Mr Balfour's Poodle

by Roy Jenkins

  ‘… I suggest that all these conventions with regard to the Cabinet representing the House of Commons and the House of Commons representing the electors and the electors representing the nation are only applicable to ordinary legislation and become tyrannical if used to push through extraordinary legislation. When they are applied to legislation which is not only extraordinary but in our view absolutely unthinkable and impossible, then we cannot entertain that affection for representative government which we ordinarily extend to it. You may claim majorities if you like in favour of the Parliament Bill at a dozen General Elections, but that will not alter my view and I do not think it will alter the view of Lord Halsbury or those acting with us in this matter.’j

  That was clear enough.

  On the side of submission the Bishop of Winchester combined his moderation with a little more liberal feeling than his brother of York had shown, Lord Russell rebuked the Duke of Bedford and Lord Ampthill1 for their desertion of the cause with which the name of Russell had once been associated, and Lord Ribblesdale gave the Government rather cooler support than might have been hoped for from the brother-in-law of the Prime Minister. But the speeches of note came from St. Aldwyn and Newton. The former attacked Halsbury’s position with great vigour, both because he was convinced that no change of opinion had occurred in the country since the last general election and because he regarded the threat of a large creation as very real. But coupled with this attack upon the die-hards was another equally strong attack on the Government and upon more surprising ground. In November, St. Aldwyn argued, Ministers should have advised the King to see the leaders of the Opposition, and it should have been suggested to him that in the event of his declining to give the promise asked for by Asquith and Crewe, Balfour and Lansdowne might be willing to form a Government. In failing so to act Ministers had shown neither common generosity nor common honesty in their dealings with the Sovereign. To the extent that this part of his speech increased Unionist feeling against the Government—and it was referred to with much approval by several subsequent die-hard speakers—it was not altogether helpful to Lord Lansdowne’s cause.

  Lord Newton was less equivocal, although his arguments were probably couched in too astringent a form to win many votes. He expressed himself tired of the constant public statements of profound mutual esteem to the accompaniment of which the two sections of the Unionist Party had assailed each other.

  ‘To me these expressions of mutual esteem and affection are rather beside the point. As military metaphors are so much in vogue, I will say that I rather look upon it in this sort of light—as if a general were to call his principal officers together on the eve of a most important, if not fatal, engagement, and to give them his orders; and those officers were to reply, “Sir, we have the most profound admiration for your character; we respect you as a man, as a husband, and as a father, but as regards your orders we propose to act in a precisely different direction.’”k

  He touched the die-hards on a very raw spot by pointing out that it was only after another election had become clearly out of the question that they had taken up their fighting position. He stressed the very considerable advantage which could accrue to the more advanced sections of the Liberal Party from an actual creation, and warned his hearers against depending upon ridicule to deal with the Government in these circumstances. ‘It seems to me highly probable that we shall have the ridicule and that the Government will have the Peers.’

  Twenty minutes after midnight Lord Midleton moved the adjournment and the rest of the debate stood over until the following day. During this adjournment there was an important development. At Buckingham Palace it was feared that Lord Crewe’s statement that the King had given the November undertaking with ‘natural and legitimate reluctance’ was encouraging the die-hards to believe that the Government might still be bluffing. Sir Harold Nicolson tells us that Lord Stamfordham, in particular, realised this danger, and that on the morning of Thursday, August 10, after consultation with the King, he wrote to Lord Morley stating that it was imperative to dispel this false idea. ‘For this reason,’ his letter continued, ‘the King authorised me to suggest that some statement might be made by you—to the effect that in the event of the Bill being defeated the King would agree to a creation sufficient to guard against any possible combination of the Opposition by which the measure could again be defeated.’l Upon receipt of this letter Morley provided an exact form of words, submitted them to the King, received them back with his ‘entire approval’, and held his statement ready for the afternoon’s debate. This, it seems clear, both from Stamfordham’s letter and from a conversation which Sir Almeric Fitzroy held with Morley on the following day, was the true sequence of events, even though Morley suggests in his Recollectionsm that the initiative came from himself and not from the Palace. But his account was written well after the event.

  Midleton opened on the second day, speaking for those who were with Lansdowne. He set himself to reply to Salisbury’s speech of the previous day and showed how much more frightened of the die-hards than of the Government he had become by arguing that, if the division were to go wrong, a very large creation—much more than 200—would be necessary before there would be a certain passage for the bill. He then adduced a new argument, which was alike tactless and of doubtful validity. In the die-hard lobby, it was thought, would be many peers ‘who are not, to say the least, of first experience in public affairs’. Perhaps five or ten such men might constitute the majority against the bill. Was it right that men of the sagacity of Lansdowne and Curzon should be overruled in such a way? The purpose of this was difficult to see. It was a form of dialectic which was hardly likely to convince the inexperienced and unsagacious ‘backwoodsmen’ themselves; and, as the Duke of Northumberland not unreasonably pointed out, the same argument could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to any close division in either House. It is not only when party revolts are organised and it is not only in the Upper House that the votes of stupid men count for as much as the votes of anyone else.

