Mr Balfour's Poodle (35 page)

¹
He developed pulmonary catarrh, which prevented his participation in the election campaign until the beginning of January.

²
A few weeks before, Mr. Churchill had been dog-whipped at Bristol, and a few days afterwards the Chancellor of the Exchequer was to be locked into his car, outside the Queen's Hall, by and with a militant young female, who lectured him for some time before he was able to escape. Even at the Albert Hall meeting immunity was only secured by extricating one woman from the organ shortly before the commencement, and by preventing another, who was disguised as a telegraph boy, from entering during the Prime Minister's speech.

¹
Why the offer was regarded as attractive is not clear, for the Cardiff District seat, for which D. A. Thomas (later Lord Rhondda) then became the candidate, was, on paper at any rate, a much less safe Liberal division than Lloyd George's own Caernarvon District. At the second 1910 election it was lost to the Unionists by a majority of 300.

²
In one way and another the Germans figured very prominently in Unionist propaganda at this election. They were portrayed as dangerously aggressive in order to justify an attack on the Government's naval policy, and as contented and well-fed in order to justify a policy of tariff reform.

¹
The political attention paid to Grimsby at this time was remarkable. At the second 1910 election, after Balfour had addressed an audience of 10,000 there during the day, Mr. Churchill, who had spoken in Cheshire that evening, travelled across by special train, stopping to have Balfour's speech supplied to him in instalments
en route
, and delivered a rumbustious reply, to a well-filled meeting, at midnight.

¹
Beaconsfield, Cranbrook, and Salisbury.

²
With the object of swinging the Roman Catholic vote.

³
When the usual sessional order was moved on the first day of the new Parliament, a Unionist amendment to restrict it to peers who were also Lords-Lieutenant of counties was proposed, and this was accepted by Asquith and carried without a division.

¹
Lloyd George replied to this, characteristically but effectively, by saying that he ‘thought the Carpenter of Galilee had more to do with the best and highest element of civilization'.
(Annual Register for
1909, p. 269.)

²
Although not quite to the extent that Austen Chamberlain suggested when he wrote to Balfour after the election and said: ‘Tariff Reform was our trump card. Where we won, we won on and by Tariff Reform. Even where we lost, it was the only subject in our repertoire about which people really cared.' (Petrie,
op. cit
., vol. 1, p. 242.) Austen's loyalty to his family cause, combined perhaps with his Liberal Unionism, made him under-estimate the effect of true Tory scepticism, of blank, negative opposition, as a vote-winning force for the Unionist Party.

¹
Even in 1868 Gladstone had a majority of only 116.

²
This enabled the Unionists, when the issue of Home Rule came more to the fore (and when the second 1910 election had confirmed the verdict of the first), to develop the constitutional sophistry of saying that no Government should attempt to carry through a structural change in the relations of the four countries—such as the setting up of a separate Parliament for Ireland––without the support of a majority of the electors of the ‘predominant partner.' It was an ingenious, if not very creditable, attempt to erect a sort of Anglo-Saxon veto to replace the veto of the peers which had then been destroyed.

¹
A list of the seats which in January, 1910, produced a result different from that of 1906 is given in appendix B.

²
The Unionists appeared to have been successful in convincing the dockyard workers that they would build more warships, even if not in convincing the rest of the country that more warships were necessary.

¹
Although it is perhaps worth noting that in the second 1910 election, when Lloyd George was not at Grimsby and when the South-West may have been better served by Opposition orators, there were Unionist gains in Grimsby and in three of the Devon divisions.

¹
1843–1911. Liberal member for Chelsea, 1868–86, and for the Forest of Dean, 1892–1911. President of the Local Government Board from 1882 until cited as co-respondent in a divorce case in 1885.

²
1868–1935. Later 1st Lord Dalziel. Member for Kirkcaldy Burghs, 1892–1921.

¹
1860–1943. Liberal member for Tyneside, 1892–1900, Saffron Walden, 1901–10, and Rotherham, 1910–16. Created 1st Lord Gainford, 1917. President of the Board of Education, 1911–15. Postmaster-General, 1916.

