Michael Thomas Sadler
Michael Thomas Sadler was a British Tory Member of Parliament whose Evangelical Anglicanism and prior experience as a Poor Law administrator in Leeds led him to oppose Malthusian theories of population and their use to decry state provision for the poor.
Overview
Michael Sadler entered the British House of Commons at the behest of the 4th Duke of Newcastle, returned by the pocket borough of Newark as an 'Ultra' opponent of Catholic emancipation, but he devoted much effort in Parliament to urging the extension of the Poor Law to Ireland. In 1832, in the last session of the unreformed House of Commons he brought forward a Bill to regulate the minimum age and maximum working hours of children in the textile industry. He chaired a Select Committee on the Bill which heard evidence from witnesses on overwork and ill-treatment of factory children. No legislation had resulted before the Reform Act passed and in the election which followed Sadler stood for Leeds but failed to be elected. Parliamentary leadership of the factory reform movement passed to Lord Ashley. Publication of the evidence gathered by Sadler's Select Committee had a considerable effect on public opinion: the effect of Sadler's Bill and Committee on the Whig government was to persuade them that new factory legislation was required but that this should be based upon evidence gathered on a sounder basis. When he died, contemporaries mentioned his work on Ireland, population, and poverty as well as his ten-hour bill, but only the latter is now remembered.Early life
Michael Sadler was born in Snelston, Derbyshire, on 3 January 1780, the son of James Sadler a minor local squire; according to tradition his family came from Warwickshire and was descended from Sir Ralph Sadler. He was educated at home; when newly elected an MP he was said to have a 'rather broad' Yorkshire accent. In 1800 on the death of his mother he moved to Leeds to work with an elder brother ; his father died soon afterwards. Sadler and his brother were linen-drapers; in 1810 they gave up the retail trade and went into partnership with the widow of an importer of Irish linen, but his biographer comments that Michael was lucky to have competent partners as his mind, nature, and habits were unfitted to business.His biographer reports that his family were Anglicans but his mother was sympathetic to Methodism adding that "He had always entertained a decided preference for the Church of England, but after his marriage he became more regular and undeviating in his attendance on her ordinances."with no indication of the nature of the pre-marital irregularities and deviations. One of his earliest publications was An Apology for Methodists written in 1797 and in 1831 the Leeds Mercury published a letter from a Methodist dignitary to the superintendent of the Leeds circuit which advised Methodists not to vote for Sadler because he had been insufficiently active in the anti-slavery cause "to say nothing of the ambition which has made him court the High Church and despise us". A correspondent in the Leeds Intelligencer confirmed that Benjamin Sadler had once been a Methodist circuit-steward and Michael had regularly gone to chapel with him, but denied that Michael had ever been a Methodist. Religious affiliation was not merely a matter of private conscience but also had political implications: Dissenters objected to paying for the Established Church, and were therefore favourable to any reform which might address this, and antagonistic to any steps which might increase the burden. A specific local instance of this arose in Leeds: additional Anglican churches were built in Leeds parish; Dissenters passed a motion at the vestry meeting forbidding any expenditure by the parish on equipping the new churches, and then voted out a churchwarden who ignored the motion. Sadler attempted to dissuade the vestry meeting from this, but was shouted down.
His interests lay largely outside business; he became a member of Leeds Corporation, contributed articles to the Leeds Intelligencer and commanded a company in the local volunteers, both during the Napoleonic Wars and when the volunteers were raised again for internal security post-Peterloo. He also visited the sick and destitute as a member of the 'Stranger's Friend Society', was superintendent of a large Sunday School, and sat on the Poor Law board for Leeds, eventually becoming Poor-rates Treasurer. These latter activities, especially the last, gave him a familiarity with the habits, the wants, and the sufferings of the poor, and a concern with them which stayed with him for the rest of his days. He became active in politics; a supporter of the Tories and strongly opposed to Catholic Emancipation. In 1817, he wrote a pamphlet First Letter to a Reformer countering the argument of a recent MP for Yorkshire that corruption and the power of the Crown were increasing and should be decreased, and that this showed the necessity for Parliamentary reform. He was a founder member of the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society, and in 1825 delivered there a course of lectures on the Poor Laws. He disagreed strongly with the orthodox authorities of the age on economics and poverty such as David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, believing that their views tended to a destruction of traditional society. As for his own views on these topics, he told a political dinner in 1826 " I.. simply sum them up in these terms, namely : – To extend the utmost possible degree of human happiness to the greatest possible number of human beings. To do this, seems to me to require far less of art than of benevolence; our duties are sufficiently plain, and fortunately for mankind, duty and interest are at length always found inseparably connected."
