Peel’s sense of the working and therefore improving classes was summed up by his speech welcoming the opening of Tamworth Library and Reading Room in 1841. For gathered were, as he observed, ‘intelligent men of all classes and all conditions in life [brought together], harmonising the gradations of society and binding men together by a new bond’. They were a part of the wider political community and, crucially, they were destined to become ever more fully involved in it. One reason why this was the case, at this moment, with the Victorian age in full swing, was because, as the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill noted, every pub and club ‘had its oracles and its declaimers. Almost everybody reads a newspaper, and those who do not read listen with attention to those who do.’ So they too deserved representation and consideration in the tally of public opinion. This in turn was a concept arguably made possible only by the existence of a mass popular press.
Peel’s attitude towards the newspapers was realistic, in that he accepted that public men had to resign themselves to reading the public prints. Indeed, ‘after long experience [he] had got so callous that he could read them without the slightest disturbance’. There can be no doubt that he was always a professional politician. The burgeoning role of the press, and the coalescing of politicians into formal parties, went hand in hand. The General Election of 1835 in this respect marks a pivotal moment, for this was the first election when papers published lists of candidates with ‘party’ labels attached. Peel by now, in the momentous aftermath of the Tamworth Manifesto, clearly led the new Conservative Party he had established but he was about to lead it into its first great and nearly fatal challenge. For, after he won the 1841 election he found himself obliged to tackle the vexed matter of trade, of protectionism versus free trade, and in doing so he struck at what his party, the party of landed interest, stood for above all else. The Conservative Party was advertising itself in the mass media but what was the party for, and what did Conservatism seek to conserve?
Here, Peel’s long years of being steeped in domestic politics paid dividends. His wide experience permitted him to gain insights into the state of the nation that would prove pivotal in his decision-making in the years to come. It enabled him to understand the ways in which British economics supported, or failed to support, the welfare and needs of the great mass of the people. Specifically, it emphasised to him the need to reform the defining issue of the day, the price of food.
At this point, it is worth noting the ways in which the long period of war with Napoleonic France had left its mark on Britain’s agricultural economy. War had brought tariff walls, to guard against the importation of grain from Europe and to protect Britain’s agricultural sector. The war made it essential that Britain be able to feed herself. The effect of the tariff walls surrounding the country was to enable farmers to name the price of the grain they grew and thus to keep prices high. In a rapidly industrialising society, the victims of these so-called ‘Corn Laws’ were the urban poor. Without the means to grow their own food supplies, at the mercy of price regulation over which they had little or no control and governed by a system which granted them little or no say over the laws and regulations passed in their name, the urban masses were essentially powerless in the face of outside legal and economic influences.
When the war with France ended in victory at Waterloo, it might be supposed that the tariff walls would have been lowered and that a more natural peacetime economy be instituted but this was not the case. Instead, protectionism remained the order of the day and now, gazing out upon a political world that had passed Emancipation and passed the Reform Bill but that had failed to intervene economically, Peel was keenly aware of the manifold dangers this situation posed to social order.
Thus, he changed his mind and his habits of communication but secrecy and discretion were such that this change of mind was not quite flagged in advance. This was the usual modus operandi. Trusted fellow Cabinet members might be taken into his confidence as he methodically and sincerely addressed this or that issue but ordinary supporters were never so favoured. Hence, when the many apparent inconsistencies which taxed Peel’s championing of the cause of free trade were subsequently, splenetically, put to him, Peel’s response was:
[T]here are two sorts of courage … there is the courage of refusing to accede to … demands at all; and there is another kind of courage – the courage to do that which in our conscience we may believe to be just and right, disregarding all the clamour with which these demands may be accompanied.
This showed to his critics two pronounced Peelite traits. The first was the egotism with which he was frequently taxed and the second was the fact, frequently hurled into his face by disenchanted and embittered past supporters, that Peel habitually had the courage publicly to face down past opinions. The latter, the critics usually added, was a luxury they generally lacked the time to deal with, given that Peel’s about-turns happened with such speed and secrecy.
There is an irony here, for while Peel founded the Conservative Party as we know it, he himself identified more closely with state, nation and people than with party. It was in this sense that the latter part of his career ran counter to the forces that obliged politicians to be party men first and foremost, party men before any loyalty to nation or to region. He was also deeply pragmatic. He was himself a landowner and thus a farmer but he found himself obliged to take a realistic stance on the changing, urbanising world that surrounded him. ‘If you had to constitute new Societies,’ wrote Peel to his estranged friend J. W. Croker, ‘you might on moral and social grounds prefer Corn fields to Cotton factories, an agricultural to a manufacturing population. But our lot is cast and we cannot recede.’
Every aspect of the Victorian story is contained in those rather important words from Peel: the idolisation of the past, balanced with the practical acceptance of the future and the dutiful sense of the work that must be done in the present to secure that future. Even the self-justifying letter, written by a politician son and grandson of weavers, living on the landed estate their riches had bought, to a politician-turned-journalist friend, has the quality of a parable. For what Peel and his contemporaries lived through was what is so generally wrongly claimed of other ages, a profound time of social, economic, religious, political and intellectual change. As a wise politician he saw that he must change with the times.
