The fear of Liverpool’s government in 1815 was that peacetime conditions would see a flood of cheap imported grain and a collapse of domestic arable production. Select Committees reporting to Parliament in 1813 and 1814 had predicted such a crisis for British agriculture. In 1815 the attractions of cheap food were easily outweighed by the problems which would accompany any crisis in domestic agriculture. Collapsing grain prices would lead directly to rural unemployment, inflated poor rates, the possibility of serious rural unrest and a collapse in demand for non-agricultural commodities. Moreover with the international situation still distinctly volatile, national defence seemed to require that government pursue autarkic policies of self-sufficiency rather than leave the nation again vulnerable to being starved into submission in a general European war. Finally, farmers had invested substantially in taking new lands into cultivation, enclosure and new techniques of production. In the context of wartime conditions, with the nation crying out for food, such investment was as much patriotic as self- interested. Much investment had been funded by borrowing, and to allow prices to fall would leave the landed interest facing large interest charges and falling prices. The victims of such a squeeze on agricultural profits would not only have been the major landowners but the many tenant farmers and smaller owner-occupiers who had borrowed and invested.

Thus no-one in parliament seriously advocated abandoning the corn laws in 1814 or 1815, and even free-trade pundits such as David Ricardo recognised the need for limited, short-term relief for agriculture. Moreover the 1815 Corn Law went nothing like as far as the leaders of the agricultural interest had hoped. The Select Committee of 1813, chaired by Sir Henry Parnell, had argued that agriculture required a minimum price of 105 shillings per quarter. Against this background the 1815 Corn law's provision that the ports be closed when the price fell below 80 shillings per quarter represented not so much a defeat for the agricultural interest as a serious attempt to balance the interests of agriculturalists with the needs of industry and a desire to promote consumption through cheaper food. In short the 1815 Corn Law was conceived, and debated, not as a class measure but as part of the necessary adjustment to peacetime conditions, offering justified relief to agriculture and a measure of security to the nation’s food supply.

Two other considerations which strengthened the case for agricultural protection in 1815 are worth noting, not least because they would play a crucial role in the eventual decision to repeal the corn laws. The first was the role of Ireland. It was no co-incidence that the chairman of the 1813 Select Committee was an Irish landlord, Sir Henry Parnell. Like many Irish agriculturalists Parnell feared that the return of peace would devastate Irish agriculture and with it the Irish economy. This Irish lobby spoke loudly of ‘a malady of peace’. The 1815 Corn Law made important concessions to Ireland by giving Irish agriculturalists free access to the large British market. To this extent the 1815 Corn Law might be seen in part as an economic consequence of the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, linking the Irish and British economies together in a way which encouraged Irish agriculture, inhibited industrial development in Ireland and facilitated industrialisation on the British mainland.

Two years before the Act of Union, in 1798, T.R. Malthus had published his Essay on the Principle of Population in which he had argued that population, if unchecked, had a natural tendency to outstrip ‘the means of subsistence’. Rapid population growth would lead to pressure on food supply and ultimately to acute shortages. For Malthus this constituted a compelling case for agricultural protection, and in two major pamphlets in 1814 and 1815 and again in his Principles of Political Economy in 1820 Maithus argued the case for an effective corn law to boost domestic agriculture and help avert serious food shortages. Many protectionist thinkers followed Malthus’s lead and, contrary to the beliefs of the Anti-Corn Law League and many subsequent historians, there was a perfectly coherent intellectual case for agricultural protection throughout the period to 1846. This case was advanced in journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and rested on the centrality of domestic agriculture to food production and the need to secure balanced economic growth rather than the fevered speculation which seemed to accompany policies of laissez faire and commercial speculation.

Changing attitudes towards the Corn Laws in the 1820s and 1830s
In a sense no-one believed that the 1815 Corn Law should be permanent. Liberal political economists such as David Ricardo believed that it should be no more than a transitional measure, and protection should be rapidly phased out. In his Principles of Political Economy published in 1817 Ricardo argued that the Corn Law inflated agricultural rents and diminished industrial and other profits, thus impeding national economic growth. The majority of leading political economists followed Ricardo’s lead, and the economic case for Repeal gathered force from around 1820.

