Mr Balfour's Poodle

by Roy Jenkins

  Yours sincerely,

  H. H. Asquithi

  The possibility of such an official communication had been discussed at the meeting between Lloyd George and the Unionist leaders on July 18. It was thought that an announcement of the Government’s intentions in this form rather than in the form of a public statement by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons might be less provocative to the peers. This view was further pressed by Lansdowne when Lord Knollys had called upon him on the evening of July 19. Lansdowne’s alternative plan that the King himself should write, through his Private Secretary, was rejected as inappropriate, but it was at the suggestion of the Palace that the Prime Minister’s letters were despatched.

  These letters may have reduced the provocative effect of the statement which Asquith subsequently made in the House of Commons (although, in view of the scene which then took place,1 this is difficult to believe), but they did nothing to ease the tensions of the Unionist meetings on July 21. The ‘rebels’ had already held a 10.30 meeting at Grosvenor House before those of their number who were summoned left for Carlton Gardens to attend the 11.30 Shadow Cabinet. Here a vote was taken, and what might previously have been disguised as a normal difference of opinion, natural to the successful functioning of any committee, became a dispute of climacteric importance, with every man forced to declare his position, with old loyalties broken and with new animosities aroused. Mrs. Dugdale, quoting from the diary which was kept at the time by J. S. Sandars, Balfour’s secretary, gives the alignment. In favour of resistance were Lords Selborne, Halsbury, and Salisbury, Austen Chamberlain (who, it need hardly be added, spoke for his father as well as himself), F. E. Smith, George Wyndham,2 who greatly felt the rift with Balfour, Edward Carson, and Balcarres,3 the Chief Whip. On the other side were Balfour and Lansdowne; Curzon, Midleton, Londonderry,4 Derby, and Ashbourne5 amongst the peers; and Bonar Law, Walter Long, Alfred Lyttelton, Henry Chaplin,1 Robert Finlay,2 and Steel-Maitland3 in the House of Commons. Akers-Douglas made it clear that he sympathised with the resisters, but voted with the majority out of loyalty to Balfour—a strong indication of the depth of feeling which separated the two factions.

  Lansdowne then returned to his house to meet the Unionist peers, about 200 of whom attended. He took a note of the proceedings, which his biographer thinks was intended for the information of the King. As a description of a meeting at which his own leadership was put to its greatest test, Lansdowne’s memorandum is frighteningly indifferent and detached in tone. His opening speech stressed the impropriety of not allowing the Lords to reconsider the bill after the Commons’ deletion of the original amendments of the Upper House, and then came very near to striking a balance between the arguments for resistance and those against. ‘Lord Lansdowne allowed it to be seen,’ he summarised his concluding passage, ‘that in his view the more prudent course might be to allow the Bill to pass.…’ He did not, however, ask the peers present to arrive at any decision, and advised them, on the contrary, to await the statement which would be made by the Prime Minister on Monday. He then went on to describe how Selborne, ‘in a speech of great force and earnestness’, had urged resistance; how similar views ‘were expressed by Lord Halsbury with great vigour, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, and in more cautious terms by the Duke of Norfolk’; how St. Aldwyn, ‘in a speech which produced a deep impression’, argued that the deliberate judgment of the country would be against a policy of ‘dying in the last ditch’; and how Curzon ‘spoke with much ability in the same sense’. He summed up by saying: ‘Lord Lansdowne is inclined to think that a majority of the peers present were in favour of the view which he expressed, but a large number not only differed but acutely resented the suggestion that they should desist until they were beaten in the House by H.M. Government aided by a reinforcement of Radical peers.… The peers referred to will, in Lord Lansdowne’s opinion, certainly not recede from their attitude.’j No vote was taken at the meeting, but other estimates put the number of ‘ditchers’1 present at fifty; the remaining 150, however, were less firmly attached to Lord Lansdowne’s point of view than the minority were to Lord Halsbury’s.

  In part this was because enthusiasm for moderate courses is always difficult to arouse. In part, too, it was because the ‘non-die-hard’ peers had been given no strong lead. It is difficult to disagree with the comment on the meeting of Lord Newton, who combined sympathy for Lansdowne with an informed but comparatively unprejudiced judgment of the issue.

  ‘The impression left upon me at this meeting,’ he wrote, ‘was that—for once in a way—Lord Lansdowne showed some slight deficiency in the art of leadership. He had personally made up his mind as to the course which should be followed, however unpalatable it might be to some of his followers, and it seemed, therefore, that he ought to have spoken with greater decision, and to have intimated that he would resign if his advice was not followed. Instead of doing so, he appeared to invite expressions of opinion, and the opportunity was at once seized by Lord Halsbury, Lord Selborne, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Willoughby de Broke to raise the standard of revolt…’k

  For his weakness on this occasion Lansdowne paid a heavy price in the ensuing weeks.

  After the meeting both sides, undeterred either by its being ate on a Friday afternoon or by the shade thermometer having reached ninety degrees, set themselves to a rapid work of organisation. On the official side difficulties arose out of the lukewarmness of Lansdowne, who was still disinclined to exert pressure on any peer, and the defection of the two Unionist whips—Lord Waldegrave and Viscount Churchill. These difficulties were swept away by the energy and determinaton of Lord Curzon. As has been seen, he was vigorously in favour of the utmost resistance a few months before. Once convinced that the threat of creation was a real one, he changed his position and advocated his new views with as much enthusiasm as he had shown for his old ones. Almost alone in the Unionist Party he stood out during this period as evidence against the truth of the lines of Yeats:

  ‘The best lack all conviction,

  And the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

  They could be applied only too appropriately to others upon that stage.

  What were Curzon’s motives? Some supplied harsh judgments: ‘… it was all snobbishness on Curzon’s part’, said George Wyndham. ‘He could not bear to see his Order contaminated by the new creation.’ But on another occasion Wyndham himself delivered another judgment which, by implication, was far kinder. ‘He is a fool,’ he said, ‘for he might have been the next Prime Minister.’l And to accuse a man as ambitious as Curzon of throwing away his chances is almost to compliment him. In fact, Curzon saw more clearly than most that further resistance could achieve nothing and would do great harm to the House of Lords, the Unionist Party, and the Monarchy; and he had no patience with those who were too stupid or too opinionated to see this. But he also believed, unlike Balfour, that he could make his views triumph over theirs. He had the intellectual arrogance and the conviction of personal rightness without which it is difficult for moderate men to achieve the force to be effective.

  The loyalist peers moved from Lansdowne House to a further meeting at Curzon’s home in Carlton House Terrace. Here a small committee was set up, which thereafter met daily under Curzon’s lead. It was known that the voices of prominent members of the House of Lords, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rosebery, St. Aldwyn, Midleton, and Cromer, would be on Lansdowne’s side, but the problem was to make contact with the ‘backwoodsmen’, the men who rarely came to Westminster, but who might be expected for the critical vote. This was approached from two angles. In the first place they were to be given as clear a lead as could be extracted from Balfour and Lansdowne. In addition they were to be canvassed by Curzon and his organisation.

  Balfour was the first problem. His views were broadly sound, but they had to be given greater force and greater publicity. To this end, Curzon, Walter Long, and Henry Chaplin believed that a full
party meeting might help, and pressed Balfour to summon one. The ‘ditchers’ were working closely with sympathisers in the House of Commons and it was therefore desirable for the moderates to rally their own supporters in the Lower House. Balfour refused, on the characteristic ground that such gatherings at a period of crisis always did more harm than good. Indeed he went further and restricted his opportunity for public pronouncement by cancelling a meeting which he was due to address in the City of London during the following week. On the Saturday, however, he wrote a paper for circulation to the other members of the Shadow Cabinet. This is so typically a Balfourian production, and sums up with such engaging frankness his views at the time, that it is worth giving in full, even though, at the insistence of one or two of his close colleagues, it never saw the light of contemporary day:

  ‘I am sorry to trouble my colleagues with any further observations on the Constitutional crisis; but I find that some who were present at the meeeting at my house on Friday last have formed a wrong impression of my position.

