The remainder of an often stormy three days’ debate was chiefly notable for Balfour’s wonderfully arrogant charge that the Prime Minister, who was in fact at his wits’ end to show the country a few worth-while Acts, framed his legislative proposals for the express purpose of getting them rejected,1 and for a sustained piece of invective from Lloyd George, in which he showed that he had not taken too seriously previous royal warnings about the violence of his language on the subject.2 Mr. Churchill3 added his conviction that the House of Lords was ‘a one-sided, hereditary, unprized, unrepresentative, irresponsible absentee’.
This was all very good in its way and may well have given some satisfaction to angry Liberal supporters in the country; but no such debate and no resolution would of itself do anything to bring the ending of the veto a day nearer. Was it the intention of the Prime Minister to press on with an attempt to place his plan on the statute book, if need be (and need there certainly would have been) dissolving on the issue? Nothing could have been expected in the session of 1907, but 1908 would have brought new opportunities. Why were they not taken? Mr. Spender has told us that in the autumn of 1907 the Prime Minister saw only two courses before the Government, ‘either to accept these conditions (a veto on all major aspects of Liberal policy) and be content with the minor legislation and administrative changes which were within the boundaries imposed by the House of Lords, or to go boldly forward and challenge that House. Campbell-Bannerman,’ Spender added, ‘was never in doubt about the choice between those alternatives. Submission, he believed would be death to Liberalism; and a long term of inglorious office on the sufferance of the House of Lords was the last thing that he contemplated either for himself or his Government.’q
Professor Emily Allyn also assumes that the Prime Minister was all for immediate and decisive action, and writes: ‘The failure to take further action … was due in part, doubtless, to differences within the Cabinet; but the decisive factor was the illness and death of Campbell-Bannerman, and succession of Asquith to the premiership in the spring of 1908.’r
But the chronology of this argument is unconvincing. The Speech from the Throne at the opening of the 1908 session, which contained no hint of a Parliament Bill, was delivered on January 29, at the end of a week of preparatory Cabinets presided over by the Prime Minister himself, who had just returned from a convalescence at Biarritz. Although he had only another two or three weeks of active life ahead of him, his illness involved no period of gradual decline. During this crucial week, according to the testimony of Spender, ‘He seemed to have recovered all his old buoyancy and energy … he was ready for the fray and confident that the session was going to be a great one’s There seems no reason why, had he intended a Parliament Bill for this session, he should have lacked the enthusiasm to put it forward or the vigour to commend it to his colleagues. It is difficult to accept any conclusion other than that the Prime Minister intended to give the peers another year’s trial before attempting to proceed any further; and it follows from this that the retirement and death of Campbell-Bannerman and the accession of Asquith made no practical difference to the date on which the issue between the two Houses was finally joined.1
Nor did the change in the premiership make as much difference to the balance of political forces within the Government as, two years previously, would have been expected. Lloyd George may not have been in the true Gladstonian tradition of Campbell-Bannerman, Morley, Bryce, or Ripon, but he was certainly not a Liberal Leaguer, and his promotion to the Exchequer did much to counter any impression of a swing to the right which the change at 10 Downing Street may have given. For the rest, there were no sensational appointments. No attempt was made by Asquith to retrieve for Haldane the Woolsack which the ineffective Relugas Compact2 had failed to give him, and all Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet appointments, with the exception of Elgin at the Colonial Office (who was replaced by Crewe) and Tweedmouth at the Admiralty (who was replaced by McKenna1), were left intact. There were viscountcies, without change of office, for Morley2 and Fowler, and of the new appointments, that of Mr. Churchill to Lloyd George’s old post at the Board of Trade probably excited the most interest. His promotion to the Cabinet strengthened what can best be called the radical opportunist wing of the Liberal Party.
These changes occurred at the beginning of April. Campbell-Bannerman resigned on the fifth, and on the following night Asquith left for Biarritz, where he had been summoned to kiss hands against the unusually exotic background of the Hôtel du Palais.3 He was back in London on the tenth, and he drove from Charing Cross station on a fine spring evening, through the cheers of the crowd (which Mrs. Asquith hoped would not reach the ears of the dying ex-Prime Minister), to call upon Campbell-Bannerman at Downing Street. He had reached the highest post at the age of fifty-five, after twenty-two years in the House of Commons and a career of unbroken, almost inevitable ascent. His constructive intellectual equipment was certainly more massive than that of any Prime Minister since Gladstone, he was in the fullness of his great powers of physical resilience, and he was to hold his high office for a longer continuous period than any of his predecessors since Lord Liverpool. Nevertheless, perhaps for the very reason that his rise had been so inevitable, his formation of a Government marked no new point of political departure. He had been brought to office by no great victory at the polls—there were only a few bye-election defeats to welcome him—such as had heralded Gladstone in 1868 and 1880, or Campbell-Bannerman in 1906, or Attlee in 1945; nor by a great shifting of parliamentary forces, as with Lloyd George in 1916 and Churchill in 1940. There was nothing of political cataclysm in the air, nothing which could sweep away old barriers and give him new opportunities. He was circumscribed by the limitations which had beset his predecessor, and was prevented, partly by these and partly, perhaps, by his own temperament, from that feeling of impatience to put his hand to the plough and to strike out in new directions which was to be experienced most strongly by Lloyd George and by Churchill when they, in turn, ascended to the central control of affairs. The programme for the session was laid down. There was the Licensing Bill, there was yet another attempt at an Education Bill, there was his own Budget, already prepared, and which he himself was to introduce a fortnight later, and there was the Old Age Pensions Bill which sprang from it. And, most important of all, there was still the House of Lords. Whether it was to be in the sand or in a more fruitful soil, he could only, for a time at any rate, plough in clearly-marked furrows.