Sir Robert Peel: A Biography

With the full encouragement of Prof. Norman Gash, THE authority on the age of Peel, Douglas Hurd has put his many years of political experience as well as his skills as a novelist together to bring to life the career of one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers. The previous reviews of this book give the details. I endorse their findings. If you enjoy British history, you will enjoy this book.

Robert Peel (13/14 people found this helpful)

I really enjoyed "Sir Robert Peel"--it's incredibly read-able, which is one of several factors that recommends it to a wide audience. One of its biggest successes is in illuminating the way the political system of the mid-nineteenth century actually worked (or didn't, at times). From the time when Peel enters government to when he leaves it, it's just a different world. The book has captured an age of transition, when people are in conflict over and changing their minds about what a government is supposed to do, and what its relationship should be to king and to country. Hurd identifies and describes these tensions well.

There's no question that the book is extremely present-minded, and there were pages that, although Hurd was writing about Peel, I thought were meant to explain his view for what the Conservative Party should be. I think present-mindedness has pros and cons, but insofar as I do think the book is in some ways a manifesto of political belief, it seems to me to be appropriate to tie it back into today. Crucially, while the book does keep one eye on the present, Hurd avoids the mistake of modernizing Peel himself. However much Peel's tenure as Prime Minister may have paved the way for what we recognize as modern British politics, he was a man of his time and he did not always enter into reforms willingly. The process of change was not inexorable, Peel did not have a telos, and if he did, it certainly was not "modernity" as we would know it. Hurd is wise to recognize this and to allow Peel to be a man of the nineteenth century rather than a man of the twentieth.

Ultimately, the book is extensively researched, well-written, and insightful. One comes away with a clear understanding of a complicated individual.

Douglas Hurd's elegantly-written masterpiece - I think! (6/6 people found this helpful)

Others have written biographies of Sir Robert Peel and it is complained by some reviewers that (Lord) Douglas Hurd has cribbed much of his material from these earlier works. Quite frankly, I see nothing wrong in the practice, provided due credit is given, and I would have thought it beneficial in any case. When writing a life, one cannot read enough. And besides, it is plainly obvious that there is much fresh material in this elegantly-written masterpiece that has the advantage of being a political biography of one of the nineteenth century's all-time 'greats' by a very experienced and respected 'great' of the twentieth century. The only weakness that I could detect was the author's apparent inability or unwillingness to avoid occasional and unnecessarily sarcastic references to two of my all-time twentieth century 'greats' - Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Despite that, this work is educative, erudite and entertaining, as one might expect. What did I learn from it? Well, I suppose that the intricacies of the Great Reform Bill's arguments are now clearer to me; I am sure that Peel's changing attitudes to Ireland are much more understandable and it is very clear indeed that the Conservative Prime Minister's reaction to the Irish potato disaster was infinitely wiser and more helpful than that of the 'Liberal' Lord John Russell, a man whose memory is not honoured; and, though my own English farming ancestors must have held strong feelings against the repeal of The Corn Laws, again I have had it made clearer that it was the Conservative Peel who came to see that high food prices were against the national interest - and he was right, too. It is also proved, to my satisfaction at least, that Sir Robert Peel, despite his difficulties with his own kind and his own 'party,' was a man and a politician and a statesman way ahead of his contemporaries and of his peers. And, surprising as it is coming from a supposed 'One Nation' Tory, Douglas Hurd, the book's verdict on Benjamin Disraeli's early political career is damning: the fellow was obviously a cad and a bounder. Finally, I learned again that another great British hero, the Duke of Wellington, born in 1769, the victor of Waterloo in 1815, and Prime Minister in the 1830s, was still doing his patriotic duty as late as 1846: what a man! Maybe Lord Hurd or someone of equal eminence should bring out an up-to-date assessment of 'The Iron Duke' as his or her next project.

Very Good (6/10 people found this helpful)

Sir Robert Peel by Douglas Hurd is a very good study of a much underated Prime Minister. As Hurd states he sacrificed his own career for the national good and won the respect of many for this. It is a very readable book and increadibly interesting.

A great man for a great time (9/12 people found this helpful)

Peel was possibly the greatest Victorian Prime Minister.
Posterity has tended to relegate his memory behind that of several of his contemporaries who are less deserving, but Douglas Hurd splendidly shows why Peel deserves to be remembered as the founder of modern Britain and of, in some senses, the contemporary world.
This is a really successful study and, in essence, a rehabilitation. Hurd does not pretend that Peel was a politician who relied on warmth. Peel scorned such superficiality. He was a man of judgement, shrewd, brilliantly perceptive and always prepared to do the right thing (for all groups in society) while judging how best to achieve it. However, Hurd does show that Peel had avowed warmth outdide the House of Commons, and that he was loved as well as respected by colleagues. He was also an unusually loving husband (by the standards of his day) who built an idyllic home life. Such was the strength of his personality that he grew, slowly but surely, in the affections of the young queen and of the nation, including, notably, of working people.
This study is in the great tradition of Jenkins on Gladstone and Hague on Pitt, but I think this is the best of the recent blockbuster politicians' biographies. It has a gentle touch and should be enjoyable for the amateur as well as the academic historian. Hurd very cleverly draws on his own experience in portraying parallels between Peel's experiences and more contemporary events in British politics, not intrusively, but always illuminatingly. It isn't easy nowadays to grasp the sensation of O'Connell's Clare election victory and why Peel realised this must force him into a U-turn on Catholic emancipation, or the great significance of the Bank Charter Act, or, above all, why the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws was one of the really great events in British history. Here Hurd succeeds brilliantly. One is left in no doubt as the magnitude of Peel's bravery and of his triumph.
As with Jenkins and Hague, one cannot help feeling that Hurd is saying he would love to have been the man about whom he is writing. Shy and cold Peel might have been in some contexts, but which politician would not have wanted to be Peel as Hurd shows him? A great mind, a man of (for all of the jibes of Disraeli and others) real sincerity, integrity and courage.
A great man for a great time. That is Hurd's verdict.

Sir Robert Peel: A Biography

Douglas Hurd

Reader Reviews:

An Agreeably Readable and Perceptive History (1/1 people found this helpful)

Robert Peel (13/14 people found this helpful)

Douglas Hurd's elegantly-written masterpiece - I think! (6/6 people found this helpful)

Very Good (6/10 people found this helpful)

A great man for a great time (9/12 people found this helpful)

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