Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  A storm of anger burst over his head. He was denounced in the popular press, excoriated in private clubs, excluded from polite society. The leader of the Liberal Party, a former War Secretary, had appallingly defamed the British Army. Pro-Boerism had reached the point of treason. Obviously, this man could never become Prime Minister. Campbell-Bannerman did not flinch. Three days later he repeated his words in the House of Commons. He absolved the soldiers who carried out the orders: “I never said a word21 which would imply cruelty or even indifference on the part of officers or men of the British Army. It is the whole system I consider, to use a word I have already applied to it, barbarous.” The repetition inflamed both Unionists and Liberal Imperialists. Haldane rose to regret that the word “barbarous” had been used and to disassociate himself and his colleagues from their party leader. In the division that followed, fifty Liberals, including Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, abstained from voting. Three days later, Asquith gave his reply in a speech at Liverpool Station Hotel. “We have not changed our view,”22 he said. “We do not repent of it... and we shall not recant it.” Public dinners and counterdinners followed; one observer described this contest as “war to the knife—and fork.”23 A dinner for Asquith was planned; C.B. appealed to Asquith to postpone it and substitute a unity dinner over which he himself would preside. Asquith declined. Rosebery spoke at a luncheon, attacking C.B.’s “methods of barbarism” phraseology but not aligning himself with Asquith. “I must plough my furrow24 alone,” he told his audience. “That is my fate, agreeable or the reverse. But before I get to the end of that furrow it is possible that I may find myself not alone.” By the spring of 1902, Asquith and Rosebery still were apart, but both had repudiated Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership of the party.

  It was at this moment, when the Liberal future looked blackest, that Joseph Chamberlain shattered the Unionist government by proposing a duty on imported wheat. For three years, the battle over Imperial Preference dragged on, pitting Prime Minister against Colonial Secretary, spurring resignations and defections, accompanied all the while by Unionist losses in by-elections. By the autumn of 1905, there was little doubt that when a General Election was called, the Liberal Party would win. Arthur Balfour, politically weary and suffering from bronchitis and phlebitis, seemed anxious to go.

  The King let it be known that if Balfour resigned, Campbell-Bannerman was his choice. King Edward had not always felt this way about C.B. After the “methods of barbarism” speech, the monarch had asked Lord Salisbury whether the Liberal leader could be silenced. The Prime Minister replied that any attempt to do so would be unwise; it would be seen as Court interference in party politics. The King had to be satisfied with extending only the minimal necessary politeness when he and C.B. were forced to meet. With the passage of time, these feelings mellowed. The two men had similar tastes: both loved France and Paris; both went annually for a cure at Marienbad. It was in Bohemia that the King and the Liberal leader talked informally and the King discovered C.B. to be “so straight, so good-tempered,25 so clever, and so full of humor that it was impossible not to like him.” Campbell-Bannerman’s solid, unpretentious qualities were quite different from Balfour’s airy graces. In conversation, the King found Sir Henry to be “quite sound on foreign politics.”26 Above all, King Edward was a realist. For seven years, C.B. had been leader of the Liberal Party. It was plain that the Liberals were coming to power. The King would be dealing with Sir Henry as sovereign to minister; why not try to make him a friend? “I lunched with the King,”27 C.B. wrote to a friend from Marienbad in August 1905. “He said he was glad to exchange views with me as I must soon be in office and very high office.” The intimacy flourished: “about half my meals28 have been taken in H.M.’s company,” Campbell-Bannerman continued. “I think my countrymen [in Marienbad] were astounded to find with what confidence, consideration, and intimacy he treated me.”

