Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/476

454 PEEL him his best support. In the following year he resigned the Irish secretaryship, of the odious work of which he had long been very weary, and remained out of office till 1822. But he still supported the ministers with official zeal, even in the question of the " Peterloo massacre." In the affair of Queen Caroline, however, he stood somewhat 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 Liver pool s invitation to take the vacant place in the cabinet. During this break in his tenure of office he had some time for reflexion, 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, somewhat punctilious, somewhat too cold and reserved to win the hearts of those whose confidence he might command, and somewhat over anxious for formal justifications when he might well have left the essential patriotism and probity of 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 corre spondence ; 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 Homer. He was chosen for this important office by Huskisson, Ricardo, and their fellow-economists, who saw in him a mind open to con viction, 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 denying the existence of any depreciation in the paper currency. The choice proved judicious. Peel was con verted 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 reso lutions 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 Avith the economists tended to give a liberal turn to his commercial principles. In the course he took he somewhat diverged from his party, and parti cularly 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 some times 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 fundholder, was even charged with being biassed 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. Three of his sons, Robert, Frederick, and Arthur, have followed him in holding parliamentary office, the youngest being now (1884) speaker of the House of Commons; while another, William, the sailor, has run a bright course in another sphere, and found a glorious grave. The writers who have most severely censured Sir Robert Peel as a public man have suspended their censures to dwell 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 gladly opened his mind, wearied with the cares of state, to the enjoyments of a circle in which it was his pleasure and his pride to gather some of the most distinguished intellects of the day. He indulged in free and cheerful talk, in which he showed a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a dry sarcastic humour, which often broke out also in his speeches in the House of Commons. He 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, even to those whom he desired to win, yet in his gay and social hour few men whose minds were so laden could be more bright and genial than Sir Robert Peel. In 1822 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 Catholic emancipation. In 1825, being defeated on the Catholic question in the House of Commons, he wished to resign office, but Lord Liverpool pleaded that his resigna tion would break up the Government. He found a happier and more congenial task in reforming and humanizing the criminal law, especially those parts of it which relate to offences against property and offences punishable by death. The five Acts in which Peel accomplished this great work, the first step towards a complete and civilized code, as well as the great speech of 9th 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. This great measure, beyond the sphere of party, was probably also another step in the emancipation of Peel s mind. 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 Can ning 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 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 impracti-