their resistance. Still more opposed to him,
if it were possible, was the Duke of Wellington. To break up the
cabinet was an act of great courage. To resume office when Lord
John had failed in constructing one, was still more courageous. He
said to the Queen: 'I am ready to kiss hands as your minister
to-night. I believe I can collect a ministry which will last long
enough to carry free trade, and I am ready to make the attempt.'
When he said this there were only two men on whom he could rely.
One of the first to join him was Wellington. 'The Queen's
government,' he said, 'must be carried on. We have done all that we
could for the landed interest. Now we must do all that we can for
the Queen.'[173]

On one of the days of this startling December, Mr. Gladstone writes to
his father: 'If Peel determines to form a government, and if he sends
for me (a compound uncertainty), I cannot judge what to do until I know
much more than at present of the Irish case. It is there if anywhere
that he must find his justification; there if anywhere that one returned
to parliament as I am, can honestly find reason for departing at this
time from the present corn law.' Two other letters of Mr. Gladstone's
show us more fully why he followed Peel instead of joining the
dissentients, of whom the most important was Lord Stanley. The first of
these was written to his father four and a half years later:--

_6 Carlton Gardens, June 30, 1849._--As respects my 'having made
Peel a free trader,' I have never seen that idea expressed
anywhere, and I think it is one that does great injustice to the
character and power of his mind. In every case, however, the head
of a government may be influenced more or less in the affairs of
each department of state by the person in charge of that
department. If, then, there was any influence at all upon Peel's
mind proceeding from me between 1841 and 1845, I have no doubt it
may have tended on the whole towards free trade.... But all this
ceased with the measures of 1845, when I left office. It was during
the alarm of a potato famine in the autumn of that year that the
movement in the government about the corn laws began. I was then on
the continent, looking after Helen [his sister], and not dreaming
of office or public affairs.... I myself had invariably, during
Peel's government, spoke