BRITISH PRIME MINISTER - SIR ROBERT PEEL
Robert Peel, was born 5th February, 1788, near Bury in Lancashire. His father, who had raised himself from a comparatively humble station to be the largest cotton manufacturer in the world, was created a baronet in 1800, and left behind him a fortune of nearly £2,000,000. of which the largest share was inherited by his eldest son Robert.
He entered Harrow, and afterwards went to Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1807 he took a double first. He entered Parliament as a Tory in 1809, at the age of 21, he was selected as a member for Cashel and in the following year 1810 Lord Liverpool appointed him under-secretary for war and the colonies. This office he held until 1812, when he was 24 he became chief secretary for Ireland for 6 years, during which period he fought the growing influence of O'Connell, opposed Catholic emancipation and established. the Royal Irish Constabulary. In 1817 he was elected representative of the University of Oxford. The following year he resigned his office in the ministry, of which he still continued to be a supporter, and began to take a leading part in the discussion of the difficult financial questions then pending.
He had not always seemed a likely guide in the darkness. After all, in 1819 he had said of Peterloo that " it was better that blood should have been shed, than that the meeting of the 16th August should have proceeded ", and in the Reform Bill struggles he had remained aloof and hostile; but he never retreated into impossible positions, and he was always ready to deal with questions as they arose on their merits. Ever willing to learn from experts, for whom he had a high regard, he was also diligent in un-learning much that he had been taught in his political nursery. He became a good guide just because he changed his mind so frequently, not as a result of meditation on general ideas, or on abstract principles, but because he was confronted throughout his life with what he recognized were fresh issues. In the words of his envious admirer Guizot, Peel was "a man of essentially practical mind, consulting facts at every step, just as the mariner consults the face of heaven".
In 1822 he became part of Liverpool's Cabinet as home secretary, this office he retained until the Premier's death in 1827. His reforms included the reduction in the number of capital crimes, prison amelioration and Peel also passed the New Metropolitan Police Act, which gave rise to the new nicknames Bobbies and Peelers for the London police. He joined the ministry of the Duke of Wellington in 1828 as home secretary and leader of the House of Commons.
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In 1829, being convinced of its necessity
for the peace of Ireland, supported Wellington's measure for Catholic emancipation. The principal act of this ministry was the passing of the Roman Catholic relief bill, which cost Peel his seat for Oxford. In 1830 he succeeded his father as baronet. At the close of this year the ministry resigned in consequence of the increasing agitation for parliamentary reform, and were succeeded by the reform ministry of Earl Grey. Peel strenuously opposed the bill, but after it became law he declared his intention frankly to accept it, and began vigorously to prepare his party for the change in its circumstances. In the election of 1832 he was returned for Tamworth, for which he continued to sit during the remainder of his life. |
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Robert Peel with the Duke of Wellington |
In opposition he set himself the task of organising the Conservative party, the very existence of which seemed bound up in him. Both he and the country gentlemen were conscious of the fact. As a lobby correspondent wrote m 1836, " he can do with them and make of them what he pleases ....... he knows that he may with impunity conceal from them what particular course he intends to pursue on any given question, and that, however much they may disapprove of that course they will soon be compelled, by the necessity of the case, to feign, if they do not feel, a disposition to acquiesce in it ". The acquiescence persisted down to 1841, although it was strained more than once by Peel's insistence that, even in opposition, factious alliances and opportunist contacts should be avoided, and that all his supporters should be content, even without responsibility, to hold " the principles generally said to belong to a government ".
Brought up in a world where fear of Jacobinism was strong enough to paralyse most efforts at reforming initiative, he was able to say even before he came into office in 1841 that " the disturbing influence of foreign example has diminished ....... the affections of the people are visibly gravitating again to their old centre - full of a respect for property, a love of rational freedom, and an attachment to long established institutions."
In 1839, when Melbourne resigned, he was invited to form his second government, but abandoned the task in consequence of the ' bedchamber question '. The general election of 1841 gave Sir Robert Peel a large majority, he held no office save that of the first lord of the Treasury, but he was for all effective purposes chancellor of the Exchequer. As Prime Minister once again he had to make policy as well as discuss it, the strains and tensions within his party were accentuated.
