of the revenue who were recommended to 'the marked favour' of the
Government because they had shown what Peel somewhat rashly called
'the common honesty' of refusing bribes. There was an official who
scandalously connived at an abuse of justice by which innocent women
were condemned to transportation, though taking measures that the
Government should indirectly hear of the transaction. There were
shameful abuses in the sale of the office of gaoler, shameful frauds
in the collection of taxes, in the Customs, in the barrack charges.
'My most decided opinion,' Peel wrote about one of these culprits, 'is
in favour of his dismissal. I am quite tired of, and disgusted with,
the shameful corruptions which every Irish inquiry brings to
light.'[23]
Much trouble was given by newspapers which were subsidised by the
Government, and at the same time conducted in a manner which no honest
Government could approve of.[24] Another evil is disclosed in the
following very creditable letter written by Peel to one of his
successors:
'I found in Ireland that every official man, not content with the
favour of Government to himself, thought he had a right to quarter his
family on the patronage of Government. I took the course that you have
done in order to enable me to resist with effect such extravagant
pretensions. I determined never to gratify any private wish of my own
by the smallest Irish appointment. There is nothing half so disgusting
as the personal monopoly of honours and offices by those to whom the
distribution of them is entrusted.'[25]
In the Irish Pension List there had been enormous abuses, but Peel
took credit for having effectually stopped them. 'No member of
Parliament,' he wrote, 'has benefited by it. No vote has been
influenced by it.... I do not think there are any three years in the
whole period of the Irish history during which so honest a use has
been made of it.'[26]
As might have been expected, blunders arising from extreme
inefficiency were very numerous. In one case, by negligent drafting,
the Insurrection Bill was made to extend to three instead of two
years, while a simple mistake in one of the Revenue Bills was believed
to have cost the Revenue not less than 40,000_l._[27]
In all this dreary field the great administrative ability of Peel and
the essential integrity of his character produced much real
improvement, though it is very possible to exaggerate his merits. No
one who has read the Hardwicke and Colchester papers will question
that some of his predecessors, and especially the Chancellor, Lord
Redesdale, had laboured with at least equal earnestness to purify
Irish administration; and the energy with which Lord Redesdale,
though out of office, still recurred to the subject, was extremely
displeasing to Peel.[28] His own patronage, as we have already seen,
was by no means ideal, and he was very anxious to stifle parliamentary
inquiries.
'I believe,' he wrote, 'an honest, despotic government would be by far
the fittest government for Ireland'; but as this could not be attained
he wished no essential alteration. 'I think the present system on
which the government of Ireland is conducted is the best, but I am
terribly afraid that Englishmen, who know nothing of Ireland, would
not concur with me if they inquired into detail. It is very difficult
to manage even the most limited inquiry. How could we prevent the
introduction of tithes, magistracy, the Catholic question itself?'[29]
Whatever might be the case in the future, he believed that in the
present it was impossible for the Irish Government to receive adequate
support unless it made up its mind to purchase it. 'It would be good
policy,' he says in one of his letters, 'to direct the channel of
patronage as plentifully as we can towards those who are adhering to
us on these pressing questions of army establishments and property
tax.' He refused in very lofty tones applications for peerages as
rewards for political support; but the merit of this refusal belongs
mainly to Lord Liverpool, who, at the beginning of the Chief
Secretaryship, took on this subject a very firm and honourable line,
both in England and Ireland, and maintained it at the sacrifice of
many votes. For Irish honours unaccompanied by endowments there appear
to have been few applicants. Peel disliked the bestowal of
ecclesiastical dignities as rewards for political services; but if he
did not practise it quite as much as his predecessors, this appears to
have been much more due to nature than to policy.
'There is nothing so extraordinary,' he wrote, 'in natural history as
the longevity of all bishops, priests, and deacons in Ireland. During
the last five years there has been literally no Church preferment to
dispose of, to the infinite disappointment of many expectants.'
In the higher legal appointments, however, while insisting that
'attachment to the Government on principle' was very material, Peel
cordially agreed with Saurin that it was vitally necessary to select
men 'for character, and not for politics or connection'; and he added,
that those were not likely to be the least fit for high office who
were too proud to solicit it. 'It is a species of pride which
occasions very little practical inconvenience in Ireland.'
