by Roy Jenkins
‘Arthur Balfour followed,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and when Grey rose to speak the silence was formidable. Always the most distinguished figure in the House, he stood for a moment white and silent, and looked at the enemy: “If arguments are not to be listened to from the Prime Minister there is not one of us who will attempt to take his place,” he said, and sat down in an echo of cheers. … I met Edward Grey for a moment afterwards alone, and, when I pressed my lips to his hands, his eyes filled with tears.’s
In Hansard,t however, the firm and clear-cut statement which Mr. Asquith recorded was lost in a column of repetitive, diffuse and inconclusive sentences. The speaker appeared to know neither what to say nor when to sit down. Perhaps in the actual performance Grey’s widely acclaimed gifts of character shone through and gave dignity to his intervention.
When Grey had finished F. E. Smith rose and attempted to carry on the debate. Not unreasonably, the Government back-benchers who had listened in silence to Balfour decided that this was too much. Uproar again developed, and after five minutes the Speaker suspended the sitting on the ground that a state of ‘grave disorder’ had arisen. Standing Order 21, under which he did this, had not previously been invoked since 1893, and a precedent for the refusal of a hearing to a Prime Minister could not be found without a much longer research.
The incident aroused great resentment, and not only amongst normal supporters of the Government. Even Lord Halsbury, we are informed by his biographer, took exception to the scene, ‘for it was as alien from his principles as it was temporarily damaging to his cause’.u The Times, Daily Telegraph, and some leading Unionist papers in the provinces delivered stern rebukes to the ringleaders,1 and a number of Opposition members of Parliament, led by Sir Alfred Cripps and Colonel Lockwood,2 sent a letter of apology to the Prime Minister. But the bitterness could not easily be undone, especially as those who had provoked the incident were in no way repentant. ‘The ugliest feature,’ Mr. Churchill had accurately reported to the King, ‘was the absence of any real passion or spontaneous feeling. It was a squalid, frigid, organised attempt to insult the Prime Minister.’v
Nevertheless, the die-hard movement as a whole was animated by a good deal of passion and some hysteria. The following extract from the diary of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt1 for July 25 gives a fascinating picture of the atmosphere of Boy Scout enthusiasm and breathless extremism in which much of the planning of the ‘ditchers’ was carried on:
‘In the evening just before dinner, I looked in at 44 Belgrave Square and found George Wyndham there with F. E. Smith and Bendor;2 all three much excited. “Here you see the conspirators,” said George. For some time past George has been organising a revolt against Lansdowne and Arthur Balfour’s management of the Tory Party in the matter of the Veto Bill, and yesterday they brought matters to a head by making a violent scene in the House of Commons and refusing to let Asquith speak. Hugh Cecil and F. E. Smith are the leaders of the revolt with George, Bendor has turned Grosvenor House into an office, where they hold their meetings, and they are to give a banquet to old Halsbury tomorrow as the saviour of the Constitution. They are all in the highest possible spirits at the commotion they have caused and consider they have forced Balfour’s hand.… The two others did not stay many minutes, and when they were gone George talked it over with me, promising an absolutely full account of it when the crisis should be over, but he had given his word of honour not to reveal certain things at present. Nevertheless, I gather from him that they suspect Arthur Balfour of having been all through in secret collusion with Asquith, and that perhaps now Arthur is in secret collusion against Asquith with them. It appears that just before the last election in January (sic) Asquith got the King to promise to create a sufficient number of peers to pass the Veto Bill, which the King promised, thinking the electors would go more against Asquith than they did. The King does not at all want to create the peers, neither does Asquith, though the King is in favour of Home Rule for Ireland. They hope the peers will give in without that necessity, and have been