Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  The reason for this sharp reaction was that Churchill’s statement ran directly counter to Asquith’s tactic, which he continued into the autumn, of treating a peers’ rejection as quite unthinkable. “ Amendment by the House of Lords,” he said at Birmingham, “ is out of the question. Rejection by the House of Lords is equally out of the question.. . . That way revolution lies.” This did not mean that he was burying his head in the sand. He knew perfectly well that rejection was already more likely than not. Nevertheless, he thought that the best way to bring the constitutional enormity home to the country was for the Government publicly to stress its impossibility. Privately, ministers were more realistic. On September 8 th the Cabinet held a preliminary discussion about the consequences of rejection, and the Lord Chancellor and the Law Officers were instructed to go into the legal aspects. The Prime Minister reported to the King that in the opinion of the majority of the Cabinet “ such action on the part of the House of Lords ought to be followed by an acceleration of the Register, so as to secure at the earliest possible moment an appeal to the country. Churchill’s reaction had been no more than premature.g

  On October 5th there was a further Cabinet discussion on the subject, but on this occasion the approach was cautious. “ It was agreed that until the course of events shapes itself more clearly it would be premature to decide upon any definite course of action,” was Asquith’s report.h This may have been because he was to see the Kang at Balmoral on the following day, and was reluctant to limit his room for manoeuvre. At this audience he found the King, as he wrote to Crewe, “ in the most amiable and forthcoming mood.” His Majesty wanted to see the Unionist leaders and put pressure on them not to reject—a course to which Asquith gladly agreed. The King also wanted to know what he could offer them in return and suggested a January general election. Asquith disliked the idea and searched around for arguments against it. It would not, he thought, be of much attraction to Balfour and Lansdowne. They would have to fight at rather a flat moment. Furthermore, an election in the depths of winter was always inconvenient for both parties. There was the added consideration that the most likely result would be a close one, with the Irish holding the balance—“ a very undesirable state of things.” These were all arguments designed to appeal to the King, and it may well have been with the same thought in his mind that Asquith refrained from using the real one—that to allow the Lords to force a dissolution would be to grant them more than half their case. In any event, he succeeded in turning the King’s thoughts away from the idea.

  The meeting with Balfour and Lansdowne took place on October 12th. It served little purpose. The King had no influence on them, and they were less than frank with him. They told him no decision had been taken, which was formally correct, but in fact both the leaders had already decided in favour of rejection. On November 3rd the Cabinet held its first discussion based on the definite assumption that a rejection would take place. The preparation of a short Finance (No. 2) Bill dealing with the relatively non-controversial taxes was ordered. This was to be rushed through so as to legalise the collections which had already taken place and to reduce the financial dislocation. This bill was ready by November 5th. But it was never proceeded with. The policy upon which it was based was destroyed in a powerful memorandum which Sir Courtney Ilbert, clerk to the House of Commons, submitted to the Prime Minister on November 16th. To introduce a second bill, with some taxes cut out, would be to concede to the House of Lords the right to determine what financial legislation the House of Commons could and could not pass. It would also, Ilbert shrewdly added, going perhaps a little outside his clericly functions, give Mr. Balfour great dialectical opportunities. It would be much better to continue to collect taxes on the strength of the Commons’ resolutions and to hope for subsequent legalisation. " There are occasions,” he concluded, " when respect for the constitution must override respect for the law. This may be one of them.”i

  Asquith responded immediately to the force of this argument. At the Cabinet of November 17th the previous policy was reversed. When the Lords’ rejection took place there was to be no bill but an immediate dissolution of Parliament. But the policy on collection was to be more cautious than Ilbert recommended. Payment of the disputed taxes (including the whole of the income tax, which requires annual re-enactment) was to be purely voluntary until the new Parliament passed the Finance Bill, although the liability was then to be retrospective. The gap was to be filled by borrowing.

