The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Although Asquith had told his Chancellor of the Exchequer that it was important to behave as if the Lords might still see sense – not least out of respect for the King, whose hopes of compromise withstood all the evidence that it was impossible – Lloyd George contrived to make inflammatory speeches. Rejecting the allegation that political uncertainty had undermined economic confidence, he returned to his favourite theme. ‘Only one stock has gone down badly. There has been a great slump in dukes. They used to stand rather higher in the market, especially the Tory Market. But the Tory press has just discovered that they are of no real value.’33

  The Finance Bill received its Third Reading in the Commons on 4 November – and was carried by 379 votes to 149. Its consideration by the House of Lords was scheduled to begin on 11 November. On the night before, the Unionists took the formal decision to reject the budget and Asquith addressed a Liberal Party rally in the Albert Hall.

  I tell you quite frankly, and I tell my fellow countrymen outside, that neither I nor any other Liberal Minister supported by a majority in the House of Commons is going to submit again to the rebuffs and humiliations of the last four years. We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the legislative utility and honour of the party of progress.34

  On 30 November 1909, the House of Lords rejected the budget by 350 votes to 75. ‘Liberty’, said Lloyd George, ‘owes as much to the foolhardiness of its foes as to the sapience and wisdom of its friends … At least the course between the Peers and the People has been set down for trial in the grand assize of the people. The verdict will come soon.’

  It came in the form of the general election on 15 January 1910. The budget was just as popular as the government hoped and the Opposition feared. However, general elections are rarely fought on the issues of the parties’ choice. The Unionist coalition won 273 seats to the Liberals’ 275 – a net gain for Balfour of 116. Asquith remained in office thanks to the support of 82 Nationalist and 40 Labour MPs. Politics had returned to the normal pattern of party allegiance. The Liberal landslide of 1906 had been an aberration brought about by the civil war in the Unionist Party. The ‘swing’ had been less against the government than in favour of old loyalties. In fact the Liberals had hung on to a remarkably large number of the votes which had ‘floated’ their way four years earlier.

  The relative success of the Liberal campaign did not reduce the problem which might have followed so close a result. Fortunately John Redmond, the Nationalist leader, was at least as determined to break the power of the Lords as the most radical Liberal, for he feared that in 1910, as in 1895, the Upper House would block Home Rule. That one policy was the object of Redmond’s political existence so, despite his reluctance to return to the issue that had destroyed Gladstone, it was the price which the Prime Minister had to pay for the Nationalists’ support. There was no doubt that the budget resolutions would be carried in the new Parliament. But what if the House of Lords rejected it again? How was Asquith to fulfil his pledge to ‘secure the safeguards’ essential to the working of a democratic government?

  Asquith had no doubt that he had a mandate to curb the power of the peers. His Cabinet had not agreed on what form the changes should take, but Lloyd George was publicly explicit. The people had already voted for reform and the budget. There had been ‘two questions on the same ballot paper’ – the budget and the House of Lords. But the popular will would only prevail if the bill in which it was set out was supported by both Houses of Parliament. The solution was to create – or, better still, to succeed by threatening to create – enough new peers to change the composition, and therefore the character, of the hereditary chamber.

  Peerages – although then as now usually the product of political patronage – are, according to constitutional theory, the gift of the sovereign. Asquith had therefore made discreet enquiries in early November 1909 about the King’s likely reaction to a request for Liberal reinforcements. The reply from Lord Knollys, King Edward’s private secretary, was diplomatic but categoric. ‘To create 570 new peers, which I am told would be the number required … would practically be almost an impossibility, and if asked for would place the King in an awkward position.’*35 Knollys later added that His Majesty might be prepared to create three hundred new peers after a second general election. Although he did not explain why that specific number gained royal favour, he did set out, in stark language, the King’s reasons for demanding a second poll. ‘The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords and thinks that, before the creation of a large number of peers is embarked upon or threatened, the country should be acquainted with the particular project for accomplishing that destruction.’36 The King did not believe that there were two questions on one ballot paper.

  Asquith had therefore gone into the January 1910 general election knowing that, whatever its outcome, the constitutional crisis would drag on. When the campaign was over and the limited victory won, the Cabinet resumed its inconsequential discussions about how the Lords was to be reformed. Harcourt wanted to concentrate on limiting the power of veto. Churchill wanted general reorganisation. Pressed to set out his policy, Asquith told the Commons ‘wait and see’, a phrase which critics claimed revealed his whole philosophy of government. When it was discovered that the King would prefer a ‘plan which followed the line of Campbell-Bannerman’s resolution of 1907’,37 opinion hardened around a variation of that proposal: a bill passed in three successive sessions of Parliament by the House of Commons should become law whether or not it was endorsed by the House of Lords.

