At the invitation of the Peel Society, based in Tamworth, Staffordshire, Alistair Lexden gave a lecture at the Castle Hotel, Tamworth on 11 January to mark the 190th anniversary of the first and most famous of all election manifestos. He summarised the political situation in the years 1832-4, set out the circumstances in which Peel, who unexpectedly became prime minister for the first time In December 1834, made his Tamworth Manifesto a document of national significance, and concluded by offering a few reflections on modern Conservative election manifestos.
On Sunday, 16 November 1834, James Hudson, then an adventurous young member of the royal household and in later life a diplomat of some distinction, left London for the continent of Europe on a mission of overwhelming importance and urgency.
His task was to find Sir Robert Peel, the much admired 46 year-old leader of the Conservative Party, the new name that had just started to be given to the old Tory Party, which had emerged 150 years earlier.
Peel was needed back in England as fast as possible so that King William IV, then in the fifth year of his short reign, could make him prime minister.
The highest political office in the land had suddenly become vacant. Two days earlier, on Friday 14 November, the King had unexpectedly sacked Lord Melbourne, who had been head of a government composed of Whigs, the age-old rivals of the Tories, for just a few months in succession to Earl Grey, the prime minister who passed the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
The Bill was seen as a great triumph for the Whigs. The Conservatives were reduced to some 150 seats in Parliament (only 30 more than in the Party’s disastrous performance in 2024). And yet within two years the King ditched them for the Conservatives under Peel. How could this happen?
Great though the Bill undoubtedly was, it did not seek to transform Britain’s entire political system . It was not passed in order to set the country on the road to the full democracy we have today.
Though no official figures were produced at the time, it has been estimated that the electorate in England and Wales rose from some 440,000 in 1831 to over 825,000 by 1839 -- almost double, though still only a small fraction of the total population of 22 million.
That is what the latest research has indicated. It was carried out by Dr Philip Salmon, author of Electoral Reform at Work, published in 2002.
As he shows, there was much excitement in the air in many constituencies after 1832 as new local political associations supporting the national parties competed fiercely to get their supporters on to the electoral registers, which had been introduced for the first time by the Reform Bill.
Conservatives did exceptionally well in these bruising local registration battles. Their successes brought the Conservative Party steadily increasing strength after 1832, and explain why Peel could take office in 1834. And yet, as Dr Salmon shows, Peel took little or no interest in them. He states: “ Peel’s relationship with the new Conservative associations was always awkward and often hostile.”
He profited at Wesminster from work done on his behalf which he did nothing to foster. In some books, Peel is depicted as a great moderniser, who co-ordinated tremendous advances in Conservative organisation from the Party’s new national headquarters at the Carlton Club in London. The reality was rather different.
The Reform Bill’s impetus for change left many constituencies virtually untouched. Tamworth was amongst them. Before 1832 it was a two-member constituency with some 470 electors; after 1832 it remained a two-member constituency with a modestly increased electorate of 586.
Both before and after 1832, it was broadly accepted that the Peel and Townshend families—one of course Tory, the other Whig-- should decide between them who would fill the two seats. For the most part, harmony reigned between the families, but it was broken at one point when the Peels got their hands on the second seat too.
In 1818 they displaced the Townshends. After much rioting in the town, the first Sir Robert Peel was returned alongside one of his younger sons, William Yates Peel, whom he described as “ free from vice” and blessed with “a considerable talent for public speaking.”
Two years later the first Sir Robert, who had been much criticised for his unfriendly conduct, gave up his seat and the old duopoly was resumed. In 1835 the Towshend influence diminished, and the second Sir Robert had a fellow Tory MP until 1841 when the Whig Townshends staged a comeback.
Peel himself said constantly that he never tried to influence elections for the second seat. When someone insisted that he did interfere, prickly Peel, a man who took offence easily, said he was prepared to fight a duel to defend his honour. In this, and in certain other respects, Peel remained true to the old ways of doing things. (Duelling, by the way, usually with pistols, came to an end in England in the 1850s, shortly after Peel’s death.)
So after the Reform Bill of 1832 political life went on in Tamworth and many other places outside the big new urban constituencies created by the Bill, in much the same way as it had done for generations. The bribery and corruption, for example, widespread before 1832, continued - actually increased - afterwards. The fascinating continuities were explored by Norman Gash in his book Politics in the Age of Peel, written with a rather lighter touch than his great, indispensable biography of Peel.