  ‘Put briefly, that position is as follows. I regard the policy which its advocates call “fighting to the last” as essentially theatrical, though not on that account necessarily wrong. It does nothing, it can do nothing; it is not even intended to do anything except advertise the situation. The object of those who advocate it is to make people realise what (it is assumed) they will not realise otherwise, namely, the fact that we are the victims of a revolution.

  ‘Their policy may be a wise one, but there is nothing heroic about it; and all military metaphors which liken the action of the “fighting” Peers to Leonidas at Thermopylae seem to me purely for Music Hall consumption.

  ‘I grant that the Music Hall attitude of mind is too wide-spread to be negligible. By all means play up to it, if the performance is not too expensive. If the creation of X peers pleases the multitude, and conveys the impression that the Lords are “game to the end”, I raise no objection to it, provided it does not swamp the House of Lords. All my criticism yesterday was directed against the policy of so profoundly modifying the constitution of the Second Chamber that it would become, with regard to some important measures, a mere annexe to the present House of Commons.

  ‘From this point of view the creation of fifty or 100 new Peers is a matter of indifference.

  ‘Let me add two further observations. I regard the importance attached to the particular shape in which the House of Lords are to display their impotence in the face of the King’s declaration, as a misfortune. The attention of the country should be directed not to these empty manoeuvres, but to the absolute necessity of stemming the revolutionary tide, by making such abuse of Ministerial power impossible in the future.

  A.J.B.’m

  This was dreadful. It was calculated to enflame the die-hards, discourage the moderates, and leave everyone convinced that the leader of the party regarded its crisis of decision as a foolish irrelevancy. So, at least, Lansdowne and Curzon thought. They were also greatly disturbed lest it became known that Balfour contemplated a limited creation with equanimity. This would destroy the whole basis of the Curzon campaign, for the resisters, who were great optimists in their own favour, would never believe that they were risking a full creation. Balfour therefore agreed to suppress the memorandum and the ideas contained in it.

  His next excursion was somewhat more helpful to the moderates. On Monday, July 24, Lansdowne wrote to every peer taking the Unionist whip who was not already pledged, to express his own view that submission was the better course and to ask upon what support he could count. ‘It is of the utmost importance that I should be made aware of the views of those Peers who usually act with us,’ the letter concluded, ‘and I should therefore be grateful if your Lordship would, with the least possible delay, let me know whether you are prepared to support me in the course which I feel it my duty to recommend.’o To follow this up, Balfour was persuaded, again by Curzon, to write a letter of support on the following day and to publish it. This took the form, to quote Lord Newton, of ‘a reply to a perplexed peer who required advice, and I learnt, to my surprise, that I had been selected as the imaginary correspondent’.o In it, Balfour committed himself quite firmly to Lansdowne and his course of action. ‘I agree with the advice Lord Lansdowne has given to his friends,’ he wrote; ‘with Lord Lansdowne I stand; with Lord Lansdowne I am ready, if need be, to fall.’p But he put forward this unequivocal declaration much more upon the grounds of loyalty and the need to preserve a united party than because it was overwhelmingly the better course. Indeed he repeated, in slightly less provoking a form, some of the arguments of his suppressed memorandum. The impression conveyed was that there was not a great deal to choose between the two alternative courses, but that, Lansdowne having decided in favour of one of them, it was much better to stick to him. Nevertheless, this letter aroused strong objection from Austen Chamberlain, who had assumed all the touchiness of a rebel. But some of his complaints were well founded.

