sects and raising the character of the people. But his greatest
service to Ireland as secretary was the institution of the regular
Irish constabulary, nicknamed after him “Peelers,” for the
protection of life and property in a country where both were
insecure. His moderation of tone did not save him from the
violent abuse of O’Connell, whom he was ill advised enough to
challenge—an affair which covered them both with ridicule.
In 1817 he obtained the highest parliamentary distinction of the
Tory party by being elected member for the university of Oxford—an
honour for which he was chosen in preference to Canning on
account of his hostility to Roman Catholic emancipation,
Lord Eldon lending him his best support. In the following
year he resigned the Irish secretaryship, of which he had long
been very weary, and remained out of office till 1821. But he
still supported the ministers, though in the affair of Queen
Caroline he stood aloof, disapproving some steps taken by
the government, and sensitive to popular opinion; and
when Canning retired on account of this affair Peel declined
Lord Liverpool’s invitation to take the vacant place in the
cabinet. During this break in his tenure of office he had some
time for reflection, which there was enough in the aspect of the
political world to move. But early office had done its work.
It had given him excellent habits of business, great knowledge
and a high position, but it had left him somewhat stiff and
punctilious, too cold and reserved and over anxious for formal
justifications when he might well have left his conduct to the
judgment of men of honour and the heart of the people. At the
same time he was no pedant in business, in corresponding on
political subjects he loved to throw off official forms and communicate
his views with the freedom of private correspondence;
and where his confidence was given, it was given without
reserve
At this period he was made chairman of the bullion committee on the death of Horner. He was chosen for this important office by Huskisson, Ricardo and their fellow-economists, who saw in him a mind open to conviction, though he owed hereditary allegiance to Pitt’s financial policy, and had actually voted with his Pittite father for a resolution of Lord Liverpool’s government asserting that Bank of England notes were equivalent to legal coin The choice proved judicious. Peel was converted to the currency doctrines of the economists, and proclaimed his conversion in a great speech on the 24th of May 1819, in which he moved and carried four resolutions embodying the recommendations of the bullion committee in favour of a return to cash payments. This laid the foundation of his financial reputation, and his co-operation with the economists tended to give a liberal turn to his commercial principles. In the course he took he somewhat diverged from his party, and particularly from his father, who remained faithful to Pitt’s depreciated paper, and between whom and his schismatic son a solemn and touching passage occurred in the debate. The author of the Cash Payments Act had often to defend his policy, and he did so with vigour. The act is sometimes said to have been hard on debtors, including the nation as debtor, because it required debts to be paid in cash which had been contracted in depreciated paper; and Peel, as heir to a great fund holder, was even charged with being biased by his personal interests. But it is answered that the Bank Restriction Acts, under which the depreciated paper had circulated, themselves contained a provision for a return to cash payments six months after peace.
In 1820 Peel married Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd, who bore him five sons and two daughters. The writers who have most severely censured Sir Robert Peel as a public man have dwelt on the virtues and happiness of his private and domestic life He was not only a most loving husband and father but a true and warm-hearted friend. In Whitehall Gardens or at Drayton Manor he gathered some of the most distinguished intellects of the day. He indulged in free and cheerful talk, and sought the conversation of men of science, he took delight in art, and was a great collector of pictures; he was fond of farming and agricultural improvements; he actively promoted useful works and the advancement of knowledge; he loved making his friends, dependants, tenants and neighbours happy. And, cold as he was in public, few men could be more bright and genial in private than Sir Robert Peel.
In 1821 Peel consented to strengthen the enfeebled ministry of Lord Liverpool by becoming home secretary; and in that capacity he had again to undertake the office of coercing the growing discontent in Ireland, of which he remained the real administrator, and had again to lead in the House of Commons the opposition to the rising cause of Roman Catholic emancipation. In 1825, being defeated on the Roman Catholic question in the House of Commons, he wished to resign office, but Lord Liverpool pleaded that his resignation would break up the government. He found a congenial task in reforming and humanizing the criminal law, especially those parts of it which related to offences against property and offences punishable by death. The five acts in which Peel accomplished this great work, as well as the great speech of the 9th of March 1826, in which he opened the subject to the house, will form one of the most solid and enduring monuments of his fame. Criminal law reform was the reform of Romilly and Mackintosh, from the hands of the latter of whom Peel received it. But the masterly bills in which it was embodied were the bills of Peel—not himself a creative genius, but, like the founder of his house, a profound appreciator of other men’s creations, and unrivalled in the power of giving them practical and complete effect.
In 1827 the Liverpool ministry was broken up by the fatal illness of its chief, and under the new premier, George Canning, Peel, like the duke of Wellington and other high Tory members of Lord Liverpool’s cabinet, refused to serve Canning and Peel were rivals; but we need not interpret as mere personal rivalry that which was certainly, in part at least, a real difference of connexion and opinion. Canning took a Liberal line, and was supported by many of the Whigs, the seceders were Tories, and it is difficult to see how their position in Canning’s cabinet could have been otherwise than a false one. Separation led to public coolness and occasional approaches to bitterness on both sides in debate. But there seems no ground for exaggerated complaints against Peel’s conduct. Canning himself said to a friend that “Peel was the only man who had behaved decently towards him.” Their private intercourse remained uninterrupted to the end; and Canning’s son afterwards entered public life under the auspices of Peel. The charge of having urged Roman Catholic emancipation on Lord Liverpool in 1825, and opposed Canning for being a friend to it in 1827, made against Sir Robert Peel in the fierce corn-law debates of 1846, has been withdrawn by those who made it.
In January 1828, after Canning’s death, the duke of Wellington formed a Tory government, in which Peel was home secretary and leader of the House of Commons. This cabinet, Tory as it was, did not include the impracticable Lord Eldon. and did include Huskisson and three more friends of Canning. Its policy was to endeavour to stave off the growing demand for organic change by administrative reform, and by lightening the burdens of the people. The civil list was retrenched with an unsparing hand, the public expenditure was reduced lower than it had been since the Revolutionary war, and the import of corn was permitted under a sliding scale of duties. Peel also introduced into London the improved system of police which he had previously established with so much success in Ireland. But the tide ran too strong to be thus headed. First the government were compelled, after a defeat in the House of Commons, to acquiesce in the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Peel bringing over their High Church supporters, as far as he could. Immediately afterwards the question of Roman Catholic emancipation was brought to a crisis by the election of O’Connell for the county of Clare. In August Peel expressed to the duke of Wellington his conviction that the question must be settled. He wrote that out of office he would co-operate in the settlement but in his judgment it should be committed to other hands than his To this the duke assented, but in January 1829, owing to the declared opinions of the king, of the House of Lords, and of the Church against a change of policy, Wellington came to the
