ABSTRACT
This review of the state of parties in Britain offered an extended consideration of Peel’s career, from his first entry to Parliament in 1809 through his part in the ministries of Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington, until his elevation to the leadership of the Conservative Party after 1832. ‘Mr Peel found himself, rather than was placed, at the head of his old friends’, it observed, ‘The party went to him - not he to the party’.
The article went on to discuss the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. It referred to the recent publication of a letter from Thomas Young, the private secretary to Lord Melbourne, with Major General William Napier, written at the time of the ‘Days of May’ crisis in 1832. The letter suggested the volatile and potentially revolutionary state of the country at the time and hinted at Whig connivance in fomenting popular agitation.
Fraser’s considered that ‘the Conservative and the Onward party must always exist’. However, Peel’s conduct after the Reform Act repeated his former error, in seeing the inevitability of concession but refusing to declare it openly. Before 1832, ‘the Government of England was … essentially a party government, the opposing parties being two sections of the aristocracy’. The magazine argued that the country needed a ‘truly Conservative Party’ which was united by the desire ‘to administer the affairs of the country for the good of all, guided by the experience of the past’.
The article wanted to end the state of Conservative disunion which had existed since 1846, attributing its continuance to ‘Spite, Vanity, and False Shame’.
