Knollys was confident of the rightness of his own view, and he made no attempt to minimise the part which he had played. He proudly told Mrs. Asquith that, after her husband had left the Palace on the afternoon of November 16, the King had turned to him and said, ‘Is this the advice that you would have given my father?’ and that he had replied, ‘Yes, Sir; and your father would have taken it’.1n For his services at this time, even if his methods were somewhat unorthodox, the nation and the institution of constitutional monarchy owe Knollys a deep debt of gratitude. But it was not a debt which was recognised by King George. Immediately after the decision was made he felt a sense of relief, and in the following week Lord Esher found him ‘proud of his strict adherence to the lines of the constitution … (and) also perfectly calm’.o But resentment soon set in. Eleven months later, again in a conversation with Esher, he was saying that ‘what he especially resented was the promise extracted from him in November that he would tell “no one”’1p Nor did he quickly forget the issue. His attitude when the minute of the Lambeth Palace meeting came to light has already been noted; and for the longer term we have Sir Harold Nicolson’s testimony that ‘King George remained convinced thereafter that in this, the first political crisis of his reign, he had not been accorded either the confidence or the consideration to which he was entitled.’q
What was the danger from which Lord Knollys saved the King? Partly because of the secrecy which enveloped the result as well as the course of the negotiations with Asquith and Crewe it was widely misunderstood. An observer with as many ears to the ground as Sir Almeric Fitzroy,2 for example, who fully realised that there was a crisis afoot, believed that it arose because the King was making difficulties about the grant of a dissolution of ‘a Parliament of (Ministers’) own choosing, in which so far they have not met With a rebuff in either House and during the existence of which they have not lost a seat.…’r Even Lord Esher, who was better informed to the extent of knowing most of what transpired at the meeting of November 16, believed that the difficulty until that day had been the King’s refusal of a dissolution to Asquith. Furthermore, he saw the dangers of a change of Government in these terms: ‘Obviously Arthur Balfour could only form a Government either if the Liberal moderates supported him, which was not to be thought of, or if he in his turn were granted a dissolution. The King therefore would have been in the position of according to a Tory Prime Minister what a few days before he had refused to a Radical.’s
This passage, although it puts succinctly the danger which would always confront a Sovereign who refused a dissolution to a majority Prime Minister,1 was not on the point. King George never contemplated refusing Asquith’s request for a dissolution. From first to last there is nothing in the King’s own writings, in those of his private secretaries, or in the Cabinet memoranda to suggest that there was any difficulty on this issue. The most that the King did, on the occasion of Asquith’s visit to Sandringham, was to suggest ‘that the veto resolutions should first (i.e. before a dissolution) be sent up to the House of Lords’,t To this condition, his biographers say, Asquith readily complied, and there was therefore little to the matter, less perhaps than the King implied whenche told Lansdowne two months later that ‘it was owing to him that we had been allowed to have the Parliament Bill in the House of Lords at all’.u Furthermore, there was no suggestion in the part of the Cabinet memorandum of November 15 which touched on this—‘The House of Lords to have the opportunity, if they demand it, at the same time, but not so as to postpone the date of dissolution, to discuss the Government resolutions’—that the Government had to be peculiarly submissive here in order to obtain a general election at all.
Simply by granting a dissolution to Balfour the King would not therefore have been treating him differently from the way in which he treated Asquith. But he would, none the less, have been accused, and justly accused, of favouritism and of unconstitutional behaviour. He would have changed his Government because the advice of the incoming Prime Minister was more congenial to him personally than was that of the outgoing Prime Minister; and he would have precipitated an election in which a principal issue was bound to be the known fact that one party enjoyed his favour and the other did not. He would have been making himself far more of a partisan than by taking the course which he did and which Sir Arthur Bigge feared would produce exactly this result. The consequences of such an action, in the explosive atmosphere of pre-1914 England, might have been far reaching, and the narrowness of the margin by which Lord Knollys prevented their being set in train cannot be doubted.