by Roy Jenkins
Austen Chamberlain, to whom Smith’s letters had been addressed, had a less mercurial mind. Unlike Smith and Churchill, he was a little shocked, although not without a touch of pleasure, at the sudden boldness of the plan. ‘What a world we live in, and how the public would stare if they could look into our minds and our letter-bags,’ he wrote. But he also appreciated the solid advantages which might accrue from it:
‘We equally recognise the vast importance of the results which Lloyd George holds out to us. To place the Navy on a thoroughly satisfactory basis, to establish a system of national service for defence, to grant at once preference to the Colonies on the duties immediately available, and to enquire, not with a view to delay but with a view to action at the earliest possible moment, what further duties it is desirable to impose in the interests of the nation and the Empire—these are objects which silence all considerations of personal comfort and all individual preferences or antipathies. And in saying this please understand that I am as assured as you are yourself that Lloyd George has made this proposal in perfect good faith and without any unavowed or unavowable arrière pensée.’ii
Despite one or two detailed objections, he was moving steadily towards a position of firm support for the plan.
Here, then, lined up behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1910 (even if, in some cases, eager to push as well as to follow), were the three men—Birkenhead (as Smith had then become), Churchill, and Chamberlain—who in 1922 remained loyal to the coalition to the end and paid the penalty of brief periods in the political wilderness; none of them was a member of the Bonar Law-Baldwin Government.
Asquith, equally presaging the future, was always cool towards the Lloyd George plan. It is true that he did not dismiss it out of hand, nor seek to discourage Lloyd George from making what he could of it. But the latter’s statement that ‘Mr. Asquith regarded the proposal with considerable favour …’jj is almost certainly too strong. Asquith’s own biographers write in quite a different tone:
‘For himself,’ they say, ‘he was wholly sceptical about any coalition being possible which would have effected the desired objects of settling the House of Lords question and carrying the Home Rule Bill and other controversial measures by consent, and he would certainly not have been willing to pay the price (compulsory military service, imperial preference, etc.) which, according to rumours current at the time, the Tory leaders would have required for their connivance. He thought the ground treacherous and dangerous for both parties, but with his accustomed tolerance, he was willing to let those who thought otherwise try their hand; and he watched the progress of the business to its inevitable conclusion with a certain detached amusement.’kk
On an issue of this sort Asquith’s essential conservatism made him a better radical than Lloyd George. He was a great man for guiding the plough to which he had set his hand, rather than for searching the horizon for some new task. In consequence he was much less willing to abandon the struggles to which he had grown accustomed—Home Rule, the battle with the Lords and the defence of free trade—in return for the excitement of a fresh twist to the political kaleidoscope. Confronted with a new issue, Asquith’s instinctive reaction to it would have been far more conservative than would Lloyd George’s. Confronted with an old one, he could be far more stubbornly radical.
The breakdown of the coalition negotiations, coming as it did just before the breakdown of discussions on the narrower point within the Constitutional Conference, reinforced the feeling amongst leading politicians that progress by compromise and secret conclave was impossible. The next round would have to be fought out in public.
This was instantly appreciated by Mrs. Asquith when, on November 10, she received a telegram from her husband announcing that all the talks were over. With a very full sense of the duties of a Prime Minister’s wife, she reacted, in her own words, as follows: ‘It was clear to me that there was nothing for it but for us to have another General Election as quickly as possible before the discontent of our party could become vocal. I sent our Chief Whip—the Master of Elibank—a telegram to this effect, and another to Henry, who had gone to Sandringham to see the King.’ll
Fortunately the Chief Whip had no conflicting orders to try to obey, for the Cabinet took roughly the same view as did Mrs. Asquith. But a dissolution raised some delicate problems. It necessarily required the King’s consent, and, in the view of the Government, on this occasion it required also to be preceded by some Royal guarantee that, if the Liberal Party were again returned, the Parliament Bill would pass into law. These were not obtained without difficult constitutional negotiation.
X The King and then the People
On Novemberc 10, the day of the breakdown of the Constitutional Conference, Asquith did not go to Sandringham to see the King, as the quotation from his wife’s autobiography at the end of the last chapter suggests. He held a Cabinet in London, at which it was decided, with some doubters, that the correct course was to dissolve at once and to get the election over before Christmas.1 It was only on the following day that he travelled to Norfolk, not, in his own words, ‘to tender any definite advice, but to survey the new situation created by the failure of the conference, as it presents itself at the moment to His Majesty’s Ministers.…’a
As part of the survey he informed the King of the decision to seek an early dissolution, said that if this were followed by another Government victory the issue with the House of Lords would have to be put to a conclusion, and, while pointing out that it would be theoretically possible for this to be done by the Crown either withholding writs of summons or exercising the prerogative of creation, stressed that there were precedents for the latter course but not for the former. He added that he had no doubt that the threat of creation would alone be sufficient to bring about an agreement.
