Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, Power and Party

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Sir Robert Peel Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, power and party provides an accessible and concise introduction to the life and career of one of the most celebrated political leaders of the nineteenth century. Perhaps best known for seeing through the repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel had an enormous impact on the political life of his age and beyond. Eric J. Evans reassesses Peel’s career, arguing that although Peel’s executive and administrative strengths were great, his arrogance, lack of empathy with the development of political parties and his inflexible commitment to economic liberalism presented political problems that he was incapable of solving. This expanded and fully revised second edition:

• fully engages with the extensive new historical work on Sir Robert Peel published since the first edition appeared fifteen years ago

• includes a glossary of key terms plus an updated and expanded bibliography, including listing useful websites. This second edition of Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, power and party is the perfect introduction for all students of nineteenth-century history. Eric J. Evans is Emeritus Professor of History at Lancaster University. His many books include The Great Reform Act of 1832 (2nd Edition, 1994), William Pitt the Younger (1999), Thatcher and Thatcherism (2nd Edition, 2004) and The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (3rd Edition, 2001).

IN THE SAME SERIES General Editors: Eric J. Evans and P. D. King

Lynn Abrams David Arnold A. L. Beier Martin Blinkhorn Martin Blinkhorn Robert M. Bliss Stephen Constantine Stephen Constantine Susan Doran Susan Doran Christopher Durston Christopher Durston Charles J. Esdaile Eric J. Evans Eric J. Evans Eric J. Evans T. G. Fraser Peter Gaunt Dick Geary John Gooch Alexander Grant P. M. Harman M. J. Heale M. J. Heale Ruth Henig Ruth Henig Ruth Henig

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LANCASTER PAMPHLETS

Sir Robert Peel Statesmanship, Power and Party

Second Edition

Eric J. Evans

First published 1991 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Reprinted 1994, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 2nd Edition 2006 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1991, 2006 Eric J. Evans All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Evans, Eric J., 1945– Sir Robert Peel : statesman, power and party / Eric J. Evans. – 2nd ed. p. cm. – (Lancaster pamphlets) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0–415–36615–1 – ISBN 0–415–36616–X (pbk.) 1. Peel, Robert, Sir, 1788–1850. 2. Prime ministers—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Great Britain— Politics and government—1837–1901. 4. Great Britain—Politics and government— 1830–1837. 5. Conservative Party (Great Britain)—History—19th Century. I. Title. II. Series. DA536.P3E84 2006 941.081′092—dc22 2005028279 ISBN10: 0-415-36615-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-36616-X (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-01874-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36615-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36616-8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-01874-3 (ebk)

Contents

Foreword

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface to second edition Chronology

x

xii

1 Introduction

1

2 The young statesman, 1809–18

5

3 Peel, the Home Office and ‘Liberal Toryism’, 1819–30 4 The collapse of the old Tory party, 1827–32

12

21

5 A King’s minister out of office: Peel in the 1830s 6 Revival: Toryism into Conservatism, 1832–41 7 The general election of 1841

31 39

48

8 Executive government under Peel, 1841–6 9 Peel and backbench Toryism, 1841–5

53 62

10 The repeal of the Corn Laws and the fall of Peel

70

11 Conclusion: Reputation and evaluation, 1846–50 and beyond Select bibliography Glossary of key terms Index

103 vii

89 96

81

Foreword

The Lancaster Pamphlets series presents up-to-date, concise accounts and interpretations of major historical topics. The books span all periods from the ancient world to the late twentieth century. They are of particular value to those wanting to get an accessible overview of themes relevant to courses in universities and in other institutions of further and higher education. They can also be used with confidence by students preparing for AS and A2 examinations. Without being all-embracing, they bring the key themes and problems confronting students into sharper focus than the textbook writer can usually do. They explicitly provide the reader with the results of recent research which, again, the textbook may not provide. Since they are written by practising professional historians, they also convey individuality of approach as well as a synthesis of existing ideas. Above all, each volume in the Lancaster Pamphlets series gives readers an understanding of a topic sufficient to imbue confidence and, thereby, enthusiasm to move on to more detailed study if required.

viii

Acknowledgements

My indebtedness to all of the scholars who have interpreted and reinterpreted a crowded, fascinating and occasionally confusing period will be evident to anyone familiar with it. However, I have received much specific help from Dr J. A. Carr and my co-editor, Dr P. D. King. Both examined first drafts, offered detailed criticism of my decisions about organization and also made me aware that my familiarity with some of the material was making inappropriate demands on readers coming to it for the first time. Their comments have been invaluable and I am most grateful. Any errors and miscalculations which remain are, of course, my own responsibility. Many of the ideas offered here have been presented to sixth-form and undergraduate audiences over the past three years. I have benefited enormously from the questions, criticisms and, above all, enthusiasm of student audiences during that time. They have been influential in the final shape of Sir Robert! I hope it is not invidious to acknowledge with great gratitude the stimulus I have received from Patrick Dereham and his pupils at Radley College who provided a congenial, yet critical, atmosphere in which to discuss my ideas. Their enthusiasm persuaded me that it was useful to persevere with Peel. I hope that their judgement will not prove misplaced. Eric J. Evans

ix

Preface to second edition

This second edition is an extension of my first thoughts on Peel, which appeared in 1991. It is now less a ‘pamphlet’ and more a short book. Those entrusted with the privilege of revisiting their own work for revised publication are faced with a dilemma. Change too little and one is bound to be asked why go to the effort of producing a new edition at all. Change too much and the accusation may be that an entirely new book has been written. I have tried to avoid both extremes. My overall judgement of Peel is not radically different from that offered fifteen years ago. Those familiar with the first edition will be aware that I have retained the section structure of the first edition. I have done so because I think it remains fit for purpose. However, changes have been made to each section. I have also taken the opportunity to add a brief glossary of key terms for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the period and I have completely revised the guide to further reading, including in the process some websites which I hope readers will find valuable. This new edition also has an index. The main purpose of producing this new edition, however, is to take account of a considerable amount of new work which has appeared during the last fifteen years. It is true that fewer scholars now seem interested in high politics as the waves of the new cultural history continue to crash uncomfortably loudly – if not always comprehensibly – against the ramparts of established scholarship. Nevertheless, the research of such leading scholars as Eastwood, Harling, Howe, Jupp, Phillips, and Taylor and Lawrence has changed the landscape and it has x

been a primary purpose of this new edition to make their insights more widely available both to the student and the more general audience. My general appreciation of the work of others which appears above should now specifically be extended to acknowledge the prime importance of these scholars. A final word to answer a question which I have sometimes been asked at student conferences and elsewhere: I do see this work as an attempt to interpret both the life and times of Sir Robert Peel. Biographies which underemphasize ‘the times’ are liable to provide insufficient context to enable the reader to evaluate the relative importance of the subject of the biography. Without doubt, Peel was the dominant political personality of his age but he was not the originator of all change. Moreover, he was also desperately anxious to preserve much of the old world in both church and state during a period of unprecedentedly and, as he saw it, dangerously rapid innovation. This study attempts to locate Peel within a broader context which also explains the key religious, social and economic developments of the period. EJE Lancaster, August 2005

xi

Chronology

1788

1800 1805

1809

1810 1812

1814–15 1817

Born at Chamber Hall, Bury, 5 February, the first son and third child of Robert Peel, a wealthy cotton manufacturer. Goes to Harrow School. Becomes undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, where he had a career of considerable academic distinction. Thanks to patronage of his father (an MP) and on recommendation of Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) becomes MP for the Irish seat of Cashel City, Co. Tipperary, a borough with only twenty-four voters. No contest held. Becomes Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies in the Tory government of Spencer Perceval, at age 22. Becomes Chief Secretary for Ireland in new government of Lord Liverpool. Becomes MP for another ‘rotten’ borough, Chippenham (Wilts). Authorizes firm action to deal with unrest in Ireland – Insurrection and Peace Preservation Acts. Makes strong speech in Parliament opposing Catholic emancipation. His position on emancipation makes him attractive to Oxford University, whose MP he becomes. xii

1818

1819

1820

1822 1823–4 1823 1825

1826

1826–7 1827

1828

1829

Professing himself ‘tired’ of the post, he resigns the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland at time of the general election. Appointed Chairman of the parliamentary committee enquiring into state of finances – the Bullion Committee. His report influential in passage of the Currency Act which provided for transition to resumption of cash payments by Bank of England. Peel’s work established his reputation as knowledgeable and effective in economic affairs. At age 32 marries Julia Floyd, daughter of a general who had seen service in India, and, while Peel was Chief Secretary, Ireland. Returns to government, and becomes a Cabinet minister for the first time as Home Secretary. Age 34. Gaols Acts rationalize provision of gaols in all towns, and establish system of inspection. Statutes passed reducing the number of offences which carry the death penalty. Jury Act rationalizes what had been chaotic practice and makes jury responsibilities and selection procedures much clearer. Supervises response to outbreaks of industrial unrest especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Sends troops to Lancashire and urges magistrates to fair but firm prosecution of offenders. Five Statutes rationalize Criminal Law on theft and other property offences. Liverpool forced to resign through ill health and Peel refuses to serve in a government headed by Canning, because of Canning’s views in favour of Catholic emancipation. Resigns from government. After death of Canning and failure of subsequent ministry of Goderich, Peel resumes office as Home Secretary and leader of the House of Commons in a new Tory ministry headed by Duke of Wellington. Supports Roman Catholic emancipation and provokes furious hostility from ‘Protestant’ Tories. Resigns parliamentary seat at Oxford University over the issue and is beaten by anti-emancipation Tory, Sir Robert Inglis, in subsequent by-election. Returns to xiii

1830

1831 1832

1833

1834

1835

1836 1837

1838

1839

Commons for ‘pocket’ borough of Westbury (Wilts). Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act establishes new professional police commissioners for London. Forgery Act reduces number of forgery offences for which capital punishment is an applicable penalty. General election and Peel returned for family seat of Tamworth. Revival of parliamentary reform issue puts government on defensive and it resigns after defeat on a technical issue in November. Peel leaves office. His father dies and he inherits the baronetcy as Sir Robert. Consistently opposes new Whig government proposals for parliamentary reform. After resignation of Whigs, refuses to serve in a Tory government (May) pledged to reform. Tories lose many seats in first post-reform general election (December). Peel beginning to be recognized as leader of the Tories. Makes declaration that he would support Whig government when it acted to defend order, law and property. Stanley and Graham desert Whig government over Irish Church issue. King dismisses Melbourne’s government (November) and Peel installed as prime minister in a minority Tory government (December). Issues Tamworth Manifesto, pledging Tories to modest reform. Ecclesiastical commission established. Tories gain ground at general election, but Peel defeated by new alliance of Whigs and Radicals; returns to opposition. Works at forging greater unity between Tories in upper and lower Houses of Parliament. Greater co-operation with Stanley and Graham increases Peel’s strength as Conservative leader; further gains in the general election. Merchant Taylors’ Hall speech emphasizes Conservatives’ support for preservation of existing institutions in Church and State. Bedchamber Crisis; Peel refuses to take office when Queen insists on retaining Whig ladies of the Bedchamber. xiv

1840

1841

1842

1843

1844

1845

1846

Disagreements between Peel and Wellington over various issues but Peel persuades Wellington to abandon opposition to Whig Canada legislation. Conservative unity maintained. Whigs defeated on vote of no confidence (June); this precipitates general election (July) which Conservatives win. Peel becomes prime minister of a majority government (August). Budget reintroduces income tax for first time since 1816 and reduces duties on wheat; general reduction of tariffs. The Protectionist Buckingham resigns from Cabinet. Mines Act prohibits women and children from working underground. Graham’s factory bill delayed by defeat over educational clauses which would have extended Anglican influence over factory education. Factory Act reduces hours of work in textile factories. Substantial Tory support for Ashley’s motion to secure maximum ten-hour working day. Government defeated but Peel’s threat of resignation secures majority for him. Many backbenchers vote against Peel on sugar duties. Bank Charter Act provides for new currency base by linking Bank of England’s power of note-issue to available reserves of bullion. Gladstone resigns on proposal to increase grant to Irish Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth; 149 Tories vote against the grant. Budget renews income tax and introduces substantial reductions of tariff, including abolition of many import duties. Beginning of Irish potato famine and Peel commits Cabinet to repealing Corn Laws (December). Fails to persuade Russell to take over as prime minister to repeal the Corn Laws. Bentinck and Disraeli organize Conservative opposition to repeal of Corn Laws (January– February). On vital Corn Law vote, only 112 Tories support Peel and repeal of Corn Laws is carried by Whig-Liberal votes. Peel defeated on Irish coercion bill (June) and resigns. Free trade Conservatives act as xv

1847

1848

1849

1850

a separate parliamentary ‘Peelite’ group, but Peel refuses to act as their party leader. General election confirms substantial Whig-Liberal majority but about a hundred ‘Peelites’ refuse to support either main party. Peel offers advice and support to Liberals on free trade policies. Peel supports Chancellor of Exchequer, Wood, on retention of income tax and increased expenditure on armed forces. Peelites refuse offer to join Whig-Liberal government. Peel refuses to take any part in negotiations or express any desire to return to office. Makes speech urging measures to aid economic recovery of Ireland. Navigation Acts repealed with Peelite support. Final speech in Parliament (June) criticizes Palmerston’s foreign policy and urges noninterference in affairs of other nations. 29 June: riding accident. Dies on 2 July.

xvi

1 Introduction

Sir Robert Peel is, with Gladstone and Disraeli, one of the three most celebrated prime ministers in nineteenth-century British history. In terms of legislative achievement, he was probably the most successful of all. Some argue that his reforms contributed more than those of any other prime minister to improving standards of living for ordinary people. The Manchester Guardian referred to a ‘most striking and extraordinary expression of popular feeling’ on the occasion of Peel’s untimely death on 2 July 1850 as the result of a riding accident suffered two days earlier. This expression soon had tangible outcomes. In Manchester, the then immense sum of £3,000 (worth more than £200,000 at current values) was raised by the town. An elaborate Peel monument was unveiled three years later. Manchester was not, of course, alone. Peel monuments and parks sprang up all over the country. Those who mourned Peel that summer credited him with giving the poor cheap bread by repealing the Corn Laws in 1846. The often high, and frequently volatile, level of bread prices had been one of the most destabilizing features of early-nineteenth-century Britain, and much misery, leading to economic and social conflict, had resulted. Some historians have also credited Peel with laying the foundations of mid-Victorian prosperity by expert management of national finances and by accelerating free-trade policies which opened up new markets for British manufacturers. Peel’s reputation, therefore, might seem secure. Yet he was a figure of 1

great controversy for much of his lifetime. Recently, also, the extent of his achievements has been reassessed by historians. Those who donated their pennies and their pounds towards Peel monuments in 1850 probably did not pause to reflect that the man whose memory they were immortalizing in stone had opposed most of the great progressive movements of the age. He had resisted greater civil and political rights for Roman Catholics until fear of a nationalist uprising in Ireland changed his mind in 1829. This volte face destroyed Peel’s credibility with many of his previously staunchest Tory allies. They never forgave him, and accepted his later leadership of their party with many reservations and profound reluctance. He was not widely trusted within his own party after 1829. Peel also opposed the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. This confirmed him as a main target for hostility at the other end of the political spectrum. As with Catholic emancipation, he later accepted the need for reform, but only, as he put it in December 1834, as the ‘final settlement of a great Constitutional question’. He resisted further political ‘adventures’, rejecting both votes for working men and the secret ballot. His opposition to the Chartists’ call for democracy in the late 1830s and early 1840s was entirely predictable. At the height of the Chartist disturbances, his effigy was publicly burned in several cities, and early in 1843 his private secretary, mistaken for Peel, was assassinated while walking in Whitehall. Predictable also was the fact that, as prime minister, he handled the Chartist threat of 1841–2 with much greater efficiency than his Whig predecessors had done when the movement first gathered mass support in 1838–9. His one steadfast ‘reformist’ cause was economic. Believing that they hampered economic growth, and thus the development of national prosperity, Peel consistently supported moves to reduce, and eventually to remove, tariffs, tolls and other encumbrances on trade. He had been an early convert to the ideas advocated so brilliantly by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The logic of these ideas led ultimately to the removal of those tariffs, known as the ‘Corn Laws’, which protected corn growers and, for much of the first half of the nineteenth century, kept the price of grain high. After Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the Tory party split and the Tories were only rarely in government between 1846 and 1874. Peel’s political career spanned an age in which the role of political parties in the British political system was changing. During a period of transition, it was possible to take diametrically different views about the centrality of party – as indeed Peel and Disraeli did during the 2

Corn Law crisis. Peel was never a committed ‘party man’. He had grown up during the turbulent period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars when the Younger Pitt – prime minister from 1783 to 1801 and again from 1804 to his death in 1806 – had fashioned a coalition across party lines. In any case, political parties were much more fluid than they were to become in the second half of the nineteenth century and Peel always considered them as subordinate entities. He believed, like Pitt, in good order and efficient governance by ministers whose primary duty was to offer loyal service to the monarch in the wider interests of the nation. He also believed that the idea of ‘serving the monarch’ was no empty form of words. In his view, the monarch still mattered. He also saw no reason why policy-making should be the responsibility of parties and he never accepted that party politics should produce polarized politics. In his view, again unlike Disraeli’s, opposition to policies formulated in the national interest should not be the default position of politicians who were not members of the governing party. The historian David Eastwood notes that Peel candidly admitted in 1830 to Henry Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Wellington’s government, that he felt ‘a want of many essential qualifications which are requisite in party leaders, among the rest personal gratification in the game of politics’. One historian, Boyd Hilton, has recently argued that Peel was imprisoned in free trade ideology and that economic obsessions warped his wider political judgement. Others have praised just this judgement. Lord Blake has seen him as ‘pursuing his cautious middle course’ and as an exponent of ‘consensus politics’ while Norman Gash, his most celebrated biographer whose views have won wide acceptance, believed that he looked first not to either party or ideology but ‘to the state [and] . . . to national expediency’. Peel’s standing as politician and statesman is debated later (Chapter 11) but, undoubtedly, his free-trade policies led directly to the breakup of the Conservative party over Corn Law repeal. After 1846, the party did not win a majority in Parliament for almost thirty years and had to be content with rare periods of minority government. Tory opponents naturally blamed Peel for destroying the party and for blighting the political careers of a whole generation. The controversy over the Corn Laws throws up an interesting paradox. If, as is widely suggested, Peel deserves the most credit for rebuilding Tory fortunes after the splits and electoral disasters of 1827–32, why was he so apparently determined to pursue a policy which, as he well knew, the majority of his backbenchers would never accept? 3

Peel’s career is fascinating to trace as a narrative, since he was at or near the centre of power for almost forty years during one of the most controversial and formative periods of modern British history. It also throws up some important questions and challenges. Why did a politician with such firm opinions and clarity of mind change that mind on the most crucial questions of the day? Why were these changes so controversial and, eventually, so damaging to his own career? What exactly was the new phenomenon historians have called ‘Peelite Conservatism’? How did it differ from the Toryism which had gone before? Did Peel in 1846 destroy his own handiwork by provoking a split in the Conservative party? Is he better seen as an economic ideologue, pursuing free trade against all political reason and judgement, or as a flexible and pragmatic politician? Why was such a controversial and frequently personally unpopular figure so widely venerated as a great national leader so soon after his fall from power? What, ultimately, was his contribution to the development of modern Britain? The remainder of this volume tries to provide answers to these questions through an assessment of Peel’s long, and varied, career. The answers provided are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. Historians must establish the relevant facts, so far as they are able, and the great quantity of information available about Peel makes this a relatively easy task. Their main responsibility, however, is to provide a coherent overall interpretation and, in doing so, to stimulate argument and debate about the key questions. The role and significance of Peel, a figure of central importance during a period of unprecedented political, social and economic change in Britain, is a worthy subject for such a debate.

4

2 The young statesman, 1809–18

Like virtually all prominent politicians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Robert Peel came from a background of considerable wealth. The source of that wealth, however, was far from orthodox in that it did not derive from large landholdings. Peel’s grandfather, also Robert who died in 1795, had been a yeoman farmer in east Lancashire, but his fortune was made in the emerging textile industry in partnership with his brother-in-law Jonathan Howarth. Peel’s father, another Robert, was given the substantial sum of £500 (worth more than £40,000 at current values) to develop his own calico-printing business, which he did in Bury from the early 1770s. The business flourished as the industrial revolution ‘took off’ in Lancashire in the 1780s and Peel senior expanded his operations into Bolton. By the time of his eldest son’s birth in 1788, he was employing more than 7,000 workers and the firm’s profits were exceeding £70,000 (nearly £6m at current values) in good years. In the manner of most successful business and professional men in eighteenth-century Britain, Robert Peel’s father bought a country estate out of the profits of his calico business. On his estate in south Staffordshire, he built a substantial property – Drayton Manor – which acted as a family power base. Robert Peel Snr became MP for Tamworth in 1790 and embarked on a political career, notable mainly for the promotion of some of the earliest legislation passed with the objective of protecting vulnerable young employees against 5

exploitation. It is worth mentioning also that he was created a baronet on William Pitt’s recommendation in 1800, the result of staunch loyalty to the government during the French wars and also probably because of his firm’s donation of £10,000 for defence against a threatened French invasion three years earlier. It was that title – the lowest titled hereditary rank but a substantial achievement nevertheless for an industrial family – which Peel the future prime minister inherited on his father’s death in 1830. His father’s success enabled Peel both to be educated as a privileged gentleman and also to begin his own political career as early as the more established representatives of landed families – such as the Younger Pitt and Charles James Fox – had done. It was clear from early days that young Robert was highly intelligent, with a formidably adhesive memory, a clear mind, great powers of organization and the ability to communicate with lucidity. He went to Harrow School in 1800 and to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1805, graduating three years later in the first class in both Mathematics and Classics, the first person known to have achieved this intellectual feat. Peel was 20 years old when he graduated and already bent on a political, rather than an academic, career. To get into the House of Commons at a young age needed family credibility and good connections. Both of these his father was now well-positioned to provide. Immediately after Robert’s graduation, his father put out feelers with the Portland administration; an opportunity soon presented itself with a vacancy in the small, easily managed if not openly corrupt, Irish Parliamentary seat of Cashel City, which had only twenty-four voters. Peel was successful in the by-election held in April 1809. By one of those twists of personal irony which often obtain in politics, the main broker of this political deal was the future Duke of Wellington, who had until recently been Chief Secretary for Ireland but who was now resuming his military career in the Peninsular War. Thus, one future Tory prime minister smoothed the initial path of another. Peel became an MP almost as soon as he reached his maturity. Relations between Wellington and Peel would be critical to the health of the Tory party for almost twenty years – from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s. There was nothing unusual about well-connected men getting into Parliament in their early twenties. Nor was it surprising that Peel should have been a Tory. Quite apart from his father’s convictions, the overwhelming majority of men of property had been thoroughly alarmed by the democratic implications of the French Revolution and saw support for a firm party of order, such as had been fashioned by 6

