Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 1 (of 2)

CHAPTER XXVI

NORTHAMPTON, 1868

There is, I think, not the least doubt that very early in my father's life he began to nurse dreams of one day playing his part in the legislature of his country, and indeed it is currently reported in Northampton that as early as 1859 he spoke to some friends there of his wish to represent that borough in Parliament. As I have no exact evidence that Mr Bradlaugh went to the town before that year, I think the report puts the date a little too early, but in any case I do not find that the idea took any definite shape in his mind until about the end of 1865 or early in the following year. In 1867 it is clear that the possibility of his candidature was realised even by those outside the circle of his personal friends, for in the spring of that year we find a sarcastic prognosis of the possible results of the extended franchise in a West of England paper, in which the writer says: "Mr Bradlaugh would perhaps take the Government of India from the hands of Sir Stafford Northcote, his intelligence being not less, and his catholicity in religious matters making him a more acceptable ruler to the 'mild' but shrewd Hindoo." In place of the Government of India Mr Bradlaugh was destined to take other things of not quite so pleasant a nature from the hands of Sir Stafford Northcote, although it is rather curious that the Western Times should have selected in jest an appointment which would have afforded him so much scope for good and useful work.

Some time before anything definite had been said as to my father's candidature at the forthcoming elections in 1868, it was regarded as so much of a certainty that people began spontaneously to subscribe towards his election expenses. In June he notified his friends through the National Reformer that he would shortly announce the name of the borough to which he proposed to offer himself, and at the same time he would issue his address. This was done within the next few days, in the midst of the burden and anxiety of the Government prosecution of the Reformer.

My father was well known in Northampton. Since he went there to lecture on the invitation of Mr Gurney and Mr Shipman, he had, as we have seen, many times visited the town, and his opinions on political, social, and religious questions were thoroughly well understood. As his address forms a sort of landmark of Mr Bradlaugh's views on many of these important subjects, some of which are still hotly discussed, and most of which still await a satisfactory solution, I give it exactly as he issued it.

"To the present and future electors of the borough of Northampton:

"In seeking your suffrages for the new Parliament, I am encouraged by the very warm feeling exhibited in my favour by so many of the inhabitants of your borough, and by the consciousness that my own efforts may have helped in some slight degree to hasten the assembly of a Parliament elected by a more widely extended franchise than was deemed possible two years ago.

"If you should honour me by electing me as one of your representatives, I shall give an independent support in the new Parliament to that party of which Mr Gladstone will probably be chosen leader; that is to say, I shall support it as far as its policy and action prove consistent with the endeavour to attain the following objects, which I hold to be essential to the progress of the nation: —

"1. A system of compulsory National Education, by which the State shall secure to each child the opportunity of acquiring at least the rudiments of a sound English education preparatory to the commencement of the mere struggle for bread.

"2. A change in our land laws, commencing with the abolition of the laws of primogeniture and entail; diminishing the enormous legal expenses attending the transfer of land, and giving greater security to the actual cultivation of the soil for improvements made upon it.

"3. A thorough change in our extravagant system of national expenditure, so that our public departments may cease to be refuges for destitute members of so-called noble families.

"4. Such a change in the present system of taxation that for the future the greater pressure of imperial taxes may bear upon those who hold previously accumulated wealth and large tracts of devised land, and not so much upon those who increase the wealth of the nation by their daily labour.

"5. An improvement of the enactments relating to capital and labour, so that employer and employed may stand equal before the law, the establishment of conciliation courts for the settlement of trade disputes, and the abolition of the jurisdiction in these matters of the unpaid magistracy.

"6. A complete separation of the Church from the State, including in this the removal of the Bishops from the position they at present occupy as legislators in the House of Lords.

"7. A provision by which minorities may be fairly represented in the legislative chambers.

"8. The abolition of all disabilities and disqualifications consequent upon the holding or rejection of any particular speculative opinion.

"9. A change in the practice of creating new peerages; limiting the new creations to life peerages, and these only to be given as rewards for great national services; peers habitually absent from Parliament to be deprived of all legislative privileges, and the right of voting by proxy in any case to be abolished.

"10. The abolition as a governing class of the old Whig party, which has long since ceased to play any useful part in our public policy. Toryism represents obstructiveness to Radical progress, but it represents open hostility. Whiggism is hypocritical; while professing to be liberal, it never initiates a good measure or hinders a bad one. I am in favour of the establishment of a National party which shall destroy the system of government by aristocratic families, and give the members of the community born poorest fair play in their endeavour to become statesmen and leaders, if they have genius and honesty enough to entitle them to a foremost place.

