A Partial Reconstruction of Robert Peel's Conservatism
An ongoing study of the man who built and broke the Conservative Party.
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet (1788-1850), was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the first Conservative to hold the position. Before the creation of the Conservative Party in late 1834, in which Peel played a decisive part, he was a rising star within the Pittites and helped to pass Catholic Emancipation in 1829. He led first in a minority government from December 1834 to April 1835, then for a second time from August 1841 to June 1846 after obtaining the first Conservative majority in the 1841 general election. He ultimately fell from power after successfully repealing the protectionist Corn Laws against the wishes of his own party. Thereafter until his death, he continued to lead those who still supported him, known as the Peelites, remaining true to his conservative principles until the end.
Although he was a key political architect of the British conservative tradition, today he appears somewhat overlooked in favour of the man who eventually succeeded him within the Conservatives, Benjamin Disraeli. Despite their bitter dispute over the Corn Laws, there is no reason why they cannot harmoniously co-exist in the realm of conservative ideas and the accumulated wisdom of its past. Hence, this piece seeks to bring together a range of works on Peel and his ideas to better situate him within his time and conservatism more broadly. This shall include relevant articles by this writer as well as a number of insightful academic sources used in the course of prior research.
Why only a partial reconstruction? Aside from being a concession to the ineluctably incomplete nature of history, one is limited by the sources at hand and the parts of the picture that have or have not been elucidated in my previous writing. Nevertheless, there remains much to discuss with confidence that sheds light on this foundational period for British conservatism and indeed modern British politics. In future, if and when one chooses to write more about Peel’s time, this piece shall be enlarged to reflect new insights, in the hope that readers may see the usefulness of better remembering this part of conservatism’s history in a politics desperately in need of more constructive parties.
Articles
The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Destruction of Peel’s Conservative Party
Recommended and Otherwise Useful Sources
Background Context
Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Penguin Books, 2015).
Specifically, chapter 12 ‘Dickensian England, c.1815—c.1850’ serves as a brilliantly varied and detailed yet concise introduction to the period that covers almost all of Peel’s political career (he entered Parliament in 1809). In particular, pp. 430-31 introduces the parliamentary Pittite ascendancy that did much to shape Peel’s ministerialist thinking, pp. 435-42 covers the fraught passage of the Great Reform Act and the Whigs’ subsequent stint in government, and pp. 443-50 details Peel’s premiership and fall in the 1840s.
Near the end of Tombs’s discussion of the Corn Laws’ repeal (p. 449), he claims “Disraeli’s stance is usually dismissed as opportunism,” including by historians. Although Tombs only briefly refutes this viewpoint, Disraeli’s late ascension to the leadership of the protectionists did undoubtedly stem from genuine convictions, consistent with the Young England beliefs he espoused earlier in the decade. Peel was, in fact, the greater opportunist in late 1845 and 1846, by using the famine in Ireland as the pretext for repeal and the Whigs to carry repeal against his party’s wishes. However, it must be remembered that when either politician’s actions can be labelled opportunism, as Disraeli’s could over the Second Reform Act, the chances taken were always motivated by deep-seated conservative principles, not self-interest or political advantage.
Michael Ledger-Lomas, “The Character of Pitt the Younger and Party Politics, 1830-1860,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 641-61.
This article argues that politics continued to be defined by the competing memories of William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox into the mid-nineteenth century. Peel, having been spurned over Catholic Emancipation by the reactionary clubs purporting to represent Pitt’s memory, refused to model himself after Pitt as Prime Minister, although that scarcely stopped others drawing equivalences in his stead. Disappointingly, Ledger-Lomas’s narrative does not afford much agency to Peel himself, instead to an array of politicians’ steadily muddier and more contradictory interpretations of him and Pitt. When the author attempts a sustained focus on Peel directly (pp. 652-53), it is for a misguided and almost ill-informed swipe through him at the historian Norman Gash (see below).
