Mr Balfour's Poodle

by Roy Jenkins

  This passage, although it puts succinctly the danger which would always confront a Sovereign who refused a dissolution to a majority Prime Minister,1 was not on the point. King George never contemplated refusing Asquith’s request for a dissolution. From first to last there is nothing in the King’s own writings, in those of his private secretaries, or in the Cabinet memoranda to suggest that there was any difficulty on this issue. The most that the King did, on the occasion of Asquith’s visit to Sandringham, was to suggest ‘that the veto resolutions should first (i.e. before a dissolution) be sent up to the House of Lords’,t To this condition, his biographers say, Asquith readily complied, and there was therefore little to the matter, less perhaps than the King implied whenche told Lansdowne two months later that ‘it was owing to him that we had been allowed to have the Parliament Bill in the House of Lords at all’.u Furthermore, there was no suggestion in the part of the Cabinet memorandum of November 15 which touched on this—‘The House of Lords to have the opportunity, if they demand it, at the same time, but not so as to postpone the date of dissolution, to discuss the Government resolutions’—that the Government had to be peculiarly submissive here in order to obtain a general election at all.

  Simply by granting a dissolution to Balfour the King would not therefore have been treating him differently from the way in which he treated Asquith. But he would, none the less, have been accused, and justly accused, of favouritism and of unconstitutional behaviour. He would have changed his Government because the advice of the incoming Prime Minister was more congenial to him personally than was that of the outgoing Prime Minister; and he would have precipitated an election in which a principal issue was bound to be the known fact that one party enjoyed his favour and the other did not. He would have been making himself far more of a partisan than by taking the course which he did and which Sir Arthur Bigge feared would produce exactly this result. The consequences of such an action, in the explosive atmosphere of pre-1914 England, might have been far reaching, and the narrowness of the margin by which Lord Knollys prevented their being set in train cannot be doubted.

  Parliament reassembled, after the long recess, on November 15. An early dissolution was known to be contemplated, but no statement could be made until the negotiations with the King were complete. Asquith therefore moved the adjourment and promised to give more information three days later. The House of Lords could not so easily be made to wait upon the Government’s convenience. Lansdowne announced that on the following day he would move a resolution inviting the Government immediately to submit the Parliament Bill; and when this had been moved, and accepted by Crewe (although with a rather bad grace and accompanied by the statement that the Government would accept no amendments), Rosebery gave notice that he now intended to proceed at once with the two more detailed resolutions of reform which he had tabled in April after the success of his three more general ones, but which had not been debated because of the death of King Edward and the subsequent truce.

  He brought them forward on November 17, and they were disposed of after half a day’s debate—the first being carried without a division, and the second abandoned by Rosebery himself on the curious ground that it ‘went too far into detail’. The terms of the resolutions were these:

  ‘(1) That in future the House of Lords shall consist of Lords of Parliament: (a) chosen by the whole body of hereditary peers from amongst themselves, and by nomination by the Crown; (b) sitting by virtue of offices and of qualifications held by them; (c) chosen from outside. (2) That the term of tenure for all Lords of Parliament shall be the same, except in the case of those who sit ex officio, who would sit so long as they held the office for which they sit.’

  The main interest of the debate was provided by Lansdowne’s speech, in which he gave his view that a half of the reformed House might be hereditary peers, and that he would like those selected to be ‘familiar with country life, familiar with the management of landed property’ rather than ‘veterans with a distinguished record, who have arrived at a time of life when they would look naturally for repose’

  On the next day—Friday the eighteenth—the Government statements were made in both Houses. The dissolution was announced for November 28, certain parts only of the postponed Budget (of 1910) were to be proceeded with before then, and (as a counter to the Osborne judgment) the Government, if it won the election, was to propose the payment of members of Parliament in the next session. On the whole there was good temper.

  ‘I heard Asquith and A.J.B. yesterday afternoon,’ Esher wrote on the following day. ‘The House was crowded. Asquith very concise and dignified. Arthur extremely mild and unaggressive. No reference in either speech to highly controversial things. Lansdowne, on the other hand, showed some bitterness.’w

  After these announcements interest quickly began to move to the constituencies, although the proceedings in the House of Lords during the following week were of considerable importance. The motion for the second reading of the Parliament Bill came up on the Monday. Lansdowne, who spoke second, claimed that with no amendments allowed the debate was unreal. He would therefore move its postponement in order to bring forward, later in the week, proposals of his own in the form of resolutions. This he did on the Wednesday. The resolutions did little more than re-state the case which the Unionists had made within the Constitutional Conference. They implied a ‘reduced and reconstituted’ House of Lords, although they gave no information as to its composition, and they stated that, provided a joint committee of both Houses with the Speaker exercising only a casting vote, and not the Speaker alone, determined what was and what was not a money bill, the House of Lords would abandon its right of rejection in this field; that where a difference between the two Houses on other bills arose and persisted for a year it should be settled by a joint sitting, unless the bill related ‘to a matter of great gravity and had not been adequately submitted to the judgment of the people’, in which case it should be put to a referendum.

