Mr Balfour's Poodle (13 page)

The essentials of the situation were therefore that the Government was committed not by the exigencies of the parliamentary position but by its own desires to giving the
Irish the main things they wanted, and that, this being so, the Irish could easily be brought to heel on points of detail or precedence.

The Prime Minister did not appear to see this as clearly as he should have done. He may have been frightened by the rather threatening tone of Redmond's speech at Dublin on February 10, or by the independent attitude which was taken up by the Labour Party at its Conference at Newport on February 8, but it was unlike Asquith not to be able to ride out heavier storms than these without concern. The probability is that the end of the election found him mentally exhausted and with a temporarily relaxed grip on affairs, that he found it difficult to adjust himself to governing with a greatly reduced and less cohesive majority, and that his equanimity was troubled by his failure to extract, before the election, a definite promise from the King to sustain the Government by a wholesale creation of peers if this should prove necessary.

This question of the ‘guarantees', as they were called, gave the Government a very bad start in the new Parliament. Asquith, it will be remembered, had stated in his Albert Hall speech at the beginning of the campaign that ‘We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the legislative utility and honour of the party of progress.…'
^a
It was widely assumed that this meant that he had obtained from the King a promise, if the Liberals won the election and if the peers proved recalcitrant, to exercise the prerogative to the extent of creating a Government majority for the passage of a ‘veto' bill through the House of Lords. In fact, however, he had not even a hint of such a guarantee
when he spoke. And five days later Asquith's private secretary had an interview with the King's private secretary which was recorded in the following terms for the Prime Minister:

‘Lord Knollys asked me to see him this afternoon and he began by saying that the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new peers (say 300) until after a second general election and that he, Lord K., thought you should know of this now, though for the present he would suggest that what he was telling me should be for your ear only. The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords and he thinks that before a large creation of peers is embarked upon or threatened the country should be acquainted with the particular project for accomplishing such destruction as well as with the general line of action as to which the country will be consulted at the forthcoming elections.'
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How long the Prime Minister was intended to keep this rather heavy confidence to himself is not clear. It must, in any event, have been confided to all his Cabinet colleagues soon after the result of the polling was known, when they were called upon to determine whether they should continue to hold office, and then, having decided to do so, what their line of action should be. Early in February the King was asking to be informed of the intentions of the Government, and a Cabinet minute dated February 11 told him that they involved no request for the exercise of the Royal prerogative until plans had been submitted to Parliament and the actual necessity arose. Asquith then had to perform the more difficult task of informing the House of Commons and the
nation of the position and of the limited extent to which anything had been settled by the general election. This he did in no spirit of apology.

‘I tell the House quite frankly,' he said on February 21, in the debate on the Address, ‘that I have received no such guarantee, and that I have asked for no such guarantee … to ask in advance for a blank authority for an indefinite exercise of the Royal prerogative in regard to a measure which has never been submitted to or approved by the House of Commons is a request which in my judgment no constitutional statesman can properly make, and it is a concession which the Sovereign cannot be expected to grant.'
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That was that, and it had to be accepted, although, as Asquith's biographers have commented, ‘it provoked cries of disappointment from even loyal members of the Party'.
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Part of the concern, however, arose not from disappointment about ‘guarantees' but from uneasiness that the Government was going to get itself lost in the morass of House of Lords reform instead of keeping to the firm if difficult road of dealing with its powers. Sir Charles Dilke,
¹
after presiding over a meeting of about thirty advanced radicals, led a delegation to the Prime Minister which demanded concentration upon the veto and threatened, if this were not done, to put down a motion declaring that the Government had no mandate for the reconstruction of the Upper House. Sir Henry Dalziel,
²
the President of the National Liberal Federation, took similar action, and Hilaire Belloc abstained from voting on the
motion for the Address because he thought that the Speech from the Throne, which mentioned no assurances that the curtailment of the veto would become law, was nothing but ‘a party sham'. As, however, he considered the House of Lords ‘by its constitution a committee for the protection of the Anglo-Judaic plutocracy',
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it may be thought that a demand for reconstitution would have been a more logical outcome of his thought and that his views were substantially less representative than those of Dilke and Dalziel.

The non-Liberal part of the Government's majority was equally or more worried. Keir Hardie declared that ‘Ministers were returned not to reconstitute but to destroy the House of Lords', and there were continual warnings from Redmond and the other Irish that it was the immediate restriction of the veto and not more sophistical solutions in which they were interested.

This concern was not entirely misplaced. Some leading members of the Cabinet were most unattracted by the suspensory veto and by the conflict with the Sovereign in which it seemed likely to involve the Government. Reform of the Upper House looked to them a far more promising prospect. Sir Edward Grey was the protagonist of this school of thought. As late as March 14 he told a Liberal banquet at the Hotel Cecil 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.
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Haldane, as was usually the case, was with Grey. He was in favour of proceeding simultaneously and at once with the Budget and with reform of the Lords. Despite his subsequent swing to the left there seems little doubt that at this time Haldane was too preoccupied with dislike and distrust of
Lloyd George to be a very loyal member of a radical Cabinet. He recorded with unattractive satisfaction an audience which he had with the King soon after the election.

‘He (the King) said the result of the election was inconclusive,' Haldane wrote, ‘and (that) he could not possibly consider the creation of peers without a much more definite expression of opinion from the country. I told him that I had every hope that it would not be necessary to proceed to that extreme.… As I was taking leave he said “This Government may not last. I say nothing of some of my Ministers, but I wish you may very long be my Minister.” '
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To add to the suspicions of the radicals, two members of the Government who were seeking new homes after defeats at the general election—J. A. Pease,
¹
the former Chief Whip who had become Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Colonel Seely,
²
the Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office—both made bye-election speeches which were concerned with reform rather than with reduction of powers.

