The Political Evolution of the Old Regime, 1715–89 353derly government. This meant that fewer than
250,000 voted—approximately 3 percent of the nation.
In addition to the poor, women, criminals, Catholics,
Jews, some Protestants (notably Quakers), and nonbe-
lievers were barred from voting. A Qualification Act
required that to become a member of parliament (M.P.)
a candidate must own land worth £300, leaving a tiny
fraction of the nation eligible for office. Walpole,
however, encouraged the dominance of the House of
Commons and accepted that his cabinet stood collec-
tively responsible to that body.
British voters typically deferred to the leadership of
a small elite of great landowners. According to a study
of British politics at the accession of King George III,
this pattern of deference meant that a few prominent
families controlled the House of Commons. The con-
stituency of Wenlock in western England, for example,
had a few hundred electors. Throughout the eighteenth
century, they deferred to the leadership of the Forester
family, choosing eight members of that family to repre-
sent them in the House of Commons. Some con-
stituencies, called pocket boroughs, were owned by a
single family, which had the seat in its pocket and
chose the M.P.; others, called rotten boroughs, had so
few votes that the seat could be bought. In 1761 the
borough of Sudbury openly advertised that its seat in
the House of Commons was for sale. The vast lands
owned by the duke of Newcastle included seven bor-
oughs for which he personally selected the M.P. In such
ways, 111 wealthy landowners controlled more than
two hundred seats in Parliament.
Eighteenth-century England also witnessed the ori-
gins of a political party system. Members of Parliament
generally split into two large factions, not yet political
parties in the modern sense, called the Tory and Whig
parties. The Tories were somewhat more conservative
(in the sense of supporting royal authority) than the
Whigs (who were monarchists and defenders of the
Hanoverian settlement, but who spoke for parliamen-
tary supremacy). The leaders of both factions typically
came from the aristocracy. Political parties did not yet
dominate elections. A famous study of politics in the
Georgian age concluded that party did not determine
the outcome of a single election in the voting of 1761.
Nonetheless, the Whigs—including Walpole—won a
majority in the first elections under King George I and
generally dominated British politics for the next two
generations.
The strongest of Walpole’s successors, William Pitt
the Elder, strengthened the position of prime minister
and the cabinet system of government. Like Walpole,
Pitt was not born to the aristocracy, but he managed to
die holding both the nickname “the great commoner”
and the noble title the earl of Chatham. He was the
grandson of a merchant who had made a fortune trad-
ing in India in illegal competition with the East India
Company. That wealth had bought Pitt’s marriage into
high society and his seat in Parliament representing a
famous rotten borough, Old Sarum. Pitt was polished
and Oxford educated; his rise in Parliament was largely
the result of exceptional oratorical skills. As prime min-
ister during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, Pitt’sIllustration 19.1
The House of Commons.Parlia-
mentary government was the institution
that most distinguished the English
monarchy from the other great powers.
The lower house of Parliament, the elec-
tive House of Commons, effectively lim-
ited the power of the Hanoverian kings
in contrast to the absolute monarchies of
continental Europe. Note how the
physical arrangement divides parliament
into two sides (the government and the
opposition), encouraging a two-party
system.