Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice during the 19th Century. He is perhaps most well-known for sponsoring the bill that formed the Metropolitan Police.

He was born on Feb. 15, 1788, in Bury, Lancashire. His father owned a cotton mill, was very rich, and was a Member of Parliament for Tamworth. Robert Peel the elder, who was named a Baronet in 1800, steered his son into politics from a young age. Young Robert was a smart child and a very good student. He went to Harrow and then Christ Church, in Oxford. He graduated from Oxford in 1808, becoming the first student ever to receive first class honors in both classics and mathematics.

A year after graduating, he gained election to Parliament as an MP for Cashel, Tipperary. He became instantly famous in the House of Commons, with the Speaker of the House himself describing Peel's maiden speech as "the best first speech since that of William Pitt (the Younger)." His first stint in government came when he was just 22; he was named undersecretary for and the colonies. When his boss, Lord Liverpool, became Prime Minister in 1812, Peel jumped at the chance to become chief secretary for Ireland. This was a very important job and a difficult one. Through the Act of Union 1800, Ireland and Great Britain had become the United Kingdom; however, because of laws still on the books as the result of distrust over Catholic monarchs from many dozens year before, no Catholics could sit in Parliament and so all of the dozens of Irish members of Parliament were Protestant and many of those were landowners and other members of the upper class, at the top of a class system at the bottom of which were the majority of the country, poor Catholics. Into this minefield-plagued environment stepped the 24-year-old Peel, and he remained in the post for six years, keeping the peace and initiating some meaningful reforms. One of the things that he achieved was the establishment of an Irish police force.

In 1819, Peel was the head of a committee in the Commons that advocated the return to the gold standard; the law that did this was commonly known as "Peel's Act." Also in that year, he married Julia Floyd, a member of English high society. They eventually had seven children.

Liverpool, still in power in 1821, named Peel Home Secretary. Peel kept that position for nearly a decade and made a name for himself revolutionizing the penal system. Among Peel's initiatives were a focus on preventing crime and reforming criminals, rather than relying strictly on terror and punishment. Prison reform was also a priority for Peel, and he achieved this by centralizing prison supervision. Perhaps his most lasting contribution in this field was the passage of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, which, among other things, established the police force of London. The members of the police, named after him, were called "Peelers" or "Bobbies." One of his more famous quotes was "The police are the public and the public are the police."

Also in 1829, Peel oversaw the long-sought-after achievement of Catholic Emancipation, the relaxing of requirements that prevented Catholics from holding posts in government, including being elected to Parliament. Peel had personally long been opposed to the idea, even when he was in charge in Ireland, but he agreed with then-Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington that the political climate at the time was such that refusing Emancipation any longer would create a period of violent unrest. Peel found himself a target of vitriol from his fellow Tories, and he was defeated for re-election.

Replacing Wellington as Prime Minister was the Whig Earl Grey, who championed the passage of the Reform Act 1832, which granted the right to vote to a large number of men who had previously been so denied. Grey's Whig government enacted some monumental elements of reform legislation, including the Abolition of Slavery Act and the Factory Act of 1833, which set a minimum working age for factory employees of 9 and mandated fewer working hours for women and older children. In 1834, however, King William IV dissolved the government and asked Peel to be Prime Minister. He served in that capacity for only 100 days, enjoying none of the fruits of a governing majority because the Whigs held a majority of seats in Parliament. In January 1835, Peel issued the Tamworth Manifesto, a set of guiding principles that is considered the basis for the modern Conservative Party. Peel resigned, and the Whig leader Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister.

Peel served as leader of the Opposition for the next six years and then became Prime Minister again in 1841. One of the measures enacted during his second tenure was a new income tax, which had been abolished after the Napoleonic Wars. Among the reform bills passed during this time were the Mines Act, which banned the use of women and children as workers underground, and the Factory Act 1844, which restricted working hours and conditions for women and children. The most well-known piece of legislation that Peel oversaw, however, was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws.

The Corn Laws were an example of the kind of disconnect that inspired the Reform Acts of the 19th Century. As a result of the laws, unemployment increased in all sectors of the economy. But because many of the Members of Parliament were landowners who were profiting handsomely from the artificially high price of food, they were unwilling to do away with the Corn Laws because doing so would mean a reduction in their income. That the poor and lower middle class were struggling was not as important to many MPs as was their economic bottom line. Wellington had introduced a sliding scale for the price of domestic corn, but poor people still couldn't afford basic necessities. Opponents of the Corn Laws formed a political organization called the Anti-Corn-Law League (ACLL); in 1841, two members of this league won seats in Parliament and took every opportunity to voice their concerns to Peel.

In 1845, a potato blight devastated the Irish crop, creating the Irish Potato Famine, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and the emigration of many others. The very next year, in May, Parliament repealed the Corn Laws. Despite the House of Commons majority's voting for the repeal, Peel faced such a backlash from his own political party, the Conservatives, that he resigned as Prime Minister. He stayed on in Parliament for another four years.

He died on July 2, 1850, in London, following complications from a fall from his horse.