Mr Balfour's Poodle(24)

Whether or not the issue was decided, however, the campaigns continued unabated throughout August and September and into October. On September 4, Mr. Churchill was telling a Leicester audience that ‘the tax-gatherer would now ask, not what have you got, but how did you get it?’ On the tenth, Lord Rosebery, who had just resigned the presidency of the Liberal League, was making his second public attack on the Budget, and defending the dukes as ‘a poor but honest class’. A week later there began the Birmingham battle between the leaders of the two parties, when Asquith spoke to an audience of 10,000 people in Bingley Hall and an overflow meeting of 3,000 on September 17, and Arthur Balfour answered him at the same place on the twenty-second. Early in October there came Lloyd George’s great series of meetings at Newcastle-on-Tyne. But more and more the issue was coming to be, not so much whether the Budget was desirable in itself, but whether or not the House of Lords was entitled to reject it, and what would be the constitutional consequences if it did. And this was another story.





V To Reject or not to Reject


The peers had not rejected a Finance Bill for more than 250 years; and their attitude towards the Old Age Pensions Bill of the previous session had given a very recent indication that even in their most recalcitrant mood they went in some awe of the doctrine of Commons’ supremacy on money matters. It was not therefore surprising that during the early stages of the battle of the Budget there was no open discussion on either side of the possibility of a Lords’ rejection. The Annual Register recorded no reference to the matter before July 16, when Lord Lansdowne somewhat ambiguously announced that ‘the House of Lords would do its duty, but would not swallow the Finance Bill whole without wincing’.1 By August 9, with the Limehouse speech to encourage him, he was leaning much more openly towards rejection, and Sir Edward Grey, in a reply on the following day, summed up the position by saying that ‘Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne are keeping two doors open. They are debating whether they should pass the Budget or not. We know their wishes, not the extent of their nerve.’a By the time of the Prime Minister’s Birmingham speech on September 17 the indication that the Lords proposed to reject had grown stronger, and, in his own words, he ‘thought it right to use the plainest language’.b ‘Amendment by the House of Lords,’ he said, ‘is out of the question. Rejection by the House of Lords is equally out of the question. … Is this issue going to be raised? If it is, it carries with it in its train consequences which he would be a bold man to forecast or foresee. That way revolution lies.’

The union  ists paid little attention to his warning, and at their own meeting at the same place a week later Austen Chamberlain read out a letter from his father which expressed the hope that the Lords would force an election, while one of the supporting speakers1 said that ‘the peers are not worthy of their seats if they do not reject the Budget’. Arthur Balfour was far more guarded, but there can be little doubt that by this time his mind was quite firmly made up in favour of rejection.

Lansdowne’s biographer, after quoting a letter to show that by October 2 Lansdowne had reached his own decision to reject, notes that ‘Mr. Balfour had, from an even earlier period, believed that a compromise was impossible.’c When, therefore, the union  ist leaders were summoned to see the King on October 12 they had already come down quite decisively on the side of rejection.

This audience took place on the initiative of the Sovereign himself, but with the full approval of the Prime Minister. At the end of September King Edward had the rumours of the summer confirmed by a memorandum, pronouncing strongly in favour of rejection, which Lord Cawdor, who was staying at Balmoral, drew up and presented to him. On receiving this the King summoned Asquith to Scotland, expressed his own desire to avoid a collision between the two Houses by the discovery of some via media,1 and secured the agreement of the Prime Minister to his talks with Balfour and Lansdowne.

These talks served little purpose. The union  ist leaders informed the King that no definite decision had been reached, which was formally correct, as no meeting of the union  ist peers had taken place;2 but they knew, and he knew, how utterly remote had become the chance of a moderate course being chosen.

The Liberals also knew how nearly the die was cast, and however fanciful may be the theory that Lloyd George had originally framed his Budget with the principal object of exciting the peers, there can be no doubt that he and Mr. Churchill and some others were now extremely anxious that rejection should take place. ‘It would give the Government a great tactical advantage,’ Mr. Churchill informed the National Liberal Club on October 8.d