Making the most of the rejection of the other two bills, Asquith denounced the situation as “intolerable” and warned that a way must be found “by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives will be made to prevail.”
His challenge was explicit and the House of Lords was waking up. The home of England’s 544 hereditary peers, including twenty-two dukes, and of the bishops and law lords who sat with them was a high, dark oak-paneled chamber ninety feet long filled by two banks of red leather benches. Stained-glass windows held portraits of royalty since the Conquest. Walls and ceiling were thick with elaborately carved gothic molding and heraldic emblems. Between the windows, statues of the barons of Magna Carta, inadvertent founders of the parliamentary system, looked down a little grimly on what they had wrought. At one end of the chamber under a golden canopy were twin thrones for the King and Queen flanked by tall candelabra standing like guardsmen at attention. Below the throne the Lord Chancellor presided on the Woolsack, a square cushioned bench. Crossbenches in the aisle accommodated princes of the royal family and peers not affiliated with party. Sovereigns and judges in scenes from English history lent their shadowy presence in murals on the upper walls. The light was subdued, the general tone one of dignified somnolence.
Now the prospect of assault began to fill the benches usually sparsely dotted with forty or fifty peers. Lansdowne encouraged his followers to speak, paid attention when they did and supported their efforts with the gracious manner of the grand seigneur which characterized him. Lord Curzon adorned debate with speech “so infinitely superior to that of the ordinary peer that it is quite difficult to believe that he is ever in the wrong.” The Liberals’ new Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, lent an invigorating presence and paid the House the compliment of always being wide awake when he was on the Woolsack. He was the former Sir Robert Reid, known as “Fighting Bob,” a Scot, a famous cricketer who had bowled for Oxford, a Radical strongly opposed to the Liberal Imperialists and a “fiery orator” in the Commons who now lectured the Opposition “in tones that almost made the sinner weep,” and advanced “the most contentious proposition with the most entrancing plausibility.” In the rhythm of Gibbon and the gallantry of Lord Tolloller bowing to Lord Mountararat in Iolanthe, Lord Curzon acknowledged Lord Loreburn as “courtesy personified, persuasiveness incarnate and dignity enthroned.”
On the crossbenches sulked the Liberals’ last Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, who had resigned the leadership and as an Imperialist and opponent of Home Rule had announced, when C.-B. became party leader, that “emphatically and explicitly and once and for all I cannot serve under that banner.” Acknowledged since Eton days for his brilliance, wit and charm, Rosebery, having won the Derby and married a Rothschild fortune, was too used to success to be an accommodator, and remained—in Morley’s phrase—“a dark horse in a loose box.” When he sulked he could turn “an eye like a fish” on his friends and wither them with biting sarcasm; when he charmed he encircled himself in adoration. His variability caused the public to lose trust in him and recalled to A. G. Gardiner the story of a rustic who, being asked if Wordsworth was not very fond of children, replied, “Happen he was but they wasna verra fond o’ him.”
During the years of crisis over Home Rule, Rosebery had been leader of the movement for reform of the House of Lords by some modification of the hereditary principle and had three times brought forward proposals toward that goal in the hope that self-reform would ward off attacks on the veto power. The reform movement was now revived with Lord Curzon as the leading spirit. Even Mr. Churchill, who liked to have a hand in everything, contributed his suggestion in an article for the Nation entitled “A Smooth Way With the Peers.” He proposed a system by which peers should be appointed for each session to reflect the same majority as in the House of Commons at the time, not however to exceed 250. This would exclude the “frivolous, lethargic, uninstructed or disreputable elements.” Most of the proposed reforms contemplated some system by which the peers would elect from among themselves those specially qualified by ability or services. But many preferred the simple principle which once had moved Lord Melbourne to say he liked the Garter “because there was no damn merit about it.” Balfour sympathized. He advised Lansdowne to “avoid the fatal admission that the ancient ground of hereditary qualification is insufficient to qualify for the upper House. If it is not sufficient qualification it is no qualification at all.… I think it a fact that the accident of birth is more easily defended on what some people call its naked absurdity than birth plus services.” The Government did nothing to encourage reform of the Lords because it did not want them reformed; it wanted an issue and an excuse to limit the Veto.
Faced with these exciting possibilities Lloyd George became quite impatient with his constituents’ single-minded attention to Welsh nationalism and tactlessly told them, “I will say this to my fellow countrymen. If they find the Government moving its artillery into position for making an attack on the Lords, Welshmen who worry the Government into attending to anything else until the citadel has been stormed ought to be pushed into the guardroom.” The military language was curious and the speech so much resented that its careless author had to hurry to Wales to declare with hand on heart, “Am I going to sell the land that I love? God knows how dear to me is my Wales!”
In June, 1907, Campbell-Bannerman told the Commons that the time had come to challenge the pretensions of the peers, supported as they were by Mr. Balfour, “at the winding of whose horn the portcullis of the House of Lords comes rapidly down.” Lloyd George’s choice of metaphor was equally picturesque. The House of Lords, he said, was not the watchdog of the Constitution but “Mr. Balfour’s poodle.” C.-B. moved a resolution stating that in order to give effect to the “will of the people, the power of the other House to alter or reject Bills passed by this House must be restricted by law” so that, within the lifetime of any one Parliament, the final decision of the Commons should prevail. The Labour party immediately offered an amendment proposing to abolish the House of Lords altogether. In introducing a resolution rather than a bill, the Government’s purpose was clearly propaganda rather than action and after the resolution was adopted—without the Labour amendment—nothing further was done.
