alternatehistory.com

II , I: Age of Brougham, Part I


There was just a nothingness over London in the morning after the regicide. "Again" was the most used word in the city and in the days that followed, the country. In the streets, people weren't fierce, they weren't breaking windows, busting doors, firing muskets and battling canons. No-one was in charge, and people's response was to carry on as normal. Fierce mourning descended over the Whig movement, however, and in the following days after the death of their leader and Peer, a fierce desire for revenge on the incompetent administration that led to militias, county divisions, and Armed Soldiers, heroic at Waterloo degraded by firing on their fellow-subjects. "We have quietly allowed tyranny," said Henry Brougham at a meeting after Peel's memorial a few days after his death "and now we must act with new and further vigour in the areas of Reform. The conflicts have become greater, more acute and direr and the effect on the harmony of our constitution means that even the solutions of 1831 have now seemingly been swept from the confines of history".

This desire amongst Whigs to finally seize the moment manifested itself in a plan in the power vacuum to manifest a feedback loop of sorts to open the reform without Parliament. It would not be an act of Liberalism, it would not be an act of revolution, but it would place a cohort of Reformists to seal a seven-year period in power that was disputed, considered illegal by some and seditious by others. Henry Brougham would speak first after the uprising and would continue to speak a lot at that this period, with fierce intent on pushing through reform to prevent chaos. He would start the day by breaking convention and calling Privy Councillors to meet without the sitting Monarch or an heir. His argument was simple and effective to the other councillors; there is a crisis, there is no Monarch but she has not renounced the throne, and there is no heir. In the absence of a Regent and a Parliament, a quorum of Privy Councillors operates in a legal vacuum where they only needed themselves to act as Regent as a temporary measure. It was similar to the vacuum occupied by the entrenched Tory administration of Eldon, but Brougham thought that it could be used to resettle Reform before the election and acting in absence of Parliament. Through several organisational changes, they could concentrate power within the Privy Council and control the legislative agenda to bring about a sense of momentary peace, a more robust constitution and much-needed reform for Parliament. Brougham and other Whigs on the Privy Council could declare a quorum with as few as three members, introduce a raft of changes to bring about order. As it happened, when the Privy Council met four days after the memorial on May 23rd, eight Whig Privy Councillors met to co-sign an attempt at reasserting control across the Realm.

They declared the 'Emergency Ordinances' on May 27th, with the support of the 'Committee of Eight' as they were known, which consisted of four notes; the Privy Council will act as Regent under the restoration of the Monarch, the Privy Council will appoint an 'Emergency Committee of the Privy Council' which would issue and sign any legislation, the Privy Council will be enacted to appoint Peers that can be further confirmed upon the restoration of return of the Monarch and finally, that Parliament would be recalled in March next year. This sought to create the rationale for legislation, for the remaking of the Lords to ease the passage for the Commons for reform and to make appointments to a Provisional Government, led by the Whigs. On the 1st June, having been without a functioning government for nearly 15 days, the Privy Council issued the Second Emergency Ordinance, appointing Thomas Denman as Lord Chief Justice, Henry Brougham as Lord Chancellor, John Spencer as Lord High Treasurer and Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice as Lord President of the Council. These four men would act as the Legislative engine for the next few months, but also in the Ordinance was the creation of a six-man Legislative Committee, who would review and recommend legislation in place of Parliament. This committee featured John Ponsonby, Michael-Angelo Taylor and William Plunket, all prominent establishment Whigs. It gave Frederick Adam command over the Royal Army as Field Marshall. While it was under the veil of constitutionalism, this represented a gross overreach by the Whigs in Westminster, but despite having control by June 6th of the levers of Government, Brougham had little in the way of authority over the rebellious counties. He had the legal methods to implement policies but could only play politics in Westminster. He, and the Emergency Committee, would need to stop the strike within the nine months of Provisional rule.

