Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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Albert’s private secretary he did not think he would ever be back in govern-

ment. But he made it clear he intended to stay in public life, and that his

‘hat’, as he said in a speech after leaving Number 10, was still ‘in the ring’.

Until his stroke he remained active and inﬂuential in Whig politics. He was

still a leading ﬁgure in his party and in the House of Lords. There were dis-

cussions and consultations with other top men like Russell and Palmerston

on political tactics and policies. He was not in favour of the Whigs taking

an aggressive line in opposition and was anxious for them to avoid making

strong commitments of their own. In 1842 he spoke in the Lords 12 times,

but after his illness he spoke on only two more occasions, in 1844 and

1846, and they were not ‘political’ speeches.

Serious politics were ﬁnished for Melbourne after his stroke, but he

would not really recognise or accept the fact. He was becoming increasingly

at odds with his own party and with Russell because of his strong oppos-

ition to the repeal of the Corn Laws, the central issue of the day, and one

on which Russell supported radical change. Melbourne resented the younger

man stepping into his shoes as Whig leader but could do nothing about

it. Russell took care to treat him with consideration, to stay in touch and to

consult, but Melbourne became increasingly alienated, critical and scath-

ing. Sometimes he was gloomily conscious of his diminished powers and

capabilities, but at other times he would or could not face the truth and

fantasised about a return to power. In December 1845, when it looked as if

Russell might become prime minister, the Palace and the Whig leaders

handled him with kid gloves, making soothing comments about valuing

his advice and wanting to ﬁnd him a role, expressing regrets about his

health. He might have been made Lord President as a consolation prize but

he ruled himself out. In 1846 when Russell ﬁnally formed a government,

Melbourne would have liked at least the offer of a Cabinet seat but it

did not come, and Russell had to explain apologetically he did not think

his health was up to even the duties of a non-departmental job, which

Melbourne now acknowledged. His unhappiness and political irrelevance

had been underlined by the way in which, while not wanting to support

Peel’s decision to abolish the Corn Laws (carried only with the help of

Whig votes), but equally not wanting to come out against and embarrass

his own colleagues, he had ended up casting a proxy vote in the Lords for

repeal, despite his well-known opposition to abolition. He became bitter

and disloyal about Russell and the Whig government. Russell’s leadership

was ‘hasty and reckless … erroneous and mischievous’, he had not shown

‘as much courage as he expected of him’. In June 1848 he gloated about the

government becoming ‘very unpopular’ and even said if it fell he would

advise the Queen to send for Peel.

By that time Melbourne was a half-forgotten ﬁgure. His health had con-

tinued to deteriorate and he was living out an isolated and melancholy

retirement at Brocket in Hertfordshire, his moods unpredictable, and brood-

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ing on the past. Many of his old friends had died, he had fallen out with

others, and felt neglected by those who were left. Although a wealthy man

(his estates giving him a disposable income of about £13,000 a year – about

£700,000 in today’s money), he had always been careless about the man-

agement of his ﬁnances and convinced himself he was in serious difﬁculties

and in danger of bankruptcy. He had always lived extravagantly, up to

the limit of his income, doing little to develop the Melbourne estate,

and in the 1840s was paying out £800 a year on doctors (equivalent to

over £40,000 today) and £1,000 a year (over £50,000 today) to one of his

former lovers (Lady Branden) to keep out of the way in Switzerland, while

also being badgered for money by another (Mrs Norton). He wrote to the

Queen in February 1848 asking for a state pension of two or three thousand

pounds, but was turned down, though the Queen privately loaned him

£10,000.

It was embarrassing for his friends and family who worried that

he was becoming rather unbalanced and decrepit.

The end came quickly. He had another stroke in April 1848 and suf-

fered further seizures in October and November, before dying aged 69

on 24 November 1848. There were none of the religious pieties of some

prime ministers, for while he supported the institution of an established

church, Melbourne had never pretended to anything more than an acad-

emic curiosity about Christianity – he was a man who had remarked that

‘things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the

sphere of private life’.

There was no great public funeral, just a low-key

service and burial in the family vault at Hatﬁeld church.

