Originally published in Saint Pauls (Virtue and Co.) vol.3 #16 (Jan 1869).
Gradual progress is not so imposing, either in the way of splendour or of terror, as revolutionary progress; but it is attended with less pain to individuals and to classes, it is not necessarily less thorough, and it issues in a state of society more stable, more homogeneous, more richly variegated, and more finely mingled. The extreme of haste produces the extreme of torpor, and if patience is a plain virtue, it is the best of safeguards against lethargy. There is an island in the remote spaces of ocean lying to the south of Cape Horn, whose geological structure is an alternation of volcanic ashes and ice. Nature is there, by turns, a maniac scattering fire, and a corpse laid out rigid under a shroud of snow. Does not this strange island serve in a rough but expressive way to emblem those societies in which outbursts of revolutionary rage have succeeded periods of torpid acquiescence in despotism, and in which the public mind, even during its intervals of slumber, is haunted with an apprehension of convulsive change? There is no doubt a price paid for calmness and deliberation in removing abuses and introducing improvements. Keen and ardent spirits find it harassing to wait. But there is compensation in the long run; and the past, consigned with reverent deliberation to the grave, leaves a legacy of benediction to the present. It is a remarkable fact that English Toryism has formed what naturalists would call the matrix, out of which have come nearly all the most illustrious modern achievements of English Liberalism.
About the year 1600, one William Peele came from East Marten in Craven, Yorkshire, and settled near Blackburn, in the county of Lancaster. He occupied a farm-house built in a hollow, and hence called Hoyle or Hole House. The situation was melancholy, and some have supposed that it cast a shade of sadness and solemnity over the man's mind and those of his children. Forty years later,—just at the time when the Long Parliament was getting under weigh,—we find Robert Peele, grandson of William, engaged in the manufacture of woollen cloths at Blackburn. He was reputed wealthy, and left nine score pounds, then a fair dowry for a provincial gentlewoman, to each of several daughters. One of his sons, named Robert, purchased a small estate, called the Crosse, subsequently named Peel Fold, and still in the possession of his descendants. He settled it on his son William, who was the first to drop the "e." William was sickly, and in his time the family lost ground. His son Robert, in whom the energy and enterprise of the race revived, tried farming and hand-loom weaving. He married Miss Elizabeth Haworth, of Lower Darwen, and, in company with her brother and a Mr. Yates, entered into business as a calico printer. One day his daughter, a lively girl of fourteen, came in from the kitchen-garden with a parsley-leaf in her hand, and told her father to look how pretty it was. He adopted it as a pattern; the pattern had a run; and the father, with pleasantly replenished purse, received the nickname of Parsley Peel. He seems to have been already a man of substance, when a rabble of infuriated hand-loom weavers made a destructive attack upon his property. Irritated and alarmed, he withdrew from the neighbourhood, rented land suitable for his purpose for three lives from the Earl of Uxbridge, and settled in Staffordshire. The land bordered on the Trent. He built three mills, brought water to one of them by cutting a canal from the Trent at an expense of £9,000, resumed operations, and grew rich. So far as we can gather from the too sparkling narrative of Sir Lawrence Peel, he henceforth traded solely on his own account. We have now arrived at the second half of last century.
The third son of the settler by Trent was again called Robert. It struck him, as he approached manhood, that the Staffordshire sphere was too limited for his ambition. His brothers and sisters stood, he said, "too thick on the ground." His uncle Haworth offering him partnership, he betook himself to the earlier seats of his family in Lancashire. He became the brain of the firm which he joined, and began to lay the foundation of a splendid fortune for himself. He was a man of clear, bold intellect in all matters connected with business, and of indomitable energy. When the weather was threatening, he would rise from his bed in the dead of night to visit the bleaching grounds, and one whole night every week he sat up, attended by his pattern-drawer, to receive any new patterns which the London coach might bring down. This sort of work, if it has a fair field, is always successful, and those were times when a vigilant eye and a quick and steady hand had many a chance in the manufacturing world of Lancashire. Neither then nor subsequently did any vein of creative genius reveal itself in the Peels; but the Bury manufacturer, if himself no inventor, could appreciate the inventions of others, and had capital wherewith to buy them. He was already a wealthy man when he married Miss Ellen Yates, the daughter of his partner, a pretty, sprightly girl of eighteen, with a handsome dowry.
