Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria/Chapter 7

by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Chapter VII.

The Queen and Peel

From the time of the Queen's accession, the power of the Whig Government under Lord Melbourne had been steadily going down. It sank to zero when they resumed office, in 1839, after Peel had failed to form a Government in consequence of the dispute over the Ladies of the Bedchamber. They had been beaten in the Commons and were in a permanent minority in the Lords; and it was said with justice that they were holding on, in office but not in power, simply to please the Queen. It would have been a discreditable position for any Government, but it was particularly damaging to a Whig Government from the fact that their party was specially identified with the principle of ministerial responsibility and a resistance to personal government.

The result of their position was that they were powerless to pass their measures. They knew they had lost the confidence of the country, and that the House of Lords could therefore veto the Government Bills with a light heart. Perhaps this was not altogether painful to Lord Melbourne. The saying by which he is chiefly remembered by the present generation, "Why can't you let it alone?" is not indicative of the ardent spirit of the reformer. He may have found consolation in the assistance given by the House of Lords to letting things alone.

Given his position and all its difficulties, Melbourne behaved loyally and generously to the Queen and to his successors. He knew the days of his own Government were numbered, and that Peel would succeed him, and he did his best to bring about a more cordial personal feeling between the Queen and Peel and the Tory party. The Queen tells us that to her his word constantly was, "Hold out the olive-branch to them a little;" with Peel, he tried to induce the shy, proud man to put on a little of the courtier and the man of the world. At a Court ball in 1840, "Melbourne went up to Peel and whispered to him with the greatest earnestness, 'For God's sake, go and speak to the Queen;' Peel did not go, but the entreaty and the refusal were both characteristic."

When the long-anticipated fall of the Melbourne Administration came, and the election of 1841 resulted in the return of the Tories to power with a majority of over 80, Melbourne, who had worked unceasingly to reconcile the Queen to the impending change, did not desist from his good offices with her new Ministers.^[1] He could not approach them directly, but he took the opportunity after Peel's Government had been formed of giving them a few hints, through Greville. He met Greville at a dinner-party and took him on one side and said: "'Have you any means of speaking to these chaps?' I said, 'Yes, I can say anything to them.' 'Well,' he said, 'I think there are one or two things Peel ought to be told, and I wish you would tell him. Don't let him suffer any appointment he is going to make to be talked about, and don't let her hear it through anybody but himself; and whenever he does anything, or has anything to propose, let him explain to her clearly his reasons. The Queen is not conceited; she is aware there are many things she cannot understand, and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily, not at length and in detail, but shortly and clearly; neither does she like long audiences, and I never stayed with her a long time. These things he should attend to, and they will make matters go on more smoothly.'" Greville conveyed the message, which was taken in exceedingly good part, and from 1841 onwards till his death the relations between Sir Robert Peel and the Queen were all that could be desired. Her former antipathy was changed into cordial respect and admiration; when he lost his shyness and reserve, and was able to show himself in his real character, she soon appreciated the very fine qualities of the man, far transcending in real worth those of the Minister whom in the beginning of her reign she had so strongly preferred. When Peel's Ministry had been in office a few months, Greville asked Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, how they were going on with the Queen. He said, "Very well. They sought for no favor, and were better without it. She was very civil, very gracious, and even on two or three little occasions, she had granted favors in a way indicative of good will." He said that they treated her with profound respect and the greatest attention. He made it a rule to address her as he would a sensible man, laying all matters before her, with the reasons for the advice he tendered, and he thought this was the most legitimate as well as judicious flattery that could be offered to her, and such as must gratify her, and the more because there was no appearance of flattery in it, and nothing but what was right and proper—so right and proper that it is not easy to see where the flattery comes in. The way of explaining business to a sensible woman must be much the same, one would imagine, as the way of explaining it to a sensible man; but this simple view of the facts was by no means perceived intuitively in 1841, but was only arrived at by demonstration from actual experiment. However this may be, when Peel and his colleagues learned their lesson, they learned it thoroughly. In this second series of interviews between the Queen and the leaders of the Tory Party, when a new Ministry was being formed in 1841, all passed off most satisfactorily. Peel said the Queen behaved perfectly to him; he was more than satisfied with her bearing towards him. To the Duke of Wellington she was equally gracious. She reproached him for not taking office himself, and he assured her that his one object was to serve her and the country in every way he could, and that he thought he could do this more effectually by making way for some of the younger men. It is true that there was still some talk about Peel's shyness making the Queen shy; and Greville has a little hit about Peel, after dinner at Windsor, talking to the Queen in the attitude of a dancing-master giving a lesson, and says that the Queen would like him better if he would keep his legs still; but this gossip probably reflects Greville's sentiments rather than the Queen's. Her respect for Peel and attachment to hm grew with her growing knowledge of his character and powers. In 1843 the Queen wrote of him to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, as "undoubtedly a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party, and never of himself." In February, 1846, Lady Canning, who was then in Waiting on the Queen, notes in her journal, "The Queen is very keen about politics, and has an immense admiration for Sir Robert Peel."

