George Peele

“ Peele is in the middle of a love-song when Kit stumbles across the room to say a kind word to Shakespeare. That is a sign that George is not yet so very tipsy; for he is a gallant and a squire of dames so long as he is sober. There is not a maid in any tavern in Fleet Street who does not think George Peele the properest man in London. And yet, Greene being absent, scouring the street with Cutting Ball—whose sister is mother of poor Fortunatus Greene—Peele is the most dissolute man in the Globe to-night. ”

“ Peele had married as early as 1583 a lady who brought him some property, which he speedily dissipated. Robert Greene, at the end of his Groats-worth of Wit, exhorts Peele to repentance, saying that he has, like himself, “been driven to extreme shifts for a living.” ”

“ This last is a plain reference to George Peele, whom he had recently described in his Menaphon "Address" as "The Atlas of Poetry." In the following year Greene refers to the same encounter in the first part of his Never Too Late. Pretending to describe theatrical conditions in Rome, he again attacks the London players and brings in Roscius—who without doubt was Edward Alleyn—as contending with Tully, who is Peele. ”

“ There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the "Bohemian" [Pg 197] life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr. Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor's degree about 1577, his Master's in 1579.
His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589) , he probably wrote at Oxford. ”

“ One composed for Sir Wolstone Dixie, Lord Mayor of London, 29 October, 1595, is curious, as it describes the flourishing condition of the metropolis in the days of Queen Elizabeth. About 1593 Peele seems to have been taken into the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, to whom he dedicated in that year The Honour of the Garter. In The Puritan, a play attributed but erroneously to Shakespeare, and acted by the children of S. Paul’s, printed in 1607, is a character, George Pieboard, that was meant to be George Peele. Peele died before the year 1598, and left behind him a widow and a daughter. ”

“ George was taken aback, he had not meant his words to be taken au grand sérieux, and he tried to get out of the visit, but a servant from the great house arrived to conduct him to it, and Peele went with him. On his arrival he was gratefully received by the squire's wife, who conducted him to her husband's room. George felt his pulse and temples, and shook his head: "He is far spent," said he, "but under Heaven, I will do him some good, if nature be not quite extinct." ”

“ Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair.
Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me;
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me;
Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,
Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. ”

“ Peel never returned to office. His conversion to free trade had split his party, and the Whigs, under John Russell, succeeded to the direction of affairs. He remained in the House of Commons, and with such personal following as yet remained to him, supported the administration. The protectionists were rallied and led by George Bentinck and Benjamin Disraeli, whose star waxed as Peel's began to wane. Death put a sudden end to his activity. He was thrown from his horse while riding up Constitution Hill in London, and died on the second of July, 1850. ”

“ Squinnige at evening preparation.
Peele glanced ruefully at the blackboard. His look of disgust gradually gave way to a broad grin of delight. Gough (he was pressing a metal inkpot against a black eye) intercepted the grin, and looked more rueful still.
"It seems to me," said Peele, again addressing his followers, "we're going to have a jolly row."
"And all because of a few potatoes," said the Tadpole.
"And a girl," added Bates.
"Girls always do let a man in for rows," observed a youthful pessimist.
Peele checked his followers with a lordly wave of his hand. ”

“ Peel resigned. Lord John Russell, who, by a letter dated from Edinburgh on 22 Nov., had declared for total repeal, tried to form a government, but failed owing to a dissension between Lords Grey and Palmerston. On 20 Dec. Peel resumed office, feeling, in his own words, ‘like a man restored to life.’ All his former colleagues stood by him, with the exception of Stanley.
Parliament met in January 1846, and the government introduced a protection of life (Ireland) bill in the lords, and a corn bill and customs bill in the commons. ”

“ The most triumphant portion of Sir Robert Peel’s political career was indeed that which followed his exclusion from official life. I know of no statesman who ever occupied so proud a position as that in which a greater commoner than even the first William Pitt stood from 1846 to July, 1850, when an unhappy accident filled with patriotic sorrow every heart in England. ”

“ Two great organisations, the anti-corn law league and the chartists, were thundering against established laws. Deficits had become as annual as the harvest. There was intense distress among the working classes. Worst of all, the British government was discredited abroad.
The party that now found itself in power under Peel's guidance contained political talents unparalleled for splendour and promise. It could show seven men who had been or were to be prime ministers—Peel himself, Wellington, Ripon, Stanley, Aberdeen, Gladstone and Disraeli. ”

“ With Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, and a few lesser lights, he belonged to that group of scholars who wrote plays, translations, occasional poems, pageants, and whatever else would find a market. Now and then, it is almost certain, he appeared as an actor. Of his dissolute course of life, its misery and squalour, there can be no doubt whatever; "driven as myself," says Greene, "to extreme shifts." As early as 1579 Peele had made trouble for his father; he lived in poverty ”

“ The author of the ‘Letters of Runnymede’ dedicated them to the opposition leader and summoned him to come from ‘the halls and the bowers of Drayton’ to ‘rescue the nation.’ As for tried men, Peel succeeded in winning over two men in the House of Commons of first-class ability—Stanley and Sir James Graham. They had seceded from the whigs soon after the Reform Bill. He had in vain offered them places in his government of 1835 ”

“ Two moments later the battle became general, Peele standing in front of Polyhymnia, and shielding her from flying missiles with heroic devotion. Then Squinnige, the usher, came out from under the table, and the result was the suppression of the customary half-holiday, and an absurd "imposition" to be done about the Landes.
"Never heard of the blessed places," said the Tadpole, with a rueful glance at the blackboard. "What are they, anyway?"
"Oh, it's easy enough," said Peele. "You fellows needn't trouble about it. It's where every one goes about on stilts. ”

