by Roy Jenkins
In part, too, it arose from the difficulty of developing the attack without criticising the conduct of the King. Unlike Lord Hugh Cecil, who on the following day made no attempt to disguise his disapproval of the Sovereign’s behaviour, Balfour avoided this pitfall, but only at the expense of some remarks about King George which, while sympathetic, were by implication far from complimentary. Advantage, he said, had been taken of ‘a sovereign who had only just come to the throne, and who, from the very nature of the case, had not and could not have behind him that long personal experience of public affairs which some of his great predecessors had’. Of a man of forty-six, who had been Heir Apparent for a decade before his accession, these were slighting words to use; they were also nonsensical, for there is a strong likelihood that King Edward VII would have acted exactly as did King George V, and a probability that Queen Victoria would have done so too.
Asquith made a more notable reply, which included an impressive passage on his relations with the King:
‘I am accustomed, as Lord Grey in his day was accustomed, to be accused of breach of the Constitution and even of treachery to the Crown. I confess, as I have said before, that I am not in the least sensitive to this cheap and ill-informed vituperation. It has been my privilege, almost now I think unique, to serve in close and confidential relations three successive British Sovereigns. My conscience tells me that in that capacity, many and great as have been my failures and shortcomings, I have consistently striven to uphold the dignity and just privileges of the Crown. But I hold my office, not only by favour of the Crown, but by the confidence of the people, and I should be guilty indeed of treason if in this supreme moment of a great struggle I were to betray their trust.’b
The King, however, was more sensitive to ‘cheap and ill-informed vituperation’ than was his Prime Minister. He spoke to Lord Morley on the subject on the morning of August 8 and pronounced himself much concerned at the criticism to which he had been subjected in the Commons. He was also worried, he further told Lord Morley, at the language which was probably used in private at the Carlton Club about his actions, at the large number of unfriendly anonymous letters which he was receiving, and at the charge of having betrayed the Irish ‘loyalists’. On the first point Morley returned a sharp answer. It was better, he said, to run the risk of criticism in the Carlton Club than ‘to be denounced from every platform as the enemy of the people’.c
But the King’s anxieties were not to be easily dismissed. He had just been reading the previous day’s censure debate in the Commons (the Council after which he spoke to Morley had been held up from 11.0 to 11.30 in order that he might complete this task) and he did not feel that Asquith had gone quite far enough in exonerating the Crown from responsibility. As a result of this complaint, according to Sir Almeric Fitzroy, it was arranged at the last moment that Crewe, who had not attended the House of Lords for several months, should intervene in the censure debate there that afternoon and go a little further than Asquith had done. His qualification to speak was that he had participated in the November conversations. Speaking under great strain and with painful slowness1 he described the King’s attitude in November in the following terms: ‘His Majesty faced the contingency and entertained the suggestion (of a creation) as a possible one with natural, and if I may be permitted to use the phrase, in my opinion with legitimate reluctance.’d
This phrase, while awakening a wave of undesirable speculation amongst Unionists who wished still to believe that the Government was bluffing, did not satisfy the King. His Majesty wished even further stress to be laid upon the reluctance with which he had agreed, and he expressed this wish in a letter which Knollys wrote to Asquith’s secretary, Vaughan Nash, on August 9. But the Prime Minister was resolved to go no further. Indeed a note of asperity enters his biographers’ description of his reactions to the King’s request. He thought that his own statement: ‘The King was pleased to inform me that he felt that he had no alternative but to accept the advice of the Cabinet,’ was both accurate and adequate. ‘To be led into public discussions about the feelings and motives of the King or his views about the policy of the Government, would, in Asquith’s opinion, be even less in the interests of the King than of the Government.… Nothing would ever have induced him to use any language which could have been construed as an admission that he had “coerced the King”.’6
