Note sull'episodio
Robert Peel was born in 1788 to a Lancashire textile magnate who threatened to disinherit him unless he became prime minister. He did it twice. This episode follows the path his father designed: Harrow alongside Lord Byron, the first double first at Oxford in classics and mathematics, and a seat in Parliament at 21, bought in an Irish borough with exactly 24 voters. Peel approached government like an equation. He steered Britain back to the gold standard, cut the long list of capital crimes known as the Bloody Code, put jailers on salaries, and in 1829 founded the Metropolitan Police, whose officers still carry his name as bobbies.
The same pragmatism made him a traitor to his own side. Once so anti-Catholic that supporters called him Orange Peel, he carried Catholic emancipation through the Commons in 1829 to avert civil war in Ireland. As prime minister during the Irish famine, he repealed the Corn Laws with opposition votes, and days later his furious party forced him out. Whether that was sacrifice or calculation is still argued.
- Peel dressed his first 1,000 constables in blue tailcoats and top hats, deliberately avoiding military red, to signal policing by consent.
- In the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839 he refused to take office because Queen Victoria would not dismiss her Whig ladies in waiting.
- Returning to power in 1841, he revived the income tax at 3 percent and used the revenue to cut more than 1,200 import tariffs.
- In 1843 Daniel M'Naghten, aiming for Peel, killed his private secretary Edward Drummond. The trial produced the legal test for the insanity defense.
- Peel resigned in June 1846 and died in 1850 at 62 after his horse fell on him on Constitution Hill. His followers, the Peelites, later helped form the Liberal Party.