Norman Gash - Mr Secretary Peel: Robert Peel 1788-1830

SIR ROBERT PEEL, first baronet
from the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.

ROBERT PEEL,
aetat. 37 from the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.

English history has been at once adorned and domesticated by great familiesCecils, Churchills, Howards, Percys, Russells, the Pitts, Greys, Pelhams, and Foxeswhose services to state and society bridge the centuries and link one era with another. The Peels were late-comers on the national stage; yet their secular achievement in the century that followed the great war against Napoleon can stand the rivalry of any others. To have produced in four successive generations an industrial millionaire, a Prime Minister, the owner of a Derby winner, a Speaker of the House of Commons, a V.C., and a Secretary of State for India, is a varied and remarkable record. The achievement was the more striking because of the rapid rise of the family from obscurity to fame by their own efforts and talents, unaided by royal and aristocratic patronage or the chance favours of military fortune. English society has always been kept healthy by its social fluidity. The rise and fall of families and classes has acted as a kind of political metabolism; fresh energies have been released, exhausted elements reabsorbed, which unassimilated or retained might have endangered the body politic. The Peels are a notable example of this perpetual process of social readjustment. The third Robert Peel, who became not only Prime Minister but the greatest statesman of his time, was the grandson of a man who started life as a small Lancashire yeoman farmer. Between them lay the cotton revolution of the late eighteenth century which made his fathers fortune. But so close in time was the Prime Minister to his social origins that his life in politics was largely conditioned by the forces which produced his familys wealth. The same historical process created both the economic revolution and the man who did more than any other single figure in politics to lessen its impact on society and to reconcile the new industrial elements with the older framework of aristocratic government.

But between the first and third Robert Peel came the second; and in the history of the Peel family he was the decisive figure. It was he that broke through the respectable anonymity of the prosperous middle classes into the real ruling class of the country. From working with his own hands at cotton-mills, bleaching-grounds and clerks ledgers, he became (alone of his fathers family) an M.P. and a baronet, and he ended his life as a wealthy landowner and fundholder . His father had put his sons to industry, trade, and finance; he placed his own children in the traditional occupations of the aristocracypolitics, the army, the law, the church, the land. Yet this social transformation was accomplished with no marked change of intellectual outlook; and the other significant aspect of the first Sir Robert Peel was the social conservatism which preceded as well as accompanied his upward progress. The Protestant, Anglican, conservative middle-class Peels were merely transmuted by his wealth into the Protestant, Anglican, conservative upper-class Peels of the third generation. English politics were enriched, in the person of his eldest son, by a family tradition which was originally nurtured in the rural isolation of pre-industrial Lancashire. The activities of Sir Robert himself, both in his pioneer work for the reform of factory conditions and in his brushes with the radicalism of a young and disorderly industrial society, form a kind of rough sketch for the large political canvas of his sons career.

Yet with the continuity there were also differences. The opinions of the first Sir Robert were those of a prosperous industrialist, firmly rooted in his personal experience of life. A self-made man, he drew his ideas from his own environment and from his practical observation of men and affairs. If the environment and observation were alike limited, they were nevertheless directly related to life as he lived it. His economic theories were derived not from books but from business. His charitable but restricted legislation for factoryapprentices and cotton-mill children, his desire for greater freedom of trade from tariffrestrictions, his consistent support for an inflationary paper-money system, were all the empirical fruits of his own career. To the end of his life he preferred to find things out for himself, and to pick up information from persons rather than paper. His great object, wrote one of his Staffordshire neighbours, appeared to me on all occasions to be the procuring information, by collecting in his intercourse with mankind all he could. His manner was to appear as knowingnothing and trying to make you In his temperament and views the first Sir Robert Peel was essentially a creature of nature.