On other points Asquith had shown a great respect for the views of the King. By August 4 it had become known to the Opposition that there was to be no creation of peers before the Lords had again had an opportunity of pronouncing on the bill, and this substantial retreat from the position Ministers had taken up at the time of Lloyd George’s interview with the Unionist leaders on July 18 was motivated principally by the King’s wish. There was little enough other reason for it. If the Lords proved recalcitrant, it meant the loss of the bill to the Government and the need to begin again in the next session. If they proved submissive, it meant that the Government would get its bill but that it would still have to wait more than two years for Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment, whereas a creation of peers would have made both these measures possible within a year. If the character of most of the leading members of the Cabinet constituted a strong a priori refutation of the Unionist view that the Government was bent on revolution, their extreme reluctance to take the step, advantageous from their own point of view, of swamping the House of Lords constituted powerful empirical disproof of that interpretation. It was not that the Cabinet were not ready for creation should the necessity be forced upon them, or that they could not find a large body of men who would serve their purposes while far from disgracing the House of Lords. Amongst Asquith’s papers was discovered a list of 249 gentlemen whom he proposed to approach, as prospective Liberal peers, should the necessity be forced upon him. It cannot be assumed that all of those included would have accepted the offer, but the existence of the list is an indication of the advanced stage of the Government’s preparations, and the nature of it shows that no lowering of the intellectual calibre of the House of Lords, and little enough of its social composition, would have been involved. Twenty of those listed were the sons of peers, forty-eight of them were baronets, and fifty-nine knights. Twenty-three were Privy Councillors and nineteen members of Parliament. Many of them were later to be elevated to the peerage in the ordinary course of events. Amongst figures of note whose names were listed may be mentioned Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, Bertrand Russell, and Gilbert Murray. Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Abe Bailey come perhaps in a somewhat different category, while General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, and the Lord Mayor of London of the day were unexpected inclusions.
The Prime Minister, even if unprepared for a creation of the size envisaged in Mr. Churchill’s somewhat oracular pronouncement at the end of the censure debate,1 was obviously in earnest about, and ready for, a very substantial creation. But he was sufficiently loath to act that he made no attempt to override the King’s desire to give the Lords another chance, even though there was no firm evidence to suggest that this would not mean the loss of the bill. Curzon’s efforts had increased to 320 the number of those who were prepared to abstain with Lansdowne, and a list containing these names was published at the end of the first week in August. Morley had also been active on behalf of the Government. He sent out an interrogative whip to all the nominally Liberal peers, and received firm promises of support from eighty, which was a better result than had been expected. But it was not in itself good enough. The die-hards were not at this stage divulging their strength, and Lansdowne declined to place his information at the disposal of the Government in order to help them determine what this strength might be. Halsbury would obviously not muster all the peers not listed by either Lansdowne or Morley—had he done so he would have got more than 200—but he was known to be increasing his strength from day to day. ‘Backwoodsmen’ were often difficult to communicate with, but they were likely, if present, to support Halsbury; and the fact that numbers of peers w
ho had not previously bothered to do so were engaged each day in taking the oath indicated a large attendance of the little known. On July 31, Morley, having gone carefully through the list of peers, came to the conclusion that a creation could not possibly be avoided without Unionist votes for the Government, and that at least forty of these would be necessary. By August 3, however, when the answers to his whip had come in, he was more hopeful and thought that the Government might scrape by under its own steam. On the following day Selborne wrote to Halsbury giving a slightly different version of the Government estimate, which he had obtained by a very circuitous route. ‘So the Government are going to risk it on Wednesday without any creation of Peers,’ he wrote. ‘Lovat tells me that Newton told him that he knew as a fact that the Government are relying on the Bishops for their majority! Can you take any measure to put a spoke in that wheel?’ he added.f
Fortunately Curzon was also taking measures to put a spoke in the wheels of Lords Halsbury and Selborne. He realised at least as clearly as did Morley the dangers of the position at the end of July and he set in train a series of private enquiries as to how many Unionists might be prepared to vote for the Government. This action, taken against the wish of Lansdowne, produced an encouraging result. Curzon himself, as a member of the Unionist Shadow Cabinet, did not feel entitled to go beyond the official party attitude, and St. Aldwyn, who is given by Newton as one of the most prominent of those who were willing to vote, either never took up or did not maintain this position; but about forty others indicated that they would go into the lobby against Halsbury. Notable amongst these were Cromer (who was in fact prevented from voting by illness), Minto, Camperdown, Desart, and Fortescue. Despite close personal relations between Curzon and Morley, there is no evidence that this information was passed to the Government.
