While preparing for the new election, Asquith’s Government drew up a Parliament Bill for abolition of the Lords’ Veto which they expected to introduce upon being returned to office. It provided that on bills certified by the Speaker as Finance Bills the Veto should be abolished and that other bills, if passed by three successive sessions of the Commons, should become law with or without the consent of the Lords. Talk flew around London about creation of peers; everyone from poets to tea merchants, “even Hilaire Belloc,” as Wilfrid Blunt noted maliciously, saw visions of the coronet descending upon his own head. Asquith meanwhile dropped hints of guarantees already secured from the King which were without foundation.
In the period of campaigning before the election in January, 1910, it became clear that Lloyd George, for all his oratorical forays against the Dukes, had failed. The public could not get excited about the peers; Haldane confessed that 40 per cent of the electorate were doubtful and 20 per cent “highly detached,” in short, returning to normal. To Alfred Austin, vacationing in the south of France, the election was deadly serious. Since his district was safely Conservative, he felt exonerated from the need to go home to cast his vote, “but I had the results telegraphed to me, every day, from the Carlton Club.” At home, wrote Beatrice Webb, “we are all awaiting breathlessly the issue of the great battle.” The issue proved unfortunate for all. The Liberals were returned but with a majority so reduced as to put them back in the grip of the Irish. Labour, crippled by the Osborne judgment of 1908 which declared the use of union funds for political purposes illegal, lost ten seats. The Conservatives gained 105 seats, enough to have been a victory but for the low point from which they started. Both sides were caught in a trap. To put the Budget through now, the Liberals needed the Irish votes and the Irish disliked the Budget because of the tax on whiskey. The price of their support was Asquith’s promise to carry through abolition of the Lords’ Veto in order to clear the way for Home Rule. During four years in office the Liberals had not once introduced a Home Rule Bill, but this now became, as Speaker Lowther said, “the crux which dominated the whole situation.” No longer hopeless suppliants, the Irish appeared “sinister and powerful” and the connection between the two issues was made “direct, obvious and unmistakable.” Whether they liked it or not the Government was now committed to carry the battle to its ultimate conclusion—a creation of peers or at least the King’s promise to create them. Events from this point on rose to a pitch of bitterness unsurpassed since the Reform Bill.
Asquith formally introduced the Parliament Bill in February, 1910, with the announcement that if the Lords failed to pass it he would advise the Crown to take the necessary steps. Then ensued a turmoil of negotiations and intrigue, of pressures on and advices to the King, of inter- and intra-party bargaining behind the scenes, of visits and consultations in country houses, of conferences with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost unnoticed, the Budget, cause of it all, was passed, as Lansdowne had promised if the Liberals won the election. But the Budget by now was forgotten, replaced as an issue by the Parliament Bill dragging along behind it its ridiculous shadow of five hundred artificial peers. Though it absorbed for months the efforts, passions and utmost political skills of Crown, Ministers and Opposition, it was a spurious issue. No basic question of human rights and justice was involved as in the Dreyfus Affair. The Liberals insisted that the issue was the power of the Lords to frustrate the will of the Commons, yet, in fact, as Herbert Samuel admitted, “It is true they let through almost all our social legislation” except for the Education and Licensing Bills, one of which had been a composite of compromises satisfactory to no one and the other hardly a question on which to shatter the British constitution. What drove the Liberals forward in the full rage of attack was the need to vindicate themselves for their failing program and for selling their honor to the Irish. They felt justified because their view of the House of Lords, as expressed by Masterman, was that of an institution which would only “allow changes it profoundly dislikes when compelled by fear.… It can do little but modify, check or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting difficult problems.”
What impelled the Conservatives in their equal rage of resistance was a determination to preserve the last rampart of privilege. To lose the Veto or to lose the Conservative majority in the House of Lords meant to lose their last check upon the advance of the besieging classes. They looked on the attainment of power by the Populace, wrote Masterman, who saw their point of view too, as the Deluge. “They see our civilization as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another” and the rise of the Populace as the rush of a crowd upon a tranquil garden, “tearing up the flowers by the roots … strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles.” Their resistance, however, was weakened by a split in their ranks. As leader of the party, Balfour held to a policy of warding off at all costs a creation of peers large enough to saddle the House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority. This in his mind was “revolution.” Loss of the Veto, that is, acceptance of the Parliament Bill, he considered a lesser evil. Opposed to this view a group of “Diehard” peers was beginning to form, taking its name from a famous regiment. Its symbol and champion was that “antique bantam of a fighting breed,” Lord Halsbury, and its active organizer was Lord Willoughby de Broke, nineteenth baron of his line, one of the eighteen members of the House of Lords whose title was created before 1500. Before succeeding to it he had served in the House of Commons, and besides political flair, possessed “unbounded energy and a marked talent for forcible and humorous oratory.” At forty-two he was a personality of ingenuous charm whose father’s dying wish was that his son should do everything he could “to prevent motor cars being used for any purpose connected with hunting,” and whose great-grandfather “had never tired of voting against the Reform Bill and died many a silent death in the last ditch, or in the last lobby, in defense of the existing order.” Willoughby de Broke looked on industrialism and democracy as forces which had “reacted hideously on the nation at large,” talked in hunting and racing metaphor and dashed about like a foxhound to rally the Backwoodsmen. In a circular letter addressed to them, Lord Halsbury urged each peer “to take your stand on your Constitutional hereditary right and stoutly resist any tampering with it.”
