Mr Balfour's Poodle (19 page)

Bigge, at Sandringham, had the advantage both of being with the King at the time and of having been his own private secretary, not for a few months as was the case with Knollys, but for nearly ten years. He was passionately, almost violently, opposed to the King giving way. He summarised his views in a document prepared for His Majesty:

‘The King's position is: he cannot give contingent guarantees. For by so doing he becomes a partisan and is placing a powerful weapon in the hands of the Irish and Socialists who, assured of the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, would hold before their electors the certainty of ultimate Home Rule and the carrying out of their Socialist programme.
¹
The Unionists would declare His Majesty was favouring the Government and placing them (the Unionists) at a disadvantage before their constituencies. Indeed it is questionable whether His Majesty would be acting constitutionally. It is not His Majesty's duty to save the Prime Minister from the mistake of his incautious words on the 14th of April.'
^h

On the proposal for secrecy, Bigge was still more vehement.

‘Is this straight?' he asked the King. ‘Is it English? Is it not moreover childish?'

The issue which Bigge did not face was what was to happen if the King accepted his advice and ignored that of his Ministers and of Knollys. In these circumstances Asquith would certainly have resigned. The King must then have sent for Balfour. To have refused the advice of one Prime Minister and sent for another would have been a dangerous enough proceeding at the best of times, but unless it was known that Balfour would accept the commission it would have been merely silly. The King, with a great loss of face, might have found himself back where he started—with Asquith, and with no possible alternative.

It fell to Knollys to give the decisive advice on this point (he had got the King up to London by November 16 for an audience to Asquith and Crewe that afternoon). In Sir Harold Nicolson's words, ‘Lord Knollys assured him that Mr. Balfour would in any event decline to form an administration.'
ⁱ
This was curiously firm advice, for it was far from certain that Balfour would not agree to form a Government, and no one had better reason to know this than Lord Knollys. On April 29 he had been present at a secret meeting at Lambeth Palace, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended also by Balfour and Lord Esher.
¹
His own record of the meeting says, ‘Mr. Balfour made it quite clear that he would be prepared to form a Government to prevent the King being put in the position contemplated by the. demand for the creation of peers.'
^j
Knollys communicated the substance of this talk to King Edward on the day before his
death, but did not subsequently pass the information on to King George. This was not perhaps surprising, for it may well be that no occasion to do so arose, either at the time of the change of reign or in the following months. But what is remarkable is that when specifically asked about the point in November, Knollys should have given advice based on facts directly contrary to those which he had recorded in a minute six and a half months previously.

The decisive nature of this advice cannot be doubted. The King gave way to the Cabinet's demand at this interview with Asquith and Crewe on the afternoon of November 16.
¹
That night he wrote his own version of what had transpired:

‘After a long talk' he recorded, ‘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
(my italics). Francis (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

Asquith, speaking of the occasion in the House of Commons nine months later,
²
used the following carefully chosen words: ‘His Majesty, after careful consideration of all the circumstances past and present, and after discussing the matter in all
its bearings with myself and my noble friend and colleague, Lord Crewe,
felt that he had no alternative but to assent to the advice of the Cabinet.'
(my italics.)

The implication of both statements is that, had he thought Balfour's attitude to be different, the King might have shifted his own position. And this is borne out by a piece of subsequent history related by Sir Harold Nicolson. Knollys gave up his appointment in 1913, the King finding the arrangement of joint private secretaries unsatisfactory. A few months afterwards King George saw for the first time the minute of the meeting of April 29, and dictated the following short note upon it: ‘It was not until late in the year 1913 that the foregoing letters and memoranda came into my possession. The knowledge of their contents would, undoubtedly, have had an important bearing and influence with regard to Mr. Asquith's request for guarantees on November 16, 1910.'
^l

Sir Harold Nicolson thinks that Lord Knollys, despite what it is difficult to regard as other than a deliberate act of concealment, was substantially right in the information he gave the King, because Balfour had changed his mind by November. The evidence he cites in support of this is a letter from Balfour to Lansdowne, dated December 27. In this letter Balfour wrote: ‘I do not believe, however, as at present advised, that it would be fair to the King to suggest that he will better his position by attempting, under present circumstances, to change his Government.'
^m
But this is no evidence at all. By December 27 the second 1910 election had occurred and confirmed the result of the first. It was therefore obvious, and this point is made by Balfour elsewhere in the letter, that a third dissolution was unthinkable. In November, as in April, the situation was quite different. A second election seemed inevitable, and the point at issue was whether it
should be fought with a majority Liberal Government in office, choosing the ground to confirm its position, or with a minority Unionist Government, choosing the ground to achieve a majority. By the end of December a change of Government was possible only if the new Government could carry on with the existing Parliament, and this the Unionists manifestly could not do.

This does not mean that Balfour was certainly still willing to form a Government in November. Indeed his increasing apprehension of the political future makes it quite likely that he was less ready for a rash venture then than he had been in April. But it does mean that we have no evidence that this was so, and that it is improbable that Lord Knollys had any either. What Knollys appears therefore to have done was not merely to have suppressed a piece of information because a better piece came to hand and he did not wish to confuse the King, but to suppress the best piece which he had because he was so convinced that the King should accept the advice of the Cabinet that he was unwilling to advance any facts which might turn his mind the other way.

Knollys was confident of the rightness of his own view, and he made no attempt to minimise the part which he had played. He proudly told Mrs. Asquith that, after her husband had left the Palace on the afternoon of November 16, the King had turned to him and said, ‘Is this the advice that you would have given my father?' and that he had replied, ‘Yes, Sir; and your father would have taken it'.
^1
n
For his services
at this time, even if his methods were somewhat unorthodox, the nation and the institution of constitutional monarchy owe Knollys a deep debt of gratitude. But it was not a debt which was recognised by King George. Immediately after the decision was made he felt a sense of relief, and in the following week Lord Esher found him ‘proud of his strict adherence to the lines of the constitution … (and) also perfectly calm'.
^o
But resentment soon set in. Eleven months later, again in a conversation with Esher, he was saying that ‘what he especially resented was the promise extracted from him in November that he would tell “no one”'
^1
p
Nor did he quickly forget the issue. His attitude when the minute of the Lambeth Palace meeting came to light has already been noted; and for the longer term we have Sir Harold Nicolson's testimony that ‘King George remained convinced thereafter 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.'
^q

What was the danger from which Lord Knollys saved the King? Partly because of the secrecy which enveloped the result as well as the course of the negotiations with Asquith and Crewe it was widely misunderstood. An observer with as many ears to the ground as Sir Almeric Fitzroy,
²
for
example, who fully realised that there was a crisis afoot, believed that it arose because the King was making difficulties about the grant of a dissolution of ‘a Parliament of (Ministers') own choosing, in which so far they have not met With a rebuff in either House and during the existence of which they have not lost a seat.…'
^r
Even Lord Esher, who was better informed to the extent of knowing most of what transpired at the meeting of November 16, believed that the difficulty until that day had been the King's refusal of a dissolution to Asquith. Furthermore, he saw the dangers of a change of Government in these terms: ‘Obviously Arthur Balfour could only form a Government either if the Liberal moderates supported him, which was not to be thought of, or if he in his turn were granted a dissolution. The King therefore would have been in the position of according to a Tory Prime Minister what a few days before he had refused to a Radical.'
^s

This passage, although it puts succinctly the danger which would always confront a Sovereign who refused a dissolution to a majority Prime Minister,
¹
was not on the point. King George never contemplated refusing Asquith's request for a dissolution. From first to last there is nothing in the King's own writings, in those of his private secretaries, or in the Cabinet memoranda to suggest that there was any difficulty on this issue. The most that the King did, on the occasion of Asquith's visit to Sandringham, was to suggest ‘that the veto resolutions should first (i.e. before a dissolution) be sent up to the House of Lords',
^t
To this condition, his biographers say, Asquith readily complied, and there was therefore little to the
matter, less perhaps than the King implied whenche told Lansdowne two months later that ‘it was owing to him that we had been allowed to have the Parliament Bill in the House of Lords at all'.
^u
Furthermore, there was no suggestion in the part of the Cabinet memorandum of November 15 which touched on this—‘The House of Lords to have the opportunity, if they demand it, at the same time, but not so as to postpone the date of dissolution, to discuss the Government resolutions'—that the Government had to be peculiarly submissive here in order to obtain a general election at all.

Simply by granting a dissolution to Balfour the King would not therefore have been treating him differently from the way in which he treated Asquith. But he would, none the less, have been accused, and justly accused, of favouritism and of unconstitutional behaviour. He would have changed his Government because the advice of the incoming Prime Minister was more congenial to him personally than was that of the outgoing Prime Minister; and he would have precipitated an election in which a principal issue was bound to be the known fact that one party enjoyed his favour and the other did not. He would have been making himself far more of a partisan than by taking the course which he did and which Sir Arthur Bigge feared would produce exactly this result. The consequences of such an action, in the explosive atmosphere of pre-1914 England, might have been far reaching, and the narrowness of the margin by which Lord Knollys prevented their being set in train cannot be doubted.

Parliament reassembled, after the long recess, on November 15. An early dissolution was known to be contemplated, but no statement could be made until the negotiations with the King were complete. Asquith therefore moved the adjourment and promised to give more information three days
later. The House of Lords could not so easily be made to wait upon the Government's convenience. Lansdowne announced that on the following day he would move a resolution inviting the Government immediately to submit the Parliament Bill; and when this had been moved, and accepted by Crewe (although with a rather bad grace and accompanied by the statement that the Government would accept no amendments), Rosebery gave notice that he now intended to proceed at once with the two more detailed resolutions of reform which he had tabled in April after the success of his three more general ones, but which had not been debated because of the death of King Edward and the subsequent truce.

He brought them forward on November 17, and they were disposed of after half a day's debate—the first being carried without a division, and the second abandoned by Rosebery himself on the curious ground that it ‘went too far into detail'. The terms of the resolutions were these:

‘(1) That in future the House of Lords shall consist of Lords of Parliament:
(a)
chosen by the whole body of hereditary peers from amongst themselves, and by nomination by the Crown;
(b)
sitting by virtue of offices and of qualifications held by them;
(c)
chosen from outside. (2) That the term of tenure for all Lords of Parliament shall be the same, except in the case of those who sit
ex officio,
who would sit so long as they held the office for which they sit.'