‘One of the most striking, and in some respects, erratic characters in recent political history’, Peel was the son, heir and namesake of the Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel, 2nd baronet (1788-1850).
Half-insane, wholly inconsistent, insomuch that no set of men can at any time wholly count on his vote, he yet commends some respect for talent and independence of character.
Joseph Parkes to Lord Hatherton, 28 Oct. 1853, Staffordshire Record Office, D260/M/F/5/27/26; Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative party: the political journals of Lord Stanley, 1849-69, ed. J. Vincent (1978), 55 (14 Mar. 1851).
At the start of his career, Peel’s ‘fine rhetorical powers, his dramatic instinct, and his sense of humour won him high repute in the House of Commons’.
Nominally a Peelite when first elected in place of his dead father in 1850, Peel initially flirted with the Derbyites, before becoming a staunch Palmerstonian. His oratorical firepower, his name and his possession of a safe seat were all in his favour as a rising politician. In 1855 he was made a lord of the admiralty by Palmerston and, less happily, served as Irish chief secretary, 1861-5. His stormy spell in the latter post found him at odds with successive lord lieutenants, while his forthright public speeches angered Catholic opinion, and his tactlessness meant that he failed to conciliate Irish MPs. His personal conduct also made him a liability. On a number of occasions he got into well-publicised brawls, and he also owned and raced horses, by which he was a ‘heavy loser’.
I have managed to get on with him without quarrelling for a year, but his departure is a great relief to me. His utter want of judgment, & above all his ‘inconséquences’ makes him a very undesirable colleague. He is quick-witted, clever, & vigorous but will always be a source of weakness rather than strength to any Govt. with which he allies himself.
The journal of John Wodehouse, first earl of Kimberley, 1862-1902, ed. A. Hawkins and J. Powell eds., Camden, 5th series, IX, (1997), 180 (8 Dec. 1865).
His father’s biographer Norman Gash has written that Peel took his ‘temperament and physical characteristics ... entirely from his mother’s Anglo-Indian family’, and possessed ‘none of the traditional Peel qualities of soberness, integrity, and purpose’.
Peel had avowed the principles of his late father on his election, but his party allegiance was unclear in the 1851 session.
The speech left behind an impression of considerable cleverness, with a plentiful lack of judgment. It is impossible to conceive a contrast more marked than that between the late and present Sir R. Peel.
Fletcher, Parliamentary portraits, 280-1; Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative party, 55 (14 Mar. 1851).
Peel’s second speech, 11 Apr. 1851, on agricultural distress was a ‘painful failure’ as he was unprepared and ‘broke down utterly’.
After his appointment as a lord of the admiralty by the new premier Lord Palmerston, Mar. 1855, Peel called at the ensuing ministerial by-election for the navy to blockade ‘every Russian port’.
Although he was sympathetic towards the Conservative government, Peel voted for Russell’s critical motion against Derby’s reform bill, 31 Mar. 1859, and hailed the uniting of the Liberal party.
Peel’s vocal criticism of the papacy was probably one of the reasons why Palmerston appointed him as Irish chief secretary in July 1861. Irritated by the hostility of Irish Roman Catholics towards the government’s Italian policy, Palmerston used the appointment to signal a shift in approach. Instead of giving further concessions to ungrateful Irish Catholics, Palmerston thought it ‘politic to draw a little closer to the Liberal Protestant gentry of Ireland, upon whom alone we really can depend’.
Peel’s period in office was severely criticised by contemporaries and historians have been equally damning.
On his appointment the Freeman’s Journal had protested that Peel was ill-suited for the role as he was ‘quick and flippant in debate – often terse, argumentative and trenchant’.
In 1864 the government’s policy became increasingly incoherent as Peel continued the Palmerstonian line, while the new lord lieutenant Lord Kimberley proposed public works and railways to promote economic development and Gladstone began to shift to a more conciliatory position.
Palmerston’s death in October 1865 and his replacement by Russell signalled a more progressive Irish policy, and Kimberley cynically noted that Peel ‘has suddenly become quite Liberal! - is all in favour of the Univ. scheme, for appointing Catholics, putting down Orangemen &c &c !!!’.
Peel topped the poll as a Liberal at the 1868 general election, but became a ‘severe critic’ of Gladstone’s Liberal government.
In his last years, Peel, who was afflicted by gout, spent most of his time at St. James’s Club in Piccadilly, reading novels, horse racing news and his father’s Hansard speeches. Having sold off much of the family estates in 1884, Peel rarely visited Drayton Manor, and he was separated from his wife Emily, the daughter of 8th marquess of Tweedale, who he had married in 1856.