The British today have even more opportunity than the Victorians did to be successful. The basic standard of living of the people is better and the knowledge of what works is far advanced. Yet if we cannot share the inner belief and self-confidence that propelled the Victorians we will stand still, petrified as other nations overtake us. Margaret Thatcher showed how the new Victorian spirit can work and reinvigorate a failing nation. Since she left office, the forces of stagnation, trepidation and hesitation have returned. These heroes of old who possessed belief and patriotism, a sense of duty, a confidence in progress and knowledge of civilisation have shown us what can be done, even if the Lytton Stracheys of this world disbelieved and mocked them. He was wrong. The truth is that Victorian Britain was not the society of a funny little old woman but one of greatness, nobility and good sense.
Peel: People Before Party
Sir Robert Peel (5 February 1788–2 July 1850) was the son of a Lancastrian mill owner who rose to the highest elected office in the land and his is one of the most fascinating of early Victorian lives. From stout defence of the status quo to advocate of change and reform, he undertook one of the great journeys in British politics. Yet Peel remained at heart a conservative, weighing up what change must be embraced in order to maintain the structures and values he held dear. He was a true Conservative, the founder of today’s Conservative Party and the man whose actions caused the party to split from top to toe. Add to these ironies and contradictions a quiet, blameless and honourable private life so we have all the ingredients for an absorbing Victorian history.
This chapter focuses on Peel’s status as essentially a self-made man, able to use his intrinsic talents and gifts that came his way, in order to better himself in the true Victorian style. It is also to show how change, radical change, is sometimes absolutely necessary, how it can work and how it can serve the national interest in the most fundamental ways.
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‘There seems to me to be very few facts, at least ascertainable facts, in politics.’ So remarked Sir Robert Peel, reflecting on the views accumulated in the course of a lifetime seated behind the most important desks in the land. No shortage of facts exists about this gentleman but nor, from his day forward, has there been an end to the disputes which surround any discussion of Peel. Did he, for example, betray the very Conservative Party he founded? Did he put principle before politics? Was he, in every sense, representative of his age or was this a man apart, both from his peers and from today’s world?
Peel enjoyed a very long career in the front rank of British politics yet his greatness was achieved relatively late in life. His personal life was a virtuous contrast to the dissolute world of Regency grandees, a self-improving Harrovian and, upon death, a symbol of his age and an argument never to be finished about his role in shaping it.
Above all else, Peel is remembered for his decision, as Prime Minister, to dismantle the economic rules that had kept the price of food artificially high in Britain and led to disaffection in our cities. There is so much more to contemplate in the history of arguably our greatest male peacetime Prime Minister, but in this chapter the case will be made that the central fact of cheaper food for the British population was indeed the great achievement of Peel’s life. The stability that Britain in the nineteenth century enjoyed, in stark contrast to Europe and the Americas, rested on many things, among them providence and faith, an industrious head of state, a robust yet flexible parliamentary system, the ever-increasing productivity of British industry and finance, the humane relationship between the aristocracy and the masses and the equitable legal order to which all were subject. Yet at the very core of this stability was the truth that, thanks to the reforms instituted by Peel, her people could be fed.
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Robert Peel was born on 5 February 1788 in the family home at Chamber Hall in Bury, Lancashire. His father, Sir Robert Peel, was one of the first great figures to epitomise the wealth and power of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in Britain. The Peels were emphatically self-made, members of the Lancastrian yeomanry who in two generations rose from the land to a baronetcy, 15,000 employees and, as the nineteenth century progressed, the full Victorian flush of generals, a Speaker, a winner of the Victoria Cross, an India Secretary, a Derby winner and aristocratic marriage.
Above all, there was a Prime Minister. Legend tells that the first Sir Robert Peel told his son, ‘Bob, you dog, if you do not become Prime Minister one day, I’m disinheriting you.’ This was not a threat to be taken lightly, for the first Sir Robert was a man of his word and a driven man in all aspects of his life. In his youth he had worked with his own hands in the family’s mills before becoming an MP for Tamworth, a ‘pocket’ or family-controlled borough which had come his way after he bought some Staffordshire lands which had fallen out of the dissolute hands of the then Earl of Bath. An improving, paternalistic mill owner, he used his position in Parliament to introduce such reforms as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, which limited the hours children could work in mills and obliged mill owners to provide them with a basic education. In doing so, this Anglican ‘Church and King’ Tory stood out against the Nonconformist, radical stereotype of the northern industrialist, forever fighting such statist restrictions on the free exercise of commerce and individual liberty. He was made a Baronet in 1800. The younger Robert Peel was born not only into a world of considerable wealth and stability but also into a family with a strong sense of obligation to those less fortunate than themselves. It seems important to underline this point for it acts as an early indicator of the general moral and political texture of Peel’s later life.