Robert Peel was then thirty-six, and the love affair between him and the bright school-girl is a welcome gleam of romance in a life in which there is not much of that kind of thing. His wife's money, however, had probably been in his view no unimportant consideration, as he was bent upon being a millionaire. He had his wish. While still in the prime of life, he was understood to be one of the richest manufacturers in England. He took a keen interest in politics, became a leading man in his district, and in 1790 entered Parliament for Tamworth. He was a Tory of the Tories, a sturdy sharer in all the regular old English prejudices, a fierce repeller of new-fangled notions, a natural enemy of Frenchmen, a hater of Catholics, a Church and King man out-and-out. He was infinitely startled and scandalised by the French Revolution, and shouted "God save the King" with a strength of lung and heartiness of tone which awoke an echo far and wide in England. In December, 1792, he was the chief mover in a local demonstration of loyalty, which culminated in a meeting held at Manchester. The speeches were doubtless stirring, and the audience, on their way home, became riotously loyal. Robert Peel was taxed with the disturbances which took place on the occasion by some member of the House. "I only," he replied, "cried 'Gud save the King.'" In 1798, when the Government was pressed for money to carry on the war, he put down £10,000 as the contribution of the firm at whose head he stood. A man like this deserved encouragement, and in 1800 he received a baronetcy. George III. had a special favour for him, "An honest man," said King George,—"a very honest man," when his name once turned up; and, as the Royal manner was, kept repeating, "a very honest man." A rich manufacturer who headed the Manchester mob in shouting "God save the King," and could not see very much harm in sacking the house of a Socinian or Papist, was as an angel sent from heaven in the eyes of Farmer George. Peel's own man of men was Pitt. He almost literally worshipped the subsidising minister, and, as hero-worshippers are apt to do, made the object of his adoration look sometimes rather absurd. He published a pamphlet to prove that the national debt was a positive source of prosperity, and stood stoutly in the breach against his own son when sacrilegious hands were going to be laid upon Pitt's inconvertible paper currency. The measure which he opposed is said to have made him a richer man by half a million; but this, had he foreseen it, would not have weighed a feather in the balance against what he conceived to be the plenary inspiration of Pitt.
The happy marriage of this notable manufacturer was blessed with issue. First came one daughter, then another, and the simple-hearted father began to yearn intensely for a son. At length, on the 5th of February, 1788, in a small cottage in the neighbourhood of Bury, a son was born to him. His own residence, Chamber Hall, was at the time under repair. He was a devout man; he had probably prayed God to send him a son; and now he received the gift as from God's hand. He "fell on his knees in his closet and returned thanks to the Almighty, and in the same moment he vowed that he would give his child to his country." He meant what he said. From the earliest dawn of his son's intelligence he educated him with a view to his becoming a great statesman, another Pitt. It was a just ambition in the citizen of a free country, and, in essentials, it was gratified. Old Sir Robert lived to see the child over whom he that day prayed one of the most eminent men of his time, and steadily advancing to the highest position which a subject in England can occupy. He called the boy Robert. It is with him that we are principally concerned.
Sir Robert had his son educated under his own eye until the time came for his entering Harrow. He was there a form-fellow of Byron's, and few passages have been oftener quoted than that in which Byron strikes off a kind of biographical parallel between himself and his friend. It is evidently Byron's wish to convey the impression that Peel was a boy of excellent parts and blameless behaviour, while he, with powers capable of beating Peel at anything if he had only thought it worth his while, was a youth of brilliant and lawless genius. He was always in scrapes, Peel never; he seldom knew his task, Peel always; but when he chose to learn it he could say it fully as well as Peel; and in acting and declamation he had the superiority. This is, no doubt, correct, but more important than his estimate of young Peel's abilities is the kindly interest which Byron unmistakably displays in his schoolfellow. Both his masters and his class-mates formed the idea that Robert Peel would do something great,—an idea which would never have occurred to them if he had been a mere plodding dullard, taking a high place by dint of industry, and faultless from want of spirit. At Harrow, as subsequently, there must have shone through his steadfast virtue a glow of friendliness and magnanimity which won him the homage of the heart as well as of the intellect. Schoolboys are keen censors in their own sphere, and the slightest taint of priggishness, affectation, meanness, or falsehood is detected by them. On the other hand, they admire virtue, even when it rebukes the feelings of the majority, if it be frank and sincere. Peel was a religious and truthful boy, healthy in body and in mind, and his masters and class-fellows liked him. He gave no proof of genius. Formality was, from first to last, his weakness. His career at Oxford was a continuation of his career at Harrow, and it ended in his taking a double first at the early age of twenty. Gilbert, Hampden, and Whately were among those who competed with him for the highest honours.
One can imagine the satisfaction with which old Sir Robert contemplated all this. Hitherto his opinions and prejudices had run without a check into the mould of the new mind, and the son was obviously to champion all the "loved beliefs and old-world ways" of the father. When Sir Robert had dedicated his child to the service of his country, he knew that he could at least give him a chance of fulfilling the destiny intended for him. Pocket boroughs were then included in the constitution, and shared, in old Peel's mind, the reverence which embraced every part of that sacred edifice. In 1809 Robert came of age, and in the same year entered thy House of Commons. The ancient city of Cashel, in Tipperary, rejoicing in twelve electors, had a representative all to itself in the British Parliament. The twelve electors of Cashel were much influenced in their choice of a representative by Mr. Richard Pennefather, who had what was politically called the patronage of the seat. Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Pennefather arrived at an understanding, and Mr. Peel became M.P. for Cashel. On the 3rd of January, 1810, he seconded the address in a maiden speech of no great power or felicity. His university fame had preceded him to the House, and though his father was too solidly able a man to be garrulous, it is probable that the exceeding fulness of his heart on the subject of his son's dedication and anticipated achievements had overflowed a little in talk. Observers thought that it would take some time to make young Peel Prime Minister. We have a specimen of the mild political witticism of the period in an ironical will, bequeathing to Mr. Peel the patience of the testator, to be used by him until his attainment of the Premiership, and then to revert to the nation, which "would have much need of it." He took his place, beside his father, in the heart of the Tory phalanx. The year had not expired when he entered official life as Under-Secretary for the Home Department. The Hon. Spencer Perceval was then at the head of the Cabinet. In 1812 Perceval fell under the knife of the assassin, many changes took place in consequence of the event, and Mr. Peel became Chief Secretary for Ireland, with a seat in the Privy Council. In the same year he exchanged his Irish borough of Cashel for the English borough of Chippenham, in Wiltshire. His constituents now numbered 185, but the seat, we are informed, was acquired "probably by means similar to those used at Cashel." The richest manufacturer in the world had no difficulty in arranging those matters for his son.
