arose, with Nonconformists looking to improve their civil position through Parliamentary reform, a radical working-class campaign which demanded manhood suffrage (or even universal suffrage), and support from some in the Whig party like Fox and Earl Grey through the Society of the Friends of the People (1792). However Tory resistance, and the English reaction against the excesses of the French Revolution, stifled all real attempts to raise the issue until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. With peace came a renewed call for reform in the shape of the spreading Hampden Clubs, but government reaction called a swift halt to them, and soon the pamphleteer William Hone concluded that “Parliamentary reform is not perhaps dead, but it is dying”. 1822-3 saw agricultural distress leading to a short-lived movement for strengthening the counties at the expense of the boroughs. The disenfranchisement for corruption by Lord Liverpool's of Grampound in Cornwall, when the borough's patron had been convicted of bribery, saw its two seats given to Yorkshire, which thus elected four county members from 1826 to 1832. A few years later East Retford was also disfranchised but its seats were transferred to the neighbouring hundred of Bassetlaw rather than to one of the new cities. As late as 1829, however, parliamentary reform remained a marginal issue for most people, both inside and outside parliament. Even those - like county landowners in those counties which contained the unrepresented cities, such as Yorkshire, who were increasingly finding themselves outvoted in their own counties by urban voters, or Whigs like Lord John Russell - who favoured reform, did so not for democracy, but to make the system a better reflection of national interests (that is to say, property), rather than numbers. This, and not a desire for democracy, was why most Whigs and even some Tories turned against the old system during the 1820s. End of the Unreformed House The issue which brought parliamentary reform to the forefront once more was Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which removed barriers to Roman Catholics being elected to the House of Commons, and which led many Anglican conservatives, the Ultra-Tories in particular, to favour abolition of the rotten boroughs so as to make Parliament more truly representative of (Anglican) county, squire and parson. Similarly, it was a Tory, Thomas Attwood, who in 1830 founded the Birmingham Political Union to press for reform. The accession of a new,