NORTHUMBERLAND ELECTION BROADSIDE – MR. BELL’S SPEECH FROM THE HUSTINGS. On the Close of the Poll, June 28th, 1826 – Alnwick – 1826

Rare Northumberland election broadside printing Matthew Bell’s speech from the hustings at the close of the poll on 28 June 1826, issued during the celebrated Northumberland county election — one of the most fiercely contested and expensive parliamentary elections of the Georgian period.

Printed at Alnwick by Smith, the broadside records Bell’s address to the freeholders, thanking them for their “unwearied exertions” despite difficult weather and the labour of the contest. Bell devotes much of the speech to the alleged coalition between Henry Thomas Liddell and Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, insisting that he had stood “totally unconnected with any other Candidate” and presenting Lord Howick as having acted honourably in exposing what Bell describes as a “conspiracy against the Freedom of Election.”

The speech is particularly significant because it captures Bell’s public positioning at a critical stage of the contest. Rather than presenting himself simply as a Tory candidate, Bell uses the language of independence, purity of election, and opposition to “secret Conspiracy,” reflecting the complex alliances and anxieties that shaped the 1826 campaign.

The broadside forms part of the extraordinary outpouring of printed propaganda generated by the famous four-cornered Northumberland election involving Matthew Bell, Henry Thomas Liddell, Lord Howick, and Thomas Wentworth Beaumont. The contest became notorious for immense expenditure, coalition rumours, religious controversy, aggressive canvassing, and highly personal printed attacks. The wider campaign also produced the well-known duel on Bamburgh Sands between Beaumont and John Lambton, later Earl of Durham.

This title is recorded in at least one previously marketed collection of 1826 Northumberland election broadsides and handbills, but no separate institutional copy of this precise broadside has been traced in the British Library, Library Hub Discover, or WorldCat databases. It therefore appears to be institutionally scarce and possibly unrecorded as a separate holding.

Single printed broadside. Sheet size approximately 27.3 x 22.6 cm.

Condition: Fold lines as issued, light creasing, age toning, and handling wear consistent with original political use. Overall near fine.

A scarce and historically significant survival of Georgian Northumberland electoral printing, preserving Bell’s own hustings rhetoric during one of the defining county elections of the early nineteenth century.

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