The disorientation of much of the article at least conveys successfully that invocations of Pitt could no longer unify Conservatives by the 1840s. That the supporters of Peel tried to employ a more historically faithful portrayal of Pitt, whether incidental or intentional, failed to convince others in the party as the policies of the government and backbenchers diverged. However, the article does not persuade that the internal party competition over Pitt’s legacy was more than a rhetorical sideshow to the actual policy of Corn Law repeal that tore Peel’s party apart.
The Great Reform Act and the Formation of the Conservative Party
Robert Saunders, “Parliament and People: The British Constitution in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern European History 6, no. 1 (2008): 72-87.
Page 80 provides a solid description of the conservative case for the Reform Act that the Whigs employed and Conservatives could retrospectively supply. Indeed, Whig language about correcting abuses and tackling corruption became quintessentially Peel’s through the Tamworth Manifesto.
Richard W. Davis, “Toryism to Tamworth: The Triumph of Reform, 1827-1835,” Albion 12, no. 2 (1980): 132-46.
This article tracks Peel’s conversion from reaction to conservatism in the late 1820s and early 1830s. It is important to remember that Peel’s thinking only shifted to a consistently conservative position after his implacable opposition to the Reform Act’s passage had utterly failed. He was partly moved by necessity and the new political realities created by the Reform Act, at the forefront of which was the enlarged electorate. Yet he crucially did so constructively and proactively, when he could have easily presided over a stubborn minority party to similar ends of defending church and state (pp. 143-46).
Matthew Cragoe, “The Great Reform Act and the Modernization of British Politics: The Impact of Conservative Associations, 1835-1841,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 3 (2008): 581-603
Alongside the last couple of pages of Davis’s article, this covers the transformation of the Pittites/Tories into the Conservatives after Peel’s first premiership of 1834-35. A national political identity emerged, aligned with the conservative ideas propagated by Peel in the Tamworth Manifesto, that brought moderate Whigs into an alliance with the shattered remnants Peel inherited from Wellington. Associations sprang up across the country upon bases that were no longer invariably the local aristocrat, focussed on voter registration, political education and social events that would persist without much change well into the twentieth century. It should be acknowledged that the emergence of local Conservative associations was predominantly an effort from below, somewhat resisted by politicians until their worth was proven in unexpected successes in the 1835 election.
Although some older local loyalties remained, this article shows some of the most important evolutions of the Conservative Party’s formation into a party of government. With a clear cause at the centre through Peel’s call for moderate reform, the rational free association in social networks of mutual interest, championed by conservative thinkers like Sir Roger Scruton, composed a new political life of Conservative associations that connected localities with national issues and stimulated positive political activity. It encouraged responsible and committed actors with an interest in ideas to rival the Whig-Radical offering in activism and at elections. Whilst this broke down between the Peelite split and the re-emergence of serious constitutional reform debates in the 1860s, there are perhaps lessons even for today of how Conservatives might go about revivifying their grassroots.
Norman Gash, “Peel and the Party System 1830-50,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1951): 47-69.
Gash was one of the foremost twentieth-century historians on Peel and his era; this article supports that reputation.
For instance, to account for Peel’s disinterest in parties and party management, Gash identifies the quite forgotten “second-line men” who reorganised the Pittite/Tory machinery towards its Conservative guise in the early 1830s, namely John Charles Herries, William Holmes and Charles Arbuthnot, with Francis Robert Bonham possibly joining this effort a little later (p. 48). Like Cragoe, Gash notes the decentralised spread of local Conservative associations as Peel’s first premiership “witnessed the first effective mobilisation of Conservative feeling in the provinces.” (p. 50). Peel’s role, he argues, in the construction in the party was not technical, but in this mobilisation of feeling amongst Tories, old reformers and new scions of the Whig families alike to conservatism.
