III. A Great Electioneer and his Motives: The Fourth Duke of Newcastle

Abstract

Despite intensive research into the history of parliamentary electioneering, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several questions, particularly concerning the electioneer himself, remain partly unanswered. Although the extent of patronage in various constituencies and the actual electioneering techniques used have been closely studied it has been more difficult to answer such questions as why certain men participated in electioneering and why they were prepared to spend so much money on it. There has been a tendency to describe these men, and to estimate their motives, in a rather stereotyped and oversimplified way. It has been the characteristic of these stereotyped generalizations to account for the activities of the electioneer in terms of purely material motives: he ‘electioneered’, it is suggested, because he was trying to promote the interests of a certain political group; or because he wanted political office; or because he wanted a peerage; or because he wanted to ensure a handsome share of patronage or income for himself and his dependants. No doubt some electioneers were swayed, even exclusively, by motives of this kind. But such motivation sounds suspicious in its brutal simplicity; if we had more individual studies of this type of politician, we might find that many of the famous electioneers were prompted just as strongly by motives of a less directly material kind, which reflected their personal characters, their personal problems in life, and even their personal idealism.