Biography:Even book reviewers sometimes need to declare an interest, in my case a family and constituency one. Two British prime ministers and long-time allies began their parliamentary careers in Ireland.
Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, sat as MP for Trim 1790-1797, where his statue stands on a high column. Sir Robert Peel began in the pocket borough of Cashel in 1809, a coming-of-age present from his mill-owning father. Wellesley, then chief secretary, though on active service, sent a request that Peel be elected: "I will let you know his Christian name by express tomorrow." The Cashel seat cost £3,000, bought from the Pennefather family, who between 1800 and 1810 provided mayors in constant rotation. There were 27 electors.
The minutes of Cashel Corporation record, "Pursuant to a precept directed to the Mayor of the City of Cashel from John Southcote Mansergh Esq. High Sheriff of the County of Tipperary [my great-great-great grandfather] to elect and return him one proper person to represent this city in the Imperial Parliament, William Pennefather Mayor after posting up notices in parts and places in the said city, when the Mayor, Baliffs, Aldermen and Freemen assembled, [ they] unanimously elected Robert Peele of Drayton Bassett and the county of Stafford Esq. to represent them in the said Imperial Parliament."
Peel did not visit the country, let alone the constituency. The sequel, not in Douglas Hurd's biography, was gleaned from Peel's papers in the library at Chequers, the Irish delegation room during a break in peace negotiations. Soon after Peel's election, with the first glimmer of ethics in government, legislation was passed making the sale of seats illegal, with a fine of £1,000. Peel, previously junior minister to Lord Liverpool, wrote to his new prime minister in 1812: "I have given up all thoughts of representing Cashel myself, as I think the risk would be too great."
His father would have been happy to purchase the interest in the borough, but instead Sir Charles Saxton "secured the good will of the respectable voters of Cashel by those popular arts and professions which no good subject should consent to". Peel's father paid in a roundabout way for a less notorious seat in Chippenham. Peel never contested an election, until he had to resign his seat in Oxford in 1829, after "ratting" on his longstanding opposition to Catholic Emancipation, which he did, sensibly enough, "to avert public calamity".
There was great indignation in Christ Church, with "No Peel" visible to this day nailed into a door. Among his persecutors was then High Anglican John Henry Newman. The Irish Catholic bishops paid tribute to the role of Wellington as prime minister, calling him "the most distinguished of Ireland's sons".
Did Peel's early connection give him any fondness for the people of Tipperary, when he was appointed chief secretary by Liverpool at the age of 24? On the contrary, he remonstrated against Liverpool's leniency towards capital sentences for violence: "You have no idea of the moral depravation of the lower order in that county." He believed an honest despotic government would be the fittest government for Ireland. The establishment of a police force first deployed in Cashel to quell disturbances in the proclaimed barony of Middlethird in 1814 was his first assay in what would be his most lasting achievement - the London Metropolitan Police, founded in 1829.
DOUGLAS HURD'S CAREER partly paralleled Peel's - he was Northern Ireland secretary from 1984 to 1985, then home secretary. He took a constructive and forward part in negotiations on the Downing Street Declaration in Dublin Castle in December 1993, but remarks how surprisingly little IRA atrocities swayed British opinion. Hurd is more detached than Peel, who regarded Ireland as "part of the fortress of the British Isles".
While Peel had mixed feelings about the Orange Order, he was clear the government could scarcely wish to see the lower classes in the North united. He hoped they would always be disunited: "The great art is to keep them so, and yet at peace or rather not at war with each other." While an upholder of the Ascendancy, he became exasperated with its pervasive corruption.
"Consent" in Ireland in the 1810s depended entirely on the continuing flow of favours.
Hurd's biography of Peel canters through his career, and is liberally interspersed with contemporary observations. Indulgent towards romantic reactionaries, Hurd reserves his ire for the "sour" Ultras, who split Toryism under Peel (and John Major). The repeal of the Corn Laws, a decisive step towards a cheap food policy, abandoned the agricultural protection that favoured the great landowners in favour of improving the subsistence of the industrial working class, whose conditions in Paisley shocked Peel. He was flattered at being compared to Turgot, the pre-revolutionary economically liberal finance minister of Louis XVI.
Peel was a formidable economic policy-maker. With Wellington, he took part in the decision in February 1826 to establish monetary union with Ireland. As prime minister, he reintroduced in peacetime income tax at 7p in the pound. With his previous experience in Ireland, he managed the outbreak of the Famine with food imports and public works much better than his successors.
While interested in Peel's role in founding the modern Conservative Party with the famous Tamworth Manifesto of 1834, Hurd sees Gladstone, one of Peel's ministers, as his successor, rather than his young tormentor Disraeli. Peel was not an enthusiast for a truculent or flamboyant foreign policy, and in his last speech in 1850, he argued: "You will not advance the cause of constitutional government by dictating to other nations."
The biography contains much information about Peel's wife, Julia. His brother, Sir William Yates Peel, married into an Anglo-Irish family (Mountcashell). Sir William's youngest daughter, Emily, and his daughter-in-law Alice, after being widowed, married Cork members of this reviewer's family. Presumably, political and marital compatibility went hand in hand.
Dr Martin Mansergh is a Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary South
Biography: Robert Peel: A Biography By Douglas Hurd Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 436pp. £25