Black Diamonds (16 page)

Asquith was unable to steer the ship ‘safely into port’. In the summer of 1909, powerful grandees came out against Lloyd George’s People’s Budget as they looked to protect their own interests. In the first week of August, many of them were gathered at Cowes Regatta, the social highlight of the summer season.

Throughout that week, the
Standart
, Tsar Nicholas II’s yacht, and the
Victoria and Albert
were moored side by side in the centre of Cowes harbour. They towered over the fleets of lesser, but no less impressive yachts, clustered around them at a respectful distance. They belonged to Europe’s royal families and to members of the British aristocracy, who had come in their hundreds to pay court to the King and the Tsar.
The Times
listed the names of the boats and their owners: Prince Henry of Battenberg’s
Sheila
, the Empress Eugenie’s
Thistle
, Lord Ormonde’s
Mirage
, Lord Arran’s
Isa
, the Duke of Leeds’s
Aries
, Lord Brassey’s
Sunbeam
, were a few among many. Billy Fitzwilliam was also there on his yacht, the
Kathleen
. Police boats patrolled around the clock to prevent unauthorized craft from entering the harbour, and a line of battleships guarded its entrance. ‘
This was the one
and only time I ever saw Tsar Nicholas,’ wrote the Duke of Windsor looking back on the event. ‘Because of assassination plots … the Imperial government would not risk their little father’s life in a great metropolis, therefore the meeting was set for Cowes on the Isle of Wight, which could be sealed off almost completely … I do remember being astonished at the elaborate police guard thrown around his every movement …’ Behind the security cordons, Cowes was en fête; those without boats, like the Duke of Somerset and the Duchess of Manchester, had rented houses for the week.

‘Ashore and afloat’, as one observer recorded, ‘there were dinner parties and balls. Steam launches, with gleaming brass funnels, and slender cutters and gigs, pulled by their crews at the long white oars, plied between the yachts and the squadron steps. By day, the sails of the racing yachts spread across the blue waters of the Solent like the wings of giant butterflies, by night the riding lights and lanterns gleamed and shone like glowworms against the onyx water and fireworks burst and spent themselves in the night sky.’

Yacht racing and socializing dominated the agenda; a constant round of lunches, dinners, dances, bridge parties and promenading on the lawns of the Royal Squadron Yacht Club. But beneath the certainties of social etiquette and the trappings of great wealth lay a profound uncertainty, an uneasy sense that the demons of revolution lurked in the chasm that divided the rich from the poor.

In the minds of many of those belonging to this social elite, Lloyd George had unleashed the demons in his Limehouse speech. Lord Rosebery, the son of the former Prime Minister, said the People’s Budget was ‘not a budget, but a revolution, a social and political revolution of the first magnitude’. Describing it as pure socialism, he claimed it represented ‘the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of property, of Monarchy, of Empire’. Lord Ridley, voicing the instinctive reaction of many of his class, believed the Government to be in the hands of a ‘pack of madmen’.

Yet, at the same time, the peers’ uncertainty was matched by blinding confidence. The thought that this period was the Indian summer of their social and political power was implausible to its contemporaries. They failed to understand the true nature, or the implications, of the currents that shifted beneath the surface of their England. While they sensed an acceleration in the pace of change, they elected to resist it, confident that they would win.

In November 1909, believing the country would support them, the House of Lords voted against the People’s Budget, forcing the King to dissolve Parliament. In January 1910, in the election that followed, the Liberal Government was narrowly voted back in. Three months later, the Lords, accepting the country’s decision, passed the People’s Budget. It was too late: the Liberals’ majority had been slashed and the Irish Nationalists and Labour MPs held the balance of power; a promise to curb the Lords’ veto was the price that Prime Minister Asquith had paid for their support.

The Lords moved to defend their interests. Their right of veto meant they could throw out any bill the Government introduced to curtail their powers. It provoked a constitutional crisis that only the King could resolve, made more acute by his death – in the middle of it – on 6 May 1910.

Edward VII’s son, George V, when he was Prince of Wales, had scarcely bothered to conceal his dislike of Liberals and Liberalism.
After an encounter
at Lord Londonderry’s house, Edmund Gosse, the society poet and critic, described the Prince as an ‘overgrown schoolboy, loud and stupid, losing no opportunity of abusing the Government’. While awaiting the results of the January election in 1910, he had made known his dread of a Liberal victory.

Humiliatingly, within months of his accession, the new and inexperienced King was forced to make a secret promise to the Prime Minister, that if the Lords would not destroy themselves he would use his royal prerogative to create an unprecedented 250 Liberal peers who would vote whichever way the Government told them. The King made one stipulation: that the Prime Minister, for the second time that year, should call an election, specifically to be fought on the question of reforming the House of Lords. In making his promise, the King secretly hoped, as the Unionists in the House of Lords believed, that the country would vote with the Peers. It didn’t: in December 1910, Britain backed the Liberals and their Parliament Bill – the proposal to legislate the aristocracy into impotence by abolishing their right of veto on finance bills, and by limiting their veto on other bills to a period of two years.

When the King’s secret pledge to create 250 Liberal peers became known, as the historian George Dangerfield wrote, ‘
it was generally supposed
that his promise to exercise it would be enough; under such a threat their Lordships would have to yield. Better to vote their death themselves, than to have it voted for them; better to die as they were, a decent corpse, than to die ludicrously swollen with Liberal peerages.’ Yet to the last, it seemed as if the die-hards in the House of Lords would destroy the Parliament Bill, and in doing so heap ridicule on the Sovereign and the nation.