At the start of November 1834, Melbourne as prime minister had a large majority in the House of Commons, but he was unable to use it effectively. This is not uncommon in politics. Comfortable parliamentary majorities have of course been the basis of many successful governments, but there have been other times when unpopular policies, disaffection on the backbenches or indecisive prime ministerial leadership – on occasions all three — have destroyed the prospects of cabinets, which started out with plentiful support in the Commons.
Indeed, we have become rather accustomed ourselves to this phenomenon in our own time. We seem to be witnessing it at the moment.
The context, however, is very different. There are no continuities here. Sir Keir Starmer’s political world has nothing in common with that of Lord Melbourne and Sir Robert Peel.
In 1834, the chief political issues were not economic growth (or the lack of it), taxation or immigration, but religion, constitutional reform and Ireland.
Melbourne ran into deep trouble on a question which brought together all three of the leading items of contemporary political debate. Today virtually no one has ever heard of it, or of the prolonged parliamentary battles to which it gave rise, producing acute division among the Whig government’s backbench MPs, and a grave sense of crisis everywhere.
The now forgotten cause of trouble was the reform of the Anglican Church in Ireland. Its formidable expenses were met by contributions paid compulsorily by the population of Ireland, which then stood at some 8 million. All but 800,00 were Catholics. They naturally felt deep resentment – to put it mildly - at paying for a Church which, as far as they were concerned, consisted of a bunch of heretics.
To make matters worse, many of these heretics owned land which they regarded as rightfully theirs—and in some, though far from all, cases charged excessive rents to the Catholics who now occupied that land as tenants.
With hindsight, it is clear that controversy over the Anglican Church in Ireland was just one aspect of that deep-seated Irish problem, which was to dog British politics for decades to come.
In Parliament 190 years ago, however, most MPs ignored that much bigger issue. Instead, they devoted hours to wrangling over a very specific point: whether some portion of the revenues of the Anglican Church in Ireland should be diverted from it, and spent in ways that would benefit the vast majority of the Irish people.
As tempers rose on this point, there was really very little that Melbourne could do to quell them, and reach a relatively satisfactory resolution of the crisis . As so often happens, he had little room for manoeuvre. But it did not help that the arguments bored him, for which perhaps he deserves sympathy.
The King now stepped into the fray. A staunch opponent of Irish Church reform, he felt that the proponents of change would begin to scent victory if one of their number, Lord John Russell, should become Leader of the House of Commons, as Melbourne proposed in November 1834.
The King also felt that Melbourne was altogether too weak and vacillating in the conduct of public affairs. He wanted the interests of the country to be in stronger hands. Sir Robert Peel possessed such hands.
These then were the circumstances — and forgive me if I have dwelt on them at undue length -- in which Melbourne was suddenly removed from his post, and his government came to an end, on 14 November 1834. Though no one realised it at the time, this was to be the last occasion on which a prime minister was dismissed by the monarch.
Peel took office in circumstances that would never recur. In retrospect, people would come to associate his brief premiership in 1834-5, the one hundred days as it came to be known( though in fact it lasted for 140 days), with a rather profound constitutional change.
An important power possessed by the Crown lapsed. The reason is that Peel was unable to get a majority in Parliament and could not remain prime ministeer. That was fatal, as far as the Crown was concerned. Its authority was gravely compromised .
A few months later the King was forced to reappoint Lord Melbourne. The humiliating U-turn meant that no monarch would ever risk dismissing a prime minister again. This gave Peel’s short period in office added poignancy and interest.
It should perhaps be noted at this point that a few years later Peel would be associated with another constitutional issue affecting the Crown. In 1839,when Melbourne resigned (no sacking of course on this occasion), Peel did not return to office as prime minister because Queen Victoria, who had succeeded her uncle in 1837, refused to diminish the number of Whig ladies at her court, having thrown her support behind the Tories’ opponents, not least because she had come to adore Melbourne. The episode became known as the Bedchamber Crisis.
It did not represent a lasting victory for the Crown. The resistance to alterations in the royal household that frustrated a change of government in 1839 was widely decried and never repeated. It is rather ironical that, as head of the Party that prided itself on loyalty to the Crown, Peel should have been a participant in two events that reduced its power, something to which he was personally opposed.
In November 1834, all this lay in the future. Peel’s hour had come, but, unlike every other new prime minister, he was not on hand to claim his glittering prize. He was on holiday somewhere in Italy, which he had never visited before, with his beloved wife, Julia, and their young daughter, also called Julia, from whom incidentally Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie magazine and well-known to the Peel Society, is descended.
