Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  The Kaiser enjoyed his uncle's funeral. He relished the prominent place accorded him among his relatives. He preened himself that "the entire royal family received me at the railway station as a token of their gratitude for the deference to family ties shown by my coming." In Westminster Hall, he admired the "gorgeously decorated coffin" and the "marvelous play" of colors created when rays of sunlight filtering through the narrow windows touched the jewels in the Crown of England surmounting the coffin. He delighted in prancing through London on horseback beside his cousin, the new King George V, past "the vast multitude… clad in black," at the head of a "splendid array" of "gorgeously" dressed English guardsmen: "Grenadiers, Scots Guards, Coldstreams, Irish Guards-in their perfectly-fitting coats, white leather facings, and heavy bearskin headgear; all picked troops of superb appearance and admirable martial bearing, a joy to any man with the heart of a soldier." In another way, it also gladdened the Emperor to telegraph his new Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, that the Liberal government of England was in trouble. His impressions, based on "many talks with… relatives, with gentlemen of the Court, with certain old acquaintances, and many distinguished persons," were "somewhat as follows: People's minds are wholly occupied with the internal situation… The outlook all around is black. The Government is thoroughly hated… It is reported with satisfaction that on the days after the King's death and during the lying-in-state, the Prime Minister and other of his colleagues were publicly hissed in the streets, and that expressions like 'you have killed the King' were heard. A demonstration against the Government is looked for… and a strong reaction in a Conservative sense is thought not improbable." The Kaiser's skills as a political reporter can be judged by the fact that the "regicide" government had five months earlier won a seven-year term in a General Election and eight months later was to reconfirm its authority in a second General Election.

  Nevertheless, it was true that King Edward's death had put the government in an awkward position. Asquith could not now avoid attacking the veto power of the House of Lords even if he wished to; it was part of his commitment to the Irish members who gave him his majority. Yet the only power that could humble the Lords was the royal prerogative. Everything rested on the King; first King Edward, now King George. Only the monarch could create the mass of new peers necessary to vote the Upper House into political impotence. And the new King was, as the Prime Minister had described him, "without political experience." To pressure him immediately after his accession was, at the least, distasteful. At worst, it might be damaging to the government. The alternative, proposed on June 6, was an armistice and a conference in which four leaders from each party, including Asquith and Lloyd George, Balfour and Lansdowne, would meet quietly and seek to resolve their differences. Although a fervent minority in both parties-extreme Radicals on one side, extreme Tories on the other-objected to their principles being compromised behind closed doors, and strict constitutionalists worried at the nation's basic political structure being altered in secret, the first meeting was held, at 10 Downing Street, on June 17. Twenty-one meetings were held during the summer and autumn of 1910-without success. Along the way, Lloyd George grew impatient, proposed a coalition government, and admitted that his desire to create hundreds of new Liberal peers was no greater than Balfour's. "Looking into the future," he told the Unionist leader, "I know that our glorified grocers will be more hostile to social reform than your Backwoodsmen." Balfour did not want a coalition; neither did Asquith; and on November 10, 1910, it was officially announced that the Constitutional Conference had failed.

  Asquith moved immediately. On the afternoon of November 10 the Cabinet agreed that Parliament should be dissolved and the issue of the veto power of the Lords put to the country. The following day, the Prime Minister called on King George at Sandringham to ask that, if the General Election produced another Liberal victory, the King pledge himself to create enough new peers to pass a Parliament bill through the House of Lords. On November 16, Asquith went to Buckingham Palace for the King's answer. In great distress, King George asked if the Prime Minister would have made the same request of his father. "Yes, Sir," said Asquith, "and your father would have consented." Reluctantly, the King agreed. With this promise-kept secret for the moment-Asquith led his party into a December election, the second within a year. Despite the excitement at Westminster, the country appeared to be even more bored than it had been in January. Five hundred thousand fewer voters went to the polls, and the results were almost identical: the Liberals lost two seats and returned to the House of Commons with 272. The Conservatives gained two seats and returned to Westminster with 272. As before, the Irish Nationalists (84 seats) and Labour (42 seats) held the balance and would vote with the government.

  Nothing now could save the Lords. Asquith had a specific mandate from the country, a majority in the House of Commons, and the King's secret promise to create new peers. In February 1911, the Parliament bill was introduced in the Commons. By May, the bill had passed and come to the Lords. Still not knowing that the King was pledged, if necessary, to overwhelm them in their own chamber, the peers treated the bill with traditional disdain, referring it to committee, where it was sufficiently disfigured by amendment to render it harmless. On July 18, Lloyd George called on Balfour and revealed the promise extracted from the King the previous December. Balfour and Lansdowne immediately saw that they were defeated; the best that could be managed now was a graceful surrender. In order to convince his followers, Lansdowne asked the Prime Minister to state his intentions in writing. On July 20, Mr. Asquith obliged with identical letters to the Unionist leaders in both houses:

  Dear Lord Lansdowne (Mr. Balfour):

  I think it courteous and right, before any public decisions are announced, to let you know… [that] should the necessity arise, the Government will advise the King to exercise his prerogative to secure the passing of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons; and His Majesty has been pleased to signify that he will consider it his duty to accept, and act on, that advice.

