and less hide-bound monarch precipitated a general election, which – galvanized by news of the French Revolution of 1830 with its middle-class power-brokers – produced a swing of 30 seats against Wellington's Government, to a coalition (including the Ultras) on 15 November. Earl Grey formed a ministry pledged to reform. In March 1831, the bill passed second reading by a single vote; forces were about balanced. When a hostile amendment was passed by eight votes, Grey sought and was granted a dissolution of parliament, asking for a fresh mandate in April 1831. At this election the Whigs won a landslide – a result that, as Elie Halevy put it, "by its condemnation of the existing franchise went near to justify the plea of its Tory defenders". In 35 of the 40 English counties they won both seats and in the boroughs where electors were able to decide they made an almost clean sweep. Of the 230 seats the Tories held after that election, most were in rotten or "closed" boroughs or else in Scotland, which had almost no broad-based electorates. By one reckoning, the Tories seats held 50,000 voters, while the four Whig members for Yorkshire held 100,000 voters. After the decisive electorate's mandate, the House of Lords rejected the Second Reform Bill. A barrage of popular protests and a constitutional crisis followed, before the King's agreement to create the necessary number of new peers to pass the Reform made the Lords give way, and the Great Reform Act was passed. The Reform Act extended the franchise from about 435,000 to about 652,000 voters in Great Britain. Setting itself out explicitly as a final settlement of the reform process, it disfranchised many rotten boroughs (56 boroughs were abolished, while another 30 were reduced from two members to one), gave seats to new boroughs and additional seats to the more populous counties, reformed the electoral system in Scotland, and introduced a uniform borough franchise. While pockets of landlord influence, voter deference, corruption, and pocket boroughs were left and still a far cry from universal suffrage of men (perhaps 1 in 5 of whom could vote in 1833), the Great Reform Act was – at least to Whig and Radical historians like G M Trevelyan – the decisive step in ending the old system. List of counties and boroughs of the Unreformed House of Commons at 1800 See List of counties and