"In order that my competitors shall not have the right to object that I unfairly put them to the expense of a contest, I am willing to attend a meeting of the inhabitants of your borough, at which Mr Gilpin and Lord Henley shall be present, and to be governed by the decision voted at such a meeting as to whether or not I persist in my candidature.

"In asking your support I pledge myself, in the event of a contest, to fight through to the last moment of the Poll a fair and honest fight. It would give me special pleasure to be returned as the colleague of Mr Gilpin, whom I believe to be a thoroughly honest and earnest representative; and if you elect me I shall do my best in the House of Commons for the general enfranchisement and elevation of the people of the United Kingdom.

"Sunderland Villa, Northumberland Park, Tottenham."

In the above address as it appears in the pages of the National Reformer for July 5, paragraphs 7 and 9 are lightly struck through in pencil by my father's hand, but whether these pencil marks have any significance I am not prepared to say. His ideas for a reform of the House of Lords certainly went very much farther, in later years at least, than those indicated in the ninth paragraph. He believed in a single Legislative Chamber and considered two unnecessary, but as a rule he disliked any sudden abolition of old-established customs, and therefore in advocating reforms of the House of Lords, he put forward such as would lead gradually and naturally to its discontinuance as a House of hereditary legislators.

This address was read in Northampton to a large audience on the last Sunday in June. Two days later, at a public meeting of about four thousand persons held in the Market Square, a vote was taken as to Mr Bradlaugh's candidature, and only one hand was lifted against it.

The issue of this address and the subsequent public meeting produced a considerable flutter in the political dovecots of Northampton. A great outcry was raised at Mr Bradlaugh's unheard-of audacity in putting himself forward without receiving the usual requisition, but, as he calmly explained at a meeting in the Northampton theatre a few weeks later, he had for two years intended to become a candidate for Parliament, and had determined to offer himself to any body of men wherever he thought he had a fair chance of success. He believed Northampton was that place, and in putting himself forward without formal invitation he did not think he had imperilled either his own dignity or that of the electors. The Northampton Mercury,114 the local Whig paper, affected the utmost scorn for his candidature, saying that he had "no more chance of being elected member for Northampton than he has of being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury." "Nous verrons" was Mr Bradlaugh's only comment upon this declaration, which was afterwards taken up and repeated by different papers as a sort of bon mot.

But the disdain of the Northampton Whigs was well balanced by the enthusiasm of the Northampton working-men. They threw themselves into the work of the election contest, from the very outset, with the utmost zeal and ardour; they delivered the address by hand at every house in Northampton – and the work was all done gratuitously. And so with all the elections in which my father took part: he had neither paid agents nor paid canvassers; he had no paid speakers (beyond, in some cases, out-of-pocket expenses) and few paid clerks; all such work was freely and eagerly volunteered. Nor were the women less ardent than the men. They soon decided upon his election colours, and at the conclusion of a meeting held by him in the theatre in the middle of July, they presented him with a rosette made of mauve, white, and green ribbons, a combination unique amongst election colours, afterwards generally identified with Mr Bradlaugh and loved for his sake. Some of these same rosettes fashioned and worn at this election in 1868 were cast into the grave at Brookwood in 1891, and some others, which their owners had carefully treasured for six-and-twenty years, were worn for the last time on the 25th June 1894, when the statue of Mr Bradlaugh was unveiled in the town whose name will be for ever associated with his own.

Amongst those who came to speak for him the first place must be given to George Odger, who was himself trying to win a seat at Chelsea. Besides Mr Odger there were the Rev. J. K. Applebee, Austin Holyoake, R. A. Cooper, E. Truelove, C. Watts, and others, and everywhere the meetings were large and enthusiastic. Poor men – freethinkers and radicals – throughout the country vied to help in this election; but men in Edinburgh and men in Lancashire could neither vote nor canvass, so they resolved to give aid in money. Long and costly was the candidature; the elections did not come off until November, and thus the campaign continued over five months. Some of the northern towns endeavoured to raise a regular monthly subscription, some a weekly one, and soon long lists appeared in the columns of the National Reformer, long lists made up mostly of small sums, of threepences or sixpences, or shillings; sums of £1 and over were rare, and seldom indeed was there such a heavy donation as £10, Mr Bradlaugh's supporters being, with scarcely an exception, poor working men. At the end of August John Stuart Mill drew upon himself a hailstorm of abuse by sending £10 to Mr Austin Holyoake, secretary of the Election Fund, with the following letter: —

"Dear Sir, – I enclose a subscription of £10 to the fund for defraying the expenses of Mr Bradlaugh's election to the House of Commons. I do so in the confidence that Mr Bradlaugh would not contest any place where by so doing he would risk the return of a Tory in the room of a supporter of Mr Gladstone, and of the disendowment of the Irish Church. – I am, dear Sir, yours very faithfully,

"Austin Holyoake, Esq."

Much capital was made out of the assertion that Mr Bradlaugh was trying to divide the Liberal vote at Northampton, and so let in a Tory, but it was an assertion entirely without foundation. Over and over again he stated that it was Lord Henley's115 seat that he was trying to win, and that rather than risk the losing of it to a Tory he was prepared to submit to a decision of a test meeting of the electors. At that time there were 5,729 electors on the register, and of these as many as 3,400 were new voters, so extensively had the new Act affected the voting power in the single borough of Northampton. Mr Bradlaugh's offer to be governed by the decision of a public meeting of the electorate was entirely ignored. "It was in vain," says the writer of the little Souvenir book issued on the occasion of the unveiling of my father's statue at Northampton, "it was in vain that Mr Bradlaugh offered to abide by any fair test that might be devised to settle beforehand which of the two Liberal candidates in the field should go to the poll." A test ballot had been taken at Manchester to decide the claims of Ernest Jones. "If, however," continued the writer of the Souvenir, "the Manchester method were unacceptable, Mr Bradlaugh was prepared to agree to any other form of gauging the opinion of the constituency that was equally just to him" and to Lord Henley. But the Whigs seemed afraid to put it "to the touch," and my father's address was rapidly followed by one signed jointly by Charles Gilpin and Lord Henley. The Tories followed considerably later with two candidates, Messrs Merewether and Lendrick, and later still came a sixth candidate, Dr F. R. Lees, well known as a Temperance advocate. Why he came it is a little difficult to say, for before coming he wrote my father that he was not hostile to him; and he publicly declared that if he were elected in Mr Gilpin's place, he would at once resign in that gentleman's favour. Mr Bradlaugh therefore asked him, as it was impossible that both could win Lord Henley's seat, "to at once consent to adopt some course which will avoid division of the Radical strength." At his first meeting amendments were carried in Mr Bradlaugh's favour, but Dr Lees persisted right up to the last day, and abandoned his candidature "only on the day of the poll, when it was too late to prevent nearly five hundred electors recording their votes on his behalf."116

During the whole time, from the end of June to mid-November, Mr Bradlaugh was of course constantly addressing meetings from one end to the other of the constituency, and it is rather curious to note that in one of his earliest speeches he shadowed forth what really happened to him twenty years later. At the conclusion of an address delivered in the theatre on the 16th of July on the subject of "Capital and Labour and Trades Unions," some one asked him whether if he were delegated to the House of Commons he could "guarantee to enact laws that should satisfy all Trades Unions and the public generally." "Certainly not," was the reply; "I daresay I should give as much dissatisfaction to Trades Unionists as anybody. But that would not be my fault. I should act honestly, and if the Trades Unionists were the bulk o£ my constituency, and they thought I acted in contravention of my programme, I should resign my trust into their hands." And when Mr Bradlaugh did act thus honestly in the matter of the Employers' Liability Bill in 1889, the Trades Unions were exceedingly dissatisfied with him, and were for the most part very bitter against him.

In a very short time the Northampton election became the subject of discussion everywhere, and the press from one end of England to the other had some sort of comment to make upon it – hostile to Mr Bradlaugh, of course. The Daily Telegraph, then professing Liberal views, was one of the earliest to raise the odium theologicum against him;117 it speculated in pious dismay as to "what outrage on good taste and on the conscientious convictions of his fellow-citizens 'Iconoclast' may not attempt in the wider circle to which he seeks admittance," and held up its Jewish hands in holy horror in imagining the possibilities of a time "when Englishmen will revile the sublime moralities of the New Testament." My father challenged Mr Levy, the editor, to give an instance of any such "outrage" committed by him, adding, "I do more than this; the Government have, out of the public funds, paid for shorthand notes of several of my speeches since 1865. These notes still exist; I know in some cases the actual professional reporters employed, and I dare the publication of these notes."

