Sir Robert Peel

Statesmanship, Power and Party

Eric J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415366151
• eBook ISBN: 9781134225224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Sir Robert Peel provides an accessible and concise introduction to the life and career of one of the most political leaders of the nineteenth century. Perhaps best known for seeing through the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Peel had an enormous impact on 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 which 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.

Sir Robert Peel is the perfect introduction for all students of nineteenth-century history.

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 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 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 break-up 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?

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 econ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to second edition
• Chronology
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The young statesman, 1809–18
• 3: Peel, the Home Office and ‘Liberal Toryism’, 1819–30
• 4: The collapse of the old Tory party, 1827–32
• 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
• 8: Executive government under Peel, 1841–6
• 9: Peel and backbench Toryism, 1841–5
• 10: The repeal of the Corn Laws and the fall of Peel
• 11: Conclusion: Reputation and evaluation, 1846–50 and beyond
• Select bibliography
• Glossary of key terms
• A library at your fingertips!
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