Disraeli and Bentinck: partnership in opposition

Disraeli’s position had been transformed by the events of late 1845, which brought Peel to the Commons in January 1846 as an advocate of repealing the Corn Laws, in defence of which the vast majority of Tory MPs had been elected in 1841. Disraeli seized the initiative against him with a stinging attack (22^nd January), accusing him of betraying ‘the independence of party’ and thus ‘the integrity of public men, and the power and influence of Parliament itself’. Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, as Lord George Bentinck and Lord Stanley took the lead in organising party opposition to the repeal, while in the constituencies there was an active protectionist campaign. In his speeches on the subject in 1846 Disraeli reiterated his earlier arguments in favour of the historic policy of multilateral tariff reductions through treaty diplomacy. But his greatest contribution to the movement against Peel continued to be his scathing attacks on the latter’s inability to uphold the principles of the territorial constitution on which Toryism must rest. This was expressed most devastatingly in his famous denunciation of Peel’s career as a ‘great Appropriation Clause’ in his speech on the second reading of the repeal bill on 15^th May, which roused the back benches to extraordinary fervour. Later in the month he lied to the Commons in denying Peel’s charge that he had sought office from him in 1841, but Peel was unable or unwilling to capitalise on this, a mark of his powerlessness to deal with Disraeli’s invective. As the session continued, Disraeli had hopes of a coalition between protectionist Tories and some Whigs and Irish MPs in defence of a compromise tariff. But Corn Law repeal passed the Lords in late June. On the same night the leading protectionists, including Disraeli, voted with the opposition to defeat Peel’s Irish Coercion Bill, on the grounds that the lack of necessity for it had been demonstrated by the long delay in promoting it. Peel resigned and Disraeli’s fame was assured.

Lord George Bentinck[1] (1802-1848) was born on 27^th February 1802 at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, the fifth child and second surviving son of William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, fourth duke of Portland (1768–1854). Bentinck was sent neither to school nor to university but picked up a patchy education in the intervals of roaming freely about Welbeck.. Plainly unsuited to peacetime military life, he was wafted into politics in 1822 as Canning’s private secretary and would have accompanied his uncle to India as his military secretary if Lord Londonderry’s suicide had not opened Canning’s way to becoming Foreign Secretary.

In 1828, he succeeded his uncle Lord William Bentinck as MP for King’s Lynn, a borough where the family had much influence and for which he sat uninterruptedly until his death. He greatly admired Canning and behaved in exemplary Canningite fashion after Canning’s death: he refused to support Wellington’s ministry after William Huskisson and the Canningites resigned from it in 1828, voted for Catholic emancipation in 1829, and generally supported the Reform Bill. His independence and close friendships with Edward Stanley (later fourteenth earl of Derby) and the fifth duke of Richmond led him in 1834 into the ‘Derby Dilly’ for which he acted as an unofficial whip. Like most of its members, he was soon absorbed into the Conservative opposition; he consistently supported Sir Robert Peel but refused office, offered to him through Stanley, when Peel formed his ministry in 1841. Politics, however, came a very poor second to Bentinck’s growing interests in racing.

Bentinck’s short, turbulent, but influential political career has no parallel in British history. Pitched unwillingly into the leadership of the protectionist cause in the Commons in April 1846 some three months after Peel’s plan for repeal of the Corn Laws was known, he suffered at first from the grave disadvantage that he was wholly inexperienced at this level. Before February 1846, he had never spoken in a major debate although he had taken an active part in 1845 in defence of the landed interest as a member of John Bright’s select committee on the game laws, subjecting witnesses who were critical of the laws to searching and well-informed cross-examination. With his indifferent education, he was ill-matched against opponents of the calibre of Peel, Russell, and Cobden, and even contemplated bringing a lawyer into parliament to put the protectionist case on his behalf. But apart from his high station, he possessed other advantages. He was wholly fearless and no respecter, as was already evident, of persons or feelings.

Bentinck was transparently sincere in believing that protectionism was right both in principle and policy. He regarded the Conservatives’ electoral victory in 1841 and the modified protection given by Peel’s corn law of 1842 as committing the party and government to a policy that was now threatened by Peel’s new course. He had been unswervingly loyal to Peel and had taken no part in earlier protectionist mutinies. ‘I keep horses in three counties’, he is reported to have said, ‘and they tell me that I shall save £1500 a year by free trade. I don’t care for that. What I cannot bear is ‘being sold’.’ He convinced himself that Peel must make ‘atonement’ for breaking the unwritten code of aristocratic honour. More practically, he believed, as he told Stanley (20^th January 1846), that if one section of the aristocracy, Peel and his followers went in for ‘political lying and pledge-breaking’, the legitimacy of aristocratic predominance would be gravely damaged. These views, combined with an energetic single-mindedness and an insistence on political consistency, formed the explosive imperatives of his politics.

Uncompromising and authoritarian, he could be vindictive in his combativeness. His ferocious attacks on Peel and his ‘paid janissaries’ and ‘renegades’, most notoriously the unjust charge on 8^th June 1846 that Peel had ‘hunted’ Canning to his early death, increased the already high temperature of debate in the Commons. Although his probity and reforming reputation were vindicated on the two occasions when opponents (Lord Lyndhurst in August 1846, Lord John Russell in June 1848) accused him of bringing into politics the disreputable methods of the turf, he readily admitted that if Lyndhurst used the rapier, he himself wielded the broadsword and the bayonet, as in his censure of Prince Albert for giving the crown’s personal sanction to corn-law repeal. His style, consciously different from Peel’s nuanced pragmatism and the equivocal passivity of his own leader Stanley, emphasised the protectionists’ commitment to clear-cut policies; and his methods had the desired effects of implicating his party in his hostility to the ‘Arch Traitor’ and of perpetuating the schism among the Conservatives. He stamped on every attempt at reconciliation, notably Lyndhurst’s improbable ‘grand junction ministry’ of July 1846 in which he was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. His mission was to purify the Conservative Party by removing all taint of Peelism. Benjamin Disraeli saw him as a modernised Whig of 1688. He called himself a ‘disciple’ of Pitt, whom he saw as far from holding ‘the cold blooded Philosophy of the Political Economists’, a political pedigree reasonable in a former Canningite and with the added attraction of reaching back well beyond Peel[2].

Bentinck made up for inexperience by readiness to take advice, most conspicuously from Disraeli who quickly made himself his lieutenant and whose ‘political biography’ of 1852, despite its flawless hero and its calculated silences, is an indispensable source for the protectionists’ strategies between 1846 and 1848, the more so given the dearth of Bentinck’s papers: these were available to Disraeli but many were apparently destroyed by Portland, though he kept some of his son’s letters to him. Bentinck may not have known Disraeli when he peremptorily refused in 1834 to accept him as a fellow candidate at King’s Lynn. Their acquaintance began in 1842 when Bentinck gave Disraeli a half interest in a filly called Kitten which proved worthless. The friendship of ‘the Jockey and the Jew’ was unlikely and unclouded. The vital trappings of landownership at Hughenden were supplied by Bentinck and his brothers with a loan of £25,000. Disraeli advanced considerably under Bentinck’s patronage and repaid it by real admiration at the time: he described Bentinck privately to Lord John Manners as ‘the only head of decision & real native sagacity, that we possess’ and noted his increasing maturity as a politician[3]. Others whom Bentinck consulted were J. C. Herries, Thomas Baring, and the ‘railway king’ George Hudson, while Richard Burn of Manchester, editor of the Commercial Glance, and H. C. Chapman, a Liverpool ship-owner and protectionist, provided much commercial and political information. Of a piece with the modernity of his interests in railways (he was a major shareholder in the London and Birmingham Railway), agricultural improvement, and navigation and drainage schemes for King’s Lynn and the fens was his keen interest in the newspaper press, and he maintained particularly close links with C. E. de Michele, proprietor of the Morning Post.

The protectionist movement, primarily agrarian but involving shipping and colonial interests as well as commercial elements in the City of London, Liverpool, and elsewhere, with writers such as Archibald Alison, Charles Neave, and William Aytoun in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the contributors to the Quarterly Review under J. W. Croker’s editorship, and the lively satirists of Fraser’s Magazine to conduct a vigorous defence of protectionism on historical, social, political, and economic grounds, presented a formidable ideological challenge to Whiggism, radicalism, and Peelite Conservatism. Protectionists saw themselves as heirs of a broadly Pittite governing ethic. Paternalistic, patriotic, and anti-radical, they believed in a responsive state which, through its tariff and taxation policies, arbitrated between the needs of society and government. Their organicist system aimed at class integration; insisting on the interdependence of consumers and producers, they wanted to promote home and colonial markets for British manufactures as against the free-traders’ emphasis on export-led growth dependent on foreign demand. Bentinck fully shared these views, rejecting only the populist Protestantism of many protectionists.

By insisting in his first major speech on 27^th February 1846 that Peel’s policies amounted to ‘a great commercial revolution’ that would damage domestic industry, shipping, and the colonies as well as agriculture, Bentinck tied his party to defending protection on the broadest grounds. He defended the corn laws pragmatically, arguing that their success had boosted farmers’ confidence and generated agricultural improvement and producing as a metaphor for his elaborate calculations about increased yields from applying guano (as to whose good quality as a fertilizer he was right). As a riposte to Peel, he argued that domestic production had more than kept pace with population growth. His handling of the statistics with which his speeches were loaded doubtless owed something to his racing experiences but also reflected his efforts both to match Peel’s and Cobden’s economic expertise and to convince a statistics-obsessed public. By his relentless exposure of the weaknesses in Peel’s case that the Irish subsistence crisis required repeal, his accusation that Ireland was a mere pretext, and his claim that Irish agriculture would be an early victim of free imports, he cast further serious doubts on Peel’s motives and judgement, at least among protectionists. Two-thirds of Peel’s party turned against him in the Commons. Bentinck’s tactics in the complex preparations for bringing Peel down on the Protection of Life (Ireland) Bill were skilful: he kept lines open to the Whigs in unsuccessful negotiations for a moderately protectionist Whig government in April–May 1846; and in refusing Disraeli’s advice to oppose the Irish Coercion Bill but holding the ministry to the alleged urgency of the measure, he put the irreconcilable protectionists in as strong a moral position as was possible. Revenge was now not the prime consideration. He feared, as he told his father (9^th June 1846), that Peel might appeal as prime minister to the country and cause ‘a terrible division of the Conservative ranks…Out of office I think for a long time he will be nobody’. On 25^th June, he and seventy protectionists joined Peel’s other opponents in defeating the government on the Irish bill.

Bentinck soon showed that his forte did not lie solely in destructive opposition. His programme of February 1847 for famine-stricken Ireland, centring on his ambitious railways scheme and including endowment of the Roman Catholic Church, tenants’ compensation, and taxes on absentee landlords, was a remarkable venture in constructive unionism and social engineering. The railway plan, by which Treasury loans of up to £16,000,000 repayable over thirty years were to be made to railway companies, was designed both to give employment to over a fifth of those half a million people currently employed on ‘unproductive’ public works and to provide Ireland with a modern transport system as a necessary stimulus to British capital investment. These social and economic objectives were linked to broader political considerations. The Union and the dominance of landownership in Britain were to be buttressed by identification with a thriving Irish economy reinvigorated in its social base and hooked into the British market. Although he received warm initial support from the so-called ‘Irish party’ of Whigs, Tories, and nationalists, his plan was wrecked by the eventual collapse of Irish unity, Whig and Peelite economic orthodoxy, and the fears of many of his own followers at the consequences of defeating the Whig government. Although Bentinck had put forward his railway scheme as non-partisan, Russell was right to make it an issue of confidence. It was a question, as Bentinck told his father (19^th February 1847), of ‘whether Lord John Russell or I were to govern Ireland’.

