by Roy Jenkins
II The New Government and the Lords
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had taken office with a big majority against him in both Houses of Parliament. He had been able, quickly and sensationally, to rectify the position in the Commons, but in the Lords the strength of the Opposition remained unimpaired. At the beginning of the first session of the new Parliament there were 602 peers, including twenty-five bishops, who were entitled to take part in the proceedings of the House of Lords. Of these only eighty-eight described themselves as Liberals—and this number included a few who were as uncertain in their support of the Government as was Lord Rosebery. One hundred and twenty-four were Liberal Unionists and 355 were Conservatives, leaving only thirty-five, including fourteen bishops and a number of Princes of the Blood, who gave themselves no political label. The nominal Unionist majority was 391, a preponderance still more decisive than that of the Government in the new House of Commons.
This degree of Tory dominance in the Upper House was of comparatively recent growth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in a House of about 150 members, there had been a small Whig majority, which Queen Anne, in the year 1711 and on the advice of the 1st Earl of Oxford of the Second Creation,1 had turned into a still smaller Tory majority by the simultaneous creation of twelve peers for the specific purpose of securing a Government majority for the ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht. A few years later, after the death of the Queen, this change was reversed by a more gradual programme of creations, and the Whigs resumed control. And they continued to hold it until the accession of the younger Pitt to the premiership. Thereafter, creations proceeded on a hitherto unknown scale. During Pitt’s seventeen years as Prime Minister, 140 ennoblements took place. The Tories were not merely given a majority in the House of Lords, as had happened to themselves and the Whigs on previous occasions. They were built up into a position of ascendancy from which they could not be dislodged save by a policy of creation on an almost revolutionary scale.
It has been suggested that Pitt’s creations brought a new social and occupational element into the House of Lords. In a passage in Sybil, Disraeli tells of his having ‘created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fatgraziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill.’a But this view is hardly borne out by a consideration of the individuals concerned; for the most part they were Tory country gentlemen, and very reactionary ones. They and their first heirs provided the greater part of the vote against the Reform Bill in 1831.
The next important change in the party balance in the Lords occurred with the secession of the Peelites from the Conservative Party and their gradual move towards alliance with the Whigs. Then, for the first time since the French Revolution, the Tories were almost balanced by a combination of Whigs and Peelites. This did not last long. The natural tendency of an hereditary House to move to the right soon came into play, and by the closing stages of the Crimean War the Lords were in opposition to the Aberdeen Coalition. A few years later, in 1860, there was a majority of eighty-nine against the second reading of Gladstone’s Paper Duty Bill. But this measure, which was supported only very lukewarmly by the Prime Minister, probably attracted more than the normal anti-Government vote into the ‘not-content’ lobby.1
This vote did much to foster the growing radicalism of Gladstone, and this in turn, with its effect upon the development of the Liberal Party, still further increased the Tory bias of the House of Lords. An evenly-balanced Upper Chamber, recruited mainly by the inheritance of titles and partly by the ennoblement of men of great wealth, was possible only so long as the differences between the two parties were more superficial than real or, in so far as they had reality, corresponded only to the difference between one form of wealth and another. The growth of radicalism and of the Liberal hold on the working class inevitably meant the decline of Liberal strength in the House of Lords.
It was quite a rapid decline. In 1868 Lord Granville informed the Queen that, excluding the bishops and nominal Liberals who preferred to vote Tory, the anti-Government majority in the Upper House was between sixty and seventy.b A few Liberal creations then followed, but they did little more than compensate for defections which were simultaneously taking place. When Gladstone came in again, in 1880, he assembled a Cabinet which with one duke, one marquess,1 and five earls (of a total of twelve members) should have personally, if not politically, recommended itself to their lordships. But this did not avail. The rate of defection became greater rather than less. Three great magnates who were members of the Government itself—the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquess of Lansdowne—were impelled by the Government’s attitude to the Irish land question to join the move to the right. They were followed by others of lesser note during the lifetime of this Government.
These changes were as nothing to the shifting of allegiance which followed the events of 1886, when Home Rule, in Rosebery’s words, ‘threw the great mass of Liberal Peers into the arms of the Conservative majority’.c This marked both a social and a political upheaval. Lord John Manners wrote that ‘Gladstone can’t find a duke who will allow his wife to become Mistress of the Robes’,d and the Government vote in the Upper House was reputed to have fallen to thirty. It was seven years before there came a test vote on a major issue, the Home Rule Bill of 1893, and that showed a majority of nearly four hundred—419 to 41—against the Government. The Liberal Party had taken a decisive turn towards radicalism and it had paid the price of creating a Conservative predominance in the House of Lords of a degree never approached before, not even after the creations of the younger Pitt, and which has persisted ever since.
In 1906 it was therefore a House of Lords of which the political shape had been largely formed by the events of 1886 and 1893 that confronted the new Liberal Government. The eighty-eight nominal Liberals, had they been allied with the 124 Liberal Unionists,1 the sons of men who had followed Hartington and Chamberlain in 1886 or, in many cases, the men themselves, would have been a respectable minority. On their own their only strength was that they were allied to political forces which, in the House of Commons, had just won nearly three-quarters of the seats.
To what extent this was to be recognised by the majority of their lordships as a legitimate source of strength and as a reason why they should exercise their own power with circumspection was a question to which an answer was eagerly awaited. It had not been held for many years that the Lords should be indifferent to the opinion of the constituencies as expressed through the House of Commons. Even such a high Tory as Lord Lyndhurst2 had declared, in 1858, that ‘I never understood, nor could such a principle be acted upon, that we (the House of Lords) were to make a firm, determined and persevering stand against the opinion of the other House of Parliament, when that opinion is backed by the opinion of the people.’e This statement begged the vital question of who was to decide when the opinion of the House of Commons coincided with the opinion of the people, but it would be difficult to argue that the period immediately following a great electoral victory should not be so regarded; certainly this had been the view immediately after 1832, when the removal of the rotten boroughs—of Croker’s ‘certain elasticity which acted like springs, and … prevented violent collision’—gave the problem for the first time a modern form.
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 t
he 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 Salisbury1 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 bil
l, 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.