Bad Behaviour All Round: More from Mr. Lowndes' Observations

Description:Richard Lowndes was an independent investigator employed by Granville Leveson-Gower (1721-1803), Lord Stafford, to investigate the canvassing expenses. Lowndes consulted Lord Stafford’s agents Fenton and Massey about the canvas and conducted an examination of their accounts.

Lowndes’s report informs Lord Stafford that the issue of his payment of the Newcastle expenses would affect whether he would in the future ‘have any interest in the borough or not’. Lowndes suggests to Gower that ‘the universal answer’ was that he ‘must pay these bills to their extent’ adding that if he refused, ‘you need never set your foot in the town again’. Lowndes reminds Lord Stafford that ‘when Mr. Fletcher first declared himself as a candidate’, Lord Stafford ‘frequently said’ that ‘no expense would be regarded to defeat his views’.

Bad Behaviour All Round

Lowndes’s Observations suggest that Lord Stafford’s election agents were to blame for the huge alcohol bill. He reports that the level of public excitement and calls for a fair election led to ‘writs’ being ‘issued’ which made it ‘illegal to treat’. When this had happened, Mr. Worrall ‘the crier of the town’ had given notice to each alehouse that ‘no liquor was to be let out’.

However, Lowndes reports that the order was ignored and Mr. Smallwood, an agent of the Trentham Interest, instructed publicans to ‘let out as usual to the Friends of the Party’, adding ‘the election must not be lost “for want of a little Liquor”'.

However, it wasn’t just election agents who were to blame. Candidates from both sides of the contest opened the pubs, and Lowndes refers to ‘Liquor’ being given out ‘by Gentlemen of the Country accompanied very probably by Hints that they were acting for the Candidate’.

Lowndes adds ‘there is not a man in the town but attributes the success of that election to the houses being opened’. He notes later in his report that the publicans believed that ‘the success’ of the election ‘depended’ on them ‘treating’ people.

Lowndes’s report describes how voters took advantage of the Candidates’s treating. He notes that publicans had reported to him that ‘their Houses were full from top to bottom all day and the greatest part of the night’. Publicans also took advantage of the situation. Lowndes writes about a ‘set’ of publicans who ‘seem to have been assiduous to increase the expence’ of the party in order to get more money for themselves.

Lowndes wrote very critically of the publicans’ manipulation of the canvassing procedure. He refers to people exploiting the situation as people ‘guilty of every species of extravagance who instead of remonstrating with a journeyman hatter or shoemaker about the impropriety of drinking wine and punch were forward to encourage him to do so’.

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