Bentinck was convinced that beyond the agrarian heartland that remained solidly protectionist in the general election of 1847, much support was waiting to be tapped in the urban and commercial worlds. He accepted that the status quo ante 1846 was not immediately realisable. The fiscal policy in his election manifesto (24^th July 1847), a deliberate reply to Peel’s Tamworth apologia, called for a ‘revision and equalisation of taxation’ to put the overtaxed agriculturist ‘on a fair footing with the Manchester manufacturer’. Excise duties would be abolished and replaced by revenue duties on foreign agricultural and manufactured products; free colonial imports would be allowed; and ‘the mischievous and absurd restrictions’ of Peel’s Bank Charter Act of 1844 would be dealt with. This programme was designed to appeal both to landlords and farmers and to urban shopkeepers and small capitalists, and it foreshadowed Disraeli’s ingenious proposals after 1849. With some 230 MPs the protectionists formed the largest single party, but Bentinck did not last long as its leader in the Commons. He had made his freedom to vote as he thought right on religious questions a condition of becoming leader, and he was disgusted by the ‘No Popery’ cry raised in 1847 by many of the party including the whips, William Beresford and Charles Newdegate, with whom he was often at loggerheads. The same elements’ resistance to the Jewish Disabilities Bill, he told Disraeli (14^th November 1847) was ‘the tea table twaddling’ of ‘a pack of Old Maids’ when ‘the greatest Commercial Empire of the World is engaged in a life & death struggle for existence’. Consistently with his support for religious toleration and his loyalty to Disraeli, he spoke and voted for the bill on 17^th December 1847. On 23^rd December, he resigned as leader without waiting, as he told J. W. Croker, to be ‘cashiered’, temporarily bitter at the degeneration of ‘the great Protectionist Party’ into ‘a ‘No Popery’, ‘No Jew’ Party’.

Overwork, the result of taking too much on himself, his habit of eating nothing after a light breakfast until he dined late at night at White’s, and recurrent, depressing bouts of influenza had damaged his health, as he recognised. Yet he continued as, in Manners’s phrase, ‘the bulwark of the [protectionist] cause’ and with a considerable body of support. Against the drive for further instalments of free trade, the protectionists’ well-organised resistance at least bought time for endangered interests to adapt to new terms of trade. Bentinck’s massive labours, often eighteen hours a day between February and May 1848 as chairman of the select committee on sugar and coffee plantations, finally allowed the bargain to be struck with Russell in August by which British-grown sugar was protected by a 10s differential duty until 1854; and his vigorous defence of the shipping interest helped to secure a year’s postponement of repeal of the navigation laws.

At the end of the 1848 session Bentinck went down on 11^th September to Welbeck, and two days later saw the Derby winner Surplice beat Stanley’s Canezou to win the St Leger at Doncaster. On 21^st September 1848, he set out to walk the five miles from Welbeck to stay with Lord Manvers at Thoresby. Last seen standing by a water-meadow gate, his head down as if reading, he died on the way of a heart attack. Curious local rumours of suicide or murder were dispelled by the autopsy which revealed ‘congestion over the whole system’, emphysema of the lungs, and a large muscular heart with the appearance of ‘irregular contraction’. He was privately buried on 29^th September in the family vault in St Marylebone Old Church. British merchant ships in the Thames from London Bridge to Gravesend, in Liverpool, and in French and Dutch ports hoisted their flags at half-mast in tribute.

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[1] The major sources for Bentinck are B. Disraeli Lord George Bentinck: a political biography, 1852, Benjamin Disraeli letters, ed. J. A. W. Gunn and others (1982-), volumes 4-5, The Croker papers: the correspondence and diaries of … John Wilson Croker, ed. L. J. Jennings, volume 3, (1884), pages 127–66, R. Stewart The politics of protection: Lord Derby and the protectionist party, 1841–1852, 1971, A. Macintyre ‘Lord George Bentinck and the protectionists: a lost cause?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5^th series, volume 39, (1989), pages 141–65, F. W. Fetter ‘The economic articles in The Quarterly Review and their authors, 1809-1852’, Journal of Political Economy, volume 66, (1958), F. W. Fetter ‘The economic articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and their authors, 1817-1853’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, volume 7, (1960), pages 85–107, 213–31, The Greville memoirs, 1814–1860, ed. L. Strachey and R. Fulford, 8 volumes, (1938), volume 6, pages 105–22 and N. Gash ‘Lord George Bentinck and his sporting world’, Pillars of government and other essays on state and society, c.1770 – c.1880, 1986.

[2] Disraeli to C. E. de Michele, 19^th October 1847

[3] Disraeli to Manners, 26^th December 1847

The Corn Law debates

Peel was undeterred by protectionist anger and introduced the bill to repeal the Corn Laws on 27^th January 1846.  Outlining his new tariff policy, he proceeded ‘on the assumption that protective duties, abstractedly and on principle’ were objectionable. In doing this, he widened the potential benefits of free trade from Ireland alone to the whole kingdom. He pointed to the falling crime rates and increased social stability in the country since the 1842 Corn Law.

The heart of the new proposal was the abolition of all duties in corn after February 1849 in order to allow the landed interest time to prepare for the change the laws. After this date all imported grains would pay only a ‘nominal’ registration duty of 1s a quarter.  Until then, there would be a duty of 10s per quarter when domestic corn was less than 48s per quarter, falling to 4s when the price rose to 53s and above. Although it was slightly less generous towards farmers than the original proposal in December 1845, the scheme retained its gradualist nature.  There was a great deal more to the proposal than Corn Law abolition. It immediately repealed duties on salt and fresh pork, live cattle, and all vegetables and reduced butter and cheese duties. The differential between colonial ‘free’ sugar and slave-grown sugar was further reduced.  Peel’s tariff reductions affected more than imported goods. As in 1842, he reduced or abolished duties on a range of manufactured goods including textiles, timber, shoes and soap.

The landowners lost their protection but were offered several things by way of compensation including the reduction on seed duties and the free import of maize and buckwheat. This would reduce the cost of fattening cattle and make stock farmers more competitive. Arable farmers would be provided with state loans at low interest rates to improve their agricultural practices especially poor drainage. Further compensatory measures included the assumption by the public treasury of certain expenses previously borne by the localities: the prosecution and maintenance of prisoners and the expenses of Poor Law medical officers, school-teachers and auditors. The highway rate would be reduced by consolidating local highway administration from 16,000 local authorities to only 600. The law of settlement that had allowed urban authorities to return the unemployed poor to their original rural residences during slumps in the economy was abolished. The lightening of these local taxes, paid largely by farmers, would, Peel hoped, make them more amenable to Corn Law repeal.

The tariff scheme in 1846 can be seen as the culmination of Peel’s attempt to bring orderly economic growth and social stability. It was a well-structured and complementary package that simultaneously reduced the cost of living, compensated the farmers and gave manufacturers cheaper raw materials. By reducing the threat from the Anti-Corn Law League, Peel also hoped to further reduce levels of public tension and class division.

The debate

Peel emphasised the social benefits of free trade and this gave his opponents reason to thin that the Irish famine was merely a pretext for Corn Law repeal. They did not believe that the potato blight was as serious as Peel maintained. Nor did they believe that the compensations offered would enable farmers to meet successfully the threat from lower prices of foreign agricultural produce on the domestic market. Most galling to the Protectionists was the change in Peel’s mind about the Corn Laws and the ‘treason’ to his party. During the debate on the Queen’s Speech, Peel candidly admitted that he had changed his mind and that he recognised that the proposals were ‘the worst measures for party interests that could have been brought forward’. Protectionists hinted broadly that Peel ought to resign his leadership of the party or, at the very least he should go to the country on the tariff scheme. Peel was, however, determined that the matter should be settled in Parliament and not at the polls.

The Protectionists did more than merely complain about Peel. On 9^th February 1846, they implemented the Duke of Richmond’s implied threat of delay by moving an amendment asking for a six month postponement. The debate lasted twelve nights and culminated on 27^th February with the first speech of Lord George Bentinck, soon to be the acknowledged leader of the Protectionists. He dismissed the ‘pretended’ potato famine and produced a mass of statistics to prove the protectionist case. At the end of the speech, Peel had a comfortable majority ob the first reading of 97 (337 against and 240 for). However, of the 337 who voted for the government, only 112 were Conservative. Two-thirds of his party had deserted Peel.

The Protectionists continued their delaying tactics but were unsuccessful in preventing the second reading in late March. During the third reading in May, the personal attacks on Peel grew in intensity and reached a climax with Disraeli’s speech during the final night of the debate. He declared that Peel’s political life was nothing more than ‘one great appropriation clause’ and that he had ‘traded on the ideas and intelligence of others’. He described the other Peelite ministers as ‘political pedlars that bought their party in the cheapest market and sold us in the dearest’. Disraeli’s voicing of genuine back-bench anguish could not overcome the Whig-Peelite combination and the bill was given its third reading in 15^th May 1846 (majority of 98 but only 112 Conservative MPs voting in favour) and sent to the House of Lords.

While Corn Law repeal was making its tortuous way through Parliament, the government was also pushing ahead with other Irish measures.  In March, it introduced the Fever Bill that would create a Board of Health in Dublin to supervise the construction of fever hospitals and to provide medical assistance to those suffering from fever because of scarcity.  More controversial was the Protection of Life Bill that proved to be the most crucial measure in the session because it was this proposal that saw Peel’s defeat in the Commons and the end of his government. The Bill was introduced in the House of Lords in February 1846. Its aim was to pacify Ireland and it represented a retreat to the more coercionist policies of 1843. It was a harsh measure though no more than the Whig 1833 Act and there was little opposition in the Lords.

Initially, there was little opposition in the Commons apart from Irish MPs like O’Connell and other groups seemed to support the first reading. The Protectionists supported it because the ensuing debate would inevitably delay repeal. Lord John Russell did not favour the bill and was displeased by the Whig peers’ support for it. However, he did not want to jeopardise Peel’s government until after repeal was achieved. This led him to temporise during the early stages of the bill while reserving his options until the later stages. He recognised that should there be a conjunction of Protectionists and Whigs against the bill, the ministry would be defeated.

Corn and coercion absorbed parliamentary energies throughout April and May 1846. A well-founded rumour of a projected alliance between Irish Whig peers and Conservative protectionist peers was motivated by the growing distaste for the disorders in Ireland among the Irish peers. Desiring a coercion bill, they were willing to compromise on Corn Law repeal, if the Protectionists would support coercion. To counter this threat, Russell convened them at Lansdowne House on 23^rd May and threatened resignation as party leader if they voted against Corn Law repeal and the revolt collapsed. Russell’s action had three important consequences: It gave the Whigs, for the first time in years, a party unity; removed the last obstruction to Corn Law abolition; and, removed any reason among the Protectionists for delay on the Protection of Life Bill.

