Towards repeal

In the late summer of 1845, disquieting rumours of the failure of some of the Irish potato crop reached England. The potato blight was not limited to Ireland: the whole of central and Western Europe was threatened by it during the wet and cold summer of 1845, but the blight was more serious because of Ireland’s dependence on the potato as the staple diet of much of its population. Peel realised the significance of the poor potato crop in Ireland almost immediately. If potatoes should fail completely in Ireland and Europe and the wheat crop fall short in England, then a widespread famine might occur. Peel well knew the appalling consequences of famine as he had witnessed an Irish famine while Chief Secretary in 1817[1].

As late as October, some optimism that most of the potatoes in Ireland could be salvaged still existed. However, by the end of the month, it was evident that the failure was extensive. The government was faced with two problems: to find adequate supplies of food; and to create the machinery for its distribution. Both Peel and Graham recognised that the government must act quickly and that every barrier to the efficient transport of food had to be removed. The most obvious barrier was the restrictive Corn Laws.

Peel and Graham believed that it would be impossible merely temporarily to suspend the Corn Laws. Its suspension on the grounds of alleviating scarcity would imply that the government favoured scarcity as a general policy should it be re-imposed. This reason alone argued strongly for Corn Law abolition.  Nor would it be possible to open the Irish ports to unrestricted grain imports and yet retain their closure in England.  Finally, if grain was to be supplied to Ireland using public funds, the public would reasonably expect that the purchase should be made in the cheapest markets and this could only be done if import barriers were removed.

Convincing the Cabinet

Peel and Graham first briefed the cabinet on the situation in Ireland on 31^st October 1845. The first of Peel’s recommendations was the creation of a committee in Ireland to coordinate famine relief. This was favourably received by the cabinet on 1^st November and two days later Graham informed Heytesbury of the decision.

The Famine Commission (or Scarcity Commission as it was also called) would have wide investigative and remedial authority.  The Commissioners would include the Head of the Irish Constabulary and the Inspector of the Coast Guard who would use their forces in gathering information. The Head of the Board of Public Works would encourage employment of the peasantry on roads, bridges, and railway and drainage projects. The Commissary in Chief would be responsible for the purchase and transport of food. The fifth commissioner was the new Poor Law Commissioner who was responsible for the distribution of food from union workhouses. In a letter to Heytesbury, Graham left open the possibility of appointing some ranking public servant to a sixth position. Peel suggested an Irish Catholic and Robert J. Kane, a professor at Queen’s College, Cork was named.  Although there were inevitable delays and administrative problems in the early days of the Commission, it had solid achievements to its credit within a few months. These included the creation of depots for imported Indian corn or maize (£100,000 of corn was imported and released on to the market as a way of preventing prices rising too high), the collection of £100,000 from private government subscriptions and the employment of 12,000 labourers a day.

In November and early December 1845, cabinet discussion continued on Peel’s second recommendation: the abolition of the Corn Laws. Parliament was not in session and it was decided to keep the discussions on the Corn Laws secret. However, the frequency of the cabinet meetings made it obvious to the public that there was serious disagreement among its members. Stanley was the firmest opponent of abolition arguing that it was too drastic. Lord Lincoln feared that small farmers would be swept away by repeal. Goulburn added his doubts to those of his colleagues believing that the failure of the Irish potato crop was only a temporary emergency. Like Stanley, Goulburn also feared the effect of Corn Law repeal on the Conservative party; the rank and file would regard the leadership as traitors and the party would be broken.

Peel’s attempt to covert his cabinet colleagues reached a climax in the first week of December. In meetings on 2^nd, 4^th and 5^th, Peel produced a memorandum that made specific new proposals altering the Corn Law. The revisions made in the 1842 Corn Law established a duty of 20s per quarter when the domestic price reached 51s per quarter; the duty decreased by 1s for every shilling rise in the domestic price until only a nominal 1s per quarter remained after domestic wheat reached 73s per quarter. Peel proposed retaining the sliding scale, but a reduction of the duty from 20s to 8s per quarter.  In addition, the duty would be reduced by 1s a year following 1846 so that within eight years there would be no duty at all and corn would be duty-free.  This was a moderate and gradual approach to free trade and it continued the trend of state policy towards corn imports followed by successive governments since 1828. However, it was not well received by the cabinet. Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch threatened to resign and the remainder only supported Peel reluctantly. In the light of the response from his closest supporters, Peel recognised that it was very unlikely that he could carry through any relaxation of the Corn Laws through Parliament, much less their abolition. On 6^th December, he tendered his resignation to the Queen.

