The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Joseph Chamberlain, in sharp contrast, was a thruster. By the age of forty he had made his fortune and was ready to take Westminster and Whitehall by storm. In Birmingham, as mayor and leader of the Liberal caucus on the town council, he had bought the local gas works and used the profits to provide new sewers and fresh drinking water. He had served in Gladstone’s government as President of the Board of Trade, but in 1886 he (like the Duke of Devonshire and Sir Michael Hicks Beach) left the government and party rather than support Irish Home Rule. Salisbury made him Colonial Secretary and he set about his task with such messianic fervour that Hicks Beach thought it necessary to remind his colleagues, ‘I was an imperialist when Mr Chamberlain’s politics did not go any further than Birmingham.’5

  Chamberlain’s imperial obsession – not confined to, but principally concerned with Africa – both complicated and complemented foreign, as well as colonial policy The Victorian view of Britain’s place in the world was succinctly expressed by George Curzon – in his time an Oxford undergraduate of such obvious merit that, when he failed to gain a first-class honours degree, the university changed what they assumed must be a deficient examination system. ‘As long as we hold India, we are the greatest power in the world.’6 It was generally assumed that, given half a chance, Russia would advance through Afghanistan and steal the jewel from the imperial crown. The extension south of the Russian strategic railway network added to the apprehension. Defence policy amounted to a reliance on naval supremacy to keep Great Britain safe and the maintenance of an army that could defend India against invasion. Diplomacy was increasingly addressed to the perceived need to construct alliances which detached the European powers from Russia.

  Fear of Russia influenced Salisbury’s judgement about Germany, a nation which, unlike most of his Cabinet colleagues, he believed would never make an alliance with Britain. The Kaiser, he told Curzon, ‘is in mortal terror on account of that long undefended frontier of his on the Russian side. He will therefore never stand by us against Russia.’7 Balfour described the risk in more cataclysmic language and (although he feared France more than Germany) regarded Russian imperial pretensions as a possible argument against making an alliance with Japan, the Czar’s historic enemy. ‘A quarrel with Russia anywhere about anything means the invasion of India and, if England were without allies, I doubt if it would be possible for France to resist joining the fray.’8

  There were solid material reasons for maintaining British rule in India. Not once, during the whole reign of Queen Victoria, was Britain’s balance of physical trade in surplus. The deficit on the United Kingdom’s international account was more than made up by ‘invisible exports’ to the subcontinent. But to many Englishmen the ownership and control of the princely states had a significance which was more mystical than economic. Principal among the romantic imperialists was George Nathaniel Curzon – the ‘most superior person’ of the Balliol rhymes. While still at Eton he had heard Sir James Stephens (barrister and member of the India Council) describe ‘British possessions in the Asian continent’ as ‘an empire more populous, more amazing and more benevolent than Rome’ and he had swelled with pride at the notion that ‘never was a goal sought with so much resolution and won with such merit and perseverance’.9 Curzon was, perhaps, extreme in his views of Britain’s Indian destiny – Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, called him ‘a regular jingo with Russia on the brain’10 – but his obsessive determination to keep India British was the extreme form of a commonly held view. He took the admirably practical step of creating the North-West Frontier Province – from what amounted to a tribal wilderness – as a buffer against Afghanistan and its supposed Russian allies.

  Despite the unanimous view that he was a man of almost unique ability, Curzon lay fallow through most of the years when Edward VII was served by a Liberal prime minister – consoled by his long affair with Elinor Glyn, a popular novelist. We possess a vignette of Curzon’s character courtesy of Halcyon, the novel which Elinor Glyn regarded as her masterpiece. It was written in 1911, shortly after the relationship between politician and novelist had been resumed following a period of estrangement. The hero, John Deringham, was clearly a caricature of Curzon – Captain of the Oppidans at Eton, gilded undergraduate at Oxford, Member of Parliament and Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs. But the recent reunion did not prevent Miss Glyn from describing the faults of her lover’s doppel-gänger. Deringham possessed an ‘insouciant arrogance’ and a ‘sublime belief in himself’. Fie thought women should be ‘feminine, dainty, exquisite creatures’ and made speeches in simple language so that ‘uneducated clods’ could follow his argument. Miss Glyn’s judgement of Curzon’s character was confirmed by the letter with which he thanked her for sending him a copy of Halcyon. It drew the author’s attention to two spelling mistakes in the cover note.11