Meanwhile many agriculturalists wished to revise the 1815 Corn Law in a quite different direction, enhancing rather than diminishing the degree of protection offered to agriculture. George Webb Hall’s Agricultural Association pressed the Liverpool government hard during the agricultural depression of 1819-22, and the government even lost by-elections in agricultural constituencies as a result of its unwillingness to increase the protection offered to agriculture. Despite the operation of the Corn Law in the five years from 1820 wheat prices averaged 57 shillings per quarter, a mere 55% of their average levels in the last five years of the war.

In fact from the early 1820s Tory governments were moving towards revisions of the Corn Law which diminished rather than increased the protection offered. The Corn Law was revised in 1822, excluding foreign wheat when the price fell below 70 shillings, and levying duties of 12 shillings per quarter on foreign wheat when the price was between 70 and 80 shillings and a 5 shilling duty on prices between 80 and 85 shillings per quarter. The difficulty both with the 1815 Corn Law and its 1822 revision was that they encouraged producers to speculate on the ports opening and closing, causing marked fluctuations in price and supply. The 1828 sliding scale was an attempt to smooth the operation of the market by introducing a graduated duty falling from 34s 8d when the price was 52s or below, to a duty of 1s when the price reached or exceeded 73s.

As President of the Board of Trade between 1823 - 27 William Huskisson was a passionate advocate of bold measures of tariff reform and a more efficient Corn Law. The fruits of Huskisson’s labours were evident in the 1828 Corn Law. Nevertheless it is clear that government policy towards the corn laws throughout the period 1813-30 was dominated by attempts to encourage a relatively buoyant and extensive domestic agricultural sector. As a result even reforming politicians such as Huskisson placed greater emphasis on securing abundant food supplies rather than on procuring cheap food.

In important ways the debate over the Corn Laws began to change in the 1830s. Three developments contributed most to this change. The first was technical but crucial. In the period immediately after 1815 the European grain market had been glutted with cheap grain, especially from eastern Prussia and Poland. In the 1830s this surplus began to disappear as population growth increased European demand. British policy, which had supposed that whenever domestic supply was in deficit there would be a cheap and abundant supply on the Continent, now began to look less prudent.

Secondly the Reform of Parliament in 1832 encouraged expectations that the newly-enfranchised middle classes and especially the newly-enfranchised industrial boroughs would translate their recently-acquired political power into a more liberal commercial and tariff policy. When the Reformed Parliament seemed to be dragging its feet over tariff reform, especially corn law reform, liberal commercial opinion began to organise.

This led to the third crucial development of the 1830s, the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester in 1838. The advent of the League transformed the politics of agricultural protection. Under the energetic leadership of Richard Cobden the League developed into the most formidable extra-parliamentary pressure group of the nineteenth century. The League’s intellectual case rested on two simple propositions. The first proposition was economic, with the League arguing that the Corn Laws reduced Britain’s economic prosperity by increasing the prices of basic foodstuffs. The effects of this were twofold. The first effect was to push up wages, thus diminishing manufacturing profits and thereby slowing the pace of economic expansion. The second was to reduce the disposable income of working families thus reducing demand for non-agricultural commodities and again slowing economic growth. The League's second proposition was political. The Corn Laws privileged the landed class - an old political elite, in other words - against the interests of the middle and working classes. The Corn Laws were a 'bread tax': a conspiracy of rich and idle landowners against the interests of the masses and manufacturers. With the advent of the Anti-Corn Law League supporters of protection began to lose the propaganda war.