  When Midleton had finished Rosebery rose and asked if there could not be a reply from the Government at this stage. Morley showed some reluctance to intervene until later—a fact which supports the view that the idea of a statement originated with the Palace and not with himself—but eventually rose, and wrapping a few rather ill-prepared sentences round his agreed statement, delivered a short speech. Most of it was built upon few or no notes, but when he came to the special passage he drew a sheet of writing paper from the pocket of his frock-coat and read carefully. The whole House gave him the closest of attention. ‘If the Bill should be defeated tonight His Majesty would assent—I say this on my full responsibility as the spokesman of the Government—to a creation of Peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different Parties in Opposition by which the Parliament Bill might again be exposed a second time to defeat.’n

  In response to a request from Selborne the statement was read a second time. ‘That, I think, is pretty conclusive.’ Morley added. And so, on the limited question, did every peer in the House whose mind was capable at that stage or assimilating a new point.

  Rosebery came next, on a sudden impulse, he said, and with the intention of speaking for no more than a minute. He put his own gloss on a number of old arguments and urged the Lansdowne policy of submission, but without disclosing whether he himself would abstain or vote for the Government. The speech lasted a quarter of an hour. Milner was then put up to re-state the die-hard case in a form which could be compatible with the certain knowledge that Morley had just given the House. He did so by claiming that those who worked with Lord Halsbury had always taken into full account the possibility of a large creation; but it was necessary not to yield to a threat, however real, because the threat of creation was something which could be used again and again, whereas an actual creation would not in practice be possible to repeat. This was not compatible, on either score, with what many of the other die-hards had been
saying, but, given the premises, it was a logically coherent argument.

  Lord Camperdown followed and introduced a new note into the well-worn discussion. He was the first Unionist peer to announce in the House that he proposed to vote with the Government. As had been anticipated this provoked the Duke of Norfolk to rise and say that he would therefore vote with the die-hards. He had been prepared to abstain, but so strongly did he disapprove of Unionist votes for the Government that he would do everything in his power to neutralise their effect. It was thought that the Duke had a number of followers and Lord Halifax, who spoke immediately afterwards, made it certain that he had at least one.

  Londonderry spoke in support of Lansdowne and then the Duke of Northumberland delivered the most extreme of diehard speeches. The bill should have been thrown out on second reading, Lansdowne’s reform scheme was a great mistake, and the advocacy of the referendum a ‘fatal error’. The general election results proved nothing because the electorate had been bribed by the reckless and corrupting financial policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It would have been much better if the House of Lords had not given way in 1832, and it was essential that there should be no repetition of that mistake. He was answered by the new Duke of Devonshire, the nephew of the great Duke. The liberal tradition of the Cavendishes had become too weak for him not to deplore the bill and the behaviour of the Government, but it was still strong enough for him to join issue with the wild obscurantism of Northumberland. ‘It is impossible for me,’ Devonshire said, ‘to regard the opinions and feelings of a large number of my fellow-citizens with the complete indifference which the noble Duke does.’o He refuted Milner’s point that the threat of the prerogative might again be invoked for Home Rule or Welsh Disestablishment (Morley intervening to support him in dismissing such an idea) and strongly urged abstention with Lansdowne. For Unionist peers to vote in the Government lobby would be a ‘repugnant and odious’ proceeding, but the responsibility for preventing this was placed firmly on the shoulders of the die-hards.

  There were only two more speeches in the general debate, both from die-hards and both of little note. Then, by agreement, the House came to the individual amendments. The first two, dealing with money bills, were disposed of with little debate and no divisions. Morley’s motion ‘that this House do not insist upon the said Amendment’ was in each case accepted. He then moved the same motion in respect of the crucial amendment—Lord Lansdowne’s amendment as it had come to be called—which excluded certain categories of bills from the normal operation of Clause Two. Upon this amendment a two-hour debate developed. The speeches were mostly short. The Earls of Meath and Plymouth began by pronouncing themselves on Lord Halsbury’s side, the former in a speech of remarkable stupidity. The Archbishop of Canterbury then intervened for one minute to declare himself shocked by the levity or callousness with which some peers appeared to contemplate a wholesale creation and to announce that, contrary to his original intention, he would now vote with the Government. ‘There was a ring of leadership in the tone,’ Lord Halsbury’s biographer wrote.p

