When was robert peel prime minister

His next government post was as Home Secretary between and and then between and His tenure there was notable for the consolidation of the criminal law and the introduction of the police force.

Political life in the s was marked by the increasing division amongst the Tories. Peel trod a careful path and eventually emerged to lead the new Conservatives. By he had become Prime Minister, but it was to be a short-lived tenure. He resigned , after just four months, following the defeat of his Irish Tithe Bill. Peel returned to power in and led an active government. In both instances he controlled the purse strings that determined the fate of the engines.

As Home Secretary in he was lobbied by a supporter of Babbage to fund a full-sized calculating engine. Peel was skeptical. But following a favorable report by the Royal Society the Treasury approved funding and the construction of Difference Engine No. In , when Prime Minister for the second time, Babbage appealed to Peel for a decision on whether government wished to complete the Engine, stalled since , or scrap it. Peel axed the project following advice from George Biddell Airy, Babbage's energetic antagonist.

John Herschel's elaborately supportive petition was to no avail. Babbage secured an interview with Peel in the hope of reversing the decision. Like other chief secretaries he called for troop reinforcements, and renewed an Insurrection Act in , , , and More promisingly, he declared that he would always prefer an army of police to an army of soldiers, and established a new Peace Preservation Force , controlled by the government in Dublin.

In he responded to a famine by the procurement of food and the distribution of money. As chief secretary Peel proved his capacity to serve the lord lieutenant as ' his friend, his adviser, [and] his representative in parliament '. But the office had also begun to shape his life in other ways. His conduct in Ireland brought him the sobriquet Orange , bestowed by Daniel O'Connell , and led, in , to a challenge to a duel, which did not take place, in Ostend.

Peel was to carry with him for ever after a settled dislike for the great Irish patriot and all his ways. Peel's antagonism to Catholic claims for relief secured him the invitation, brought by Charles Lloyd , to stand, in preference to George Canning , for one of the two Oxford University seats in Peel was elected, but he had, perhaps, allowed himself to be miscast.

His protestantism ran deep. But he acknowledged that Ireland had been misruled in the past. He had found the tools with which he was constrained to work—a jobbing aristocracy with a ' vortex of local patronage ', and loyalist associations—distasteful, and he had spoken out in favour of the protestant ascendancy because he had been called upon to govern Ireland ' circumstanced as Ireland now is '. For six years Peel took but one real holiday, in , when he met Wellington in Paris, heard from his own lips how the battle of Waterloo had been fought, and went on to stay with the duke of Richmond in Brussels and view the ground where the victory had been won.

Peel left Ireland in August he never went back , and did not rejoin Lord Liverpool's administration until January In the meantime he chaired a committee considering the expediency of requiring the Bank of England to resume paying gold, on demand, for its notes, and in due course he drafted the report and introduced the bill embodying the committee's proposals. The evidence taken before the bullion committee in had shown that the over-issue of paper currency since the suspension of cash payments in had resulted in a depreciation of the pound and a rise in the price of gold.

The question was, did this matter? In the house had decided that the answer was yes, but not while there was a war on, and Peel himself had voted against resumption. Post-war experience persuaded him that over-issue also led to speculation, crises, unemployment, and political unrest.

Now Peel thought the committee's first responsibility was to protect the public creditor, who was morally entitled to be repaid in the coin which he had lent and not in a depreciated one.

In thus rounding up the theoretical complexities of an issue, and giving effect to the solution he favoured in the clauses of a durable act of parliament , Peel was to have no equal. It is not clear whether, when he left Ireland, Peel had already fallen in love with Julia Floyd — , the daughter of General Sir John Floyd , who was, when Peel arrived in Ireland in , the second in command of the military forces, and his first wife, Rebecca Juliana , daughter of Charles Darke , a merchant in Madras.

Julia had been born in India, and like Peel she had lost her mother in She and her stepmother, Lady Denny , were entertained at the chief secretary's house in Phoenix Park. Peel , we are told, was unusually attentive to them when, in , they left Dublin for London.

