REJECTION OF MR. PEEL AT OXFORD.
The University of Oxford had elected Mr. Peel as a champion to the Protestant cause; and when his mind underwent the change it manifested on the subject of Catholic emancipation, he could not in common decency or honesty retain his seat as member for that University. Under these circumstances he addressed a letter to the vice-chancellor, announcing his new views of policy by which he was to be guided, acknowledging that his resistance to the Catholic claims had been one main ground of his election by the University, and tendering his resignation. Mr. Peel, however, was proposed as a candidate at the new election, trusting that he might skill sit as the representative for Oxford in parliament. But in this he was disappointed. He had for an opponent Sir Robert Harry Inglis; and though the united influence of the Whigs was pushed to its utmost limit in behalf of the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Inglis, who was supported by the dignitaries of the church, and by the parochial clergy, was elected. Mr. Peel was subsequently returned for the borough of Westbury; and in this character he brought forward those measures which for twenty years he had repudiated as dangerous and ruinous to the best interests of the country, and which even now he was convinced were pregnant with danger to the constitution.