Whittington families » Robert (2Nd Baronet) PEEL (1788-1850)

Personal data Robert (2Nd Baronet) PEEL 

• He was born on February 5, 1788 in A Cottage, Nr Chamber Hall, Bury, Peelford, Lancashire.
• He died on July 2, 1850, he was 62 years old.

  Age:62

• He is buried on July 9, 1850 in St Peters Churchyard, Drayton Bassett, Staffs.
• A child of Robert (1St Baronet) PEEL and Ellen Elizabeth YATES (PEEL)
• This information was last updated on July 30, 2015.

Household of Robert (2Nd Baronet) PEEL

He is married to Julia (Lady Denny)(Countess of Drayton) FLOYD (PEEL).

They got married on June 8, 1820, he was 32 years old.

CHAN: NOTE 13:25

Child(ren):

1. Julia PEEL (VILLIERS)  1821-1893 
2. Robert (Sir) (3Rd Baronet) PEEL  1822-1895 
3. Frederick (Rt Hon) PEEL  1823-1906
4. William (Sir) V.C. PEEL  1824-1858
5. John Floyd (Capt) PEEL  1827-1910
6. Arthur (1St Viscount) Wellesley PEEL  1829-1912 
7. Elizabeth Eliza PEEL FLOYD (STONOR)  1832-1883 

Notes about Robert (2Nd Baronet) PEEL

Sir Robert Peel, the eminent statesman, born February 5, 1788 (near Chamber Hall, in a cottage, the hall being then under repair), and died July 2, 1850, married, June 8, 1820, Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd, Bart.

Sir Robert Peel (1788- 1850), by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1825 *Sir Robert Peel (1788- 1850)*, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1825 Peel, Sir Robert, second baronet (1788- 1850), prime minister, was born on 5 February 1788 at Chamber Hall, Bury, the third child and the eldest boy among the eleven children of Sir Robert Peel, first baronet (1750- 1830) , printed calico manufacturer, landowner, and MP, and his first wife, Ellen Yates (1766- 1803), who was the daughter of one of his two partners, Haworth and Yates. Two sisters died in infancy. Three sisters and five brothers survived, and all married. Peel was only two when his father bought a property in Tamworth and entered parliament as the member for the borough in 1790.

Education Peel showed an aptitude for his first lessons, taken with the rector of Bury, the Revd James Hargreaves, and may have preferred the schoolroom to the streets, where his red hair and curls exposed him to insult. Peel was eight when his father took possession of Drayton Manor, Tamworth, in 1796, and ten when the family moved in. He brought with hi m a Lancashire accent, traces of which could be detected in his speech thr oughout his life. At Drayton, he received his lessons from the Revd Francis Blick. Out of school, he had the run of the park. He learned to ride, but preferred to exercise onfoot, with a gun, rambling and rough shooting. In 1800, when he was twelve, his father, a supporter of gov ernment, was made a baronet. In January 1801, when Peel was already begi nning to grow tall,he was sent away from home to board at the Revd Mark Drury's house at Harrow School. He had been there two years, and was fifteen, when his mother died. Years later, he said that he had misspent his time at Harrow, and reminiscences tell of long excursions throught he countryside with his guns, which he kept at a nearby cottage. But Latin and Greek came easily to him, and his schoolfellows ran tohim for help with their translations and verses. In 1804 Byron and Peel declaimed together, Byron taking the part of the judicious Latinus, which allowed him- he was lame- to sit down, and Peel that of the impetuous Turnus. Peel left school at Christmas 1804, and resided for some month s at his father's London house in Upper Grosvenor Street, attending lectures at the Royal Institution and listening to debates in the House of Commons. It is said that Pitt himself asked Sir Robert who the young man was, and led him into the chamber. Peel spent the summer of 1805 at Drayton studying mathematics with the Revd R. Bridge, a senior wrangler from Cambridge, before going up to Oxford in October. At Christ Church, Oxford, his first tutor was Thomas Gaisford and his second Charles Lloyd, the future bishop of Oxford, with whom Peel continued to correspond about church and state un til Lloyd's death in 1829. Peel's closest friend was Henry Vane, son and heir of Lord Darlington, and later earl of Cleveland. Peel expanded at Christ Church. Cricket is mentioned, and rowing, and he dressed fo r effect. He entered his name for (oral) examination in both /literae hu maniores/ and mathematics in November 1808. In the weeks leading up to the examinations he overworked, could not sleep, and talked o f withdrawing. The day before the exams he played tennis. Peel did not dis appoint his examiners, or his audience. He was the first person ever t o be placed in the first class in both schools, and his performance becam e legendary.

A young MP Peel did not follow his father and grandfather into the family business, and within a few weeks of his coming of age in February 1809, his father used his influence with the Portland ministry to secure him a seat in the House of Commons. There was a vacancy at Cashel, a corrupt borough with a couple of dozen voters. A deal was arranged by Sir Arthur Wellesley, and Peel was elected on 14 April. He took his seat straight away, but did not speak until 23 January 1810, when he was invited to second the reply to the king's speech. Acceptance signifie d allegiance to the ministry, and Peel took a patriotic line, urging res istance to Napoleon, support for Sir Arthur Wellesley's renewed campai gn in the Peninsula, and confidence in British commerce. Four month s later Lord Liverpool, the secretary of state for war and colonies (an d another Christ Church man), offered Peel his first post as an under -secretary. Peel took charge of departmental correspondence with the colonies- everything, he said, from Botany Bay to Prince Edw ard Island. As his chief sat in the upper house, he was also called upo n to answer questions in the House of Commons. His departmental and his parliamentary skills, his administrative abilities, and hi s authority as a speaker thus grew together. Lord Liverpool found Peel a n official house, and here he began to entertain. It was in this perio d, rather than at school or university, thathis enduring friendship s were formed, with Henry Goulburn and John Wilson Croker.