The King, however, was so pleased with one aspect of this audience that he could hardly notice anything else about it. ‘He asked me,’ he wrote in his notebook after the Prime Minister had gone, ‘for no guarantees.’b ‘(Mr. Asquith) did not ask for anything from the King,’ Sir Arthur Bigge1 confirmed in a minute written the same night: ‘no promises, no guarantees during this Parliament.’c
Neither the King nor his private secretary understood that this was merely a preliminary discussion, intended to show the way the mind of the Cabinet was moving, and that exact advice would follow later. It was, indeed, an example of Asquith’s over-delicate method of approach to the King on the constitutional issue. ‘Unaccustomed as he (King George) was to ambiguous phraseology he was totally unable to interpret Mr. Asquith’s enigmas,’ Sir Harold Nicolson has written.d A more direct, even if more brusque, approach would have been better understood. It might have avoided the very delicate situation which arose three days later, when Lord Knollys came up from Sandringham to Downing Street and discovered that the Prime Minister’s intentions had become more definite. ‘What he now advocates,’ Knollys wrote to the King, ‘is that you should give guarantees at once for the next Parliament.’ The King’s response was to instruct Bigge to telegraph to Vaughan Nash, Asquith’s private secretary, in the following terms: ‘His Majesty regrets that it would be impossible for him to give contingent guarantees and he reminds Mr. Asquith of his promise not to seek for any during the present Parliament.’e This message was despatched and received on the same morning (November 15) that the Cabinet was giving final approval to a minute to the King, formally outlining ‘the advice which they feel it their duty to tender to His Majesty’, of which the key paragraph read:
‘His Majesty’s Ministers cannot, however, take the responsibility of advising a dissolution, unless they may understand that, in the event of the policy of the Government being approved by an adequate majority1 in the new House of Commons, His Majesty will be ready to exercise his constitutional powers (which may involve the prerogative of creating peers), if needed to secure that effect should be given to the decision of the country.’f
The minute added the suggestion that the underst
anding should not be made public unless and until the actual occasion should arise.
The King and his Ministers were rapidly moving into positions of direct conflict. And the situation was not made easier by the fact that the Sovereign was receiving directly contradictory advice from his two private secretaries. Lord Knollys, in London, was for accepting the wishes of the Cabinet. ‘I feel certain that you can safely and constitutionally accept what the Cabinet propose,’ he wrote in a letter accompanying the Government minute, ‘and I venture to urge you strongly to do so.’g He had the advantage, in the King’s eyes, of greater experience of the constitutional issue, having served King Edward VII and seen the difficulty develop from the beginning.
Bigge, at Sandringham, had the advantage both of being with the King at the time and of having been his own private secretary, not for a few months as was the case with Knollys, but for nearly ten years. He was passionately, almost violently, opposed to the King giving way. He summarised his views in a document prepared for His Majesty:
‘The King’s position is: he cannot give contingent guarantees. For by so doing he becomes a partisan and is placing a powerful weapon in the hands of the Irish and Socialists who, assured of the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, would hold before their electors the certainty of ultimate Home Rule and the carrying out of their Socialist programme.1 The Unionists would declare His Majesty was favouring the Government and placing them (the Unionists) at a disadvantage before their constituencies. Indeed it is questionable whether His Majesty would be acting constitutionally. It is not His Majesty’s duty to save the Prime Minister from the mistake of his incautious words on the 14th of April.’h
On the proposal for secrecy, Bigge was still more vehement.
‘Is this straight?’ he asked the King. ‘Is it English? Is it not moreover childish?’
The issue which Bigge did not face was what was to happen if the King accepted his advice and ignored that of his Ministers and of Knollys. In these circumstances Asquith would certainly have resigned. The King must then have sent for Balfour. To have refused the advice of one Prime Minister and sent for another would have been a dangerous enough proceeding at the best of times, but unless it was known that Balfour would accept the commission it would have been merely silly. The King, with a great loss of face, might have found himself back where he started—with Asquith, and with no possible alternative.
It fell to Knollys to give the decisive advice on this point (he had got the King up to London by November 16 for an audience to Asquith and Crewe that afternoon). In Sir Harold Nicolson’s words, ‘Lord Knollys assured him that Mr. Balfour would in any event decline to form an administration.’i This was curiously firm advice, for it was far from certain that Balfour would not agree to form a Government, and no one had better reason to know this than Lord Knollys. On April 29 he had been present at a secret meeting at Lambeth Palace, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended also by Balfour and Lord Esher.1 His own record of the meeting says, ‘Mr. Balfour made it quite clear that he would be prepared to form a Government to prevent the King being put in the position contemplated by the. demand for the creation of peers.’j Knollys communicated the substance of this talk to King Edward on the day before his death, but did not subsequently pass the information on to King George. This was not perhaps surprising, for it may well be that no occasion to do so arose, either at the time of the change of reign or in the following months. But what is remarkable is that when specifically asked about the point in November, Knollys should have given advice based on facts directly contrary to those which he had recorded in a minute six and a half months previously.
