That was that, and it had to be accepted, although, as Asquith’s biographers have commented, ‘it provoked cries of disappointment from even loyal members of the Party’.d Part of the concern, however, arose not from disappointment about ‘guarantees’ but from uneasiness that the Government was going to get itself lost in the morass of House of Lords reform instead of keeping to the firm if difficult road of dealing with its powers. Sir Charles Dilke,1 after presiding over a meeting of about thirty advanced radicals, led a delegation to the Prime Minister which demanded concentration upon the veto and threatened, if this were not done, to put down a motion declaring that the Government had no mandate for the reconstruction of the Upper House. Sir Henry Dalziel,2 the President of the National Liberal Federation, took similar action, and Hilaire Belloc abstained from voting on the motion for the Address because he thought that the Speech from the Throne, which mentioned no assurances that the curtailment of the veto would become law, was nothing but ‘a party sham’. As, however, he considered the House of Lords ‘by its constitution a committee for the protection of the Anglo-Judaic plutocracy’,e it may be thought that a demand for reconstitution would have been a more logical outcome of his thought and that his views were substantially less representative than those of Dilke and Dalziel.
The non-Liberal part of the Government’s majority was equally or more worried. Keir Hardie declared that ‘Ministers were returned not to reconstitute but to destroy the House of Lords’, and there were continual warnings from Redmond and the other Irish that it was the immediate restriction of the veto and not more sophistical solutions in which they were interested.
This concern was not entirely misplaced. Some leading members of the Cabinet were most unattracted by the suspensory veto and by the conflict with the Sovereign in which it seemed likely to involve the Government. Reform of the Upper House looked to them a far more promising prospect. Sir Edward Grey was the protagonist of this school of thought. As late as March 14 he told a Liberal banquet at the Hotel Cecil that the country would not tolerate single-chamber Government, and that to leave reform to the union ists would mean ‘disaster, death, and damnation’ to the Liberals.f Haldane, as was usually the case, was with Grey. He was in favour of proceeding simultaneously and at once with the Budget and with reform of the Lords. Despite his subsequent swing to the left there seems little doubt that at this time Haldane was too preoccupied with dislike and distrust of Lloyd George to be a very loyal member of a radical Cabinet. He recorded with unattractive satisfaction an audience which he had with the King soon after the election.
‘He (the King) said the result of the election was inconclusive,’ Haldane wrote, ‘and (that) he could not possibly consider the creation of peers without a much more definite expression of opinion from the country. I told him that I had every hope that it would not be necessary to proceed to that extreme.… As I was taking leave he said “This Government may not last. I say nothing of some of my Ministers, but I wish you may very long be my Minister.” ’g
To add to the suspicions of the radicals, two members of the Government who were seeking new homes after defeats at the general election—J. A. Pease,1 the former Chief Whip who had become Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Colonel Seely,2 the Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office—both made bye-election speeches which were concerned with reform rather than with reduction of powers.
Where did Asquith stand on this issue? Grey and Haldane were his closest political associates, and by the views of the former at least he still set the greatest store, depending on his advice more than on that of any member of the Cabinet except one. We know, too, that in 1907 he had been most reluctant to accept the suspensory veto, and we can guess that he did not relish the prospect of the difficult Court and social relations which a bitter constitutional struggle was likely to bring in its train. On February 18, Lord Hugh Cecil1 wrote Margot Asquith a brief letter, which read as follows: ‘Lloyd George has got you into a nice mess: nothing left for you but to try and create 500 peers and perish miserably attacking the King. That’s what comes of making an irresponsible demagogue Chancellor of the Exchequer.’h Mrs. Asquith quotes this as being ‘among the best’ of the ‘many and amusing letters’ which she and her husband received after the election, and it would be easy to believe that it struck an answering chord in the Prime Minister.
On the other hand we have Asquith’s steady loyalty to causes he had espoused and to colleagues he had chosen—the essential quality which enabled a conservative-minded man to be a great radical Prime Minister; we have his sureness of touch in all constitutional matters; and we have the knowledge that, apart from Grey, his closest adviser was Crewe, who had shown when dealing with Lord Newton’s bill in 1907 that on matters relating to the Second Chamber he was a clear-sighted radical. Furthermore, there is the assurance of Asquith’s biographers that: ‘In his own mind Veto and Reform were always in separate compartments. With or without Reform the curtailment of the Veto was essential, and no Reform which he ever contemplated was to involve the restoration of the Veto.’i