Peel was now in his twenty-fifth year. The post to which he had been appointed was perhaps the most difficult in the whole administrative system of Great Britain. On brain, on heart, on temper, it made severe demands. Ireland was the battle-field of exasperated factions, raving and tearing in the frenzy of their hatred. The Orangemen were for ascendency without stint or qualification, for ascendency that might be felt, for ascendency that would send the cold iron of its domination to the heart of the subject race. The Irish party was hounded on by demagogues of towering audacity, bitter malevolence and great parts, and inflamed by every stimulant that could be applied by an incendiary press. A just and merciful man, holding the principles of Peel, was exposed to the animosity of both sets of combatants. His mind was made up as to the general policy which ought to be pursued by England in relation to Ireland. The admission of Roman Catholics to a share in the government of the empire would, he believed, be the knell of England's glory and prosperity. On that point, therefore, he agreed with the Orangemen, and their opponents gave him the poor nickname of Orange Peel. But his nature was humane, and for the feelings of malevolence with which the Orangemen regarded the native Irish, he had no sympathy. The Orangemen accordingly disliked him. Reasonablenes and moderation were at that time sure to be detested by every faction in Ireland. In the discharge of his duties it was impossible for him not to come across the path of O'Connell, and, with the instinct of dogs and demagogues, biting at the stick when they cannot bite the hand which holds it, the Liberator fiercely insulted him. For once he lost his temper, and in 1815 challenged O'Connell. The challenge was accepted, but O'Connell was bound over to keep the peace in Ireland. The foes proceeded with their respective friends to England, but O'Connell was again arrested in London, and bound over to keep the peace with all his Majesty's subjects. A nobler Irishman than O'Connell, the orator Plunket, acknowledged in Parliament that Peel showed himself when in Ireland friendly to the Irish; and young as he was, his administrative capacity displayed itself in the practical efficiency of the Irish government, and the introduction of an improved system of police. It would be difficult to exaggerate the benefit which this measure has effected for Ireland, in the way of preventing agrarian outrage, and putting a mild but powerful check upon seditious agitation. The improved system was subsequently adopted in London, and Peel thus became the reformer of a most important branch of the public service throughout the United Kingdom. He earnestly endeavoured to introduce in Ireland a national system of education, and spoke with deep feeling in Parliament of the love of the native Irish for instruction; but the spirit of faction was too strong for him. In 1817, on being elected representative for the University of Oxford, he resigned his Irish secretaryship, and was for three years out of office.
It is a weighty attestation of the soundness of Peel's character and the goodness of his heart, that his official life in Ireland, though undoubtedly a hardship, was not in any other sense a misfortune. To be the instrument of a system radically bad is trying for the moral nature, and there is incurable injustice in the exclusion of a vast population,—for the Roman Catholics of England, Scotland, and Ireland were a vast population,—from the civil privileges enjoyed by their fellow-subjects, merely on account of their religion. A disposition with any taint of baseness in it would have grown baser under the influence of Peel's Irish experience. But the perfectly healthy face will not become dirty, and Peel emerged from the foul atmosphere of Irish corruption and Irish faction with conscience clear, with temper unsoured, with intellect not indeed perceptibly expanded, but with no acquired twist or narrowness. As an apprenticeship in the duties of administration, and a discipline in the art of dealing with men, no introduction to public life could have been more valuable than his career in Ireland. Nay, it may be doubted whether the practical demonstration he had witnessed of the impossibility of making Ireland loyal and prosperous on Orange principles had not an effect in determining his ultimate course on the Catholic question. His was a mind in which seeds of thought might lie long before germinating.