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Peel to Rosebery

Robert Peel (resigned 29 June 1846)

The break between Sir Robert Peel and his party, which cast him out of

ofﬁce in 1846, had been coming for a long time. Peel had been a dominant

ﬁgure as prime minister 1841–46 (having earlier had a brief four-month

spell as PM in 1835–36) but he was a quintessential man of government

and an executive politician, and was neglectful of the political and personal

arts of party management. A cold, remote and high-handed leader, he

rather took his backbenchers for granted. His centrist/liberal conservatism

put him at ideological odds with many of his followers representing other

groups and tendencies in the Tory party. Divisions, discontent and dissen-

sion built up across a range of issues (economic, Irish and social policy)

after 1841, with Peel forcing his party into line and sometimes threatening

to resign if they refused to support him. With party morale and unity

cracking Peel’s determination to repeal the Corn Laws was the ﬁnal straw.

He pushed his party too far, two-thirds of Tory MPs voting against him,

and repeal was carried only with the votes of Liberals and Radicals. When

vengeful rebels then voted with the Liberals to defeat him on an Irish bill,

Peel resigned and Lord John Russell and the Whigs took ofﬁce.

By 1846 Peel was tired and battered, worn out by the burdens of ofﬁce

and resentful at the bitter and highly personal attacks made on him.

He made it abundantly clear to friends and supporters that he had no appe-

tite or desire for the premiership or for party leadership again. The loss of

power, he insisted, was a ‘blessing’. Heading the government had been a

‘painful and thankless’ task. Rather than regretting expulsion from ofﬁce,

he rejoiced in it as ‘the greatest relief from an intolerable burden’. He said

he was determined not to resume ofﬁce. He would be only a head of

government and that role demanded more ‘youth’, ‘ambition’ and ‘love of

ofﬁcial power’ than he now possessed. He intended to ‘keep aloof from

party combinations’ and would never be ‘the tool of a party’ again. His

contempt for the Tory protectionist backbenchers who had brought him

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down was palpable: they were ‘men with great possessions and little fore-

sight’, it would be an ‘odious servitude’ to submit to the opinions of ‘men

who have not access to your knowledge, and could not proﬁt by it if they

had, who spend their time in eating and drinking, and hunting, shooting,

gambling, horse-racing, and so forth’. There was too much truth in the

saying ‘the head of a party must be directed by the tail’, he argued, the

problem being that ‘heads see and tails are blind’.

‘I ﬁnd the day too short for my present occupations’, Peel wrote a few

months after leaving ofﬁce, ‘which consist chieﬂy in lounging around my

library, directing improvements, riding with the boys and my daughter,

and pitying Lord John and his colleagues’. Lady Julia Peel was not a ‘polit-

ical wife’ and was not unhappy at his resignation. With his family and

close friends Peel could be unbuttoned, displaying a taste for humorous

anecdotes. He was rich, owning a 9,000-acre estate and enjoying an income

of £40,000 a year (equivalent to over £2.5 million today); at the end of

his life he left a personal fortune of £120,000 (apart from the entailed estate

which was worth about one million pounds). He was a model landlord,

humane and actively engaged with improvements and scientiﬁc agricultural

development. A notable art patron and connoisseur, he had built up a large

private collection and was a trustee of the National Gallery, later home

to many of his paintings. A man of wide interests, he was an active and

enthusiastic member of the commission set up in 1850 to plan the Great

Exhibition. Only 58 when he left ofﬁce, he suffered from chronic pains in

his left ear and head, linked to a shooting accident in the 1820s, but was

otherwise still robust.

At one point, deeply wounded and angry at the protectionists’ attacks on

him, he had considered leaving parliament. But Peel was not ready for a

busy non-political retirement. He wanted to stay in public life but in an

independent political role. He was still ‘indisputably the ﬁrst man in the

country’, a dominant ﬁgure on the political scene, and someone who over-

shadowed Russell, the new prime minister. But he was in the late-1840s to

ﬁnd himself in ‘an impossible and unsatisfactory situation’, as Robert Blake

put it, neither leading a party nor allowing others to lead it, and ‘his atti-

tude was an anachronism in an age of increasing party domination’. ‘The

position of Sir Robert Peel in the last four years of his life’, Gladstone once

insisted, ‘was a thoroughly false position.’

