Asquith (33 page)

The relative political calm which marked Asquith’s first summer as Prime Minister was not something which most Liberal supporters wished to last. They looked to the Government for a political initiative bold enough to reverse the disastrous flow of the by-election tide. The losses were of no significance from the point of view of the Government current majority, but were on a scale (seven seats changed hands during the year) to suggest that the Unionists might well win a general election. The session, up to the summer holidays, had not been entirely barren. The Old Age Pensions Bill was through, although not without a great deal of grumbling from the peers, and there seemed some prospect of obtaining an educational compromise in the autumn.
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But the Licensing Bill, after a weary passage through the House of Commons, seemed a certain candidate for slaughter when Parliament resumed in November. A controversial Liberal bill of limited popularity which was anathema to the brewers, was hardly likely to get much mercy from the peers. The legislative impotence of the Government would again be displayed. But the experience of the Old Age Pensions Bill suggested the possibility of the Government regaining its authority by means of financial initiative. The majority of the peers had made no attempt to conceal their hostility to this bill. They had carried a destructive amendment to it, but when the Commons firmly announced that a Lords’ amendment to a money bill was inadmissible, they had accepted this as sound if unwelcome constitutional doctrine. Social advance by means of money bills became the obvious course for the Liberal Government.

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_{In fact, this hope proved baseless. Asquith came very near to a provisional agreement with the Archbishop of Canterbury during the first three weeks of November, but Davidson had to draw back at the last moment because it became clear that he could not carry the other bishops with him.}

Haldane was one of the first to see this. He wrote to Asquith from Cloan on August 9th and succeeded in combining in about equal proportions the sweeping and the trivial:

“We should boldly take our stand on the facts and proclaim a policy of taking, mainly by direct taxation, such toll from the increase and growth of this (national) wealth as will enable us to provide for (1) the increasing cost of Social reform; (2) National Defence; and also (3) to have a margin in aid of the Sinking Fund ”. . . .

“ The import and manufacture of mineral waters,” he continued, “ supply a luxury. I do not see why, as alcohol ceases to be fashionable and these are increasingly consumed, they should not bear a tax which, in one shape or another, would give £2m.. . . Look at the consumption of Apollinaris on the one hand and of Soda Water on the other.. . .

“ If there is anything in (my scheme),” he concluded, “ the condition of success is that you should direct operations yourself. No one else is competent to do it.”
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The last sentence probably owed as much to Haldane’s deep-seated distrust of Lloyd George as to his faith in the Prime Minister, real though that was. But in fact the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s mind was already beginning to turn in the same direction (towards more direct taxation, if not towards mineral waters) and it was he who, in the following spring, was to take the fiscal initiative which determined the course of politics for the next two years.

Before that could happen the session of 1908 had to run its course, and the Licensing Bill, the last non-financial furrow in the barren legislative sand which the Government had ploughed since 1906, show itself as firmly blocked by the House of Lords as the others had been. In the meantime, during the recess, a sudden political squall, minor but violent, had blown up out of the temporarily calm atmosphere. As is sometimes the case with these unexpected storms it was an isolated incident having little to do with the general current of politics. But it involved the resignation of one minister and the diversion of the career of another; it touched on the relations between the King and his Cabinet; it provided the first test of how Asquith would deal with such a situation; and the events from which it arose have a certain curious interest of their own. For all these reasons it is worth some detail of treatment.

During the latter part of August and early September a Eucharistic Congress took place in London. It was proposed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy that the conclusion of this, on Sunday, September 13 th, should be marked by a ceremonial public procession over an extended route. The Host was to be carried, and a great body of Roman Catholic dignitaries in full vestments were to attend it. Such an arrangement was undoubtedly contrary to the letter of the law. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 contained a prohibition of public observance of the ceremonies of the Church of Rome. But there was ground for believing that this part of the Act was in desuetude.

In 1898 and in 1901 similar although smaller processions had taken place without official interference. The practical position appeared to be that the law was only enforced if a breach was likely to give rise to public disorder. Acting on this assumption, Cardinal Bourne, the Archbishop of Westminster, had approached Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police (himself a Roman Catholic) at the end of July, had informed him of the proposed procession, and obtained his sanction.

Almost everyone who was to become concerned in the matter, except for the Roman Catholics prelates, then went on their holidays. By early September they were scattered over the remoter parts of the British Isles. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, was in the south of Scotland. Asquith was at Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire. Lord Ripon, the only Roman Catholic member of the Cabinet, was at Ripon Abbey in Yorkshire. The King was at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, where Lord Crewe was a fellow-guest. Sir Edward Henry was fishing in Ireland. The only man of relevant authority in London was Sir Edward Troup, permanent secretary to the Home Office. But this did not prevent the squall from developing.

The procession, the scale of which may not have been fully disclosed to Henry in July, was widely advertised in the few weeks before it took place. Militant Protestants began a vigorous campaign of complaint. Some of them wrote to Asquith, and more of them wrote to King Edward. The King reacted strongly and urged the Home Secretary to ban the whole procession. Gladstone was uncertain whether he could do this and dilatory in his replies. Asa result the King began telegraphing to Asquith, complaining about the Home Secretary and asking the Prime Minister either to get Ripon to intervene with the Cardinal Archbishop or to put pressure on the Home Office. The royal state of mind was described in a letter which Crewe wrote to Asquith on September 12th: “ The King has taken this
d........d procession greatly to heart, and asked me to say that he
was ‘ greatly cut up about it ’—a rather curious phrase. . . . He has received dozens of letters from enraged Protestants, who compare him disadvantageously with his revered mother, now with God, and hint that his ultimate destination may be directed elsewhere.”
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Asquith’s position was difficult, both on the merits of the issue and on the means by which it was proper for him to proceed. His own natural tolerance was fortified by no particular respect for the rites of
the Roman church. . there is a good deal of quite respectable Protestant sentiment which is offended by this gang of foreign cardinals taking advantage of our hospitality to parade their idolatries through the streets of London: a thing without precedent since the days of Bloody Mary,” he wrote to Crewe on September 1oth.
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But he had no particular interest in offending the Catholics, most of whom were working class Irish immigrants and Liberal voters. On the other hand Nonconformists were still more important to the Liberal Party than were Catholics, and some of their leaders were already disaffected by the Government’s inability to give them educational relief. “You know the way (the Free Churchmen) have fought for Liberal principles for the last six years,” Dr. John Clifford wrote to Asquith only a few days later; “ but I fear many of them are losing heart. ”
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Then there was the Prime Minister’s friendship with Herbert Gladstone, who had been his under-secretary in the government of 1892. He was one of the very few men who wrote to Asquith as “ My dear Henry.” Gladstone handled the crisis with a mixture of carelessness and indecision. He never went to London to consult with his own officials and the police. He failed to provide either Asquith or the King with a clear statement of the exact legal position. And he gave bewilderingly conflicting advice about the likelihood of the procession leading to public disorder. “ Police confident they can preserve order,” he telegraphed to Asquith on September 9th. “ Difficult to say we anticipate breach of the peace. Procession not in main thoroughfares. Troup against interference and on the whole I agree with him.” On the following day he telegraphed again: “ Further information this morning shows gravity of feelings. Nothing but overwhelming force of police will prevent serious disorder.” And on September 12th he was back on his first line of advice. “ Troup reports that police find no reason to fear riot,” he wrote, “ and thinks himself that the chance of serious disturbance is very small.”
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In the circumstances it was not surprising that Asquith decided to act independently of the Home Office through Ripon. He asked the old Catholic marquess to get the Cardinal Archbishop to abandon the liturgical aspects of the procession. Ripon agreed, but with deep reluctance. “ I feel it a great humiliation I have had to make such a communication at the last moment,” he wrote to Asquith. Cardinal Bourne, in turn, responded equally reluctantly to Ripon’s appeal

“ Having considered your communication,” he telegraphed to the Prime Minister on September nth, “have decided to abandon ceremonial of which you questioned legality provided that you authorize me to state publicly that I do so at your request.’
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The procession therefore passed off without trouble. But it left a legacy of difficulty for the Government. Ripon decided that, torn as he had been between his religious and his political loyalties, he must resign. He refrained from making public the reason for his withdrawal. He allowed it to be attributed to ill-health, and his final letter to Asquith was in notably friendly terms. “ And so my public life closes,” he wrote on October 7th, “ and my last word in it is to wish you and your Government every possible success.
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Gladstone created a different difficulty. Most of the other ministers who had been involved (particularly Crewe and Ripon) blamed him for the trouble, and the King was anxious for blood. “You will find H.M. very bitter about Herbert,” Crewe wrote to Asquith on September 16th, “ and longing to get rid of him.”
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When Asquith went to Balmoral, a week later, he found no improvement in the King’s mood towards Gladstone, but, he reported to Crewe, “ I succeeded in diverting some of his wrath in the direction of Henry, who (Knollys tells me) is said to be a bigoted Papist. If this is true, it may throw some light on his otherwise inexplicable inaction.”
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Gladstone himself showed no enthusiasm for resignation. Eventually, on September 24th after receiving a most wounding letter from the King, he wrote saying that perhaps he ought to go. But when Asquith responded by offering him the sinecure of the Lord Presidency of the Council, he refused the change. He thought this would be too obvious a demotion. The Prime Minister therefore let him stay for another year. Then, against the wishes of the King,
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he went to South Africa as first governor-general of the new dominion, and was created
a viscount. Asquith’s faith in Gladstone’s administrative competence was gravely shaken by the affair of the procession, but he did not rebuke the Home Secretary—he merely replied rather coolly to his apologies—and he had him to stay at Archerfield during the following Christmas holidays.

As 1908 drew to a close, and the Liberal Government looked increasingly becalmed in the lee of the House of Lords, Asquith received vigorous if not wholly accurate letters of information and advice from the new President of the Board of Trade. “ I learn that Lansdowne in private utterly scouts the suggestion that the Lords will reject the Budget Bill,” Churchill wrote on December 26th. He followed this up with an expression of his own desire to use the new session both to construct a system of Labour Exchanges and to introduce “ a big railway bill,” which would “ devise some form of state control of these amalgamations which will secure the interest of the trading public.” Three days later Churchill broadened the canvas. We should follow the example of Germany, he urged: “ She is organised not only for war, but for peace. We are organised for nothing except party politics. ... I say thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system, and await the consequences whatever they may be with a good conscience.”
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In fact it was not the new President of the Board of Trade, but his close associate, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who set the tone of the forthcoming session. And it was to be a tone which made organisation for party politics a matter of primary importance.