Robert Peel

Prime Minister

  • Born: February 5, 1788
  • Birthplace: Bury, Lancashire, England
  • Died: July 2, 1850
  • Place of death: London, England

Prime minister of Great Britain (1834-1835, 1841-1846)

A Tory politician, Peel broke with party doctrine to reform the criminal code, create an effective police force, legalize labor unions, and repeal the Corn Laws, thereby ensuring the success of free trade and leaving a legacy of fundamental reforms in Great Britain.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

Robert Peel was born in a cottage near Chamber Hall, his family’s manor house in Lancashire. His father, Sir Robert Peel, and his mother, née Ellen Yates, were the children of partners who owned a successful cotton mill. The senior Peel’s father had been a skilled craftsperson who had founded the family fortune by manufacturing cotton textiles. The Peels thus were part of the new commercial aristocracy, only two generations removed from Yorkshire yeomen. The senior Peel, independently wealthy, had won a seat in Parliament, served in William Pitt’s cabinet, and been rewarded with a baronetcy.

Young Robert Peel was educated at Marrow and at Christ Church, Oxford University, where he distinguished himself as a first-rate scholar in classics, history, and mathematics. He was a deeply religious High Church Anglican but was never interested in theological debate.

In 1809, at the age of twenty-two, Peel joined his father in the ranks of the Tory Party in Parliament. After brief periods in lesser offices, he accepted the post of secretary for Ireland. For five years, between 1812 and 1817, he stirred extreme reactions of hatred and admiration for his administration of Ireland. He pursued a repressive policy depending heavily on armed force to keep order. He earned a reputation as a thorough bigot for his opposition to Roman Catholic emancipation, which meant principally the right of Roman Catholics to hold public office. At the same time, Peel created the Irish Constabulary, an efficient police force that was to be a valuable model for his later work with the London police.

In 1817, Peel resigned the uncongenial Irish secretaryship and was rewarded by his party with a parliamentary seat representing Oxford University, his alma mater. His policies in Ireland had made him the natural spokesperson for Oxford, which was known for its unyielding Anglican conservatism.

In 1820, Peel married. His wife, Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd, bore him five sons and two daughters. His devoted family formed a solid pillar of strength during the stormy years of his controversial political career.

Life’s Work

From 1822 to 1827, Peel held the cabinet post of home secretary. With regard to Ireland and Catholic emancipation, he held to his old views. In other areas, however, his unyielding antireform Toryism showed signs of softening.

Peel took a leading role in convening a special parliamentary committee to investigate the condition of the working class. Francis Place, the former tailor who was to become the founder of British labor unionism, selected representative workers, coached them carefully, and brought them to the committee to offer testimony, through the collusion of Joseph Hume, a brilliant parliamentary radical. Thus, Peel, whose own fortune rested on the factory system, became a willing aid to those seeking to legalize the formation of labor unions and strikes. In 1824, the Combination Acts and the Statutes of Apprentices, which had previously prevented strikes, were repealed.

Inspired by the earlier work of Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh, Peel took the initiative in 1825-1826 in passing the Five Acts, a series of ordinances that reformed criminal law. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it was no longer possible to get juries to bring in guilty verdicts that carried mandatory death sentences for such crimes as stealing a shilling’s worth of merchandise or appearing on a highway masked or in blackface. The great object of the Five Acts was to fit punishment to crime. Peel accepted the dictate that the certainty of punishment is more important than the severity of penalty.

During a second term as home secretary, in 1829, Peel created the London Metropolitan Police, the source of the ultimately fabled Scotland Yard. The fact that the police came to be called “Peelers” in Ireland and “Bobbies” in London constitutes a memorial to the same home secretary.

During his second term as home secretary, Peel entered the next phase in what his opponents termed a betrayal of old principles. In 1828, he joined in support of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which had previously ensured that only Anglicans and Presbyterians could hold office in the British Isles. In 1828, these rights were extended to nonconformist or dissenting Protestant denominations that had enjoyed freedom of religion since 1689 but whose members had been denied the right to hold office or to send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge Universities.