‘An ex-prime minister of Peel’s

standing’, argued Norman Gash, ‘especially when surrounded by a devoted

and ambitious group of younger followers, can scarcely revert to the role of

a private MP. As [Lord] Stanley observed in 1849, “he must be a Leader, in

spite of himself.”’

Peel’s role and status as an inﬂuential, non-party or above-party states-

man had both royal and popular support. When he had ﬁrst become prime

minister, Peel’s relations with Queen Victoria had been awkward but he

had forged a close relationship with Prince Albert and the Queen herself

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had grown to trust, admire and depend on him. The royal couple con-

tinued to see much of the former prime minister. Prince Albert regarded

him as a friend, conﬁdant and mentor, and frequently sought his advice on

foreign affairs, sometimes showing Peel copies of diplomatic despatches

and correspondence. At times the Prince wanted to discuss the domestic

political scene but Peel, conscious of the constitutional proprieties, was

careful and discreet. Foreign statesmen and diplomats stayed in touch with

Peel and sought his views after 1846; he knew Guizot, the French prime

minister, well, and after King Louis Philippe was forced into exile in 1848

entertained him at Drayton Manor and offered a secret personal loan.

In the country he had a unique prestige and popularity, lauded as the

champion of free trade and the people’s cheap bread. When he travelled

and visited towns, making public appearances and speeches or attending

public functions, there would be big and cheering crowds and fulsome

reports in the press. On a visit to Darlington in 1847 the union jack was

run up at the railway station, church bells rung and the local shops closed

early in his honour. ‘Everybody’, it was said, ‘would be glad to see him in

ofﬁce again.’ ‘If the country could be polled’, Charles Greville commented,

‘he would be elected by an immense majority. There is a prevalent opinion

that he must return to power; nobody knows when or how, but the notion

is that … if a crisis of difﬁculty and danger arrive … Peel is the only man

capable of extricating the country from it.’

But Peel’s stance was much less popular in parliament and with his

fellow-politicians. As Anna Ramsay put it, it was ‘impossible that any-

one but himself should accept Peel’s abdication’. Dependent on his pre-

decessor’s support and assistance Lord John Russell could not believe Peel

was serious about not wanting to take ofﬁce again and feared a come-back.

That could not be at the head of a Conservative government, however, for

Peel showed no interest in reuniting or rebuilding the party – the policy

and personal rift between him and the protectionists was too deep. Such

had been the ferocity of his attacks on Peel’s character and honour that

at one point Peel had had to be talked out of challenging their leader, Lord

George Bentinck, to a duel. The protectionist backbenchers regarded Peel

as a traitor and were good haters; two years after the break-up they burst

out hooting and bellowing in a hooligan effort to stop Peel being heard

in a debate on the Navigation Laws.

However, Gladstone and some other

Peel supporters still saw themselves as Conservatives and wanted to see the

party reconstructed and back together, and on the other side Lord Stanley

(the future Earl of Derby), who had resigned from Peel’s Cabinet over Corn

Law repeal, sought to repair the schism. He was conscious that most of the

real talent and brains in the Conservative Party had gone with Peel. But it

was to no avail – Peel had rebuilt the Tory party after 1830 but was now

through with it. It would be almost 30 years before there was another

Conservative government with a parliamentary majority behind it.

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Peel did not think much of Russell’s abilities as prime minister or his

handling of problems like the famine in Ireland. But he believed it was vital

to swing his support behind the Whig government to preserve and defend

his own policy achievements and legacy, and in particular to prevent the

possibility of a return to protectionism. Though he made gains in the 1847

general election Russell lacked a clear and stable parliamentary majority

and without the Conservative split and the existence of the 90–100 strong

Peelite group of MPs his weak Whig government might not have lasted

long. On one issue or occasion after another in these years, Peel was an

indispensable prop to the Whig government.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Wood, repeatedly sought his

advice and cooperation: on budget measures, taxation and the public

ﬁnances; and on the handling of the great commercial and banking crisis

of 1847. Behind the scenes Peel was shown ofﬁcial papers, gave freely of his

experience and expertise, and even redrafted letters from the Chancellor

to the Bank of England. In the Commons he made effective speeches

defending free trade, supporting the government’s measures and actions,

and coming to their rescue in key votes. After Peel wiped the ﬂoor with the

Tory opponents of repeal of the Navigation Laws in one debate, the hapless

prime minister had to confess he had been left with nothing to say when

winding-up. In the winter of 1849–50 when there were rumours the gov-

ernment might reintroduce a small duty on foreign corn, Peel made his

concerns known and ministers were quick to reassure him they were stead-

fast against a return to protectionism. On Ireland Peel thought the famine

provided an opportunity for a fresh start and major initiatives. He showed

great imagination and foresight in identifying land reform, and the break-

up, improvement and efﬁcient development of the great estates, as key

steps. But he was ahead of his time and was frustrated at the government’s

inaction and drift, though the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, was sym-

pathetic, consulted with Peel, and introduced some minor measures with

his support.

The problem was, as Gash put it, that in keeping Russell’s weak and

struggling government in ofﬁce, Peel was losing his freedom of action and

becoming a captive of Whig policy. This strategy increasingly frustrated

Peel’s supporters and acolytes. As long as he played the role he did, Gash

argues, ‘Peel made it difﬁcult for anything like a proper two-party system

to re-emerge’, and strong government would be almost impossible. Indeed

some Peelites wanted to redraw the political battle-lines and ‘looked for-

ward to a coalition of moderates in which their reluctant leader would

be forced by circumstances to play the central role’. By 1850 the number of

Peelite MPs willing regularly to vote with Peel in support of the Whigs had

fallen to around 45, though one insider perhaps over-estimated that up to

160 MPs would rally to Peel personally. Splits in the Peelite ranks opened

up: when Disraeli moved a motion on relief for agriculture in February

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1850, 35 Peelites voted with the protectionists while 27 joined Peel in

voting for the government, which narrowly won. Many wondered how

much longer things could continue like this, and whether Peel might not

be forced by events to take the initiative and give a stronger lead himself

to avoid a protectionist come-back.

Would Peel take ofﬁce again was the question. In the spring of 1848,

Russell’s political ﬂoundering on the budget, together with his poor health,

had made him seem vulnerable. Some Whig ministers felt strongly that

if Russell resigned then Peel’s return to government would be a national

necessity – but he made it clear at that time that that was something he

would not hear of. It is in the end impossible to know, argues Boyd Hilton,

whether Peel ever seriously contemplated a come-back. Perhaps he left

himself some wriggle room when, in May 1850, he insisted he would do

‘everything in my power’ to prevent the reversal of the free trade policy

and the restoration of protectionism. In the same year, when his friend and

supporter Edward Cardwell noted the general belief that he had resolved

under no circumstances to resume ofﬁce, Peel apparently insisted: ‘I never

said so.’

One of the things Peel and his supporters disliked about the Whig

government was the style and content of Palmerston’s foreign policy,

feeling particularly that his encouragement of democratic nationalism

increased European tensions. Peel, however, had been reluctant to speak

out publicly on foreign affairs and did not want to risk overthrowing the

Whig government by gunning for its controversial Foreign Secretary. It was

therefore with some relief that on 28 June 1850 in the famous Don Paciﬁco

debate he had been able to speak and vote against Palmerston, while the

government still won a comfortable majority.

A few days later, only 62 and at the height of his powers, Peel was dead.

Out riding, he was thrown by his horse, which then trampled him, causing

severe internal injuries. He lingered in great pain for a few days, while a

large crowd gathered anxiously outside his house, and died on 2 July 1850.

His sudden and unexpected death had a massive public impact. He had a

private funeral at Drayton in Staffordshire; on the day, in a display of

national mourning, mills and factories stopped work, shops closed, and

ships in the ports ﬂew their ﬂags at half-mast. Lord Campbell claimed ‘If

Peel had lived on in the common routine of parliamentary warfare, and

died of old age, he would have had no statues erected to his memory.’

