When Sir Robert Peel, as leader of the House of Commons in the Duke of Wellington’s administration, dramatically resigned his seat for Oxford University in the spring of 1829 to obtain its approval for his change of front in regard to the concession of Catholic Emancipation, he was ignominiously rejected for his constituency at the very time when O’Connell had been triumphantly returned for Clare. Peel’s defeat was the climax of a long conflict between the two men. It had begun when Peel came to Dublin as Chief Secretary in 1812, a young man of twenty-four, at the opening of his ,career. The conflict between them was thus symbolical of the forces that were arrayed on each side in the last and most bitter phase of the agitation for Catholic rights.

Peel had come to Dublin full of self-confidence and energy, wealthy, backed by powerful interests, and as the rising hope of the English Conservatives, keenly interested in politics, hard working and determined to assert his mastery in a position which could be made important or insignificant according to his own abilities and success as an administrator. Miss Ramsay in her admirably sympathetic study of his life points out how chance favoured him in the first year of his new office. Neither the Viceroy nor the Chief Secretary for Ireland in those days had a seat in the Cabinet, and ‘the division of authority between them varied according to the character of the individuals who held the posts.’