In these fifteen days, the rebellious cities and counties continued to attempt civic Governance in the absence and at the distance from the wrangling in Westminster. The Grand National Holiday dragged on, and in need of a conclusion and many within the Radical elements could not decide on what to do with the nearly 5 million people who were, at least in theory, under their protection. As the news of the second Regicide filtering through, the state authorities collapsed all because of over-reaction: many of the richer elements of the cities feared a French Revolution-style Terror on wealth and privilege. Most fled to the countryside and estates. Brougham, with his electorate in Yorkshire, was more accustomed to the people in the North and felt they did not want to create a Republic or a godless state as some of the less acquainted and constructed members around him asserted. He began to press for a policy of rapprochement towards the Radicals and negotiation to integrate them, the Irish, the Scots, the West Country, the Welsh and the Northerners and Midlanders together back towards the Empire. To do this, he gambled on a few things; the need for Political Unions who were unprepared for power to transfer it back, the willingness of them to work with a Whig administration and successfully testing the willingness of commercial Whigs, who were beginning to show fractures in their support for the Grand National Holiday, now stretching into a fifth week of the complete economic shutdown.

He believed that a coalition of Commercial Whigs, who could be bought with economic reforms including the Corn Laws, Artisans and Urban Middle-Class, who could be bought off with the vote, and the working-class could be brought off with a role in civic government and redistricting - as shown by the Riots in Bristol and much of the rioting in Yorkshire brought further reform in civic improvement and administration simultaneously through the Charters - an expression of 'good government'. Brougham saw the irony in seizing power to prevent a seizure of power but preferred to think more as a seizure of the vacuum on behalf of the constitution. "It's ironic," he said in his memoirs "that through the boldness of character, and little else, we engineered our rise to become the law. What is more important to me was that we used ourselves, as the law, to guarantee that no-one would have the law after us". He met once again with the Privy Council on June 7th and presented to a further subcommittee of the council created, the Grand Security Committee, that included the Emergency Committee, the Judicial Committee and the Field Marshall, and presented his strategy for bringing the strike to an end. While no official records were kept of the meetings, the term Brougham is thought to have concluded that negotiation with the groups separately could mould a settlement - and while no records were kept, he began those negotiations a few days later, arranging meetings, writing letters and building the coalition needed to end the strike and prepare a space for a pathway to stability and harmony.


Firstly, Brougham approached the Irish and Scottish. They were aware the Northern English rebellion was well underway, but events in Scotland and Ireland had been slower to progress and the Grand National Holiday was less effective. The campaign for suffrage and repeal was serious in Ireland, however, and attempts to draft a National Charter to give a resemblance of self-government to Ireland and Repeal Aspects of the Act of Union. These areas would be easier to pick off and to negotiate with. Brougham held private conversations with Daniel O'Connell and felt laws restoring the rights of the Constitution of 1782, with no legislative initiative but a commencement veto would potentially suffice. O'Connell did not feel the same way. "A Ministry for Ireland," he said, in a letter "that is all that will suffice my people to stand down". He summarised his argument "my people want liberty, my people want equality and my people want their Parliament". His conversations were echoed by George Kinloch, who represented the Scottish Political Union, most active in Glasgow and Dundee. Kinloch had crossed paths with the authorities before, having made defences of trade unions during the Radical War and found himself exiled to France, but returned amongst the unrest and began agitating against the state due to a combination of his outlaw status and he deep-held sympathy with the industrial working class. Despite this, he was ultimately a conventional insider and believed in reform to prevent what he described as "permanent revolution" - a continuous cycle of demands for rights and violence to achieve them. But his main argument rested in religious toleration, and he held commonplace with the liberal Catholicism, albeit with a non-conformist denomination, beliefs held by O'Connell. He felt that England, a state dominated by the Church of England and a Southwestern Establishment, was unable to deliver "true emancipation", equality of all denominations as a basis of state-building. Kinloch was a controversial character but found common ground with Brougham on the subject of tolerance, himself an atheist.

Further discussions with the Palatinates' Union representative, Richard Potter, revealed a deep desire for an end to the centralised government of monarchy and wished to enshrine religious toleration and basic rights as undeniable. Discussions with Thomas Attwood revealed a desire for political reform to meet a more representative and good government for his city, Birmingham, but also for its region which was facing both the extreme opportunity of a vastly developing age, but an urgent need for state institutions, especially his area of specialism, the Banking institutions, to adapt with the times. Conversations held in parallel between Brougham and Potter, O'Connell and Attwood all brought similar conclusions - the desire for a sharing of knowledge about how to rule the country more effectively. Brougham, by his nature, was a political realist, and he sensed the country was moving in a different direction, and showed adaptation to it, rather than fear and anger.