When Peel himself returned to England in he wondered whether Julia ' would be able to abandon her gay fashionable world for the severer climate of a professional politician's wife. They became engaged in March , and were married on 8 June. In London, they lived in a new house designed by Robert Smirke and built in at 4 Whitehall Gardens. Here, in a specially commissioned long gallery, Peel hung his collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings. These were purchased, with assistance from his father and advice from David Wilkie , in a period when the European salerooms were still busy following the upheavals of revolution and restoration, and included Hobbema's The Avenue, Middelharnis and Rubens's Chapeau de paille.

Whenever Peel found himself alone in London he wrote to Julia every day, and no breath of scandal has ever attached to his name. In and Peel refused offers of a place in the cabinet as president of the Board of Control. But on 17 January he rejoined the administration as home secretary, a post he was to hold until Lord Liverpool suffered a stroke in , and again, under the duke of Wellington , from to As home secretary Peel's primary responsibility was for law and order, and here he distinguished himself from other contemporary reformers by his ability to see the process whole and to attend to all aspects, from the formulation of the criminal law and the mechanics of policing, through indictment, trial, and sentencing, to punishment on the scaffold, in prison, and in penal colonies.

Contemporaries gave Peel credit for reducing the number of offences which carried the death penalty. But there was no fall in the number of executions, and the most striking achievement of his period at the Home Office , and perhaps of his whole career, was the consolidation of the criminal law.

He began in where his predecessor, Lord Sidmouth , had left off, with the law relating to prisons. The following year he attended to the laws relating to transportation, and began to coax the Scottish judges towards a reform of Scottish criminal law. In he consolidated eighty-five laws relating to juries into a single act.

In he proposed to consolidate the laws relating to theft. Out of 14, persons in England and Wales charged with various crimes in the course of the previous year, 12, at least had been accused of theft, which was the most important category of crime.

Consolidation was needed because, year by year throughout the eighteenth century, specific acts he cited the stealing of hollies, thorns, and quicksets had been made into crimes instead of species of acts.

There were now ninety-two statutes relating to theft, dating from the reign of Henry III , and Peel sought to unite them in a single statute of thirty pages. Upon this occasion his attempt to reduce the law to a single act proved to be too ambitious, and the bill emerged, finally, as four separate acts in Peel's talents were never more apparent than in this labour of consolidation.

In a select committee had recommended that consolidation and amendment should be kept distinct. Peel decided that they were not separable. He interpreted consolidation to mean the collection ' of dispersed statutes under one head ' followed by the rejection of what was ' superfluous ', the clearing up of what was ' obscure ', the weighing of ' the precise force of each expression ', and ' ascertaining the doubts that have arisen in practice and the solution which may have been given to those doubts by decisions of the courts of law ' Hansard 2 , Where he found any gap ' through which notorious guilt escapes ' he instanced the theft of stock certificates in the funds which was not at that time an offence , he would remedy it ibid.

In Peel's hands, then, a consolidating act was a reforming act which incorporated case law and supplied omissions. As he turned from one aspect of the law to another, Peel circulated drafts of his consolidating bills among the judges, and took pains to win their support, flattering Lord Eldon with a bag of game which perhaps he had shot himself. He succeeded because nine-tenths of criminal law was statute law, which judges loved to criticize, and one-tenth, only, common law, the anomalies of which judges might seek to preserve.

On 9 March Peel's method of presenting a case came to maturity in his great speech on theft Hansard 2 , There was an apology a preference really for a topic which could ' borrow no excitement from political feelings ' and might appear ' barren and uninviting '.

There was a reference to a hypothetical fresh start ' if we were legislating de novo, without reference to previous customs and formed habits '. There was a glance at more radical proposals for ' rapid progress, which is inconsistent with mature deliberation ', and a promise that, if he was allowed to have his way, there would be ' no rash subversion of ancient institutions ' and ' no relinquishment of what is practically good, for the chance of speculative and uncertain improvement '.

