The chequered career of 19th-century politician Charles Frewan

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When Leicestershire politician, Charles Hay Frewen, was born in 1813, only a select group of wealthy male landowners were entitled to vote in UK parliamentary elections, meaning that most of the population had no say in how their country was governed.

His political career provides a fascinating insight into the challenges faced by those seeking to end this democratic inequality, as well as highlighting the corrupt practices that continued to blight elections during this era.

The Frewen family belonged to the landowning elite. Their origins lay in East Sussex, where they had owned an extensive rural estate since the mid-1600s. In the late 18th century, Charles Frewen’s grandfather also inherited Cold Overton Hall from a cousin. This impressive Jacobean mansion in the heart of east Leicestershire came with over 300 acres of land.

As the second-born son, 15-year-old Charles did not inherit Cold Overton Hall upon his father’s death in 1829. Nevertheless, he later became a wealthy man in his own right. His 1878 Times obituary described him as “a gentleman whose large estates made him one of the most influential landowners in Sussex and in Leicestershire”.

His late father had served one five-year term as MP for the Irish constituency of Athlone in the early 1800s, and Frewen was keen to follow in his footsteps after completing his education at Trinity College, Cambridge. He decided to stand for Parliament just as the campaign for electoral reform was gaining significant momentum.

Hailed as a landmark moment in the history of UK democracy, the 1832 Reform Act introduced a series of measures which extended the right to vote to a greater proportion of the male population. However, working-class men were still excluded from voting, as were all women. This Act, too, did little to address the widespread corrupt practices then associated with parliamentary elections.

Frewen first stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate at an 1839 Leicester byelection where he lost out to the Radical Liberal, Wynn Ellis. Shortly after his defeat, he gave a speech at a dinner, held in his honour, in which he accused his Liberal opponent of having called the byelection at very short notice so that “the Conservatives might not be prepared with a candidate”.

This tactic was regularly employed to ensure that elections remained uncontested. Frewen was attending to business in Sussex when the Leicester byelection was called. Despite, setting out immediately on the then long and arduous journey back to the Midlands, he only arrived there with just hours to spare, leaving little time to canvass support or prepare for the hustings.

Ahead of the general election two years later, Frewen was widely reported to be considering the prospect of running again for the Leicester seat. In the end, though, the Conservatives caused controversy by deciding not to nominate a candidate, arguing that “the chances of success at other places [are] much more sure than at Leicester” (Patriot, 21 June 1841). Instead, Frewen was drafted in as a last-minute Conservative candidate in the Sussex town of Rye, only to be defeated once more.

He finally achieved his ambition of becoming an MP in the uncontested byelection in East Sussex in 1846. He was offered the seat because of his vociferous opposition to the campaign calling for free trade and the end of the Corn Laws. This longstanding legislation offered protection to British food producers by imposing high tariffs on imported goods. Those in favour of abolishing the Corn Laws argued that they primarily benefited wealthy landowners and kept food prices artificially high.

Frewen’s so-called protectionist stance made him a popular candidate with the affluent voters of rural Sussex. Although the Corn Laws were repealed just months after he was elected to Parliament, he retained his seat at the 1848 General Election.

He served as an MP there for nearly a decade until unexpectedly quitting, in early 1857, to contest a forthcoming byelection in North Leicestershire.

This constituency was regarded as a Tory stronghold, and its two parliamentary seats were traditionally uncontested. Successive members from the influential Manners family of Belvoir Castle had long dominated the local political scene. The byelection was caused by the elevation to the House of Lords of Charles Manners, who had recently succeeded his father as Duke of Rutland. Charles’ younger brother, John, had already been earmarked to occupy the vacant seat at the byelection until Frewen decided to enter the contest.

In the weeks leading up to polling, Frewen ran a controversial campaign motivated by what The Times referred to as “extreme Protestant notions”. As far as back as 1848, the then East Sussex MP had publicly voiced his support for a populist pro-Protestant movement that sought to limit the new-found political freedom being enjoyed by Roman Catholics after centuries of suppression. Frewen described himself as a “sound Protestant” who would “give my cordial opposition to any…proposal for extending the influence of the Roman Catholic Religion throughout the British Empire”.

Nine years later, he cited John Manners’ allegedly pro-Catholic stance as his reason for standing in the North Leicestershire byelection. Frewen vigorously attacked his opponent’s continuing support for the 1845 Maynooth College Act – a controversial decision. The Act tripled government funding to Ireland’s leading seminary for Catholic priests, as well as highlighting Manners’ backing for the campaign to strengthen ties with the Vatican.

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Initially, Frewen appears to have attracted plenty of local support, with a sizeable crowd gathering to hear him speak in Leicester’s Market Place in early February. During his speech, however, he alluded to his concerns regarding reports of visits by land agents of the Manners’ family to encourage tenant farmers to vote for their candidate.

Just a fortnight later, The Times reported that Frewen had pulled out of the contest, having realised that the odds were too heavily stacked against him to have any chance of defeating Manners. Local farmers were reluctant to vote against the powerful family which owned the land on which they worked and lived.

Undeterred, Frewen challenged for the North Leicestershire seat again at the general election held just a couple of months later. At the hustings in late March, the speeches of Manners, along with his longstanding ally and fellow MP, Edward Farnham, were loudly booed by large sections of the crowd. In the end, though, they were once more successfully re-elected. Soon after the results were announced, Frewen wrote an open letter to the Leicester Mercury, in which he pointedly thanked the “1250 Free and Independent Electors” who had given him their vote.

Manners were obliged to seek re-election the following year after being appointed First Commissioner of Works. Although usually a formality, Frewen did consider running against him before abandoning the idea. This prompted yet another row.

Manners sarcastically thanked his rival for avoiding “what, in Parliamentary language, might be termed a frivolous and vexatious opposition”. Frewen penned a furious response to The Times, in which he called for electoral reform and once more accused his rival of having sent his land agents “to coerce whole villages” into voting for the Manners candidates during the previous year’s general election.

Over the course of the following decade, Frewen contested three further elections but failed to break the Manners family’s stranglehold on local politics. As before, the contests were marred by accusations of foul play and intimidation on both sides of the divide.

In July 1865, supporters of Frewen’s cause attempted to disrupt polling at Loughborough, Syston and Ashby-de-la-Zouch. The most serious disturbance occurred at Ashby, where a large group of men gathered outside the Town Hall, intending to intimidating voters. They are reported to have yelled insults at voters before attacking a carriage and hurling stones. The men in question were described in the press as local miners who had purposely taken a day’s holiday so that they might disrupt proceedings.

Polling was suspended for the day, as the protestors clashed violently with the police. When the polls reopened in Ashby the following morning, only a handful of locals voted before Manners and his ally, Edward Hartopp, were declared to have secured sufficient support elsewhere to be elected.

Over the course of the next few days, Frewen’s critics used the golden opportunity presented by events in Ashby to lambast him in the media. An anonymous columnist in the Leicester Journal, a newspaper known for its pro-Manners stance, declared that Frewen was “answerable for the unmannerly and brutish conduct of his partisans” before concluding that “the men of North Leicestershire… don’t want him or his twaddle, and what’s more we won’t have him”.

In November 1868, Frewen had one final unsuccessful shot at loosening the Manners’ family grip on local politics. In what proved to be another typically ill-tempered contest, polling day was marred by more violent disturbances, notably in Shepshed where Frewen’s supporters were reported to have attacked a local Catholic school that was in use as a polling station. Frewen also complained about numerous examples of voter intimidation for the Manners camp, but this merited only the briefest of mentions in most of the papers.

Frewen died, aged 65, at Cold Overton Hall in September 1878, having lived long enough to see the 1872 Ballot Act passed by Parliament. This trailblazing legislation aimed to eliminate bad electoral practices, such as voter intimidation, by introducing the requirement for all UK elections to be conducted by secret ballot. It would, however, take another five decades for universal adult suffrage to be finally achieved in the UK with the passing of the 1928 Representation Of The People (Equal Franchise) Act.

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