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  Only ‘calamity’ had changed the situation. It had not, however, by any means changed the minds of all Peel’s party. He had noted the asperity with which some Tories had dealt with his arguments. Faction was rife, and Greville, in his diaries, first talks of ‘Peelites’ on 22 January 1846, describing the term as by then current.70 The most extreme example of this, a cross between theatre and stand-up comedy, came late on the eighth night, when Disraeli entered the debate.

  If Peel perfectly exhibited the Victorian high mind, Disraeli showed characteristics that were the polar opposite. His position was based on prejudice and not on reason. If he had an intellect – and originality of thought, as opposed to the occasional bout of tactical cunning, was never his strong suit at any stage of his career – he did not apply it in this debate. He was a client of the family of the Duke of Portland and, although a heavily indebted counter-jumper, spoke and acted for the landed interest that funded him. There is no incidence of exercise of integrity in any of his contributions to the Corn Law debates, least of all in the cynical outpouring that followed the statesmanlike remarks of Peel.

  He began his two-and-a-half-hour speech by ridiculing some who had defended Peel, and mocking the government’s volte-face. He then announced: ‘I shall endeavour to show that the system of protection is not that odious system which it has so long been assumed to be,’ a view no Conservative would argue in public when the party next held office, briefly, in 1852 – including Disraeli, who would be Chancellor of the Exchequer.71 He argued that parties existed as expressions of public opinion, and that the public opinion that had elevated Peel to be the Queen’s First Minister in 1841 was not behind his policy.

  His argument was couched in sarcasm; but he also attempted to repudiate a link between import tariffs on goods and a lack of demand for them. He cited sugar and cotton as examples, which missed the point that neither was a basic foodstuff useful for staving off starvation. He branded the Cabinet ‘the children of panic’.72 He said that Turkish adherence to free trade had destroyed that country’s manufacturing industry. He mocked the idea that the condition of the English ‘peasantry’ was attributable to the evils of protection. In his peroration he argued that favouring agriculture over manufacturing in Britain was right because the nation had ‘a territorial constitution’, with land the basis of the political settlement.73

  He contrasted this with the new ‘thraldom of capital’ in which wealth, rather than intelligence, was everything, and which were the very interests to which he believed Peel was surrendering.74 Whereas Peel, when he had spoken, had bombarded the House with detail, Disraeli chose instead to hose it with assertion. Even with tariffs, the amount of flour exported from Britain to Ireland had risen from 839,567 hundredweights in 1844 to 1,422,379 in 1845, such was the gravity of the Potato Famine.75

  On the twelfth and final day of the debate Lord George Bentinck, from the floor of the House of Commons, humiliatingly rebuked Albert in his absence for his attendance. He did not rise until midnight on the final evening, and spoke for three hours, making a statistical case for protection. In tones that would outrage the Queen he said, at the very end of his speech, that he wanted to make a statement ‘with regard to our limited monarchy’.76 The Commons was already impatient: not only had he gone on for three hours, but he had not risen until very late, and his speech had, according to Greville, been ‘intolerably tiresome’.77 His attack on Albert had the merit, at least, of being almost the only interesting part of his oration.

  In a seemingly interminable sentence that extended even beyond the following quotation, he said:

  ‘If so humble an individual as myself might be permitted to whisper a word in the ear of that illustrious and royal personage, who, as he stands nearest, so is he justly dearest, to Her who sits upon the throne, I would take leave to say, that I cannot but think he listened to ill advice, when, on the first night of this great discussion, he allowed himself to be seduced by the First Minister of the Crown to come down in this House to usher in, to give éclat, and, as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of the personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or for evil, a great majority at least of the landed aristocracy of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, imagine will be fraught with deep injury, if not ruin, to them’.

  Some elements in the press picked up the criticism and amplified it: Bentinck was, after all, brother of the Duke of Portland. Albert lay low, concentrating on building Osborne, and other less controversial projects.

