Peel and the Party System 1830–50

The relations between Peel and his party form a familiar theme, and even in this centenary year of his death there seems little to be gained from a restatement of the problem, or at least from a restatement in the old polemical terms. Yet in raking over the ashes of that controversy one must always be struck by the paradox inherent in Peel's position. If Peel destroyed his party, he destroyed his own handiwork. The man that twice ‘betrayed’ his followers ranks in British political history as the creator of the first modern parliamentary party. The contrast may be stated in the words of M. Halévy: ‘the statesman who ten years before had accomplished such an outstanding work of party organization by a most intelligible reaction had come to execrate the very notion of party politics’. Clearly if we accept the sharp contrast we must also accept the revulsion of feeling to which Halévy alludes. But another line of approach might be to inquire whether the Peel of the thirties was different in any essential aspect from the Peel of the forties. If the contrasting elements in Peel's career have been emphasized at the expense of the elements of continuity, the task is not so much to explain as to explode the paradox.