1

The summer of 1845 was one of the wettest for many years. A poor harvest was inevitable, and at the end of September an even worse disaster loomed up. A deadly potato disease, which had appeared in America the previous year and moved to Europe, reached southern England, then Ireland. This was serious enough for England, but in Ireland, where half the eight million inhabitants lived exclusively on potatoes because they could not afford bread, it was a complete catastrophe. Peel was horrified at the sinister prospect which he saw. Given the circumstances of the time, it is doubtful whether anything could have prevented the great majority of the million deaths which ultimately resulted. The root of the trouble was the poverty of the Irish peasants, so great that, even if bread had been made as cheap as it could be by complete removal of import duties on grain, it would still have been far beyond their purchasing power. The only solution was state charity, outdoor relief on a huge scale, and, apart from the ideological difficulties which this raised with any government in those days, the sheer physical task of distribution would probably have been insuperable in a country of bogs and mountains, bad roads and no railways.

Although Peel took some action on these lines – for example, the purchase of American maize, ‘Peel’s brimstone’, which was retailed at a penny a pound – his principal remedy was to open the ports to duty-free foreign and colonial grain. Despite all that has been written in explanation and defence of his policy, it remains something of a puzzle why he thought that this could help in the immediate crisis. The mass of the Irish peasantry lived so far below the bread level that the relatively slight fall in the price, which might be expected to follow, could not have made bread a substitute for potatoes. Moreover, if Peel was convinced that total repeal was essential at once as an emergency measure, why did he bring forward a Bill which enacted not immediate abolition but the gradual tapering off of import duties over a period of three years? Why did he not do what several members of his Cabinet urged – suspend the Corn Laws temporarily by Order in Council on grounds of emergency? There was provision under the existing Act for just such a step, and he would probably not only have kept his Cabinet united but also have retained the support of the party. Peel himself argued that it would be disingenuous to do this, because he did not believe that Parliament would ever consent to reimpose the duties on grain when they had once been suspended. But no one asked Peel to guarantee that the duties would be reimposed. ‘Suspend the Corn Laws,’ said Lord John Manners, ‘open the ports, and leave it to the good sense of the English people to decide whether they should be closed again.’

The truth was that Peel had long been convinced on quite other grounds that the Corn Laws ought to be repealed. He had already decided to come forward at some suitable later date as an avowed free trader. For him, to continue to use the language of protectionism and talk of the suspension of the Corn Laws as a disagreeable temporary expedient, was an intolerable psychological strain. He could not pretend that he was in favour of closing the ports again as soon as the emergency was over. Yet at the same time he could not bring himself to base his case on the full economic arguments for free trade, for, if he did this, he was open to the personal charge of betraying his party and his pledges. It was only on grounds of emergency that he could justify his own action in personally piloting the repeal through the House. If the case was one to be considered in due course by ‘the good sense of the English people’, then there was an overwhelming argument for leaving the initiative with – indeed, forcing it upon – Russell, who had belatedly and unexpectedly announced his conversion to free trade in the middle of the crisis.

After a number of Cabinet meetings held in November, Peel resigned, unable to persuade the Duke of Buccleuch and, more important, Stanley to acquiesce in repeal. The Queen sent for Russell, who, after taking six days to make up his mind, accepted the commission, and then within forty-eight hours resigned it on a trumped-up excuse. His real reason was evidently the division in his own ranks. Peel regarded Russell’s conduct with contempt. He did not attempt to dissuade him from resigning. On the contrary he accepted the Queen’s commission with an alacrity which suggests that he was delighted at the prospect. ‘I want,’ he told her, ‘no consultation, no time for reflection. I will be your Minister, happen what may. I will do without a colleague rather than leave you in this extremity.’ The Queen noted that she had never seen him so excited and determined. Peel resumed office with the support of all his old Cabinet, except Buccleuch and Stanley, the latter being succeeded at the Colonial Office by Gladstone. Parliament was due to meet in a month, and Peel decided to bring forward the repeal of the Corn Laws at the first opportunity.

Disraeli was out of England when these events occurred, and he does not seem to have discerned their significance. In a letter written to Palmerston from Paris on December 14 about the King’s attitude to the apparent imminence of Palmerston reassuming the Foreign Office, he observes casually ‘… if Parliament be summoned speedily, I do not think I shall be tempted to quit this agreeable residence.’ Three days later, writing to Lord John Manners, he observed that Guizot had said that ‘if it be a real famine, Sir Robert will be a great man’, and went on to add his own comment,

Disraeli stayed on in Paris until January 16, less than a week before Parliament opened. He just missed Smythe, who arrived that very day on his return from a characteristic tour of the Continent, devoted largely to amorous intrigues. Young England was now little more than a dream. Maynooth had finally killed it and, though Smythe, like Manners, was, and remained always, deeply devoted to Disraeli, he was weak and Lord Strangford was persistent. The reshuffle of the Cabinet in December led to Aberdeen offering him the Under-secretaryship for Foreign Affairs.1 He felt that, unless he was to break with his father irrevocably, he could not refuse. He wrote to Disraeli:

Hotel Bristol       
December2 16, 1846

Caro Dis

… Everything conspires to make you think me a blackguard – first of all my never writing – and Aberdeen’s offer to my father, which I find in a letter here – the quadruplicate of one sent on the ninth of Jany to Venice, Florence, Rome.