As tourists the Peels set a cracking pace, determined to visit as many of Italy’s many and varied glories as possible.Sir Robert, lover of art, bought three statues, and visited the pope, who did not impress him, displaying, Peel said, “childish admiration” for “a trumpery illuminated model of some excavations.” Catholics were always at something of a disadvantage with “ Orange” Peel in that long-gone age of deep religious divisions.
It does seem rather remarkable that someone at the very forefront of political life should leave England for months on end without telling anyone how he could be reached in the event of some major national development, such his own summons to the premiership.
But that is how it was. He was able to disappear in this way because Parliament, which had gone into recess in August, was not due to reassemle until February 1835 , in accordance with standard practice at the time ; it would reconvene earlier only if serious business demanded urgent parliamentary attention.
Peel made it clear before he left that that he intended to continue his Italian grand tour until the following Easter. Westminister politics at that time were effectively in abeyance for a large part of the year. There is perhaps something to be said for that.
Hardly anyone at the time seems to have thought it odd that Peel should have have been out of contact when he was wanted urgently by the King. He worked phenomenally hard, and deserved a long holiday. He wanted to be free to plan his movements as he went along, unconstrained by commitments to stay in particular places where letters could be sent to him.
So thank goodness for James Hudson, the intrepid young messenger I mentioned at the start who was despatched to find Peel. Intrepid is the word for him. He also happened to be the grandson of Lord Townshend, the Peels’ great rival in Tamworth, but that in no way reduced his ardour for locating the missing Conservative leader .
Though he was on important royal business, no one gave young Hudson a helping hand, even leaving him to find money for the journey. He rushed down to Dover on Sunday, 16 November to find that the last steamboat had left for France. He got himself rowed across the Channel, arriving frozen in Boulogne four hours later.
After riding furiously to Italy,he could find no trace of Peel at hotels in the leading cities of the north. He lost his luggage at one point and had his passport confiscated by the police at another.
It is hard to believe that, when the exhausted Hudson finally caught up with Peel in Rome on 25 November, he was greeted without warmth and told that he taken nine days over a journey that ought to have been completed in eight. Peel’s cold, distant manner seems to have been evident even on this occasion when a little emotion might have been expected. Peel set out for home with his wife and young daughter the following day.
As Peel’s return was anxiously awaited, the most famous man in England ran the the country. The Duke of Wellington, national hero turned Tory statesman, had become Peel’s indispensable political partner, stopping restive right-wing Tory lords in the Upper House from clashing with the moderate policies that Peel espoused in the Lower House as the basis of his plans for ultimate election victory .
Wellington’s contribution to Conservative progress after 1832 was immensely significant. It is described fully in the second volume of an excellent biography of him by Professor Rory Muir, published in 2015.
All government departments were in Wellington’s hands until Peel’s return. He enjoyed himself enormously, and his pleasure was widely shared. There were jokes about the country at last having “a united government” with “ministers all of one mind.” For years afterwards Wellington liked being teased about his “ dictatorship.”
In July 2022 when Boris Johnson was forced to announce his resignation, I suggested that it might be useful if history repeated itself while the Conservative Party elected a new leader. As a discussion of some major environmental problems was going on in the Lords, I turned the attention of the House to the relevant events, saying: “Towards the end of 1834, the Duke of Wellington ran the Government single-handedly for some 24 days. I wonder whether there is a case for suggesting that his highly respected successor the current noble Duke, with his well-known environmental interests, be invited to assume the position of Prime Minister on a caretaker basis to improve recycling and clean up our rivers.”
The Lords Minister for the Environment, who happened to be a direct descendant of another Tory prime minister, Lord Salisbury, replied: “That is a very good suggestion. Having a duke at No 10 is probably long overdue.” The current noble Duke smiled graciously.
His great predecessor’s custodianship of the nation’s affairs ended on 9 December 1834 when Peel arrived back in London, having travelled through Alpine snow, stopping only four times for a night’s rest during the long journey .
He recorded the last stages in a notebook: “Monday 8 December: reached Calais at 5 o’clock. Sailed that evening at 6, reached Dover at eleven. Julia and Julia staid all night at Dover. I left in a hack chaise at 20 min to 12, reached London at half past 8. Tuesday morning Dec 9. Saw the King at half past ten, accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and proceeded forthwith in the formation of the Government.”
