Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
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Lloyd George was clearly a man with whom the Secret Elite could do business. By averting a national railway strike in 1907, he again attracted their approval. The Times called him ‘the greatest asset of the government with the commercial classes’,8 and he was subsequently invited to the state banquet for the visiting kaiser at Windsor Castle: a sure sign that his star was in the ascendancy.9
In April 1908, Lloyd George was made chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s first Cabinet, a remarkable promotion and one that raised his salary from £2,000 per year to £5,000.10 But was the rising star already in the Secret Elite’s ample pocket? Had they intended to destroy him, they could have done so several times over. By pandering to his many weaknesses and drawing him into a dependency, they did the very opposite.
Lloyd George harboured two serious cravings: a wealthy lifestyle and sex. Wealth and patronage the Secret Elite could provide in abundance, and he himself oozed the charm and dynamism, sometimes to the point of predatory insistence, to ‘conquer’ the opposite sex.
From his earliest days in Parliament, Lloyd George developed a taste for the ‘good life’. His source of wealth necessarily came from others. Early attempts at speculative moneymaking were generally a disaster. He had been involved in a Patagonian gold syndicate that failed to realise the expected fortune and is alleged to have tried to sell his shares to an unwitting investor after he discovered there was no gold.11 He progressed to the Liberal Party’s front ranks and dined with King Edward. With typical immodesty he wrote to his brother that he had made a favourable impression on the king.12 D.R. Daniel, a friend and companion in his early years, acknowledged that Lloyd George accepted funds from rich patrons without compunction. He stayed at the best hotels and dined at the best restaurants, had the most comfortable and most expensive seats reserved for him and expected to be treated as a … well, as a lord! It never seemed to embarrass him when he accepted favours. He exploited his wealthy supporters and they in turn fed his habit, knowing full well that there would be a payback.13
Lloyd George was constantly in trouble over his extra-marital relationships. Women were a damaging distraction, and fidelity was completely beyond him. His daughter claimed bluntly that he started having affairs soon after he was married.14 He blamed his wife Margaret for his serial adultery because she was reluctant to move from Wales to London.15 Lloyd George entered into relationships with scant regard for the women he left behind. His appendage was rumoured to be as large as his ego, but neither serve as adequate explanation for his sexual misbehaviour.16 And of course it landed him in serious trouble. As early as 1897 he was forced to deny the allegation that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a Mrs Catherine Edwards.17 Though that in itself would have meant his resignation from Parliament, he escaped being cited by her husband in court ‘in rather mysterious circumstances’.18 What these precisely were, we may never know, but ‘mysterious circumstances’ frequently surrounded him.
In 1908, scandalous rumours linked Lloyd George and Lady Julia Henry, wife of Sir Charles Henry MP, a Liberal colleague and millionaire merchant. The Sunday People inferred that Lloyd George managed to avoid being named as a co-respondent in the subsequent Henry divorce case because the injured husband had been bought off for £20,000.19 Lloyd George looked into the political abyss and saw the darkness of final rejection. He was obliged to sue the People to save his name. Matters were so critical that the errant husband had to beg his wife Margaret to accompany him to court. According to his son, the desperate Lloyd George promised her: ‘If I get over this, I give my oath that you shall never have to suffer this ordeal again.’20
He was represented in court by a team of legal colossi: Rufus Isaacs, the future Lord Reading and Lord Chief Justice; F.E. Smith, the future Lord Birkenhead; and Raymond Asquith, the prime minister’s son. Ranged against this venerable trio was one of the most formidable advocates of the time, the Right Honourable Sir Edward Carson, KC MP. Here was the man who had personally nailed Oscar Wilde to the public pillory, stripped him of any vestige of dignity, frozen the caustic tongue with which Wilde had taunted the aristocracy, and destroyed for ever that self-styled genius.21
On 12 March 1909, the hyenas packed the press benches in anticipation of a legal free-for-all that might end the career of the most high-profile politician of that period. How many former lovers would Carson cite to demolish the chancellor’s claims of innocence and fidelity?
