Peel’s conversion to the arguments of the Anti-Corn Law League had been suspected for some time in the Conservative Party, and had been at least partly responsible for the formation of the Anti-League in 1843, whose whole purpose was the preservation of the Corn Laws and Protection for British agriculture. Not surprisingly, it had strong support in the Parliamentary Party, where fears of betrayal by its leader rumbled menacingly long before the disastrous summer of 1845 persuaded Peel to put all at hazard to advocate a policy diametrically opposed to that on which he had been elected in 1841. By October 15th he had definitely resolved that ‘The remedy is the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food – that is, the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of substance’.
To attempt some appreciation of the passions aroused in the late autumn of 1845 and throughout 1846 it could be said that it were as though a Conservative leader in Britain or the United States in the 1980s suddenly pronounced himself in favour of massive nationalisation and penal taxation, or a Socialist leader in Office was dramatically converted to the total virtues of private enterprise and the iniquities of State management, coupled with the supreme virtues of the Christian reliance upon the all-dominant role of the individual in society. The religious analogy is important, because there was a fervent, and to its opponents singularly obnoxious, religious fervour behind the Free Trade movement. The Anti-Corn Law League was essentially urban, and Radical, its most persuasive and popular champions Cobden and Bright, but it had little sympathy or support in either political Party in Parliament until the Irish famine gave the League its opportunity. In Bright’s own words, in his eulogy to Cobden many years later, ‘Famine itself, against which we had warred, joined us’. The clamour to ‘open the ports’ to cheap foreign grain swept Ireland, the north of England, and its harsh echoes reverberated in Whitehall and Westminster. The Crusade now appeared to have been abundantly justified.
Much censure, then and subsequently, has been placed upon Peel for his reaction to this real and terrible crisis. He could easily, it has been argued, have dealt with the emergency with emergency measures. If he had become convinced that the high price of grain was certain to make the Irish crisis worse, why did he not suspend the Corn Laws temporarily, as he was fully entitled to under the existing legislation? Other historians – and many contemporaries – have justifiably pointed out that the repeal of the Corn Laws in itself could have done little to help the literally starving Irish. Nor did it. But the reality was that Peel had become intellectually and emotionally convinced of the strength of the Free Trade cause and the grave limitations of Protection. The Irish Famine merely accelerated a step that he would have taken sooner or later; it was this that revealed the full extent of his apostasy to his dismayed and demoralised colleagues and followers. He believed that he could carry them with him. He saw none in Parliament in his Government or Party who could match his Parliamentary or national experience, following, or skills. The Whig Opposition, feebly led by Russell, and with Palmerston in moody eclipse, presented few dangers. He had the full confidence and backing of Prince Albert and, through him, the Queen. ‘The Queen thinks the time is come when a removal of the restrictions upon the importation of food cannot be successfully resisted’, came the clear message from Osborne to Peel on November 28th, ‘Should this be Sir Robert’s own opinion, the Queen very much hopes that none of his colleagues will prevent him from doing what it is right to do’. Peel had been through such storms before in his long career, and had triumphed. But this time, he gravely miscalculated.
The failure has been described with great clarity by Justin McCarthy:
The influence of Peel at that time, and indeed all through his administration up to the introduction of his Free Trade measures, was limitless, so far as his party were concerned. He could have done anything with them. But Peel . . . was a reserved, cold, somewhat awkward man. He was not effusive; he did not pour out his emotions and reveal all his changes of opinion in bursts of confidence even to his habitual associates. He brooded over these things in his own mind; he gave such expression to them in open debate as any passing occasion seemed strictly to call for; and he assumed perhaps that the gradual changes operating in his views when thus expressed were understood by his followers.
The crisis began in late November, when Peel was unable to persuade Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch to agree to repeal, and on December 5th the Ministry decided to resign. ‘We were, of course, in great consternation,’ Prince Albert wrote in a memorandum of December 7th. ‘. . . The whole country cries out: the Corn Laws are doomed’. Peel assured the Queen that he would support a Russell Administration on the repeal of the Corn Laws, and agreed to put this undertaking in writing. Russell, who was clearly seeing the political advantages of espousing Free Trade, and who had abandoned the fervent faith in the Corn Laws that still animated his predecessor Melbourne – who wrote to the Queen on December 9th that he ‘would be very unwilling to come in [to any office] pledged to a total and immediate reform of the Corn Law’ – was unwilling to accept the Premiership under such lowering circumstances, and with his own supporters so sorely divided. Prince Albert, although eager to see Peel continue as Prime Minister, regarded Russell’s action as evidence of cowardice and weakness, and although his relations with Lord John remained formally correct, Russell had permanently forfeited his full respect. There was to be, of constitutional necessity, a rapprochement, and not least because Russell gradually developed a high opinion of the Prince. He noted, with evident approval, Peel’s complaints of Russell’s actions; ‘He blamed the want of deference shown to the Queen, by not answering her call with more readiness.’ Significantly, the Queen reported to Leopold (December 30th) that ‘Joseph Hume expressed great distress when Peel resigned, and the greatest contempt for Lord John Russell’. When Russell threw in his hand, and passed what Disraeli described as ‘the poisoned chalice’ back to Peel, the couple were relieved and pleased.