When the debate on the second reading of the Protection of Life Bill started in the House of Commons in early June, Bentinck announced that the Protectionists had changed their minds and now opposed the legislation. On 25^th June, the Commons voted against the second reading of the bill. An uneasy combination of Whigs, Irish liberals, Leaguers and Protectionists had turned out the Peel government by a vote of 292 to 219. Peel had the satisfaction of seeing half the Protectionists vote for the coercion bill. Their anti-Irish feeling had overcome the factious desire to oppose on this occasion.

The defeat left Peel with two alternatives: he could appeal to the country in a general election or resign. He chose the latter. In any case, the Corn Bill was safe having already received the Royal Assent. In his resignation speech on 28^th June, Peel widened the breach with his former supporters by giving the whole credit for repeal to Richard Cobden, who was in their eyes no better than a demagogue. He ended with a prayer that he might leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice[1].

The Protectionist tactic of trying to break Peel was probably the right approach for without Peel, it is unlikely that Corn Law repeal would have been successful in 1846. Of course, it was not his achievement alone. He was closely supported by Graham and, in the later stages of the debate Russell had lent timely assistance. But it was Peel who, since late 1845 when the first rumours of famine reached England, had provided the determination to relieve Ireland and it was this determination that won his cabinet to a policy of Corn Law repeal.

Retribution

Retribution was swift and Peel did not hold office again. He did not regret his expulsion from office seeing it as a relief from ‘an intolerable burden’. Nor did he take an active part in Conservative party politics after 1846 despite numerous appeals from non-protectionist MPs to do so. In his last four years, he refused to lead his ‘Peelites’ and offered advice and support to the incoming Whig government, particularly on economic matters. He stood above the party fray, an elder statesman who had put the interests of the nation above all others. Peel’s legacy was an uncomfortable one for the ‘Peelites’, especially William Gladstone, whose careers dominated the next thirty years. The driving force of British politics had become the party system yet the Peelites were not ‘party men’. Like Peel, they found that their consciences did not always fit well with the need to play politics and take account of prevailing party opinions. Peel’s death, after a horse-riding accident, in July 1850 was universally mourned.

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[1] Hansard 3, 87.1055

Peel returns

A revised government

The failure of Russell to form a government transformed the prospects for the Peel ministry. Peel was not sorry to be required to carry on and, having been summoned again by his monarch, felt a heightened sense of duty to act as a national rather than a mere party leader. He was always inclined to suppose that if a thing was good to be done it would be better done by himself. Now he believed that, with the elimination of the only possible alternatives, he would resume power ‘with greater means of rendering public service’ than he would have enjoyed had he ‘not relinquished it’. Except for Stanley, who resigned, the cabinet now supported Peel coming round to Wellington’s view that ‘a good Government for the country’ was ‘more important than Corn Laws or any other consideration’. Peel was able to strengthen his cabinet. He brought Gladstone back into the cabinet as colonial secretary, though he had no seat in the Commons. Lord Eliot, former Chief Secretary for Ireland and now Earl of St Germain took the Post Office; Ellenborough was given the Admiralty; and Dalhousie, President of the Board of Trade since Gladstone’s departure was advanced to the cabinet. Palmerston observed to Russell that Peel had ‘on the whole mended his position by resigning, for he has gained some Good Recruits for his Cabinet, and having taken the benefit of the act, he is free from his former entanglements and sets up business as a new man’.

Protectionist opposition

Even before Parliament on 22^nd January 1846, the Protectionists were mobilising. Lord Redesdale bitterly complained to Ellenborough of the ‘insane conduct’ of Peel. The Duke of Rutland wrote to Wellington that the ministerial change of policy on the Corn Laws was ‘dangerous’ because it was a ‘species of genuflexion’ towards the Anti-Corn Law League. Lord George Bentinck condemned Peel and his colleagues as ‘no better than common cheats’.

If anything even more outraged than members of the aristocracy were the farmers. They believed that the Conservative victory in 1841 had carried the pledge of protection. The countryside had voted overwhelmingly against the liberalisation of the Corn Laws proposed by the Whig government. For Peel to go beyond even the Whig proposal of 1841 and adopt the League’s demands for free-trade was intolerable. In December 1845, protectionist farmers, led by the Anti-League campaigned against Peel’s proposals. In meetings and through petitions, farmers brought intense pressure to bear to their MPs to stand firm on the Corn Laws. Peel was vilified in meetings and in local newspapers.

Protectionist pressure increased as the date for the parliamentary session approached. Over thirty local protectionist associations met in January and February. Some of these meetings decided to seek protectionist pledges from their MPs and several MPs who felt they could not uphold protection were forced to resign. Protectionist wrath among the electorate even struck down members of the government who had to seek re-election once they were given office. Lord Lincoln, for example, was severely beaten in a contest in which his father, the Duke of Newcastle, had used his influence against him. In addition to by-election defeats, the government was faced with protest resignations from some of the minor Household positions and from the Treasury and Admiralty.

It was a worrying trend, Peel admitted in a letter in late January and there is little doubt that Peel and his colleagues had seriously underestimated the strength of local protectionist sentiment. Peel had ignored the representatives of county constituencies and in doing so made a serious tactical error. His decision is hardly surprising since he had a very low opinion of their abilities. But by leaving the country MPs out of account during the policy discussions prior to the opening of Parliament, he placed them in an awkward position when they faced their constituents in the early days of the Corn Law debates. Since Peel had not consulted them or explained the reasons why repeal was necessary, they had little choice but to conform to their constituents’ demands. Peel’s treatment of his back-benchers in the early weeks of the crisis broke the majority’s loyalty.

Towards repeal

In the late summer of 1845, disquieting rumours of the failure of some of the Irish potato crop reached England. The potato blight was not limited to Ireland: the whole of central and Western Europe was threatened by it during the wet and cold summer of 1845, but the blight was more serious because of Ireland’s dependence on the potato as the staple diet of much of its population. Peel realised the significance of the poor potato crop in Ireland almost immediately. If potatoes should fail completely in Ireland and Europe and the wheat crop fall short in England, then a widespread famine might occur. Peel well knew the appalling consequences of famine as he had witnessed an Irish famine while Chief Secretary in 1817[1].

As late as October, some optimism that most of the potatoes in Ireland could be salvaged still existed. However, by the end of the month, it was evident that the failure was extensive. The government was faced with two problems: to find adequate supplies of food; and to create the machinery for its distribution. Both Peel and Graham recognised that the government must act quickly and that every barrier to the efficient transport of food had to be removed. The most obvious barrier was the restrictive Corn Laws.

Peel and Graham believed that it would be impossible merely temporarily to suspend the Corn Laws. Its suspension on the grounds of alleviating scarcity would imply that the government favoured scarcity as a general policy should it be re-imposed. This reason alone argued strongly for Corn Law abolition.  Nor would it be possible to open the Irish ports to unrestricted grain imports and yet retain their closure in England.  Finally, if grain was to be supplied to Ireland using public funds, the public would reasonably expect that the purchase should be made in the cheapest markets and this could only be done if import barriers were removed.

Convincing the Cabinet

Peel and Graham first briefed the cabinet on the situation in Ireland on 31^st October 1845. The first of Peel’s recommendations was the creation of a committee in Ireland to coordinate famine relief. This was favourably received by the cabinet on 1^st November and two days later Graham informed Heytesbury of the decision.

The Famine Commission (or Scarcity Commission as it was also called) would have wide investigative and remedial authority.  The Commissioners would include the Head of the Irish Constabulary and the Inspector of the Coast Guard who would use their forces in gathering information. The Head of the Board of Public Works would encourage employment of the peasantry on roads, bridges, and railway and drainage projects. The Commissary in Chief would be responsible for the purchase and transport of food. The fifth commissioner was the new Poor Law Commissioner who was responsible for the distribution of food from union workhouses. In a letter to Heytesbury, Graham left open the possibility of appointing some ranking public servant to a sixth position. Peel suggested an Irish Catholic and Robert J. Kane, a professor at Queen’s College, Cork was named.  Although there were inevitable delays and administrative problems in the early days of the Commission, it had solid achievements to its credit within a few months. These included the creation of depots for imported Indian corn or maize (£100,000 of corn was imported and released on to the market as a way of preventing prices rising too high), the collection of £100,000 from private government subscriptions and the employment of 12,000 labourers a day.

In November and early December 1845, cabinet discussion continued on Peel’s second recommendation: the abolition of the Corn Laws. Parliament was not in session and it was decided to keep the discussions on the Corn Laws secret. However, the frequency of the cabinet meetings made it obvious to the public that there was serious disagreement among its members. Stanley was the firmest opponent of abolition arguing that it was too drastic. Lord Lincoln feared that small farmers would be swept away by repeal. Goulburn added his doubts to those of his colleagues believing that the failure of the Irish potato crop was only a temporary emergency. Like Stanley, Goulburn also feared the effect of Corn Law repeal on the Conservative party; the rank and file would regard the leadership as traitors and the party would be broken.

Peel’s attempt to covert his cabinet colleagues reached a climax in the first week of December. In meetings on 2^nd, 4^th and 5^th, Peel produced a memorandum that made specific new proposals altering the Corn Law. The revisions made in the 1842 Corn Law established a duty of 20s per quarter when the domestic price reached 51s per quarter; the duty decreased by 1s for every shilling rise in the domestic price until only a nominal 1s per quarter remained after domestic wheat reached 73s per quarter. Peel proposed retaining the sliding scale, but a reduction of the duty from 20s to 8s per quarter.  In addition, the duty would be reduced by 1s a year following 1846 so that within eight years there would be no duty at all and corn would be duty-free.  This was a moderate and gradual approach to free trade and it continued the trend of state policy towards corn imports followed by successive governments since 1828. However, it was not well received by the cabinet. Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch threatened to resign and the remainder only supported Peel reluctantly. In the light of the response from his closest supporters, Peel recognised that it was very unlikely that he could carry through any relaxation of the Corn Laws through Parliament, much less their abolition. On 6^th December, he tendered his resignation to the Queen.

A Whig interlude

In November and early December, the Whigs had been manoeuvring to take what political advantage they could of the divisions within the cabinet. They were concerned that Peel might ultimately decide to steal a march on the Whig position on the Corn Laws. To preclude this, Lord John Russell made his position clear in his Letter to the Electors of the City of London, the so-called ‘Edinburgh Letter’ on 22^nd November 1845. In it, he announced his conversion of Corn Law repeal, with the strong implication that this was also the line to be adopted by the Whigs in the next parliamentary session (though he had not consulted his colleagues on the issue). By placing the Whig position first before the public, Russell could claim to have prodded Peel into action, if the Conservatives came to similar free-trade conclusions.