Pitt the Younger in the years after 1794, as the best guarantee that the contagion of Revolution would not spread to Britain. Peel was easily persuaded of the justice of the Tory cause. Its anti-reformist ideology and the reputation for order and administrative efficiency built up by Pitt suited both Peel’s talents and his temperament. Good connections could not only get a man into Parliament early. They could also provide him with opportunities to shine in debate in the Commons. Such opportunities Peel grasped eagerly, and, within a few months of his arrival, he was already being noted on both sides of the House as a ‘coming man’. His first ministerial post – Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies in the department headed by Lord Liverpool – was gained as early as 1810. It was not a post which gave much opportunity either for debating fireworks or for independence of expression although, since Liverpool sat in the House of Lords, Peel did get the opportunity to take the lead in the lower house. Peel gave Liverpool diligent support during a critical stage of the war with Napoleonic France and discharged the duties of the office with that administrative efficiency which was already becoming a Peelite hallmark. The post proved a useful launching pad for a ministerial career. Every aspiring politician needs luck as well as ability, and the assassin’s bullet which ended the life of the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, in 1812 served to advance Peel’s career. After a brief period in which the Prince Regent cast about for more exciting alternatives, Lord Liverpool was appointed as Perceval’s successor. He offered the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland to his recent deputy at the war office. Undoubtedly the working relationship which had been established between the two men was a factor in the appointment. The Chief Secretaryship was not a Cabinet post but it was a substantial promotion for a man of 24. It brought Peel to national attention and it presented – as Irish jobs are prone to do for British politicians – a substantial challenge. In Peel’s case, the challenge was to reconcile the majority of Irishmen both to the loss of their own Parliament in consequence of the Act of Union of 1800 and to government by a Protestant minority under direction from Westminster. Peel remained Chief Secretary for six years, the longest tenure of the post in the nineteenth century, during which time his resilience and his political skills were fully tested. The function of the Chief Secretary was to represent British government policy in Ireland and to make proposals for action based on direct knowledge of the country. He was not head of the administration in Ireland – the Lord Lieutenant 7

fulfilled that responsibility – but the job was a vital one. It required dual residence – at Westminster during Parliamentary sessions and in Dublin for much of the rest of the year. Inadequate roads and frequently choppy or stormy sea crossings combined to make Anglo-Irish travel physically wearing. Peel retained a close interest in Irish matters after he left office in 1818 but it is perhaps not surprising that he never set foot in Ireland again. Peel’s skills were tested, not only by Ireland’s problems, but by establishing effective working relations with the permanently resident Lord Lieutenant. His famous attention to detail, rapid assimilation of a political brief and respect for proper authority combined to make his relationship with the three viceroys he served generally harmonious. Indeed, Norman Gash noted a ‘close personal and political confidence’ in the partnership with Viscount Whitworth, Lord Lieutenant from 1813 to 1817, ‘which made the Irish administration [in those years] a model of unity and efficiency’. None of this is to say that the young Peel found his time in Ireland particularly congenial. A number of intricately interwoven political, religious and economic factors made the country notoriously difficult for the British to govern. The Union of the two kingdoms had not been accompanied by more political rights for Roman Catholics, and many leading Irish Catholic landowners felt betrayed by a Union they had initially supported as a means of preserving property. Virtually all leading positions in the Irish administration continued to be held by Anglican Protestants, who comprised considerably less than 10 per cent of the population. The ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ manifested too many instances of complacent corruption in the distribution of offices to inspire confidence, and Peel, a natural Protestant supporter, nevertheless bridled at the provocative distribution of the spoils. He bridled even more at the aggressive Protestantism, usually of Scottish Presbyterian origin, which was developing among workers in Ulster and viewed the new ‘Orange Lodges’ with deep suspicion. ‘There are many phrases applied to the Association of Orangemen which are of much too military a character to suit my taste’, he wrote in 1814. He was, inevitably, a strong supporter of the Union but he feared civil war between the Presbyterian minority and the Catholic majority and was concerned at the narrow power base occupied by an Anglican and aristocratic elite. Efficient though much of his work in Ireland was, it was characterized by a barely suppressed irritation at what Peel saw as the petty-mindedness of much of the indigenous 8

population. He also railed at the frequent attacks on landowners and justices of the peace and he harboured suspicions that the Irish peasantry had been incited to violence against their social superiors by Catholic priests. This was a typical British reaction. Though he made himself far better informed than most about Ireland, he shared British prejudices about the lawlessness and savagery of the Irish peasantry which from time to time overbore his subtle understanding of the economic basis of their miseries. He feared both the existence of secret societies and the tribal warfare which he believed they provoked. He sought to establish firm authority in Ireland not just because he believed in peace and the rule of law but also because he shared the belief of most of his countrymen that he was dealing with an inferior race at a lower stage of development than the British. The Irish needed firm lessons because they could not understand oblique ones. As an early-nineteenth-century Protestant, also, Peel’s background and upbringing conditioned him to believe that Roman Catholicism was a primitive, authoritarian religion appropriate only to simple minds and inimical to liberty and freedom of speech. His prejudices occasionally got the better of his logic. In 1815, he allowed himself to be drawn into a dispute with the Catholic barrister and nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell which almost culminated in a duel at Ostend, where both parties had agreed to meet in order to avoid the authorities. It was O’Connell who first coined the sobriquet ‘Orange Peel’, not only to describe his opponent’s Protestant sympathies as is usually assumed, but also to attack what he called a ‘ludicrous enemy . . . a raw youth squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England’. Religious conflict was the most obvious problem presented by Irish affairs but the economic dimension could never be ignored. Ireland, the linen industry of eastern Ulster apart, was an overwhelmingly rural country. It did not share in the economic advances being made during the first phase of Britain’s industrial revolution. What it did share, however, was disturbingly rapid population growth. Between the early 1780s and the early 1820s, the country’s population grew from 4 million to almost 7 million, the most rapid growth being concentrated in the remoter western regions of Ireland and the least in the most economically developed north-east. The result was great pressure on landholdings and available foodstuffs and sharply declining living standards for the peasantry. In 1815, Peel proposed to the government a scheme for assisted emigration from Ireland to Canada, but it did not find 9

favour with the prime minister and population pressures continued to mount. In 1816, the potato crop, on which increasing numbers of Irish folk depended, partially failed and Peel spent much of the first half of 1817 in organizing emergency supplies. About £37,000 was raised for famine relief and substantial movements of food were arranged. The measures were hardly adequate and the government was fortunate that the 1817 harvest was ample enough to see prices fall substantially and take the sharpest edge off the hunger. It was also the case that Peel’s policy was motivated as much by fear of widespread violence if nothing were done as by concern for the well-being of the Irish peasant. Nevertheless, his work was widely praised and the famine of 1817 had a happier outcome for Peel and for the Irish than the much more serious potato famine of 1845–6. Ireland’s economic difficulties were compounded by the country’s contribution to the protracted war effort against France. By the time the exchequers of Britain and Ireland were united in 1817, the Irish National Debt was 250 per cent higher than it had been at the time of the Union in 1801. Britain contributed much more to the war effort, of course, but its vastly more diverse and expanding economy could better bear the load. During the same period, Britain’s debt increased by only 50 per cent. Ireland was suffering from shortages of capital which made the country’s post-war economic recovery much more difficult. Peel’s policies as Chief Secretary were dominated not by finance, however, but by problems of order based on religion. In 1811, Irish Catholics had formed a ‘Catholic Board’ to co-ordinate activity aimed at achieving greater political rights. Under its umbrella, Daniel O’Connell, leader of what Peel called the ‘violent party’, orchestrated the single strands of violence into something like a concerted Catholic campaign. This led Peel to recommend the dissolution of the Board in 1814. The dissolution was skilfully timed, against the advice of the Protestant government in Ireland which wanted precipitate action at the height of the crisis, to take effect when internal disunity had already weakened the Catholic cause. The disturbances of 1812–13 gave Peel the incentive to collect information from across the country about the extent of lawlessness. This evidence he sifted meticulously in order to prepare what became his first substantial legislation. The Peace Preservation Act and the Insurrection Act of 1814 were designed to give greater peacekeeping powers to the authorities by establishing for the first time professional, 10

and salaried, magistrates and full-time local police forces. Appointments to the new Peace Preservation Force, so far as possible, were not to be influenced by established patronage networks, which Peel felt only inflamed Catholic opinion; he looked to old army and militia men to service the new organization. His police policies, of course, foreshadowed the more celebrated initiatives in London fifteen years later. They were also an early instance of using Ireland as a kind of ‘social laboratory’ in which to try out policies which might have later application on the mainland. Proposals to allow Catholics to take up government positions and to remove their other legal disabilities came periodically before Parliament. Though ‘Protestants’ (to use the convenient shorthand for those who opposed any form of Catholic emancipation) were advantaged by the absence of consensus on the ‘Catholic’ side about precisely what rights it was safe to confer, the issue was naturally contentious and provoked damaging disagreements within Liverpool’s Tory party. Peel’s speech against Henry Grattan’s motion for Catholic relief in 1817 proved to be a landmark in his career. Several of his opponents declared it the most able statement of the Protestant case that they had heard; some believed that it swayed a close vote the government’s way. It certainly strengthened Lord Liverpool’s political position and gave the prime minister further evidence of Peel’s potential for high office. More important perhaps in the light of later developments, it established Peel on the ‘Protestant’ wing of the Tory party and as the most effective champion of their cause. Though Peel resigned his office in 1818, his period as Chief Secretary had important implications for the remainder of his career. He had proved his administrative capability and shown, in the managing of the Protestant administration in Dublin, a high degree of political skill. His policies on law and order in Ireland and against Catholic emancipation, however, conveyed the impression that he was a natural leader for the more extreme anti-Catholic Tories in Westminster. In reality, Peel was too ambitious and too shrewd to hitch himself irredeemably to a cause which might well be a political deadend. Ultimately, however, he was to pay a heavy price for his reputation as an unswerving Protestant.

11

3 Peel, the Home Office and ‘Liberal Toryism’, 1819–30

Peel’s overall reputation depends heavily upon his competence as a finance minister. Yet, until he accepted Liverpool’s invitation to chair a Parliamentary enquiry into the state of public finances in 1819, he had little economic knowledge. Characteristically, however, he was determined to learn, and quickly. The Chairmanship of the Currency Committee gave Peel his first opportunity to play a leading role in British, rather than Irish, politics. Monetary policy is a technical subject and it is hardly surprising that most MPs did not master it. Its importance, however, was undeniable since government finances were in a frail condition after the return of peace in 1815. Even before the war ended, a Parliamentary bullion committee had concluded that, since Pitt suspended cash payments from the Bank of England in 1797, banks had issued more bank notes than they could make good. This had lowered the value of the pound and increased the price of gold. Under the weak direction of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, after 1815 government debts mounted. The high interest rates which resulted from the raising of new loans were considered by many of the new breed of ‘political economists’ to stifle any prospect of post-war economic recovery. The benefits of tying British currency once again to a fixed standard of value had been advocated cogently by the economist David Ricardo, in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation published in 12

1817. He argued that the supply of credit needed to be reined in and ‘sound money’ established. His free trade and ‘monetarist’ ideas, which developed those of Adam Smith, were translated into practical politics by William Huskisson, a junior minister in Liverpool’s government. Huskisson was influential in all economic questions but Peel reached his own decision about ‘bullionism’ (as this aspect of Ricardo’s ideas was called) and expressed himself intellectually converted to Ricardo’s view. British currency had not been linked to a fixed standard of value since 1797, during the major financial crisis caused by the wars with Revolutionary France. Peel’s committee duly recommended that, after a four-year transitional period, the Bank of England should from 1823 go back on the ‘Gold Standard’. This resumption of cash payments tied to the price of gold was translated into legislation widely known as ‘Peel’s Act’ in 1819. Rural backbench MPs liked the Act because they resented financial manipulations and speculations in the City of London. They did not understand economics but they knew both that some dubious fortunes had been made in the City and that the moneyed men had enjoyed a much more profitable war than landowners had done. They wanted a clipping of City wings with the authority of Parliament over financial institutions openly reasserted. Liverpool, defending ‘sound-money’ policy in the House of Lords, said that it was necessary to restrain the Bank’s ‘power of making money, without any check or influence to direct them, than their own notions of profit and interest’. Peel concurred: ‘The House [of Commons] had too long transferred its powers [to the Bank and other financial agencies]. Let it recover the authority which it had too long abdicated.’ Political economists believed that leading merchants and manufacturers had most to gain from Peel’s Act but the commercial interests mostly opposed it. Peel’s own father presented a petition to the Commons from the merchants of London against any resumption of cash payments. Even in Manchester, which later in the century would be acclaimed as both the practical and the intellectual centre of ‘sound money’, almost 150 leading merchants, bankers and traders wrote an anguished letter to Liverpool. They recognized that they must eventually tread the path of monetary virtue but prayed, St Augustine-like, that it be not yet. Despite influential opposition, the Bank decided that it did not need the full four-year transition period recommended by Peel’s committee. By 1821, Britain was securely back on the Gold Standard. What was to become the dominant financial wisdom of the Victorian age – a sound, 13

metal-based currency buttressed by cheap government, balanced books and, eventually, low rates of direct and indirect taxation – was foreshadowed by the policies followed by Liverpool’s government between 1819 and 1822. In putting these policies in place, Robert Peel played an intellectually subordinate but politically substantial role. From 1819 to the end of his life, Peel would be associated with what came to be called ‘economic liberalism’, a term deriving from the freedom given to industrialists and businessmen to chase markets, increase their profits and thus, at least in theory, improve job prospects for ordinary people and stimulate economic growth for the benefit of all citizens, if not equally. A similar, if simplified, reasoning led Margaret Thatcher to adopt strict ‘monetarist policies’ in the Conservative governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s. For Peel, as for Thatcher much later, determined political pursuit of an economic theory was to produce strong reactions. If Peel polarized political opinion, as by the mid-1840s he unequivocally did, it was on an economic philosophy grounded in sound money, low taxes and free trade to which he had become an ardent convert in 1819. Peel was a backbencher during this formative process, having resigned office as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1818. Newly married and, perhaps more significant, unconvinced of the stability of Liverpool’s government during the messy farce of the Queen Caroline divorce scandal, he refused the offer of a Cabinet post as President of the Board of Control when George Canning resigned in December 1820. Almost a year later, however, in calmer political waters, he was offered a more substantial prize – to succeed the tired, ageing and anyway discredited Viscount Sidmouth. Early in 1822, at the age of 34, Peel entered the Cabinet as Home Secretary. During the next five years he was to play a central part in directing Liverpool’s government during what is misleadingly called its ‘liberal’ phase. ‘Liberal Toryism’ is a phrase which has stuck fast to the period 1822–7. It requires both explanation and apology. It is associated with the broadly reformist policies adopted both in domestic and foreign affairs by ministers generally new to Cabinet rank after a ministerial reshuffle by Liverpool in 1822–3. The new men included Peel at the Home Office, of course, but also Frederick Robinson as Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Huskisson as President of the Board of Trade and George Canning, the most experienced of them, who replaced Viscount Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary when the latter committed suicide in August 1822. Each of these ministers introduced policies which, at first sight, seem to be turning points. Huskisson, in particular, 14

and Robinson reduced both tariffs and the number of trading monopolies, and also lowered taxes. Canning gave cautious support to nationalism abroad. Britain seemed to become the champion of nations ‘struggling to be free’ from old, imperialist powers – the Greeks from the Ottoman Turks in southern Europe, for example, and Brazil and Buenos Aires from Portugal and Spain in South America. Peel’s reforms are discussed below. Liberal Toryism has seemed an appropriate term partly because a younger generation replaced the older one represented by Sidmouth, Vansittart and Castlereagh. It also offers a contrast with the less libertarian policies which the Liverpool government adopted during the economic and political difficulties of 1815–20. During these years unemployment was widespread, prices were high and ‘hunger politics’ stimulated greater support for radical politics. They witnessed the Peterloo Massacre (1819), which occurred when a political meeting calling for Parliamentary reform was forcibly broken up by the local yeomanry, and the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), an attempt by an extreme radical group to blow up members of the Cabinet. In fact, as I have explained more fully elsewhere (Britain before the Reform Act, see Select bibliography, p. 90), Liverpool’s government did not experience anything so unsettling as a political or ideological conversion in the early 1820s. Rather it reacted to changing circumstances, perceiving much greater danger to the social fabric in the political activities of the later 1810s than it did in the more buoyant and generally prosperous climate of the 1820s. In many respects, the ‘new’ policies of the ‘liberal Tories’ were a continuation, if something of an acceleration, of policies initiated by the Younger Pitt in the 1780s, before the French Revolution polarized Europe and dominated the thinking of an entire generation. Statesmen active in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were frequently described as ‘cold-war warriors’, a phrase which captured the climate of ideological conflict which divided East and West into the armed camps of communism and capitalism after the end of the Second World War. The French Revolution had a similarly profound, polarizing, effect on the generations of Liverpool and Peel. Wealthy politicians born between about 1770 and 1800 sincerely believed that they were engaged in a desperate struggle to uphold the old order, hereditary privilege and civilized values against what that quintessentially anti-French Revolutionary warrior Edmund Burke called the ‘rash and speculative opinion’ threatening to destroy the world they knew. Liberal Toryism in the 1820s might more appropriately be seen as the 15

first, cautious recognition that the old world had not been destroyed and that, after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, governments could safely adapt to change rather than manning what some were beginning to see as anachronistic ideological barricades. The changes were anything but revolutionary. As we shall see, however, ‘liberal Toryism’ at least until the end of the 1820s had predominantly economic and administrative foci. It did not extend to embracing Parliamentary reform, while the religious question remained a deeply divisive issue within the party. Nowhere in the final phase of Liverpool’s government is the emphasis on continuity rather than change between the 1780s and the 1820s more apt than in the stewardship of the Home Office by Robert Peel. Like Pitt, Peel was more effective as an administrator and codifier than as an innovator, and the Home Office presented a peculiarly appropriate challenge. He is remembered for his work in four fields: law, prisons, trade unions and police. In the first two of these, which were also the most administratively complex, rationalization was the overriding requirement. The argument for change had already been effectively deployed, particularly by the prison reformer John Howard and by the Whig politicians and intellectuals Samuel Romilly, Thomas Folwell Buxton and Sir James Mackintosh. Similarly, the case for a professional police force which would deter crime as well as prosecute wrongdoers had been advanced by Henry and John Fielding in the middle of the eighteenth century and by the impressive Scottish lawyer and statistician Patrick Colquhoun at the end. On trade unions, Peel was responding to initiatives and, as he saw them, to the important errors made by Francis Place and the Edinburgh surgeon turned radical MP Joseph Hume. Like Pitt, Peel, having been intellectually convinced by the innovative arguments of others, used his formidable organizational powers to bring about necessary change. English law by the 1820s was chaotic. Over the centuries, new statutes had been introduced to meet a wide variety of circumstances and the legal system had become increasingly complex and confusing. Over two hundred offences, many of them trivial, carried the death penalty at the judge’s discretion. In consequence, juries, well aware of the possible consequences, refused to convict felons for fear of condemning them to strangulation on the gallows. After 1815 it seemed that the country was suffering from a crime wave. The number of convictions in England and Wales in the period 1818–25 was 115 per cent higher than that for the period 1809–16. Peel also became con16

cerned that the law lacked popular respect because of its theoretical, but in practice capriciously selective, savagery. In 1823 he passed five statutes greatly reducing the number of capital offences. No longer would offences such as larceny of sums less than £2 or the impersonation of a Greenwich pensioner risk the hangman’s noose. The opening up of Australia after 1788 provided a convenient repository to house Britain’s ‘undesirables’. Juries, so the argument ran, would convict more readily when the likely punishment was transportation rather than death. In fact, the number of executions which actually took place in the period 1822–8 was remarkably similar to that of the period 1805–12 and, arguably, Lord John Russell, Whig Home Secretary in the 1830s, effected a larger, and more permanent, reduction in the number of executions, which were then overwhelmingly for murder rather than for property crimes. Transportation was also an eligible solution to the problem of overpopulation. Not until 1801 did British politicians have a reliable indication of the country’s population and not until 1811 could they work out how rapidly it was growing. Peel’s Jury Act of 1825 rationalized the rules governing jury selection. In 1826 and 1827, determined, as he put it, to ‘break the sleep of a century’, he introduced two famous consolidating statutes. The first aimed at improving the administration of central justice. The second removed ninety-two pieces of legislation concerned with theft and other offences against property. Five much clearer and more workable statutes were substituted ‘to accommodate the laws relating to crime to the present circumstances and the improved state of society’. These new statutes covered more than 80 per cent of the most common offences. In 1830, during Wellington’s government, Peel completed his legal reforms with a statute reducing the number of forgery offences which carried the death penalty. Peel’s approach to prison reform was likewise functional. In 1823, the Gaols Act made possible for the first time a national policy on prisons. Each county and large town was now required to maintain its own gaol or house of correction, funded by local rates. Eighteenthcentury gaols, numerous but often unstructured and unsupervised, now came within a standard system of discipline. Inspection by local Justices of the Peace was also introduced. An amending Act in 1824 provided a code for the classification and, if necessary, physical separation of different categories of prisoner, enabling juvenile offenders to be treated differently from adults. As with legal reforms, Peel followed the lead of others, but he showed sound judgement in selecting workable from fanciful, or wildly expensive, solutions. 17

Peel’s direct involvement with trade union legislation derived from the problems attending the legalization of unions (or ‘combinations’ as they were called) by the Combination Act of 1824. Trade unions had been formally prohibited by an Act passed by Pitt’s government in 1799. The campaign to lift this ban, always a priority for radical leaders among working men, had been taken up by an increasingly influential group of political economists who were followers of Jeremy Bentham. Benthamites like J. R. McCulloch used the existing climate of liberality in economic matters to argue that government legislation should not be used to stop men from working together to raise wages and protect their jobs. Evidence was mounting, especially from the north-east and from Staffordshire, that mine owners were exploiting the artificial weakness of workers which the Combination Acts ensured. In this climate, and with adroit political lobbying organized by Francis Place and Joseph Hume in 1824, it was possible to persuade a more than half-empty House of Commons to repeal these Acts. Repeal during a climate of economic expansion, however, encouraged an immediate rash of strikes in the cotton, coal and shipbuilding industries. These strikes led to attacks on strikebreakers and alarmed the authorities. Peel and William Huskisson worked together to produce an amending Act in 1825. This preserved the legality of trade unions but introduced fresh penalties for those who made threats or used undue persuasion on workers either to join a union or to go on strike. As Peel explained: ‘Men who . . . have no property except their manual skills and strength, ought to be allowed to confer together . . . for the purpose of determining at what rate they will sell their property. But the possession of such a privilege justifies, while it renders more necessary, the severe punishment of any attempt to control the free will of others.’ Peel first took an interest in policing during his years as Chief Secretary for Ireland, when he helped to create a Police Preservation Force there. He did not, however, envisage the creation of a unified, professional and preventive police force for the whole of England while Home Secretary. He was sensitive to the long tradition of English localism, whereby law and order was considered a problem best solved by the co-operation of property owners at parish and county level. Backbench MPs representing the English counties took much persuading that any government intervention in police matters was justified, and the notion of a central agency with responsibility for prosecuting offenders was anathema, smacking of inquisitions and improper interference. In any case, local policing arrangements were often surpris18

ingly effective, with many towns and some rural areas already having preventative measures in place. Peel proceeded slowly and obliquely, first establishing Parliamentary committees of enquiry to consider the need for policing. His attention was anyway focused on the peculiar problems of London, a city with a population ten times larger than any other in Britain whose public order problems were widely considered unique. As the capital, of course, its difficulties were more apparent to men of influence who lived there for part of the year. Peel used the Home Office’s direct control over the Bow Street force, near Covent Garden in the West End, to expand its numbers in 1822. He appointed twenty-four uniformed officers who conspicuously patrolled central London by day to deter crime, particularly the petty crime likely to be committed by the capital’s teeming masses of vagrants, drunks, prostitutes and other ‘marginal folk’. Not until Peel’s second stint at the Home Office, in Wellington’s government of 1828–30, was a more permanent solution found. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established Britain’s first professional, preventive police force. The capital – the small and already well policed City of London apart – was divided into five sections under the control of two police commissioners, responsible directly to Peel. The force was initially established at 3,000 men, many of these recruited from existing ‘Bow Street Runners’ and also from ex-members of the Army. Initial recruitment was easy but there was a rapid turnover and only during the 1830s, during the competent leadership of the first two commissioners, Charles Rowan (an army veteran both of the Peninsular War and of the Battle of Waterloo) and Richard Mayne (the son of an Irish judge and a lawyer himself, practising in England), was continuity and efficiency established. The basis of police organization inaugurated in London was adopted by other forces as they emerged under later legislation passed by Whig and Liberal governments in 1839 and 1856. Peel’s time as Home Secretary consolidated a reputation first established in Ireland. When illness forced Liverpool to resign early in 1827, Peel was still young – not yet 40 – and he was known throughout Westminster as a highly competent minister. His statements to the Commons now carried a practised authority. He did not speak there without being sure of his ground. Not a naturally gifted orator, he nevertheless rarely spoke less than soundly and, at his best, he crushed opponents with the accumulated weight of unchallengeable information. 19

Despite, or perhaps because of, these gifts, however, he was much more admired than loved. Contemporaries detected a frostiness and aloofness underlying that massive competence. A year later, Harriet Arbuthnot, a confidante of Wellington, noted his ‘arrogance & ill temper’, asserted that he was ‘detested by all the young men’ in the party and said that he lacked generosity to subordinates. Similar observations were made by prominent Tories, such as Ellenborough and Bathurst and even Wellington himself, who felt the rough edge of Peel’s tongue more than once. Furthermore, Peel’s concern for administrative detail did not obscure the flexible nature of his Toryism. He was known to support policies which buttressed the positions of the leading ‘economic’ ministers, Robinson and Huskisson. On a less cerebral plane, and on matters more obviously divisive within the Tory party, he was a known opponent of further measures of Catholic relief, either in Ireland or Britain. So important was the religious question that this position alone placed him on the right of the Tory party in the company of ministers like Eldon, an adamantine reactionary, and Wellington. On the left, favouring Catholic emancipation, stood Canning, who saw himself as Liverpool’s natural successor, and Peel’s economic ally, William Huskisson. Even before Liverpool departed the scene, it was becoming difficult to avoid the eruption of important political divisions within the Tory party over religious policy. From 1827, they shattered increasingly glassy party unity and, in doing so, set Peel’s career on course at once more prominent and yet more contentious.

