9 - Reform and Stabilization

Summary

AS TENSIONS GREW in early 1820, Peel reflected whether the public had become more liberal than Liverpool's government could accommodate. Never more influential, public opinion seemed more than ever dissatisfied with the power it now held. Sustained discontent, Peel feared, might force a choice between sweeping concessions on essential points or handing Whigs and Radicals power. Liverpool, however, crafted an approach that defused pressure for political reform and reduced the popular discontent that gave it force. What historians later called liberal Toryism sought to promote economic growth and raise living standards while separating particular reforms from restructuring the entire political system. Showing ministers could govern in the public interest under the existing constitution gave them the political initiative while denying critics leverage. Measures worked to stabilize political authority and contain pressures on existing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, a central challenge of the period with the revival of a mass politics linked only tenuously with the political elite. Liberal Toryism ensured reforms would come on terms that kept the essential fabric intact. Moving beyond the defensive management that had weathered the past five years, Liverpool took advantage of the shifting tide to pursue commercial reform within an agenda that consciously aimed to secure the constitutional order.

Defending obvious abuses and failings with a high hand, Liverpool realized, only invited opposition. Correcting them without conceding faults in the system as a whole avoided the trap Peel identified. It bolstered a case against wider reform. Liberalism as it later became understood differed from the liberal reforms Liverpool used to preempt it. The term liberal, which Peel considered “an odious but intelligible phrase,” only acquired political meaning from the later 1810s, partly in the context of resistance to established authority in Spain. Seeing Liverpool's policies from the perspective of developments after 1832 distorts their intent as he sought to deflect the kind of sweeping changes that followed his resignation in 1827. Instead of breaking with earlier policy, liberal Toryism brought a more active and systemic approach to a line Liverpool had pursued as circumstances allowed. His efforts to promote trade adapted a much older emphasis on securing market share to post-1815 realities.