Days of May

The Days of May was a period of significant social unrest and political tension in the United Kingdom in May 1832, after the Tories[a] blocked the Third Reform Bill in the House of Lords, which aimed to extend parliamentary representation to the middle and working classes as well as the newly industrialised cities of the English Midlands and the North of England.

The campaign to broaden the electoral franchise had garnered wide and organised national support over the preceding years, led by Thomas Attwood's Birmingham Political Union, which boasted that it "had united two million men peacefully and legally in one grand and determined association to recover the liberty, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country".

[2] The fall of the bill, and the subsequent resignation of the Whig government of Earl Grey, were met with rioting, campaigns of economic sabotage and threats of armed insurrection that many contemporaries judged to be credible.

Historians debate as to how decisive this extra-parliamentary pressure was in securing the passage of the bill, but the period is seen as one of the times when the United Kingdom came closest to a revolution, which could have also led to the end of the monarchy in the manner of France.

Parliamentary representation was limited and haphazard in 18th and early 19th century Britain: in 1780 it was calculated that there were only 214,000 qualified to vote in England and Wales out of a total population of 8 million; and property qualifications varied widely between constituencies.

[6] Lord John Russell tried sporadically and unsuccessfully during the 1820s to abolish specific rotten boroughs and transfer representation to larger towns,[7] but the newly elected Whig government headed by Earl Grey in November 1830 was the first to commit to parliamentary reform.

Contemporary observers had little doubt: Edward Littleton, then a Whig MP, commented in his diary that the country was "in a state little short of insurrection",[19] while the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith later described a "hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear".