2017 was the 150th anniversary year of the publication of Langport-born Walter Bagehot’s classic, The English Constitution, so it was fitting to look at the one time when Bagehot was a direct participant in the political system.
Bagehot had, for some years, been keen to enter the parliamentary arena. In 1860, Bagehot was adopted as the Liberal candidate for the proposed London University seat, but this was not confirmed, and, in any event, the seat not actually created until 1868. In late December 1861 he told his wife, Eliza, that, despite the nearby Bridgwater constituency’s notorious reputation for electoral corruption, he wished to become its MP. After refusing an invitation in 1865 in becoming Dudley’s Liberal candidate, he did try to stand for Manchester. However, despite a letter of support from William Gladstone, he campaigned poorly and withdrew before the election.
His chance eventually came in his ‘dream seat’ of Bridgwater the following year, in a by-election caused by the unseating of its Tory MP, Henry Westropp, who had topped the two-member poll the previous year. Bagehot agreed to stand, and threw himself immediately into the brief campaign. . A mere day after the writ for the by-election was issued, he arrived in Bridgwater, and told a large, enthusiastic crowd that he was “a true and sincere Liberal”, and optimistically predicted victory.
During the campaign, Bagehot stressed his local credentials, including his family’s close river trade links with the town, contrasting them with the Scots lawyer background of his Tory opponent, George Patton. He shamelessly played the ‘English card’ criticising Patton as a Scots lawyer: “I wonder why the party which possesses such zeal for old English institutions cannot find an English representative… Being represented by a Scotchman is being represented by a man unknown. He knows nothing of you, and you can find out very little about him…. Scotland, you will feel, is not the same sort of place as Bridgwater. There is a perfectly different system of laws there. He can’t help you with English laws …”
Though the Liberals were confident of victory, a show of hands at the nomination hustings on 6 June fell in Patton’s favour, and in the poll the following day, Bagehot, despite being ahead in the early voting, lost by a mere 7 votes, 294-301. A crestfallen Bagehot briefly addressed the crowd, conceding defeat and hoping it would not be long before the Liberals retake the seat. He then returned to his family home at Herd’s Hill, outside Langport.
Ironically, the following month there was another by-election opportunity at Bridgwater, as Patton was given government office, and so had to stand for re-election, as was the practice then. but Bagehot declined to stand. His reticence was due to his unwillingness to allow any electoral malpractice by his supporters; he had emphasised that he wanted his June campaign to be ‘pure’.
The full story later emerged when there was a major public inquiry into Bridgwater’s endemic electoral corruption. Appearing before the inquiry on 13 October 1869, he revealed that, though he did not participate in any wrongdoing at the June 1866 by-election, his election team did, and he had chosen to reimburse personally the £800 spent illegally as the only honourable option. His fear of a repetition of this was why he could not stand again at Bridgwater.It was clear that Bagehot was not cut out for parliamentary politics, especially as it became more democratic, requiring more intensive direct campaigning of the growing electorate. He was not a good public speaker before large audiences. A later critic of his, the Langport-based poet, CH Sisson, later remarked in his 1972 book on Bagehot, that the whole 1860s Bridgwater experience was “not a happy occasion for him. Practice proved to be less exhilarating than theory.”
Bagehot never again stood for Parliament, rejecting offers for Mid-Somerset (1868) and Liverpool (1873), and withdrawing from the race to be a candidate for London University in 1868. A critic of his, the Langport-based poet, CH Sisson, remarked in his 1972 book on Bagehot, that the whole 1860s Bridgwater experience was “not a happy occasion for him. Practice proved to be less exhilarating than theory.”
Though Bagehot would have accepted this analysis, he still retained some yearnings for representing Bridgwater in Parliament, as he revealed in an 1871 paper to the Metaphysical Society:
Some years ago I stood for a borough in the West of England, and after a keen contest was defeated by seven. Almost directly afterwards there was accidentally another election, and, as I would not stand, another candidate of my own side was elected, and I of course ceased to have any hold upon the place, or chance of being elected there. But for years I had the deepest conviction that I should be “Member for Bridgwater”; and no amount of reasoning would get it out of my head. The borough is now disfranchised; but even still, if I allow my mind to dwell on the contest,—if I think of the hours I was ahead in the morning, and the rush of votes at two o’clock by which I was defeated,—and even more, if I call up the image of the nomination day, with all the people’s hands outstretched, and all their excited faces looking the more different on account of their identity in posture, the old feeling almost comes back upon me, and for a moment I believe that I shall be Member for Bridgwater…. . For a long time the ineradicable fatalistic feeling, that I should some time have this constituency, of which I had no chance, hung about my mind, and diminished my interest in other constituencies, where my chances of election would have been rational at any rate… The idea of being member for the town had been so intensely brought home to me by the excitement of a contest, that I could not eradicate it, and that as soon as I recalled any circumstances of the contest it always came back in all its vividness.”
© JB Seatrobe (Barry K Winetrobe & Janet Seaton) 2018. A version of this article was published originally in the July 2017 issue of the Somerset Leveller, #27.