Asquith (39 page)

¹
_{L. S. Amery.}

“ After a long talk,” the King wrote in his diary that evening,

“ I agreed most reluctantly to give the Cabinet a secret understanding that in the event of the Government being returned with a majority at the General Election, I should use my Prerogative to make Peers if asked for. I disliked having to do this very much, but agreed that this was the only alternative to the Cabinet resigning, which at this moment would be disastrous. Francis (Lord Knollys) strongly urged me to take this course and I think his advice is generally very sound. I only trust and pray he is right this time.”
^k

“ I have never seen the King to better advantage,” was Asquith’s relieved judgment on the same evening; “ he argued well and showed no obstinacy.”* But afterwards the King’s mind obstinately refused to leave the subject and, Sir Harold Nicolson tells us, he “ remained convinced . .. that in this, the first political crisis of his reign, he had not been accorded either the confidence or the consideration to which he was entitled.” But what was the basis of his resentment? Sir Harold says that what he most disliked was the secrecy of the undertaking. This, however, was a most surprising aspect of the matter to which to take objection. It was only proposed with the object of safeguarding the King. It would have suited the Government much better to have been able to announce the pledge the moment it was given. And Knollys at least attached great value to the secrecy provision, and credited the King with doing so too. He wrote to Vaughan Nash on December nth: “ The King hopes that all the members of the Cabinet clearly understand that he relies on their not divulging in the future or at any time anything whatever regarding the guarantee question any more than at present.”
^m

The picture is therefore a little confused, and is not made less so by Sir Harold also assuring us that:

Against the Prime Minister personally he (the King) retained no rancour whatsoever. He realised that Mr. Asquith’s hand had also been forced. He was fully aware of the qualities of mind and heart possessed by that shy but greatly gifted man.
ⁿ

By whom then, unless it were only Knollys, whom he kept in his most confidential service for another two years and to whom he gave
a step in the peerage in 1911, did the King believe that he had not been accorded “ confidence or consideration ”? Perhaps Sir Harold Nicol-son deliberately introduced a little confusion at this stage, for only thus could he represent what seems to have been the King’s feeling—a generalised dislike of the whole incident, accompanied by a reluctant acceptance that nobody (except perhaps for Knollys) could reasonably have been expected to behave differently.

The King’s acceptance of the Government’s advice cleared the way for the general election. Dissolution took place on November 28th, and the campaign was over before Christmas. There was general agreement that, to a much greater extent than in the previous January, it was dominated by the Prime Minister. Perhaps because the settling of the guarantees had given him an easier conscience, he displayed a far greater measure of confidence, force, and wit. At Hull and Reading, amongst other places, he delivered speeches before huge audiences which were as notable for their trenchancy as for their range of constitutional knowledge. In Churchill’s phrase they “ stood out in massive pre-eminence whether in relation to colleagues or opponents.”

The other point about this election upon which there was also general agreement was that it was for the most part a dull one. Public interest was low. The voters were bored with being asked to go to the polls for the second time within a year and weary of the long drawn-out constitutional struggle. They wanted the matter settled, and they indicated this by producing a result which, in its way, was as decisive as any which could easily be imagined. It was almost an exactreplica of the previous result. Over fifty seats changed hands but he net effect was that the Unionists lost one seat and the Liberals three, while the Irish Nationalists and the Labour Party each gained two. For practical purposes the Government majority went up from 124 to 126. The Liberals had performed the feat, unprecedented since 1832, of winning three successive general elections, and by so doing had brought the Unionists to the end of the road so far as appeals to the country were concerned. The Liberal preponderance amongst the voters was not a great one, but for the time being it was solid and unchanging. Thereafter the constitutional battle had to be fought to a finish within the parliamentary arena.

After this election the Government had no decisions of difficulty to face comparable with those which had confronted it eleven months before. The lines upon which it must proceed were clearly defined.

Perhaps for this reason Asquith did not receive the same spate of advisory post-election letters from his colleagues. But there was at least one member of the Cabinet who did not let the occasion pass without setting down on paper his view of the future. In the re-shuffle following the previous election, Winston Churchill had been promoted from the Board of Trade to the Home Office. On January 3rd, 1911, he composed a long hand-written letter to Asquith. In the middle of this task he left for Sydney Street in the East End to carry out his famous direction of operations against the murder gang who had there barricaded themselves. The siege over, he returned to Whitehall to complete his letter, which lost nothing in verve as a result of the interruption. The political world was divided between those who did and those who did not believe that the Liberals were entitled to use the threat of creating peers. But Churchill was almost alone in wanting to carry out the threat:

We ought as early as possible to make it clear that we are not a bit afraid of creating 500 Peers if necessary.... Such a creation would be in fact for the interest of the Liberal Party and a disaster to the Conservatives.... We should at a stroke gain a great addition of influence in the country. The wealth and importance of British society could easily maintain 1,000 notables—much more easily than 300 a century ago.

The Parliament Bill, Churchill went on to argue, ought to be pushed through before the Coronation, which was fixed for June 22nd. And if it did not make proper progress “ we should clink the coronets in their scabbards.” But once it was through the Government should pursue “
tine politique d’apaisement
.”

“ Privy Councillorships to Bonar Law and F.E. (Smith); the order of merit for Joe; a proportion of Tory peers and Baronets; something for the Tory Press; and if you could find a little place for Neil (Primrose) it would please Rosebery in spite of himself.... We ought to pursue a national not a sectional policy; and to try to make our prolonged tenure of power as agreeable as possible to the other half of our fellow-countrymen.”
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Asquith was by no means inclined to reject all these suggestions.