Brougham's nature as a political realist blossomed his friendship with Mercian Reformer Joseph Parkes, who shared his similar desire for compromise and sobering realism to deliver necessary reforms. Parkes correspondence with Brougham, beginning on June 18th and ending on June 29th, consisted of 18 letters and two essays on the state of Governance in the Kingdom. Parkes had become convinced that the need for reform stemmed from no effective delegation of command, rather than Corporations (who worked to benefit members of both political factions while remaining practically inept), and Parliament (which was unrepresentative and unreformed). His thinking had changed throughout the conflict and he had concluded that Local and Provincial Government could be used to strengthen central control by creating flexible levers of good government across the Isles. All areas could have a local, responsible government that would strengthen efforts across the Union. His political philosophy, of organisation of a country to utilise full Government control in reverse federalism where the state delegates power, rather than enshrines its power from internal States, interested Brougham and influenced his thinking. He began to re-explore his ideas on Colonial self-Government and apply them to the internal politic of the State at that time.

After his conversations with Parkes, he felt a compromise could be reached if it met a series of ends; on the Unions side an end to the strikes and demobilisation of militias and a return to law and order, on the Whigs side to concede a greater degree of reform and the Lords to refrain from slowing this process down, and to the Moderate Tories to concede an end to the cycle of violence in exchange for reform from above that may exceed their tolerance, rather than revolution and the further outpouring of anger from subjects. To counterbalance the Reformists, he conceded and ordered the Legislative Committee to draft legislation admitting full ratepayer suffrage, some 4,000,000 new voters, into the legislative process. It would be countered with a poll tax to meet the larger cost of administration of £1, 2s - half the weekly wage for average workers and prohibitive to the poorest, designed to weed out undesirable voters who were "unwilling" to match their desire for suffrage with a financial contribution.

He went further to this by creating a commission to assign seats before the election. To restore order, he divided the country into units ruled by a Lieutenant Governor; Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Northern England, Central England, London and Southern England. All these reforms, dated until the recall of Parliament in March, were packaged together into the Third Emergency Ordinance on July 2nd. This ordinance was different in that it was subject to approval from the Parliament upon opening. Before the ordinance was proclaimed on June 30th, he circulated legal copies to the Political Union's leaders, O'Connell and Kinloch outlining the practices and offering most of the places on the Commissions and upon its declaration, all National Holidays were called off immediately, and workers slowly, over the next couple of days, returned to work. While they were to be balanced by Whig appointments in an expected renewed confidence in a Brougham ministry in March, he subsequently received letters from several independent Political Unions in support of the measure, although mostly in the South where mail was more reliable.

Most messages sent were sent via private messengers as Royal Mail workers in London, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Derby, Liverpool and most of the cities and towns in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the North were on strike. People around there began hand-delivering letters and as the 'Grand National Holiday' proved tragic but successful, their movement had seen the authorities to be rendered powerless by a mass paralysis of subjects; mutinies gave around 40% of the military force, however undisciplined, voluntarily to the 'services of Reform', three important services within many Northern places emerged that would be fulfilled within these rioting areas: Policing, Indignance Reform and Public Health. In the first days of after the events in Lancashire and Yorkshire, the societal collapse wasn't by any means total but took three common forms across the North. In the early days of the strike, looting of businesses, most ironically sympathetic to reform, were widespread. Public buildings and known meeting places of magistrates and judges were ransacked and county jails and debtors prisons were opened and criminals were released. Petty crime increased dramatically over the first weekend, and Political Union leaders were forced to act to prevent lawlessness from breaking out on the street. Therefore, most militias weren't ransacking weapons from Army bases, or engaging in battle throughout most of the strike, but were simply patrolling the streets. What is more, they were quite effective. The streets were cleaned, wives would bake and trade at markets communally in the cities and factory by factory smaller groups of militias, under the command of the central commands of some sort, mostly middling Colonels in the Army who were sympathetic to the cause, but also factory foremen, local well-to-dos and liberal vestry members who felt the opportunity for power. What is remarkable, is the consistency of the adoption of these militias across the cities in the North. By July, these men had still not yet been stood down but had been adopted and reported in Newcastle, Manchester, Stockport, Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield, Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham and Bristol to be the only forces keeping somewhat rudimentary law and order. Without uniforms, their identification was a Yellow Ribbon around their arms, becoming known as the Ribboners.

