Norman Gash - Sir Robert Peel: 1830-1850

As in the first volume of this new edition of the life of Sir Robert Peel, I have amended a few misprints and stylistic defects and added a bibliographical note on subsequent publications. I have also taken the opportunity in Part II of this Foreword to give a brief sketch of the later Peel family in order to round off the account in the text which halts in 1850.

A feature of the new bibliographical material is the number of books and articles on the Conservative Party in the first twenty years of its existence. This is clearly useful for the biography of a politician of whom it could be said (with a certain amount of compression ) that his career after 1832 consisted of leading the party in opposition, splitting it when in office, and repudiating it thereafter. As a historian, however, one may regret that the same amount of attention has not been given to the rival party. The process of bringing together Whigs, Liberals and radicals in one coherent organisation is just as important a field for investigation as the parallel movement among Conservatives. Indeed, a comparison of the two might well illuminate both. In this pioneer phase of party evolution the problems were similar. The position of the leader, responsibility for policy, tactics in opposition, maintenance of discipline, the permissible latitudes of dissent, the role of public opinion in a limited electoral systemall these were important matters for which there were few accepted rules. The whole question of party as distinct from parliamentary authority was still viewed with a certain objectivity . As late as 1851 G. C. Lewis wrote that my attachment to party is the result more of reason than of feeling. I believe it to be the only means of government in our political system and it is impossible for a party to continue if everybody insists on his own opinion to its full extent.

In the controversies which attended the emergence of the party system one central issue was the question of ministerial responsibility . The concept was old enough; it was the circumstances under which it operated which had changed. To whom were ministers responsible? To the monarch whose servants they professed to be? To parliament on which their practical ability to govern depended? To the party which sustained them in office? To the country which they governed? Or, embodying but transcending all these claims, to a personal concept of public duty? After his defeat on the sugar duties in June 1844 Peel said in cabinet that his personal honour would not permit him to accept the victorious resolution or, alternatively , to take refuge in a mere renewal of the old duties for another year. Both he and Sir James Graham talked of the incapacity of disgraced men to serve their party or their country. This was not an argument taken up just for the occasion. Graham wrote privately to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland that after the opposition of some of their own party to the measures of the ministry, he was at a loss to discover how, with honor or advantage to the country, we can be made responsible for the administration of affairs. If the use of the word honour was old-fashioned at the time of the second Reform Act, it was certainly not so a generation earlier.

The obverse of this notion of ministerial honour was an unflattering (and in Peels case an occasionally contemptuous) opinion of the parliamentary parties as either reliable channels of public feeling or as depositories of higher statesmanship. For Peel there was a world of difference between government through party and government by party. It would, he wrote in 1846, be an odious servitude if a

Any consideration of the disruption of the Conservative Party in 1846 ought therefore to begin with the years before 1841. It has been argued indeed that Peels attempt to inspire and lead a Conservative opposition party between 1832 and 1841 was a failure in the sense that he was unable to animate his party with the Tamworth Manifesto principles which informed his own actions and unable to secure sufficient support from other classes in the electorate to change the nature of his party. Failure is a relative term. Most political leaders would gladly compound for a failure which gave them a majority of eighty in the Commons and made possible five years of epoch-making legislation. Over the truth of the underlying propo sition , however, there can be no dispute; though it is scarcely a novel discovery. Nobody has ever contended that Peel moulded an entire party in his own image. It would be difficult, in fact, to name any outstanding party leader who has. That large political parties are coalitions, in a state of uneasy equilibrium, is one of the commonplaces of political observation. As far as the Conservatives of 1841 are concerned, a tentative assessment which I put forward over twenty years ago was that the Peelite section numbered only between a third and a quarter of the parliamentary party. Nor has it commonly been contended that Peel alone was responsible for the strength of the party in the 1841 general election. The real issue is whether Peels leadership produced the margin of victory. Party politicians today measure success in terms of 5 per cent or 10 per cent swings in electoral support. Did Peels presence make the difference between victory and defeat? It cannot be proved; though many contemporaries believed so in 1841. The fact remains, however, that for all its natural strength in the rural constituencies, this was the only occasion on which the party obtained a parliamentary majority in the whole period between the first and second reform acts; and that, despite the weaknesses and divisions among their opponents after 1847.

After 1846 there was frequent speculation that Peel might lead a new Peelite party or that the Conservative Party would reunite. Peel made it clear that he had no intention of pursuing either object. The only realistic possibility was that he might be persuaded to return to office as head of a coalition government. Given the bitterness of the 1846 disruption, that coalition could only be composed of Peelites and Liberals. Such an administration actually came about two and a half years after his death. It cannot, however, be taken for granted that a junction with the formidable Peel instead of the amiable Aberdeen would have been equally attractive to the Whigs. Certainly it would not have been so to Lord John Russell who entered the ministry in 1852 with the firm expectation that Aberdeen would be little more than a caretaker premier. It would have been difficult even for Lord John to believe that Peel would allow That was not conclusive. Six or seven years of comparative leisure might have produced a change of heart; but it was an attitude which would have had to be overcome.