Mr Balfour's Poodle(5)

The next important change in the party balance in the Lords occurred with the secession of the Peelites from the Conservative Party and their gradual move towards alliance with the Whigs. Then, for the first time since the French Revolution, the Tories were almost balanced by a combination of Whigs and Peelites. This did not last long. The natural tendency of an hereditary House to move to the right soon came into play, and by the closing stages of the Crimean War the Lords were in opposition to the Aberdeen Coalition. A few years later, in 1860, there was a majority of eighty-nine against the second reading of Gladstone’s Paper Duty Bill. But this measure, which was supported only very lukewarmly by the Prime Minister, probably attracted more than the normal anti-Government vote into the ‘not-content’ lobby.1

This vote did much to foster the growing radicalism of Gladstone, and this in turn, with its effect upon the development of the Liberal Party, still further increased the Tory bias of the House of Lords. An evenly-balanced Upper Chamber, recruited mainly by the inheritance of titles and partly by the ennoblement of men of great wealth, was possible only so long as the differences between the two parties were more superficial than real or, in so far as they had reality, corresponded only to the difference between one form of wealth and another. The growth of radicalism and of the Liberal hold on the working class inevitably meant the decline of Liberal strength in the House of Lords.

It was quite a rapid decline. In 1868 Lord Granville informed the Queen that, excluding the bishops and nominal Liberals who preferred to vote Tory, the anti-Government majority in the Upper House was between sixty and seventy.b A few Liberal creations then followed, but they did little more than compensate for defections which were simultaneously taking place. When Gladstone came in again, in 1880, he assembled a Cabinet which with one duke, one marquess,1 and five earls (of a total of twelve members) should have personally, if not politically, recommended itself to their lordships. But this did not avail. The rate of defection became greater rather than less. Three great magnates who were members of the Government itself—the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquess of Lansdowne—were impelled by the Government’s attitude to the Irish land question to join the move to the right. They were followed by others of lesser note during the lifetime of this Government.

These changes were as nothing to the shifting of allegiance which followed the events of 1886, when Home Rule, in Rosebery’s words, ‘threw the great mass of Liberal Peers into the arms of the Conservative majority’.c This marked both a social and a political upheaval. Lord John Manners wrote that ‘Gladstone can’t find a duke who will allow his wife to become Mistress of the Robes’,d and the Government vote in the Upper House was reputed to have fallen to thirty. It was seven years before there came a test vote on a major issue, the Home Rule Bill of 1893, and that showed a majority of nearly four hundred—419 to 41—against the Government. The Liberal Party had taken a decisive turn towards radicalism and it had paid the price of creating a Conservative predominance in the House of Lords of a degree never approached before, not even after the creations of the younger Pitt, and which has persisted ever since.

In 1906 it was therefore a House of Lords of which the political shape had been largely formed by the events of 1886 and 1893 that confronted the new Liberal Government. The eighty-eight nominal Liberals, had they been allied with the 124 Liberal union  ists,1 the sons of men who had followed Hartington and Chamberlain in 1886 or, in many cases, the men themselves, would have been a respectable minority. On their own their only strength was that they were allied to political forces which, in the House of Commons, had just won nearly three-quarters of the seats.

To what extent this was to be recognised by the majority of their lordships as a legitimate source of strength and as a reason why they should exercise their own power with circumspection was a question to which an answer was eagerly awaited. It had not been held for many years that the Lords should be indifferent to the opinion of the constituencies as expressed through the House of Commons. Even such a high Tory as Lord Lyndhurst2 had declared, in 1858, that ‘I never understood, nor could such a principle be acted upon, that we (the House of Lords) were to make a firm, determined and persevering stand against the opinion of the other House of Parliament, when that opinion is backed by the opinion of the people.’e This statement begged the vital question of who was to decide when the opinion of the House of Commons coincided with the opinion of the people, but it would be difficult to argue that the period immediately following a great electoral victory should not be so regarded; certainly this had been the view immediately after 1832, when the removal of the rotten boroughs—of Croker’s ‘certain elasticity which acted like springs, and … prevented violent collision’—gave the problem for the first time a modern form.