Mr Balfour's Poodle(67)

This willingness to put the issue to the test of violence did not find expression only in the private conversations of such an emotionally unstable character as George Wyndham. It also appeared in a letter which Willoughby de Broke wrote to Halsbury on July 28. ‘Anyhow,’ he concluded a passage suggesting that the right to sit of the ‘puppet peers’ should be challenged, ‘I put it to you that even if Lord Lansdowne opposes it, we shall at least have accepted Midleton’s challenge, and put ourselves right in the sense that we have used every weapon save personal violence. I should not be adverse to using even that!’x Willoughby’s opinion on this point gained sufficient currency for Lansdowne in his final crisis speech on the House of Lords to feel it necessary to raise the matter and deliver a rebuke. ‘My noble friend will think me a very pusillanimous person,’ he said, ‘but I confess that I prefer Parliamentary methods.’y It was a beginning to that Tory taste for violent resistance to disliked measures which was later to spread much wider in the party.

More immediately the ‘ditchers’ were concerned with counteracting the effects of Curzon’s canvassing and displaying their own strength. On the Tuesday a circular letter was sent out under the signatures of Halsbury, Selborne, Salisbury, Mayo, Lovat, and Willoughby de Broke. Perhaps because of the greater difficulty of drafting by a committee, perhaps because of a simple difference of intellectual power,1 it was far less lucid than was Lansdowne’s appeal to the uncommitted peers, Balfour’s letter to Newton, or Curzon’s to The Times, to all of which it was intended as a reply. ‘Should a General Election take place,’ it argued with a never wearying determination to demand another chance, ‘the Electors would for the first time have the opportunity of deciding between the alternative policies of reconstitution and revolution, and of expressing an opinion of the attempt to rob them of their constitutional right to give the final decision on grave national issues’. The crux of the advice given was as follows: ‘We do not believe that the credit of the Peerage can be as much injured by the number of new Peers which may be created, as it would be degraded by our failure to be faithful to our trust.’z

The display of strength took the form of the Halsbury Banquet, which was referred to in the extract from Blunt’s diary. This was organised with great speed. The idea appears to have originated during the week-end. On Monday the following notice was sent out:

Carlton Club, Pall Mall, S.W.

July 24, 1911





HALSBURY BANQUET


Dear Sir,

Viscount Wolmer, M.P., and Mr. Harold Smith, M.P., will be at the House of Commons tomorrow, Tuesday, with tickets for the Halsbury Banquet on Wednesday. Tickets can also be obtained by application to Mr. F. E. Smith at Grosvenor House by telegram or letter.

Austen Chamberlain

Edward Carson

F. E. Smith

George Wyndham aa

During the Tuesday applications for tickets poured in, and on the Wednesday evening 600 guests sat down to dinner at the Hotel Cecil.1 Selborne presided, and the other speakers were Halsbury himself, Wyndham, Milner, Salisbury, Austen Chamberlain, Carson, and F. E. Smith. A letter from Joseph Chamberlain was read. It was an occasion for unrestrained demagogy, and little of interest emerges from most of the speeches. Austen Chamberlain’s was to some extent an exception.1 He was, by virtue of his position in the union  ist hierarchy, the most responsible politician present, and he gave it as his considered opinion that the Government threats were still not to be taken seriously.

‘They have been playing and they are playing a game of gigantic bluff,’ he said. ‘They do not wish to create peers. Those peers will be an embarrassment to them in their creation and when they are created, and they have sought to believe themselves, and have induced others to believe, that no peers would need to be created. Even now the bluff continues, and in spite of the letter of the Prime Minister which tells us what the King’s undertaking is, it is sought to intimidate us by the idea that the pledges go far beyond any Mr. Asquith has pretended to have asked, still less to have received, and that the House of Lords will be swamped by these new creations because one hundred or two hundred peers are found to follow Lord Halsbury’s lead. I say that is bluff, and fraudulent bluff.’bb

Nothing would make the ‘ditchers’ look squarely in the face the consequences of their own actions. They persisted in believing that the only danger was that of a creation which would balance the number by which their own adherents exceeded those of the Government,2 and that—a curious logical position for such a self-righteous band—they could count upon enough union  ists abstaining with Lansdowne to make this number tolerably small.