The Third Reform Act, which received royal assent on 6 December 1884, established a uniform parliamentary franchise across the United Kingdom. The legislation, formally the Representation of the People Act – added approximately two million voters to the electoral roll – increasing the total electorate from three million to over five million.

The legislation built on previous reform acts in 1832 and 1867 by extending the household and lodger franchises in boroughs (urban constituencies) to the counties (historically rural constituencies). The Second Reform Act in 1867 had significantly expanded the parliamentary franchise to large numbers of working-class men in borough constituencies.

The Third Reform Act, passed by William Gladstone’s Liberal government, provided for a uniform franchise, meaning agricultural labourers in the counties received the vote for the first time. Section 2 of the Act stated that “a uniform household franchise and a uniform lodger franchise at elections shall be established in all counties and boroughs throughout the United Kingdom”.

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The act’s passage followed years of campaigning by radical figures and constitutional deadlock in the face of the Conservative-dominated House of Lords.

Radical Liberal MP Sir George Otto Trevelyan was a leading supporter of extending the county franchise, first tabling a bill to this effect in 1874. Introducing his Household Franchise (Counties) Bill in May 1874, Trevelyan said that a large section of the country stood “in a position of political inferiority, or rather, of political nullity”. He argued that this state of affairs was “unjust, and in practice is full of disadvantages of the gravest nature to the excluded portion of the community.”

Trevelyan’s bill was defeated by 287 votes to 173 – a majority of 114.

The 1880 general election returned the Liberal Party to government. Once in office, Joseph Chamberlain, a radical Liberal cabinet member, lobbied Gladstone to act quickly. The prime minister resolved to defer the issue to later in the parliament.

The Representation of the People Bill was eventually introduced on 28 February 1884. Addressing MPs at the bill’s first reading, Gladstone said he stood on “the broad principle that the enfranchisement of capable citizens… gives an addition of strength to the state.”

The prime minister argued that it was now time to enfranchise “the peasantry of the country.”

He asked: “Is there any doubt that the peasantry of the country are capable citizens, qualified for enfranchisement, qualified to make good use of their power as voters?”

Gladstone added: “The principle upon which [the bill] proceeds is, that the head of every household, under the conditions of the law, shall vote… It is, in point of fact, if it is to be described by a single phrase, a Household Franchise Bill for the United Kingdom”.

Gladstone pointed to the expansion of suburban areas, which had reduced the social distinction between borough and county constituencies. This separate treatment of the boroughs and counties under the 1867 settlement also meant those working men who moved from the former to the latter found themselves disenfranchised.

Gladstone referred to this as “the infliction of personal disfranchisement” and cited an example in Glasgow.

He told the commons: “It is that of the ship-building works on the Clyde. Those works were within the precincts of the City of Glasgow, and the persons who laboured in them were able to remain within the city, being near their work, and at the same time to enjoy the franchise.

“But the marvellous enterprise of Glasgow, which has made that city the centre and crown of the shipbuilding business of the world, could not be confined within the limits of the City of Glasgow, and it moved down the river. As the trade moved down the river the artisans required to move down the river with it. That was a matter of necessity, and the obedience to that necessity involves, under the present law, wholesale disfranchisement.”

The bill was not subject to the significant parliamentary opposition and subsequent popular mobilisations that characterised the passage of the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts.

But the Conservatives did resist the bill’s passage in the House of Lords, however, where they possessed a substantial majority. The Marquess of Salisbury, the Conservative leader, feared that flooding the county constituencies with new voters without redrawing electoral boundaries would entrench a Liberal majority in the country. Large multi-member seats could see traditional Conservative voters in rural areas – landowners and farmers – effectively drowned out.

In the commons, Conservative MP John Hay said there were 181 unrepresented towns in England and Wales “with a population of over 10,000 each… whose voters would be thrown into the county constituencies”. This, Hay said, would “almost nullify the county vote.”

Gladstone initially defended his decision not to include redistribution measures in the original bill, saying this course of action would make a “confusion of things that ought to be kept sedulously apart”. He argued that franchise reform “was a large and national” question, which should be separated from the “sectional and local” issues that would arise from redistribution.

Moreover, the prime minister referred to a political “trap”, whereby criticism of redistribution proposals could torpedo the entire bill.

But on 17 July 1884, the House of Lords stalled the bill’s progress. Addressing the upper chamber, Salisbury said that if the Reform Bill passed without redistribution, the government would have a political “lever” to force the hand of the opposition.