The peers resisted reform to the wire; finally, to the King’s immense relief, on a sultry night in August 1911, more than two years after the People’s Budget had sparked the constitutional crisis, the Parliament Bill passed through the House of Lords by a slender majority of seventeen. George V had Lord Curzon to thank: almost single-handedly he had succeeded in persuading a sizeable number of Unionists to defect to the Liberals in the final hours of the debate. The following day, the usually unflappable Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, wrote to Lord Curzon: ‘What a relief all is well! The King is quite another man – and if I may say so, is deeply grateful to you for the very valuable service which you have rendered to save the situation.’

The crisis had passed. But, people wondered, had it not simply been deferred? In both the elections of 1910, it had been a close-run thing: the country, it appeared, had been split down the middle. The power of the peerage was substantially diminished; confidence had evaporated: the impression the crisis left was that the next bloodshed would come from a war not between nations, but between classes.

The signs were ominous
: the character and strength of trade unionism had changed since its cornering by the legal offensive of the 1890s that culminated in Taff Vale. In 1906, the Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries Company had finally lost its court action against the Yorkshire Miners’ Association. The judge, in delivering the verdict, said that if he had found against the union, he would in effect be ruling that ‘every strike was an actionable wrong’. Months later, steered by Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade, the new Liberal Government had introduced the Trades Disputes Act, reversing the Taff Vale decision. Labour had regained its most powerful weapon; the legislation meant that trades unions could strike without fear of being bankrupted.

The stage was set for a titanic struggle between capital and labour, between the upper and working classes.

Between 1902 and 1909 trades union membership, spurred by Taff Vale and isolated parochial disputes such as the Bag Muck Strike, had risen dramatically. Among the most powerful of the unions was the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. The internecine rivalry that had characterized the relationship between the regional miners’ unions in the late nineteenth century was a thing of the past. As the century dawned, so too did the realization in the ranks of the miners’ unions that they possessed a devastating weapon: if they joined forces to halt production, they could hold the country to ransom.

In 1912 the miners would put their newfound strength to the test.

PART III

12

It was a midsummer morning in July 1912. At Wentworth, at eight o’clock, the temperature was already 70 degrees.

In the formal gardens behind the house there was not a blade of grass or a petal out of place. Bees drifted lazily along winding beds crammed with roses and white stocks. The scent of the flowers hung tantalizingly in the warm, still air. Wentworth was expecting a special visitor. For the first time in the history of the house, the reigning monarch, King George V, was coming to stay.

The most important task had been left – deliberately – till last. A long straight path, half a mile long and some ten yards wide, was the crowning feature of the formal gardens. Huge rosette-shaped flowerbeds lay along its centre; at its edges, the scalloped borders, framed by low box hedges, were planted with lobelias in rows of alternate colours: brilliant white, set against a glowing blue. Most striking of all was the colour of the path itself: in contrast to the sombre green of the topiary and the vivid natural colours of the flowers around it, it was a deep synthetic pink.

A solitary figure appeared by the stone urns at the bottom of the steps leading up to the West Front of the house. He was carrying a two-handled brush; a yard wide at its base, it had long, stiff bristles. Placing it behind him, his arms awkwardly stretched back, the servant set off up the path, turning from time to time to ensure the brush was flush against its border. ‘
That path,
it was made from red ash, it came from Earl Fitzwilliam’s mines,’ Geoffrey Steer, a garden boy at Wentworth, recalled. ‘It was red from fire. It was muck from the pit that had turned red from the fires that burnt on the slag heaps. They used pit shale – little bits of rock broken up into pieces – for the gravel on the drive at the front of the house. They didn’t stripe that though, it was only the path that was striped. The brushman had to walk up it keeping the brush straight all the way to the top. Then he used to turn round and come back, always dragging the brush behind him, else his footprints would mark it. By the time he’d walked to the top and back it was about a mile. He’d take the width of a brush at a time. Up and down, down and up, until he’d done. It used to take him about five hours. It was the only way to do it. One width was light, and the other dark, from the brushing in different directions. Two colours, you see, light and dark.’

At the front of the house, vehicles of every description crowded the drive. In the Kennels across the Park the Wentworth foxhounds howled and bayed, disturbed by the commotion. Dog carts pulled by ponies, ancient barouche sociables and double victorias drawn by pairs of cobs lined up alongside gleaming new motor-cars at the entrance to the Pillared Hall. The luggage had arrived ahead of the guests. Scores of footmen and housemaids milled in front of the house, supervising its unloading, shouting instructions to the ‘oddmen’, the servants lowest in the pecking order whose job it was to carry the baggage to the long list of pre-allocated bedrooms. It took two men to carry the ‘Noah’s Arks’, the large trunks that contained the guests’ clothes. A house party of thirty-four had been invited for the King and Queen’s stay.

In the State Dining Room, the preparations were almost complete. Three circular tables, covered in damask cloths and seating upwards of twenty people, had been placed beneath each chandelier. On the ten-foot-long Chippendale sideboard, there were rows of crystal decanters with silver labels denoting the different wines and spirits.
Tropical lianas,
cultivated in Wentworth’s greenhouses, trailed from the chandeliers on to the centre of the tables; fresh grapes, specially selected for the depth of their silvery bloom, were piled in pyramids in gold dishes. Everything that adorned the tables – with the exception of the cut glass – was gold: the cutlery, the Fitzwilliams’ racing cups, the tiny matchboxes. The head gardener and his assistants had arrived to add the final touches. Reaching cautiously across the tables, they wove spider’s fern through the settings, threading it between the knives and forks and up the delicate fluted spines of the racing cups and ornamental dishes.