Domestic / Political

_{SIr Robert Peel became Conservative Prime Minister after beating the Whigs in a August general election. © Getty Images}

Lord Melbourne’s Whig government was beaten in June in the House of Commons and the Conservatives won the August election under Sir Robert Peel.

The Whig majority had been in decline since their landslide of 1832, partially due to Peel’s corrosive criticism. Queen Victoria was sorry to see the departure of Lord Melbourne who had given her guidance on state affairs since being crowned as a teenager in 1837, and she had no political sympathy with the Tories.

One in five men had the vote, through a property qualification, making an electorate of 813,000 out of a total population of 24 million. Polling took two days and corruption was rife with free rides, free food and free drink expected by voters, leading to this being called the ‘bribery parliament.’

One of Peel’s lasting legacies was a response to the £2 million budget deficit he inherited – the introduction of a peacetime income tax at seven (old) pence in the pound. The continuing political dilemma was what to do about the Corn Laws that kept the price of corn (and therefore of bread) artificially high in the interests of British landowners who dominated parliament.

Workers grumbled that the 1832 Reform Act had given middle-class men political power. Activists were collecting signatures for the People’s Charter, a petition to parliament calling for universal manhood suffrage and other electoral reforms. When the last petition, of 1,280,000 signatures, was rejected in 1839 there were violent outbursts in Birmingham and Newport.

There were splits in the Chartist ranks between those such as William Lovett who argued that ‘moral force’ would prevail, and the supporters of ‘physical force’ who favoured violent tactics. The leader of the ‘physical force’ Chartists, Feargus O’Connor, took control of the National Charter Association after he was released from a jail sentence for seditious libel in August 1841.

John Henry Newman, the leader of the high church Oxford Movement, was attacked by fellow university tutors who resented his ‘Tracts for the Times’ that criticised the decline of church standards and the increase in liberal theology.

Newman withdrew from Oxford in 1841, taking a few of his disciples to live a quasi-monastic life while he worked out his spiritual problems. His critics feared, correctly, that Newman was heading towards the Roman Catholic Church himself, contributing to a Catholic revival in England.