  Still unsure of the King’s reaction, Asquith moved to ensure the support of the Irish Nationalists. Redmond inflated the price of his support. Increases in spirit duty damaged the Irish whiskey industry and must be dropped from the budget. Asquith reported to the King the government’s unanimous view that ‘to purchase the Irish vote by such a concession would be a discreditable transaction’.38 No doubt the King was impressed, but Asquith knew that most of the Irish (with Home Rule in mind) would support the budget anyway. And so they did. On 27 April 1910 it was carried on the Third Reading by 324 votes to 231.

  On the same day, the Archbishop of Canterbury convened a meeting at Lambeth Palace. Its ostensible purpose was to avoid embarrassment for the King by achieving a compromise which insulated him from controversy. But, since it was attended by the Leader of the Opposition, it was not altogether objective in its analysis of what needed to be done. By then it was agreed that the Lords would let the budget through and fight the government, not on the right of dukes to exploit the increased value of their development land, but on the need to protect the state from arbitrary government. The Lords passed all the stages of the Finance Bill on the following day without one division. Asquith, after dining with Lloyd George to celebrate the budget’s eventual acceptance, drove with Margot, his wife, to Portsmouth. There they joined the Board of Admiralty Yacht Enchantress for a Mediterranean cruise.

  On 6 May, shortly after the Enchantress left Gibraltar, the Prime Minister received a wireless message from Lord Knollys: the King was mortally ill. The Enchantress turned for home. On 7 May, a second message reached the Admiralty Board Yacht. It was signed on behalf of George V. King Edward VII was dead. Asquith, who had travelled to Biarritz to receive his seals of office because the old King was on holiday, received his commission from the new King while cruising off Lisbon. The circumstances in which Asquith’s premiership began, and his service to Edward VII ended, contributed to the myth that Edwardian Britain always put pleasure before work.

  The Boer War was the poisoned inheritance which Edward VII was bequeathed by his mother. The constitutional crisis, Peers versus People, was the rancid legacy which he passed on to his son. Asquith, conscious of his obligations to a grieving son and inexperienced sovereign, said he ‘would endeavour to come to some sort of understanding with the Opposition to prevent a ge
neral election’.39 In any event, the idea of a constitutional conference appealed to him. The alternative was a dreary repetition of the events leading up to the January election and, in the absence of new peers, another stalemate. The talks covered a remarkably wide terrain, including, at Lloyd George’s suggestion, a grand coalition of the major parties to resolve all the outstanding issues from Home Rule to Lords’ reform. But there was no real common ground. When the talks broke down, the Cabinet could only resume the ‘old fight against the Lords’40 with another dissolution and another general election.

  To make sense of the repeat performance, Asquith needed assurances from the new King that the second general election having been held and won, new peers would be appointed. At first the King was strongly opposed – partly because of confusion in his mind about whether it was the guarantee of elevations or the elevations themselves for which the Prime Minister asked. Asquith made his request clear by saying that the guarantee need not be made public until it was redeemed in a future Parliament. The notion of what amounted to a secret compact greatly impressed Knollys, who advised the King to agree to the Prime Minister’s request. It was clearly in the interests of the monarchy as well as the monarch for him to do so. If he refused, Asquith would feel it was necessary to resign, and the brief Balfour administration which followed would end with a general election in which the King’s conduct would be the chief source of dispute between the parties.

  Nevertheless, Sir Arthur Bigge, the private secretary who had been with the King since he was the Prince of Wales, argued against accepting the government’s proposal. And Bigge – although junior to Knollys, closer to the King – might well have got his way had the senior adviser not deceived his sovereign. As a result of the Lambeth Palace meeting a message had been sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury to King Edward. It explained that Balfour had made clear that he would be prepared to form a government to ‘avoid the King being put in the invidious position which would follow a demand for new peers’.41 It never reached the new King. Instead Knollys predicted, perhaps even said, that he had been informed that Balfour would decline to form a minority (and necessarily brief) administration. The King’s mind was made up. He had no choice but to accept his Prime Minister’s request. The alternative was parliamentary anarchy. The King wrote in his diary, ‘I agreed most reluctantly to give the Cabinet a secret undertaking that, in the event of the government being returned with a majority at the General Election, I should use my prerogative to make Peers if asked for. I did dislike doing this very much, but agreed that this was the only alternative to the whole Cabinet resigning.’42

  That meant that Asquith had won. But before victory could be declared, there had to be a general election (in which the Unionists lost one seat and the Liberals three) and long, weary nights of discussion and division on a Parliament Bill which reduced the Lords’ power of veto to the ability to delay. Between 28 June and 6 July the House of Lords emasculated the Bill. It returned to the Commons and, at the King’s insistence, was sent back to the Lords, restored to its original form with a request for reconsideration. The Unionists in the Upper House, suspecting (or perhaps knowing) that Asquith would ask for new peers, were deeply divided about whether to fight a gallant rearguard action or retreat. Despite that, passions ran high in both Houses of Parliament. On 24 July 1911, Asquith was shouted down in the Commons in an unprecedented scene of verbal violence. He was called ‘Traitor!’ and subjected to the strange, rhetorical question ‘Who killed the King?’43 The Tories in the House of Commons maintained the esprit de corps of a public school. So the deeply divided Shadow Cabinet gave the two warring factions nicknames. Both were puns on agricultural occupations. The ‘Hedgers’ were ready to surrender. The ‘Ditchers’ wanted to fight on.* The ‘Ditchers’ had a slight majority in the Shadow Cabinet. But Balfour wanted to hedge. So hedge became their recommendation. Asquith, who either did not know or did not believe that the Opposition would draw back, prepared for another rejection. A list of potential Liberal (or at least reformist) peers was drawn up. It included Gilbert Murray, Thomas Hardy and J. M. Barrie.