The bulk of the law and order was set up in response to growing homelessness of workers due to ransacking of outlying villages by County Divisions, especially in their most active regions - Durham, North Yorkshire, Westmorland & North Lancashire and South Cheshire, where large rural gentry leaders raised armies to raid cities, plied with booze, food and cash to restore honour to the Crown and seize the cities from the revolutionaries. This phenomenon was largely contained to the North that saw the worst of violence, but was also supercharged with the presence of the Magistrates fleeing the cities, who formed a Crown-Lord-Church axis of traditional authority in many areas and recruited through midnight raids "For God & For England". Where they found resistance, they burned villages and destroyed property without restraint. Their methods caused hundreds of refugees to flee to the cities which were perceived as safer. It also scattered many across the country, as people fled violence and searched for work, food and shelter. To combat this, the militias had to make themselves distinct from the Divisions, they were required to have a connection to the people they gave their oaths publicly in the town square, and in Huddersfield, Newcastle and Manchester, Commissioners were chosen at public meetings, as were magistrates, and many candidates were middle-class lawyers who were well practiced in the law, and they instituted legal reforms with open trials and juries co-opted from the wider public. Fundamentally though, their strength was in their composition, as most of their men were local born and represented the defence of their homes and livelihoods. While the bulk of the men were working class, all saw a sense of collective will to continue the gains of the strike.

This also extended to a social reformist agenda, feeding workers at factories striking, providing whatever rudimentary shelter was available and providing basic education to striking and refugee children. These efforts were led by Commercial Class women, who took an active role in the relief of the poorest in the cities. This effort had begun before the Grand National Holiday but vastly expanded with relief organisations responding to the crisis. In two areas, Public Health took a more pertinent role, with Cholera outbreaks in the North East and despite the best efforts of the relief organisations, in most refugee settlements in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds were reported to Political Unions and their response on June 18th to combined resources and declare one, single declaration from all Northern Political Unions asking for volunteers to man a Northumbrian Public Health Administration, which attempted to treat victims and reduce the effects of the pandemic. 1,500 mostly middle-class volunteers were signed up in 8 days, and Doctors who remained in cities were organised into columns, like an impromptu army, to tend to the sick, with the right to seize any rudimentary medical supplies and use buildings for hospitals. Churches aided the cause as well, with Quakers forming a key role in providing additional volunteers. The effect of these responses was to connect Upper and Lower Middle-Class urban subjects into the governmental process. Through their work to concentrate on civic improvement within the freedom the North they gained a real, true thirst for civil rights and basic freedoms to rule responsibly. The commitment was echoed in a letter from Privy Council member, Legislative Committee member and future speaker of the House, James Abercromby to Brougham coining a phrase that would define power relationships for centuries, and have a massive implication on the constitution. "What seems missing from these protests is a defining epithet. However, I would like to propose an epithet for this era if I may to you. I believe these people are in the pursuit of peace, order and good government and that has not been delivered to them. May that be the central epithet of this reform party". This statement would appear again in a few months and define the constitutional reform of Brougham and "this reform party" over the coming seven years.

In the South, mistrust of the gentry in the rural areas made it more radical than the cities, who despite sympathetic protests, saw little violence outside of Bristol. The western city had erupted earlier (as in October 1831) and expelled its magistrates from the city on May 21st after they convicted Thomas Bereton, the Lieutenant-Colonel with suspected reformist sympathies to death for sedition. A militia in the city overwhelmed the Jails, freed him, closed the gates of the city and declared themselves "Free". This 'gate closure' was merely symbolic - as most of the wealthiest in the city fled in the days after the uprising, but a significant stayed and with military fall in discipline manifested itself more peacefully in the south without raids and counter raids by Radicals and Reactionaries respectively, they were able to enact meaningful reform. A renewed coalition of radicals and moderate liberals that had shattered after the events in 1831. William Herapath, the President of the Bristol Political Union, used civic pressure within the city to force a special public meeting to discuss the municipal situation. This meeting held on June 2nd, abolished the Bristol Corporations, elected a provisional committee to enact reform. Herapath travelled to Westminster to meet Brougham, and while he was received in secret, was received warmly. He stressed the desire at the civic level for reform and was asked to occupy a seat on the Reform Commission. On his return, the provisional committee proposed an elected Mayor, an elected council with public meetings and annual elections and a council of aldermen, elected by the council for longer terms. Their city and county charter claimed jurisdiction over the "good and just government of the city and county" and finally, prepared a letters patent for the Charter, to receive Royal Assent at a future date. For now, similarly to the Northern authorities, they concentrated on restoring law and order, enacting basic civil rights and searching for those who were attempting to comply with elements sympathetic to the Regent and demobilising them and disarming them. A militia known as the Civic Guard patrolled the streets, formed of a similar coalition of social forces as in the North, governing with the idea of liberal policing; with greater oversight and accountable to local authorities, gained ground and Policing, a Conservative idea centred around central control, gives way to the division between 'policing by consent', which was the ethos and mantra of Peel's reforms establishing the Police of the Metropolis, and 'policing by control', which was the desired aim of the County Divisions and the Ultras - backed and supported by the atmosphere created by the reigns of Wellington, the Regent, Eldon and the Tories.

