To all this Peel had a brisk reply, encapsulated in a promise of better administration and practice. The so-called Peel Acts saw laws codified and implemented with consistency. Gaols were regularised in their management, with a measure of education introduced for inmates. Archaic habits by the bench were reformed. Masses of obsolete laws were swept away and the worthy remainder consolidated into an up-to-date and reformed statute book. This new and reforming Home Secretary faced unprecedented challenges. His task was to introduce and explain his reforms, and, crucially, to handle discontent among the labouring classes without reacting in the manner of Peterloo, the state response to worker unrest in Manchester in 1819 which had led to fifteen deaths.
It is important to note that Britain’s workers had true and pressing grievances. Working conditions were horrendous but the unions which spearheaded the drive for working reforms themselves became part of the problem. The so-called union ‘closed shop’, for example, was accompanied by demands as to what machinery could be used and how many apprentices could be taken on. Unions dictated caps on how many men could be employed and called for unpopular foremen to be dismissed. Militancy in general rose apace as money was gouged from workers in the form of union dues, union membership was made compulsory and the unions determined what work could be done by whom. Violence occurred as a low drumbeat throughout the 1820s and most dangerously early in the decade as timid magistrates and cowed owners declined to stand by the law.
To this difficult and dangerous labour question can be added more nakedly political combinations. These years saw the formation of mass political movements such as the Irish Catholic Association, and in England the Anti-Corn Law League and Chartists. They all had honest grievances but each one brought with them attendant threats to the constitutional order. To the politicians observing the scene at Westminster, it became evident that the public realm needed to be defended, so policing would have to be reformed. As incoming Home Secretary in 1822, Peel had four hundred London policemen for a city of a million. The police service, insofar as it could be said even to exist before Peel, was essentially a private militia, nominally the servant of the ramshackle courts but in practice the hired help for those with money. Competing boards might sponsor their own watches, a dozen or more to a given parish, with no central control nor any coordinated purpose. As Peel tellingly put it to his patron Wellington, ‘Think of the state of Brentford and Deptford, with no sort of police by night!’
The chief defect of such ramshackle law and order was that it dealt only with the consequences of crimes once they had been committed. It did little to deter them from being committed in the first place. By 1828, with Wellington now the Prime Minister, and Peel’s own policing work in Ireland to act as a useful template, he was ready to set about massive police reform in London and in these pre-Victorian years he laid suitably moral foundations for the Metropolitan Police, the first truly Victorian institution. He sought for his new police force men of the utmost probity and he saw to it that they would not be tempted by outside blandishments of financial gain. Unlike earlier forces, there was to be strictly no moonlighting as private security. There was also, from the onset, no division between officer and enlisted constable. Most significantly of all, the new police were by design practical men. Peel did not want distressed, genteel layabouts in it for the public dole. His designs were a success, as the formation of the Metropolitan Police gives Peel his most lustrous claim on public fame today. Most crucially, the triumphant legacy of his police reforms in London and Ireland was that they secured the situation without the recourse to reaction which occurred everywhere else in Europe at one time or another.
As always in the nineteenth century, however, the truest passions of Peel’s age were excited not by moral squalor and what might be needed to deal with it but by more elevated disputes of doctrine. It fell to Peel’s lot to be the decisive voice in ending the confessional state in Britain as it had existed from the settlement of William of Orange onwards. This was no small matter and in few other countries could such a constitutional revolution have been contemplated without civil war being encompassed. At much cost to his own reputation, Peel’s political dexterity over these great issues, and Catholic Emancipation in particular, ensured that his new-fangled police service was not put to the test of a religious war.
*
The disparaging nickname of ‘Orange Peel’ had been deservedly earned, for in the first phase of his career Sir Robert Peel was no friend to the notion of Catholic Emancipation. Nor was he alone, for relief for Catholic civic and political disabilities, an enduring feature of English and British civic and political life since the Reformation, had been a neuralgic issue in British politics for two decades before Peel entered the ranks of the Cabinet in 1822, with both government and opposition deeply divided on the subject. William Pitt, the Prime Minister of the day, had hoped that Emancipation would come with the passing of the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 but his hopes failed against the virulent opposition first of George III and then of George IV. These two kings helped to block any progress on the measure for the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
This state of affairs suited the young Peel, who by 1820 was solid in his defence of the ostensibly unified Protestant realm formed by British history. At this point, he had supported the exclusion of Catholics from the Privy Council, colonial governorships, Parliament and the ancient universities. The issue for the young Peel, what he perceived to be the practical essence, was not the rigorous enforcement of an outdated constitutional settlement but the maintenance of a civilised, working historic compromise. If the status quo worked, at least in Great Britain, an effective, substantial, de facto toleration of Catholics, while at the same time the Anglican majority remained in control and unprovoked, why would one risk making things needlessly worse?