Irish secretary In May 1812 Liverpool became prime minister and invited Peel to join the Irish administration as chief secretary. Peel held the post for six years- the longest tenure in the nineteenth century- and served three lord lieutenants, the duke of Richmond, Lord Whitworth, and Lor d Talbot. Nothing in Peel's upbringing gave him the historical imagin ation to question the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland, and h e cheerfully joined a regime which was locked into reliance upon penal l aws and the protestant ascendancy. As chief secretary he was required t o attend to business upon both sides of the water. In Ireland he stage- managed the election of sound protestants toparliament in 1812 and 1818, and persuaded Whitworth to dissolve the principal- and far from revolutionary- organization representing Catholics, the 'Catholic board', in 1814. In London, where politicians were, in the eyes of the administration in Dublin, embarrassingly soft about Catholi c claims for political rights, he opposed every proposal for relief. Pee l delivered an outspoken expression of the case against the Catholics i n 1817 (Hansard 1, 36.404- 23). Catholics owed allegiance to a fore ign power, he was not prepared to erect the influence of the pope into ' a fourth estate',and he tied his belief in the future of the Unio n to his faith in the exclusive principle. What religion suggested was con firmed by political economy. Ireland was, in Peel's opinion, a primitive and backward land, and at this stage in his career Peel appear s to have felt that in the long run the best hope for the country was tha t popery was something which a more prosperous people would grow out of . In the meantime Peel had to cope with the secret societies, the in timidation, and the crimes which resulted from the alienation of seven- eighths of the population. Like other chief secretaries he called fo r troop reinforcements, and renewed an Insurrection Act (in 1814, 1 815, 1816, and 1817). More promisingly, he declared that he would alwa ys prefer an army of police to an army of soldiers, and established a ne w Peace Preservation Force, controlled by the government in Dublin . In 1817 he responded to a famine by the procurement of food and the di stribution of money. As chief secretary Peel proved his capacity to serve the lo rd lieutenant as 'his friend, his adviser, [and] his representative in pa rliament'. But the office had also begun to shape his life in other ways. His conduct in Ireland brought him the sobriquet Orange, bestow ed by Daniel O'Connell, and led, in 1815, to a challenge to a duel, whic h did not take place, in Ostend. Peel was to carry with him for eve r after a settled dislike for the great Irish patriot and all his way s. Peel's antagonism to Catholic claims for relief secured him the in vitation, brought by Charles Lloyd, to stand, in preference to Georg e Canning, for one of the two Oxford University seats in 1818. Peel was el ected, but he had, perhaps, allowed himself to be miscast. His protestant ism ran deep. But he acknowledged that Ireland had been misruled in the past. He had found the tools with which he was constrained to work- a job bing aristocracy with a 'vortex of local patronage', and loyalist associations- distasteful, and he had spoken out in favour o f the protestant ascendancy because he had been called upon to go vern Ireland 'circumstanced as Ireland now is'.

The committee on cash payments For six years Peel took but one real holiday, in 1815, when he met Wellington in Paris, heard from his own lips how the battle of Waterloo had been fought, and went on to stay with the duke of Richmond in Brussels and view the ground where the victory had been won. Peel left Ireland in August 1818 (he never went back), and did not rejoin Lord Liverpool's administration until January 1822. Inthe meant ime he chaired a committee considering the expediency of requiring the Bank of England to resume paying gold, on demand, for its notes, an d in due course he drafted the report and introduced the bill embody ing the committee's proposals. The evidence taken before the bullio n committee in 1811 had shown that the over-issue of paper currency sin ce the suspension of cash payments in 1797 had resulted in a depre ciation of the pound and a rise in the price of gold. The question was , did this matter? In 1811 the house had decided that the answer was yes, but not while there was a waron, and Peel himself had voted against resumption. Post-war experience persuaded him that over-issue also led to speculation, crises, unemployment, and political unrest. No w Peel thought the committee's first responsibility was to protec t the public creditor, who was morally entitled to be repaid in the coin which he had lent and not in a depreciated one. The committee moved swif tly into a consideration of the when and how (Peel's favourite ground) , the accumulation of a reserve of gold, and the successive step s by which, starting with the larger notes, paper was to be made conver tible into gold bullion, at the current price of £4 1/s/. 0/d/. the ou nce (1 February 1820), at £3 19/s/. 6/d/. (1 October 1820), and a t the 'ancient and permanent standard of value' £3 17/s/. 10 ½/d/. (1 Ma y 1821), until finally all notes, however small, were to be exchanged for £3 17/s/. 10 ½/d/. in specie (1 May 1823). In thus rounding up the theoretical complexities of an issue, and giving effect to the solution he favoured in the clauses of a durable act of parliament, Peel was to have no equal.

Marriage and family It is not clear whether, when he left Ireland, Peel had alr eady fallen in love with Julia Floyd (1795- 1859), the daughter of Gener al Sir John Floyd, who was, when Peel arrived in Ireland in 1812, the second in command of the military forces, and his first wife, Rebecc a Juliana, daughter of Charles Darke, a merchant in Madras. Julia ha d been born in India, and like Peel she had lost her mother (in 1802). She and her stepmother, Lady Denny, were entertained at the chief secre tary's house in Phoenix Park. Peel, we are told, was unusually attentive to them when, in 1817, they left Dublin for London. When Peel himse lf returned to England in 1818 he wondered whether Julia 'would be abl e to abandon her gay fashionable world for the severer climate of a prof essional politician's wife. "You are my world", she replied disarmingly' (Gash, Mr Secretary Peel, 257). They became engaged in March 1820 , and were married on 8 June. During the next twelve years, while Peel rose towards the top in politics, seven children were born: Julia (1821) , Robert Peel (1822), Frederick Peel (1823), William Peel (1824), John Floyd (1827 ), Arthur Wellesley Peel (1829), a nd Eliza (1832). In London, they lived in a new house designed by Ro bert Smirke and built in 1824 at 4 Whitehall Gardens. Here, in a specia lly commissioned long gallery, Peel hung his collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings. These were purchased, with assistance from his father and advice from David Wilkie, in a period when the European salerooms were still busy following the upheavals of revolution and restoration, and included Hobbema's The Avenue, Middelharnis and Rubens's Ch apeau de paille. Whenever Peel found himself alone in London he wrot e to Julia every day, and no breath of scandal has ever attached to hi s name.

