The loyalist peers moved from Lansdowne House to a further meeting at Curzon’s home in Carlton House Terrace. Here a small committee was set up, which thereafter met daily under Curzon’s lead. It was known that the voices of prominent members of the House of Lords, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rosebery, St. Aldwyn, Midleton, and Cromer, would be on Lansdowne’s side, but the problem was to make contact with the ‘backwoodsmen’, the men who rarely came to Westminster, but who might be expected for the critical vote. This was approached from two angles. In the first place they were to be given as clear a lead as could be extracted from Balfour and Lansdowne. In addition they were to be canvassed by Curzon and his organisation.
Balfour was the first problem. His views were broadly sound, but they had to be given greater force and greater publicity. To this end, Curzon, Walter Long, and Henry Chaplin believed that a full party meeting might help, and pressed Balfour to summon one. The ‘ditchers’ were working closely with sympathisers in the House of Commons and it was therefore desirable for the moderates to rally their own supporters in the Lower House. Balfour refused, on the characteristic ground that such gatherings at a period of crisis always did more harm than good. Indeed he went further and restricted his opportunity for public pronouncement by cancelling a meeting which he was due to address in the City of London during the following week. On the Saturday, however, he wrote a paper for circulation to the other members of the Shadow Cabinet. This is so typically a Balfourian production, and sums up with such engaging frankness his views at the time, that it is worth giving in full, even though, at the insistence of one or two of his close colleagues, it never saw the light of contemporary day:
‘I am sorry to trouble my colleagues with any further observations on the Constitutional crisis; but I find that some who were present at the meeeting at my house on Friday last have formed a wrong impression of my position.
‘Put briefly, that position is as follows. I regard the policy which its advocates call “fighting to the last” as essentially theatrical, though not on that account necessarily wrong. It does nothing, it can do nothing; it is not even intended to do anything except advertise the situation. The object of those who advocate it is to make people realise what (it is assumed) they will not realise otherwise, namely, the fact that we are the victims of a revolution.
‘Their policy may be a wise one, but there is nothing heroic about it; and all military metaphors which liken the action of the “fighting” Peers to Leonidas at Thermopylae seem to me purely for Music Hall consumption.
‘I grant that the Music Hall attitude of mind is too wide-spread to be negligible. By all means play up to it, if the performance is not too expensive. If the creation of X peers pleases the multitude, and conveys the impression that the Lords are “game to the end”, I raise no objection to it, provided it does not swamp the House of Lords. All my criticism yesterday was directed against the policy of so profoundly modifying the constitution of the Second Chamber that it would become, with regard to some important measures, a mere annexe to the present House of Commons.
‘From this point of view the creation of fifty or 100 new Peers is a matter of indifference.
‘Let me add two further observations. I regard the importance attached to the particular shape in which the House of Lords are to display their impotence in the face of the King’s declaration, as a misfortune. The attention of the country should be directed not to these empty manoeuvres, but to the absolute necessity of stemming the revolutionary tide, by making such abuse of Ministerial power impossible in the future.
A.J.B.’m
This was dreadful. It was calculated to enflame the die-hards, discourage the moderates, and leave everyone convinced that the leader of the party regarded its crisis of decision as a foolish irrelevancy. So, at least, Lansdowne and Curzon thought. They were also greatly disturbed lest it became known that Balfour contemplated a limited creation with equanimity. This would destroy the whole basis of the Curzon campaign, for the resisters, who were great optimists in their own favour, would never believe that they were risking a full creation. Balfour therefore agreed to suppress the memorandum and the ideas contained in it.
His next excursion was somewhat more helpful to the moderates. On Monday, July 24, Lansdowne wrote to every peer taking the union ist whip who was not already pledged, to express his own view that submission was the better course and to ask upon what support he could count. ‘It is of the utmost importance that I should be made aware of the views of those Peers who usually act with us,’ the letter concluded, ‘and I should therefore be grateful if your Lordship would, with the least possible delay, let me know whether you are prepared to support me in the course which I feel it my duty to recommend.’o To follow this up, Balfour was persuaded, again by Curzon, to write a letter of support on the following day and to publish it. This took the form, to quote Lord Newton, of ‘a reply to a perplexed peer who required advice, and I learnt, to my surprise, that I had been selected as the imaginary correspondent’.o In it, Balfour committed himself quite firmly to Lansdowne and his course of action. ‘I agree with the advice Lord Lansdowne has given to his friends,’ he wrote; ‘with Lord Lansdowne I stand; with Lord Lansdowne I am ready, if need be, to fall.’p But he put forward this unequivocal declaration much more upon the grounds of loyalty and the need to preserve a united party than because it was overwhelmingly the better course. Indeed he repeated, in slightly less provoking a form, some of the arguments of his suppressed memorandum. The impression conveyed was that there was not a great deal to choose between the two alternative courses, but that, Lansdowne having decided in favour of one of them, it was much better to stick to him. Nevertheless, this letter aroused strong objection from Austen Chamberlain, who had assumed all the touchiness of a rebel. But some of his complaints were well founded.