1788-1809

SIR ROBERT PEEL, twice Prime Minister of England in
the first half of the present century, was born in 1788,
the year before the assembling of the States-General in
France, and died in 1850, the year before the opening
of the first Great Exhibition of the Arts and Industries
of all nations in England. Between these two epochs,
the opening of the democratic age and the close of the
long period of European peace, the political career of
Peel is included. His childhood witnessed the begin-
ning of the revolutionary wars, and he was nurtured
by his father in the fear and admonition of Pitt. He
first took office in 1810, having entered Parliament in
the previous year; but it is to the period of European
peace, which opened in 1815 and lasted until 1854,
more than three years after his death, that the political
history of his life belongs. He began life as the
colleague of Liverpool and Castlereagh, of Sidmouth
and Eldon, and his earlier sympathies were with the less
liberal tendencies of that illiberal régime. He ended his
career estranged from his own party, and associated with
only a section of his personal friends and followers, who

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