It was as the distinguished advocate of ecclesiastical and political exclusion that Peel was chosen by the University of Oxford to represent it in Parliament. The style of his arguments on the Catholic question at the period when he still stood low enough in sympathy, intelligence, and statesmanlike daring to represent the University of Oxford, is instructive. "Sir," he said, addressing the Speaker, "I own that I require more than the mere disclaimer of such doctrines as these, that the Pope has the power of deposing sovereigns, or that faith is not to be kept with heretics. While the superiority of any earthly prince is admitted within these realms, of whatever nature that supremacy may be, spiritual or temporal, it ought to be defined, without the possibility of error or misconception. We know that at present it is not so; and Catholic writers have told us that, while the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, unexplained and unlimited as it is, is admitted, no great security must be expected from restrictions on the exercise of his temporal authority." When Mr. Whalley now assures the House of Commons that the Pope cannot change, and that Roman Catholics are all bound to do their utmost to drive her Majesty from the throne, he is replied to with entreaties for a song. Probably, in the terms of logic, Peel was right in anticipation, and Whalley is right as to fact. Thorough-going Romanists, men of the pure Ultramontane type, would place all temporal as well as all spiritual authority under the Pope, and restore and develop the theory and practice of the Middle Ages. There is no law in England to prevent such men from taking part in the government of the kingdom. Is the peril of our situation, therefore, appalling? Hardly. There is no law to prevent any man from taking the Peak of Teneriffe between finger and thumb and planting it as an extinguisher upon the legislative palace at Westminster. Is that catastrophe, therefore, to be greatly apprehended? Not very greatly. There are forces, quite independent of law, which secure us against the disaster; and those forces are not much more to be relied upon, in their own sphere, than the forces of another character which provide against the resuscitation of medieval Catholicism, and guard the British throne from subversion by the ghostly arms of Pius IX. Logic is at bottom but a transcript of fact, and the logical formula may remain when the fact has vanished. The power of the Pope of Rome is no longer practically available to overthrow temporal sovereignties, and the true statesman,—the man who, having to deal only with living men, ought to have regard only to the logic that is alive,—will therefore cease to take it practically into account in determining the civil rights and duties of nations. Geologists see the mould of an organism in the rock. Once it contained a living creature, put the species has for ages ceased to be. They do not construct their science on the hypothesis that it still lives. In political science or nescience, this is done every day.
Another grand argument of Peel's, while he continued dark enough to represent the enlightenment of Oxford, was that, if Roman Catholics were admitted to a share in the government of the empire, the Protestant constitution of the United Kingdom would be at an end. Admit Roman Catholics to Parliament and the ultimate jurisdiction over the Church of England would be vested in a tribunal in which Roman Catholics might vote. A Roman Catholic might be Lord Chancellor. Horror of horrors !—a Roman Catholic might be keeper of the Royal conscience. If this was not wreck and ruin for all that Englishmen held dear, what could be? This was the kind of reasoning which, to his dying day, had firm possession of the mind of the first Sir Robert Peel. It was on the strength of reasoning like this that King George III., heartily backed up by his people against ministry after ministry, determined rather, as Thackeray says, to "lay that stout head upon the block than that Catholics should have a share in the government of England." Men of splendid genius and the most chivalrous tone of character, men like the late Professor Wilson of Edinburgh, preached this kind of thing with impassioned earnestness. "Let all Protestants," wrote Wilson, "who venerate the holy altar of the Living Temple resist Catholic emancipation even to the death! though to avert that calamity they once more must see the green shamrock—God bless it—blush red, and for a season trodden with pain under patriotic feet, torn from the foreheads of traitors and rebels." Wilson was not merely not inhuman; he was tenderly and generously kind; yet he would rather have seen Ireland subjected to the horrors of another '98, and Irish rebels once more trampled down in their blood, than admit Roman Catholics to the rights of citizenship. Nevertheless, the argument upon which all this adjuration and alarm hung suspended. was, even in respect of formal logic, superficial and flimsy. Those who trusted in it took for granted that there was no safety for Protestantism save in one particular form of ecclesiastical establishment. If the constitution of Great Britain means simply and exclusively the maintenance of the exact ecclesiastical arrangement made in England in 1688, then the emancipation of the Catholics was the destruction of the constitution. But in point of fact the word "constitution" in this connection cannot signify any large proportion of those advantages which as Englishmen we enjoy, and if we vaguely put it for the whole of those advantages, we practise a deception upon ourselves. No modification of our ecclesiastical arrangements can make us cease to be represented in Parliament by those whom we elect to represent us. If we persist in being Protestants, and have a Parliament in which the immense majority are Protestants, we shall be a Protestant nation; and it will become in that event a mere question of words and forms whether our constitution is Protestant or not. It was in the sense of destroying our national Protestantism that the opponents of Roman Catholic emancipation declared that the measure would subvert the constitution, and in this sense they are now seen to have been ludicrously in the wrong. It is true, as Mr. Disraeli explicitly affirmed many years ago, that the whole technical theory of our Protestant constitution was broken to pieces by the emancipation of the Roman Catholics; but England was never more thoroughly Protestant than at this hour. If the constitution of England means what is vital and perdurable in her character and institutions, then is that constitution a proclamation to the world that no authority, foreign or domestic, will be permitted to deter her from taking her place in the religious, ecclesiastical, social, moral, intellectual, and political advance of mankind. Protestantism is the resolution to be ever advancing in the path of the right and the true; and of English Protestantism, in this vital sense, the Act of Catholic Emancipation was a genuine birth and a magnificent triumph.
It may be doubted, however, whether the delay which occurred in passing the Emancipation Act was not conducive to the ultimate benefit of the nation. Had the Roman Catholics obtained civil privileges at a much earlier period, and had the disestablishment and disendowment of the Anglican Church in Ireland followed soon after, it is probable that some form of establishment and endowment of Roman Catholicism would have been attempted in Ireland. This would have been a great evil. Apart from all question as to the superiority of one form of the Christian religion to another, it is obvious that the scheme of universal endowment would have hampered the State with a retinue of dependent Churches, involving endless expense, and occasioning an infinite amount of occupation irrelevant to the true business of statesmen. In the first quarter of the century the proposal to disestablish and disendow the Anglican Church in Ireland was universally understood to take along with it the proposal to establish and endow the Church of Rome. The ability of religious denominations to maintain their clergy in comfort and respectability had not then been demonstrated on any such scale as has been witnessed in our day, and the world was not prepared for conduct so noble as that of the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland in declaring that it seeks no endowment from the State. The proved capacity of free Churches to maintain themselves, and to perform with the utmost efficiency every part of the duty of Churches, has simplified the ecclesiastical problem in all its aspects, and the man who now talks of the disestablishment and disendowment of a Church as synonymous with its destruction, will be understood to be either shamefully uninformed or given to indulgence in the figures of a childish and obsolete rhetoric.
