Peel and the Conservative Party

A Study in Party Politics 1832-1841

George Kitson Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000553109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1964, Peel and the Conservative Party is a major historical study that considers the problems of Peel who in 1932 was to recreate a party which had been shattered successively by Canning, Catholic Emancipation, and the Reform Bill, and, to lead a party whose interests were hopelessly divided between agriculture and industry. The author acknowledges the work of Professors Aspinall and Gash on the subject, and among other things considers the true significance of the resignation of the Duke of Wellington in 1830. This book will be an interesting read for students of history and political science.

CHAPTER I PEEL AND THE TORIES BEFORE 1832

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273004-1

In 1815 the great war stopped. In 1830 the Whigs took charge of the country’s destinies, and in 1832 the Bill for Parliamentary Reform was passed and a first step taken on the long road that led, in the nineteenth century, towards democracy. But in the intervening fifteen years the country was ruled by Tories. They had to race the crowd of troubles that follow great wars; they had to face the challenge of disturbing forces in the country and also of disturbing ideas.

For not only had the example and the ideas of the French Revolution managed to find their way into various English minds, but there were also native traditions to be considered. The cause of Parliamentary reform had been agitated before the war broke out, and it had escaped being completely frozen to death in the long winter that followed. At the end of the eighteenth century the Whigs had considered themselves to be the friends of liberty and the people, and when the war was over there still remained some of them who had not been caught up into the Government party. Moreover enlightenment and perhaps philanthropy yawned in the road ahead. Religion had awakened, men’s consciences and nerves were being quickened, while science and common sense already intruded themselves on some of the mysteries of government. A desire for Reform was abroad, and reforms were in fact urgently needed. Many of the country’s institutions were unjust or absurd, and the most notable corruption of all was the House which was partly elected by irrational franchises and debauched or non-existent constituencies, leaving whole regions and important classes without any direct representation at all.

The men who were opposed to the existing regime differed as widely as the two sides of the sky in their origins and desires. There were the demagogues who directed into political channels the discontent caused by the acute distress which followed the wars, and were responsible for a revolutionary fermentation in the first years of peace. In different parts of the country political and democratic clubs succeeded in coming into existence in spite of the laws against them. More important for the future were probably Francis Place, the tailor who organized the constituency of Westminster, and William Cobbett, the violent country-bred reformer who was, among other things, the father of popular journalism. Aristocrats such as Sir Francis Burdett had taken up democratic politics, and a little group of solid men promoted the utilitarian views of Jeremy Bentham. All these were Radicals, but there were men of less drastic ideas opposed to the Tories, men of more or less middle-class origin who had imbibed enlightened or what were to be called Liberal opinions, and the remnant of the aristocratic Whigs who held to the memory of Charles James Fox. Behind the Whigs in the country were the politically minded Dissenters with grievances real enough to keep them active in the cause of reform.

The Whigs and their more immediate allies might perhaps fill, in Parliament and the country, the role of a respectable Opposition. The clumsy and oppressive character of the domestic policy of the Tories immediately after the war gave them opportunities, and they could ally themselves at times with any section of opinion that happened to be antagonized by the Tory Government. As a backbone for any opposition to any Government there was usually alive in those days a vigorous feeling that taxation was wilfully increased by the expense of defence and administration and especially by the expense of pensions and sinecures. But the Whig chance was delayed. The Whigs were themselves disorganized, and impotent and undecided in policy. They could not gain control of the unreformed House of Commons, and after about 1821 the sky cleared, the country grew more prosperous and men’s tempers quieter, and, most fatal of all, the Government began itself to become enlightened.

For the Tories were nothing worse than a mixed collection of ordinary men. They wished to protect their country, were harassed by the fear of revolution, bewildered by the difficulties of politics and naturally impressed by the fact that it was important for society that they should preserve their own interest. They did not believe in democratic reform, but they had not less than the ordinary equipment of both conscience and intellect. It was possible, but it was not necessary, for a Tory to hold with Eldon, that everything that existed, however corrupt, should be defended to the death lest all should fall together. In particular a group of liberal Tories were gathered round the splendid figure of George Canning, who was the disciple of Pitt if he was the enemy of Castlereagh. Consequently after 1821 Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, was able to refresh his Government by able and effective recruits from out of the Tory Party. The Ministry took up the work of reform. Robert Peel as Home Secretary set about such labours as reform of the criminal law. Canning’s friend William Huskisson at the Board of Trade made important if cautious steps towards liberating trade from the restrictions with which the past had encumbered it, and Canning himself became Foreign Secretary, defied the autocrats of the continent and became the cynosure of Liberal eyes.

