He was not a man to lose
time when he had once made up his mind. It was already too late in the
session for anything to be done in 1828; but the Parliament had scarcely
been prorogued before he put his views on the subject before the King,
and began, in concert with the Home-secretary, to frame a bill such as
he hoped might settle the long-agitated question, without doing more
violence than was necessary to the feelings of those whose opposition or
reluctance he was aware he should have to encounter: among whom was the
King himself, who, though thirty years before he had, with an
ostentation rather unbecoming, considering his position, put himself
forward as an advocate of Emancipation, had subsequently changed his
opinion, and had recently taken more than one occasion to declare that
he had never doubted that, as the head and protector of the Protestant
religion, he was bound to refuse his assent to any relaxation of the
existing law.[203] The Duke, however, was too well acquainted with his
royal master's character to apprehend any real firmness of resistance
from him; but he knew that a great majority of the clergy, and no small
portion of the country gentlemen, were conscientiously and immovably
fixed in opposition to any concession at all, some refusing to regard
the question in any but a purely religious light, and objecting to
associate in the task of legislation for those whom they regarded as
adherents of an idolatrous superstition; while those who mingled
political reasoning with that founded on theology dwelt also on the
danger to be apprehended to the state, if political power were given to
those whose allegiance to the King was divided with another allegiance
which they acknowledged to a foreign prelate. And he had presently an
unmistakable proof afforded him how great was the strength of this party
in the country. Peel was one of the representatives of the University of
Oxford; and, as from his earliest enjoyment of a seat in Parliament he
had been a prominent opponent of the Roman Catholic claims, he
considered that it was to that maintenance of a policy identified in
their eyes with that Protestant ascendency which his supporters took to
be both the chief bulwark and one of the most essential parts of the
constitution that he owed his position as their member. With a
conscientiousness which was rather overstrained, and not quite
consistent with the legitimate position of a member of the House of
Commons a