  As the election approached, the only issues were the margin of victory and whether the Liberals, so long out of power, were ready to govern. Campbell-Bannerman believed they were and, while ready to accept the Premiership himself, was equally ready to step aside if another Liberal seemed able to provide greater harmony. For a while, in the spring and summer of 1905, it seemed that Lord Spencer, Liberal leader in the House of Lords, might be chosen. Dubbed “the Red Earl”—because of the color of his beard rather than the hue of his politics—he had had long service during the Gladstone years and his placid, undemanding ways seemed likely to offend the fewest in the party. Rosebery remained a remote possibility but his maverick political behavior had alienated him from both the leaders and the rank and file. In the autumn the breach between Campbell-Bannerman and Rosebery was further widened by their differing positions on Home Rule. Campbell-Bannerman advocated genuine Home Rule (“the effective management of Irish affairs29 in the hands of a representative Irish Authority”), albeit step by step. Rosebery rejected ultimate Home Rule in any form and declared in ringing tones: “Emphatically and explicitly,30 once for all, I cannot serve under that banner.”

  In the autumn of 1905, Lord Spencer suffered a cerebral seizure which ended his political career. Rosebery had removed himself from consideration. Campbell-Bannerman, the overwhelming preference of the Liberal rank and file, the clear preference of the King, was now the overwhelming favorite. Suddenly, new obstacles rose in his path. If C.B.’s ascent to the summit could not be denied, three men in his party meant at least to limit his power. Early in September, the three leading Liberal Imperialists, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, gathered at Grey’s fishing lodge at Relugas in northeastern Scotland to discuss the prospects of a Liberal government and their roles should one be formed. Their doubts about C.B.’s leadership went beyond their differences with him over South Africa. In Haldane’s words, “Campbell-Bannerman... was genial31 and popular and respected for the courage with which he had resisted the policy of the Government in South Africa. But he was not identified in the public mind with any fresh ideas, for indeed he had none. What was wanted was not the recrudesence of the old Liberal Party, but a body of men with life and energy and a new outlook on the problems of the state. At these problems some of us had been working diligently....”

  There was also concern about Campbell-Bannerman’s health and its effect on his capacity for leadership. On the podium, C.B. had always been dull; now, old and weary, he—and therefore the party—were certain to be minced in debate by the brilliant parliamentary skills of Arthur Balfour. Accordingly, the trio’s decision, which came to be known as the Relugas Compact, was to support C.B.’s installation as Prime Minister, but to make their support conditional on his leaving the House of Commons for the House of Lords. The party in the Commons would be led by Asquith, an acknowledged master of debate. This arrangement had precedent: Salisbury had sat in the Lords while Balfour managed the Commons; Lord Spencer, had he become Prime Minister, would have governed from the Upper House. The bludgeon to enforce the trio’s demand was powerful: if C.B. did not agree, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane would refuse to accept office. Assuming that Campbell-Bannerman would give way, the three picked out the offices they wished: Asquith would become Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Leader of the House of Commons; Grey would go to the Foreign Office; Haldane would become Lord Chancellor and preside over the House of Lords. Control of these three offices would allow the trio to dominate the government; the weakened Prime Minister would occupy a largely figurehead role. Before leaving the fishing lodge, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane pledged themselves to one an-other: unless C.B. went to the Lords, all would stay out; unless all came in together, none would accept office.

  The trio’s first move was to inform the King. Haldane visited the sovereign at Balmoral, insisting that his colleagues’ decision was based on concern for Campbell-Bannerman’s health. The King, aware that C.B. was not robust, accepted the wisdom of the new Prime Minister’s going to the Lords and agreed to suggest it to him. But King Edward objected to the trio’s threat to remain outside the
Cabinet. The government, he pointed out, would be crippled from the beginning and he, as monarch, would be in an awkward position. On November 13, Asquith confronted Campbell-Bannerman with the Relugas Compact. C.B. listened carefully. He was anxious, he said, to have Asquith as Chancellor and agreeable to Grey as Foreign Secretary, but at Haldane, he bucked violently. He blamed the suggestion that he go to the House of Lords on “that ingenious person,32 Richard Burdon Haldane.” He would go to the Lords, “a place for which33 I have neither liking, training nor ambition,” he said, only “at the point of a bayonet.”