Before the end of his Administration, she not only loyally supported him in the face of his growing unpopularity with his own party, but showered every honor upon him that a Sovereign could bestow upon a Minister. She and the Prince visited him at his house in Drayton. She became godmother to his grandchild, and would have given him the Order of the Garter, but that Peel, with the characteristic pride of humility, intimated his desire that it should not be offered him. He said that if his acceptance of the honor would increase his power of serving the Queen he would not hesitate to accept it; but he could not believe this was the case. Personally, he would prefer not to accept it; he was a man of the people, and the decoration in his case would be misapplied. "His heart was not set upon titles of honor or social distinctions. His reward lay in Her Majesty's confidence, of which by many indications she had given him the fullest assurance; and when he left her service the only distinction he coveted was that she should say to him, 'You have been a faithful servant, and have done your duty to your country and to me.'"

When Peel's Ministry came to an end in 1846, both the Queen and the Prince expressed the hope that his leaving office would not interrupt the cordial relations that had been established between them. His tragic death, from a fall from his horse, in 1850, was bitterly mourned in the Palace. The Queen wrote at the time: "Peel is to be buried to-day. The sorrow and grief at his death are most touching. Every one seems to have lost a personal friend." The Prince on the same day wrote to the same correspondent: "Sir Robert Peel is to be buried to-day. The feeling in the country is absolutely not to be described. We have lost our truest friend and trustiest counsellor, the throne its most valiant defender, the country its most open-minded and greatest statesman." The Queen offered a peerage to Lady Peel after her husband's death, but she declined the honor, acting in accordance with what she knew had been his wishes. The Duke of Wellington, in the tribute he paid to Peel in the House of Lords, spoke with tears streaming down his face; the chief part of his panegyric on his friend and leader was based on his unswerving love of truth. It was this quality, together with his political sagacity, caution, and courage, that had endeared him to the Queen. No Prime Minister has ever had a more remarkable history. The election of 1841 was fought on the Corn Laws, and resulted in the return of Peel with a majority of eighty pledged to Protection. In four years from that time, after a career of brilliant success as a Minister, he repealed the Corn Laws which he had been returned to support, amid the execration of the great bulk of his own party and even that of a considerable number of his former opponents;^[2] and yet those who knew him best loved him chiefly for his absolute integrity and love of truth. The explanation lies in the hard logic of facts. Peel and his immediate followers became convinced they were wrong in their protective policy; in ordinary times the only right thing for them to have done would have been to declare their change and its grounds, resign office and appeal to the country. Some of the Peelites, as they were called, took this course, so far as was possible, as private individuals; they declared their change and resigned their seats. Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was one of these. He had been returned as a Protectionist and became a Free Trader, and therefore, quite rightly, resigned his seat, appealing to his constituents unsuccessfully for re-election. He notes in his diary, "I shall resign my seat and throw up all my beloved projects for which I have sacrificed everything that a public man values, all that I had begun and all that I have designed. Nearly my whole means of doing good will cease with my membership of Parliament." He refused an offer of £2,000 from the then Whip to enable him to fight his seat, because he would not jeopardize his independence. He was very poor, and he fought and lost. But to lose like that is to win. Why could not Peel have done the same? The answer is: The Irish Famine. Just as the Emperor Nicholas during the Crimean War said that he relied most of all on his Generals January and February, so Peel's scruples were conquered by the Famine. In Ireland in 1845-6 there were millions of people within measurable distance of death from starvation; the measures of relief could, under the best of circumstances, only be partially successful; they would have been terribly hampered by the continuance, even for another few months, of the import duties on corn. The aim of the Corn Laws was to make bread dear; the pressing necessity of the moment was to make it cheap, and pour in food supplies to starving Ireland. Peel's feeling may have been, "Better endure the charge of dishonesty rather than add to the fearful total of those who will die of starvation in Kerry and Connemara." As the alarming accounts from Ireland came pouring in h, his first desire was to deal with the matter by opening the ports by an Order in Council (November, 1845). This would have been by far the best course; it would have secured a supply of cheap bread without delay, and the war of words over it in Parliament could have been protracted to any extent without practical mischief; but his Cabinet would not agree to it. Then he resigned office (December, 1845), and left with the Queen a paper, to be given to his successor, stating that he would give every support to the new Minister to effect a settlement of the question of the Corn Laws. The Queen sent for Lord John Russell, who, however, failed to form a Government, because Lord Grey refused to take office if Lord Palmerston were at the Foreign Office, and Lord Palmerston refused to take any other place. Peel was therefore recalled. It was thus through the absolute necessity of the moment that he repealed the Corn Laws which he had been elected to support. In the House of Commons he confessed the error of his former opinions, and maintained the duty and dignity of owning one's self to have been wrong rather than pretending by casuistical hair-splitting that there had been no change of opinion when there was so striking a change in conduct; he bore with magnanimity the reproaches of those who still shared the error which he had abandoned, and finally appealed to the facts of the situation, the national calamity of impending famine in Ireland; he claimed that as the Government were responsible for the lives of millions of the Queen's subjects in the sister country, they felt it impossible to take any other course than that of repeal. The great bulk of the Tories accused him of dishonesty, but he took with him the flower of his party, both in regard to intellect and character, while he earned the enthusiastic gratitude and respect of the great bulk of the nation, and of the men led by Cobden and Bright and the Hon. Charles Villiers, who had devoted themselves to the cause of repeal. Their favorable verdict has been confirmed by posterity. Peel's change was an honest change, and he was forced to give effect to it when he did by the inexorable necessities of famine. He did not make a volte face for the sake of place and power. But notwithstanding all that can be urged in his justification, he shattered his party. The Tories had a majority of eighty in the general election of 1841; they never secured a similar victory till 1874. They had short tenures of office in 1852, and again in 1858-9, and in 1866-8; but on each occasion they had to govern as best they could with a minority in the House of Commons. They were in the wilderness thirty-tree years, and never regained the Canaan of politicians, except by the aid of the new electorate called into existence by the Reform Bill of 1867.

