The Proud Tower (69 page)

Balfour, following his uncle’s line of thought, feared that the Lords would let themselves be provoked into making mistakes. He at once suggested to Lord Lansdowne, Conservative leader of the upper House, that the Government’s strategy would be to send up bills with more extreme provisions than needed, trusting to the Lords to amend or reject them until they had built up a case against themselves. Then the Liberals would appeal to the country for a mandate to limit the Veto. Never before, he warned, had the Lords been called on to play a role “at once so important, so delicate or so difficult.”

The tone of debate in the Lords on the Education Bill showed no sign of caution and their temper was not improved when they received from the Commons a Plural Voting Bill designed to end the ancient usage whereby owners of land in more than one constituency had more than one vote. “Something will happen,” said Lloyd George almost visibly rubbing his hands. “There will be a great game of football on that field before long, I can assure you.” In December, fulfilling his anticipation and Lord Salisbury’s foreboding, the Lords threw out both the Education and the Plural Voting Bills. Significantly, however, they did not interfere with the equally, if not more, unpalatable Trades Disputes Bill, although the Liberals would have been only too pleased if they had. This bill, reversing the Taff Vale judgment, had been introduced in the Commons and passed against the real wish of the Government and over the objections of several ministers because of the pressure of Labour joined by the Radical members. “We could not resist the numbers pledged to it,” Haldane, the Liberal Minister of War, admitted. Cautiously steered by Lansdowne, the Lords let the bill pass because they did not wish to antagonize the working class and cement its alliance with the Liberals.

Making the most of the rejection of the other two bills, Asquith denounced the situation as “intolerable” and warned that a way must be found “by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives will be made to prevail.”

His challenge was explicit and the House of Lords was waking up. The home of England’s 544 hereditary peers, including twenty-two dukes, and of the bishops and law lords who sat with them was a high, dark oak-paneled chamber ninety feet long filled by two banks of red leather benches. Stained-glass windows held portraits of royalty since the Conquest. Walls and ceiling were thick with elaborately carved gothic molding and heraldic emblems. Between the windows, statues of the barons of Magna Carta, inadvertent founders of the parliamentary system, looked down a little grimly on what they had wrought. At one end of the chamber under a golden canopy were twin thrones for the King and Queen flanked by tall candelabra standing like guardsmen at attention. Below the throne the Lord Chancellor presided on the Woolsack, a square cushioned bench. Crossbenches in the aisle accommodated princes of the royal family and peers not affiliated with party. Sovereigns and judges in scenes from English history lent their shadowy presence in murals on the upper walls. The light was subdued, the general tone one of dignified somnolence.

Now the prospect of assault began to fill the benches usually sparsely dotted with forty or fifty peers. Lansdowne encouraged his followers to speak, paid attention when they did and supported their efforts with the gracious manner of the grand seigneur which characterized him. Lord Curzon adorned debate with speech “so infinitely superior to that of the ordinary peer that it is quite difficult to believe that he is ever in the wrong.” The Liberals’ new Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, lent an invigorating presence and paid the House the compliment of always being wide awake when he was on the Woolsack. He was the former Sir Robert Reid, known as “Fighting Bob,” a Scot, a famous cricketer who had bowled for Oxford, a Radical strongly opposed to the Liberal Imperialists and a “fiery orator” in the Commons who now lectured the Opposition “in tones that almost made the sinner weep,” and advanced “the most contentious proposition with the most entrancing plausibility.” In the rhythm of Gibbon and the gallantry of Lord Tolloller bowing to Lord Mountararat in
Iolanthe
, Lord Curzon acknowledged Lord Loreburn as “courtesy personified, persuasiveness incarnate and dignity enthroned.”

On the crossbenches sulked the Liberals’ last Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, who had resigned the leadership and as an Imperialist and opponent of Home Rule had announced, when C.-B. became party leader, that “emphatically and explicitly and once and for all I cannot serve under that banner.” Acknowledged since Eton days for his brilliance, wit and charm, Rosebery, having won the Derby and married a Rothschild fortune, was too used to success to be an accommodator, and remained—in Morley’s phrase—“a dark horse in a loose box.” When he sulked he could turn “an eye like a fish” on his friends and wither them with biting sarcasm; when he charmed he encircled himself in adoration. His variability caused the public to lose trust in him and recalled to A. G. Gardiner the story of a rustic who, being asked if Wordsworth was not very fond of children, replied, “Happen he was but they wasna verra fond o’ him.”

