Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  By the beginning of autumn, a reckoning could no longer be postponed. On September 9, Chamberlain sent a dramatic letter to the Prime Minister declaring that he wished to resign from the government and go out, a free man, to stump the country on behalf of Imperial Preference. Balfour, golfing at Whittingehame during the parliamentary recess, did not reply in writing. Instead, he summoned the Cabinet to meet on Monday, September 14. An hour before the Cabinet met, Balfour and Chamberlain met at a private flat. The Colonial Secretary firmly repeated his argument: the Cabinet as constituted, with Ritchie and other free-traders adamantly opposed, would not accept Imperial Preference. He agreed with the Prime Minister that public opinion was not yet ready for legislation involving a tax on food. Much convincing would first have to be done, and this he was prepared, even eager, to do. Balfour accepted Chamberlain’s reasoning but still did not accept his resignation.

  The Cabinet meeting lasted three hours. Confronting his Ministers, the languid and amiable Balfour displayed why, as Irish Secretary, he had been called “Bloody Balfour.” He did not reveal his discussion with the Colonial Secretary. He said that he was determined to put an end to dissension, at least within his own Cabinet. He declared that some form of tariff was to be the government’s policy and that any ministers opposed could not remain in the Cabinet. Ritchie and another free-trader promptly resigned. In fact, the astonished Duke of Devonshire wrote to a friend, “Ritchie and... [the other free-trader] did not really resign19 but were told they must go.” To another friend, he added, “I never heard anything20 more summary and decisive than the dismissal of the two Ministers.” The following day—the second of the Cabinet meeting—two more ministers, one of them the Duke himself, resigned. Only when they were gone, on September 16, did the Prime Minister accept Mr. Chamberlain’s resignation as he had planned all along to do. The Duke, seeing that Chamberlain was leaving, withdrew his own resignation, responding as Balfour had calculated. That same day, September 16, the Prime Minister published a short pamphlet, entitled “Notes on Insular Free Trade,” in which he analyzed England’s dangerously isolated position as a free-trade island surrounded by a protectionist sea. Devonshire, feeling tricked, resigned a second time on October 6. With the departure of Chamberlain on one extreme and four free-traders on the other, Balfour had purged his Cabinet and hoped to govern amidst diminished rancor.

  The only loss he regretted was that of the Duke. “The Duke, whose mental processes21 were not rapid,” wrote a Liberal journalist, “had apparently been mystified by the dialectic of Mr. Balfour’s pamphlet and dazed by the swiftness and subtlety of the transactions that followed. A fortnight later, he awoke with a crash.” Balfour’s own impression was similar: “The Duke never read it22 [Balfour’s pamphlet], you know. I remember hearing he had confessed to somebody that he tried, but couldn’t understand it. Dear Devonshire! Of course he hadn’t. He told me once he had been content to leave his financial conscience in the hands of Mr. Gladstone. But it was all a muddle. He got himself into such a position that he had to behave badly to somebody—and there it was! But it never made the slightest difference to my love for him.”

  Balfour’s “purging” of Chamberlain was less brutal than his dismissal of Ritchie and the free-traders, because Chamberlain had suggested his own resignation. The departure was even more friendly because, in parting, Balfour and Chamberlain had struck a bargain. The Prime Minister did not wish to break completely with the former Colonial Secretary, whose popularity he knew to be greater than his own. A bond would be maintained in the person of Chamberlain’s eldest son, Austen, who was already in the Cabinet as Postmaster-General. Austen, then forty, would be offered Ritchie’s post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, nominally the second most powerful office in the Cabinet and a traditional springboard to the Premiership. Balfour urged Chamberlain to persuade Austen to accept. Chamberlain did and Austen accepted.