His own proposals were then presented as a middle way ' between the redundancy of our own legal enactments and the conciseness of the French code '. Finally he avowed his ambition to leave behind him ' some record of the trust I have held ', and to connect his name with ' permanent improvements ' to the institutions of the country. So long as Lord Liverpool was prime minister Catholic emancipation remained an open question, and Peel , who as home secretary had overall responsibility for the administration in Ireland, continued to act as the protestant champion in the House of Commons.

But the issue was beginning to pass out of control, both at Westminster and in Ireland. In the pro-Catholics won the annual vote in the House of Commons. Peel offered to resign, but was told that his resignation would bring Liverpool's government down. Understandably, he was unwilling to terminate the career of the statesman who had given him his first step up the ladder, and he allowed himself to be persuaded to continue.

In there was a general election, and early in the following year Liverpool suffered a stroke. When the succession passed to George Canning , the leader, since , of the Catholic party within Liverpool's administration, Peel and others did resign, and when Canning , too, died in August and was succeeded by Lord Goderich , Peel remained out of office.

Early in , when Goderich's administration collapsed and the king invited the duke of Wellington to form a government, Wellington asked Peel to return to the Home Office and to take the lead in the House of Commons. At the Home Office , Peel resumed consolidating where he had left off. In he dealt with the law of offences against the person, reducing it from fifty-seven acts to one, and in he turned the twenty-seven acts relating to forgeries punishable with death into a single statute. Even more important in his eyes, he began at last to make progress with the police.

In a committee had refused to recommend any reform. In Peel secured a new inquiry into the police of the metropolis, and the following year he was able to legislate. He had already given an indication of the way his mind was working when he praised the small force of full-time professional magistrates and constables established in London in But this efficient superstructure rested upon a complex of autonomous parochial and district watches.

In St Pancras alone there were eighteen different night watches, many of which had no authority to intervene in a brawl on the other side of the street. Peel resolved to create a unified body under the control of the home secretary and paid for out of a general rate. The new force started patrolling the streets on 29 September They were not there to carry out sophisticated criminal detective work, but to restrain the thousands of vagrants, thieves, prostitutes, and drunks who tried to beg, steal, earn, or expend a living upon the streets of the capital, and to keep order.

Peel's ' vigorous preventive police ' carried truncheons but not firearms, and their secret or innovatory weapon was their military discipline. This ' unconstitutional ' police force, as it was called in the Chartist petition, was bitterly resented, and there were many assaults upon policemen at first.

But a force of just over men won control of the streets. The thin blue line penning vice back into the rookeries and shielding gentility from coarseness was a huge step up from the parish constables and night watchmen.

In sterner times of supposedly revolutionary turmoil, it was also a reassuring step down from the use of soldiers and the risk of bloodshed. Like so many of Peel's reforms this one lasted. Fears of the police developing into a secret police on the continental model proved to have been exaggerated, and hostility to the very idea of an efficient police force ebbed away.

In the meantime, as leader of the House of Commons, Peel was obliged to grapple with the Catholic question. In the protestants had won the annual vote in the House of Commons.

The following year, when the protestant dissenters and the Roman Catholics, in effect, came to terms, the government was heavily defeated on a motion for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts , and it was defeated again on a motion for Catholic emancipation. The first defeat was easy to deal with— Wellington and Peel gave way and brought in a bill of their own. The second was compounded by the rise of the Catholic Association and the defeat of Vesey Fitzgerald , a popular protestant landlord and government minister, by O'Connell , who was not eligible to take his seat, at a by-election in co.

The protestant ascendancy had collapsed, and emancipation was now imperative. The only question was whether it should be undertaken by the king's present ministers or by a new political combination. Once again Peel offered to resign, and once again he was persuaded to stay. That decision taken, he offered to vacate his seat for Oxford University.