Repeal of the Corn Laws, 1841-69
Hardly surprisingly the issue of agricultural protection loomed large in the 1841 election. The League was anxious to gain representation in Parliament and, although it failed to secure a substantial number of seats, it did secure the election of figures of substance, notably Richard Cobden in Stockport. Lord John Russell, the Whig leader, had sought to wrong foot Sir Robert Peel by coming out in favour of a low fixed duty on imported corn. Peel studiously avoided committing himself either on Russell's proposals or on the future of the Corn Laws. Many of Peel's back bench supporters showed no such caution, and 60% of Tory candidates made the maintenance of the existing Corn Law the leading issue in their election manifestos. The logic of Peel's victory in 1841 was that the Corn Laws would stay. If they were to be repealed the principal casualty would be the Conservative party which, in 1841, still seemed overwhelming committed to agricultural protection.

The Corn Laws were not exempt from Peel's great fiscal reforms of 1842, where his strategy in the budget was to encourage economic recovery by cutting tariffs and reintroducing the income tax. In the same year he revised the 1828 sliding scale, making the Corn Laws work more smoothly but, crucially, diminishing the amount of protection offered in the key price band, 50-70 shillings per quarter. A number of historians, including Boyd Hilton, have claimed that Peel was converted to free trade in the 1820s and this conversion was the result of Huskisson's influence on Peel. The direct evidence for such a conversion is slender, and Peel's public position in 1842 was that he was making the Corn Laws work better, not paving the way to their abolition. Seeing Peel as an early covert free trader and secret believer in Corn Law repeal in 1842 involves a rather selective reading of the evidence and casts him in an unnecessarily Machiavellian light. It is much more persuasive to see Peel in 1842 as a tariff reformer, committed to dramatic lowering of duties to encourage economic recovery. The logic of this policy of tariff reform might well be an eventual abandonment of substantial agricultural protection, and Peel was intimating this to close colleagues by late 1843. Nevertheless the 1842 budget was an experiment, and there is no evidence at all to suggest that, even as late as 1844, Peel was intending to repeal the Corn Laws in the present parliament.

The drama of the 1845-6 Repeal crisis was a denouement which few would have predicted. What happened between the August of 1845 and the July of 1846 was so central to the development of Victorian politics and political culture that the motivations for, and meanings of, Corn Law Repeal have become obscured beneath myths and misunderstandings of quite epic proportions. At one level Peel's stated reason for repealing the Corn Laws, the potato blight in Ireland, is the least plausible. As his Chancellor, Henry Goulburn, repeatedly pointed out, it was difficult to see how Repeal could help Ireland, and in 1846 Peel himself conceded to the Commons that he had always believed that there was one area of the United Kingdom which would not benefit from Repeal, and that was Ireland. After Repeal cheap foreign corn would compete with Irish corn in the British market on equal terms, to the obvious disadvantage of Irish agriculture.

It is therefore fashionable to claim that the Irish famine was merely the occasion for Corn Law Repeal. Three considerations might make us pause before accepting this orthodoxy uncritically. The first is that, whatever the likely effect on Ireland, the political symbolism of Ireland starving and English agriculturalists enjoying protection would have been powerful indeed - a propaganda gift to Cobden and the League. At the very least Peel might have been forced to concede suspension of the Corn Law to mollify public opinion and suspension would have been an admission of the League's case. The second is that Peel was acutely sensitive to the politics of starvation. He had been moved by the widespread hunger during the recession of 1842 and the suffering at Paisley had been seared into his political consciousness. To uphold the Corn Law in such circumstances was, Peel argued, 'to be willing to encounter the tremendous risk of two bad harvests and the recurrence of such a state of things in Paisley and Stockport as was witnessed in the winters of 1841 and 1842 – [and] not to see that the Corn Laws would, in such an event, be swept away with dishonour on the demand of a starving population'. The third consideration was that in August 1845 Peel was receiving worrying intelligence from British representatives abroad that Powers such as Prussia might refuse to export grain to Britain if it persisted in a policy of punitive tariff protection. In short the principle of agricultural protection was in danger of becoming counter-productive, and a policy designed to secure supply in 1815 looked as if it might jeopardise supply in 1845.

