Mr Balfour's Poodle (27 page)

Fortunately Curzon was also taking measures to put a spoke in the wheels of Lords Halsbury and Selborne. He realised at least as clearly as did Morley the dangers of the position at the end of July and he set in train a series of private enquiries as to how many Unionists might be prepared to vote for the Government. This action, taken against the wish of Lansdowne, produced an encouraging result. Curzon himself, as a member of the Unionist Shadow Cabinet, did not feel entitled to go beyond the official party attitude, and St. Aldwyn, who is given by Newton as one of the most prominent of those who were willing to vote, either never took up or did not maintain this position; but about forty others indicated that they would go into the lobby against Halsbury. Notable amongst these were Cromer (who was in fact prevented from voting by illness), Minto, Camperdown, Desart, and Fortescue. Despite close personal relations between Curzon and Morley, there is no evidence that this information was passed to the Government.

The plan for an immediate creation had been abandoned, and the Cabinet had decided to defer to the King's suggestion and not reject the Lords' amendments
en bloc;
without immediate creation the Cabinet itself was no doubt attracted to this suggestion on its own merits, for the goodwill of the moderate Unionists became of paramount importance. Consequently the amendments had to be dealt with
seriatim.
This was done on August 8, the day of the censure debate in the Lords. Mr. Churchill was in charge, for Asquith had lost his voice, but the attitude of the Government was quite conciliatory. The amendment excluding from the scope of the bill any measure which would extend beyond five years the duration of a Parliament was accepted, and a concession was also offered on Cromer's amendment to Clause One. The
Speaker, in determining what was a money bill, should take into consultation the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the latter being by firm tradition a member of the Opposition. The exact form of this concession did not commend itself to the House, however, and after debate a change which substituted two members of the Chairman's Panel, nominated by the Committee of Selection, was put forward by J. F. Hope and accepted by the Government. The motion for disagreeing with the Lords' other amendments was carried by a majority of 106.

The most notable feature of the day's debate was a speech of startling violence and bitterness delivered by Lord Hugh Cecil. He announced that he would be glad to see Asquith punished for high treason by the criminal law, and declared that, if peers were to be created, the more completely the constitution were broken, the better it would be for the Unionist Party. ‘The Home Rule issue,' he continued … ‘would be decided in Belfast. There might be secession and a separate body might be organised to collect taxes. These might be regarded as empty threats: so had disorder in the House. He looked back on it with satisfaction; it showed that the Government could not silence the Opposition.'
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On the following day, Wednesday, August 9, the Lords, meeting specially for this purpose at ten o'clock in the morning, received the Commons' amendments. Having ordered them to be printed the House then adjourned until half past four in the afternoon. There was then to begin a two-day debate which was the final encounter of the long played-out constitutional struggle. Unlike most of the other phases of the struggle it assumed something of the air of drama. The debate itself was almost unique amongst major parliamentary occasions
of the past eighty years in that the result was not known beforehand. There had been no last-minute developments to turn the tide decisively one way or the other. Lord Morley had been able to muster only sixty-eight Liberals to oppose Curzon's motion of censure, and this might have slightly encouraged the die-hards. But then it was thought that he was reserving his major whipping effort for two nights later. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, had secured 120 guests for the supper party at Arlington House which he gave to ‘ditcher' peers after the division on the Tuesday. But this was not widely known; and, in any event, these signs of Liberal weakness and of die-hard strength were just as likely to swell the number of Unionists preparing to vote in the Government lobby as to produce any other result. The debate therefore opened in a penumbra of doubt. All that was certain was that, for once in a way, speeches would count, and that every vote was important.

