Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Percy never really recovered from this first stroke, which was partly attributed to his splenetic anger over the direction of the country. Henceforth he was perpetually in the care of two nurses. His doctor banned him from any further public speaking on politics.

  His resolve was immediately tested. On 29 April 1909, in a rambling four-hour speech Lloyd George, now Chancellor, introduced his first Budget: a ‘war budget’ to ‘wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’.34 It introduced direct taxation on spirits, estates and higher incomes (a ‘supertax’ of sixpence in the pound on incomes over £5,000 a year) and land taxes including a tax on the ‘unearned increment’ on the value of land enhanced by the effort of the community. The landed classes saw it as a war on themselves. ‘This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude’ and ‘obviously intended as one’, declared Lord Rosebery both from the cross-benches and in The Times.35

  In the months that followed, Lloyd George did not trouble to conceal his contempt for the parasitical leisured classes. But his Budget seems primarily to have been expedient. The pensions scheme had a £16 million shortfall; new social reforms required funding; local government was in financial crisis; naval expenditure was running out of control. If the Government could redistribute wealth at the same time as generating revenue, so be it. But Unionists thought it was dressing up a social measure in fiscal clothing: in Balfour’s view, as one biographer has put it, this was ‘unwise and dishonest’36 and constitutionally dangerous. Mary thought the Government had disgraced itself by allowing its policy to be dictated by ‘party enmity’ while disregarding the country’s wishes.37 Both her Liberal brothers-in-law were seriously concerned by their Government’s proposal.

  Rosebery circulated around the Liberal League’s executive a letter testing the waters to see who might wish ‘to join a crusade against the Governments [sic] proposals if they knew that Lord Rosebery would lead the movement, and accept full official responsibility’. Eddy Tennant showed the letter to Edward Grey, and wrote privately to the League’s Secretary discussing its implications. He did not go so far as to suggest that he might be among their number, but his sympathy for Rosebery’s position is clear enough.38 In an address delivered two days later at the National Liberal Club Edward Grey defended the Budget inasmuch as he suggested that it was not quite the revolution Rosebery had claimed – but he did not directly endorse it.39

  All knew that if the Lords rejected the Budget, a constitutional crisis would ensue. Balfour’s observation that the conventional prohibition of a veto related to an alteration of fiscal measures, not to outright rejection, was too subtle a distinction for most. The summer and autumn of 1909 were dominated by the issue. The undoubted star of the hustings was Lloyd George, addressing crowds of thousands. At Limehouse in East London in July he addressed his audience on landlords: ‘a gentleman … who does not earn his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks that receive for him … He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending … His sole function, his chief pride, is the stately consumption of wealth produced by others.’ At Newcastle’s Palace Theatre in October he turned his guns on the dukes. ‘“A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as a couple of Dreadnoughts,” he said in the tone of one who is proposing a complimentary toast; “and they are just as great a terror and last longer,” he added when the 4,000 had done laughing.’40

  The genius of Lloyd George’s rhetoric was the good humour with which he delivered his blows – but those blows were trenchant enough to prompt Edward VII to demand that Asquith control his excitable Chancellor; and for The Times to condemn the Chancellor for inciting class warfare – a demagogue, appealing only for ‘men who have the crude taste for ginger’, more suited to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park or down the Mile End Road.41 In fact, the tone of politics, gradually shifting since the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 and the legislation of 1884–5, had irrevocably changed. It was now impossible for a politician to make any kind of speech without ‘the constant expectation of interruption’ – whether heckling or more aggressive interruption since the Women’s Social and Political Union (known as the WSPU) had begun to employ violent tactics in its campaign for votes for women, and had adopted a policy of harassing Cabinet ministers.