But we had not got past the year 1817. Peel received the blue-ribbon of Toryism in his election for the University of Oxford. For three years he confined himself to his duties as a member of Parliament. He was not idle. He was chairman of the committee appointed to inquire into and report on the Resumption of Cash Payments. In 1811 he had sat in a committee on the same subject, of which Horner was chairman. At that period he opposed Horner, and agreed with his father in supporting what he supposed to be the financial policy of Pitt. In 1819 he for the first time took a different side from that on which his father stood. He frankly declared that the evidence presented to the committee had overcome his arguments, and that he had abandoned his former views. Old Sir Robert was bitterly disappointed, and told the House that it had been his ambition to make his son like Pitt. So much easier is it to stick to the formula of a great man dead, than to shape a formula to suit the present fact, such as the great man, if alive, would have produced! His son was attaining fall intellectual stature, was becoming able to walk in Pitt's steps, and was therefore learning to dispense with Pitt's old shoes. There are interminable speculations in Alison about the ruin which the resumption of cash payments after the war might, could, would, or should have produced in Great Britain, but no one now imagines that the inconvertible currency ought to have been let alone. "If," said a powerful writer at the time of Peel's death, "it be asked who bound England to the faithful discharge of the largest debt ever contracted or imagined by man, and who thereby raised her credit and advanced her prosperity to an unexampled standard, one name, and one only, will present itself to the mind of either Englishman or foreigner, and that name is Peel."
He was still out of office when, at the age of thirty-three, he married Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd. In 1822 he became Home Secretary in the Liverpool administration, and continued in the Home Office for five years. Consummate efficiency in the discharge of business, and the accomplishment of invaluable reforms in the system of criminal law, signalised his conduct of domestic affairs. It was for him an eminently congenial task to mitigate the barbarity of the old criminal code, and his business aptitude and acquaintance with the details of legislation enabled him to carry the enterprise to conclusion with extraordinary celerity and precision. He placed the police system of the metropolis at the same time on a proper footing.
In April, 1827, he withdrew from the Cabinet formed by Canning, stating as his motive for so doing that he could not, as Home Secretary, administer Ireland while the head of the Government was in favour of Catholic emancipation. He was doubtless honest upon this occasion, although events which quickly followed led to his being severely blamed, and one would like to have seen him, in view of the desertion of Canning by his aristocratic allies, playing a more brotherly and cordial part. It was in the subsequent January,—Canning having fallen in the meantime,—that he joined the Duke of Wellington in forming an administration. In the following August he wrote to the Duke in favour of concession to the Roman Catholics, His suggestion was that he, Peel, should leave the Cabinet, and bring forward measures for the settlement of the question, in the character of an independent member. The Duke disliked this plan, and gradually succeeded in convincing him that his assistance in office was indispensable to success in a policy of Catholic emancipation. No difficulty was found in securing the support of the Cabinet to their views, but the King stood out stiffly.
George IV., when Prince of Wales, had almost broken his father's heart by his pro-Catholic sentiments; but he was now violently anti-Catholic, and when the Duke of Wellington had apparently succeeded in convincing him of the necessity of concession, he continued to cabal against his own Ministers, giving ear to Lord Eldon and other Tory malcontents, and trying to thwart the policy to which he ostensibly adhered. "I have undertaken this business," said the Duke, "and am determined to go through with it. Nobody knows the difficulties I have had with my royal master,—nobody knows him so well as I do. I will succeed, but I am as on a field of battle, and must fight it out my own way." The assent of the King was at last given. The rumour of a grand change of policy, soon to be disclosed, passed over the country. The excitement was tremendous. Peel was denounced as an apostate; Wellington was called a dictator, perhaps aiming at the crown. With sensitive conscientiousness, and a practical wish to have his hands free, Peel resigned his seat for the University of Oxford, and that learned and gracious body, accepting the resignation, returned Sir Robert Inglis in his stead. So intense was the anti-Catholic feeling throughout England that Peel narrowly escaped being rejected by the electors of Westbury, to whom he applied to return him to Parliament. A candidate dashed down from London in the Protestant ascendency interest, arriving in a coach and four just too late to win. On the 3rd of March, 1829, Peel re-entered Parliament, and announced on the same day that, on the 5th of the month, he would introduce bills for a settlement of the Catholic question. Roman Catholics were, by one bill to be relieved of the declaration against transubstantiation, and, by another, to be permitted to take an oath abjuring the civil but not the spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope in his Majesty's dominions.