His letters show clearly the terrible evils of Irish life. He speaks
of 'the enormous and overgrown population,' with no employment except
agriculture; of a poverty so extreme that in many districts widespread
starvation was averted only by prompt Government intervention; of
'that infernal curse, the forty shilling freeholds'; of the evil
system of employing the military in distraining for rent and in the
collection of tithes; of juries, through fear or sympathy, acquitting
prisoners in the face of the clearest evidence; of the gross perjury
in the law courts; of the almost universal disaffection of the lower
orders, fostered by a seditious press; of the growing spirit of
animosity in the north of Ireland between the lower orders of
Protestants and Catholics, which was breaking out in constant riots,
and had already cost many lives. This last evil, it might be truly
said, was very largely due to the policy of his own party, who had
protracted through so many years the Catholic question, which ought
to have been settled at the Union. There was extreme and chronic
ignorance, poverty, and anarchy; the payment of tithes was constantly
resisted; and a failure of the potato crop, and a sudden and terrible
fall in the price of agricultural products after the peace, added
enormously to the difficulties of the situation. It is remarkable,
indeed, that there appears to have been in 1816 and 1817 less
disturbance of the public peace in Ireland than in England; Peel found
it even possible to reduce the military establishments, and in Dublin
extreme distress was borne with remarkable patience; but in many parts
of the country crimes of combination were frequent, and almost
incredibly savage. Peel mentions one case of a family of eight persons
who were deliberately burnt in their house by a party of armed men,
because the owner of the house had prosecuted to conviction three men,
on a capital charge, at the Louth assizes. In another case a farmer,
who had shot two men who attacked his house, was himself shot dead on
a Sunday morning, after Mass, at the chapel door, in the presence of
hundreds of men, not one of whom attempted to arrest the culprit.
These things filled Peel with a not unnatural horror, and his letters
showed clearly his intense dislike both of the Irish character and of
the Irish religion.[30] By far the most valuable contribution he made
to the improvement of Ireland during his Chief Secretaryship was the
formation, in 1814, of an efficient police force, which has ever since
been popularly associated with his name, and which was the nucleus
from which the present admirable constabulary force was developed in
1822 and in 1835. 'We ought to be crucified,' he wrote, 'if we make
the measure a job, and select our constables from the servants of our
parliamentary friends.' He attempted also, though without much
success, to institute a system of popular education on a perfectly
unsectarian basis, and with Catholics among the commissioners.[31] He
appears to have met with little encouragement, and at least one
Catholic bishop lost no time in cursing 'these nefarious deistical
schools'; but some schools were established, and Peel has the merit of
being one of the earliest advocates of a general system of unsectarian
national education for Ireland, which many years after was
accomplished. His measures for the relief of distress appear to have
been skilful and judicious, supporting and stimulating, but not
superseding private benevolence.[32] For the rest, he relied chiefly
on Insurrection Acts strengthening the Executive and giving a greater
efficiency to the administration of justice, and on strong protective
legislation encouraging the corn and the manufactures of Ireland.
'I have always,' he wrote, 'been, and always shall be, as strong an
advocate for giving that preference to the productions of Ireland,
natural or artificial, which will best promote the industry of the
people, as I am for instructing the lower orders.'[33]
To the tithe system he would do nothing, and this is one of the fatal
blots on his reputation as a statesman. There was no single source of
crime, agitation, and disaffection in Ireland which was so prolific as
this, and there was no subject on which the wisest statesmen had been
more agreed than on the supreme importance of meeting this evil by a
judicious system of commutation. Pitt had clearly expressed his
opinion of the necessity of such a commutation to the Duke of Rutland
as early as 1786, and it was one of the measures which he intended to
have followed the Union. Grattan had brought schemes of commutation in
three successive years before the Irish Parliament. Lord Loughborough,
who was the chief cause of the failure of Catholic emancipation after
the Union, had himself drawn up a Tithe Commutation Bill. Lord
Redesdale, who represented the extreme Toryism of the ministry of
Addington, strongly urged the absolute necessity of speedy legislation
on the subject. The Duke of Bedford, in 1807, dwelt on the importance
of commuting tithes into a land-tax, and ultimately into land. Parnell
and Grattan had brought the subject before the Imperial Parliament in
1810, and it was again and again insisted on by the Whig writers, and
nowhere more strongly than in Sydney Smith's admirable letters to
Peter Plymley and in some of the pages of the 'Edinburgh Review.' But
nothing was done till the evil had become intolerable, and had brought
the country to a state of anarchy and demoralisation that can scarcely
be exaggerated. The connection of Peel with the question of Irish
tithes is a very remarkable one. The Tithe Commutation Act, which was
carried by a Whig Government in 1838, is one of the few instances of
perfectly successful legislation in Irish history, and it is well
known that the chief credit of this measure does not belong to the
Ministers who carried it. It was the very measure which Sir Robert
Peel had introduced in 1835, which the Whig party when in opposition
defeated by connecting it with the Appropriation clause, and which the
Whig party when in power were compelled to carry without that clause.
