the recommendations of its published reports.6 The History of Parliament’s recent seven- volume House of Commons 1820–32 provides the best account of the boundary commission available at present. Its constituent parts suggest that the commission and parliamentary boundaries were far more important to the processes of reform between 2 J. F. McLennan, Memoir of Thomas Drummond (Edinburgh, 1867); R. B. O’Brien, Thomas Drummond, Under- Secretary in Ireland 1835–40: Life and Letters (1889); R. B. O’Brien, ‘Drummond, Thomas (1797–1840)’, in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Stephens (1888), xvi. 41–5; his biography was recently updated for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (S. H. Palmer, ‘Drummond, Thomas (1797–1840)’, O.D.N.B. (Oxford, 2008) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8084> [accessed 23 Feb. 2015]); A. Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (Oxford, 2012), p. 208. 3 Some tentative discussion of Drummond’s list is provided by S. J. Thompson, ‘“Population combined with wealth and taxation”: statistics, representation and the making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c.1800–2000, ed. T. Crook and G. O’Hara (New York, 2011); B. Robson, ‘Maps and mathematics: ranking the English boroughs for the 1832 Reform Act’, Jour. Hist. Geography, xlvi (2014), 66–79; and M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), pp. 157–9, 265, 377 n. 122 and n. 158. Notably, J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973) mentions the reorganization of Schedule B, but does not acknowledge Drummond’s involvement (pp. 228–9). 4 N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1971), pp. 69–72. 5 D. C. Moore, The Politics of Deference (New York, 1976), pp. 173–83; D. C. Moore, ‘Concession or cure: the sociological premises of the First Reform Act’, Historical Jour., ix (1966), 39–59. 6 The Holland House Diaries, 1831–40, ed. A. Kriegel (1977), pp. xxx–xxxi. For general criticism of Moore’s thesis, see R. W. Davis, ‘Deference and aristocracy in the time of the Great Reform Act’, Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxxi (1976), 532–9; E. P. Hennock and D. C. Moore, ‘The First Reform Act: a discussion’, Victorian Stud., xiv (1971), 321–37; D. Eastwood, ‘Contesting the politics of deference: the rural electorate, 1820–60’, in Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820, ed. J. Lawrence and M. Taylor (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 27–49; P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–41 (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 120–3. VC 2017 The Authors Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 249 (August 2017) Historical Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Institute of Historical Research, University of London Thomas Drummond, the boundary commission and the 1832 Reform Act 545 1831 and 1832 than has previously been acknowledged. Its M.P. and constituency biographies reveal a range of reactions to individual boundary changes at a local level that had not previously been documented.7 Furthermore, Salmon’s survey of the 1832 English reform legislation for the volumes suggests that the commission and the issue of boundaries intersected with parliamentary debate over the reform bill at several key points between March 1831 and June 1832. Ultimately though, Salmon’s survey concludes by asking more questions than it answers – he recognizes that little is known about the establishment of the commission, Drummond’s contribution to its work and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/90/249/543/5603617 by guest on 27 September 2021 the wider significance of its recommendations to the eventual passage of the 1832 Reform Act.8