He argued that once the new voters were legally enfranchised, the government could produce a redistribution bill that benefitted the Liberal Party. The Lords could then be forced to accept it, knowing that any opposition could prompt Gladstone to call an election; the unreformed constituencies, he calculated, would return a significant Liberal majority. Gladstone could therefore threaten peers that “if they did not take the enfranchisement with such redistribution as he was pleased to give, they should have enfranchisement without redistribution at all.”

An amendment expressing the Conservative demand for redistribution legislation alongside franchise reform was passed by 182 votes to 132.

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The position adopted by Conservative peers raised the spectre of a constitutional crisis and wider popular agitation.

Chamberlain, who served in cabinet as the president of the Board of Trade, spearheaded a campaign under the slogan “The Peers Against the People”.

In August, the radical Liberal MP told a rally that during the last century the House of Lords had “never contributed one iota to popular liberties or popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal; and during that time it has protected every abuse, and sheltered every privilege.”

He said the upper chamber was ‘irresponsible without independence, obstinate without courage, arbitrary without judgment, and arrogant without knowledge.”

Chamberlain urged the people to fight back. “The opinion of the streets has had a mighty force in our political history”, he added.

“It has shaken monarchs on their thrones. In 1832, it carried the Reform Bill in the teeth of the House of Lords – more powerful than that with which we have to deal, after a conflict which had brought the country almost to the verge of revolution…

“But there are still evil counsellors, provoking and slandering the people, who are straining their privileges to the utmost, and who obstinately resist the extension of the popular liberties. Let them take heed. If we are commencing this great conflict with temper and moderation, it would be a mistake to suppose that we are less earnest or resolute than our forefathers.”

John Morley, a radical ally of Chamberlain, saw a chance to upend the Lords once and for all. On 30 July 1884, he told a rally that “no power on earth” could now separate “the question of mending the House of Commons from the other question of mending or ending the House of Lords”.

On 13 October 1884, the Conservatives staged a massive demonstration at Aston Hall in Birmingham – the heartland of Chamberlain’s Liberal machine. Thousands of Liberals responded by storming the grounds. One contemporary report said the demonstrators “scaled the wall… and ultimately pulled down a portion of it”, before bursting into the meeting hall and attacking the audience with “chair legs.” The Conservative speakers, Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Randolph Churchill, were forced to flee.

Addressing the rally, Churchill had described Chamberlain as a “pinchbeck Robespierre” who desired to become “president… of the British Republic”.

He added: “You may, I think, gentlemen, without any exaggeration, anticipate a very genuine and useful imitation of the ‘reign of terror’, sanctioned and supported by the view of the guillotine.”

In the commons, Churchill referred to Chamberlain as the “real author of the riots” and tabled a vote of censure against the cabinet minister. He accused Chamberlain, acting through the Birmingham Liberal Association, of orchestrating the violence using forged tickets and hired “roughs”. He named a series of street gangs, such as the Cecil Street gang, the Harding Street gang, who he alleged were paid to break into the premises.

Chamberlain forcefully denied these allegations, and claimed he could produce testimony from a dozen men who said they were “engaged by certain Tories to go to the grounds at Aston in order to assault the Liberals, to tear off their badges, and, if necessary, to ‘clout’ them”.

The vote of censure was defeated by 214 votes to 178.

On 17 October, shortly after the Aston riot, a young David Lloyd George observed that Chamberlain was “unquestionably the future leader of the people… He is a radical and doesn’t care who knows it, as long as the people do.”

Queen Victoria, greatly perturbed by Chamberlain’s antics, intervened to avert a constitutional crisis. She urged Gladstone and Salisbury to meet and break the deadlock. The key talks were carried out at Salisbury’s home on Arlington Street, Westminster.

Under the terms of the ‘Arlington Street compact’, Salisbury’s Conservative Party agreed to allow the Franchise Bill to pass, so long as it was followed by a Redistribution of Seats Bill that it deemed acceptable.

The Redistribution of Seats Act, passed in 1885, introduced the concept of equally populated constituencies, broke up multi-member constituencies and created single-member seats. The recommendations of a boundary commission, which reported in February 1885, were incorporated in the act. A remaining number of undivided borough seats continued to return 2 MPs (the last two member seats were abolished in 1950).

According to Salisbury’s design, the act separated Liberal-voting and Conservative-voting constituencies. He believed this would allow Conservatives to win suburban and rural seats, protecting them from being outvoted by the urban masses in large multi-member blocs.