But if the chief credit of the final settlement of this momentous
question justly belongs to Peel, it must not be forgotten that in the
eleven years during which, as Chief Secretary or as Home Secretary, he
was directly responsible for the government of Ireland, he had allowed
this monster curse to grow and strengthen without making any serious
effort to mitigate it.
Peel was Chief Secretary during the concluding part of the viceroyalty
of the Duke of Richmond, during the whole of that of Lord Whitworth,
and during part of that of Lord Talbot. He had grown very tired of his
position, but agreed to postpone his departure till after a general
election, and he at last left Ireland, as he says, with 'undiminished
and unqualified satisfaction,' in August 1818. He remained out of
office until January 1822; but the interval was not spent in idleness,
and in 1819 he took the leading part in the great Act for resuming
cash payments, which, as it has been truly said, attaches to his name
'the same meed of praise which he had quoted as inscribed on the tomb
of Queen Elizabeth: "Moneta in justum valorem redacta."' It is one of
his greatest legislative achievements; it is also the first of that
series of recantations which forms one of the most distinctive
features of his career, for it was based upon the policy which Horner
had advocated in 1811, and against which Peel had then voted. He still
took, on the Catholic question, the leading part in opposition to
emancipation, declaring his determination to offer 'a most sincere and
uncompromising,' though he now feared unavailing, resistance to
Catholic concession. The last time the question was brought forward,
by Grattan, was in 1819, and he was defeated by a majority of only
two. In 1821, after the death of Grattan, and in a new Parliament,
Plunket carried a Bill for Catholic emancipation successfully through
all its stages in the House of Commons, though it was afterwards
rejected in the Lords. In the ensuing session a similar fate befel a
Bill of Canning's to relieve Catholic peers of their disabilities.
Some considerable change, however, was introduced into the spirit of
the Irish Government by the appointment of Lord Wellesley, who was in
favour of the Catholics, to the viceroyalty. One of its most important
results was the removal of Saurin from the office of Attorney-General
and the appointment of Plunket in his place. Lord Wellesley described
this measure to Lady Blessington as the removal of 'an old Orangeman'
who, though 'Attorney-General by title, had really been
Lord-Lieutenant for fifteen years'; but it is evident from the letters
of Peel that his warm sympathies, both personal and political, were
with Saurin.
The accession of George IV. to the throne in the beginning of 1820
brought to a crisis the quarrel between the new King and his wife, and
led to the resignation of Canning in the last days of the year, and
Lord Liverpool then tried to induce Peel to enter the Cabinet in the
vacant post of President of the Board of Control. Peel, however,
refused the office, declaring that he differed from some of the
proceedings of the Ministry about the Queen. In the summer of 1821 he
again declined a similar offer, chiefly, as it appears, on the ground
of uncertain health and of a dislike to official life which his recent
marriage had produced. But when Lord Sidmouth resigned the Home
Office, Peel proved less inflexible, and on January 17, 1822, he
accepted the seals, which he held till 1827. In August Castlereagh,
or, as he now was, Lord Londonderry, committed suicide. Lord
Liverpool saw the necessity of recalling Canning to the Cabinet as
Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Canning would accept the post only as
leader of the House of Commons. The King hated Canning, and would
gladly have excluded him altogether from the Ministry, and Eldon and
the Duke of Newcastle greatly desired that the leadership of the House
of Commons should be given to Peel. Canning, however, who had been
sixteen years longer in Parliament than Peel, had both the right and
the power to insist upon the leadership, and Peel acquiesced in his
claim with honourable frankness. Except on the Catholic question they
appear to have cordially agreed, and something of the success of
Canning's brilliant foreign policy is due to the loyalty with which he
was supported by Peel in the Cabinet and at Court.