Never side-tracked into problems of political reform,
he concentrated on the difficult issues which seemed to him to be of central importance in a rapidly changing society,
even when such concentration meant breaking ties of connexion and party. Between 1841 and 1846 his achievements
were real and visible. His opponents could not deny that trade prospered, that the people were contented, that
the labourer had a greater command than he ever had over the necessaries and comforts of life, that Chartism is
extinguished - at least fast asleep - that the Church is stronger than it ever was ........ that
any wish for organic change in the constitution - for addition to popular privileges - is dormant, that the revenue
is so prosperous that our calculations of deficiency are constantly baffled, that our monetary system is sounder
than it has been, and yet that there has been boundless activity in commerce and in all speculations of gain, and
that even land is increasing in value, in consequence of the prosperity of commerce . All these improvements depended
not only on natural forces but on the influence of the administration, and above all on Peel himself. Such was
the energy and zeal he brought to bear on securing his objectives, that he became a national example of sustained
industry and unstinted service. The limitations of a Ten Hours Bill he never applied to himself. Despite strains
and sacrifices,
Peel's ministry of 1841-6 laid the foundations of Victorian England. It was then that all his finest qualities
were revealed; for although the range of administrative activity was more restricted than it was even at the end
of the nineteenth century, the problems to be tackled almost all demanded thoroughness of grasp and freshness of
approach. Peel impressed his personality and his outlook on his well-balanced Cabinet with exceptional force. Though
he stressed the importance of departmental investigation, he himself strictly supervised the business of each branch
of government. As Lord Rosebery, who called him " the model of all Prime Ministers ", said, " he
was Conversant with all departmental questions, and formed and enforced opinions on them. And, though he had an
able Chancellor of the Exchequer, in whom he had full confidence, he himself introduced the great budget of 1842
and that of 1845. The War Office, the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, the administration of India and of Ireland
felt his personal influence as much as the Treasury or the Board of Trade." Much more than a coordinator,
Peel was the presiding genius of his administration; but the strain of his office told on him severely, particularly
during the political battles of his last two years in power.
In 1845, for instance, he wrote that he defied "
the Minister of this country to read all that he ought to read, including the whole foreign correspondence; to
keep up constant communication with the Queen, and
the Prince ; to see all whom he ought
to see; to superintend the grant of honours and the disposal of civil and ecclesiastical patronage; ( Talking of the personal strain of the Prime
Minister's office Sir Robert Peel stressed in his letter to Cobden in 1846 " the odious power which patronage
confers " as being one of the heaviest of his duties )
to write with his own hand to every person of note who chooses to write to him; to be prepared for every debate
including the most trumpery concerns; to do all these indispensable things, and also sit in the House of Commons
eight hours a day for 118 days. It is impossible for me not to feel that the duties are incompatible, and above
all human strength - at least above mine ".
Even before the formation of the ministry in 1841, Macaulay had warned Peel that " it was very easy to lose
the confidence of the party which raised him to power, but very difficult to gain the confidence of the people
of Ireland "; and after the final cleavage of 1846 Peel himself confessed that he was more surprised that
the union was so long maintained than that it was ultimately severed. The elements of discord went deep. Some of
them were in part temperamental. Peel had begun his political career with the real and important advantages of
an independent fortune, a university reputation, and the presence of a respected father in the House of Commons.
But he also suffered from the handicap of a cautious and often apparently cold disposition - he reminded Ashley
of " an iceberg with a slight thaw on the surface ". The aloofness was accentuated by the social circumstances
of his birth and the manufacturing basis of his wealth. Angry representatives of the landed interest were always
capable of ignoring his administrative reputation and remembering that he was, after all, merely " the Spinning
Jenny ".
Peel as a financier proved
himself extremely capable, and introduced many reforms; in the session of 1842 the most important measures were
the sliding-scale, by which a considerable reduction was made on the duties on the importation of corn ; the imposition
of an income-tax for three years, taxed incomes over £150 per annum, which with various alterations has continued
to be levied to the present time ; he took steps to develop free trade, In 1844 and 1845 he passed his celebrated
English and Scotch Banking Charter Act, which still regulates the country's currency. The Canada-Oregon border
dispute was settled.
