Mr Balfour's Poodle (23 page)

But whatever the state of internal Unionist Party relations the salient feature of the committee stage (and the position was in no way retracted at the report stage, which took place on July 13) was that the House of Lords had declined to accept the verdict of the second 1910 general election and had thrown down an unmistakable challenge to the Government. The bill which the House of Commons had passed had been changed out of all recognition.

Confronted with this challenge the Cabinet sent a minute to the King declaring that the ‘contingency' referred to in the November negotiations had arisen, and that Ministers would expect the King to act in accordance with the undertaking he had then given. The minute was dated July 14 and was couched in very firm language:

‘The Amendments made in the House of Lords to the Parliament Bill are destructive of its principle and purpose,' it ran, ‘both in regard to finance and to general legislation. There is hardly one of them which, in its present form, the Government could advise the House of Commons, or the majority of the House of Commons could be persuaded, to accept. The Bill might just as well have been rejected on Second Reading. It follows that if, without any preliminary conference and arrangement, the Lords' Amendments are in due course submitted to the House of Commons, they will be rejected
en bloc
by that House, and a complete conflict between the two Houses will be created. Parliament having been twice dissolved during the last eighteen months, and the future relations between the two Houses having been at both Elections a dominant issue, a third Dissolution is wholly
out of the question. Hence, in the contingency contemplated, it will be the duty of Ministers to advise the Crown to exercise its Prerogative so as to get rid of the deadlock and secure the passing of the Bill. In such circumstances Ministers cannot entertain any doubt that the Sovereign would feel it to be his Constitutional duty to accept their advice.'
^a

Asquith's biographers inform us that three days later the King indicated that he would accept this advice. It appears, however, from Sir Harold Nicolson's life of King George V
^b
that when, a few days afterwards, the question arose of the exact stage at which the prerogative should be exercised, a slightly different interpretation of this agreement was given by the King on the one hand and his Ministers on the other. The King indicated by means of a letter from Lord Knollys to the Prime Minister that he was unwilling to agree to a creation before the Lords had been given an opportunity to pronounce on the Commons' rejection of their amendments, and that, in any event, he feared that an
en bloc
rejection by the Commons would be likely to provoke the peers to more determined resistance. The difference was resolved by the Cabinet deferring to the King on both issues. It is difficult to believe that when it came to the point, even without the King's remonstrance, Asquith would have forced a creation until the last possible moment.

More important, however, was the question of making known to the Opposition the Sovereign's general view of his constitutional duty. The Government had observed most carefully the arrangement as to secrecy which had been reached in November. But this arrangement, designed to protect the King, had become an embarrassment to him and
made him feel guilty of dissimulation in his dealings with the Unionist leaders. Furthermore, so long as the King's undertaking was not known, an increasing number of peers were liable to commit themselves to positions of resistance from which they could not retreat. Balfour, as his conversation with Lord Esher at the beginning of January made clear, had long envisaged both that the Government would if necessary invoke the prerogative and that the King would accede to such a course. But there is little evidence that he convinced even so close a colleague as Lansdowne that this would be the course of events. Certainly Lansdowne's action between January and the beginning of July gave no indication that he recognised the strength of the Government's hand. Curzon, also, remained defiant for some time because he believed that defiance would triumph. ‘Even after the Election (of December 1910),' his biographer has written, ‘he had spoken derisively at a private luncheon of Unionist candidates and M.P.'s of any such proceedings (a wholesale creation of peers), and had advised his audience—somewhat incautiously as it turned out—to fight in the last ditch and let them make their peers if they dared.'
^c