His friends renominated him, but at the end of February he was defeated in a poll by Sir Robert Inglis by votes to , and the government had to ask Sir Manasseh Lopes to vacate his pocket borough at Westbury in Peel's favour. Peel was aware, then, when he rose on 5 March to introduce the cabinet's bill to emancipate the Catholics, that he would be asked why he saw ' a necessity for concession now, which was not evident before '.

He answered that it was the condition of Ireland. The time had come when less danger was to be apprehended from ' attempting to adjust the Catholic Question, than in allowing it to remain any longer in its present state '. He ignored O'Connell , and saved face by announcing that the details of the measure had not been discussed with the Roman Catholics themselves. Catholics were to be allowed to enter both houses of parliament and to hold any office except regent, lord chancellor, and more strangely lord lieutenant of Ireland.

In return Peel asked the Irish to accept the disfranchisement of the 40 s. The government did not ask for any control over the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops, because no British government, Peel said, could enter into negotiation with the court of Rome. The bill passed, but it split the tory party , and politics were never to be the same again. Peel had spent his formative years in parliaments where ministers relied for their majority upon the sweetening effects of royal patronage, and where, for want of such influence, the opposition was weak.

It was a situation in which a secretary of state could devote the greater part of his day to his department, and one in which, when he had framed a measure, he could come before the House of Commons with a reasonable expectation that he would prevail. Now, the ultra-tories began to mutter that a more popular parliament would never have passed an emancipation act. Their disaffection helped the whigs back into the mainstream of politics, and parliamentary reform became a practical issue.

Between and Peel himself had been willing to transfer the two seats taken away from Penryn to Manchester. But he had acquiesced in the Lords' refusal to enfranchise any large town. Now, in , reform motions were already being debated by the old parliament before George IV died in June, and new elections were held in July and August.

Wellington and Peel met the new parliament without any increase in strength. The ministry could not make overtures to the ultra-tories, and the followers of William Huskisson did not welcome the advances made to them. Peel felt that he was in a false position, and he was scarcely on speaking terms with the duke. When the ministry was defeated in a vote on the new civil list, on 15 November , he was glad to go.

In the course of the next two years—while a government headed by Lord Grey introduced a reform bill, called another general election, and sought to persuade William IV to create peers in order to carry their bill through the House of Lords— Peel was obliged to learn a new role, as leader of an opposition.

He did not, at first, find it easy. In March he was appalled by the magnitude of the whig scheme, and on 9 April he was actually on his feet, and had lost his temper, when black rod arrived to summon the Commons to hear the announcement of the dissolution of parliament.

During the election which followed, Peel's house in London had to be protected by the new Metropolitan Police , and Peel himself had to be stopped by his friends from becoming involved in a duel with Sir John Hobhouse. When the excitement over the bill moved on from the Commons to the Lords, Peel surprised Lord Harrowby and the waverers by saying that he would prefer the bill to pass by a creation of peers whose effects, he believed, would be temporary, because the newly created peers would not remain radical for long rather than a threat to create peers which might establish a precedent for permanent revolution.

In May , when ministers resigned, Peel declined the king's invitation either to form or to join a new administration. The bill, he thought, should be passed by the men who had introduced it. Once the bill became law, Peel accepted it as the settlement of a great question, and demonstrated confidence in the future by commissioning Robert Smirke to design him a new mansion, complete with every modern convenience of heating and plumbing, at Drayton. There it became a tradition for the family to lunch off silver and dine off gilt.

Thither Peel transferred many of his British paintings. These included portraits, commissioned from Sir Thomas Lawrence , of his political colleagues Liverpool , Canning , Huskisson , Wellington , and Aberdeen —canvases to inspire him during the parliamentary recesses when he was considering how to block any further increase in popular power at the expense of the traditional institutions, crown, church, and aristocracy.

At first the instruments to hand for this defensive warfare were weak. There were about tories, only, of all kinds, returned at the general election in December , and the party in the House of Lords was not his to control.

