At the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution there still stood a few miles south of Tamworth, on the borders of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, the old manor house of Drayton Bassett. In the sixteenth century it had been in the possession of the famous Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s favourite. At his death he had left it to his wife, Lettice Knollys, who resided there with her third husband, Sir Christopher Blount. From the Blounts it passed into the hands of the Earl of Essex and later to the family of Thynne. The house, surrounded by some six hundred acres of deer park, was a rambling half-timbered structure, with a tall detached banqueting hall in the walled gardens near by. Its low, gabled buildings were arranged in rough quadrangular shape not unlike an old-fashioned decayed college, with small rooms and separate staircases, and a hall hung with portraits and stagsheads. To the contemporaries of George III it appeared a rude and antique dwelling-place, ‘a curious specimen of the occasional simplicity of our antient nobility’.1 Little remained of its Tudor glories, and latterly the house was inhabited only by a steward.

Not only the manor house but its proprietor also had fallen on lean times. Thomas Thynne, who succeeded his father as Viscount Weymouth in 1751 and was created Marquess of Bath in 1789, like many other great landowners before and after had wasted his substance on ephemeral pleasures. It was unkindly written of him that his chief amusement was burgundy; and not only drink but love of gaming had absorbed his time and faculties, and ultimately his estate.2 In 1790 he sold a large block of his Staffordshire estates, including the manor and house of Drayton. The purchasers were two north-country industrialists, Joseph Wilkes of Measham, Leicestershire,3 and Robert Peel of Bury in Lancashire. The price paid was £123,000 (very much, it was said, under its real value), and the property which changed hands included besides Drayton Bassett, the hamlets and villages of Sherrold and Fazeley, Bonehill with its rectory, and corn and paper-mills at Comberford and Wigginton. The total extent was an estimated 4,755 acres, all but six lying within the county of Staffordshire, of an annual value reckoned at £3,217. To finance the purchase Wilkes and Peel raised a mortgage on part of the estate for £50,000 and it was originally intended that the property should be divided equally between them. Peel, however, paid separately a sum of £19,000 for lands at Comberford and Wigginton, and certain pieces at Drayton and Fazeley, which were taken out of the main estate and freed from the mortgage. The partners then each put up £27,000 to pay off the balance of the purchase price. Once the property was in their hands the new owners sold off part of the unmortgaged estates and divided the remainder. Wilkes took Drayton Manor and Bonehill, and since this was the most valuable part of the property remaining in their possession, he agreed to pay his partner £40,000 in compensation and in addition to discharge himself the £50,000 mortgage. Whether for lack of capital or because he regarded the purchase solely as a speculation, Wilkes in turn sold Drayton Manor to his son-in-law, Mr. Thomas Fisher, for £74,880, a figure which included the unpaid residue of the original mortgage, amounting to £20,000. Fisher seemed to have thoughts of settling down at Drayton, for he pulled down the banqueting hall, demolished the old quadrangle as far as the hall, and repaired the remaining buildings for his own residence. Nevertheless, within a short time he too abandoned the enterprise and sold house and manor at the reduced price of £66,952, the sum of £20,1724 still outstanding on the mortgage to be paid out of the purchase money.

The date of this final transfer of Drayton was 1796 and the purchaser was the same Robert Peel who had partnered Joseph Wilkes in the negotiations for the main Thynne estates in 1790. His share in the complicated transactions which had taken place since that date offered a singular example of the good fortune in money matters for which he was proverbial in his family circle. Of the three principals he had emerged in the end with the lion’s share of the property. Wilkes in direct purchase, mortgage, and compensation, had paid out a total of £117,000 and received £74,880 from Fisher and an additional unknown amount for other parts of the property. Fisher had bought Drayton Manor less mortgage for £54,880 and sold it for £46,780. Peel, on the other hand, had paid out a total of £46,000 for his half-share and separate purchases, but had received both a share (presumably) of the minor sales and a sum of £40,000 which together must virtually have covered his original expenditure. He then bought Drayton Manor for only £66,952, unencumbered and with certain modest improvements in the way of new farms and other buildings erected by Fisher. By 1796, therefore, he was the owner of his separate purchases of property at Comberford, Wigginton, Drayton and Fazeley, certain lands, tenements, and mills from his share in the principal estate, and the Manor of Drayton by purchase from Fisher, the first and last items alone amounting to over 2,600 acres.5

Even this was not the total of his Staffordshire purchases, however, for by another separate transaction in 1790 he had acquired from the Thynnes lands and property in the borough of Tamworth, including 120 houses, for the sum of £15,500.6 It is probable, indeed, that from the start Robert Peel was bent on securing a permanent position in the county. His Tamworth purchase enabled him to succeed to the half-share in the representation of the borough formerly enjoyed by the Thynnes, and the year of the sale saw the new proprietor returned as M.P. for the constituency. From the north he brought his industrial interests. Cotton-and bleaching-mills were started at Fazeley and Bonehill, springs at Drayton harnessed to provide a source of pure water, and for a time Tamworth Castle and the Castle mill were used for calico printing.7 The final step was the removal of his family from Bury and the establishment of a new home for the Peels at Drayton Bassett. What was left of the ancient manor house after Fisher’s improvements was completely pulled down and before the end of the century there rose in its place a large modern building—Old Drayton Hall8—solid, rectangular, three-storeyed, large enough for a prosperous manufacturer with a numerous family, even though Croker was to complain thirty years later that it would only hold three or four guests at a time. But though the house was undistinguished, the combination of the Drayton estate, industrial wealth, and a parliamentary seat at Tamworth, was more than enough to secure for Robert Peel a position of influence in the county and make him the object of respectful if curious attention among the Wolseleys, Bagots, Wrottesleys, Chetwynds, Littletons, and other old-established Staffordshire families among whom he had chosen to settle.

II

The new owner of Drayton Manor was the second generation of a Lancashire family that had risen to wealth in the cotton revolution of the eighteenth century. The constant reinforcement of the landowning and aristocratic classes by successful members of the great mercantile, banking, and brewing families was not a novel phenomenon in English social history; but Robert Peel was an early representative of a new class, the industrial magnate. He was not, however, entirely a self-made man, for it was his father who had laid the foundations of the family’s industrial fortune. Originally the Peels were small yeoman farmers and traced their ancestry back no further than a certain William Peele who in 1600 migrated from the Craven district of Yorkshire to a farm called Hole or Hoyle House near Blackburn in Lancashire. Even that derivation is uncertain for there were many Peeles in the neighbourhood of Bolton from at least the middle of the sixteenth century, and a later family historian, Jonathan Peel of Knowlmere,9 argued strongly for a descent from this more numerous Lancastrian branch. The first Peele that can clearly be identified is a Robert Peele who in 1731 bought a small farm called The Crosse or Oldham’s Cross at Oswaldtwistle and renamed it Peele Fold. His son and heir William was a man of indifferent health who lived a retired life on his farm and died in 1757, leaving four sons and two daughters. It was his eldest son Robert—‘Parsley’ Peel—who lifted the Peels out of their narrow rural environment into the small but rapidly expanding industrial society that was taking shape north of the Trent. The event owed almost everything to the accident of time and place. The same revolutionary process that transformed the barren uplands and lonely hamlets of Lancashire and Yorkshire carried to early fortune and reputation the obscure yeomen Peels.

At the start of the eighteenth century the development of a native British cotton industry was hindered by various statutory prohibitions and restrictions passed by parliament to protect the great staple woollen trade that had been the backbone of English industry since the Middle Ages. But in 1736 a limited relaxation of this protective barrier was...