If a single year in this period were pivotal it was 1845, the tipping point in the whole electrifying nineteenth century. Thereafter more people lived in an urban realm than a rural one. Moreover, the United Kingdom by 1845 was such a young country. In England and Wales fully 45 per cent of the population were under twenty and only 7 per cent were over sixty. In 1840 no more than a quarter of the workforce was employed on the land, compared to well over half in the eighteenth century.
Peel was Prime Minister in 1845 and he was aware of the momentous changes now underway. It was through his usual close study of the matter at hand that he had come to change his stance on free trade and to see that free trade would deliver all that it promised, economic growth that would help all sectors of society and that would lead to cheaper food. Since his return to office as Prime Minister in 1841, as leader of a majority Conservative administration, he had proceeded slowly, carefully, by degrees. Obscurely is perhaps the best word. He had good reasons for his stealth, for his target was the repeal of the Corn Laws, but he was acutely aware that the Conservatives drew their greatest strength from the agricultural shires, from those districts of the country with most to lose should protectionist policies end. For some time, his supporters were able to convince themselves that he remained a supporter of the principle of protection, whatever tinkering he might have to do round the edges during day-to-day administration.
This was not a sustainable situation and when the day of reckoning came at last for Peel, the air crackled with the bitterness of betrayal. The 1841 parliamentary intake had included several outspoken supporters of free trade. One of them, Richard Cobden, who became a parlia
mentary critic of Lord Palmerston, used his new platform to drum up further support for the repeal of protectionist policies, thus ensuring the issue remained a pressing one. At first, Peel moved with ostentatious slowness, rejecting the efforts of Cobden and others to implement change, and offering small, judicious concessions.
In the outside world, meanwhile, pressure waxed and waned. A run of good harvests in the early 1840s ensured a plentiful supply of food at reasonable prices but the potato blight had been spreading across Europe in these years and in 1845 it appeared for the first time in Britain and Ireland. There was hunger in Britain and the beginning of a period of devastating famine in Ireland. Now Peel acted. He argued in Cabinet that tariffs must be withdrawn to permit a free flow of grain imports and, as the year ended, he summoned Parliament to debate the repeal of the Corn Laws. Simultaneously, Peel resigned as Prime Minister. He was all too aware that he could not carry his Cabinet and the Conservative Party with him but nobody else could form a government either so Queen Victoria requested that Peel remain at the head of an increasingly strained administration.
As 1846 dawned, Britain was in a state of ferment. Anti-repealers agitated in the countryside and local Conservative worthies joined their ranks, in the process splitting from their own party. In May, the Commons voted on Peel’s proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, with new regulations to be implemented gradually over the next three years. Prominent Conservatives argued bitterly against Peel’s measure, the divisions in the Commons mirroring the splits in the country as a whole. Even the Royal Family were publicly involved in this tense situation. In January, on that first day of deliberations, Prince Albert appeared in the Commons’ public gallery to listen to Peel’s opening speech in favour of free trade, a move taken as a sign of Royal approval, an error of judgement never to be repeated.
Peel declared to the House that ‘this night you will select the motto which is to indicate the commercial policy of England. Shall it be “advance” or “recede”?’ He won the vote but lost his party, with more than two-thirds of Conservative MPs voting against the bill as it was passed only with the support of opposition votes. Wellington, meanwhile, pushed the measure through the Lords. There was no happy ending for Peel. On the same night that the repeal bill passed in the Lords, his Irish Coercion Bill, designed to quell rising public disorder in a famine-struck Ireland, was rejected in the Commons and the Prime Minister resigned.
Peel’s defence to a dismayed Conservative Party was that he had conserved all that he could, and that free trade would lay the foundation for still more conservation to come. All the great Conservative objectives, increased trade, an end to Chartism, an intact Church of England, buoyant tax revenues but no excessive taxation and a widely accepted Constitution, had been secured by his government. Free trade, he claimed, was simply a further means to these ends. The critics, not least in the press, were having none of it. According to the Morning Post, Peel seemed:
really to imagine that the more widely his measures differ from the principles which he professed when he was raised to office, the more imperatively is he called on to disparage the principles in question, and to promote the success of schemes which war with all his previous convictions. Never, assuredly, was there devised a moral code more favourable to the growth of habits of rascality in public men.
Peel’s fellow Conservative Benjamin Disraeli was less kind. He led the charge against Peel’s betrayal and in lacerating style. Peel, he said, ‘bamboozles one party and plunders the other, til, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries out, “let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure” ’.
Disraeli would become Peel’s eventual successor, though he may have done himself no immediate favours with the sceptical middle of the country by deploying such tart language. Disraeli had hit exactly upon what most antagonised Peel’s estranged supporters: the immediate canonisation of Peel by his erstwhile opponents as now being worthily ‘above party’. With each attack by an inarticulate Tory Ultra given voice by the silky Disraeli, the agony of Peel’s spurned supporters was doubled. With each Tory complaint, their radical, Whig and Liberal foes self-righteously ratcheted up their infuriatingly magnanimous argument that, by backing them, Peel had now transcended party.