I had never written to you because I had too much to say – and all maudlin and mawkish. The … [illegible, but evidently the name of some woman] followed me to Paris as I predicted, and here I got helplessly and damnably entangled with another woman who gave me mortification and heart burning enough – all which I wrote in a book which will now never see the light … at Venice I had other affairs of debauch into which I flung myself for compensation which turned out not over much; and for 3 weeks had the satisfaction of thinking the Whigs in … I left Venice on the 7th and here I find this letter from my father.

I have not answered yet but as after reflection I mean to accept, and as I fear us being in opposite camps may lead to a severance of sympathy – if not of friendship – I cannot accept without first acknowledging all I owe to you and thanking you …

A prudent man would be silent on the event of a passage in our lives which must irk and hurt … but I am not prudent and never shall forget how you found me low abused in my own esteem and that of others, morbidly debating my own powers, and how you made a man of me and set me on my legs at Manchester, and have ever been to me the kindliest and gentlest of councillors.

I am sorry to pain you – as I know I shall by thus becoming a Peelite – why I do so there are many reasons – but my object in writing this letter is only to let you know before I answer, what course I take: and to assure you that whatever be your feelings towards me, I shall ever feel to you as to a man of genius who succoured and solaced and strengthened me when I was deserted even by myself.

Your affectionate friend    

George Smythe3        

Disraeli’s answer is unknown, but we may be sure that, however saddened at the defection, if such it can be called, of Coningsby himself, he said nothing harsh. He knew well enough the strain under which his younger friend laboured. Certainly their friendship remained unimpaired, even though their paths diverged and they saw less of each other. The last letter surviving from Smythe among Disraeli’s papers is dated July 2, 1852. In it he wrote,

The fact that Peel’s Cabinet intended to repeal the Corn Laws was well known before Parliament met on January 22 and steps had already been taken by a body known as the Anti-League to organize opposition. This, which had been founded in 1843, out of alarm at the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League and uneasiness at some of Peel’s actions, was a federation of local county protectionist societies under a Central Agricultural Protection Society presided over by the Duke of Richmond.5 It had considerable funds and used its influence at county meetings to secure declarations from Tory MPs and force them to show their hands in favour of the Corn Laws before Parliament met. A number of influential county members belonged, William Miles (Somerset), G. J. Heathcote (Rutland), Charles Newdegate (Warwickshire), Sir John Tyrell (Essex), and the only link with Young England, Augustus Stafford O’Brien (Northamptonshire). It is probably true to say that the parliamentary organization of the protectionist party was largely made possible by the Anti-League and that without some such basis Disraeli and Bentinck could never have carried on such a long struggle against the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Disraeli had no previous connexion with the agriculturists, unless we go back to the days of his intrigue with Chandos and Lyndhurst in 1836. On the contrary he and Young England tended to laugh at the more fanatical country gentlemen like Vyvyan, of whom Smythe was fond of relating ludicrous stories. Indeed, there is no evidence that Disraeli had concerted any plans with anyone when he walked into the House on January 22 – a day destined to be one of the most fateful in his life. But we cannot doubt that he had pondered deeply and that he came not unprepared.

What followed has often been told. Peel opened with a long and tedious speech full of details, not only about corn duties but about the price of lard and salt beef and the importation of foreign cattle, then proceeding to an account of the Cabinet meetings in November and December so involved that scarcely anyone could follow it, ending on a defiant note to the effect that he would be minister by no servile tenure and that it was not easy to ‘insure the united action of an ancient monarchy, a proud aristocracy, and a reformed House of Commons’. He was received in dead silence by his party. Then came Russell with an even less intelligible speech, explaining – and it needed some explanation – his own curious conduct during the crisis, and reading copious extracts from dull documents in that thin nasal drawl which made him such an unattractive speaker. At the end of all this dreary recital the House was bored and depressed. It was generally felt that the issues of principle would be postponed for a later debate, and the impression might well have been given to the country at large that little real opposition existed to the repeal of the Corn Laws.

‘The opportune in a popular assembly’, wrote Disraeli, ‘has sometimes more success than the weightiest efforts of research and reason’. He was determined not to let Peel get away with this success on the first night. He knew that this question, to a far greater extent than any of the previous subjects on which he had baited Peel, was capable of causing a real rebellion in the Tory ranks. He jumped to his feet and delivered one of the most brilliant of all the brilliant attacks which he had launched and was to launch against Peel.

It was a wonderful speech, and those who take the trouble to read it in Hansard7 will not be bored by a single sentence; nor will they doubt that, however much Disraeli might talk of ‘the opportune’, he had most carefully prepared what he was going to say. The finest orator in the world could not have delivered all this impromptu: the parallel with the great fleet sent out by the late Sultan under the command of an admiral who steered it straight to the enemy port declaring, ‘the only reason I had for accepting the command was that I might terminate the contest by betraying my master’; the image of protection as a baby whose brains had been dashed out by its nurse, ‘a person of very orderly demeanour too, not given to drink, and never showing any emotion, except of late, when kicking against protection’; the denunciation of Peel as ‘no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. Certainly both are disciples of progress. Perhaps both may get a good place. But how far the original momentum is indebted to their powers, and how far their guiding prudence applies the lash or regulates the reins, it is not necessary for me to notice.’