looking all along for a compromise, but the extremists on both sides will have none of it, and now George says the country is in revolt, meaning the Tories in the constituencies. “If we had given in without a fight there would have been an end of the Tory Party.” George thinks they have saved that at least. They are ready for actual armed resistance, or rather, they would like that. They have chosen old Halsbury for their nominal leader because of his great age (eighty-eight),1 otherwise there would have been jealousies. All the best men of their party are with them, including Austen Chamberlain, whom they did not expect. The only one who has disappointed them has been George Curzon.… George (Wyndham) thinks war with Germany quite possible,’ the entry rather inconsequently concluded, ‘and he wants it.’w
This willingness to put the issue to the test of violence did not find expression only in the private conversations of such an emotionally unstable character as George Wyndham. It also appeared in a letter which Willoughby de Broke wrote to Halsbury on July 28. ‘Anyhow,’ he concluded a passage suggesting that the right to sit of the ‘puppet peers’ should be challenged, ‘I put it to you that even if Lord Lansdowne opposes it, we shall at least have accepted Midleton’s challenge, and put ourselves right in the sense that we have used every weapon save personal violence. I should not be adverse to using even that!’x Willoughby’s opinion on this point gained sufficient currency for Lansdowne in his final crisis speech on the House of Lords to feel it necessary to raise the matter and deliver a rebuke. ‘My noble friend will think me a very pusillanimous person,’ he said, ‘but I confess that I prefer Parliamentary methods.’y It was a beginning to that Tory taste for violent resistance to disliked measures which was later to spread much wider in the party.
More immediately the ‘ditchers’ were concerned with counteracting the effects of Curzon’s canvassing and displaying their own strength. On the Tuesday a circular letter was sent out under the signatures of Halsbury, Selborne, Salisbury, Mayo, Lovat, and Willoughby de Broke. Perhaps because of the greater difficulty of drafting by a committee, perhaps because of a simple difference of intellectual power,1 it was far less lucid than was Lansdowne’s appeal to the uncommitted peers, Balfour’s letter to Newton, or Curzon’s to The Times, to all of which it was intended as a reply. ‘Should a General Election take place,’ it argued with a never wearying determination to demand another chance, ‘the Electors would for the first time have the opportunity of deciding between the alternative policies of reconstitution and revolution, and of expressing an opinion of the attempt to rob them of their constitutional right to give the final decision on grave national issues’. The crux of the advice given was as follows: ‘We do not believe that the credit of the Peerage can be as much injured by the number of new Peers which may be created, as it would be degraded by our failure to be faithful to our trust.’z
The display of strength took the form of the Halsbury Banquet, which was referred to in the extract from Blunt’s diary. This was organised with great speed. The idea appears to have originated during the week-end. On Monday the following notice was sent out:
Carlton Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
July 24, 1911
HALSBURY BANQUET
Dear Sir,
Viscount Wolmer, M.P., and Mr. Harold Smith, M.P., will be at the House of Commons tomorrow, Tuesday, with tickets for the Halsbury Banquet on Wednesday. Tickets can also be obtained by application to Mr. F. E. Smith at Grosvenor House by telegram or letter.
Austen Chamberlain
Edward Carson
F. E. Smith
George Wyndham aa
During the Tuesday applications for tickets poured in, and on the Wednesday evening 600 guests sat down to dinner at the Hotel Cecil.1 Selborne presided, and the other speakers were Halsbury himself, Wyndham, Milner, Salisbury, Austen Chamberlain, Carson, and F. E. Smith. A letter from Joseph Chamberlain was read. It was an occasion for unrestrained demagogy, and little of interest emerges from most of the
speeches. Austen Chamberlain’s was to some extent an exception.1 He was, by virtue of his position in the Unionist hierarchy, the most responsible politician present, and he gave it as his considered opinion that the Government threats were still not to be taken seriously.
