Peel, the League and the Politics of a Bread Tax

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Richard Cobden supplied the Anti-Corn Law League's ideas and Manchester manufacturing base; John Bright, a Quaker orator from Rochdale, supplied its moral voice. From the League's founding in the late 1830s the two men ran one of the nineteenth century's most sophisticated pressure campaigns: mass meetings, traveling lecturers, millions of pamphlets, a conference of seven hundred ministers in 1841, and a deliberate framing of the tariff as a Bread Tax that taxed the poor to enrich landowners. Robert Peel, a Conservative prime minister whose party depended on the same landowners the League attacked, spent years resisting the case in public while, by his own later account, growing steadily more convinced of it in private. The Irish potato blight of 1845 gave him the opening to act. In January 1846 he told the Commons the country could no longer sustain a tariff that risked shortage on top of failed harvests, and by May and June the bill had passed both houses, over the votes of two thirds of his own party's backbenchers. The League declared victory and dissolved itself within weeks. Peel resigned before the month was out, brought down by a separate defeat on Irish policy, having broken his own party to pass a law it never forgave him for.