, though by no means
without effect in the country, fell upon deaf ears in the house of
commons, and further humiliations followed rapidly. One of these was the
successful outcry against the appointment of Londonderry, who had
excited much hostility as an uncompromising enemy to reform, to the
embassy at St. Petersburg, in consequence of which he, very honourably,
relieved the government from obloquy by declining the post. A motion to
repeal the malt tax was decisively defeated, and soon afterwards a
motion in favour of granting a charter to the University of London was
carried against the government by a large majority. Then came a defeat
on a motion for adjournment, and the arts of obstruction were
obstinately practised in debates on the estimates. At last the
inevitable crisis arrived, and, as might be expected, the final issue
was taken upon an Irish question.

The influence of O'Connell and his "tail," as his followers were called,
had been neutralised, since the reform act, by the overwhelming strength
of the whigs, and the public-spirited action of Peel, who, as leader of
the conservative opposition, actually supported the whig government in
sixteen out of twenty most important contests on domestic policy. A very
different spirit was now shown by the whig opposition, and an evil
precedent, pregnant with disastrous consequences, was set by the famous
"Lichfield House compact". This was a close alliance between O'Connell
and those whom he had so fiercely denounced as "the base, brutal, and
bloody whigs". It bore immediate fruit in a motion of Russell for a
committee of the whole house to consider the temporalities of the Irish
Church. After a debate of four nights, the resolution was carried, on
March 30, by a majority of thirty-three. On April 5, a further
resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-five for applying any
surplus-funds "to the general education of all classes of the people
without religious distinction," and was more emphatically affirmed two
days later by a majority of twenty-seven.

Peel had long been conscious of the hopelessness of his position and
impatient of maintaining the struggle. He felt the constitutional danger
of allowing the executive government to become a helpless instrument in
the hands of a hostile majority in the house of commons. Nothing but the
earnest remonstrances of the king and his tory friends, including
Wellington, had induced him to retain office so long, and, after