Mr Balfour's Poodle(49)

The King, however, was so pleased with one aspect of this audience that he could hardly notice anything else about it. ‘He asked me,’ he wrote in his notebook after the Prime Minister had gone, ‘for no guarantees.’b ‘(Mr. Asquith) did not ask for anything from the King,’ Sir Arthur Bigge1 confirmed in a minute written the same night: ‘no promises, no guarantees during this Parliament.’c

Neither the King nor his private secretary understood that this was merely a preliminary discussion, intended to show the way the mind of the Cabinet was moving, and that exact advice would follow later. It was, indeed, an example of Asquith’s over-delicate method of approach to the King on the constitutional issue. ‘Unaccustomed as he (King George) was to ambiguous phraseology he was totally unable to interpret Mr. Asquith’s enigmas,’ Sir Harold Nicolson has written.d A more direct, even if more brusque, approach would have been better understood. It might have avoided the very delicate situation which arose three days later, when Lord Knollys came up from Sandringham to Downing Street and discovered that the Prime Minister’s intentions had become more definite. ‘What he now advocates,’ Knollys wrote to the King, ‘is that you should give guarantees at once for the next Parliament.’ The King’s response was to instruct Bigge to telegraph to Vaughan Nash, Asquith’s private secretary, in the following terms: ‘His Majesty regrets that it would be impossible for him to give contingent guarantees and he reminds Mr. Asquith of his promise not to seek for any during the present Parliament.’e This message was despatched and received on the same morning (November 15) that the Cabinet was giving final approval to a minute to the King, formally outlining ‘the advice which they feel it their duty to tender to His Majesty’, of which the key paragraph read:

‘His Majesty’s Ministers cannot, however, take the responsibility of advising a dissolution, unless they may understand that, in the event of the policy of the Government being approved by an adequate majority1 in the new House of Commons, His Majesty will be ready to exercise his constitutional powers (which may involve the prerogative of creating peers), if needed to secure that effect should be given to the decision of the country.’f

The minute added the suggestion that the understanding should not be made public unless and until the actual occasion should arise.

The King and his Ministers were rapidly moving into positions of direct conflict. And the situation was not made easier by the fact that the Sovereign was receiving directly contradictory advice from his two private secretaries. Lord Knollys, in London, was for accepting the wishes of the Cabinet. ‘I feel certain that you can safely and constitutionally accept what the Cabinet propose,’ he wrote in a letter accompanying the Government minute, ‘and I venture to urge you strongly to do so.’g He had the advantage, in the King’s eyes, of greater experience of the constitutional issue, having served King Edward VII and seen the difficulty develop from the beginning.

Bigge, at Sandringham, had the advantage both of being with the King at the time and of having been his own private secretary, not for a few months as was the case with Knollys, but for nearly ten years. He was passionately, almost violently, opposed to the King giving way. He summarised his views in a document prepared for His Majesty:

‘The King’s position is: he cannot give contingent guarantees. For by so doing he becomes a partisan and is placing a powerful weapon in the hands of the Irish and Socialists who, assured of the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, would hold before their electors the certainty of ultimate Home Rule and the carrying out of their Socialist programme.1 The union  ists would declare His Majesty was favouring the Government and placing them (the union  ists) at a disadvantage before their constituencies. Indeed it is questionable whether His Majesty would be acting constitutionally. It is not His Majesty’s duty to save the Prime Minister from the mistake of his incautious words on the 14th of April.’h

On the proposal for secrecy, Bigge was still more vehement.

‘Is this straight?’ he asked the King. ‘Is it English? Is it not moreover childish?’

The issue which Bigge did not face was what was to happen if the King accepted his advice and ignored that of his Ministers and of Knollys. In these circumstances Asquith would certainly have resigned. The King must then have sent for Balfour. To have refused the advice of one Prime Minister and sent for another would have been a dangerous enough proceeding at the best of times, but unless it was known that Balfour would accept the commission it would have been merely silly. The King, with a great loss of face, might have found himself back where he started—with Asquith, and with no possible alternative.