It was crude knockabout stuff in places, and much of it was unfair. Disraeli was ill advised, for example, to say that ‘even’ Peel’s ‘mouldy potatoes’ and the ‘reports of his vagrant professors’ had failed him. But it was extremely effective. Disraeli was creating an image of Peel as a slightly pompous, priggish mediocrity who was betraying the party by which he had risen. There was just enough reality in it to appeal to the angry back benchers who felt that they were being double-crossed. They applauded with ever louder cheers each repetition – and Disraeli was a great believer in repetition – of this congenial theme. He ended with a passionate plea:

By the time he sat down, amidst cheers which lasted for several minutes, it was clear that the case for protection was not going to go by default. There would be a battle and it was by no means certain that Peel would win.

2

Among those who on this memorable occasion surveyed Peel from the Tory back benches with a baleful eye was a person whose important part in future events could not easily have been guessed at this time. Lord George Bentinck, second son of the 4th Duke of Portland, had been a Member of Parliament for eighteen years, and, for three years before that, private secretary to Canning, who was his uncle by marriage. But he seldom spoke: indeed, he remained wholly silent for his first eight years as a MP. Preferring to use Parliament, so Disraeli says, ‘rather as a club than a senate … he might have been observed on more than one occasion entering the House at a late hour, clad in a white greatcoat which softened but did not conceal the scarlet hunting coat’. In politics he had been a Canningite Tory, moving to the Whig side when Wellington took office and supporting Grey’s Reform Bill. In 1834 he followed Stanley and Graham into semi-opposition, and by 1841 had become like them an ardent supporter of Peel. But in spite of these changes Disraeli is probably right to describe him as being at heart a Whig of 1688, favourable to toleration and by no means averse to popular suffrage, a supporter of the Church but an enemy of clericalism, a firm believer in the importance of the territorial aristocracy, and an opponent of anything that could be construed as monarchical pretension.

Although Bentinck had taken so small a part in politics, he was far from being an unknown person. On the contrary he was one of the most celebrated figures on the turf, his racing stable was famous and his successes were numerous. Crucifix, his best-known filly, won in a single year, 1840, the Two Thousand Guineas, the One Thousand Guineas, and the Oaks. Moreover, he possessed great prestige among all reputable racing men because of his efforts to eliminate the malpractices which marred racing at that time. His culminating success was the exposure of the great Running Rein fraud when in the 1844 Derby a four-year-old, really called Maccabeus, was passed off as a three-year-old and won the race. The worlds of sport and politics overlapped far more then than now, and Bentinck’s forceful personality was respected by many Members of Parliament for non-Parliamentary reasons.

Bentinck had a straightforward, somewhat rigid cast of mind. He saw life in black and white. The conduct of others was to him either honourable, in which case he would respect it even if he disagreed, or it was not, in which case his attack would be truly ferocious. He was a man of violent temper and extreme prejudice, and he pursued his enemies with unrelenting virulence. The House of Commons was none too squeamish in those days, but the invective uttered and charges levelled by Bentinck were destined to excite disapprobation on more than one occasion. All this, however, lay in the future. At the beginning of 1846 only a few intimate friends knew that to Bentinck his former hero, Peel, had now become no better than one of the sharpers, crooks and defaulters whose villainies he had exposed on the turf. As Bentinck himself is supposed to have said, ‘I keep horses in three counties, and they tell me that I shall save fifteen hundred a year by free trade. I don’t care for that: what I cannot bear is being sold.’

Bentinck had never, apparently, even spoken to Disraeli before 1846. Ten years earlier, when Lyndhurst tried to persuade him to accept Disraeli as a parliamentary colleague, he would not even consider the idea.8 Nor is it likely that Disraeli’s mocking attacks on Peel in 1844 and 1845 pleased Bentinck at that time. Until the last moment he remained a loyal admirer of the Prime Minister. But events now brought him into close alliance with Disraeli. Conscious of his own inexperience as a speaker, he had actually contemplated briefing one of the legal members of Parliament to put his case for him, but he saw at once that Disraeli’s mastery of the art of debate would solve this problem. Inevitably he could not at once become a personal friend. His first letter, on March 31, is headed ‘My dear Sir’ and ends ‘Very sincerely yours’. In the middle of June, when their combined efforts were about to oust Peel, he becomes slightly less formal – ‘My dear Disraeli’ and ‘Always yours most sincerely’. But it is not until December that we find ‘My dear D.’ and ‘Yours ever’; which are as intimate a mode of superscription and signature as we find from any of Disraeli’s close friends – save for one or two exceptions like George Smythe. Their friendship, once cemented, remained unimpaired until the end. Bentinck quarrelled with many people, but never with Disraeli; and no one can doubt that Disraeli’s devotion to Bentinck was genuine and sincere.

Disraeli’s account of their relations and of the battle over the Corn Laws is given in his famous Lord George Bentinck published in December 1851. It is a most remarkable book, extremely readable, and full of often-quoted comments and descriptions. Documents have been subsequently published which show some of Disraeli’s conjectures, particularly about the Cabinet crises of autumn 1845, to be incorrect, but as a vivid story of one of the great parliamentary dramas in our history it is unsurpassed. It is, moreover, extraordinarily detached. The portrait of Peel, who had died in 1850, is penetrating, not at all unsympathetic, and in many respects just. Oddly enough, as with the heroes of the novels, it is Lord George himself who fails to come to life. Disraeli depicts him as too much of a paragon, exaggerates his ability and statesmanship, and altogether underplays his own personal role, appearing merely from time to time as ‘a friend who sate by Lord George Bentinck’.