Peel's accepted the necessity of change in politics, and thereby stood out among European statesmen as an enlightened exponent of progressive and constitutional government. In an age of profound social conflicts and of challenge to all established institutions, he was always ready in the last resort to avoid disorder, conflagration and bloodshed, by accepting faits accomplis. He laid down the pattern of his future action when, after having attacked Catholic Emancipation for many years, he came to admit that " the pressure of present evils is so great and overwhelming, that I am willing to encounter the risk of ...... contingent dangers, rather than, in the existing situation of the country (Ireland), to endure, not only the continuance, but the aggravation of the present system ".
Peel admitted that the opinions he had previously entertained had undergone a great change, but he could not expect his followers opinions to change quite so drastically. In time many of them showed that they were far from being mere clay in the hands of the potter. They no longer felt compelled to acquiesce in courses of action with which they completely disapproved, particularly where those courses touched their own interests. The position was not made any easier by Peel's approach to the problem of parliamentary discipline.
He was only half right when he wrote to Hardinge in 1845 that
" people like a certain degree of obstinacy and presumption in a minister. They abuse him for dictation and arrogance, but they all like being governed ".
This claim was probably reasonable so long as the country party could find no alternative sources of leadership; but in 1845-6, already disturbed, they became more and more openly suspicious of Peel, remembering old instances of " treachery ".
Peel himself while a great Prime Minister, was never willing to become a popular politician. The centre of his political stage was Parliament. A great House of Commons man, he revered the decisions of Parliament, it was said, as if they were the ordinances of heaven. In his Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli described how Peel, " who in private life was constrained and often awkward, who could never address a public meeting or make an after-dinner speech without being ill at ease, and generally saying something stilted or even a little ridiculous, in the senate was the readiest, easiest, most flexible and adroit of men. He played upon the House of Commons as on an old fiddle." Supreme in Parliament, he refused to see politics in terms of crowds gathered at public meetings. " Fatal must be the consequences to this country, if government is to be deterred, by popular clamour, from the performance of its duty . " Even when the clamour was associated with the pursuit of correct principles, it had to be watched.
The challenge to the great ministry of 1841- 46 did not merely come from a few ambitious men, or from, ignorant M.P.s. It came from frightened men who felt that their interests had been betrayed. The administrative problems with which Peel wrestled contained political dynamite. While he was carrying out his vast programme of fiscal reform, he was relentlessly undermining the foundations of the party he had created from the post 1832 wreckage. The country gentlemen were hostile to the programme of free trade by installments, particularly when it came to the last installment in the catalogue; and in March 1845 their relations with the administration were so strained that Graham could write: " the country gentlemen cannot be more ready to give us the death blow than we are to receive it. If they will rush on their own destruction, they must have their way."
Peel ushered in what Professor Burn has fittingly called " the age of equipoise " Peel was neither willing to stand with the country gentlemen on an impossible line of defence nor to advance with the Manchester School to an untakable vantage point. In some ways he was perfectly fined to represent a reasonable balance of interests. His family had helped to create Lancashire, but if they were cotton magnates they were also improving landlords.
Agriculture and industry had to move together, and not in opposition to each other. At times the balance seemed somewhat tilted in favour of industry, and that was what made Cobden, in his strange love-hate relationship with Peel, exclaim at an Anti-Corn Law League meeting, " I do not altogether like to give up Peel. You see he is a Lancashire man." ( Ebenezer Elliott, the Anti-Corn Law rhymer, commented in 1842, " Peel, I have long thought, understands our position, and will do his best to prevent the coming catastrophe, but he wants moral courage. " ) Cobden was blindly wrong, however, when he thought that Peel might rule England in the name of Lancashire. Peel was as aware as Disraeli, but more realistically so, of the dangers of " a dull succession of enormous manufacturing towns, connected by railways, intersecting abandoned tracts which it was no longer profitable to cultivate ". In his speech announcing the repeal proposals he continued to claim, as he had always maintained, that " the land is subject to particular burdens " and that equivalent compensation in some form or other is necessary to replace the unconditional loss of duty.
