Mr Balfour's Poodle(62)
After this meeting and the despatch of Halsbury’s letter to Lansdowne, Willoughby continued to canvass hard for support. Two days later he had brought the number of signatories to fifty-three, and a day after this to sixty. ‘And I shall get I trust quite eighty before the day,’ he wrote to Halsbury. Evidence that this trust was not misplaced came as early as July 20, the day of the third reading, when almost exactly this number of union ist peers assembled at Grosvenor House1 in the morning and pledged themselves not to surrender. But there was still no open split in the party; Lansdowne himself, in his behaviour on the committee stage, had given no hint of retreat. That evening, however, the fissure became a little more obvious. Halsbury delivered a violent speech and committed himself and his followers to an insistence upon the Lords’ amendments at all costs. Lansdowne, on the other hand, cautiously announced that the Opposition would not be prepared to withdraw some of their amendments ‘as long as they were free agents’. He was at last beginning to deal with facts and not with fantasies.
Despite this clear difference of emphasis, the bill was let through in its new form without a division, and the fissure was not therefore as deep at this stage as it might have been. Lansdowne had told Newton that he expected a ‘revolt’,g and it had been Halsbury’s original intention to provoke one, a course from which he was dissuaded by the reluctance of Salisbury and Selborne to desert their leader so soon.h Next morning the dispute was continued at a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. For this and for a general meeting of union ist peers which took place at Lansdowne House in the afternoon, Balfour and Lansdowne had fortified themselves with a written statement of the Government’s intentions from Asquith. This took the form of identical letters written in the following terms to each of the two union ist leaders:
10, Downing St.,
July 20, 1911
I think it courteous and right, before any public decisions are announced, to let you know how we regard the political situation.
When the Parliament Bill in the form which it has now assumed returns to the House of Commons, we shall be compelled to ask the House to disagree with the Lords’ amendments.
In the circumstances, should the necessity arise, the Government will advise the King to exercise his Prerogative to secure the passing into Law of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons, and His Majesty has been pleased to signify that he will consider it his duty to accept and act on that advice.
Yours sincerely,
H. H. Asquithi
The possibility of such an official communication had been discussed at the meeting between Lloyd George and the union ist leaders on July 18. It was thought that an announcement of the Government’s intentions in this form rather than in the form of a public statement by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons might be less provocative to the peers. This view was further pressed by Lansdowne when Lord Knollys had called upon him on the evening of July 19. Lansdowne’s alternative plan that the King himself should write, through his Private Secretary, was rejected as inappropriate, but it was at the suggestion of the Palace that the Prime Minister’s letters were despatched.
These letters may have reduced the provocative effect of the statement which Asquith subsequently made in the House of Commons (although, in view of the scene which then took place,1 this is difficult to believe), but they did nothing to ease the tensions of the union ist meetings on July 21. The ‘rebels’ had already held a 10.30 meeting at Grosvenor House before those of their number who were summoned left for Carlton Gardens to attend the 11.30 Shadow Cabinet. Here a vote was taken, and what might previously have been disguised as a normal difference of opinion, natural to the successful functioning of any committee, became a dispute of climacteric importance, with every man forced to declare his position, with old loyalties broken and with new animosities aroused. Mrs. Dugdale, quoting from the diary which was kept at the time by J. S. Sandars, Balfour’s secretary, gives the alignment. In favour of resistance were Lords Selborne, Halsbury, and Salisbury, Austen Chamberlain (who, it need hardly be added, spoke for his father as well as himself), F. E. Smith, George Wyndham,2 who greatly felt the rift with Balfour, Edward Carson, and Balcarres,3 the Chief Whip. On the other side were Balfour and Lansdowne; Curzon, Midleton, Londonderry,4 Derby, and Ashbourne5 amongst the peers; and Bonar Law, Walter Long, Alfred Lyttelton, Henry Chaplin,1 Robert Finlay,2 and Steel-Maitland3 in the House of Commons. Akers-Douglas made it clear that he sympathised with the resisters, but voted with the majority out of loyalty to Balfour—a strong indication of the depth of feeling which separated the two factions.