During the years of crisis over Home Rule, Rosebery had been leader of the movement for reform of the House of Lords by some modification of the hereditary principle and had three times brought forward proposals toward that goal in the hope that self-reform would ward off attacks on the veto power. The reform movement was now revived with Lord Curzon as the leading spirit. Even Mr. Churchill, who liked to have a hand in everything, contributed his suggestion in an article for the
Nation
entitled “A Smooth Way With the Peers.” He proposed a system by which peers should be appointed for each session to reflect the same majority as in the House of Commons at the time, not however to exceed 250. This would exclude the “frivolous, lethargic, uninstructed or disreputable elements.” Most of the proposed reforms contemplated some system by which the peers would elect from among themselves those specially qualified by ability or services. But many preferred the simple principle which once had moved Lord Melbourne to say he liked the Garter “because there was no damn merit about it.” Balfour sympathized. He advised Lansdowne to “avoid the fatal admission that the ancient ground of hereditary qualification is insufficient to qualify for the upper House. If it is not sufficient qualification it is no qualification at all.… I think it a fact that the accident of birth is more easily defended on what some people call its naked absurdity than birth plus services.” The Government did nothing to encourage reform of the Lords because it did not want them reformed; it wanted an issue and an excuse to limit the Veto.

Faced with these exciting possibilities Lloyd George became quite impatient with his constituents’ single-minded attention to Welsh nationalism and tactlessly told them, “I will say this to my fellow countrymen. If they find the Government moving its artillery into position for making an attack on the Lords, Welshmen who worry the Government into attending to anything else until the citadel has been stormed ought to be pushed into the guardroom.” The military language was curious and the speech so much resented that its careless author had to hurry to Wales to declare with hand on heart, “Am I going to sell the land that I love? God knows how dear to me is my Wales!”

In June, 1907, Campbell-Bannerman told the Commons that the time had come to challenge the pretensions of the peers, supported as they were by Mr. Balfour, “at the winding of whose horn the portcullis of the House of Lords comes rapidly down.” Lloyd George’s choice of metaphor was equally picturesque. The House of Lords, he said, was not the watchdog of the Constitution but “Mr. Balfour’s poodle.” C.-B. moved a resolution stating that in order to give effect to the “will of the people, the power of the other House to alter or reject Bills passed by this House must be restricted by law” so that, within the lifetime of any one Parliament, the final decision of the Commons should prevail. The Labour party immediately offered an amendment proposing to abolish the House of Lords altogether. In introducing a resolution rather than a bill, the Government’s purpose was clearly propaganda rather than action and after the resolution was adopted—without the Labour amendment—nothing further was done.

That summer the Second Hague Conference assembled. In April of the following year, 1908, C.-B., expecting death, resigned and died within a month. Succeeding to the premiership Asquith remodeled the Cabinet more nearly in his own image. Four of a very able group of under-secretaries were promoted to Cabinet rank, among them Walter Runciman, son of a wealthy shipowner, Herbert Samuel, son of a Jewish banking family and like Asquith a First at Balliol, and Reginald McKenna, son of a London civil servant who had taken a superior degree in mathematics at Cambridge. His appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in place of Lord Tweedmouth prompted Morley to recall that when he had proposed a certain name to Gladstone for that post in 1892, Gladstone with great solemnity and a wave of his hand said, “Well, for the Admiralty I think we require what is called a
gentleman
!” And “Here we are,” sighed Lord Esher, looking over the new Cabinet, “overwhelmed by the middle classes.”

The most important change in the Cabinet was Lloyd George’s promotion to fill Asquith’s place as Chancellor of the Exchequer while his own vacated place as President of the Board of Trade was filled by Winston Churchill, fourth of the under-secretaries to be promoted. Churchill’s career almost ended at this point when he had to fight a by-election at Manchester owing to a custom then in force which obliged an M.P. raised to Cabinet rank to have his seat confirmed by the electorate. In a hard contest, harassed by Suffragettes, Churchill lost, to the screaming delight of the Tory press. His defeat proved that the balance was already swinging back from the abnormal Liberal victory of 1906 and it made more urgent the Liberals’ need of the labour vote. At Dundee, where Churchill was immediately offered another seat, he insisted that only with the workers’ support could the Liberals have the strength to put their legislation through the House of Lords against the growing forces of Tory reaction. “With your support we shall overwhelm them.… Ah, but we must have that support.”

