Robert Peel - Statesman or Turncoat?

Any interpretation of Robert Peel's political career naturally hinges around four key areas of policy: Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, Ireland and agricultural protection. On each of these major questions, Peel changed his view quite dramatically, in the process apparently repudiating his own previously expressed position and, over Ireland and the Corn Laws, majority opinion within his own party. Hardly surprisingly, Peel came to be vilified in some Tory circles as the great apostate; but, as Donald Read has shown in his book Peel and the Victorians (Blackwell 1987), Peel's posthumous reputation has anointed him as 'the greatest statesman of his age'. Such an apparent paradox merits serious consideration.