ABSTRACT
The Quarterly Review offered its response to Peel’s financial measures in an extended review of recent Conservative publications. These included Peel’s financial statement to the House of Commons, in March, and a letter from Sir Richard Vyvyan (1800–1879), the Conservative MP for Helston, Cornwall, to his constituents, published in June 1842.
Vyvyan had been the leader of the ‘Country Party’ during the 1830 parliamentary session, which had opposed Wellington’s government after the passage of Catholic Emancipation. After a period out of parliament, from 1837–1841, Vyvyan returned to political action. As a strict Protectionist and a leading opponent of Free Trade, his letter offered stout criticism of the government’s commercial and financial policy.
Vyvyan wanted his constituents to petition Queen Victoria to dismiss the government and, rather than return the Whigs to power, look to some alternative means of forming an administration. The magazine surmised that such a government would be ‘centred in, if not confined to, the individual person of Sir Richard Vyvyan himself’. Vyvyan was exercised by the fact that, in spite of the pledges made by many Conservatives at the General Election, the government had proceeded to modify the Corn Laws and continue the Poor Law. The Quarterly denied that the Conservatives ‘as a Party, could, or that any eminent Conservative leader did pledge themselves’ on these issues.
The magazine claimed that it was only ‘by coincidence, and not from authority’, that it spoke ‘the sentiments of the Conservative leaders’. Nevertheless, it offered unqualified support for Peel’s financial measures, providing a detailed rebuttal of the charge of inconsistency and want of good faith in proceeding to modify the Corn Law and revise the tariffs on manufactured goods and raw materials.
Whilst acknowledging that Peel had ‘declared boldly, almost arrogantly, the conditions on which he alone would accept the support of his party’, the measures proposed were ‘wise in their principle, just in their application, and likely to be successful in their result’. Given their ‘gradual’ and ‘progressive’ nature, the journal had no hesitation in concluding that ‘the great Conservative party will see in this remarkable circumstance additional grounds of confidence in their leaders’.