Other peers, less close to the hub of affairs than either Lansdowne or Curzon, found it still easier to build upon false premises. ‘Early in July,' we are informed by Sir Harold Nicolson, ‘Lord Derby,
¹
and subsequently Lord Midleton, had warned the King that a large number of Unionists remained convinced that the Government were bluffing and that the Prime Minister would hesitate, when it came to the moment, to invoke the Royal Prerogative.'
^d
Their excuses
for such convictions thereafter diminished rapidly, although some Unionists did not change their minds as a result. On July 7, Balfour received private information of what had passed between the King and his Ministers in November.
¹
The Shadow Cabinet was immediately summoned to a meeting at his house in Carlton Gardens. The other Unionist leaders were informed of the knowledge which Balfour had acquired, and, in the words of his biographer: ‘There for the first time surrender by the House of Lords was discussed as practical politics.' It was not discussed in an atmosphere of general agreement. It was noted at the time, Mrs. Dugdale informs us, that ‘there was a distinct division of opinion among those present, but the majority decided that it would be imprudent to resist the menace of the creation of peers'.
^e

A week or so later the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acting as the agent of the Prime Minister, saw Balfour and Lansdowne by arrangement and confirmed the information which they had acquired on July 7. He further informed them, it being still five days before the Cabinet received the King's remonstrance on this point, that the intention was to proceed to a creation before the bill was sent back to the Lords. This was to avoid any risk that the bill might be lost between the two Houses.

This warning was delivered on Tuesday, July 18. Two days later the bill came up for third reading in the Lords. Here the split within the Unionist Party came more into the open. For some time previously a number of Unionist peers, amongst whom Willoughby de Broke was the most active,
had been organising together. As early as June II Lord Willoughby was able to write to Lord Halsbury that ‘at a Meeting of Peers recently held it was resolved “to adhere to such amendments as may be carried in Committee of the House of Lords on the Parliament Bill which would have the effect of securing to the Second Chamber the powers at present exercised by the House of Lords, notwithstanding the possible creation of Peers, or the dissolution of Parliament”'.
^f
On July 6 a further meeting was held at Lord Halsbury's house in Ennismore Gardens, and this was followed by another and more important gathering there on July 12. This last meeting, attended by thirty-one peers,
¹
resulted in Halsbury writing to Lansdowne, informing him of the meeting and of the common resolve of those present to act along the lines laid down in Willoughby de Broke's earlier letter. Willoughby was still able to refer to this activity as ‘strengthening Lord Lansdowne's hands', but it is difficult to believe that Halsbury, who had attended the Shadow Cabinet held on July 7 and had expressed beforehand his intention of asking some pertinent questions of his leaders, did not believe by this stage that there was more of defiance than of support in his behaviour.

After this meeting and the despatch of Halsbury's letter to Lansdowne, Willoughby continued to canvass hard for support. Two days later he had brought the number of signatories to fifty-three, and a day after this to sixty. ‘And I shall get I trust quite eighty before the day,' he wrote to Halsbury.
Evidence that this trust was not misplaced came as early as July 20, the day of the third reading, when almost exactly this number of Unionist peers assembled at Grosvenor House
¹
in the morning and pledged themselves not to surrender. But there was still no open split in the party; Lansdowne himself, in his behaviour on the committee stage, had given no hint of retreat. That evening, however, the fissure became a little more obvious. Halsbury delivered a violent speech and committed himself and his followers to an insistence upon the Lords' amendments at all costs. Lansdowne, on the other hand, cautiously announced that the Opposition would not be prepared to withdraw some of their amendments ‘as long as they were free agents'. He was at last beginning to deal with facts and not with fantasies.

Despite this clear difference of emphasis, the bill was let through in its new form without a division, and the fissure was not therefore as deep at this stage as it might have been. Lansdowne had told Newton that he expected a ‘revolt',
^g
and it had been Halsbury's original intention to provoke one, a course from which he was dissuaded by the reluctance of Salisbury and Selborne to desert their leader so soon.
^h
Next morning the dispute was continued at a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. For this and for a general meeting of Unionist peers which took place at Lansdowne House in the afternoon, Balfour and Lansdowne had fortified themselves with a written statement of the Government's intentions from Asquith. This took the form of identical letters written in the following terms to each of the two Unionist leaders:

10, Downing St.,

July 20, 1911

I think it courteous and right, before any public decisions are announced, to let you know how we regard the political situation.

When the Parliament Bill in the form which it has now assumed returns to the House of Commons, we shall be compelled to ask the House to disagree with the Lords' amendments.