Peel resumed Office immediately,38 and with conspicuous alacrity, informing the Queen that ‘I want no consultation, no time for reflection. I will be your Minister, happen what may. I will do without a colleague rather than leave you in this extremity’. Stanley was the only Cabinet Minister who refused to join him, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws was brought forward as the supreme priority of the Government.
One very significant oddity must be noted.
Gladstone, of whom both Prince Albert and Peel had a very high opinion, had resigned from the Presidency of the Board of Trade over the issue of the Government’s decision to increase the annual grant to Maynooth, the Roman Catholic training college in Dublin, from £9,000 to £30,000, on the grounds that he had written a book – long forgotten by everyone save himself – opposing the principle involved. There was general astonishment, and Gladstone himself subsequently wrote that his action was ‘fitter for a dreamer, or possibly a schoolman, than for the active purposes of public life in a busy and moving age’. But he did accept the post of Secretary of State for the Colonies under Peel; under the then electoral law – unchanged until 1918 – he had to submit himself for re-election for his constituency of Newark, only to find that his patron, the vehemently Protectionist Duke of Newcastle, would not have him. Gladstone was therefore a member of the Peel Cabinet without a seat in the House of Commons until he was returned for Oxford University in 1847. Peel was thus deprived of the abilities and oratory in Parliament of one of the most formidable debaters in the House of Commons at a critical point in his fortunes, and Gladstone’s absence was a major – although probably not crucial – factor in the events of 1846. Prince Albert, like everyone else, found Gladstone’s attitude incomprehensible, and temporarily lost faith in a politician he had regarded with specially high esteem.
But Peel was in an exultant mood. ‘I feel like a man restored to life after his funeral service has been preached’, he wrote on December 26th. Even Wellington, who had agreed t
o put his unrivalled prestige behind Peel, was unhappy. ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all’, he complained to Greville; ‘they have put Peel in his d–d fright’.
Queen Victoria, totally persuaded by her husband, all her previous hostility to Peel forgotten, wrote to Leopold on December 23rd:
. . . I have little to add to Albert’s letter of yesterday, except my extreme admiration of our worthy Peel, who shows himself a man of unbounded loyalty, courage, patriotism, and high-mindedness, and his conduct towards me has been chivalrous almost, I might say. I never have seen him so excited or so determined, and such a good cause must succeed.
We have indeed had an escape, for though Lord John’s own notions were very good and moderate, he let himself be entirely twisted and twirled about by his violent friends, and all the moderate ones were crushed . . .
Albert recorded on December 25th on the Privy Council of the previous day that Peel had stayed at Windsor for over three hours after the Council with him and the Queen and was ‘in the highest spirits . . . It is to his own talent and firmness that Sir Robert will owe his success, which cannot fail’. Peel described to them at length what he had in mind, which Prince Albert admiringly recorded was ‘that of removing all protection and removing all monopoly, but not in favour of one class and as a triumph over another, but to the benefit of the nation, farmers as well as manufacturers’. Peel spoke of a rural police force on the same lines as his famous Metropolitan Police, the establishment of a State Public Prosecutor, new State commitment for the relief of the poor, and what could be done to assist the railway labourers when the rail boom ended. It was exciting, and the Queen and Albert were entranced.
Peel’s was an astonishing political metamorphosis, but not as out of character as some historians have alleged, or Wellington believed. In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli, a bitterly disappointed seeker after Office in 1841, could not be regarded, even by himself, as a formidable politician. A gifted speaker and with a merited reputation as a novelist and essayist of rare vividness of expression and colour, he was widely regarded in the House of Commons, with good cause, as essentially disreputable, blatantly opportunistic and unprincipled, undeniably clever, but fundamentally a Jewish adventurer. No one saw him, and he did not see himself, as the future champion of the Tory agricultural interests, the Squirearchy from which he was separated by a vast gulf of intellect, background, and attitude. But, with his acute sense of political realities, their contempt and mistrust of him were not shared by his for them, although he was certainly not a natural nor obvious spokesman for their bewilderment and mounting anger at Peel’s latest betrayal. Disraeli’s hour had not yet dawned by the close of 1845 – he was, in fact, out of the country – but it is to him that we should look for the heart of Peel’s complex personality: ‘Instead of being cold and wary, as was commonly supposed’, Disraeli later wrote of Peel in one of the few authentic classics of British political literature,39 ‘he was impulsive, and even inclined to rashness . . . he was ever on the outlook for new ideas, and when he embraced them he did so with eagerness, and often with precipitancy’. In the case of the Corn Laws, Peel’s inner conversion had been long made, but his public conversion gave the clear, if entirely incorrect, impression of an unappealing mixture of panic, eagerness for Office at whatever price, and total lack of remorse for having totally overturned the policies and principles on which he and his Party had stood in the 1841 election. In this harsh and acrid dispute the cause of it all – the starving millions in Ireland – was totally forgotten.
