Prime Minister
wrong, and, that being the case, he was not obliging enough to return
him to power. The big drum had been successfully beaten, moreover, at
the General Election by the defenders of all sorts and sizes of vested
interests, sinecures, monopolies, and the like, and Sir Robert
Peel--though not without personal misgivings--accordingly succeeded
Melbourne as First Lord, whilst Stanley, now the hope of stern unbending
Tories, took Russell's place as Secretary for the Colonies.

The annals of the Peel Administration of course lie outside the province
of this monograph; they have already been told with insight and vigour
in a companion volume, and the temptation to wander at a tangent into
the history of the Queen's reign--especially with Lord John out of
office--must be resisted in deference to the exigencies of space. In the
Peel Cabinet the men who had revolted under Melbourne, with the
exception of the Duke of Richmond, were rewarded with place and power.
Lord Ripon, who was spoken of at the time with scarcely disguised
contempt as a man of tried inefficiency, became President of the Board
of Trade. Sir James Graham, a statesman who was becoming somewhat
impervious to new ideas, and who as a Minister displayed little tact in
regard to either movements or men, was appointed Home Secretary.
Stanley, who had proved himself to be a strong man in the wrong camp,
and therefore the evil genius of his party, now carried his
unquestionable skill, and his brilliant powers of debate, as well as his
imperious temper and contracted views, to the service of the Tories. One
other man held a prominent place in Peel's Cabinet, and proved a tower
of strength in it--Lord Aberdeen, who was Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
and who did much to maintain the peace of Europe when the Tahiti
incident and the Spanish marriages threatened embroilment. Lord
Aberdeen, from 1841 to 1846, guided the foreign policy of England with
ability and discretion, and, as a matter of fact, steered the nation
through diplomatic quarrels which, if Lord Palmerston had been at the
Foreign Office, would probably have ended in war. This circumstance
heightens the irony of his subsequent career.

[Sidenote: THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK]

The outlook, political and social, when Peel took office and Russell
confronted him as leader of the Opposition, was gloomy and full of
hazard. The times, in Peel's judgment, were 'out of joint,' and this
threw party Government o