In the circumstances, should the necessity arise, the Government will advise the King to exercise his Prerogative to secure the passing into Law of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons, and His Majesty has been pleased to signify that he will consider it his duty to accept and act on that advice.

Yours sincerely,

H. H. Asquith
ⁱ

The possibility of such an official communication had been discussed at the meeting between Lloyd George and the Unionist leaders on July 18. It was thought that an announcement of the Government's intentions in this form rather than in the form of a public statement by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons might be less provocative to the peers. This view was further pressed by Lansdowne when Lord Knollys had called upon him on the evening of July 19. Lansdowne's alternative plan that the King himself should write, through his Private Secretary, was rejected as inappropriate,
but it was at the suggestion of the Palace that the Prime Minister's letters were despatched.

These letters may have reduced the provocative effect of the statement which Asquith subsequently made in the House of Commons (although, in view of the scene which then took place,
¹
this is difficult to believe), but they did nothing to ease the tensions of the Unionist meetings on July 21. The ‘rebels' had already held a 10.30 meeting at Grosvenor House before those of their number who were summoned left for Carlton Gardens to attend the 11.30 Shadow Cabinet. Here a vote was taken, and what might previously have been disguised as a normal difference of opinion, natural to the successful functioning of any committee, became a dispute of climacteric importance, with every man forced to declare his position, with old loyalties broken and with new animosities aroused. Mrs. Dugdale, quoting from the diary which was kept at the time by J. S. Sandars, Balfour's secretary, gives the alignment. In favour of resistance were Lords Selborne, Halsbury, and Salisbury, Austen Chamberlain (who, it need hardly be added, spoke for his father as well as himself), F. E. Smith, George Wyndham,
²
who greatly felt the rift with Balfour, Edward Carson, and Balcarres,
³
the Chief Whip. On the other side were Balfour and Lansdowne; Curzon, Midleton, Londonderry,
⁴
Derby, and Ashbourne
⁵
amongst the peers;
and Bonar Law, Walter Long, Alfred Lyttelton, Henry Chaplin,
¹
Robert Finlay,
²
and Steel-Maitland
³
in the House of Commons. Akers-Douglas made it clear that he sympathised with the resisters, but voted with the majority out of loyalty to Balfour—a strong indication of the depth of feeling which separated the two factions.

Lansdowne then returned to his house to meet the Unionist peers, about 200 of whom attended. He took a note of the proceedings, which his biographer thinks was intended for the information of the King. As a description of a meeting at which his own leadership was put to its greatest test, Lansdowne's memorandum is frighteningly indifferent and detached in tone. His opening speech stressed the impropriety of not allowing the Lords to reconsider the bill after the Commons' deletion of the original amendments of the Upper House, and then came very near to striking a balance between the arguments for resistance and those against. ‘Lord Lansdowne allowed it to be seen,' he summarised his concluding passage, ‘that in his view the more prudent course might be to allow the Bill to pass.…' He did not, however, ask the peers
present to arrive at any decision, and advised them, on the contrary, to await the statement which would be made by the Prime Minister on Monday. He then went on to describe how Selborne, ‘in a speech of great force and earnestness', had urged resistance; how similar views ‘were expressed by Lord Halsbury with great vigour, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, and in more cautious terms by the Duke of Norfolk'; how St. Aldwyn, ‘in a speech which produced a deep impression', argued that the deliberate judgment of the country would be against a policy of ‘dying in the last ditch'; and how Curzon ‘spoke with much ability in the same sense'. He summed up by saying: ‘Lord Lansdowne is inclined to think that a majority of the peers present were in favour of the view which he expressed, but a large number not only differed but acutely resented the suggestion that they should desist until they were beaten in the House by H.M. Government aided by a reinforcement of Radical peers.… The peers referred to will, in Lord Lansdowne's opinion, certainly not recede from their attitude.'
^j
No vote was taken at the meeting, but other estimates put the number of ‘ditchers'
¹
present at fifty; the remaining 150, however, were less firmly attached to Lord Lansdowne's point of view than the minority were to Lord Halsbury's.