In addition, the Liberals naturally enough made great play with the point that if the union ists believed in a referendum before a change as constitutionally important as Home Rule was effected, they should also wish it to precede a change so economically important as tariff reform. On November 29 the Prime Minister put out a direct challenge in a speech before an audience of 8,000 in the railway sheds at Reading. The same night it was unexpectedly answered by Balfour at the Albert Hall. After consultation only with Lansdowne (no one else was quickly available) he announced that, provided there were no technical difficulties which he had not yet had time to consider, ‘he had not the slightest objection to submit(ting) the principles of tariff reform to a referendum’.ee ‘That’s won the election!’ cried an eager listener, and the whole audience rose to its feet to cheer the pronouncement with due reverence.
Elsewhere it was received with less enthusiasm. Austen Chamberlain said he ‘felt the decision like a slap in the face’, and later, when the end of the election campaign found him unwell, described his real complaint as ‘referendum sickness’; ff the Morning Post urged tariff reform candidates to take no notice of their leader; and whatever else Balfour’s retreat did, it did not win the election. Whether it made any appreciable difference to the result is open to question. Mr. R. C. K. Ensor refers without argument to ‘a shelving of Chamberlainism which won him (Balfour) back some Lancashire seats’;gg but Austen, impressed by union ist defeats at Cheltenham (‘where the moderate man with a small fixed income is supposed to abound’) and Lincoln (where there was a distinct union ist Free Trade organisation) and by the fact that the only Opposition candidate in Manchester to increase his poll was one who repudiated Balfour, was convinced that the insignificance of union ist opposition to tariff reform had been exposed. In fact eight Lancashire seats which had been held by the Government parties earlier in the year swung over to the union ists, but as five of them were away from predominantly cotton areas, where tariff reform might have been expected to be electorally most dangerous, and as two Lancashire seats changed hands the other way, there is no very strong evidence to support Mr. Ensor’s view.
Nevertheless the main pattern of the results was provided by union ist gains in Lancashire offset by Liberal gains in London.1 In the ‘Nonconformist fringe’, also, there was a slight recession from Liberalism, four seats in the West Country, two in Wales and one in Scotland changing over to the union ists. The net result of these and other changes was to reduce the union ists by one and the Liberals by three, but to increase the Nationalists and the Labour Party by two each. The Government became marginally stronger vis-à-vis the Opposition and marginally weaker vis-à-vis the more independent parts of its own majority. But these slight changes were totally insignificant compared with the broad confirmation of the result of the previous January which the election gave. The Liberal Government achieved the distinction, unique since 1832, of winning three successive general elections. In Mr. Ensor’s words: ‘Nothing could in its way have been more decisive. Any further election was out of the question.… The people regarded the issue as settled, and only wanted the dispute wound up as quickly as possible.’hh Their wants had still to wait some little time before they could be satisfied.
XI The Peers Persist
When the dust had settled, after Christmas, there could be no doubt that the Government had secured a ‘sufficient majority’ within the meaning of the November arrangement with the King. Augustine Birrell spoke of ‘the sudden emergence of a certainty’, and Asquith’s biographers, who quote this remark, say that it ‘struck the popular imagination’.a But it did not strike the union ist leaders. Asquith had assumed, during the negotiations in November, that the King’s promise could always remain secret. If the Government were defeated at the polls, the matter would not arise. If it won, the peers would surely accept the verdict to the extent of allowing the Parliament Bill through without forcing the use of the prerogative. In this chain of reasoning he over-estimated the ability of Lansdowne to see ahead and to map out a firm course, and he under-estimated Balfour’s growing weariness with emotional or stupid followers.
The trouble began early in the New Year. Lord Esher and Lord Knollys dined with Balfour at the Marlborough Club on January 10 and passed on to the King a whole series of very sensible remarks from this source.
‘Mr. Balfour therefore holds,’ wrote Esher, ‘that the King should now assume from his general knowledge of the state of affairs that no alternative government is at this moment possible, and that being the case, His Majesty could not well ultimately refuse to comply with Mr. Asquith’s demand, should it be made, for a promise to create peers.… Mr. Balfour … went on to say that he was sure that it would be the strong desire of Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and Lord Crewe to safeguard as far as possible the position of the King, and to ease the situation for him as far as they could do so having regard for the exigencies of their party. He feels sure that no public disclosure would be made of the so-called guarantee, and so far as he and his own party leaders are concerned the Government would not be questioned on the point.’b