Home secretary In 1820 and 1821 Peel refused offers of a place in the cabinet as president of the Board of Control. But on 17 January 1822 he rejoined the administration as home secretary, a post he was to hold until Lord Liverpool suffered a stroke in 1827, and again, under the duke of Wellington, from 1828 to 1830. As home secretary Peel's primary responsibility was for law and order, and here he distinguished himself from other contemporary reformers by his ability to see th e process whole and to attend to all aspects, from the formulation o f the criminal law and the mechanics of policing, through indictment, tria l, and sentencing, to punishment on the scaffold, in prison, and i n penal colonies. Contemporaries gave Peel credit for reducing the number o f offences which carried the death penalty.But there was no fall in t he number of executions, and the most striking achievement of his period at the Home Office, and perhaps of his whole career, was the consolidat ion of the criminal law. Hebegan in 1823 where his predecessor, Lord Sidmouth, had left off, with the law relating to prisons. The following year he attended to the laws relating to transportation, and began to coax the Scottish judges towards a reform of Scottish criminal law. In 1825 he consolidated eighty-five laws relating to juries into a sin gle act. In 1826 he proposed to consolidate the laws relating to theft . Outof 14,437 persons in England and Wales charged with various cr imes in the course of the previous year, 12,500 (at least) had been accused of theft, which was the most important category of crime. Consolidation was needed because, year by year throughout the eighteenth cent ury, specific acts (he cited the stealing of hollies, thorns, and quickse ts) had been made into crimes instead of species of acts. There were no w ninety-two statutes relating to theft, dating from the reign of Henr y III, and Peel sought to unite them in a single statute of thirty pages. U pon this occasion his attempt to reduce the law to a single act prov ed to be too ambitious, and the bill emerged, finally, as four separat e acts in 1827. Peel's talents were never more apparent than in this labou r of consolidation. In 1824 a select committee had recommended t hat consolidation and amendment should be kept distinct. Peel d ecided that they were not separable. He interpreted consolidation to me an the collection 'of dispersed statutes under one head' followe d by the rejection of what was 'superfluous', the clearing up of wha t was 'obscure', the weighing of 'the precise force of each expre ssion', and 'ascertaining the doubts that have arisen in practice and t he solution which may have been given to those doubts by decisions of t he courts of law' (Hansard 2, 14.1236). Where he found any gap 'throug h which notorious guilt escapes' (he instanced the theft of stock c ertificates in the funds which was not at that time an offence), he wou ld remedy it (ibid., 14.1222- 3). In Peel's hands, then, aconsolidatin g act was a reforming act which incorporated case law and supplied omis sions. As he turned from one aspect of the law to another, Peel circulat ed drafts of his consolidating bills among the judges, and took pains t o win their support, flattering Lord Eldon with a bag of game (which pe rhaps he had shot himself). He succeeded because nine-tenths of crimina l law was statute law, which judges loved to criticize, and one-tenth , only, common law, the anomalies of which judges might seek to pre serve. On 9 March 1826 Peel's method of presenting a case came t o maturity in his great speech on theft (Hansard 2, 14.1214- 39). There wa s an apology (a preference really) for a topic which could 'borrow no ex citement from political feelings' and might appear 'barren and uninviting '. There was a reference to a hypothetical fresh start ('if we were legi slating de novo, without reference to previous customs and formed habi ts') . There was a glance at more radical proposals for 'rapid progress , which is inconsistent with mature deliberation', and a promise that , if he was allowed to have his way, there would be 'no rash subversio n of ancient institutions' and 'no relinquishment of what is practicall y good, for the chance of speculative and uncertain improvement'. His o wn proposals were then presented as a middle way 'between the redundanc y of our own legal enactments and the conciseness of the French code'. F inally he avowed his ambition to leave behind him 'some record of th e trust I have held', and to connect his name with 'permanent improvements ' to theinstitutions of the country.

The Catholic question, Liverpool, Canning, and Goderich So long as Lord Liverpool was prime minister Catholic emanc ipation remained an open question, and Peel, who as home secretar y had overall responsibility for the administration in Ireland, continue d to act as the protestant champion in the House of Commons. But the is sue was beginning topass out of control, both at Westminster and i n Ireland. In 1825 the pro-Catholics won the annual vote in the House o f Commons. Peel offered to resign, but was told that his resignation woul d bring Liverpool's government down. Understandably, he was unwilli ng to terminate the career of the statesman who had given him hi s first step up the ladder, and he allowed himself to be persuaded to co ntinue. In 1826 there was a general election, and early in the followi ng year Liverpool suffered a stroke. When the succession passed t o George Canning, the leader, since 1822, of the Catholic partywith in Liverpool's administration, Peel (and others) did resign, a nd when Canning, too, died in August 1827 and was succeeded by Lor d Goderich, Peel remained out of office. Early in 1828, when Goderich's administration collapsed and the king invited the duke of W ellington to form a government, Wellington asked Peel to return to the H ome Office and to take the lead in the House of Commons.

Home secretary again At the Home Office, Peel resumed consolidating where he ha d left off. In 1828 he dealt with the law of offences against the person , reducing it from fifty-seven acts to one, and in 1830 he turned the twe nty-seven acts relating to forgeries punishable with death into a sin gle statute. Even more important in his eyes, he began at last to make p rogress with the police. In 1822 a committee had refused to recommend an y reform. In 1828 Peel secured a new inquiry into the police of the metr opolis, and the following year he was able to legislate. He hadalread y given an indication of the way his mind was working when he praise d the small force of full-time professional magistrates and constable s established in London in 1793. But this efficient superstructure reste d upon a complex of autonomous parochial and district watches. In S t Pancras alone there were eighteen different night watches, many o f which had no authority to intervene in a brawl on the other side of th e street. Peel resolved to create a unified body under the control of th e home secretary and paid for out of a general rate. The new forc e started patrolling the streetson 29 September 1829. They were no t there to carry out sophisticated criminal detective work, but to res train the thousands of vagrants, thieves, prostitutes, and drunks wh o tried to beg, steal, earn, or expend a living upon the streets of th e capital, and to keep order. Peel's 'vigorous preventive police' carr ied truncheons but not firearms, and their secret (or innovator y) weapon was their military discipline. This 'unconstitutional' police f orce, as it was called in the Chartist petition, was bitterly resented , and there were many assaults upon policemen at first. But a force o f just over 3000 men won control of the streets. The thin blue line pen ning vice back into the rookeries and shielding gentility from coarse ness was a huge step up from the parish constables and night watchmen . In sterner times of supposedly revolutionary turmoil, it was also a re assuring step down from the use of soldiers and the risk of bloodshed. Li ke so many of Peel's reforms this one lasted. Fears of the police develop ing into a secret police on the continental model proved to have bee n exaggerated, and hostility to the very idea of an efficient police forc e ebbed away. By the mid-century the policeman's image was becoming a fri endly, neighbourly one, and constables were being called 'bobbies ' or 'Peelers' after their founder Robert Peel.