On the same day, the Duke of Wellington, Mr. Peel, and the Lord Chancellor were summoned to Windsor. "The King," writes Peel, "observed that he could not possibly consent to any alteration of the ancient oath of supremacy,—that he was exceedingly sorry that there had been any misunderstanding on so essential a point,—that he did not blame us on account of that misunderstanding,—that he did not mean to imply that in the explanation which we had previously given to him in writing, there had been any concealment or reserve upon this point." He insisted, however, that there had been misapprehension, and his deliberate and conscientious judgment did not permit him to sanction the new policy. The ministers stated it as their clear opinion that, if his Majesty had lain under any misconception, he did right to modify a decision formed under those circumstances. All very well; but what, asked George, would they do? On that point their answer was distinct;—they would resign office. For five mortal hours did this Protestant king, shuffling, as one can imagine him, about the room, and imploring them to defer to his "deliberate and conscientious judgment," try to move Wellington and Peel. They were not the men to be convinced or cowed by George IV. "At the close of the interview the King took leave of us with great composure and great kindness, gave to each of us a salute on each cheek, and accepted our resignation of office, frequently expressing his sincere regret at the necessity which compelled us to retire from his service."
Returning to London, the Ministers joined a Cabinet dinner at Lord Bathurst's, and informed the company that they were out. The intelligence passed like an electric shock through the City. Late in the evening of the 4th, Wellington received a letter from the King, stating that the attempt to form another administration had failed, and declaring that they must recall their resignations. Peel and the Duke required express and full authority to proceed as they had proposed. In the course of the night his Majesty acceded to their request. On the 5th, therefore, as intimated two days before, Mr. Peel introduced his motion for a settlement. "I rise," he pointedly said, "as a Minister of the King, and sustained by the just authority which belongs to that character." The Eldonite Tories still kept plying poor George,—presenting petitions, and so forth,—and the King told a person in his confidence to inform the peers of the household that it was his wish that they should vote against the Cabinet; but the gentleman applied to had too much sense or too little courage to execute the unconstitutional commission, and the conscientious monarch was compelled to give in. The bills were accordingly passed, and the first of Peel's two supreme offences against the old Tory party was consummated.
In the spring of 1830, the first Sir Robert Peel was gathered to his fathers, and his son succeeded to the baronetcy. From about this time the latter sat in the House of Commons for Tamworth. In the middle of November the Government was put in a minority of 29 in a division on the civil list. Brougham was threatening a motion for Parliamentary Reform. The prospect looked, on the whole, so troublous that Ministers resigned. Sir Robert Peel had outgrown his early friends and instructors on the currency question, and on that of religious liberty, but on Parliamentary Reform he continued to belong to the straitest sect of the Tories. He argued in the way with which we are now so familiar. The words may have varied; the substance has always been the same. "Let us never," he said, "be tempted to resign the well-tempered freedom which we enjoy, in the ridiculous pursuit of the wild liberty which France has established. What avails that liberty which has neither justice nor wisdom for its companions,—which neither brings peace nor prosperity in its train?" Sir Robert Peel was a man of specially clear and circumspect intellect; he knew England well; and yet these warnings, if they had any practical meaning at all, meant that the middle class of Great Britain, with a few from the upper section of the wage-receiving class, would choose men to represent them who would start off in an idiotic dance of French imitation, and cast justice and wisdom, prosperity and peace, to the winds. That nations have an invincible preference for fools, knaves, and madmen by way of representatives, is the suppressed premise of all Tory reasoning on popular election. So strange are the performances of that illusive faculty which apes the work of the true imagination, and by its spectres, painted on the mental retina and mistaken for realities, throws men into agonies of fear, and startles reason into shuddering ineptitude.
Sir Robert Peel found himself in the House of Commons, after the general election which succeeded the passing of the Reform Bill, with a mere handful of followers. The party had dwindled to about a hundred. The persuasion in all quarters was that the Tories had vanished from the political world of England, and that, for the future, all Governments must be Whig. Such was probably at first Sir Robert Peel's own idea, but he did not sink into apathy, or settle into dogged and sullen opposition. A consummately skilful critic of every department of the administration, and a luminous and convincing speaker, he was necessarily a power in the House. As he sat facing Ministers, his Majesty's Opposition was speedily perceived to be still present in our constitutional system. The Whigs were new to office, flushed with success, expected by the nation to introduces political and social millennium, inclined to believe that no political millennium could be more genuine than their own permanent enjoyment of office, and wondering what people would still want to have done. Peel's little band gradually became a party, and with organisation, discipline, and pride in their leader, the hopes of the Tories began to revive. Sir Robert, however, was not impatient, and he well knew that the time was not near when he could construct a permanent administration.
At the close of the session of 1834 he quitted England, and arrived with his family in Rome, intending to enjoy an Italian winter. He was suddenly recalled by the King, and required to form a Ministry. He knew that the strength of his antagonists was irresistible, but he felt that it was of essential importance to teach the nation that the Tories had not been beaten out of hope and heart by the Reform Bill. "Was it fit," he asked, "that I should assume that either the object or the effect of the Reform Bill has been to preclude all hope of a successful appeal to the good sense and calm judgment of the people; and so to fetter the prerogative of the Crown, that the King has no free choice among his subjects, but must select his Ministers from one section, and one section only, of public men?" He formed a Government; conducted the public business with great vigour; and fought the Whigs splendidly for a few months. In the beginning of April, 1835, he resigned office. "For myself," he said upon that occasion, "the whole of my political life has been spent in the House of Commons; the remainder of it will be spent in the House of Commons; and whatever may be the conflicts of parties, I, for one, should always wish, whether in a majority or a minority, to stand well with the House of Commons." The words were received with immense cheering throughout the House, which was continued for some minutes.