  Yours sincerely,

  h. h. asquith

  The following morning, July 21, Lord Lansdowne brought the Prime Minister's letter to a meeting of two hundred Unionist peers at Grosvenor House, the London mansion of the Duke of Westminster. Lansdowne read Asquith's letter and said that he believed the government was not bluffing.* He advised that, to avoid dilution of the peerage, the Lords pass the bill as sent from the Commons. Either way, he pointed out, the House of Lords would lose its veto power.

  Lord Lansdowne's argument failed to persuade a number of his titled listeners, who declared themselves implacably opposed to passing the bill no matter what the consequences. Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India, himself a fledgling peer and therefore anxious to prevent devaluation of a recent honor, defied the government, the monarch, and Lord Lansdowne by crying, "Let them make their peers. We will die in the last ditch before we give in!" thus giving the name "Ditchers" to the bill's diehard opponents. "Ditcher" resistance rallied around the stumpy, red-faced figure of Lord Halsbury, a former Lord Chancellor, then eighty-eight (he lived to be ninety-eight), who as a lawyer and judge had worked his way up to the Woolsack and an earldom, and who, said one of his followers, "invariably objected on principle to all change." Lord Halsbury already had announced that he would vote against the bill as a "solemn duty to God and country." At Grosvenor House, he cried that he would cast that vote "even if I am alone, rather than

  * Asquith was not bluffing. Although, at one point, he declared that he would ask the King to create only enough new peers to carry the Parliament bill through the House of Lords by a majority of one, he already was drawing up lists of Liberal gentlemen whom the King might be asked to ennoble. One list of 249 names survives. It contains men of varied distinction: forty-four were baronets and fifty-eight were knights; there were four generals and one admiral (one of the generals was Baden-Powell, defender of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scouts
); history was represented by G. M. Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch; the law by Sir Frederick Pollock; commerce by the South African millionaire Abe Bailey; classics by George Gilbert Murray; philosophy and mathematics by Bertrand Russell; the theater by J. M. Barrie; and fiction by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Hope (author of The Prisoner of Zenda).

  surrender." At least sixty Ditchers stood with this bantam gladiator, and the number was thought to be growing.

  Those who supported Lord Lansdowne were known as "Pledgers."* And no one hedged more carefully than Arthur Balfour. Perhaps because he sensed that nothing he could say would deter Lord Halsbury; perhaps because, after thirty years of party leadership, he was weary and wanted only to lose gracefully and move on to other issues; perhaps because for Arthur Balfour politics was never more than a game; perhaps for all these reasons, Balfour was reluctant to become involved. Unwilling to appear before the angry peers, he would only agree to writing a letter to the Times: "I agree with Lord Lansdowne and his friends," he announced. "With Lord Lansdowne, I stand. With Lord Lansdowne, I am ready, if need be, to fall." It was the statement of a man who knew and accepted that he was about to be beaten. In ultra-Tory clubs in London and at weekend parties in the country houses of England, the cry "B.M.G.- Balfour Must Go" grew louder.

  Balfour's abdication of leadership became manifest at a scene in which Asquith suffered the most conspicuous public humiliation of an English Prime Minister in the history of Parliament. On July 24, Asquith arose in the House of Commons to announce the King's promise and to explain how this would affect passage of the Parliament bill. The opposition, believing the government had forced the pledge from the King and was bent on the destruction of not only the House of Lords but the class system, private property, the Anglican Church-everything that for centuries had made England "a green and pleasant land"-refused to let him speak. From the seats behind Balfour, Unionists shouted "Traitor!" It was the beginning of a cannonade of vilification. Whenever the rage ebbed slightly, Asquith began a sentence; immediately he was drowned by hoots and jeers: "Traitor!" "Dictator!" "Who killed the King?" Lord Hugh Cecil, a son of Lord Salisbury, stood repeatedly and screamed, "You have disgraced your office!" A Labour M.P., staring in disgust at Lord Hugh, finally rose and shouted back, "Many a man has been certified for less than half of what the noble lord has

  * The Times, the stalwart, schoolmasterish voice of Conservative England, stood with Lansdowne. It reproached Lord Halsbury and his "Ditchers" for their use of "picturesque phrases, such as 'nailing the colors to the mast,' 'going down with the flag flying,' and 'dying in the last ditch'… [phrases which, in real life] stir the heart and fire the blood. What makes… [these phrases] so splendid is the majesty of death. But the heroic peers will not go down or die in the last ditch; they will only be out-voted. That is not the majesty of death but the bathos of the stage; and to assume airs about it is not tragedy but melodrama."

  done this afternoon!" For forty-five minutes, Asquith stood at the dispatch box waiting to speak. In the Gallery, Margot Asquith, blazing with fury, scribbled a note and sent it down to Sir Edward Grey, who sat behind Asquith on the Government Bench: "For God's sake, defend him from the cats and cads." Grey could do nothing and sadly tore, up the note. Eventually, the Prime Minister gave up. "I am not going to degrade myself," he said and sat down. The din continued; fists were brandished on both sides, until the Speaker halted the proceedings.

