on the assumption that the new coercion act could not contain certain repressive clauses which were part of the old act. The clauses, however, were inserted; O'Connell charged Littleton with deception; and in July 1834 Grey, Viscount Althorp and the Irish secretary resigned. The two latter were induced to serve under the new premier, Lord Melbourne, and they remained in office until Melbourne was dismissed in November 1834. Career in House of Lords, 1835–1863 In February 1835, Littleton won re-election to the House of Commons as member for Staffordshire Southern – part of a Whig victory that returned Melbourne to power. Shortly afterwards, the new administration raised Littleton to the peerage as Baron Hatherton, of Hatherton in the County of Stafford. Hatherton took his title from a Staffordshire village which at that time was an exclave of Wolverhampton, where Littleton owned Hatherton Hall, a country house that formed part of the Walhouse inheritance. Since he was now constitutionally barred from serving as a member of the House of Commons, his seat had to be contested again in a by-election in May, won by a fellow Whig, Sir Francis Goodricke. As a peer, Hatherton was automatically a member of the House of Lords and able to make a contribution to parliamentary debate and processes. This he did until the year before his death, although his contributions tailed off considerably after his Address in Answer to the Speech from the Throne in 1847, perhaps for family reasons. For several years after his elevation to the peerage, Hatherton was closely involved in campaigns to extend the political reforms of the Whig administration. Most important of these initially was municipal reform. Hatherton presented numerous petitions, and took up the cause of several small towns, in the campaign preceding the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. He served on the Lords committee on the bill and was often acerbic in debate, much as he had been on earlier reforms. Key to the measure was the enfranchisement of ratepayers. When the Tory peers rallied to the cause of the freemen, a rather flexible class who dominated the electorate in many towns and cities, Hatherton observed caustically that: When a similar measure was proposed for Ireland in 1838, Hatherton defended it trenchantly in the Lords, taking particular exception to attempts to tamper with the franchise. In a substantial, detailed speech he used his old tactic of marshalling demographic and