Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Peel, Arthur Wellesley
PEEL, ARTHUR WELLESLEY, first Viscount Peel (1829–1912), Speaker of the House of Commons, was born in London 3 August 1829. He was the youngest of the five sons of Sir Robert Peel, second baronet, prime minister [q.v.], by his wife, Julia, daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir John Floyd, first baronet [q.v.]. He was named after his godfather, the first Duke of Wellington. He figures as a boy in The Private Letters of Sir Robert Peel' (1920). His early years were spent at Drayton Manor, Tamworth, and he was educated at Hatfield, Eton, and Balliol College, Oxford, taking second-class honours in literae humaniores in 1852.
In 1865, two years after an unsuccessful candidature at Coventry, he began his career in the House of Commons as liberal member for Warwick. He represented Warwick until 1885, and, when that borough was joined to Leamington, he sat for the new constituency until his elevation to the peerage in 1895. At the end of 1868, when Mr. Gladstone formed his first ministry, Peel became parliamentary secretary to the Poor Law Board, and then, from 1871 to 1873, served as secretary to the Board of Trade. From 1873 to 1874 he was patronage secretary to the Treasury, that is, chief whip to the liberal party. When Gladstone returned to office in 1880, Peel became under secretary to the Home Department, but resigned after a few months on account of ill-health.
In 1884, on the retirement of Sir Henry Brand (afterwards Viscount Hampden) [q.v.] from the speakership, Gladstone nominated Peel, who was unanimously elected 26 February. His speech of acceptance was reckoned so much a masterpiece that The Times recorded that ‘the House suddenly woke to the knowledge that its numbers had among them them another Peel, who might fairly compare in parliamentary eloquence with the great Sir Robert himself’. In 1895 Gladstone said that none of the Speakers for two centuries past had had to contend with a tithe of the difficulties which were met with, and overcome, by Peel. The eleven years of his speakership, lasting until April 1895, coincided with an intensity of party spirit unknown since the days of the first Reform Bill. These feelings had their root in the Irish question, more especially in the two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. The Irish members, whose numbers had much increased since the election of 1880, were able to practise what their critics termed ‘obstruction’ with proportionate power. The House in 1882, in order to parry obstruction, had adopted for the first time in its history a closure resolution, which threw upon the Speaker the burden of determining when closure should be applied. Peel used this power in February 1885, for the first time. If, as happened, more than forty members voted against closure, then there had to be at least 200 votes cast in its favour in order to carry it. On this initial occasion only 207 votes were so cast. This critical event marked a turning-point in the procedure of the House of Commons. Warned by this instance, the House in March 1887 passed a standing order leaving it to the Speaker to accept or to refuse a motion ‘that the question be now put’, thus adopting the policy of distributing these self-governing powers between the Speaker and the members. Nevertheless, the parliamentary machine could not, and did not, run smoothly, the passions of that time being too hot; so that the work of the Speaker was, on the one hand, to forward such reforms of procedure as were possible, and, on the other, to carry on the life of the House of Commons from day to day. ‘Theoretically Peel was the servant of the House. There were occasions when a stranger might almost have regarded him as its master. His character, and his known uprightness, carried him through all his difficulties’ [The Times, 25 October 1912].
In 1895 Peel was created a viscount, and from this time his main public work was to be chairman of the royal commission on the licensing laws, which sat from 1896 to 1899. He took the lead in preparing the minority report, which, though agreeing with the majority report in many points, inclined to the views of temperance reformers on the main issues of the reduction of public-houses and the basis for compensation. Peel then, as in later years, opposed the creation of a perpetual interest in a terminable licence, and favoured the rapid reduction of licences by the aid of a compensation fund levied on the trade itself. When the liberals came into power, the Licensing Bill which they carried through the House of Commons in 1908, only to be defeated in the House of Lords, was based on the Peel minority report.
Lord Peel had many other activities and honours. He was visitor of Balliol College (1894–1912), and for many years chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, as well as an active trustee of the British Museum. He was president of the Temperance Legislation League, first chairman of the State Children's Aid Association, chairman of the council of Toynbee Hall, a governor of Harrow School, and vice-chairman of the Bedfordshire County Council. He received the honorary D.C.L. at Oxford in 1887. He married in 1862 Adelaide (died 1890), daughter of William Stratford Dugdale, of Merevale, Warwickshire. They had four sons and three daughters. Lord Peel died 24 October 1912 at Sandy, Bedfordshire, where he had lived for many years. There is a portrait of him by Sir W. Q. Orchardson, as Speaker, now in the Speaker's House, Westminster, and another by Sir H. von Herkomer, in the hall of Balliol College.
[Memoir (by the present writer) in The Times, 25 October 1912.]