iament for an Irish
constituency, for his father had simply bought the seat, and the young
member appears to have never gone over to his constituents or held any
communication with them.

'When I sat for Cashel,' he afterwards wrote, 'and was not in office,
having made those sacrifices which could then legally be made, but now
cannot, I did not consider myself at all pledged to the support of
Government.'[12] Perceval, who represented in its extreme form the
Tory reaction that followed the Revolution, was then Prime Minister,
and Peel at once took his place among his followers. He first spoke in
seconding the Address in 1810, and in the partial judgment of his
father his speech was considered, 'by men the best qualified to form a
correct opinion of public speaking, the best first speech since that
of Mr. Pitt.'[13]

It was not, perhaps, an unmixed advantage to Peel that while he was
still a mere boy his father had somewhat ostentatiously destined him
to be one day a Tory statesman. Such an education could hardly fail to
strengthen the self-consciousness which was never wanting in Peel's
character, and to give a decided bias to his judgment. At the same
time, the distinctive merits of his career would have probably never
been fully developed without the early administrative training which
his opinions made possible for him, and there is nothing in his early
history to give the least countenance to the belief that his adherence
to the extreme type of Tory politics imposed the slightest strain upon
his judgment. His immediate interests and his sentiments appear at
this time to have perfectly concurred. He came into Parliament with
the party which was dominant, and with the section of the party which
was most poor in able men. Had he adopted on the Catholic question the
liberal opinions of Canning and Castlereagh, he must have held a
position altogether subordinate to them; and the same causes that in
the preceding Ministry had raised Perceval to be leader of the House
of Commons over the heads of Castlereagh and Canning, marked out for
Peel the future leadership of the party of resistance to concession.
It has been said, on the authority of Sir Lawrence Peel, that his
first appointment was that of private secretary to Lord Liverpool, but
Mr. Parker has found no trace of this in the papers either of Peel or
of Lord Liverpool. In 1810, however, when he was but just twenty-two,
he entered administrative life as Under-Secret