But

statues of him were to be erected in towns the length and breadth of the

country.

The Queen offered to make his widow a Viscountess but was declined,

Peel having left instructions that no member of his family should receive

any title or public reward because of his services. Peel had inherited his

baronetcy but had refused all other honours, turning down both the Order

of the Garter and an earldom. As prime minister he had been unusually

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stingy about bestowing honours, creating only ﬁve peerages between 1841

and 1846. ‘The distinction of being without an honour is becoming a rare

and valuable one’, he remarked, ‘and should not become extinct.’

There is a sense in which Peel had almost sought and welcomed martyr-

dom for his great cause in 1846. He wanted his motives and actions to be

understood and, while not the man to write personal memoirs, he put

together in the late 1840s detailed justiﬁcatory accounts, built from his

correspondence and memoranda, of the two big controversial issues of his

career, Catholic emancipation (in the 1820s) and Corn Law repeal, leaving

instructions that they should be published after his death. They came out

in 1856.

Few former prime ministers have enjoyed the sort of national popularity

and inﬂuence or been able to dominate politics in the way Peel did in the

last four years of his life. In part the parliamentary arithmetic gave him

great leverage but it was also the case that his return to government was

widely seen by the public and by other politicians as, one way or another

and sooner or later, almost inevitable. His continued presence in politics

and the role he played both fed into and complicated the reorganisation

of party politics and contributed to the parliamentary instability of the

period. Peel’s legacy was as the progenitor of Gladstonian liberalism but

the route there was not straightforward.

Had Peel lived, the course of

British politics in the 1850s would have been different. Had he returned

to ofﬁce, he would have been a stronger and more effective prime min-

ister than Aberdeen was when a Peelite/Liberal coalition was formed in

1852. But what a political leader like Peel might have become or done, had

he not been cut off in midstream, can only ever be supposition.

Lord Aberdeen (resigned 30 January 1855)

Aberdeen paid the price for the muddle, incompetence and disasters of

the Crimean War. His two-year premiership ended when he resigned on

30 January 1855 after losing a censure vote in parliament on a proposal to

set up a committee of enquiry into the conduct of the war. It was an igno-

minious end, which overshadowed the achievements of his career before

then, and from which his reputation never recovered. He later said he

wished he had resigned before the war began (in March 1854) rather than

letting himself be dragged into it. He was not cut out to be, nor in a situ-

ation which had allowed him to be, a strong prime minister. His pre-

miership had a provisional stopgap aspect to it from the ﬁrst, not least

in his own eyes. He had headed from December 1852 a Peelite-Whig coali-

tion government (his Peelite group having only 30 MPs compared with

270 Whigs/Radicals), and he aimed to stand aside at some point and make

way for Lord John Russell. Aberdeen had apparently been preparing to ‘slip

out of ofﬁce’ as early as the autumn of 1853, but the right moment for the

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handover never came.

Russell had been prime minister before, resented

being supplanted and was impatient for the succession. He was an awkward

and disloyal prima donna throughout the life of the government, regularly

bandying about resignation threats. He ﬁnally stabbed Aberdeen in the

back by resigning a week before the crucial Commons vote that toppled the

government.

Aberdeen was 71 when he left Number 10; he never again held ofﬁce but

remained politically active for three or four more years.

Queen Victoria was upset to lose him and thought he had been badly

treated by his colleagues and by the public. Even before he had resigned

she had decided to give the beleaguered Aberdeen the Order of the Garter

to hold alongside his existing Order of the Thistle, which he had held since

1808 (Bute and Rosebery are the only other two prime ministers to have

been given both honours). ‘These are empty honours’, Aberdeen believed,

‘but they are proofs of real regard.’ His relations with the Queen and the

Court remained close. The Queen made a private visit to his house and

estates in Scotland; she sought his advice and support on various con-

stitutional questions (such as Albert’s assumption of the title of Prince

Consort, and the protocols and the rights of the prime minister in relation

to the prerogative of dissolution during Derby’s minority government

in 1858); Prince Albert sought his views when the French went to war

against the Austrians in Italy in 1859 (Aberdeen did not take a liberal line

in support of Italian nationalism – a point of disagreement between him

and Gladstone).

