With such tact and such mastery of the political situation did Peel conduct himself in the years of opposition--now mildly criticising the government's policy, now joining forces with it, and now tearing its policies to pieces--that he constantly grew in the national esteem, and began to be looked upon as the inevitable successor of the Whigs. His turn came sooner than any one expected, in December, 1834. It was too soon, in fact, for the first Peel ministry could maintain itself but a few months, failing to secure a majority of Parliament. Yet in this brief lease of power Peel gave evidence of his fitness to govern. He undertook the reform of the ecclesiastical courts, gratified the Dissenters by proposing to remove the regulations which required all marriages to be celebrated according to the rites of the Established Church. He even addressed himself to the delicate question of settling the temporalities of the Established Church in Ireland, where the collection of church tithes was accompanied with much disorder and distress, arising from the fact that the vast majority of the tithe-payers were hostile to the Protestant bishops and clergy whom they were taxed to support. The opposition, led by John Russell, took advantage of the prejudices surrounding this subject and forced a succession of adverse votes, in consequence of which the Peel ministry abandoned office in April, 1835, after one hundred days of power--a period sometimes considered the most brilliant in Peel's whole career. For six years Sir Robert Peel remained in opposition, conducting himself so sagaciously as to gather about him all disaffected elements of the disintegrating majority. Peel saw to it that whatever popular measures of reform were carried by the Melbourne ministry should be credited largely to Conservative support. Wellington still survived as a great national figure, but his political influence was gone, and there was no one in the Whig or Liberal camp who could dispute Peel's position as the leading public man of England. Of his course at this time he said himself (1838): "My object is that by steadily attending to our duty, by censuring the government on all occasions when they deserve it, enforcing our principles by aiding them to carry those measures which we think right, even though by so doing we may be rescuing the government, we may establish new claims upon the approbation of the country."