What happened next gave rise to one of the greatest mysteries that ever surrounded the unscrupulous Welshman. Once Lloyd George had categorically denied the People’s allegations, Sir Edward Carson, representing the newspaper, did nothing more than ask a few meaningless questions. There was no cross-examination. No witnesses were called. The trial was over. Lloyd George had been raised from the edge of the abyss and retained his parliamentary office. Miraculously, he was deemed blameless. He had been grossly over-represented by the top legal brains in England, but to whom was Lloyd George forever indebted? The People had retained Edward Carson, the most expensive King’s Counsel in the land, yet he failed to present their case. Why? What powerful strings had been pulled inside the hidden chambers of the legal profession?
It is impossible to determine precisely the point at which the Secret Elite drew Lloyd George into their web, but by rescuing his career they protected their chosen man. The rising star was not allowed to fall. In return, they gained an asset of peerless value. His indiscretions had been so numerous and his dependence on their largess become so strong that had he wished to turn back, he faced political oblivion. There was no escape from the web they had woven around him.
Six weeks after his court appearance, on 29 April 1909 Lloyd George presented his self-styled ‘People’s Budget’ to the House of Commons.22 A means-tested old-age pension had been introduced 12 weeks earlier and additional revenue was required to pay for it. The pension, which ranged from one shilling to five shillings per week, was for citizens aged over seventy who were living in poverty. Some 30 years earlier, Germany had introduced a significantly more generous old-age pension. While the banner-headline of the ‘People’s Budget’ focused on social legislation, the £16 million shortfall in revenues was mainly caused by the additional spending on dreadnoughts. Much of the deficit that Lloyd George was trying to fill at the Exchequer was due to increased spending on defence.23 By deliberately including a land tax that infuriated the gentry, Lloyd George designed his budget to provoke the House of Lords. On 30 July 1910, he addressed a massed gathering at Limehouse and waded into the Conservative opposition.24 He directly attacked peers like the Duke of Northumberland for valuing land at 30 shillings an acre until the local authority wanted to build a school on it, whereupon the valuation rose instantly to £900 per acre.25 In October, he roused the massive crowds at Newcastle by lambasting the House of Lords as ‘500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’ and claimed that they were forcing a revolution which would be eventually directed by the people.26 Churchill also joined in the provocation, and Asquith did very little to control them.27
The bill’s passage through the Commons took over 70 parliamentary days but was finally passed on 4 November. The next hurdle was the House of Lords, bedrock of Conservative peers and hereditary noblemen. It should have been a formality because in over 200 years a finance bill had never been formally rejected in the upper house.
The great debate in the House of Lords lasted six nights.28 Their Lordships refused to accept the budget unless the country approved it through a general election. Uproar followed, but self-interest won the day. In his warped antediluvian approach to social justice, the gambling spendthrift Henry Chaplin MP, who owned some 4,000 acres of Lincolnshire, claimed that the old-age pension was ‘the greatest possible discouragement to thrift’.29 Alfred Milner deeply resented the ‘People’s Budget’, railing against the ‘utterly rotten and bad way of financing old-age pensions’ because the shortfall would come from ‘taxes raised exclusively from the rich’.30 H
e told an audience of Conservatives in Glasgow that its consequences were ‘evil’.
Consider Milner’s words carefully. It was not the building of warships, the preparations for war, the commitment to Armageddon he deemed ‘evil’ but provision for the most vulnerable elderly people in Britain. His philosophy was straightforward and absolute: ‘If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and damn the consequences.’31 This was Milner at his most revealing: ‘damn the consequences’, so reminiscent of ‘disregard the screamers’.
Lord Rothschild, who had vigorously campaigned for more dreadnoughts, also took up arms against the budget, denouncing it as ‘the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of property, of Monarchy, of Empire’ – in short ‘revolution’.32 Such were the values the Secret Elite wanted to impose on the whole world in the name of the extended British Empire. When news of the defeat in the Lords came through, the great ‘champion of the poor’, Lloyd George, was dining at Frascati’s, a top London restaurant in the Strand.
