Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  After this election the Government had no decisions of difficulty to face comparable with those which had confronted it eleven months before. The lines upon which it must proceed were clearly defined.

  Perhaps for this reason Asquith did not receive the same spate of advisory post-election letters from his colleagues. But there was at least one member of the Cabinet who did not let the occasion pass without setting down on paper his view of the future. In the re-shuffle following the previous election, Winston Churchill had been promoted from the Board of Trade to the Home Office. On January 3rd, 1911, he composed a long hand-written letter to Asquith. In the middle of this task he left for Sydney Street in the East End to carry out his famous direction of operations against the murder gang who had there barricaded themselves. The siege over, he returned to Whitehall to complete his letter, which lost nothing in verve as a result of the interruption. The political world was divided between those who did and those who did not believe that the Liberals were entitled to use the threat of creating peers. But Churchill was almost alone in wanting to carry out the threat:

  We ought as early as possible to make it clear that we are not a bit afraid of creating 500 Peers if necessary.... Such a creation would be in fact for the interest of the Liberal Party and a disaster to the Conservatives.... We should at a stroke gain a great addition of influence in the country. The wealth and importance of British society could easily maintain 1,000 notables—much more easily than 300 a century ago.

  The Parliament Bill, Churchill went on to argue, ought to be pushed through before the Coronation, which was fixed for June 22nd. And if it did not make proper progress “ we should clink the coronets in their scabbards.” But once it was through the Government should pursue “ tine politique d’apaisement.”

  “ Privy Councillorships to Bonar Law and F.E. (Smith); the order of merit for Joe; a proportion of Tory peers and Baronets; something for the Tory Press; and if you could find a little place for Neil (Primrose) it would please Rosebery in spite of himself.... We ought to pursue a national not a sectional policy; and to try to make our prolonged tenure of power as agreeable as possible to the other half of our fellow-countrymen.”0 1

  Asquith was by no means inclined to reject all these suggestions.

  1 Another point of interest in this remarkable letter was Churchill’s suggestion that he would like to see “ a provision enabling Peers to stand for the House of Commons on renunciation of their privilege, and its counterpoise, ministers to be allowed to speak in both Houses.”

  He gave both Bonar Law and Smith their privy councillorships in the Coronation honours (although not without a good deal of trouble with Balfour so far as Smith was concerned);1 he made two Tory “ press lords ” into real barons;2 and, although not until a few years later, he even found “ a little place ” for Primrose. But his attitude to the creation of 500 peers was quite different from Churchill’s. He both hoped and believed that it would be unnecessary. Indeed, immediately after the December election, he thought it quite likely that it would not even be necessary to make further use of the threat of creation. The Lords might accept the verdict of the electorate to the extent of offering little further resistance to the Parliament Bill. This hope proved unfounded, and it became impossible to achieve Churchill's aim of getting the bill through before the Coronation. Balfour, in January, was already prepared to accept the inevitable. But Lansdowne took a less clear-sighted view.

  1 Balfour wanted an undistinguished but hard-working Unionist parliamentarian, Hayes Fisher, to have the honour instead. After a good deal of argument both Smith and Fisher became Privy Councillors. Smith wrote to Asquith: “ I can only say that it is a paradoxical and singular circumstance that those against whom I have been fighting for fifteen years have paid me the greatest compliment I have ever had in my life; while those on whose behalf I have been fighting did their best to prevent it. You will I think believe me when I say that there is no one at present in political life from whom I would have valued this recommendation so highly as from yourself.” (Asquith Papers, box 13, ff. 24-5). This did not prevent Smith from playing a leading part in shouting down Asquith in a House of Commons scene six weeks later.

  2 Asquith had difficulty in getting any peerages through that year, for the King, who had said the same thing more mildly in 1910, protested strongly against any new creations while the issue of the 500 was still undecided. But he probably objected less to the Tory peerages than to the Liberal nominations. “ The King says he does not pretend to understand the logic of those people who while vilifying the House of Lords on every convenient occasion are yet apparently anxious to become members of that Body,” Knollys wrote to Asquith. (Asquith Papers, box 2, f. 151). But the King’s objection did not extend to “ steps ” for members of the Government. In the Coronation list Crewe became a marquess and Lorcburn an earl, both at the suggestion of the Palace.

  Another point of dispute between King and Prime Minister that year was whether Sargent should be made an O.M. The King successfully resisted the proposal. He admired Sargent neither as a painter nor as a man. (Asquith Papers, box 2, f. 211).