  The motion to overturn protection was carried by 337 votes to 240, the victory assisted by Bentinck. Even before him, Greville had described the momentous debate as ‘the dullest on record’.78 The Tory party was devastated by the victory of the notionally Tory Prime Minister: only 112 voted for him, and 231 against. The vote was taken on 27 February. On the next sitting day, 2 March, Charles Villiers, a long-standing free-trader, moved a motion for the total and immediate repeal of the Corn Laws, rather than waiting until 1 February 1849. Colonel Sibthorp, one of the Tory party’s most boneheaded reactionaries, led the opposition. He said Peel had ‘insulted the country by bringing forward these measures in a deceitful manner’, whereas at least Villiers was being ‘bold, manly and independent’.79 He accused Peel of having changed his mind, which was fair comment, but he also accused him of lacking ‘moral courage’, which was far from the mark. In his peroration he accused Peel of having ‘deceived and betrayed’ his party and of ‘sowing the seeds of a revolution’: although Sibthorp was an extreme case, it was indicative of how high emotions were running in his party.80 Greville (a Whig and a free-trader) described his Tory friends as feeling ‘disgust and indignation’ towards their leader.81 Another dismayed by the calibre of the Tory protectionists was Prince Albert. He felt that ‘they have no leader and one of their chief members admitted the other day . . . that they were quite divided and very jealous of each other. There is a host of young men, who have never in their life paid any attention to public business, whose chief employment has been hunting and who now come down to the House of Commons as great statesmen, cheering each other and rendering it almost impossible for any business to be carried on.’82

  Bright warned that the agitation of the League would continue until repeal was total: so there was nothing to be gained from the delay. Peel followed him and explained, quite candidly, that the government had settled on the delay because it had feared that was the best way in which it could secure the support of the House; and the calamity in Ireland required immediate attention. He did not wish to alter the government’s plans, and was supported by Russell, for the Opposition. The proposal was defeated, in the interests of securing eventual repeal. The Whigs and Liberals feared that to press for immediate repeal would alienate Tories who, reluctantly, were supporting Peel and providing a parliamentary majority.

  VI

  When, later in March, the legislation had its second reading, it passed by eighty-eight votes – nine fewer than in the great debate of February. Not only was what support Peel had in his own party drifting away, it was also clear that his party was determined to be rid of him. When he rose to speak in the second reading debate he was howled down for five minutes by protectionists on his own side who wished to hear one of their own, the Marquis of Granby, heir to the Duke of Rutland, who had deliberately risen at the same time. Eventually order was restored and the Speaker saw that Peel was heard. However, when he observed, matter-of-factly, that he knew the protectionists could, if they wished, turn him out, they cheered ‘savagely’, according to Greville, who was present.83

  The diarist continued: ‘At present, however, Peel holds office for the sole purpose of carrying the Bill. The Whigs are guarding him, while he is doing this work, ready to turn against him the moment he has done it, and then, this great contest over, the Protectionists will either join the Whigs in their first onset, or leave him to his fate.’ A sign that the Whigs were preparing for office was that Palmerston had been t
o Paris to meet the King of France, his leading courtiers and ministers. The Whigs desired good relations with France. Palmerston was regarded there with fear and loathing. He would have to be Foreign Secretary in any Whig administration. The Queen and his party worried about what effect this would have on Anglo-French relations. Therefore, Palmerston was on what the twentieth century would call a charm offensive.