The Government he formed lacked some of the people he would have liked to have in it. All prime ministers and party leaders rejoice when they are able to attract defectors from an opposition party. Earlier in 1834,a group of very talented MPs had deserted the Whigs. They were headed by Lord Stanley, later 14th Earl of Derby, a star performer in the House of Commons, who would oppose Peel over the reform of the Corn Laws eleven years later and become leader of the Conservative Party after it had been shorn of the moderate elements Peel had fostered.
In 1834, Stanley and his team of ex-Whigs stood for careful, measured reform of the country’s institutions that needed improvement. They were fierce opponents of radical change. These were the very things that Peel was determined to have as central features of his Government.
He immediately offered cabinet posts to Stanley and his principal supporters. But they could not be persuaded to do more than give the Government support from the backbenches. There was a personal dimension to this, as there so often is when major political upheavals take place. Stanley wanted to be prime minister himself.
It is conceivable that if Peel had been able to bring Stanley and others from the Whig side into his Government, there would have been no Tamworth Manifesto. Their very presence would have shown forcibly from the start what kind of Government Peel would be leading. Everyone would have known that change would proceed at a steady pace to secure the improvements for which there was wide support among the electorate. It would have been obvious that right-wing opponents of change within the Conservative Party’s ranks, a source of worry to the forces of moderate reform, would be kept firmly in their place.
Without the ex-Whigs in coalition with him, Peel needed to explain to the country how he intended to govern—and do it fast. The new Government required one thing above all: a new House of Commons. In the existing House, the Conservatives were in a hopeless minority. Fresh elections were the only answer.
This was the background to the first national election manifesto in British history. Individual candidates were inceasingly in the habit of publishing election addresses to the electors in their constituencies. Peel, Conservative candidate for Tamworth, followed that practice, and did something else: he made his Tamworth address known to the whole country, which had never happened before, after having secured the approval of his cabinet for it.
On Thursday, 18 December 1834, just nine days after Peel had taken office, The Times newspaper told its readers: “ At an early hour( half -past 3) this morning, we received the address of Sir R Peel to his constituents in Tamworth. The anxiety of the public for some authentic declaration of the policy of the new Government has induced us to give this document as conspicuous a position as its importance demands.” Other national newspapers followed suit.
Charles Greville, a famous diarist of the day , once a critic of Peel but now an admirer, recorded that the document caused “a prodigious sensation, and nobody talks of anything else”, adding “all the moderate people are satisfied with it”— and “the moderate people” were of course Peel’s target audience.
Conservative candidates all over the country drew on the Manifesto during the month-long period of voting which began in early January 1835, giving the Conservative appeal to the nation a greater degree of consistency than it had ever known. One Conservative candidate did not appear in his constituency to endorse the Manifesto. Peel’s heavy burden of work kept him in London. He was elected in absentia.
His constituents were at last able to greet their MP again on this very day 190 years ago. What the Staffordshire Advertiser described as “ a sumptuous entertainment” took place in Tamworth’s Town Hall. The newspaper put the number present at between 250 and 300.
In a speech, punctuated with “rapturous” and “ thunderous” applause, Peel said: “It was a source of deep regret to me that I had not the opportunity, previously to the election, of soliciting in person a renewal of your confidence, and of appearing at the hustings in the face of my constituents, to give an account of my past, and to explain the principles on which my future in Parliament would be regulated.”
Posterity can hardly share the regret that Peel expressed exactly 190 years ago. If he had been able to get back to Tamworth earlier, his Manifesto might never have been released to the national press. A statement of the new Government’s aims and purposes could well have been provided in some other way— through a big speech in London, for example.
In the great Manifesto’s 24 paragraphs - most of them substantial in length, amounting to some 3,000 words in all - Peel explained the circumstances in which he had taken office, and expounded the principles, so dear to his heart, to which he returned again when he spoke at Tamworth’s “sumptuous entertainment”.
Indeed, the Manifesto is first and foremost—to quote its own words-- a “ frank exposition of general principles and views.” After denying emphatically that he had ever been “ the defender of abuses”, Peel comes to his central principle: “ I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question—a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb.”
Peel then moves to the heart of the matter: what principles should guide the country in this new age of reform? Should politicians promise the instant redress of anything which anybody may call an abuse"? He firmly rejects that approach: “if this be the spirit of the Reform Bill, I will not undertake to adopt it.”
There follows the passage in this historic document which, I think, stands out above all. Many Conservative candidates over the last 190 years have quoted it—sometimes even committing it to memory- because of the way in which it pledges that the Party will carry out reform when it is needed.
