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| 'Sir Robert Peel', by William Pickersgill Public domain |
The age of Peel
The Reform Act of 1832 had given the vote to more middle-class people and enfranchised great industrial cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. In the long term this was a hugely important potential change, but in the short term the Reform Act did not transform politics. The working classes were still disenfranchised, and the aristocracy continued to play a dominant role which only ended with the growth of mass politics at the end of the century. Most nineteenth-century prime ministers sat in the Lords. There were, however, some notable exceptions.The dominant politician of the 1830s and 1840s was Sir Robert Peel and some historians have described the period as 'the age of Peel'. Unlike most Victorian politicians he came from a manufacturing background. In his lifetime he became hugely controversial. His most significant achievement was to modernise the Tory party in the wake of its stunning defeat in 1832, but having built up his party, he proceeded to destroy it when he repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.
Early career
Peel was the son of the calico printer, Sir Robert Peel, who had been made a baronet and become a member of Parliament. Peel the younger entered Parliament in 1809 as member for the Irish seat of Cashel and at a time when party divisions were hardening, he identified with the Tories. In 1812 he became Chief Secretary for Ireland and in the election of that year he acquired a new seat, Chippenham, Wiltshire. (Note: nineteenth-century politicians chopped and changed their seats with a frequency that would be unthinkable today!)In 1817 he made an eloquent speech in Parliament attacking Catholic emancipation - the demand from Catholics to be allowed to take their seats in Parliament. As a result the Irish leader, Daniel O’Connell nicknamed him ‘Orange Peel’ but he was later offered the staunchly Anglican seat of Oxford University. (The voters had to be MAs from the university and this means that they were overwhelmingly Anglican clergymen.) In 1822 he became home secretary. As such he removed a number of capital offences from the statute book. His most famous reform was the setting up of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.
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| A 'Peeler' or 'Bobby' of the 1850s Public domain |
Catholic emancipation - the first betrayal?
In the mid-1820s, therefore, Peel was seen as a reforming home secretary, but also as an inflexible Tory, strongly opposed to allowing Catholics to enter parliament. But in 1829 he faced the first great crisis of his career when he and the Duke of Wellington passed the Catholic Relief Act.This was a response to the election of Daniel O’Connell as MP for County Clare in the preceding year, and the act was passed, not out of conviction but out of the fear that it Catholic emancipation were denied, Ireland would become ungovernable. But many Tories never forgave him for his betrayal and when he called a by-election in his Oxford seat, he was defeated and had to find a pocket borough before he could return to parliament.
The Tamworth Manifesto
When the Whig government passed the Great Reform Act in 1832, Peel, who had strongly opposed the measure during the parliamentary debates, emerged as the natural leader of the Tories. In the election of 1832 the Tories were defeated in a landslide election.1834 Peel was installed as prime minister by the William IV after he sacked his Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, even though he had a large Commons majority. (This was the last time a monarch dismissed a prime minister.) In December he called a general election. During the campaign he issued an election address to his constituents, the Tamworth Manifesto. The manifesto was recognised at the time as an important constitutional innovation, the first time a prime minister had come out with a full political programme.
The manifesto was addressed to
‘that great and intelligent class of society … which is far less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the course of good government’.He accepted the Reform Act as a
‘final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question’and declared himself in favour not of
‘following every popular whim, promising instant redress of every alleged abuse, abandoning respect for ancient rights and prescriptive authority’,but of
‘a careful review of institutions, both civil and ecclesiastical’and
‘the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’.
Peel therefore promised reform in order to conserve the essentials of the constitution. It was also designed to give the Tories, increasingly calling themselves Conservatives, a broader basis of support.
In 1838 Peel followed up the theme of the manifesto when he told his followers at a great Conservative party banquet in Merchant Taylors Hall:
'You are supported by the clergy, the magistracy, the yeomanry, and the gentry of the country, as well as by the great proportion of the trading community.'However this was too optimistic; the party remained an uneasy coalition of country squires who distrusted democracy and most forms of industrial change, and the moderate reformers who occupied positions of influence. Though Conservative strength grew very substantially between 1835 and 1841, far more of this support came from rural and small-town England than from the industrial North or the rest of the country.
The Bedchamber Crisis
In May 1839 Melbourne lost a parliamentary vote and resigned as Prime Minister. He told Queen Victoria that she would have to swallow her dislike of Peel and ask him to form a government.However, when the queen turned down Peel’s request to accept Tory ladies-in-waiting, he refused to take office, and Melbourne became Prime Minister again.
Probably Peel was not sorry to refuse. It was a poisoned chalice to be the head of a minority government. He knew the Whigs were weak, and that it was only a matter of time before the Conservatives were returned to power.
The age of Peel is marked by the emergence of two great pressure groups, the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League.
The Chartists
There are some useful web sites on Chartism. I have my own detailed account here.The Anti-Corn Law League
This movement achieved a more important place in national life than any previous radical body. Unlike the Chartists, it represented the interests of an urban middle class. Unlike them, too it was well funded and had precise and limited aims. I have a more detailed post on the League here.The Corn Laws were a generic term for a whole system of legislative protection of agriculture. In 1815 there was a prohibition on the import of foreign agricultural products until the price at home reached a high figure (80s a quarter in the case of wheat). In 1828 this absolute prohibition was replaced by a sliding scale of import duties. This legislation was not solely dictated by class interests – there was also the desire to be self-sufficient in food at a time of war.
However there was a strong body of opinion, particularly among manufacturers, opposed on principle to legislative protection for agriculture.
On September 10 1838 the Anti-Corn Law League was founded in Manchester and became a national organisation in the following March. Two leaders soon emerged, the Rochdale manufacturer, John Bright, and Richard Cobden. During its first year the League drew nine tenths of its funds from the Manchester district. Cobden said:
‘The League is Manchester’.The Tory press treated the League as an agent of urban sedition.
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| John Bright |
The organisation of the League: Formal control rested in a council of the large subscribers. Each subscription of £50 carried one vote. The League organised lecture tours. It had a paper, 'The Anti-Corn Law Circular' – everyone who contributed a £ to the League received it free. Other copies were given away. The paper made a loss, but this was thought worth the price.
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| A meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League at Exeter Hall, London, in 1846. Note the number of women present. Public domain |
Women were involved in the movement. Cobden said:
‘We have obtained the co-operation of the ladies; we have resorted to tea parties’.At Anti-Corn Law League bazaars customers could buy free trade handkerchiefs, breadplates, teapots and pin cushions.
The election of 1841
In 1841 the Whigs went down to electoral defeat after the Prime Minister, Melbourne, lost a vote of confidence. Peel’s Conservatives swept back to power with an overall majority of 367/291 and a lead in England of almost 100, winning more than 85 per cent of the county seats.The election was the first in which one government was replaced by another solely by choice of the electorate – there would not be another until 1874. The issue that emerged during the campaign was that of the Corn Laws. The Whigs had promised their supporters that they would consider the existing levels of protection for corn. This was ‘dynamite’ in the southern counties and many smaller boroughs. Peel allowed the Tories to fight the election on the false prospectus of his staunch support for protection. He had transformed his party and won the election decisively, but was he elected on a lie?
Cobden was elected MP for Stockport and in 1843 Bright was returned for Rochdale in a by-election. In the same year the Free Trade Hall in Manchester was built to house the increasingly large meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League.
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| Richard Cobden, MP for Stockport from 1841 |
The big issue of the day was therefore the debate between free trade and protection - and Peel had been elected on a protectionist platform, with the overwhelming support of his party.