Where did Asquith stand on this issue? Grey and Haldane were his closest political associates, and by the views of the former at least he still set the greatest store, depending on his advice more than on that of any member of the Cabinet except one. We know, too, that in 1907 he had been most reluctant to accept the suspensory veto, and we can guess that he did not relish the prospect of the difficult Court and social relations which a bitter constitutional struggle was likely to
bring in its train. On February 18, Lord Hugh Cecil
¹
wrote Margot Asquith a brief letter, which read as follows: ‘Lloyd George has got you into a nice mess: nothing left for you but to try and create 500 peers and perish miserably attacking the King. That's what comes of making an irresponsible demagogue Chancellor of the Exchequer.'
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Mrs. Asquith quotes this as being ‘among the best' of the ‘many and amusing letters' which she and her husband received after the election, and it would be easy to believe that it struck an answering chord in the Prime Minister.

On the other hand we have Asquith's steady loyalty to causes he had espoused and to colleagues he had chosen—the essential quality which enabled a conservative-minded man to be a great radical Prime Minister; we have his sureness of touch in all constitutional matters; and we have the knowledge that, apart from Grey, his closest adviser was Crewe, who had shown when dealing with Lord Newton's bill in 1907 that on matters relating to the Second Chamber he was a clear-sighted radical. Furthermore, there is the assurance of Asquith's biographers that: ‘In his own mind Veto and Reform were always in separate compartments. With or without Reform the curtailment of the Veto was essential, and no Reform which he ever contemplated was to involve the restoration of the Veto.'
ⁱ

It may therefore be assumed that Asquith, who had also to live with the facts of party politics in a way which Grey or the other side of Downing Street did not, was an influence, and no doubt the decisive influence, in favour of the more radical course. Nevertheless there could be no question of his giving Redmond the assurance which the latter was constantly demanding
—that if the Irish voted for the Budget a veto bill would be passed into law within a year. On February 25 the Prime Minister reported to the King that ‘certain Ministers were of opinion that the wisest and most dignified course for Ministers was at once to tender their resignation to your Majesty', and on the same day he instructed the new Chief Whip, the Master of Elibank,
¹
to tell Redmond that there could be no assurance and that he must act on his responsibility as the Government would act on theirs.
²

Three days later the morale of Ministers seemed to have rallied somewhat, and Asquith, in moving to take the whole time of the House until Easter for Government business, was able to announce some of the intentions of his Cabinet. Until March 24 the time would be taken up with routine but essential business, mainly relating to Supply. Then, after the Easter week-end, the Government would press on with their detailed proposals on relations between the two Houses, which would be embodied in the first instance in a set of resolutions. These changes in the powers of the House of Lords would be based on the assumption that in a subsequent session a reform bill would be brought forward. No date for proceeding with the Budget was given.

Balfour, rather to the disgust of some of his followers, gave
Asquith his motion without a division, and so the decision of the Irish to abstain was of no importance. Trouble then arose over the Government's need to borrow money to replace the revenue temporarily lost by the failure of the 1909 Finance Bill to reach the statute book. No great sum was involved, for, whether legally or not, the collection of everything except income tax, super-tax and certain other new taxes to the total extent of £30 million was proceeding normally. The Chancellor of the Exchequer sought to fill this gap by the Treasury (Temporary Borrowing) Bill, and the second and third readings of this measure, as well as its passage through the House of Lords, provided the Opposition with opportunities somewhat brazenly to accuse the Government of creating ‘financial chaos'. The Unionist leaders claimed that the correct course for Ministers was to split the Budget into parts and to proceed immediately with those sections, including an income-tax resolution, to which the Lords had no objection. To create further embarrassment they caused, in the Prime Minister's words, ‘the stream of criticism (on Supply) mysteriously to run dry', and thus gave the Government an unwanted abundance of parliamentary time. ‘Why was it not used to get on with the financial business?' was continually asked.

Asquith and Lloyd George very wisely refused these enticements. To have split up the Finance Bill and allowed the peers to pick and choose would have been to go back on the position which Gladstone had established in 1861 after the rejection of his Paper Duty Bill. At the same time Ministers' inability to announce a definite date for the reintroduction of the Budget gave an impression of weakness and confusion, and undoubtedly impaired the prestige of the Government. Disputes outside the Cabinet as to the terms on which the
Irish could be persuaded to vote for the Budget, and within the Cabinet as to the relationship between reform and the veto, were still proceeding.

Asquith's next important pronouncement was made before a public meeting in the Oxford Town Hall on March 18. He first declared, with almost unnecessary frankness, that ‘the Ministry had hesitated whether they ought to go on'. But, he continued, they had resolved not to run away from their tasks—the passing of the Budget and the abolition of the financial, and limitation of the legislative, veto of the Lords. The Liberal Party further held that the Lords ‘must be rebuilt on a democratic basis'. The resolutions were then put on the paper of the House of Commons on March 21. They were three in number and corresponded very closely with Camp-bell-Bannerman's 1907 scheme. The Lords could neither amend nor reject a money bill, and the definition of a money bill was to rest with the Speaker, acting in accordance with certain specified rules. For other legislation the Lords were to retain a power of delay of two years and one month. A bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions was to become law without the assent of the peers if, on the third occasion, it had not been passed by the House of Lords without amendments, other than those agreed to by both Houses, within twenty-eight days of being received by the Upper House. The maximum duration of a Parliament was to be reduced from seven years to five. The only differences between these proposals and those of Campbell-Bannerman were that the provision for a conference between the two Houses had been abandoned, the restriction of the life of Parliaments was new, and so was the drafting of the second resolution in such a way that the three sessions could be spread over more than one Parliament; the last two years of a Liberal
Parliament need not therefore be barren, provided the Government was successful at the subsequent general election.