Catholic emancipation In the meantime, as leader of the House of Commons, Peel wa s obliged to grapple with the Catholic question. In 1827 the protestant s had won the annual vote in the House of Commons. The following year, wh en the protestant dissenters and the Roman Catholics, in effect, c ame to terms, the government was heavily defeated on a motion for the rep eal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and it was defeated again on a m otion for Catholic emancipation. The first defeat was easy to deal wi th- Wellington and Peel gave way and brought in a bill of their own. The s econd was compounded by the rise of the Catholic Association and th e defeat of Vesey Fitzgerald, a popular protestant landlord and governm ent minister, by O'Connell, who was not eligible to take his seat, at a b y-election in co. Clare. The protestant ascendancy had collapsed, and ema ncipation was now imperative. The only question was whether it should b e undertaken by the king's present ministers or by a new political combinat ion. Once again Peel offered to resign, and once again he was persuad ed to stay. That decision taken, he offered to vacate his seat for Oxfo rd University. His friends renominated him, but at the end o f February he was defeated in a poll by Sir Robert Inglis by 609 votes t o 755, and the government had to ask Sir Manasseh Lopes to vacate his pock et borough at Westbury in Peel's favour. Peel was aware, then, when he ro se on 5 March 1829 to introduce the cabinet's bill to emancipate the Cath olics, that he would be asked why he saw 'a necessity for concession no w, which was not evident before'. He answered that it was the conditio n of Ireland. '[The protestant] Reformation in Ireland' had hitherto 'mad e no advance', and after twenty years he was convinced that 'th e evil' was 'not casual and temporary, but permanent and inveterate'. T he time had come when less danger was to be apprehended from 'attemptin g to adjust the Catholic Question, than in allowing it to remain any lo nger in its present state'. 'I yield … unwilling to push resistance t o a point which might endanger the Establishments that I wish to defend' (H ansard 2, 20.728- 80). He ignored O'Connell, and saved face by announc ing that the details of the measure had not been discussed with the Roma n Catholics themselves. Catholics were to be allowed to enter both hous es of parliament and to hold any office except regent, lord chanc ellor, and (more strangely) lord lieutenant of Ireland. In return Pee l asked the Irish to accept the disfranchisement of the 40/s/. freehold ers and a reduction of the electorate. The government did not ask fo r any control over the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops, because n o British government, Peel said, could enter into negotiation with th e court of Rome. Coming to terms with parliamentary reform and whig gove rnment The bill passed, but it split the tory party, and politic s were never to be the same again. Peel had spent his formative years in pa rliaments where ministers relied for their majority upon the sweeteni ng effects of royal patronage, and where, for want of such influence, th e opposition was weak. It was a situation in which a secretary of stat e could devote the greater part of his day to his department, and one in w hich, when he had framed a measure, he could come before the House of Com mons with a reasonable expectation that he would prevail. Now, the ultr a-tories began to mutter that a more popular parliament would neve r have passed an emancipation act. Their disaffection helped the whigs ba ck into the mainstreamof politics, and parliamentary reform became a p ractical issue. Between 1826 and 1830 Peel himself had been willin g to transfer the two seats taken away from Penryn to Manchester. But h e had acquiesced in the Lords' refusal to enfranchise any large t own. Now, in 1830, reform motions were already being debated by the ol d parliament before George IV died in June, and new elections were hel d in July and August. The year was a watershed in Peel's personal as in h is public life, for his father died on 3 May, and Peel became the sec ond baronet, inherited the property at Drayton Manor (which, together wi th his dividends from the funds, brought him an income of £40,00 0 p.a.), and succeeded his father as the member for Tamworth, which he c ontinued to represent until the end of his life. Wellington and Peel me t the new parliament without any increase in strength. The ministry c ould not make overtures to the ultra-tories, and the followers of Willia m Huskisson did not welcome the advances made to them. Peel felt that h e was in a false position, and he was scarcely on speaking terms wit h the duke. When the ministry was defeated in a vote on the new civil l ist, on 15 November1830, he was glad to go. He had been in office fo r fourteen of the past eighteen years, and he was wounded by charges of ' ratting' on the Catholic question. In the course of the next two years- while a government head ed by Lord Grey introduced a reform bill, called another general elect ion, and sought to persuade William IV to create peers in order to c arry their bill through the House of Lords- Peel was obliged to lear n a new role, as leader of an opposition. He did not, at first, find it easy . In March 1831 he was appalled by the magnitude of the whig scheme, a nd on 9 April he was actually on his feet, and had lost his temper, whe n black rod arrived to summon the Commons to hear the announcement of t he dissolution of parliament. During the election which follow ed, Peel's house in London had to be protected by the new Metropolita n Police, and Peel himself had to be stopped by his friends from becomin g involved in a duel with Sir John Hobhouse. When the excitement over th e bill moved on from the Commons to the Lords, Peel surprised Lord Harro wby and the waverers by saying that he would prefer the bill to pass b y a creation of peers (whose effects, he believed, would be temporary, b ecause the newly created peers would not remain radical for long) rath er than a threat to create peers (which might establish a precedent f or permanent revolution). In May 1832, when ministers resigned, Peel declined the kin g's invitation either to form or to join a new administration . The bill, he thought, should be passed by the men who had introduced it . Once the billbecame law, Peel accepted it as the settlement of a gr eat question, and demonstrated confidence in the future by commissionin g Robert Smirke to design him a new mansion, complete with every modern con venience of heating and plumbing, at Drayton. There it became a traditi on for the family to lunch off silver and dine off gilt. Thither Pee l transferred many of his British paintings. These included portraits, co mmissioned from Sir Thomas Lawrence, of his political colleagues Liver pool, Canning, Huskisson, Wellington, and Aberdeen- canvases to in spire him during the parliamentary recesses when he was considering h ow to block any further increase in popular power at the expense of th e traditional institutions, crown, church, and aristocracy. At first th e instruments to hand for this defensive warfare were weak. There were ab out 150 tories, only, of all kinds, returned at the general electio n in December 1832, and the party in the House of Lords was not his to co ntrol. Peel felt his way. Sitting for Tamworth, he had no experience o f how respectable a contest in a newly enfranchised large boroug h might be, and he shared many of the ultra-tories' fears for the const itution. But he avoided making any premature attempt to reunite the part y, and he waited for the tories to gather round him on his own terms . In the meantime he was fortunate. The whigs began to fall out wit h their radical allies, and among themselves. This gave Peel the op portunity to step in and save the moderate whigs from the extremists, an d in this way the new Conservatism was born.

Prime minister, 1834- 1835 In July 1834, when Grey resigned, the king invited Peel t o coalesce with Melbourne. But that was impracticable. Melbourne became pri me minister, and when autumn came Peel took Julia and his elder daughte r to Italy. They were in Rome when William IV dismissed Melbourne, an d the duke of Wellington advised the king to send for Peel (and agreed t o act as caretaker until Peel arrived). The king's messenger reache d Rome on 25 November, and Peel was back in London on 9 December and kis sed hands the same day. He never doubted that he must accept the commissi on- it had, in effect, been accepted for him, and refusal would injure th e crown. The whig dissidents, Sir James Graham and Lord Stanley, were no t yet ready to join Peel, whose cabinet could not then differ much fro m the duke of Wellington's cabinet in 1830. But Peel took the office of c hancellor of the exchequer for himself, and he found new blood for junior offices- Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, and Praed. The ministr y could not survive in the existing House of Commons, and Peel asked th e king to dissolve parliament.

The Tamworth manifesto Next, Peel found an imaginative way of communicating with t he electorate. The Tamworth manifesto was addressed to his own constituents, but it was distributed to the national newspa pers and published on 19 December 1834. Peel appealed, in inspired w ords, 'to that great and intelligent class of society … which is fa r less interested in the contentions of party, than in the mainten ance of order and the cause of good government'. He promised 'a careful r eview of institutions, both civil and ecclesiastical' and 'the corre ction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances'. It did n ot take him long to show that this was no mere rhetoric. For his own pa rt he found religiosity almost as distressing as impiety, and avoided r eligion as a topic of conversation. But he valued the church as an insti tution, and he persuaded the bishops to embrace an ecclesiastical commi ssion, which would enable the church to reform itself and save it from i ts enemies. Hopefully this would atone, among the ultras, for his actio ns in 1829. Simultaneously, ministers let it be known that they were wi lling to consider the whole range of dissenters' grievances. In th e elections which followed, early in 1835, Peel's supporters won 290 se ats and became the largest single party in the House of Commons. I t was not enough to give them a majority, and Peel was surprised by t he skill with which Lord John Russell persuaded the whigs, the radicals , and the Irish to combine against him. First, they threw out the former sp eaker. Next they carried an amendment to the address. But the margin wa s small, Russell dared not take up Peel's challenge to move a motio n of no confidence, and Peel gained time in which to introduce hi s Irish Tithe Bill. In the first week of April, Peel was defeated three t imes, and on 8 April he resigned. In the space of four months the king h ad elevated Peel into the leader of the party of resistance, and Peel h ad earned high praise. He had not been able to pass his own measure , but he had stayed in office long enough to get his opponents committe d to the (unpopular) appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Ir ish church to the education of all classes of Christians. The contest thu s begun, across the floor of the House of Commons, between Peel, wit h his tall stature, huge frame, and uneven, slightly wobbly legs (caug ht even better in Political Sketches by H. B. than in the portrait s at age thirty-seven by Sir Thomas Lawrence, at fifty by John Linne ll, and at fifty-six by F. X. Winterhalter), and the diminutive Russel l, was to last, with many changes of fortune, to the end of his life.

An opposition leader For six years between 1835 and 1841 Peel showed a wonderfu l patience waiting for the whig ministry to perish, andfor the premie rship to return to him unencumbered by any debt to any man. At firs t he was extremely apprehensive. Party feeling reached a new peak i n the summer and autumn of 1835. Inside parliament, Peel was afraid les t the tory peers, by challenging the government's Municipal Corporatio ns Bill, bring about their own destruction. The reform was an inesca pable postscript to the Reform Act, and he wanted it out of the w ay. He tried, as he expressed it in 1838, to 'diminish the risk and deade n the shock of collisions between the two deliberative branches of th e legislature'. He lent his aid to see the bill safely through the House o f Commons and onto the statute book, and then passed the recess reading G uizot's history of the French Revolution. The following year he con tinued toproclaim selective opposition. But he was happy to see th e House of Lords block every whig measure for Ireland (tithe, corporat ions, poor law). Outside parliament he continued to develop the them eof the new Conservatism- in a speech in the City in May 1835, and in Gl asgow (where he had been elected lord rector of the university) in Janua ry 1837. Party and its organization was something Peel felt ambiguou s about. He was not in love with parties, and he regretted the high pro file of party warfare after 1830, which demanded more frequent attendanc e in parliament and took ministers away from their offices. Bu t he did well what he had to do. He selected the chief whips, Sir Georg e Clerk in 1835 and Sir Thomas Fremantle in 1837. He directed Lord Granvill e Somerset to operate- tothe extent that the constituencies would allow i t- a central clearing house for parliamentary candidates. He encourage d F. R. Bonham (a frequent visitor to Drayton) to brief him about the stat e of the electorate, and he reminded his supporters in the constitue ncies that 'the battle of the constitution must be fought in the regis tration courts'. At the general election of 1837, following the dea th of the king, the party won another twenty-three seats in the Engli sh counties. This left the whigs dependent for their majority upon O'Con nell's Irish members. It was an inconsistency in Peel that, having sat f or an Irish seat himself, he now thought it unconstitutional, almost, f or the course of the United Kingdom to be determined by Irish votes whe n they were not to his liking. Butit was a prejudice shared by Graham an d Stanley, who joined forces with Peel in 1838. Even after the whigs aband oned the appropriation clause in 1838, Peel denounced their plan fo r the state to construct the main lines of railway in Ireland (1839), an d confined the Irish Municipal Corporations Act (1840) to almost the narro west possible compass. Whatever Peel gained in popular franchises in 1837 he lost , for the time being, with the accession of Queen Victoria. Melbourne ha d a hold upon her affections, and a partisan whig for a queen was a novel ty. Peel kept Conservative spirits up with another speech in May 1838 a t the Merchant Taylors' Hall. In 1839, when the whig majority fell to fiv e upon a proposal to suspend the constitution of Jamaica, and the mi nistry resigned, Peel wasunable to take Melbourne's place becaus e the queen would not grant him the expression of confidence for whic h he asked- the dismissal of some (the queen thought he demanded all) of th e whig ladies of the bedchamber. Peel could have forced the issue, but gi ven his respect for royalty he preferred to yield and allow Melbour ne to carry on. The ministry was weak, but Peel still lacked the means to topple it, and in the following year, when the Conservatives essaye d a motion of no confidence, it was emphatically defeated. Peel did not expl oit the ministry's difficulties over Canada.

The general election of 1841 In 1841 the whigs addressed themselves to the budget defici t. In trying to take politics onto new ground, they proposed to reduce t he duties on sugar,timber, and corn. Peel made sport with them by drawi ng a picture of the chancellor of the exchequer 'seated on an empty ches t, by the pool of bottomless deficiency, fishing for a budget', and d efeated them upon sugar. He then moved a vote of no confidence which wa s carried by one vote on 4 June 1841. At the general election which foll owed, 'every Conservative candidate', J. W. Croker said, 'professed hims elf … to be Sir Robert Peel's man', and all turned on the name of Sir R obert Peel. The whigs campaigned upon a small fixed duty on corn. Pee l skilfully avoided pledging himself to any particular course of actio n about the corn laws or anything else. The Conservatives won a majorit y of about 76. In the English and Welsh counties they won 137 out of t he 159 seats. In the English and Welsh boroughs they took almost as man y seats as the whigs, 165 to 176. In Scotland the Conservatives held 20 ou t of the 30 county seats, but two only of the 23 borough seats. In Irel and, where they made some gains, they held 43 out of 105 seats.

