Mr Balfour's Poodle(65)

‘I have read your letter with pain and more than pain.’ he wrote. ‘I think we have deserved better treatment at your hands. … I have discussed this matter with you in council of your colleagues and in conversation. Nothing that you have said on any of these occasions has prepared me for the line you have now taken up or given me a hint of your intention to treat this as a question of confidence in the leadership of either yourself or Lansdowne. On the contrary, you have repeatedly stated that this was a question which must be decided by each individual for himself. The crisis at which we have now arrived has been visible for a year past. We have frequently discussed it. Yet till this morning you had given no lead.…’ q

Balfour replied that no issue of disloyalty to himself arose (it is almost impossible to imagine a letter of political disagreement to which he would not have returned this slightly weary answer), and with a tu quoque to the charge, which Chamberlain also made, that he had denounced the ‘ditchers’ rather than answered their arguments. This interchange of letters is interesting as an indication both of the personal irritation which had developed between the two sides and of the conviction that Balfour had shown no leadership which existed in the mind of even so naturally loyal a man as Austen Chamberlain.

Lansdowne’s letter was something, and so was Balfour’s, but Curzon did not allow matters to rest there. He published a most cogent statement of his own position in The Times on July 24. He kept careful watch of the replies which came in to Lansdowne’s letter (more than 200 peers indicated in writing that they would abstain; about fifty replied that they would vote with Halsbury). And he wrote individually to many peers, couching his letters in far more persuasive terms than Lansdowne had felt able to employ.

‘Any vote that you can give now,’ he argued (ineffectively, as it transpired) to Lord Roberts on July 30, ‘can either produce no effect or drive into the Government lobby some self-sacrificing and conscientious union  ist Peer who will go so far as to vote for the Government sooner than see the peers created. That would be a lamentable result and we desire that no one should be placed in so invidious a position.’r

On the rebel side the campaign was carried on with at least equal determination and, in most cases, much greater enthusiasm. Immediately after the Lansdowne House meeting a committee was formed with Halsbury as chairman and F. E. Smith and Willoughby de Broke as joint secretaries. The offices were deliberately shared between the two Houses, and in the next few weeks the die-hard members in the House of Lords worked far more closely with their sympathisers in the House of Commons than did their opposite numbers in the ‘hedgers’ camp. Austen Chamberlain, George Wyndham, F. E. Smith, and Lord Hugh Cecil were as violent in their attachment to the cause of the Upper House as was any peer.

Willoughby organised a meeting at Grosvenor House1 on the Sunday afternoon and wrote to inform Halsbury, who had taken to his bed for the week-end, that they were to be at least sixty strong there, with another forty absent adherents. There was probably a meeting of the committee on the same day too, for on the following day a scene which was both organised and without recent precedent took place in the House of Commons. Asquith was to outline the Government’s intentions on the motion to consider the Lord’s amendments. He was cheered by crowds in the streets as he drove with his wife in an open motor car from Downing Street, and he was cheered by his own back-benchers as he walked up the floor of the House of Commons. But as soon as he rose to speak he was greeted by a roar of interruption. ‘Divide, divide,’ was the dominant shout, but interspersed with it were cries of ‘Traitor’, ‘Let Redmond speak’, ‘American dollars’, and ‘Who killed the King?’ For half an hour the Prime Minister stood at the box, unable to make any full sentence heard to the House, and unable to fill more than a staccato half-column of Hansard. F. E. Smith and Lord Hugh Cecil were manifestly the leaders (Will Crooks, the Labour Member for Woolwich, proclaimed that ‘many a man has been certified insane for less than the noble Lord has done this afternoon’), but there were many others who took a full part. In a moment of comparative calm, Sir Edward Carson attempted to move the adjournment of the debate. Balfour sat unruffled in his place throughout these proceedings. He took no part in the scene, but he did not make any attempt to restrain his followers.

At last Asquith gave up. With a remark about ‘declining to degrade himself further’, he sat down. Balfour followed and was heard in silence throughout his speech. He had begun with a very mild implied rebuke to those who had perpetrated the scene, but made no further reference to it. Then Sir Edward Grey rose. He had been subjected to a perhaps understandably hysterical note passed down from the Ladies’ Gallery by Mrs. Asquith, but it is not clear whether or not this was the decisive cause of his intervention. ‘They will listen to you,’ the note had run, ‘so for God’s sake defend him from the cats and the cads!’ This Grey made some attempt to do, and his performance satisfied Mrs. Asquith at least.