Asquith (37 page)

After this speech the difficulties with the Irish evaporated. It remains difficult to see quite why they had ever looked so formidable. The Government was able to re-introduce the Budget and to get it through the House of Commons by April 27th. The vote on third reading was 324 to 231, 62 of the Irish voting with the Government. On the following day the Lords passed it through all its stages, without
divisions, in the course of a few hours. Lansdowne and his followers were prepared to recognise that the January election had settled the issue of the Budget, even if not the wider constitutional question. Parliament, having missed any real Easter holiday, then adjourned for a ten-day spring recess.

That evening, after Parliament had risen, Asquith went to Buckingham Palace. “ I had a good talk with the King this evening and found him most reasonable,”
^y
he wrote to his wife. Then he attended a dinner at the Savoy Hotel, given by Lloyd George to celebrate the passing of the Budget. Asquith left early in order to motor to Portsmouth with the McKennas. There he embarked on the Admiralty yacht,
Enchantress
, and set off, with the First Lord and his very young, recently acquired wife for companions, on a ten-day cruise to Portugal and Spain. The political outlook was still far from reassuring. But at least it looked a little better than at any time since the January election. The form of the battle seemed reliably predictable. If the Lords remained intransigent another election would have to be faced. If the Government won the King must be forced to create peers, or at least to use the threat of creating them. No doubt that would involve some distasteful audiences, for the Sovereign was clearly distrustful of the whole constitutional policy of the Government. Guided by the urbane and moderate Liberalism of Lord Knollys, he was however unlikely to resist in the last resort. There was one hazard for which neither Asquith nor anyone else made allowance. It did not occur to the Prime Minister that on his visit to Buckingham Palace before leaving London he had seen King Edward for the last time.

1
_{He probably had some difficulty in the Treasury as well. On April 7th, Sir George Murray, the Permanent Secretary, wrote to Asquith: “ I think the Budget is fairly ship-shape now. The two largest blots on it are (1) the
reversion duty
—which is iniquitous in principle, but will not otherwise do very much harm; and (2) the
Petrol Tax
, which I believe to be quite unworkable. ...”
(Asquith Papers
, box 22, f. 123).}

2
_{These were by far the most controversial part of a controversial Budget. As introduced, they provided for (i) a tax of 20% on the unearned increment in land values, payable either when the land was sold or when it passed at death; (ii) a capital tax of |d. in the £ on the value of undeveloped land and minerals; and (iii) a 10% reversion duty on any benefit which came to a lessor at the end of a lease. The first two provisions were modified, with the Chancellor’s consent, during the Committee Stage of the Finance Bill. The yield, and consequently the social effect, of all these taxes proved disappointing. After 1918 they were repealed, ironically enough, by a Government over which Lloyd George was presiding. In reality much the most important part of the 1909 Budget, for future social change, passed with comparatively little notice. This was the introduction of surtax (or super-tax as it was then called). Lloyd George levied it at the rate of 6d. in the £ on the amount by which incomes of £5,000 or more exceeded £3,000.}

3
_{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.}

4
_{He had been appointed immediately after the election in spite of the view of his predecessor, J. A. Pease, that he was “ a bit too scheming.”}

5
_{Independent Nationalists}
.

By May 6th Asquith and his party had completed their visit to Lisbon, where they had been feted by the Portuguese royal family (“ The Queen ... is still handsome, and like all the Orleans family, quite good company,” the Prime Minister recorded), and were steaming towards Gibraltar. A few hours before they arrived a wireless message was received from Lord Knollys with the information that the King had become gravely ill and was in a critical condition. On arrival at Gibraltar Asquith discovered that the 72 hours in which
Enchantress
could return to Plymouth was, surprisingly, less than the journey would take by train. He therefore ordered an immediate turn-round. A short time after they had left, in the early hours of Saturday, May 7th, he received a further message, this time from the new King George V, informing him that King Edward was dead. Later he recorded—for publication—his thoughts on that night:

I went up on deck, and I remember well that the first sight that met my eyes in the twilight before dawn was Halley’s comet blazing in the sky.... I felt bewildered and indeed stunned. At a most anxious moment in the fortunes of the State, we had lost, without warning or preparation, the Sovereign whose ripe experience, trained sagacity, equitable judgment, and unvarying consideration, counted for so much. For two years I had been his Chief Minister, and I am thankful to remember that from first to last I never concealed anything from him. He soon got to know this, and in return he treated me with a gracious frankness which made our relationship in very trying and exacting times one, not always of complete agreement, but of unbroken confidence. It was this that lightened a load which I should otherwise have found almost intolerably oppressive: the prospect that, in the near future,
I might find it my duty to give him advice which I knew would be in a high degree unpalatable.