The cowardly insinuations of the Daily Telegraph were printed as a placard and posted all over the town, where they produced the strongest excitement and bitterness. This placard was quickly followed by another of bright green, conveying a message from "The Irish Reform League to the Irishmen and friends of Ireland in Northampton." Northampton was entreated to return to Parliament "a man like Charles Bradlaugh, who advocated the cause of Ireland with pen and tongue when such advocacy was unpopular, if not dangerous." Irishmen in Dublin appealed to Irishmen in Northampton not to deserve the reproach of the defeat of such a man. "We, the Reformers of Ireland, gladly and heartily recommend him: by his works in the cause of Reform we know him; as a politician we endorse him; … we believe him to be true, we have faith in his political honesty, in his undaunted perseverance, and in his desire to elevate the downtrodden in our land and in his own."118

In September one of the newly enfranchised electors wrote to Mr John Bright for his advice as to the casting of his "maiden vote," and received from Mr Bright the following letter in reply: —

"Dear Sir, – I cannot interfere in your election matters, but I can answer the question you put to me.

"I do not think you can improve the representation of your borough by changing your members. I think Lord Henley and Mr Gilpin worthy of your support. – I am, yours truly,

"Mr Thomas James, Northampton."

When Mr Bradlaugh saw this letter, which was given the fullest publicity, he wrote Mr Bright as follows: —

"Sir, – I feel some difficulty in intruding myself upon you; but as you have taken a step in the Northampton election which I regard as prejudicial to my interests, you will pardon my trying to set the matter right. At the end of June I issued the address of which I enclose you a copy; the only other address issued is that of the sitting members. You will see in my address that I offered to submit my claims to the decision of an aggregate meeting, which offer has been entirely disregarded by Lord Henley. Whether or not Lord Henley is worthy of the support of the electors is a query to which a large proportion of the inhabitants of Northampton have already responded; they declare that he is not. As to whether I shall make a better member, I here offer no other remark than that through my life I have actively striven to advance the cause of Reform; while Viscount Henley has often discouraged and hindered effort, and has only voted in obedience to the irresistible pressure of public opinion. That you should support Mr Charles Gilpin with the weight of your great influence is natural, but that you should bolster up tumbling Whiggism as represented by Lord Henley I confess surprises me. Mr Gilpin's name has been associated as a working member in many highly valuable social and political reforms. Lord Henley's activity has been nearly limited to the prevention of compulsory education, the advocacy of increased expenditure for fortifications, and general care for landed interests. – Yours most obediently,

"John Bright, Esq., M.P.

"P.S.– I shall take the liberty of printing this letter and any reply you may forward me."

To my father's letter Mr Bright made answer that he had written an honest reply to a simple question, with no suspicion that he should be considered as taking sides with any party in the contest, adding some remarks as to his regard for past services and a tried fidelity, without any further definite opinion on Lord Henley's fitness. But if Mr Bright did not suspect that he should be considered as taking sides – and my father loyally accepted his statement – other people took a different view of the matter, and his letter was freely used against Mr Bradlaugh. The Spectator was of opinion that Mr Bright had succeeded "in more than neutralising the effect of Mr J. S. Mill's very injudicious and unexpected testimonial to Mr Bradlaugh's (Iconoclast's) claims as candidate for Northampton;" whilst the Saturday Review considered that if this letter saved Northampton "from the discredit of electing Mr Bradlaugh," Mr Bright would have done the borough "valuable service."

Finding that this letter had been such a success, the Whigs next addressed themselves to Mr Gladstone, asking him if he endorsed the opinion expressed by Mr Bright. Mr Gladstone promptly replied in these terms: —

"Sir, – While I am very unwilling to do or say anything that could be construed into interference in any election, I cannot refuse to consider the question you have put to me. Having for many years sat in Parliament with Lord Henley and Mr Gilpin, I have always considered both these gentlemen entitled to respect and confidence as upright and highly intelligent men, cordially attached to the Liberal party. – I remain, Sir, your faithful servant,

"I send this answer to you individually, and I should not wish it to be published unless you find that your brother-electors wish to know the purport of it."