Having been subjected to bullying arrogance from their Lordships, Asquith threatened to reform the House of Lords and greatly reduce its constitutional powers. He dissolved Parliament and called a general election early in 1910. Recent by-election triumphs appeared to promise victory to the Conservatives, and their chosen government would have been led by Arthur Balfour and might have included Lord Curzon, Lord Lansdowne and, of course, though he professed no interest, Alfred Milner. At a stroke, all of the proposed legislation would have been abandoned and the business of governing returned to the safe hands of the natural elite.
Democracy dealt them a very different hand. In the ensuing election, the Liberals suffered serious reverses but held on to a majority, albeit of only two over the Conservatives, in a hung parliament.33 The Liberals survived in power thanks to support from both the emerging Labour Party with 40 seats and the Irish Home Rulers with 82. Asquith’s government now depended on the support of the Irish Members of Parliament, putting Irish Home Rule firmly back on the political agenda. There was frequent talk of Cabinet resignations, but none took place.34 Asquith had not formally asked the king to create new peers, and the Cabinet was unsure on how it wanted to limit the powers of the House of Lords. Should it be elected? Did they require a referendum? No one had a clear view, and there was little hope that King Edward would rescue them. He did worse than that.
On 6 May 1910, King Edward VII died of a bronchial complication that was in no little way caused by his gluttony, his overindulgences and his constant smoking. He was sixty-eight years old and had been on the throne for nine. His intimate association with the Secret Elite through Lord Esher, Lord Milner, Lord Lansdowne and others had guided British foreign policy into a very different twentieth century and done much to prepare the way for war. King Edward thoroughly disliked the constitutional change through which the Liberals claimed they were going to reform the House of Lords, and many Conservatives genuinely believed that Asquith had caused his death.
On 7 May, Alfred Milner and about 50 other peers took the oath and kissed the hand of King George V. A quarter of a million people filed past King Edward’s catafalque at Westminster Hall. It was widely rumoured in the Conservative press that when Asquith came to pay his formal respects, Queen Alexandra told him bitterly, ‘Look at your handiwork.’
Alfred Milner waited at Windsor to receive the body and attend the service at St George’s Chapel. He predicted that in the new reign of King George V the British Empire would either be ‘consolidated’ or ‘disrupted’.35 Milner knew that with Edward dead and the Liberals still in power, the Secret Elite were themselves in uncharted waters. Although they used corrupt politicians to their own end, men who would sell their souls to stay in power were abhorrent to Milner. Even so, he was a pragmatist, prepared to work with anyone who would advance the great cause of British-race supremacy. The spirit of the dead king was invoked in a carefully worded editorial in Northcliffe’s Observer. The editor, James Garvin, concocted a message from the grave calling for ‘A Truce of God’, as if the recently deceased king’s last message to his grieving people was a plea for national unity exclusively revealed in the columns of The Observer36 and blessed by the Almighty. His text ran:
If King Edward upon his deathbed could have sent a last message to his people he would have asked us to lay party politics aside, to sign a truce of God over his grave, to seek … some fair means of making a common effort for our common country … let conference take place before conflict is irrevocably joined.37
Voice of the king? No, this was the voice of the Secret Elite.
A former columnist for the Daily Telegraph, Garvin had been handpicked by Northcliffe as the Observer’s editor. A true-blue Conservative and close friend of Admiral Fisher, Garvin was probably the last person to whom you might expect the Liberals to listen, but they did. With the approval of his Cabinet, Asquith called a ‘constitutional conference’ to see how far the two major parties might agree on a common approach and possibly even a coalition. A newspaper stunt was turned into a strategy, and it took 21 meetings of the ‘constitutional conference’ before the futility of such meaningless time-wasting was recognised.38
Lloyd George suddenly found he had a new message. A strident critic of the Conservatives in public, he became an advocate of compromise in private. According to Donald McCormick in The Mask of Merlin: ‘In honeyed whispers he was heard at the dinner tables of Mayfair to give the words “Coalition Government” a melodious and seductive air.’39 He held private meetings with Arthur Balfour that had to be kept secret even from his own Cabinet colleagues. Lloyd George was apparently prepared to concede a stronger navy, accept compulsory military service and agree a compromise on Irish Home Rule. It was a betrayal of virtually everything he had originally stood for, a betrayal of the wishes of the majority of the British people and a betrayal of his party. It did, however, safeguard his own position.