  After a full debate the resolutions were carried without a division, but also, of course, without the support of the Government peers. It cannot be pretended that they were not greatly disliked by many Unionists. The almost impossible position into which the Tory Party had manoeuvred itself was making many converts of convenience to reform. ‘… (The debate’s) most remarkable feature,’ wrote Lord Newton, ‘was the enthusiasm shown for drastic reform by some of those who had previously deprecated any action of this nature as inopportune and ill-advised.’x But even this simulated enthusiasm was far from universal. There were many who agreed with Lord Esher1 that Lansdowne’s proposals constituted more of a break in the English constitutional tradition than did the Government plan for limiting the veto. And so indeed they did. To reconstitute the House of Lords, to distinguish between different bills according to the highly subjective test of their importance, to introduce the entirely novel device of the joint sitting, and, in Asquith’s words, to substitute ‘a plebiscite’ for ‘parliamentary government’, all as a result of no more than six months of far from calm thought, was fairly hard going for a Conservative Party. But in constitutional matters and where its own influence is at stake, the Tories can sometimes be a party not of conservation but of restless innovation.

  The election campaign was generally agreed to have been a dull one. ‘The general election (of December, 1910),’ wrote Sir Sidney Low in the Fortnightly for January, 1911, ‘was the most apathetic within living memory.’ The issues were inevitably rather stale, although Home Rule played a larger part than in January, and the electorate was bored with being asked to vote again so quickly. Over one in six, indeed, of those who had previously voted declined to do so, and the total poll fell by more than a million votes. There were some shafts of interest, however. Lloyd George turned with vigour from the moderation of his coalition proposals to the immoderation of his platform manner, and at Mile End, at the beginning of the campaign, he gave what was almost a second edition of his Limehouse speech. He described the Lor
ds (according, it may be thought, an unduly ancient lineage to most members of the peerage) as ‘descended partly from plunderers who came over with William the Conqueror and partly from plunderers of the poor at the Reformation’, and contrasted their good fortune with that of a man he had seen in Dartmoor who, he claimed, had been sentenced to thirteen years’ penal servitude for stealing 2s. from a church box when drunk. ‘An aristocracy,’ he added, ‘is like cheese; the older it is the higher it becomes.’y

  In this speech Lloyd George also delivered a riposte to a Unionist line of attack which was given great prominence throughout the campaign. Redmond and three other Nationalist members had spent the recess touring Canada and the United States and collecting dollars for the Home Rule cause. A very respectable list of subscribers, including the name of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian Prime Minister of the day, gave them a total of £ 40,000. But the respectability of its sources did not prevent the Unionist press from denouncing the menace of this dollar fund. Even Balfour joined in the attack, when, in his Nottingham speech of November 17, he announced that ‘the Government were going to destroy the constitution at the will of American subscribers’. The issue showed every sign of developing into the major Tory stunt of the campaign. Lloyd George attacked it as such, and related it to the other ‘bogeys’ which the Unionists had created for previous elections. ‘But since when,’ he asked, ‘has the British aristocracy despised American dollars? They have underpinned many a tottering noble house.’ It was an effective thrust, sufficiently so at any rate to provoke the Duke of Marlborough,1 who, the Annual Register assures us,z had entertained the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Blenheim, ‘publicly to denounce his reference to American heiresses’.

  In their different ways the Liberal leaders pursued the campaign. Mr. Churchill began firmly by writing a public letter to the chairman of his election committee announcing that ‘The Liberals had long claimed equal political rights. They were now going to take them.’aa But he then missed a great opportunity by declining Bonar Law’s offer that they should fight each other in North-West Manchester (where Mr. Churchill had been defeated at a bye-election in 1908, but which had again become Liberal at the first 1910 general election), the loser to remain out of the next Parliament. The seat stayed in Liberal hands. Sir Edward Grey argued strongly against the referendum—‘a pig in a poke’—and Lord Morley broke a Nestorian silence to ridicule ‘the appeal to moderate men by a Unionist Party which had destroyed the House of Lords and were destroying the parliamentary system’.bb

  To a greater extent than at the previous election, however, Asquith dominated the Government campaign. From his Hull speech on November 25, with its famous and sustained satire of the peers’ sudden eagerness to reform themselves,1 through to the end he rained a series of hammer blows on to the Opposition case. ‘He spoke in all parts of the country,’ his biographers tell us, ‘expounding with rare force and dignity what he believed to be the true constitutional doctrine, employing raillery and satire, when they served his purpose, but most carefully refraining from all violence of language and mob-oratory.’cc

  On the Unionist side the chief excitement was provided by Balfour’s partial retreat from tariff reform. As soon as the election became imminent he was strongly urged by some supporters of his party to do this.