In 1828 he published an essay on Ireland; its Evils and their Remedies, in which he argued for the establishment of Poor Laws there, and denied that the ills of Ireland were due to over population, since Ulster was both the most prosperous province and the most densely populated one.
Election to parliament
Before the 1832 Reform Act Newark a borough in Nottinghamshire returned 2 MPs, chosen for it by a coalition of local landed interests; those of the Duke of Newcastle and other Tories chiefly Lord Middleton. The vote for these candidates was supported by the 4th Duke of Newcastle's policy of unfailingly evicting any tenant who gave a vote to the 'Blues' ; his allies took similar measures but less implacably. In 1829 one of Newark's MPs was General Sir William Henry Clinton GCB, a kinsman of the Duke of Newcastle. He held a minor post under the Duke of Wellington, whom he had served under in the Peninsula. Wellington had formed a government from the opponents of Catholic Emancipation, but by 1829 the state of Ireland was such that – despite his previous strong opposition to Catholic Emancipation – Robert Peel, the leading MP in the government became convinced that granting it was the only safe way to defuse the situation. Wellington's government therefore brought in a Catholic Relief Bill. Since Clinton felt unable to vote against this Bill, and Newcastle was strongly opposed to it, Clinton offered to resign as MP for Newark. Without consulting his allies, Newcastle accepted Clinton's resignation; he did not inform his allies of this. Again without consulting them, he searched for Clinton's replacement, eventually picking Sadler as a good public speaker with suitably hard-line views against Emancipation. In 1813 at a meeting in Leeds he had seconded a petition to be sent to Parliament against any relief of Catholic disabilities.Sir, the Protestant cause has long been identified with that of the British nation. May they never be separated ! But we are firmly convinced, that to concede to its grand adversary the power it seeks to recover, to resign that influence which it would infalllibly exert, would be to dilapidate the venerable fabric of that happy constitution erected by the wisdom and cemented by the blood of our ancestors; would shake the very pillars on which the Protestant throne of these realms is founded; would invalidate the title of the present Protestant royal family; would threaten the existence of the Protestant establishment; would change many of our laws and subvert many of our sacred institutions; would extinguish the very spirit of the glorious revolution of 1688, and pour contempt on those great characters, who, under divine providence, brought about that happy event; and in fine, would, in the present state of political parties, deliver up the country to Roman Catholic ascendancy.but his objections were not merely political or constitutional; he held – he said in his declaration speech in 1829 – that "No man is properly qualified to fulfil the duties of any important office whose religion is not founded upon the sacred book of God – who does not derive his faith from that only source -who is prevented from reading it in his native language – who is deprived of the translated Bible". In the by-election following Clinton's resignation, Sadler campaigned against Catholic Emancipation, but his Blue opponent campaigned against Newcastle's electoral tyranny as evidenced by Sadler being imposed on the borough without consultation: the candidate had become the issue. Sadler was elected with a majority of 214, but at the General Election of 1830 was ahead of the Blue candidate by only 94 votes, the Blue cause having gained adherents and the Yellows having become less keen to enforce support of the Red candidate. In 1831, it was therefore thought prudent that Sadler should stand for Aldborough, rather than Newark where his election would be ensured as the borough, which had less than 80 electors, was securly under the control of the Duke of Newcastle. The Duke's candidates for Aldborough were always returned. In the 1831 election Sadler, and the man who stood with him Clinton James Fynes-Clinton, were therefore returned unopposed as the representatives for Aldborough.