Mr Balfour's Poodle (3 page)

In the first session of the 1832 Parliament the Lords had behaved with great restraint. Confronted with the huge Government majority in the House of Commons and chastened by their recent humiliation, they had allowed such controversial measures as the abolition of slavery, Scottish burgh reform and the Irish Church Bill to pass. In Peel's words: ‘The business was got through, but only because that which we prophesied took place; namely that the popular assembly exercised tacitly supreme power; that the House of Lords, to avoid the consequences of collision, declined acting upon that which was notoriously the deliberate judgment and conviction of a majority.'
^f
But as soon as the Government's ‘honeymoon' period was over and there were indications that it might be losing some support in the country, the Tory peers began to regain their courage. In the 1834 session an Irish Tithes Bill was rejected and a measure for the prevention of bribery at elections was so amended as to cause its withdrawal by the Government. After the interlude of the Peel Government of 1834-35, the Lords proceeded to deal in a still more brutal fashion with bills sent up from the Commons. Both the English and the Irish Corporation Bills were smothered in amendments, and the Irish Tithes Bill went down for a third time. So sweeping, indeed, was their policy of rejection or wholesale amendment that when, in 1836, they allowed the passage of a bill permitting persons accused of felony to be defended by counsel (which had already been passed on three occasions by the Commons) it was regarded as a triumph of moderation and a vindication of the liberal sentiments of Lord Lyndhurst, who had at the last moment
changed his mind on the issue. And all this occurred when the Tory peers were under what was subsequently regarded as the unusually restraining influence of Wellington's leadership. At times, however, as in the case of the English Corporations Bill, the degree of restraint exercised was so little that even the Tory Opposition in the House of Commons could not subscribe to the demands of the peers; but at least this meant that the Upper House was acting as something more than the servant of the leader of the Opposition in the Commons.

Strong interference by the Lords with Government measures continued so long as the Whig Administration lasted, although the decline in the reforming zeal of the latter naturally tended to lessen the force of the conflict. During the greater part of the life of Peel's 1841-46 Government there was no conflict. It was a Tory Government, and trouble showed signs of arising only when the Prime Minister had quarrelled with his less enlightened supporters on the issue of the Corn Laws. On this occasion Wellington fully acted up to his reputation. He wrote individually to each of the Tory peers, urging them not to oppose the bill, and they accepted his advice.

Between 1846 and 1868 the Tory majority in the House of Lords was smaller than at any other time between 1789 and the present day, and the country was governed by a series of weak Administrations, none of which commanded the support of a straight party majority in the House of Commons. As a result, conflicts between the two Houses were comparatively rare, and most of those which arose were not on matters of major importance. In the case of the principal exception to this rule, that of the Paper Duty Bill of 1860, the effect of rejection on Gladstone may have been great, but that on most people was modified by the limited support which
the measure enjoyed in the Cabinet, and the even more limited support which the Cabinet enjoyed in the country. And in the following year, by reverting to the earlier practice of taking all the major financial measures as one, the Chancellor was able to get his Paper Duty provisions through as part of the Finance Bill.

The Reform Bill of 1867 passed the Upper House with little difficulty. Lord Derby had anticipated some trouble, but, except for a few rumblings from such high Tories as Salisbury
¹
and Rutland, none developed. The colour of the Government was more important than the content of the bill.

In 1868 the colour of the Government changed, and the Liberals came back with a majority of 112—the strongest party Government for a quarter of a century. Its first major measure was the Irish Church Bill of 1869, which the majority of their lordships vehemently disliked, but to which they gave a second reading by a majority of thirty-three. Thirty-six Conservative peers, led by Lord Salisbury,
²
voted for the bill. Salisbury was no doubt giving effect to a view which he expressed three years later that it was the duty of the Lords to give way ‘only when the judgment of the nation has been challenged at the polls and decidedly expressed'.
^g
This principle, he thought, was ‘so rarely applicable as practically to place little fetter upon our independence'. Certainly he applied the principle very sparingly, and his moderation towards the Irish Church Bill was not repeated for any of the Government's other major measures. The bill to abolish the purchase of army commissions, which had met with bitter Tory opposition in the Commons, was summarily rejected
by the Lords; but in this case the Government was able to obtain its objective by administrative action. The Ballot Bill twice failed in the Upper House, and would probably have done so a third time had not Disraeli's caution proved stronger than Lord Salisbury's pugnacity.

This was not the only occasion during this Parliament on which the leader of the Opposition in the Commons tried to exercise a moderating influence on his followers in the Lords. In 1870 a private member's bill to abolish religious tests at the universities, which had received Government support, failed to get a second reading in the Upper House.
¹
But a year later Disraeli's influence was strong enough to get a similar measure accepted.

In 1874 Disraeli's second Government came in, and six years of almost complete peace between the two Houses began. But the peace was not quite complete. Even with a Conservative Government in office the House of Lords retained a touchiness on any question affecting the ownership of land, which led to its refusal to accept one or two measures or parts of measures.

The return of the Liberals in 1880 provoked more serious differences between the two Houses, although until the Reform Bill of 1884 these were not on the scale which had marked the life of Gladstone's previous Administration. Both the Irish Land Bill of 1881 and the amending Arrears Bill of the following year were seriously altered in the Upper House, but when the Government remained firm, the peers' amendments were mostly not pressed. The big dispute of this Parliament arose over the Reform Bill of 1884. On second
reading the Conservative Opposition in the Commons divided in favour of a reasoned amendment that an extension of the franchise should be accompanied by redistribution, but on third reading there was no division. In the Lords an amendment to the motion for second reading in similar terms to the one which had been defeated in the Commons was carried against the Government by 205 to 146. The Prime Minister announced that the bill would be re-introduced in the autumn, and, the Lords having defended their action not so much in relation to the merits of the bill as to their right to force a dissolution on an issue of such importance, the summer saw a bitter Liberal campaign against the composition and powers (but more particularly the former) of the Upper House. Joseph Chamberlain attacked the peers as the representatives of a class ‘who toil not, neither do they spin', and John Morley announced that their House must be either ‘mended or ended'. By the autumn both sides were more disposed to compromise, and an arrangement was arrived at by which the Lords passed the Franchise Bill and the Government followed it up with a redistribution measure.