  At the next meeting of the Cabinet a week later the details of the dissolution were fixed. As an immediate response to the action of the Lords the House of Commons was to be asked to carry the following resolution: “ That the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provision made by the House for the service of the year is a breach of the constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.” This done, there was to be an adjournment on the next day. Prorogation was to be on January 8th, and polling was to begin on January 15th and be over by the end of the month. This programme was meticulously followed.

  A dissolution was of course inevitable once the Lords had performed the act of rejection. There was no dispute in the Cabinet about this. The legislature had refused Supply, and in these circumstances no government could carry on. This fact gave the full measure of what the Lords had done. They had not merely confronted the Government with the choice between an immediate election and acceptance of the loss of a particular measure, as they had frequently done before. They had left ministers with no choice, and had taken upon themselves the right of deciding when a Government could carry on and when it could not, when a Parliament should end and when it should not. It was a claim which, if allowed, would have made the Government as much a creature of the hereditary assembly as of the elective assembly.

  Yet what was the dissolution to achieve? No doubt it would force the Lords, provided the new House of Commons produced a majority in its favour, to accept the disputed Finance Bill. This in itself would hardly be a great victory. Even in their most arrogant moments the peers had never claimed a right beyond that of forcing a general election on a measure which they disliked. But would it enable a new and satisfactory balance between the two Houses to be struck? Would it open the way towards the legislative implementation of the Campbell-Bannerman resolution of 1907? Many enthusiastic Liberals assumed without question that it would. But their assumption was too optimistic. On November 28th Knollys, who was himself a Liberal even if not an enthusiastic one, had written to Asquith saying that “ ... to create 570 new Peers, which I am told is the number required, (to coerce the House of Lords) would practically be almost an impossibility, and if asked for would place the King in an awkward position.”j And on December 15th, after the campaign had begun, he sent for Asquith’s secretary, Vaughan Nash, and was still more explicit. “ He began by saying,” Nash recorded, “ that the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new Peers (say 3001) until after a second general election and that he, Lord K., thought you should know of this now, though, for the present he would suggest that what he was telling me should be for your ear only. The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords and he thinks that before a large creation of Peers is embarked upon or threatened the country should be acquainted with the particular project for accomplishing such destruction as well as with the general line of action as to which the country will be consulted at the forthcoming Elections.”k

  1 The number seemed to be rather volatile at this stage.

  Asquith had therefore to fight the campaign burdened by the knowledge that it could only be the beginning and not the end of the struggle, yet unable to share this knowledge at all widely. The burden was made greater by the fact that, in his opening speech at the Albert Hall, five days before Nash’s interview with Knollys, although after Knollys’s letter, he had made a statement which was generally assumed to mean that he had a far more satisfactory understanding
with the King. “ We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office,” he said, “ unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the legislative utility and honour of the party of progress.. . .” l

  In the circumstances it was not surprising that he sometimes showed a lack of zest during this campaign. It was not always so. His opening speech, before an enthusiastic Albert Hall audience of 10,000 was a great success.2 And at Liverpool just before Christmas he indulged in some brilliant sustained raillery at the expense of Curzon, who had been particularly orotund at Oldham a few days before. But towards the end he flagged somewhat. Churchill, writing a year later to congratulate him on his handling of the second 1910 election, ventured then to speak of his being “ far more effectively master of the situation and argument than at the January election.”

  2 Its most notable passage was that in which he expressly freed the new Parliament from the “ self-denying ordinance ” not to raise Home Rule which the Liberals had imposed upon themselves in 1906.

  As soon as the January campaign was over Asquith retired to Cannes, forgetting in his hurry to get away (what were his secretaries doing?) that he had an engagement to dine and sleep at Windsor. This solecism led both to the King’s displeasure and to some publicity, and could only be smoothed away by Asquith allowing the King to accept the excuse that he was “ completely knocked up by the election.” This statement was an exaggeration, but the very fact that it had to be made may have edged the truth a little nearer to it. For several weeks after his return to London on February 9th he exhibited less sureness of touch than at any other stage in the long constitutional struggle.

