Sat in the House of Commons for forty-seven years. He introduced the great Reform Bill in 1831 and was twice Prime Minister (1846-52, and 1865-6). He was raised to the Peerage in 1861.] [Sidenote: State of Parties.] The battle of Reform had been fought out in the country and in Parliament five years before the accession, and there were, as yet, no signs--to quote Sir Robert Peel's famous expression at Tamworth--of the Constitution being "trampled under the hoof of a ruthless democracy." On the whole, life--its business and pleasures--seemed to be going forward on much the same lines as before the great Act, dreaded, as it had been, as intensely by one party, as it had been pressed forward and welcomed by the other. Lord Melbourne was the head of a Whig Administration, of which, as everybody knows, the late King had waited impatiently for the first decent opportunity to get rid. But Melbourne and Lord John Russell (who, with the office of Home Secretary, was leader of the House of Commons) had to reckon with an advance wing of their own party, already known as Radicals, and were at least as profoundly averse from their projects as they were from the Tory policy. Melbourne and Russell desired to put down Radicalism and proceed with moderate and safe reforms, above all in Ireland, where the chronic discontent was being fanned to eruption by the exertions of Daniel O'Connell. The King's death had relieved the Whig Cabinet from the adverse influence of the Court; moreover, the reliance placed from the first by the young Queen upon Lord Melbourne, and the intimate relations between them, brought about by the circumstances of the case, enabled the Whigs to assume the peculiar rôle of their opponents--that of the special supporters of the throne. [Illustration: _M. Noble._} {_National Portrait Gallery._ SIR ROBERT PEEL (1788-1850). Was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1812, Home Secretary in 1822, and again in 1828-30 under the Duke of Wellington. In 1830 he reconstructed the Metropolitan Police. He was Prime Minister in 1834-5, and again from 1841 to 1846. His second Administration was distinguished by the total abolition of the Duty on Corn.] The Tories,[B] on the other hand, approached with much misgiving the General Election, which, according to the law as it then stood, followed of necessity on the demise of the monarch. They knew that the Duchess of Kent had favoured Whig principles in the education of the Queen; they saw that Melbourne's personal charm had secured for him complete ascendancy in the councils of the new Sovereign, and they had nothing to expect in the country but reverse. [Sidenote: Result of General Election.]