Gash also elaborates on Peel’s conservative political philosophy, which often drove him to support the Whigs to save them from their Radical or later Irish contingents. Of particular note is Peel’s regret at the collapse of the Pittites at the end of Lord Liverpool’s government in 1827, which he viewed as ending the traditional two-party system and strong governments, followed by a supposedly similar break in Whig unity upon the Reform Act. These were the experiences, which Lusztig (see below) also details, that shaped Peel’s administrative and non-partisan view of conservatism and its duties on either side of the Commons (pp. 53-55). “Conservatism, as Peel understood it, was not a tactical doctrine designed to draw votes to the Tory party; the Tory party was a tactical device to make Conservatism the basis of government” (p. 56). Yet, he still needed the party insofar as a Conservative government required naturally Conservative support, united by common principles but not at this time a policy programme, for its solidity in office (pp. 56-58).
As Peel and his Peelite successors similarly struggled after 1846 (see Stuart below), the strategy of “administering the country from the opposition benches proved untenable” as the Whigs weakened in the late 1830s and Conservative backbenchers grew restless for office (pp. 58-60). This led to challenges of party discipline, although Peel’s would never be led by his party’s opinions. Of course, this was a source of the divides that tore the Conservatives apart in 1846, when Peel bent that dissatisfied party interest too far in his pursuit of the national interest. Gash argues this was a feature of the period and that the Whigs too suffered from a looseness of structure: “the surprising feature is not that his party broke up when it did, but that it lasted so long and that it ended on a note of achievement rather than failure” (pp. 63-65).
The Repeal of the Corn Laws and Peel’s Thinking
Betty Kemp, “Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” Victorian Studies 5, no. 3 (1962): 189-204.
Michael Lusztig, “Solving Peel’s Puzzle: Repeal of the Corn Laws and Institutional Preservation,” Comparative Politics 27, no. 4 (1995): 393-408.
Lusztig (pp. 396-400) and Kemp (pp. 198-204) both offer great explanations of Peel’s thinking and its impact on the parliamentary passage of repeal in 1846. They prove Peel and the protectionists equally supported institutional conservation, but the latter misjudged the significance of agricultural protection to maintaining the constitution and rural/aristocratic ways of life. The two factions even shared similar views on the dangers of capitulating to extra-parliamentary movements, but in the tense atmosphere of 1846 that was nonetheless perceived to be Peel’s fatal error by the protectionists.
Iain McLean, “‘The Politics of Corn Law Repeal’: A Comment,” British Journal of Political Science 20, no. 2 (1990): 279-81.
Peelites and Conservatives After 1846
Randall E. McGowen and Walter L. Arnstein, “The Mid-Victorians and the Two Party System,” Albion 11, no. 3 (1979): 242-58.
A worthwhile survey of contemporary periodicals trying to find meaning in the Peelite split, the subsequent instability of governments in the 1850s, the non-reforming Liberal government of Palmerston and finally the solid reassertion of the two party system in 1868. In turn, it covers well the merits and limitations of Disraeli’s more partisan approach, sported by Conservative journals until traditionalists failed to understand his principled pursuit of electoral reform, as well as those of Peel’s non-partisan approach, or its overly enthusiastic Whig-Liberal interpretation until Aberdeen’s coalition collapsed in 1855.
Altogether, Conservative and Liberal periodicals both agreed on the decay of party in the 1850s, with the Peelites a symptom of this process. To the Conservatives, they were unprincipled apostates that had weakened Parliament itself. To the Whigs, they heralded a new era of free association and national government by dispassionate men of reason. Both were rather polemical in fashion, hence disappointed by events.
C. H. Stuart, “The Formation of the Coalition Cabinet of 1852,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1954): 45-68.
Despite the title, this details the slow decline of the Peelites from 1846, including whilst Peel was still alive, from his supporters drifting into either organised party. Such backbench politicians and even senior Peelites such as William Gladstone wanted to return to office, but Peel in his final years was always too reticent or principled to lead what would almost inevitably be a coalition across parties.