‘They have been playing and they are playing a game of gigantic bluff,’ he said. ‘They do not wish to create peers. Those peers will be an embarrassment to them in their creation and when they are created, and they have sought to believe themselves, and have induced others to believe, that no peers would need to be created. Even now the bluff continues, and in spite of the letter of the Prime Minister which tells us what the King’s undertaking is, it is sought to intimidate us by the idea that the pledges go far beyond any Mr. Asquith has pretended to have asked, still less to have received, and that the House of Lords will be swamped by these new creations because one hundred or two hundred peers are found to follow Lord Halsbury’s lead. I say that is bluff, and fraudulent bluff.’bb
Nothing would make the ‘ditchers’ look squarely in the face the consequences of their own actions. They persisted in believing that the only danger was that of a creation which would balance the number by which their own adherents exceeded those of the Government,2 and that—a curious logical position for such a self-righteous band—they could count upon enough Unionists abstaining with Lansdowne to make this number tolerably small.
At the end of the evening the enthusiasm for Halsbury and the cause he had come to represent was such that the banqueters wished to draw him in triumph from the Strand to his house in Kensington. The plan was abandoned only because his family feared the effect of the excitement upon his health. The fact that it was ever put forward shows how uphill must have been Lord Lansdowne’s struggle for the cause of dull reason.
Thereafter the revolt against the official leadership became still less restrained. Any suggestion that their movement was directed against Balfour and Lansdowne or was designed to deprive them of their positions was scouted by the rebels; but such denials are common form with political dissidents, and did not prevent the ‘ditchers’ from assuming most of the features of what would today be called a party within a party. ‘We have our meetings now not at Lansdowne House,’ Halsbury wrote to his daughter at the beginning of August, ‘but at Lord Leith’s1 and the Duke of Westminster’s, and we have our Whips. I enclose a specimen.’cc Nor was the importance of a separate propaganda appeal neglected. Special public meetings were organised at the Chelsea and St. Pancras Town Halls and at some places in the provinces; Halsbury and others attended and made appropriately defiant speeches. It was a deep and bitter schism, with both sides publicly proclaiming their respect for the motives and characters of the leaders of the other group, but with great hostility and unpleasantness present behind the scenes.
What were the lines along which the Unionists split so sharply? Almost all the obvious and attractive generalisations fail to give an answer. With a substantial part of the die-hard leadership provided by the Cecils, and with men like Bonar Law and Alfred Lyttelton firmly faithful to Lansdowne, it was hardly a case of the protectionists demanding resistance and those who were lukewarm on this issue urging submission; in any event the tariff question was much less in the forefront of politics than it had been in the immediately preceding years. Nor did the split occur clearly along any of the lines dividing the different economic interests which made up the Unionist party. With seven or eight dukes the ‘ditchers’ were rich in magnates, but they did not sweep the board in this category—how could they with Lansdowne leading the ‘moderates’?—as the anti-Home-Rulers had done in 1886. The country gentlemen were even less decisively on the side of resistance. Wyndham, as we have seen, was a violent ‘ditcher’, but he was far less typical than was Walter Long, who combined a general tendency to complain about his leaders with, on this occasion, an almost aggressive loyalty to their policies. Furthermore, the Chamberlains with their Birmingham business background (largely honorary in Austen’s case) might be on one side, but Bonar Law with the Glasgow business background was on the other.
Little help is given by considering the issue—Home Rule— which had dominated so much of the constitutional struggle. The fear that the Parliament Bill would make this a certainty may have made Sir Edward Carson a die-hard, but if so, why did it leave Lansdowne, whose political life had been largely shaped by his narrow and obstinate views on Ireland, or the Ulster landowner Londonderry, on the other side?
Was the split not perhaps a simple division between the clever and the stupid, with those who could think ahead leading the ‘hedgers’ and those whose mental processes were closer to those of bulls charging gates on the other side? This would be an entertaining theory and one containing a grain of truth, but not much more. On the die-hard there was no one, except perhaps for Milner, who did not understand English politics, of the mental calibre of Balfour, Curzon, or Lansdowne. The talent of the ‘ditchers’ was largely forensic, and clever, successful lawyers, as there are many examples to show, can be sparingly endowed with general intellectual equipment. But Carson and F. E. Smith, at least, were not fools, and Smith possessed a very cool head. Too much cannot therefore be explained away in this manner.