This legislation thereby ended the practice of the Liberal and Conservative parties choosing to divide two-member constituencies between them, averting the need for an election. 657 of 670 seats were contested at the 1885 general election. Moreover, the provision meant that constituencies could not be carved up between factions within Liberalism, thereby averting electoral collisions between radical and whig candidates.

The Third Reform Act still fell short of universal suffrage. It preserved plural voting, whereby men who met the qualifications in more than one seat, and were registered to vote in each seat, could continue to do so. During the committee stage of the bill an amendment, proposed by Liberal MP Charles McLaren, stated that no man should be “entitled to be registered as a voter in more than one county or borough”.

McLaren argued that there was no valid reason in the UK why a man should “have votes in 20 counties”. Gladstone, however, opposed the amendment, insisting the government had to “set ourselves steadily against all changes in the bill in whatever direction they might be aimed to alter the basis of the measure.”

McLaren’s measure was defeated by 235 votes to 43.

Later in the debate, Conservative MP Lord George Hamilton argued that McLaren’s support for “one man, one vote” was somewhat ironic, because his brother had previously erected a “huge tenement” in Midlothian specifically to create 205 so-called “faggot votes” to support Gladstone’s famed 1880 election campaign.

Section 4 of the Third Reform Act ultimately restricted these “faggot votes” – the practice of subdividing land to create multiple property qualifications for the same plot. During the bill’s second reading debate, Liberal MP J.W. Mellor described an especially egregious case in West Somerset where “one tithe-rent charge had been divided amongst 33 Bristol Tory merchants, who had nothing to do with West Somerset, and never came there except to vote at the elections.”

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The act maintained the total exclusion of women from the franchise. Liberal MP William Woodall proposed an amendment at committee stage that sought to grant women the vote by changing the “words in the Representation of the People Acts importing the masculine gender include women”.

Woodall argued that no one who had considered the state of public opinion could “hesitate to say that there has been a remarkable and very strong growth of public opinion in its favour.”

He added: “The time has long since gone by when the proposal to enfranchise women was received with derision… Surely, then, it does not need many more words to show that these women are eminently ‘capable citizens’, and worthy of recognition by the committee.”

Gladstone spoke against the amendment, once more arguing that the bill was already carrying “a cargo as large as she can carry safely”. He explicitly threatened his own party that if Woodall’s amendment passed, the government would “disclaim all responsibility” for the bill.

Conservative MPs Stafford Northcote and Lord John Manners were among those to support the amendment. Manners contrasted the government’s eagerness to enfranchise “Irish cottiers”, whom he said occupied “a servile position”, with their refusal to enfranchise “female farmers”.

Northcote said the government was about to admit “so large a body of men as to whose qualification and efficiency for the franchise” who did not have “half as much knowledge of the real questions at issue as most of the women of England.”

He asked: “When you are going to admit these people as capable citizens, is it unreasonable to demand that the same privilege shall be given to 400,000 or 500,000 women who are at the heads of households and are managers of property in this country?”

Irish Conservative Edward King-Harman argued the bill would enfranchise the very class “from which come the wife-beaters and wife-kickers… who live on their wages, ill-use them, and treat them more like animals than human beings.”

Liberal MPs, sceptical of such Conservative support, accused the party of setting a “trap” for the government. They believed the Tories didn’t really care about women’s rights but were voting for the amendment solely to force Gladstone to drop the bill, thus killing the entire reform. Liberal MP Alfred Illingworth questioned the “cause of the sudden conversion” of these Conservatives, describing their object as “not to secure to women the vote” but “to destroy the bill”.

He said the Tory support for the amendment was “nothing but a trick and a trap.”

There was also Conservative opposition to the amendment. Charles Newdegate cited scripture to argue that the hierarchy of the sexes was divine law. “From the Book of Genesis to the last chapter of the Epistles, the position of woman is clearly defined”, he said. “She is to be dependent on man.”

The Liberals split three ways.

There were those, such as John Morley, who supported women’s suffrage but spoke against the amendment to save the bill; Morley would not allow “no side question, however much interested I may be in it, to make me swerve from supporting an object of this paramount importance”. There were Liberal rebels, including James Stansfeld and Sir Wilfrid Lawson, who supported the amendment in spite of Gladstone’s threat; Lawson said Liberal MPs should “be just and fear not”. Finally, there were Liberal MPs, like Edward Leatham, George Goschen, Henry Labouchere and James Bryce, who opposed the amendment because they opposed women’s suffrage.