The full emancipation of Roman Catholics was another matter. In the popular mind, Roman Catholicism was still associated with the legends of “Bloody Mary Tudor,” John Foxe’s The Book of Martyrs (1559), and the alleged sinister intentions of King James II. The fact that most British Roman Catholics were Irish compounded theological and ethnic hatreds.

Nevertheless, a practical politician such as Peel found it easier to overcome old prejudices when he observed that the Irish had learned the fine art of political organization under the inspired leadership of the Protestant Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, who had founded the Catholic Association in 1823. O’Connell had proved that the Irish had the capacity to support and vote for Protestant parliamentary representatives pledged to Catholic emancipation and to do so in a disciplined and nonviolent fashion. Peel, who had a healthy respect for Irish violence, was perhaps more impressed with O’Connell’s use of the electoral apparatus to attain his goals within the British system. Thus, it was Peel and the arch-Tory Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, who persuaded King George IV to approve Catholic emancipation in 1829.

Peel’s support of Catholic emancipation briefly cost him his seat in Parliament. He was too valuable for the Tories to lose, however, and he was back almost immediately. The firmness with which Peel opposed Charles Grey’s parliamentary reform bill of 1832 regained for him many of the Tory allies he had lost over the issue of Catholic emancipation. It was Peel who rebuilt the Tory Party, which had fallen to a mere 150 members in Commons after Grey’s Whig triumph.

In 1834, Peel became prime minister for the first time. His parliamentary majority was too precarious, however, and his cabinet fell. Interestingly, the issue that forced his resignation was a proposal to devote the surplus income of the Anglican Church in Ireland to Irish nonsectarian education. He was thirty-four years premature with an idea later passed into law by his great disciple, William Ewart Gladstone.

Peel’s second and final tenure of the prime ministership occurred between 1841 and 1846. In foreign affairs, the ministry enjoyed two notable successes. An Afghan war was ended under honorable terms, and war was avoided with the United States by a settlement of the borders of Maine and Oregon. These years are chiefly remembered, however, for Peel’s adoption of free trade. For twenty years, he had moved closer to the ideas of economists such as David Ricardo and pragmatic capitalists such as William Huskisson—after all, his own roots were not in the old aristocracy, which owed its wealth to agriculture, but in the new aristocracy, which had grown rich in the Industrial Revolution. In that sense, he had never been one with the country squires who made up the backbone of Toryism.

Thus, in 1842, Peel imposed an income tax to absorb a budget deficit. By the time that he left office, the Treasury boasted a surplus. Until the crucial year 1845, he managed to cut tariff rates on about 450 items, most of them raw materials not produced in Great Britain. Here again, Peel actually increased tariff income, as he approached free trade. His conversion to free trade raised criticism but did not precipitate party rebellion, because he did not speak of opening Great Britain to the free importation of foreign wheat.

The Corn Laws protecting aristocratic landowners from the competition of foreign wheat were regarded as sacred. The aristocracy asserted that a financially secure gentry was the only class in society prepared by heredity, education, and tradition to serve their country in the armed forces and in government without regard to personal financial reward. Since 1836, however, under the leadership of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the Anti-Corn Law League had argued that eliminating the Corn Laws would reduce the price of bread, lower the cost of living, and permit foreign grain producers to sell agricultural produce in Great Britain, thereby increasing their purchases of British goods.

Peel might have been content to refrain from touching the Corn Laws since they were so essential to maintaining Tory strength, rebuilt with such difficulty since 1832. Nature, however, intervened. An Irish potato famine plunged that island into starvation and despair in 1845. The price of food staples flew so high that only a repeal of the Corn Laws could solve the crisis of millions of people faced with penury, starvation, or emigration. Peel could no longer defend the Corn Laws and abandoned them. In 1846, he finally formed a cabinet that was committed to repeal of the Corn Laws. The parliamentary debate was bitter; the Tory Party split in two.

Benjamin Disraeli turned against his mentor, Sir Robert Peel, and led that large faction of the Tories who regarded the repeal of the Corn Laws as equivalent to social revolution and the destruction of the old aristocracy. Gladstone, by contrast, stood by his prime minister. The Tory ministry leading the fight for repeal knew that they were ending their own tenure of office because they could obtain repeal only with the help of Lord John Russell and the Whigs. In a magnificent gesture of self-sacrifice, Peel lost his own chance ever to be prime minister again and sent his party into twenty-eight years of eclipse. Nevertheless, by his adoption of a low revenue tariff system of free trade, he gave Great Britain forty years of unparalleled prosperity and that special brand of national optimism that historians refer to as mid-Victorian self-confidence.

Out of office, though still in Parliament, Peel lent his generous support to the Whig-Liberal cabinet in repealing the Navigation Acts in 1849. He also made a vain effort, in his last days, to obtain full civil rights for the Jews. On June 29, 1850, he suffered fatal injuries while horseback riding in a park near his London home. He died on July 2.

Significance

Sir Robert Peel must be remembered as the quintessential political pragmatist. An Anglican whose birth and education had infused him with a deep mistrust of Irish Catholics, he ended by doing more for them than any English leader had done before. He developed the Royal Irish Constabulary to carry out repressive measures, but ended by creating a London Metropolitan Police Force that became a model for maintaining order in a free society. By birth and education he belonged to the Tory gentry, but practical experience made him sympathetic to labor unions, legal strikes, and ultimately to laissez-faire capitalist free trade.

In a word, Peel held to no fixed position if experience proved him wrong. In the end, he enjoyed the respect and even the affection of those who at various times in his career had called him a renegade turncoat.

Bibliography

Cecil, Algernon. Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1953. A serious examination of Victoria’s long reign and her view of the ministers who served her. In the examination of sixty-three years, Peel’s role is retrospectively modest.

Conacher, J. B. The Peelites and the Party System, 1846-1852. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1972. Explores the fate of the Tories who followed Peel when he broke with Disraeli and the party loyalists in 1846. Some, like Gladstone, went on to become leaders in the Whig Party as it became the Liberal Party.

Evans, Eric J. Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, Power, and Party. London: Routledge, 1991. Brief (82-page) discussion of Peel’s political career. Evans argues that Peel was more successful as an administrator than as a politician.

Gash, Norman. Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel After 1830. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972. A solid, well-written, meticulously documented biography that should be the first work consulted by anyone interested in Peel.

Jenkins, T. A. Sir Robert Peel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. An examination of Peel’s political career, analyzing the achievements of his ministry. Jenkins views Peel as a link between Toryism and progressivism.

Jones, Wilbur Devereux. The Peelites, 1846-1857. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972. Like the Conacher volume (see above), this serious and well-documented work traces the impact of the disaffected Tories on the Whig-Liberal Party.

Parker, Charles Stuart, ed. Sir Robert Peel, from His Private Papers. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1891-1899. Reprint. New York: Kraus, 1970. As the collection was published by the trustees of Peel’s estate, and as Sir Robert’s grandson George Peel wrote a eulogistic chapter, it may be assumed that this valuable source is accurate but selective and incomplete.

Peel, Sir Robert. Memoirs by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1856-1859. Reprint. New York: Kraus, 1969. The memoirs were published by Earl Stanhope and Edward Cardwell on behalf of the trustees of the Peel estate, six years after Sir Robert’s death. This valuable source reflects what the deceased hoped would be posterity’s judgment of his work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., Delivered in the House of Commons, with a General Explanatory Index, and a Brief Chronological Summary of the Various Subjects on which the Speeches Were Delivered. 4 vols. London: G. Routledge, 1853. Reprint. New York: Kraus, 1972. A valuable primary source.

Ramsay, Anna Augusta Whittal. Sir Robert Peel. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1928. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. A solid, scholarly, and well-written study of Peel’s life. It is particularly good for analyses of the political alignments that affected Peel’s choices of policy.

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain. The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861. Edited by Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher. 3 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907. Offers revealing comment by the queen on her benign relationship to Peel.

May 9, 1828-April 13, 1829: Roman Catholic Emancipation; June 4, 1832: British Parliament Passes the Reform Act of 1832; September 9, 1835: British Parliament Passes Municipal Corporations Act; 1845-1854: Great Irish Famine; June 15, 1846: British Parliament Repeals the Corn Laws; June 15, 1846: United States Acquires Oregon Territory.