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SIR ROBERT PEEL'S MEMOIRS.* AMONG the moral characteristics of the late Sir Robert Peel, hiS sensitiveness to the opinion of others, especially of his friends and those who followed. his lead and honoured hinrby their confidence in politics, was unusually delicate.and susceptible ; and this feel- ing, which, stating by nature, had been developed by the sort of regard and homage paid to him during the earlier half of his political career as the selected representative of Protestant prin- ciples and their leading supporter .in the House of Commons, derived an almost morbid- force from the 'circumstances of that career from 1829 to the period of his death. It was his lot twice to break up a great political party of which he had been the trusted head ; twice to carry, by an apparently. instantaneous change of conviction; measures to which he had given a strenuous and con- tinued opposition' and in opposing which he had won the position which he thus turned to the overthrow of his own party. In both cases, the announcement of his change of opinion took by sur- prise all but a few sagacious observers ; • in both cases, he refused to allow the ordinary appeal to the country ; in both cases, he remained in office, to which he had gained access by the belief on the part of the constituencies that he was heartily opposed to the measures he at last proposed as beneficial and necessary., It was no matter of astonishment that, as in one of these 'cases the measures in question involved the most cherished:religious prejudices and in the other the most valued material advantages of the party which he led, the utmost indignation should have been felt and expressed at his conduct. Nor, under the circumstances, can we be surprised that the per-. sons who thought themselves the victims of treachery, and knew themselves to be disappointed and outraged, should not have been very nice in the language they applied to the leader who had de- serted them, or very discriminating in .their estimate of his motives. Upon Sir Robert Peers own mind the result would, seem to bay& been a permanent impression that he was not, pro- perly appreciated—that his..conduct needed a further vindication, than was to be found in his speeches and in the well-known cir- cumstances of the time ; and under this impression he drew up the Memoirs of which the first part is now published. The Memoir comprises the confidential correspondence that passed in the year 1828 between Mr. Peel, then Home Secretary in the Duke of Wellington's Government, and the Lord. Lieute- nant, Chief Secretary, and other members of the Irish Govern- ment, with some memoranda and letters between the Premier and the Home Secretary. The object with which this official corre- spondence is published is to establish three points, on which ob- jection has been taken to Mr. Peel's conduct. It will show, he says in the commentary by which he connects the documents, whether ." it _does not account for the apparent abruptness of the change of counsel, and for the maintenance of that reserve which was apparently unnecessary after the course to be taken had been actually resolved upon." And again—" It will be seen from that evidence, whether there was any disposition on my part to truckle, or to coquet with agitation,. or to shrink from the responsibility of using any legal power which could be rendered available for the repression of disorder in Ireland, or for the control of that dangerous influence which it was sought to establish by means of political confederacies and of an organized excitement of the pub- lic mind." This passage occurs at the commencement of the Memoir. A supplemental statement of the motive to the work is placed at the end ; where the writer, after avowing that, if the charge against him had been that of want of early sagacity and foresight, of adhering with too much pertinacity to a hopeless cause, and so on, he should have found it more difficult to refute it, goes.on to. say—" But the charge preferred by those whose favour and good-will I had forfeited was the opposite of this : it was that I had wiihout any sufficient reason, nay, that I had from pusil- lanimous and unworthy motives, counselled the abandonment of resistance, which it would have been easy as well as wise to continue unabated." The greater part of the Me- moir is devoted to proving that the continuance of resist- ance would have been neither easy nor wise : and 'this- admits of proof convincing enough to the advocates of Catholic Eman- cipation, and, probably. now to many of those who at the time opposed it, but not involving either facts or arguments that were not known as 'well in 1829 as they Can be nowand, as they are stated in the correspondence of the Memoir, thifowing no new light whatever upon the proceedings of the Catholic Aasociation, Memoirs of the light Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bggrt., M.P., 4.e. Pub- lished by the. Trustees of his Papers, Earl Stanhope and The Right Honourable Rdtvard Cardwell. M.P. Part I. The Roman Catholic Question : 1828-'9. Pub- lished by Murray. or the difficulties of the Irish Government. If, indeed, the docu- ments here published are regarded as the pieces justificatives of the speech with which Mr. Peel moved for his Committee, on the 5th of March 1829, and therefore as the formal proofs of the state- ments of that speech, they no doubt have an interest to 'his- torians, and were worth publishing, But they have for the most part no novelty, and no interest for the general reader who is acquainted with that speech. In the same way, we may say of the running commentary, that it contains no arguments; no state- ments of circumstance or opinion, materially different from the arguments and statements of that speech of the 5th March 1829, and other speeches delivered by Mr. Peel on the Catholic question. So far as this Memoir was needed to throw new light upon Mr. Peel's change of opinion, it appears to us to fail ; and the far larger portion of it might have been left in manuscript without any loss to the general student of history. We had forgotten last week, in the few summary remarks we made, how ample and satisfactory was the argument by which Mr. Peel publicly in the House of Commons justified his conduct in reference to the Catholic question ; and the Memoir has, in reference to that speech, simply the interest of rough notes or raw material. In other words, the Memoir assigns no single fact or argument for Mr. Peel's change of mind that was not assigned with greater force in the speech itself.