By 1820, Peel was out of step with his colleagues. There was by this point a substantial majority in the Commons in favour of Emancipation but the Lords was still adamantly opposed, and what had become an awkwardness in England was an infinitely worse matter in Catholic-majority Ireland. The following historical vignette gives some indication of the tension building in both England and Ireland in these early decades of the nineteenth century. Wellington’s elder brother, the Marquess Wellesley, was appointed Viceroy of Ireland in 1821 and held the post until 1828. In 1825 he married an American Catholic, Marianne Patterson, and he arranged for a Mass to be said in the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. On hearing the news, George IV, who had acceded to the throne in 1820, exploded. ‘That house’, the King raged, ‘is as much my palace as the one in which I am, and in my palace Mass shall not be said.’
In 1823, the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell had marshalled a Catholic Association to agitate for Emancipation. The Association was a vast and enormously potent mass movement and an organisational achievement without parallel, especially given the intrinsic challenges it faced in raising funds from a poverty-stricken Irish Catholic peasantry. As late as 1826, Peel was deploying arguments against Emancipation in the House of Commons, while simultaneously observing O’Connell’s daunting assertion of Catholic power in Ireland and taking the temperature of the climate in Britain itself. By 1828, mindful of both his existing Irish insights and his position as the most immediately responsible minister, he had recognised that his principles must change, before change was forced upon him.
In the summer of that year, the issue was encapsulated by the result of a by-election in Co. Clare in the west of Ireland. O’Connell squared up to William Vesey Fitzgerald in a confrontation between Catholic power and the Establishment. O’Connell had chosen to exploit a loophole in the law, which barred a Catholic from taking a seat in Parliament but said nothing about a Catholic standing for election itself. O’Connell and Catholic power won and Peel could see the shape of the future. The power of the Ascendancy in Ireland was crumbling, the power of Catholic Ireland, and by extension Catholic Britain, was growing. Peel’s world would s
imply have to change to accommodate this unmistakable fact.
Various compromises were considered as a solution to the Catholic question. The long-standing Test and Corporation Acts refused public office to Catholics and other non-Anglicans. By the early nineteenth century, as Peel and everyone else knew, these laws were not always upheld but the very fact of their continuing existence was an affront to British and Irish Catholics. One compromise suggested the enfranchisement of Catholics, while continuing their disqualification from most public offices, in order to uphold the Anglican character of the British state. The pragmatic Peel, who would once have supported such reasoning himself, saw that nothing less would do now but full-scale reform. Instead, he spoke with exasperation of the wilful ignorance displayed in some quarters about what was a complex issue. As he put it, ‘House of Commons’ arguments [are] arguments for people who know very little of the matter, care not much about it, half of whom have dined, or are going to dine, and are only forcibly struck by that which they instantly comprehend without trouble.’
It was true. Nothing about the process of Emancipation would be easy. Wellington, who became Prime Minister in 1828, was like his protégé prepared to be pragmatic on this increasingly tense constitutional point to the extent that he would presently threaten to resign if George IV did not give Royal assent to the bill. He wanted to draw on the continental model and have some kind of concordat that the British state would license and pay for Catholic priests in the United Kingdom. Peel doubted the efficacy of this approach. In the first place, because intermingling state and Rome would infuriate the country’s Anglican Establishment to no good end and, in the second, because he did not for an instant believe that any such measure of state control over Catholicism would improve the attitude of Irish Catholicism in general to the Union.
The fraught measure finally came before Parliament in 1829. Peel pushed in the Commons and Wellington in the Lords for the fullest measure of Emancipation which could be obtained. Front and centre of Peel’s mind now was the question of expediency. He wanted full civil equality, justifying arriving at that end not for its own sake but because resisting it any longer would risk harm to the Church of England. A spiteful joke did the rounds that Peel had now abandoned what was once his own fight, so now the Pope would have to respond by inaugurating a new festival in the calendar, the Conversion of St Peel.
Both Peel in the Commons and Wellington in the Lords gave the speeches of their lives and both were immediate, resounding, national triumphs. Yet it was inevitably the case that once the cheering had died down, lesser mortals would resume their carping from the sidelines. In Wellington’s case, his support for Emancipation brought him scathing criticism from the Earl of Winchilsea. Remarkably, the Prime Minister met this criticism by challenging Winchilsea to a duel. It was a deeply reckless move and both Wellington and his opponent were criticised roundly, the Duke for fighting, Winchilsea for not declining to fight the Duke. Peel in turn was mocked for so neatly, as it seemed, sloughing off his previous career as an Anglican paladin and diehard Tory Ultras felt a deep sense of betrayal. This would be nothing to the sensations of betrayal they would experience later in Peel’s career.
The leadership Peel had shown would bear bitter personal fruits. In 1817, he had become MP for his alma mater of Oxford University. Now, in the aftermath of Emancipation, he felt obliged to resign and stand again for election to this seat, such was the strength of feeling in the university about his having changed his line on the Catholic question. In the subsequent by-election, though he had, by his friends’ telling of it, the ‘quality’ with him, which is to say the better degrees and titles, and the wealthier and more prestigious colleges, ‘an immense number of parsons’ did for him. Within weeks, Peel became MP for his family seat of Tamworth in Staffordshire, but there can be no disguising the sense of bitter humiliation he felt at the loss of his cherished Oxford seat. It is still possible to see ‘No Peel’ carved on a door at Christ Church.