Peel felt his way. Sitting for Tamworth, he had no experience of how respectable a contest in a newly enfranchised large borough might be, and he shared many of the ultra-tories' fears for the constitution. But he avoided making any premature attempt to reunite the party, and he waited for the tories to gather round him on his own terms. In the meantime he was fortunate.

The whigs began to fall out with their radical allies, and among themselves. This gave Peel the opportunity to step in and save the moderate whigs from the extremists, and in this way the new Conservatism was born. In July , when Grey resigned, the king invited Peel to coalesce with Melbourne. But that was impracticable. Melbourne became prime minister, and when autumn came Peel took Julia and his elder daughter to Italy.

They were in Rome when William IV dismissed Melbourne , and the duke of Wellington advised the king to send for Peel and agreed to act as caretaker until Peel arrived.

The king's messenger reached Rome on 25 November, and Peel was back in London on 9 December and kissed hands the same day. He never doubted that he must accept the commission—it had, in effect, been accepted for him, and refusal would injure the crown.

The whig dissidents, Sir James Graham and Lord Stanley , were not yet ready to join Peel , whose cabinet could not then differ much from the duke of Wellington's cabinet in But Peel took the office of chancellor of the exchequer for himself, and he found new blood for junior offices— Gladstone , Sidney Herbert , and Praed. The ministry could not survive in the existing House of Commons, and Peel asked the king to dissolve parliament.

Next, Peel found an imaginative way of communicating with the electorate. The Tamworth manifesto was addressed to his own constituents, but it was distributed to the national newspapers and published on 19 December Peel appealed, in inspired words, ' to that great and intelligent class of society … which is far less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government '.

He promised ' a careful review of institutions, both civil and ecclesiastical ' and ' the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances '. It did not take him long to show that this was no mere rhetoric. For his own part he found religiosity almost as distressing as impiety, and avoided religion as a topic of conversation.

But he valued the church as an institution, and he persuaded the bishops to embrace an ecclesiastical commission, which would enable the church to reform itself and save it from its enemies.

Hopefully this would atone, among the ultras, for his actions in Simultaneously, ministers let it be known that they were willing to consider the whole range of dissenters' grievances. In the elections which followed, early in , Peel's supporters won seats and became the largest single party in the House of Commons. It was not enough to give them a majority, and Peel was surprised by the skill with which Lord John Russell persuaded the whigs, the radicals, and the Irish to combine against him.

First, they threw out the former speaker. Next they carried an amendment to the address. But the margin was small, Russell dared not take up Peel's challenge to move a motion of no confidence, and Peel gained time in which to introduce his Irish Tithe Bill.

In the first week of April, Peel was defeated three times, and on 8 April he resigned. In the space of four months the king had elevated Peel into the leader of the party of resistance, and Peel had earned high praise.

He had not been able to pass his own measure, but he had stayed in office long enough to get his opponents committed to the unpopular appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Irish church to the education of all classes of Christians. The contest thus begun, across the floor of the House of Commons, between Peel , with his tall stature, huge frame, and uneven, slightly wobbly legs caught even better in Political Sketches by H.

Winterhalter , and the diminutive Russell , was to last, with many changes of fortune, to the end of his life. For six years between and Peel showed a wonderful patience waiting for the whig ministry to perish, and for the premiership to return to him unencumbered by any debt to any man. At first he was extremely apprehensive.

Party feeling reached a new peak in the summer and autumn of Inside parliament , Peel was afraid lest the tory peers, by challenging the government's Municipal Corporations Bill , bring about their own destruction. The reform was an inescapable postscript to the Reform Act , and he wanted it out of the way. He tried, as he expressed it in , to ' diminish the risk and deaden the shock of collisions between the two deliberative branches of the legislature '.

He lent his aid to see the bill safely through the House of Commons and onto the statute book, and then passed the recess reading Guizot's history of the French Revolution. The following year he continued to proclaim selective opposition.

But he was happy to see the House of Lords block every whig measure for Ireland tithe, corporations, poor law. Outside parliament he continued to develop the theme of the new Conservatism—in a speech in the City in May , and in Glasgow where he had been elected lord rector of the university in January Party and its organization was something Peel felt ambiguous about.

