Sir Robert Peel (review)

Sir Robert Peel, by T. A. Jenkins; pp. vi + 179. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, $49.95.

Good biographies rarely come as short as this. It is hard to compress what needs to be said about any life eventful enough to attract a biographer. There are too many deviations in behaviour, too much inconsistency, especially among politicians who must respond to unpredictable events, to make adequate discussion of a person's life within brief compass readily practicable. Yet T. A. Jenkins has performed this feat for one of the most controversial of British prime ministers, a man accused of repeatedly betraying the principles he espoused and the people who gave him power. What makes Jenkins's account still more remarkable is its clarity. Admittedly his task was made easier by the shelves of books and articles that have been written about Sir Robert Peel. The main events of his life are sufficiently familiar that Jenkins can plunge quickly into analysis without devoting a lot of words to narrative. Whenever he conveys unfamiliar information, it is to explain passages in Peel's life when he was not at the centre of attention, or points in his career that remain puzzling.

Jenkins makes his general theme clear from the start. He roots Peel's attitude toward government in his early ministerial experience, before the enactment in 1832 of the Great Reform Bill. Ministers then conceived of themselves as servants of the Crown rather than of their parliamentary supporters, and were accordingly expected to promote the welfare of the whole country rather than the sectoral interests of those supporters. After 1832, however, "the enhanced authority of parliament, resulting from the Great Reform Act, meant that in practice ministers depended on support from an organised political party" (3). Peel's inability to adjust to this change led to the destruction of his ministry when he repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. Yet the policy of free trade that underlay Peel's action quickly established itself as the national consensus.

In the general election of 1841, the voters, for the first time, rejected an incumbent ministry favoured by the Crown and called for its replacement by the opposition, then formed by the Conservatives under Peel. Without minimising the contribution of Peel's leadership to the Conservative victory, Jenkins points out how much the outcome owed to the owners of land and the cause of agricultural protection. Breaking down the Conservative vote by location, size of constituency, and occupation of supporters, Jenkins shows that the Conservative party derived its parliamentary majority primarily from county seats and small boroughs. The middle-class support that it secured, while vital to its margin of victory, came from bankers, merchants, lawyers, and other professionals, not from industrial areas. Jenkins concludes that the outcome of the 1841 election was "a tribute to the resilience of the landowning élite" (91). During the election, moreover, the issue of agricultural protection, in particular of maintaining the Corn Laws, not only dominated the county contests but was also of paramount concern in many small- and middle-size boroughs. Here, then, was the issue and the body of support that brought Peel to power.

There was a genuinely conservative side to Peel; his ultimate objective was to secure the safety of cherished national institutions. But he thought that this could best be done "through the pursuit of active and constructive policies, designed to seize the initiative on behalf of those forces committed to the existing social order" (104). Inspired by the example of Pitt the Younger, he also sought to prove to the enlarged electorate that the government was "supremely neutral" in its benevolence, "that it disdained to promote the selfish interests of sectional groups" (108). He proved his point eventually by betraying the expectations of those who brought him to power. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the crowning manifestation of Peel's determination to benefit the whole country. He placed his proposal in the context of a tariff-reducing budget designed...