Why did Peel stick so long with the anti-Catholic cause? In short, because he had no great hopes for the claims positively made for the pro-Catholic one. He stood by the Settlement handed down from 1689 precisely because it was tried and tested, because it had been shown to work. Catholics had obtained tolerance if not equality in England, and the Constitution which performed that miracle, among a multitude of other virtues, demonstrably worked rather better and rather more durably than did the constitutions of other, less fortunate states abroad. Peel further doubted that Emancipation would in fact transform the political scene in Ireland or the attitude of Irish Catholics to the Union. Here, his scepticism would be vindicated.
For Peel, Emancipation inexorably became a political necessity, not an action driven in any way by political conversion. In short, he was making the best of a bad job and impelled by a sense of pragmatism and duty. Soon he would find himself making the best of another bad job, this time on the matter of parliamentary reform. Peel no more wanted parliamentary reform for its own sake than he had wanted Catholic relief but he would again have to grin and bear it.
As it turned out, however, reform was to be the making of Robert Peel and of his brand of enduring political action.
The Great Reform Act of 1832 marks the climactic end of Whiggish politics. It allowed preceding history to be seen to be building up to this point and it was held thereafter to have set the country on its destiny towards full and complete democracy. Peel opposed its passage. Once it passed through Parliament, however, he made its provisions work and he was to be its first true beneficiary.
This attitude was demonstrated transparently in Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of December 1834. Such local manifestos, written documents, distributed as widely as necessary in the cause of electoral gain, were not uncommon. Peel’s manifesto, however, had no local purpose since the seat was a family borough. Instead, he always intended to take advantage of the press to make this a programme presented to the entire country. Its context was specific: the Reform Bill had been passed by a Whig government, which had collapsed in November 1834. King William IV asked Wellington to form a government but a reluctant Wellington had demurred, suggesting that the Sovereign summon Peel instead. It can be seen, therefore, that Tamworth was the ultimate national manifesto, as it was the establishment of Peel’s platform. It was a call for a new party and a new politics to operate within a newly reformed political system. As it turned out, Peel’s first spell as Prime Minister was at the head of an unstable minority government and would last a mere four months but historians agree that Tamworth marks the end of the old ceaseless morphing and shifting Tory faction at Westminster and the beginning of the contemporary British Conservative Party.
In the Tamworth Manifesto Peel looked to both the past and the future. Summoning the stability and security of the past, he declared:
[I]f, by adopting the spirit of the Reform Bill, it be meant that we are to live in a perpetual vortex of agitation; that public men can only support themselves in public estimation by adopting every popular impression of the day – by promising the instant redress of anything which anybody may call an abuse – by abandoning altogether that great aid of government – more powerful than either law or reason – the respect for ancient rights, and the deference to prescriptive authority; if this be the spirit of the Reform Bill, I will not undertake to adopt it.
Elsewhere, he glanced into a future that was now, he suggested, equally firmly founded and rooted:
I will repeat now the declaration I made when I entered the House of Commons as a member of the Reformed Parliament – that I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question – a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means.
The task now for these new Conservatives, Peel implied, was simply this: to say thus far but no farther. This was neither ignoble nor insensible, no matter how unfashionable it has seemed since. Above all else,
it was necessary for stability, a quality considered all the more necessary by Conservatives as they gazed out at a country in flux, one in which such campaigners as the Chartists called for further and greater reforms, for universal suffrage, the ballot and for the abolition of the property qualification which, embedded in the Reform Bill, ensured that only gentlemenfn2 of property could aspire to stand for Parliament.
Movements such as the Chartists threatened, for Peel, ‘an impeachment of the whole constitution of the country’, risking a needless upending of the time-hallowed system of government which had delivered ‘more practical happiness [and] true liberty than has been enjoyed in any other country that ever existed’. For Peel, the task in hand was to ensure that this new dispensation, this new constitutional form, worked correctly. Some years later, in the peroration of an 1846 speech in the Commons commending free trade over protection, Peel would make his wishes explicit, claiming a desire to sate the needs of those who had no vote, precisely so that they would have confidence in the system which gave them none.
The Tamworth Manifesto can therefore be seen as a very British phenomenon, being a gradualist step towards the very idea, democracy, against which it formally set itself, and it was British because it exemplified a very British lesson: the importance of taking part and playing by the rules. The very constitutionalism to which Peel submitted was precisely the constitutionalism he urged on others, because an acceptance of the importance of the rules of the game was as important as the game itself. This helps explain his and his heirs’ reluctance to accept that the rules should ever be changed other than lawfully and by the means duly provided for changing them.
The Victorians Page 3