²
1868–1947. Secretary of State for War, 1912–14. Created 1st Lord Mottistone, 1933.

¹
1869–1956. Created 1st Lord Quickswood, 1941. Unionist member for Greenwich, 1895–1909, and for Oxford University, 1910–1937.

¹
1870–1920. Alexander Murray. Heir to Viscountcy of Elibank, but created 1st Baron Murray of Elibank, 1912. Member for Midlothian, 1900–5, Peebles and Selkirk, 1906–10, and Midlothian, 1910–12. Chief Liberal Whip, 1909–12.

²
Irish threats were taken sufficiently seriously at this time for the King to make an informal approach to Balfour, no doubt with the approval of Ministers, to see whether, in event of the Irish deciding to vote against the Budget, Unionist support for it could be obtained. Balfour replied in a memorandum dated February 15, that ‘great as would be the embarrassment to all parties which would follow upon an immediate defeat of the Government … it would be vain to ask the Unionist Party on tactical grounds to vote black where they had before voted white'.
(See
Newton,
op. cit
., p. 389.)

¹
Although, as late as April 13, the Prime Minister had telegraphed to the King at Biarritz that recent Government decisions to make no changes in the Budget might well involve their defeat. (Spender and Asquith,
op. cit
., vol. I, p. 278.)

¹
1865–1931. Francis Stanley. 2nd Earl Russell. Later joined Labour Party. Parliamentary Secretary to Ministry of Transport, 1929. Brother of Bertrand Russell (3rd Earl Russell).

¹
Lord Selby. 1835–1909. Formerly Mr. Speaker Gully.

²
1856–1942. St. John Brodrick. Succeeded to Viscountcy, 1907. Created 1st Earl of Midleton, 1920. Conservative member for Surrey, West, 1880–85, and for Guildford, 1885–1906. Secretary of State for War, 1900–3, and for India, 1903–5.

¹
The chief Conservative Agent in Scotland.

¹
Lord Torphichen. 1846–1915. 12th Baron, representative peer for Scotland, 1894 to January, 1910, and December, 1910–15.

¹
1869–1923. Richard Greville Verney. 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke. Conservative member for Rugby, 1895–1900.

¹
1851–1926. Aretas Akers-Douglas. Created 1st Viscount Chilston, 1911. Conservative member for St. Augustine's division of Kent, 1880–1911. Chief Conservative Whip, 1883–95. First Commissioner of Works, 1895–1902. Home Secretary, 1902–5.

¹
Mrs. Asquith's grief, for example, was of a less Roman quality than her husband's. She has described how on the morning of May 7 she wept on a sofa in Downing Street with Sir Ernest Cassel, and in the evening attended a dinner party at which Mr. Churchill said ‘Let us drink to the health of the new King', and Lord Crewe with a slight rebuke replied ‘Rather to the memory of the old.'
(The Autobiography of Margot Asquith
. vol. 11, p. 138.)

¹
1872–1943. Later 1st Lord Wedgwood. First Liberal and then Labour member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1906–42.

¹
Sir Robert Finlay, former Attorney-General, in a note which he took of Balfour's statement at a Shadow Cabinet held after the breakdown of the conference
(see
Newton:
op. cit
., pp. 402–3), says that twenty of the representative peers were to be ‘members of the Government', leaving only eighty to be chosen by proportional representation. This would be most strictly in accord with ‘fifty majority in the House of Commons' theory, but it is rendered implausible by the fact that the total number of peers who were members of the Government was substantially less than twenty (when Asquith formed his Government in 1908, he gave office to only thirteen peers, including the Household appointments).

²
Balfour, who was the recipient of the memorandum in which this sentence occurs and who was less addicted to self-deceit than most men, must have found it somewhat difficult to reconcile with the exchange of views which had passed between himself and Lansdowne at the time of the previous election, or with his own opinion, as relayed by Austen Chamberlain, at the Shadow Cabinet in March
(see
pp. 143–4
supra)
.

