The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  The Lords kicked out the People’s Budget in November 1909, by 350 votes to 75, breaking a constitutional convention which had lasted since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was an act of suicidal stupidity. The landed aristocracy was already in headlong economic retreat, with the sales of great estates in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England continuing at a relentless pace ever since the great agricultural decline began in the 1880s. Grand houses were being let, scores of fabulous artworks – paintings by Van Dyck, Titian, Rembrandt, superb furniture, historic Renaissance statues – were coming up, year after year, in the London salerooms. The social status of ‘land’ was beginning to shake, just a little. The number of knighthoods being given out had been rising sharply, so that Lord Salisbury remarked you could not throw a stone at a dog in London without hitting a knight. Army reforms attacked the traditional aristocratic route towards a red coat and braid – buying commissions. Edward VII’s circle contained many Jewish financiers and he seemed to enjoy luxury and good living more than the rarefied class distinctions of the old landed set. Behind gnarled hands, in which old blue blood still gurgled, they called him traitor, and thought the same of his ministers. It was easy for paranoia to grab the throats of the old order, particularly when ‘squiffy’ Asquith, with his young female admirers and love of the bottle, and Lloyd George’s already-rumoured love affairs and financial corruption were the talk of the town.

  With no Budget the government could not long survive. On the Liberal side, the need for a general election to provide moral authority for a full-frontal attack on the Lords became clear. Under the British constitutional system, the Lords could not simply be abolished. The Tory majority there would have to be diluted out of existence. Then long-discussed plans to bring them forever to heel could be put into place. This meant the formal removal of their power to stop any monetary bill, and powers for the Commons to override them on all other legislation too, after three attempts by the Peers to amend it or throw it out. They would have the power of delay, not of veto. The King thought there would need to be two general elections, the first on the Budget and the second on the future of the Lords, before the latter could have its power taken away, an idea he detested. And this is indeed what happened. For a short time the payment of income tax was voluntary, since the Budget could not pass. In the first 1910 election the Liberals’ huge 1906 majority in the Commons vanished, though with the Irish nationalists brought in as allies they could still beat the Tories. The Budget then passed, and Asquith turned his attention to the neutering of the Lords. In early May, the King had died. He was succeeded by his forty-five-year-old son George, desperate for a compromise. The Tory and Liberal leaders met, trying to find one, but could not. Lloyd George fantasized about the break-up of the party system and a new coalition government of the best of both parties in the Commons, perhaps with him as prime minister. There was talk of putting it all to the people in a referendum.

  George V agonized over what to do. Perhaps he should refuse to swamp the peerage but instead call on the Tory leader Balfour to try to form a government? Then in an election, perhaps the people would vote for Balfour, King and Peerage, not for the damned radicals. Then again, if they voted for Asquith and Lloyd George, that might well mean the end of the monarchy, as well as the House of Lords. It now seems that King George was conned by his own adviser, who hid from him the fact that Balfour, if asked, would have tried to form a government. So, eventually, believing there was no alternative, he gave Asquith the promise he was looking for. There would be 500 or so new peers if necessary, but this was to remain a dark secret until after the second general election. In his diary the King, who was not given to overstatement, wrote, ‘I agreed most reluctantly . . . I disliked having to do this very much.’ The second, winter, election of 1910 produced little change in the Commons and through the first half of 1911 the Parliament Bill, assaulting the old power of the Lords, ground its way through the Commons. In July, Asquith formally announced the deal he had done with the King eight months earlier. He had more than 200 names already drawn up for instant peerages – retired military men, Oxford professors, plenty of knights and businessmen, the list seems dully respectable now. But up in the Lords, they were not quite ready to give up. Not yet.

  Compton Verney, a grand Adam house of the 1760s, stands near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, the traditional seat of the Willoughby de Brokes. There, for centuries, there had been hierarchy and deference, fox hunting and forelock-tugging by honest farmers and ploughmen. In 1906 Richard Greville Verney, the nineteenth Lord Willoughby de Broke, was innocently clip-clopping along, contemplating fox hunting, his lifelong obsession, when he met an old farmer who told him that the Liberal landslide meant that ‘everything I had would be taken away from me and divided among the people who had voted for the Radical candidate. But, of course, I did not believe a single word of it, and went on hunting as if nothing were going to happen.’41 These were acres which had seen off impertinent requests to allow railways through, where the rude remarks of Joe Chamberlain and the radicals of nearby Birmingham had been treated with disdain. Like so many of his friends, Willoughby de Broke’s life was wholly bound up with his county and his land. The modern world was a nasty rumour. Like so many, he was woken up by the People’s Budget.

  Along with many other ‘backwoodsmen’ among the Tory peers, Willoughby de Broke attended Lord Landsdowne’s grand London house for a brisk meeting to agree to vote down the licensing bill and then adjourned for a decent lunch at the Carlton Club. Even Willoughby de Broke could see this might seem offensive to the elected government of the day: ‘a great nobleman, living in a palace in the heart of Mayfair’ had written a few letters to his brother noblemen in the country ‘summoning them to take private counsel with him under his own roof, where, after a desultory conversation lasting less than an hour, it is agreed to turn down a proposal that has occupied the Liberal Party for something like a quarter of a century’. Yet he confessed to finding the meeting itself ‘great fun’. Some of the Tory peers, he reported, were believed to have thought that Landsdowne House was the House of Lords, and that they had been voting formally. Before the Liberals had won their Commons majority, the upper house had been sparsely attended and votes were so rare that, when they happened, the peers would ‘cackle as if they had laid an egg’. But with radicals at large in the Commons, all this was about to change.

