more responsive to the wishes of the common man and
campaigned to extend voting rights. But this meant only a
small increase in the electorate. Universal suffrage, even
only for men, was not on the table. The Whigs won the
election, and their leader, Earl Grey, became the prime
minister. Earl Grey was no radical—far from it. He and the
Whigs pushed for reform not because they thought a
broader voting franchise was more just or because they
wanted to share power. British democracy was not given by
the elite. It was largely taken by the masses, who were
empowered by the political processes that had been
ongoing in England and the rest of Britain for the last
several centuries. They had become emboldened by the
changes in the nature of political institutions unleashed by
the Glorious Revolution. Reforms were granted because
the elite thought that reform was the only way to secure the
continuation of their rule, albeit in a somewhat lessened
form. Earl Grey, in his famous speech to Parliament in favor
of political reform, said this very clearly:
There is no-one more decided against
annual Parliaments, universal suffrage and
the ballot, than I am. My object is not to
favour, but to put an end to such hopes and
projects … The principle of my reform is, to
prevent
the
necessity
of
revolution … reforming to preserve and not to
overthrow.
The masses did not just want the vote for its own sake
but to have a seat at the table to be able to defend their
interests. This was well understood by the Chartist
movement, which led the campaign for universal suffrage
after 1838, taking its name from its adoption of the
People’s Charter, named to evoke a parallel with the
Magna Carta. Chartist J. R. Stephens articulated why
universal suffrage, and the vote for all citizens, was key for
the masses:
The question of universal suffrage … is a
knife and fork question, a bread and cheese
question … by universal suffrage I mean to
say that every working man in the land has a