Russell hoped the Whigs would gain a useful political initiative and when, within two weeks of the publication of the Letter Peel resigned, it seemed that Russell’s gamble had paid off. Unfortunately, he had not calculated very accurately the results of his action. By committing himself to free-trade, he had alerted the Protectionists and if they were strong enough to bring down Peel, then there was no guarantee that they could not do the same to the Whigs. Russell was not only engaged in finding support for Corn Law abolition outside Whig ranks, but in negotiating among his Whig colleagues for a viable cabinet. He soon discovered that two colleagues, whom he considered as indispensable could not be in the same cabinet. Earl Grey objected to the inclusion of Palmerston at the Foreign Office suggesting the Colonial Office instead. Grey was such a prominent free-trade supporter that Russell could not omit him from any free-trade cabinet. It was similarly unthinkable not to include Palmerston and he was unwilling to take anything other than the Foreign Office. The result was stalemate. As Russell explained in a letter to the Queen on 20^th December 1845, a division among his colleagues in a minority government did not augur well for its continuance. Peel hoped that Lord John Russell and the Whigs would form a government, pass repeal through Parliament and perhaps allow him to keep the Conservative Party together. Lord John Russell may have recently announced his conversion to repeal in his ‘Edinburgh Letter’ but he was unenthusiastic about forming a minority administration. Peel was again summoned by the Queen. The ‘poisoned chalice’ was passed back.

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[1] Cecil Woodham-Smith The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849, Penguin Books, London, England, 1991, first edition, 1962 remains a graphic narrative. Christine Kinealy This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1997 and The Great Irish Famine, Palgrave, 2001 provide a more modern perspective.

1845-1846: A Crisis of Conservatism

The crisis of Conservatism began with the dispute over the Maynooth grant in 1845 and ended with the repeal of the Corns Laws in 1846 followed by the end of the Peel government. It is tempting to see the division of the Conservative party in 1846 as inevitable and the disagreements between Peel and his back-bench MPs from 1842 as steps towards the final confrontation. There were certainly difficulties between Peel and his MPs but this did not make division inevitable. Political parties have survived even when dogged by disagreement. What made the divisions of 1845-1846 different was that they concerned the issue of the Corn Laws.

Introduction

Relations between Peel and his backbenchers had been difficult from the early days of his ministry. It was not simply a matter of differences on policy. Many Conservative MPs regarded Peel as insensitive to their interests and he made little attempt to court backbench opinion. He unadvisedly took the loyalty of Conservatives in Parliament for granted and was irritated when this was withheld. Peel managed his government but he made little effort to manage his party. The 1842 budget led to considerable criticism. Poor law and factory reform also resulted in back bench discontent. Over fifty Conservatives, largely representing northern seats opposed the extension of the poor law and supported the reduction of the working day to ten hours. These rebellions did not threaten Peel’s position in the early years of his government but the divisions within the party they represented were merely papered over. It was a normal and regular feature of parliamentary politics for MPs to vote against their leaders on issue that were not considered to be of major importance. This was not indicative of a general desire to bring Peel’s government down or represented a repudiation of Peel’s leadership.

In 1844 divisions widened further. Ninety-five Tories voted for Ashley’s amendment to the Factory Bill in March. In June, sixty-one Tories supported an amendment to the government proposal to reduce the duty on foreign slave-grown sugar by almost half while leaving sugar from the West Indies unaltered. Both amendments were carried and though Peel had little difficulty in reversing them his approach caused considerable annoyance. Peel believed that government defeats reduced his authority but was not prepared to reach an accommodation with the dissident MPs. He threatened to resign if they refused to support him. Reluctantly, but also because there was no alternative to Peel, they fell into line. However, on the Maynooth grant in 1845, 149 Conservatives voted against the proposal and 148 in favour. Party morale was at a low level by mid-1845 and party unity was showing signs of terminal strain. On Maynooth and then the Corn Laws[1], Peel pushed his party too far.

When did Peel decide to repeal the Corn Laws?

It seems likely that Peel seized on the opportunity provided by the potato famine to implement free trade policies on which he had already made up his mind. The critical question is at what point did he become converted to the ideas put forward by the middle class radicals of the Anti-Corn Law League? It is not possible to provide a definitive answer but Boyd Hilton may be right that Peel had accepted the intellectual arguments in favour of free trade in the 1820s long before the League came into existence and that by 1841 he recognised it was ‘theoretically correct’ that the Corn Laws would eventually have to be repealed. The moves to free trade in the 1842 and especially the 1845 budgets made the continuance of the Corn Laws increasingly untenable. Yet Peel did not announce his conversion to repeal until the end of 1845. Why?

First, he may have accepted the need for repeal but he was the leader of a Protectionist party. He needed time to persuade his supporters of the arguments for repeal. The Irish potato famine did not give him that time. It was the occasion rather than the cause of repeal that Peel would probably have preferred to put to the electorate in 1847 or 1848.  Secondly, Peel disapproved of extra-parliamentary pressure and viewed the Anti-Corn Law League with considerable suspicion. The success of the League, especially between 1841 and 1844, may have persuaded Peel not to move quickly to repeal. He saw it as his duty to act in the national interest and did not want to be accused of acting under pressure. The activities of the League threatened to divide propertied interests and Peel saw that social stability was essential if there was to be economic growth. Giving in to the League was not an acceptable political option.  Peel was also critical of the League’s propaganda especially its use of the language of class warfare. The strident, anti-aristocratic attacks by the League on landowners and the creation of a Protectionist Anti-League raised the spectre of commercial and industrial property being pitted against agricultural property. This, Peel believed, would significantly weaken the forces of property against those agitating for democratic rights.

Perhaps the nearest thing we have to evidence that Peel was nurturing a plan for repeal before the Irish famine and that this crisis merely hastened the timetable for action is provided by Prince Albert’s account of a conversation with Peel on Christmas Day 1845. Though this cannot be taken as conclusive proof of Peel’s intentions because he was speaking to the Prince shortly after the decision to proceed with the Corn Law, it is probably a good indication of what he had in mind. According to Peel’s original plan, the Conservative party was going to be persuaded to drop its commitment to agricultural protection before the general election due in 1847 or 1848, with repeal to follow sometime during the next parliament, probably in the early 1850s. Peel’s conversation with Prince Albert suggests that his decision was motivated less by the crisis in Ireland but by fears of how the crisis might be exploited by the radical supporters of repeal in Britain.

Certainly, in 1844-1845, the campaign of the Anti-Corn Law League entered a new and politically more threatening phase. Urban supporters of free trade were encouraged to purchase freehold properties in county constituencies so as to qualify themselves for the vote in parliamentary elections. This deliberate manufacturing of voters was concentrated in South Lancashire, North Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and Middlesex but by November 1845 there was a broader plan for challenging landed MPs in their county strongholds across the country. At the same time, the League responded to the famine in Ireland by demanding immediate repeal, a move Peel feared would succeed in persuading the British public that protection was somehow responsible for Ireland’s plight. This claim may be illogical and dishonest but it might, if it gained credence in people’s minds risk depicting the government as callous and defending the interests of landowners while Ireland starved. Peel was anxious to prevent radicals from using the current crisis to launch a class-based attack on landowners by promoting a wider settlement of the free trade issue that would appeal to the whole nation.

Peel may have not been prepared to repeal the Corn Laws if this could be seen as surrendering to external pressure but, by 1845, there were powerful practical arguments that repeal was in the national interest. The Corn Laws were designed to protect farmers against the corn surpluses, and hence cheap imports, of European producers. However, by the mid-1840s there was a widespread shortage of corn in Europe. Peel reasoned that British farmers had nothing to fear from repeal because there were no surpluses to flood the British market. The nation would benefit, the widespread criticism of the aristocracy would be removed and the landowning classes were unlikely to suffer. This was too sophisticated for the Protectionists. Their case can be seen, in retrospect, as narrow but contemporaries did not recognise this. For small landowners and tenant farmers, the most vocal supporters of protection, repeal meant ruin. Peel’s argument that free trade would offer new opportunities for efficient farmers made little impact.

Peel said later that ‘in the interval between the passing of the Corn Bill in 1842, and the close of the Session of 1845’ the opinions he had ‘previously entertained on the subject of protection to agriculture 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’. In 1844, he found himself unable to answer the arguments used by Cobden, and in 1845 he agreed with Graham, who said that, following the failure of the potato, ‘the Anti-Corn Law pressure’ would become ‘the most formidable movement in modern times’.

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[1] The connection between Maynooth and repeal are clear. Of the 153 Conservative MPs who voted against the government at some stage in 1845, 133 voted against repeal and only twenty supported Peel.

Sources: Peel's fiscal policy

Peel’s Speech on the Corn Laws, 27^th August 1841

Peel had been a leading member in the government of 1828 which had returned to the principle of a sliding scale on corn, as advocated by Huskisson and implemented by Wellington‘s ministry. In 1834 in the Tamworth Manifesto, Peel said that agriculture along with the other great interests should receive adequate protection, especially in view of the special burdens on the land, land-tax, tithe, poor-rate and malt-tax but he did not accept that the landowners should be regarded as a favoured body for whom the rest of the community should be taxed and he believed that the interests of industry and agriculture were interdependent. His support of agricultural protection was therefore based on expediency. He reserved his right to modify the existing law when he came to power. In 1842, as one of his first major acts of legislation, he passed a new Corn Law that almost halved the previous scale of protection. The following is an extract of his speech to parliament just after he had become Prime Minister. Hansard, 3^rd series, volume LIX., columns 413-29.

‘I now approach the more important and exciting question of the Corn-laws. In order that I may make no mistake, allow me to refer to the expressions which I made use of on this point before the dissolution. I said, that on consideration I had formed an opinion, which intervening consideration has not induced me to alter, that the principle of a graduated scale was preferable to that of a fixed and irrevocable duty; but I said then, and I say now, in doing so I repeat the language which I held in 1839, that I will not bind myself to the details of the existing law, but will reserve to myself the unfettered discretion of considering and amending that law. I hold the same language now; but if you ask me whether I bind myself to the maintenance of the existing law in its details, or if you say that that is the condition in which the agricultural interest give me their support, I say that on that condition I will not accept their support.... If I could bring myself to think - if I could believe that an alteration of the Corn-laws would preclude the risk of such distress - if I thought it would be an effectual remedy, in all cases, against such instances of lamentable suffering as that which have been described, I would say at once to the agricultural interest, ‘It is for your advantage rather to submit to any reduction of price, than, if an alteration of the Corn-laws would really be the cure for these sufferings, to compel their continuance.’ I should say, that it would be for the interest, not of the community in general, but especially of the agriculturists themselves, if, by any sacrifice of theirs, they could prevent the existence of such distress. If any sacrifice of theirs could prevent their being the real cause of the distress - could prevent the continuance of it - could offer a guarantee against the recurrence of it, I would earnestly advise a relaxation, an alteration, nay, if necessary, a repeal of the Corn-laws. But it is because I cannot convince my mind that the Corn-laws are at the bottom of this distress, or that the repeal of them, or the alteration of their principle, would be its cure, that I am induced to continue my maintenance of them....’  

Greville on Peel’s 1842 Budget

‘On Friday night in the midst of the most intense and general interest and curiosity, heightened by the closeness and fidelity with which the government measures had been kept secret Peel brought forward his financial plans in a speech of three hours and forty minutes, acknowledged by everybody to have been a masterpiece of financial statement. The success was complete; he took the House by storm; and his Opponents (though of course differing and objecting on particular points) did him ample justice. A few people expected an income tax, but the majority did not. Hitherto the Opposition have been talking very big about opposing all taxes, but they have quite altered their tone. It is really remarkable to see the attitude Peel has taken in this parliament, his complete mastery over both his friends and his foes. His own party, nolentes aut volentes, have surrendered at discretion, and he has got them as well disciplined and as obedient as the crew of a man-of-war. This great measure, so lofty in conception, right in direction, and able in execution, places him at once on a pinnacle of power, and establishes his government on such a foundation as accident alone can shake. Political predictions are always rash, but certainly there is every probability of Peel’s being Minister for as many years as his health and vigour may endure ... There can be no doubt that he is now a very great man, and it depends on himself to establish a great and lasting reputation.’