  At almost every venue at which Liberal ministers spoke over the summer and autumn, a jostling, heckling crowd of suffragists was massed outside. At Limehouse, a man wearing the WSPU’s purple, white and green, hauled down from a pillar by stewards, was roughed up so badly by the crowd that he was hospitalized.42 The night before Lloyd George’s Newcastle address, suffragists had smashed all the Liberal Club’s windows after a fracas with local youths. The next day, The Times looked back wistfully to days when political meetings required no more than a couple of policemen on the door: ‘The woman suffragists have changed all that. When a Cabinet Minister is announced to speak the local authorities close all the neighbouring streets to ordinary traffic, barricades are erected, and the county is scoured for extra police and quiet horses … no doubt, at a pretty cost to the ratepayers.’43

  ‘I am very low about the future of this country and things generally. People are all on a wrong tack,’ Percy wrote to Mary at the year’s end, in spidery writing noticeably shakier than the neat script that preceded his stroke.44 Mary was scarcely more cheerful. Her efforts to keep Cincie and Beb apart had failed. In October, Hugo got wind of the fact that the two had been seen together at a party organized by Letty Manners which Mary had chaperoned. Mary fought back:

  … Beb is very dogged & a hard worker … if money is to be confiscated from the ‘leisure’ classes – it will be better for Cynthia to marry, a man with grit who is hardworking & able to make money than a member of the aristocracy of the Charteris type (yr sons) – you say everyone has to make money nowadays – Beb is about the only man she knows who seems able and willing to do so.45

  Mary timed her defence well. On 4 November 1909, after seventy days of parliamentary debate and 554 divisions, the Budget passed its last stages in the House of Commons by 379 votes to 149. Three weeks later the Lords rejected it by 350 votes to 75. The Radical Daily News fired red rockets into the London sky in anticipation of the battle to come. The first skirmish was just days later, on 2 December. By the early afternoon the House of Commons was packed, with not a single vacant seat on the floor, the Strangers Gallery full to overflowing and peers spilling over their reserved spaces into the side galleries. ‘[O]ne saw on every side rows upon rows of eager, attentive faces … mindful of the great issues at stake,’ reported The Times. Asquith entered the Chamber just after 3 p.m., and shortly afterwards was followed by Balfour, to cheering from his backbenchers because he had been ill and it had been feared he might not attend.

  The debate itself was short, barely two and a half hours. To lusty support from the Government side, Asquith declared that the Commons would be betraying its heritage and traditions were it to brook such interference and usurpation for another day. Balfour ‘taunted the Government on having a perfect passion for these motions, which bound no one, hurt no one, probably encouraged no one, and certainly frightened no one’. By 349 to 134 the measure was carried that the peers’ action was ‘a breach of the constitution and an usurpation of the rights of the Commons’.46 The House adjourned at twenty-five to six. Asquith went to the King who, at his Prime Minister’s request, dissolved Parliament, and a general election was announced for January 1910.

  TWENTY-SIX

  1910

  The entire Budget episode consisted of ‘a series of risks – the government wagered that Lloyd George could make his radical plan work and breathe life into the flagging administration, and Balfour and his colleagues gambled that the electorate would endorse rejection by the Lords and reward the Unionists with an electoral victory’, as R. J. Q. Adams has said.1 In January and again in December 1910 the politicians went to the people, the elections bracketing a summer of secret talks between the p
arty leaders as they tried to find a solution to the growing constitutional crisis.

  The January electoral campaign was twenty-six days in total – the longest in political history. Hugo threw himself into it, passionately advocating tariff reform on hustings at Tewkesbury and Doncaster, and haring from Chelsea to Stanway then to Peebles over three days so as to cast his ballot in all his different constituencies. It seemed as though everyone had become politicized: Nanny Cliffe had manifested herself as ‘a great politician – hates Mr. Asquith & longs for Mr. Balfour to come in again’. To Mary’s distinct amusement, it appeared that her chauffeur, Turner, was a ‘socialist’: ‘while Ego & I went up the hill [near Stanway] & were talking Tariff Reform inside the farms – we came out & found that Turner was having an impromptu meeting on the road! & doubtless more than neutralizing any results we may have achieved!’2

  Asquith had made it clear that, if re-elected, his party intended to address the Lords’ veto with constitutional reform. As the election results came in, Mary was hopeful: ‘things look healthier …’, she told her father, ‘if only we can keep on at this rate – both sides may end up even – they will then be dependent upon the nationalists who hate the budget and altogether their claws will be well cut & I think on the whole it’s the best thing that can happen just now & Free Trade will be pretty well dead …’3 The night before, she had been seated by the King at a dinner for the Duke of Connaught. The atmosphere was ‘amusing … [for] of course the King has to affect a kind of neutrality … yet all the time one knew that feeling was running high & everyone was acutely excited’. Throughout dinner Edward VII received telegrams with the latest results from the constituencies. ‘All the Peers’ eldest sons are being returned,’ he commented, which Mary took to ‘express … his relief … [I] think he begins to feel that the Gov. miscalculated the real feeling of the Country (whatever party feelings may have been) when they made such a fuss about the Lords – & I think the King must feel relieved for he was very agitated at one time.’4

  In the final tally the two parties were almost equal: Liberals 274, Unionists, 272. Eighty-odd Irish and forty Labour MPs held the balance of power. Eddy Tennant was one of over 100 Liberal MPs to lose their seats. When Pamela expressed disappointment, Mary gave her short shrift. Salisbury was ‘a conservative town, if ever there was one’, and besides, ‘Eddy … hates practically everything that this Gov. has done & he ought to be on his proper side or none at all.’5 The Budget had been mandated, but only just. The country was uncertain. For Percy this simply proved how ill suited the masses were to make decisions about the future of their country: ‘Power has been taken from those who should hold power …’ he said, blaming patrician and upper-middle-class ‘vote hunting’. Once again, he predicted the death of his class. ‘When the country has gone into the melting pot an aristocracy or governing Class call it what you will will arise, but it will arise from Trade and Commerce and our lineal successors are not likely to be among them. The grandsons of the Labour members more likely,’ he told Mary.6 George had a ‘splendid majority’ and returned to Parliament, guns blazing, ready for an Armageddon-like battle to the death. Edward VII made almost straight for Biarritz. The Budget was passed without division by the Lords at the end of April.

  In March, fearful of approaching Hugo, Beb Asquith had taken the unusual step of discussing his financial prospects with Mary. He had earned £800 in the past year, and his father had promised him £600 a year more – a sum he knew was ‘most moderate’ but hoped might be ‘just possible’.7 Mary was still concerned. Violet Rutland had just written her a ‘frantic private letter’ revealing that her son John, now Marquess of Granby, ‘admires C. much (great compliment for them to want a pauper!) and begging me to stem the Beb tide’.8 Mary had long talks with George along ‘the “Riviera”’, Clouds’ river walk, ‘about Nyncie [sic] and Beb where they “argued all about it and about” …’.9 But she was instinctively sympathetic to the determined young lovers: ‘I do think that if poor old Squith [sic] can allow 600 it’s awfully shabby if the Earl [of Wemyss] cannot give another 600. But his bitter politics will make him mad.’10

  Weeks later, Asquith threw down the gauntlet with his Parliament Bill which proposed to replace the Lords’ absolute veto with a suspensory one – and stipulated that the Lords had no veto at all on fiscal measures. In his Commons speech introducing the Bill, he set out two alternatives. The Lords could pass it, thereby castrating themselves, or they could veto it, in which case he would seek an immediate dissolution and recommend that the royal prerogative be used to create enough new peers to secure its passage – if that threat was not enough to make the Lords capitulate.

  In fact, unbeknown to all but Edward VII’s private secretary Lord Knollys, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Balfour, there was one more option. At a secret meeting between the three at Lambeth Palace, Balfour had indicated that in certain circumstances he would be willing to form a government if necessary. Knollys told Edward VII of Balfour’s offer in early May. The next day, history ‘rattled over the traces’ with the King’s sudden death. His successor, the forty-four-year-old George V, was politically naive and totally ill equipped to deal with a crisis Asquith deemed ‘without example in our constitutional history’.11 On hearing the news of the King’s death Asquith, on board an Admiralty yacht nearing the Bay of Biscay, was ‘bewildered … indeed stunned’ by this terrible turn.12 He went up on deck to see Halley’s Comet blazing in the night sky, a grave omen.

  Edward VII’s death flung the country into mourning – it was the summer of the famous ‘Black Ascot’ when Society turned out to the races in funereal dress – and provoked the two parties to seek a resolution to the brewing crisis. Over the course of the summer eight men – Balfour, Lord Lansdowne, Austen Chamberlain and Lord Cawdor; and Asquith, Lloyd George, Lord Crewe, Liberal Leader in the Lords, and the Irish Secretary Augustine Birrell – met more than twenty times in ‘constitutional conference’. The fact of their meetings was public; everything else was secret, and the subject of frantic press speculation.