The Whigs resumed office, but the heart of England was turning to the gallant and brilliant band, Graham and Stanley, Gladstone and Sydney Herbert, and the rest, that followed the banner of Peel. In 1839 he was in a position to take office, but justly insisted that Whig ladies should not rule in the bedchamber, and being thwarted on this point, continued in opposition. In 1840 he gave battle to the Government, and compelled them to appeal to the country. A large Conservative majority was returned. Instantly unseating Ministers, he took office at the head of a compact, well-disciplined, and enthusiastically loyal party, comprising an ample majority in both Houses of Parliament. The annals of Parliamentary warfare record no worthier or more signal triumph. By legitimate methods, in the normal way, through sheer superiority in talent, in tact, in experience, in knowledge, he climbed to power. In those eight years he practically refuted his own arguments against extension of the suffrage. The electors, ten pounders and all, saw that he and his crew were the men most capable of sailing the ship of State, and, regardless of party names and previous offences, put the helm into his hand.
His Government was one of the greatest which has ruled England for the last hundred years. Mi. Disraeli allows that Sir Robert Peel was a transcendent administrator, and his vigilance and energy infused vigour into every department. He occupied a proud position, respected by all parties at home, honoured throughout Europe. Mr. Disraeli's expression is that, in 1844, he "reeled" under "the favour of the Court, the homage of the Cabinet, and the servility of Parliament."
He descended from his pinnacle consciously, voluntarily, deliberately, sacrificing the pomp of power and the sweetness of party devotion on the altar of principle and of patriotism. "Sir Robert Peel," it has been aptly remarked, "was one man by parentage, education, friends, and almost every circumstance of his very early entrance into public life; and another man by the workings of his great intellect, the expansion of his sympathies, and his vast and varied experience." Unendowed with genius, imagination, or originality, he could not do for England what only the greatest men do for their country; he could not stamp the impress of a creative mind upon her institutions, or turn her history into a new channel. But he was profoundly in sympathy with her general progress, and knew when the hour had struck for important changes. In the case of Parliamentary Reform, indeed, we have an exception to this general rule. But in connection with Parliamentary Reform also his watchful intellect might ultimately have been taught by experience. It would surely have dawned upon him, that, for a noble people, there may be a fascination in kingly character and commanding parts; and that, away from this consideration, money and land exert in British society an influence so penetrating, subtle, intense, and popular, that it evades all formal arrangements in the distribution of electoral power, and makes proletarian revolution practically impossible. He had discerned with fine precision the time for Roman Catholic emancipation, and at a much earlier date he had begun to cast off the yoke of those economic fallacies in which his father devoutly believed to the last. Owing his fortune to manufactures, himself an extensive land-owner, he was in a position to apprehend with sympathetic candour the arguments on both sides in the free-trade controversy. His decision in favour of opening the ports of a kingdom like ours, limited in its territorial area, unlimited in its manufacturing energy and resources, to the grain merchants of the world, could not be long deferred. The almost unanimous opinion of economists beyond the walls of Parliament, and the convincing logic of Mr. Cobden in the House of Commons and on the platform, impelled him towards free trade. He must have known that in abandoning the Corn Laws he was decreeing the fall of his Cabinet. The Liberals would support him in carrying his motion, but he was aware that magnanimity is not pushed so far in party warfare, that the Whigs who voted with him on free trade would lose an opportunity for combining with the rebel section of his own party to turn him out. He felt that he was performing an illustrious service to his country, and this consciousness was his reward in stepping down from the proud seat which he had occupied.
There was no cause whatever in the nature of the case why Sir Robert Peel should not have been reconciled to his party, and should not have regained that position to which the suffrages of his country had called him in 1840, and which the England of free trade was well prepared to accord him. The man who stood in the way of this result was Mr. Disraeli. Not only was he no protectionist, but he had stated in his most important work that commercial restriction was one of those grand errors of degenerate Toryism which it was the duty of Conservatives to spurn. Mr. Disraeli, the freetrader, organised under Lord Derby the party which gnashed its teeth at Peel for striking the flag of protection. The confederates had no bond of union except a common hatred and a hopeless cause. When Mr. Disraeli entered Parliament, Sir Robert Peel had been about thirty years in the House; he was the first administrator of his time; he had served the Tories with a devotion second only to that with which he had served his country; he had rallied their broken and despairing squadrons, had taught them to face the foe, had led them to victory, and had made them renowned throughout the world. It must have seemed strange to him, and with all his consciousness of duty done, it must have struck cold to his heart, that the men whose pride it had so long been to blend their acclamations round his feet, now shouted with delight while a brilliant adventurer, who had never held office, who was master of nothing save the rhetoric of scorn and the art of Parliamentary special pleading, made him the butt of raillery and the aim of invective. There are few things in modern Parliamentary history so humiliating as the spectacle of the free-trader Disraeli, surrounded by a yelping pack of protectionists, attacking Peel for slightly endangering the rents of the rich by permanently averting famine from the poor.