From Greville, Memoirs, 13^th March 1842

Disraeli: a study in opposition 1841-1845

Disraeli[1] made his maiden speech in parliament on 7^th December 1837, in a debate on MPs’ privileges. It was another challenge to Daniel O’Connell, the previous speaker, and was hooted down by jeering O’Connellite Irishmen, though not before its extraordinarily elaborate and affected language had caused much hilarity. After that unpropitious beginning, Disraeli avoided publicity for most of the rest of the parliament, generally supporting Peel and attacking the free trade agitators. However, he did urge respect for the Chartist movement. Feeling unable to satisfy the financial expectations of the electors of Maidstone, he sought a cheaper seat for the 1841 election; his friend Lord Forester secured him the nomination at Shrewsbury.

When Peel became prime minister after the 1841 election, Disraeli sought office from him; unsurprisingly, he did not get it. He continued his support for Peel in 1842 and 1843, seeking fame by attacking the foreign policy of the late government. He blamed the economic depression partly on the Whigs’ warmongering extravagance and failure to sign a commercial treaty with France. He projected himself as an authority on the needs of British international trade, urging a reversion to the historical policy of commercial diplomacy and reciprocity. He went to France in late 1842 in order to make connections at the court there which would assist his claim to be promoting a new entente with that country. His contacts there, supplied through Bulwer, Count d’Orsay, and Lyndhurst, gained him an audience with Louis Philippe.

In a memorandum to the French king, Disraeli talked of organising a party of youthful, energetic Tory back-benchers in pursuit of a policy sympathetic to France. Though nothing came of this notion as such, it showed his susceptibility to the excitement of high intrigue with a group of youthful men of independence and vision. A small group of such men was in fact forming on the Tory benches, inspired by George Smythe, Lord John Manners, and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. This trio had been at Eton and Cambridge together and had a romantic attachment to the ideals of chivalry, paternalism, and religious orthodoxy which had become fashionable in some landed and university circles in reaction to reform, utilitarianism, and political economy. Disraeli did not adopt all of the specific enthusiasms of Young England, as the group came to be known in 1843.

But by the end of the session Disraeli was accepted as a fertile contributor to its activities in the house, and some of the group’s enthusiasms rubbed off on him, especially a respect for historic religious ideals evident in Sybil. Over the winter of 1843–1844 Disraeli wrote Coningsby, his most effective and successful novel to date, a vibrant commentary on the political and social worlds of the 1830s. Featuring the three friends, it gave considerable publicity to the idea of Young England, contrasting its ideals with Peel’s lack of principle. Published in May 1844, it quickly sold 3,000 copies, for which Disraeli received about £1,000. In 1843, Disraeli offended the Conservative leadership by his vote against the Canada Corn Bill and his speech against Irish coercion. Early in 1844 Peel rebuked him by omitting him from the list of MPs to be summoned to the official party meeting at the start of the session. Over the coming months Disraeli made three speeches containing pointed and sarcastic criticism of the party leadership, such as his attack on its inability to tolerate dissent over the sugar issue.

In October 1844, Disraeli, Manners, and Smythe made successful addresses to young artisans at the Manchester Athenaeum, testifying to the impact made by Young England. While in the north, Disraeli also collected observations about industrial life which he used in Sybil, the novel which he wrote over the winter of 1844-5 and published in May 1845, again to considerable interest; it too sold 3000 copies. But Young England broke up in 1845, partly owing to a difference of opinion on the government’s proposals for the Maynooth seminary and partly because of parental pressure on Smythe and Manners not to be disloyal to the party. Meanwhile, Disraeli’s abuse of Peel was mounting. In late February he made a celebrated, extended, and neatly vindictive assault on Peel’s shiftiness, described by one onlooker as ‘aimed with deadly precision’, yet delivered with Disraeli’s normal ‘extreme coolness and impassibility’. On 17^th March he declared that a ‘Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy’. His opposition to the Maynooth grant (11^th April) was similarly based on the argument that Peel cared nothing for Tory principles and sought to extend the ‘police surveillance’ of Downing Street to entrap Irish Catholics, when they required independence and respect. By the end of the 1845 session Disraeli had become a celebrated orator. He undoubtedly helped to stimulate the questioning of Peel’s trustworthiness on the back benches. Yet he stood essentially alone, without allies, and in such circumstances his capacity to tolerate abuse and short-term political injury is testimony to his remarkable self-confidence and self-reliance. Disraeli’s position was transformed by the events of late 1845 that brought Peel to the Commons in January 1846 as an advocate of repealing the Corn Laws, in defence of which the vast majority of Tory MPs had been elected in 1841.

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[1] Valuable studies of Disraeli include: W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle The life of Benjamin Disraeli, 6 volumes, 1910–20, R. Blake Disraeli, 1966, Disraeli’s reminiscences, ed. H. M. Swartz and M. Swartz, 1975, Benjamin Disraeli, letters, ed. J. A. W. Gunn and others, 1982-, R. Vincent Disraeli, 1990 and P. Smith, Disraeli: a brief life, 1996.

The question of Ireland: Seeking conciliation 1844-1845

With the receding threat of repeal from late 1843, there were now opportunities for a new approach to Irish matters. The government recognised that coercion could not be maintained indefinitely. However, the options available to Peel were limited.  Economic grievances were thought to be beyond the scope of government action. Peel was opposed to state aid for Irish railway construction. Nor was the government willing to introduce any major alteration to the Irish land system especially if that meant interfering with property rights.  A settlement of the religious question was also largely beyond the government’s powers. The Conservative party could not alter the Church of Ireland without serious electoral consequences. Former Whigs like Stanley and Graham had originally joined the Conservatives partly because of the Whig attack on the Irish Church in the 1830s and it was unlikely that they would reverse this position.

Despite these limitations, the government was determined to pursue a policy of conciliation. Graham described the necessity of this approach in grim terms: ‘If Ireland be not reconciled to Great Britain, she will destroy us and open a break in our defences through which our enemies will ultimately triumph.’ The Union could only be assured by winning the good will of the majority of Catholic Irishmen. Conciliation of Catholic Ireland proceeded on several lines: appointing Irish Catholics to posts in the Irish administration; improving clerical and secular education facilities; and, attempting a reform of the Irish franchise and revision of the laws regarding land occupation

The government offered more positions of political responsibility to Irish Catholics. Irishmen and especially Catholics were often excluded from official circles in Dublin. In 1843, W. Smith O’Brien argued that Catholic Emancipation could never be fully realised as long as religion remained a bar to office. Of the major posts in the Irish administration at this time, twenty-three were held by Protestants and three by Catholics. Peel recognised the justice of this criticism and in the summer of 1843, in a series of letters to de Grey, urged that Catholics be appointed to vacant positions. However, de Grey was jealous of the patronage power in his hands and resentful of any interference. Irish Protestants would be unlikely to support a policy that favoured Catholics, while there was no guarantee that Catholics would accept the government’s belated generosity. When Peel persisted in the appointment of John Howley, a Catholic barrister to a judicial position, it was clear that religion had been the reason for his appointment. Protestant opinion was outraged that more qualified Protestant Tories were ignored while Catholic opinion denounced it as a ‘shallow artifice’ that was ‘insulting’ to Ireland. This was not a promising beginning to conciliation.

For Peel, the key to conciliation lay with the Catholic clergy. It had been prominent in the repeal agitation and Peel was determined to win their loyalty to the Union. By late 1843, Peel, Graham and Stanley were agreed that the state must bear a greater responsibility for the education and maintenance of the clergy. This meant a review of ministerial policy towards the Maynooth seminary. It had been established in 1795 by the Irish parliament for training Catholic priests as a means of luring them away from their traditional training in French or Spanish seminaries, a potentially subversive education. After the Union, the practice of supporting Maynooth from public funds continued but by the 1840s the amount allocated was clearly inadequate. Fixed in 1808 at £9,250 annually, it had not been raised since. Successive governments had neglected the facilities and educational standards at Maynooth and this alienated the clergy who studied there. The decision to review Maynooth was a reversal of opinion. In 1842, Lord Eliot had urged an inquiry into Maynooth but the cabinet had turned down his suggestion with Peel expressing reluctance to disturb the ‘existing tranquillity’. O’Connell’s repeal meetings had ruffled the religious calm and Peel’s initial argument could no longer be advanced. However, the whole issue required a delicate balancing act.

Peel’s most immediate concern was ministerial divisions over Maynooth. In cabinet meetings in early 1844, Goulburn and Graham expressed some reservations while Gladstone was wholly opposed to any increase in the Maynooth grant. His problem was that in 1838 he had written The State in its Relations with the Church in which he established the principle that the state was bound to support the established church and no other and Maynooth violated that principle. Gladstone feared that his reliability would be impugned if he agreed to a change in the grant and he threatened resignation if the government persisted. Unable to resolve its differences, the cabinet postponed the decision.  With action on Maynooth stalled, Peel began to send Ireland what Disraeli termed ‘messages of peace’. The Charitable Bequests and Donations bill was introduced in 1844 placing Catholic clergy in Ireland on a more equitable financial footing with Anglican clergy. While the Church of Ireland was well endowed, Roman Catholic clergy were dependent on a voluntary system of customary offerings and dues given by their often impoverish parishioners. Existing law and practice hindered private endowment of Catholic chapels by ensuring that the Board of Charitable Donations and Bequests were Protestants. The proposed bill guaranteed an equal voice on the Board and encouraged private endowments to Catholic institutions. The bill had an easy passage in Parliament with the Whig leader Lord John Russell supporting it.

However, in Ireland the legislation encountered opposition from the repeal leaders who feared that it would detract from repeal by removing genuine grievances. Campaigning among the clergy, they argued for non-cooperation with the new Board. To deflect the campaign, the Irish executive entered into direct negotiations with the Catholic hierarchy. Earl de Grey had resigned in May 1844 on grounds of health and was replaced by Lord Heytesbury, a career diplomat who had no interest in promoting either side in the sectarian dispute. He won the confidence of the Catholic hierarchy largely because it had petitioned the previous Whig government for just those concessions contained in the Act. It could scarcely refuse what it had so recently sought. After protracted discussions, a majority of the hierarchy agreed to cooperate in the execution of the legislation. It was an important victory for the government’s policy of conciliation.

The government fared less well in two other attempts at conciliation.  It attempted to reform the Irish franchise in April 1844 by enfranchising the £5 freeholder and remedying defects of the legal machinery. This proved highly contentious. Conservatives thought the bill would promote democratic tendencies by lowering the county franchise. Irish liberals and repealers, on the other hand, feared it would place the newly enfranchised rural poor at the disposal of their landlords on election day. This combined assault doomed the bill to failure and it was withdrawn in June 1844.  A second failure related to land occupation. In November 1843, the government appointed a commission to consider the law and practice of land occupation in Ireland. Known as the Devon Commission after its chairman, it worked through the 1844 session conducting interviews and collecting evidence in Ireland. It published its findings in 1845 in four massive volumes. Though the Commission revealed little that was new, it drew together much information. Based on its report, the Compensation of Tenants (Ireland) Bill was introduced by the House of Lords by Lord Stanley in June 1845. It required landlords to compensate tenants for their improvements in building, fencing and drainage should they be ejected before they had gathered the fruits of that improvement. A salaried Commissioner of Improvements, resident in Dublin, would supervise tenant applications. Reaction to the proposal was instantly unfavourable and in mid-July Peel withdrew the bill.

