Mr Balfour's Poodle (15 page)

‘(1) That a strong and efficient Second Chamber is not merely an integral part of the British Constitution, but is necessary to the well-being of the State, and to the balance of Parliament.

‘(2) That such a chamber can best be obtained by the reform and reconstitution of the House of Lords.

‘(3) That a necessary preliminary of such reform and reconstitution is the acceptance of the principle that the possession of a peerage should no longer of itself give the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.'

The debate on these resolutions began on March 14. Rosebery
himself led off with a speech of great oratorical distinction. He praised the House of Lords both because of its deliberative qualities and because it could claim to be the direct lineal descendant of the Witenagemot. But on the other hand there were the insuperable objections of Scotland and the North of England to the hereditary principle and a majority of 125 in the other place bent on the destruction of the existing chamber. The peers must act first, so that an Upper House able to see ‘that the voice of the people should be deliberate' remained in being. He proposed that there should be an elected element in the new House, and that it should be chosen by corporations and county councils, existing members of the House being eligible for election. ‘I believe that at this critical moment,' he concluded, ‘you have an opportunity of rendering your country a greater service than has fallen to any body of men since the Barons wrested the liberties of England from King John at Runnymede.… What is the alternative? The alternative is to cling with enfeebled grasp to privileges which have become unpopular, to powers which are verging on the obsolete, shrinking and shrinking until at last, under the unsparing hands of the advocates of single-Chamber Government, there may arise a demand for your own extinction, and the Second Chamber, the ancient House of Lords, may be found waiting in decrepitude for its doom.'
^d

Support for Rosebery, varying greatly both in its enthusiasm and in the assumptions on which the speakers were acting, came from Curzon, Salisbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Newton, Cawdor, Cromer, and Lansdowne. Curzon was probably the most enthusiastic, although he thought that Rosebery had over-stated the case against the hereditary principle and claimed that ‘in India the House of
Lords was regarded with enormous veneration and respect, largely because its composition rested on a basis familiar throughout Indian society'. The Archbishop set the tone for a rather condescending speech by telling their lordships that his title to sit in the House was 600 years older than that of any hereditary peer. In the quarrel between the Lords and the Government there had been exaggeration on both sides. Rosebery's proposals, ‘got into shape', should produce the adjustment necessary to relieve the strain. The bishops were ready to help. It all sounded very easy.

Cawdor devoted most of his speech in favour of a new House of Lords to defending the existing one. On Home Rule, the Education Bill, the Licensing Bill, and the Budget it had represented the mind of the people far better than had the Commons. His conclusion did not seem to follow very obviously from his premises. Salisbury was another rather static reformer. The character and reputation of the House of Commons had declined, and so had the independence of its members. But in the House of Lords there was perfect independence (a perfection which was somewhat blemished, however, by Crewe's reminder that the only Scottish representative peer
¹
who had voted for the Budget had been deprived of his seat). The hereditary principle had the merit of ‘trusting a man because of his sense of public duty; it meant that a man reverenced the example of his fathers and avoided prejudicing his son's prospects'. But some reform appeared to be necessary and the best plan was the selection of representative peers and the nomination of some members by the Crown. Cromer interpreted the ‘silent voters'—
ex hypothesi
a safe body of men to whom to attribute views—as being
frightened of single-chamber government, and insisted that a reformed House should have full powers over finance.

Lansdowne made the most important speech. He was in favour of going into committee, but reform must result in preserving the historic continuity of the House of Lords. He was not prepared to change its name, to renounce the hereditary principle, or greatly to reduce the number of hereditary peers. He was against election by the county councils or anyone else, but thought that a certain non-hereditary element might be secured by life peerages and by Government nominations for a substantial term. This speech greatly disappointed Rosebery.