That summer the Second Hague Conference assembled. In April of the following year, 1908, C.-B., expecting death, resigned and died within a month. Succeeding to the premiership Asquith remodeled the Cabinet more nearly in his own image. Four of a very able group of under-secretaries were promoted to Cabinet rank, among them Walter Runciman, son of a wealthy shipowner, Herbert Samuel, son of a Jewish banking family and like Asquith a First at Balliol, and Reginald McKenna, son of a London civil servant who had taken a superior degree in mathematics at Cambridge. His appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in place of Lord Tweedmouth prompted Morley to recall that when he had proposed a certain name to Gladstone for that post in 1892, Gladstone with great solemnity and a wave of his hand said, “Well, for the Admiralty I think we require what is called a gentleman!” And “Here we are,” sighed Lord Esher, looking over the new Cabinet, “overwhelmed by the middle classes.”
The most important change in the Cabinet was Lloyd George’s promotion to fill Asquith’s place as Chancellor of the Exchequer while his own vacated place as President of the Board of Trade was filled by Winston Churchill, fourth of the under-secretaries to be promoted. Churchill’s career almost ended at this point when he had to fight a by-election at Manchester owing to a custom then in force which obliged an M.P. raised to Cabinet rank to have his seat confirmed by the electorate. In a hard contest, harassed by Suffragettes, Churchill lost, to the screaming delight of the Tory press. His defeat proved that the balance was already swinging back from the abnormal Liberal victory of 1906 and it made more urgent the Liberals’ need of the labour vote. At Dundee, where Churchill was immediately offered another seat, he insisted that only with the workers’ support could the Liberals have the strength to put
their legislation through the House of Lords against the growing forces of Tory reaction. “With your support we shall overwhelm them.… Ah, but we must have that support.”
As it proved, none of the social legislation carried through by the energetic team of Lloyd George and Churchill was blocked by the House of Lords. A Coal Mines Act establishing the eight-hour day for miners, a Trade Boards Act establishing minimum wages for piecework in the sweated trades, a Workman’s Compensation Act establishing employers’ liability for industrial accidents and the Old Age Pensions Act were passed and the team began work on the National Insurance Bill for unemployment and health insurance which was to be the crown of the Liberals’ welfare legislation. None was obstructed by the House of Lords for the same reason that the Trade Disputes Act had not been. The oncoming conflict with the Commons, however, was not diverted.
All the challenges, resistances and emotions of the conflict were stuffed like gun-cotton into a new piece of legislation, the Licensing Bill. The darling object for twenty-five years of Liberal temperance reformers, mostly Nonconformists, who wished to reduce the drinking of the lower classes, the Bill was the Government’s election debt to the Nonconformist voters. It was designed to reduce the number of public houses by thirty thousand over fourteen years by canceling their licenses according to a fixed ratio of the population. Since the public houses were owned by the brewing and distilling companies, the Bill was strenuously opposed by the vested interests, not to mention the drinking public. Every property owner allied himself with the distillers; the Bill took on an aspect as sinister as Home Rule, as threatening as Socialism. Balfour declared it to be a direct attack on the rights of property and Conservatives responded to it much as the working class had responded to Chinese slavery. A special meeting of Conservative peers was called at Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square. The country peers, or “Backwoodsmen,” as they were known, who were never consulted on anything outside the affairs of their own counties, were summoned. Some had never spoken in the House, some had never even been inside it, and, mistaking Lansdowne House for the House of Lords itself, thought the Bill was being decided then and there. “Some of us … met each other fresh from the hunting field and were able to compare notes about the past season and discuss possible winners of the spring handicaps.” All agreed the Bill must be rejected, and “adjourned for a good lunch at the Carlton Club.”
In this case they had the country with them, as was shown in a by-election at Peckham fought on the Licensing issue. It turned what had been a Liberal majority of two thousand into a Conservative majority of the same amount. For the moment it was not popularity but the principle of the thing that concerned the Liberals. The high-handed disposal of the bill by caucus in Lansdowne House enraged them. In November, 1908, when the bill was formally rejected by the House of Lords, Churchill, “perfectly furious,” revealed in a private conversation that the Liberals’ answer had already been decided. “We shall send them up such a Budget in June,” he said, “as shall terrify them; they have started the class war and they had better be careful.” In fact the Licensing Bill had nothing to do with the class war, nor was it the class war alone, but the accumulating pressures of a new age which were the cause of Liberal discomfiture.