The Maynooth question could no longer be postponed and it dominated the 1845 session. The fiercest opposition was not to the proposed increase in grant but from it being established as a permanent endowment outside parliamentary control. To Anglicans, this implied a revision of existing relations between church and state. Dissenting ‘Voluntaries’ disliked the bill because they opposed all religious establishments. This laid the basis for cooperation between Anglicans and Nonconformists in the Central Anti-Maynooth Committee, a powerful and extensive extra-parliamentary pressure group that deluged parliament with 10,000 petitions signed by over 1¼ million people condemning the Maynooth plan. Also opposed to Maynooth were those Conservatives within the party who were exasperated by Peel’s continued betrayal of implicit party pledges. Charles Greville reported that ‘The Carlton Club was in a state of insurrection…The disgust of the Conservatives and their hatred of Peel keep swelling every day’. He had already tampered with the Corns Laws and now threatened the dominance of the Church of Ireland.  Gladstone tendered his resignation In January 1845. In the early weeks of the session, petitions and public meetings hostile to the government increased in number. Peel, however, remained firm and was determined to ‘risk the fate of the Government’ on Maynooth.

Peel introduced the details of the Maynooth Bill on 3^rd April 1845. It proposed a special grant of £30,000 for new buildings, putting of cost of repairs and maintenance under the Board of Works. He proposed raising the grant to £26,000 and confirmed that the new grant would be a permanent endowment. The response was immediate and the anticipated opposition became vociferous inside Parliament and in the country. For Sir Robert Inglis, MP for Oxford the proposal represented ‘the endowment of the Church of Rome’. Others objected to the removal of the Maynooth grant from annual parliamentary scrutiny. Peel especially took a beating, not least from his own back-benchers with Disraeli, who emerged as a dangerous critic of Peel’s style of leadership, calling him a ‘Conservative dictator’, accusing him of ‘cunning’ and ‘habitual perfidy’ and denouncing him as an unscrupulous middleman whose shameless borrowing of his opponents’ policies demonstrated his total lack of commitment to fixed political principles.  Peel relied on the support of a combination of liberal Conservatives, Whigs and Catholic Irish MPs to carry the bill and it passed its third reading with a comfortable majority. Without opposition support, the bill would not have passed since the Conservatives divided 149-148 against on the third reading. Peel recognised that the proposals would probably be fatal for the government but argued that they were right. Characteristically he would not compromise with Protestant Tories and, because he had Whig support, had no need to.  The more conservative agricultural wing of the party was especially angered by the bill. C. Goring, MP for Shoreham declared that the agricultural interest viewed the Maynooth grant with ‘regret and alarm’ and feared that the government would soon sacrifice the agriculturalists by repealing the Corn Laws just as they had sacrificed the Protestant church in Ireland. Goring was voicing the sentiments of a large section of the Conservative party whose loyalty towards their leadership was now at breaking point. Graham was not alone in believing that, though the Maynooth Bill passed through Parliament, the Conservative party would be ‘destroyed’ by its passage.

Peel encountered less opposition to his remaining conciliatory measure, the improvement of Irish education. Since 1833, Ireland had a system of national education involving the payment of state grants to any school provided it did not promote sectarianism. The number of national schools increased from 789 in 1844 to 2,637 in 1846. Both Anglicans and Presbyterians, as minority religions in Ireland, felt more threatened by this than did Catholics and expanded their own separate schools outside the national system. Opposition to the national system was extensive enough in 1841 to raise doubts among some of Peel’s colleagues as to the wisdom of its continuance. Both Stanley and de Grey thought it had failed but Peel disagreed. It was Peel’s affirmation of national education that assured its continuance. In May 1845, Graham introduced the Academical Institutions Bill to establish three colleges in Cork, Galway and Belfast to extend a university education to the Irish middle classes. Opposition to their non-sectarian nature was muted in England and there was little parliamentary opposition to the bill. There was far more opposition in Ireland with O’Connell and some Catholics wanting separate sectarian colleges. Peel recognised that the northern college at Belfast would effectively become a Presbyterian college and the two southern colleges Catholic, but he was unwilling to make them wholly sectarian. A compromise was reached with the Catholic hierarchy and it agreed to cooperate with the government in establishing the colleges. The bill received the Royal Assent on 31^st July 1845.

It is clear that Irish policy shifted decisively during Peel’s ministry. Neglected at first, Ireland increasingly became the government’s most absorbing concern. Peel’s somewhat belated attempt at conciliation involved him in an ever-deepening commitment to satisfy Irish grievances. His remedy to the threat posed to the Union by O’Connell involved constructing an alliance between the British State and the Catholic gentry and middle classes of Ireland. To this end, he strove to ensure that Catholics obtained a fairer share of Crown patronage, improved opportunities in secular higher education and sought to inculcate business attitudes among tenant farmers. Whatever qualities these policies had, they were simply denied the time they needed to work on Irish social and cultural attitudes. Peel’s party was already in an ill humour before the potato harvest failed in the wet summer of 1845 and Peel and his ministers met in the autumn to consider what to do about the Corn Laws. Gladstone foretold with considerable accuracy the fatal importance of Ireland to the government when he wrote in 1845: ‘Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm, the minister of God’s retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice!’

The question of Ireland: Peel responds

The strength of the repeal movement in the summer of 1843 caused growing alarm among its opponents. Opposition was also building in England to Peel’s inactive Irish policy. In May, a deputation of Protestant peers urged on Peel and Graham a proclamation against demonstrations in Ireland. By early June, The Times was convinced that Ireland was ‘on the verge of rebellion’ and by July harshly condemned the government ‘whose wits seem fairly to have departed in this crisis’.

These criticisms may have been somewhat unfair but Ireland was becoming a matter of deep anxiety, as cabinet papers indicate. Peel was especially concerned that the largely Catholic repeal meetings would result in a violent response from the Protestant Orange Society, banned in the 1830s that might bring Ireland to the brink of civil war. Peel’s government found itself in a difficult position in dealing with the repealers for two main reasons.  First, no laws had been broken. O’Connell warned his followers at virtually every meeting against violence of any kind. The suppression of peaceful meetings might alienate moderate Irishmen on which the government placed its hopes. Peel believed that nothing could be done without clear evidence of illegality. A second difficulty for Peel was divisions in the Irish administration. The Lord Lieutenant, Earl de Grey was unsympathetic to Irish aspirations and ultra-Protestant in his religion. Most of the other senior Irish officials were also partisan Protestants: for example, Edward Lucas, the Under-Secretary was an Irish Protestant landowner and Edward Sugden, the Lord Chancellor had advocated the exclusion of O’Connell from the House of Commons in 1828. By contrast, the Chief Secretary, Lord Eliot had a different outlook and believed that government policy towards Ireland should be more conciliatory. It is not entirely clear why Peel appointed men of different views to such sensitive posts unless he saw it as a means of establishing some balance between coercion and conciliation. The effect on the Irish administration was to give it a Protestant enough flavour to be distasteful to Catholics, yet Catholic enough in the person of Lord Eliot to alienate the most fervent Protestants.

It was Protestant fears of the repeal movement that led Peel to harden his attitude in 1843. If it could not act against the repeal meetings, it was still possible to send a warning to the repealers. In late May 1843, an Arms Act imposing tighter controls on the traffic in Irish weapons was introduced. Also, to the delight of the duke of Wellington, the cabinet resumed recruiting for the army. The belief that civil war was imminent in Ireland resulted in the total military establishment being reinforced to its highest level since 1829. By October 1843, there were some 34,000 troops there. These coercive measures did not stop the repeal meetings but did provide O’Connell with an attractive topic for his speeches.

Other actions, however, played directly into O’Connell’s hands. A minor civil servant was dismissed in late May for attending a repeal meeting and soon after Lord Ffrench, a Galway magistrate was relieved of his commission for announcing his intention to attend a meeting. By the end of May, fourteen magistrates had been dismissed and eventually the number rose to twenty-four, including several MPs. The Lord Chancellor, Edward Sugden was responsible and he had acted without official approval. The dismissals were universally condemned even by the anti-repeal Dublin Evening Mail and, although ministers supported Sugden in public, it was unhappy about his actions in private. The whole episode was undoubtedly damaging to the government and may well have driven some moderate men into the ranks of the repealers.

It was the growing militancy of the language of the repealers that gave the government the opportunity to act. O’Connell did not abandon the constitutionalist approach as the peaceful way of achieving repeal but increasingly his speeches contained military and separatist references. The last straw for the government was the announcement of a mass meeting at Clontarf for 8^th October and it decided to act firmly. Since Lord de Grey, the Lord Lieutenant was in England, it was an easy matter for Peel and Graham to confer with him and this occurred on 3^rd and 4^th October. It was decided that the meeting at Clontarf should be suppressed, by force if necessary and that O’Connell and the Repeal Association leaders should be arrested and charged with treasonable conspiracy. The proclamation against Clontarf was announced on 7^th October and O’Connell immediately acquiesced urging his followers to continue with the legal and peaceful means of achieving repeal. Within a week, he and several others were arrested but the trial was postponed until February 1844. Initially found guilty, O’Connell was released in 1844 on appeal to the House of Lords on the grounds that the jury had been packed with Protestants. But the damage had been done and the repeal movement, without its leader, was significantly weakened. It never again reached the heights of 1843 and finally collapsed in 1848, a year after O’Connell’s death.

The question of Ireland

During the 1810s and 1820s Peel was regarded as the champion of the Protestant Constitution and, in many respects the contrast between this and his approach to governing Ireland after 1841 is remarkable. The extraction of Catholic Emancipation from Wellington’s government in 1829 had forced a reappraisal of Peel’s thinking about the nature of the Irish problem. This led him towards a more ‘liberal’ perspective grounded on the principle of allowing free-play between the forces of Protestantism and Catholicism in the province. Events in the early 1830s made it clear that Ireland was still not reconciled to the Union with Britain and Daniel O’Connell put himself at the head of a campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union. The Whigs temporarily contained the problem after 1835 by establishing a working political relationship with O’Connell but in 1841 Conservative electoral victory prompted a renewal of the repeal campaign.

Fiscal and social issues posed numerous difficulties for the government but Peel was reasonably confident that solutions could be found. However, ministerial confidence seemed often to be more uncertain when faced with the issue of Ireland[1]. The administration of Irish policy fell into three distinct phases[2]:

1. The first phase, extending from 1841 to mid-1843 was characterised by what may be termed benign neglect.
2. Under the pressure of Irish events, however, the second half of 1843 witnessed a reversal of ministerial inactivity as the passage of an Arms Act and the dismissal of Irish magistrates initiated a policy of coercion.
3. The third phase, from 1844 to the end of the ministry, was characterised by conciliatory legislation as Peel sought to promote the welfare of Ireland through the passage of important educational and religious measures.