He refused to contemplate anything like a new middle-class system of government, which might have meant revision of the taxation system and further assaults on the social position of the landlord. Repeal had been necessary in the national interest, and not in the interests of one class. This was the fundamental thesis which Peel proclaimed after his defeat in the Coercion Bill debate, when he urged that the object of the repeal had been " to terminate a conflict which, according to our belief, would soon place in hostile collision great and powerful classes in this country ".
During the recess in 1845
the potato-rot and famine in Ireland brought the question of the corn-laws to a crisis. The anti Corn Law League
led by Cobden and Bright, wanted the duty on imported corn repealed for which there was strong agitation throughout
the country. Peel was at first opposed to the repeal of the corn laws, but after the failure of the harvest, he
became convinced of its necessity. The act repealing the corn-laws (after a modified duty for three years of a
nominal sum of 1s) was the climax . He was bitterly attacked for his change of face on this question, but he had
earlier laid down the principle which guided him: "As minister of the crown I reserve to myself, distinctly
and unequivocally, the right of adapting my conduct to the exigency of the moment and to the wants of the country
"'.
With a reserved dignity, tempered even with mild contempt, Peel rejected Cobden's proposals, after the repeal of the corn laws in 26th June 1846, that he should dissolve Parliament and go to the hustings with the election cry of " Peel and Free Trade ". He could not consider himself seriously in such a role. " If you say that I individually at this moment embody or personify an idea ( ' the idea of the age ' ) be it so. Then I must be very careful that, being the organ and representative of a prevailing conception of the public mind, I do not sully that which I represent by warranting the suspicion even, that I am using the power it confers for any personal object ........ I must also ask you to consider this. After the passing of the Corn and Customs Bill, considering how much trade has suffered of late from delays, debates, and uncertainty as to the final result, does not this country stand in need of repose? Would not a desperate political conflict throughout the length and breadth of the land impair or defer the beneficial effect of the passing of those measures? " On the same day as Peel carried his Corn Law Bill through the ministry was defeated in the House of Commons on the Irish Coercion Bill, all the half-hidden grievances were out into the open .
Although Peel had expected a break he was shocked, as he always was at times of political crisis, by the violence of the disintegration and the sharp antitheses of outlook it produced. The duel between Peel and Disraeli provided a recurring drama in politics - the battle between the experienced administrator, forced to be didactic, and the youthful rebel, forced to combat experience with imagination. Disraeli reveled in the opportunity of exploiting memories of betrayal and charges of misappropriation; and he deserved Ponsonby's handsome tribute that " I doubt if any classic orator of Rome or England ever did anything so well as you crucified Peel. Had I been him, I would have rushed at and murdered you, or run home and hanged myself ". Peel was forced resign with Lord John Russell forming a Whig ministry .
Disraeli was not content with a crucifixion scene: he profited from the divisions of 1846 to enunciate ideas of party, which went much further than Peel himself or current usage accepted. While Peel looked at posterity to justify him, Disraeli pointed out that posterity was a limited assembly, " not much more numerous than the planets ", and that in the last resort free politics were more dangerous than free trade. He had a word of constitutional advice: " Maintain the line of demarcation between parties, for it is only by maintaining the independence of parties that you can maintain the integrity of public men, and the power and influence of Parliament itself."
This doctrine was never accepted dogmatically by Disraeli, and it certainly did not correspond to Peel's view of the constitutional practice of the past or the plain facts of 1846 itself. One of Peel's admirers, Sidney Herbert, presented exactly the opposite thesis when he remarked, " it has been said that party is part of our constitution. I think it is contrary to the whole spirit of our constitution ".
Had Peel been more theoretical and less practical he could never have earned Cobden's tribute in 1846 that " you represent the idea of the age, and it has no other representative among statesmen ". It was Peel's practical interest in the three great economic and social issues of the first half of the century - " cash, corn - ( The export and import of corn had been controlled in England since the middle ages. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Corn Law of 1815 allowed corn to come into the country completely free at over 80s. a quarter, but prohibited imports entirely at a lower price. Although a sliding scale was introduced in 1828, and Peel further simplified and lowered it in 1842, the Free-traders demanded a complete repeal of" the Bread Taxes ) - and Catholics " - which ensured his mid-century reputation. To each of these questions, which touched many vested interests, and raised much public clamour, Peel brought a severely ordered private judgment. Rejecting policies based on ideal states of society or on complicated chains of theoretical argument, he worked out administrative solutions to meet what he considered to be " public necessities".