The case, however, is different in respect to the much smaller portion of the Memoir which explains why, having changed his opinion, Mr. Peel chose to remain in office himself to propose the bill for removing the disabilities of the Catholics ; and why he and the rest of the Cabinet did not make known their intentions till the King's speech at the opening of the session took. the world by surprise. With respect to these points, which in reality are the only points in the least affecting the personal character of Mr. .Peel, the explanation is satisfactory, and though known before in its general tendency, is new in its exact detail. It appears that, from the commencement of the Wellington Ministry, Mr. Peel ecirdially concurred in the liberal basis of its construction in regard to the Catholic question. He points out to his correspondent, Mr. Gregory, the Irish Under Secretary, the utter impossibility of an Ad- ministration founded on the principle of resisting the Catholic claims with an united Cabinet. A month later, we find him discussing with his friend the Bishop of Oxford, in some highly characteristic letters, the steps to be taken by the Government in consequence of Lord John Russell's victory on the Test and Corporation Acts ; and laying down the danger of taking high theoretical ground about the Church in the House of Commons, lest, in being beaten on such ground, the triumph of the adversary should be all the greater, and the Church be overthrown by the avowal beforehand ' of her own advocates. " I do not 1). k," he says, " that it is possible to contend for the abstract position that the true test, or one of the essential tests, of an established church, is the su- perior privilege as to civil rights of its members." With such sentiments, opposition to the Catholic claims could only be an, op- position of policy, of expediency, and therefore thoroughly amenable to circumstances. And when Sir Francis Burdett's mo- tion in favour of the claims was carried by a small majority in the Commons shortly after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, we have Peel imploring the Duke of Wellington to take a course in debate, in the approaching discussion in the Lords, which should not preclude him, who was less deeply committed than himself, " from taking the whole state of Ireland into con- sideration during the recess, with the 'view of adjusting the Catholic question." ' The Duke of Wellington and Lord. Chancellor Lyndhurst so modified their previous tone on this occasion, that, though the resolution moved by Lord Lansdowne was rejected by a majority of 44, Lord Lansdowne was able to say, that " it al- most necessarily followed from their speeches" that they intended to look into the question with a view to its final arrangement. Mr. Peel accompanied his advice with an expression,of his own wish to retire from the Government, in consequence of being in a minority in the House of Commons on the Catholic question ; but Mr. Huskisson's withdrawal or dismissal had taken place in the mean time, followed by the retirement of all the Can.ningites, and Mr. Peel did not choose to desert the Duke under such circum- stances.