Those most vitally affected awaited the result according to their various habits of behaviour. Balfour incurred more criticism by retiring to Paris, on his way to Bad Gastein. He occupied the final day of the crisis, as we have seen, by writing letters of complaint to Lady Elcho from the Ritz. He could bear London no longer. From the suspense he was more immune than most men; it was the bickering which he found tiring. Asquith was also away, although not out of the country. He travelled down to Wallingford on the Wednesday to stay with friends and recover from his laryngitis. From there, on the Thursday, he wrote a laconically matter-of-fact note to his secretary. ‘If the vote goes wrong in the H. of L.,' it ran, ‘the Cabinet should be summoned for 11.30 Downing Street tomorrow morning and the King asked to postpone his journey till the afternoon. … If I have satisfactory news
this evening I shall come up for Cabinet 12.30. My voice is on the mend but still croaky.'
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But the King, more agitated by the prospect of the result than either of the two party leaders, and much less at ease with himself than Asquith at least, was too involved to wish to leave London, despite the date and despite the temperature.

This last factor provided another element of drama. It was the hottest weather for seventy years. The whole summer had been torrid, and the previous week exceptionally so. On August 9 the shade temperature over most of England rose to 95°. At South Kensington it was 97° at Greenwich Observatory it was 100°—the highest ever recorded in Great Britain. Roads melted. Railway lines were distended. That evening a serious fire developed at the top of the Carlton Hotel in Pall Mall. In these circumstances the unfettered House of Lords began its final debate.

Morley rose to move that the Commons' reasons for disagreeing to several of the Lords' amendments be now considered. He indicated that he would have preferred to take the amendments
seriatim,
but that in deference to the views of the Opposition he was now moving a motion which would provide for a general debate. There was an understanding that the detailed examination of the Commons' reasons would begin at about dinner time on the following evening.

Morley deployed no arguments and within five minutes he had resumed his seat. Thereafter there was no Government speaker for the whole of the day. From the Liberal backbenches Earl Russell and Lord Ribblesdale
¹
were heard, and from the episcopal bench the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Winchester. For the rest it was a day of battle
between the two sections of the Unionist Party. Lansdowne began it. He dismissed the concessions made by the Commons as of trivial importance and threw in occasional words of strong condemnation of the Government, but almost the whole of his argument, very cogently expressed, was directed against his own dissidents. The safeguards left to the House of Lords under the bill were worth something. But a swamping creation would sweep these safeguards away, and might also confront the next Conservative Government, intent upon undoing the damage, with a delaying radical majority in the Upper House. Furthermore, the effect of a mass creation, not because of the individuals concerned but because of the manner of their ennoblement, would be degrading to the House of Lords, to parliamentary institutions, and to the King. What of the suggestion that a mass creation was not possible? Lansdowne cited a statement which Crewe had made in the censure debate the previous night,
¹
interpreted this as implying a very heavy creation, and asked Morley to confirm his view. This Morley refused to do, saying that it was too delicate and important a matter to be dealt with by an intervention. Lansdowne concluded by referring to a long constitutional struggle ahead and the undesirability of divided counsels in the Unionist Party. He was followed by Halsbury
who showed himself truculently sensitive to the charge of disloyalty, but who added little by way of argument, perhaps because his principal speech had been delivered in the censure debate. The Hansard report of his speech, however, is enlivened by frequent appearances of the splendid archaism ‘forsooth!' He had not been born in 1823 for nothing. But on some observers his speech, in juxtaposition with that of Lansdowne, did not create a good impression.

‘Lord Lansdowne,' Sir Almeric Fitzroy wrote, ‘who always shines in a position of extreme difficulty, acquitted himself of the task he had to perform with the greatest tact, polish, dignity and address, and but for the fact that he appealed to a section of the House impenetrable to reason and proof to the dictates of prudence, his allocution could not have failed of success. It was lamentable to see his calm and dispassionate view of a very critical situation succeeded by a blunt appeal to blind passion, couched in terms of turgid rhetoric and senile violence.'
ⁱ

Dr. Lang of York, who followed, stressing that he spoke only for himself, censured the Government and urged moderation with some force and more unction. Then came Salisbury, who placed upon Crewe's statement an entirely different construction from Lansdowne, again pressed Morley for clarification, and, failing to receive an answer, took this as further evidence that talk of a large creation was not to be taken very seriously. In any event, he somewhat surprisingly argued, if the radicals created 500 peers to serve their purpose, the Conservatives could easily do the same when their time came, so there would be no great disadvantage from their point of view. The other die-hard speakers that day were Willoughby de Broke, Bedford, Marlborough, Ampthill, Denbigh, Scarbrough, and Stanhope. Of these, Willoughby
and Ampthill remained sceptical of the threat to create, whilst the two dukes and, to some extent, Stanhope thought that there could be many worse things than even the largest of mass creations. Marlborough said quite bluntly that he would prefer a big reinforcement to the ‘purge' which Lansdowne had tried to force upon the House; Bedford believed that creation would advertise the despotic power that the majority in the Commons was arrogating to itself; and Stanhope thought, ingeniously and possibly correctly, that a Government majority in the Lords and the rapid implementation of the principal Liberal measures would result in the break-up of the coalition upon which the Government depended in the Commons. Within the die-hard ranks there was another conflict between the ‘autocrats' and the ‘democrats'. Some, like Ampthill and Bedford, persisted in the claim that their refusal to accept the will of the Commons was bound up with their determination to give the electorate an endless series of last words. Even on the Parliament Bill they could not admit that it had yet spoken with a decisive voice. Others, like Willoughby—and Halsbury would probably have agreed with him—faced the issue more frankly:

‘… I suggest that all these conventions with regard to the Cabinet representing the House of Commons and the House of Commons representing the electors and the electors representing the nation are only applicable to ordinary legislation and become tyrannical if used to push through extraordinary legislation. When they are applied to legislation which is not only extraordinary but in our view absolutely unthinkable and impossible, then we cannot entertain that affection for representative government which we ordinarily extend to it. You may claim majorities if you like in favour of the Parliament
Bill at a dozen General Elections, but that will not alter my view and I do not think it will alter the view of Lord Halsbury or those acting with us in this matter.'
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That was clear enough.

On the side of submission the Bishop of Winchester combined his moderation with a little more liberal feeling than his brother of York had shown, Lord Russell rebuked the Duke of Bedford and Lord Ampthill
¹
for their desertion of the cause with which the name of Russell had once been associated, and Lord Ribblesdale gave the Government rather cooler support than might have been hoped for from the brother-in-law of the Prime Minister. But the speeches of note came from St. Aldwyn and Newton. The former attacked Halsbury's position with great vigour, both because he was convinced that no change of opinion had occurred in the country since the last general election and because he regarded the threat of a large creation as very real. But coupled with this attack upon the die-hards was another equally strong attack on the Government and upon more surprising ground. In November, St. Aldwyn argued, Ministers should have advised the King to see the leaders of the Opposition, and it should have been suggested to him that in the event of his declining to give the promise asked for by Asquith and Crewe, Balfour and Lansdowne might be willing to form a Government. In failing so to act Ministers had shown neither common generosity nor common honesty in their dealings with the Sovereign. To the extent that this part of his speech increased Unionist feeling against the Government—and it was referred to with much approval by
several subsequent die-hard speakers—it was not altogether helpful to Lord Lansdowne's cause.

Lord Newton was less equivocal, although his arguments were probably couched in too astringent a form to win many votes. He expressed himself tired of the constant public statements of profound mutual esteem to the accompaniment of which the two sections of the Unionist Party had assailed each other.

‘To me these expressions of mutual esteem and affection are rather beside the point. As military metaphors are so much in vogue, I will say that I rather look upon it in this sort of light—as if a general were to call his principal officers together on the eve of a most important, if not fatal, engagement, and to give them his orders; and those officers were to reply, “Sir, we have the most profound admiration for your character; we respect you as a man, as a husband, and as a father, but as regards your orders we propose to act in a precisely different direction.'”
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