  By the time of Cincie and Beb’s wedding – held at Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Street on 28 July 1910 – tensions were such that guests arriving at the church were asked by ushers ‘Unionist or Liberal?’, and seated accordingly.13 Mary, inspired by dancers at the Hippodrome, had designed the bridesmaids’ dresses: ‘quasi-greek’ drapery, belts of fine gold braid, and red gladioli in their arms – an ‘authorized classical style’, she told Hugo, anticipating criticism. She emphasized that she had not gone for the full fashion, which involved a rope tied around the ankles: ‘it is too ugly the fat bridesmaids would look like tubs’, she said, illustrating her words with a sketch – doleful tub next to her reed-like counterpart, the latter waving her gladioli in triumph.14 The following summer, Balfour was amused to be asked by one concerned hostess whether he would object to being at a dinner where Cincie and Beb were present.15 Mary’s early fears proved sadly well founded. By the 1920s, with Beb debilitated by shell-shock and alcoholism, Cynthia was more or less singlehandedly supporting their family as private secretary to the celebrated playwright J. M. Barrie and what she could earn as a freelance writer.

  Percy and Madeline Wyndham celebrated their golden wedding at Clouds in October.16 Only Mananai was absent, from illness.17 They held a large, celebratory tea as was customary. Their tenantry gave them a silver-gilt Tudor rose bowl, East Knoyle’s schoolchildren a pair of fountain pens. In 1904, Percy had commissioned William Orpen to paint both their portraits.18 Now a series of photographs marked the occasion, in front of Clouds’ great doorway. In one, Percy and Madeline stand, strangely formal, shaking hands, a curious dachshund by Madeline’s feet. In another, seated, they gaze at one another, Percy clutching a cane, Madeline swathed in shawls, her hand to her throat. Fifty years after they had married, the Wyndhams’ relationship was still strong. Madeline’s infidelities of the past had never diminished Percy’s devotion.

  Percy is dapper as ever in t
hese portraits, but his health was slipping. He complained to Webb of ‘various distressing infirmities’.19 He was consumed by anxiety at the direction of the country, his class’s apparently firm foundations turning to quicksand before his eyes. Had he known of the ‘secret understanding’ which George V ‘reluctantly’ gave Asquith in November, Percy would have been more splenetic still. In November, Asquith informed the King that, no cross-party resolution having been reached, the only solution was Parliament’s dissolution, and an election fought on the question. He asked George V for a guarantee that if his government should win that election, then the King would use his prerogative ‘to make Peers if asked for’. Without that guarantee, Asquith told him, he and his entire Cabinet would resign at once.

  Faced with this ultimatum, George V sought the advice of his secretary Knollys. Knollys had told Edward VII of Balfour’s offer of that spring, but he had concealed it from his successor, fearing, presumably, that the novice King might seek to take up Balfour’s offer. Now Knollys assured his monarch (with no evidence that this was the case) that Balfour would decline to form a government; and that George V’s only option was to give Asquith the guarantee. He told George V that this was the advice he would have given Edward VII, who would have taken it. Pressed by Asquith, deceived by Knollys, the King reluctantly assented. ‘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,’ he explained to his diary on 16 November 1910.20

  The campaign itself was muted. Lloyd George did his best to keep the fires of class enmity burning, revisiting Limehouse to liken the aristocracy to cheese (‘the older it is the higher it becomes’). At the Albert Hall, Balfour appeared to move slightly from the fence on tariff reform by announcing that he had no ‘objection’ to putting the matter to a referendum – immediately alienating tariff reformers, furious that he would not adopt it outright.21 By and large apathy reigned. Candidates rehashed speeches made just a few months before. Poor weather kept people indoors. One-sixth of the men who had voted in January – over a million in all – declined to do so in December. The results, after a year of haggling, debating and gambling, were near identical. The Unionists had lost one seat, the Liberals three, and the Irish Nationalists and Labour Party each gained two. As Christmas approached, Percy wrote to Mary in anticipation of his daughter’s visit to Clouds: ‘Arthur is very welcome here especially if accompanied by yourself. The door is closed to Socialists, Fabians or other and I cannot say Radicals are welcome unless near connections by marriage,’ he added meaningfully.22