The fact is that Peel’s eventual championing of repeal split the new Conservative Party for decades. No previous battle of Peel’s had prepared him for the possibility that his internal party opponents would themselves organise and resist. Now, they did precisely this and in doing so they completed the evolution of this Conservative movement into a political party for the times. Politics had moved on since Peel first evolved from one cornerstone belief to another and, now, his renunciation of the Corn Laws meant his party renounced him. Meanwhile, one hundred or so ‘Peelite’ Conservatives, including Lord Aberdeen, a youthful William Gladstone and others, joined what was rapidly evolving into the British Liberal Party. There can be little doubt that Peel, and the effects of repeal, solidified a British party political system that would endure until the early decades of the twentieth century.
What of Peel’s legacy? A large part of the reason we remember Peel and continue to extol his example today is that one result of his response to evident, visible, actual change was the creation of the Conservative Party itself, even if, in the end, he and this party parted ways. It tells its own story that the British Conservative Party is still with us, whereas no other European country can make the same claim of consistency and continuity. British conservatism conserved not least itself, which separates it as fully from the continental political experience as anything else. That the party Peel founded as something new was taken in his own time, as much as now, to be something ancient was his genius.
In his own era, critics sent up the tactical and anachronistic cry that he was ‘always really a Liberal’ and had indeed ‘been in the wrong party’. It has already been shown that the reality of party politics that evolved in mid-Victorian Britain differed radically from the loose groupings of Tories and Whigs, factions and splinters that prevailed in the first part of Peel’s career. Yet what was his politics? Gash, his biographer, puts it best:
[Peel’s] Conservatism was not a party label, still less a class interest, but an instinct for continuity and the preservation of order and good government in a society which was confronted with the choice between adaptation and upheaval.
That Peel was to follow just this ‘instinct for continuity’ yet split with the party he created to serve it is the great paradox of his life. Surely, however, this very paradox provides confirmation of the sturdiness of the man’s spirit. After all, he did what he felt was best by his own lights, the abuse of past friends and allies notwithstanding.
There is perhaps something slightly unfortunate about the way the great Iron Duke was forgiven by his own side and forgotten by history for doing much as Peel did. History remembers Wellington as an emphatic Conservative yet in the end he connived in all the things he fulminated against still more noisily than Peel ever did. The great issues of the day passed through Wellington’s hands just as they did through those of Peel. Wellington has been forgiven by all Conservatives, probably because he defeated Napoleon so everything else is secondary, while Peel has never been because he was a professional politician.
To understand Peel and the age he brought into being is to appreciate that pivotal Victorian virtue of respectability. Properly understood it ‘was dynamic, not static; it carried with it a commitment to self-help’. There are any number of other Victorian exemplars. Such men showed just what was industriously possible. Peel the bourgeois was explicitly glad that good honest toil meant ‘opportunities of elevation and distinction’. In true Victorian fashion, however, he also knew that it was proper that ‘industry, sobriety, honesty, and intelligence will as assuredly elevate the low, as idleness, profligacy, and vice will depress, and justly depress, those who are in high stations’. Victorian values was not the slogan of a century to come but a real scheme
of morals which sought to improve, sustain and care for the community as a whole, and in hard-headed fashion to boot.
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Finally, it is time to turn to Peel the man and Peel the politician. His industry and ability far outpaced those of most of his contemporaries: he did not found a philosophy but it is possible to catch glimpses of one in development. This is true even in the field of foreign and imperial policy, which was an inescapable consideration for Peel, as a leading politician in an age of British global power. It is an area of Peel’s legacy which is rarely considered but inevitably important.
Peel’s last speech before his death in 1850 was in response to the Don Pacifico affair, a bitter Anglo-Greek spat involving his contemporary Lord Palmerston, the details of which are mentioned in the following chapter. This episode hinged on the issue of intervention. When was it, if ever, allowable to follow an interventionist foreign policy?
Peel was clear. He deprecated from the backbenches the idea that Britain should strain to promote interventionism as some kind of ideological imperative. As Prime Minister too, he had been contemptuous of the Afghan crisis he inherited from the Whigs, it being ‘the most absurd and insane project that was ever undertaken in the wantonness of Power’. He wanted no imperial acquisitions for their own sake, still less for the glory which might attach to those who acquired them. Rather he wanted only to make the best of what we had. This was Peel the man of business who saw patriotism as based on practicality.
Then there is Peel the domestic politician. On the hustings at Tamworth in 1841 he observed that the Reform Bill a decade before had led him to see:
… the good that might result from laying the foundations of a great Conservative party in the state, attached to the fundamental institutions of the country – not opposed to any rational change in it which the lapse of years or the altered circumstances of society might require, but determined to maintain on their ancient footing and foundation our great institutions in Church and in State.
The Victorians Page 4