‘I honestly think,' he wrote to Lansdowne. ‘that if you cannot go beyond the limits you laid down last night, the House of Lords plan will be stillborn. The great mass of the Lords are not solicitous about reform at all; if they must have it, they will go for the minimum, and it is the minimum which their leader offers and declares to be sufficient.'
^e

Two members of the Government—Morley and Crewe—took part in the debate. They were even less enthusiastic than Lansdowne. Morley thought that the changes proposed would not free the House of Lords from the imputation of class prejudice, nor did they contain any provision for removing or diminishing deadlocks. Crewe, with his usual good sense, said that 'the Liberals in the House of Commons and the country would believe that the object of the reforming peers was to consolidate the power of the Unionist party and to increase it by limiting the prerogative of the Crown. The real point at issue was the deadlock between the two Houses, and any considerable reform must destroy or weaken the unwritten understanding between them.' This was the essence
of the problem: a reformed House of Lords would inevitably destroy the constitutional safety-valve of large-scale creation, and the Unionist reformers, who from almost every other point of view were perfectly satisfied with the existing chamber, were urged forward by the knowledge that this would be so.

Crewe's prescience, however, did not lead him to oppose Rosebery in the division lobby, either on the motion to go into committee or on the substantive resolutions. This task was left to Lord Halsbury, who could be depended upon, rather like a comedian achieving his laughs by the repetition of a well-known series of catch-phrases, to put up his standard performance of opposition to all change. ‘It was impossible to make an institution more practically useful for its purpose than the present House,' he declared on this occasion. He was supported by one or two die-hard peers like Willoughby de Broke
¹
and Oranmore and Browne. But he divided only against the last resolution, and mustered a lobby of no more than fifteen. The Government peers voted with the majority.

Before the debate a private Unionist colloquy on the subject had been held at Lansdowne House, and Rosebery had stretched his cross-bench conscience to the extent of attending what was virtually a meeting of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet. Austen Chamberlain has left an account of what took place, which is notable chiefly for a statement of Balfour's putting the opportunist Unionist case with such lucidity that the elegant cynicism of his words was not obscured by Austen's rendering of them:

‘I agree with what I believe Austen thinks,' the account characteristically opens. ‘I dislike the whole thing. I
would like to leave things as they are if we could. I don't believe you can make a better House. But that is not the question. The question is: can you make a Second Chamber strong enough to stand and resist assault? Can you make such changes as will enable our men (surely Austen's phrase and not Balfour's) to fight with success in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland against single-chamber government? I don't think you can in our democratic days unless you admit an elective element, and although at first I thought the elective and non-elective elements would at once clash, and the remaining hereditary element be thrust out, I have come to the conclusion on reflection that this danger is not as great as I at first thought, and that such a House as we are discussing might stand at any rate for fifty years.'
^f

This suggests that Balfour had moved a little ahead of Lansdowne. And Austen Chamberlain, Walter Long, Curzon, and Akers-Douglas
¹
appear to have been with or in front of the leader of the party, with Salisbury, Midleton, and Lansdowne urging greater caution. In the event, however, these various currents of opinion became of little immediate importance. The spring recess, as we have seen, found the Commons with their veto resolutions complete and with the Parliament Bill given a first reading, but with no further progress made. Equally, it interrupted the Lords at a stage at which the Rosebery resolutions had been passed but when the moment had not arrived to give them more concrete shape. And before Parliament reassembled the whole political atmosphere had been transformed by the death of the King.

It was a comparatively sudden death, and for that reason it was all the more politically cataclysmic in its effects. On April 27, His Majesty had returned to London after spending most of the previous two months at Biarritz. After his return he had attended a performance of
Rigoletto
at Covent Garden, visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and spent a week-end at Sandringham. As late as May 5, he received the new Governor of New Zealand in audience. On that afternoon the first warning bulletin was issued. On the following morning he was up and transacting a little business. At 11.45 pm on that evening—May 6—he was dead.