A Whig interlude

In November and early December, the Whigs had been manoeuvring to take what political advantage they could of the divisions within the cabinet. They were concerned that Peel might ultimately decide to steal a march on the Whig position on the Corn Laws. To preclude this, Lord John Russell made his position clear in his Letter to the Electors of the City of London, the so-called ‘Edinburgh Letter’ on 22^nd November 1845. In it, he announced his conversion of Corn Law repeal, with the strong implication that this was also the line to be adopted by the Whigs in the next parliamentary session (though he had not consulted his colleagues on the issue). By placing the Whig position first before the public, Russell could claim to have prodded Peel into action, if the Conservatives came to similar free-trade conclusions.

Russell hoped the Whigs would gain a useful political initiative and when, within two weeks of the publication of the Letter Peel resigned, it seemed that Russell’s gamble had paid off. Unfortunately, he had not calculated very accurately the results of his action. By committing himself to free-trade, he had alerted the Protectionists and if they were strong enough to bring down Peel, then there was no guarantee that they could not do the same to the Whigs. Russell was not only engaged in finding support for Corn Law abolition outside Whig ranks, but in negotiating among his Whig colleagues for a viable cabinet. He soon discovered that two colleagues, whom he considered as indispensable could not be in the same cabinet. Earl Grey objected to the inclusion of Palmerston at the Foreign Office suggesting the Colonial Office instead. Grey was such a prominent free-trade supporter that Russell could not omit him from any free-trade cabinet. It was similarly unthinkable not to include Palmerston and he was unwilling to take anything other than the Foreign Office. The result was stalemate. As Russell explained in a letter to the Queen on 20^th December 1845, a division among his colleagues in a minority government did not augur well for its continuance. Peel hoped that Lord John Russell and the Whigs would form a government, pass repeal through Parliament and perhaps allow him to keep the Conservative Party together. Lord John Russell may have recently announced his conversion to repeal in his ‘Edinburgh Letter’ but he was unenthusiastic about forming a minority administration. Peel was again summoned by the Queen. The ‘poisoned chalice’ was passed back.

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[1] Cecil Woodham-Smith The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849, Penguin Books, London, England, 1991, first edition, 1962 remains a graphic narrative. Christine Kinealy This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1997 and The Great Irish Famine, Palgrave, 2001 provide a more modern perspective.

1845-1846: A Crisis of Conservatism

The crisis of Conservatism began with the dispute over the Maynooth grant in 1845 and ended with the repeal of the Corns Laws in 1846 followed by the end of the Peel government. It is tempting to see the division of the Conservative party in 1846 as inevitable and the disagreements between Peel and his back-bench MPs from 1842 as steps towards the final confrontation. There were certainly difficulties between Peel and his MPs but this did not make division inevitable. Political parties have survived even when dogged by disagreement. What made the divisions of 1845-1846 different was that they concerned the issue of the Corn Laws.

Introduction

Relations between Peel and his backbenchers had been difficult from the early days of his ministry. It was not simply a matter of differences on policy. Many Conservative MPs regarded Peel as insensitive to their interests and he made little attempt to court backbench opinion. He unadvisedly took the loyalty of Conservatives in Parliament for granted and was irritated when this was withheld. Peel managed his government but he made little effort to manage his party. The 1842 budget led to considerable criticism. Poor law and factory reform also resulted in back bench discontent. Over fifty Conservatives, largely representing northern seats opposed the extension of the poor law and supported the reduction of the working day to ten hours. These rebellions did not threaten Peel’s position in the early years of his government but the divisions within the party they represented were merely papered over. It was a normal and regular feature of parliamentary politics for MPs to vote against their leaders on issue that were not considered to be of major importance. This was not indicative of a general desire to bring Peel’s government down or represented a repudiation of Peel’s leadership.

In 1844 divisions widened further. Ninety-five Tories voted for Ashley’s amendment to the Factory Bill in March. In June, sixty-one Tories supported an amendment to the government proposal to reduce the duty on foreign slave-grown sugar by almost half while leaving sugar from the West Indies unaltered. Both amendments were carried and though Peel had little difficulty in reversing them his approach caused considerable annoyance. Peel believed that government defeats reduced his authority but was not prepared to reach an accommodation with the dissident MPs. He threatened to resign if they refused to support him. Reluctantly, but also because there was no alternative to Peel, they fell into line. However, on the Maynooth grant in 1845, 149 Conservatives voted against the proposal and 148 in favour. Party morale was at a low level by mid-1845 and party unity was showing signs of terminal strain. On Maynooth and then the Corn Laws[1], Peel pushed his party too far.

When did Peel decide to repeal the Corn Laws?