The events of 1886, despite the great change in the allegiance of peers to which they led, gave the Upper House no work to do. The Whigs and the Chamberlainites who destroyed Gladstone's majority in the House of Commons and threw out the first Home Rule Bill did its job for it. And the six years of Conservative Government which followed were, as always, a period of rest for their lordships. But the formation of the Liberal Government of 1892 brought them back to the centre of the stage. Their first task was to dispose of the second Home Rule Bill, and they did this with alacrity, and by the biggest anti-Government majority ever recorded. The Government was fresh from a victory (although not a
great one) at the polls, and Home Rule had certainly figured prominently in the electioneering of both major parties; but the Lords excused themselves from the influence of these considerations by saying that there was no majority in Great Britain for the bill, and that full weight must be given to the wishes of the ‘predominant partner'. The Prime Minister was for dissolving, but he was apparently unable to carry his Cabinet with him.

In the view of Lord Rosebery it was not so much by the rejection of the Home Rule Bill (he was influenced by the absence of an ‘English' majority in the House of Commons) as by the destruction of Asquith's Employers' Liability Bill in the following session that the House of Lords showed its extreme partisanship. The loss of this bill, combined with the drastic alteration of the Parish Councils Bill, which gave Gladstone the subject for his last speech in the House of Commons, provoked Lord Rosebery, when he became Prime Minister, to devote most of his public speeches to the subject of the relations between the two Houses, and to address urgent memoranda to the Queen on the same point.

‘When the Conservative Party is in power,' he wrote in April, 1894, ‘there is practically no House of Lords: it takes whatever the Conservative Government brings it from the House of Commons without question or dispute; but the moment a Liberal Government is formed, this harmless body assumes an active life, and its activity is entirely exercised in opposition to the Government…. I cannot suggest any remedy,' he rather helplessly continued, ‘for any remedy which would be agreeable to the House of Commons would be revolting to the House of Lords, and any remedy which would please
the House of Lords would be spurned by the House of Commons'.
^h

Seven months later he was writing again on the subject and announcing: ‘Nearly if not quite half of the Cabinet is in favour of a Single Chamber. The more prominent people in the Liberal Party appear to be of the same opinion'.
ⁱ
But the defeat and resignation of the Government occurred before even a declaratory resolution against the Lords which had been proposed was carried. Indeed both Morley and Harcourt (whose controversial Finance Bill of 1894 had passed the Commons by a majority of only twenty, and escaped unscathed) thought that the Lords had not exposed themselves sufficiently to make an attack practicable.

During the ten years of Unionist Government which followed Rosebery's resignation in 1895, the Upper House was more than usually quiescent. The tendency for the peers to be more active against a Liberal Government, which we have seen growing and which reached its culmination after 1906, was accompanied by an equally strong tendency for their repose to be more complete when a Government of the right held office. The most controversial legislative proposal of these ten years was the Education Bill of 1902. It marked a sharp departure of policy on an issue which aroused very strong sectarian feeling; it was bitterly opposed by the Liberal Party (although supported by the Irish Nationalists); it was introduced against the known wishes of an important section of the Government; and it was passed by a House of Commons in the election of which a discussion of the issue had played no important part. Yet the only reaction of the House of Lords was to insert into it an amendment, moved by the Bishop of Manchester, which made it a still more extreme and partisan measure. Many of the same considerations
applied to the Licensing Bill of 1904; and the Government had by then begun to lose very heavily in the bye-elections. But the Lords passed it with alacrity.

It was therefore difficult to predict with any degree of certainty the treatment which the new Liberal Government would get from the Upper House. Obviously there could be no doubt of the power of the Lords to wreck a Liberal legislative programme; and equally obviously there could be no hope that throughout the whole life of the Government this power would remain entirely unused. But on the basis of what had been said and what had been done in the past there was good room for hope that at least the earlier and electorally more discussed measures of this enormously popular Government would be allowed to pass. If the electorate were not held to have spoken with a clear voice in 1906, the test of audibility must have been an unusually severe one.

Nevertheless, too much reliance could not be placed on precedent. The growing partisanship of the House of Lords made a more extreme course of action a possibility. This view was strengthened by Balfour's ominous remark, made in an election speech at Nottingham on January 15, 1906, that it was the duty of everyone to see that ‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or whether in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire'. Asquith interpreted this as a direct call to the House of Lords to redress the balance of the constituencies. To what extent this was so could not be determined at the time, but the unfolding of events quickly provided the answer.

The king's speech at the opening of the 1906 session forecast a great crop of legislation. Twenty-two bills in all were promised, but pride of place was clearly to be given to the Education Bill. This was the only measure which achieved a paragraph of its own in the Gracious Speech. ‘A Bill will be laid before you at the earliest possible moment,' it ran, ‘for amending the existing law with regard to Education in England and Wales.' A Trades Disputes Bill, to rectify the position created by the Taff Vale and
Quinn
v.
Leathens
decisions, and a Plural Voting Bill, to prevent the owners of numerous property qualifications from exercising more than one vote, were the other contentious measures. The remainder could be described, at least for the purpose of reassuring the King, as ‘uncontroversial' or ‘departmental'.
^a