The issues of 1846 were thus sharply defined at the time ; but it is doubtful whether in the decades after, Peel's
sense of duty to his conscience, to his sovereign and to posterity, could continue in English politics . To contemporaries
there seemed to be an object lesson in this successful blend of old and new. The lesson was driven home in 1846,
when Continental writers were astonished to see a bloodless revolution carried through by one man, when England
avoided all but the distant tremors of political revolutions on the Continent . As leader of the opposition he supported many of the measures of the government
of Lord John Russell, who succeeded him; but the policy of Lord Palmerston after the revolution crisis of 1848
- 49 evoked from him a more active hostility.
On 29th June,1850, he was thrown from his horse, on Constitution Hill and received injuries from which he died 3 days later. By his will he renounced a peerage for his family, as he had before declined the Garter for himself . Foreign writers lamented the passing of the most distinguished European statesman; and in 1851 when the Great Exhibition was thought to demonstrate finally how "superior " was the Peelite method " of giving the people gradually those privileges which would satisfy all the reasonable and well-intentioned, and would weaken the power of the Red Republicans ".
Bagehot, writing in the 1850's, once declared that the world of the Six Acts - ( Six Acts, 1819. One forbade any meeting of more than 50 persons unless notice was given to a magistrate six days in advance by not less than seven householders. Others prohibited the use of arms and the instruction of persons in military exercises, increased the punishment for seditious libel and imposed stamp duties on certain publications. ) - seemed so far removed from his countrymen that they could not comprehend its ever having existed. The statesman most responsible for the general lapse of memory was Sir Robert Peel. By the time that he died in mid-century, on the eve of the Great Exhibition, England's prospects of progress and order were at last secure. Peel's share in the achievement was generally recognized, for as the Times remarked in his obituary notice, " under Providence, Peel has been our chief guide from the confusions and darkness that hung round the beginning of this century to the comparatively quiet haven in which we are now embayed ".
Even after his death, his administrative preeminence, founded on a deep sense of responsibility and public duty, inspired the band of Peelites, who remained true to their leader to the end of their lives.' ( As the Duke of Newcastle wrote to Lady Peel in December 1851 " He is my leader still, though invisible. I never take a step in public life without reflecting, how would he have thought of it." ) Vigour and industry, however, failed to fascinate those who wanted politics to be perpetually fierce and exciting. It had always been so. Men had contrasted Canning and Peel in the early 1820's. The force of Canning's oratory had thrilled them to admiration and hatred. Peel they associated with subjects which often appeared barren and uninviting, like the reform of the Criminal Law, introduced by Peel himself with the serious and somewhat sombre words that the subject could " borrow no excitement from political feelings, nor can it awaken the hopes or fears of conflicting parties; but it involves higher interests - it concerns the security of property - the prevention of crime, the moral habits of the people ". There were many subjects of this sort in the 1840's, and Peel had to appear far more frequently as a teacher than as a prophet. As Disraeli, who was not preoccupied with the cares of administration, once said, " Peel had to deal with greater details than his predecessors and he had in many instances to address those who were deficient in previous knowledge. Something of the lecture, therefore, entered into his displays."
In his youth he had sometimes been described as " the
sublime of mediocrity "; but
by 1850, as the newspapers pointed out, he had far outstripped his school-fellow Byron as the idol of the public,
and even the industrious poor were collecting thousands to build a statue to his memory, in scores of provincial
towns. Indeed, he became a hero of the gospel of work, revealed to the mid-Victorian nation as an ideal type to
which all should aspire. In any comparative examination of the story of the different European nations between
Waterloo and Sarajevo, the administration of Peel stands out as one of Britain's distinctive contributions to the
framework of modern government. As Peel's grandson pointed out, " the age in which he flourished was one of
revolutions on the Continent, and of reforms at home ". Without those reforms there could have been no golden
age of Victorian Britain.
However good Peelites, like Gladstone, faithful
to the financial heritage, the administrative legacy and the personal memory of Peel, had to free themselves from
some of Peel's restraints before they could become great politicians, or even, new-style Prime Ministers.
