Family.—Birth.—Formation of character.—Education at Harrow and Oxford.—Entry into Parliament.—Line adopted there.—Style of speaking.—Becomes Secretary of Colonies.—Secretary for Ireland.—Language on the Catholic question.—Returned as member for the University of Oxford.—Resigned his post in Ireland.
I.
The family of the Peels belonged to the class of yeomanry, which in England, from the earliest times, was well known and reputed, forming a sort of intermediate link between the gentry and the commonalty, as the gentry formed an intermediate link between the great barons and the burghers or wealthy traders. The yeoman was proud of belonging to the yeomanry, and if you traced back the descent of a yeoman’s family, you found it frequently the issue of the younger branch of some noble or gentle house. For some generations this family of Peel had at its head men of industry and energy, who were respected by their own class, and appeared to be gradually rising into another. The grandfather of the great Sir Robert inherited a small estate of about one hundred pounds a year, called Peel’s Fold, which is still in the family. He received a fair education at a grammar-school, and married (1747) into a gentleman’s family (Haworth, of Lower Darwen).
Beginning life as a farmer of his little property, he undertook, at the time that the cotton manufacture began to develop itself in Lancashire, the business of trader and printer.
The original practice had been to send up the fabricated article to Paris, where it was printed and sent back into this country for sale. Mr. Peel started a calico printing manufactory, first in Lancashire and afterwards in Staffordshire, and his success was the result of the conviction—that “a man could always succeed if he only put his will into the endeavour,” a maxim which he often repeated in his later days, when as a stately old gentleman he walked with a long gold-headed cane, and wore the clothes fashionable for moderate people in the days of Dr. Johnson.
The first Sir Robert Peel was a third son. Enterprising and ambitious, he left his father’s establishment, and became a junior partner in a manufactory carried on at Bury by a relation, Mr. Haworth, and his future father-in-law, Mr. Yates. His industry, his genius, soon gave him the lead in the management of this business, and made it prosperous. By perseverance, talent, economy, and marrying a wealthy heiress—Miss Yates, the daughter of his senior partner—he had amassed a considerable fortune at the age of forty.
He then began to turn his mind to politics, published a pamphlet on the National Debt, made the acquaintance of Mr. Pitt, and got returned to Parliament (1790) for Tamworth, where he had acquired a landed property, which the rest of his life was passed in increasing. He was a Church and King politician in that excitable time, and his firm contributed no less than ten thousand pounds in 1797 to the voluntary subscriptions for the support of the war. So wealthy and loyal a personage was readily created a baronet in 1800.
His celebrated son was born in 1788, two years before he himself entered public life, and on this son he at once fixed his hopes of giving an historical lustre to the name which he had already invested with credit and respectability.