  The moment, and the opportunity, for bringing an end to the divided government came on 25 June 1846. On the same night that the House of Lords gave the third reading to the bill to repeal the Corn Laws, the government lost the Irish Coercion Bill (which would have allowed rule by force in Ireland in times of civil unrest) in the House of Commons by 292 votes to 219. Peel called a Cabinet the next day – ‘the shortest cabinet I ever knew’, according to Gladstone – and it was agreed the government would resign rather than seek a dissolution.84 On 29 June Peel told the House he and the ministry had resigned. He began by saying what a relief it was that he had been able to give up his post, and then justified his advice not to ask the Queen for a dissolution – ‘the power of dissolution is a great instrument in the hands of the Crown; and it would have a tendency to blunt the instrument if it were employed without grave necessity.’85 Peel’s conscience was manifestly clear: ‘During the five years for which power has been committed to our hands, neither the interests nor the honour of this country have been compromised.’86

  Thus far Peel’s valedictory remarks were what would be expected of a prime minister relinquishing office. However, he chose not to leave without rubbing the noses of his former supporters into the dirt. He delivered an encomium about Cobden, the great architect of repeal. ‘The name which ought to be associated with the success of those measures [repeal] is not the name of the noble Lord [John Russell] . . . nor is it mine. The name which ought to be, and will be, associated with the success of those measures, is the name of one who, acting, I believe, from pure and disinterested motives, has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason, and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned: the name which ought to be chiefly associated with the success of those measures, is the name of Richard Cobden.’87

  When one recalls the obloquy that Tories, and their stooges such as Croker, had heaped on Cobden – one of the most serious intellectuals of the radical movement and a man, as Peel had affirmed, not in the least motivated by self-interest – one can imagine the effect these words had on Peel’s former adherents. Peel himself had had the rough end of Cobden’s tongue, notably after the murder of his private secretary, Edward Drummond, in 1843: Drummond was killed by a man who mistook him for Peel, and Cobden hinted that the desire to assassinate the Prime Minister indicated the depth of misery in the country. But Cobden had been the driving force behind the League, and had sacrificed his lucrative business (which had almost gone bust) and his health to a cause in which he passionately believed. Russell, already an admirer, endorsed what he heard Peel say to the extent that he renewed his offer of office to Cobden, this time a place in the Cabinet: but Cobden again declined. He was worried about financial ruin: only a testimonial organised by supporters of the League, which raised almost £77,000, allowed him to pay his debts and establish himself once more on a sound footing. Gladstone noted that ‘much comment is made upon Peel’s declaration about Cobden last night. My objection to it is that it did not do full justice. For if his power of discussion has been great and his end good, his tone has been most harsh, & the imputation of bad and vile motives to honourable men incessant.’88

  Having praised Cobden, Peel referred to himself. ‘I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, from less honourable motives, clamours for protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of the brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.’89 In a rare break with precedent, those remarks were followed by cheering. However traumatic the event was for Peel, it was incomprehensible to Wellington. He had never seen the necessity of repeal, but with a soldier’s tones said to another of like mind ‘it is a damned mess, but I must look to the peace of the country and the Queen.’90 Peel told Bright he ‘had no conception of the intense feeling of hatred with which the Corn Law had been regarded.’91 He had, nonetheless, undertaken one of the great acts of moral courage in British history.

  The repeal of the Corn Laws marked another step – some would argue, along with the 1832 Reform Act, the crucial step – in the growth and advance of the middle classes and their power. Cobden identified himself entirely with the middle-class interest against the landed one. Bright was the embodiment of the middle-class advance. The aristocracy would have its incomes reduced by the end of protectionism. An era of lower prices and cheaper food materially increased the prosperity of all who did not draw their incomes from the land. If the landed aristocracy felt they had endured the hardest blow in 1832, that of 1846 was of equal, if not greater, force. Their political power had already been put on the slide: their economic power would now go with it. Those great families who owned coal, or had diversified into shipyards or other forms of heavy industry, would be protected for decades yet: but the land would never again be so remunerative.