  On Monday afternoon, December 4, Balfour went to Buckingham Palace and resigned. That evening, knowing the King would summon Campbell-Bannerman the following day, Grey called on C.B. and told him bluntly that he would not take office in the new government unless the Prime Minister went to the Lords, and Asquith—who, Grey said to C.B. was “the more robust and stronger34 leader in policy and debate”—was permitted to lead the Commons. Campbell-Bannerman was surprised, hurt, and indignant. Grey, he said later, had come to him “all buttoned-up35 and never undoing one button.” Grey explained his harshness as honesty: “I wanted him to know36 just where I stood and to feel that I was not suppressing in his presence things that I had said about him elsewhere.”

  The next morning, Tuesday, December 5, the King asked Campbell-Bannerman to form a government. During their interview, the monarch urged his friend to accept the proposal of the Liberal trio and take a peerage. C.B. was noncommittal. He told King Edward that he must talk to his wife, who was still in Scotland. On Wednesday evening, Lord Morley and Lord Tweedmouth, both about to enter the Cabinet, appeared in Campbell-Bannerman’s house in Belgrave Square. The new Prime Minister still was undecided. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was soon to arrive and Morley and Tweedmouth were asked to return after dinner. When they returned, they found C.B. exultant. “No surrender!”37 he cried. Lady Campbell-Bannerman, despite worries over her husband’s health and her jealousy of his time spent away from her, so loathed the Relugas trio that she had put her fears aside and urged her husband to remain in the Commons.fn2

  Asquith, informed of C.B.’s decision, immediately deserted his friends. “The conditions are in one respect39 fundamentally different from those which we, or at any rate I, contemplated when we talked in the autumn,” he wrote to Haldane. “The election is before us and not behind us.... I stand in a peculiar position which is not shared by either of you....” Asquith felt that if the trio refused to come in, “a weak Government would be formed... and the whole responsibility would be mine.” Having decided to enter the government, Asquith wanted his friends to join him and began doing his best to negotiate on their behalf. Grey and Haldane, weakened by Asquith’s defection, repledged to each other that neither would take office without the other. Grey was staying at Haldane’s flat in Whitehall Court, and when Haldane came home at six P.M. on December 7 he found Grey reclining on a sofa in his library “with the air of one40 who had taken a decision and was done with political troubles.” Neither had eaten and Haldane proposed that they go to the Café Royale, where they could take a private room, dine, and talk. Over a fish dinner, it became apparent to Haldane that Grey keenly wanted to find a way to back down and join the government. He could do so easily on his own—it was clear that C.B. wanted him—but he was refusing to ask for a place unless Haldane was taken, too. Haldane understood that the next move was up to him. Leaving his dinner on the table, he took a hansom cab to Belgrave Square. The Prime Minister was dining with his wife; Haldane was shown into the study. C.B. entered and Haldane said that he had come to ask whether Campbell-Bannerman still wanted Grey at the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister said that he did, very much. Haldane said that he thought that Grey would be willing. C.B. sensed the unspoken half of Haldane’s message and asked whether Haldane would consider the Home Office or the Attorney Generalship.

  “What about the War Office?”41 Haldane asked.

  “Nobody will touch it with a pole,” Campbell-Bannerman replied.

  “Then give it to me,” Haldane said. “I will come in as War Secretary if Grey takes the Foreign Office. I will ask him to call on you early tomorrow to tell you his decision which I think may be favorable.”

  The arrangement was made. Haldane returned to tell Grey. Grey agreed. The following morning he went to see C.B. and accepted the Foreign Office, which he was to hold for eleven years. During the two years of C.B.’s Premiership, Grey and Campbell-Bannerman worked closely together; the Prime Minister relied almost completely on the Foreign Secretary to manage the nation’s relations with other states. Before Campbell-Bannerman stepped down, Grey offered an apology for his earlier behavior: “My thoughts have often gone back42 to the days when this Government was being formed and I have felt from the early days of this Parliament that all my forecast before the elections was wrong, and that your presence in the House of Commons has been not only desirable but essential to manage this party and keep it together; and so it continues to be.”

