You have to understand what was really going on beneath the Colonial complaints about representation. America was an emerging nation, and the colonists no longer felt a real loyalty to Great Britain that overrode their private concerns. That much has been acknowledged by many posters, but what is not acknowledged is that people were MUCH FREER in American than in England in the late 18th century. And it was this conflict between a rising Democracy in which the people largely governed their own affairs, and the aristocratic rule of England that was the real cause of the conflict.
In England George III insisted on his traditional right to run the country through his cabinet ministry, led by Lord North Most government actions simply reflected the policy of the King, through his ministers, who could be dismissed without cause by the King at any time. Parliament held the right to approve all taxes — that had been the result of a generation of conflict with the Stuart Kings that resulted in the English Civil War and the political settlement of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in which the House of Stuart was deposed and the Hanoverian Dynasty of King George established. And the King would need Parliamentary support to pass legislation through the House of Commons.
The Parliamentary System of “Rotten Boroughs”
Old Sarum in Wiltshire, an uninhabited hill which until 1832 elected two Members of Parliament. Painting by John Constable,1829
But, Parliament in the 18th Century was a basically run under a system of “rotten boroughs in which only the land owning gentry, generally backed by the King, held any political power at all. In addition to the rural constituencies, many constituencies were simply bought and sold.
“For centuries, constituencies electing members to the House of Commons did not change to reflect population shifts, and in some places the number of electors became so few that they could be bribed or otherwise influenced by a single wealthy patron. In the early 19th century, reformists scornfully called these boroughs "rotten boroughs" or "pocket boroughs", or more formally "nomination boroughs", because their democratic processes were rotten and their MPs were elected by the whim of the patron, thus "in his pocket"; the actual votes of the electors were a mere formality; all or most of them voted as the patron instructed them, with or without bribery. As voting was by show of hands at a single polling station at a single time, none dared to vote contrary to the instructions of the patron. Often only one candidate would be nominated (or two for a two-seat constituency), so that the election was uncontested.”
So, essentially the King could govern the country, but had to make sure that his minster (Lord North) was supported by a majority of Parliament in order to raise taxes and pass legislation through the House of Commons, but that majority was a majority of Peers and the rural gentry, and not the population as a whole. Especially the cities and towns were largely unrepresented.
People who complained to their nominal Member of Parliament might be considered “impudent” for daring to offer their suggestions about governance. As one MP of a rotten borough replied to his constituents:
“In the early eighteenth century, a particularly obstreperous Member of Parliament replied in these terms to some constituents who had written to him asking him to vote against the Budget. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have received your letter about the excise and I am surprised at your insolence in writing to me at all. You know, and I know, that I bought this constituency. You know, and I know, that I am now determined to sell it, and you know what you think I don’t know, that you are now looking out for another buyer, and I know what you certainly don’t know, that I have now found another constituency to buy. About what you say about the excise. May God’s curse light upon you all and may it make your homes as open and free to the excise officer as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your rascally constituency.’
And the Colonies were not represented at all. That was the central problem. The political crisis that led to the American Revolution was simply the attempt of King George, supported by a Parliamentary majority of Peers, to take much firmer control over the American Colonies in the wake of the French and Indian War (1754–1763).
The Colonists, used to running their own affairs for nearly a century, became increasingly resentful of this heavy handed attempt to insist on governing them from London, 6,000 miles away, and administering them under a government that neither understood nor cared about their concerns and which was in any case entirely hostile to their notions of representative Democracy and saw such views as “sedition” against the King and traditional late medieval notions of government by an aristocracy.
A conflict between the growing sense of an independent identity on the part of Americans, combined with British attempts to bring the colonies under more direct control of the King and Parliament was bound to lead to a Revolution. The slogan “no taxation without representation” was more a complaint about the undemocratic form of government in England and attempts by the North government (culminating in passage of the punitive “Intolerable Acts in 1774) to force the colonies to submit to much more thorough British control, thus bringing the Colonies under this oppressive form of government.
It took a long time in England to reform the Rotten Boroughs because when the people organized political societies to urge reforms, William Pitt the Younger had them outlawed. In the U.S. today, ironically, the modern House of Representatives reflects efforts by the Republicans (condemned by a Appellate Judges in North Carolina) to craft electoral maps with “surgical precision. to make sure they maximize the number of Republican House seats. "It is not the free will of the People that is ascertained through extreme partisan gerrymandering. Rather, it is the carefully crafted will of the map drawer that predominates." So, while England long ago reformed Parliament, the United States is currently moving in exactly the opposite direction.
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