The decisive nature of this advice cannot be doubted. The King gave way to the Cabinet’s demand at this interview with Asquith and Crewe on the afternoon of November 16.1 That night he wrote his own version of what had transpired:
‘After a long talk’ he recorded, ‘I agreed most reluctantly to give the Cabinet a secret understanding that in the event of the Government being returned with a majority at the General Election, I should use my Prerogative to make Peers if asked for. I disliked having to do this very much, but agreed that this was the only alternative to the Cabinet resigning, which at this moment would be disastrous (my italics). Francis (Knollys) strongly urged me to take this course and I think his advice is generally very sound. I only trust and pray he is right this time.’k
Asquith, speaking of the occasion in the House of Commons nine months later,2 used the following carefully chosen words: ‘His Majesty, after careful consideration of all the circumstances past and present, and after discussing the matter in all its bearings with myself and my noble friend and colleague, Lord Crewe, felt that he had no alternative but to assent to the advice of the Cabinet.’ (my italics.)
The implication of both statements is that, had he thought Balfour’s attitude to be different, the King might have shifted his own position. And this is borne out by a piece of subsequent history related by Sir Harold Nicolson. Knollys gave up his appointment in 1913, the King finding the arrangement of joint private secretaries unsatisfactory. A few months afterwards King George saw for the first time the minute of the meeting of April 29, and dictated the following short note upon it: ‘It was not until late in the year 1913 that the foregoing letters and memoranda came into my possession. The knowledge of their contents would, undoubtedly, have had an important bearing and influence with regard to Mr. Asquith’s request for guarantees on November 16, 1910.’l
Sir Harold Nicolson thinks that Lord Knollys, despite what it is difficult to regard as other than a deliberate act of concealment, was substantially right in the information he gave the King, because Balfour had changed his mind by November. The evidence he cites in support of this is a letter from Balfour to Lansdowne, dated December 27. In this letter Balfour wrote: ‘I do not believe, however, as at present advised, that it would be fair to the King to suggest that he will better his position by attempting, under present circumstances, to change his Government.’ m But this is no evidence at all. By December 27 the second 1910 election had occurred and confirmed the result of the first. It was therefore obvious, and this point is made by Balfour elsewhere in the letter, that a third dissolution was unthinkable. In November, as in April, the situation was quite different. A second election seemed inevitable, and the point at issue was whether it should be fought with a majority Liberal Government in office, choosing the ground to confirm its position, or with a minority Unionist Government, choosing the ground to achieve a majority. By the end of December a change of Government was possible only if the new Government could carry on with the existing Parliament, and this the Unionists manifestly could not do.
This does not mean that Balfour was certainly still willing to form a Government in November. Indeed his increasing apprehension of the political future makes it quite likely that he was less ready for a rash venture then than he had been in April. But it does mean that we have no evidence that this was so, and that it is improbable that Lord Knollys had any either. What Knollys appears therefore to have done was not merely to have suppressed a piece of information because a better piece came to hand and he did not wish to confuse the King, but to suppress the best piece which he had because he was so convinced that the King should accept the advice of the Cabinet that he was unwilling to advance any facts which might turn his mind the other way.
Knollys was confident of the rightness of his own view, and he made no attempt to minimise the part which he had played. He proudly told Mrs. Asquith that, after her husband had left the Palace on the afternoon of November 16, the King had turned to him and said, ‘Is this the advice that you would have given my father?’ and that he had replied, ‘Yes, Sir; and your father would have taken it’.1n For his services at this time, even if his methods were somewhat unorthodox, the nation and the institution of constitutional monarchy owe Knollys a deep debt of gratitude. But it was not a debt which was recognised by King George. Immediately after the
decision was made he felt a sense of relief, and in the following week Lord Esher found him ‘proud of his strict adherence to the lines of the constitution … (and) also perfectly calm’.o But resentment soon set in. Eleven months later, again in a conversation with Esher, he was saying that ‘what he especially resented was the promise extracted from him in November that he would tell “no one”’1p Nor did he quickly forget the issue. His attitude when the minute of the Lambeth Palace meeting came to light has already been noted; and for the longer term we have Sir Harold Nicolson’s testimony that ‘King George remained convinced thereafter that in this, the first political crisis of his reign, he had not been accorded either the confidence or the consideration to which he was entitled.’q
What was the danger from which Lord Knollys saved the King? Partly because of the secrecy which enveloped the result as well as the course of the negotiations with Asquith and Crewe it was widely misunderstood. An observer with as many ears to the ground as Sir Almeric Fitzroy,2 for example, who fully realised that there was a crisis afoot, believed that it arose because the King was making difficulties about the grant of a dissolution of ‘a Parliament of (Ministers’) own choosing, in which so far they have not met With a rebuff in either House and during the existence of which they have not lost a seat.…’r Even Lord Esher, who was better informed to the extent of knowing most of what transpired at the meeting of November 16, believed that the difficulty until that day had been the King’s refusal of a dissolution to Asquith. Furthermore, he saw the dangers of a change of Government in these terms: ‘Obviously Arthur Balfour could only form a Government either if the Liberal moderates supported him, which was not to be thought of, or if he in his turn were granted a dissolution. The King therefore would have been in the position of according to a Tory Prime Minister what a few days before he had refused to a Radical.’s