On 17 August 1910, he produced 29 pages of typescript that set out the case for a coalition government to ‘unite the resources of the two parties’.40 He proposed a formal alliance between Liberals and Conservatives that would have unquestionably sunk the constitutional reform. Britain, he argued, faced imminent impoverishment if not insolvency. Well, he was chancellor and would have had access to the Treasury figures. Despite the country’s empty coffers, he proposed expensive compulsory military training. What? The great Liberal radical proposing conscription by any other name? The Conservatives would never have dared to go to the polls advocating this policy no matter how much they wanted to. It would have been electoral suicide. But Lloyd George? If anyone could convince the country, it was him. His memorandum did insist on the passage of bills already proposed for land, unemployment and insurance, but his view on constitutional reform and the Irish Question, especially the Irish Question, were stumbling blocks. Finally, he turned his attention to ‘imperial problems’, and his suggestions could have been written by Alfred Milner himself. Perhaps they were, for they read like a Round Table script. He advocated ‘schemes for uniting together the Empire and utilizing and concentrating its resources for defence as for commerce’.41 The rising star was now very firmly in the pocket of the Secret Elite.
Lloyd George’s new ‘philosophy’, if indeed it was ever his, was a hybrid collection of ideas that would never have been acceptable to true Liberals. Obliged by the command of King George V to cut short a holiday in Austria, he shared his memorandum with the king at Balmoral before he had given his own prime minister sight of the document.42 When he returned to his Welsh home, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine immediately joined him. Churchill, of course, was more interested in what post Lloyd George had proposed for him than any other consideration.
Contemporary observers were concerned and perplexed. Charles Hobhouse noted on 4 November 1910 that ‘curious movements were taking place. Balfour has been daily at 11 Downing Street [the chancellor of the Exchequer’s abode] for
the last fortnight’ and the details he wrote in his diary stated that a plan was afoot to defeat the government over the finance bill so that ‘Balfour would become Prime Minister with Lloyd George as second-in-command’.43
Asquith should have quashed such disloyal behaviour, and it is absolutely untrue that he would have accepted proposals that effectively removed him from the office of prime minister. Yet here we have a new phenomenon: Lloyd George in furtive discussions with Arthur Balfour, the leading Conservative member of the Secret Elite.44
Like many of Lloyd George’s political intrigues, this came to nothing. His proposals reeked of desperation, and neither the Liberal rank and file nor the Conservative Party itself was ever likely to accept such cut-and-dried machinations. His less than subtle moves to oust Asquith were abandoned. On 28 November 1910, with deadlock and stalemate in Parliament, the prime minister dissolved it and called a second general election. The result was almost exactly identical to the election held earlier in the year.45 Yet again, the Liberal government could only survive with the help of the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists.
This time they took decisive action. A Parliament Bill removed the right of the House of Lords to amend or vote down finance bills and reduced their powers to reject legislation from the House of Commons. Asquith had been given a secret undertaking by King George V that he would create the required number of Liberal peers to force through the constitutional changes.46 With typical public-school bravado, their lordships opposed change from within by dividing themselves into two factions: the ‘Hedgers’ and the ‘Ditchers’. Surprisingly, the ‘Hedgers’ were led by Lord Curzon, while Milner, who championed the ‘Ditchers’, was actively working throughout ‘to incite as many as possible of the peers to vote against surrender’.47 The final vote in favour of change was passed by 131 to 114. The Secret Elite had to protect the king from the embarrassment of creating hundreds of new peers, and they did not want to see nearly 250 ‘glorified grocers’ inside their private chambers.48