The spokesman of the angry Tories was one of whom much was to be heard in coming years. Benjamin Disraeli had done nothing as yet to redeem the apparently hopeless failure of his maiden speech in 1837. Outwardly, a remarkable figure enough, in a Parliamentary sense he was no more than obscure when he rose from his seat on the Government benches to lead the first attack on the new policy. He was bitter, he was personal, but he was adroitly opportune; and his fame as a statesman dates from that day.
G. F. Watts, R.A.] [In the National
Portrait Gallery.
THE SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY,
1801–1885.
The Rt. Hon. Anthony Ashley-Cooper entered Parliament, as M.P. for Woodstock, in 1826. He was then known as Lord Ashley. In 1842 he secured the exclusion of women and children from mines, and in 1844 the passing of the Ten Hours Bill. He succeeded to the Earldom in 1851. His life was devoted to practical philanthropy.
The immediate result was a split—a secession. The House of Commons ratified Peel’s policy by a majority of ninety-seven, but Disraeli himself has put on record the feelings which animated Peel’s ancient supporters. |Defeat and Resignation of the Government.| “Vengeance had succeeded in most breasts to the more sanguine sentiment: the field was lost, but at any rate there should be retribution for those who had betrayed it.”
The opportunity for vengeance was not long delayed. The Corn Bill left the House of Commons on May 15. On June 25 it passed the third reading in the House of Lords, and the most momentous measure of Queen Victoria’s reign awaited only the Royal Assent to complete it. On that very night the House of Commons were to divide on one of those Bills conferring extraordinary powers on the Executive in Ireland which it has been the fate of successive Governments to introduce—Coercion Bills, as they are called for short. The Protectionists perceived what lay in their power: if they threw their weight in with the regular Opposition and O’Connell’s Irish Catholics, they could defeat their lost leader. About eighty of them did so: the rest stayed away and Ministers were left in a minority of seventy-three.
Peel resigned: “he had lost a party but won a nation.” He never returned to office, but, though he did not live to see it, the principles for which he fought and fell became those of the Conservative party.