He was not in love with parties, and he regretted the high profile of party warfare after , which demanded more frequent attendance in parliament and took ministers away from their offices.

But he did well what he had to do. He directed Lord Granville Somerset to operate—to the extent that the constituencies would allow it—a central clearing house for parliamentary candidates. He encouraged F. Bonham a frequent visitor to Drayton to brief him about the state of the electorate, and he reminded his supporters in the constituencies that ' the battle of the constitution must be fought in the registration courts '. At the general election of , following the death of the king, the party won another twenty-three seats in the English counties.

This left the whigs dependent for their majority upon O'Connell's Irish members. It was an inconsistency in Peel that, having sat for an Irish seat himself, he now thought it unconstitutional, almost, for the course of the United Kingdom to be determined by Irish votes when they were not to his liking.

But it was a prejudice shared by Graham and Stanley , who joined forces with Peel in Even after the whigs abandoned the appropriation clause in , Peel denounced their plan for the state to construct the main lines of railway in Ireland , and confined the Irish Municipal Corporations Act to almost the narrowest possible compass.

Whatever Peel gained in popular franchises in he lost, for the time being, with the accession of Queen Victoria. Melbourne had a hold upon her affections, and a partisan whig for a queen was a novelty.

In , when the whig majority fell to five upon a proposal to suspend the constitution of Jamaica, and the ministry resigned, Peel was unable to take Melbourne's place because the queen would not grant him the expression of confidence for which he asked—the dismissal of some the queen thought he demanded all of the whig ladies of the bedchamber.

Peel could have forced the issue, but given his respect for royalty he preferred to yield and allow Melbourne to carry on. The ministry was weak, but Peel still lacked the means to topple it, and in the following year, when the Conservatives essayed a motion of no confidence, it was emphatically defeated. Peel did not exploit the ministry's difficulties over Canada.

In the whigs addressed themselves to the budget deficit. In trying to take politics onto new ground, they proposed to reduce the duties on sugar, timber, and corn. Peel made sport with them by drawing a picture of the chancellor of the exchequer ' seated on an empty chest, by the pool of bottomless deficiency, fishing for a budget ', and defeated them upon sugar. He then moved a vote of no confidence which was carried by one vote on 4 June At the general election which followed, ' every Conservative candidate ', J.

The whigs campaigned upon a small fixed duty on corn. Peel skilfully avoided pledging himself to any particular course of action about the corn laws or anything else. The Conservatives won a majority of about In the English and Welsh counties they won out of the seats. In the English and Welsh boroughs they took almost as many seats as the whigs, to In Scotland the Conservatives held 20 out of the 30 county seats, but two only of the 23 borough seats.

In Ireland, where they made some gains, they held 43 out of seats. The whigs met the new parliament towards the end of August and were ejected. The queen, who was now guided by Prince Albert , made no difficulty about the bedchamber, and on 30 August Peel at last became prime minister upon his own terms.

Or so it seemed at the time. But in fact, for all his attempts to modernize the party and to broaden its appeal to the industrious middle classes, he was more dependent than ever upon the country squires.

Analysis of the borough seats shows that Peel's success was concentrated in the small English boroughs, with fewer than electors, and that in the large English boroughs, with more than electors, he had actually won two fewer seats—15 to his opponents' 43—than in The triumph and the tragedy of the ministry of —6 were written into the results. Goulburn became chancellor of the exchequer , and the earl of Ripon president of the Board of Trade with Gladstone as his junior.

Thus far, everything was under Peel's control. Graham acted as his lieutenant, Peel himself took responsibility for explaining Aberdeen's conciliatory conduct of foreign affairs to the House of Commons, and Goulburn and Ripon , survivors of the governments of the s, both turned, by long habit, to Peel himself for advice.

Stanley , who took the colonies, was more independent, and he was given early promotion to the House of Lords in