¹
The referendum was not universally popular on the Unionist side either. F. E. Smith included the following passage in a letter to Austen Chamberlain dated October 21: ‘Personally I hate the referendum. We should win matters which don't much matter like the licensing question or education on its sectarian side. But if the referendum once comes it will spread and in the great predatory appeals of the future the Tory Party will always be beaten. Imagine a referendum upon the last Budget!' (Birkenhead:
Frederick Edwin, Earl of Birkenhead
, vol. 1, p. 207.)

¹
An indication of this is given by the almost apologetic speech which Augustine Birrell thought it necessary to deliver to his constituents at Bristol on June 24, ‘… do not be agitated,' he said, ‘there is no need to be agitated.… It is obviously the duty of any persons engaged in any such task as this not to invent compromises but to discover agreement; and then, if discovery is not made, or if it is unsatisfactory, I assure you all, the most enthusiastic politician amongst you, that you will find yourselves relegated to your former positions, with all your rights preserved and able to fight as hard, and I hope as vigorously, with as much good sense and as much information as before, when the time comes.'

¹
He went to the almost fantastic length of writing to Austen Chamberlain asking advice as to whether he should speak in public at all. ‘Of course,' he said, ‘I should make not the most distant allusion to the “constitutional question” but, even with this limitation, I hesitate.…' (quoted by Petrie,
op. cit
., vol. 1, p. 255.)

²
Nevertheless, Mrs. Dugdale's feat of filling two large volumes with information about Balfour, while leaving so many of his most interesting letters and statements to be quoted by other people, is remarkable.

¹
1868–1947. Editor of the
Observer
, 1908–42.

²
1864–1934. He wrote the letters under the pseudonym of
Pacificus.

³
1857–1913. Liberal Unionist member for Leamington, 1895–1906 and for St. George's, Hanover Square, 1906–13. Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1903–5.

¹
In the sense that he was frank in his dealings with other leading politicians, not in the sense that he informed the electorate of what he was doing, of course.

¹
1853–1945. Succeeded his brother as 2nd Earl Balfour, 1930. Conservative member for Leeds, Central, 1885–1906. Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1895–1900. President of the Board of Trade, 1900–5. President of the Local Government Board, 1905.

¹
‘I cannot become another Robert Peel in my party,' he said to Lloyd George
(War Memoirs
, vol. 1, p. 38). ‘But his (Balfour's) “stalwarts” and his young wreckers are opposed to him, and he does not fancy the role of Sir Robert Peel,' Lord Esher recorded on November 9
(Journals and letters
, vol. III, p. 30). ‘Yet there was much nobility in the Peel of 1846,' Esher added.

¹
It is suggested by his biographer that this decision was almost entirely due to the advice of the Master of Elibank. ‘Alick, as Chief Whip, and in charge of the Party organization,' writes Colonel A. C. Murray (
Master and Brother,
p. 59), ‘had always been firmly of the opinion that if the Conference failed the Government should immediately appeal to the country, and although, to begin with, the Cabinet was against him, his view ultimately prevailed.' ‘Ultimately,' at least, seems to be the wrong word, for the Cabinet decision in favour of an immediate election was made on the first occasion on which a decision could have been taken.

¹
1849–1931. Assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, 1880–95, and principal private secretary, 1895–1901. Private secretary to George V as Duke of York and Prince of Wales, 1901–10, joint private secretary (with Lord Knollys) to him as King from 1910–13, and principal private secretary from 1913–31. Created Lord Stamfordham, 1911.

¹
A rather vague phrase, it may be thought, and one which departed from the salutary principle that in parliamentary affairs a majority is a majority, and a bill carried by one vote is just as effectively law as one carried by 250. But Crewe, speaking in the Vote of Censure debate nine months later, indicated that it was intended to be more than a phrase. ‘The question whether at any time the advice to “create peers” should be given,' he said, ‘must necessarily depend for one thing upon the adequacy of the majority with which we were returned to the House of Commons… Fortunately the question of interpretation never arose.