  The King, although determined to keep his promise, began to lose his nerve. It was, he said, essential that his reluctance to create new peers was made clear. Then, anxious only for the drama to end, he urged the Unionists to give way gracefully. Grace was beyond them, but they did give way. On 10 August 1910 the Parliament Bill, in the form sent up to the House of Lords for a second time, was carried by 131 votes to 114. The government’s majority included thirteen bishops and thirty-seven Unionists who, under the influence of a suddenly emollient Lord Curzon, had eventually accepted that the House of Lords, like the rest of life, must change from time to time.

  Of course it remained a basically Edwardian institution. It was Edward who, realising the English love of pageant, tradition and ceremony, had revived the State Opening of Parliament with the Lords in their ermine-edged scarlet robes in attendance on their sovereign. He had brought Iolanthe to life, and the reforms which began in his reign (and were completed with the confused co-operation of his son) moved the Lords just far enough into the real world to guarantee its survival. It was a strange combination of show and cynicism which, in the end, produced progress. In that it was typically Edwardian.

  *Details of that legislation are to be found in Chapter 11, ‘United We Stand’.

  *The government promised to use the income from both those innovations to pay the cost of the highway improvements made necessary by the increasing popularity of the automobile. The road works were to be carried out by a Roads Board. Thus was the fiction of the road fund born.

  *It would also have been of doubtful value to Asquith. The House of Lords ‘admits’ peers at its own discretion – normally at the rate of two a day on three days each sitting week. It would have taken three years for 570 new peers to take their seats.

  *The ‘Hedgers’ were Balfour, Bonar Law, Lansdowne, Curzon and Long. The ‘Ditchers’ were Chamberlain, Smith, Carson, Selborne, Salisbury and Halesbury.

  PART THREE

  ‘The Force Majeure which Activates and Arms’

  By 1900 Britain had reached the point of general prosperity at which most working men and women possessed both enough to eat and sufficient self-confidence to ask for more. Often their demands were articulated on their behalf by the middle classes. But increasingly the calls for greater influence and an improved standard of living were supported by mass movements of their own, dedicated to achieving a radical change in society. The people’s century had begun. A substantial section of the working class – Conservative voters included – was no longer willing to be ruled by its ‘betters’. Rebellion began to replace deference. The rich man remained in his castle but the poor man at the gate wanted to play some part in the determination of his own destiny.

  Trade unionists, women, Irish Nationalists all campaigned with renewed vigour for what they regarded as their natural rights. Even the Establishment came to believe that success – perhaps even survival as a Great Power – required a better educated working class and an extension of higher education beyond the boundaries of the ancient universities. The century of the common man, and woman, had begun.

  The campaigning escalated from rhetoric to revolt. First the disadvantaged and dispossessed – ranging from Methodists who believed that the new schools system discriminated against their faith to Irish Republicans who demanded Home Rule – tried to work within the system. Then it became clear that the citadels would fall only to a direct attack.

  The trade unions – always respectable – decided to travel to power by the parliamentary route. Women and the Irish attempted to follow but were rebuffed and decided on more dramatic protests. Militancy was encouraged by a comment made by the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, during one of the many debates on women’s suffrage. Success, he unwisely said, is achieved only by application of ‘the force majeure which activates and arms’.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ourselves Al
one

  English politicians have never understood Ireland and the Irish. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was still the view, in Westminster and Whitehall, that the fate of the nation and people would be determined by the Imperial Parliament. The Irish character dictated otherwise. The formal legislative decisions remained with the Houses of Commons and Lords. But after 1900 the pace at which Home Rule was approached, and the form which it eventually took, was imposed on hesitant and reluctant governments by pressure from the ‘nationalists’ on one hand and the ‘loyalists’ on the other. The rival factions both demonstrated their ruthless determination with an identical threat which they undoubtedly meant to make good. Each of them announced that, if the final settlement was not to their liking, they would set up their own provisional government and, if necessary, defend it by force of arms.

  The Boer War had distracted English attention from the demand for Home Rule, but had served to confirm nationalist opinion about the ruthless brutality of imperialist government. Michael Davitt, an old Parnellite and Nationalist MP, went to South Africa as the war stuttered to its bitter end and wrote on his return: