 After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure, and exacerbated by the Corn Laws which kept the price of bread high.At that time only around 11% of adult males had the vote, very few of them in the industrial north which was worst hit, and reformers identified parliamentary reform as the solution.A mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons.