On 19 February 1835, the first meeting of the House of Commons since the recent general election led to the deposition of the incumbent speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton. The Whig opposition successfully thwarted Manners-Sutton’s bid for an eighth term, electing James Abercromby in his stead.

Manners-Sutton had served as speaker since 1817. He was reelected unopposed in 1819, 1820, 1826, 1830 and 1831. The move to displace Manners-Sutton in 1835, orchestrated by the Whig leadership, represented the first time a speaker had been removed by a vote of the House since 1780.

The debate centred on the accusation that Manners-Sutton had colluded with King William IV and the Duke of Wellington to subvert the previous Whig government.

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In the final months of the 1832-1834 parliament, William IV dismissed the Whig administration of Viscount Melbourne. He reportedly objected to the appointment of Lord John Russell as a senior minister in Melbourne’s government, believing Russell to be a radical. These moves came despite the Whigs holding a majority in the House of Commons.

William first turned to Wellington, who took on the post of prime minister as an effective caretaker, while Robert Peel was located. Peel was holidaying in Italy at the time.

Peel’s Conservative government called the 1835 general election – the second since the 1832 Great Reform Act – in search of a commons majority. During the campaign, Peel issued the famous Tamworth Manifesto. But results failed to redress the Conservative Party’s minority status. Peel’s party returned with 273 MPs; the Whigs, allied with Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Repeal Association, held 385 seats.

The 1835 speakership election therefore represented an opportunity for the Whigs to exhibit their parliamentary strength.

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Parliament’s reassembly on 19 February marked both the first meeting since the 1835 general election – and the first since a devastating fire destroyed most of the medieval Palace of Westminster. The inferno – the biggest blaze since the Great Fire of London in 1666 – was started by the burning of tally sticks (a form of medieval tax receipt) in two under-floor furnaces beneath the House of Lords.

MPs met in the building previously occupied by the Lords, the Lesser Hall, which was serviceable after some renovation work.

Conservative MP Lord Francis Egerton was the first to speak in the new parliament.

Egerton argued that the blaze necessitated the re-election of Manners-Sutton as speaker. Egerton referenced the destruction of documents containing records of parliamentary precedent. He maintained that the House had lost its written memory, and therefore needed Sutton’s personal memory to function in its temporary accommodation.

Egerton told MPs: “I ask the House to look at the loss we have recently experienced – to consider the lamentable deprivation we have suffered – the documents, the records, the evidence that has been consumed by that melancholy catastrophe, and then honourable members will feel, that the extensive knowledge and intimate acquaintance with such matters possessed by that individual cannot be too highly appreciated”.

Egerton’s defensive posture owed to the aggressive stance adopted by the Whigs. For the inferno had inspired a sense of political intrigue.

In his contribution to proceedings, Manners-Sutton argued that his frequent meetings with the king and attendance at the privy council – which the Whigs viewed as plotting – were actually about the fire.

The incumbent speaker summarised the three principal accusations levelled against him: that he had colluded in the subversion of Melbourne’s government, assisted in the formation of the new Conservative government, and “counselled and advised the dissolution of the late parliament.”

He denied all the charges, arguing that “in all of them collectively, and in each of them individually – there was not one word of truth… from the beginning to the end.”

Manners-Sutton detailed how he rushed from Brighton to London as the fire raged and wrote an immediate letter to the king reporting the devastation. He argued that his subsequent attendance at the privy council was not to plot a new government, but to serve on a committee of inquiry into the “cause of the fire”.

He also said he had been asked to “survey Buckingham house and gardens” to judge whether the estate could serve as a temporary parliament, placing him at the scene of the alleged crime.

Manners-Sutton insisted that “at no one of the privy councils that he had attended had any business been done but of the most formal description.”

William Joseph Denison rose to propose James Abercromby as the Whig candidate for the speakership.

Denison argued that the dismissal of the previous government “unheard and without a trial” required a speaker who could firmly represent the rights of the commons against the crown. He contended moreover that the recent election had returned a pro-reform majority that was “warmly and steadily attached to the great principles”. MPs, he recommended, should elect as speaker “a gentleman assimilated in principle and opinions to the great majority of the House”.

William Henry Ord, who seconded Abercromby’s nomination, suggested that deposing Manners-Sutton would send a signal to the public that parliament disapproved of “those important events which have taken place within the last few months”.

Lord John Russell, the leader of the Whigs in the commons, acquitted Sutton of “any share in any political intrigues” regarding the dismissal of the government. However, he argued that Manners-Sutton’s attendance at the privy council during the crisis – even if it was regarding the fire – was “conduct unbecoming the speaker of the House of Commons”.

Russell argued that Manners-Sutton should have made excuses to avoid meetings dominated by Wellington’s caretaker government. By failing to do so, he stated, Sutton’s “political bias… had got the better of him” and “induced him to concur in acts, which, as speaker of the House of Commons, he had much better have avoided.”

Manners-Sutton was a Tory parliamentarian before assuming the speaker’s chair, and the Whigs saw him as an opponent of the Reform Act 1832. (Following the act’s passage, the speaker was even considered as a possible prime minister at the head of a pro-reform Conservative ministry – largely because, in his capacity as speaker, he had maintained a technically neutral stance on the reform question.)

Addressing the commons, Russell argued that if the “sword of prerogative” had been drawn by the king in dismissing a ministry, MPs should respond with the “shield and buckler of popular privileges” by electing their own representative.

He referenced the case of Edward Seymour, who King Charles II refused to accept as speaker in 1679. At the time, parliamentarian Harbottle Grimston protested: “Shall we not have the liberty to choose our own servant, fit to do our own work?”