What then was the quality, the distinguishing quality, common to all the ‘ditchers’? It was that they were tired of the existing leadership of their party. Some of them had specific policy grievances, like Austen Chamberlain, who had spent the early part of the year suffering from ‘referendum sickness’. Others, like F. E. Smith, were made more hostile by cool personal treatment.1 Others, again, like George Wyndham, combined great personal affection for Balfour with mounting impatience at the loss of three successive general elections to the wretched radicals. It was inconceivable that rightminded Englishmen could award three successive victories to such a band of sophists and disrupters. It must be the Unionists’ own fault; the leadership must be to blame.
And everyone, whether or not they had particular grievances, and in whatever direction they wished to be led, felt the need for a firmer hand on the reins. It was not so much that Balfour was pusillanimous as that he was indifferent. It was not so much that Lansdowne was wrong as that he could not make up his own mind what was right until it was too late to influence the minds of many others. The crisis was therefore in the fullest sense of the phrase a crisis of leadership. The revolt grew out of the successive defeats to which the party had been led, it was fed upon indecision at the top in the spring and early summer, and its real purpose, however much its perpetrators might protest, was to put new men at the head of the Unionist Party. Balfour himself fully appreciated how much his conduct was directly under fire, and in the end ceased to be indifferent to this aspect of the matter at least.
‘Politics have been to me quite unusually odious,’ he was to write from Paris to Lady Elcho on August 10. ‘I am not going into the subject, but I have, as a matter of fact, felt the situation more acutely than any in my public life —I mean from the personal point of view. As you know I am very easy-going, and not given to brooding over my wrongs. But last Friday and Saturday I could think of nothing else: a thing which has not happened to me since I was unjustly “complained of” at Eton more than forty years ago! On Saturday the cloud lifted; yet it has not, and perhaps will not disappear until recent events are things barely remembered.…’dd
It was a deep and unpleasant quarrel which could so ruffle Arthur Balfour.
XIII The Issue Resolved
Confronted with this gaping split in their party, the Unionists’ leaders did what politicians in trouble have often done. They tried to bring together their own followers by launching a strong attack upon the other side. They tabled votes of censure in the two Houses. Both were in substantially the same terms, the exact form of that in the Commons being: ‘That the advice given to His Majesty by His Majesty’s Ministers whereby they obtained from His Majesty a pledge that a sufficient number of peers would be created to pass the Parliament Bill in the shape in
which it left this House is a gross violation of Constitutional liberty, whereby, among many other evil consequences, the people will be precluded from again pronouncing upon the policy of Home Rule.’
This motion was moved by Balfour on August 7. It was a delicate subject, but it did not call forth one of his most effective speeches. This may have been partly because the Unionists were uncertain of the gravamen of their charge against the Government. Was it that it was in itself wrong to advise the use of the prerogative to force through a keenly disputed measure, more especially as the points at immediate issue had arisen since the last general election? This was an argument which Balfour and his supporters (as well as Curzon and the others who spoke in the Lords on the following day) used strongly. But they also relied to a great extent upon the view that Asquith’s greatest sin was that he demanded and obtained a hypothetical undertaking from the King, so that the Crown was committed before the Bill had even received a second reading in the Commons, and long before the final form of the dispute could be envisaged. This has since developed into a criticism that it was wrong for Asquith to seek any advance understanding because he should not have doubted that the King would accept the advice of his Ministers when the moment came. This, says Lord Halsbury’s biographer, was the real infamy of the Government.a But it is a view which is manifestly incompatible with the first line of attack. Asquith could hardly be expected to be certain that the King would behave in a way which almost the whole Unionist Party professed to believe was unconstitutional. Some of Balfour’s unease therefore came from the attempt to ride two rather ill-matched horses.
