DEATH OF SIR ROBERT PEEL

(1850)

Famous men whose merit it is to have joined their name to events
that were brought onwards by the course of things. PAUL-LOUIS
COURIER.

LORD PALMERSTON

It was now that Lord Palmerston strode to a front place one of the two conspicuous statesmen with whom, at successive epochs in his career, Mr. Gladstone found himself in different degrees of energetic antagonism. This was all the stiffer and more deeply rooted, for being in both cases as much a moral antagonism as it was political. After a long spell of peace, earnestness, and political economy, the nation was for a time in a mood for change, and Palmerston convinced it that he was the man for its mood. He had his full share of shrewd common sense, yet was capable of infinite recklessness. He was good-tempered and a man of bluff cheerful humour. But to lose the game was intolerable, and it was noticed that with him the next best thing to success was quick retaliation on a victorious adversary a trait of which he was before long to give the world an example that amused it. Yet he had no capacity for deep and long resentments. Like so many of his class, he united passion for public business to sympathy with social gaiety and pleasure. Diplomatists found him firm, prompt, clean-cut, but apt to be narrow, teasing, obstinate, a prisoner to his own arguments, and wanting in the statesman’s first quality of seeing the whole and not merely the half. Metternich described him as an audacious and passionate marksman, ready to make arrows out of any wood. He was a sanguine man who always believed what he desired; a confident man who was sure that he must be right in whatever he chose to fear. On the economic or the moral side of national life, in the things that make a nation rich and the things that make it scrupulous and just, he had only limited perception and moderate faith. Where Peel was strong and penetrating, Palmerston was weak and purblind. He regarded Bright and Cobden as displeasing mixtures of the bagman and the preacher. In 1840 he had brought us within an ace of war with France. Disputes about an American frontier were bringing us at the same period within an ace of war with the United States. When Peel and Aberdeen got this quarrel into more promising shape, Palmerston characteristically taunted them with capitulation. Lord Grey refused help in manufacturing a whig government in December 1845, because he was convinced that at that moment Palmerston at the foreign office meant an American war. When he was dismissed by Lord John Russell in 1852 a foreign ruler on an insecure throne observed to an Englishman, ’This is a blow to me, for so long as Lord Palmerston remained at the foreign office, it was certain that you could not procure a single ally in Europe.’

Yet all this policy of high spirits and careless dictatorial temper had its fine side. With none of the grandeur of the highest heroes of his school of Chatham, Carteret, Pitt without a spark of their heroic fire or their brilliant and steadfast glow, Palmerston represented, not always in their best form, some of the most generous instincts of his countrymen. A follower of Canning, he was the enemy of tyrants and foreign misrule. He had a healthy hatred of the absolutism and reaction that were supreme at Vienna in 1815; and if he meddled in many affairs that were no affairs of ours, at least he intervened for freedom. The action that made him hated at Vienna and Petersburg won the confidence of his countrymen. They saw him in Belgium and Holland, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, the fearless champion of constitutions and nationality. Of Aberdeen, who had been Peel’s foreign minister, it was said that at home he was a liberal without being an enthusiast; abroad he was a zealot, in the sense most opposed to Palmerston. So, of Palmerston it could be said that he was conservative at home and revolutionist abroad. If such a word can ever be applied to such a thing, his patriotism was sometimes not without a tinge of vulgarity, but it was always genuine and sincere.

This masterful and expert personage was the ruling member of the weak whig government now in office, and he made sensible men tremble. Still, said Graham to Peel, ’it is a choice of dangers and evils, and I am disposed to think that Palmerston and his foreign policy are less to be dreaded than Stanley and a new corn law.’ In a debate of extraordinary force and range in the summer of 1850, the two schools of foreign policy found themselves face to face. Palmerston defended his various proceedings with remarkable amplitude, power, moderation, and sincerity. He had arrayed against him, besides Mr. Gladstone, the greatest men in the House Peel, Disraeli, Cobden, Graham, Bright but in his last sentence the undaunted minister struck a note that made triumph in the division lobbies sure. For five hours a crowded house hung upon his lips, and he then wound up with a fearless challenge of a verdict on the question, ’Whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong?’

DON PACIFICO

The Roman citizen was in this instance a Mediterranean Jew who chanced to be a British subject. His house at Athens had for some reason or other been sacked by the mob; he presented a demand for compensation absurdly fraudulent on the face of it. The Greek government refused to pay. England despatched the fleet to collect this and some other petty accounts outstanding. Russia and France proposed their good offices; the mediation of France was accepted; then a number of Greek vessels were peremptorily seized, and France in umbrage recalled her ambassador from London. Well might Peel, in the last speech ever delivered by him in the House of Commons, describe such a course of action as consistent neither with the dignity nor the honour of England. The debate travelled far beyond Don Pacifico, and it stands to this day as a grand classic exposition in parliament of the contending views as to the temper and the principles on which nations in our modern era should conduct their dealings with one another.

It was in the Greek debate of 1850, which involved the censure or acquittal of Lord Palmerston, that I first meddled in speech with foreign affairs, to which I had heretofore paid the slightest possible attention. Lord Palmerston’s speech was a marvel for physical strength, for memory, and for lucid and precise exposition of his policy as a whole. A very curious incident on this occasion evinced the extreme reluctance of Sir R. Peel to appear in any ostensible relation with Disraeli. Voting with him was disagreeable enough, but this with his strong aversion to the Palmerstonian policy Peel could not avoid; besides which, it was known that Lord Palmerston would carry the division. Disraeli, not yet fully recognised as leader of the protectionists, was working hard for that position, and assumed the manners of it, with Beresford, a kind of whipper-in, for his right-hand man. After the Palmerston speech he asked me on the next night whether I would undertake to answer it. I said that I was incompetent to do it, from want of knowledge and otherwise. He answered that in that case he must do it. As the debate was not to close that evening, this left another night free for Peel when he might speak and not be in Disraeli’s neighbourhood. I told Peel what Disraeli had arranged. He was very well satisfied. But, shortly afterwards, I received from Disraeli a message through Beresford, that he had changed his mind, and would not speak until the next and closing night, when Peel would have to speak also. I had to make known to Peel this alteration. He received the tidings with extreme annoyance: thinking, I suppose, that if the two spoke on the same side and in the late hours just before the division it would convey the idea of some concert or co-operation between them, which it was evident that he was most anxious to avoid. But he could not help himself. Disraeli’s speech was a very poor one, almost like a ‘cross,’ and Peel’s was prudent but otherwise not one of his best.

Mr. Gladstone had not in 1850 at all acquired such full parliamentary ascendency as belonged to the hardy veteran confronting him; still less had he such authority as the dethroned leader who sat by his side. Yet the House felt that, in the image of an ancient critic, here was no cistern of carefully collected rain-water, but the bounteous flow of a living spring. It felt all the noble elevation of an orator who transported them apart from the chicane of diplomatic chanceries, above the narrow expediencies of the particular case, though of these too he proved himself a thoroughly well-armed master, into a full view of the state system of Europe and of the principles and relations on which the fabric is founded. Now for the first time he made the appeal, so often repeated by him, to the common sentiment of the civilised world, to the general and fixed convictions of mankind, to the principles of brotherhood among nations, to their sacred independence, to the equality in their rights of the weak with the strong. Such was his language. ’When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights that belong to our fellow-subjects resident in Greece,’ he said, ’let us do as we would be done by; let us pay all respect to a feeble state and to the infancy of free institutions, which we should desire and should exact from others towards their authority and strength.’ Mr. Gladstone had not read history for nothing, he was not a Christian for nothing. He knew the evils that followed in Europe the breakdown of the great spiritual power once, though with so many defects, a controlling force over violence, anarchy, and brute wrong. He knew the necessity for some substitute, even a substitute so imperfect as the law of nations. ’You may call the rule of nations vague and untrustworthy,’ he exclaimed; ’I find in it, on the contrary, a great and noble monument of human wisdom, founded on the combined dictates of sound experience, a precious inheritance bequeathed to us by the generations that have gone before us, and a firm foundation on which we must take care to build whatever it may be our part to add to their acquisitions, if indeed we wish to promote the peace and welfare of the world.’

EXALTS THE LAW OF NATIONS

The government triumphed by a handsome majority, and Mr. Gladstone, as was his wont, consoled himself for present disappointment by hopes for a better future. ‘The majority of the House of Commons, I am convinced,’ he wrote to Guizot, then in permanent exile from power, ’was with us in heart and in conviction; but fear of inconveniences attending the removal of a ministry which there is no regularly organised opposition ready to succeed, carried the day beyond all authoritative doubt, against the merits of the particular question. It remains to hope that the demonstration which has been made may not be without its effect upon the tone of Lord Palmerston’s future proceedings.’

The conflict thus opened between Mr. Gladstone and Lord Palmerston in 1850 went on in many changing phases, with some curious vicissitudes and inversions. They were sometimes frank foes, occasionally partners in opposition, and for a long while colleagues in office. Never at any time were they in thought or feeling congenial.

On the afternoon of the day following this debate, Peel was thrown from his horse and received injuries from which he died three days later (July 2), in the sixty-third year of his age, and after forty-one years of parliamentary life. When the House met the next day, Hume, as one of its oldest members, at once moved the adjournment, and it fell to Mr. Gladstone to second him. He was content with a few words of sorrow and with the quotation of Scott’s moving lines to the memory of Pitt:

’Now is the stately column broke,
The beacon-light is quench’d in smoke,
The trumpet’s silver sound is still,
The warder silent on the hill!’

These beautiful words were addressed, said Mr. Gladstone, ’to a man great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert Peel.’

‘Great as he was to the last,’ wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes in 1851, ’I must consider the closing years of his life as beneath those that had preceded them. His enormous energies were in truth so lavishly spent upon the gigantic work of government, which he conducted after a fashion quite different, I mean as to the work done in the workshop of his own brain, from preceding and succeeding prime ministers, that their root was enfeebled, though in its feebleness it had more strength probably remaining than fell to the lot of any other public man.’

Peel may at least divide with Walpole the laurels of our greatest peace minister to that date the man who presided over beneficent and necessary changes in national polity, that in hands less strong and less skilful might easily have opened the sluices of civil confusion. And when we think of Walpole’s closing days, and of the melancholy end of most other ruling spirits in our political history of the mortifications and disappointments in which, from Chatham and Pitt down to Canning and O’Connell, they have quitted the glorious field Peel must seem happy in the manner and moment of his death. Daring and prosperous legislative exploits had marked his path. His authority in parliament never stood higher, his honour in the country never stood so high. His last words had been a commanding appeal for temperance in national action and language, a solemn plea for peace as the true aim to set before a powerful people.

To his father Mr. Gladstone wrote:

July 2, 1850. I thought Sir R. Peel looked extremely feeble during the debate last week. I mean as compared with what he usually is. I observed that he slept during much of Lord Palmerston’s speech, that he spoke with little physical energy, and next day, Saturday, in the forenoon I thought he looked very ill at a meeting which, in common with him, I had to attend. This is all that I know and that is worth telling on a subject which is one of deep interest to all classes, from the Queen downwards. I was at the palace last night and she spoke to me with great earnestness about it. As to the division I shall say little; it is an unsatisfactory subject. The majority of the government was made up out of our ranks, partly by people staying away and partly by some twenty who actually voted with the government. By far the greater portion, I am sorry to say, of both sets of persons were what are called Peelites, and not protectionists. The fact is, that if all calling themselves liberal be put on one side, and all calling themselves conservatives on the other, the House of Commons is as nearly as possible equally divided.

QUESTIONS OF LEADERSHIP

I have already described how Mr. Gladstone thought it a great mistake in Peel to resist any step that might put upon the protectionists the responsibilities of office. In a note composed a quarter of a century later (1876), he says: ’This I think was not only a safe experiment (after 1848) but a vital necessity. I do not, therefore, think, and I did not think, that the death of Sir R. Peel at the time when it occurred was a great calamity so far as the chief question of our internal politics was concerned. In other respects it was indeed great; in some of them it may almost be called immeasurable. The moral atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite the same, and is now widely different. He had a kind of authority there that was possessed by no one else. Lord John might in some respects compete with, in some even excel, him; but to him, as leader of the liberals, the loss of such an opponent was immense. It is sad to think what, with his high mental force and noble moral sense, he might have done for us in after years. Even the afterthought of knowledge of such a man and of intercourse with him, is a high privilege and a precious possession.’

An interesting word or two upon his own position at this season occur in a letter to his father (July 9, 1850):

The letter in which you expressed a desire to be informed by me, so far as I might be able to speak, whether there was anything in the rumours circulated with regard to my becoming the leader in parliament of the conservative party, did not come to my hands until yesterday. The fact is, that there is nothing whatever in those rumours beyond mere speculation on things supposed probable or possible, and they must pass for what they are worth in that character only. People feel, I suppose, that Sir Robert Peel’s life and continuance in parliament were of themselves powerful obstacles to the general reorganisation of the conservative party, and as there is great annoyance and dissatisfaction with the present state of things, and a widely spread feeling that it is not conducive to the public interests, there arises in men’s minds an expectation that the party will be in some manner reconstituted. I share in the feeling that it is desirable; but I see very great difficulties in the way, and do not at present see how they are to be effectually overcome. The House of Commons is almost equally divided, indeed, between those professing liberal and those professing conservative politics; but the late division [Don Pacifico] showed how ill the latter could hang together, even when all those who had any prominent station among them in any sense were united....

Cornewall Lewis wrote,’Upon Gladstone the death of Peel will have the effect of removing a weight from a spring he will come forward more and take more part in discussion. The general opinion is that Gladstone will renounce his free trade opinions, and become leader of the protectionists. I expect neither the one event nor the other.’ More interesting still is something told by the Duke of Buccleuch. ’Very shortly,’ said the duke in 1851, ’before Sir Robert Peel’s death, he expressed to me his belief that Sidney Herbert or Gladstone would one day be premier; but Peel said with sarcasm, If the hour comes, Disraeli must be made governor-general of India. He will be a second Ellenborough.’