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Peel
A Verray Parfit Gentil Knyght
I very well agree with you in the hopes of him. It is a gallant child; one that indeed physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh. They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man.
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
Whom the Gods love, die young.
Byron, Don Juan
I
IT IS HARD TO KNOW WHETHER to envy or to pity the third and favourite son of Sir Robert Peel. From the day William Peel was born at the family’s London home in 1824 he moved in a world of wealth and privilege, the gifted and beautiful child of a beautiful and devoted mother, the darling boy of a father who did not, on the whole, go in for ‘darlings’, the grandson on one side of a distinguished general and on the other of a Staffordshire manufacturer with the energy to create a fortune and the dynastic ambition to set his family on the course that would take them from the industrial Midlands to Downing Street and a position of power and respect unrivalled in nineteenth-century Britain.
There might well be men in every generation with the gifts of William Peel, but to be born with the right talents at the right time and in the right place is an altogether rarer blessing. If William had belonged to an earlier or later generation of the Peels’ evolutionary cycle his fate and character might have been very different, but he was born while the family fortunes were at their apogee, at that brief, transitory moment in its history when everything was in place to nurture success and nothing of the drive and purpose that had first earned it had yet been forgotten.
In the classic paradigm of English social life, it has always taken three generations to make a ‘gentleman’, but with the Peels the process was slightly longer. The founder of the family fortunes in the middle of the eighteenth century was a Lancashire cotton manufacturer known as ‘Parsley’ Peel, and even when his son – the first Sir Robert, a Pittite MP rewarded for his loyalty with a baronetcy – sent his oldest child, the future Prime Minister, to Harrow and Christ Church there were still vowels to be smoothed and table manners to be polished before a Peel could finally emerge from their manufacturing chrysalis as the ‘beau ideal’ of Victorian manhood.
The Peels themselves would always see something of his father’s look in the young William – ‘the same glance of the eye, the same lurking smile playing about the corners of the mouth’ – but family portraits tell a rather different tale. There is a wonderful Lawrence of the first Sir Robert that captures all the shrewd acumen of the great industrialist, but place it, or even the Linnel portrait of the young Prime Minister Peel, alongside any likeness of William and the difference is plain – not just a difference of appearance, a refining of features, a tempering of all coarseness, but a sort of thoroughbred nervousness, an air of spirituality almost, that signals both the rise of the family and the gulf that separates the age of Byron and Frank Hastings from that of Thomas Arnold and William Peel.
With the brains of his father, the looks of his mother, the inherited courage and energy of his ancestry, and a magnetism all his own, William Peel has claims in fact to be seen as the fine point of a particularly English process of social evolution. In his Memoir of the great Sir Robert, the French historian and statesman Guizot hazarded the guess that ‘God seldom accords to a man so many favours,’ and that might have been said with even more truth of the Prime Minister’s favourite son. To those who knew him, and perpetuated his memory, the future Sir William Peel VC KCB seemed to have been given everything. Where his father was grudgingly admired or respected, William was loved by everyone who met him. Where Sir Robert’s massive, slow-grinding, utilitarian intelligence took him reluctantly to unpalatable truths, William’s quicksilver mind seized on opportunities. Where Sir Robert’s slow rise to the top was marred by bitter dispute, William’s brief career was effortless in its inevitability. When he wrote his juvenile letters home, it went without saying that the Duke of Wellington was given them to read. When he passed his exams with unparalleled speed and brilliance, nobody was surprised that speeches of congratulation were made in Parliament. When he spoke French, Frenchmen assumed he had been brought up in France. When he learned Arabic, he spoke it as well as he did English in six months. And when, at the age of thirteen, he entered the navy, its admirals merely awaited the time when he was to take up his predestined place at its summit.
If this seems too good to be the whole story, that is because it probably is; but what certainly remains true is that he arrived at a moment in history when the country at large was ready to embrace a Peel. The first Sir Robert had taken the family as far socially and politically as any eighteenth-century industrialist might well do, but by the birth of his grandson in the 1820s, the next crucial peak had already been conquered, with a Peel – the second Sir Robert – securely entrenched in the high office that a formidable career at Oxford and a typical and grimly formative political apprenticeship in Ireland had always promised.
And while all the great battles and achievements of Robert Peel’s career – a police force, tariff reform, Catholic Emancipation, the Irish Church, the Corn Laws – still lay in the future, he was clearly the coming man. The long afterglow of Waterloo would always give the Duke of Wellington a unique position in public life, but with the transition from war to peace, and the gradual fading of a generation of politicians – Castlereagh, Liverpool, Canning, Eldon – whose careers and ideas had been shaped by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, there would be nobody on either side of the house for the next twenty-five years who could remotely rival Peel’s abilities or authority.
It was not just in politics that the ’20s proved a crucial decade for the Peel dynasty, because at the age of thirty-two Robert married a twenty-five-year-old heiress and beauty he had first met in Ireland called Julia Floyd. Julia was the orphaned daughter of a cavalry general whose career had stretched from the Seven Years War to the Siege of Seringapatam, and if the spirit she would show during the rural unrest of 1842 is any guide, was not just the source of her son’s good looks but the conduit for that extraordinary physical bravery that marked his whole naval career.
It would be impossible to find a more devoted couple than Robert and Julia Peel, or fonder parents, and their thirty years of married life present almost a caricature of proto-Victorian domesticity. They had been married in Julia’s stepmother’s Seymour Street drawing room in June 1820, and a daughter – another Julia – was born the following year, followed in regulation succession by Robert, Frederick and – on 2 November 1824 – William, the last of the children to be born in Peel’s old bachelor house before the family moved to the Whitehall home Sir Robert Smirke had built for them on the banks of the Thames.
There were two more sons, John and Arthur, and another daughter, Eliza, and from the glimpses of family life in correspondence, their early years were enveloped in a protective cocoon of love and attention. As the children got older they would inevitably be exposed to the fall-out of their father’s politics, but in a succession of rented country houses and then in the great, ugly architectural mishmash that the ubiquitous Smirke built to replace the old manor at Drayton, Julia – the least political of political wives – did everything she could to provide a family retreat from the uproar over Catholic Emancipation, Maynooth or the Corn Laws.
But even at Drayton, where the portraits of Sir Robert’s contemporaries stared down in admonitory gloom from the great gallery, there could have been no escaping the burden of obligation that came with being a Peel. ‘I there saw Sir Robert Peel in the bosom of his family,’ Guizot wrote some years later, capturing with a nicely Gallic touch the faintly claustrophobic Tory idyll in which the young William Peel was formed,
and in the midst of the population of his estates: Lady Peel still beautiful, personably and modestly devoted to her husband; a charming daughter … three sons … Altogether, a beautiful domestic existence, grand and simple, and broadly active: in the interior of the house an affectionate gravity, less animated, less expansive, less easy than our manners desire or permit; political recollections perpetuated in a gallery of portraits, most of them of contemporaries … Out of doors, between the landlord and the surrounding population, a great distance, strongly marked in manners, but filled up by frequent relations. Full of equity and benevolence on the part of the superior, without any appearance of envy or servility on the part of the inferiors. I there beheld one of the happiest examples of the legitimate hierarchy of position and persons, without any aristocratic recollection or pretentions, and amid a general and natural feeling of right and respect.
It says a lot for the moral and intellectual authority of Sir Robert Peel that his son William never consciously kicked against the political and social assumptions that underlay this idyll. The chequered careers of William’s brothers, particularly the oldest, Robert, underline just how oppressive it might have felt, but from his earliest, precocious years the principal things that drove him – and the standards by which he judged himself – were the approval of his father and the recognition and acclaim of that public and masculine world that washed through Drayton.
It would arguably take the death of Sir Robert, in fact, to free him from the invisible strands of family expectations, but there was something about even the infant William that bedded down uneasily with his predestined role in life. ‘I had a comfortless journey,’ his father wrote home in 1828, in a letter that gives the first, unlikely glimpse of the future hero of Sevastopol and Lucknow, ‘and really, at the first stage, had half a mind to return to you and those dear little ones that I left acting Thurtell and Weare. God bless little Julia, asking me who there was besides Hunt and Probert,* in order that she might find an appropriate character for little Willy. Poor little fellow, he is but a bad representative of a murderer.’
In many ways, in fact, the highly strung, physically delicate, fastidious and over-sensitive William would remain the most unlikely of killers. Throughout his life he suffered from bouts of depressive ill-health, and in some respects his whole career seems a triumph of willpower over temperament, a victory – if it should be seen as such – for the Peelite virtues of energy, ambition, power, duty and masculine virility over an innate softness of nature that would always make him more receptive to a pressed flower or a sister’s ball dress than was customary in the Victorian hero.
He was a wonderfully spirited lad, and yet if there seems never to have been a time when he did not want to enter the navy, it is perhaps just as pertinent that there was never a time when his father did not want him to go into it. Sir Robert had himself grown up against the background of the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and he had enough of those Johnsonian instincts about the military life to push his spirited young son into fulfilling some of those dormant urgings that always left him in such awe of the Great Duke. ‘I have always had a strong presentiment from my Boy’s earliest infancy,’ he wrote to the Earl of Haddington, on William’s promotion to lieutenant, ‘(for his heart was fixed on the Navy when he was a child of 3 years old) that he was destined (if his life should be spared) to very great eminence in the Profession. He will most assuredly attain it.’
William was not the first child to be saddled with his father’s martial ambitions – by the end of Victoria’s reign it would become the stuff of A.E.W. Mason’s novels – but in an age in which the boundaries between the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ spheres of home and public life were ever more strictly policed, the pressures on a boy who might find ‘the Duke’ reading his letters must have been all the greater. ‘My dearest Papa and Mamma,’ he would write wistfully at the age of just seventeen, three thousand miles from ‘dear old Drayton’ and bound for the First Opium War, ‘this is Christmas evening, and I indeed wish you a very merry and happy one. Though I cannot join the dear family circle which I hope is pressing at this moment round the cheering fire, yet I find it my greatest pleasure and real happiness to take up my letter and hold a distant correspondence with you, and think how happy you must be and what you are doing now.’
It is as impossible to quantify the cost of this kind of dislocation for William as it is for Victorian society at large, yet even at seventeen Eden and the prelapsarian world of his dearest Mamma and the dear family circle were only distant memories. By the time William was ten his father had already become Prime Minister for the first time, and if the real world was held at bay for a while by the Revd F.J. Faithful’s private school at Hatfield, the respite was brief. By the age of twelve family theatricals, Mrs Faithful, ‘thick trousers … snowballing … dreadful battles and armies’ at Hatfield belonged to the past, and a very different and brutally masculine future was closing in. And if the second Sir Robert had been looking for a perfect induction into the casual savagery of life ahead for his favourite son, he could not have done better. He sent him to Harrow.
II
If there has ever been a good time to go to Harrow it certainly was not the 1830s. Sir Robert had been at the school at the beginning of the century in the golden age of Byron and Palmerston, but by the time William joined his brothers there a new headmaster was beginning his long and – if John Addington Symonds’s fond memories of ‘“Bitches”, onanism, mutual masturbation … and obscene orgies’ are to be believed – losing battle for the souls and bodily temples of the uncontrollable sexual delinquents and future empire-builders in his charge.
Even as loyal and robust a Harrovian as Robert Peel would eventually be obliged by scandals, expulsions, falling rolls and suspicions of ritualism to remove his sons, but on 12 April 1837 William was taken down by his mother and placed in the unctuous care of the Revd William Whitmarsh Phelps at Harrow Park. The son of a modest West Country schoolmaster, Phelps had won a closed scholarship to Corpus in the summer of Waterloo, and after finding Christ Crucified at Oxford, had embarked on that classical Evangelical accommodation with the things of this world that would eventually lead him to Harrow, ownership of ‘The Park’ and an archdeaconry. ‘Who is the tutor that would express indifference to a position of trust at one of our distinguished schools, as Harrow,’ asked his Victorian apologist, the Slope-like Revd Charles Hole, ‘while watching the early years of many bearing historic names, who might themselves be guiding the national destinies, and working in influential spheres of English welfare … Mr Phelps was not indifferent to any of it.’
It would have been hard in any circumstances for the son of a Prime Minister to have been unaware of his position, but the deference of the Revd Phelps cannot have helped. In many ways William would remain remarkably immune to the prejudices and assumptions of his class, but there was always an element of self-consciousness and entitlement about him – an awareness of the Peel name – that probably had as much to do with the clerical meekness of the Revd Phelps as with the enlightened self-interest of naval captains anxious to turn Sir Robert’s son into a kind of glorified Admiralty pet.
It is difficult to gauge what other influence Phelps had on him – on his English or Classics, none it would seem, on his intense and distinctive spirituality probably just as little – but if another Peel was precisely the sort of pupil he was after, he was not to have him for long. ‘I have only therefore to express my sincere thanks to you for the care you have taken of my boys committed to your charge,’ Sir Robert was writing soothingly to him within the year, ‘and my sincere regret at the necessity of withdrawing them from your superintendence.’
Sir Robert’s regret did not stop him sending his younger boys to Eton, or loosen the public purse strings when Phelps came looking for preferment, but it is unlikely that he could...