  The fox-hunting peer was soon taking regular early morning trains south from Warwickshire to destroy Lloyd George’s Budget and defend the Lords against Asquith’s democratic threats. Though Willoughby de Broke and his world have long gone, it is worth trying to understand his motives. In his memoirs, much of them devoted to country pursuits, he argued that the late-Victorian period had been a golden age for the ruling classes:

  Their order still continued to dominate in both Houses of Parliament. The freak, the faddist, the schemer and the doctrinaire were either not returned to the House of Commons . . . or . . . made to feel out of place in an assembly composed of those whom an orator of blue blood once called ‘people like ourselves’. In their own counties the squirearchy were supreme, and hunted and shot to their heart’s content with no one to say them nay . . . They had a dominating influence in politics, a comfortable balance at the bank, and modern comforts on a scale of which their fathers could never have dreamed.

  Yet this long-faced, quizzical aristocrat maintained that in the 18,000 acres of his ancestral home, everyone was happier for knowing their place, from the master of foxhounds to the curate. ‘I am prepared to defend the hereditary principle,’ he once said, ‘whether that principle is applied to peers . . . or to foxhounds.’42 It was well said of him that he believed England’s masses should be ‘treated as he treated his gamekeepers, grooms and indoor staff – that is, kindly and firmly. He had quite a gift for writing, thought clearly, and was not more than two hundred years behind his time.’43

  The Tory leaders of the day, including Lords Lansdowne and Curzon, were fir
st in line in the great reactionary battle but the backwoodsmen were always suspicious that the grandees might eventually sell them out. Curzon was regarded as insufferably pompous even in aristocratic Edwardian England. The story was told that, after it was suggested he try public transport for once in his life, he boarded a bus and gave the driver his home address. He had been Viceroy of India and hoped to become prime minister. He gave the hardliners their nickname by saying, at a dinner in May 1911: ‘Let them make their peers; we will die in the last ditch before we give in.’ So they became ‘ditchers’. The Tories who decided to compromise, indeed to cave in, were known as ‘hedgers’ – and soon included Curzon himself.

  After riotous and vicious scenes in the Commons and an abortive attempt to find a compromise between the party leaders, the final act would be played out in the Lords. The second general election had confirmed the Liberals in power, albeit still only with Irish support. Would the peers accept the democratic will of the country and vote for their own emasculation? The Tory Party itself was now at daggers drawn. The party leaders were calling for surrender. The ditchers were determined to go down fighting and set up their own organization to campaign across the country for the survival of aristocratic government. The beginnings of a breakaway party emerged, with its own typists, campaigners, public speakers and lobbyists. Ferocious rows broke out, families divided and old friendships were broken. On 24 July 1911, with the King’s promise to swamp the Lords in his pocket, Asquith arrived in the Commons having been cheered by crowds in the short motor-car ride from Downing Street. But inside the chamber the prime minister was shouted down for nearly half an hour by irate, almost berserk, Tory MPs, screaming ‘Traitor’, ‘Who killed the King?’ and (rather more obscurely) ‘American dollars’ until eventually he had to give up and leave. It was, reported Churchill afterwards to King George, ‘a squalid, frigid, organized attempt to insult the Prime Minister’. But like many scenes in the Commons, its effect was the opposite of its intent. It broke the nerve of the Conservative leadership. Asquith was not going to crack. Worried, among other things, about the effect another 500 low-born peers would have on their own social status, 234 Tory peers agreed to throw in the towel. Curzon wrote that anyone who kept fighting deserved to be sent to a lunatic asylum.

  Willoughby de Broke and many others preferred Bedlam to Curzon. Most of his troops were horsemen, bred to charge first and think afterwards. A huge final ‘no surrender’ dinner was held in the Hotel Cecil. Up and down London Willoughby de Broke was taking numbers, making lists. It would be very tight. On 8 August the two factions faced one another in the Lords, many of the ditchers wearing white heather in their buttonholes and the hedgers wearing red roses. After a bitter debate, when the vote was about to be called, some of the ditcher aristocrats were having second thoughts. Willoughby hid the top hat and coat of one noble duke to keep him in the Lords for the vote. But he bolted anyway, running off into the night. In an age when it was unthinkable for a gentleman, never mind a duke, to appear hatless, this is as good an image as any for the final defeat of the aristocratic order. The ditchers lost. Asquith and Lloyd George had won.

  This was a parliamentary revolution. It was accomplished without bloodshed but was the definitive defeat for the landowning class, which had believed for centuries that even in the age of ‘demagogues’ the country could not be run against their vital interests. Its effects are still with us, but it was a very British revolution. Willoughby de Broke was a sentimental, hunting-obsessed believer in the good old days; he was a fanatic with a sense of humour, who knew when he was defeated. In 1921 he was forced to put up his beloved Compton Verney for sale. It was bought – the ultimate humiliation – by a soap manufacturer and Willoughby de Broke died the following year. At the time of writing, his descendant is one of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, and a member of the UK Independence Party.

  Huns in Sussex

  The light is failing on a cold sandy island off the Baltic coast. In a corrugated-iron hut a group of men are talking in some kind of code. Outside, crouched down, his heart thumping, is a young Foreign Office employee who has been moving around these treacherous waters in a battered yacht. He makes out a single word which catches his attention – ‘Chatham’. Piece by piece, the mutterings about water depths, tugs and weather fall into place. The observer, with the delightfully old-fashioned English surname of Carruthers, follows the muttering strangers and smuggles himself onto a small tug, pulling a barge half filled with coal into the murky seascape. He now understands. He is watching ‘an experimental rehearsal of a great scene, to be enacted, perhaps, in the near future – a scene when multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers, not half loads of coal, should issue simultaneously in seven ordered fleets from shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores’. Though a fictional scene, it comes in a book which in 1903 felt all too real. The description of the German coast around East Friesland was uncannily accurate, there were detailed charts inside the book and the clever nature of the German invasion plan convinced many that it was accurate. The man responsible for the story was a clerk in the House of Commons and the Liberal leader – soon to be prime minister – Campbell-Bannerman called him into his office to ask whether it was true. A former prime minister, Lord Rosebery, was equally intrigued. Soon MPs with constituencies on the English east coast, apparently to be targeted for German landings, were bombarding the government and navy with worried questions, and the First Lord of the Admiralty was in urgent communications with the director of Naval Intelligence.

  The book was The Riddle of the Sands, written by an experienced amateur sailor and sometime soldier called Erskine Childers. It remains the best of the ‘invasion scare’ fictions of Edwardian Britain. It was the fruit of Childers’s own knowledge of sailing round and exploring the sandy, foggy, treacherous Baltic coast of Germany, and his determination to alert politicians and public to the vulnerability of Britain to a forthcoming invasion by the Kaiser’s forces. Like many other serious sailors, he had seen the Kaiser’s racing yachts and battleships up close. In the first months of the new century, illustrated magazines had made much of a new volunteer force being recruited in the City of London to go off and fight in the increasingly desperate Boer War. There are drawings of clerks and lawyers standing in line – the City of London Imperial Volunteers. One of them was Childers, who found his Tory views being softened and liberalized by his experiences as an ordinary soldier in South Africa. In the epilogue to Childers’s novel, a memorandum explains: ‘We have a small army, dispersed over the whole globe . . . We have no North Sea naval base, no North Sea fleet, and no North Sea policy. Lastly, we stand in a highly dangerous economical position.’ There were plenty who pooh-poohed such a grim view of Britain’s real military strength. The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, was a boatman of a different temper. He was disinclined to panic and suggested that as soon as every Englishman knew how to use his horse, bicycle, motor car and rifle for home defence, the invasion threat would recede.

  But the great national jitter about invasion overwhelmed aristocratic scepticism. The Riddle of the Sands was reprinted again and again in the years before 1914. Three years after Childers’s book, men in spiked German helmets and blue-grey uniforms startled passers-by in London’s Oxford Street. This was a publicity stunt by the Daily Mail, advertising ‘The Invasion of 1910’, a serial by the sensationalist novelist (much admired at court) William le Queux, which contained a bloodthirsty account of the German army landing after preparations at just the spot Childers predicted. There are firing squads, German soldiers murdering women, Uhlans galloping into undefended British towns and the rest. Le Queux had worked closely with the British field marshal, former Boer War commander and all-round imperial hero Lord Roberts, who in turn boosted the book at Westminster. In fact, their plausible scenario for invasion was judged too boring for circulation purposes by Lord Northcli
ffe, the paper’s proprietor, who ensured the Germans invaded one town at a time, with the Mail providing a map for each day’s events. In 1909 Northcliffe sent the socialist Robert Blatchford on a tour of Germany to warn Britons of the Huns’ ‘gigantic preparations . . . to force German dictatorship on the whole of Europe’.44

  Many other influential journalists pursued the same theme. Leo Maxse, an admiral’s son and talented right-wing controversialist, helped foment the spy mania of 1908, going so far as to warn a friend to get rid of his German nanny because, as a keen cyclist, she was almost certainly a military agent. Le Queux entirely agreed, warning his readers that the German high command had a secret civilian army hidden in England, posing as waiters, clerks, bakers, hairdressers and servants: ‘Each man, when obeying the Imperial command to join the German arms had placed in the lapel of his coat a button of a peculiar shape, with which he had long ago been provided, and by which he was instantly recognized as a loyal subject of the Kaiser.’45 It was reported elsewhere that every grocer’s shop, dairy, garage, pub and telephone office had been marked down to prepare for the invasion, that German military bands had secretly prepared siege guns in the London suburbs and that – according to one MP – there were 66,000 German reserve soldiers living secretly in the Home Counties with an arms dump at Charing Cross, just along the road from the Commons.