As it proved, none of the social legislation carried through by the energetic team of Lloyd George and Churchill was blocked by the House of Lords. A Coal Mines Act establishing the eight-hour day for miners, a Trade Boards Act establishing minimum wages for piecework in the sweated trades, a Workman’s Compensation Act establishing employers’ liability for industrial accidents and the Old Age Pensions Act were passed and the team began work on the National Insurance Bill for unemployment and health insurance which was to be the crown of the Liberals’ welfare legislation. None was obstructed by the House of Lords for the same reason that the Trade Disputes Act had not been. The oncoming conflict with the Commons, however, was not diverted.

All the challenges, resistances and emotions of the conflict were stuffed like gun-cotton into a new piece of legislation, the Licensing Bill. The darling object for twenty-five years of Liberal temperance reformers, mostly Nonconformists, who wished to reduce the drinking of the lower classes, the Bill was the Government’s election debt to the Nonconformist voters. It was designed to reduce the number of public houses by thirty thousand over fourteen years by canceling their licenses according to a fixed ratio of the population. Since the public houses were owned by the brewing and distilling companies, the Bill was strenuously opposed by the vested interests, not to mention the drinking public. Every property owner allied himself with the distillers; the Bill took on an aspect as sinister as Home Rule, as threatening as Socialism. Balfour declared it to be a direct attack on the rights of property and Conservatives responded to it much as the working class had responded to Chinese slavery. A special meeting of Conservative peers was called at Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square. The country peers, or “Backwoodsmen,” as they were known, who were never consulted on anything outside the affairs of their own counties, were summoned. Some had never spoken in the House, some had never even been inside it, and, mistaking Lansdowne House for the House of Lords itself, thought the Bill was being decided then and there. “Some of us … met each other fresh from the hunting field and were able to compare notes about the past season and discuss possible winners of the spring handicaps.” All agreed the Bill must be rejected, and “adjourned for a good lunch at the Carlton Club.”

In this case they had the country with them, as was shown in a by-election at Peckham fought on the Licensing issue. It turned what had been a Liberal majority of two thousand into a Conservative majority of the same amount. For the moment it was not popularity but the principle of the thing that concerned the Liberals. The high-handed disposal of the bill by caucus in Lansdowne House enraged them. In November, 1908, when the bill was formally rejected by the House of Lords, Churchill, “perfectly furious,” revealed in a private conversation that the Liberals’ answer had already been decided. “We shall send them up such a Budget in June,” he said, “as shall terrify them; they have started the class war and they had better be careful.” In fact the Licensing Bill had nothing to do with the class war, nor was it the class war alone, but the accumulating pressures of a new age which were the cause of Liberal discomfiture.

By 1909, the year of the great Budget battle, Liberalism had run into the realities of a world grown too difficult for the building of Jerusalem. The Liberal program was not winning the working class. On the contrary Labour and Liberals were drawing apart. Labour, impressed by the extent of its own power as revealed in the election of 1906, was becoming more aggressive; strikes had begun again as soon as the unions recovered their freedom of action by the Trades Disputes Act. Liberals of the employing class responded like employers. No pact operated now, and in two three-cornered by-elections in 1907 Labour won. The victory of Victor Grayson, a raving Socialist, in the West Riding of Yorkshire raised frightening prospects. A former theological student with a gift for oratory and a fondness for drink, he preached Socialism as the deliverance of the poor with a fervor that swept through the mill towns like fire. His wild antics in the House twice caused his suspension and attracted attention all over Europe. The Kaiser was reported to have proposed invading England with an Army corps or two, proclaiming that he had come not as an enemy but as Victoria’s grandson to deliver England “from the Socialist gang which is ruling the country.” In cooperation with King Edward he would dissolve Parliament and re-establish autocratic monarchy as a feudatory of Germany.