Prime minister, 1841- 1846 The whigs met the new parliament towards the end of Augus t and were ejected. The queen, whowas now guided by Prince Albert, ma de no difficulty about the bedchamber, and on 30 August Peel at l ast became prime minister upon his own terms. Or so it seemed at the t ime. But in fact, for all his attempts to modernize the party and to br oaden its appeal to the industrious middle classes, he was more depen dent than ever upon the country squires. Analysis of the borough seat s shows that Peel's success was concentrated in the small English boroug hs, with fewer than 1000 electors, and that in the large English bor oughs, with more than 2000 electors, he had actually won two fewer seat s- 15 to his opponents' 43- than in 1837. The triumph and the tragedy o f the ministry of 1841- 6 were written into the results. Peel appointed Sir James Graham to the Home Office and Aber deen to the Foreign Office. Goulburn became chancellor of the exchequer , and the earl of Ripon president of the Board of Trade (with Gladsto ne as his junior). Thus far, everything was under Peel's control. Gra ham acted as his lieutenant, Peel himself took responsibility for explai ning Aberdeen's conciliatory conduct of foreign affairs to the H ouse of Commons, and Goulburn and Ripon, survivors of the governmen ts of the 1820s, both turned, by long habit, to Peel himself for advi ce. Stanley, who took the colonies, was more independent, and he was giv en early promotion to the House of Lords in 1844. Ellenborough becam e president of the Board of Control, and then, a month later, governor- general of India. The forward policy which he adopted towards Afghanis tan and China, the annexation ofSind, and the conquest of Gwalio r were not much to Peel's taste. Among the less-effectives, Knatchbull (paymaster-general) represented the ultras, as he had in 18 35, and Buckingham was offered a place (lord privy seal) as a spoke sman for the agricultural interest. Peel's first objective was to restore the authority of gove rnment. Throughout the 1830s, the whigs (as he saw it) had allowe d their policies to be suggested to them, and their measures to b e amended, by their radical and Irish supporters. This was dangerous. Min isters should be seen to be in charge. It was imperative to put the polit ical pyramid back the right way up again. Legislation should be prepare d by ministers, with deliberation. Considered measures should th en be respected as the work of professionals, and theyshould b e seen to pass without amendment. Peel would exercise power upon his own ' conception of public duty', and he took pride in never having proposed an ything which he had not carried.

The economy and the budget of 1842

Peel had now to grapple with the problem which had faced his predecessors, the recession, which had begun in 1838 and wo uld not go away. He had come to power in the middle of structural chan ges in the economy, which led many to question whether the country ha d taken a wrong turning. Would manufacturing towns ever be loyal? Wa s poverty eating up capital? Was it safe to depend upon imports for f ood and raw materials? Could the fleet keep the seas open? Or should go vernment encourage emigration and require those who remained behin d to support themselves by spade husbandry? These were the 'condition o f England' questions which Peel faced, together with the phenomena whi ch rode upon them, Chartism and the agitation to repeal the corn laws. I n accordance with Peel's governmental ethic, he did not introduce emerge ncy measures in haste in the autumn of 1841. He and his cabinet spent th e autumn and winter of 1841- 2 taking stock, and then brought forward pro posals fit for the hour. Land, as Peel's supporters reminded him, was the historic b asis of the constitution. It was a 'permanent' interest which appreciat ed in value with cultivation. Commercial capital, by contrast, put dow n no roots and might be taken to another country, while manufacturing capi tal depreciated with use. But commerce andmanufactures had bor ne Britain to its pre-eminence in the world. Writing to J. W. Croker on 2 7 July 1842, Peel agreed that one might, if one 'had to constitute new S ocieties', 'prefer Corn fields to Cotton factories', but 'our lot' wa s cast (Sir Robert Peel: from his Private Papers, 2.529). The decisio n had already been taken in Peel's father's or in his grandfather's day , and there could be no turning back now. What was wrong with the econo my was not that population had outrun capital, but that the power of p roduction had overtaken the capacity to consume. The way to 'remove the b urden which presses upon the springs of manufactures and commerce' wa s to make Britain a cheap country to live in (Hansard 3, 61.460). In 1842, then, Peel was addressing himself through the fisc al system to the health of the economy and to the morale of the nation a s a whole. He resolved to redistribute the tax burden by reducing dutie s upon articles of mass consumption and reintroducing the income tax whic h had been abolished after a back-bench revolt in 1815. Reducing dutie s would help to get the nation back to work and take the momentum out o f the Chartist movement. Peel did not recognize the political aspiration s of the Chartists, and (unlike his father) he would never himself p ropose statutory restrictions upon the hours of labour. But he und erstood hunger, and he wanted thoughts of 'sedition' to be forgotte n 'in consequence of greater command over the necessaries and min or luxuries of life' (Hansard 3, 87.1048). Imposing a peacetime incom e tax would demonstrate that the British state was an equitable one, i n which burdens were placed (despite the warnings of political econ omists who identified income as the source of savings and the route t o capital formation) upon those best able to bear them. These measures had to be sold to a party which was still so lidly protectionist. Accordingly, in 1842, grain was singled ou t for separate treatment and dealt with first, and on 9 February Peel anno unced a thorough revision of the sliding scale of 1828- to make it m ore defensible. Then, on 11 March, when he introduced the budge t- which he did himself (the complaisant Goulburn stepping aside)- he be gan by making much of the deficit. Having worked up a sense of urgency h e explored and rejected alternative remedies (lower expenditure, increase d duties, and the 'wretched expedient' of borrowing). Finally he came t o his own plan. An income tax of 7/d/. in the pound on incomes over £150 p. a. was to be imposed for three years. This would turn the deficit int o a surplus. With that surplus Peel proposed to undertake 'a complete re view, on general principles, of all the articles of the tariff'. N o duty should ever again be prohibitive. Imports were to be categorized ( the word 'consolidated' was not mentioned but might not have been ou t of place) into raw materials, semi-finished articles, and manufacture d products, which were not to pay more than 5 per cent, 12 per cent, an d 20 per cent respectively. Duties were reduced on 750 out of the 1200 ar ticles in the tariff (Hansard 3, 61.422- 76). It was Peel's finest hour; t he crisis of the century was met by the fiscal reform of all the centuri es. The budget brought the resignation of the duke of Buckingham, a nd Peel recalled that 'these changes … were not effected without gr eat murmuring and some open opposition to the Government on the part of m any of its supporters' (Memoirs, 2.100- 01). But in fact it was a wonde rfully ambiguous measure. He had rationalized the tariff: he had t aken a step towards free trade. He could still move in either direction.

The Canada Corn Act of 1843 In 1843 it appeared that the best way to save Canada fro m a future invasion by the United States was to try and interest the f armers in the American mid-west in selling their grain to Britain. The Ca nada Corn Act granted wheat shipped from Canada a privileged position i n the British market (above other colonies), and nobody could doubt tha t the greater part of all the wheat which would come down the St Lawrenc e would have originated in the United States. In 1843 the protectionist s in the party scarcely knew what to make of the Canada Corn Bill. They fe ared the consequences of opening the door to American grain, but the y wanted to retain Canada,and the bill was introduced by Stanley who w as known to sympathize with their own views.

