Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/477

PEEL 455 cable 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 ad ministrative 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, through Dr Lloyd, bishop of Oxford, his tutor at Christ Church, and now his beloved friend and the partner of his counsels in political matters affecting the interests of the church. Immediately afterwards the question of Catholic emancipation was brought to a crisis by the menac ing power of the Catholic Association and the election of O Connell for the county of Clare. Peel expressed to the duke of Wellington his conviction that the Catholic question must be settled. The duke consented. The consent of the king, which could scarcely have been obtained except by the duke and Peel, was extorted, withdrawn (the ministers being out for a few hours), and again extorted ; and on the 5th of March 1829 Peel pro posed Catholic emancipation in a speech of more than four hours, which was listened to with unflagging atten tion, and concluded amidst cheers which were heard in Westminster Hall. The apostate was overwhelmed with obloquy. Having been elected for the university of Oxford as a leading opponent of the Catholics, he had thought it right to resign his seat on being converted to emancipation. His friends put him again in nomination, but he was defeated by Sir 11. H. Inglis, though the great majority of distinction and intellect was on his side. He took refuge in the close borough of Westbury, whence he afterwards removed to Tamworth, for which he sat till his death. Catholic emancipation was forced on Peel by circumstances ; but it was mainly owing to him that the measure was complete, and based upon equality of civil rights. This great concession, however, did not save the Tory Government. The French Revolution of July 1830 gave fresh strength to the movement against them, though, schooled by the past, they promptly recognized King Louis Philippe. The parliamentary reform movement was joined by some of their offended Protestant supporters. The duke of Wellington committed them fatally against all reform, first by cashiering Huskisson for voting in favour of giving the forfeited franchise of East Retford to Bir mingham, and then by a violent anti- reform declaration in the House of Lords. The elections went against them on the demise of the crown ; they were compelled, by popular feeling, to put off the king s visit to the city; they were beaten on Sir H. ParneU s motion for a com mittee on the civil list, and resigned. While in office, Peel succeeded to the baronetcy, Dray- ton Manor, and a great estate by the death of his father 3d May 1830. The old man had lived to see his fondest hopes fulfilled in the greatness of his son ; but he had also lived to see that a father must not expect to. fix his son s opinions, above all, the opinions of such a son as Sir Robert Peel, and in such an age as that which followed the French Revolution. The ability and obstinacy of Sir Robert Peel s resistance to the Reform Bill won back for him the allegiance of his party. His opposition was resolute, but it was temperate, and not such as to inflame the fierce passions of the time, delay the return of civil peace, or put an insurmountable barrier between his friends and the more moderate among their opponents. Once only he betrayed the suppressed fire of his temper, in the historical debate of the 22d April 1831, when his speech was broken off by the arrival of the king to dissolve the parliament which had thrown out reform. He refused to join the duke of Wellington in the desperate enterprise of forming a Tory Government at the height of the storm, when the Grey ministry had gone out on the refusal of the king to promise them an un limited creation of peers. By this conduct he secured for his party the full benefit of the reaction which he no doubt knew was sure to ensue. The general election of 1832, after the passing of the Reform Bill, left him with barely 150 followers in the House of Commons; but this handful rapidly swelled under his management into the great Conservative party. He frankly accepted the Reform Act, stamped it as final, taught his party to register instead of despairing, appealed to the intelligence of the middle classes, whose new-born power he appreciated, steadily supported the Whig ministers against the Radicals and O Connell, and gained every moral advantage which the most dignified and constitutional tactics could afford. The changes which the Reform Act necessarily drew with it, such as municipal reform, he rather watched in the Conservative interest than strongly opposed. To this policy, and to the great parliamentary powers of its author, it was mainly due that, in the course of a few years, the Conservatives were as strong in the reformed parliament as the Tories had been in the unreformed. It is vain to deny the praise of genius to such a leader, though his genius may have been of a practical, not of a speculative or imaginative kind. The skill of a pilot who steered for many years over such waters may sometimes have resem bled craft. But the duke of Wellington s emphatic eulogy on him was, " Of all the men I ever knew, he had the greatest regard for truth." The duke might have added that his own question, " How is the king s Government to be carried on in a reformed parliament?" was mainly solved by the temperate and constitutional policy of Sir Robert Peel, and by his personal influence on the debates and proceedings of the House of Commons during the years which followed the Reform Act. In 1834, on the dismissal of the Melbourne ministry, power came to Sir Robert Peel before he expected or desired it. He hurried from Rome at the call of the duke of Wellington, whose sagacious modesty knew his superior in politics and yielded him the first place, and became prime minister, holding the two offices of first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer. He vainly sought to include in his cabinet the two recent seceders from the Whigs, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham. A dissolution gave him a great increase of strength in the House, but not enough. He was outvoted on the election of the speaker at the opening of the session of 1835, and, after struggling on for six weeks longer, was finally beaten, and resigned on the question of appropriat ing the surplus revenues of the church in Ireland to national education. His time had not yet come ; but the capacity, energy, and resource he displayed in this short tenure of office raised him immensely in the estimation of the House, his party, and the country. Of the great budget of practical reforms which he brought forward, the plan for the commutation of tithes, the ecclesiastical commission, and the plan for settling the question of dissenters marriages bore fruit, then or afterwards. His scheme for settling the question of dissenters marriages, framed in the amplest spirit of liberality, was a striking instance of his habit of doing thoroughly and without reserve that which he had once made up his mind to do.