When the Whigs were finally ousted in the General Election of 1841, a new kind of Tory came to power as Prime Minister – the efficient, hard-working Sir Robert Peel, who as Home Secretary under both Lord Liverpool (1770–1828) and the Duke of Wellington had simplified the criminal law and famously, in 1829, established London’s blue-uniformed Metropolitan Police Force, popularly dubbed ‘Bobbies’ or ‘Peelers’. Reticent, undemonstrative, upright and rationalist in character and approach, Peel was nonetheless animated by a powerful Evangelical conscience – one which, for example, had caused him to
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