20

4 The collapse of the old Tory party, 1827–32

Lord Liverpool suffered a stroke in February 1827. It left him partially paralysed and precipitated his resignation a few weeks later. His departure severely exacerbated divisions in the party over which he had presided for almost fifteen years. The King confirmed Canning in his expectation that he should succeed Liverpool as prime minister, but the Tory ‘right’ was reluctant to back such a firm supporter of Catholic emancipation. Peel’s opposition to Canning turned exclusively on the Catholic question. Peel was as opposed as ever to ‘carrying the Catholic question’ and thus ‘of injuring the Protestant Constitution of the country’. As Peel well knew, however, personal factors also came into it. Few of Canning’s Cabinet colleagues had escaped his famously lacerating tongue and it was no surprise when about forty of those who had held office under Liverpool resigned. They included Wellington, Peel, Eldon, Westmorland and Bathurst from the previous Cabinet. Among their replacements, Canning included three Whig supporters, Lansdowne, Tierney and Carlisle, so that what had seemed since the early years of the nineteenth century to be a clear division in Parliament between Whigs and Tories now became much more complex. Canning’s government, though it lasted only a few months because the new prime minister died suddenly in August 1827, was significant in that it involved the loosening of party ties. Canning’s replacement, 21

Viscount Goderich, proved as ineffective a leader as he had been a competent subordinate (as Frederick Robinson) under Liverpool. He preserved the new political balance for only a few months before, unable to resolve growing Cabinet dissension, he tearfully tendered his resignation to George IV in the first few days of 1828. The King almost immediately sent for the Duke of Wellington to form a ministry. Wellington recognized Peel’s importance and asked him to resume office as Home Secretary. Peel had high hopes of a Wellington ministry. He wrote to his wife: ‘My view is to reunite the old Party which was in existence when Lord Liverpool’s calamity befell him.’ Peel’s conception of ‘the old party’ is both interesting and, in the light of future developments, significant. He did not see it as partisan and certainly not as an entity whose rationale was to crush Whig opponents. Party allegiance, both he and Wellington agreed, was necessary. However, both men saw other factors as equally important to political stability. These included support from the Crown – even when the crown was in the hands of such an idle, wilful, self-indulgent and politically capricious figure as George IV – and from independent country gentlemen representing the shires. Peel’s was a view of party which looked back to the eighteenth-century world of patronage, loose, family-based, connections and the centrality of the Crown in the political process. It was not a view which would change much during the remainder of his career. For a few months, Peel’s hopes of Tory reunification seemed realistic. He pressed on Wellington the importance of bringing Canningite –Tory followers, led by Huskisson, into his ministry since they would add much needed debating strength in the House of Commons. The few Whigs who had served Canning and Goderich refused to remain in a ministry led by such a firm anti-reformist Tory as Wellington. Thus, conventional early-nineteenth-century allegiances seemed established again. Since the new ministry would survive for almost three years, moreover, it might be concluded that an appropriate degree of stability had been re-established. Not so. The Wellington ministry proved disastrous for the fortunes of the Tory party. Wellington’s soldierly background had trained him to think in terms of black and white and, though he was not totally lacking in political ability, he lacked both the subtlety and the flexibility required to heal Tory wounds. He never quite understood why political subordinates in Cabinet and party were not amenable to obeying orders honestly given in the interests of King and Country, as their military counterparts were. 22

Important disagreements within the Cabinet in the spring of 1828 did not bode well. The Whig politician Lord John Russell carried a motion in the Commons to remove most of the remaining political disabilities from Protestant Dissenters by repealing the seventeenthcentury Test and Corporations Acts. Against considerable opposition, Peel and Wellington decided not to get the Commons resolution overturned in the Lords. Russell interpreted this as Peel showing ‘a very pretty hand in hauling down his colours’. William Huskisson’s plan to introduce a modest liberalization of the Corn Laws in the spring of 1828 also proved contentious. Personal animosities, as so often in politics, were sharpened on what might otherwise have been trivial disagreements. It was no real surprise when Huskisson resigned on one such minor matter – the disfranchisement of the two small Parliamentary boroughs of Penryn (Cornwall) and East Retford (Nottinghamshire) – in May 1828. Huskisson’s supporters – notably Palmerston and Grant – followed him out of office and, despite Peel’s hopes, by the end of the spring the basis of support for Wellington’s administration was worryingly slanted towards the ‘Ultra’, proProtestant, wing. It was the very situation Peel had hoped to avoid, not least because – temperamentally and ideologically – he had more in common with the ‘liberal’ Tories who had departed than with most of Wellington’s colleagues who remained. Neither Peel nor Wellington was a bigoted defender of the Church of England. However, the failure of a broadly-based Tory party to reestablish itself in 1828 led Ultras unwisely to believe that both would preserve the Protestant Constitution, as established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, against any assault. For the Ultras, still fighting battles of the seventeenth, if not the sixteenth, century to give votes to Catholics was to subvert the Constitution and to threaten revolution. Peel’s record as Chief Secretary for Ireland convinced them that the Home Secretary was indeed ‘Orange Peel’ and could be trusted to stand firm against growing calls for Catholic emancipation. They overlooked the fact that he had supported bills to give votes to English Catholics in 1823 and 1824. They also chose to ignore Peel’s substantial contribution both in Commons debates and in negotiations with the Anglican bishops to securing the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts, which many Ultras considered the thin end of a wedge of capitulation to the Catholics. A further problem was the Ultras’ justifiable belief that public opinion was on their side. In so far as the most recent general election – that in 1826 – had been indicative of anything, it was that candidates who 23

opposed giving votes and other liberties to Catholics did well. Led by the Whigs, and supported by an increasing number of the unaligned in the Commons, Parliamentary opinion as a whole was moving slowly, but substantially, in the direction of giving political liberties to both Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. Public opinion was not. Indeed, the influx of Irish Catholic migrant labour was exacerbating tensions in several British towns by the late 1820s. Irishmen were accused of taking Englishmen’s jobs – and at lower wages. Populist parallels exist with the situation in our own day when support for capital punishment remains substantially higher outside than within Parliament. The religious question by the end of 1828, therefore, had substantially weakened Tory unity. Events in 1829 would destroy it and, as part of this process, have long-term consequences for Peel’s political career. Growing Parliamentary liberality would almost certainly have extended from Protestant Dissenters to Catholics had the question been restricted to Britain. Catholics in much of England, Scotland and Wales were still a relatively small minority and – a few growing towns apart – offered limited threat. The ‘Catholic question’, however, was essentially an Irish one. More than three-quarters of Irish people were Catholic and, under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, they had become much better organized in the 1820s after the formation of the Catholic Association, an organization which attracted support from Catholic property owners as well as priests and the peasantry. Those who opposed Catholic emancipation in the late 1820s, therefore, were not just concerned about the supremacy of the Church of England, important though this remained to the Ultras. They feared emancipation as a stalking horse for Irish nationalism and the repeal of the recent Act of Union between Britain and Ireland. This, in its turn, would risk the integrity of the growing British Empire. By one of those ironies which give spice to political life, the resignation of the Huskissonites from Wellington’s government precipitated the Tory crisis over Catholic emancipation. The President of the Board of Trade had resigned to be replaced by an Irish MP, William Vesey Fitzgerald. By the political rules of the age, his acceptance of a government post required him to submit himself to re-election. Knowing Wellington’s government to be less well disposed towards Catholic emancipation than Canning’s, the Catholic Association had recently been agitating with particular vigour. It was now ready for a well publicized test of its strength and Fitzgerald was opposed by O’Connell himself, who duly won the by-election. Since, under the law as it 24

stood in 1828, the Catholic O’Connell was permitted to stand for election but not to take his seat if successful, this brought the Catholic issue to the forefront of British politics. Wellington, who had probably begun to acknowledge the eventual inevitability of Catholic emancipation for Ireland as early as 1825, could make his calculations on quasi-military criteria. Forces in favour were: the overwhelming majority of the Irish population; an Irish Chief Secretary who by the autumn of 1828 was seriously alarmed about the extent of civil disorder and the prospect of rebellion; a House of Commons in which a substantial majority for emancipation now existed; the inadvisability of dissolving Parliament and calling fresh elections. In a few large constituencies, public opinion would ensure the return of an extra ‘Protestant’ or two but an election would divide the Tories still further and produce no significant redistribution in the balance of forces on the Catholic question. Forces against amounted to only two: a ‘Protestant’ King who would certainly be difficult and had already made his views clear – but who had been successfully defied before during Liverpool’s administration; and a substantial minority of Protestant Ultras in the Commons who would feel betrayed. No general would fight for the purity of the Protestant Constitution on such a battlefield with any expectation of success and Wellington, if a limited politician, was a good general. Peel had reached a similar conclusion, but his personal position was more vulnerable. His ‘Protestant’ credentials had been firmly established, at least in the eyes of the Ultras, during his time in Ireland. He had been invited to represent Oxford University as an MP largely on this reputation. Peel had hoped to avoid having to support Catholic emancipation as a minister, knowing the damaging consequences it would have for his credibility among many Tories. However, the deteriorating situation in Ireland, the patent inability of the Marquis of Anglesey, the Lord Lieutenant, and Peel’s sense of loyalty to Wellington all contributed to the fateful decision, made at the beginning of 1829, to help frame a Catholic emancipation bill. The bill, which Parliament first saw in March 1829, and which was law by mid-April, owed much to Peel’s administrative brain. It also reflected the objective to which he was groping as a solution to the Irish dilemma and to which he would return as prime minister in the early 1840s: cementing the Union by securing the loyalty to it of the wealthier Catholic gentry and middle-class families. Thus, by the Emancipation Act, Catholics were permitted to hold virtually all offices of State except a few in the King’s household, but the qualification to vote in 25

Irish county seats was raised from the old 40s (£2) freehold to £10. This would keep out ill-educated, and quite possibly priest-controlled, Catholic peasants, while enfranchising all those with adequate property. Despite the change in voting qualifications, Peel’s intervention probably increased the ‘liberality’ of the measure. He argued against many of the conditions which Wellington had contemplated imposing, arguing that these ‘would give power to the Roman Catholics without giving satisfaction’. There was in any case no chance that emancipation would ‘satisfy’ Roman Catholics, still less that it would ‘solve’ the Irish question in the longer term, but it was a sufficient concession to O’Connell to stave off the immediate threat of civil war. Peel himself did not explain his change of heart on emancipation on the grounds of civil disturbance – which he was confident would be easily subdued. This was rather the pretext. As he told the Commons in March 1829, when he introduced the Catholic relief bill on behalf of the government, ‘It is because the evil is not casual and temporary but permanent and inveterate . . . that I am contented to run the hazards of a change’. The hazards were personal as well as political. As Peel had anticipated, emancipation destroyed his reputation with the Protestant party not only in Ireland and among backbench MPs but also in the industrial Lancashire from which he had sprung and which was now experiencing increasing waves of Irish immigration. Peel was branded an apostate; neither his decision to resign his Oxford University seat and seek renomination nor a careful explanation of his new views in the Commons was of much help. He was defeated in Oxford and had quickly to find a new constituency. To the Commons he said: ‘I yield . . . to a moral necessity which I cannot control, unwilling to push resistance to a point which might endanger the Establishments that I wish to defend.’ The speech made a favourable short-term impression, but did not assuage the longer-term wrath of the Protestants. As Norman Gash puts it, Peel had been ‘the idolized champion of the Protestant party; that party now regarded him as an outcast’. His ‘betrayal’ in 1829 was neither forgiven nor forgotten. As we shall see, it was to prove a formidable obstacle in the way of Peel’s aim in the 1830s and 1840s to build a new ‘Conservative’ party from the rubble of that Toryism which collapsed between 1827 and 1832. It is tempting in a secular age to brand the Ultras as ignorant bigots. Some no doubt were, but the Ultra case is not so lightly dismissed and at crucial points in the remainder of his career, Peel suffered for discounting their arguments. Peel was extremely able, but he was also 26

proud, could be arrogant and found empathy with those of contrary views extremely difficult. A fatal flaw in his character was that, once convinced himself of the validity of an argument, he tended to regard it as proven and those who were not convinced as either mischievous or intellectually inferior. In 1829, the Protestant party could deploy the respectable argument that legal privileges for the Church of England were an essential prop of the old Constitution which, as they bitterly reminded Peel and Wellington, was a Constitution in Church and State. As the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had taught them, Catholicism was equated with tyrannical kings and the threat of foreign rule. Peel, they argued, might have bought temporary peace in Ireland, but he had destroyed the Constitution he had been brought up to respect and defend. For a High Tory in the late 1820s, no charge was more serious. The Protestants’ attempts to mobilize public opinion against the government’s emancipation proposals were extremely successful. As Peter Jupp has pointed out, 3,326 petitions were presented to Parliament in the two months from February to April 1829, some supported with huge numbers of signatures – over 38,000 from Bristol and nearly 37,000 from Glasgow, for example. Wellington’s government survived the immediate anger and frustration of the Ultras, and Peel, immediately after the conclusion of his contentious labours on emancipation, introduced Metropolitan police legislation (see Chapter 3). There was no denying, however, that the government had been severely damaged by the resolution of the Catholic question. About forty members who had previously supported Wellington’s government in the Commons formed a separate party of opposition in early 1830 because of the Catholic question and up to thirty others could not be relied upon in any particular vote. Wellington lost the clear majority he had previously held. The general election of 1830 provided no obvious accession of strength and the arrival of more than 150 new members whose loyalties were not clear injected further elements of uncertainty. The onset of economic depression and the related revival of the Parliamentary reform question in 1829–30 also presented challenges which, ultimately, Wellington’s government could not resist. That story of its decline has been told elsewhere (The Great Reform Act of 1832, see Select bibliography, p. 90). Suffice it to say here that a combination of personal rivalries and the divisive nature of the religious question had shattered Liverpool’s Tory party and left it ill-equipped to respond to new challenges. Any opportunity, never particularly strong, of broadening the base 27

of the administration to include more reformist Tories was lost because of Wellington’s confident rejection of the need for Parliamentary reform. His government eventually fell in November, to be replaced by a Whig-led coalition administration headed by Earl Grey and pledged to bring in Parliamentary reform. Where did this extended period of decline and fall leave Peel? It is doubtful if, in November 1830, he regarded loss of office as anything other than a burden relieved. His work as Home Secretary, and increasingly as first lieutenant to Wellington, had been punishing and not very rewarding. He took on extra-departmental duties and chafed at correcting what he saw as the blunders and omissions of others. The short temper and open intolerance of inefficiency, which so many commentators noted as discordant features of his great administration of 1841–6, were frequently on display in the years 1828–30. His political integrity had been seriously challenged for the first time over Catholic emancipation and his reputation dented. Peel was never close to Wellington personally, and he was actively disliked in his social circle. Personal tragedy, in the shape of his father’s death in May 1830, also depressed him. On the other hand, he inherited the baronetcy (and was henceforth Sir Robert), had ample wealth and enjoyed a stable and successful marriage. In an age unprecedented for the quality – and usually accuracy – of insider gossip and innuendo, no breath of scandal ever surrounded Peel’s family life. It was no convenient euphemism for Peel to say at the end of 1830 that he looked forward to spending more time with his family; it was a simple truth. But it was rest and recuperation Peel craved, not permanent retirement. In November 1830 he was 42 years old and he knew perfectly well, especially after the death of Huskisson at the opening of the Liverpool–Manchester railway two months earlier, that both his abilities and his track record made him now the natural successor to Wellington. His ambitions certainly encompassed being prime minister, but over what political configuration he might preside was uncertain. The rapidly changing shape of party politics, soon to be affected once more by the Reform Act, needed digestion. Though Peel was established as a leader, it was not clear who would follow him and on what terms. Peel was to remain out of office for a period of four years, the first part of which was dominated by the Whigs’ attempt to pass a Parliamentary reform bill a task they found both gruelling and thankless. They obviously wished to capitalize on a rare return to office by exploiting the growing pressure for reform outside Parliament. This 28

was a key factor in proposing a reform more radical – especially in the number of Parliamentary boroughs they proposed to disfranchise – than most inside Westminster were expecting. Peel was one of the most surprised. After his bruising experience over Catholic emancipation, and recognizing also the virtual inevitability of reform sooner rather than later, he had been happy to watch from the sidelines as Grey, Russell and the rest took on a task which was bound to be controversial. It was the radical nature of the Whig proposals which elicited one of his most passionate Parliamentary speeches, delivered in early March 1831. Above all, he had expected a measure which continued to enfranchise interests – including the working men who could vote in significant numbers in a small number of populous constituencies – rather than specific groups narrowly defined by property qualification. He also favoured the survival of a large number of ‘managed boroughs’ which had historically allowed leading political figures – like Pitt, Fox and himself – to enter Parliament at almost the earliest possible opportunity and thus to serve a proper apprenticeship in the service of the nation. The Whig bill, he argued, jeopardized both principles and several more besides. Peel thus played a bigger role in attempting to stem a remorseless pro-reform tide than he had either wanted or envisaged. Indeed, for a brief period before the Whigs persuaded the King to allow them a general election which turned on the subject of Parliamentary reform, he even harboured hopes that the Whigs would be forced to withdraw proposals motivated, as he saw it, by nothing more worthy than ‘popular clamour’. Peel reappeared in the spotlight again during the crisis of reform in May 1832. Faced by apparently intractable opposition from William IV over creating fifty new Whig peers to ensure that the bill passed the Lords, Grey tendered the Whigs’ resignation and the King asked Wellington to form a government. The so-called ‘Days of May’ were a time of high excitement and much agitation during which many contemporaries believed, and some historians have agreed, that revolution was a possible consequence. Peel’s position on reform had been explained to the House of Commons. He refused to condemn the principle outright, but he had reiterated that the Whigs’ bill went too far, threatening the eventual transfer of sovereignty from Parliament to the people, and threatening to weaken almost to vanishing point the power and influence of both the monarchy and the House of Lords. He was also deeply uneasy at the precedent set by having a controversial measure passed by Parliament on the basis of co-ordinated 29

extra-Parliamentary activity. Government should not be constrained by pressure from the masses. In these circumstances, although he was reluctant to reject any request from his sovereign to serve the nation, he felt that ‘he should suffer in his own self-esteem without rendering any advantage to the country . . . . he did not think that it would be for the benefit of the king’s service’. In a famous phrase he explained that he was also ‘unwilling to open a door which I saw no prospect of being able to close’. So, in May 1832 he refused to join Wellington to pass an acceptable – that is to say, more modest – reform bill. It is generally accepted that it was Peel’s refusal to serve which scuppered Wellington’s chances of forming a government, leaving the King with no choice but to accept the Whigs back on their own terms. Peel was accused of deserting Wellington and also, indirectly, of reducing that royal authority which he stood pledged to maintain – a serious charge against a Tory politician. He could respond that, thinking reform inevitable, it was better passed by the Whigs who had originally sponsored it. For the Tories suddenly to take up the reform issue which so many of them viscerally opposed would be to sacrifice consistency and risk losing public respect. It is much more likely, however, the real reason for Peel’s refusal was the political consideration that his career could not stand a second volte-face on an issue of principle. He had recanted on Catholic emancipation in 1829; an ambitious politician with his eyes on the leadership of his party could not risk Tory fury a second time. The Tories were condemned to pay a high electoral price for their opposition to Parliamentary reform. In the first election for the reformed Parliament, held in December 1832, Tory strength in the Commons was reduced to 175 seats at most. Peel was now, by default and by general assumption, the Tories’ leader but they were a bedraggled and demoralized group: not at all the confident party of order over which Liverpool had presided during Peel’s long political apprenticeship. Peel’s task was now not just to lift morale but to find organizing principles and ideas around which a plausible Tory revival could be mounted.

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5 A King’s minister out of office: Peel in the 1830s

During the nine years immediately after the passing of the Great Reform Act, the Whigs were in office almost without a break. First Earl Grey and then Viscount Melbourne headed administrations responsible for important measures which many historians have seen as justifying the title sometimes given to the 1830s: ‘the decade of reform’. A new and more rational system of governing Britain’s cities and larger towns was made possible by the passage of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. The annual elections for town councillors would soon prove an important means of heightening political awareness in early Victorian England. In 1834, a new, and highly controversial, Poor Law was enacted which saved money but created much antagonism in the towns of midland and northern England, whose problems it had not been passed to solve. In the countryside, however, it established a more uniform system, weakening the power of local officials and magistrates. An important series of measures to reform the Church of England followed between 1836 and 1840, and a State system for the registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced in 1837. Also in these years, Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire, passed the first factory legislation buttressed by government inspection, and voted the first State grant in aid of education for the lower classes. Most of these reforms were a response to the rapid changes being 31

brought about by industrial revolution. The calamitous events of 1827–32 had seen the Tory party branded as the party which opposed all reform – in some cases even into the last ditch. The Whig reforms of the 1830s, therefore, seemed in tune with the mood of the nation and it might be thought that a thoroughly demoralized Tory party could only look resentfully on. The truth is not so straightforward. Ferocious opponents of all change there certainly were among the Tories, but the party’s leading spokesmen were not among them. Indeed, Peel, now recognized on all sides as the leading Tory spokesman in the lower House, went out of his way in responding to the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament in January 1833 to deny that he was an anti-reformer: ‘He was for reforming every institution that really required reform; but he was for doing it gradually, dispassionately, and deliberately in order that the reform might be lasting.’ Peel’s conception of ‘reform’ emphatically did not include responding to outside pressures. As he wrote to his close friend and political colleague Henry Goulburn at the same time, the Tories (though he actually used the word ‘Conservative’ – see Chapter 6) should seek to ‘resist Radicalism and to prevent . . . further encroachments of democratic influence’. Peel was not yet recognized as leader of the opposition – a post as yet unknown to the Constitution. Rather he was making an early declaration to the newly elected Parliament of his open-mindedness on the leading questions of the day. It was not a speech to win over his Ultra opponents but it was designed to indicate to all who looked to Peel for leadership that the party of Pitt and Liverpool must adapt to survive. Peel was playing for high stakes. He knew that steadfast opposition to all reform was a sure route to political oblivion but he also held a deeply conservative view of the Constitution. He retained a profound belief in the importance of keeping executive government in the hands of an elite with the background, education and expertise to discharge its responsibilities efficiently and in the national interest. He feared that the crisis over reform had given public opinion too great an influence in the affairs of the nation and he was anxious to reassert executive supremacy over extra-Parliamentary influence. Like most political figures of his age, Peel was undemocratic. He believed that ‘the people’ lacked the education and the judgement to take important decisions. If the nation’s legislators acted under pressure from outside, the quality of their judgement would be impaired and national well-being threatened. The distinction between government by the people and govern32

ment in the interests of the people was crucial, and Peel expressed it neatly during a debate on the reform bill in 1831: ‘We are here to consult the interests of the people, and not to obey the will of the people.’ This issue was far more important than party disagreements between Whigs and Tories, political groupings overwhelmingly of the privileged, and heavily dependent on hereditary wealth. Peel’s overriding commitment was to good government, discharged by men of responsibility and efficiency. The representative basis of that government was a secondary consideration. Peel’s political objectives in the 1830s were threefold: first, to strengthen government and put ‘public opinion’ in its place; second, to ensure, so far as was possible since he was out of office, that necessary changes strengthened, rather than weakened, both the Constitution and Britain’s governing elite; third, to dispel the image of the Tory party as one of narrow reaction supported only by a small, unrepresentative proportion of the population. The third of these objectives was the least important to Peel. He did not see political life in the 1830s as polarized between Whigs and Tories but as a struggle to ensure that good governance was maintained by those best educated and best equipped to discharge it. He said that it was important to save the Whigs from the potentially dire consequences of their folly in promoting Parliamentary reform on the back of extra-Parliamentary agitation. This was not the language of a party politician. Nevertheless, changing his own party’s image meant that Peel needed to take on, and beat, the Ultra Tories. As is evident, this agenda is one which sits uneasily with modern conceptions about the role of the leader of the opposition, whose primary purpose is to provide ‘loyal opposition’ to the measures proposed by the government of the day. Peel in the 1830s was not a leader of the opposition in this sense. For the first few years he was not even the official leader of the Tories. Various overtures were made for a reconciliation between himself and the Ultras. Before 1834, they foundered on mutual distrust and lack of sympathy. In essence, the Ultras feared that Peel would ‘rat’ again, as he had done in 1829. While Peel did not trust the Ultras to behave responsibly he also denied their qualification for political influence, believing rather too uncritically the stereotype of the ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ squire whose politics were dictated purely by considerations of the self-interest of English landowners. Peel became the unequivocal leader of his party only at the end of 1834. In February of that year, with relations between Peel and the Ultras remaining frosty, the diarist Charles Greville was even envying 33

Peel’s position as a man of wealth, ability and leisure ‘unshackled by party connections and prejudices’. The change in this position came unexpectedly when, in November 1834, King William IV (having previously asked Peel to join in a coalition government with the Whigs) dismissed the Whig ministry of Melbourne and asked the Tories to form an administration on their own. The King’s original invitation went to the Duke of Wellington, and it was the old soldier’s assertion that prime ministers should now carry authority in the Commons which ensured that the King’s commission was transferred to Peel. Peel hurried back from an enjoyable autumn holiday in Italy with his wife and daughter and on 10 December accepted from the King the post of First Lord of the Treasury – which, until the midtwentieth century, remained the senior official title of the prime minister. Peel could argue, therefore, that his authority as leader of the Tories was a by-product of appointment by the King to the most senior government office. If the Tories supported Peel in Parliament, then he was de facto their leader. He did not become prime minister because he was leader of a party in the Commons. This may seem a precious Constitutional distinction but it was central to Peel’s perception of the role of a minister. That perception did not change between then and the end of his career. He saw himself as an executive servant of the King first – very much on the model of eighteenth-century prime ministers – especially the Younger Pitt – and the leader of a party second. The distinction would prove crucial during the great crisis of the Conservative party over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845–6 (see Chapter 10). Despite the consensus among historians, only recently challenged by Ian Newbould, that the 1830s were a decade not only of reform but also of increasingly clear party division between Whigs and Tories, some important caveats must be made. First, although voting records in the Commons suggest that considerably more MPs voted consistently according to the wishes of their political leaders after 1832 than before, a substantial number did not and some, though a dwindling number, continued to reject party labels. It is very easy to exaggerate the extent to which two-party division was a driving force in British political life during the 1830s. Second, the powers of the monarchy, though likewise dwindling, had not evaporated. Peel became prime minister in 1834 only because William IV dismissed his previous government. It proved to be the last occasion on which a monarch would get rid of a government with a 34

workable majority in Parliament, but contemporaries could not know this. The monarch in the 1830s was more than the titular head of State and the phrase ‘the King’s minister’ was not an empty one. Peel resigned after his brief ‘Hundred Days’ Ministry in April 1835 not because he had just suffered a damaging defeat in the Commons but because he felt that, without a majority there, he could not guarantee to pass necessary measures. Not to do so would weaken the executive. His resignation speech emphasized the continued importance of the monarch in Peel’s conception of what he called ‘the spirit of the Constitution of this country’: ‘I do sincerely regret the necessity which has compelled me to abandon the King’s service at the present moment.’ To struggle on against continued defeat would be ‘a useless struggle, which might involve his Majesty’. Similarly, when Queen Victoria offered him the prime ministership again in 1839 he refused it, during the so-called Bedchamber Crisis, not because of weakness in the Commons (where his position was considerably stronger than it had been in 1834) but because the Queen would not dismiss ladies of the bedchamber appointed under the previous Whig government led by Melbourne, who had in effect acted as her close guide and tutor in Constitutional matters since she had acceded to the throne two years earlier. Peel interpreted the new Queen’s loyalty to well-liked court appointees as a sign of lack of trust in him. On 10 May, Victoria had sent Peel a very curt note which stated the idea of removing any ladies of the bedchamber on the prime minister’s advice as ‘repugnant to her feelings’. Later the same day, Peel sent a much more developed reply, the core of which was an incoming ministry must have ‘the advantage of a public demonstration of your Majesty’s full support and confidence’. Even when dealing with a young, inexperienced and wilful monarch, Peel continued to believe that proper ministerial service was not possible without such a demonstration. The third, and perhaps most important, reason for doubting that the 1830s was a decade of two-party politics in the modern sense concerns the nature of the opposition that Peel mounted. Both major parties were fairly loose coalitions of interests. However, Peel was concerned that the Whigs had become associated with groups who, though they generally supported Whig ministers in Parliament, did not support their, or Peel’s, overall philosophy of government. Historians usually term these groups ‘the Radicals’, and sometimes talk of the WhigRadical party in the 1830s. No such party existed. The so-called ‘Radicals’ comprised a heterogenous group of politicians who fostered 35

a wide range of political causes, including (as one of the largest identifiable groups) nationalism or separatism in Ireland and further political reform. Some were out-and-out democrats. What they tended to have in common, apart from a belief that the Whigs were a softer touch on reform than the Tories, was a belief in the importance of extraParliamentary pressure and agitation to achieve their objectives. It was this, of course, which so alarmed Peel and, to a large degree, shaped the nature of his opposition in the 1830s. It was far more important to him to defeat a radical challenge sustained by extraParliamentary pressure than it was to beat the Whigs. Defeating the Radicals often meant supporting the Whigs, and the idea of allying with Radicals in order to bring down the government was utterly unacceptable, much to the chagrin of more ‘party-minded’ Tories. Peel’s underlying strategy was explained to his friend Goulburn, in letters written in 1833 and 1834: ‘Our policy ought to be rather to conciliate the goodwill of the sober-minded and well-disposed portion of the community, and thus lay the foundation of future strength.’ ‘My opinion is decidedly against all manoeuvring, and coquetting with the Radicals, for the mere purpose of a temporary triumph over the Government . . . If it [the government] breaks up . . . in consequence of a union between Radicals and Conservatives, in my opinion the Government which succeeds it will have a very short-lived triumph.’ Peel’s ‘opposition’, therefore, involved sustaining the government when it passed measures which he considered to be in the national interest and, especially, when it stood firm against one or other of the radical pretensions. In the Parliamentary session of 1833, admittedly one during which Peel was not officially the Tory leader and when ‘sound government’ immediately after the passage of the Reform Act was especially necessary, he voted against the Whigs in only three out of forty-three Parliamentary divisions. On the biggest questions, such as the new Poor Law in 1834 and municipal corporations in 1835, Peel either actively supported the government or did not interfere. During 1837 and 1838, he supported the Whig legislation on various contentious Irish issues, including tithe and Poor Law reform. The Whig party manager, Edward Ellice, noted in 1836 that Peel ‘was as anxious as the most selfish adherent of the Treasury to keep the Gov’t in office’. At the general elections of 1835 and 1837, the Tories improved their position substantially. They won about a hundred seats more in 1835 than during the disastrous post-reform election of 1832 and, having added about forty more in the election necessitated by the death of 36