The plan for an immediate creation had been abandoned, and the Cabinet had decided to defer to the King’s suggestion and not reject the Lords’ amendments en bloc; without immediate creation the Cabinet itself was no doubt attracted to this suggestion on its own merits, for the goodwill of the moderate Unionists became of paramount importance. Consequently the amendments had to be dealt with seriatim. This was done on August 8, the day of the censure debate in the Lords. Mr. Churchill was in charge, for Asquith had lost his voice, but the attitude of the Government was quite conciliatory. The amendment excluding from the scope of the bill any measure which would extend beyond five years the duration of a Parliament was accepted, and a concession was also offered on Cromer’s amendment to Clause One. The Speaker, in determining what was a money bill, should take into consultation the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the latter being by firm tradition a member of the Opposition. The exact form of this concession did not commend itself to the House, however, and after debate a change which substituted two members of the Chairman’s Panel, nominated by the Committee of Selection, was put forward by J. F. Hope and accepted by the Government. The motion for disagreeing with the Lords’ other amendments was carried by a majority of 106.
The most notable feature of the day’s debate was a speech of startling violence and bitterness delivered by Lord Hugh Cecil. He announced that he would be glad to see Asquith punished for high treason by the criminal law, and declared that, if peers were to be created, the more completely the constitution were broken, the better it would be for the Unionist Party. ‘The Home Rule issue,’ he continued … ‘would be decided in Belfast. There might be secession and a separate body might be organised to collect taxes. These might be regarded as empty threats: so had disorder in the House. He looked back on it with satisfaction; it showed that the Government could not silence the Opposition.’g
On the following day, Wednesday, August 9, the Lords, meeting specially for this purpose at ten o’clock in the morning, received the Commons’ amendments. Having ordered them to be printed the House then adjourned until half past four in the afternoon. There was then to begin a two-day debate which was the final encounter of the long played-out constitutional struggle. Unlike most of the other phases of the struggle it assumed something of the air of drama. The debate itself was almost unique amongst major parliamentary occasions of the past eighty years in that the result was not known beforehand. There had been no last-minute developments to turn the tide decisively one way or the other. Lord Morley had been able to muster only sixty-eight Liberals to oppose Curzon’s motion of censure, and this might have slightly encouraged the die-hards. But then it was thought that he was reserving his major whipping effort for two nights later. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, had secured 120 guests for the supper party at Arlington House which he gave to ‘ditcher’ peers after the division on the Tuesday. But this was not widely known; and, in any event, these signs of Liberal weakness and of die-hard strength were just as likely to swell the number of Unionists preparing to vote in the Government lobby as to produce any other result. The debate therefore opened in a penumbra of doubt. All that was certain was that, for once in a way, speeches would count, and that every vote was important.
Those most vitally affected awaited the result according to their various habits of behaviour. Balfour incurred more criticism by retiring to Paris, on his way to Bad Gastein. He occupied the final day of the crisis, as we have seen, by writing letters of complaint to Lady Elcho from the Ritz. He could bear London no longer. From the suspense he was more immune than most men; it was the bickering which he found tiring. Asquith was also away, although not out of the country. He travelled down to Wallingford on the Wednesday to stay with friends and recover from his laryngitis. From there, on the Thursday, he wrote a laconically matter-of-fact note to his secretary. ‘If the vote goes wrong in the H. of L.,’ it ran, ‘the Cabinet should be summoned for 11.30 Downing Street tomorrow morning and the King asked to postpone his journey till the afternoon. … If I have satisfactory news this evening I shall come up for Cabinet 12.30. My voice is on the mend but still croaky.’h But the King, more agitated by the prospect of the result than either of the two party leaders, and much less at ease with himself than Asquith at least, was too involved to wish to leave London, despite the date and despite the temperature.
This last factor provided another element of drama. It was the hottest weather for seventy years. The whole summer had been torrid, and the previous week exceptionally so. On August 9 the shade temperature over most of England rose to 95°. At South Kensington it was 97° at Greenwich Observatory it was 100°—the highest ever recorded in Great Britain. Roads melted. Railway lines were distended. That evening a serious fire developed at the top of the Carlton Hotel in Pall Mall. In these circumstances the unfettered House of Lords began its final debate.