The Bank Charter Act of 1844 The Bank Act of 1819 had imposed upon the Bank of Englandt he duty of honouring its notes in gold if asked to do so. In normal ti mes the bank's customers did not wish to exchange their notes for g old, and in 1819 Peel had believed that the bank could be trusted to de cide how many more notes it would be prudent to put into circulation tha n it had gold to back. Upon several occasions since, when speculation wa s rife and sound management was called for, the bank had still been in creasing its note issue when prices were rising and gold had already beg un to leave the country. The Bank of England, then, paid too little att ention to the state of the foreign exchanges, and the English country ban ks, which had about one-quarter of the circulation, paid none. The resul t was that the collapse, when it came, and the consequent business failure s and distress were all the greater. Here was another factor bear ing upon the condition of England question. Peel determined to end the d iscretion allowed to the bank. If gold was leaving the country,note s must be withdrawn from circulation until prices fell, British good s became attractive to foreign buyers, and gold returned to the coun try again to pay for them. The bank's charter had been renewed in 1833. But there wa s a break clause, and Peel waited until he could move in and place no te issue under statutory control. By the act of 1844 there were to b e no new banks of issue. Existing country bank issues were frozen a t their present levels, and no bank which gave up issuing its own n otes would ever be allowed to resume. Note issue would imperceptibly b ecome concentrated in thehands of the Bank of England. The ban k itself was to be separated into a banking department and an issue departm ent- the first free, the second regulated. Notes to the value of £14 milli on- the minimum amount needed if the business of the country was to continue- might be issued, backed by securities (the credi t of the British government). Beyond that amount notes were only t o be issued when there was gold in hand to back them, and the figures w ere to be published every week. The act had interesting overtones. I t was a vindication of the right of the state to interfere with pow erful interests, and, in a period when other monopolies were bein g swept aside, it established a new one. It has been criticized i n detail for paying too little attention to other negotiable instrument s such as cheques and bills of exchange and to the bank's role as len der of last resort, but it was a marvellous demonstration of Peel's com mand of an abstruse subject, and the act (which applied to England an d Wales and was followed the next year by comparable measures for Scotl and and Ireland) did help to reduce the severity of crises and last ed until 1914.

Gathering disaffection In other ways 1844 was not such a good year. There was a di spute with France over Tahiti which necessitated an increase in the de fence estimates. The ministry was defeated by Lord Ashley, a tor y paternalist, on the ten-hours issue, and by Philip Miles on its proposal s to revise the sugar duties (with their complicated links to the issu e of slavery). Both defeats were reversedby the threat of resignation. Th e tactic was sufficient unto the day, but it helped to accumulate resent ment for the future. Then, in 1845, matters began to come to a head. Th e income tax was about to expire. But the economy was now in a positio n to benefit from another virtuous circle of tariff reductions, and Pee l chose, once again, to introduce the budget himself, on 14 February. H e renewed the income tax for another three years explicitly in order to e nable him 'to make a great experiment' in reducing other taxes, 'the remo val of which will give more scope to commercial enterprise, and occasio n an increased demand for labour'. Customs duties were to be abolished o n 430 articles which provided 'the raw materials of our manufactures'. Th e excise duty on glass was abolished too. Peel believed that the result o f this 'extension of industry and encouragement of enterprise' wou ld be 'the benefit of all classes of the community, whether they are d irectly or indirectly connected with commerce, manufactures, or agricu lture' (Hansard 3, 77.455- 97). But the distinguishing mark of thi s budget was abolition not rationalization. Peel had dropped the mask, a nd now appeared as a convinced free-trader. What, then, would happ en to the corn laws? Nothing, perhaps, in that parliament, had it no t been for Ireland. Ireland lay athwart Britain's transoceanic trade routes. Pe el dared not contemplate a repeal of the union, and in 1841 he invited an ultra-protestant, Earl De Grey, to become lord lieutenant . In thus signalling his determination to reverse the Irish policie s of Lord Melbourne's administration Peel reignited the repeal moveme nt. The government succeeded in banning a monster meeting at Clonta rf in 1843, but an attempt to prosecute O'Connell failed. Realizing hi s mistake, Peel changed tack in 1843, and appointed the Devon commissi on to investigate the problems of Irish land tenure. The followin g year he began to send Ireland what Disraeli termed'messages of pea ce', replacing De Grey with Heytesbury and passing a Charitabl e Bequests Act (to enable Catholics to bequeath money for the support of t heir clergy). In 1845 he passed a bill to establish three Queen's college s, which would offer a university education to the Irish middle clas ses, and attended to the condition of the Roman Catholic college a t Maynooth. Ireland could not be governed unless the priests preached o bedience to the powers that be. If the British government did not see t o the repair and upkeep of the seminary, then the priests would go abroa d for their training, and who knew what they would preach then? Peel pr oposed to increase the existing grant to Maynooth, which had been pai d for half a century, from £9000 to £26,000 p.a., to make a non-recurren t advance for new buildings, and to place the cost of repairs and mainten ance upon the board of works. It was a small price to pay for the chanc e of peace in Ireland. But it led to Gladstone's resignation from the cab inet, it jarred nerves frayed by the 'betrayal' of 1829, and it rous ed protestants throughout the United Kingdom to a frenzy. Th e connections between protestants and protectionists in the Conservativ e Party were close: the bill was passed; but 148 Conservatives voted fo r the measure, 149 against. The government was saved by whig votes. So muc h for not consenting to hold office on sufferance. Peel's party was a lready in an ill humour, then, before the potato harvest failed in the w et summer of 1845, and Peel and his ministers met in the autumn to consi der what to do about the corn laws.

Repeal of the corn laws Peel said later that 'in the interval between the passing o f the Corn Bill in 1842, and the close of the Session of 1845' the opi nions he had 'previously entertained on the subject of protection to agr iculture had undergone a great change', and that 'many concurring proofs ' had demonstrated to him that 'the wages of labour do not vary [ he meant fall] with the price of corn' (Memoirs, 2.101). In 1844 h e found himself unable to answer the arguments used by Cobden, and in 184 5 he agreed with Graham, who said that, following the failure of the po tato, 'the Anti-Corn Law pressure' would become 'the most formidable m ovement in modern times' (Sir Robert Peel: from his Private Papers, 3. 224). Peel did not think it would be possible to suspend the corn law s and then reimpose them again afterwards; he did not think it would b e wise to put the issue to the electorate, and on 15 October he wrote t o inform Lord Heytesbury that he was considering 'the total and absolut e repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence' (ibid.) . His cabinet were not convinced of the necessity. Meeting followed meeti ng and still they could not agree whether to maintain, modify, suspend , or abolish the law of 1842. On 26 November the Morning Chronicle publi shed Lord John Russell's 'Edinburgh letter', announcing hisconversio n to total and immediate repeal, and on 4 December Peel asked his cabi net to agree to a phased extinction of the corn laws over a period of ei ght years. Stanley warned him that this wouldbreak up the ministry, a nd on 5 December Peel decided to resign. In the ensuing two weeks , Stanley himself declined even to try and form a protectionist gover nment, and Lord John Russell failed toform a whig one. Peel was not s orry to be required to carry on. He was always inclined to suppose tha t if a thing was good to be done it would be better done by himself. No w he believed that, withthe elimination of the only possible alternative s, he would resume power 'with greater means of rendering public servic e' than he would have enjoyed had he 'not relinquished it' (Memoirs, 2 .251). Others were more aware of the shame of abandoning their own law o f 1842 and the likely effect upon the party. The ministry was recalled upo n the understanding that it would propose a repeal of the corn la ws. Wellington expressed the view that 'a good Government for t he country' was 'more important than Corn Laws or any other considerati on' (ibid., 2.200). Stanley and the duke of Buccleuch were the only mem bers of the government who refused to return, and Peel brought Gladston e back into the cabinet as colonial secretary, though he had no seat i n the Commons. Peel introduced the bill torepeal the corn laws on 27 Janu ary 1846. In order to allow the landed interest time to prepare for th e change the laws were to be abolished in three years' time, on 1 Februa ry 1849, after which all imported grains would pay only a 'nominal ' registration duty of 1/s/. a quarter. In the meantime new scales of dut y were to operate. Colonial grains were to be admitted at 1/s/., an d foreign maize, too, was to be admitted at 1/s/. Other foreign grain s were to pay duties ranging between 4/s/. and 10/s/. according to the pr ice. Nobody got what they wanted. The Irish did not secure the suspensi on appropriate to their emergency, partly, perhaps, because Pe el had already arranged for the government to buy maize on their b ehalf. The landowners lost their protection, and were offered cheap dr ainage loans by way of compensation. The Anti-Corn Law League did not wi n total and immediate repeal, but was, in effect, made an offer which i t could not refuse. The Conservative Party split: Lord George Bentinc k arose to lead the protectionists, and on 7 February the second reading fo und 112 Conservatives supporting Peel and no fewer than 231 followi ng Bentinck in voting against the government's bill. The rancour was un believable, and from February to June the ministry was supported by whi g and radical votes. The bill received the royal assent on 25 June, and t he following day thewhigs combined with the protectionists to defeat the government's Coercion Bill for Ireland. In his resignatio n speech on 28 June, Peel widened the breach with his former supporters b y giving the whole credit for repeal to Richard Cobden, who was in thei r eyes no better than a demagogue. He ended with a prayer that he mig ht leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of g oodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to e arn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shal l recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food , the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustic e. (Hansard 3, 87.1055)