Quoting from the French statesman and writer Agénor de Gasparin, Leatham told the House: “We shall lose the woman without getting the man. What we shall get is that monstrous and repulsive creature, already looming above the horizon – la femme-homme.”

Goschen said that inviting women’s suffrage would encourage the “sirens of the political boudoir”.

Labouchere described the pro-suffrage Liberals as “political cuckoos” who were trying to “lay eggs in [the prime minister’s] nest”.

He warned: “I am told that in every county, with the exception of Hampshire, more women would be put on the register than men if we had womanhood suffrage. And what would be the consequence? They would look to the interests of women rather than to the interests of men… we should have women opposite, women on these benches, and a woman, perhaps, in the chair.

“They would, like women everywhere, have their own way.”

Thorold Rogers, another anti-suffrage Liberal, argued that “while a good and excellent woman is one of the best things one sees in nature, and a thing a man is always ready to honour and reverence, a bad woman, is the most odious and most hateful thing in nature.”

Woodall’s amendment was defeated by 271 votes to 135 – a majority of 136.

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The 1884 and 1885 acts came at the cost of a Liberal minister.

Leonard Courtney, the financial secretary to the Treasury, was a leading advocate of proportional representation (specifically the single transferable vote). Courtney believed that single-member districts under the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system – which the Third Reform Act and Arlington Street compact effectively created – would undermine the representation of minority voices, creating a system that critics referred to as “Arithmocracy”.

In May 1884, during the Reform Bill’s committee stage, Gladstone had urged a Liberal MP to withdraw his amendment on minority representation. He vowed that “a most thorough consideration and examination of all the questions of minority voting must be an essential part of any new settlement of the representation of the people.”

The Arlington Street compact guarded against any such considerations.

On 4 December 1884, Courtney delivered his first commons speech following his resignation. He explained that he had remained silent during the franchise debates because he hoped that the Redistribution Bill would address minority representation.

Courtney described single-member constituencies, the central feature of the Arlington Street compact, as a dangerous “new departure from the old lines of the constitution.” He argued that such districts would fail to secure the “balance of the judgment of the people.” He cited election data from New York and Ohio to show how a party with a minority of votes overall can win a majority of seats if their opponents’ votes were concentrated in one ward while theirs are spread efficiently.

Courtney told the House: “In the 40th congress, the state of New York was represented by 11 Democrats to 20 Republicans, whereas the proportion of the voters was 16 Democrats to 15 Republicans. The Democrats were actually in the majority, but as returned in single-member districts to Congress they were in a minority.”

He further argued that in “the crowded parts there is an immense waste of voting power, while in the uncrowded parts there is an economy of voting power.”

Courtney contended that the proposed single-member system would force voters to obey party bosses to avoid splitting the vote, referring to the “pain and ignominy of being compelled to vote as someone tells you”.

He warned that splitting big cities into wards will lead to a “degradation of the character of this House.” MPs will become mere “vestrymen”, Courtney argued, representing narrow local interests rather than the whole community. The result would be a “decay and atrophy of political energy and power”.

Courtney, a man of both letters and numbers, then set out his case for the single transferable vote system.

He explained how the system would work: “Each voter would put a figure 1 against the name of the candidate whom he most desired to see elected, a figure 2 against a second to whom he desired to give his vote if the first did not require it, and so on.”

To win, Courtney added, a candidate would need a specific number of votes (the quota). Courtney calculated this by dividing the total votes by the number of seats plus one. If 40,000 votes were cast for 9 seats, the quota would stand at 4,001. Any candidate reaching this number would be “certain to be elected”. And if a popular candidate received more votes than the quota, their “surplus” votes would be transferred to the voter’s second preference.

He continued: “The process would thus go on, until in the end the nine persons would be elected, each receiving 4,001 votes.

“The plan is a simple one. It is as simple as – it is simpler than a sum in long division.”

Courtney said this system would ensure “all sorts of opinions in their proportions, and only in their proportions, represented in the House.”

He declared: “The scheme would emancipate those who are enslaved by the false machinery you have adopted… giving them, not merely a barren privilege, but bringing them into direct relationship with this assembly.

“The plan I have placed before the House would prove as firm as a rock in popular estimation.

“There would be no single artisan or agricultural labourer or man of learning or man of letters who would not be able to say – ‘There is someone in the House of Commons for whom I voted who represents me, who possesses my political ambitions and my political life.’”