¹
_{Another point of interest in this remarkable letter was Churchill’s suggestion that he would like to see “ a provision enabling Peers to stand for the House of Commons on renunciation of their privilege, and its counterpoise, ministers to be allowed to speak in both Houses.”}

He gave both Bonar Law and Smith their privy councillorships in the Coronation honours (although not without a good deal of trouble with Balfour so far as Smith was concerned);
¹
he made two Tory “ press lords ” into real barons;
²
and, although not until a few years later, he even found “ a little place ” for Primrose. But his attitude to the creation of 500 peers was quite different from Churchill’s. He both hoped and believed that it would be unnecessary. Indeed, immediately after the December election, he thought it quite likely that it would not even be necessary to make further use of the threat of creation. The Lords might accept the verdict of the electorate to the extent of offering little further resistance to the Parliament Bill. This hope proved unfounded, and it became impossible to achieve Churchill's aim of getting the bill through before the Coronation. Balfour, in January, was already prepared to accept the inevitable. But Lansdowne took a
less clear-sighted view.

¹
_{Balfour wanted an undistinguished but hard-working Unionist parliamentarian, Hayes Fisher, to have the honour instead. After a good deal of argument both Smith and Fisher became Privy Councillors. Smith wrote to Asquith: “ I can only say that it is a paradoxical and singular circumstance that those against whom I have been fighting for fifteen years have paid me the greatest compliment I have ever had in my life; while those on whose behalf I have been fighting did their best to prevent it. You will I think believe me when I say that there is no one at present in political life from whom I would have valued this recommendation so highly as from yourself.”
(Asquith Papers
, box 13, ff. 24-5). This did not prevent Smith from playing a leading part in shouting down Asquith in a House of Commons scene six weeks later.}

²
_{Asquith had difficulty in getting any peerages through that year, for the King, who had said the same thing more mildly in 1910, protested strongly against any new creations while the issue of the 500 was still undecided. But he probably objected less to the Tory peerages than to the Liberal nominations. “ The King says he does not pretend to understand the logic of those people who while vilifying the House of Lords on every convenient occasion are yet apparently anxious to become members of that Body,” Knollys wrote to Asquith.
(Asquith Papers
, box 2, f. 151). But the King’s objection did not extend to “ steps ” for members of the Government. In the Coronation list Crewe became a marquess and Lorcburn an earl, both at the suggestion of the Palace.}

_{Another point of dispute between King and Prime Minister that year was whether Sargent should be made an O.M. The King successfully resisted the proposal. He admired Sargent neither as a painter nor as a man.
(Asquith Papers,
box 2, f. 211).}

He neither dug in for resistance
à outrance
nor prepared himself for retreat. He merely decided to stay where he was for as long as he could in the hope that delay might shift the dispute on to slightly different ground and enable the powers of the Lords still to be preserved. He started on a course which six months later was to lead both himself and the less blameworthy Balfour into a position of humiliating weakness; but in the meantime his tactic effectively prevented the Government making rapid progress with its bill.

It took until May 15 th to get the bill through the Commons, the Government having to pick its way between more than 900 amendments tabled for the committee stage. The Lords, during this period, had been occupied with a Referendum Bill, introduced by Balfour of Burleigh, and with Unionist schemes for their own reform. They turned distastefully to the Parliament Bill in the last week of May, and proceeded after a three-day debate to give it a second reading without a division. But it was made clear that this emollient attitude was only a prelude to severe amendment in committee. Knowledge of the exact severity of these amendments, however, was not available until after a Whitsun recess lengthened to include the Coronation.

This festivity therefore occurred at a moment of high party tension. Feeling at the time was much higher amongst politicians than amongst the general public. Lloyd George was booed on his way to the Abbey —but only by some of those in the stands reserved for members of Parliament and their families and friends. And when Asquith himself, a few weeks later, was involved in a formidable scene and shouted down for nearly an hour with cries of “ traitor,” it was in the House of Commons that this occurred. Even so, it is easily possible to exaggerate the degree of social ill-feeling which surrounded Asquith at this time— although the position became a little worse during the Home Rule quarrel two or three years later. Throughout the constitutional struggle the Prime Minister retained easy personal relations with the leader of the opposition, and close ones with other members of his family. Lady Frances Balfour drove over from Whittinghame to Archerfield for Asquith’s small birthday luncheon party in September 1910. And in May 1911, the Prime Minister did not hesitate to attend (although wearing nothing more exotic than a tail coat) a lavish fancy dress ball which F. E. Smith and Lord Winterton gave at Claridge’s and which was one of the most flamboyant events of that hot and fevered Coronation summer.

From this point onwards the battle became an internal one within the Unionist Party. The “hedgers” fought the “ditchers,” the former advocating a retreat under pressure which would at least prevent the dilution of the peerage by a swarm of new Liberal creations, the latter demanding resistance at all costs. The roles both of the King and of the Government became rather like that of the German armies surrounding Paris at the time of the Commune. Their presence had precipitated the civil quarrel, but once it had started they became little more than onlookers holding their ground and waiting for the outcome. Occasionally however they were appealed to by the more moderate of the contestants and asked to strengthen their hand by some pronouncement of intention. Thus on July 20th Lansdowne wrote to Asquith asking if he could have by return a written statement of exactly what the Prime Minister proposed to do, as he had a meeting of Unionist peers fixed for the following day and wished to disillusion those who still believed that the Government was bluffing. There was no difficulty at this stage about secrecy, for a week earlier Bigge had telegraphed on behalf of the King urging a public disclosure of the position to Balfour and Lansdowne. He was now eager to make the threat as real as possible in order to avoid having to carry it out. Accordingly, Asquith on July 20th wrote identical letters to Balfour and Lansdowne: