Asquith (36 page)

In the early days of the new Parliament, however, the nerve of the Cabinet was far from good, and there was a real danger that it would be diverted from the clear issue of the veto on to the shifting sands of reforming the composition of the Lords. Asquith received a welter of conflicting advice from his colleagues. Harcourt was at this stage the most pertinacious in urging concentration upon the veto rather than reform. “We must stick tight to principles and not go a’whoreing after false constitutions,” he wrote on February 7th.
^m
This was only one of a series of letters along the same lines which he wrote to Asquith at the time. Although, as was seen, Harcourt had not liked the Budget,
¹
on this issue he spoke for most advanced opinion in the party. Dilke led a deputation of thirty M.P.’s to the Prime Minister to urge concentration upon the veto; Sir Henry Dalziel, a prominent Scottish radical, threatened to put down a motion in the same sense; and the Irish and the Labour Party were even more restively of this way of thinking. But from within the Government most of the written advice leaned the other way. John Simon wrote to support Harcourt, but he did not become Solicitor-General until a few months later. On the side of reform were Samuel, Haldane, Churchill, and, most powerfully, Grey. Churchill’s view was largely based on tactical considerations. “ I would not myself be frightened by having only one
(chamber) ...” he wrote on February 14th, “But I recognise the convenience and utility of a properly constituted and duly subordinated second chamber____The C-B plan will not by itself command
intellectual assent nor excite enthusiasm. But even if by a dead-lift effort we succeeded in carrying it—which I gravely doubt—the work would remain unfinished. On the first return of the Conservative Party to power, the Lords would be reformed in the Conservative interest and their veto restored to them.”
ⁿ

¹
_{Nor had he become any more favourable to its author in the interval. “ I found all over the country,” another of his post-election letters to Asquith ran, “ that all Ll.G.’s speeches and Winston’s earlier ones (not the Lancs, campaign) had done us much harm, even with the advanced men of the
lower
middle class.”
(Asquith Papers
, box xii, ff. 79-80).}

Grey’s view turned more on the merits of the matter. It is the constitution of the House of Lords, and not its powers, which is an anomaly,”
⁰
he wrote on February 7th. Five weeks later he strengthened and publicised this view by telling a Liberal banquet that the country would not tolerate single-chamber government, and that to leave reform to the Unionists would mean “ disaster, death and damnation ” to the Liberals.?
^p
A week or so after this, he wrote to Asquith saying that he thought he ought to resign. On receipt of this the Prime Minister for once showed signs of impatience with the Foreign Secretary, whom he normally regarded as almost beyond criticism, and wrote to Crewe: “ I have had a tiresome letter from E. Grey."
^1
q
But the matter sorted itself out. No sooner had it done so, however, than Morley was threatening to leave the Government, on grounds which were most surprising for such a determined old Gladstonian. “You all really mean the creation of 500 peers,” he wrote on April 14th, “ and have only wrapped it up out of friendly consideration for me.
You had far better let me go.”
^r
But Morley by this stage of his career—perhaps this was not the least part of his Gladstonian inheritance—rarely let a month go by without offering or threatening resignation.

¹
_{He found many of his colleagues irritating at this stage, and twelve days earlier he had written, also to Crewe, about a letter of Churchill’s, “ Yes—this is very characteristic, begotten by froth out of foam.”
(Asquith Papers
, box
xlvi,
f. 183.)}

Altogether it was a difficult early spring. The Cabinet was in confusion. The Irish were saying that they would not pass the Budget without a firm promise of a veto bill in the same session. And the Liberals were excessively sensitive to Unionist charges that they were buying office at the expense of corrupt concessions to Redmond.
²

²
_{Had this not been so it might have been possible to settle the matter by promising the Irish that the increased spirit duty would be dropped in the
following year, a step which had in any event been made necessary by checked consumption and diminished revenue; but the Cabinet was against such a bargain.}

Immediately after Asquith’s return from the South of France the Cabinet tried to resolve its difficulties and prepare for the opening of Parliament with a long series of meetings. They met on Thursday and Friday, February 10th and nth, and again on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, February, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 19th. Then on the following Monday Asquith made his first, inevitably disappointing statement to the new House of Commons. “ I tell the House quite frankly,” he said, “ that I have received no such guarantee” —as to the creation of peers—“ and that I have asked for no such guarantee....”

The Master of Elibank whom Asquith had just promoted to be Chief Whip
^3
4
described this speech as “ the very worst I have ever heard him make,” and added: “ In a week the Prime Minister’s prestige fell to so low an ebb that at one moment I despaired of his ever recovering it.”
^s
On the day following the speech Asquith had his first post-election meeting with Redmond and found him “ cold and critical.” “He is not altogether his own master,” Asquith reported to the King, “ as the Budget is extremely unpopular in Ireland, and the O’Brien party
⁵
are on his flank
^t
.The Labour Party, however, Asquith found to be more friendly than he had expected.

The result of all this was that when the Cabinet met on the Friday of that week ministerial morale was so low that some members thought immediate resignation to be “ the wisest and most dignified course.” But this was not Asquith’s view. He thought at this stage that the end might well be near but that the Government could not voluntarily go out until it had tabled its House of Lords proposals and received the verdict of the new House of Commons upon both these and the Budget. He had no difficulty in rallying the majority to this view. Indeed at this meeting the Cabinet began to recover both its nerve and its power of decision. The Master of Elibank, “ was instructed ... to inform Mr. Redmond that they were not prepared to give any
such assurances (about a veto bill being enacted that year), and that he must act on his responsibility as they would on theirs.
^u
On the following day the Prime Minister was able to report that it had then become “ the universal opinion that there could be no question of immediate or voluntary resignation.” The Cabinet even felt able to give up its bad recent habit of over-frequent meetings. It appointed a committee to draft resolutions which would expound its House of Lords policy and adjourned for eleven days.

In the meantime Asquith had to parry a whole series of House of Commons questions about the intentions of the Government both in regard to the resolutions and to the re-introduction of the Budget. In reply to these he used the phrase which was later to be most closely associated with his name. “We had better wait and see,” he said in reply to Lord Helmsley on March 3rd. He used the phrase in no apologetic or hesitant way, but rather as a threat; and he obviously liked it, for he repeated it at least three times, in similar contexts, between then and April 4th. It was a use for which he was to pay dearly in the last years of his premiership when the phrase came to be erected by his enemies as a symbol of his alleged inactivity.

The Cabinet committee reported back in favour of resolutions which embodied the Campbell-Bannerman plan subject only to minor amendments.
¹
The problem of Grey’s threatened resignation then became acute. It was overcome by an agreement that the Parliament Bill, which was to follow immediately in the wake of the resolutions and to give legislative force to them, should have a preamble (which has remained a dead letter from that day to this) declaring that it was “ intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at
present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis.”

¹
_{The amendments were (1) that the provision for conferences between the two Houses was dropped, and (2) that it was laid down that the three successive sessions in which a bill must pass the House of Commons if it was to become law against the opposition of the House of Lords need not be in the same Parliament. There were three resolutions. The first said that the Lords could neither amend nor reject a money bill, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons should determine, subject to certain rules, what was and what was not a money bill. The second outlined the three session arrangement by which ordinary legislation could pass over the heads of the Lords, provided that not less than two years had elapsed between the first introduction of the bill into the House of Commons and its final third reading there. And the third declared that the maximum duration of Parliaments should be reduced from seven years to five.}

The problem of the Irish still remained. Lloyd George and Birrell saw Redmond and Dillon on March 21st, and the possibility of a modification of the Budget was discussed between the two sides. But the Cabinet later stiffened against such a course. It was considered at a series of meetings on April nth, 12th and 13th. After the last of these Asquith wrote to the King, who was again at Biarritz, announcing the stiffening: “After full consideration... your Majesty’s
advisors are strongly and unanimously of opinion that to purchase the Irish vote by such a concession would be a discreditable transaction, which they could not defend
.”
^v
The King was further informed that it was “ possible and not improbable ” that this might involve the defeat of the Government.

At the same meeting, however, the Cabinet took a further decision which made such a development highly unlikely. They agreed that if the Lords rejected the veto resolutions the Government would immediately launch the strongest possible constitutional counter-attack. And this, because it would open the way to Home Rule, was of far more importance to the Irish than any possible budgetary concessions, whether on liquor duties or anything else. There were other people in Ireland, as Joseph Devlin, a leading “Redmondite,” was a few days later to remind the leading Independent Nationalist, William O’Brien, besides distillers and landlords. The form of the counter-attack was outlined in a later section of Asquith’s letter to Biarritz:

“ (Ministers) came to the conclusion that, (in the event of a Lords’ rejection of the resolutions), it would be their duty at once to tender advice to the Crown as to the necessary steps—whether by the exercise of the prerogative, or by a
referendum ad hoc
, or otherwise—to be taken to ensure that the policy, approved by the House of Commons by large majorities, shall be given statutory effect in this Parliament. If they found that they were not in a position to accomplish that object, they would then either resign office or advise a dissolution of Parliament, but in no case would they feel able to advise a dissolution, except under such conditions as would secure that in the new Parliament the judgment of the people as expressed at the election, would be carried into law.”
^w

The form of this declaration was a little elliptical but the meaning
was reasonably clear. Either the King would have to agree to a dissolution with guarantees that if the Government were again successful he would create sufficient peers to swamp the House of Lords; or he would have to accept the resignation of his ministers and let Balfour (if he would) try to govern against the wishes of the majority of the House of Commons—with all the hazards to the royal position which would be involved in such a course. The only possible escape from this difficult choice lay in Asquith’s suggestion that the issue between the two Houses might be settled by a referendum. There is an element of mystery about this. The Cabinet took the suggestion sufficiently seriously to order the preparation of a Referendum Bill. But when Asquith made a public statement of the Government’s intention on the day following his communication to the King, and used language in most respects identical with that of his letter, he omitted any reference to the referendum solution.

The note which he struck was therefore still firmer. The Government Chief Whip was as impressed on this occasion as he had been depressed in February:

“Thursday night,” he wrote, “saw a grand Parliamentary triumph for the Prime Minister. All his lost prestige has been recovered. He played a great part on a great occasion, and he announced the decision of the Cabinet in that wonderful language of his, and with a dignity that abashed some of the ruder spirits opposite who tried to interrupt. It was a stirring scene, not likely to leave the memories of those who witnessed it, nor (s/c) the enthusiasm with which the crowded Liberal, Nationalist and Labour benches cheered the Prime Minister.... I accompanied him to his room, and we were shortly afterwards joined by Churchill and Lloyd George, who came to offer him their congratulations. Under that modest, unassuming, almost shy nature —so often mistaken for coldness—the Prime Minister has a softness of character which attaches men to him humanly as firmly as his great intellectual gifts compel their admiration.”
^x