  Genuine radicals rejected Curzon’s imperial pretensions, but they too believed in the Anglo-Saxon obligation to bring good government to a savage people. John Morley, journalist, Liberal Cabinet minister and Gladstone’s biographer, spoke even for progressive opinion when he confessed that he could ‘not see how any Englishman, contrasting India as it is now with what it was and certainly would have been under any other conditions than British rule, could fail to see that we came and we stayed … in obedience … to the will of providence’.12 Morley recognised the existence of ‘a school of thought who (sic) say that we might walk out of India and that the Indians can manage their affairs better than we can’. But he went on to insist that ‘Anyone who pictures to himself the anarchy, the bloody chaos which would follow might shrink from that decision.’13

  That view, although shared by most of the political Establishment, did not hold good for the colonies in which the population was predominantly white. The Durham Report had proposed self-government for Canada in 1839. Almost fifty years later, in Adelaide, Lord Rosebery – soon to become, albeit for barely a year, Prime Minister and Liberal Leader – spoke of extending the same principle to other territories which were ‘no longer colonies in the ordinary sense of the term’. Australia, he argued, was ‘A country which has established itself as a nation. Its nationality is now, and will be henceforth, recognised by the world … But there is a further question: does the fact of your being a nation imply separation from Empire? God forbid! There is no need for any nation, however great, leaving the Empire because the Empire is a Commonwealth of nations.’14

  The notion of Commonwealth was profoundly attractive as a means of avoiding the separation which had been the inevitable result of Westminster’s aggressive rule in North America. But it was conceived as a constitutional settlement between people of the same race. India did not qualify. The Cape Colony was clearly British. The Transvaal was not. Resolving the differences between English-speaking and Afrikaans South Africa exposed both the inadequacy of the British Army and the incompetence of the Salisbury government.

  The Liberal Opposition was in no position to take advantage of either the Tory Party’s disarray or the obvious inadequacy of its moribund leadership. After Gladstone resigned the Liberal Party leadership in 1894 – rejecting the Navy estimates with the explanation that ‘things are best done by those who believe in them’ – there were two contenders for the succession: Lord Rosebery, the Foreign Secretary, and Sir William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nobody doubted that Harcourt was the more able man. Unfortunately the rest of the Cabinet found him personally intolerable. When Rosebery became Prime Minister, Harcourt demonstrated why he was so disliked. Knowing that the new government’s survival depended on his support, he insisted on becoming both Chancellor and Leader of the House of Commons, being allowed to call Cabinet meetings on his own initiative and enjoying as much political patronage as the Prime Minister. Rosebery reacted to Harcourt’s behaviour with a combination of patrician fury and aristocratic disdain, but he did not fight to assume full control of the government. His languid character did not allow such vulgar conduct.
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  Rosebery’s reminiscences revealed his true attitude towards the demands and rewards of high office. ‘There are,’ he wrote, ‘two supreme pleasures in life. One is ideal, the other is real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back.’15 Rosebery’s Eton tutor said that he ‘sought the palm without the dust’.16 That characteristic made him as much an anachronism as Balfour. He was accused of ‘feeling about democracy as if he were holding a wolf by the ears’, a view which he confirmed by an admission of the reluctance with which he accepted and continued to hold office. ‘When I found myself in this evil-smelling bog, I was always trying to extricate myself. This is the secret of what people used to call my lost opportunities.’17

  The Liberal Party lost office in 1895. Rosebery’s brief residence in Downing Street was most notable for his two Derby winners, Ladas and Sir Visto, and a growing national enthusiasm for colonial expansion which followed the annexation of Matabeleland. Once the election was over and he was out of office, Rosebery announced that he was, and always had been, against Irish Home Rule. When, in 1896, Gladstone came out of retirement to demand that Britain intervene in the Balkans to protect the Armenians against Turkey, Rosebery announced that ‘the last straw’ had broken his will to lead the Liberal Party. He was still under fifty and his comparative youth, combined with his capricious temperament, made his erstwhile colleagues fear that it was only a matter of time before, being ‘unduly attracted by the dramatic’, he indulged in the ‘pleasure of making some sort of fine gesture’. Its object, they assumed, would be a demonstration of his moral superiority over members of the official opposition.

  Rosebery’s successor as Liberal Leader was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a Scottish barrister whose jovial manner hid a fine mind and strong will. His father, who imported foreign goods into Scotland, had been Lord Provost of Glasgow. So Liberal politics was in his blood. He spent an undistinguished three years at Cambridge and failed to make an early mark on Parliament. After almost two decades as an MP he reached the Cabinet and, at his first meeting, was struck dumb by the proximity of Mr Gladstone. Born Campbell he added Bannerman as the condition of a rich uncle’s legacy.

  Ironically, he was the occasion, though not the cause, of the election which preceded his predecessor’s ejection from office. When he was Secretary of State for War, he was accused of leaving the Army short of cordite, a smokeless explosive used in ammunitions. A snap vote, censoring the government, was unexpectedly carried by the House of Commons. Most of the Cabinet wanted to dissolve Parliament rather than resign, but Rosebery insisted on handing over the government to the Tories. Salisbury, able to choose the election date, went to the country at the moment which gave him greatest advantage. The Tories won a majority of one hundred and fifty-two.

  At the time of Queen Victoria’s funeral, it was taken for granted that the Liberal leadership would soon pass to Herbert Henry Asquith, Gladstone’s Home Secretary and a man of universally admired intellect and probity. Asquith, born in Morley, a small West Riding woollen town, was a man of modest origins whose success was wholly the result of his extraordinary ability. He won a classical scholarship to Balliol, gained the anticipated First and, having been called to the Bar, affronted more traditional members of the legal Establishment by standing for Parliament, and winning the seat, before he took silk. His appointment as junior counsel for the plaintiff when Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Party leader, successfully sued The Times for libel, made him famous. From then Asquith ascended to the heights of political achievement without apparent effort, though no one who knew him doubted that his life was a victory for the vigorous application of a fine mind and highly developed conscience.

  We learn much of the workings of Mr Asquith’s mind – as well as the process of government before the Great War – from the extensive correspondence which he carried on with Miss Venetia Stanley, the youngest daughter of Lord Sheffield. It began in 1910 and increased in regularity, as well as volume, into and throughout his life as war leader. Miss Stanley was twenty-five when they met. Asquith was fifty-eight. The relationship was certainly emotional (although probably never physical) and it was carried on with a charming candour which would be impossible today On most Friday afternoons throughout Asquith’s premiership, the couple were driven round one of London’s more picturesque suburbs or through Richmond Park. They lunched together in fashionable, though highly respectable, restaurants and Asquith called upon Miss Stanley at her parents’ house in the early evenings. Occasionally they spent a weekend with Lord Sheffield in his house on Anglesey. Miss Stanley kept Asquith’s letters. Asquith destroyed hers.18

  Asquith, Sir William Harcourt, John Morley and Edward Grey were Campbell-Bannerman’s Praetorian Guard – though, like the Roman originals, they were from time to time attracted by the idea of assassinating the leader whom it was their duty to protect. None of them thought that the Liberal Leader had the qualities which were essential to the successful conduct of the nation’s business. The importance of the quartet, in terms of the Opposition’s prospects of recovery, was the wide spectrum of Liberal opinion it represented. Asquith and Grey were Liberal imperialists and had doubts even about Home Rule.