Peel and Graham recognised, as early as 1841 that the policy of exclusion of Catholics from effective participation in the Irish political system provided an important sense of grievance. Graham believed that it was essential for ministers to pursue ‘an impartial and liberal policy…equal justice administered to Roman Catholics’. Peel was anxious to demonstrate the material advantages of Catholic Emancipation by encouraging the recruitment of ‘moderate’ and ‘respectable’ Catholics into the magistracy, the police, the legal profession and other walks of life. He justified this by reference to the alleged existence of a well-disposed mass of people who would be amenable to conciliatory measures. To follow a policy of exclusion risked turning these people into enemies of the Crown.

Initial inactivity 1841-1843

This view did not, however, become evident until 1843 and initially Peel neglected Ireland. In 1841, he mistakenly invited an ultra-protestant, Earl De Grey, to become lord lieutenant. He was unwilling to cooperate with the conciliatory approach and later even dismissed some Catholics from the magistracy. The initial inactivity of the government can be explained in several ways. First, the activities of the secret society of the Irish peasantry, such as the Rockites and Ribbonmen[3] were at a low ebb. Secondly, the influence of Ireland’s only national leader of stature, Daniel O’Connell, appeared to be waning. His Repeal Association, dedicated to the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union with Britain, seemed moribund. At the 1841 general election, O’Connell stood as a repealer for the City of Dublin and was defeated though he was later returned for Cork. There were only seventeen other repealers returned with O’Connell in 1841 and this represented a significant reduction in the thirty-eight repealers returned in 1832. Without the Whigs in office, it was perhaps inevitable that O’Connell’s influence should decline and it seemed to many in Britain (if not in Ireland) that the best days of the ageing O’Connell were over.

This was premature. O’Connell’s influence in Ireland remained high and in 1841 he became the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin since the 1680s. He also had never ceased in his efforts to organise from the grassroots a National Repeal Movement. He worked closely with Richard Barrett, editor of The Pilot, a Dublin newspaper that became the unofficial mouthpiece of repeal. He also maintained close contact with John MacHale, the Catholic Archbishop of Tuan in planning the arrangement for repeal meetings and continually urged his supporters to secure the approval of the Catholic clergy whose influence on political issues was steadily increasing. By early 1843, O’Connell’s efforts bore fruit and in February he sponsored a repeal motion in the Dublin Corporation. The result, a vote of 41 to 15 in favour of repeal was sensational. The Anglican, Conservative and virulently anti-repeal Dublin Evening Mail reported on 6^th March 1843 that repeal ‘had made an immense as well as a rapid stride…from the platform of a seditious assembly to the council-table of legitimate municipal government…’ The repeal ‘rent’ contributions to the Repeal Association increased and a national campaign of repeal meetings was organised in every county in Ireland. O’Connell reminded his audiences that Peel and Wellington had responded to public pressure in granting Catholic Emancipation in 1829 so why not again?

Addressing repeal 1843

O’Connell’s campaign acquired added momentum during the course of 1843. The repeal meetings were an unqualified success at attracting large crowds. In August 1843, there was a reported 200,000 to 300,000 present at Castlebar; 350,000 at Roscommon; and, at the largest meeting of all at Tara (the seat of the ancient Irish kings), one million. Even allowing for exaggeration (some estimated the number at Tara at 500,000), these were impressive gatherings, called ‘monster meetings’ by The Times. They seemed to give substance to O’Connell’s claim that Ireland was becoming one nation under the repeal agitation. Some of the most respected leaders in Ireland, both lay and clerical spoke at the meetings. O’Connell maintained that repeal did not mean separation from Britain but it did mean an Irish parliament and self-government. He argued that the Westminster Parliament had too often neglected Irish interests and that an Irish Parliament would abolish tithe rent-charges, revise the poor relief system and ensure security of tenure.

The aspirations of the repealers suggest why the movement should have suddenly caught fire in the summer of 1843. Recurring economic and religious grievances had come to a head and these supplied O’Connell with much of his support.   Economic trends detrimental to industrial development were especially worrying to Irish merchants. Unlike most other countries, Ireland was becoming increasingly rural. Few of its major towns, apart from Belfast and Dublin, grew between 1821 and 1841 and some smaller centres stagnated. The severe economic slump of the early 1840s revealed the inadequacy of Ireland’s resources. Whereas England had the means to overcome the depression, Ireland did not. Irish investment tended to flow outwards because of the better speculative opportunities available on the mainland. This led to under-investment in Irish infrastructure such as railways: by 1845, only 70 miles of line had been opened. Agricultural development faced as many problems as industry. Improvement was hindered by absentee landlords and insecurity of tenure discouraged tenant farmers from investing in even the simplest manuring and drainage practices. Economic cooperation between landlord and tenant in Ireland was made more difficult by divisions of interests and religion that more often made landlord and tenant bitter enemies rather than entrepreneurial partners as was the case in England.

In addition, O’Connell built on the sense of grievance among Catholics. The established Anglican Church of Ireland ministered to the needs of around 20 per cent of the population and acceptance to this state of affairs was beginning to wear thin for Roman Catholics by the 1840s. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a revival of Irish Catholicism. Churches were repaired; cathedrals begun; parish schools were started and the National Seminary of Maynooth grew in importance. For many Catholics, the repeal movement was one way of demonstrating their faith. Though predominantly Catholic, the movement attracted some Protestant support among them Thomas Davis, a leader of the Young Ireland movement and William Smith O’Brien, MP for Limerick who joined the Association in 1843.

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[1] Ireland is well covered by both general and specialist studies: F. S. L. Lyons Ireland since the Famine, Fontana, 1973 is a classic study of value for the period before 1850 for its opening section. L. M. Cullen The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600-1900, Batsford, 1981 offers a radical interpretation of this period. Roy Foster Modern Ireland 1600-1972, Allen Lane, 1988 is an essential study worth reading in full. D. McCartney The Dawning of Democracy: Ireland 1800-1870, Helicon, 1987, K. T. Hoppen Ireland since 1800, Longman, 2^nd ed., 2000 and G. O. Tuathaigh Ireland Before the Famine 1798-1848, Gill and Macmillan, 1971 are more focussed. W. E. Vaughan (ed.) A New History of Ireland, volume v, 1801-1870, OUP, 1988 is a very detailed study.

[2] R. C. Shipkey Robert Peel’s Irish Policy 1812-1846, New York 1897 provides a general account of Peel’s approach to governing Ireland. Donal A. Kerr Peel, Priests and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland 1841-1846, Oxford University Press, 1982 is invaluable on relations between Peel and the Catholic Church.

[3] S. Clarke and J. S. Donnelly (eds.), Irish Peasants: violence and political unrest 1780-1914, Manchester, 1983 contains important material on this issue.

Gathering disaffection 1841-1845

The issue of the growing division between Peel and his supporters and the rest of the Conservative party is made more difficult for historians because they know the end result, the division of the party over the Corn Laws in 1846. This makes it tempting to read growing division into every act of opposition to Peel’s policies after 1841 as an escalating series of events that culminated in the events of 1846.

• Was there growing divergence between government and its supporters or was this simply a series of isolated incidents?
• If there was growing divergence, what were its causes?
• If it was simply a series of isolated influences, at what point did opposition prove terminal?
• Was it simply the question of the Corn Laws?

The 1841 election and Peel’s character

It is generally accepted by historians that the 1841 election was a victory for Protectionist Conservatives rather than those who accepted Peel’s view of Conservatism. It is probably true to say that Conservative paternalist sentiments were expressed more forcibly in the 1840s than in the previous decade when the bulk of the party seemed content to follow Peel’s lead by voting for the Poor Law Amendment Act. Another reason why paternalism gained in political force in the 1840s was that in provided Conservative MPs with a potential defence against attacks from the Anti-Corn Law League. If landowners were to be accused of selfishly protecting their own incomes at the expense of urban consumers of bread through the maintenance of the Corn Laws, they could reasonably retaliate by citing the appalling working conditions, job insecurity and urban squalor endured by those who worked in the factories owned by supporters of the League. For many agricultural MPs support for Ashley’s ten hour amendment in 1844 arose, as Peel reported to the Queen ‘partly out of hostility to the Anti-Corn Law League’.

Peel’s attitude to his back-benchers did not help the situation. There was a perhaps inevitable conflict between Peel’s executive view of government and the notion of ‘independence’ held by many Conservative MPs. Peel could count on their support as long as he did not threaten their Protectionism and Protestantism. However, many Conservative MPs feared that their leader was leaning further and further in the direction of the urban Free Trade radicals and that he was approaching the ‘condition of England’ question almost exclusively from the viewpoint of cheap food, regardless of the consequences for rural society and the existing aristocratic elite.

The Corn question

The question of the Corn Laws proved the most damaging difference between Peel and Conservative back-bench MPs though its catastrophic consequences were in the future.  Conservative loyalty to Peel proved strong enough to withstand the strains imposed by the modified Corn Laws in 1842, though the duke of Buckingham and Edward Knatchbull resigned from the government but later in the session eighty-five MPs voted against the reduction of import duties on cattle.

In 1843, Peel believed that the best way to protect Canada from a future invasion by the United States[1] was to interest the farmers in the American mid-west in selling their grain to Britain. The Canada Corn Act granted wheat shipped from Canada a privileged position in the British market (above other colonies), and nobody could doubt that the greater part of all the wheat which would come down the St Lawrence river would have originated in the United States. The duty on Canadian corn reduced to 1s per quarter while United States corn could be exported into Canada at 3s per quarter. In 1843, the Protectionists scarcely knew what to make of the Canada Corn Bill but over sixty opposed it. They feared the consequences of opening the door to American grain, but they wanted to retain Canada and the bill was introduced by Stanley who was known to sympathise with their own views.

In 1844, there was a dispute with France over Tahiti which necessitated an increase in the defence estimates. The ministry was defeated by Lord Ashley on the ten-hour issue and by Philip Miles, MP for Bristol on its proposals to revise the sugar duties. Both defeats were reversed by the threat of resignation. The government planned to slash the tariff on foreign sugar grown by free labour from 63s per hundredweight to 34s plus 5 per cent, while leaving the duty of colonial sugar unchanged on 25s 3d. The question at stake for Conservative opponents was maintaining imperial preference for sugar grown in the West Indies and there was also an underlying concern about Peel’s commitment to protectionism in general. Miles’ amendment proposed that the tariff differential between colonial and foreign sugar should be widened by reducing the duty on colonial sugar to 20s. This attracted the support of many Whig and Radical free-trades as well as sixty-two Conservatives and the government lost by twenty votes.

Peel’s reaction to the show of Conservative defiance over the Sugar Duties was identical the ten hours crisis earlier in the session. He threatened to resign unless the Commons reversed its decision. A meeting of 200 alarmed MPs at the Carlton Club on 17^th June expressed its appreciation of Peel’s service to the nation and his demand was duly complied with after 43 abstainers from the original vote attended the second vote and ten of the rebels stayed away. The tactic was effective, but it helped to accumulate resentment for the future. Many people, including Gladstone were dismayed by Peel’s uncompromising stance that appeared to be the product of personal disgust at the oppositional behaviour of Conservative MPs. The diarist Charles Greville went further and wrote that Peel’s behaviour in the Commons was ‘offensive and dictatorial, and people of all parties are exasperated and disgusted with it’. However, Peel had been advised by party managers that only about twenty MPs, men such as Disraeli, wanted to bring the government down, an assertion confirmed by modern research.

The ten hours and sugar duties defeats illustrated the difficulties in reconciling Peel’s executive view of government with Conservative back-benchers’ demands that they be allowed ‘independence’. MPs were prepared to give their support to Peel and his government since they wished him to remain in office. However, MPs in this period did not generally owe their election to the party machine and were difficult to discipline. Back-benchers could genuinely assert their independent judgement on specific issues. Peel, however, expected MPs to be loyal to the government and that this overrode their personal prejudices. In reality, given the state of party discipline in the 1840s, Peel was asked for more compliance than he had a right to demand.

It is important, at least to the end of the 1844 session not to exaggerate the seriousness of Conservative disunion. It had yet to develop into a terminal condition. The critical questions were: was there growing divergence between government and its supporters or was it simply a series of isolated incidents or what a later prime minister called ‘local difficulties’? Certainly before the end of the 1844 session, there were signs that Peel and his party had managed to patch up their differences and that a much better feeling existed. Peel was persuaded to use more conciliatory language at the end of the sugar duties debate and at the end of June 1844 he motivated his supporters with a powerful speech affirming that his government had no intention of reducing the level of protection to agriculture secured by the Corn Laws.

Then, in 1845, matters began to come to a head. The income tax was about to expire. But the economy was now in a position to benefit from further tariff reductions, and Peel chose, once again, to introduce the budget himself. On 14^th February, he renewed income tax for another three years explicitly to enable him ‘to make a great experiment’ in reducing other taxes, ‘the removal of which will give more scope to commercial enterprise, and occasion an increased demand for labour’. Peel believed that the result of this ‘extension of industry and encouragement of enterprise’ would be ‘the benefit of all classes of the community, whether they are directly or indirectly connected with commerce, manufactures, or agriculture’[2]. But the distinguishing mark of this budget was abolition not rationalisation. The critical question was had Peel now dropped the mask and become a convinced free-trader? If so, what would happen to the Corn Laws? Nothing, perhaps, in that parliament, had it not been for Ireland.

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[1] Relations between the United States and Canada had been difficult since the war of 1812-14. Rebellion in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837-8 had exacerbated the problem especially as the rebels received unofficial support from some of the northern American states, Establishing stability in Quebec and Ontario was a priority for the Colonial Office, under Lord Stanley and the ‘freeing-up’ of the wheat trade was seen as one way of achieving this.

[2] Hansard 3^rd series, volume 77, columns 455–497

Graham as Home Secretary

Sir James Graham (1792-1861)[1] brought untiring industry and a powerful administrative brain to the Home Office. He was faced with great problems: social unrest, Chartism, the emergence of the ‘condition of England’ problem and a campaign in Ireland for the repeal of the Union. But was he a ‘good’ Home Secretary? He reacted with great conscientiousness and zeal, but with distinctly mixed success but his record of legislative success was poor.

Graham described the strikes and Chartist activity of 1842 as ‘the mad insurrection of the working classes’ and sought to intimidate the agitators by a display of state power. He ordered troops to turn out around the country, urged magistrates to use their powers to suppress meetings, and presided over a policy of widespread arrests and special trials. Radical antagonism was naturally excited against him, and this was exacerbated in 1844 by an incident involving the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, who was living in exile in London. In the autumn of 1843 the Austrian ambassador in Britain, Baron Philipp von Neumann, had met Graham and asked him to locate Mazzini’s hiding-place. In March 1844, after further pressure from Neumann, Graham issued a warrant for the copying of Mazzini’s mail by the Post Office and agreed to pass to Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, any information about suspected risings against the Austrian and other conservative regimes in the various Italian states, which Aberdeen could then communicate to the Austrians. By accommodating Austria in this way, Graham and Aberdeen hoped to get the pope to use his influence to dissuade the Irish Catholic clergy from fomenting the campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Mazzini and his friends discovered that their mail was being tampered with, and in June a parliamentary furore arose. Graham defended the right of governments to open mail for political purposes. This right was upheld by a secret committee which investigated precedents, though it also revealed that Graham had been unusually assiduous in opening mail, and in the summer of 1842 had issued twenty warrants to inspect Chartists’ letters. The affair excited public revulsion at ministers’ behaviour; tampering with correspondence, especially at the behest of an illiberal foreign government, was deemed despicable and un-English. Although he was less to blame than Aberdeen, Graham suffered much more criticism because of his autocratic reputation; there was a fad for correspondents to write ‘Not to be Grahamed’ on their envelopes.

Graham’s zeal in defending order upset Liberals but it also managed to offend many propertied Conservatives. He criticised magistrates for their complacency and inefficiency during the unrest of 1842 and unsuccessfully proposed to the cabinet the appointment of salaried assistant barristers at quarter sessions in order to quicken and tighten up the law and order process in the localities. Back-benchers retaliated, interpreting much of his legislation as overbearing and destructive of traditional liberties. With personal sympathy for him among MPs scant, his controversial bills foundered, such as his measure to establish a central council to standardise qualifications for the medical profession. The British Medical Association accused him of seeking despotic control. His worst set-back came in the field of education. Graham saw the promotion of religious education as one of the principal means by which the state could combat the threat of social unrest. In particular, he sought to reduce the danger of disorder in the turbulent industrial districts by establishing a better education for factory children. In 1843 he introduced a bill requiring factory employees under thirteen to be given three hours of instruction daily. But he included securities for an Anglican presence in the schools. Dissenters were indignant, a vast petitioning campaign ensued, and the bill was withdrawn.

In Ireland, the repeal movement revived in 1842 and a series of monster meetings was planned for 1843. Graham’s initial response was one of intense alarm at ‘the reign of Terror’, the failure of juries to convict offenders, and the unwillingness of the Irish executive to assert itself to uphold the law. This anxiety helps to explain the government’s decision to proclaim the biggest repeal meeting, scheduled for Clontarf in October 1843, and, a week later, to arrest the repeal leader Daniel O’Connell on a charge of conspiring to incite disaffection. Unwisely the prosecuting authorities had Catholics removed from the trial jury. O’Connell appealed against the conviction and eventually, in September 1844, the House of Lords overturned it, on the votes of Liberal judges. Graham was very bitter and believed that the authority of government in Ireland had been gravely wounded. By this time, assisted by Peel’s influence, he had come to see the need for legislative activity in order to counter the propaganda of the repealers. Strongly convinced of the potency of religion as a bulwark of social order, he was particularly keen to increase the Catholic priests’ confidence in British rule. The Charitable Bequests Act of 1844 aimed to improve the Catholic Church’s financial position and to draw the bishops into the habit of communication with government through membership of a board of commissioners. The same strategy can be discerned in the educational policy of 1845, featuring an increased grant to the Catholic seminary of Maynooth and the establishment of the Queen’s colleges, non-denominational university colleges for Catholics and Protestants to use together. However, only a minority of bishops, from the older generation, defied O’Connell’s wishes and participated in the running of the charitable bequests board and the colleges. By the autumn of 1845 the government still did not feel confident of the loyalty of the Irish people, and this was to be of major significance in the corn tariff crisis of 1845-6.

Graham and Peel shared a staunch but controversial loyalty to the principles of political economy. When factory reformers called for reductions in the length of the adult working day to ten hours, the government resisted, arguing that it would make British factories uncompetitive internationally. In 1844, the factory reformers defeated the government, and the twelve-hour day had to be reasserted by the calling of a vote of confidence in government, a manoeuvre which embittered relations with back-benchers. Graham’s refusal to compromise with those who criticised the severity of the 1834 poor law was similarly contentious.

Into this fraught atmosphere, in the autumn of 1845, came news of the failure of the Irish potato crop. Graham saw the famine as a dispensation of providence which it was man’s duty to rectify in order to preserve social peace. Moreover, on political grounds some gesture was necessary in order to reassure sceptical Irishmen of the government’s concern for their survival. But if the Corn Laws were suspended temporarily, the strength of public agitation would prevent their re-imposition, giving the impression that government had surrendered to popular pressure. Though in the 1830s Graham had defended the sliding scale, he and Peel had agreed since 1842 that the corn laws were politically and economically counter-productive and that, despite their significance for most Conservative back-benchers, they must be repealed in the near future if economic stagnation was to be averted. The famine provided the occasion. The decision to press ahead with the repeal of the Corn Laws demonstrated great long-term administrative wisdom and great short-term political inflexibility. It reveals the extent to which the experience of government since 1841 had engendered in both Peel and Graham a conviction of the superiority and sufficiency of their judgement, condescension towards those who lacked their knowledge of affairs, and an overpowering concern with public order. Throughout the crisis, they seemed, in Punch’s words, ‘two persons with only one intellect’. After months of high drama, the Corn Laws were repealed in June 1846, the Conservative Party split, and Peel fell from office. Lord John Russell formed a Liberal government, which was kept afloat by the hundred or so Conservative MPs who remained loyal to Peel. Inevitably these included Graham, who became the leading member of the group in the Commons after Peel’s death in 1850.

Temperamentally, Graham was a man of superficial contradictions. Arthur Gordon described him as ‘rash and timid’ and belittled his judgement on both grounds. This was a widely held view. Graham’s outlook was dominated by an often excessive concern with the maintenance of public order, property, and government authority. But his arrogant manner sat uneasily with a tendency to overreact to social instability, ambivalence about responsibility and a susceptibility to depression and self-doubt. Distrusting the excesses of public opinion, he was inclined to exaggerate its radicalism and force. He was an efficient manager of a desk, a major influence on the professionalising of Victorian administration, and a contributor to the Peelite-Gladstonian fiscal tradition, but he lacked the character, the vision, and the warmth to be a successful political leader. Although he had the advantage of a large and powerful frame, and the detail of his parliamentary speeches was often forceful, their delivery could be monotonous and feeble, while his wit rarely rose above biting sarcasm and he disdained to cultivate either fashionable society or potential political supporters. Hard-working and serious, he seemed to believe that political power could rest entirely on administrative ability. Disinterested, devout, and genuinely alarmed for the future of his class, his religion, and his civilisation, he threw himself into public service. He did not intend to belittle party, but party kept belittling him, as he saw it, and this he found intolerable. In the course Peel’s ministry, he alienated the bulk of both sides of the Commons.

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[1] The major published sources for Sir James Graham are: C. S. Parker Life and letters of Sir James Graham, 1792–1861, 2 volumes, 1907, J. T. Ward Sir James Graham, 1967, A. B. Erickson The public career of Sir James Graham, 1952, A. P. Donajgrodzki ‘Sir James Graham at the home office’, Historical Journal, volume 20 (1977), pages 97–120, F. B. Smith ‘British post office espionage, 1844’, Historical Studies, volume 14 (1969-71), pages 189–203, D. A. Kerr Peel, priests, and politics: Sir Robert Peel’s administration and the Roman Catholic church in Ireland, 1841–1846, Oxford University Press, 1982 and D. Spring ‘A great agricultural estate: Netherby under Sir James Graham, 1820–1845’, Agricultural History, volume 29 (1955), pages 73–81.