Yet though the Tories could satisfy some of the claims of enlightenment, their position was not secure. They too had their divisions. Some Tories distrusted reforms, and some Tories more and more bitterly distrusted Canning. Worst of all, the question of emancipating the Roman Catholics from the disabilities still imposed on them by law split the party from top to bottom. Lord Liverpool managed to keep these hostile elements together, but in 1827, when he was removed, the “Protestant” Tories and Canning’s friends found that they could no longer continue together in the same Government.

The Catholic question had helped to destroy the great Tory Ministry; it was to do further damage. It drew its importance from Ireland. There the restraints on the Catholics hurt the vast majority of the population, and the agrarian outrages frequent among the Irish peasantry were often inflicted in the name of their religious divisions. Ireland had started the century with revolt and rebellion, and the cause of Catholic Emancipation was likely to be pressed forward in connection with Irish Nationalism. In about 1805 the Irish Roman Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell embarked on the struggle and became from that time its centre. Perhaps there were moments when the movement could have been placated by concession, but no effective concession was forthcoming. In 1824 the formation of the Catholic Association put the agitation on a national basis. By 1829 the situation had become so serious that the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, who were at that moment in power, were forced to concede, although they were “Protestants,” the emancipation of the Roman Catholics.

The betrayal of Protestantism made a new split in the Tory Party, and probably deprived it for a time of its most powerful popular appeal. Consequently the Ministry were unable to face the storm which overtook them in 1830. In 1830 distress and discontent came again to a head, especially in the country districts. Liberalized opinion developed rapidly in the country round the Whigs as a nucleus, for Canning had died in 1827. In the summer the people of France got rid of the Legitimist Bourbon regime which the allies had set up when they defeated Napoleon. Inspired by France the cry for Parliamentary Reform became in Britain louder and more definite than ever before. It was a demand which the Tory Government did not attempt to satisfy, and they were turned out that autumn by a coalition of Whigs, Liberals and disgusted Protestants. A Whig Government was formed. In 1831 they produced a Bill for Parliamentary Reform, and in 1832, after desperate Tory resistance and after riots and disorder in the country, it was passed. The Tories were utterly defeated in the elections which followed. They had fallen from their high estate into a condition of utter impotence and humiliation; they seemed to have survived into a world which had no further use for them. After 1832 they had to set out on the rough road of opposition with but little force and no hope at their command.

For a rough road memories and ghosts are not good travelling companions. By 1832 the Tories suffered from too much history; from a past that was too angry and varied to help the unity of the present. It is true that Canning was dead. He had flamed himself out, and the party no longer suffered from the distracting presence of genius. But it still held within it the chief agents in the passage of Catholic Emancipation, the men who had forced an unprincipled compliance with the demands of necessity.

Of course all Tories had a common feeling to unite them in the fear of Jacobinism and Revolution. Fear is a justifiable political emotion, but as a basis for party unity it is perhaps not so satisfactory as belief or hope; and when it is one of the simplest fears, as for life or property, it must override too many other considerations, take up too much of men’s attention and dangerously obscure intrinsic differences. Wild animals may cower together from a storm in a common shelter, forgetting their natural antipathies, their growling silenced by thunder. But when the storm abates nature will reassert itself, while an animal of principle will have snarled the whole time.

Most of the Tories had a general belief in the efficiency of the political machine and in the danger of stopping its action, in the goodness of the social fabric and in the disaster of spoiling it, while they had their formulae about preserving the existing constitution in Church and State. But such beliefs, when generally stated or very vaguely assumed, are but loose bonds for a party; and as for the existing Constitution, there was doubt as to what were its essentials, when it was being attacked, or how it was to be defended. Obviously within these limits Tories of like original ideas could luxuriate into very different growths, and by their fruits, not by their roots, would men know them.

So there were some who wished to defend the right on the sheer edge of principle, and others who believed in the relaxing doctrines of moderation. Some remembered Canning as a leader, some as a necessity, some as a sin. There were Free Traders and Protectionists, gold currency men and inflationists. There were old High Churchmen, new Low Churchmen, generally moral and generally careless men, fierce Irish Protestants, Erastians, and a few of the fashionable ungodly. There were manufacturers, bankers and agriculturists, independent country members and men who till 1830 had been usually in office; and to unite them all in the common peril of 1832 was the hard task and high destiny of one who had been nurtured in office, and who had quarrelled notably, on a quasi-religious ground, with a large division of the party that followed him.