“ This sentiment was shared by the people at large. He had first attracted their attention by his policy in regard to catholic emancipation in 1829, and as time went on he won their complete confidence. His repeal of the corn laws, though it alienated the majority of his party, was recognised as a sacrifice made for the public good.
In an age of European revolutions, Peel may alone be said to have had the foresight and the strength to form a conservative party, resting not on force or on corruption, but on administrative capacity and the more stable portion of the public will. ”

“ His racing career commenced in 1821, when he was part owner of some horses with the Duke of Richmond and Lord Stradbroke. In 1824 his mare Phantom ran second for the Oaks to Lord Jersey's Cobweb. It was not till 1830 that Peel's name first appeared in the ‘Calendar,’ when he raced in confederacy with his relative, General Jonathan Yates. Two years later he took a leading position on the turf through the victory of his horse Archibald in the Two Thousand Guineas, and his good fortune culminated with the triumph of his Orlando in the Derby for 1844. ”

“ His conduct in this crisis won him back the tory allegiance which he had forfeited over catholic emancipation.
When Peel entered the parliament of 1833 as member for Tamworth his position was unique. He was the representative of an extinct system and the leader of a shattered party. For the tories, if nominally about 150 in number, rarely mustered one hundred on a division, and they were so dispirited that they even allowed their leader to be pushed from his place and made to sit nearer the speaker. On the other hand, he was incomparably the first man in the House of Commons. ”

“ Peel bore himself throughout all the trials of that most trying time with indomitable courage and with unfailing skill. Never during his whole career did he prove himself more brilliant and more full of resource than as the leader of what might be called an utterly hopeless struggle. The highest tribute has been paid to his never-failing tact and temper during that trying ordeal by his principal opponent in the House of Commons, Lord John Russell. ”

“ I wish you wouldn't speak to that beast Gough."
"Gough is full of good points," said Polyhymnia, angrily.
"So are a lot of other beasts," retorted Peele, more than ever decided that the combat should be waged to the death.
A bogus match was played under the Doctor's nose one afternoon, in which Peele's followers got decidedly the worst of it. Gough, emboldened by triumph, proposed that Peele and himself should settle their differences in Homeric combat then and there.
"I fight," retorted Peele, "when there is no chance of interruption." ”

“ The Young Englanders disliked him because he had hoisted the flag of Conservatism instead of Toryism on the morrow of the Reform Bill. The strong philanthropists and Tory Chartists disliked him because he was a strict economist and an upholder of the new poor law. But the fatal question was protection. That question was being fast brought to a crisis by public opinion and the Anti-Corn-Law League. Sir Robert Peel had been recognized in 1841 by Cobden as a Free Trader, and after experience in office he had become in principle more and more so. ”

“ Hence the references to his own views and feelings which recur in his speeches, and which his enemies affected to ascribe to egoism, are more rightly attributable to an opposite cause—the open terms on which he stood with the House of Commons. Not that there was no trace of the art whereby an orator invests the dry details of business with the attraction of personal feeling, for no one was a more refined master of persuasion than Sir Robert Peel. ”

“ But when he proceeded to claim permission to recommend certain changes in the household, by which he meant that some few ladies of the bedchamber closely connected with the outgoing ministers should be superseded, the queen declined to entertain the proposal, and Lord Melbourne and the whigs resumed office. Peel held that his view was not only constitutional, but also that the whigs had hitherto been so much in favour with the court that some overt act was needed to inform the public that the conservatives enjoyed an equal measure of the royal confidence. ”

“ Late in life Peel's neighbours and friends, including Sir Wilfrid Lawson and George Moore the philanthropist, presented him with a sum of money in acknowledgment of his long services. Besides his patrimonial estate at Caldbeck, Peel acquired, through his wife, a property at Ruthwaite, on which his last years were spent. ”

“ But this by no means exhausted his scheme of policy. In offering to William Gregory the conduct of Irish business in 1846, he used these words: ‘It will hereafter be a matter of pride to you to be associated with measures of a wide and generous character, which may entirely change the aspect of Ireland to England’ (Gregory, Autobiography, p. 129) . Unhappily Peel fell in 1846, before he could mature his plans. Too late, he pressed a portion of them on the whig ministry in the debate 30 March 1849. ”

“ And, cold as he was in public, few men could be more bright and genial in private than Sir Robert Peel.
In 1821 Peel consented to strengthen the enfeebled ministry of Lord Liverpool by becoming home secretary; and in that capacity he had again to undertake the office of coercing the growing discontent in Ireland, of which he remained the real administrator, and had again to lead in the House of Commons the opposition to the rising cause of Roman Catholic emancipation. ”

“ He followed, at some distance, in the steps of Romilly and Mackintosh, and he left very much to be done, which was chiefly accomplished during the Whig ascendancy that followed the Reform Bill of 1832. It appears, from some remarkable letters in this volume, that, before Peel took up the question of criminal reform, George IV. was exceedingly sensible of the enormity of executing very young men for secondary offences, and that he was continually pressing on his Ministers a more merciful administration of the law. He sometimes found Peel by no means ready to yield. ”

“ Peel was still a young man, of tall and robust stature, sanguine, with much sham refinement in his manner; he prided himself on the civility with which he behaved to all who had business relations with him, but every now and then the veneer gave an awkward crack, and, as in his debate with Miss Walcott, the man himself was discovered to be of coarse grain. His aspect was singular when, on Clara’s entrance into the private room, he laid down his cigarette and scrutinised her. ”