  1 Independent in the sense that they had broken with Redmond over what they regarded as his excessive subservience to the Liberal leadership. Their whole raison d'etre was therefore to be totally unreliable as supporters of the Government.

  The election result was not so bad as to be a debilitating shock to the Prime Minister. The Liberal losses were heavy—somewhat more so than the party organisers expected—and the great independent majority of 1906 had melted away. The Unionists gained 116 seats and became the majority party in England. Scotland and Wales redressed the balance. The shape of the new Parliament was:

  This gave the Government a normal majority of 112, which as Asquith himself pointed out “ compared favourably with the majorities which such statesmen as Lords John Russell and Palmerston considered adequate.” It was in fact the largest left-wing majority, with the solitary exception of 1906, since 1832. But it was not of course an independent majority. If the Irish chose to oppose the Government they could put them out. This was exactly the situation which Asquith had foreseen in his conversation with the King on October 6th. It may have been an unwelcome development, but it was not a surprising one to the Prime Minister.

  How cohesive was the new majority? Redmond was held to have made a threatening speech at Dublin on February 10th, and the Labour Party, at its Newport conference two days earlier, had spoken in an independent tone. The difficulty with the Irish was that they did not like one aspect of the Budget. They regarded the .£1,200,000 increase in the spirit duty as a blow at the Irish whiskey trade, and they were even more dependent upon liquor interests than were the Tories. But in the previous Parliament, while they had voted against the second reading of the Finance Bill, the shadow of the House of Lords had caused them to abstain on third reading. The two great issues of the day were the curbing of the veto and Home Rule. On both of these the Irish (and the Labour Party) were at one with the Liberals. This being so they had no basis of alliance with the Unionists and were most unlikely to wish to put the Government out. Provided it did not waver on these main issues and kept its nerve, the Cabinet could afford to be tough with its allies on matters of detail or precedence.

  In the early days of the new Parliament, however, the nerve of the Cabinet was far from good, and there was a real danger that it would be diverted from the clear issue of the veto on to the shifting sands of reforming the composition of the Lords. Asquith received a welter of conflicting advice from his colleagues. Harcourt was at this stage the most pertinacious in urging concentration upon the veto rather than reform. “We must stick tight to principles and not go a’whoreing after false constitutions,” he wrote on February 7th.m This was only one of a series of letters along the same lines which he wrote to Asquith at the time. Although, as was seen, Harcourt had not liked the Budget,1 on this issue he spoke for most advanced opinion in the party. Dilke led a deputation of thirty M.P.’s to the Prime Minister to urge concentration upon the veto; Sir Henry Dalziel, a prominent Scottish radical, threatened to put down a motion in the same sense; and the Irish and the Labour Party were even more restively of this way of thinking. But from within the Government most of the written advice leaned the other way. John Simon wrote to support Harcourt, but he did not become Solicitor-General until a few months later. On the side of reform were Samuel, Haldane, Churchill, and, most powerfully, Grey. Churchill’s view was largely based on tactical considerations. “ I would not myself be frightened by having only one (chamber) ...” he wrote on February 14th, “But I recognise the convenience and utility of a properly constituted and duly subordinated second chamber____The C-B plan will not by itself command intellectual assent nor excite enthusiasm. But even if by a dead-lift effort we succeeded in carrying it—which I gravely doubt—the work would remain unfinished. On the first return of the Conservative Party to power, the Lords would be reformed in the Conservative interest and their veto restored to them.”n

  1 Nor had he become any more favourable to its author in the interval. “ I found all over the country,” another of his post-election letters to Asquith ran, “ that all Ll.G.’s speeches and Winston’s earlier ones (not the Lancs, campaign) had done us much harm, even with the advanced men of the lower middle class.” (Asquith Papers, box xii, ff. 79-80).