By 1909, the year of the great Budget battle, Liberalism had run into the realities of a world grown too difficult for the building of Jerusalem. The Liberal program was not winning the working class. On the contrary Labour and Liberals were drawing apart. Labour, impressed by the extent of its own power as revealed in the election of 1906, was becoming more aggressive; strikes had begun again as soon as the unions recovered their freedom of action by the Trades Disputes Act. Liberals of the employing class responded like employers. No pact operated now, and in two three-cornered by-elections in 1907 Labour won. The victory of Victor Grayson, a raving Socialist, in the West Riding of Yorkshire raised frightening prospects. A former theological student with a gift for oratory and a fondness for drink, he preached Socialism as the deliverance of the poor with a fervor that swept through the mill towns like fire. His wild antics in the House twice caused his suspension and attracted attention all over Europe. The Kaiser was reported to have proposed invading England with an Army corps or two, proclaiming that he had come not as an enemy but as Victoria’s grandson to deliver England “from the Socialist gang which is ruling the country.” In cooperation with King Edward he would dissolve Parliament and re-establish autocratic monarchy as a feudatory of Germany.
Englishmen were increasingly conscious of the threat of Germany. “The danger now is,” wrote Lord Esher to a friend in 1908, “that in Europe we have a competitor the most formidable in numbers, intellect and education with which we have ever been confronted.” The necessity of facing that danger was one more blow to the Liberal creed. Traditional pacifist Liberalism was violated when Asquith and his fellow Imperialists in the Cabinet, who controlled foreign policy, agreed to give Sir John Fisher four new Dreadnoughts. Conservatives, dissatisfied, shouted the slogan, “We want eight and we won’t wait.” Haldane’s Territorial Army was equally resented by the pacifists of his party, who claimed that it would cost too much and drain money from social reform. With the King’s strong support it was enacted over their objections. “We are certainly living in hard times,” mourned King Edward, “but yet I hope that peace may be maintained—but only because Europe is afraid to go to war.”
The topic of invasion occupied both the official and the public mind. The Committee of Imperial Defence appointed an Invasion Inquiry in 1908 and summoned the ex-Prime Minister to give his views on the evidence it had collected. Balfour spoke for an hour in a closely reasoned and “luminous” exposition, “quite perfect in form and language,” which according to Esher, a member of the committee, so “dumbfounded” Asquith, Grey, Haldane and Lloyd George that none of them could think of a single question to ask him. “The general opinion was that no finer exposition of this question has ever been made.”
The Committee’s conclusion that a successful invasion could not be mounted was not known to the public, which felt an awful fascination in the topic. Erskine Childers had raised it in an absorbing novel The Riddle of the Sands, in 1903 and William Le Queux more emphatically if less artistically in a novel called The Invasion of 1910 which ran as a serial in the Daily Mail in 1906 and was advertised through London by sandwich-men dressed in Prussian blue uniforms and spiked helmets. In 1909 Guy du Maurier’s play An Englishman’s Home, which dramatized an invasion by the forces of “the Emperor of the North,” opened at Wyndham’s Theatre and played to packed houses for eighteen months. The idea of invasion became almost a psychosis. Living at Rye on England’s south coast Henry James felt “exposed,” as he nervously wrote a friend in 1909. He worried that “when [he did not say ’if] the German Emperor carries the next war into this country, my chimney pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective.”
The prospect of war negated everything that orthodox Liberalism stood for, yet the Government had to adapt to it. Meanwhile the sex war raged at home. The Suffragette movement, which Charles Masterman believed to be an “outlet for suppressed energy,” released a curious surge of sex hatred, a mutual “blaze of antagonism,” as H. G. Wells called it, which fitted the other strangely violent quarrels afflicting England in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Wells thought the main impulse of the Suffragettes—that swarm of “wildly exasperated human beings”—was “vindictive,” an outburst against man’s long arrogant assumption of superiority. Their open warfare followed almost immediately upon the advent of the Liberals, prompted by repeated postponements and refusal of the Government to introduce a bill of enfranchisement. Unable to obtain any satisfaction by legal means, the women resorted to tactics which were essentially “propaganda of the deed” and, like their prototype, anarchic in spirit. They turned up at every political meeting despite all doorkeepers’ precautions and drowned out the speakers by ringing bells and shrieking for t
he vote. They besieged the Houses of Parliament and offices of Whitehall, attacked ministers on their doorsteps, in one case knocking down Mr. Birrell, the Minister of Education, and kicking him in the shins, broke department-store windows with hammers, set fires in mail boxes, penetrated the House and stopped proceedings by chaining themselves to the grill of the Ladies Gallery and keeping up the incessant shout, “Votes for Women!”
In 1909 under the Liberal Government occurred the first forcible feeding of imprisoned Suffragettes, a peculiarly revolting process in which both the victims, who invited it by hunger strikes, and the officials who performed it, writhed like animals. It was accomplished by means of rubber tubes passed through the mouth, or sometimes the nostrils, to the stomach. While the prisoner was strapped in a chair and held down by guards or matrons, liquid food was forced down the tubes by stomach pumps. Outside in the streets Suffragettes marched with placards proclaiming, “Stop Forcible Feeding!” and one threw herself at the King’s feet in the midst of a court reception crying, “Your Majesty, won’t you please stop torturing women!” Inside the prisons the Suffragettes persisted in the hunger strikes which provoked the treatment. The irrational was gaining ground.
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