Now he had gone. His successor with all his fine and engaging qualities, was without political experience. We were nearing the verge of a crisis almost without example in our constitutional history. What was the right thing to do? This was the question which absorbed my thoughts as we made our way, with two fast escorting cruisers, through the Bay of Biscay, until we landed at Plymouth on the evening of Monday, May
9
.
^a

On the following Tuesday Asquith held a Cabinet and also had his first audience with the new King. On the Wednesday he moved a vote of condolence in the House of Commons and delivered a notable
eloge
of King Edward. On the Thursday he held another Cabinet, but these meetings were not concerned with the major constitutional issue. They were occupied with arrangements for the change of reign, and in particular with a proposed alteration in the Royal Declaration (of faith) so as to make it less offensive to Roman Catholics. But the constitutional issue simmered under the surface. What was to be done in the new circumstances? Were immediate “ guarantees ” and an early dissolution to be demanded from King George as they would have been from King Edward? All Asquith’s instincts recoiled from this. He had been in no hurry to tender unpalatable advice to the old King, and he was doubly reluctant to do so to the new one. Although King George V was a man of forty-five when he succeeded, and had seen far more of State papers during his period as Heir Apparent than ever his father had done, Asquith was greatly struck by the contrast between the worldly experience of King Edward and the unsophisticated mind and tastes of his son. This made him feel that it would be unfair to confront King George with a most delicate decision at the very outset of his reign. He was not alone in feeling this. Harcourt, the most determinedly radical member of the Cabinet on the constitutional issue, had written to him on the day of his return from Gibraltar urging, on the ground of public feeling about the King’s death, the postponement of the conflict until the autumn, with no election until January 1911.
^b
Others may well have spoken to him in the same sense.

In any event, despite the lack of Cabinet discussion, Asquith felt justified in telling King George when he saw him again on May 18th, that he would explore the possibility of compromise. “We had a long talk,” the King recorded. “ He said he would endeavour to come to
some understanding with the Opposition to prevent a general election and he would not pay attention to what Redmond said.”
^c
This interview over, Asquith attended the royal funeral on May 20th and then rejoined
Enchantress
for the remainder of his cruise. This time he went up the West coast to Skye, and occupied himself mainly by reading and preparing a long constitutional memorandum for the new
King-

At the first Cabinet after his return, on June 6th, a general political discussion led to “a practically unanimous desire” to try the method of a constitutional conference with the opposition leaders. Balfour and Lansdowne, when approached, responded eagerly to the suggestion, and the conference was able to hold its first meeting (in Asquith’s room at the House of Commons) on June 17th. The participants were the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, Crewe and Birrell from the Government side, and Balfour, Lansdowne, Austen Chamberlain and Cawdor from the opposition. Twelve meetings were held before the end of July and some progress appeared to have been made. There was then an interval until early October, Lansdowne having stood out against a proposal for holiday meetings at Crewe’s country house on the ground that he did not wish to be thought “softened by the excellence of Crewe’s champagne.” After this came two brief but intensive series of meetings, separated by another fortnight’s adjournment, until November 10th.

The King, not unnaturally, was throughout an enthusiast for the idea of the conference. Militant Liberals, the Irish and the Labour Party, equally naturally, were a good deal less enthusiastic. They saw it as a device for removing the cutting edge from the Government’s constitutional policy. But they need not have worried. The conference never came close to success. A Unionist memorandum, presented at one of the early meetings, proposed that legislation should be divided into three categories: financial, ordinary and constitutional. In respect of each of these three categories unresolved difficulties arose. So far as the first category was concerned it was proposed that the Lords should explicitly abandon any right to reject or amend money bills, provided that measures with “ social or political consequences which go far beyond the mere raising of revenue ” should be excluded from this category. But although there is some conflict of evidence it is doubtful whether the Government representatives ever accepted such a sweeping exclusion. Had they done so, hardly a single Budget from that day to
this would have been statutorily protected against the interference of the peers. In regard to “ ordinary ” legislation it was agreed that when a bill within this category had been twice rejected by the Lords its fate should be determined by a joint sitting of the two Houses. But what was to be the composition of such a joint session? The key to this, as Lansdowne pointed out, was agreement on a scheme for a reformed House of Lords; and this was never near.

Constitutional or “ organic ” legislation raised still greater difficulties. The Unionists wanted such measures, if they were twice rejected by the Lords, to be submitted to a referendum. The Liberals, Asquith’s mind having turned increasingly against such an innovation, preferred totally to exempt a closely limited list of such measures from the operation of the Parliament Act. But what should be on such a list? The Unionists were determined that it should include Home Rule, and the Liberals were equally determined that it should not.
¹
This was the nub of the disagreement on which the conference broke down. The man who was primarily responsible for the failure was Lansdowne. Of the other principal participants, Asquith, Balfour and Lloyd George were all anxious for a settlement. But Lansdowne was a Southern Irish landlord who had never forgotten the Land League. He was determined to do nothing to assist the passage of Home Rule, and he pursued his determination with stubborn resource.