In conclusion, Courtney invoked the memory of his friend Henry Fawcett, the postmaster general and husband of Millicent Fawcett, who had died a month earlier. The former minister claimed that had Fawcett lived, he too would have resigned. “I have higher authority than my own for knowing that had he whom we have lost so prematurely been present he would have borne his powerful testimony in the direction in which I have attempted to bear it tonight”, Courtney said.

Responding from the government frontbench, Gladstone began by praising Courtney’s intellect and sincerity, thanking him, caustically, for having “inspired life into what I might almost call, but for the effect of his speech, an army of dry bones.”

The prime minister dismissed Courtney’s proposed scheme as a pons asinorum (a “bridge of asses”).

He told the House: “My impression was that the proposition presented to us, which he said was of so simple a character, was, in truth, a pons asinorum, which very few of us indeed, if a record of consciences and understandings could at this moment be taken, would have been enabled to pass.”

Gladstone mocked Courtney’s “short and simple explanation of an hour long”, suggesting he could not “find an entry for it into the minds of ordinary and average people of the country.”

The prime minister did not claim that settlement produced by the Arlington Street compact was “necessarily a solid and a irrefragable judgment.” But he dismissed Courtney’s claim that he had got “hold of a perfect nostrum.”

John Lubbock, founder of the Proportional Representation Society, described the Redistribution of Seats Bill as a “danger to the Liberal cause”.

An amendment along the lines of Courtney’s scheme, introduced by Lubbock, was defeated by 134 votes to 31.

In April 1884, John Morley argued that schemes of proportional representation “were but new disguises for the old Tory distrust of the people”.

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The Representation of the People Act 1884 and Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 followed the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act 1883 – which criminalised attempts to bribe voters.

The legislation passed in the 1880-1884 parliament thereby precipitated the transition towards a recognisable form of modern mass politics. A majority of the adult male population, free from the intimidation of landowners and politicians, now had the vote in single-member seats.

The Third Reform Act had significant consequences for Britain’s political culture and party system. Its impact was felt most dramatically in Ireland, where the significance of the 1884-85 reforms became apparent almost at once.

The act greatly strengthened the rural Irish nationalist vote. At the 1885 general election, Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) increased its representation from 63 seats to 85 seats. This result helped catalyse Gladstone’s famous Hawarden Kite and unbending commitment to home rule.

The first home rule showdown in 1886 triggered an extraordinary realignment. Scores of Liberal MPs and peers broke with Gladstone, forming a new anti-home rule faction known as the ‘Liberal Unionists’. The grouping feared home rule would destabilise the British Empire by injecting the possibility of self-determination. The Liberal Unionists began to act as a unified bloc with the Conservative Party.

Among their leading figures was Joseph Chamberlain. His attempt to mobilise the thousands of agricultural labourers who had been enfranchised in 1884 – the radical “unauthorised programme” – was abandoned. Chamberlain served as colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903 as a leading light in the Conservative-Unionist government.

Other prominent Liberal Unionists included Leonard Courtney (became an independent in 1899) and George Goschen (appointed chancellor in 1887).

Gladstone’s response to the defeat of his 1886 Home Rule Bill was to dissolve parliament. The subsequent general election produced a transformed political landscape. A new Conservative–Liberal Unionist alliance returned 393 MPs (316 Conservatives and 78 Liberal Unionists), an increase of 146 seats. Gladstone’s Liberals were reduced from 319 seats to 192.

Lloyd George, the erstwhile “Chamberlain groupie”, soon found himself entirely at odds with Chamberlain, especially over imperial policy and the Second Boer War. On 18 December 1901, speaking in Birmingham – Chamberlain’s political heartland – Lloyd George met with a mob of protesters. The crowd was reportedly enraged by Lloyd George’s “pro-Boer and anti-Chamberlain utterances”. The protesters, estimated to number between 10,000 and 50,000, chanted favourably for “Joey”.

The passage of the 1884 act, therefore, was pregnant with political ironies.

The high politics of the ‘Arlington Street compact’ helped deliver a recognisable form of democratic politics. Simultaneously, the Third Reform Act was implicated in the transformation of its most forceful advocate (Radical Joe) into a statesman and pillar of the Conservative-Unionist establishment (Unionist Joe).

The 1884 act also cornered Gladstonian Liberalism. In Ireland, the Liberals were besieged by the newly empowered forces of nationalism; in England, the Arlington agreement had fortified Salisbury’s Conservative Party and incubated a suburban ‘Villa Toryism’. The Liberal Unionist split stood the test of time, with an official merger occurring in 1912.

The 1880s and 1890s ultimately represented a period of electoral decline for the Liberal Party.