The passage in question refers to “a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances.”
In other words, there should be no hesitation in carrying out reform when the case for it has been established in order to improve, rather than to overturn, the institutions through which the country was governed.
Peel devoted the rest of the Manifesto to explaining how this most fundamental principle should be applied in practice to deal with the things which at that point most needed improvement: namely, local government, the Church of England and the severe legal restrictions to which non-Anglicans were at that time subject.
This kind of approach to reform would help bring the Conservative Party much success over the following 190 years; when it has been ignored or replaced by narrow right-wing attitudes, failure has often followed.
The message certainly worked when it was first tried. It helped take the number of Conservatives in the House of Commons up to some 290, a very substantial increase, showing just how shrewdly Peel had judged the way in which his Party could make progress. The increase was insufficient, however, to keep Peel in power, and he resigned in April 1835.
But the tide had turned. The fervour of Conservative associations in the constituencies, which Dr Philip Salmon has charted, rose further. Melbourne, back in power, had no more success than before in keeping his followers united. Peel’s ultimate triumph was just a matter of time.
There can be no doubt that the Tamworth Manifesto will always retain a prominent position among Sir Robert Peel’s many achievements. It was wholly unforeseen and unexpected, which added to its impact. The diarist Charles Greville praised it as “a very well written and ingenious document.”
It was recalled fequently and favourably because Conservative leaders after Peel during the rest of the 19th century did not match his high standard in their manifestos. They did not follow him in setting out carefully both their principles and the policies that had been derived from them.
The Peelites’ least favourite leader, Disraeli, was the most successful. His brisk and stylish manifesto at the 1874 election was commended by The Times for its “penetration - the ability to cut through complex areas of policy and set out a compelling argument.”
Disraeli’s argument was that Britain needed “a little more energy in our foreign policy and a little less in our domestic legislation”—rather a compelling message, come to think of it, for Britain today.
Most manifestos in this period could not say very much. They were kept short, just a few hundred words.
In the 20th century, the reverse happened. Manifestos became very long. In 1992, the manifestos of the three main parties, taken together, ran to 53,259 words - as compared with 1,076 in 1910.
The length went on increasing. In 2015, the Conservative manifesto alone ran to more than 31,000 words.
Of course, with the expansion of the work of government, there was much more to say. And, with the sudden arrival of mass democracy after 1918, there were many more people with differing expectations for the political parties to address through their manifestos.
And yet was it sensible for the Conservatives to make some 600 pledges in 2015, covering a whole host of policy areas? Many were never fulfilled. There is, I think, some connection between the public’s loss of confidence in politicians and the current habit of cramming masses of promises into party manifestos, many of which fall by the wayside.
By contrast the Conservative manifesto for the 1951 election which brought the Party back to power after its massive defeat in 1945 was much the same length as its Tamworth forebear. Within a framework of principle,It set a limited number of pledges. Housing, it said, would be given “a priority second only to national defence. Our target remains 300,000 houses a year.” The promise was delivered.
A winning party’s manifesto is not, of course, a formal contract with the people, but it is a serious prospectus for government, and should be treated as such to secure public confidence.
Mrs Thatcher understood this. She hated mainifestos that were filled with detailed proposals. She took pride in her own manifesto for the 1987 election because, in her words, “it projected a vision and then arranged the policies in a clear and logical way around it.”
And where did she get that idea from? The Tamworth Manifesto of course.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (Fontana paperback, 1990) . Alistair Cooke (Lexden), Introduction to Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900-1997, ed. Iain Dale (Routledge,2000). Charles R.Dod, Electoral Facts 1832-1853 , ed. H.J.Hanham (Harvester Press, 1972). D.R.Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-30, 7 Vols. (The History of Parliament Trust, 2009). Norman Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (Longman paperback, 1986). Douglas Hurd, Robert Peel: A Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). Rory Muir, Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814-1852 (Yale University Press,2015). Sir Robert Peel, Memoirs, Vol.2, ed. Lord Mahon & Edward Cardwell (John Murray, 1858). Philip Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841 (Boydell Press,2002). Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (Longman,1978).David Thackeray & Richard Toye, “The Age of Promises: British Election Manifestos & Addresses 1900-1997” in 20th Century British History, Vol.31 (March 2020). Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993). Edward Young, “1835” in British General Election Campaigns 1830-2019, ed. Iain Dale (Biteback, 2024).