Death by accident Peel felt worn out. For twenty years he had been troubled b y deafness followinga mishap with a gun. In 1843 he had been the inte nded victim of an assassination which cost the life of his secretary, E dward Drummond. Above all there was the incessant work. There wa s so much more to do now than there had been in the 1820s, and Peel had sh ouldered responsibility for the operation of every department. He kn ew his back-benchers had found him cold, aloof, and unresponsive . He knew also that many tories, who had come to terms with Catholic emanc ipation and one betrayal, would never forgive him two. But he, too, fel t let down. He had fought the battle for the squires stoutly until 1844 . But he had received little support in the House of Commons from them , and being expected, for the sake of party, 'to adopt the opinions o f men who have not access to your knowledge, and could not profit by it i f they had, who spend their time in eating and drinking, and hunting, s hooting, gambling, horse-racing, and so forth' was 'an odious servit ude' to which he would not submit (Peel to Lord Hardinge, Sir Robert Peel : from his Private Papers, 3.474). He never wished to hold office agai n, and he showed little inclination to lead the ninety or so Peelite s who were returned at the general election of 1847. He remained a fav ourite with the royal family, and, while still holding his distance, ga ve a general kind of support to Lord John Russell who succeeded him. I n 1847 he was consulted about a possible suspension of the Bank Charter A ct. In 1848 he laid a finger on the defects in the Encumbered Estates A ct for Ireland. In 1849, when corn prices were low andLord John w as considering reverting to a fixed duty, Peel joined in a cou ncil at Woburn which stiffened the whigs' resolve to defend the fre e-trade policy. On 28 June 1850 he spoke against the government i n the Don Pacifico debate. The following day, he was thrown by his ho rse at the top of Constitution Hill. He fell face downwards, and the h orse then trampled on his back, causing internal injuries. He was car ried home to Whitehall Gardens, and several long and very painful days l ater, on 2 July, he died. On 3 July the Commons adjourned on the motio n of Joseph Hume and Gladstone, andon 4 July the house again adjourne d after formal tributes had been paid. Lord John Russell, as prime ministe r, offered a public funeral, but Goulburn, on behalf of the Peel family , declined it, Peel having earlier in the year declared his wish to be bur ied in the churchyard of Drayton Bassett beside his mother and father . The interment took place in a private ceremony on 9 July. Upo n that day, in an exceptional expression of national mourning, the mills i n the great northern towns stopped work, shops closed, and in the port s ships' flags flew at half-mast. Peel had left firm instructions, Lord Jo hn Russell told the Commons on 12 July, that his wife and family wer e to accept no titles or rewards for his services. Julia Peel died on 27 O ctober 1859 and was buried beside her husband.

Reputation The Peelite wing of the Conservative Party was gradually ab sorbed, between 1846 and 1859, into the Liberal Party. In his budge t speeches of 1853- 4 and 1860- 66 Gladstone spoke of continuing and comple ting the free-trade policies of Sir Robert Peel. Within the family , Peel's second son, Frederick, entered parliament as a Liberal in 1849; hi s eldest son, the third Sir Robert, who succeeded to the representation o f Tamworth, served for four years as Irish secretary in Palmerston's Li beral ministry of 1859- 65; and his youngest son, Arthur Wellesley , began his political career as Liberal member for Warwick in 1865. I t has therefore sometimes been suggested that Peel had all along been in the wrong party. But this is to ignore the fact that Peel himself, with his background, perceived no contradiction between manufacturin g interests and tory principles. To portray him as a Liberal /manqué/ overlooks his abhorrence of whig principles, and his contempt for the whigs' levity and carelessness in government. It overlooks, too, the exte nt to which Peel's supporters and the Peel dynasty did not so much choo se to be Liberal as have Liberalism thrust upon them. Historians have often professed to see continuity between t he Conservatism of the Tamworth manifesto and the Conservatis m of subsequent generations. Certainly, a reverential attitude t o crown, church, and aristocracy may be said to link Peel with Lor d Salisbury, and even with Stanley Baldwin. But Salisbury still referred unforgivingly to Peel as the man who had betrayedhis party twice, and other Conservative leaders who conceded that one of Peel' s two changes of course might have been a principled one did not agree which one. Catholic emancipation ceased, after a generation, to be an emotive issue, but protection and free trade continued, as Balfou r and Baldwin found, to divide the Conservative Party. Far into the twent ieth century, the party related more easily to the pragmatism and balanc e of the 1842 budget than it did to the capitulation of 1846. The shade of the supreme workman, who dominated the parliamentary debates of his age, found no assured resting place among succeeding generations of Conservatives. In the Dictionary of National Biography Peel's grandson G. V. Peel wrote that in an age of revolutions Peel alone had had 'the foresight andthe strength to form a conservative party, resting not on force or corruption, but on administrative capacity and the more stable portion after the de? Peel

While living in «u»Tamworth «/u», he is credited with the development of the «u»Tamworth Pig «/u» by breeding Irish stock with some local Tamworth pigs.

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Timeline Robert (2Nd Baronet) PEEL

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