Space will not permit us to relate at length the history of Peel's
conduct as home Minister. The Catholic question was rapidly advancing
to a crisis, and the system of a divided Ministry in which it was an
open question, and in which the leading Ministers took opposite sides,
was becoming plainly impossible. Ireland was again in a state of
anarchy bordering on civil war, and the foundation, in 1823, of the
Catholic Association by O'Connell and Sheil gave a new impulse to the
agitation. The Duke of Wellington, who knew the country well and was
not liable to panic, predicted that the new association if it
continued would lead to civil war, and declared that the organisation
of the disaffected in Ireland was much more perfect than in 1798.[34]
At the same time the long-protracted and increasing violence of the
conflict had aroused fierce Orange passions both in the North and in
Dublin, while in England the King was embarrassing even his
'anti-Catholic' Ministers by the vehemence of his hostility to
concession. He described Peel as 'the King's Protestant Minister' and
Lord Wellesley as an 'enemy in the camp.' He assured Peel that,
whether the Cabinet wished it or not, he would never consent to give
letters of precedence to a Roman Catholic barrister, and he wrote Peel
a formal letter in which he said, 'the sentiments of the King upon
Catholic emancipation are those of his revered and excellent father;
from those sentiments the King never can and never will deviate.'[35]
Peel, while maintaining his unflinching hostility to important
concessions, tried to moderate all parties. He implored the King to
make no public declaration. He wrote to Ireland strongly discouraging
the violence of the Orangemen and urging that 'in this age of liberal
doctrine, when prescription is no longer even a presumption in favour
of what is established, it will be a work of desperate difficulty to
contend against "emancipation," as they call it, unless we can fight
with the advantage on our side of great discretion, forbearance, and
moderation on the part of the Irish Protestants.' He recurred to his
old idea of establishing a system of unsectarian national education,
and he readily abandoned the corrupt and proselytising charter
schools. He supported a measure of Lord Nugent, which Lord Eldon
succeeded in defeating in the Lords, for extending to the English
Catholics such privileges as were already possessed by Catholics in
Ireland, and he fully approved of a letter written on behalf of the
Cabinet to the Lord-Lieutenant urging 'that a disposition should be
manifested to admit the Roman Catholics of Ireland to a fair
proportion of the emoluments and honours to which they are eligible by
law,' but without issuing patents of precedence.[36]
On matters unconnected with the Catholic question his administration
was skilful and, on the whole, enlightened; and in 1823 he introduced
the first of a series of important measures diminishing the enormous
number of capital offences that disgraced the English criminal code,
and, at the same time, doing much to simplify and consolidate that
code. In this, as in most respects, there was little original in his
legislation. He followed, at some distance, in the steps of Romilly
and Mackintosh, and he left very much to be done, which was chiefly
accomplished during the Whig ascendancy that followed the Reform Bill
of 1832. It appears, from some remarkable letters in this volume,
that, before Peel took up the question of criminal reform, George IV.
was exceedingly sensible of the enormity of executing very young men
for secondary offences, and that he was continually pressing on his
Ministers a more merciful administration of the law. He sometimes
found Peel by no means ready to yield. In one case Peel invoked the
aid of the Cabinet to overrule the wish of the King, who desired to
save two culprits from the gallows; and, in another case, he
threatened to resign his office if the King persisted in commuting the
sentence of a youth who had been found guilty of uttering forged
notes.[37] But Peel had at least the merit of recognising an
intolerable abuse, and his legislation on the subject was skilfully
framed and still more skilfully introduced and carried. In his
patronage in this, as in later periods of his life, he cared much more
than most English Ministers for the interests of science, literature,
and art. He was by no means indifferent to the opportunities his
position gave him of advancing his own family and friends; but he
never, in his English patronage, forgot the character of those whom he
recommended for promotion, and he brought forward or assisted many men
of ability and learning with whom he had no connection and no
political sympathy. The letters in this volume between Peel and his
very intimate Oxford friend Dr. Lloyd are especially interesting and
characteristic. They are in general very honourable to Peel; but Mr.
Parker is much too indulgent when he describes the intensely worldly
letters in which Dr. Lloyd urged his own merits and his claims to the
bishopric of Oxford as merely 'frank, and free from affectation of the
traditional _nolo episcopari_.' Both Peel and Lord Liverpool appear to
have had a much stronger sense than most of their predecessors of the
responsibilities attaching to Church patronage and of the duty of
administering it in the public interest, and in this respect they were
broadly distinguished from Lord Eldon.
'It is really a cruel thing,' Lord Liverpool wrote to Peel, 'that the
patronage of the Crown as to Church matters should be divided between
the Minister and the Chancellor, and that all the public claims should
fall upon the former. The Chancellor has nine livings to the
Minister's one. With respect to these he does occasionally attend to
local claims, but he has besides four cathedrals, and to no one of
these cathedrals has any man of distinguished learning or merit been
promoted.'