Although Palmerston invited him, and the Queen was in favour, Aberdeen

would not countenance joining the government of the man who replaced

him. It would, he told a Peelite colleague urging this step in February 1855,

‘expose [him] to gratuitous indignity’ and he would not be ‘of the slightest

use’ in the government. ‘To be stigmatised as the head, and tolerated as a

subordinate member, I cannot endure’ – he would ‘rather die’. However, he

was careful not to rule out some sort of eventual return to ofﬁce. ‘If at any

future time my presence should ever be required in a Cabinet, I should feel

no objection to accept any ofﬁce, or to enter it without an ofﬁce. But to be

the head of a Cabinet to-day, and become a subordinate member of the

very same Cabinet to-morrow, would be a degradation to which I could

never submit.’ However, he helped Palmerston form a government by

putting much effort into overcoming the doubts of his Peelite colleagues

who were unwilling to serve under the new PM, though several of them did

not stay long and soon resigned. He was irritated when Palmerston ‘stole

our thunder’ by ‘appropriating credit for measures resolved on in Cabinet’

before he had succeeded to the premiership.

The future looked rather bleak to Aberdeen in February 1855, as he admit-

ted to his daughter-in-law: ‘I do not know how I shall bear being out of

ofﬁce. I have many resources and many objects of interest; but after being

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occupied with great affairs, it is not easy to subside to the level of common

occupation.’ Although a grandee, Aberdeen was not tremendously wealthy:

his estates were huge (over 50,000 acres) but were poor-quality land, had

been neglected and his income from them rarely exceeded £20,000; he felt

the absence of his prime-ministerial salary. There had been great tragedy in

his life before he became prime minister: both his wives and four daughters

had died prematurely. Now his eldest son became seriously ill and for a

while Aberdeen was worried he too would die. Aberdeen’s own health began

to trouble him and, behind the equable and controlled public façade, there

are signs he was disappointed and unhappy.

For a while politics and public affairs continued to keep him busy. He

acquitted himself well enough in front of the select committee invest-

igating the mismanagement of the war, the new government ensured that

a condemnatory Commons motion was defeated, and talk of impeaching

Aberdeen and his ministers was quashed.

He spoke frequently in the

House of Lords during his retirement years, most often on rather technical

and/or Scottish questions; his last speech, on the suppression of the slave

trade, was made in July 1858. For some time after Aberdeen left ofﬁce, Lord

Clarendon, who had kept his job as Foreign Secretary in the new govern-

ment, privately briefed him about Cabinet discussions and showed him the

diplomatic despatches from the Continent. In return Aberdeen fed in his

own detailed comments and advice on foreign policy. He played the elder

statesman, seeing and being consulted by other ministers and politicians,

and keeping in touch with foreign statesmen (like Guizot) too. He managed

to listen politely and patiently when Lord John Russell – who had done so

much to wreck his premiership – came to seek his advice and complain

about his colleagues in the new government. Aberdeen’s feelings about

Russell were by now ‘ambivalent’, as his biographer puts it, though his

distrust of Palmerston’s foreign policy was so great he was prepared to let

bygones be bygones and hoped Russell would one day become Liberal

leader and prime minister again.

By 1857 Aberdeen was willing to vote with Derby and the Conservatives

over China to bring Palmerston down, though in the subsequent general

election Palmerston bounced back and the Peelites lost many seats. For a

brief moment in 1858, when politics were in ﬂux again, with the fall of

Palmerston’s government and Derby forming a minority government, there

was talk that Aberdeen might come back as head of a coalition. There are

claims he might not have been unwilling to resume the premiership, but it

seems more likely, given his age and declining health and strength, that his

preferred role would have been as kingmaker on the Liberal side. Probably

the most important political role Aberdeen played in the years after 1855

was repeatedly to insist that the Peelites now had no role or future as an

independent force and that the sooner it was accepted they ought to merge

with the Liberal Party, the better. He made strenuous efforts to dissuade

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