Mr Balfour's Poodle(4)

Another question which may be asked about the members of this Parliament is the extent to which they were men of great wealth. In the case of many individuals this is, for obvious reasons, a difficult question to which to reply accurately, but the answer appears to be (the degree of error which may exist should at least be constant for the different parties) that 102 Liberals (27%), forty-six Conservatives (35%), and ten Liberal union  ists (40%) fell within this category. The variation between parties was surprisingly small.

The geographical spread of the Liberal strength also requires analysis, and here it is of interest to make a comparison with the distribution of Labour strength in 1945—the only occasion since 1906 on which a great left-wing majority was elected to the House of Commons. It is a commonly held view that these two majorities were geographically almost identical. Mr. Churchill, for example, expressed in 1949 his belief that ‘the House returned in 1906 represented … more or less the same slice of the population, the people who elected it coming very largely from the same homes and from the same areas, as does this majority today’.f This view contained a great deal of truth although there were certain striking exceptions to the general proposition. The Liberals of 1906 were very strong in Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, the West Country and most of the industrial areas. They were fairly strong in London and most of the mixed agricultural and residential counties of England. They were weak only in the Universities, in Northern Ireland, and in Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield. Labour strength in 1945 was less evenly spread. It was greater in London and most of the industrial areas than that of the Liberals had been, but overwhelmingly low in the Highlands, rural Wales and the West Country, and substantially low in most English agricultural and residential districts. Conservative successes in industrial seats were somewhat more frequent in 1906 than in 1945, but in the small country town, the mixed county division, or the seaside resort the Liberal candidate of 1906 was a much stronger contestant than his Labour counterpart of thirty-nine years later.1





II The New Government and the Lords


Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had taken office with a big majority against him in both Houses of Parliament. He had been able, quickly and sensationally, to rectify the position in the Commons, but in the Lords the strength of the Opposition remained unimpaired. At the beginning of the first session of the new Parliament there were 602 peers, including twenty-five bishops, who were entitled to take part in the proceedings of the House of Lords. Of these only eighty-eight described themselves as Liberals—and this number included a few who were as uncertain in their support of the Government as was Lord Rosebery. One hundred and twenty-four were Liberal union  ists and 355 were Conservatives, leaving only thirty-five, including fourteen bishops and a number of Princes of the Blood, who gave themselves no political label. The nominal union  ist majority was 391, a preponderance still more decisive than that of the Government in the new House of Commons.

This degree of Tory dominance in the Upper House was of comparatively recent growth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in a House of about 150 members, there had been a small Whig majority, which Queen Anne, in the year 1711 and on the advice of the 1st Earl of Oxford of the Second Creation,1 had turned into a still smaller Tory majority by the simultaneous creation of twelve peers for the specific purpose of securing a Government majority for the ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht. A few years later, after the death of the Queen, this change was reversed by a more gradual programme of creations, and the Whigs resumed control. And they continued to hold it until the accession of the younger Pitt to the premiership. Thereafter, creations proceeded on a hitherto unknown scale. During Pitt’s seventeen years as Prime Minister, 140 ennoblements took place. The Tories were not merely given a majority in the House of Lords, as had happened to themselves and the Whigs on previous occasions. They were built up into a position of ascendancy from which they could not be dislodged save by a policy of creation on an almost revolutionary scale.

It has been suggested that Pitt’s creations brought a new social and occupational element into the House of Lords. In a passage in Sybil, Disraeli tells of his having ‘created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fatgraziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill.’a But this view is hardly borne out by a consideration of the individuals concerned; for the most part they were Tory country gentlemen, and very reactionary ones. They and their first heirs provided the greater part of the vote against the Reform Bill in 1831.