Mr Balfour's Poodle (26 page)

What then was the quality, the distinguishing quality, common to all the ‘ditchers'? It was that they were tired of the existing leadership of their party. Some of them had specific policy grievances, like Austen Chamberlain, who had spent the early part of the year suffering from ‘referendum sickness'. Others, like F. E. Smith, were made more hostile by cool personal treatment.
¹
Others, again, like George
Wyndham, combined great personal affection for Balfour with mounting impatience at the loss of three successive general elections to the wretched radicals. It was inconceivable that rightminded Englishmen could award three successive victories to such a band of sophists and disrupters. It must be the Unionists' own fault; the leadership must be to blame.

And everyone, whether or not they had particular grievances, and in whatever direction they wished to be led, felt the need for a firmer hand on the reins. It was not so much that Balfour was pusillanimous as that he was indifferent. It was not so much that Lansdowne was wrong as that he could not make up his own mind what was right until it was too late to influence the minds of many others. The crisis was therefore in the fullest sense of the phrase a crisis of leadership. The revolt grew out of the successive defeats to which the party had been led, it was fed upon indecision at the top in the spring and early summer, and its real purpose, however much its perpetrators might protest, was to put new men at the head of the Unionist Party. Balfour himself fully appreciated how much his conduct was directly under fire, and in the end ceased to be indifferent to this aspect of the matter at least.

‘Politics have been to me quite unusually odious,' he was to write from Paris to Lady Elcho on August 10. ‘I am not going into the subject, but I have, as a matter of fact, felt the situation more acutely than any in my public life —I mean from the personal point of view. As you know I am very easy-going, and not given to brooding over my wrongs. But last Friday and Saturday I could think
of nothing else: a thing which has not happened to me since I was unjustly “complained of” at Eton more than forty years ago! On Saturday the cloud lifted; yet it
has
not, and perhaps
will
not disappear until recent events are things barely remembered.…'
^dd

It was a deep and unpleasant quarrel which could so ruffle Arthur Balfour.

Confronted with this gaping split in their party, the Unionists' leaders did what politicians in trouble have often done. They tried to bring together their own followers by launching a strong attack upon the other side. They tabled votes of censure in the two Houses. Both were in substantially the same terms, the exact form of that in the Commons being: ‘That the advice given to His Majesty by His Majesty's Ministers whereby they obtained from His Majesty a pledge that a sufficient number of peers would be created to pass the Parliament Bill in the shape in which it left this House is a gross violation of Constitutional liberty, whereby, among many other evil consequences, the people will be precluded from again pronouncing upon the policy of Home Rule.'

This motion was moved by Balfour on August 7. It was a delicate subject, but it did not call forth one of his most effective speeches. This may have been partly because the Unionists were uncertain of the gravamen of their charge against the Government. Was it that it was in itself wrong to advise the use of the prerogative to force through a keenly disputed measure, more especially as the points at immediate issue had arisen since the last general election? This was an argument which Balfour and his supporters (as well as Curzon and the others who spoke in the Lords on the following day)
used strongly. But they also relied to a great extent upon the view that Asquith's greatest sin was that he demanded and obtained a hypothetical undertaking from the King, so that the Crown was committed before the Bill had even received a second reading in the Commons, and long before the final form of the dispute could be envisaged. This has since developed into a criticism that it was wrong for Asquith to seek any advance understanding because he should not have doubted that the King would accept the advice of his Ministers when the moment came. This, says Lord Halsbury's biographer, was the real infamy of the Government.
^a
But it is a view which is manifestly incompatible with the first line of attack. Asquith could hardly be expected to be certain that the King would behave in a way which almost the whole Unionist Party professed to believe was unconstitutional. Some of Balfour's unease therefore came from the attempt to ride two rather ill-matched horses.

In part, too, it arose from the difficulty of developing the attack without criticising the conduct of the King. Unlike Lord Hugh Cecil, who on the following day made no attempt to disguise his disapproval of the Sovereign's behaviour, Balfour avoided this pitfall, but only at the expense of some remarks about King George which, while sympathetic, were by implication far from complimentary. Advantage, he said, had been taken of ‘a sovereign who had only just come to the throne, and who, from the very nature of the case, had not and could not have behind him that long personal experience of public affairs which some of his great predecessors had'. Of a man of forty-six, who had been Heir Apparent for a decade before his accession, these were slighting words to use; they were also nonsensical, for there is a strong likelihood that King Edward VII would have acted exactly as did King
George V, and a probability that Queen Victoria would have done so too.

Asquith made a more notable reply, which included an impressive passage on his relations with the King:

‘I am accustomed, as Lord Grey in his day was accustomed, to be accused of breach of the Constitution and even of treachery to the Crown. I confess, as I have said before, that I am not in the least sensitive to this cheap and ill-informed vituperation. It has been my privilege, almost now I think unique, to serve in close and confidential relations three successive British Sovereigns. My conscience tells me that in that capacity, many and great as have been my failures and shortcomings, I have consistently striven to uphold the dignity and just privileges of the Crown. But I hold my office, not only by favour of the Crown, but by the confidence of the people, and I should be guilty indeed of treason if in this supreme moment of a great struggle I were to betray their trust.'
^b

The King, however, was more sensitive to ‘cheap and ill-informed vituperation' than was his Prime Minister. He spoke to Lord Morley on the subject on the morning of August 8 and pronounced himself much concerned at the criticism to which he had been subjected in the Commons. He was also worried, he further told Lord Morley, at the language which was probably used in private at the Carlton Club about his actions, at the large number of unfriendly anonymous letters which he was receiving, and at the charge of having betrayed the Irish ‘loyalists'. On the first point Morley returned a sharp answer. It was better, he said, to run the risk of criticism in the Carlton Club than ‘to be denounced from every platform as the enemy of the people'.
^c

But the King's anxieties were not to be easily dismissed. He had just been reading the previous day's censure debate in the Commons (the Council after which he spoke to Morley had been held up from 11.0 to 11.30 in order that he might complete this task) and he did not feel that Asquith had gone quite far enough in exonerating the Crown from responsibility. As a result of this complaint, according to Sir Almeric Fitzroy, it was arranged at the last moment that Crewe, who had not attended the House of Lords for several months, should intervene in the censure debate there that afternoon and go a little further than Asquith had done. His qualification to speak was that he had participated in the November conversations. Speaking under great strain and with painful slowness
¹
he described the King's attitude in November in the following terms: ‘His Majesty faced the contingency and entertained the suggestion (of a creation) as a possible one with natural, and if I may be permitted to use the phrase, in my opinion with legitimate reluctance.'
^d

This phrase, while awakening a wave of undesirable speculation amongst Unionists who wished still to believe that the Government was bluffing, did not satisfy the King. His Majesty wished even further stress to be laid upon the reluctance with which he had agreed, and he expressed this wish in a letter which Knollys wrote to Asquith's secretary, Vaughan Nash, on August 9. But the Prime Minister was resolved to go no further. Indeed a note of asperity enters his biographers' description of his reactions to the King's request. He thought that his own statement: ‘The King was pleased to inform me that he felt that he had no alternative but to
accept the advice of the Cabinet,' was both accurate and adequate. ‘To be led into public discussions about the feelings and motives of the King or his views about the policy of the Government, would, in Asquith's opinion, be even less in the interests of the King than of the Government.… Nothing would ever have induced him to use any language which could have been construed as an admission that he had “coerced the King”.'
⁶

On other points Asquith had shown a great respect for the views of the King. By August 4 it had become known to the Opposition that there was to be no creation of peers before the Lords had again had an opportunity of pronouncing on the bill, and this substantial retreat from the position Ministers had taken up at the time of Lloyd George's interview with the Unionist leaders on July 18 was motivated principally by the King's wish. There was little enough other reason for it. If the Lords proved recalcitrant, it meant the loss of the bill to the Government and the need to begin again in the next session. If they proved submissive, it meant that the Government would get its bill but that it would still have to wait more than two years for Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment, whereas a creation of peers would have made both these measures possible within a year. If the character of most of the leading members of the Cabinet constituted a strong
a priori
refutation of the Unionist view that the Government was bent on revolution, their extreme reluctance to take the step, advantageous from their own point of view, of swamping the House of Lords constituted powerful empirical disproof of that interpretation. It was not that the Cabinet were not ready for creation should the necessity be forced upon them, or that they could not find a large body of men who would serve their purposes while far from disgracing the
House of Lords. Amongst Asquith's papers was discovered a list of 249 gentlemen whom he proposed to approach, as prospective Liberal peers, should the necessity be forced upon him. It cannot be assumed that all of those included would have accepted the offer, but the existence of the list is an indication of the advanced stage of the Government's preparations, and the nature of it shows that no lowering of the intellectual calibre of the House of Lords, and little enough of its social composition, would have been involved. Twenty of those listed were the sons of peers, forty-eight of them were baronets, and fifty-nine knights. Twenty-three were Privy Councillors and nineteen members of Parliament. Many of them were later to be elevated to the peerage in the ordinary course of events. Amongst figures of note whose names were listed may be mentioned Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, Bertrand Russell, and Gilbert Murray. Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Abe Bailey come perhaps in a somewhat different category, while General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, and the Lord Mayor of London of the day were unexpected inclusions.

The Prime Minister, even if unprepared for a creation of the size envisaged in Mr. Churchill's somewhat oracular pronouncement at the end of the censure debate,
¹
was obviously in earnest about, and ready for, a very substantial creation. But he was sufficiently loath to act that he made no attempt to override the King's desire to give the Lords another chance, even though there was no firm evidence to suggest that this would not mean the loss of the bill. Curzon's efforts had increased to 320 the number of those who were prepared to abstain with Lansdowne, and a list containing these names was
published at the end of the first week in August. Morley had also been active on behalf of the Government. He sent out an interrogative whip to all the nominally Liberal peers, and received firm promises of support from eighty, which was a better result than had been expected. But it was not in itself good enough. The die-hards were not at this stage divulging their strength, and Lansdowne declined to place his information at the disposal of the Government in order to help them determine what this strength might be. Halsbury would obviously not muster all the peers not listed by either Lansdowne or Morley—had he done so he would have got more than 200—but he was known to be increasing his strength from day to day. ‘Backwoodsmen' were often difficult to communicate with, but they were likely, if present, to support Halsbury; and the fact that numbers of peers who had not previously bothered to do so were engaged each day in taking the oath indicated a large attendance of the little known. On July 31, Morley, having gone carefully through the list of peers, came to the conclusion that a creation could not possibly be avoided without Unionist votes for the Government, and that at least forty of these would be necessary. By August 3, however, when the answers to his whip had come in, he was more hopeful and thought that the Government might scrape by under its own steam. On the following day Selborne wrote to Halsbury giving a slightly different version of the Government estimate, which he had obtained by a very circuitous route. ‘So the Government are going to risk it on Wednesday without any creation of Peers,' he wrote. ‘Lovat tells me that Newton told him that he knew as a fact that the Government are relying on the Bishops for their majority! Can you take any measure to put a spoke in that wheel?' he added.
^f