  Haldane was the single member of the Relugas trio who did not achieve the office to which he aspired. (Eventually, in 1911, Asquith as Prime Minister appointed his friend Lord Chancellor.) In the early days of the new Cabinet, Haldane and Campbell-Bannerman avoided each other. C.B. spoke of his War Minister with disparagement. “Haldane is always climbing43 up and down the backstairs but he makes such a clatter that everyone hears him,” the Prime Minister said. “We shall see44 how ‘Schopenhauer’ gets on,” Campbell-Bannerman grumbled another time, applying his penchant for nicknames to Haldane, who was steeped in German philosophy. “Myself he did not like45 at first,” was Haldane’s way of putting it. “For some months he said nothing to me and encouraged me but little in Cabinet.” With the passage of time and mounting evidence of Haldane’s loyalty, hard work, and efficiency in the reform of the British Army, C.B. mellowed.

  The Liberal government which presented itself at the Palace on December 11 was studded with talent. Besides the Relugas trio, it included Morley at the India Office; Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade; Herbert Gladstone, son of the Grand Old Man, as Home Secretary; Tweedmouth at the Admiralty; and Winston Churchill, just below Cabinet rank, as Under Secretary for the Colonies. John Burns, the first workingman in English history to reach Cabinet rank, became President of the Local Government Board. “I congratulate you, Sir Henry,”46 chortled the delighted appointee when told that the post was his. “It will be the most popular appointment that you have made.”

  While the new ministers were at the Palace receiving their seals of office, a thick fog crept over London. When the ceremony was over, Grey and Haldane set off in a carriage down the Mall for their respective offices. Along the way, the fog was so dense that the driver was forced to halt. Haldane got out to see where they were and could not find his way back to the carriage. After a while, Grey stepped down and after prolonged wandering around eventually reached the Foreign Office. Haldane by “feeling among the horses’ heads”47 at last stumbled into the War Office, where he handed his seals to the Permanent Under Secretary and asked the tall ex-Guardsman on duty as a footman for a glass of water. “Certainly, sir,”48 replied the old soldier. “Irish or Scotch?”

  The following morning, the generals of the Army Council trooped in to discover what they could of the new War Minister. Haldane said that “as a young and blushing virgin49 just united to a bronzed warrior... it was not expected by the public that any result of the union should appear at least until nine months had passed.” Delighted, the generals passed this phrasing along to the King, who roared with laughter.

  Within a month of taking office, the new government faced a General Election. The campaign began after Christmas and polling took place over the last three weeks of January. The result was a Liberal landslide. Traditionally safe Unionist seats were swept away. Over two hundred Unionist M.P.’s, including Arthur Balfour, were defeated. The Liberal Party stormed into the House of Commons with 379 members, a clear majority o
f 88 over all other parties in the House. With the backing of 83 Irish Nationalists and 51 Labourites, Campbell-Bannerman and his fellow ministers could look down on a woeful Unionist remnant from a summit of 513 votes to 157.

  When the new Parliament met on February 13, Campbell-Bannerman seemed transformed. He spoke with an authority and dignity which surprised the opposition and delighted the hundreds of Liberal members crowded into the seats or jostling for standing room behind the Government Front Bench. A month later, when Balfour returned to the Commons, having found a seat in a by-election, the Unionist leader made the mistake of attempting to trifle with the sturdy Scot. Offering his views on a resolution favoring free trade, Balfour launched into one of his rhetorical performances, articulate, ambiguous, evasive, and, to both the hostile majority and its leader, patronizing. Grimly, Campbell-Bannerman replied.

  “The Right Honorable gentleman50 is like the old Bourbons—he has learned nothing,” the Prime Minister threw back at his predecessor. “He comes back to this new House of Commons with the same airy graces, the same subtle dialectics, the same light and frivolous way of dealing with a great question, but he little knows the temper of the new House of Commons if he thinks those methods will prevail here.... They are utterly futile, nonsensical and misleading. They were invented by the Rt. Hon. gentleman for the purpose of occupying time on this debate. I say, enough of this foolery!... Move your amendments and let us get to business.”