  He neither dug in for resistance à outrance nor prepared himself for retreat. He merely decided to stay where he was for as long as he could in the hope that delay might shift the dispute on to slightly different ground and enable the powers of the Lords still to be preserved. He started on a course which six months later was to lead both himself and the less blameworthy Balfour into a position of humiliating weakness; but in the meantime his tactic effectively prevented the Government making rapid progress with its bill.

  It took until May 15 th to get the bill through the Commons, the Government having to pick its way between more than 900 amendments tabled for the committee stage. The Lords, during this period, had been occupied with a Referendum Bill, introduced by Balfour of Burleigh, and with Unionist schemes for their own reform. They turned distastefully to the Parliament Bill in the last week of May, and proceeded after a three-day debate to give it a second reading without a division. But it was made clear that this emollient attitude was only a prelude to severe amendment in committee. Knowledge of the exact severity of these amendments, however, was not available until after a Whitsun recess lengthened to include the Coronation.

  This festivity therefore occurred at a moment of high party tension. Feeling at the time was much higher amongst politicians than amongst the general public. Lloyd George was booed on his way to the Abbey —but only by some of those in the stands reserved for members of Parliament and their families and friends. And when Asquith himself, a few weeks later, was involved in a formidable scene and shouted down for nearly an hour with cries of “ traitor,” it was in the House of Commons that this occurred. Even so, it is easily possible to exaggerate the degree of social ill-feeling which surrounded Asquith at this time— although the position became a little worse during the Home Rule quarrel two or three years later. Throughout the constitutional struggle the Prime Minister retained easy personal relations with the leader of the opposition, and close ones with other members of his family. Lady Frances Balfour drove over from Whittinghame to Archerfield for Asquith’s small birthday luncheon party in September 1910. And in May 1911, the Prime Minister did not hesitate to attend (although wearing nothing more exotic than a tail coat) a lavish fancy dress ball which F. E. Smith and Lord Winterton gave at Claridge’s and which was one of the most flamboyant events of that hot and fevered Coronation summer.

  The Lords returned to the Parliament Bill on June 28th and proceeded in six committee days to make a massacre of the Government’s intentions. On July 6th Asquith drafted a minute for the King saying the contingency envisaged in November was about to arise, that ministers would advise the exercise of the prerogative of creation, and that they could not doubt that in the circumstances “ the Sovereign would feel it to be his Constitutional duty to accept their advice.” This minute was shown to Knollys for the King’s information before it was approved
by the Cabinet on July 14th and formally submitted to His Majesty. The King made no substantial difficulty about accepting the minute, merely asking that the peers should not be created until the Lords, having seen their amendments rejected by the Commons, had been given an opportunity to reconsider their intransigence. Asquith agreed.

  From this point onwards the battle became an internal one within the Unionist Party. The “hedgers” fought the “ditchers,” the former advocating a retreat under pressure which would at least prevent the dilution of the peerage by a swarm of new Liberal creations, the latter demanding resistance at all costs. The roles both of the King and of the Government became rather like that of the German armies surrounding Paris at the time of the Commune. Their presence had precipitated the civil quarrel, but once it had started they became little more than onlookers holding their ground and waiting for the outcome. Occasionally however they were appealed to by the more moderate of the contestants and asked to strengthen their hand by some pronouncement of intention. Thus on July 20th Lansdowne wrote to Asquith asking if he could have by return a written statement of exactly what the Prime Minister proposed to do, as he had a meeting of Unionist peers fixed for the following day and wished to disillusion those who still believed that the Government was bluffing. There was no difficulty at this stage about secrecy, for a week earlier Bigge had telegraphed on behalf of the King urging a public disclosure of the position to Balfour and Lansdowne. He was now eager to make the threat as real as possible in order to avoid having to carry it out. Accordingly, Asquith on July 20th wrote identical letters to Balfour and Lansdowne:

  “I think it courteous and right,” they ran, “ before any public decisions are announced, to let you know how we regard the political situation.

  “When the Parliament Bill in the form which it has now assumed returns to the House of Commons, we shall be compelled to ask the House to disagree with the Lords’ amendments.

  “In the circumstances, should the necessity arise, the Government will advise the King to exercise his Prerogative to secure the passing into Law of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons; and His Majesty has been pleased to signify that he will consider it his duty to accept, and act on, that advice.”

  That seemed clear enough; and the fact that Asquith’s next appearance in the House of Commons provoked the famous scene of July 24th1 could be regarded merely as the yelping in defeat of some sections of the Unionist Party.

  1 The following description of the scene is taken from the author’s Mr. Balfour s Poodle:

  "(Asquith) 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.... 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. . . . 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 was 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. . . . When Grey had finished F. E. Smith rose and attempted to carry on the debate. . . . 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 ’ugliest feature,’ Mr. Churchill. . . . 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 (pp. 158-60).

  But a fresh point of doubt quickly arose. Was the creation, if it became necessary, to be on such a scale as to give the Liberals a permanent majority in the House of Lords or was it merely to be sufficient to close the gap between the number who persisted in voting against the Parliament Bill and the number who voted in its favour? In the latter case, assuming that the Unionist “ moderates ” abstained, fifty or at most a hundred new peers were all that would be necessary; and there were many, including Balfour, who were not prepared to regard creation on this limited scale as a disaster.

  There is no evidence that the Government, or the King, ever contemplated such a limited operation. Indeed, once Asquith had acceded to the King’s request that the prerogative should not be exercised until the bill had been to the Lords for the second time, it became an impracticable course. Had the Lords then insisted on their amendments, the bill would have been lost for that session. The Government would have had to start again in the autumn. In these circumstances they would never have been willing to embark on another circuit of the parliamentary course with a majority so insecure that it could be destroyed by a change of mind on the part of a few abstaining Unionists.

  Furthermore, Asquith already had in his possession a fist of 249 men of Liberal conviction whom he proposed to ennoble should the need arise.1

  1 The list, with certain annotations, is printed in appendix A.

  This number, while insufficient for the larger operation, was far greater than was necessary for the smaller one. And the calibre of most of the names on this fist did not suggest that he had scraped the barrel of possible Liberal nominees or that he would have difficulty in preparing a suitable supplement. This point about the size of the threatened creation was not finally cleared up until August 10th, the last day of the final debate in the House of Lords, when Morley, at the instigation of the King, read out a statement saying that “ His Majesty would assent... to a creation of Peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different parties in opposition by which the Parliament Bill might be exposed a second time to defeat.”

  In the meantime the disimion of the Unionists had proceeded apace. The “ ditchers ” or “ die-hards ” organised hard under the leadership of Halsbury, Selborne and Salisbury in the Lords and Austen Chamber-lain, Carson, F. E. Smith and George Wyndham in the Commons. All the other leading Unionists were in varying degrees “ hedgers,’'* but almost the only one who organised energetically for retreat was Curzon. Apart from the great bulk of the Unionist peers, who in the final division abstained with Lansdowne, Curzon persuaded a decisive 37 to follow him in voting for the Government. The bitterness to which these internal divisions led was at least as great as that between the two parties.

  While this civil strife developed, relations between the King and the Prime Minister, the two generals of the investing army, showed some signs of strain. As the issue moved towards its conclusion the King could not emulate Asquith’s calm passivity. “ The King has at present a rage for seeing people about the crisis,” Knollys wrote to the Prime Minister on July 23 rd, “ Lord Salisbury yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury today and he also wanted to see Lord St. Aldwyn, but he is out of Town.... These appointments are generally told me after they have been settled as my opinion about them is known.p At the beginning of August the King left London, first for Co
wes and then for Sandringham. There could be no more political audiences for the moment, but (through his private secretaries) he bornbarded ministers with letters. First there was a request that Crewe, who had been ill for several months, should speak in the Lords debate on August 8th and stress the reluctance with which the King had given the November pledge. This debate was to be on a Unionist motion of censure, similar to one which had been taken in the Commons on the previous day. Asquith, on this earlier occasion, had delivered a notable reply to the accusations which were levelled against him, but it had been insufficiently apologetic in tone to give much comfort to the King:

  I am accustomed, as Lord Grey in his day was accustomed, to be accused of breach of the Constitution and even of treachery to the Crown. I confess, as I have said before, that I am not in the least sensitive to this cheap and ill-informed vituperation. It has been my privilege, almost now I think unique, to serve in close and confidential relations three successive British Sovereigns. My conscience tells me that in that capacity, many and great as have been my failures and shortcomings, I have consistently striven to uphold the dignity and just privileges of the Crown. But I hold my office, not only by favour of the Crown, but by the confidence of the people, and I should be guilty indeed of treason if in this supreme moment of a great struggle I were to betray their trust. q