The elder Sir Robert liked to put his son through his paces, for example requiring the young Robert to precis sermons on a Sunday after church to test his piety, attention, memory and the workings of his mind. Education was of high importance in such a family and after various local Lancashire grammars, the young Peel was despatched to Harrow. The school in Peel’s generation was to establish a near monopoly on future premiers, with Peel himself, Goderich, Aberdeen and Palmerston all appearing one by one on its rolls. From Harrow to Oxford, specifically Christ Church, where Peel was an academic triumph, earning a double first in Mathematics and Classics with large audiences turning up to hear his public examinations. University was followed by a brief stint at Lincoln’s Inn before Sir Robert arranged a parliamentary seat for his son.
The influence of Peel the father can be clearly tracked throughout the life of Peel the son. The opinions of the son were firmly shaped by those of the father. The elder Peel excoriated the French Revolution, the memory of which was to haunt Britons for half a century and more. His cause was emphatically that of John Bull, his values those of liberty, order and property. Nonetheless, in due course, the son became his own man. Douglas Hurd notes that the older Sir Robert had ‘a good life, well sustained by family pleasures, worldly success, orthodox Christian faith and a strong practical mind’. In all these qualities his eldest son certainly shared but he added his own set of interests and characteristics too.
The younger Peel became a man of taste, in his case afforded not so much by leisure as by learning, discernment and sensibility. His private collection of pictures figured in guidebooks, becoming an attraction that distinguished visitors to London made certain to see. In addition, he threw himself into the wider world of the arts. From 1824, he served as a trustee of the newly formed National Gallery and he commissioned likenesses of his contemporaries from Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most distinguished painters of the day. So close, indeed, was the relationship with the great painter that Peel was to be the last man Lawrence dined with and acted as pallbearer at Lawrence’s funeral at St Paul’s on 21 January 1830.
He was a moving force in the Royal Commission on Fine Art, charged with the internal decoration of the new Palace of Westminster which began to take shape from 1840 after its predecessor was destroyed in the famous fire of 1834. In this task, Peel was joined by Prince Albert, who headed the Commis
sion. The two men became friends while Augustus Pugin’s vision for the building proved to be a lasting masterpiece of Gothic design. Peel was also a defender of the Royal Academy against parliamentary radicals who wanted to dismember it, a champion at the end of his life of the scheme for a Great Exhibition and a personally generous patron of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund. He was, in other words, sensitive and informed about the visual arts, his one true passion away from governing. He was also wonderfully practical too. As a trustee of the British Museum, he was insistent on the provision of both affordable guidebooks and plentiful ‘conveniences’.
Peel’s public manner could be offputtingly cool, if not cold, and in this sense he lacked any overt common touch. Conversely his private life was stable and warm. He was a devoted and constant husband to his wife Julia, as well as an attentive and loving father to their five children, and he enjoyed the comforts of family life to the full. Some were to sneer in hatefully snobbish terms at his modest antecedents. Queen Victoria thought he was not a gentleman because he parted his tailcoat when he sat down but the man himself never questioned his place in the social order he had spent his political youth defending. If his offspring were to have the life befitting those who counted among their godparents the Duke of York that was all to the good.
A well-rounded individual, with aspirations for his future and for his nation and family and the good sense never to lose touch with the needs of society: such was Peel the man. Most importantly, he was the scion of a self-made family and he remained true to and aware of his roots and antecedents. This stood him in good stead.
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As is the case with all successful political careers, the young Peel’s was marked by good fortune. His first parliamentary seat in 1809 was the rotten borough of Cashel, County Tipperary in Ireland and as soon as he was elected the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, chose him to second the reply to the King’s speech which opened the new session of Parliament. Peel took the opportunity to make his mark and his maiden speech was acclaimed as the best and most powerful since that of Pitt the Younger in 1781. Soon he was a member of government. His first ministerial office was as under-secretary for War and Colonies, answering to Lord Liverpool as Secretary of State. Here he had responsibility for the secret service, a role he drily disclaimed to his successor: ‘[it] gave me very little trouble as I am no great advocate of sending people to the Continent to collect information which generally reaches us in the papers before it arrives from the spy.’ Following Perceval’s assassination in May 1812, Liverpool became Prime Minister and now another change beckoned.
The young Peel enjoyed the patronage of Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, a close associate of Peel the elder. Wellesley appears and reappears throughout the pages of this book, as his life and career, both remarkable for their longevity, intersect repeatedly with many of our eminent Victorians. Wellesley was Irish-born and Peel’s fate would be woven with that of Ireland in the years to come and with that of Wellesley for the next quarter-century. At this time, Wellesley was in the throes of the brutal Peninsular War with France. His success in this conflict would see him ennobled as the Duke of Wellington and he would round off this military phase of a long public career with victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. It is clear, however, that Wellesley, as he then still was, retained the ability to influence the domestic scene too; the combined goodwill of both Wellesley and Liverpool himself was instrumental in carrying Peel forward at this critical point in his career.
For now, at the age of just twenty-four, he was appointed Chief Secretary to Ireland. This was no lowly government job but the second most prominent position within the hierarchy of the British administration in Dublin. Peel was nominally answerable to the Viceroy, since the Act of Union of 1800 the Sovereign’s representative in Ireland, but in effect he was administering the country. Since Ireland at this time had a population of some six million and was perennially restive, there could be no doubts as to how challenging a task this was.