William IV, were only about thirty short of the Whigs and their normal voting allies in the years 1837–41. Many Tories felt that Peel should seek to turn out the Whig government at the earliest possible opportunity, with the help of dissident Radical votes in the Commons if necessary. The Tories were increasingly confident of ultimate success and by-elections between 1837 and 1841 seemed to confirm that the tide was running in their favour. They were, however, by no means united either on principles or on tactics. It was widely felt that Peel should have taken the opportunity presented in 1839 when Melbourne resigned after his government’s majority on the Jamaica bill fell to five. They were concerned that Peel had upset the new Queen during the Bedchamber Crisis which followed. It was feared that the image of a young monarch browbeaten by an experienced and arrogant politician however at variance with the truth – would alienate popular support and convince voters that Queen Victoria’s preference for the Whigs, and her partiality for the avuncular, but cynical, Lord Melbourne, was well grounded. Ireland was another bone of contention. Votes on Irish issues, especially in the Lords where the nominal Tory leader Baron Lyndhurst was no friend of Peel, showed the extent of Tory divisions, but dissident Tory votes in the Commons were not uncommon. The myth that the Whigs were first humiliated and then destroyed in 1841 by a united Tory party needs to be dispelled. By 1841, Peel had every reason to be grateful both for the inadequacies of Whig financial strategy and for the downswing in the economy which seemed to buttress his charges of financial mismanagement. Government deficits were reaching alarming proportions and Peel’s financial expertise afforded him gratifying victories in debate over the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Baring. In 1841, fearful that if they did not make a move Peel might pre-empt them, the Whigs introduced a Budget which promised general reductions in tariffs and less protection for farmers from a revised Corn Law. Their supporters in the towns, especially in the West Riding of Yorkshire, urged that these reforms would bring cheap bread and prosperity to the working classes. With considerable effrontery, given the way his own mind was working and the course his government would shortly take (see Chapter 8), Peel savaged Baring’s proposals: ‘Can there be a more lamentable spectacle than that of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, seated on an empty chest, by the pool of bottomless deficiency, fishing for a Budget?’ The debate ended with a government defeat and, most 37

gratifyingly in view of recent party indiscipline, only one Tory MP voted in support of the Whigs. A Tory motion of no confidence in the government followed almost immediately and on 5 June 1841 was won (like the next no-confidence defeat, that of James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979) by a single vote. The Whigs, seeking to limit the damage, had already decided to risk their fortune at a general election, but being forced to hold it after the Commons had declared no confidence in their capacity to govern gave the Tories a great psychological boost. To the reasons for increasing Tory success between 1832 and 1841, and to the great electoral victory of that year, we must now turn.

38

6 Revival: Toryism into Conservatism, 1832–41

When Peel hurriedly returned from Italy at the end of 1834 to form his first government, a letter from Henry Goulburn awaited him. Goulburn offered his view of the political climate during Peel’s absence: ‘the property of the Country desires a conservative & not an ultra Tory government, meaning by that a Government deaf to all improvement which comprises change, however much on other grounds to be desired’. It is unlikely that this report came as any surprise to Peel. His own perception, at least since 1832, had been that those with property to conserve, many of them very recently enfranchised, wanted stability and sound government above all but recognized that purblind resistance to justified change was the surest prescription for disorder. The riots and alarms of 1830–2, furthermore, had provided ample evidence that this disorder could be on a sufficient scale to threaten the political system and advance ‘the democratical spirit’. Peel had a clear strategy for the revival of Toryism, based on broadening its electoral appeal and making it, as observers in our own age might say, more ‘relevant’ to the needs of a society changing with unprecedented rapidity. Much has been made of this. Not so much has been made of Peel’s strategy for the party at Westminster. He did not envisage significant change in the composition of the Parliamentary Tory party. Revival would depend on a rapprochement between the ‘administrative’ or ‘Court’ Tories – professional politicians committed 39

to the service of the monarch in the interests of the nation – and ‘landed Tories’, who represented rural England and distrusted change in general and strong central executives in particular. These Tories were the inheritors of what was called in the eighteenth century the ‘country party’ tradition. Peel did not envisage the election of substantial numbers of industrialists from the urban areas, still less the members of the lower middle classes who had been the main beneficiaries of the enlarged franchise agreed in 1832. Peel intended existing Tory groupings to work more harmoniously, not significantly to broaden the base of his party. Peel’s grand political design was not conceived primarily in party terms anyway. Party was a necessary, but a subordinate, element. His overriding objective, both in Ireland and in Britain, was to yoke propertied interests decisively to the security of the old Constitution. For him, propertied interests included industry and commerce and it was crucial to his strategy to preserve the landowners from breaking themselves on the wheel of narrow reaction by promoting only interests which seemed to be in tune with the old, safe, ossified rural world. He believed that he was saving the Ultras from the certain destruction to which their own narrow perceptions of the national interest would condemn them. Though he was reluctant to admit it, however, he needed the Ultras. By no means all of the old landed Tory party was anti-reformist, but it was impossible to revive the party’s fortunes without first obtaining at least the grudging support of those who accused him of desertion in 1829. The King’s dismissal of the Whigs in November 1834 (Chapter 5) gave Peel an ideal opportunity to do this by offering the Tories office once again. He used it to request a dissolution of Parliament and to make a direct appeal to the new electorate. The Tamworth Manifesto of December 1834 was the form which the appeal took. Although addressed in theory only to his Staffordshire constituents, it was in reality intended for nationwide distribution and discussion. Published election addresses by candidates to their constituents were already common but the novelty of the Tamworth Manifesto lay with its national coverage. According to Norman Gash, the Manifesto represented ‘an electioneering document on a grand and unprecedented scale’. In one respect it was. However, it is worth noting that the Manifesto is not partisan. It can be seen as the logical outworking of the message of 1832, although Peel (who saw the Great Reform Act as far too radical) would not have agreed. Its appeal was to property owners and its message was that moderate reform was not only a 40

safe policy to pursue, but a necessary one if the essentials of the Constitution in Church and State were to be safeguarded. With this in mind, Peel promised ‘a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper, combining with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’. In this spirit, Peel committed his party to accepting Parliamentary reform, while continuing to reject democracy, or government by mere numbers, entirely. The Manifesto was addressed to those without firm party loyalties: ‘that great and intelligent class of society . . . which is much less interested in contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government’. This bid for middle-class votes was also a means of broadening the Tory appeal. However, the Tamworth Manifesto also aimed to appeal to all but the most bigoted Ultras. Establishing a tradition for later election appeals, the Manifesto was much better at fine-sounding generalities than on commitments to specific policy. It did, however, make concrete proposals for reviving the fortunes of the Church of England by reforming its most irritating and irrational abuses, such as the holding of more than one living by a single cleric and the grotesque disparity of income between richer and poorer clergy. This section of the Manifesto was designed to convince Ultras, whose commitment to the Church of England was at the heart of their belief in the primacy of a Protestant Constitution in Church and State, that Peel the emancipator of the Catholics was first and foremost a committed Church of England man. Peel’s brief minority government of 1834–5 achieved nothing in legislative terms except the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission. From the Commission’s recommendations, however, flowed the legislation passed by the Whigs between 1836 and 1840 which buttressed the established church and fought off radical demands for its disestablishment. The Manifesto had the dual aim of widening Tory support in the country and convincing Peel’s opponents within the party that he had their interests at heart. The substantially increased Tory vote in the 1835 election suggests that the former purpose was successful. Peel had some success in the latter also. Some Ultras branded the Manifesto dangerously ‘liberal’ but the majority were prepared to accept Peel’s leadership, and with it his interpretation of Toryism, though guardedly. By 1835, as the more perceptive of them saw, they had little alternative to Peel. The Ultras and other landed Tories were leaderless and anyway in considerable need of political rehabilitation, so Peel’s ecclesiastical 41

olive branch could be seized gratefully enough. Most landed Tories would neither love nor fully trust Peel. For the moment, however, they were happy to follow him. The attempt to broaden the party base was accompanied by the wider use of the term ‘Conservative’ in place of ‘Tory’. The MP Sir John Welsh explained his understanding of the distinction in 1836: ‘The Conservative party is not identical with the Tory party. It includes, indeed, the Tories, but it is a more comprehensive term and the basis is a wider one . . . the Conservative party may be said to consist of all that part of the community who are attached to the Constitution in Church and State and who believe that it is threatened with subversion by the encroachments of democracy.’ This sounds good and it has been widely quoted because it seems to offer a helpful distinction between the two terms. In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that those who used the terms in the 1830s and 1840s followed Welsh’s logic. In practice, the terms ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ continued to be used more or less interchangeably. The Conservatives made substantial progress between the end of 1834 and the famous general election victory of 1841. Why did they recover so quickly? Various explanations have been offered but perhaps too much of this success has been attributed to Peel’s leadership, both by contemporaries and by some later historians. The Annual Register of 1839 personalized the issue: ‘No man, it is probable, ever deserved better of a party than Sir Robert Peel of his . . . . Unassisted by the faculties, the temperate wisdom and the Parliamentary tactic and address of their leader in the House of Commons, they [the Tories] could scarcely . . . have recovered with such steady rapidity, and with so few reverses from the prostration in which the revolutionary struggle of 1831 and 1832 had left them.’ Norman Gash considered that ‘Peel’s restraint and realism enlarged and consolidated the forces of Conservatism’. Yet there is a sense in which a Tory recovery after 1832 was almost inevitable. As Gash himself acknowledged: ‘Many forces had been at work and most of them had little or nothing to do with Peel.’ It is worth examining these forces in a little more detail. First, the depth of the Tory trough after the 1832 election is easily overstated. That election was untypical in almost every respect, and not least because it became almost a retrospective plebiscite on the desirability of Parliamentary reform. Many Tory candidates sacrificed themselves needlessly beyond this last ditch. What appeared to be an enormous Whig majority did not produce a massive, committed or united Whig party so much as a loose agglomeration of reform 42

supporters. Once that dust settled, the fragility of the basis for common action on the Whig side became apparent. About forty MPs who had supported the Reform Act, and thus would have been crudely classified as Whigs in 1832, crossed over to the Conservative side between the elections of 1832 and 1837. Almost twenty more followed during the Parliament of 1837–41. Second, the relationship between the core of the Whig party, led by grandees such as Grey, Melbourne, Russell and Lansdowne, and the exotic assortment of radical politicians was only a marriage of temporary convenience. Melbourne had absolutely nothing in common, either ideologically or socially, with nationalists like O’Connell or democratic currency reformers like the Birmingham banker Thomas Attwood. From the earliest years, the apparently secure Whig majority was in reality fragile. Once Peel had established his strategy of ‘government in opposition’, the Whigs often depended on Tory votes to sustain ‘sensible’ measures against radical pressure. The Whigs, therefore, were never as strong as their majorities implied and the core of their party had scarcely greater Parliamentary support in the 1830s than in the long years of Parliamentary opposition to Lord Liverpool between 1812 and 1827. The signs of marital strain between Whigs and Radicals soon appeared. O’Connell’s supporters were anxious to press the Irish cause, and discontent flared once again in the early 1830s, The Whig response to this was a mixture of coercion and attempted reform. Since this reform involved using surplus Church of Ireland (Irish Anglican) revenues for a range of educational and social purposes, it stirred deep passions. Churchmen hated the idea of using Church money for any State purpose, and it was not only committed Tories who saw this apparently benign initiative as the thin end of a wedge which would end with disestablishment and the destruction of Church supremacy. The ‘Appropriation’ issue, as it was called, considerably weakened the Whig government and precipitated the resignation of four Cabinet ministers in June 1834. Two of these, Edward Stanley (later Earl of Derby) and Sir James Graham, after a few years of ineffectual attempts to create a centre party, had become Conservative supporters by the late 1830s and would serve with distinction in Peel’s famous government of 1841–6. The Church question, therefore, provided a convenient rallying point for a reviving Tory party. Peel exploited his opportunity with skill, but the opportunity itself had been provided by the Whigs. From concern over the Church, it was only a short step to worries about the 43

Whigs’ ability to safeguard all forms of property. The 1832 Reform Act had substantially widened the electoral base, but virtually all the new electors were small property owners. None are so tenacious in their defence of property as those who have relatively little of it and thus feel threatened by the ambitions of those just below them. As Michael Brock observed in his study of the Reform Act, modest property owners, having achieved the vote in 1832, did not greatly favour ‘further adventures’. Yet such ‘adventures’ seemed much more likely with the Whigs than with the Tories. This was especially so after April 1835 when, after a general election in which it had lost support, the Whig leadership felt it necessary to make the so-called ‘Lichfield House Compact’ with assorted Radicals and O’Connellite Irishmen. The Compact’s purpose was to secure a majority in the Commons to get rid of Peel’s government. This was entirely successful in the short term. However, the longer-term implications for the Whigs were anything but happy. The Compact was the first formal agreement between the Whigs, Radicals and nationalists. In England, at least, the strong probability is that it alienated more voters than it attracted, precisely because it seemed to presage ‘further adventures’. Whether these comprised more concessions to those who wanted to dismantle the Anglo-Irish Union, a weakening of the Church of England, a system of education controlled by State rather than Church, a secret ballot or votes for the working classes, the electorate as a whole was at least sceptical, if not downright fearful, rather than enthusiastic. In the circumstances, Peel’s pledge that the Reform Act should be seen as ‘the final settlement of a great Constitutional question’ had a sympathetic resonance. Significantly, Tory propaganda in the later 1830s tended to stress the Whigs’ inability to restrain wild figures to their left. Sir James Graham, in an effective speech at Merchant Taylors’ Hall in 1838, for example, asserted that the Reform Act was as far as sensible men would want to go but that his old Whig allies could no longer be trusted to hold the line against damaging further changes in Church and State. This was a charge to which the Whigs were themselves sensitive. Lord John Russell suggested to Melbourne in 1837 that the government was on the horns of a dilemma. Their more radical supporters, on whom after 1837 they were dependent for majorities, wanted much more reform than the party leadership thought prudent. If they pleased their allies, they risked alienating public opinion and further strengthening the Tories. If they followed their own instincts as landed gentlemen concerned to preserve the Constitution, then they 44

might (and frequently did) receive the support of Peel but they would alienate the radicals, making their majority more parlous. In opting for the latter course, they gave Peel the opportunity of waiting for the best moment before striking. Meanwhile, the government drifted along, bereft of a clear legislative programme. This, tied to the increasing popular agitation associated with Chartism from 1838, only seemed to confirm that, increasingly, Melbourne’s government was in office but without power, building up a tide of resentment upon which Peel was – eventually – to sail to victory. Peel’s position was further strengthened by the frequency of general elections in the 1830s. These enabled propertied opinion to be both canvassed and heard. The election of 1832 was necessitated by the Reform Act. After it, the next would not normally have been held until 1839. Instead, two more were held within five years. Peel used William IV’s invitation to ask the Tories to form a minority government at the end of 1834 to request a dissolution of Parliament and allow the Tories a chance to regroup, which they took. The 1837 election, which saw further Tory gains, came about only because of the death of William IV. The requirement until the late nineteenth century was that a new monarch must have a new Parliament. These elections undoubtedly boosted Tory morale, but their circumstances were fortuitous. The case for arguing that a Tory revival was almost bound to take place is a strong one, but does it tell the whole story? Without strong and clear-headed leadership, it might be argued, these gains could as easily have evaporated as been consolidated. Peel’s handling of a difficult Parliamentary situation during the brief minority government of December 1834 to April 1835 won almost universal praise. The Times, admittedly a newspaper highly sympathetic to the Tories, gushed about ‘temper, capacity and powers . . . absolutely unapproached by any Minister but one [the Younger Pitt] who has addressed Parliament since the beginning of the present century’. Greville, more sceptical but worldly-wise and shrewd, commented on his ‘great capacity’ and ‘safe views and opinions’. Peel was also absolutely the right man to capitalize on Whig financial difficulties during the growing economic crisis and periods of unemployment of 1838–41. At a time when evident control of a brief, debating skill and command of the House of Commons counted for far more than they do nowadays, Peel’s Parliamentary performances there greatly contributed to the Tory revival. He was also well aware of the need for party organization. The 1832 45

Reform Act required electors to register their entitlement to vote. This presented an excellent opportunity for local supporters to organize and maximize their party’s voting strength. Many aspects of modern party organization date from the 1830s and there is little doubt that, despite important exceptions in the larger boroughs where Liberals were particularly effective, the Conservatives became much the better organized national party. Peel urged his supporters, in a famous speech in 1837, to ‘Register, register, register’ and told his Tamworth constituents in 1841 that ‘the battle of the Constitution must be fought in the registration courts’. It may legitimately be doubted, however, how much Tory organization owed to Peel. He made exhortations which were widely publicized, but the spadework was done by others – the party agent F. R. Bonham, and myriad local representatives working for the cause. Other Tories, like Archibald Alison, had spelled out the value of ‘a good registration’ before Peel took it up. His relations with the many local Tory organizations which sprang up after the government of 1834–5 were not particularly close and his aversion to extra-Parliamentary pressure as well as his own shyness both contributed to the awkwardness of the relationship with loyal ‘Operative Conservative Associations’ of working men established in northern industrial towns. A party leader who set such store on broadening the party’s appeal might have responded with greater cordiality to evident expressions of support in the constituencies. But such a reaction would have been uncharacteristic. Anyone less like a populist politician it would be difficult to imagine. Peel was happy to leave detailed organizational work to others, believing that a party with a clear sense of direction would earn more willing support and thus anyway be easier to organize. He would provide the leadership and the overall strategic direction; it was the responsibility of others to ensure that there would be sufficient followers. It was a characteristic response from a politician for whom the norms of the eighteenth century were more natural than those which were being developed in the first half of the nineteenth. It did, nevertheless, present a paradox. As Richard Shannon has recently pointed out, Peel was trying to achieve divergent aims. He recognized as shrewdly as anyone the growing importance of political parties. However, he continued to see them, in effect, as necessary evils. He wanted his party to win a large majority at a general election but only in order that Peel should exercise the key executive functions of government in the service of the monarch and continue to give due weight to the unelected, hereditary and 46

overwhelmingly landed interest in the House of Lords. The long-term problem about adopting a stance which could already be characterized as anachronistic was that Peel’s party was unlikely to take kindly to his preferred role for it as voting fodder on the floor of the House of Commons. As historians have recently been pointing out, the reformed Parliament gave MPs greater confidence that they were acting with, rather than against, the grain of extra-Parliamentary popular opinion. The increased flow of ‘social’ legislation in the 1830s and 1840s is one important outcome of this. Members of the Commons took very seriously their responsibility to represent the interests of their constituents and felt no compunction about pointing out any inconsistencies between their perceived responsibilities as MPs and policy initiatives taken by their leaders. Two other factors pointed up the potential difficulties for Peel even before he took office. MPs were not subject to the ‘three-line whip’ which developed precisely in order to bring backbenchers to heel and to ensure that the political party at Westminster took a consistent line on matters of policy. They were thus free to express their opinions without disciplinary come-back. Second, and perhaps more importantly, only a minority of MPs in the 1830s and 1840s saw themselves as career politicians for whom the prime objective was promotion to ministerial, and perhaps even Cabinet, rank. The knowledge that, in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, the overwhelming majority of MPs want to be Cabinet ministers acts as a formidable brake on any independence of thought or action which is ruthlessly exploited by party leaders and government ‘whips’. One of the great paradoxes is that, in an age where most property owners considered democracy as a great evil and likely to result in massive misgovernment, the House of Commons itself acted much more ‘democratically’ – in the sense of MPs being free to express their opinions – than it does in our own day. In summary, Peel’s leadership of the Tories in the 1830s capitalized very effectively on trends in the 1830s which anyway favoured a revival of Toryism. But were the Conservatives a party fashioned in Peel’s image and what was the basis of the party’s strength at the time he became prime minister a second time? To answer these questions, it is necessary to analyse the general election of 1841, perhaps the most significant in the entire nineteenth century.

47

7 The general election of 1841

Both John Wilson Croker, a leading Tory writer of the 1830s and 1840s, and the historian Norman Gash believe that the credit for the Tory victory of 1841 lies with Robert Peel. Croker stated in the Quarterly Review that ‘Every Conservative candidate professed himself in plain words to be Sir Robert Peel’s man, and on that ground was elected.’ Gash believes that the election, including ‘success in the urban constituencies’, was a tribute to Peel’s ability to broaden the Conservative appeal and ‘practical reward for all that he had worked for in the previous decade’. The 1841 election was, of course, a famous triumph. It produced a victory for the Conservatives by more than seventy seats and was also the first time in British electoral history that a party with at least a theoretical Parliamentary majority had been replaced in government by another with a majority. Moreover, Queen Victoria, no lover of the Tories after years of careful tutelage from the outgoing premier Lord Melbourne and especially after her embarrassing brush with Peel over the Bedchamber issue in 1839 (Chapter 5), had no leeway in the choice of the next prime minister. She must have Peel or no one since Peel, as party leader, was the electorate’s choice. The election was a landmark in the development of party government (see Tables 1 and 2). But what kind of Conservative party had the electorate chosen and what was the significance of the victory for the role of party? The 48

Table 1 The general election of 1841 Party

England

Wales

Scotland

Ireland

Total

Conservatives Whig-Liberals Total

281 190 471

21 8 29

22 31 53

43 62 105

367 291 658

Conservative majority: 76 Table 2 Percentage of seats won by Conservatives in each country England Wales Scotland Ireland

%

No.

