Christopher Wyvill

Christopher Wyvill (1740–1822) was an English cleric and landowner, a political reformer who inspired the formation of the Yorkshire Association movement in 1779.

The American Revolutionary War had forced the government of Lord North to increase taxation. Frustrated with government profligacy, Wyvill and the gentry of Yorkshire called for a package of 'economical reforms': cuts in government spending and patronage, annual parliaments and an increase in the number of county seats in parliament.

Wyvill's cause was taken up by the Rockingham Whig opposition, culminating in the carrying of Dunning's motion in 1780. Some moderate reforms were implemented by the Rockingham-led administration of 1782. William Pitt the Younger raised a number of issues surrounding parliamentary reform in opposition to the Fox-North Coalition in 1783, but his proposal failed to gain the necessary support. In the wake of the French Revolution, Wyvill's platform came to be seen as moderate. Its influence can be detected in the later Great Reform Act and Chartist movement in the nineteenth century.

Early life He was born in Edinburgh in 1740, the son of Edward Wyvill (died 1791), supervisor of excise there, by Christian Catherine, daughter of William Clifton of Edinburgh. Sir Christopher Wyvill, 3rd Baronet, of Constable Burton, was his great-great-grandfather.

Wyvill matriculated at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1756, obtaining an honorary degree of LL.B. in 1764. In 1774 he came in for the large landed estates of the family in Yorkshire and elsewhere, and the mansion at Constable Burton, the building of which he completed from his cousin, Sir Marmaduke's, designs. He had some years previously taken orders and been presented through his cousin's influence to the rectory of Black Notley in Essex, which he continued to hold and administer by means of a curate, down to 22 September 1806. Debarred from entering the House of Commons, Wyvill began to take a prominent part in county politics.

Herbert Butterfield argued that the Yorkshire Association was a quasi-revolutionary organisation and that "our "French Revolution" is in fact that of 1780—the revolution that we escaped". This interpretation was adopted by Robert Roswell Palmer but criticised by other historians such as Richard Pares and I. R. Christie.

With the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, however, and the fall of Lord North, the Association disintegrated. Wyvill's supporters dwindled, to a small group including Sir George Savile, and Sir Charles Turner, who spoke of the House of Commons as resembling a parcel of thieves that had stolen an estate and were afraid of letting any person look into their title-deeds for fear of losing it. a naval officer; and Edward, rector of Fingal, Yorkshire, who died on 15 September 1869.