Asquith (40 page)

“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 24th
¹
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 Cowes 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

Crewe did better from the King’s point of view and talked of the latter’s “ natural, and if I may be permitted to use the phrase, in my opinion . . . legitimate reluctance.” But this was not enough for the King. He made Knollys write to Asquith on the following day asking if his “ reluctance ” could not be made still clearer. On the same day he made him write a letter to Churchill protesting against part of his speech in the censure debate, and send a copy to Asquith. Churchill , replied softly, although it was difficult to tell what he intended to be the effect of his assurance, that “ before making (the speech) I consulted . . . the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
^r
" But Asquith for once reacted with some irascibility. After the censure debate he travelled down to Wallingford to stay with friends and nurse the laryngitis which had attacked him, and Knollys’s letter was sent on to him there. It may be that this unaccustomed ill-health, occurring unpropitiously in the hottest weather for seventy years, with the shade temperatures over most of England exceeding 95
⁰
, gave an unusual edge to his reaction. Or it may be that he would in any event have regarded this further request of the King’s as entirely unreasonable. As it was, he covered the letter with a series of controversial annotations and sent back a strong reply to Knollys: “ I cannot give any countenance,” he wrote “ to the ‘ pathetic story ’ (in Lansdowne’s phrase) that last November the King was ‘ browbeaten ’ and ‘ blackmailed.’ Nothing of the kind happened.. . . ”
^s

The crisis could not have continued for much longer without an all-round deterioration of relations. Fortunately, it was all over within twelve hours of Asquith drafting this reply to Knollys. The final division in the House of Lords was taken at 10.30 on the night of August 20th. By a vote of 131 (81 Liberals, 13 bishops and 37 of Curzon’s Unionists) to 114 diehards the House decided not to insist on its amendments. The Parliament Bill was law; the need for creation had disappeared; the session was effectively over. The King’s complaints were dissolved in his sense of relief. “ So the Halsburyites were
thank God beaten.. .. and I am spared any further humiliation. . . .
^t
he wrote. The next day he left London to join the Duke of Devonshire’s shooting party at Bolton Abbey.

Asquith had written a laconic note to his secretary and sent it up with his reply to Knollys:

If the vote goes wrong in the H. of L. to-night the Cabinet should be summoned for 11.30 Downing St. tomorrow morning, and the King asked to postpone his journey till the afternoon....

If I have satisfactory news this evening I will come up for Cabinet 12.30; if otherwise by 11.30. My voice is on the mend but still croaky.
^u

Accordingly he returned to London at about the same time as the King’s departure. The fact that the long constitutional struggle had ended without the upheaval of a mass creation was as important to him as to the King; Asquith always preferred to achieve his radical purposes within a conservative framework. Still more vital was the fact that it had ended successfully. The struggle had consumed the best part of two years of parliamentary time. It had involved two general elections and the sacrifice of the vast independent Liberal majority of 1906. Not only the future legislative utility of the Government but its prestige and authority had become inextricably bound up with a successful outcome. And what was true of the Government as a whole was doubly true of the Prime Minister. From the time that the merits of the 1909 Budget had been subsumed in the wider question of the peers’ right to reject, the responsibility for the conduct of the battle had been overwhelmingly his. His generalship had not been without fault. In particular, his hesitancy between January and April 1910 had wasted much more than three months, for it prevented the issue being pushed near to a conclusion during the lifetime of King Edward. But on the whole Asquith’s slow moulding of events had amounted to a masterly display of political nerve and patient determination. Compared either with Lansdowne’s sullen lack of foresight or with Balfour’s casual indecisiveness, his leadership was outstanding.

The battle had been fought on ground particularly suitable to a display of Asquith’s skill. It had almost all taken place on the parliamentary stage and according to the classical rules of nineteenth century politics. Important new ground had been broken, but in a direction which would have been perfectly familiar to Lord Grey or Russell or Gladstone. Beneath that stage, however, and while the battle was
proceeding, new and potentially violent forces had been simmering away. One of them, symbolically, erupted as the issue of the Parliament Bill was being settled. The Cabinet for which Asquith returned to London on August 11th could not be a calm gathering of mutual congratulation. It had to address itself to a menacing dock strike and a still more threatening railway dispute.