59.7 72.4 41.5 41.0

471 29 53 105

answers to these questions are, perhaps, not the ones which most of the textbooks lead us to expect. They also provide important clues to explaining why historians have viewed Peel’s government ambivalently. It was supremely successful as an executive government, full of administrative and financial successes as we shall see. Ultimately, however, it proved a major political disaster, splitting the Tory party and depriving it of majority office for a generation. At first sight, Table 3 seems to support the conclusion that Peel had broadened the Tory base. Conservatives won almost as many seats as the Liberals in the English and Welsh boroughs. For a ‘party of the land’ this was a notable achievement. Yet deeper study of what kinds of boroughs these were is instructive (see Table 4). Only forty-four of the seats won in English and Welsh boroughs were in places with electorates of 1,000 or more. In the fifty-eight largest boroughs, where the Liberals won almost three times as many seats as the Conservatives, Peel’s party suffered a net loss of two compared with its performance in the 1837 election. These large boroughs, of course, were concentrated in the industrial midlands and north – precisely where Peel was seeking to broaden the party’s electoral base. Yet it was here that the Conservatives did least well. Those larger towns in which they did have some success were older ports and commercial centres like the City of London, Bristol and Hull rather than industrial textile giants like Manchester or Leeds. In London, indeed, Lord John Russell only just squeaked in as the second of two Liberal 49

Table 3 Analysis of the election according to type of seat English English Welsh Welsh Scottish Scottish boroughs & counties boroughs counties boroughs counties universities Conservatives Whig-Liberals

157 170

124 20

8 6

13 2

2 21

20 10

Table 4 Analysis of the election in English boroughs

Conservatives Whig-Liberals

Large English boroughs (more than 2,000 electors)

Medium English boroughs (1,000– 2,000 electors)

Small English boroughs (fewer than 1,000 electors)

15 43

29 34

109 93

candidates elected, and seven votes ahead of the third Conservative candidate. In general, the Conservatives did best in those boroughs least changed by the 1832 Reform Act. Several remained old-style ‘rotten boroughs’ where the patronage of a substantial landowner, rather than electoral popularity, was the decisive factor. Here elections still followed a recognizably eighteenth-century pattern; actual contests were a rarity and members frequently returned unopposed. Many had little or nothing to do with industry, being market towns whose economy depended on agriculture. It is not often remarked that the 1841 general election, apparently the triumphant vindication of Peel’s ‘broadening’ strategy, saw actual contests in only 47 per cent of the country’s constituencies, considerably fewer than in the elections of 1832, 1835 and 1837, which the Whig-Liberals won, albeit with dwindling majorities. The Conservative majority of 1841, therefore, was based in the smaller boroughs and, especially, in the counties of England. Indeed, the Liberals were all but wiped out in the English counties, winning only twenty (14 per cent) of the 144 available seats. In the counties such prominent northern landed Whigs as Lords Howick and Morpeth were defeated. By contrast, Scotland and Ireland both returned Whig or Whig-allied majorities of roughly three to two. The Conservatives hardly made any kind of showing in the Scottish boroughs. The Conservatives won in 1841 because they had majority support where the seats were thickest on the ground (southern England), not 50

where the electorates were most numerous or most changed by recent industrial and commercial developments. The Conservatives were the party of rural England and its small market towns: squirearchical, deferential, Church-loving, intolerant of any diversity of religious view, and much keener to preserve the past than look to the future. They were not strong in the United Kingdom as a whole. Despite Peel’s best endeavours, his Conservative party remained dominated by old-style Tory opinions. Furthermore, it was the electoral organization of old-style Tories – clerics, solicitors and landowners among them – which raked in the majorities, not Peel’s rhetoric or his dispassionate analysis of political issues. An analysis of candidates’ statements and speeches and of the newspaper reports relating to the election confirms this assessment. In many constituencies, as was the case at least until 1867, the election turned mainly on local issues, personalities or loyalties. When national policy predominated, the issues which brought out the Tory vote were economic protection for the landed interest and defence of the established church. There was widespread fear in the shires of the Whigs’ intention to modify the Corn Laws and thus to jeopardize agricultural protection. The effect of Francis Baring’s recent Budget, warned the Tory Kentish Gazette in May 1841, would be to ‘overthrow the existing order of society, to trample down the agriculturalist and the farm labourer’. The same calculations almost certainly enabled the WhigLiberals to hold on to many of their prized northern industrial seats. It was widely suggested that removing protection would also harm commercial interests, increase unemployment and reduce wages. Ironically, in view of what was to happen during Peel’s government, Tory votes appear to have been cast overwhelmingly for the party most likely to protect landowners and defend the established Protestant Church. Significantly, Peel did little to advertise either to voters or to his supporters his own unease about protection. He relied on his growing reputation as an expert on financial and commercial affairs to garner votes in the towns, while encouraging rural Tories to let rip in defence of the Corn Laws and the values of ‘rural old England’ more generally. Melbourne’s Whigs undoubtedly looked the more vulnerable because of the sharpness of Peel’s attacks on mounting government deficits in the years from 1838 but its wider economic problems, which were at their peak in 1841, contributed to the scale of the Whig defeat. It is hardly surprising that a comfortable majority of the 370 or so Conservative MPs elected in 1841 were fervent Protectionists. Peel 51

certainly had a broader vision, but his party’s creed remained much narrower than his own. The new prime minister had no right to expect either that his followers could be ready converts to economic liberalism generally and certainly not, on the evidence of their speeches, to free trade in corn. The reformist elements which figured prominently in the Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 hardly featured in the election literature of 1841. Protectionist arguments predominated and they carried the day where they were most likely to – in rural England. It has to be said also that Peel – by now going all out for electoral victory and a return to office – did little or nothing to inform potential Tory voters of his real intentions in economic policy. Accordingly, the 1841 general election should be seen more as a victory for Protectionist Toryism rather than Peelite Conservatism. Yet much of Peel’s policy as prime minister between 1841 and 1846 ignored this crucial distinction. During the no-confidence debate which precipitated the 1841 general election, the Whig spokesman and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay anticipated the difficulties which Peel might face in sustaining an administration: ‘if, with the best and purest intentions, the right honourable baronet were to undertake the government of this country, he would find that it was very easy to lose the confidence of the party which raised him to power’. He also asserted that the Tories would find it ‘very difficult indeed to gain that which the present [Whig] government possessed – the confidence of the people of Ireland’. Macaulay’s statements were prescient. He was tracing a clear line of descent which can be seen from the Tory ‘triumph’ of 1841 to its ‘catastrophe’ in 1846. As we shall see, both Peel’s conception of party and the Irish question played key roles.

52

8 Executive government under Peel, 1841–6

I am told that in the exercise of power . . . I must be the instrument of maintaining the opinions and feelings which I myself am disposed to repudiate. With my views of Government . . . the obligations which it imposes, the duties which it entails, the sacrifices it involves – I am not disposed to add to these sacrifices, by accepting it with a degrading and dishonourable condition . . . If I exercise power, it shall be upon my conception – perhaps imperfect, perhaps mistaken – but my sincere conception of public duty. These words were spoken by Sir Robert Peel in the Commons immediately after the 1841 election. It was the clearest possible declaration that Peel intended to be an executive prime minister. It spoke volumes about his view of the relationship between political parties and the exercise of power. For Peel, in 1841 as it was to be in 1846, party had an entirely subordinate function. His conception was that the prime minister should do his public duty on behalf of the sovereign and in the interests of the nation. It was the reciprocal duty of the party to submit to these higher imperatives. Peel, therefore, felt entirely justified in his lofty pronouncement that, if agricultural protection were proved to be at the root of the country’s current financial troubles, he would ask the landowners to make a ‘sacrifice’ by earnestly advising ‘a relaxation, an alteration, nay, if necessary a repeal, of the corn laws’. 53

His Tory backbenchers would have been entitled to ask why, if his mind was really open on the Corn Laws, he had allowed them to pile up votes in the shires on support for agricultural protection which Whig-Liberal proposals threatened (see Chapter 10). They would have been entitled to ask whether Peel would have won power had it not been for the result of an election fought substantially on the protection question. Anxious to see the back of the Whigs and to re-establish a majority Tory government for the first time in more than a decade, they did neither of these things. Peel, for the moment, got away with his claim to unfettered freedom of political action while the long fuse of party frustration, which would lead to the explosion of 1846, remained to be lit. His position was, to put it at its kindest, paradoxical. He had used a revived Conservative party as the vehicle to gain power. He now sought to rule as an expert above the fray of party battle. As Dr Hawkins has neatly described it, the Tory victory of 1841 was ‘a great party triumph for an anti-party view of executive authority’. Peel from 1841 is much better considered as an executive prime minister, not a party leader. His goals were efficiency and progress. His choice of Cabinet reflected these priorities. He wanted able men efficient in the discharge of business. He kept faith with most of those who had served in his brief minority government of 1834–5 but he was careful to find important positions for Sir James Graham (Home Secretary) and Viscount Stanley (War and the Colonies). Not only were they both in their forties and in their prime; they were prize captures as the two leading defectors from the Whigs in 1834 and men of already proven ability. The Presidency of the Board of Trade, a vital commercial post, went to the Earl of Ripon, a close colleague (as F. J. Robinson) from the 1820s and now, despite his fatuous interlude as prime minister in 1827–8, one of the great survivors of Tory politics. Wellington survived from the 1820s too, but with his faculties somewhat impaired by age (in 1841 he was 72). A combination of increasing deafness and permanent lack of tact would have made him an unwise choice as Foreign Secretary, the post he had briefly held in 1834–5. Peel was happy to see him in Cabinet with the largely honorific title of Minister without Portfolio. This enabled him to return the Earl of Aberdeen to the Foreign Secretaryship, a post he had held between 1828 and 1830 in Wellington’s government. A cautious, conscientious and fastidious man, Aberdeen had been schooled in diplomacy by the Younger Pitt; Peel, whose own interest in foreign affairs was not pronounced, was happier to delegate responsibility here than in any other aspect of government work. 54

To the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, where precisely the opposite situation obtained, Peel appointed his old friend and close confidant Henry Goulburn, knowing that he could rely on conscientious and effective discharge of his own policies from that quarter. Outside the Cabinet, Peel gave his first taste of government office to William Gladstone, later the nineteenth century’s pre-eminent Liberal prime minister but in 1841 still, as the Whig historian T. B. Macaulay termed him, ‘the rising hope of those stern, unbending Tories’. Gladstone, whose abilities were already recognized as being rivalled only by his conscience, became Ripon’s deputy and took over from him, with his first Cabinet post, when the latter moved to the Board of Control in 1843. Peel’s was an administration fashioned for executive efficiency. Virtually the only concession made to party sentiment was the appointment of the Duke of Buckingham, self-appointed leader of the agricultural interest, to the anyway largely titular post of Lord Privy Seal. Buckingham, who had a large ego but was not cut out for detailed administrative work, was, as Gash put it, ‘the darling of the Buckinghamshire farmers’ and Peel’s hope was that this solitary Protectionist flag would deflect the backbench breezes of criticism away from an administration dedicated to doing the nation good. Three other points might be made about the government. First, for a prime minister supposedly interested in broadening the base of his party in order to attract the middle classes, his administration was traditional in its social composition, being overwhelmingly aristocratic. Only one of his Cabinet – Henry Goulburn – lacked a title. Second, below Cabinet rank in 1841, the government included a number of extremely able young men whom Peel trained in the arts of government. Gladstone proved pre-eminent but Lincoln, Herbert and Dalhousie were also extremely promising. As we shall see (Chapter 11), they utterly rejected the idea that Peel was cold, aloof or arrogant. They saw him as an almost endlessly watchful and sympathetic guide, anxious to nurture their careers. Third, absolutely no doubt existed that this was Peel’s administration. He took pains to ensure that he picked able men and, to a degree, he trusted them. He was, however, anxious to ensure that he knew the business of all departments – with the partial exception of foreign affairs – in some detail. As has frequently been pointed out, he turned Goulburn’s job into something not far removed from a cipher since he both formulated the Budgets and presented them to the Commons. This was an opportunity afforded to relatively few prime ministers in the first half of the nineteenth century 55

since most of them were peers and, as such, sat in the House of Lords. Peel exploited his commoner status to the maximum. No doubt existed in Peel’s mind as to the best way of doing the nation good. His administration before the Corn Law crisis of 1845–6 is mostly remembered for its economic and fiscal reforms. As he told Gladstone in persuading him to take the Vice-Presidency of the Board of Trade, when he had hoped to be Chief Secretary for Ireland, ‘In this great struggle in which we have been & are to be engaged the chief importance will attach to questions of finance.’ What was called the ‘Condition of England question’, together with public order, and Irish affairs were not unimportant but always yielded in priority to the need to make the country solvent and prosperous. No one with knowledge of Peel should find this priority in the least strange. He believed that the only route to social harmony was via economic progress, and he believed that the only route to economic progress was by treading the path of financial probity and rectitude. This involved keeping government cheap and wealth-generators happy and productive. He justified scepticism about any wider political philosophy by reference to its cost. ‘Philosophers are very regardless of expense when the public has to bear it’, he tartly informed his First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Haddington, in 1844. He had earlier declared to the House of Commons: ‘Of all the vulgar arts of government that of solving every difficulty which might arise by thrusting the hand into the public purse is the most delusory and contemptible.’ Priority, accordingly, had to be given to finance. According to Gash, ‘at the heart of Peel’s policy was the conviction that the only way to overcome both the human misery and the social threat was to increase the purchasing power of the masses’. If the country were prosperous, in other words, social tension would be reduced. The equation was too simple, but the experience of mid-Victorian Britain, when the socalled ‘Hungry Forties’ were past, suggests that it contained an essential truth. Peel’s first concern was to eliminate the government deficit run up by the Whigs during the economic depressions at the end of their period in office. The Budget of 1842, which he introduced in a speech lasting almost four hours, was the chosen instrument. Income tax was reintroduced at 7d (3p) in the pound on incomes of more than £150. This threshold was carefully chosen to ensure that virtually none of the working classes had to pay it. The tax was designed to last for three years and to contribute £3.7 million towards new revenue of £4 million raised to eliminate the deficit. Peel was anxious to present this 56

as a crisis measure. He knew perfectly well that the tax had been introduced by Pitt in 1799 during a major economic crisis brought about by the war with Revolutionary France. In 1816, Parliament had not permitted Liverpool to retain such a controversial impost once peace returned, despite the economic difficulties which peace brought with it. Peel, therefore, played both on the depth of the economic difficulties which he had inherited from the Whigs and also on the extent of radical protest, disaffection and even revolt in 1842. At the same time, and no less controversially for many supporters of protection, Peel reduced customs duties on about 750 of 1,200 goods coming into the country. The maximum import duty on raw materials was set at 5 per cent and on manufactured items 20 per cent. A new, and reduced, scale of duties was introduced for corn. The Budget was controversial but politically well judged. Peel asked the wealthier classes to make an additional contribution, in the form of income tax, during an economic crisis so that the ‘labouring classes of society’ might not be further burdened. As this appeal came during a year of substantial Chartist disturbance, it is not surprising that the middle and upper classes might consider their collective self-interest better served by a small additional temporary tax burden than by resisting the income tax and risking further popular disturbances in support of that manhood suffrage so many of them saw as tantamount to the destruction of civilized life. Approval for what the diarist Greville grandly called ‘this just measure, so lofty in conception, right in direction and able in execution’ greatly outran disapproval and criticism on the Conservative benches was strangely muted, even over the reduction in corn duties. Buckingham, however, could not stomach it and resigned from the Cabinet. The Budget as a whole is best seen as a continuation of ‘liberal Toryism’ and in particular of the trade liberalization initiatives developed by Robinson and Huskisson in the 1820s. Except for the income tax and the decisiveness and élan with which it was introduced, its broad direction was remarkably similar to the Baring Budget of 1841 which Peel had taken such delight in savaging (see Chapter 5). As in the days of Pitt, the income tax proved relatively easy to collect and also lucrative. Trade revived from 1843 onwards and the stimulus to consumption provided by reduced duties soon outran the lower tariff return on each item. Government finances moved into surplus in 1844. The overall philosophy apparently vindicated, Peel proceeded in 1845 to introduce even more sweeping measures of trade liberalization. 57

Income tax, a temporary measure to ease the country through economic crisis in 1842, had miraculously become for Peel ‘the foundation of the commercial policy of the country’ by 1845 and was renewed for a further three years. By 1845, it was not only inveterate cynics who assumed that the tax would become permanent, as, despite Gladstone’s best efforts in the 1870s, it did. Raising about £5.5 million in the later 1840s, income tax was soon providing about 10 per cent of government income. The 1845 Budget was even more swingeing in its reduction of duties. Those on raw cotton went entirely, as did duties on most raw materials. Controversially, given the number of Conservative supporters in the large ports, duties on colonial sugar from the West Indies and on foreign sugar were both reduced. Further reductions followed and, by the time of the government’s fall in 1846, Britain had become an almost completely free-trading nation. The other central pillar of Peel’s fiscal reforms was the Bank Charter Act of 1844. Peel considered this one of his most important legislative achievements, ensuring that the issuing of notes remained related to reserves of gold. The Act, which has been criticized by economic historians as resting on both a naive and an outmoded defence of the principles of ‘bullionism’ (see Chapter 3), defined the role of the Bank of England in the British economy carefully. Its ability to issue promissory notes in place of cash was confirmed but issues in excess of £14 million had to be backed by bullion reserves. The rights of other English banks to issue their own notes were restricted and, as the century progressed, the Bank of England came to have virtually a monopoly of English note issues. The Act confirmed the triumph of ‘bullionists’, of whom none was more rigidly orthodox than Peel, over ‘paper currency’ theorists like Thomas Attwood and Thomas Tooke who were groping towards a mechanism to ensure stability of prices in a rapidly expanding but volatile economy. Peel never had any time for such, as he saw it, dangerous tinkering with the currency. His speech to the Commons made it clear that the Act’s main purpose was ‘to inspire just confidence in the medium of exchange’. It remained the basis of British currency control until the First World War. The passing of the Bank Charter Act had wider significance. It formed an important plank in the construction of what Philip Harling has called the ‘neutral state’. In his view, the role of the State in public life changed in the first half of the nineteenth-century as the emphasis shifted from eighteenth-century priorities directly associated with the fighting of expensive, if ultimately successful, wars. Raising money for 58

frequent, large-scale, conflicts turned Britain into what John Brewer has called, in a now famous phrase, an interventionist ‘fiscal–military state’. That state was progressively dismantled after 1815, since during the nineteenth century, Britain would fight relatively few wars and none remotely on the scale of the French Wars which framed the beginning and end of the eighteenth century or, come to that, the major conflagration of 1914–18. Peel was a leading figure in what might be called the ‘retreat of the State’. The Bank Charter Act had symbolic as well as practical significance. It gave the leading role to the Bank of England and, in doing so, distanced the State from monetary intervention under normal circumstances. The potential for government to intervene remained, of course, and under unusual circumstances such as a major currency crisis it did so but the Act represented a significant withdrawal by the State from day-to-day interference with economic affairs. Peel’s unequivocal belief was that the government’s main concern with the ‘social question’ should be in helping to provide the economic conditions which would stimulate economic growth, create new jobs and enable ordinary folk to consume more. Another aspect of the ‘neutral state’ was the belief that direct government intervention to ‘solve’ social problems was likely to be counterproductive and was anyway far less efficient than free-market solutions. Government action, therefore, should be slender and subordinate although, if appropriate, supportive of other initiatives. In 1842, for example, his government extended the Whig 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and upheld its controversial basic strategy of making poor relief demeaning to seek and thus ‘less eligible’ than independent wage labour. The Act also enabled a check to be made on ‘wasteful’ expenditure by ratepayers and offered an incentive for paupers to help themselves out of their plight. For Peel the concept of a ‘government social policy’ was a contradiction in terms. He was neither heartless nor mean, although in the normal currency of political debate his opponents accused him of being both. He was a wealthy English Christian gentleman of the 1840s, who believed – like most of his kind – in charity as the proper way of alleviating short-term distress. In the longer term, charity should be supplemented by education and other constructive means towards making people self-sufficient. He made numerous charitable donations, many of them anonymous, during the long period of high unemployment and rising prices between 1837 and 1842. During the 1840s, he also contributed substantially to subscriptions for the 59

building of new churches in Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Lancashire (where he had family connections) and London (where, of course, he lived for much of the Parliamentary year and where the need was perhaps greatest). These contributions linked naturally with an Act passed in 1843 designed to enable the Church of England to build more churches in the most crowded districts. Peel believed that one objective of the reform proposals he had supported in the 1830s was enabling the Church of England to bear more effective witness in the industrial towns. Government support for social measures was, therefore, unlikely to be fervent. Nevertheless, a fine head of steam about the social question was building up outside Parliament in response both to Parliamentary reports originally commissioned by the Whigs in the late 1830s and to extra-Parliamentary agitation for a range of humanitarian causes espoused both by radical politicians and by Tory paternalists unpersuaded of the benefits of industrial capitalism. The Mines Act of 1842, which forbade the employment of women and children in mining activities beneath ground, was not government legislation. It reached the statute book thanks to the lobbying of Viscount Ashley (later Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) and the heightening of public consciousness following revelations about the conditions under which children had to work. The government provided assistance in drafting the legislation but did not take the initiative. Factory proposals introduced by the government proved controversial. Graham’s attempt to reduce the hours worked by women and children in 1843 was linked to proposals for compulsory schooling provided, in most instances, by the Church of England. In the face of unremitting hostility from nonconformists and the feeling that a measure which deserved to have wide public support was becoming unacceptably partisan, the bill was withdrawn. In the following year, shorn of its education clauses, Graham’s factory bill proposed to reduce the maximum working day for children under 14 to six and a half hours. It was confronted by a well orchestrated campaign, with both Whig and Tory paternalist support in Parliament and effective press lobbying outside, to restrict the maximum working day for all to ten hours. The ‘Ten-Hours Campaign’ had been active since the early 1830s, and by 1844 it had mobilized substantial support both in Parliament and outside on both humanitarian and practical grounds. How could efficiency and safety be preserved among workers forced to work for longer? Peel refused to bow to the Ten-Hours Campaign. The proposal was, 60

of course, contrary to his political philosophy, dependent as it was upon the free play of market forces. Women and children were not, however, in the eyes either of the law or considering practical family arrangements, free to choose their jobs. Government might thus properly acknowledge a responsibility to protect them from exploitation. Adult males, however, were free agents and legislation must not presume to alter what market forces dictated. If an employer, required by law to reduce working hours, became uncompetitive and had to lay off workers, where was the advantage for the employee? Sensitive though he was to humanitarian arguments, he nevertheless told the Commons that the proposed ten hours maximum would deprive textile owners of the equivalent of seven weeks’ work during the year. Since textiles accounted for approximately 80 per cent of all British exports in the 1840s, the effect on Britain’s trade recovery was bound to be severe. ‘I admit’, said Peel, ‘that I am afraid of foreign competition.’ Peel’s fears were insufficient to persuade the Commons, which initially voted to accept Ashley’s ten hours’ amendment, albeit with a majority of only nine. Reluctant Tories were only persuaded to change their minds by Peel’s crude threat to resign. Graham’s 1844 Factory Act effectively set a maximum working day at twelve hours. Ten hours legislation had to await the return of a Liberal government and was enacted in 1847. The conflict with Tory backbenchers over the Ten-Hours Campaign was becoming symptomatic. By 1844, Peel’s disagreements with his backbenchers were becoming both frequent and acrimonious. On the social question, on religion, on trade, on education and on Ireland, Peel seemed to landed Tories to be going his own way, certain of his own policies, buttressed by a coterie of like-minded ministers and apparently impervious to criticism. The decisive conflict between an ‘executive’ minister and a frustrated party was beginning to take shape.