It seems likely that Peel seized on the opportunity provided by the potato famine to implement free trade policies on which he had already made up his mind. The critical question is at what point did he become converted to the ideas put forward by the middle class radicals of the Anti-Corn Law League? It is not possible to provide a definitive answer but Boyd Hilton may be right that Peel had accepted the intellectual arguments in favour of free trade in the 1820s long before the League came into existence and that by 1841 he recognised it was ‘theoretically correct’ that the Corn Laws would eventually have to be repealed. The moves to free trade in the 1842 and especially the 1845 budgets made the continuance of the Corn Laws increasingly untenable. Yet Peel did not announce his conversion to repeal until the end of 1845. Why?

First, he may have accepted the need for repeal but he was the leader of a Protectionist party. He needed time to persuade his supporters of the arguments for repeal. The Irish potato famine did not give him that time. It was the occasion rather than the cause of repeal that Peel would probably have preferred to put to the electorate in 1847 or 1848.  Secondly, Peel disapproved of extra-parliamentary pressure and viewed the Anti-Corn Law League with considerable suspicion. The success of the League, especially between 1841 and 1844, may have persuaded Peel not to move quickly to repeal. He saw it as his duty to act in the national interest and did not want to be accused of acting under pressure. The activities of the League threatened to divide propertied interests and Peel saw that social stability was essential if there was to be economic growth. Giving in to the League was not an acceptable political option.  Peel was also critical of the League’s propaganda especially its use of the language of class warfare. The strident, anti-aristocratic attacks by the League on landowners and the creation of a Protectionist Anti-League raised the spectre of commercial and industrial property being pitted against agricultural property. This, Peel believed, would significantly weaken the forces of property against those agitating for democratic rights.

Perhaps the nearest thing we have to evidence that Peel was nurturing a plan for repeal before the Irish famine and that this crisis merely hastened the timetable for action is provided by Prince Albert’s account of a conversation with Peel on Christmas Day 1845. Though this cannot be taken as conclusive proof of Peel’s intentions because he was speaking to the Prince shortly after the decision to proceed with the Corn Law, it is probably a good indication of what he had in mind. According to Peel’s original plan, the Conservative party was going to be persuaded to drop its commitment to agricultural protection before the general election due in 1847 or 1848, with repeal to follow sometime during the next parliament, probably in the early 1850s. Peel’s conversation with Prince Albert suggests that his decision was motivated less by the crisis in Ireland but by fears of how the crisis might be exploited by the radical supporters of repeal in Britain.

Certainly, in 1844-1845, the campaign of the Anti-Corn Law League entered a new and politically more threatening phase. Urban supporters of free trade were encouraged to purchase freehold properties in county constituencies so as to qualify themselves for the vote in parliamentary elections. This deliberate manufacturing of voters was concentrated in South Lancashire, North Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and Middlesex but by November 1845 there was a broader plan for challenging landed MPs in their county strongholds across the country. At the same time, the League responded to the famine in Ireland by demanding immediate repeal, a move Peel feared would succeed in persuading the British public that protection was somehow responsible for Ireland’s plight. This claim may be illogical and dishonest but it might, if it gained credence in people’s minds risk depicting the government as callous and defending the interests of landowners while Ireland starved. Peel was anxious to prevent radicals from using the current crisis to launch a class-based attack on landowners by promoting a wider settlement of the free trade issue that would appeal to the whole nation.

Peel may have not been prepared to repeal the Corn Laws if this could be seen as surrendering to external pressure but, by 1845, there were powerful practical arguments that repeal was in the national interest. The Corn Laws were designed to protect farmers against the corn surpluses, and hence cheap imports, of European producers. However, by the mid-1840s there was a widespread shortage of corn in Europe. Peel reasoned that British farmers had nothing to fear from repeal because there were no surpluses to flood the British market. The nation would benefit, the widespread criticism of the aristocracy would be removed and the landowning classes were unlikely to suffer. This was too sophisticated for the Protectionists. Their case can be seen, in retrospect, as narrow but contemporaries did not recognise this. For small landowners and tenant farmers, the most vocal supporters of protection, repeal meant ruin. Peel’s argument that free trade would offer new opportunities for efficient farmers made little impact.

Peel said later that ‘in the interval between the passing of the Corn Bill in 1842, and the close of the Session of 1845’ the opinions he had ‘previously entertained on the subject of protection to agriculture had undergone a great change’, and that ‘many concurring proofs’ had demonstrated to him that ‘the wages of labour do not vary [he meant fall] with the price of corn’. In 1844, he found himself unable to answer the arguments used by Cobden, and in 1845 he agreed with Graham, who said that, following the failure of the potato, ‘the Anti-Corn Law pressure’ would become ‘the most formidable movement in modern times’.

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[1] The connection between Maynooth and repeal are clear. Of the 153 Conservative MPs who voted against the government at some stage in 1845, 133 voted against repeal and only twenty supported Peel.