Immediately, however, upon the close of the session of 1828, communications took place between the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel ; and the result was a formal memorandum by the latter, in which he embodied his suggestions for the settlement of the Catholic question on the basis of full concession, and accompanied it with a letter to the Duke, in which he argued at length, that the cause would be best served by himself if he resigned his office, and lent a cordial independent support to the Government. The letter and memorandum are dated 1 lth August 1828. The ques- tion is, why this opinion of Mr. Peel and the determination of the Duke of Wellington to act in accordance with it were kept secret for the next six months ; and why, finally, Mr. Peel re- mained in office and brought in the bill, instead of following his
own wishes in going out. The simple fact is, that it was not con-
sistent with either Mr. Peel's or the Duke of Wellington's poli- tical principles to make a Cabinet question of the Catholic claims
in direct opposition to the wishes of the King. Till the King's consent was obtained, the Cabinet could not even bring the ques- tion before him. The Cabinet had been formed on the principle of leaving this an open question, by the King's express wishes; and personally he was vehemently and obstinately opposed to the removal of the disabilities. It was left to the Duke of Wel- lington as Prime Minister to attempt to persuade the King ; and at the close of the year 1828 he had not succeeded. At the beginning of 1829, the Duke of Wellington sought an inter- view with some of the highest authorities of the Church, in the hope that their consent to the concession might render the King more compliant. The heads of the Church were obstinate; and on the very day that their definitive resolution was taken, Mr. Peel, with a devotion that cannot be too highly praised, offered to continue in office with the Duke if it appeared that his resignation would be an insuperable obstacle to success with the King. An elaborate memorandum by Mr. Peel in support of concession was then laid before the King ; and finally the six members of the Cabinet who up to that time had opposed the Catholic claims waited successively upon the King to support the arguments of Mr. Peel's memorandum. These members were the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Bathurst, Mx. God- burn, Mr. Herries, and Mr. Peel ; and to their representations the King yielded his reluctant assent so late as the 17th January. Parliament had been summoned for the 6th of February. It thus appears that no decision was really come to by the Cabinet a long time previous to the meeting of Parliament which could have been communicated to their supporters, and yet that there was only an apparently abrupt change of policy. Secrecy under the circumstances was imperative ; and, whatever we may think of the political principle by which an English Minister is prevented from proposing a measure personally disagreeable to such a sove- reign as George the Fourth, no stain remains upon the character of Mr. Peel from the reserve maintained throughout the autumn of 1828. The circumstances under which he finally resolved not to resign his office can scarcely bejudged otherwise than to his honour even by the most heated and inveterate partisan. Another curious scrap of secret history supplies the last scene of the struggle so far as the King was concerned. The King " had intimated his consent that the Cabinet should consider the whole state of Ireland, and submit their views to his Majesty: his Majesty being by such consent in no degree pledged to the adoption of the views of his Government, even if it should con- cur unanimously in the course to be pursued." Subsequently, the King assented, reluctantly still, to the draught of the Speech from the Throne ; " the import of the terms of which," says Mr. Peel, " though werded with all due reserve and cautious qualifi- cations, no one could doubt." Parliament received the message ; Mr. Peel resigned his seat for Oxford ; and on the 3d of March, as Member for Westbury, gave notice that he would on the 5th call the attention of the House to that part of the Speech from the Throne which related to the state of Ireland and the removal of the civil disabilities under which the Roman Catholics laboured. Up to that time perfect unanimity had prevailed in the Cabinet on the principle and details of the measure, and the Ministers acted under the impression that they had the King's reluctant but complete sanction for their proceedings. But on the evening of the 3d of March, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, and Mr. Peel, were summoned to Windsor for the next morning ; and on their arrival, the King said that he desired to receive from them " a more complete and detailed explanation of the manner in which we proposed to effect the object.' Of course the Oath of Supremacy was to be done away -with, and at this the King stuck. The interview lasted five hours; at the end of which the three Ministers took their leave, having resigned their respective offices. In the evening, however, the King wrote to say that he anticipated so much difficulty in forming another Administration that he could not dispense with their services. Specific authority to proceed with the measures proposed was demanded and given ; and Mr. Peel's motion came on the next evening as if nothing had happened. Afterwards, in giving an account of this proceedin to old Lord Eldon, George the Fourth seems to have exceeded even his usual allowance of lying ; and a more curious illustra- tion of " the first gent. in England" need not be sought than in comparing Peel's exact statement with Lord Eldon's report of the King's story. It is imrssible to deny that we have been disappointed with this Memoir; but that disappointment is itself a high testimony to the admirable ability and honesty of the speech with which it is necessarily brought into comparison : and in the only two points in which Peel's character stood in need of the slightest expiane- tion the Memoir has supplied satisfactorily what was needed. If the bulk of the Peel Papers are of the character of those published in the Memoir, the editors will show more fussiness than sense in deeming it necessary to consult times and seasons for publishing them, or to indulge freely the aristocratic and official taste for suppression. Such papers, let them remember, are a portion of history, and a legacy to a nation, and are not to be kept back to gratify whims or squeamishness.
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