61

9 Peel and backbench Toryism, 1841–5

As an examination of the 1841 election suggests (Chapter 7), Peel’s victorious Conservative party was not naturally sympathetic to free trade ideas. Peel’s difficulties with his backbenchers stemmed not just from ideological differences but also from different conceptions both of party and the nature of political loyalty. As we have seen, Peel saw his role as the Queen’s minister discharging his responsibilities according to the national interest. It was part of his responsibility to interpret what that national interest might be. Backbench Tories largely interpreted the national interest as the landed interest writ large and buttressed by the Church of England. Whatever the composition of his own Cabinet (see Chapter 8), Peel in office took the view that this was too narrow a basis not only for legislative action but also for a national party. Yet, as recently as 1838, in a speech at Merchant Taylors’ Hall he had said that Conservatism should defend establishment institutions: By conservative principles I mean a determination to resist every encroachment that can curtail the just rights and settled privileges of one or other of those three branches of the state [monarch, Lords and Commons] . . . there shall be an established religion and an imperishable faith, and that established religion shall maintain the doctrines of the Protestant Church. By conservative principles I mean, a steady resistance to every 62

project which would divert church property from strictly spiritual uses, a determination to meet every threatened danger to the Protestant establishment. Perhaps this was a plea for support from Tories who had not trusted Peel since 1829 rather than a statement of faith. However, he did little between 1838 and the election of 1841 to dissuade Tories from believing that his vision of Conservatism matched theirs. He allowed supporters to exploit the Whigs’ desire to reform the Corn Laws (Chapter 10) which were such an article of faith for country gentlemen, and informed his Tamworth electors that the country’s distresses were not attributable to the operation of agricultural protection. Conservative supporters went to the polls in 1841 believing that their leader was an anti-reformer in all essentials. If the theme of the Tamworth Manifesto had been the need to reform in order to conserve, that of the Merchant Taylors’ speech was that the necessary reforms had been completed or were in train. Peel’s speech immediately after the election, which effectively discharged him from any prior obligations (see Chapter 8), represented, at the very least, an important shift of emphasis. Tory backbenchers, still euphoric after their election victory, would have done well to heed its implications. In office, Peel rarely considered their wishes; he either assumed the unswerving loyalty of Tories in Parliament or evinced indignant, and not infrequently intemperate, irritation when it was not forthcoming. Strains between Peel and his backbenchers were apparent from the outset. The 1842 Budget produced pointed criticisms from the shires. George Palmer, the MP for South Essex, for example, was concerned that the movement towards free trade would not stop until it swept the Corn Laws clean away. Conservative whips warned Peel that his policy was not welcomed, and in one Budget division no fewer than eighty-five Conservatives failed to support him. The Poor Law and factory reform were also issues which detached a substantial minority of Tory MPs from the leadership. It has been estimated that fifty-three Conservatives, mostly representing northern constituencies, saw it as their duty to oppose the continuation of the hated Poor Law of 1834 and to support a compulsory maximum ten-hour day for factory workers. They could not threaten Peel’s position but they acted both as a permanent irritant in the early years of the ministry and as an embarrassing reminder in 1841–3 that cracks in Conservative unity were only being papered 63

over. As Fraser’s Magazine noted in September 1843: ‘whether it be from pride, or shyness, or an excess of caution, the minister takes no pains whatever to win the personal love and affection of his supporters. As a party they are never admitted to his confidences.’ In that year, an early indication of later trouble over free trade was given when sixty Tory MPs refused to support the government over the Canada corn bill, allowing preferentially low rates of duty on corn from the colony. Party cracks widened damagingly in 1844, just as the long-standing government economic deficit was being turned around. Ninety-five Tories voted for Ashley’s amendment to write a maximum ten-hour day into Graham’s factory bill in March. This was substantially more than the complement of ‘Tory Radicals’ and paternalists and it precipitated a government defeat, In June, as part of its now well advanced trade liberalization policy, the government proposed to reduce the duty on foreign sugar by almost one half while leaving slave-grown sugar from the West Indies at the same level. Philip Miles, the Conservative MP for Bristol, a port whose prosperity was closely linked to the West Indies trade, proposed that the duty on colonial sugar should be reduced to twenty shillings thus widening the tariff differential between corn grown on foreign and on colonial soil. In a well orchestrated campaign, he received support from sixty-one Tories. His amendment, like Ashley’s, also passed. Peel had no difficulty in reversing both decisions, but the manner of his doing so caused considerable offence. He refused to negotiate or compromise with his backbenchers, offering them the alternative of withdrawing their amendments or forcing him to resign. He told Lady de Grey in June that government defeats weakened his authority. They also threatened to transfer the initiative from the government to Parliament. His reason for deprecating such a development is characteristic of an executive prime minister. He believed that giving backbenchers greater influence would transfer power to ‘parties wholly irresponsible and much less informed than Ministers are or ought to be’. Criticism about Peel’s aloofness, overbearing manner and personal coldness had also begun to swell. The MP for Pontefract, Richard Milnes, considered Peel’s style of leadership ‘absolutely indefensible . . . . He is asking from his party all the blind confidence the country gentlemen placed in Mr Pitt . . . without himself fulfilling any of the engagements on his side’. The Whig opposition, lacking cohesion and direction since the 1841 election defeat, might have recalled the prescient observation which had appeared in its political journal Edinburgh 64

Review in 1840 that Peel’s ‘ostracism [from his party] may be distant, but to us it appears certain’. The Conservatives thus entered 1845 with morale low and unity in jeopardy. In a rare moment of levity, Peel joked about his wish that someone would introduce a compulsory ten-hour day for ministers. The quip had a serious side. It was clear that the prime minister was overworking; it was not only critics and opponents who detected that a new testiness was modifying the traditional reserve. The lack of rapport between prime minister and backbenchers left the Conservatives poorly equipped to meet the specially divisive challenges which Ireland still offered. Early in his ministry, Peel had indicated that it would be important for ministers to pursue impartial policies in Ireland with ‘equal justice administered to Roman Catholics’. His target here was to deflect support away from Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the Act of Union. Realising that Roman Catholicism would remain the religion of the overwhelming majority of Irish citizens, his key objective in Ireland was to give the propertied Roman Catholics equal opportunities to thrive both economically and culturally and thus to give them an incentive to sustain the Union. In a pronounced shift of government emphasis, Catholics would be welcomed into the ranks of the magistracy, the legal profession and the armed forces. Unfortunately for Peel his choice of Lord Lieutenant, Lord de Grey, was far less ‘liberal’ in his sympathies and even dismissed many Catholics from the magistracy. By the time he was replaced by Lord Heytesbury in 1844, the damage had been done and O’Connell had exploited opportunities which Peel had never intended that he should be given. In 1843, Peel dealt adequately enough with O’Connell’s antiUnion agitation. Violence, or the threat of violence, arising out of mass meetings was a constant accompaniment to O’Connell’s strategy. The government, treading the thinnest of lines between necessary firmness and the need not to alienate potential Catholic support, had passed the Irish Arms Act, requiring all firearms to be registered with the authorities. O’Connell’s proposed anti-Union mass meeting at Clontarf was interpreted by the government as an incitement to illegality and was banned. O’Connell himself, despite assertions that he only sought separation by peaceful means, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy a little later and convicted by a Protestant jury of incitement to treason before being released on appeal in 1844. As Peel knew, however, support for Irish nationalism could not be neutralized merely by firm action against O’Connell, an ageing and 65

increasingly dispirited nationalist leader. In any case, as we have seen, Peel’s broader strategy rested more upon accommodation with Catholic property owners than upon coercion. Both the logic of the situation and Peel’s own experience as Chief Secretary convinced him that a population more than 80 per cent Catholic could not be coerced or discriminated against indefinitely. Hence his lengthy memorandum to his Cabinet early in 1844 in which he asserted that, while the maintenance of the Union was the overriding objective, equality of treatment for Protestant and Catholic citizens was necessary in order to persuade the Irish majority of the value of the Union. Though, as most historians now agree, the basic Irish problem was an economic one – inadequate growth in an overwhelmingly agricultural economy to sustain a massively increased population – Peel’s solution was religious. He wanted to make public declaration from Britain of the government’s commitment to improved educational opportunities for Irish Catholic citizens. The key to the problem, in Peel’s view, lay with the Roman Catholic priests whose influence over the peasantry remained huge. Most priests were educated in a seminary at Maynooth (Co. Kildare) which was underfunded and inadequately administered. Peel considered that ‘the wit of man could not devise a more effectual method for converting them into sour, malignant demagogues, hostile to the law, from all the sympathies of low birth and kindred, living by agitation, inclined to it and fitted for it by our . . . penurious system of education’. His solution was virtually to treble the annual grant to the college, from £9,000 to £26,000, to make that grant permanent and to provide £30,000 for new buildings. This became the kernel of Peel’s Maynooth bill, presented to the Commons early in 1845. Peel had anticipated trouble with his party over Maynooth, but not the ferocity of the opposition it engendered. For loyal Anglicans, bent on defence of the Protestant Constitution in Church and State, it appeared to be yet another Peelite betrayal. To the original perfidy of emancipation was now to be added a policy of Catholic appeasement. The package was deeply unappealing to Protestant sensibilities. It included a reduction in the extent of patronage available to Protestants in Ireland, a Charitable Bequests Act of 1844, which made it easier for gifts to be made to the Catholic Church, and finally, with the Maynooth bill, positive discrimination in favour of representatives of the Church of Rome. It had not gone unnoticed, either, that Peel and Graham had preferred to withdraw a factory bill in 1843 in the face of Dissenter and Catholic opposition rather than fight for the supremacy 66

of the Church of England by defending that bill’s pro-Anglican education clauses (see Chapter 8). Over Maynooth, of course, Anglican Tories and Protestant Dissenters were at one. Dissenters organized a campaign against the bill which gathered a million and a quarter signatures on more than ten thousand petitions. As usual, Peel convinced the Cabinet of its appropriateness and long-term necessity, if not its short-term political value. Gladstone, however, ever the most upright, assertive and sanctimonious defender of Anglican supremacy in the Cabinet, resigned over Maynooth in January 1845, believing that those who favoured the measure ‘deluded themselves with visionary hopes of improvement’. Graham and Peel, not surprisingly, stuck to their guns. Gladstone had been an immensely energetic and effective minister but he was still junior and both men believed that he was harming his career by making a gesture over what he had opaquely described as a ‘personal pledge’ – presumably to uphold Protestantism. As Graham wrote to Peel, Gladstone’s loss ‘is serious and on every account to be regretted; but I do not think that we should be justified in averting it by abandonment of a most important part of our Irish policy’. Bewilderingly, Gladstone then voted for the Maynooth grant from the backbenches. As his biographer Colin Matthew elliptically explained it: ‘Principle rejected the Maynooth grant; good government demanded it. Thus Gladstone both resigned from the Cabinet and voted for the grant: the man of government.’ In any case, the schizoid conscience was soon back. Gladstone was persuaded to return to Cabinet in December to fight the Corn Law crisis. Meanwhile, things had got considerably worse for Peel, and Gladstone might be thought to provide one of the few instances in politics of a rat returning to a sinking ship. On the second reading of the Maynooth bill, Peel managed to secure a small majority among Conservatives (159 votes to 147), but on the crucial third reading, after more acrimony, Conservative opponents outnumbered supporters by 149 votes to 148. For the first time, Peel had a majority in his own party against him. The Maynooth bill was carried only because the Whigs, preferring to let their historic commitment to religious toleration outweigh the opposition of their Dissenting supporters, mostly voted for it. By the middle of 1845, Peel was becoming fatalistic about the future of his administration. In an unavailing attempt to keep Gladstone in the government, he had privately conceded that the Maynooth proposals would ‘very probably be fatal to the Government’ but argued that they were right. He thus had a duty as the Queen’s minister to put them 67

before the nation. The same point was made, in suitably orotund language, to the Commons in May 1845. A government must retain ‘the absolute right, without reference to the past and without too much regard for what party considerations must claim from them, to risk even the loss of confidence of their friends, rather than abstain from doing that which conviction tells them the present circumstances require’. Peel, therefore, would not compromise with the ‘Protestants’ in his party and, assured of sufficient Whig support, he had no need to in order to get the bill passed. Characteristically, however, he had discounted the possibility that his opponents might have equally strong arguments in support of their own ‘conviction’ – of the supremacy of the Church of England and its importance in preserving the old Constitution in Church and State. The Home Secretary Sir James Graham knew that finally, and over Maynooth, the government had ‘lost the slight hold which we ever possessed over the hearts and kind feelings of our followers’. Perhaps more significantly, Peel’s Tory opponents found over the Maynooth question a Parliamentary spokesman of verve, subtlety and ruthless opportunism. Whereas their Parliamentary performances before 1845 had been characterized by a combination of choleric outrage and inarticulate passion in defence of the old Constitution, their protests were now given a new, and more dangerous, dimension. Anyone less representative of the beating heart of rural England than Benjamin Disraeli it would be difficult to imagine. Disraeli was the son of a Jewish intellectual and was determined to make himself famous. He had written tolerably popular, and tolerably good, novels and had espoused romantic Tory causes loosely arranged around the conceit that the industrial revolution had not happened. He was extremely clever and utterly unscrupulous. The Liberal Quaker John Bright sardonically remarked that Disraeli was ‘a self-made man and worships his creator’. Disraeli perceived in the disarray of the Conservative party in the mid-1840s his best chance to advance his political career. He seems to have had a personal grudge against Peel for refusing him office in 1841 when younger and better connected men, like Gladstone, had been preferred. To champion the cause of the Tory opposition over Maynooth, therefore, seemed a natural career move for Disraeli. For the first time, Peel found a Tory opponent able and willing to make capital out of the broader issues thrown up by his proposals. In Disraeli’s view, Peel was abusing his position as the head of a great party by going against the 68

clear wishes of a majority of his supporters. Since the Commons was sustained by a government and an opposition which offered policies for the electorate to adjudicate upon, it was unacceptable for the leader of one party to shake off party obligations and arrogate to himself the right of speaking for the nations. Peel was lambasted as ‘a great Parliamentary middleman . . . who bamboozles one party, and plunders the other’. Disraeli called for an end to ‘this dynasty of deception’ which had placed ‘the intolerable yoke of official despotism’ around the neck of Parliament. Disraeli and Peel held diametrically different views of the role of party in the Parliamentary system. These arguments would be rehearsed yet more damagingly over the question of Corn Law repeal during the next two years. All of the ingredients for the collapse of the Conservative party were assembled by the time of the Maynooth vote. Peel was now to mix them to his own recipe.

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10 The repeal of the Corn Laws and the fall of Peel

Many students find it strange that in 1846 a great political party should have broken up over a trading regulation. Considered in purely economic terms, of course, the Corn Laws amounted to precisely this. A simple explanation of their purpose, however, will quickly suggest that they had a far more important political resonance. The famous Corn Law of 1815 had been passed to ensure that, with food prices across Europe dropping sharply at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, British producers would have some protection against the dumping of large quantities of grain at rock-bottom prices. From the beginning, this new law attracted criticism. Liverpool had tried to defend it as a measure which provided sufficient incentive for British farmers to continue production. It thus guarded against famine. Opponents characterized it in class terms. It was legislation designed to protect the landed interest. The cost of this inappropriate support was higher bread prices for ordinary working folk. Opposition to the Corn Laws became an important rallying cry for Parliamentary reformers between 1815 and 1832. For Peel, and what became known as ‘liberal Tories’ generally, the Corn Laws presented an acute dilemma. They were the evident obstacles to that freeing of trade restrictions on which, so the new political economy of Adam Smith and his followers held, economic growth and increased prosperity depended. On the other hand, they were embraced by the landed interest – which constituted the great bulk of 70

Tory support – as the essential props of their survival. Protectionist Tories (as those who opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws were called) criticized Huskisson’s and Peel’s reductions of duty in their separate Corn Law amendments of 1828 and 1842 as detrimental to their interests. Abolition of the Corn Laws would be considered by many of Peel’s supporters as the ultimate betrayal. On the other side, failure to remove agricultural protection was increasingly regarded as a crime against the productive classes of the country. As Britain industrialized, so its population increased. Between 1801 and 1851 the population virtually doubled; these extra mouths had to be fed. Demographic pressures alone required that corn supplies be maximized, since bread was the staple diet. It became increasingly difficult to contest the argument that the Corn Laws protected a sector of the economy whose contribution to gross national product was lessening by the year while imposing heavy burdens on those who were contributing more and more. Employers complained that agriculture was receiving unfair, and unnecessary, protection to preserve the high levels of rent on which landowners lived. Rent, furthermore, was unearned income. Manufacturers on the other hand worked hard and took risks both to make their own profits while also providing work for their employees. Those employees had to pay more for bread than they would under free trade. In times of hardship especially, this was intolerable. There is little doubt, as Boyd Hilton has convincingly argued, that Peel had become an intellectual convert to free trade as early as the 1820s. He had almost certainly made up his own mind before taking office in 1841 that, ultimately, the Corn Laws had to go. The question of repeal, therefore, was one of tactics and timing rather than overall strategy. The repeal of the Corn Laws, after all, was only a logical extension of the policy of trade liberalization cautiously begun by William Pitt in the 1780s, continued by Robinson and Huskisson in the 1820s and accelerated by Peel’s own Budgets of 1842 and 1845. The new political economy, with its emphasis on trade liberalization and cheap government, was intellectually dominant by the 1840s. Every move to reduce or remove tariffs made the survival of the Corn Laws the more anomalous. Why, then, did Peel delay announcing his conversion to repeal until the end of 1845? Several explanations can be offered but it is almost certain that the official reason given by the government – that repeal was necessary to cope with the consequences of the Irish potato famine – was not the real one. It is true that the failure of the Irish potato crop in 1845 and 71

the imminent prospect of widespread famine presented Peel with a human crisis on a massive scale. With poor harvests throughout Europe and the certainty of higher food prices generally, it was unlikely that Englishmen would be able to afford the massive expenditure needed to stave off total catastrophe in Ireland. But immediate repeal would not enable sufficient supplies of food to be transferred to Ireland, and, even if changing the laws would help, Peel could have suspended their operation for the duration of the food crisis. Instead he moved immediately to total repeal. Suspension for the duration was urged on Peel by many of his opponents, and decisively rejected. We should conclude that the Irish potato famine was the occasion, rather than the cause, of Corn Law repeal. Perhaps Peel would have preferred to ‘sell’ repeal to the public at the next election, due in 1847, but the famine of 1845 only accelerated his move by a year or so. Three reasons probably explain why Peel did not move earlier. The first was party political. Like it or not, and he did not, Peel knew that he stood at the head of a Protectionist party. He had given certain assurances to his supporters in the late 1830s and early 1840s which could not lightly be set aside. He had even encouraged Protectionists to attack the Whigs during the 1841 election campaign over their unsoundness on the question of agricultural protection. Besides, he wanted to remain prime minister and knew well that on Corn Law repeal even a minister who had just won a large election victory but who had grievously disappointed his supporters before was especially vulnerable. His supporters would need to be persuaded gently and over a long period of time, if they were persuadable at all. Second, the repeal of the Corn Laws was the primary objective of the Anti-Corn Law League, an overwhelmingly middle-class pressure group founded in Manchester in 1838 whose power base remained in the industrial north. It was well organized, extremely well funded and initiated a new development in British politics – a predominantly peaceful single-issue organization whose purpose was to coerce government into adopting its objective as policy. Peel regarded the Anti-Corn Law League with extreme distaste. He disliked ‘singleissue’ politics anyway but he particularly objected to the League’s tactics. In 1841–2, though the League advocated peaceful protest, it was widely believed, not least by Graham who enquired into the question as Home Secretary, that its agitation had inflamed passions and contributed to the widespread industrial unrest during the summer of 1842, with the consequences of which he had to deal. League tactics were also considered by Peel to put members of Parliament under 72

inappropriate pressure. MPs should properly represent the interests of their constituents, but by using their own powers of reasoning. They should not be subjected to coercive tactics or to inappropriate pressure and Peel believed the Anti-Corn Law League employed both. As we have seen, Peel also saw it as the duty of government to settle matters as it determined best in the national interest. It should not be deflected from this course by the power of a sectional interest group. Peel believed that the League was attempting to usurp some of the functions of government in setting a highly specific political agenda. The Anti-Corn Law League enjoyed its greater success as a pressure movement between 1838 and 1843 and it is likely that its very success dissuaded Peel from moving more quickly on repeal. He did not wish to risk being accused of acting under duress and thus sacrificing that integrity and independence of action which belonged uniquely to government. Peel’s attitude may seem precious but he was in power at a time of delicate transition from a predominantly agricultural to a predominantly commercial and industrial economy. He believed that the government should preserve traditional procedures during this transition, or risk being swept away. A third reason for Peel’s delay was the dangerous climate of opinion which both Anti-Corn Law League and Chartist agitation provoked in the early 1840s. Much League propaganda, with its virulent attacks on the landowners, spoke the language of class war. The League’s leader, Richard Cobden, admitted as much later: ‘I am afraid that most of us entered upon this struggle with the belief that we had some direct class interest in the question.’ In the words of the historian W. O. Aydelotte, ‘The Corn Laws question provided a focus for a great deal of pent-up resentment against the old order of things, against the aristocratic domination of the country.’ This was particularly apparent during the years 1843–5 when League fortunes were beginning to wane but when it took its campaign into the agricultural areas and tried to set tenant farmer against landowner. The League spawned a Protectionist ‘AntiLeague’ which was particularly effective in the south and east, the heartland of arable England. Peel saw the danger that commercial property would be set against agricultural property in a conflict from which only democratic causes would profit. Peel had two overriding objectives in politics. The first was to rally and unify diverse propertied interests to stabilize and support society at a time of potentially disastrous social change. Repeal of the Corn Laws can be seen as the economic counterpart to the Parliamentary reform which Peel himself had opposed in 1832 in that he was anxious to 73

preserve the integrity and viability of the established British Constitution. Reform of an unpopular and, so Peel held, unviable set of regulations reduced the dangers of radical challenge to the established elite. His second objective was to provide conditions which would stimulate economic growth and prosperity sufficient to increase living standards for the population as a whole. The activities of the League, in his view, disastrously threatened the former objective and contributed little to the achievement of the latter. In consequence, he frequently attacked the League, not primarily to gain favour with his Protectionist supporters – by 1845 such considerations hardly weighed with him at all – but because he feared the wider implications of its message. Peel clandestinely supported the specific objective for which the League was founded, but he was bitterly opposed to the wider, anti-aristocratic, agenda which many League representatives espoused. There were cogent reasons, therefore, for not repealing the Corn Laws when such action could be interpreted as giving in to powerful, class-dominated pressure. By 1845, however, important short-term economic factors were beginning to buttress Peel’s intellectual conviction in favour of free trade. After a long post-war period in which corn surpluses were the norm in most of Europe’s leading arable countries, and thus when the Corn Laws did in fact operate to keep domestic prices up, the mid-1840s saw widespread shortage. As events were to prove for a generation after the Corn Laws were repealed, there was no glut of European supplies waiting to flood the British market as soon as protection was removed. British landowners and farmers would not be crushed by a foreign wheat mountain because, by 1846, no such mountain existed. As Susan Fairlie puts it, ‘A situation in which the Corn Laws protected the British farmer against continental post-war glut was giving way to one in which their retention threatened Britain with famine.’ Looked at from Peel’s point of view, the Corn Laws needed to be repealed in 1846 in the national interest. It was an additional, and by no means unimportant, benefit that the landowning classes were unlikely to go bankrupt as a result. Not surprisingly, the Protectionists failed to see matters this way. As Peel knew, he could not repeal the Corn Laws without breaking up the Conservative party. Since the Protectionists found an articulate champion in Disraeli, whose debating forte was political and personal and who was not anyway from the landed classes, the case against repeal has tended to be seen in unduly narrow terms. It is too easy to caricature those who opposed Peel in Parliament in 1846 as self-serving reactionaries defending an outmoded interest and generally standing in the 74

way of progress. Our knowledge of how Britain developed after 1846 may lend support to that interpretation. Britain did become an overwhelmingly urban society and the power and influence of the landed interest did wane. However, contemporaries should not be condemned for lacking powers of clairvoyance and, as economic historians are now agreed, the extent to which Britain had been industrialized by the middle of the 1840s has been exaggerated. The cotton trade, from which so much of the Anti-Corn Law League drew its strength, despite its enormous contribution to British exports, could still be considered just as narrow and specific an economic interest as arable farming and Manchester was certainly not in the 1840s a more ‘typical’ British city than Norwich or Salisbury. The Protectionists’ economic case was weak but it was not contemptible and it deserves a hearing. It rested on the undeniable fact that corn prices before the 1840s were substantially lower than they had been during the French Wars, despite protection. The average price of an imperial quarter of wheat in the 1810s had been 91s 5d (£4.57); by the 1840s it had slumped to 55s 11d (£2.80). In such circumstances, it was easy to contest the central plank of the Anti-Corn Law League’s economic argument. This was that protection produced such high prices that people were forced to spend too much of their income on food, thus threatening both the expansion and the international competitiveness of industry and commerce. Furthermore, arable farming was not prosperous enough to generate substantial profits which could be invested in those ‘improvements’ such as drainage and fertilizers which political economists were constantly exhorting. Many farmers, it was asserted, were moving over to pastoral rather than arable farming, since prices in the pasture sector were less liable to significant short-term fluctuation. The volatility of arable prices had a tendency to distort the British food market, making consumers dangerously dependent on volatile foreign supplies. Protection was needed to ensure stability of supply to the home market. Landowners could with some plausibility argue that they were under substantial pressure and hardly the unworthily privileged class tyrants of Anti-Corn Law League imaginings. Furthermore, free-traders tended to give either evasive or unconvincing answers to the not-unimportant question: ‘What happens if the United Kingdom removes its agricultural tariffs but competitor nations do not?’ Until recently, historians have paid little attention to the influence of the economist Richard Torrens who argued that changes to Britain’s tariff arrangements should be dependent on 75

reciprocal tariff reductions of foreign tariffs. The ‘reciprocity debate’ was an unimportant undercurrent to the wider struggle over the Corn Laws. In 1846, Lord George Bentinck, using a simplified variant of Torrens’s ideas, indicated that Peel was living in a ‘fool’s paradise’ if he believed that other nations would abandon their tariffs merely because Britain proposed to do so. For Disraeli, the lack of reciprocity would disadvantage those vulnerable elements of British society which the repeal of the Corn Laws was supposed to benefit: ‘You can only carry on your system of fighting hostile tariffs with free imports, by requiring more labour for the effort and thus involving the further depression of wages, and the further degradation of the labourer.’ One basic weakness of the Protectionists’ case , however, was that it assumed monolithic arable depression. In reality, the Protectionist position aimed to support smaller landowners and tenant farmers. They were the most ardent defenders of protection. Larger landowners with more resources and, probably, greater opportunities for diversification could ride out even lengthy periods of depression and have capital available for investment. Peel’s case to the landowners made much of the new opportunities which free trade would offer to efficient farmers. Anyway, his repeal proposals included both a three-year phasing out of protection and a loan scheme to aid drainage of wet, but potentially extremely fertile, lands. From this, those with capital were best placed to benefit. The repeal of the Corn Laws did indeed stimulate agricultural efficiency and it was followed by a long period of prosperity. These years of ‘High Farming’, lasting roughly from 1850 to the early 1870s, seemed to vindicate Peel’s optimism. It did not, however, substantially reduce the pressure on smaller or more marginal farmers. On Peel’s interpretation of the iron law of economics, of course, this mattered little. Free trade would shake out the inefficient and redeploy them more productively. Markets would decide. Peel’s announcement to his Cabinet at the end of 1845 that he intended to propose Corn Law repeal to Parliament was initially met with consternation. The Duke of Wellington was opposed to repeal on principle but acknowledged a higher duty. In a memorandum written on 30 November in response to a letter from Peel, he rehearsed the uncontroversial view that the prime minister must reckon on having the support of the majority of landowners in the Tory party withdrawn from the government over the issue. His duty as a member of Peel’s Cabinet, however, he felt to be clear: ‘In respect to my own course, my only object in public life is to support Sir Robert Peel’s administration of the Government for the Queen.’ 76

Eventually, only Viscount Stanley (who, as the Earl of Derby, would lead the post-repeal Conservatives for twenty years) and the Duke of Buccleuch pushed their reservations to resignation. The loss of two such stalwart members both of the Cabinet and of the landed interest was considered by Peel to be sufficient grounds for resignation. He knew that Lord John Russell, the leader of the Whig-Liberals, had recently publicly announced his conversion to repeal and his calculation was that, if he allowed the Whigs to pass the measure, albeit with a substantial minority of Conservatives supporting it, he might just keep his own party together. For a few days in early December, Russell attempted to form a government. He did so without enthusiasm, however, because he knew that repeal would provoke damaging disagreements within his own party and also because of difficulties presented by potential senior ministers, especially Earl Grey, recently succeeded to a famous Whig title, who would not tolerate the controversial Lord Palmerston as Foreign Secretary. In the week before Christmas, Russell informed the Queen that he could not form an administration. He passed what he appropriately described as the ‘poisoned chalice’ of Corn Law repeal back to Peel. Peel gallantly, and as he knew fatefully, informed Cabinet members who assumed that they were about to relinquish the seals of office that: ‘I am going to the Queen . . . I will not abandon her. Whatever may happen, I shall return from Windsor as her minister.’ The debate on Peel’s Corn Law bill in the first half of 1846 was of generally high quality but predictable content. Peel occupied the high ground of national interest. After carefully rehearsing the economic arguments against continued protection, he asserted that the Corn Laws could be maintained only if the nation was prepared for class conflict. He could not charge himself with ‘having taken any course inconsistent with conservative principles’. More importantly, however, he wished to convince the public that his government had been ‘animated with a sincere desire to frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice . . . the greatest object which we or any other government can contemplate should be to elevate the social condition of that class of the people with whom we are not brought into direct relationship by the exercise of the elective franchise’. Peel’s tender, if ponderous, concern for those without votes cut no ice with either Disraeli or Lord George Bentinck who between them carried the burden of the Protectionist opposition. Bentinck launched into a vituperative condemnation of Peel’s inconsistencies and lack of loyalty to party and colleagues alike, even accusing him of harrying 77

Canning literally to death in 1827, of ‘base and dishonest conduct . . . inconsistent with the duty of a minister to his Sovereign’ and of deserting his followers. Disraeli composed numerous variations, both witty and vulgar, on the theme of apostasy, accusing Peel of causing all ‘confidence in public men’ to be lost by his dissimulations and faithless dealings with his supporters. His most positive contribution was to assert that Peel had betrayed more than his party; he had bent the Constitution: ‘Above all, maintain the line of demarcation between parties; for it is only by maintaining the independence of party that you can maintain the integrity of public men, and the power and influence of Parliament itself.’ Backbenchers were not slow to weigh in. Colonel Sibthorp, for example, regretted that ‘the Treasury benches [were] so infested with the noxious animals called rats’. The Corn Laws were repealed by comfortable majorities in the Commons, but only because the Whigs voted so solidly for the bill. On third reading in May 1846 Peel’s majority was 98 (for repeal 327; against 229). Only 106 of the majority votes, however, were Conservative and 222 Tories voted against. Professor Aydelotte has made a detailed study of the Parliamentary divisions over the Corn Laws which demonstrates clearly that the votes were not crudely cast in terms of land versus commerce. The great landowners who still formed the bulk of the Whig leadership voted solidly for repeal, indicating both their feeling that repeal did not threaten them and also their concern to keep the support of business and commercial interests which were much more strongly represented on the Whig-Liberal side of the House than on the Conservative. Those of landed background in the Conservative party outnumbered commercial and other interests by about two to one. On Corn Law repeal, however, their relationship to government was far more important than their background: 86 per cent of those who had held office under Peel supported repeal, as against only 26 per cent in the rest of the party. There could be no stronger demonstration of the extent to which Peel had cut himself off from grassroots opinion and relied upon the opinions of likeminded ‘experts’. Whatever their background, Conservative MPs seem to have been sensitive to the opinions of their constituents. Most, of course, represented county seats, ‘managed’ boroughs under the control of landowners, or market towns with smallish electorates and dependent on the fortunes of agriculture for their prosperity. No less than 86 per cent of Conservative MPs who sat for county or university seats voted against repeal; 63 per cent of those who sat for boroughs with elector78

ates of fewer than 500 did so, and 50 per cent of those who sat for the larger boroughs. The party of small landowners voted to the end according to their Protectionist beliefs or, as an increasingly irascible Peel would have termed them, their prejudices. Peel’s government resigned not over the Corn Laws, but on an Irish coercion bill in June 1846. That Bentinck and Disraeli could keep enough of their Protectionist followers together to vote with the Whigs against a law-and-order bill shows both the bitterness of Tory hatred against Peel and an implacable determination to force his resignation. Peel was ready enough to go. On 29 June, he gave a muted valedictory speech to the Commons which awkwardly mingled genuine pathos and synthetic sentiment. It did, however, confirm his perception of the role of the prime minister who should be the monarch’s servant in the cause of executive government first and party leader a long way second. He regretted that his name had been ‘severely censured by many who . . . deeply regret the severance of party ties’. It was a cause of no regret that ‘I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who . . . clamours for protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit’ and it was his fervent hope that he would leave ‘a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice’. He confirmed his belief that his government would be broken by the outcome: ‘whether these measures [repeal] were accompanied by failure or success, the certain issue must be the termination of the existence of this government. It is, perhaps, advantageous for the public interests that such should be the issue.’ Peel’s speech also included a surprising and controversial encomium to Richard Cobden, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League whose activities as a pressure group during its heyday Peel had so much deprecated. Cobden’s name, said Peel, ought to be the one chiefly associated with repeal since he had always acted ‘from pure and disinterested motives’. His ‘untiring eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned’ deserved especial praise. The diarist Greville was bemused by such references. They were, he said, ‘very generally condemned . . . his unnecessary panegyric of Cobden, his allusion to selfish monopolists, and his claptrap about cheap bread . . . exasperated his former friends and adherents’. In David Eastwood’s view, this extraordinary speech ‘took the idea of non-party government 79

to new extremes: he deliberately associated the policy of a Conservative government with the leader of the most successful extra-Parliamentary movement of the nineteenth century’. Perhaps this exaggerates the case. The Anti-Corn Law League was primarily an extraParliamentary movement but several of its leaders, like Cobden himself, sat in Parliament as loyal Whig-Liberals. Undoubtedly, though, Peel’s speech emphasizes, perhaps as never before, his belief in the virtues of executive government over party preference. In repealing the Corn Laws, he believed that he had won the most important political argument of the age and, in doing so, had opened the road to continued national prosperity. Peel was not to resume office again, though there is little to suggest that he believed in 1846 his departure would be permanent. It is true that he told Gladstone in a private conversation a fortnight after leaving office that ‘he had been twice Prime Minister and nothing should induce him again to take part in the formation of a government: the labour and anxiety were too great’. It is more likely that these comments reflect the short-term reaction of an exhausted figure who felt that he had just won a bruising battle, rather than the considered response who had taken a measured decision at the age of 58 to remove himself permanently from the fray of public life of which he had been such a prominent figure for almost forty years. Certainly, he made no move to quit politics altogether. He took his ‘Peelite’ elite corps into opposition with him, though he refused to provide leadership of it as a party ‘in exile’. The Conservatives were not leaderless: Derby and Disraeli would rapidly see to that, but it was difficult to see how they could fashion any kind of majority in the foreseeable future. For the remaining four years of his life Peel offered advice to his Whig successors, especially on economic matters, and he played to perfection the role of pre-eminent national statesman, uncontaminated by the messy compromises which party considerations necessitated for lesser mortals.

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11 Conclusion: Reputation and evaluation, 1846–50 and beyond

Whatever his residual private feelings, Peel spent the last four years of his life as an MP consistently disclaiming any ambition to return to office. In particular, as he told Goulburn in 1847, when asked whether there might be any basis for reuniting the Conservatives, he was ‘not inclined to undertake the painful and thankless task of reconstructing a party’. In fact, he began to relish the role of elder statesman which circumstances had cast him to play. He willingly confirmed his position as one loftily above the party fray. He could present himself as having put the nation’s interests before his own career in 1846, thus preserving his own integrity. It is not surprising that he remained on close personal terms after 1846 with the Queen’s husband, Prince Albert, to whom he had acted since the Prince’s arrival in England almost as a private political tutor and whose own talents he had grown immensely to admire. Both were hard-working experts with a strong commitment to peace, progress and to fostering a culture of improvement. Not surprisingly, both preferred to look for expertise and virtues wherever they may be found. Parties were confining. He confided to Albert his views about them. He regarded it as a matter of pride that he had made few concessions to party interests, ‘However much I have been blamed for not showing more deference to a great Party . . . all I have to regret is that I shewed so much’. Peel’s interest in the great questions of the day never flagged. Had he not met with his fatal riding accident in 1850, at a time when 81

the Whig government was showing few signs of competence and stood low in public esteem, it is at least possible that he would have been tempted by an offer from the monarch to head a government based on national, rather than party, principles. Given the circumstances in which Peel’s erstwhile Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Aberdeen, accepted the leadership of a Peelite-dominated coalition in 1852, it is difficult to imagine that the Queen’s commission would not have been offered first to Peel himself. On the not unreasonable assumption that Peel would have led the coalition with greater ability than Aberdeen, it is not improbable that his survival in 1850 might well have postponed the complete polarization of parties which Disraeli had advocated in 1846. Peel used his enormous residual authority between 1846 and 1850 to support the Whig government in its continuation of the liberal economic policies he had done so much to nourish. He offered advice to the new Chancellor, Sir Charles Wood, on economic policy and the technicalities of his banking legislation; he defended the Bank Charter Act when it came under Protectionist attack during a commercial crisis in 1847; in 1848–9 he strongly supported the repeal of the Navigation Acts which remained the last significant barrier to making Britain a free-trade nation. It is true that his last vote in the Commons was with the Conservatives against an aspect of foreign policy supported by the controversial Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston but he stressed that his vote had been determined by his own judgement and not by party considerations. As he told Aberdeen, in 1850, he stood firmly behind ‘those who have had enough of party connections and are resolved to keep themselves free from its engagements’. To the end, Peel’s views on party remained paradoxical. Most of the 112 Conservatives who voted with him over the Corn Laws in 1846 stayed together in opposition as ‘Peelites’. Sixty-nine were returned to Parliament in the 1847 general election; only ten were defeated. About thirty new ‘Liberal Conservative’ free traders were elected. Among the Peelites were some of Britain’s ablest politicians. Two of them, Aberdeen and Gladstone, were future prime ministers. Most had been trained, directly or indirectly, in the Peelite virtues of administrative expertise and service to the nation. It is a tribute both to Peel’s educative influence and also to his domination of affairs that such an elite corps of politicians remained as a separate grouping, sustaining his ideals but failing to benefit from his leadership. In a political career not otherwise noted for generating expressions of personal warmth, Peel undoubtedly retained not only the respect of 82

his old ministerial colleagues but even their love. Henry Hardinge called him ‘My great Master and generous friend’ and Gladstone in 1853 referred to him glowingly as ‘my great teacher and master in public affairs’. He thought him the greatest man he ‘ever knew or could conceive of’. Lord Lincoln told Lady Peel the month after her husband’s death: ‘I never take a step in public life without reflecting on how he would have thought of it.’ Those outside the Peelite charmed circle were as likely to pay tribute. Lord Clarendon, the Whig who in the last years of Peel’s life served at the Board of Trade and as Viceroy of Ireland and who thus had a clear understanding of two of Peel’s political preoccupations, considered his premature death ‘a great national calamity’. Even the Scottish intellectual and critic Thomas Carlyle, editor of a famous collection of Oliver Cromwell’s letters and speeches, believed that Peel was a political giant – the nearest approximation of the hero figure so central to Carlyle’s thinking since Cromwell himself two centuries earlier. It may be worth lingering a little longer on the views of Benjamin Disraeli, his great adversary of 1845–6. These were most reflectively presented in 1852 during the course of a book on Lord George Bentinck. Disraeli conceded that Peel had ‘many admirable parts . . . He was gifted with the faculty of method in the highest degree; and with great powers of application which were sustained by a prodigious memory; while he could communicate his acquisitions with clear and fluent elocution.’ Though ‘gifted and accomplished’, however, Disraeli believed that his ‘great deficiency’ was lack of imagination: ‘Wanting imagination, he wanted prescience . . . His judgment was faultless provided he had not to deal with the future.’ He also offered interesting comment on Peel’s interaction with administrative and other experts: ‘he had a dangerous sympathy with the creations of others. Instead of being cold and wary, as was commonly supposed, he was impulsive and even inclined to rashness’. To these striking contemporary judgements we shall return in the context of the current historiography on Peel. In the last four years of his life, Peel’s ostentatiously manned vantage point above the party-political fray was of little help to his admiring coterie. They were left without his leadership and, while he lived, would not be reabsorbed into normal political life. The Peelites had been educated not to be ‘party men’ and those with long careers ahead of them – most notably Gladstone – were never entirely happy playing party games or subordinating their own consciences to the dictates of prevalent party opinion. Gladstone, in particular, expressed his frustration. Peel had been his prize pupil in lessons on the arts of government 83

and in the later 1840s he yearned for further office. Peel, he judged, could easily have returned to high office had he been so minded. Since he was not, Gladstone would have to wait to return as well. This clearly rankled. In later years, he even went so far as to indicate that ‘The question may be fairly raised whether he [Peel] would not have set as a greater luminary if he had been taken from us in 1846.’ As Michael Winstanley has also argued in his Lancaster Pamphlet on Gladstone, the Liberal party under Gladstone was far from comfortable with the ideals of Gladstonian Liberalism, largely because so many of its more prominent members came from a Peelite background. From the first two days of July 1850, as sympathetic crowds gathered outside his house in Whitehall Gardens waiting for news of the mortally injured man, the tendency has been to praise Peel’s achievements. Among the many memorials studied by Donald Read in his 1987 evaluation of Peel’s reputation is the following inscription, appearing beneath a likeness of Britannia on a medal struck in his honour in 1850: ‘His death was deeply deplored by men of all shades of political opinion, as the loss of a great practical statesman, earnestly devoted to the welfare of his country.’ Posterity has dealt kindly with Peel. He tends still to be remembered today as the man who sacrificed his career for the good of the nation, as a gifted administrator who put national above party interests and who provided decisive and gifted leadership during a period of massive change and considerable political and social crisis. His enlightened policies are said to have given working people cheap bread, stimulated industry and laid the foundations of mid-Victorian prosperity. Peel, the wealthy landowner from an industrial background, was uniquely placed to reconcile the divergent interests of aristocracy and commerce for the benefit of the nation as a whole. It is generally held that his leadership of the Conservative party saw a necessary broadening of its base. Peel made the Conservatives a national, rather than a narrowly landed and Church of England, party. On this secure base, Disraeli was able to build in the late 1860s and 1870s, confirming the Conservatives as both the national and the patriotic party, an image which in the twentieth century they profitably maintained – at least until the disaster of the general election of 1997 (the party’s largest defeat since 1832, incidentally) from which, at the time of writing, they have still not recovered. These perceptions have, in general, been supported by specialist historical opinion. His biographer Norman Gash saw Peel exercising ‘unrivalled leadership at the centre of power . . . His place as the foun84

der of modern Conservatism is unchallengeable.’ By 1850, according to Gash, ‘The age of revolt was giving way to the age of stability; and of that age Peel had been the chief architect’. For Robert Blake, the election victory of 1841 was a ‘striking vindication of Peel’s policy’. Donald Southgate believed that Peel’s ‘moderation and empiricism . . . his reputation as an administrator and his supremacy as a Parliamentarian’ offered ‘the gist of the Conservative appeal’. Donald Read concluded that Peel ‘died the hero equally of the newly enfranchised, propertied middle classes, and of the unenfranchised, propertyless masses . . . In troubled and changing times, he had satisfied the majority of the British people of all classes that the reformed political system, under strong leadership, was capable of reacting purposefully to their needs.’ Finally, even the present writer, though his current position is more critical, wrote in 1983 of Peel’s ‘extraordinary . . . ability’ and ranked his ministry of 1841–6, along with Gladstone’s first, as ‘the ablest of the nineteenth century’. By now, the reader must be wondering whether this composite picture of Peel as the paragon of statesmanlike virtue is too good to be true. The reader is right to wonder! A less flattering picture emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Boyd Hilton has denied that Peel was a flexible statesman, responding rationally to each new challenge. He has argued that he was the prisoner of the economic ideology of laissez-faire who acted both inflexibly and dogmatically in pursuit of a predetermined policy. Ian Newbould has reappraised Peel’s leadership of the Conservative party between 1832 and 1841 and concluded that he deserves much less credit for ‘rebuilding’ it than he has usually been given. Newbould even had the temerity to talk of ‘a study in failure’. As was argued earlier (Chapter 7), the Conservative party elected in 1841 remained narrow in its support. Peel did not make the headway in the industrial areas which is usually assumed. It is also possible to be severely critical of Peel’s handling of his party. He needed Protectionist support to cement Conservative recovery in the late 1830s and, arguably, deceived both the electorate and the Protectionists about his real feelings on free trade during the 1841 election campaign. He certainly took backbench support for granted when in office. Because he despised his backbenchers’ lack of experience, relevant political education and, as he saw it, absence of vision, he grossly underestimated both their case in defence of established institutions and their sense of grievance against him personally. His real feelings were revealed in a private letter to his wife written when the Protectionists failed to support him in 1845: ‘How can those who 85

spend their time hunting and shooting and eating and drinking know what were the motives of those who are responsible for the public security who have access to the best information and have no other object under heaven but to provide against danger and consult the general interests of all classes?’ Peel’s conception of party may be criticized as both narrow and selfish. In the 1830s, he had seen more clearly than most the implications of 1832 for political reorganization in the constituencies. What he had not seen, or more likely had chosen to ignore, was that party was becoming a dynamic factor whose importance in government would inevitably grow. The backbench case that Peel deserved his fate in 1846 is, at the least, a reasonable one. Between 1841 and 1845 Peel either ignored his followers’ sensibilities or bludgeoned them into submission. He proved himself untrue to their Tory principles on Ireland, on religion, on commerce and, finally and fatally, on the English landed interest itself. Norman Gash seems almost as contemptuous of the Protectionist Tories as was his idol. He wrote: ‘The essence of Conservatism was a government ethic and not a party interest . . . the party broke up in 1846 because the majority forsook the ethic for an interest.’ Gash, however, seems to be confusing Conservatism with Peelism and asserting that all the nobler aspects of the former were attributes of the latter. It might be more accurate to conclude that the success of Peelism, as Peel himself came to recognize, depended on support from men whose political views had become diametrically opposed to his own. He had courted them in the 1830s; their education in the need to accept ‘modest reform’ he had begun. Once safely in office in 1841, however, he took their continued support for granted and adopted policies which offended their every sensibility. It is not necessary to accept the Protectionists’ views or to deny the intellectual superiority of the Peelites to conclude that Peel’s government betrayed a party trust. In pursuing his own vision of the national interest in the 1840s, Peel neglected his power base. By 1846, the essence of Conservatism had to be a fusion of government ethic with party interest. Peel fell, his party broke up and was forced to endure a generation in the political wilderness, because Peel tried to subordinate party to both an ethic and an ideology entirely foreign to it. In essence, Peel was an expert who devoted his political career to developing professional expertise in discharging efficient executive government. The benefits of this are clear. Like Pitt half a century earlier, he got things done. His legislative record is second to none in 86

nineteenth-century politics. He dominated the House of Commons not by natural oratory and certainly not by flattery. He just knew more about the subject under discussion than almost anyone else in the House. He invariably mastered his brief. The negative aspects of ‘expertism’, however, are worth stressing. They include intolerance, aloofness and arrogance. Peel was persistently criticized for all three vices during a long career which was far more viciously controversial for much of its span that the fulsome tributes of 1850 would indicate. He was also surprisingly sensitive to criticism and too readily looked for personal, rather than political or intellectual, reasons to explain it. Like many experts, also, Peel lacked political sensitivity. He believed that those who knew should rule and that those who did not had a duty to defer to the opinions of their professional and intellectual betters. Among those who ‘did not know’ he readily consigned to the outer limits of his condescension perhaps three-quarters of the House of Commons. For a politician, he relied on a dangerously narrow circle of intimates. In Walter Bagehot’s words, written in 1856, he ‘was a reserved, occupied man of business’. He did not take kindly to being interrupted. He probably worked too hard and there is plenty of evidence that his judgement during the Corn Law crisis was warped not only by purblind self-belief and contempt for the arguments of his opponents but also by exhaustion. Let us look further into Bagehot’s perceptive, but littleremembered, assessment of Peel. Bagehot is best known for his superb dissection of the British Constitution in the middle years of the nineteenth century. He was also, however, a shrewd and practised observer of political affairs. He urged his readers to remember not only ‘the great legislative acts which we owe to his trained capacity, every detail of which bears the impress of his practised hand’. They should also recall his earlier career: ‘his name was once the power of the Protestant interest, the shibboleth by which squires and rectors distinguished those whom they loved from those whom they hated’. He never escaped the consequences of that earlier career and, in the end, they brought him down. Bagehot provides a further important insight. Peel has been widely praised for his innovations. In reality, as Disraeli also noted, he was happier to systematize and codify than to innovate. He possessed administrative gifts of a high order; he was not a creator. As Bagehot put it, ‘He could hardly have created anything. His intellect, admirable in administrative routine, endlessly fertile in suggestions of detail, was not of a class which creates . . . a new idea.’ In a more profound sense, 87

too, Peel was happier looking back. Most of his reforms were concerned with making old institutions work better, thus preserving their life. He preferred to see himself as the servant of the Crown. Perhaps it was his lack of imagination which prevented his appreciating what was so clear to Disraeli: party had become a central element in political life in early Victorian Britain. Peel certainly possessed the self-confidence and political will to push ahead once he was convinced that he had chosen the right course. Party considerations were of relatively little consequence to him. Given his character and administrative training, it is not really a paradox that Peel became the natural conservative who broke up the Conservative party.

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Select bibliography

This is intended to be an aid for teachers and students wanting interesting and important work on Peel and his times. It is arranged by category and is highly selective. Useful textbooks and general interpretations The most authoritative and up-to-date study of the period is now Boyd Hilton’s volume in the new Oxford History of England, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People: England: 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). There is a good section on government, political parties and Corn Law repeal in the next volume by K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp127–52. N. Gash, Aristocracy and People, 1815–65 (London: Arnold, 1979), though now in some respects outdated, remains specially useful on Peel, since Gash is his most distinguished biographer. E. J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 1783–1870 (London: 3rd edn, Longman, 2001) has established itself as a text which students have found valuable over quite a long period. The introduction to the third edition updates the story; chapter 28 includes a historiographical revision which presents a rather less favourable view of Peel than the first edition, published in 1983, had done. After reading this new edition, readers may feel that the present author’s personal pendulum has swung back a little – demonstrating that, even at the level of the individual historian, interpretations change over a career. C. Williams (ed.), 89