This obvious distortion has caused some critics to go to the other extreme and maintain that Bentinck was a mere puppet whom Disraeli manipulated. That picture, too, is incorrect. Bentinck leaned much on Disraeli for advice and aid, but he was in no sense a puppet. Nor did he lack ability. It is true that he was not a good speaker, and his habit of never eating till after he had spoken, which was frequently at a late hour of night, did not help him, for he was often weak and exhausted before he began. But he had a great capacity for hard work and a wonderful head for figures. He used scarcely any notes. It was all very well for Monckton Milnes to observe that Bentinck ‘had a marvellous memory but so had the learned pig’, or for others to attribute his arithmetical skill to long experience in speedy calculation of the odds. The fact remains that a memory for statistics and the gift of quick calculation were considerable assets in these debates.

The adherence of a man like Bentinck to the protectionist cause was a notable asset. The country gentlemen of old England might applaud Disraeli, but they would not at this stage have followed him. Bentinck, younger son of a duke, wealthy in his own right, King of the Turf, grandson of one Prime Minister, nephew of another, was a very different proposition. He was the sort of man whom people instinctively regarded as a leader. It is often said that Disraeli overthrew Peel, and in a sense it is true. But it is very doubtful whether even he could have managed without Bentinck. Certainly he would have been the last person to claim otherwise.

Bentinck hitherto had been no more involved than Disraeli with the Agricultural Protection Society, or ‘Anti-League’, but both men were quick to see its value as an organization on which to base a third parliamentary party. The task was clearly going to be formidable. Nearly every man of proved parliamentary ability on the Conservative side was a Peelite, except Stanley. But he was a peer, and his attitude to the other protectionists was sceptical. He saw a lack among them, he said, of ‘public men of public character and official habits, in the House of Commons to carry on a government’.9  He evidently intended to see what they were going to do for themselves before he committed himself.

The Protection Society proved its value at this juncture. The managers of its central council invited all MPs who sympathized with the cause, whether members of the society or not, to attend a meeting. Lord George Bentinck’s attitude was made public for the first time on this occasion. He pressed strongly for the creation of a third party with its own management and whips, and he succeeded in rallying the doubters. Plans were made to organize the coming debate, and a programme of action was drawn up. Already the Protection Society had exerted its moral influence on certain MPs who, though convinced of the necessity to repeal the Corn Laws, were persuaded by the society that they could not honourably retain their seats, but must either retire or submit themselves for re-election. Accordingly a number of by-elections pended. It was therefore important to fight a prolonged battle on Peel’s motion to go into committee to consider the Corn Laws: public opinion would be heartened by signs of real resistance; and the country party might be strengthened by new recruits if the by-elections went well.

The debate began on February 9. The dissident Tories proved to be much more formidable than the Government expected. A wrecking amendment was proposed by Sir Philip Miles, a member of the Protectionist Society, and seconded by another, Sir William Heathcote. The debate was kept going for no less than twelve parliamentary nights. Disraeli spoke on the eighth (February 27), and his speech was of a more thoughtful, or as he would have said, ‘philosophic’, nature than his previous efforts. It throws light on his political ideas at this time, and is also notable for the first use of the expression ‘the school of Manchester’ in reference to Cobden, Bright and their allies – a phrase which became part of the English language. Disraeli rested the case for the Corn Laws openly on the argument that of the two great branches of industry it was essential to give to the agricultural a preponderance compared with the manufacturing. England had a territorial constitution. It was upon the land that there fell ‘the revenues of the Church, the administration of justice and the estate of the poor’. The ‘territorial constitution’ was important not because it pampered the proprietor but because it was ‘the only security for self-government; and more than that the only barrier to that system of centralization which has taken root and enslaved the energies of surrounding nations’. Cobden, he declared, wanted the repeal of the Corn Laws in order to transfer power from the landed class to the manufacturers.

The debate was wound up by Bentinck at the end of no less than three parliamentary weeks. He rose, in Disraeli’s words, ‘long past the noon of night’, having consumed nothing during the whole day except some dry toast for breakfast, but he proceeded to address the House at immense length in a speech packed with complicated statistics.

We may well surmise that his audience felt, not so much the ‘astonishment’ which Disraeli claims, as exhaustion, at the recital of his interminable figures. But his final observations must have made them sit up, however weary. For Bentinck, in this respect a true eighteenth-century Whig, had no special respect for the House of Hanover, still less for the German princelings who had married into it. Prince Albert, a keen Peelite and enthusiastic free trader, had appeared on the first night of the debate to listen to Sir Robert. Bentinck did not let this gesture go unnoticed. He proceeded to censure the Prince in what must surely be one of the longest sentences in Hansard.11

… If so humble an individual as myself might be permitted to whisper a word in the ear of that illustrious and royal personage, who as he stands nearest, so is he justly dearest, to her who sits upon the throne, I would take leave to say that I cannot but think he listened to ill advice when on the first night of this great discussion he allowed himself to be seduced by the first minister of the crown to come down to this house to usher in, to give éclat, and as it were by reflexion from the Queen, to give semblance of the personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or for evil, a great majority of the landed aristocracy of England, of Scotland and of Ireland imagine fraught with deep injury if not ruin to them – a measure which, not confined in its operation to this great class, is calculated to grind down countless smaller interests engaged in the domestic trades and interests of the empire, transferring the profits of all these interests – English, Scotch, Irish, and Colonial – great and small alike, from Englishmen, from Scotchmen, and from Irishmen, to Americans, to Frenchmen, to Russians, to Poles, to Prussians, and to Germans.

This was strong language. The hostility of the Crown was to be one of the difficulties under which the protectionists – Disraeli not least among them – had to labour for many years after the crisis of 1846, and the attitude of Bentinck may well be a part of the explanation. He ended by declaring that the ‘proud aristocracy’ to which he and his friends belonged ‘never have been guilty and never can be guilty of double-dealing with the farmers of England, – of swindling our opponents, deceiving our friends, or betraying our constituents’.

The division was at last taken, and the protectionist amendment was beaten by only 97 votes in a House of 581 members present. But the Government won, thanks to the help of 227 Whigs and Radicals. Only 112 Tories voted for repeal. No less than 242 of Peel’s former supporters voted on the side of Bentinck.

Peel had clearly never expected such a rebellion when in December he originally undertook to remove the corn duties.12 To be outnumbered by more than two to one in his own party was a serious matter, however good a face he put on it. His plight was the more perilous since his 112 supporters were by no means all convinced of the actual merits of his policy. A substantial number voted for him solely from personal loyalty and a desire to keep him in office. In these circumstances the hopes of the protectionists began to rise. If they could prolong the battle, there was always a chance that they might bring down the Government on some other issue before the Corn Law Bill could be enacted. With a new government, new loyalties and pressures would arise. By-elections were going in favour of protectionists, and their prospects were improving. Moreover, the procedure adopted by Peel gave a wide scope for procrastination and obstruction. The motion which he carried on February 27 was simply to go into committee of the whole House to consider the Corn Laws. Then it would be for the Government to propose resolutions upon which a subsequent Bill or Bills would be founded. There would be votes on the resolutions, votes on every stage of the Bills. Then there was the House of Lords. Bentinck and Disraeli plunged into the struggle with enthusiasm.

It is hard to overstate the bitterness and fury which Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws had provoked. Home Rule in 1886 and Munich in 1938 are the nearest parallels. Friendships were sundered, families divided, and the feuds of politics carried into private life to a degree quite unusual in British history. The Duke of Newcastle severed all relations with his Peelite son, Lord Lincoln, used his territorial influence to defeat Lincoln’s election for the county of Nottingham, and was only reconciled years later on his death-bed. Sidney Herbert, meeting his oldest and closest friend, Lord Malmesbury, at a party at Lady Palmerston’s told him that his conduct in leaving Peel was not worthy of a gentleman. Months after the event passions still raged. ‘Ma’am it’s a damned dishonest act,’ cried the ill and ageing Melbourne to the Queen at dinner at Windsor Castle. And in November Bentinck reporting a scandal about Smythe wrote with relish to Disraeli:

These violent feelings were hardly surprising. Whatever the justification for Peel’s decision, he was executing to all appearances a complete volte-face. The cry of betrayal was bound to be raised, and a certain unctuousness in the Prime Minister’s demeanour was not likely to diminish it.

It would be tedious to detail every stage of the contest. No new arguments emerged. Everything that could be said on both sides had been said. It was a battle not of persuasion but of tactics, manoeuvre and parliamentary procedure, and in this field where he was normally a master Peel made what turned out to be a surprising error. With some justice he decided that the agrarian outrages provoked by the starvation conditions of Ireland must be met by a ‘coercion act’, ie a measure to suspend habeas corpus, and to introduce military tribunals and a curfew. Had Peel brought this Bill forward at the very beginning of the session, he would probably have carried it without difficulty, for Parliament would usually support a measure restoring law and order in a crisis. But members required to be convinced that there really was a crisis, or at least that the Government believed that there was. Yet the Bill was not introduced until February 24, and then in the House of Lords with no apparent sense of haste or urgency. It was not until March 30 – and after the second reading of the Corn Law Bill – that the Irish Coercion Bill was put down for its first reading in the lower House.

The Bill had the support of all parties in the House of Lords, and, as the Tories were in general readier than the Whigs to subordinate constitutional niceties to the preservation of order, it seemed likely to pass in the lower House despite Irish and Radical hostility. When the protectionists met to discuss tactics Disraeli alone urged them to pause before voting for the measure. Bentinck did not agree. He and most of his followers supported the first reading on May 1. Disraeli abstained.

The Government was in an uncomfortable position from March 30 onwards. On the Corn Law question they had been able to rely on the Whigs, Liberals and Irish, but the Irish Bill produced an entirely different and basically unstable balance of power. The protectionists, it was true, supported Peel for the time being on coercion, but grudgingly and conditionally: they could not be relied upon. As for the Whigs, some were for it, some were against it. The Irish, O’Connell’s Tail as men still called them, were, of course, its relentless opponents. Bentinck was delighted at the sight of these complicated cross-currents.

‘For God’s sake get quite right before you venture out,’ he wrote on March 31 to Disraeli, who was ill, ‘as we shall want you after Easter in earnest – just now you are not wanted and the TAIL appear to be doing our work to admiration …’ And he ended with a fine mixture of metaphors. ‘We have now fairly set them [the Government] and the Tail by the ears.’14

Those who are interested in the details of the parliamentary warfare which raged until Peel’s fall should consult Lord George Bentinck, where the story is told with inimitable verve. There is, however, one episode not mentioned in that book, which deserves some reference. It occurred during the debate on the third reading of the Corn Law Bill on May 15. Disraeli spoke for three hours, and the last twenty minutes were packed with wit and invective in his best style. He described how the Peelites, like the Saxons confronting Charlemagne, ‘were converted in battalions and baptised in platoons’. He acquitted Peel of any profound or long-meditated plot. On the contrary, Peel merely picked up ideas from others as he went along. ‘His life has been a great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of other’s intellect … there is no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale.’ Disraeli then gave his famous excursus, too long to quote, upon ‘Popkins’s plan’, and he ended with a fine rhetorical flourish.

I know Sir that we appeal to a people debauched by public gambling, stimulated by an inefficient and short-sighted Minister. I know that the public mind is polluted by economic fancies – a depraved desire that the rich may become richer without the interference of industry and toil. I know Sir that all confidence in public men is lost. But Sir I have faith in the primitive and enduring elements of the English character. It may be vain now in the midnight of their intoxication to tell them that there will will be an awakening of bitterness … But the dark and inevitable hour will arrive …

The people would then ‘recur to those principles which made England great’. They would remember those who were not afraid ‘to struggle for the “good old cause” – the cause with which are associated principles the most popular, sentiments the most entirely national, the cause of labour, the cause of the people, the cause of England’.15

Disraeli sat down to an ovation such as he had never received before. With the applause of the gentlemen of England thundering in his ears he could indeed feel that he had come a long way since his fruitless efforts on the hustings at High Wycombe. But the evening did not quite end as it had begun.

Hitherto Peel had made little effort to answer Disraeli’s onslaughts, not because he felt that they were beneath notice but because he did not know what to say. He had never in his long parliamentary career encountered an enemy quite like this. Years after Disraeli’s death Morley asked Gladstone, a witness not biased in Disraeli’s favour, whether the latter’s famous philippics were really as effective as people claimed. ‘Mr. G.’, he records, ‘said Disraeli’s performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of “righteous dulness”.’16

But on this occasion, whether maddened by his tormentor’s malicious wit or infuriated at the thought of this shady adventurer discoursing on ‘the primitive and enduring elements of the English character’, Peel attempted a personal riposte. Why, he asked, if Disraeli really believed his whole life to be one of political larceny, was he ‘ready as I think he was, to unite his fortunes with mine in office’?17

This allusion to Disraeli’s letter in 1841 was, perhaps, not much of a retort. Certainly Disraeli could have dealt with it either by a full explanation or, better still, by ignoring it. But he was foolish enough to do neither, and instead made a categorical denial of ever having sought office. Rising after Peel and asking to be allowed to make a personal statement, he began by saying, incorrectly, that Peel had accused him of ‘envenomed opposition’ occasioned by ‘being disappointed of office’. There would, he went on, have been nothing at all dishonourable if he had solicited office. He then declared with what can only be described as reckless mendacity:

Peel replied quite correctly that he had not suggested disappointment in office as the reason for Disraeli’s opposition, but repeated that he still remained surprised that Disraeli had been willing to join him in 1841. He significantly ignored Disraeli’s denial.

It is inconceivable that Disraeli had forgotten what he had written to Peel. Nor is it plausible to suggest, as Miss Ramsay does in her life of Peel,19 that he knew his man and reckoned on Peel being too gentlemanly to produce the letter. It is true that Disraeli knew of Peel’s refusal to read out a damaging letter from Joseph Hume in 1830 in somewhat similar circumstances, but no one would have dared, in the light of cool reason, to gamble upon a repetition; even though, as events turned out, the gamble would have come off. Disraeli had indeed denied asking for office once before – to his constituents at Shrewsbury in 1844. He had not been contradicted then, but that was a different matter from confronting in person the very minister to whom he had written an almost abject letter of solicitation. The most likely explanation is panic, rare though such lapses were in Disraeli’s life. He possibly knew that in some circles his reputation was none too good. He may well have been flustered, and he probably blurted out his unconvincing denial without fully considering the risk. He certainly asked for trouble, by not only denying that he ever solicited office, but also, and equally untruthfully, that he had ever asked for a favour. Had he forgotten the applications that he made to Graham and Stanley for his brother? It is unlikely that they had.

Peel did not read out Disraeli’s letter, but there is no truth in the story apparently believed by Buckle that he was unable to find it. Goldwin Smith in his reminiscences delares that he had first-hand information on this point from Lord Lincoln, who had walked with Peel to the House in the morning and actually saw the letter in Peel’s dispatch-case.20 Why, then, did he miss such a splendid opportunity? We will never know for certain. Perhaps Peel, who had the hypersensitivity on points of honour of a man only half belonging to the patrician world, refrained because it would be unfair to read out a personal communication.21 If so, it is to his credit. One cannot easily imagine Palmerston or Russell or Stanley showing a similar delicacy. Disraeli was lucky, but the general impression of his conduct seems to have been adverse. No doubt much was said in the Lobbies and the Carlton that has not survived to posterity, and people drew their own conclusions. It is not an episode on which his admirers care to dwell.

At four o’clock in the morning of Saturday, May 16, the division was taken. The third reading of the Bill was carried by ninety-eight votes. Later that morning Disraeli must have read the news in the papers that Henrietta, widow of Sir Francis Sykes, had died the previous day at Little Missenden in Buckinghamshire, the very day of his great speech in the House.