  Party, as we understand the term, did not exist in the first twenty years of Victoria’s reign. Parliament housed Whigs, Liberals and Radicals, Tories, Conservatives and, after 1846, Peelites. It was not until 1859 that the leading Whig, Palmerston, and the leading Liberal, Russell, came together to form a Liberal ministry that also, crucially, included Peelites such as Gladstone. An attempt to unite these factions was made by Aberdeen after 1852, but it foundered on the conduct of the Crimean War. Once the Peelites had welded themselves on to the Liberals, and the Tories had abandoned protectionism, the way was clear to make the modern Conservative party.

  Disraeli was an important factor in this realignment, for he was so intensely unpopular with the Peelites and with some Liberals (Whigs such as Palmerston found him amusing) that he became a common enemy and a unifying force. As Lord Blake wrote: ‘One sometimes wonders whether Disraeli has a claim not only to be the architect of the Conservative party, but the unconscious founder of the Liberal party, too.’92 As he would show twenty years later in the arguments over the second Reform Act, he was a man of the most flexible principle, and no sentiment could be allowed to stand in the way of his movement up the greasy pole, or his survival once at the top. Within months he was telling landed proprietors that the game was up with protection: he turned his coat and moved on without ever looking back, which made a retrospective mockery of the intensity of his opposition before 1846.

  The argument over the Corn Laws effected a long-term realignment in British politics. It also, potentially, saved the country from severe civil unrest. Once the ports opened, it was estimated that a substantial proportion of Britons became dependent upon ‘foreign bread’: perhaps 5 or 6 million of the 21,185,000 counted in the census of 1851, according to Board of Trade figures.93 Peel himself knew that he had led the party to a point of no return – at least so long as he was in charge. He told his last Cabinet meeting that ‘he was convinced that the formation of a Conservative party was impossible while he continued in office’.94 For the next twenty years, with various changes of sides, the realignment would continue: until, by the second Reform Act, the Peelites were all in what was by then known as the Liberal Party, and one was preparing to lead it.

  CHAPTER 4

  CHARTISM: THE RISE OF WORKING-CLASS POLITICS

  I

  THE WORKING CLASS in the first half of the nineteenth century was a varied coalition of those who principally had in common that they owned little or no capital or land. At the bottom end were manual labourers, whether agricultura
l or urban, and miners. A cut above them were operatives who had the skills to work machinery in mills, collieries and factories. For the most part, these lowest two classes were uneducated. Then were artisans and craftsmen, some of them sole traders and on the cusp of the lower-middle class, and mostly literate and numerate. For those in the lower categories, the basic problem in life was survival and being able to provide for themselves and their families. For those nearer the top, who had the resources to take subsistence for granted, their attention turned to the question of obtaining civil and political rights. It was as this increasingly politically aware class grew, and was radicalised, that the pressure for more reform became unstoppable.

  The story of the working class – and of how other classes interact with them – is the stuff of novels about the ‘Condition of England Question’. They, or their parents, had moved to the towns in increasing numbers from the Napoleonic Wars onwards. When trade was good money rewarded their exceptionally hard work; but they endured squalid working conditions, and what Carlyle called ‘cheap and nasty’ housing. When trade was bad they could be pushed, as we have seen, to the point of starvation. As the population increased and became more concentrated in cities, so squalor increased too. Between 1810 and 1840 consumption of gin rose from a gallon per head per year to a gallon and a half.1 In England in 1823 duty was paid on 1,976,000 gallons of spirits. In 1837 it was paid on 6,620,000 gallons.2 It was a sign of greater prosperity, but also an indicator of greater unhappiness. Friedrich Engels wrote that ‘competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society.’3 He also reported the Sheriff of Glasgow saying that 30,000 working men got drunk in his city every Saturday night. He said that there were 40,000 prostitutes in London in 1844 living ‘upon the virtuous bourgeoisie’. Crime had risen sevenfold in England and Wales between 1805 and 1842, despite savage punishments. The principal victims were the lower classes.4 Engels, quoting the Children’s Employment Commission Report, says that half of all criminals were under fifteen. In addition, ‘unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the opinion of the commissioner almost universal, and that at a very early age.’5