  ‘I have read your letter with pain and more than pain.’ he wrote. ‘I think we have deserved better treatment at your hands. … I have discussed this matter with you in council of your colleagues and in conversation. Nothing that you have said on any of these occasions has prepared me for the line you have now taken up or given me a hint of your intention to treat this as a question of confidence in the leadership of either yourself or Lansdowne. On the contrary, you have repeatedly stated that this was a question which must be decided by each individual for himself. The crisis at which we have now arrived has been visible for a year past. We have frequently discussed it. Yet till this morning you had given no lead.…’ q

  Balfour replied that no issue of disloyalty to himself arose (it is almost impossible to imagine a letter of political disagreement to which he would not have returned this slightly weary answer), and with a tu quoque to the charge, which Chamberlain also made, that he had denounced the ‘ditchers’ rather than answered their arguments. This interchange of letters is interesting as an indication both of the personal irritation which had developed between the two sides and of the conviction that Balfour had shown no leadership which existed in the mind of even so naturally loyal a man as Austen Chamberlain.

  Lansdowne’s letter was something, and so was Balfour’s, but Curzon did not allow matters to rest there. He published a most cogent statement of his own position in The Times on July 24. He kept careful watch of the replies which came in to Lansdowne’s letter (more than 200 peers indicated in writing that they would abstain; about fifty replied that they would vote with Halsbury). And he wrote individually to many peers, couching his letters in far more persuasive terms than Lansdowne had felt able to employ.

  ‘Any vote that you can give now,’ he argued (ineffectively, as it transpired) to Lord Roberts on July 30, ‘can either produce no effect or drive into the Government lobby some self-sacrificing and conscientious Unionist Peer who will go so far as to vote for the Government sooner than see the peers created. That would be a lamentable result and we desire that no one should be placed in so invidious a position.’r

  On the rebel side the campaign was carried on with at least equal determination and, in most cases, much greater enthusiasm. Immediately after the Lansdowne House meeting a committee was formed with Halsbury as chairman and F. E. Smith and Willoughby de Broke as joint secretaries. The offices were deliberately shared between the two Houses, and in the next few weeks the die-hard members in the House of Lords worked far more closely with their sympathisers in the House of Commons than did their opposite numbers in the ‘hedgers’ camp. Austen Chamberlain, George Wyndham, F. E. Smith, and Lord Hugh Cecil were as violent in their attachment to the cause of the Upper House as was any peer.

  Willoughby organised a meeting at Grosvenor House1 on the Sunday afternoon and wrote to inform Halsbury, who had taken to his bed for the week-end, that they were to be at least sixty strong there, with another forty absent adherents. There was probably a meeting of the committee on the same day too
, for on the following day a scene which was both organised and without recent precedent took place in the House of Commons. Asquith was to outline the Government’s intentions on the motion to consider the Lord’s amendments. He was cheered by crowds in the streets as he drove with his wife in an open motor car from Downing Street, and he was cheered by his own back-benchers as he walked up the floor of the House of Commons. But as soon as he rose to speak he was greeted by a roar of interruption. ‘Divide, divide,’ was the dominant shout, but interspersed with it were cries of ‘Traitor’, ‘Let Redmond speak’, ‘American dollars’, and ‘Who killed the King?’ For half an hour the Prime Minister stood at the box, unable to make any full sentence heard to the House, and unable to fill more than a staccato half-column of Hansard. F. E. Smith and Lord Hugh Cecil were manifestly the leaders (Will Crooks, the Labour Member for Woolwich, proclaimed that ‘many a man has been certified insane for less than the noble Lord has done this afternoon’), but there were many others who took a full part. In a moment of comparative calm, Sir Edward Carson attempted to move the adjournment of the debate. Balfour sat unruffled in his place throughout these proceedings. He took no part in the scene, but he did not make any attempt to restrain his followers.

  At last Asquith gave up. With a remark about ‘declining to degrade himself further’, he sat down. Balfour followed and was heard in silence throughout his speech. He had begun with a very mild implied rebuke to those who had perpetrated the scene, but made no further reference to it. Then Sir Edward Grey rose. He had been subjected to a perhaps understandably hysterical note passed down from the Ladies’ Gallery by Mrs. Asquith, but it is not clear whether or not this was the decisive cause of his intervention. ‘They will listen to you,’ the note had run, ‘so for God’s sake defend him from the cats and the cads!’ This Grey made some attempt to do, and his performance satisfied Mrs. Asquith at least.