undergone by the next who followed this pair of friends. Sir Robert Peel had, in one respect, a harder task to fulfil than either Canning or Huskisson. He had to be converted to progression himself before he led a progressive policy. This was his difficulty; as that of lack of aristocratic position and fortune had been the impediment in the path of his friends: and Peel perhaps suffered the most of the three. In rank he was about on a level with Canning and Huskisson: but his great fortune, and his having been expressly trained for political life from his youth up, prevented his being taunted as a political adventurer, even if people had not been tired of the useless sarcasm.
All the three had to live and learn; but Peel alone had the difficult destiny of changing sides on great questions of policy. His father represented the characteristic British class of high Conservative traders. He gained a great “stake in the country,” as our grandfathers were fond of saying; and he was ambitious that his son should increase the security of such a stake, and glorify the order of men who held it. All influences were brought to bear upon the child first, and then the boy, and the young man, to make him consider himself destined to an illustrious public career, and in the service of Toryism as it existed at that day. His heart and his father’s would have failed them for fear if they could have known, when he left Oxford, what a set of measures he would be immortalised by. They would have prayed that he might rather die obscure.
When he entered parliament at one-and-twenty, graced by extraordinary university honours, and independent in fortune, he was on the winning side in every way. It was in 1809, when Perceval was minister, and Castlereagh and Canning were his colleagues, that Peel began his career; and when the murder of Mr. Perceval caused a recomposition of the ministry, Peel had become well enough known as a man of business to be appointed to the Irish secretaryship. O’Connell’s party called him Orange-Peel: O’Connell himself pursued him with insult till they came to a challenge; and if there was an Englishman who could be pointed out as the representative of an anti-Catholic policy, it was Peel. He was honest in his opposition to the Catholic claims; but he was not satisfied with the method of governing Ireland; and here perhaps a close observer might have found a basis for speculation as to whether Peel would prove to be a stationary politician, after all. He made the best speeches against Catholic emancipation, session after session; but then, he did not relish or approve of, the sectarian quarrels in Ireland; and he had a notion that a sound popular secular education would be the best thing for the country. The smack of the pungent orange flavour was wanting in this Peel, his party observed: and when 1829 came, there were persons who said they had long ago thought what would happen.
In other questions he was assumed to be sound, as he himself took for granted he must be. His taste was rather for practical reforms than for high-flying political doctrine: but that he was sound in the faith, nobody doubted. He was so modest and diligent, and so respectful to the leaders of his party that nobody looked for the signs and tokens in him of the future political reformer. He was an administrative and economical reformer; but so much the less likely was it that he should occupy himself with liberalism in any shape.
So Lord Eldon and other Tories, who dreaded the vigour of Canning’s genius, at the critical period of 1818, exerted themselves to bring in, to Canning’s exclusion, the trustworthy Mr. Peel as member for Oxford. Oxford was thus provided with an anti-Catholic representative who would be a better Conservative in all ways than the restive and irreverent Canning could ever be. So thought the Eldons and Sidmouths to whom Canning appeared simply restive and irreverent, and Peel a model of discipline and deference as a partyman. They were sorry that he was steady in resigning his Irish secretaryship: but they should get plenty of work out of him by-and-by. Meantime he supported the Liverpool Ministry with all his force; and he was doing useful things in matters of currency and finance. His Bill for the resumption of cash-payments bears the date of 1819; and he was occupied with that class of questions till after the collapse and crash of 1825-6. He became Home Secretary in 1822, in the place of Lord Sidmouth, on which appointment it was observed by his party that “the substitution of the one for the other could have no effect on the course of administration.” The outgoing minister regarded him as a docile pupil and creditable successor. He wrote of him that “nothing could have been more becoming and creditable” than Mr. Peel’s behaviour in entering the Home Office. The old gentleman was unaware that Peel’s notions of administration were as unlike his as the projects of a social reformer are unlike the devices of a detective policeman.
Canning and Peel were alike in their shrinking from all implication with the scandal of the Queen’s trial: and they were the most prominent members of the Liverpool Cabinet during its latest period. No doubt Canning’s mind wrought upon Peel’s, both in regard to foreign politics and Catholic emancipation, though they were regarded as leaders of the two sections of the Cabinet. Their common horror of parliamentary reform was a strong bond between them: and Peel was certainly coming round to the conviction that the Catholic disabilities could not be maintained. When Canning became Premier in 1827, he lamented that he must lose Peel as a colleague, on account of the Irish question. On that occasion he declared that Peel was the only man who behaved well to him in his hour of difficulty, and that he regarded Peel as his political heir and successor. As Canning’s difficulties and popularity at that time were caused by his reputed Liberalism, the declaration must have been abundantly startling to the patrons of the young Peel of twenty years before.
The time was at hand when Peel was to find what it was to be born into an untenable position, and to have to struggle over into another. When his great speech of 1829 was read by every fireside in the kingdom, the universal remark of both parties was that there was no conviction in his mind: he had acted from a regard to expediency