  Grey’s view turned more on the merits of the matter. It is the constitution of the House of Lords, and not its powers, which is an anomaly,”0 he wrote on February 7th. Five weeks later he strengthened and publicised this view by telling a Liberal banquet that the country would not tolerate single-chamber government, and that to leave reform to the Unionists would mean “ disaster, death and damnation ” to the Liberals.?p A week or so after this, he wrote to Asquith saying that he thought he ought to resign. On receipt of this the Prime Minister for once showed signs of impatience with the Foreign Secretary, whom he normally regarded as almost beyond criticism, and wrote to Crewe: “ I have had a tiresome letter from E. Grey." 1 q But the matter sorted itself out. No sooner had it done so, however, than Morley was threatening to leave the Government, on grounds which were most surprising for such a determined old Gladstonian. “You all really mean the creation of 500 peers,” he wrote on April 14th, “ and have only wrapped it up out of friendly consideration for me. You had far better let me go.” r But Morley by this stage of his career—perhaps this was not the least part of his Gladstonian inheritance—rarely let a month go by without offering or threatening resignation.

  1 He found many of his colleagues irritating at this stage, and twelve days earlier he had written, also to Crewe, about a letter of Churchill’s, “ Yes—this is very characteristic, begotten by froth out of foam.”(Asquith Papers, box xlvi, f. 183.)

  Altogether it was a difficult early spring. The Cabinet was in confusion. The Irish were saying that they would not pass the Budget without a firm promise of a veto bill in the same session. And the Liberals were excessively sensitive to Unionist charges that they were buying office at the expense of corrupt concessions to Redmond.2

  2 Had this not been so it might have been possible to settle the matter by promising the Irish that the increased spirit duty would be dropped in the following year, a step which had in any event been made necessary by checked consumption and diminished revenue; but the Cabinet was against such a bargain.

  Immediately after Asquith’s return from the South o
f France the Cabinet tried to resolve its difficulties and prepare for the opening of Parliament with a long series of meetings. They met on Thursday and Friday, February 10th and nth, and again on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, February, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 19th. Then on the following Monday Asquith made his first, inevitably disappointing statement to the new House of Commons. “ I tell the House quite frankly,” he said, “ that I have received no such guarantee” —as to the creation of peers—“ and that I have asked for no such guarantee....”

  The Master of Elibank whom Asquith had just promoted to be Chief Whip3 4 described this speech as “ the very worst I have ever heard him make,” and added: “ In a week the Prime Minister’s prestige fell to so low an ebb that at one moment I despaired of his ever recovering it.”s On the day following the speech Asquith had his first post-election meeting with Redmond and found him “ cold and critical.” “He is not altogether his own master,” Asquith reported to the King, “ as the Budget is extremely unpopular in Ireland, and the O’Brien party5 are on his flank t.The Labour Party, however, Asquith found to be more friendly than he had expected.

  The result of all this was that when the Cabinet met on the Friday of that week ministerial morale was so low that some members thought immediate resignation to be “ the wisest and most dignified course.” But this was not Asquith’s view. He thought at this stage that the end might well be near but that the Government could not voluntarily go out until it had tabled its House of Lords proposals and received the verdict of the new House of Commons upon both these and the Budget. He had no difficulty in rallying the majority to this view. Indeed at this meeting the Cabinet began to recover both its nerve and its power of decision. The Master of Elibank, “ was instructed ... to inform Mr. Redmond that they were not prepared to give any such assurances (about a veto bill being enacted that year), and that he must act on his responsibility as they would on theirs.u On the following day the Prime Minister was able to report that it had then become “ the universal opinion that there could be no question of immediate or voluntary resignation.” The Cabinet even felt able to give up its bad recent habit of over-frequent meetings. It appointed a committee to draft resolutions which would expound its House of Lords policy and adjourned for eleven days.