Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/227

Peel prudent, wary leader who was fighting after a plan’ (, p. 87). That plan was concisely described by himself in May 1838: ‘My object for some years past has been to lay the foundations of a great party, which, existing in the House of Commons, and deriving its strength from the popular will, should diminish the risk and deaden the shock of collisions between the two deliberative branches of the legislature.’ This was the party which bore the name, first used in 1831, of conservative. For the formation of such a body there were needed young men, and tried men, and men in numbers. Since the death of Pitt the tories seemed to have alienated political ability; in 1828 it was held that there was not a single young tory of promise in the House of Commons. In a cartoon of 1830 by ‘H. B.,’ Wellington and Peel are drawn looking over ‘the Noddle Bazaar’ for ‘a few good heads.’ Now the most brilliant young men in England gathered under the banner of the conservative chief, among them Sidney Herbert and the future Lord Canning, and, above all, Gladstone and Disraeli, who entered parliament in 1837. To the latter Sir Robert seems to have shown marked kindness and attention (Beaconsfield's Correspondence with his Sister, pp. 9, 10, 55, 59, 72, 79, 121, 148, 171). When Disraeli rose to make his maiden speech ‘no one backed me with more zeal and kindness than Peel, cheering me repeatedly, which is not his custom.’ When they talked of failure, Peel said: ‘I say anything but failure; he must make his way’ (ib. p. 79). The author of the ‘Letters of Runnymede’ dedicated them to the opposition leader and summoned him to come from ‘the halls and the bowers of Drayton’ to ‘rescue the nation.’ As for tried men, Peel succeeded in winning over two men in the House of Commons of first-class ability—Stanley and Sir James Graham. They had seceded from the whigs soon after the Reform Bill. He had in vain offered them places in his government of 1835; now in 1838 they openly avowed that they had thrown in their lot with his. As for numbers, his party had risen at the two successive elections of 1832 and 1834 from about 150 to about 250. In the first parliament of Queen Victoria's reign (November 1837) Peel's party numbered nearly 320. For half a century no such opposition had been gathered together.

The policy that united this opposition was that of maintaining intact the established constitution of church and state, and found its best expression in the indignant question of Sir Robert: ‘Is the British constitution a standing grievance, to be redressed and abolished?’ This was enough for an opposition, but not enough to be the policy of a government. Accordingly Peel laboured to infuse into the mind of his party that respect for the opinions and wishes of the nation as a whole which had grown to be the rule of his own mind. It was impossible, of course, to wholly restrain or exorcise bigotry and party spite. Peel sometimes found himself forced ‘to keep his party in wind,’ as he expressed it. But as a rule he was the master. His action over the question of privilege raised by the case of Stockdale v. Hansard brought upon him the wrath of his own side. But it ‘appealed straight to the innermost heart of Sir Robert Peel, than whom our constitutional and representative system never had a more loving child or a more devoted champion’ (Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century, xxvii. 40). Again, when the lords, led by Lyndhurst, had mutilated the English Municipal Corporations Bill, Peel boldly stood by the government, in the spirit of a patriot, not of a partisan. Mr. Gladstone has recorded that there never was a period when the struggle of parties was ‘so intense, so prolonged, and so unremitting.’ But he has added that the struggle was sharp because Peel on one side and Russell on the other ‘were strong men and earnest men,’ and that ‘it was perhaps the best time I have ever known’ (ib. p. 40).

On all sides there were symptoms of the expanding influence of the opposition chief. In 1836 he was elected lord rector of the university of Glasgow, and at a great banquet given in his honour at that town in the following January he expounded the new conservative faith. In 1838 he was entertained by 313 members of the House of Commons at Merchant Taylors' Hall, where he reviewed the power and the patriotic conduct of his party, and, probably for the first time, laid down the duties of a constitutional opposition. In the same year he forced the government to omit from their settlement of the Irish tithe that very principle of appropriation which they had adopted as the main object of their policy in 1835. So puissant had he become that a political opponent declared soon after in the House of Commons that ‘the right honourable member for Tamworth governs England.’

In 1839 Lord Melbourne's government resigned on the Jamaica question. Peel was summoned to form a cabinet, and submitted a list which was approved by the queen. But when he proceeded to claim permission to recommend certain changes in the household, by which he meant that some few ladies of the bedchamber closely connected