Trouble & discontent amongst rural workers spread to mass desertions of enclosures, burning of country houses and torture of landed gentry which peaked around December 1831 but tailed off afterwards throughout 1832, much to the surprise of urban observers. The reason for this was simple - between December and March, over a thousand leaders and suspected ring leaders were either executed or transported for sedition which pacified the militant elements of the rural radicals from overt violent agitation but left a fit of residual anger towards the landed gentry against enclosed rural workers, whose numbers represented around 7% of all workers in the Kingdom as a whole. This hostility resumed as the gruesome, public nature of the Swing executions caused renewed rioting which did however see the burning of country houses and the massacre of Landed Gentry throughout July and August. There were some 2,000 acts of arson, mainly across the Midlands but also in parts of Kent, East Anglia, and Lincolnshire, where sympathy riots occurred despite no violence the previous winter.

In the backdrop of this violence, August saw the beginning of the first Special Commissions to be convened - the Commission on County & Borough Representation which would review the representation of the districts. The Commission was populated with a coalition of Whigs and Radicals and was presided by Thomas Drummond, who had presided over the first boundary commission and was brought in to redesign the boundary changes to reflect the number of ratepayers, rather than the intricate property requirements of £10 householders, as in the previous act. Drummond had secured predated statistical information from the 1831 census and was brought any census data collected by the military during martial law throughout the end of 1831 and beginning of 1832. While this helped track some of the data, Drummond held up the Commission by six weeks, until September, to gather data and insisted on using Militia numbers in the North rather than Army numbers, and asked Brougham and the Emergency Committee to order a headcount in affected regions by militias. He felt that the numbers they would produce would be more accurate of ratepayers in the district and those who could afford the poll taxes for the election in 1833. With this data added to the records, he maintained a couple of side records and according to most modern demographic experts. The data, however, overstated the presence of thousands of people moving to the cities in the strife in the countryside in the cities. This, combined with the skew towards urban delegates, with many Tories outside of the reform movement giving the map very little rural oversight made an electoral map that vastly underestimated populations in many rural areas.


Drummond succumbed to pressure from the more moderate elements of the Commission to retain multi-seat constituencies, and moderate Whigs wished for an extension of the current franchise system - where Tories, Whigs and new electoral groups like the Repealers and the Radicals would be represented by a seat each. This moved the commission to, in this light, consider the matter of representation in its entirety. A unanimous vote moved to reconsider from a blank map to redraw the map in England and Wales into new, manageable units of two and three-seat constituencies across the country. In England, the map was drawn by Drummond, with the threat of Tory or Lords revolt removed, he produced a revolutionary map. He abolished counties and boroughs and divided the country into 167 electorate districts of between one and four members. The two-tiered system was replaced by a one-tier system which concentrated rural constituencies (often large ones) in many ones and two-seat constituencies, under-representing the rural areas quite significantly. Urban seats were divided into three and four-seat constituencies, with the central ethos of attempting to provide representation to the minority groups, as insisted by the few Tories on the panel who wanted to retain some level of representation for themselves and the Radicals in cities who wanted to do the same. Finally, they settled on 24 one-member electorates, 36 two-member electorates, 48 three-member electorates, 57 four-member electorate and two University constituencies of two members. It also set procedures for registering and listing new voters and recommended empowering the new Governors with establishing an Office of Registrars to take payment of the poll taxes and put them under the authority of the Governors and Lieutenant to collect registrations by a certain date. The process was completed on September 8th and the Commission Ordinance was signed in the following day.