In the midst of tense maneuvering around the throne, King Edward suddenly and unexpectedly died. Extreme Tories claimed the wickedness of the Government had caused his death and regarded the Liberals as regicides. There was a general sense as of an anchor slipping away and of a recognized order of things gone. People somehow felt that the familiar royal bulk had stood between England and change, between England and outside menaces. A song sung by the charwoman in Pelissier’s Follies of 1909 was widely popular:
There’ll be no wo’ar
As long as there’s a King like good King Edward
There’ll be no wo’ar
For ’e ’ates that sort of thing!
Mothers needn’t worry
As long as we’ve a King like good King Edward.
Peace with ’Onner
Is his Motter
So God Sive the King!
When he died people expected times would now get worse. “I always felt,” said one Edwardian, “that he kept things together somehow.”
In verse for the occasion the Poet Laureate urged Englishmen to cease their “fateful feuds” and “fractious clamors” and declare “a truce of God.” In an effort to spare the new King a crisis at the moment of his ascending the throne, the parties agreed to try to reach a settlement in a Constitutional Conference attended by four leaders from each side including Asquith and Lloyd George, Balfour and Lansdowne. Through twenty-one meetings during the summer and fall of 1910 they discussed and bargained, tried out the idea of a popular referendum and came close to an agreement only to founder finally over Home Rule. The Conference at least demo
nstrated that the Parliament Bill itself was something less than a fundamental issue, but statesmen would not or could not disengage themselves from the combat. Lloyd George, who was nothing if not a realist, tried. Principles being now thoroughly muddied, he approached Balfour with a proposal for a Coalition which, being free of the pressures of party extremists on both sides, might solve both the Veto and the Irish questions. He did not really want creation of peers any more than Balfour, he admitted amiably, because “looking into the future, I know that our glorified grocers will be more hostile to social reform than your Backwoodsmen.” Since it is believed that Lloyd George made his first overture to Balfour without informing Asquith, it is possible he also had in mind ditching the Prime Minister as he was ultimately to do six years later. When Asquith was informed of the proposal he neither joined nor enjoined it but remained in the background, faithful to his motto, “Wait and see.”
Believing that the British system of government depended on the check and balance of two parties and that a Coalition was warranted only in case of national emergency, such as war, Balfour refused. He did not really believe the Liberals could force the King to give them the necessary promise and in any case he considered there was less “real public mischief” in the Parliament Bill than in the creation of peers. Further he believed that if sufficient Conservative peers abstained from voting, the number of new peers created could be kept to a minimum short of the “revolution” of a permanent Liberal majority.
When Conference and Coalition both had failed, a General Election once more was called, in December, 1910, the second within a year. With public apathy unshaken, the results, except for a Liberal loss of two seats, were identical with those of the previous election. The country, as Wilfrid Blunt wrote, “cares too little about abolishing the House of Lords to make a revolution for it.”
By judicious bullying before the election, Asquith had succeeded in obtaining the fateful promise of creation of peers from King George, who was confused by the conflicting advice and devious maneuvers of his advisers. The horrid prospect of England’s hereditary peerage submerged by a “battalion of emergency noblemen,” all Liberals, pleased no one and the prospect of the world’s laughter and ridicule even less. Nevertheless the Government went ahead partly because it was impossible to stop and partly because they believed that when it came to a test the Lords would prefer to lose their Veto than to be doubled by the middle class. At some undated stage in the proceedings Asquith drew up, or caused to be drawn up, a list of some 250 names for wholesale ennobling which, though it included Sir Thomas Lipton, did not altogether deserve Lloyd George’s sneer about glorified grocers. On the list along with Lipton were Asquith’s brother-in-law, H. J. Tennant, as well as his devoted admirer and future biographer, J. A. Spender; also Sir Edgar Speyer, Bertrand Russell, General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, the historians Sir George Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch, the South African millionaire Sir Abe Bailey, Gilbert Murray, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda.
In February, 1911, the Parliament Bill was reintroduced in the Commons to the accompaniment of “a great roar of cheering which had in it not only a note of triumph but of resolution, determination.” “We are in grim earnest,” wrote Herbert Samuel, “and if the Lords reject the Bill, “nothing could suit us better.” Passed by the Commons in May, the Bill was duly sent for consideration to “another place.”