§2. 1809–18

Peel was born a Tory. His father, the first Sir Robert, was a rich cotton spinner with a great admiration for Pitt. The younger Robert came of age and into Parliament in 1809, with a distinguished career at Oxford behind him. He was soon pressed firmly and almost uncomfortably dose to the bosom of Government, taking office under Lord Liverpool in 1810 as Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies. It is said that the young man sulked a little on first being taken into that coercive embrace,—t is not unlikely, for he was not elaborating his own principles or settling his own destiny. But he did not protest strongly enough to delay the rush of his good fortune, and he was hurried on to honour and to his fate. Lord Liverpool, in cultivating his intimacy, had admired his qualities, his father’s heart was set on his political career, and he had already proved himself a useful instrument. He spoke and voted on the Protestant side in the debates on Roman Catholic Emancipation, but refused to pledge himself; a refusal in which he could not persist, for in the September of 1812 he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland.

It was a responsible position, and Peel was twentyfour; so young that O’Connell complained that he was yet a dandy. He had light reddish hair and a fair complexion, a long nose, finely curved, a long face, rather broad and with strange high cheeks, a high forehead and a strong deep chin. About the mouth, in his portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, there is an expression implying contempt or possibly defiance, and about both eyes and mouth there is certainly something high mettled and nervous. He stood more than the ordinary height and was usually elegantly and richly dressed. He-was a splendid young man, liked by his employers, appreciated by his friends; but there seems to have been sometimes an awkwardness in his carriage, a stiffness in his manner suggesting that, in superficial matters, he was not always completely at ease.

He was at this time young, able and successful, with not a little of the self-assurance natural to one who had been not only the hope of his family and its heir, but first its good boy and afterwards its success. To his superiors he wrote as one whose opinions were important, and to his contemporaries as one whose good offices might be useful; and as the implication in each case was well grounded, it is not surprising that his accents early took on the full rounded tones, at once confident and guarded, of a mature statesman. The facade was being erected from behind which there was to look out upon the world a man not cold or sly, as other men said, but of genuine and conscious honesty, and, above all, intensely sensitive.

The government of Ireland was at this time no tranquil affair of sleep, routine and memoranda; it was more like war, and war in which the new Secretary must be a protagonist. In Parliament he was confronted by the tedious struggle over Emancipation, an endless series of mangling blows and indecisive engagements. In Ireland there was O’Connell and his party and the memories of rebellion, to fill the hands and minds of those in power, and order had to be kept, agitators prosecuted, societies crushed. Peel was not tempted to flinch or to waver, for he had great reserves of strength and of contempt, and his experience stiffened his nature and his opinions. He saw disloyalty in time of war and agitation in time of peace, and he saw them both from the Castle in Dublin. He felt the weight of O’Connell’s furious invective, and he resented and despised, as perhaps he suffered. He saw outrages; they were begotten, it may be, by oppression out of misery, but they were of a nature to make him feel that among large classes of Irish peasants there was neither mercy, nor shame, nor faith, except to accomplices. Moreover he saw what seemed to be inexorable religious hatred, and he entered on his duties under a Lord Lieutenant most definitely “Protestant,” and with an executive almost wholly opposed to the Roman Catholic claims.

It was a natural consequence that Peel’s views on the Roman Catholic question should ripen into a most stubborn maturity, and at five-and-twenty he became the leader on the Protestant side in the battles in the House of Commons over Emancipation. Here were evils only to be cured by “gradual and tardy reforms” for which his experiences did not suggest an easy solution by the sudden magic of “Emancipation.” He had little sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, since he believed that half the ills of Ireland were due to “Popish superstition,” and he saw the largest part of that Church in close alliance with O’Connell and his party. Moreover on general grounds he held the doctrine, then common, that Roman Catholics could not be loyal to a state without giving securities, which he knew they were not prepared to give, but which he thought they did give to every state but England. He felt that Roman Catholics, once Emancipation was conceded, must be driven by their religion and their hate to press on over Church and State to a Catholic ascendancy, resolutely to be resisted by one born and employed on the side of the Government and the Church. In fact he was carried by his fate to the implication that the Roman Catholics must be refused, for ever, civil equality.

“For ever” are words no man can imply with saf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Preface to first edition
• Preface to second edition
• Contents
• Introduction to first edition
• Introduction to second edition
• Chapter I PEEL AND THE TORIES BEFORE 1832
• Chapter II WHIGS AND TORIES—1832
• Chapter III THE FIRST REFORMED PARLIAMENT, 1833
• Chapter IV 1834—THE END OF THE GREAT REFORM MINISTRY
• Chapter V AN UNSUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT, 1834-35
• Chapter VI 1835—THE MUNICIPAL REFORM BILL
• Chapter VII 1836—THE LORDS' INDEPENDENCE
• Chapter VIII 1837—A NECESSARY COMPROMISE
• Chapter IX THE NEW REIGN—1837—38
• Chapter X PEEL AND THE QUEEN—1839
• Chapter XI THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY-1840-1
• Bibliography
• Index