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Please forgive a newbie if this has already been covered -1500+ pages are rather a lot to scroll through!

I've just finished reading Edward Pearce's excellent "Reform!" about the 1832 Reform Act (in the UK). Although I did study it at school, I'd forgotten that following the defeat of the Bill in the Lords, Grey and his Whig cabinet resigned and William IV asked the Duke of Wellington, who had preceded Grey as (Tory) Prime Minister to form a government. Wellington decided that he couldn't do so and so Grey returned to office, and carried his Bill into law.

But suppose Wellington had decided to form a Government? He was, after all, the last-ditcher who had turned his coat and carried Catholic Emancipation - and it was the Irish seats falling to O'Connell's associates that provided Grey with his majority (English MPs voted against Grey's bill). And, Pearce tells us, there were Tories who planned a Reform of their own.

A Tory Reform Bill seemed perfectly possible in London in 1832. (It was what King William IV wanted.) It would have disfranchised a few dozen of the smallest and "most corrupt" seats - I say "most corrupt" in quotes because although that's how we think of the Old Sarums and so forth, contemporaries often saw them as just another form of property. It would have given some of those seats to the large industrial towns - Manchester, Birmingham and so forth - but it would almost certainly have also created seats for the overseas "interests" - notably the East India Company, or at least its nabobs, and also the for the slavers in the Caribbean. (The Slave Trade had been criminalised a generation before, but slave ownership in the colonies was still legal in 1832.)

What do Forum members think might have been the consequences of such an Act? Would it have done enough to draw the teeth of the Political Unions who were campaigning for the extension of the franchise? And would it have forestalled the 1833 Act which abolished slavery in British colonies? If so, might it not have led to Britain supporting the South in the US Civil War? And where might that have led to?
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