4

The Corn Law Bill now went up to the House of Lords, where it might have been expected to have an even stormier passage than in the Commons. Curiously enough, however, no comparable effort seems to have been made by the protectionists to throw it out at this stage. Stanley delivered one of his slashing orations, but there is nothing to suggest that he organized opposition. The Bill passed its second reading on May 28 by forty-seven votes. There was clearly no longer any hope of postponing, let alone rejecting, the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Bentinck and Disraeli now turned their attention to revenge. They could not stop the Bill becoming law, but they might nevertheless eject the ‘Arch Traitor’ from office. Not that this was easy, a vote of no confidence would certainly be lost, and the Whigs were determined to keep Peel in until the Corn Law Bill had passed its third reading in the House of Lords – a matter of at least three weeks. But Disraeli acutely perceived that there was one useful, though by no means infallible weapon to hand, the Irish Coercion Bill – or, as Bentinck called it, ‘the anti-murder Bill’ – which had still to pass its second reading in the House of Commons. There were signs that Lord John Russell and most of the Whigs who had supported the first reading would for various reasons oppose the second. If in addition any considerable number of protectionists could be induced to vote against the Bill, its defeat was certain. On such an issue the Government would be bound to resign or dissolve, and Lord George had convinced himself that they would never dissolve if only because so many of them were in danger of losing their seats. The difficulty was that Bentinck and his followers, apart from Disraeli, had nearly all voted, and some of them had spoken, for the first reading.

Fortunately, however, as Disraeli was quick to remind him, Bentinck had been prudent enough to prepare a retreat. He had declared that he was only willing to support the Bill if the Government showed a genuine belief in its urgency. Now it could be argued that by postponing the second reading of the Coercion Bill for over five weeks in order to take the later stages of the Corn Law Bill the Government had shown just such a lack of urgency as would justify Bentinck in reversing his previous vote. It was not a very strong argument, but it would serve.

Although no final decision had been taken by the party before the debate began on June 8, Bentinck resolved after an hour or so to take the plunge, to speak forcibly and early, thus setting the tone for the waverers. His speech was one of the most violent and intemperate that he had yet delivered. He declared that he voted against the Bill because the Government could not be trusted to use their powers. He referred to Peel as being ‘supported by none but his forty paid janissaries and some seventy other renegades’. He accused Peel of having admitted in 1829 that he had changed his mind on the Catholic question in 1825, but of having none the less in 1827 concealed his conversion and ‘chased and hunted an illustrious relative of mine to death’, viz Canning – merely on the ground that the latter seemed likely to forward the cause of Catholic emancipation. ‘A second time,’ he ended, ‘has the right honourable baronet insulted the honour of parliament and of the country, and it is now time that atonement should be made to the betrayed constituencies of the empire.’22

Bentinck’s allegations about Peel and Canning involved Disraeli. On June 12 Peel replied with a lengthy vindication of his conduct in 1827. He had not changed his mind in 1825, nor had he ever said so in 1829. And he asked why Bentinck, if he had really believed in such atrocious conduct, should have been his loyal supporter for the last ten years, and should only now for the first time have revealed his belief.23 Bentinck could not, under the rules of procedure, speak again, and so he briefed Disraeli to reply.

The difficulty was that Hansard seemed to confirm Peel’s account. But Hansard was admittedly corrected and revised by speakers themselves. Disraeli discovered in the Mirror of Parliament, which was an unofficial, but in general reliable, organ based on newspaper accounts by reputable parliamentary supporters, the exact admission on Peel’s part alleged by Bentinck. This seemed a score for Bentinck. But Peel was able to show in his reply that the only newspaper report which contained the admission was that of The Times; this had been adopted by the Mirror of Parliament, but no one else had included the sentence in question. There were other ramifications and complications, but by the time he came to write his life of Bentinck, Disraeli was satisfied that The Times had misinterpreted Peel’s remarks and that the charge was baseless. Indeed, six months after the rumpus he advised Bentinck, who never admitted being in the wrong, to drop the matter, despite some further evidence which the latter thought he had discovered to support his case.

The debate lasted for many days while the various factions in the House of Commons intrigued, organized and calculated against the critical day when the fate of Peel’s Government would be determined. It was by no means a foregone conclusion. On June 25 the Speaker was able to announce that the Lords had passed the Corn Law Bill without amendment. The division on the second reading of the Coercion Bill was taken that night. Bentinck had come nowhere near carrying with him the 242 Tories who had originally voted against the repeal of the Corn Laws. Over a hundred now supported Peel. Some eighty abstained. But more than seventy voted with Bentinck and Disraeli, and they were enough together with Whigs, Radicals and Irish to defeat the Government by seventy-three. What the Duke of Wellington called ‘a blackguard combination’ had beaten Peel and turned him out of office for ever. He announced his resignation four days later, delivering an encomium of Cobden which even scandalized a disciple as ardent as Gladstone, and a self-congratulatory peroration which jarred on many besides the protectionists. The Queen sent for Lord John Russell. It was to be twenty-eight years before a Conservative Prime Minister again headed a ministry with a clear majority in the House of Commons.

*

After 1832, as we can now see, there had been three possible policies for the Conservative party to adopt. They might have become a party of old-fashioned Protestant squirearchical reaction, resisting all change, internal émigrés outside the main stream of English political life. They might, on the other hand, have endeavoured to compromise with the new forces in politics, ally themselves with the industrial professional world, with the men of property in general, in order to resist quasi-revolutionary forces such as Chartism which the spirit of reform had conjured up. Or they might as the party of land have sought to exploit the differences between capital and labour, between the millocracy and the mill hands, by a programme of factory legislation and social reform, a sort of benevolent aristocratic paternalism.

The first of these policies was that of the ‘Ultras’ of the 1830s, of Chandos, the Duke of Cumberland, and in some degree of Lyndhurst. It did not prevail, for it had one huge defect: it would have condemned the Conservatives to the status of a perpetual minority party. Broadly speaking, Peel adopted the second. He wished to cement an alliance of moderate men against a Whig party that seemed to be perpetual prey to the intrigue and agitation of extremists. He was not averse from social reform, but he thought that in the end the condition of England question would be solved by economic prosperity, by the removal of checks on industry, rather than by state interventionism which was in any case anathema to accepted views on political economy. Disraeli and his friends, however, favoured the third of these alternatives; not very coherently, it is true, nor with any clear calculation as to the specific measures which such a policy entailed. But in a general way Young England, Shaftesbury, Oastler, Stephens, Ferrand, and intellectuals like Southey and Lockhart, stood for this sort of approach, a union of discontented industrial workers with aristocratic landowners against; factious Whigs, selfish factory-owners, and dissenting shopkeepers, with their ‘anti-national’ allies in Ireland and Scotland. The snag in this policy, as Disraeli would find soon enough when he reached a position of responsibility, was that it ultimately presupposed extending the franchise to the working classes. They were no use as allies if they had no votes. But to do this in the atmosphere of the 1830s and 1840s, or indeed for many years after, was politically impossible. What could be achieved in very different circumstances in 1867 would not have had a chance twenty years earlier.

The difficulty was obvious before the crisis of 1846. Peel’s policy, in fact, made much better sense, but it foundered on the rock of Corn Law repeal – an issue which had no connexion at all with the ideals of Young England or the sort of popular Toryism in which Disraeli and his friends were vaguely involved. Indeed, any analysis even of the earlier issues on which Disraeli opposed Peel shows that Young Englandism had very little to do with the matter. Over the Corn Law question the protectionists had a fair case on the merits of the policy, though historians have usually ignored it. Protectionists also had a case, perhaps a stronger one, against Peel’s personal conduct and against the arguments he used to defend his actions. But from the point of view of the party as a viable alternative to Liberalism, Disraeli and Bentinck were pursuing a line that was politically negative and electorally disastrous. In fact, they were going back to the first of the three alternatives that confronted the party after 1832, the policy of the ultras and the agricultural reactionaries of the 1830s. The consequence was just what might have been predicted. The Conservatives became the minority party for forty years. In wrecking Peel’s career, Bentinck and Disraeli came very near to wrecking his and their party too. Between 1846 and 1886 there was to be only one Conservative administration with a clear majority behind it in the House of Commons. All the rest were short-lived minority governments existing only because of their opponents’ dissensions. Disraeli was to spend a longer time in opposition than almost any statesman of comparable stature in our history.

1 To the immense mortification of Monckton Milnes, who expected the place for himself, and never forgave Peel. Milnes moved over soon afterwards to the Whig-Liberal camp.

2 Smythe distinctly writes ‘December’, but this must be a slip of the pen for January.

3 Hughenden Papers, Box 144, B/XXI/S/650.

4 ibid., B/XXI/S/652.

5 See an interesting article by Mary Lawson-Tancred, ‘The Anti-League and the Corn Law Crisis of 1846’, Historical Journal, III No. 2. (1960). Disraeli minimizes its activities in his own account in Lord George Bentinck, 47–48, but Miss Lawson-Tancred is probably right in explaining the omission by the fact that, at the time of writing, Disraeli was endeavouring to liquidate what remained of the Anti-League, which, by rigid insistence on protectionism, was proving something of a nuisance to him in 1849–50.

6 Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck; A Political Biography (1852), 57.

7 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxiii, 111–23.

8 See above, p. 1.

9 Lawson-Tancred, 175, quoting Lord Norreys’ speech to the Oxfordshire Protection Society, January 14, 1846, in which he referred to a letter from Stanley.

10 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxiii, 1847.

11 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxiv, 348.

12 See John Morley, Life of W. E. Gladstone (3 vols, 1903), i, 286, for Gladstone’s account of Peel’s ‘glee and complacency’ at the prospect and his confidence in holding the party together.

13 Hughenden Papers, Box 89, B/XX/Be/12, November 9, 1846.

14 ibid., Box 89, B/XX/Be/1. Using the licence of the novelist, forbidden to the orthodox biographer, Disraeli in Lord George Bentinck, 158, altered the last three words to ‘at loggerheads’.

15 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxvi, 677.

16 Morley, Gladstone, iii, 465, from notes which he took while on holiday with Gladstone at Biarritz in December 1891.

17 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxvi, 689.

18 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxvi, 707–9.

19 A. A. W. Ramsay, Sir Robert Peel (1928), 343–4.

20 Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences (1910), 177.

21 But the explanation sometimes offered that the letter was actually marked ‘Confidential’ is not correct. Disraeli did not take that precaution with either of his letters, British Museum, Add. MSS, 40487, ff.286–7, 290–1, although his wife did. ibid., ff.284–5.

22 Hansard, 3rd series, lxxxvii, 183.

23 ibid., 537–9.