Later that week, on the 12th September, reports came in that the missing Queen had been located in Southampton. Brougham had averted a succession by declaring the Monarch missing, so set about a nationwide search, and even co-opted informal searches with Militias and the Royal Irish Constabulary, which had become naturalised and had already been suspended in March by order of Earl Eldon, to see if the Monarch had been smuggled behind enemy lines to continue the open line that there was no need for Succession. Tories had stood back from the Reforms for that very reason,- there was a widespread belief that the fact that the Queen would be declared dead and Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover would reunify the Hanoverian and the British Crowns once again. The Hanoverian faction believed that whatever reforms were enacted, the new King, a staunch Conservative, would veto and reject them, declare all ordinances as illegitimate and probably arrest most of the people who put their name to it. The arrival of the Queen, who had been hidden in an attic in a city centre apartment during the unrest, having been smuggled out of the violence and dressed as a boy by one of the maids in Bushy House. She had, as always, been in the same room as her mother, but she told them early to get her out of the house so to ensure her safety. From there, she was brought to Hampshire, where she stayed in a country home before she was hidden in the city centre. She was discovered and the couple who held her claimed they had no idea she was the Queen, and she requested both be absolved of any wrongdoing to the militia who found her, fearing that it was revolutionary.

Her return to London was celebrated, and she was brought to Kensington Palace to cheering crowds. Her return in a legal sense only settled one question - there would be a Regency Act, rather than a Succession Act in Parliament. As she was under 18 and the prior Regent had been incapacitated, they would first need to agree on a permanent regency option in Parliament before there would be any official channels for law-making. Essentially, once it was passed, the Government and the Parliament would be legitimate, because Parliament (as Monarch, Lords & Commons) would endorse the decision to pass a Regency, making the ordinances passed by the Privy Council subject to Royal Assent - but going through whatever Regency appointed for the Crown. Parliament designed for greater suffrage against the will of the Tories would now be able to create laws in the absence of Parliament, make them law by planting their regent and confirming their perpetual rule. Amongst Tories and the traditional right, this growing into the wider Anti-Reform movement would try and gain some kind of representation in the 1833 elections but would be confined to many rural constituencies which were underrepresented and refused to register their workers. They saw this power-grab as unconstitutional and despotic, leading to them becoming ironically known alongside the Anti-Reform moniker as the 'Constitutionalists' or 'Conservatives'.


From September until March, ordinances ceased as preparation for the elections began. These preparations were hampered, however, as Militias in the North and Bristol refused to stand down in fear of Corporations, Vestries and Magistrates returning to their cities and counties and conducting harsh reprisals. Political Unions also wanted local control over policing and militias, fearing a national police force would be despotic and cruel. More local representation and Governance resembling the Charters was now a Radical aim. With Commissions due to start, with Parliamentary approval, to report in 1835. Brougham had already hired Joseph Parkes, a prominent leader in the Birmingham Political Union, as it's General Secretary. While this was designed to quell feeling that this was an insider reform rather than outside reform, it irritated the majority of Tories within the reform movement, who now thought reform would be too deep and too wide to retain any resemblance of the Constitution. He appointed seven men to administration positions across the Kingdom, all of good Whig stock and all of them would receive places on the Commission. These Governors and Lieutenant Governors would be in direct control of three important areas: decommission of Militias, for which they were to be personally concerned with, opening and maintenance of Offices of Registrars for their province, and overseeing reforms of municipal governments, to make recommendations to Parliament through the Parkes Commission.

He appointed positions in Ireland first, bringing in Henry Paget as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and William Plunket as Chief Secretary for Ireland - a position, it was felt, that would allow municipal reform and reform of several more repressive and irresponsible elements of the Dublin Castle Administration and equally to conduct their boundary commissions to implement the abolition of the separation of constituencies and dual electorates. Plunket's work with O'Connell in the Catholic Emancipation Acts was seen to be working in his favour to bring Ireland under control. In a more low-key appointment, Andrew Skene was appointed Lieutenant of Scotland, with Henry Cockburn appointed the re-established pre-Union role of Lord Secretary of Scotland in Edinburgh, establishing an office in Melville Drive. The five other Governors, who were equally low key, saw a series of reformers given control over their Regions, with Sir James Graham given Governorship over Wales, Lord Durham over Northern England, Edward Littleton over Central England, John Spencer over Southern England and John Hobhouse over the Metropolis - although he was similarly to be given a unique title of 'Lord Mayor of the Metropolis' - designed not to override the Liberties of the City of London & City of Westminster, who would remain under separate control.

In Particular, the works of Lord Durham and Littleton set the legislative tone for the municipal and provincial reforms in the North through the recruitment of an advisory committee, appointed by the Governor, to help in the administration of the Governors area of control. These committees essentially allowed the co-option of the leadership of the Political Unions into the decision making in the North and the Midlands. Durham had a reputation and was nicknamed "Radical Jack" in his time around politics. He wasn't particularly involved in politics in the North, but had a fine reputation for his radicalism and was sent by Brougham to investigate the political situation in the North and any solutions that could be implemented in the North to bring lasting control over the region. Durham was popular as Governor - he was seen out in public in the North a great deal, visited Mechanics Institutes and City Halls and spoke to rural and coastal communities a great deal as well, living by the motto to stay "across my jurisdiction without bias to location, creed and means". Littleton's appointments were more moderate in their composition to reflect the more moderate nature of the Mercian Political Union: Thomas Attwood was appointed alongside more Moderate Tory Reformers who were to form the 'Waverers' group in the next Parliament.

These committees directed registration drives and heralded a softer implementation of the poll taxes, meaning a larger electorate benefiting managerial working-classes and artisans. bulging the electorate in the North and Midlands, especially in big cities like Manchester and Liverpool where there were next to no oversight on registrations meant pretty large numbers of factory workers gained the vote, with militias (now outlawed) playing an important role in registrations. In the final tallies, just over 1,000,000 voters were on the electoral roll for the 1833 election, and ballots were organised from January. This period saw a series of pressures come to light on those running for office, and the presumed liberalisation of the press (censors had been inactive since May and the libel courts hadn't yet been called into session) meant that public interest in the elections, especially to the new electorate was fierce.

In the lead up to the election in the North, the ranks of the army were growing again after the mutinies with the more popular Frederick Adam as Field Marshall requesting a loan from the Bank of England to finance a bonus of £1 (the amount needed for the poll tax) for all soldiers who returned, giving soldiers who returned a vote in the election. This proposition was undercut by an £80,000 loan from the Bank of England to the British Army directly but funded initially by Order of Privy Council. Most stayed in an informal capacity in downtime and when in reserve protecting the streets in the meantime, however, despite the order that militias should demobilise. This dual system saw strikers returning to work, but retaining the institutions that formed during the strike to continue doing work in the aftermath of the strike. Brougham himself visited the North and stood for the electorate of York, and it was here that a campaign to return candidates to rid slavery from the British Empire emerged as the first key tenet of campaigning in the Kingdom. Abolition was a large interest point for many of the new electors who gained the franchise in 1833 - a keen interest of middle-class reformers, especially in the North. Even before this, in 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society was formed with Brougham as a member and he was keen to take an Act to outlaw the slave trade across the Empire, which his two previous acts had failed to do. Brougham was elected, and as the North of England and Central England started balloting in January, it was clear that the influx of new voters affected, as Radical candidates, and Radical professing Whigs were elected in droves in the new electorates.

When the rest of the country voted in the weeks that followed, it produced a result that decimated Tory candidates in favour of Reformists. With the Parliament divided on the issue - Reform against Anti-Reform, papers in the North when the final electorates were called in total the number of Reformers at 482, Repealers at 57, and Anti-Reformers at 122. The composition of the Reform movement was interesting though. While it was made up in the majority by traditional Whigs, candidates who were radical Reformists, campaigning for more democracy, more reform and the four main tenets of the Reform movement: universal suffrage, annual elections, vote by ballot and professional members won a high number of urban seats and seemed to convert both middle-class, shopkeeper liberals, artisans and the greater numbers of working men towards the prospects of Radical reform. These candidates, Potter in Manchester among them, wanted the new Parliament in any reform to stick to the Charters, stick to the so-called aforementioned tenet of the "Four Reforms" and in growing numbers, in solidarity with Irish Repeal and the prospect of more local responsible government. They wanted deeper and more radical reform and a constitution and recognised the authority of the Charters over their Provinces. They were more brazen in their demands and wanted a Parliament that would prevent the abuses shown by the last few years to re-emerge again. There were around 185 members who were considered "Radical", "Radical Whig" or "Radical Reform". Despite supporting the Government, they would form a core of members who would continue to press for greater and greater reform.