  Morley, crucially for the recovery of his party, proclaimed himself the heir to Gladstonian liberalism. He was far more radical than his mentor and hero. But he remained stubbornly attached to Irish Home Rule and Free Trade and attributed his ‘advanced’ views on domestic policy to his development of the Grand Old Man’s ‘Newcastle Programme’ of social reform. Although a journalist by trade, he was a philosopher by inclination who, in his youth, had sat at the feet of George Meredith and John Stuart Mill. ‘In such ideas as I have about political principles, the leader of my Federation was Mr Mill. He was a great and benign lamp of wisdom and humanity and I and others kindled our modest rush lights at that lamp.’19 In the first turbulent decade of the twentieth century, the Liberal Party was fortunate to retain within its high command someone who maintained their beliefs in the first principles of radicalism, albeit guided by the sentimental misconception that Mill’s essays on Liberty, Representative Government and The Subjection of Women had determined the programme of Gladstone’s four administrations.

  Morley was – like Harcourt and, to an extent, Campbell-Bannerman – part of the Liberal Party’s illustrious past. The new Liberal Leader’s poor health (combined with his constant concern for his chronically ill wife) added to the impression that a revival depended on the transfusion of new blood. Asquith – both the bridging passage between Gladstonian glories and the last great flowering of Liberalism and the architect of the final triumphs – was accepted as the man who could lead the recovery once Campbell-Bannerman could be decently dispatched to the House of Lords. But he needed followers of youth and vigour, men who, in the popular imagination, were clearly figures of the future. Fortunately, two such paragons were at hand. They were men of wildly different origins who were united in energy, ambition and self-confidence – though at the beginning of their parliamentary careers they were not even members of the same party.

  Winston Churchill was a soldier and adventurer. His father, Lord Randolph, Chancellor of the Exchequer at thirty-seven – had died of syphilis before he was fifty. His son was similarly prodigious but more sober. He was elected to the House of Commons – aged twenty-six – a month after Queen Victoria’s death, as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Oldham. Just over three years later, on 29 May 1904, he crossed the floor of the House of Commons and declared himself a Liberal, attributing his apostasy to the Conservatives’ abandonment of free trade* and his fear that the government’s immigration bill would exclude from Britain Jews who were seeking asylum from persecution in Russia and Poland. After the Liberal election victory of 1906, he became Under-Secretary for the Colonies† and he remained a minister until November 1915, when he resigned the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Six months before, he had been de
moted from First Lord of the Admiralty, one of the most prestigious appointments in the early twentieth-century ministry. His fall had followed the tragic consequences of the allies’ failed attempt to open a second front against the Turks by invading the Dardanelles, a disaster for which he was held solely responsible. It was generally assumed that his political career was over. He was forty years of age.

  In the closing years of Edward’s reign, Churchill was to form a glittering parliamentary partnership with a young Welsh MP of diametrically different background and temperament. David Lloyd George – a solicitor who was born in Manchester but adopted by his uncle in the Principality – entered Parliament in 1890 as Member for the Caernarvon Boroughs. His by-election victory, by eighteen votes, so elated his supporters that they carried him home to Llanystumdwy shoulder-high, where his wife complained that the noise they made was likely to wake the baby. He at once made his name as a formidable, indeed ferocious back-bencher and became the champion of Nonconformist demands for the disestablishment of the Church of Wales. At the turn of the century he spent long parliamentary days and nights enhancing his popular reputation by conduct which irritated his honourable friends almost as much as it infuriated his opponents.

  Lloyd George was an irreconcilable opponent of the Boer War. Churchill, a retired cavalry officer who had fought at Omdurman, went to South Africa as a war correspondent and took such an intimate interest in the campaign that he was captured and imprisoned by the Boers. The unlikely partnership was destined to set Edwardian politics alight.

  There were politicians whose company the King enjoyed – but his enjoyment was confined to occasions when they were companions at dinner, competitors at race meetings and opponents at baccarat. When he needed to deal with them as politicians he normally conducted his business through the intervention of a small group of men with whom he felt at home and who were, therefore, employed – initially as a result of private acquaintance – to act as a conduit between the sovereign and men whom he neither liked nor trusted. Edward certainly possessed distinct (some would say idiosyncratic) ideas about the prosecution of foreign policy. But his attempts to impose them on ministers were usually assisted (and sometimes frustrated) by the urbane advice of Arthur Hardinge.