Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

IV.

The subject to which he now particularly devoted himself was the most useful that he could have chosen. We had at the time he entered office a police that was notoriously inefficient; prisons, which by their discipline and condition were calculated rather to increase crime than to act as a corrective to it; and laws which rendered society more criminal than the criminals it punished. One can scarcely, in fact, believe that such men as Lord Eldon and Lord Ellenborough did not think it safe to abolish the punishment of death in the case of privately stealing six shillings in a shop; and it is with a shudder that one reads of fourteen persons being hanged in London in one week in 1820, and of thirty-three executions in the year 1822.

No one reflected whether the punishment was proportionate to the offence; no one considered that the alleged criminal himself was a member of the community, and had as much right to be justly dealt with and protected against wrong as the community itself. Satisfied with the last resort of hanging, the State neglected to take suitable precautions against the committal of those acts which led to hanging; nor did it seem a matter of moment to make places of confinement places of reformation, as well as places of atonement. To Bentham, Romilly, Mackintosh, Basil Montagu, and others, we owe that improvement in the public mind which led finally to an improvement in our laws. Mr. Peel had marked and felt this gradual change of opinion; and almost immediately after he became invested with the functions of the Home Department, he promised to give his most earnest attention to the state of the police, the prisons, and the penal laws; a promise that, in the four or five succeeding years, he honourably fulfilled; thus giving to philanthropic ideas that practical sanction with men of the world, which theories acquire by being taken up by men in power.

It is true that the country was, as I have observed, becoming desirous for the changes that Mr. Peel introduced, and that he never advocated them until, owing to the efforts of others, they had won their way with the good and the thoughtful; but it is likewise true that, so soon as they became practically possible, he took them up with zeal, and carried them against a considerable and, as it was then deemed, respectable opposition, which held fœtid dungeons, decrepid watchmen, and a well-fed gallows to be essential appendages to the British constitution.

During this time also he supported, though not conspicuously, the liberal foreign policy of Mr. Canning, and the liberal commercial policy of Mr. Huskisson. He kept, nevertheless, at the head of his own section in the Ministry, as well by his consistent opposition to the Catholic claims as by his defence of Lord Eldon, whose slowness in the administration of justice and obstinate adherence to antiquated doctrines were frequently the subject of attack. This remarkable man, one of the many emanations of the Johnsonian mind which contrived to make the most narrow-minded prejudices palatable to the most comprehensive intellect, exercised great influence over the King, over the older peers and members of the House of Commons, and over that large mass of uncertains that rallies round a man who entertains no scruples and doubts. Mr. Peel took care, however, not to pass for a mere follower of Lord Eldon, nor a mere bigot of the ultra-Protestant party. In defending and lauding the great judge and lawyer, he said expressly: “The House will remember I have nothing to do on this occasion with the political character of the Lord Chancellor:” and again, in discussing the question of proselytism and education, he not only ridiculed the idea that some extravagant people entertained of making Catholic Ireland Protestant, but stated in so many words, “that he was for educating Catholics and Protestants together under one common system, from which proselytism should be honestly and studiously excluded.” His conduct on this occasion merited particular attention. The great difficulty which he foresaw in passing Catholic emancipation was the hostile feeling between Catholics and Protestants. If that feeling was removed, and a common education secured—the best mode of modifying or removing it—the practical and political objections to Catholic emancipation ceased.

V.

The fact is that even as early as 1821, when he answered a speech from Mr. Plunkett, which he once told me was the finest he ever heard, Mr. Peel felt that the ground on which he had hitherto stood was shifting from under him; that just as it had been impracticable to carry what was called “Catholic emancipation” when he entered public life, so it was becoming more and more impracticable to resist its being carried as time advanced.

Such an impression naturally became stronger and stronger as he saw distinguished converts, from Mr. Wellesley Pole, in 1812, down to Mr. Brownlow, in 1825, going over to his opponents, whereas not a single convert was made to the views he advocated. He might still think that the hope of those who imagined that the Irish Catholics, once admitted to Parliament, would rest satisfied with that triumph, was chimerical: he might still think that the Irish Catholics would, as a matter of course, insist upon equality in all respects with the Protestants: he might still foresee that this equality, the Catholics being the majority, would lead to superiority over the Protestants: he might still believe that the Protestants, accustomed to domination, and supported by property and rank, would not submit tranquilly to numbers: he might contemplate the impossibility of maintaining a Protestant Church establishment, absorbing all the revenue accorded to religious purposes, with a Catholic representation which would feel galled and humiliated by such a preference; and he might also recognise the probability that the English Protestant clergy would take part with the Irish Protestant clergy, and denounce as an atrocious robbery what might be demanded as a simple act of justice: and yet, retaining all his former convictions against the measure he was called upon to agree to, he might feel that prolonged opposition would only serve to protract a useless struggle, and be more likely to increase the evils he foresaw than to prevent them. Such a consideration could not but deeply affect his mind, and breathe over his conduct an air of hesitation and doubt.

It is not surprising, therefore, that any one who reviews his conduct attentively during the five or six years that preceded Lord Liverpool’s retirement should find evident traces of this state of thought. On one occasion he says: “No result of this debate can give me unqualified satisfaction.” On another: “If I were perfectly satisfied that concession would lead to perfect peace and harmony, if I thought it would put an end to animosities, the existence of which all must lament, I would not oppose the measure on a mere theory of the constitution.” Just previous to the Duke of York’s celebrated declaration that, “whatever might be his situation in life, so help him God he should oppose the grant of political power to Roman Catholics,” Peel says, on the third reading of the Catholic Relief Bill, which had been carried in the House of Commons by a majority of twenty-one, that he should record, perhaps for the last time, his vote against the concessions that it granted.

This phrase, “for the last time,” much commented on at the time, might have alluded to the possibility of the measure then under discussion being carried; and it was generally believed that Mr. Peel meditated at this time quitting office, and even Parliament, in order not to prevent Lord Liverpool from dealing with a matter on which his own opinions differed from those to which he thought it likely that the Government would have to listen.