The fallen chief was not deserted by all his followers. A faithful few, the élite of the old army, conspicuous among them Mr. Gladstone, Sir James Graham, and Sydney Herbert, took their places by his side. The little band of Peelites formed an important section in the House. Sir Robert's temper was as sunny and placid as before the revolt of his followers; his wisdom had never been so calm and deep; his criticism on all parts of the administration was conclusive and authoritative. The free-trade policy which he had introduced was appreciated by the nation with deepening enthusiasm each successive year, and the solecism of a Tory party led by Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, while its natural leader, encircled by a ring of the ablest administrators in England, awaited its return to allegiance, might any day have ceased to exist. Or things might have taken a different course, and one still more auspicious. If we may judge by what occurred in the case of the ablest Tories of the century, Canning, Palmerston, Gladstone, Peel's intellect might have opened to the fact that improvement is the deepest principle of Conservatism, and he might have attested the maturity of his political intelligence by joining the party of progress. Physically his vigour was unimpaired, and the faith reposed in him by the great body of his countrymen was stronger than ever. He was capable of serving England more effectually than at any former period, and a supremacy still more illustrious than he had previously enjoyed seemed to await him.
On the 28th of June, 1850, he delivered an important speech on Mr. Roebuck's motion for a vote of censure upon Lord Palmerston's conduct of foreign affairs. Remarkable for the elevation of its tone and the absence of all harshness, it was full of sagacity, and exact and well-applied historical information. He sat down amid loud and long-continued cheering. Next afternoon he left his residence in Whitehall Gardens on horseback, made a call at the Palace, and, passing through the Park, was proceeding up Constitution Hill, when his horse swerved, kicked up its heels, and threw him over its head. He fell on his face, still grasping the reins, and the animal, thus checked, fell heavily upon him, planting its knees between his shoulders, and crushing in a rib upon the lung. He was taken up in a state of insensibility, from which he awoke in excruciating pain. The anguish was so great that he could be subjected to no examination, nor was it possible to remove him from the sofa on which, when brought into his house, he was first laid down. At times he was delirious, and then, as the crests of charging columns flashed upon the fixing eye of Napoleon, the scenes of his old Parliamentary battles passed before the mind of Peel. He named Graham and Hardinge. He was thinking of those glorious days when, with a few devoted followers, he reconstituted his party after the overthrow of 1832, and led it on from feebleness and contempt, until "the whisper of a faction" swelled into the thunder of a host, and timid resistance became triumphant attack. On the second day of July he died. The impression produced throughout the country was indescribable. With the universal grief was mingled a feeling of dumb and awestruck wonder. A sense of mystery in the dealings of the Infinite Ruler,—a vague apprehension of the "strangeness" of God's work,—oppressed reverent minds. The foremost statesman of England, one in whom the civilised world had an interest, had fallen a victim to the momentary panic of a brute! Such an event recalled that phenomenon known to astronomers as the sudden darkening of a sun in heaven.
There is no problem of any difficulty connected with the character or career of Sir Robert Peel. He was not a man of genius; he attained neither humour nor pathos; he was formal; there was a majestic egotism, something of haughtiness and ostentation, about him. He had not the light touch of Palmerston, the priceless gift of natural, irrepressible gaiety, the art of making duty a manly sport. But in truthfulness, in magnanimity, in civic courage, in simplicity, in strength and soundness of intellect, he reached the heroic standard. He had the tastes of a refined and cultivated gentleman. He loved art, he loved books. There was a princely courtesy in his treatment of men of eminence in the world of pure intellect,—an exquisite appreciation of the honour of serving them,—an unaffected delight in showing them kindness. "I am more than repaid," he writes to Hood, "by the personal satisfaction which I have had in doing that, for which you return me warm and characteristic acknowledgments. . . . . One return, indeed, I shall ask of you,—that you will give me the opportunity of making your personal acquaintance." Nature had not given him faculties of gigantic power or qualities of perilous fascination, but she had been kind to him. His physical frame was finely proportioned, his countenance open and commanding, his features gracefully bold, and of a high and characteristic English type. As an orator, he did not rival the brilliant terseness of Lord Derby or the felicitous precision of Lord Palmerston; but he was luminous in arrangement, and his stately and sonorous periods told well in a great representative assembly. In administration he is universally allowed to have been masterly. It has been said that he was always led by some other mind,—Horner, Romilly, Cobden. But the leading was invariably right, and to follow it was, under the circumstances, the noblest thing he could do. As light by light came out along the coast up which he steered his vessel, he shaped his course accordingly. It is melancholy to think that he left elaborate apologies for his conduct in connection with Roman Catholic emancipation and free trade. England, prosperous and harmonious,—Catholic and Protestant rejoicing in a common citizenship,—sectarian bigotry left to Mr. Murphy and his friends,—England the mart of the world, with free trade inscribed on the banners of all her parties,—these are his vindication. Sir Robert Peel's conduct throughout his career was as nearly irreproachable as is ordinarily attained by man; in those two instances it was sublime; and profoundly unconscious as he was of any such intention, the satire upon human folly and ingratitude involved in apologising for these is too painfully severe.