Mr Balfour's Poodle(63)

Lansdowne then returned to his house to meet the union  ist peers, about 200 of whom attended. He took a note of the proceedings, which his biographer thinks was intended for the information of the King. As a description of a meeting at which his own leadership was put to its greatest test, Lansdowne’s memorandum is frighteningly indifferent and detached in tone. His opening speech stressed the impropriety of not allowing the Lords to reconsider the bill after the Commons’ deletion of the original amendments of the Upper House, and then came very near to striking a balance between the arguments for resistance and those against. ‘Lord Lansdowne allowed it to be seen,’ he summarised his concluding passage, ‘that in his view the more prudent course might be to allow the Bill to pass.…’ He did not, however, ask the peers present to arrive at any decision, and advised them, on the contrary, to await the statement which would be made by the Prime Minister on Monday. He then went on to describe how Selborne, ‘in a speech of great force and earnestness’, had urged resistance; how similar views ‘were expressed by Lord Halsbury with great vigour, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, and in more cautious terms by the Duke of Norfolk’; how St. Aldwyn, ‘in a speech which produced a deep impression’, argued that the deliberate judgment of the country would be against a policy of ‘dying in the last ditch’; and how Curzon ‘spoke with much ability in the same sense’. He summed up by saying: ‘Lord Lansdowne is inclined to think that a majority of the peers present were in favour of the view which he expressed, but a large number not only differed but acutely resented the suggestion that they should desist until they were beaten in the House by H.M. Government aided by a reinforcement of Radical peers.… The peers referred to will, in Lord Lansdowne’s opinion, certainly not recede from their attitude.’j No vote was taken at the meeting, but other estimates put the number of ‘ditchers’1 present at fifty; the remaining 150, however, were less firmly attached to Lord Lansdowne’s point of view than the minority were to Lord Halsbury’s.

In part this was because enthusiasm for moderate courses is always difficult to arouse. In part, too, it was because the ‘non-die-hard’ peers had been given no strong lead. It is difficult to disagree with the comment on the meeting of Lord Newton, who combined sympathy for Lansdowne with an informed but comparatively unprejudiced judgment of the issue.

‘The impression left upon me at this meeting,’ he wrote, ‘was that—for once in a way—Lord Lansdowne showed some slight deficiency in the art of leadership. He had personally made up his mind as to the course which should be followed, however unpalatable it might be to some of his followers, and it seemed, therefore, that he ought to have spoken with greater decision, and to have intimated that he would resign if his advice was not followed. Instead of doing so, he appeared to invite expressions of opinion, and the opportunity was at once seized by Lord Halsbury, Lord Selborne, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Willoughby de Broke to raise the standard of revolt…’k

For his weakness on this occasion Lansdowne paid a heavy price in the ensuing weeks.

After the meeting both sides, undeterred either by its being ate on a Friday afternoon or by the shade thermometer having reached ninety degrees, set themselves to a rapid work of organisation. On the official side difficulties arose out of the lukewarmness of Lansdowne, who was still disinclined to exert pressure on any peer, and the defection of the two union  ist whips—Lord Waldegrave and Viscount Churchill. These difficulties were swept away by the energy and determinaton of Lord Curzon. As has been seen, he was vigorously in favour of the utmost resistance a few months before. Once convinced that the threat of creation was a real one, he changed his position and advocated his new views with as much enthusiasm as he had shown for his old ones. Almost alone in the union  ist Party he stood out during this period as evidence against the truth of the lines of Yeats:

‘The best lack all conviction,

And the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

They could be applied only too appropriately to others upon that stage.

What were Curzon’s motives? Some supplied harsh judgments: ‘… it was all snobbishness on Curzon’s part’, said George Wyndham. ‘He could not bear to see his Order contaminated by the new creation.’ But on another occasion Wyndham himself delivered another judgment which, by implication, was far kinder. ‘He is a fool,’ he said, ‘for he might have been the next Prime Minister.’l And to accuse a man as ambitious as Curzon of throwing away his chances is almost to compliment him. In fact, Curzon saw more clearly than most that further resistance could achieve nothing and would do great harm to the House of Lords, the union  ist Party, and the Monarchy; and he had no patience with those who were too stupid or too opinionated to see this. But he also believed, unlike Balfour, that he could make his views triumph over theirs. He had the intellectual arrogance and the conviction of personal rightness without which it is difficult for moderate men to achieve the force to be effective.