  Through the afternoon, Arthur Balfour lounged on the Opposition Front Bench, taking no part in the brawl, but doing nothing to halt it either. Some observers thought they saw concern on his face, others thought he seemed revolted. Nevertheless, out of a sense of weariness, or understanding that there were pleasures-in philosophy, perhaps-superior to involvement in such a scene, or perhaps from sheer indifference, Balfour did not act.

  In the end, to save the House of Lords from ridicule, Lansdowne persuaded the majority of Unionist peers to abstain from voting on the bill. The vote was narrowed to the Liberals versus the Ditchers. Even then, as Lord Halsbury increased the numbers of his adherents, it seemed that the bill must die. On the day of the vote, August 10, with the temperature at one hundred degrees, the greatest heat recorded in England in seventy years, many Ditchers still believed that the government's threat to create new peers was "pure bluff." The Liberal Lord Morley, who had moved the bill, attempted to disabuse them: "I have to say that every vote given tonight against my motion is a vote in favor of a large and prompt creation of peers." In the end, it was Lord Curzon, hating what he had to do, who saved the House of Lords from an invasion of Liberal "grocers." When the final division took place, Curzon grimly led thirty-seven Unionist peers into the lobby in favor of the government bill. They were joined by eighty-one Liberals and thirteen bishops and opposed by 114 Ditchers; the final vote was 131 to 114. The Parliament bill became law and the House of Lords lost its power to veto. The Ditchers were "boiling with rage." Lady Halsbury hissed from the Gallery when the result was announced and subsequently refused to shake Lord Lansdowne's hand. That night at the Carlton Club, peers who had voted with Lord Curzon and the government were denounced to their faces as "Traitor!" and "Judas!"

  The scene in the House of Commons on July 23 was too much for Arthur Balfour. On August 9, the day before the climactic vote in the House of Lords, the leader of the opposition departed England for a vacation in the Austrian Alps. There, amid "the cataracts, the pines, and the precipices" of Badgastein, he reflected upon his life, then in its sixty-fourth year. Politics seemed "quite unusually odious"; it was time to devote himself to philosophy; he already had a short article in mind. That autumn on returning to England, the elegant prince of the House of Commons resigned the leadership of the Unionist Party. His successor was a Glasgow steel manufacturer, born in Canada, named Andrew Bonar Law.

  Chapter 36 The Eulenburg Scandal

  When Asquith drew Balfour aside in November 1908 to say that he could give no explanation for Germany's behavior except that "the internal condition of Germany was so unsatisfactory that they might be driven to the wildest adventures," he was referring to the upheavals caused by the Eulenburg Affair and the Kaiser's Daily Telegraph interview. "Prussian court scandals" headlined the London Times, as reporters from around the globe sat in a Berlin courtroom writing stories which bathed the leadership of the German Empire in a lurid glow. Before the conclusion of these events, shock waves had rolled through German society, the Kaiser had suffered two nervous collapses, and the Chancellor had announced in the Reichstag, "It is false and foolish to suppose that because some members of society have failings, the nobility as a whole is corrupt or the army destroyed."

  The diplomatic policy of Bülow and Holstein-threatening war with France over Morocco; attempting to smash the Anglo-French Entente before it took root-had spectacularly failed. The Kaiser, who in his delight at the fall of Delcasse had made Billow a prince, was frustrated and angry. Someone would have to pay. Bülow, who had adopted, administered, and taken credit for Holstein's strategy as long as it was successful, was determined not to be the scapegoat.

  In the spring of 1906, during the humiliation at Algeciras, Holstein's personal position in Berlin worsened. State Secretary von Richthofen, whom Holstein was accustomed to ignoring, died in January and was replaced by Heinrich von Tschirschky, a friend of the Kaiser's whom Holstein disliked. Tschirschky reciprocated the feelings. After Algeciras, it occurred simultaneously to Bülow and Tschirschky that the moment had come to rid themselves completely of Holstein. The First Counselor, aware of the tremors beneath him, resorted to his customary tactic: on April 2, he handed his resignation to Billow. On April 4, Bülow told Holstein that he would do nothing until he had discussed the matter with the Kaiser. On April 5, before he had seen William, Bülow fainted on the floor of the Reichstag and was carried home to bed. From his bed, the Chancellor instructed Tschirschky to forward Holstein's resignation to the Emperor with the recommendation that it be accepted. When William received the document,
he signed it immediately.

  Holstein, stunned at his sudden downfall, quickly turned his formidable powers to ferreting out the enemy who had brought it about. He discounted Bülow: the Chancellor had been his protege and ally for thirty years; Bülow always had been elaborately respectful of the First Counselor's special role at the Wilhelmstrasse; besides, Bülow had been home in bed. Tschirschky, he knew, lacked the authority to persuade the Kaiser to such a deed. Then Holstein learned that, on April 17, the day William had countersigned the resignation, Prince Philip von Eulenburg had been at the Palace for lunch. Holstein looked no further. This friend of the Kaiser, who had helped overthrow chancellors and state secretaries during the nineties, had once again wielded personal power over the Emperor. His enemy, Holstein was convinced, was Prince Philip von Eulenburg.