Not the least of the difficulties Ireland presented to a British politician was that, although the country had been brought into the Union, it had not been taken out of the previous century. The minuscule inbred Irish political class, the Ascendancy, was disinclined to forgo the pleasures of what might be termed the ‘old corruption’ of easy preferment without responsibility. Its members desired to enjoy the largesse of patronage without discharging the duties which might have been expected in return. Peel would have to learn and to strategise quickly, which he did. As his great biographer Norman Gash noted: ‘The constant canvassing, the bluster and the deceit, the tendency of Irish suitors to claim silence as an assent and a friendly word as a promise, taught Peel habits of official caution and reserve’ which never left him.
Peel in Ireland became a model of discretion but also one of administrative vigour, the depredations and demands of place-hungry members of the Ascendancy notwithstanding. He is best remembered for his creation of the country’s first national police force, by means of a Peace Preservation Act of 1814. This policy was designed to remove the possibility of regional and religion-based militias forming across Ireland, with concomitant threats to social stability, and it worked. The Royal Irish Constabulary, its members nicknamed Bobbies and Peelers in acknowledgement of the politician who created the force, would be a feature of the Irish scene for the next century.
Peel showed the positive effects of good administration in other ways too. Poor potato and grain harvests in 1816, combined with the economic shock caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, brought a threat of famine to Ireland and a spreading plague of typhus. The country was fortunate in that the 1817 harvest was good, thus heading off the very worst effects of famine, but it is very much to Peel’s credit that he was energetic in raising emergency funds to deal with what threatened to become a national crisis.
Departing Ireland in 1818, Peel chaired the Bullion Committee at Westminster. This was another significant position. The Committee was charged with restoring the national finances to a sound footing, in the wake of the titanic and costly struggles of the wars with France, which had forced Britain to depart from the gold standard. Peel’s appointment to the Committee, which also included David Ricardo, probably the most important British economist after Adam Smith, led directly to the passage through Parliament of the Resumption of Cash Payments Act. This Act was not without controversy and some critics questioned the need and sense of placing the country once more on the gold standard. Peel himself began discussions as a studiously neutral Committee chairman. Ultimately, however, he was convinced that the gold standard must return as evidence, both symbolic and practical, of Britain’s possession of a sound and well-founded currency.
As a result of Peel’s financial changes, sterling would become entrenched as the global currency for the remainder of the nineteenth century. It is also important to note that Peel never forgot this relatively early lesson in the importance of financial planning and prudence and he took the opportunity to apply the lesson later in his career. His Bank Charter Act of 1844 was the second great pillar of the economic achievement upon which the United Kingdom rested until 1914. It set the limit on how much currency the Bank of England could issue according to its holdings of gold and began the process of centralising note issuance so that only the Bank could issue notes.fn1 This measure provided stability and trust: Bank of England notes traded at face value, whereas other banks’ issue was negotiable. It further underpinned Britain’s reputation as the financial haven of choice in a stormy world with an impregnable central bank to boot.
This was for the future. For now, Peel was building a reputation for prudence and steadiness deployed in combination with an instinct for sweeping reform and an ability to cut through the cobwebs to get the required things done. This was an excellent combination and high office was beckoning for him. In 1822, he was appointed Home Secretary in Liverpool’s administration, and soon he was seen to rank in the Commons just behind Robinson (later Viscoun
t Goderich), Castlereagh and Canning in the minds of the ministry supporters. Peel’s time at the Home Office was to see all his political virtues fully on display.
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As Home Secretary Peel found himself with a considerably smaller official apparatus than he had enjoyed as Chief Secretary in Dublin. With a mere ministry to run instead of a country, his staff amounted to ‘fourteen clerks, a précis-writer, a librarian and various porters and domestic officials’, all confined inside the dankest offices Whitehall had to offer. What the Home Office lacked in space and light, however, it made up for in abundance in other matters, specifically an extraordinary superfluity of laws under its purview. Indeed, so many laws that nobody could reasonably be expected to grasp their mass of intricacies. When Peel became Home Secretary, nobody knew how many capital offences existed in English law. That there were a great many was evident but the ferocity of the law in theory was tempered by lax and inefficient application, not least because juries refused to convict when they felt an injustice would be done by means of an overly harsh sentence. This was English liberty in action, the liberty so admired on the Continent. In no other country in Europe did the subject have so much scope for private activity unchecked by the state. Now Peel was coming to put an end to this ostensibly prelapsarian age. His solution was to reform the legal system and to set in place a modernised police force.
It was difficult for some in early nineteenth-century Britain to contemplate the innovation of an efficient police service as being anything other than an instrument of tyranny on the continental model. The burgeoning crimes which went ever more unchecked could after all be regarded as being a price paid for liberty. According to this way of thinking, simply following God and the Church was the best riposte to vice. The application of fresh state laws, state intervention, state interference, meanwhile, appeared a rank oppression and a violation of cherished English and British liberty.
The Victorians Page 2