‘The Late and the Present Ministry’

The Repeal of the Corn Laws passed through both Houses of Parliament in June 1846. The government resigned shortly afterwards, when it was defeated by a combination of Whigs, Irish, and Protectionist MPs over its Irish Coercion Bill. Peel’s resignation speech, on 29 June 1846, commended Richard Cobden for his role in the achievement of Repeal and left a parting shot against his critics within the Conservative Party. In a famous peroration, Peel observed,

I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, from less honourable motives, clamours for protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.

Blackwood’s responded to the fall of the Conservative government in sorrow rather than anger. It maintained that Repeal was an ‘act of gross injustice and impolicy’ which was not justified by the circumstances in Ireland. It criticised Peel for his lack of frankness and those qualities which would have made him ‘not only respected but loved’.

The magazine argued that ‘perhaps no minister of this country ever owed more to party than Sir Robert Peel’. Given that agricultural protection ‘became the touchstone’ at the heart of the 1841 General Election, it was not a ‘discretionary’ measure upon which Conservative MPs could exercise their independent judgement, because they had pledged themselves to maintain protection and were being consistent with their declared views. In Blackwood’s opinion, it was ‘worse than vain’ to talk of an MPs ability ‘to act irrespective of the opinion of their constituents’, because they were ‘neither more nor less than the embodied representatives of that opinion’.

Whilst hoping that Peel might live to vindicate his actions, it did not hesitate to describe him as a ‘Dictator’ whose future position, at the head of a group of Peelite MPs, was ominous. The article concluded that future statesmen would reflect that ‘the most powerful party in this age and country has been broken up and severed, not by any act of their own, but by the change of policy of their leader’.