Morley rose to move that the Commons’ reasons for disagreeing to several of the Lords’ amendments be now considered. He indicated that he would have preferred to take the amendments seriatim, but that in deference to the views of the Opposition he was now moving a motion which would provide for a general debate. There was an understanding that the detailed examination of the Commons’ reasons would begin at about dinner time on the following evening.
Morley deployed no arguments and within five minutes he had resumed his seat. Thereafter there was no Government speaker for the whole of the day. From the Liberal backbenches Earl Russell and Lord Ribblesdale1 were heard, and from the episcopal bench the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Winchester. For the rest it was a day of battle between the two sections of the Unionist Party. Lansdowne began it. He dismissed the concessions made by the Commons as of trivial importance and threw in occasional words of strong condemnation of the Government, but almost the whole of his argument, very cogently expressed, was directed against his own dissidents. The safeguards left to the House of Lords under the bill were worth something. But a swamping creation would sweep these safeguards away, and might also confront the next Conservative Government, intent upon undoing the damage, with a delaying radical majority in the Upper House. Furthermore, the ef
fect of a mass creation, not because of the individuals concerned but because of the manner of their ennoblement, would be degrading to the House of Lords, to parliamentary institutions, and to the King. What of the suggestion that a mass creation was not possible? Lansdowne cited a statement which Crewe had made in the censure debate the previous night,1 interpreted this as implying a very heavy creation, and asked Morley to confirm his view. This Morley refused to do, saying that it was too delicate and important a matter to be dealt with by an intervention. Lansdowne concluded by referring to a long constitutional struggle ahead and the undesirability of divided counsels in the Unionist Party. He was followed by Halsbury who showed himself truculently sensitive to the charge of disloyalty, but who added little by way of argument, perhaps because his principal speech had been delivered in the censure debate. The Hansard report of his speech, however, is enlivened by frequent appearances of the splendid archaism ‘forsooth!’ He had not been born in 1823 for nothing. But on some observers his speech, in juxtaposition with that of Lansdowne, did not create a good impression.
‘Lord Lansdowne,’ Sir Almeric Fitzroy wrote, ‘who always shines in a position of extreme difficulty, acquitted himself of the task he had to perform with the greatest tact, polish, dignity and address, and but for the fact that he appealed to a section of the House impenetrable to reason and proof to the dictates of prudence, his allocution could not have failed of success. It was lamentable to see his calm and dispassionate view of a very critical situation succeeded by a blunt appeal to blind passion, couched in terms of turgid rhetoric and senile violence.’i
Dr. Lang of York, who followed, stressing that he spoke only for himself, censured the Government and urged moderation with some force and more unction. Then came Salisbury, who placed upon Crewe’s statement an entirely different construction from Lansdowne, again pressed Morley for clarification, and, failing to receive an answer, took this as further evidence that talk of a large creation was not to be taken very seriously. In any event, he somewhat surprisingly argued, if the radicals created 500 peers to serve their purpose, the Conservatives could easily do the same when their time came, so there would be no great disadvantage from their point of view. The other die-hard speakers that day were Willoughby de Broke, Bedford, Marlborough, Ampthill, Denbigh, Scarbrough, and Stanhope. Of these, Willoughby and Ampthill remained sceptical of the threat to create, whilst the two dukes and, to some extent, Stanhope thought that there could be many worse things than even the largest of mass creations. Marlborough said quite bluntly that he would prefer a big reinforcement to the ‘purge’ which Lansdowne had tried to force upon the House; Bedford believed that creation would advertise the despotic power that the majority in the Commons was arrogating to itself; and Stanhope thought, ingeniously and possibly correctly, that a Government majority in the Lords and the rapid implementation of the principal Liberal measures would result in the break-up of the coalition upon which the Government depended in the Commons. Within the die-hard ranks there was another conflict between the ‘autocrats’ and the ‘democrats’. Some, like Ampthill and Bedford, persisted in the claim that their refusal to accept the will of the Commons was bound up with their determination to give the electorate an endless series of last words. Even on the Parliament Bill they could not admit that it had yet spoken with a decisive voice. Others, like Willoughby—and Halsbury would probably have agreed with him—faced the issue more frankly: