Lloyd George introduced his historic budget before the House of Commons on April 29, 1909, one month after the conclusion of the censure debate on the Naval Estimates. He called it the “People’s Budget” and said it was intended “to raise money12 to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalor.” The bill slashed at wealth and property in a variety of ways. The only new taxes which hit all classes were increased duties on alcohol and tobacco. Taxes on motor cars and gasoline fell on the upper classes and the affluent. Lloyd George hit back at the brewers who had helped kill the Licensing Bill by increasing the cost of liquor licenses for public houses. He graduated income taxes from ninepence per pound to one shilling and twopence per pound (from slightly under 4 percent to a little less than 6 percent). He imposed a “Super Tax” on all incomes over £3,000 per year and substantially increased death duties. What most enraged Conservatives was that the Chancellor inserted into the Finance Bill a Land Valuation Bill intended to prepare the way for new taxes on land. For the first time, all private land in England was to be appraised. This was perceived—as was intended—as an attack on the great landowners. It created a storm. The image of strangers tramping over ancient lands to assess their value in order to levy taxes threw English noblemen into a frenzy; if the Bill could not be defeated in the House of Commons, then it must and would be vetoed in the House of Lords.
The long battle over the House of Lords evolved in two phases: the initial battle over the 1909 budget; then, overtaking and overshadowing the budget, the fundamental constitutional question as to whether the House of Lords should retain its power to overrule the House of Commons. As long as the issue was primarily financial, Lloyd George fought the government’s case. Once the battle shifted onto constitutional grounds, the Prime Minister, Asquith, stepped forward to lead his party.
The Chancellor was an eager, active, sometimes inflammatory spokesman. In Parliament and the country, he delivered speeches, “something between incomparable drama13 and a high class vaudeville act,” which left his audiences “howling with alternate rage and laughter.” The most famous was delivered on a summer evening at Limehouse in London’s East End where, before an audience of four thousand Cockneys, he described the government’s fight to pass the Old-Age Pensions Bill and the resistance of the nation’s landlords and property owners. The highlight was his description of his visit to a coal mine:
“We sank into a pit14 half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain.... The earth seemed to be straining, around us and above us, to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibers split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way and there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundered of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended, just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them—‘Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are very old... they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’—they scowl at us and we say—‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper.’ They say, ‘You thieves!’ And they turn their dogs on to us.”
Lloyd George embraced all peers, magnates, and landowners great and small in an inclusive, generic, derogatory term, “the dukes.” Describing these landed noblemen to his audiences, for the most part workers and townspeople, he painted scenes of rustic barbarians who sat around rough tables before vast fireplaces in their castles, wearing coronets like the peers in Iolanthe, occasionally ordering their horses saddled so they could ride up to London and gleefully vote against Liberal bills. At Newcastle on October 9, the Chancellor was in good form. He had good news to work with: Conservatives had predicted that the introduction of his budget would depress the economy; in fact, it was healthy and rising. “Only one stock15 has gone down badly,” he reported. “There has been a great slump in dukes.” And no wonder: “A fully equipped duke16 costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.” He turned to the issue of the Lords’ veto: “The question will be asked17 ‘Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgement—the deliberate judgement—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?’”
The Chancellor’s provocative speeches did their work; as Lloyd George sharpened his stick and prodded mercilessly, cries broke out all over England. From country shires and mountain fastnesses, noblemen emerged. The Duke of Portland earnestly explained how the budget would spread unemployment through the country as great estates were forced to dismiss gardeners and gamekeepers. The Duke of Somerset announced that he would be compelled to reduce his contributions to charity. The Duke of Beaufort grimly wished that he could see Mr. Lloyd George caught in the middle of his pack of hounds. Experienced politicians were goaded by the Chancellor’s speeches. Lord Lansdowne likened Lloyd George to “a swooping robber gull,18 particularly voracious and unscrupulous, which steals fish from other gulls.” Lord Rosebery, who since formation of the Liberal government in 1906 had remained detached, describing his own speeches as “the croakings of a retired raven19 on a withered branch,” suddenly burst into partisan flame with a speech in Glasgow. Attacking the budget, he said bitterly, “I think my friends20 are moving on the path that leads to Socialism. How far they are advanced on that path I will not say. But on that path, I, at any rate, cannot follow them an inch. Socialism is the end of all, the negation of Faith, of Family, of Property, of Monarchy, of Empire.” Rosebery’s words brought joy to the country houses of England. If this great Liberal orator and former Prime Minister was, after all, “on the side of the angels,” all was not lost.
Asquith left most of the argument at this stage to his fiery Welsh colleague, providing the Chancellor with support which Lloyd George characterized as “firm as a rock.”21 The Prime Minister’s single major speech of the autumn, an address to thirteen thousand people in Birmingham on September 17, treated passage of the budget as certain: “Amendment by the House of Lords22 is out of the question,” he declared. “Rejection by the House of Lords is equally out of the question.... That way revolution lies.” Nevertheless, the unthinkable happened. On November 4, the House of Commons passed Lloyd George’s budget. Debate moved to the Lords. Lord Lansdowne reminded the House that Oliver Cromwell, the greatest English republican, had said that a House of Lords was necessary to protect the people against “an omnipotent House of Commons23—the horridest arbitrariness that ever existed in the world.” Lord Curzon declared that never in human history had poverty been cured by taxation and that the taxes now proposed would grow from sporadic confiscation to complete and uniform confiscation. On November 30, the Lords rejected the budget by a vote of 350 to 75, the first time in 250 years that the Upper House had repudiated a finance bill. Asquith promptly moved a resolution in the Commons describing the Lords’ action as “a breach of the Constitution24 and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.” Privately, Liberals who wished a showdown with the Lords were delighted. “If you gentlemen25 throw out the Budget, we shall have the time of our lives,” one Cabinet minister told a Conservative friend. “We have got them26 at last,” Lloyd George exulted.
The way lay open for a General Election. On December 10, 1909, in the Albert Hall, Asquith announced that the Liberal Cabinet would not again submit to the rebuffs and humiliations dealt by the Lords over the preceding four years. “We shall not assume office27 and we shall not hold office, unless we can secure the safeguards... necessary for the legislative utility and honor of the party,” he said. Surprisingly, the election held in January 1910 was dull. Both parties campaigned on the merits of the budget, but the real issue was the veto power of the House of Lords. The country voted
in moderate numbers and the result was a loss for both sides. The Liberals won a majority with 275 seats, but suffered a huge shrinkage from the 377 seats they had gained four years earlier. The Unionists gained 105 seats and came back to Westminster with a total of 273, but remained a minority. Eighty-two Irish Nationalists and forty Labour members were certain to vote with the government. The Unionist defeat ensured that the budget would pass; Lord Lansdowne had promised that if the Liberals won the election the House of Lords would let it through. In order to pass the bill through the Commons, however, with a government majority of only two, the Cabinet needed the Irish—and the Irish were only available for a price. They wanted Home Rule, and the only way to pass Home Rule through the British Parliament was to annul the veto power of the House of Lords. The price of passing the “People’s Budget” through the House of Commons, therefore, was Asquith’s promise to make a powerful assault on the Lords. For the next year and a half the Prime Minister attempted to carry out this promise.
When the new Parliament assembled in February 1910, Asquith immediately announced that the government intended to eliminate the veto power of the House of Lords. On April 14, he introduced a Parliament bill into the House of Commons, declaring that “if the Lords fail28 to accept our policy, or decline to consider it... we shall feel it our duty immediately to tender advice to the Crown as to the steps which will have to be taken....” The rumor, awful to Unionist peers, was that the Prime Minister had obtained the King’s promise to create enough new peers—as many as five hundred—to carry the bill through the House of Lords. Distracted by this prospect, Unionists scarcely noticed as the Chancellor’s budget, land valuation and all, passed through the Commons on April 27 and the Lords the following day. That evening, exhausted by their labors, needing a respite before they continued, members of both houses adjourned for the Easter recess.
Ultimately, the King would have to decide. Lansdowne had averted an immediate crisis by carrying out his pledge that, if the Liberals won the General Election, the Lords would pass Lloyd George’s budget. This was no longer enough. The government now was committed to Irish members and thus to stripping the power of veto from the House of Lords. King Edward agreed that some reform of the upper house was necessary; in October 1909, Lord Knollys, his private secretary (who shared and reflected the monarch’s view), wrote to a friend, “I myself do not see29 how the House of Lords can go on as presently constituted.” Yet while the cosmopolitan King did not share the tastes of all peers, particularly some of the Backwoodsmen, the exclusiveness of the aristocracy and the privilege of the House of Lords were part of the England into which he had been born. Although Asquith told Parliament in February 1910 that he had neither requested of nor received from the King any pledge to create five hundred peers to subvert the House of Lords, even the hint that such a request might someday arrive worried the monarch.
King Edward was in poor health. For four years, his bronchitis and gout had worsened. Despite nights of coughing and a constant increase in weight, he refused to obey his doctors. “Really, it is too bad,”30 he would complain. “There is the attack again, although I have taken the greatest care of myself”—and then sit down to a dinner of turtle soup, salmon steak, grilled chicken, saddle of mutton, snipe stuffed with foie gras, asparagus, fruit, dishes of flavored ices, and a savory, after which he would light up an enormous cigar. In addition to his physical ills, there were the obligations of constitutional monarchy: he must, in public, always be cheerful, patient, and wise.
One burden the King found heavy was the need to be civil to his nephew the Emperor William. This made even more difficult a duty on which the British Foreign Office now insisted. King Edward had been on the throne for eight years. He had made state visits to all the major—and a number of minor—European capitals, but he had never formally visited Berlin. (His many trips to Germany to see his dying sister or to call on his nephew had all been private and informal.) The Kaiser felt this keenly, German diplomats mentioned it frequently, and the Foreign Office pressed hard. The King, ill and melancholy, agreed reluctantly and in February 1909 he went.
The visit was plagued by mishaps. The first occurred as the King’s train reached Rathenow, on the Brandenburg frontier, where a military band and a regiment of hussars were drawn up. When the royal train pulled into the station, the King was unready; the train had crossed into a different time zone and his valet, having failed to adjust his watch, had not laid out His Majesty’s uniform. When the King’s suite in full uniform descended from the train, the band, expecting the monarch to follow, struck up “God Save the King.” For ten minutes, while King Edward struggled into the uniform of a German field marshal, the band played “God Save the King” over and over, “till we all nearly screamed,”31 said a member of the British suite. Eventually, King Edward appeared and, walking so briskly that he lost his breath, inspected the hussars.
In Berlin, the Kaiser awaited his uncle at the place on the station platform where the King’s railway car was to stop; the King, however, was in the Queen’s carriage a hundred yards away. The Kaiser, the Kaiserin, and the rest of the welcoming party had to run down the platform and line up again to greet their guest. A long cavalcade of carriages waited to carry them to the Palace, but there was trouble with the horses. Some of the carriages were bunched together, and the footmen following one had to keep turning around to make sure they would not be bitten by the horses immediately behind them. Nearing the Palace, the horses pulling the carriage in which the Empress was riding with Queen Alexandra suddenly stopped and refused to move, and the two women had to descend and climb into another, hastily emptied carriage. Two horses in the cavalry escort became frightened, threw their riders, and galloped disruptively along the procession. The result of these misadventures was that the Kaiser and the King arrived at the Palace, looked behind them, and saw no one. William, humiliated, turned his anger on Baron von Reischach, Master of the Horse, declaring that of all the people in the world, this should not have happened in front of the English who were, to a man and woman, all experienced riders.
The state visit, which lasted three days, included a heavy schedule of family luncheons and dinners, civic receptions, visits to regimental headquarters, a drive to Potsdam, a performance of the Berlin Opera, and a Court ball. Throughout, King Edward persevered, but he was weary, kept his remarks to a minimum, and was anxious to abbreviate each event. The question of which English decorations to bestow on German officials, normally a matter which would have occupied him for hours, interested him scarcely at all. He tolerated the Kaiser, who tried to please, but whose forced jokes and continual grunts of approval frayed King Edward’s nerves.
The King’s night at the opera gave him a scare. The performance was of Sardanapalus, one of the Kaiser’s favorites. The last scene was a realistic portrayal of the funeral pyre of Sardanapalus. King Edward, weary from a tiring day and nodding off during the opera, suddenly awoke. Alarmed, believing that the fire was real, he demanded to know why the fireman stationed in the wings had not taken action. The Empress, sitting beside him, convinced him that there was no danger.
There was a moment of real danger. The King had a bronchial cough, but refused to moderate his use of cigars. After a luncheon at the British Embassy, he went into a parlor with Princess Daisy of Pless, a young Englishwoman married to one of the premier noblemen of Germany. She curtsied before him and, in Bülow’s words, “the head of the British Empire32 inspected her with all the satisfaction of an old connoisseur of female beauty.” They sat together for almost an hour while the King smoked his immense cigar and tugged at the collar of his tight-fitting Prussian uniform. Suddenly, King Edward broke into a spasm of coughing, and then fell back against the sofa. The cigar fell from his fingers, and his eyes stared. “My God, he is dying!”33 thought Princess Daisy. She tried to undo the collar of his uniform and failed. Queen Alexandra rushed in and the two women tried together. They failed. The King revived and opened it himself. Sir James Reid, t
he King’s doctor, hurried in and asked everyone to leave the room. Within fifteen minutes they were invited to return. The King, insisting that nothing serious had happened, would not let Princess Daisy leave his side.
Upon his return to England, King Edward’s health continued poor. He began falling asleep over luncheon and dinner, and sleeping soundly through performances at the theater and the opera. He wheezed painfully when required to climb stairs. He went to Biarritz and then on to the Mediterranean, but he could shake neither his pallor nor his cough. That winter at Sandringham he seemed in better spirits, playing bridge until midnight and up every morning to shoot. The January 1910 General Election made certain that the budget would pass, but it also ensured that the Prime Minister would call upon the sovereign to use (or at least to threaten to use) his prerogative of creating additional peers. King Edward, sympathetic to the peers’ desire to maintain their dignity, saw their diehard position as suicidal. As a constitutional monarch, he could not refuse the advice of a prime minister backed by a majority of the House of Commons. What he could do and did do was to tell Mr. Asquith that before he would agree to create the swarm of Liberal peers necessary to subvert the House of Lords, the issue must be submitted again to the country in a second General Election.
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