11 - Hunt and Liberty: Popular Politics in Bristol, 1800–20

Summary

When the politics of opposition reappeared openly in Bristol in the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was driven once again by local issues, but also by the fortuitous arrival of Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt on the eve of the general election in 1807, who took a house in fashionable Bellevue, Clifton, while settling his business interests in the Jacobs Wells brewery. Hunt had developed an appetite for arguments about electoral independence through a series of noisy interventions in the contest for Wiltshire the previous year, and now saw Bristol as an ideal place in which to further develop his ambitions. Partly through Hunt's influence then, conflicts over local corruption and the right of franchise came to dominate the language of opposition in the city in this period, once more making the corporation and the local party system the principal focus of discontent.

The Bristol newspapers had loudly congratulated the Whig and Tory clubs for getting their candidates elected without the trouble of a poll after the general election of November 1806, but the collapse of the resulting ministry after just six months raised the issue again in the late spring of 1807. Soon after the new election was called, it was announced in Bristol that an independent candidate, Sir John Jarvis, had unexpectedly come forward to oppose the customary coalition. Jarvis was the commander of the city's Volunteer rifle corps, an unlikely candidate, and Hunt was highly suspicious of him. In the first place Hunt believed Jarvis to be a Tory and in the second Jarvis appeared to have nobody in place to nominate him. Suspecting that Jarvis was actually a paper candidate, produced by the coalition to dissuade the freemen from putting forward a genuine independent candidate of their own, Hunt accompanied Jarvis to the Guildhall. There he tried to nominate Jarvis himself, but was debarred since he was neither a freeman nor a freeholder in the city and since nobody else stepped forward to do it, the Whig Evan Baillie and the Tory, Charles Bragge-Bathurst were elected without a contest. Jarvis's farcical non-candidature raised tempers that had already been sorely tested in 1806, and public animosity towards Bathurst in particular led to serious disturbances, the immediate causes of which remain unclear.