Russell repeated this appeal as a justification for Abercromby’s elevation as speaker.

Whig MP Robert Ferguson said it was the “universal demand on every reformer throughout the country” that MPs should elect Abercromby as speaker. He said that, despite his past support for Manners-Sutton, his constituents had been “loud in their demands upon me to perform my duty.”

Lord Stanley (a future Conservative prime minister) condemned the tactics used by the Whigs. He argued that if the Whigs wanted to “try the strength of parties” they should use conventional means and not “damage the character of an individual [Manners-Sutton] to decide a party question.”

George Robinson, an independent-minded MP, said the rejection of Manners-Sutton “would be an act of great injustice”. But he alluded to the support for Abercromby in the country when he said the speakership was an issue on which he would countenance the “loss of his seat in parliament”.

Robert Peel, the new prime minister, characterised the attempt to remove Manners-Sutton as an act of “singular ingratitude.” He reminded the House that the reformers were happy to support Manners-Sutton in the 1833 speakership election, but now sought to “unfairly take the very first opportunity to subject him to disgrace.”

Manners-Sutton had faced a challenge in 1833, but only from disgruntled Radical members (notably Joseph Hume, Francis Burdett and Daniel O’Connell). At the time, Whig ministers preferred the prospect of an experienced speaker to preside over the first parliament elected since the 1832 Great Reform Act.

Peel concluded that the “precincts of the chair ought not to be converted into ground on which political battles might be fought”.

The House proceeded to a division – an immediate test of the strength of the parties in the new parliament. The result was a narrow victory for the Whig opposition. Abercromby was elected speaker by 316 votes to 306 – a majority of 10.

Among those who voted for Manners-Sutton was William Gladstone, a young Conservative MP, and John Evelyn Denison, a future speaker of the House.

Abercromby was led to the chair amidst loud cheers, which drowned out his first address as speaker-elect. Peel congratulated Abercromby on his election.

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In March 1835, Manners-Sutton was raised to the peerage as Baron Bottesford of Bottesford and Viscount Canterbury. He spoke a total of nine times in the House of Lords before his death in 1845, aged 65.

The 1835 speakership election reflected the hostile parliamentary environment Peel, the leader of a minority government, found himself in.

During his short first tenure as prime minister, Peel established the Ecclesiastical Commission to review the governance of the Church of England and recommend potential reforms. The policy exemplified the “Peelite” approach of reforming institutions to ensure their survival. In April, however, the Whigs brought forward a report critical of the administration of the Church of Ireland. It was an attempt to unite the Whigs and Irish Repeal Association MPs – the composition of the Lichfield House Compact – on an issue Peel could not accept.

The government was defeated by 285 votes to 258.

Peel resigned on 8 April 1835 and Melbourne returned to power at the head of a majority Whig administration. Melbourne appointed Russell to serve as home secretary.

Notably, William IV’s dismissal of Melbourne’s Whig administration in 1834 – apparently over Russell’s appointment – remains the last time in British history that a monarch attempted to oust a government to suit their own political preferences.

Abercromby served as commons speaker until 1839. Charles Shaw-Lefevre, who succeeded Abercromby as speaker, was re-elected following the 1841 general election despite a change of government (from Whig to Peel’s Conservative party).

Lord Norton, a Conservative peer and parliamentary expert, has referred to Manners-Sutton’s deposition as something of a watershed moment in the history of the speakership.

Norton delivered his assessment during an oral evidence session of the commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee (Pacac) in 2019, as part of its inquiry into the role of the speaker.

He said: “In a way, the removal of Manners-Sutton marked the pivotal point in the change of the nature of the role.

“Before then, speakers had been moving to be more impartial, but they were not necessarily apolitical and sometimes they went on to hold government office. Manners-Sutton, who had a record for the number of parliaments to which he was re-elected, was also considered a potential prime minister. So that was the last case.

“Since then, you have moved from a practice to a convention that whoever is the speaker, on ceasing to be speaker, retires from the House, is offered a peerage and is seen as neutral.

“Since then, the practice of being detached has become developed.”

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Significantly, since Manners-Sutton, no sitting speaker has been defenestrated by the House of Commons.

MPs arguably came closest to repeating this controversial act in 2015 when the Conservative government, led by David Cameron as prime minister, suffered a humiliating defeat on a motion widely seen as an attempt to oust John Bercow as speaker.

The proposal, spearheaded by the leader of the House of Commons, William Hague, sought to introduce a secret ballot to re-elect Bercow as speaker in the next parliament. This would have provided political cover for critical Conservative MPs who wished to remove Bercow from his post.

Opponents of the move, comprising Labour, Liberal Democrat and some Conservative MPs, condemned the move as a cynical ploy to remove Bercow – who was unpopular with many on the government frontbench.

In the end, Bercow was re-elected unopposed as commons speaker following the 2015 election.

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who nominated Bercow, said it was vital for “constitutional reasons” that incumbent speakers were generally re-elected.

Rees-Mogg stressed that the speaker’s role is to defend the independence and rights of the commons “against the Lords and sometimes against the judges, but perhaps most particularly against the executive.”

He argued that if MPs regularly defenestrated sitting speakers, they would find that “the speaker spent the whole time paying regard to what the frontbench on one side or the other were thinking as to how he should rule, lest he should not continue in office after a general election.”

Rees-Mogg said the last time this had happened was in “1835, when Charles Manners-Sutton was booted out by the Whigs for being too much of a Tory.”