In part at least Peel's conversion to free trade in agriculture rested on a perception that the economic framework within which policy was made was changing. As early as 1842 Peel had made it clear that 'our lot was cast' and that rapid population growth and urbanisation meant that 'we cannot recede' from being a manufacturing nation. Repealing the Corn Laws took this policy further, but was wholly consonant with it. Henceforth Britain would feed itself from exporting its substantial manufacturing surplus and importing grain from the cheapest market.

In abandoning the Corn Laws Peel was not abandoning agriculture, however loudly his Protectionist critics such as Disraeli and Bentinck might suggest otherwise. Peel, after all, was a substantial and successful farmer himself. Rather, Peel believed that the future of British agriculture lay in what was known as 'high farming', a more commercialised agriculture which depended on high levels of investment in new techniques, new fertilisers and new machinery. Peel sought to encourage 'high farming' and to sweeten the pill of Corn Law repeal by a package of rate relief and improvement grants to agriculture amounting to over a million pounds. Only a commercialised agricultural sector, freed from the false comforts of protection, could, Peel believed, prosper in a modern, dynamic national economy. The period of agricultural prosperity and high farming which followed Corn Law Repeal in the 1850s and 1860s was at least a partial vindication of Peel's policies.

Political considerations were also crucial to the timing of Corn Law Repeal. It has been suggested, by John Prest and Derek Hamer most notably, that the Anti- Corn Law League had developed an electoral strategy which might have frightened Peel into Repeal. The league had certainly been successful in securing the registration of supporters as forty-shilling freeholders in counties such as South Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and South Warwickshire. It is highly improbable that the registration drive could have done more than dent Peel's majority, and Peel himself came to acknowledge the intellectual but not the political significance of the League.

When Peel resigned on 6 December, having failed to secure Cabinet unanimity in support of Repeal, he seemed genuinely to have intended to support a Russell Whig government in carrying Repeal. When Russell's lack of political nerve and political judgement meant that he had to tell Queen Victoria he was unable to form an administration, Peel returned to office committed to carrying Repeal, and to carrying it without pandering to his Protectionist wing. As Peel wrote on 3 August 1846, 'I would have done anything to carry the repeal of the Corn Laws. I had put my hands to the plough and could not have looked back'. In the process Peel failed to carry the party but carried public opinion.
Indeed Peel came positively to court public support. His resignation speech lavished praise on Cobden - but not, significantly, on the League - and entrusted his reputation to 'the abodes of those whose lot is to labour with the sweat of their brows'. Cheap and abundant food was to be Peel's political epitaph. There is no doubt that Peel believed that, once famine had broken out in Ireland, Repeal was unavoidable. His intention was that Repeal should be carried by a deliberate act of the House of Commons, not by the Commons capitulating to the League.

That is why Peel claimed that carrying Corn Law Repeal was 'the most Conservative act of my life'. It was an act designed to reconcile the industrial middle class, advanced commercial opinion and even many former Chartists to Parliament in its present form. Much to Cobden's later dismay, Repeal destroyed the League and prevented it from campaigning for reform across a much broader front. Paradoxically, destroying the League entailed destroying the Conservative Party. That was a price Peel willingly, perhaps even eagerly paid. His exasperation with his Ultra wing is well known, and Peel was adamant that they should never hold power again. 'Thank God', Peel exclaimed the month after his resignation, 'I am relieved for ever from the trammels of such a party.'

Yet even now the complex story of the Corn Laws held one final ironic twist. Peel's Bill phased the Corn Laws out gradually to be replaced from February 1849 by an innocent-sounding small 'registration duty'. At one shilling a quarter on imported wheat this appeared to be a modest and technical measure. In fact by 1868 it was yielding an embarrassingly large revenue, nearly £900,000, and in 1869 Robert Lowe, as Liberal Chancellor, abolished the registration duty. Peel, 'the greatest financier of his day', abolished a protectionist Corn Law but continued the tariff in perhaps the most efficient form possible. Still, only the most perverse of Examiners would he tempted to ask candidates 'Why did Robert Lowe repeal the Corn Laws in 1869?'