  ‘The editor of the Express, Buckle,1 Norton-Griffiths,2 M.P. for Wednesbury, some others, and Garvin—Garvin of all men!’ Austen Chamberlain wrote on November 13, ‘… had all been in quick succession to tell Balfour that we could not win with the food duties, that he must —not indeed abandon them altogether—but announce that if returned to power now he would not impose any new food duty without yet annother appeal to the country.’dd

  In addition, the Liberals naturally enough made great play with the point that if the Unionists believed in a referendum before a change as constitutionally important as Home Rule was effected, they should also wish it to precede a change so economically important as tariff reform. On November 29 the Prime Minister put out a direct challenge in a speech before an audience of 8,000 in the railway sheds at Reading. The same night it was unexpectedly answered by Balfour at the Albert Hall. After consultation only with Lansdowne (no one else was quickly available) he announced that, provided there were no technical difficulties which he had not yet had time to consider, ‘he had not the slightest objection to submit(ting) the principles of tariff reform to a referendum’.ee ‘That’s won the election!’ cried an eager listener, and the whole audience rose to its feet to cheer the pronouncement with due reverence.

  Elsewhere it was received with less enthusiasm. Austen Chamberlain said he ‘felt the decision like a slap in the face’, and later, when the end of the election campaign found him unwell, described his real complaint as ‘referendum sickness’; ff the Morning Post urged tariff reform candidates to take no notice of their leader; and whatever else Balfour’s retreat did, it did not win the election. Whether it made any appreciable difference to the result is open to question. Mr. R. C. K. Ensor refers without argument to ‘a shelving of Chamberlainism which won him (Balfour) back some Lancashire seats’;gg but Austen, impressed by Unionist defeats at Cheltenham (‘where the moderate man with a small fixed income is supposed to abound’) and Lincoln (where there was a distinct Unionist Free Trade organisation) and by the fact that the only Opposition candidate in Manchester to increase his poll was one who repudiated Balfour, was convinced that the insignificance of Unionist opposition to tariff reform had been exposed. In fact eight Lancashire seats which had been held by the Government parties earlier in the year swung over to the Unionists, but as five of them were away from predominantly cotton areas, where tariff reform might have been expected to be electorally most dangerous, and as two Lancashire seats changed hands the other way, there is no very strong evidence to support Mr. Ensor’s view.

  Nevertheless the main pattern of the results was provided by Unionist gains in Lancashire offset by Liberal gains in London.1 In the ‘Nonconformist fringe’, also, there was a slight recession from Liberalism, four seats in the West Country, two in Wales and one in Scotland changing over to the Unionists. The net result of these and other changes was to reduce the Unionists by one and the Liberals by three, but to increase the Nationalists and the Labour Party by two each. The Government became marginally stronger vis-à-vis the Opposition and marginally weaker vis-à-vis the more independent parts of its own majority. But these slight changes were totally insignificant compared with the broad confirmation of the result of the previous January which the election gave. The Liberal Government achieved the distinction, unique since 1832, of winning three successive general elections. In Mr. Ensor’s words: ‘Nothing could in its way have been more decisive. Any further election was out of the question.… The people regarded the issue as settled, and only wanted the dispute wound up as quickly as possible.’hh Their wants had still to wait some little time before they could be satisfied.

  XI The Peers Persist

  When the dust had settled, after Christmas, there could be no doubt that the Government had secured a ‘sufficient majority’ within the meaning of the November arrangement with the King. Augustine Birrell spoke of ‘the sudden emergence of a certainty’, and Asquith’s biographers, who quote this remark, say that it ‘struck the popular imagination’.a But it did not strike the Unionist leaders. Asquith had assumed, during the negotiations in November, that the King’s promise could always remain secret. If the Government were defeated at the polls, the matter would not arise. If it won, the peers would surely accept the verdict to the extent of allowing the Parliament Bill through without forcing the use of the prerogative. In this chain of reasoning he over-estimated the ability of Lansdowne to see ahead and to map out a firm course, and he under-estimated Balfour’s growing weariness with emotional or stupid followers.

  The trouble began early in the New Year. Lord Esher and Lord Knollys dined with Balfour at the Marlborough Club on January 10 and passed on to the King a whole
series of very sensible remarks from this source.

  ‘Mr. Balfour therefore holds,’ wrote Esher, ‘that the King should now assume from his general knowledge of the state of affairs that no alternative government is at this moment possible, and that being the case, His Majesty could not well ultimately refuse to comply with Mr. Asquith’s demand, should it be made, for a promise to create peers.… Mr. Balfour … went on to say that he was sure that it would be the strong desire of Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and Lord Crewe to safeguard as far as possible the position of the King, and to ease the situation for him as far as they could do so having regard for the exigencies of their party. He feels sure that no public disclosure would be made of the so-called guarantee, and so far as he and his own party leaders are concerned the Government would not be questioned on the point.’b

  From this analysis a Unionist policy of retreat under protest seemed to follow quite automatically. But from Lord Lansdowne, whom later in January he thought he would like to see personally for a discussion of the Unionist position, the King obtained a rather different view. Asquith at first objected to this suggested audience and then, when the King persisted, reluctantly agreed. In 1909, before the Lord’s rejection of the Budget, the Prime Minister had taken the initiative in advising the King to see the Opposition leaders, but on this latter occasion, when the King’s own actions were to be central to the next phase of the constitutional struggle, Asquith thought that it would be difficult to draw a line between ‘desiring knowledge’ and ‘seeking advice’. He went so far as to draw up a formal minute for the King on the point.