Asquith received the news at sea. He had gone with McKenna, one of his closest friends in the Cabinet, on an Admiralty yacht cruise to Spain and Portugal. Near Gibraltar the first disturbing bulletin had been received. The yacht had been ordered to turn round and make full steam for Plymouth. Before reaching the Bay of Biscay the final news had been received. Asquith has recorded his thoughts that night:

‘I went up on deck, and I remember well that the first sight that met my eyes in the twilight before dawn was Halley's comet blazing in the sky.… I felt bewildered and indeed stunned. At a most anxious moment in the fortunes of the State, we had lost, without warning or preparation, the Sovereign whose life experience, trained sagacity, equitable judgment, and unvarying consideration, counted for so much. For two years I had been his Chief Minister, and I am thankful to remember that from first to last I never concealed anything from him. He soon got to know this, and in return he treated me with a gracious frankness which made our relationship in very trying and exacting times, one, not always of complete
agreement, but of unbroken confidence. It was this which lightened the load which I should otherwise have found almost intolerably oppressive: the prospect that, in the near future, I might find it my duty to give him advice which I knew would be in a high degree impalatable.

‘Now he had gone. His successor, with all his fine and engaging qualities, was without political experience. We were nearing the verge of a crisis without example in our constitutional history. What was the right thing to do? This was the question which absorbed my thoughts as we made our way, with two fast escorting destroyers, through the Bay of Biscay, until we landed at Plymouth on the evening of Monday, May 9.'
^g

The shock affected different people in different ways,
¹
but few in the world of politics were unmoved by it. And many much further away from the Throne were equally affected. The Victorian age had accustomed the British people to long reigns and to the occupation by their Sovereign of a dominant position in the family of European royalty. King Edward's death destroyed both these conventions. The Edwardian period, which in fact possessed little of that tranquil and assured dignity with which the personality of the monarch has since invested it, had shown itself to be but a brief epilogue to the reign of the old Queen. And King George was very different from his father. He had not been brought up to reign. He had lived, first as a naval officer and then as a
country gentleman, a life far removed from high politics. He was bored by foreigners, he disliked smart society, he had no interest in clever conversation. He did not inspire the German Emperor, as his father had done, with feelings which were a mixture of respect and resentful envy. He had not been, and was never to become, a leader of European society.

From the Prime Minister's point of view the most important difference between the new King and his father was the former's lack of political experience. In fact, King George had seen far more of state papers during his period as Heir Apparent than had King Edward. Perhaps therefore he appeared as a tyro more because of his unsophisticated mind and tastes than because of newness to the job. But whatever the reason it is undoubtedly true that Asquith felt that King Edward had been able to look after himself and find his own way through constitutional difficulties in a way that King George was not. However unlikely the principals, most Prime Ministers at the beginning of a new reign have half a desire to play the Melbourne.

It was therefore natural that Asquith, who, we have seen, had been in no hurry to tender unpalatable advice to King Edward, should have found procrastination given a new lease of life by the accession of King George. At one of his first private audiences the Prime Minister, as recorded in the King's own words, ‘said he would endeavour to come to some understanding with the Opposition to prevent a General Election and (that) he would not pay attention to what Redmond said.'
^h

This endeavour took the form of an approach to Arthur Balfour for a two-party constitutional conference. The suggestion was eagerly taken up by the Unionists—the
Morning Post
and the
Observer
had indeed advocated a move along
these lines within a day or two of the death of King Edward, and Austen Chamberlain had told Lansdowne during the train journey back from the funeral at Windsor that any further move by the Lords on the reform resolutions would be most unfortunate. Opinion on the Government side, not unnaturally, was less enthusiastic. The Nationalists (except, paradoxically, for O'Brien and his followers) were very restive, the Labour Party was suspicious, and Josiah Wedgwood
¹
led a mild revolt of advanced Liberals. But Asquith had committed himself with the King and was, in any event, firm in his own mind; and so the plan went forward. For six months the constitutional struggle retired behind closed doors.