When Peel went out of office he requested the Queen, as a personal favor to himself, never to ask him to form a Government again. He was not defeated in his great measure; his majority was ninety-seven in the House of Commons, and forty-seven in the House of Lords. But the day on which the Corn Bill passed its third reading in the Lords, the Ministry were defeated in the Commons on a Protection of Life in Ireland Bill, introduced on account of an outbreak of midnight murders and murderous attacks, such as are now known by the name of "moonlighting."

For modesty, dignity, simplicity, and sincerity, Peel's figure stands out conspicuous for greatness among the statesmen of this century. Cobden said of him that he had lost office and saved his country.

His other great achievement was that of reorganizing and simplifying the fiscal arrangements of the country. It was this that first so highly recommended him to the Queen and Prince. They were good economists in their own private affairs, and wished for good order in national revenue and expenditure also. When Peel succeeded Melbourne, huge deficits were of constant occurrence; the revenue was falling, and the expenditure was increasing. Peel evolved order out of this chaos. He inaugurated the era of financial reform. In 1845 import duties were levied on no fewer than 1,142 separate articles. Peel and his pupil and successor, Mr. Gladstone, reduced the number to about five, and Peel was the first to discover the productiveness and utility of the income tax, as a means of raising revenue. The Queen most cordially supported him in his financial reforms, and authorized him to announce in the House of Commons that she did not wish to be exempted from the operation of the income tax. We owe to him more than to any other of the Queen's Prime Ministers that the national accounts almost invariable show a balance on the right side. Peel was a man of whom it was said that it was necessary to know him intimately to know him at all; and this intimate friendship existed between him and the Queen and her husband from the time he became Prime Minister, in 1841. It was an inestimable advantage for the Royal couple that their political tutor (if one may use the expression) in the early years of the reign was changed from the kindly but frivolous and complaisant Melbourne to the earnest and strenuous Peel, a man gifted beyond most with what Matthew Arnold has called "high seriousness," a quality without some portion of which no character has any solid foundation. Peel's Premiership was a national blessing from his political and economical achievements while he held the reins of power; and it was also a blessing from its effect on the Queen's political education.

1. This generosity was thoroughly in keeping with his character. After Melbourne's death, Greville tells how he occupied his room at Brocket, and, "poking about" to see what he could find, came upon several MS. books of the late Prime Minister. In one of these was recorded Melbourne's settled determination "always to stand by his friend," and his conviction that it was more necessary to do so "when they were in the wrong than when they were in the right."
2. Lord Melbourne, to whom in 1839 Repeal of the Corn Laws had been "the maddest of all mad projects," and who became a Free Trader, for party purposes, in 1841, spoke of Peel's change of view at a dinner party at the Palace with vehemence which even the presence of a lady, and that lady his Sovereign, could not restrain. "Ma'am, it's a damned dishonest act" (Greville, vol. v. p. 359).