Albert and Victoria had been dismayed at Peel’s resignation, and delighted at Russell’s failure to form a Government. When Melbourne burst out with the comment that Peel’s behaviour was ‘a damned dishonest act’ the Queen rebuked him with total effect. She, also, had become a partisan. ‘We are glad in soul, as they say in Coburg’, Albert wrote, ‘or still more frequently, in high glee [ganz fidel] that we have survived a Ministerial crisis of fourteen days’ duration, and are now standing exactly where we stood before’. Stockmar, however, was troubled by these events, and not convinced by Peel’s professions of acting solely in the national interest: ‘the most that can be said of him’, he wrote to Albert with some bleakness on December 27th, ‘is that he has not helped to make Royalty weaker than it was when handed over to him by Melbourne’. The Prince pointed out in his reply that at least there had been no public questioning of the Constitutional impartiality of the Queen in the crisis.40
This was not to be of long duration. When Parliament resumed on January 19th 1846 Peel informed the Commons that ‘It is no easy task to insure the harmonious and united action of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and a reformed House of Commons’, and on the 27th, with Prince Albert prominent in the Gallery, he introduced the Resolution to deal with the crisis, whose most momentous proposal was the total abolition of the Corn Laws within three years.
On that day, immediately after Russell, Disraeli had struck his first blow against Peel, but it was from a most improbable source that there arose the true leader of the betrayed Tories. Lord George Bentinck was one of those people, more common then than now, and yet happily not wholly extinct, who enter the House of Commons for no particular reason, and certainly not from motives of personal ambition, and play little part in its political proceedings. The second son of the Duke of Portland, he had been in Parliament for eighteen years, hardly ever spoke, and although a celebrated and respected figure on the Turf, with a famous racing stable, had occasioned no notice or attention in the Commons beyond enjoying the respect accorded to a country gentleman of manifest integrity, wealth, and family prominence. What no one suspected, until he rose to speak in the debate on Peel’s Resolutions on the twelfth day, was that he felt a man betrayed. For years he had been a strong supporter of Peel, and could have even been described as an admirer. All that was now finished.
Disraeli’s speech immediately after Peel and Russell on the first day had been the most brilliant he had ever made, and stands as one of the best he ever made in the House of Commons. The images poured out, with Peel compared to the admiral who took his fleet immediately to the enemy’s port ‘so that I might terminate the contest by betraying my master’, to a nurse who dashed out the baby’s brains, and depicted as ‘no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip’. The Conservatives who had listened to Peel in stunned silence had cheered Disraeli excitedly. Bentinck, who had never met nor spoken to him, had heard a kindred voice. But Disraeli, for all his brilliant and vicious oratory, could be safely ignored by the Ministry; Bentinck was another matter; and this unlikely combination was to spell political doom for Peel.
Prince Albert and the Queen identified themselves strongly with Peel against his opponents. She wrote to Peel to tell him (January 23rd, 1846) that his speech was ‘beautiful & indeed unanswerable’, while her husband noted with intense disapproval and distaste the ‘violent invectives’ of ‘Mr D’lsraely’, ‘calling him [Peel] a traitor & hypocrite, accusing him of overbearing vanity, want of purpose, time serving, etc, ridiculing his manner, etc, etc, etc, etc’. But although Albert regarded Peel’s speech of February 16th as ‘one of the finest he ever made’, he noted with alarm that whereas the Prime Minister on January 30th was ‘in good spirits on the whole & has received good accounts from the Country, where his measure is generally well received’, there was a steady succession of resignations from the Royal Household on the issue, and also from the House of Commons. The latter included Ashley, who after his resignation decided not to contest the by-election. By February 11th Peel wrote to inform the Prince that 197 Conservatives would vote against his measure, and only 123 for it; he was, accordingly, totally dependent upon the Whig, Radical, and Irish Members for his survival. Prince Albert now saw the clear indications of disaster, writing on Peel’s letter, ‘This is of course a heavy blow for the Government’. What was difficult to realise, although it is evident that Albert was beginning to appreciate, was that the
Conservative divisions were fatal for Peel and his Party.
Peel had grievously underestimated the fury that now fell upon him from his former supporters, and not even the bitter disputes over Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s – another ‘betrayal’ keenly remembered by the Protectionists – equalled the passions now unleashed.
This is not one of those political disputations of a distant past over which historians brood with such contentment to the bafflement of later generations. The issues involved may have centred on the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the real dispute was between two firmly entrenched and bitterly opposed faiths. That of Free Trade was to triumph in the late 1840s, and to hold sway until Joseph Chamberlain in 1903 was to question its very foundations, and to initiate again the schisms and arguments which, like the Irish Question, have had periods of abeyance, only to surge once again into the centre of political debate. For a politician of the 1970s and 1980s the debates of 1846 have an eerie familiarity. Then, as now, there was no middle ground.
Prince Albert Page 23