  There was more to the bargain. Chamberlain was not leaving the Cabinet simply to go home to his orchids or to hasten the advancement of his son. Despite differences, there was an area of agreement on fiscal reform between Balfour and Chamberlain and both men seized it. Balfour agreed that greater imperial unity was desirable and that Imperial Preference might be a way to achieve it. As party leader, however, he feared the domestic political cost if the public perceived the imposition of tariffs as a tax on food. Chamberlain agreed with Balfour that the sudden and sweeping nature of his proposal had alarmed the country and that before the enactment of legislation (and certainly before the public was asked to choose in the next election), a great deal more educating and persuading had to be done. This he was prepared to do himself. Balfour and Chamberlain, accordingly, agreed that the former Colonial Secretary, now a free man, would stump the country, propagandizing on behalf of Imperial Preference. When public opinion was swayed, the Prime Minister would lead the party onto this electorally safe new ground. Balfour would simultaneously follow with a minimum program which rejected free trade, but proposed only selective retaliatory tariffs, avoiding anything that smacked of a tax on food.

  In early October, Chamberlain set out as a free-lance missionary of Imperial Preference, tariff reform, and protection. He was still the most popular politician in the country and he expected success preaching this new gospel. He began with a speech in Glasgow on October 6, 1903, in which he revealed his program: a two-shilling-per-ton duty on foreign wheat and flour, 5 percent tariffs on foreign meat and dairy products, and a 10 percent duty on foreign manufactured goods. Agricultural imports and manufactured goods from the British Empire would be exempted. He went from Newcastle to Cardiff, to Liverpool, Newport, and Leeds, concluding in the London Guildhall on January 18, 1904. Everywhere, he displayed an energy and zeal astonishing for a man of seventy. He had the support of most of the younger Unionist M.P.’s and of the entire Conservative press. As his progress continued, however, his message began to change. He had begun by demanding Imperial Preference solely for the sake of Imperial unity; with the passage of time his theme evolved increasingly into the protection of British agricultural products and British manufactured goods. His most vociferous backers were businessmen like himself who wanted protection for their own products against foreign competition. Chamberlain’s speeches now rang with appeals to save this or that “dying British industry.”23

  While Chamberlain preached, Balfour did his best to hold the Unionist free-traders on the leash. The Liberal Party was under no constraint. Asquith, the party’s finest debater, set out in pursuit of Chamberlain and followed him around the country, speaking in the same town where Chamberlain had spoken, two or three evenings after the former Colonial Secretary had departed. Asquith’s essential theme was that Chamberlain’s tariffs would increase the price of food. Asquith also observed that the former screw manufacturer was a businessman who knew little of economics and whose arguments sometimes rested on flawed intellectual or even factual foundations. When he blundered, Asquith pounced and held up the error for public scrutiny and ridicule. After a few weeks of this relentless shadowing, Chamberlain angrily lashed back. At Cardiff, he dismissed Asquith as a mere lawyer with no business experience. Asquith tartly replied that he would “gladly defer24 to a businessman who understood and applied the rules of arithmetic.” During the autumn, Chamberlain’s campaign and Asquith’s countercampaign, heavily reported in all the national newspapers, developed into a kind of rhetorical mano a mano, scrutinized, analyzed, and relished by the entire country.

  Balfour—true to his bargain with Chamberlain—launched his own proposals for milder tariffs. Addressing a Unionist association at Sheffield on September 30, he sought a middle ground between free-trade absolutism and Chamberlain’s Imperial Preference tariff on imported food. Abandoning the high-flown goal of Imperial unity, he asked only for weapons to combat the protectionist policies of other nations. He proposed that the government be empowered to apply selective tariffs against specific products from specific foreign countries. Such tariffs could be us
ed as negotiating chips with foreign powers, or, if negotiating failed, to retaliate until the foreign powers removed their tariffs. Once this happened, Balfour explained, British tariffs could be removed and free trade would be reestablished. On its own, the Prime Minister’s scheme might have been logical, but in the political atmosphere in which it was launched, it was received with contempt by free-traders and protectionists alike. Everyone on both sides understood that Balfour’s real purpose was not a new system of selective tariffs, but a compromise—any compromise—that would hold his party together.

  Rejection of Balfour’s program did not mean rejection of Balfour. He was still Prime Minister and both Unionist free-traders and Unionist protectionists believed that this created an advantage for them. The Chamberlainites cited his selective tariffs as evidence that he was at heart a protectionist simply holding the government in line while Joe converted the country. The Unionist free-traders believed that Balfour was forced to indulge Chamberlain for the sake of party unity, but would in time declare himself, in party tradition, a pure free-trader. Both sides were willing for him to continue until—as seemed to each certain—he arrived in their camp. Balfour, clearly understanding that the moment he chose sides his government would collapse, found precarious safety by encouraging everyone to believe of him whatever suited them.

  By the spring of 1904, Chamberlain sensed that something was wrong. His agreement with Balfour had been that he would lead and that once the path was cleared, Balfour, following behind, would catch up and embrace Imperial Preference. What Chamberlain had not realized was that, for Balfour, there was an escape clause: if Chamberlain did not clear the path, there would be no catching up and no embrace. In fact, Arthur Balfour was not passionately interested in either Imperial Preference or free trade. He could watch Joseph Chamberlain proclaiming the glories of an imperial Zollverein and then observe his cousin, Lord Hugh Cecil, an ardent Tory, zealously defending the great legacy of free trade, and be moved by neither. Balfour did not much care which policy was adopted as long as the party survived. He waited to see how successfully Chamberlain was converting the country to protectionism. As the months dragged on, it became apparent that the former Colonial Secretary was in difficulty. At that point, Chamberlain, looking over his shoulder for Balfour’s support, did not find the Prime Minister. Chamberlain’s principal failure in his tariff-reform campaign lay not in his embarrassment by the gadfly stings of Asquith, or even in his inability to sweep the country with a slogan as he had in the Khaki Election, but in his failure to convince the Prime Minister that what he was doing was right and important. Balfour had the power to introduce—or to refuse to introduce—legislation. He had given Chamberlain a chance to convince the country; the country remained unconvinced. He had promised to follow and embrace once the path was cleared. The path had not been cleared. For Balfour, the important thing now was to save the party.

  The task seemed hopeless. Mr. Balfour’s own policy, the official policy of retaliation, had, by the beginning of 1904, become negligible. Except for the Prime Minister himself, no one propounded it or defended it or regarded it as anything other than a temporary shelter for a politician in distress. The Prime Minister, said an observer, was “a Free Trader who sympathized25 with Protection, a well-wisher of food taxes who was also their official opponent.” By spring, Chamberlain’s campaign and Balfour’s equivocation had spread confusion and dismay through the party rank and file. In thirty-seven House of Commons by-elections held in 1904 and 1905, the Unionists lost twenty-eight seats and won only nine. Balfour’s majority, which had been 134 when Lord Salisbury and Joseph Chamberlain won the Khaki Election in 1900, slid on some votes to only fifty. One celebrated party member was lost on May 31, 1904, when Winston Churchill, amid cries from the Unionist benches of “Blenheim Rat”26 and “Blackleg Blueblood,” crossed the aisle and joined the Liberals. Churchill was an absolute free-trader as his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been, as Lord Salisbury had been, and as Churchill believed he had heard Arthur Balfour promise the Carlton Club he was when Balfour succeeded his uncle as Prime Minister. Now, as Churchill saw it, Chamberlain, a turncoat former Liberal, was proposing protectionism and Balfour, guardian of Tory traditions, was, if not wholly supporting him, disgracefully waffling. Churchill fumed: “Some of us were born27 in the Tory Party and we are not going to let any aliens turn us out.” His attacks on the Prime Minister in the House became violent: “To keep in office28 for a few weeks and months there is no principle which the Government is not prepared to abandon, and no quantity of dust and filth they are not prepared to eat,” he said. “The dignity of a Prime Minister, like a lady’s virtue, is not susceptible to partial diminution.” Balfour, normally suavely immune to barbs hurled at him in the House of Commons, was stung by Churchill’s malice. He rose to put the enfant terrible in his place: “It is not, on the whole,29 desirable to come down to this House with invective which is both prepared and violent. The House will tolerate, and very rightly tolerate, almost anything within the rule of order which evidently springs from genuine indignation aroused by the collision of debate. But to come down with these prepared phrases is not usually successful, and at all events, I do not think it was very successful on the present occasion. If there is preparation there should be more finish and if there is so much violence there should certainly be more veracity of feeling.”

  Somehow, Balfour survived. For sheer political nimbleness, few parliamentary achievements can match his performance in maintaining his government for over two years after Chamberlain’s resignation. He endured the steady erosion of strength in by-elections, the constant bitter warfare in the House of Commons, and the rising chorus of press predictions that the government could not outlive each coming month. What struck everyone—delighting some, enraging others—was how much Balfour enjoyed it. There was no challenge in leading a government with a huge majority in which a prime minister’s every whim glided submissively into law. Living on borrowed time, Balfour mobilized all his talents and maneuvered his government through session after session. Nevertheless, by artificially prolonging the Unionist government, Arthur Balfour ensured that when the fall came, it would be precipitous and catastrophic.fn2

  fn1 “Corn,” to Britons, is the grain Americans call wheat.

  fn2 The campaign for Imperial Preference was Joseph Chamberlain’s last political battle. On June 1, 1905, he suffered the first of a series of strokes which affected his ability to speak and largely confined him to a wheelchair. Balfour, visiting him in 1910, found him “very unintelligible.” Chamberlain died on July 6, 1914, three weeks before the beginning of the Great War.

  Chapter 20

  Lord Lansdowne and the Anglo-French Entente

  When Lord Salisbury departed the Foreign Office in 1900, he was succeeded by a man whom an admiring fellow peer described as “possibly the greatest gentleman1 of his day.” What set the Marquess of Lansdowne apart was not his ancient title, his enormous estates, or his great wealth, but his elegance, his air of serenity, and his unwillingness to cause other gentlemen distress. A small man with a narrow head and a bushy mustache, Lord Lansdowne was always immaculately tailored, whether wearing a gray frock coat and top hat in the House of Lords, or a tweed suit and panama hat when fishing for salmon. Membership in the aristocracy, Lansdowne believed, entailed un-shirkable obligations. He himself served England, not from ambition or for pleasure, but as an obvious duty. Equally, the nation had an obligation to permit him to serve. “The longer I live,”2 he wrote to his sister, “the more firmly do I believe in blood and breeding.” Lord Lansdowne’s most bitter battle, fought after he left the Foreign Office, was his attempt to prevent a Liberal government from nullifying the ancient privileges of the House of Lords.

  On his father’s side, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, was descended from the Normans. The First Marquess had been Prime Minister under George III; the Third Marquess turned down the Premiership and a dukedom under Ge
orge IV. In County Kerry, Ireland, the family owned 120,000 acres. Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square, London, was a majestic private palace in whose galleries hung two hundred paintings including Rembrandts, Reynoldses, Gainsboroughs, Hogarths, and Romneys. From his mother, Lansdowne acquired a more exotic strain: his mother’s father was General Count de Flahaut de la Billarderie, an illegitimate son of Talleyrand and an aide to the Emperor Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino.

  As a boy, Lansdowne, then Viscount Clanwilliam (the nickname “Clan” stuck all his life), served as Arthur Balfour’s fag at Eton. At Balliol, he became an intimate friend of young Lord Rosebery. He was twenty-one in 1866 when his father died and he succeeded to both the title and the estate. The family was Liberal and, almost by hereditary right, the young Marquess entered Gladstone’s government in 1872. In 1883, Lansdowne, thirty-eight, was sent as Governor General to Canada, where he spent five years. His tenure was marked by a record as a salmon fisherman: in four summers, he and his friends, casting with flies, managed to pull 1,245 fish from Canadian rivers. The average salmon weighed twenty-four pounds.