The Proud Tower (72 page)

In the midst of tense maneuvering around the throne, King Edward suddenly and unexpectedly died. Extreme Tories claimed the wickedness of the Government had caused his death and regarded the Liberals as regicides. There was a general sense as of an anchor slipping away and of a recognized order of things gone. People somehow felt that the familiar royal bulk had stood between England and change, between England and outside menaces. A song sung by the charwoman in
Pelissier’s Follies
of 1909 was widely popular:

There’ll be no wo’ar
As long as there’s a King like good King Edward
There’ll be no wo’ar
For ’e ’ates that sort of thing!
Mothers needn’t worry
As long as we’ve a King like good King Edward.
Peace with ’Onner
Is his Motter
So God Sive the King!

When he died people expected times would now get worse. “I always felt,” said one Edwardian, “that he kept things together somehow.”

In verse for the occasion the Poet Laureate urged Englishmen to cease their “fateful feuds” and “fractious clamors” and declare “a truce of God.” In an effort to spare the new King a crisis at the moment of his ascending the throne, the parties agreed to try to reach a settlement in a Constitutional Conference attended by four leaders from each side including Asquith and Lloyd George, Balfour and Lansdowne. Through twenty-one meetings during the summer and fall of 1910 they discussed and bargained, tried out the idea of a popular referendum and came close to an agreement only to founder finally over Home Rule. The Conference at least demonstrated that the Parliament Bill itself was something less than a fundamental issue, but statesmen would not or could not disengage themselves from the combat. Lloyd George, who was nothing if not a realist, tried. Principles being now thoroughly muddied, he approached Balfour with a proposal for a Coalition which, being free of the pressures of party extremists on both sides, might solve both the Veto and the Irish questions. He did not really want creation of peers any more than Balfour, he admitted amiably, because “looking into the future, I know that our glorified grocers will be more hostile to social reform than your Backwoodsmen.” Since it is believed that Lloyd George made his first overture to Balfour without informing Asquith, it is possible he also had in mind ditching the Prime Minister as he was ultimately to do six years later. When Asquith was informed of the proposal he neither joined nor enjoined it but remained in the background, faithful to his motto, “Wait and see.”

Believing that the British system of government depended on the check and balance of two parties and that a Coalition was warranted only in case of national emergency, such as war, Balfour refused. He did not really believe the Liberals could force the King to give them the necessary promise and in any case he considered there was less “real public mischief” in the Parliament Bill than in the creation of peers. Further he believed that if sufficient Conservative peers abstained from voting, the number of new peers created could be kept to a minimum short of the “revolution” of a permanent Liberal majority.

When Conference and Coalition both had failed, a General Election once more was called, in December, 1910, the second within a year. With public apathy unshaken, the results, except for a Liberal loss of two seats, were identical with those of the previous election. The country, as Wilfrid Blunt wrote, “cares too little about abolishing the House of Lords to make a revolution for it.”

By judicious bullying before the election, Asquith had succeeded in obtaining the fateful promise of creation of peers from King George, who was confused by the conflicting advice and devious maneuvers of his advisers. The horrid prospect of England’s hereditary peerage submerged by a “battalion of emergency noblemen,” all Liberals, pleased no one and the prospect of the world’s laughter and ridicule even less. Nevertheless the Government went ahead partly because it was impossible to stop and partly because they believed that when it came to a test the Lords would prefer to lose their Veto than to be doubled by the middle class. At some undated stage in the proceedings Asquith drew up, or caused to be drawn up, a list of some 250 names for wholesale ennobling which, though it included Sir Thomas Lipton, did not altogether deserve Lloyd George’s sneer about glorified grocers. On the list along with Lipton were Asquith’s brother-in-law, H. J. Tennant, as well as his devoted admirer and future biographer, J. A. Spender; also Sir Edgar Speyer, Bertrand Russell, General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, the historians Sir George Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch, the South African millionaire Sir Abe Bailey, Gilbert Murray, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Hope, author of
The Prisoner of Zenda.

In February, 1911, the Parliament Bill was reintroduced in the Commons to the accompaniment of “a great roar of cheering which had in it not only a note of triumph but of resolution, determination.” “We are in grim earnest,” wrote Herbert Samuel, “and if the Lords reject the Bill, “nothing could suit us better.” Passed by the Commons in May, the Bill was duly sent for consideration to “another place.”

In June began the great transport strike which opened a new period of deep industrial warfare. It marked the change from individual “trades disputes” to action according to the Syndicalist pattern in which workers struck not against a particular employer but against a whole industry. Unskilled labour had become disgusted with the political methods which won them no wage increases and revolted against the leadership of the Labour party, which once inside Westminster had become absorbed in the parliamentary game, with MacDonald gradually displacing Keir Hardie. Mass labor wanted hard gains in more pay and recognition of its unions by employers. It was clamoring for direct action and growing increasingly aggressive. Assaults on mine-owners’ property had marked the strike of thirty thousand coal-miners in the Rhondda Valley of Wales a few months previously. Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, leaders of the first great dockers’ strike, in 1889, were now preaching the doctrine of Syndicalism derived from Sorel and the French CGT, which combined belief in revolution with trade unionism and rejected political action in favor of the final weapon of the general strike. Mann and Tillett succeeded in organizing thirty-six unions of seamen, firemen, cooks and stewards, dockers and teamsters into a National Transport Workers’ Federation. When shipowners refused to negotiate with it, the strike was called in June. It was to last seventy-two days and involve 77,000 men. As it spread from London to Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Bristol and Southampton, all traffic stopped in nearly every port and riots, looting and arson followed in its wake. “It is revolution!” exclaimed an excited employer to a Board of Trade official. “The men have new leaders, unknown before; and we don’t know how to deal with them.”

At this juncture, on July 1, the German gunboat
Panther
arrived at Agadir in Morocco, precipitating an international crisis which teetered for several weeks on the imminent brink of war. In August, in the midst of the crisis, four railway unions joined the seamen’s and dockers’ strike, threatening a total stoppage of all transport. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, supplied military convoys to keep essential trains running and sent troops to strike centers. There were inevitable clashes; soldiers in Liverpool opened fire, killing two strikers and wounding two hundred. For appealing to the soldiers not to shoot at British workers even if ordered, Tom Mann was imprisoned on a charge of inciting the troops to mutiny. Although the strike was settled on emergency terms, owing to the foreign crisis, others of equal intensity followed during the next three years. After the gunfire at Liverpool, trade-union votes turned increasingly toward their own representatives, ending the alliance with Liberalism. In the clang of the realities of class war, Churchill’s earnest plea to labour in 1908, “Ah, but we must have that support!” echoed now with the faint ironic note of a faraway horn. Dividing from labour, Liberalism’s road to the political wilderness was open.

Against this background, Coronation Summer, the hottest in a generation, bloomed in the golden fullness of an open rose. There were dinner parties and extravagant receptions every night, garden parties every afternoon, country house parties every weekend, glitter and picnics and fancy dress balls. Even the heat was “splendid—such a summer as comes seldom in England.” The Henley Regatta was held in ideal weather and clear days were on hand for every rite of the season, polo at Ranelagh, the Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lords, the Gold Cup at Ascot. Neither the prospect of war, a general transport strike nor even creation of peers could subdue the high spirits of the festivities. Newspapers used the language of crisis and indignant noblemen growled at “nothing short of revolution” but a guest came to a masquerade ball at Claridge’s flippantly wearing a peer’s mantle and coronet with “No. 499” pasted on it. Lady Curzon was crowned Queen of Beauty at a Tournament of Knights organized by Mrs. Cornwallis-West, Churchill’s mother, with tickets at £20 apiece. The Russian Ballet made its London debut at Covent Garden, Pavlova and Nijinsky danced at private parties, including one in a garden under a blue sky at Strawberry Hill, once the home and gothic extravaganza of Horace Walpole. Its new owner, Lady Michelham, owned nineteen yards of pearls and gave a dinner for sixty guests after the dance in the garden, at which the entrées were served in the form of lighthouses, lit up inside and surrounded by ortolans representing sea gulls with a surf of white sauce breaking over them. At a house party at Blenheim, the Duke, his cousin Winston, Neil Primrose, son of Lord Rosebery, and F. E. Smith played cards till dawn in a tent by candlelight on upturned barrels. “What shall we play for, F. E.?” asked Marlborough. “Your bloody palace, if you like,” Smith answered, although what he staked himself is not recorded.

Yet it was not the same, not the England of Jubilee year. The strikes were a reminder of the rising pressure of the working class, as Agadir was a reminder of the pressure of Germany. The assurance of a time characterized in English memory long afterward in terms of “the golden sovereigns, the sense of honor, the huge red blocks on the map,” was gone. The gaiety was “feverish,” the fancy dress ball of the season was given by F. E. Smith, not by the Duchess of Devonshire (the Duke had died in 1908), and in London the last horse-drawn bus had disappeared from the streets; motor-taxis, of which there had been none at the turn of the century, now outnumbered horsecabs 6,300 to 5,000.

The upper class still found life and each other immensely agreeable. At a party given by Mrs. Hwfa Williams and entertained by the wit of the Marquis de Soveral, the conversation was so generally enjoyed that the guests who had come to lunch stayed until one o’clock in the morning. It may have been enjoyment or they may have stayed from boredom, the boredom of having nothing else to do. The laughter, the fun, the practical jokes, the undeniable high spirits of privileged life of the time were the other face of ennui. The endless talk “at luncheon, tea and dinner, at dances and gatherings far into the night,” Masterman believed, was the talk “of a society desirous of being interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute conviction that it must ‘play the game,’ and that this is the game to be played.” They were “an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people … trying with desperate seriousness to make something of a life spared the effort of wage-earning.” Writing in 1909 he did not call it the boredom of peace, yet when he wrote of “the present Roman peace which has come upon the western races of Europe,” it was almost with a reluctant sigh.

During the first week of July the House of Lords amended the Parliament Bill so as to cancel abolition of the Veto and to except Home Rule from legislation which could become law without their consent. On July 18 Asquith officially informed Balfour by letter that he was in possession of the King’s promise to create peers, that the amendments were unacceptable and that he proposed to make a statement to the Commons that unless the Lords passed the bill in its original form he would ask the Crown to take appropriate measures. The Diehards flung themselves furiously into organizing resistance like settlers preparing a stockade against the Indians. “Let them make their peers,” declared Lord Curzon at a Diehard meeting, “we will die in the last ditch before we will give in!” To those who did not sympathize they were known as “Ditchers” thereafter. Among them were the new Marquess of Salisbury, his brother-in-law the Earl of Selborne, and, in the Commons, his younger brother Lord Hugh Cecil, Austen Chamberlain, George Wyndham and the two adventurers, Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith. During that hot July, Lord Willoughby de Broke worked feverishly canvassing all the peers, arranging meetings and obtaining speakers. On July 12, fifty-three peers including five dukes signed a letter to Lord Lansdowne stating that unless the amendments were retained they would vote to reject the Parliament Bill at its final reading “even though the consequence be the creation of peers.”

Balfour and Lansdowne, whom the King begged not to force him to the loathsome expedient, summoned a Shadow Cabinet of the Opposition of which a majority, though not all, were willing to follow their recommendation to surrender, that is, to let the Parliament Bill pass without a division, since to die in the last ditch, while upholding principle, would not prevent abolition of the Veto. Unless the Government were bluffing, the result would only be creation of peers
and
loss of the Veto. But the Ditchers were adamant. To call for a division, said Lord Halsbury, was his “solemn duty to God and country.” Assuming that the “Hedgers,” as the followers of Balfour and Lansdowne were now called, abstained, the Ditchers needed enough votes to outnumber the seventy-five Liberal peers. Willoughby de Broke believed he had sixty and hoped for eighty.

Once more a meeting was called at Lansdowne House in an effort to arrive at a concerted policy between Hedgers and Ditchers. Curzon had now come around to Balfour’s view but old Lord Halsbury grimly maintained he “would divide, even if alone, rather than surrender.” Balfour was urged to call another meeting of the Shadow Cabinet but he was becoming irritated and impatient with the “theatrical” attitude of the Die-hards, especially of the commoners such as Smith and Chamberlain. The most he would do was to write a public letter to
The Times
addressed to a “perplexed peer” advising the necessity of passing the Bill. The Ditchers replied that the Bill would establish Single Chamber government and they could not absolve themselves from responsibility “for a contemplated revolution merely by abstention.” As the climax of their campaign they organized a great banquet in honor of Lord Halsbury for which the demand for tickets exceeded the capacity of the hall. Amid gladiatorial speeches and toasts Lord Halsbury, appearing “very unwell, anxious and tired,” expressed the determination of his group to fight to the end and received a tremendous ovation. Lord Milner, whose “Damn the consequences” might be said to have started the train of events, was a logical addition to the company. Among other speakers Austen Chamberlain denounced Asquith as having “tricked the Opposition, entrapped the Crown and deceived the people.”