In June began the great transport strike which opened a new period of deep industrial warfare. It marked the change from individual “trades disputes” to action according to the Syndicalist pattern in which workers struck not against a particular employer but against a whole industry. Unskilled labour had become disgusted with the political methods which won them no wage increases and revolted against the leadership of the Labour party, which once inside Westminster had become absorbed in the parliamentary game, with MacDonald gradually displacing Keir Hardie. Mass labor wanted hard gains in more pay and recognition of its unions by employers. It was clamoring for direct action and growing increasingly aggressive. Assaults on mine-owners’ property had marked the strike of thirty thousand coal-miners in the Rhondda Valley of Wales a few months previously. Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, leaders of the first great dockers’ strike, in 1889, were now preaching the doctrine of Syndicalism derived from Sorel and the French CGT, which combined belief in revolution with trade unionism and rejected political action in favor of the final weapon of the general strike. Mann and Tillett succeeded in organizing thirty-six unions of seamen, firemen, cooks and stewards, dockers and teamsters into a National Transport Workers’ Federation. When shipowners refused to negotiate with it, the strike was called in June. It was to last seventy-two days and involve 77,000 men. As it spread from London to Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Bristol and Southampton, all traffic stopped in nearly every port and riots, looting and arson followed in its wake. “It is revolution!” exclaimed an excited employer to a Board of Trade official. “The men have new leaders, unknown before; and we don’t know how to deal with them.”
At this juncture, on July 1, the German gunboat Panther arrived at Agadir in Morocco, precipitating an international crisis which teetered for several weeks on the imminent brink of war. In August, in the midst of the crisis, four railway unions joined the seamen’s and dockers’ strike, threatening a total stoppage of all transport. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, supplied military convoys to keep essential trains running and sent troops to strike centers. There were inevitable clashes; soldiers in Liverpool opened fire, killing two strikers and wounding two hundred. For appealing to the soldiers not to shoot at British workers even if ordered, Tom Mann was imprisoned on a charge of inciting the troops to mutiny. Although the strike was settled on emergency terms, owing to the foreign crisis, others of equal intensity followed during the next three years. After the gunfire at Liverpool, trade-union votes turned increasingly toward their own representatives, ending the alliance with Liberalism. In the clang of the realities of class war, Churchill’s earnest plea to labour in 1908, “Ah, but we must have that support!” echoed now with the faint ironic note of a faraway horn. Dividing from labour, Liberalism’s road to the political wilderness was open.
Against this background, Coronation Summer, the hottest in a generation, bloomed in the golden fullness of an open rose. There were dinner parties and extravagant receptions every night, garden parties every afternoon, country house parties every weekend, glitter and picnics and fancy dress balls. Even the heat was “splendid—such a summer as comes seldom in England.” The Henley Regatta was held in ideal weather and clear days were on hand for every rite of the season, polo at Ranelagh, the Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lords, the Gold Cup at Ascot. Neither the prospect of war, a general transport strike nor even creation of peers could subdue the high spirits of the festivities. Newspapers used the language of crisis and indignant noblemen growled at “nothing short of revolution” but a guest came to a masquerade ball at Claridge’s flippantly wearing a peer’s mantle and coronet with “No. 499” pasted on it. Lady Curzon was crowned Queen of Beauty at a Tournament of Knights organized by Mrs. Cornwallis-West, Churchill’s mother, with tickets at £20 apiece. The Russian Ballet made its London debut at Covent Garden, Pavlova and Nijinsky danced at private parties, including one in a garden under a blue sky at Strawberry Hill, once the home and gothic extravaganza of Horace Walpole. Its new owner, Lady Michelham, owned nineteen yards of pearls and gave a dinner for sixty guests after the dance in the garden, at which the entrées were served in the form of lighthouses, lit up inside and surrounded by ortolans representing sea gulls with a surf of white sauce breaking over them. At a house party at Blenheim, the Duke, his cousin Winston, Neil Primrose, son of Lord Rosebery, and F. E. Smith played cards till dawn in a tent by candlelight on upturned barrels. “What shall we play for, F. E.?” asked Marlborough. “Your bloody palace, if you like,” Smith answered, although what he staked himself i
s not recorded.
Yet it was not the same, not the England of Jubilee year. The strikes were a reminder of the rising pressure of the working class, as Agadir was a reminder of the pressure of Germany. The assurance of a time characterized in English memory long afterward in terms of “the golden sovereigns, the sense of honor, the huge red blocks on the map,” was gone. The gaiety was “feverish,” the fancy dress ball of the season was given by F. E. Smith, not by the Duchess of Devonshire (the Duke had died in 1908), and in London the last horse-drawn bus had disappeared from the streets; motor-taxis, of which there had been none at the turn of the century, now outnumbered horsecabs 6,300 to 5,000.
The upper class still found life and each other immensely agreeable. At a party given by Mrs. Hwfa Williams and entertained by the wit of the Marquis de Soveral, the conversation was so generally enjoyed that the guests who had come to lunch stayed until one o’clock in the morning. It may have been enjoyment or they may have stayed from boredom, the boredom of having nothing else to do. The laughter, the fun, the practical jokes, the undeniable high spirits of privileged life of the time were the other face of ennui. The endless talk “at luncheon, tea and dinner, at dances and gatherings far into the night,” Masterman believed, was the talk “of a society desirous of being interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute conviction that it must ‘play the game,’ and that this is the game to be played.” They were “an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people … trying with desperate seriousness to make something of a life spared the effort of wage-earning.” Writing in 1909 he did not call it the boredom of peace, yet when he wrote of “the present Roman peace which has come upon the western races of Europe,” it was almost with a reluctant sigh.
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