Mr Balfour's Poodle(61)

More important, however, was the question of making known to the Opposition the Sovereign’s general view of his constitutional duty. The Government had observed most carefully the arrangement as to secrecy which had been reached in November. But this arrangement, designed to protect the King, had become an embarrassment to him and made him feel guilty of dissimulation in his dealings with the union  ist leaders. Furthermore, so long as the King’s undertaking was not known, an increasing number of peers were liable to commit themselves to positions of resistance from which they could not retreat. Balfour, as his conversation with Lord Esher at the beginning of January made clear, had long envisaged both that the Government would if necessary invoke the prerogative and that the King would accede to such a course. But there is little evidence that he convinced even so close a colleague as Lansdowne that this would be the course of events. Certainly Lansdowne’s action between January and the beginning of July gave no indication that he recognised the strength of the Government’s hand. Curzon, also, remained defiant for some time because he believed that defiance would triumph. ‘Even after the Election (of December 1910),’ his biographer has written, ‘he had spoken derisively at a private luncheon of union  ist candidates and M.P.’s of any such proceedings (a wholesale creation of peers), and had advised his audience—somewhat incautiously as it turned out—to fight in the last ditch and let them make their peers if they dared.’c

Other peers, less close to the hub of affairs than either Lansdowne or Curzon, found it still easier to build upon false premises. ‘Early in July,’ we are informed by Sir Harold Nicolson, ‘Lord Derby,1 and subsequently Lord Midleton, had warned the King that a large number of union  ists remained convinced that the Government were bluffing and that the Prime Minister would hesitate, when it came to the moment, to invoke the Royal Prerogative.’d Their excuses for such convictions thereafter diminished rapidly, although some union  ists did not change their minds as a result. On July 7, Balfour received private information of what had passed between the King and his Ministers in November.1 The Shadow Cabinet was immediately summoned to a meeting at his house in Carlton Gardens. The other union  ist leaders were informed of the knowledge which Balfour had acquired, and, in the words of his biographer: ‘There for the first time surrender by the House of Lords was discussed as practical politics.’ It was not discussed in an atmosphere of general agreement. It was noted at the time, Mrs. Dugdale informs us, that ‘there was a distinct division of opinion among those present, but the majority decided that it would be imprudent to resist the menace of the creation of peers’.e

A week or so later the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acting as the agent of the Prime Minister, saw Balfour and Lansdowne by arrangement and confirmed the information which they had acquired on July 7. He further informed them, it being still five days before the Cabinet received the King’s remonstrance on this point, that the intention was to proceed to a creation before the bill was sent back to the Lords. This was to avoid any risk that the bill might be lost between the two Houses.

This warning was delivered on Tuesday, July 18. Two days later the bill came up for third reading in the Lords. Here the split within the union  ist Party came more into the open. For some time previously a number of union  ist peers, amongst whom Willoughby de Broke was the most active, had been organising together. As early as June II Lord Willoughby was able to write to Lord Halsbury that ‘at a Meeting of Peers recently held it was resolved “to adhere to such amendments as may be carried in Committee of the House of Lords on the Parliament Bill which would have the effect of securing to the Second Chamber the powers at present exercised by the House of Lords, notwithstanding the possible creation of Peers, or the dissolution of Parliament”’.f On July 6 a further meeting was held at Lord Halsbury’s house in Ennismore Gardens, and this was followed by another and more important gathering there on July 12. This last meeting, attended by thirty-one peers,1 resulted in Halsbury writing to Lansdowne, informing him of the meeting and of the common resolve of those present to act along the lines laid down in Willoughby de Broke’s earlier letter. Willoughby was still able to refer to this activity as ‘strengthening Lord Lansdowne’s hands’, but it is difficult to believe that Halsbury, who had attended the Shadow Cabinet held on July 7 and had expressed beforehand his intention of asking some pertinent questions of his leaders, did not believe by this stage that there was more of defiance than of support in his behaviour.