A Companion to Nineteenth-century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) contains a large number of high-quality chapters supported by strong bibliographical references. See particularly chapters by Philip Harling, pp110–24, Michael J. Turner, pp125–39 and Michael S. Smith, pp156–73. Other valuable interpretations include W. D. Rubinstein, Britain’s Century, 1815–1905 (London: Arnold, 1998) and H. Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy, 1832–1918 (London: Longman, 2001). Two books in the Longman Seminar Studies series deal, respectively, with the earlier and later parts of Peel’s career: these are E. J. Evans, Britain before the Reform Act: Politics and Society, 1815–32 (London: 2nd edn, Longman, 2006) and P. Adelman, Peel and the Conservative Party, 1830–50 (London: Longman, 1989). See also the useful brief summary of the crowded politics of the 1830s and 1840s by R. Stewart, Party and Politics, 1830–52 (London: Macmillan, 1989). Biographies Peel has not attracted as many biographical studies as some other major political figures. The quality of those most accessible to students is, however, very high and can be safely recommended. A very useful, and accessible, recent biography is T. A. Jenkins, Sir Robert Peel (London: Macmillan, 1999). Much the most authoritative study remains that by Norman Gash, first published in 1961 but recently reissued in a twovolume format: Mr. Secretary Peel (London: Longman, 1985) takes the story to 1830 and Sir Robert Peel (London: Longman, 1986) completes the biography. As might be expected, Gash, though not uncritical, takes a much more favourable view of his subject than some more recent specialist studies do. D. Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) is a splendid attempt to explain Peel’s reputation and his hold over the Victorian imagination. Studies of politics in the time of Peel Books The two earlier Lancaster Pamphlets by the present author, The Great Reform Act of 1832 (2nd edn, 1994) and Political Parties in Britain, 1783– 1867 (1985) are, it is hoped, useful and succinct introductions to the sometimes tricky and definitionally awkward issue of party and party government. Many studies of Peel and the politics of ‘the Peel period’ 90

exist, reflecting continued interest in the man, despite a pronounced historiographical lurch in recent years away from older-style studies of high politics towards a broader cultural approach. A critique of this development is provided in the introduction to the 3rd edition of The Forging of the Modern State, 1783–1870 (see above). Two much older studies may still be consulted with profit: N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (London: Longman, 1983) and G. Kitson Clark, Peel and the Conservative Party (London: 2nd edn, Cass, 1964). N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1830–52 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) was a major reinterpretation which still has much to offer. Peel’s involvement in the economic debates of the period 1815–30 forms a small part of Boyd Hilton’s Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments of 1815–30 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). The best overall study of developments and tribulations in the Conservative party in the 1830s and 1840s is probably R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–67 (London: Longman, 1978). D. Southgate (ed.), The Conservative Leadership, 1832–1932 (London: Macmillan, 1974) includes an article by Gash on the leadership of Wellington and Peel. See also Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London: Fontana, 1985). A number of important specialist works on politics and political attitudes have been published in the last twenty years. Our understanding of politics immediately prior to the Reform Act has been transformed by P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–30 (London: Macmillan, 1998). D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700– 1870 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1997) covers a range of important topics. I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–41 (London: Macmillan, 1990) performs the extremely valuable, and long overdue, task of reinterpreting the 1830s from a Whig perspective, rather than through the Peelite prism. P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) performs a similar service but in the context of explaining the resilience of aristocratic ideals in politics. Its focus, too, is primarily Whig-Liberal. P. Harling, The Waning of Old Corruption: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) has a good section on what motivated Peel’s economic policies and his strategic thinking. R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830– 41 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) examines the religious issue which was of such importance in stimulating Conservative revival 91

in the 1830s. A. Burns and J. Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform, Britain, 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) presents numerous fresh insights, particularly how a study of language can be used to shed new light on old concepts, such as reform itself. The Protectionists have been studied much more seriously in the past generation. No longer can they be safely reduced to the status of ‘idiot-reactionaries’ entirely fitted for the contumely of Sir Robert. For this necessary service, scholars are much indebted to the work of R. Stewart, The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the Protectionists, 1841–52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) and T. I. Crosby, English Farmers and the Politics of Protection, 1815–52 (Brighton: Harvester, 1977). A valuable more recent study is Anna Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–52 (London: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1999). In addition to the studies above, a study of the Peel government of 1841–6 is provided in T. I. Crosby, Sir Robert Peel’s Administration (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1976). On the Anti-Corn Law League, see N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League (London: 2nd edn, Unwin, 1968) and D. A. Hamer, The Politics of Electoral Pressure (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977), ch5. Articles and book chapters One of the best introductions to Peel and his party is David Eastwood, ‘Peel and the Tory Party Reconsidered’, History Today 42, 3 (1992), pp27–33. A venerable article by Norman Gash, ‘Peel and the Party System, 1830–50’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series I (1951), pp47–59 remains useful. Two much more recent ones by him concentrate on the growth of party: ‘The Organization of the Conservative Party, 1832–46’, Parliamentary History I (1982), pp137–59 and II (1983), pp131–52. The other articles cited here take issue with some of Gash’s judgements. Boyd Hilton, ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal XXII (1979), pp585–614 argues that Peel was imprisoned in laissez-faire ideology to the detriment of his wider political judgement. Ian Newbould has tried to set Peel’s party political achievement in a wider, and more sceptical, context in ‘Sir Robert Peel and Conservative Party, 1832–41: A Study in Failure?’, English Historical Review IIC (1983), pp529–57 and ‘Whiggery and the Growth of Party, 1830–41’, Parliamentary History IV (1985), pp137–56. Angus Hawkins, ‘ “Parliamentary Government” and Victorian Political Parties, c. 1830–80’, English Historical Review CIV (1989), pp639–69 is also valuable in pro92

viding a wider context. See also on Peel’s dilemmas concerning Catholic emancipation, Boyd Hilton, ‘The Ripening of Sir Robert Peel’ in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp63–84. On the operation of the Corn Laws, Susan Fairlie, ‘The Nineteenthcentury Corn Law Reconsidered’, Economic History Review 2nd series XVIII (1965), pp562–75 remains extremely useful. The electoral implications have long since been investigated by G. Kitson Clark, ‘The Electorate and the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series I (1951), pp109–26. Quite a bit of more recent work has been done on free trade and the economic and social context of repeal. The link between Corn Law repeal and Ireland is traced in C. Kinealy, ‘Peel, Rotten Potatoes and Providence: The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Irish Famine’ in A. Marrison (ed.), Free Trade and its Reception, Vol. 1: Freedom and Trade (London: Routledge, 1998), pp50–62. From the same volume, see also Douglas A. Irwin, ‘The Reciprocity Debate in Parliament, 1842–1846’, pp129–144. On political calculations preparatory to the repeal of the Corn Laws, see I. McLean, ‘Irish Potatoes and British Politics: Peel, Wellington and the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, Rational Choice and British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp33–56. See also M. Lusztig, ‘Solving Peel’s Puzzle: Repeal of the Corn Laws and Institutional Preservation’, Comparative Politics 27, 4 (1995), pp393–408, which is good on Peel’s wider objectives in pushing ahead with a measure which broke the Conservative party. Three useful recent studies on the relationship between Peel and Gladstone at the beginning of the latter’s career are a new biography by M. Partridge, Gladstone (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. pp38–71; Eric Evans, ‘The Strict Line of Political Succession?: Gladstone’s Relationship with Peel’ in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp29–56 ; and R. Shannon, ‘Peel, Gladstone and Party’, Parliamentary History 18, 3 (1999), pp317–49. Primary sources It is not possible to provide a full indication of the voluminous published primary sources on Peel and the politics of his age, but the vast expansion of web-based learning resources since the first edition of this book was published fifteen years ago now enables easier searching. See under Web-based resources below. 93

Among printed sources, four collections may be useful as a starting point. The Memoirs of Sir Robert Peel (2 vols, London, 1857) contain much useful material, including the full text of the Tamworth Manifesto and Peel’s own careful and detailed explanation of his decision to repeal the Corn Laws. G. C. Greville, Journals of the Reigns of George IV and William IV (3 vols, London, 1874) are a political insider’s skilfully crafted, and frequently indiscreet, memoirs of the times in which he lived. They are lively and they offer a non-Tory appraisal of Peel. William Cooke Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (3 vols, 1846–8) was produced before Peel’s death by a pro-free trader. As might be expected, the tone of the volumes is warmly appreciative. The volumes contain generous extracts from Peel’s speeches and from some private correspondence. All three collections are available in many research libraries, such as those located in universities and in large cities. Material on Peel can be found more accessibly in M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Vol. 3, published in 1974, includes material from the 1841–6 ministry which gave William Gladstone his first experience of political office. Representative, but necessarily brief, documentary selections are, of course, also accessibly provided in the two Seminar Studies by Evans and Adelman quoted above, and these might perhaps act as a starting point. Web-based resources For students who prefer, or who are encouraged, to make their own preliminary searches of information two accessible and widely used websites may be safely recommended as providing effective backgrounds with some detail. Spartacus Educational (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk) gives a brief biography of Peel with cross-referencing and links to other sites. It is regularly updated. The US-based Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org/history/histov.html) covers a range of topics and links nineteenth-century history to contemporary literary and cultural developments. This website also includes a selection of extracts from contemporary speeches, articles and letters. Professional historians are also now much better served in their work on contemporary manuscripts and printed collections than they were in the early 1990s. The best starting point is the search engine provided by the National Register of Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches). Reference GB/NAF/P22455 94

provides names and locations of a large collection of archive material on Peel housed at the NRA in Kew (especially PRO30), throughout the United Kingdom and in the United States and Canada. From a huge collection, particular note might be made of Peel’s extensive correspondence with the Duke of Wellington, now housed in the Southampton University Library, and with Lord Stanley, housed in the Liverpool Record Office. Reference to the British Library’s large collection of Peel manuscripts (Add MSS 40181–40617, 54316–7, 61831–4) is also found on the British Library’s website (www.bl.uk/collections/manuscriptsnamedor.html).

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Glossary of key terms

The following list provides what are intended to be simple explanations or expositions of a number of terms which might be unfamiliar to a reader new to British history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Anti-Corn Law League

Appropriation

Bedchamber Crisis

Extra-parliamentary political organization founded in Manchester in 1839 and supported by significant numbers of middle-class commercial figures. Its objective was the repeal of the Corn Laws (see below), which happened when Peel promoted the relevant legislation in 1846 In context of this book, controversial proposals to make use of Church property for a range of ‘social’ purposes, such as educational advance. It caused the resignation of prominent members of a Whig Cabinet in 1834 because Catholics in Ireland stood to benefit from money removed from the Protestant Church of Ireland In 1839, Peel was invited to form a government but refused to do so when Queen Victoria refused to dismiss a number of her lady courtiers, known as Ladies of the Bed96

Borough seat/franchise

Cabinet

Catholic emancipation

Chartism

Conservatives

Constituency

Corn Laws

County seat/franchise

chamber. The ladies in question were Whig supporters and Peel was a Tory Parliamentary seats were categorized as ‘borough’ (largely towns) or ‘county’. The 1832 Reform Act redefined and rationalized the qualifications for voting in these two types of seat Group of senior ministers who met together, under the chairmanship of the prime minister, to formulate government policy and present it to Parliament Term for granting Roman Catholics a range of political liberties which had previously been withheld, such as the right to sit in Parliament. The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829 Extra-Parliamentary, democratic political movement largely of working men, which was most active in 1838–48. The Charter comprised six points, including one man one vote and constituencies of equal size Term often used interchangeably with Tories (see below), but often used to denote Tories who were sympathetic to a programme of cautious reform designed to stabilize the political system in the 1830s and 1840s A place, or an area, with the right to send members to Parliament – sometimes known as ‘Parliamentary constituency’ Trading regulations. The most important were passed in 1815 and prohibited the import of foreign grain into Britain until the domestic price of grain reached 80 shillings (£4) a quarter – a very high price See ‘Borough seat’ above. Before 1832, almost all counties, however large or small, returned two members to Parliament. Representatives of county seats often claimed higher status because they claimed to represent a wider cross-section of the population and because land was thought by many to be 97

Disestablishment

Dissenter

Established church

Executive government

Factory reform

a superior form of property to industrial or commercial forms The act of removing the legal privileges enjoyed by the Church of England as the ‘State Church’. It was advocated by a number of radical politicians (see ‘Radical’ below) and was fiercely resisted by most property owners Usually member of a Protestant church outside the Church of England. Dissenters could not until 1828 hold a range of political offices (see ‘Test and Corporations Acts’ below) Another term for the Church of England, established by law. The particular link between Church and State saw bishops sit in the House of Lords and be appointed theoretically by the monarch but in practice by the government of the day Technically this merely means the work of government discharged by ministers of the Crown. Historians have increasingly used it, however, to denote a government carried out to achieve national objectives and placing less emphasis on party loyalties. Thus the repeal of the Corn Laws has been seen as an example of ‘executive government’ because it was carried by Peel against the wishes of a substantial majority of his own party in the House of Commons although Peel held the measure to be of national benefit. The term is often used to cover those who saw government primarily as a duty of trust to the monarch, rather than as a privilege earned by those representing the political party which held a majority in the House of Commons Movement designed to restrict the number of hours that women and children (and latterly men also) were allowed to work per day. The most important Factory Acts in the period were those passed in 1833, 1844 and 1847 98

Franchise

The right to vote in public elections (see also ‘Suffrage’) Government The discharge of public business in Parliament by the monarch’s ministers Liberals Term associated by the end of the period with a grouping linked to the Whig party (see below). More generally, term employed to cover those who wanted to see more free trade (‘trade liberalization’) or greater personal freedoms Member of Parliament A member of Parliament could sit either in (MP) the House of Commons (lower house) or House of Lords (upper house). In this period only hereditary aristocrats, male members of the royal family and bishops of the Church of England could sit in the House of Lords. Members of the lower house, often referred to just as MPs, were elected by those entitled to vote in one of (at this time) 658 Parliamentary constituencies in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Members holding a political office, technically under the Crown, were ministers and senior ministers would be in the Cabinet. See ‘Minister’ and ‘Cabinet’ for distinctions between MPs and ministers. Ministers needed to be MPs but only a minority of MPs were ministers Ministers In politics, those holding office under the Crown. They were members of the governing political party and the most senior ministers were members of the Cabinet (see above) Parliamentary constituency See Constituency Parliamentary reform Changes to the way MPs were elected and to the constituencies they represented. Most Parliamentary reform activity in this period was aimed at increasing the number of male voters and at reducing the number of Parliamentary seats in which very few people were entitled to vote. The most important change in this period was that brought about by the Reform Act of 1832, which transferred many 99

Party/party government

Protectionists

Radicals

Rotten boroughs

Social question

Suffrage

small boroughs to larger towns and to county seats and increased the number of voters by about 65 per cent A group of people who have come together to advocate a programme of political objectives, often called ‘policies’. In this period, the main parties were the Whigs (or later WhigLiberals) and the Tories (or sometimes Conservatives). See under specific terms. Party government refers to government activity carried out usually by the party which has the most seats in Parliament and particularly the House of Commons (see also ‘Executive government’) Those who supported the continuation of tariffs to protect domestic trade and industry. In this period, most commonly used of those who opposed repeal of the Corn Laws A disparate group united only by their desire to promote significant change. The kinds of changes proposed included substantial Parliamentary reform, disestablishment of the Church of England and the increase of state support for education and other social purposes Term used, often quite vaguely, to denote Parliamentary constituencies with few voters and usually controlled (‘managed’) by a large landowner or by the Crown. Their number was reduced by the Reform Act of 1832 Term increasingly used by the 1840s to cover a range of concerns about conditions experienced by ordinary people. It tended to cover issues such as public health and sanitary reform and it attracted attention because death rates were often very high and living standards for ordinary people were low. Concern in this period tended to concentrate on social conditions in the rapidly growing industrial and commercial towns and cities The right to vote in political elections (see also ‘Franchise’) 100

Test and Corporations Acts Acts passed in 1661 and 1673, during the reign of Charles II, which prevented religious Dissenters (see above) from holding a range of political offices. Most of these prohibitions were removed when these Acts were repealed in 1828 Tory party Political party, at this time supported predominantly by landowners and tenant farmers. Its main objective was the preservation of the old Constitution in Church and State. It tended to oppose most reforms and to support special privileges for the landowners and the established church – the Church of England Ultras Informal name given to more extreme Tories, especially those who opposed Parliamentary reform with special fervour Whig party Political party, led by large landowners but with increasing support from many in the middle classes and especially in the growing towns. It favoured cautious reform, often as a means of preserving the essence of the old political order. Its leaders tended to think of themselves as protectors of the people’s liberties

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Index

Aberdeen, Earl of (Hamilton-Gordon, George, 4th Earl) 54, 82 Addington, Henry see Sidmouth, Viscount agricultural protection 51, 55, 63, 70–80 Albert, Prince 81 Alison, Archibald 46 Anglesey, Marquis of 25 Annual Register 42 Anti-Corn Law League 72–4, 79–80, 96 Anti-League 73 ‘appropriation’ 43, 63, 66, 96 Arbuthnot, Harriet 20 Ashley, Lord (7th Earl of Shaftesbury) xv Attwood, Thomas 43, 58 Bagehot, Walter 87–8 Bank Charter Act (1844) xv, 58–9, 82 Bank of England xiii, xv, 12–14, 58–9 Baring, Sir Francis 37, 51, 57 Bathurst, Earl (Bathurst, Henry, 3rd Earl) 20, 21 Bedchamber Crisis (1839) xiv, 35, 37, 48, 96 Bentinck, Lord George xv, 76, 77–9

Bolton 5 Bonham, F.R. 46 Bright, John 68 Bristol 49, 64 British Empire 24 Buccleuch, Duke of (MontaguDouglas-Scott, Walter, 5th Duke) 77 Buckingham, Duke of (Grenville, Richard Chandos, 2nd Duke) xv, 55, 57 Budget (1842) xv, 56–7, 63, 71 Budget (1845) xv, 57–8, 71 Bullion Committee (1819) xiii, 12–14 Burke, Edmund 15 Bury 5 Buxton, Thomas Folwell 16 Canada 64 Canning, George xiii, 14, 15, 20, 21–3, 78 Carlisle, Earl of (Howard, George, 6th Earl) 21 Carlyle, Thomas 83 Caroline, Queen 14 Cashel City (Ireland) 6 Castlereagh, Viscount (Stewart, Robert) 15 Catholic Association 24

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Catholic Board 10 Catholic Emancipation xii, xiii, 2, 10–11, 20, 21, 23–30, 41, 63, 97 Cato Street Conspiracy 15 Charitable Bequests Act (1844) 66 Chartism 2, 45, 57, 73, 97 Church of England xiv, 8, 23–4, 31, 41–2, 43–4, 60, 66–8, 84, 98, 100 Church of Ireland 43 Clarendon, Earl of (Villiers, George William, 4th Earl) 83 Clontarf meeting (1843) 65 Cobden, Richard 73, 79 Combination Acts (1824–5) 18 Conservative party xv, 2–4, 26, 32, 39–47, 48–52, 58, 62–9, 70–80, 84, 97, 100; see also Tory party Cooper, Anthony Ashley see Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of Corn Law Repeal (1846) x, 1, 2, 52, 56, 69 Corn Laws xv, 1, 23, 37, 51–2, 53–4, 63, 64, 70–80, 96, 97, 98 cotton duties 58 crime 16–17, 28 Croker, John Wilson 48 crown, role of 22 Currency Committee 12 currency reform 43 Dalhousie, Marquis of (Ramsay, James Andrew Broun, 1st Marquis and 10th Earl) 55 De Grey, Earl (Robinson, Thomas Philip, 2nd Earl) 65 Derby, 14th Earl of xiv, 80; see also Stanley, Edward Disestablishment 98 Disraeli, Benjamin xv, 1, 2–3, 68–9, 74, 76, 77–80, 82, 83, 84, 87–8 dissenters see nonconformists Ecclesiastical Commission xiv, 41 Economic policy 1–4, 9–10, 12–14 Edinburgh 16 Edinburgh Review 64–5 education 31 Eldon, Baron (Scott, John) 20, 21 Ellenborough, Baron (Law, Edward) 20

Ellice, Edward 36 Emigration 9–10, 17 Factory Act (1844) xv, 60, 98 factory reform 5–6, 31, 60–1, 63, 66–7, 98 Fitzgerald, William Vesey 24 foreign policy 15, 54, 82 Forgery Act (1830) xiv Fox, Charles James 6 Fraser’s Magazine 64 free trade xv, 1–3, 52, 56–8, 61, 70–2, 75–6, 79, 85, 99 French Revolution 6–7, 13, 15 French Wars 3, 6–7, 10, 13, 57, 70, 75 Gaols Act (1823) xiii, 17 General Election (1826) 23–4 General Election (1830) xiv, 27 General Election (1832) xiv, 3, 30, 42–3, 45 General Election (1835) xiv, 36, 40–1, 45 General Election (1837) xiv, 36, 45, 49 General Election (1841) xv, 38, 42, 47, 48–52, 53, 63, 64–5, 72, 85 General Election (1847) xvi, 72 George IV 21, 22, 25, 29 Gladstone, W.E. xv, 1, 55, 56, 58, 67, 80, 82–4 Goderich, Viscount xiii, 22–3; see also Robinson, F.J.; Ripon, Earl of Gold Standard 13–14 Goulburn, Henry 3, 32, 36, 39, 55 Graham, James xiv, xv, 43, 44, 45, 60, 61, 64, 66–8, 72 Grant, Charles 23 Grattan, Henry 11 Great Reform Act see Reform Act (1832) Greville, Charles 33–4, 57, 79 Grey, Earl (Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl) 28–30, 31, 43 Grey, Earl (Grey, Henry George, 3rd Earl) see Howick, Viscount Haddington, Earl of (Hamilton, Thomas, 9th Earl) 56 Hardinge, Henry 83

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Harrow School xii, 6 Herbert, Sidney (Baron Herbert of Lea) 55 Heytesbury, Baron (A’Court, William) 65 ‘High Farming’ 76 Howard, John 16 Howick, Viscount (Grey, Henry George, 3rd Earl Grey) 50, 77 Hull 49 Hume, Joseph 16, 18 Huskisson, William 13, 14–15, 18, 20, 22–4, 28, 57, 71 income tax xv–xvi, 56–8 industrial revolution 32, 51, 71, 73, 75 Inglis, Sir Robert xiii Insurrection Act (Ireland) 1814, 10–11 Ireland xii–xvi, 2, 6–11, 18, 20, 24–5, 36, 37, 40, 43–4, 50, 52, 61, 65–7, 71–2, 96, 99 Irish Arms Act (1843) 65 Jamaica Bill (1839) 37 Jury Act (1824–5) xiii, 17

Manchester 1, 13, 28, 72, 75, 96 Manchester Guardian 1 manufactures 1, 13 Mayne, Richard 19 Maynooth seminary xv, 66–8 Melbourne, Viscount (Lamb, William) xiv, 31, 35, 37, 43, 44–5, 48, 51 Merchant Taylors’ Hall speech (1838) xiv, 44, 62–3 Metropolitan Police Act (1829) xiv, 16, 19 Miles, Philip 64 Milnes, Richard 64 Mines Act (1842) xv, 60 monarchy, powers of 34–5 Morpeth, Viscount (Howard, William Frederick, later 7th Earl of Carlisle) 50 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 31, 36 national debt 10 Navigation Acts, Repeal of (1849) xvi, 82 nonconformists 60, 66–8, 98 Norwich 75

Kentish Gazette 51 laissez-faire 85 Lancashire 5, 26, 60 Lansdowne, Marquis of 21, 43 law reform 16–17 Leeds 49 Liberal Party xv, 46, 54, 77–80, 99, 100 ‘Liberal Toryism’ 12, 14–16, 23, 57, 70–1 Lichfield House Compact (1835) 44 Lincoln, Lord 55, 83 Liverpool 28 Liverpool, Earl of, (Jenkinson, Robert Banks, 2nd Earl) xiii, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 30, 32 London 11, 13, 19, 49–50, 60 Lyndhurst, Baron (Copley, John Singleton 1st Baron) 37 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 52, 55 McCulloch, J.R. 18 Mackintosh, James 16

O’Connell, Daniel 9–10, 24–6, 43, 44, 65–6 Orange Lodges 8 Oxford University xii, xiii, 6, 25–6 Palmer, George 63 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount (Temple, Henry) 23, 77 parliamentary reform xiv, 2, 23, 28–30, 32, 36, 70, 99–100 Peace Preservation Act (Ireland) 1814, 10–11 Peel, Sir Robert (Jnr): biographical details xii–xvi, 84; baronetcy 6, 28; birth 5; charitable donations 59–60; Chief Secretary for Ireland xii–xiii, 6–11, 18, 23, 25; death xvi, 1, 84; economic, trade and financial policy xiii, xv–xvi, 12–14, 37–8, 51–2, 55–9, 64, 70–2, 77; election strategy 40–1, 48–52; executive government 53–61, 78, 98; family 5, 28, 83; Home

105

Secretary xiii, xiv, 14, 16–20, 22–30; Irish policy xii–xiii, 6–11, 18, 23, 25, 65–8; last years 81–4; marriage (to Julia Floyd), xiii; memorials and monuments to 1–2, 84; opposition in 1830s 32–47, 85; parliamentary reform 29–30, 32, 36, 39–42; party organisation 45–6; political philosophy 2–4, 32–6, 39–41, 45–7, 51–2, 53–4, 56, 62–3, 66–8, 72–4, 77, 85–6; Prime Minister xiv–xv, 1–4, 25, 34–5, 41, 43, 45, 48–9, 53–80; reputation 82–8; resignation as prime minister xiv, xv, 44, 52, 79–80; resumption of Cash Payments 1819 (Peel’s Act) 13–14; Under-Secretary for War and Colonies xii, 7 Peel, Sir Robert (Snr, father of prime minister) 5, 6, 13, 28 Peelites xvi, 80, 82–4 Peterloo Massacre 15 Pitt, William (the Younger) 3, 6, 7, 12, 15, 18, 32, 34, 57, 64, 71, 86 Place, Francis 16, 18 police reforms xiv, 16, 18–19, 27 Pontefract 64 poor law policy 31, 59, 63 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 31, 36, 59, 63 Portland, Duke of (Bentinck, William, 3rd Duke) 6 potato famine (Ireland, 1845–7) xv, 71–2 Presbyterians 8 Prince Regent 7; see also George IV Principles of Political Economy and Taxation 12–13 prison reform 16–17 protection see agricultural protection Protectionists 51–2, 55, 70–80, 82, 100 Protestant Ascendancy (Ireland) 8, 11 Quarterly Review 48 ‘radicals’ 35–7, 44, 64, 100 railways 28 ‘reciprocity’ of duties 76 Reform Act (1832) 28–30, 31, 36, 40, 44, 45–6, 50, 99–100

Reform Act (1867) 51 registration of births, marriages and deaths 31 registration of voters 46 Ricardo, David 12 Ripon, Earl of 54, 55 Robinson, F.J. 14–15, 20, 22, 54, 57, 71 Roman Catholics 2, 8–11, 23–7, 65–7, 96 Romilly, Samuel 16 Rowan, Charles 19 Russell, Lord John xv, 17, 23, 43, 44, 49–50, 77 Salisbury 75 Scotland 50, 99 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 7th Earl) xv, 60–1, 64 Sibthorp, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo 78 Sidmouth, Viscount (Addington, Henry) 14 Smith, Adam 2, 13, 70 ‘social question’ 47, 59–61, 100 Staffordshire 5, 18, 40, 60 Stanley, Edward (14th Earl of Derby) xiv, 43, 54, 77 sugar duties 58, 64 Tamworth xiv, 5, 63 Tamworth Manifesto xiv, 40–1, 52, 63 taxation policies 13–14, 37–8, 51–2, 55–9 ‘Ten Hours’ campaign 60–1, 63, 64, 65 Test and Corporations Acts, repeal of 23, 98, 101 Tierney, George 21 Times, The 45 tithes 36 Tooke, Thomas 58 Torrens, Richard 75–6 Tory Party xiv–xvi, 2–4, 6, 11, 13, 20, 21–30, 32, 39–47, 49, 54, 60–1, 62–9, 70–80, 85–6, 101 trade unions 16, 18 ‘Ultra’ Tories (Ultras) 23–7, 32, 33–4, 39–42, 101

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Vansittart, Nicholas 12, 15 Victoria, Queen xiv, 35, 37, 48, 77, 81, 96 Warwickshire 60 Waterloo, Battle of (1815) 16, 19 Wealth of Nations (1776) 2 Wellington, Duke of (Wellesley, Arthur, 1st Duke) xii, xiii, xv, 3, 6, 17, 19–20, 21, 22–8, 30, 34, 54, 76 Welsh, Sir John 42

Westmorland, Earl (Fane, John, 10th Earl) 21 Whig Party xiv–xvi, 2, 16, 17, 21–30, 31–8, 40–4, 48–52, 45, 57, 59–60, 63, 64–5, 67–8, 72, 77–80, 81, 83, 96–7, 100, 101 Whitworth, Charles (Viscount) 8 William IV 29, 32, 34–5, 36–7, 40, 45 Wood, Sir Charles xvi, 82 Yorkshire 37

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