  Next came Lord St. Levan,1 with an orthodox die-hard speech distinguished only by a pleasantly simpliste description of his relations with Lansdowne. ‘In a kind of way we are not actually resisting Lord Lansdowne,’ he said; ‘we have followed his lead, only we have gone further. Lord Lansdowne said, “Come on”, and we came on so hard and with such good will that we found it impossible to stop.’q Lord Heneage, in place of Lord Cromer, who was absent through illness, announced his intention of voting against the die-hards. The division was obviously near, and there then began a contest for the last word. Curzon, who had not previously spoken in the two days of debate, was the first and best justified contestant. He devoted his full effort to averting the catastrophe. His final words were an appeal to the peers ‘to be very careful indeed before you register a vote which, whatever may be your emotions at this moment, when you look over it calmly, I do not say tomorrow but a month, three months or six months hence, you may find has wrought irreparable damage to the Constitution of this country, to your own Party, and to the State’.r It was for Curzon the final blow in a battle which had drained his great vitality and left him ill and exhausted.

  Then, in rapid succession, came the other contestants, Halsbury, Rosebery, and Selborne. Halsbury had been provoked by Curzon but had nothing to add, and Selborne could offer only a few debating points, well below the level of the occasion. But the most unjustifiable intervention was Rosebery’s. He offered no leadership. He based his statement on an argument of force only to himself and of no general validity. He had decided, however, to vote in the Government lobby and he could not forbear to tell the House of his great sacrifice and of the pain with which he made it.1 At last he was down and so was Selborne. It was a quarter to eleven and the suspense was nearly over. The division could be taken.

  Even at this stage no one knew what the result would be. Everything clearly turned on the number of Unionists who would vote with the Government, even though this involved incurring the obloquy of the extremists without the compensation of a blessing from Lord Lansdowne. The bishops also provided an element of doubt, although it seemed highly likely that the majority of them would vote for the bill, following the lead of Dr. Davidson, who, Mrs. Asquith tells us, exerted great pressure on the general mass of peers, being ‘cursed and blessed, as he moved from group to group, persuading and pleading with each to abstain’. From the same source we learn that ‘some of Lord Murray’s (the Master of Elibank) possible Peers watched from the gallery, hoping for rejection’.s Others, too, watched, but with different emotions. Lansdowne himself retired from the floor as soon as the division was called, and looked down from the gallery above the Throne. Curzon sat stiff in his place. Stamfordham waited anxiously to receive the news and return with it to the King.

  During the division there were a few contradictory indications of the way things were going. Bishops and Unionists were seen entering the Government lobby in good number. But then there was a check to the flow from that lobby while a stream of peers still came from the other. Then again Willoughby de Broke, a teller for the ‘Halsburyites’, was seen with an anxious, downcast face. In all there was no certainty until the Lord Chancellor read the figures. There was a silence of suspense for him to do so. ‘Contents, 131; Not contents, 114,’ he announced, and the struggle was over. The Government was home by seventeen votes, the die-hards were defeated, and there was to be no creation of peers.

  Thirty-seven Unionists and thirteen prelates1 had given decisive support to Morley’s eighty-one Liberals. On the other side, Willoughby, despite the last-minute accession of the Duke of Norfolk’s followers and the votes of the Bishops of Peterborough and Worcester, was nine down from the maximum support he had been promised.1 The weight of argument deployed by the ‘hedgers’ may have had some effect here.

  The division lists show most strikingly how complete had been the desertion of the Whigs. Halsbury had a great vote of magnates—seven dukes with none in the other lobby—and of those who bore famous political titles. Salisbury and Bute, Clarendon and Hardwicke, Lauderdale and Malmesbury were only some of those in this latter category. On the Government side there were many fewer. Chesterfield and Durham had a ring about them, and so perhaps did Spencer and Granville. For the rest the list of ‘Contents’ read more like the Directory of Directors or a Lloyd George Honours List. Some of the great families of England were ‘ditchers’ and more were ‘hedgers’. But for the first time in the advance to political democracy in this country there was hardly a patrician who would aid the process.

  Immediate reactions to the vote were varied. The die-hards were mostly hysterical. Lady Halsbury refused to shake hands with Lansdowne when she and her husband met him on their way out of the House. There was organised hissing of some of the thirty-seven in the Carlton Club, and a plan for circulating lists of these ‘traitors’ to all the Unionist Clubs in the United Kingdom was seriously discussed. George Wynd
ham said ‘We were beaten by the Bishops and the Rats’, and Lord Robert Cecil suggested that the former category should be excluded from any reformed House of Lords. As for the latter category, the Globe expressed the hope that ‘no honest man will take any of them by the hand again, that their friends will disown them, their clubs expel them, and that alike in politics and social life they will be made to feel the bitter shame they have brought upon us all’. And the Observer maintained the standard of invective by referring to ‘the ignoble band, clerical and lay, of Unionist traitors, who had made themselves Redmond’s helots’.