And everyone, whether or not they had particular grievances, and in whatever direction they wished to be led, felt the need for a firmer hand on the reins. It was not so much that Balfour was pusillanimous as that he was indifferent. It was not so much that Lansdowne was wrong as that he could not make up his own mind what was right until it was too late to influence the minds of many others. The crisis was therefore in the fullest sense of the phrase a crisis of leadership. The revolt grew out of the successive defeats to which the party had been led, it was fed upon indecision at the top in the spring and early summer, and its real purpose, however much its perpetrators might protest, was to put new men at the head of the union ist Party. Balfour himself fully appreciated how much his conduct was directly under fire, and in the end ceased to be indifferent to this aspect of the matter at least.
‘Politics have been to me quite unusually odious,’ he was to write from Paris to Lady Elcho on August 10. ‘I am not going into the subject, but I have, as a matter of fact, felt the situation more acutely than any in my public life —I mean from the personal point of view. As you know I am very easy-going, and not given to brooding over my wrongs. But last Friday and Saturday I could think of nothing else: a thing which has not happened to me since I was unjustly “complained of” at Eton more than forty years ago! On Saturday the cloud lifted; yet it has not, and perhaps will not disappear until recent events are things barely remembered.…’dd
It was a deep and unpleasant quarrel which could so ruffle Arthur Balfour.
XIII The Issue Resolved
Confronted with this gaping split in their party, the union ists’ leaders did what politicians in trouble have often done. They tried to bring together their own followers by launching a strong attack upon the other side. They tabled votes of censure in the two Houses. Both were in substantially the same terms, the exact form of that in the Commons being: ‘That the advice given to His Majesty by His Majesty’s Ministers whereby they obtained from His Majesty a pledge that a sufficient number of peers would be created to pass the Parliament Bill in the shape in which it left this House is a gross violation of Constitutional liberty, whereby, among many other evil consequences, the people will be precluded from again pronouncing upon the policy of Home Rule.’
This motion was moved by Balfour on August 7. It was a delicate subject, but it did not call forth one of his most effective speeches. This may have been partly because the union ists were uncertain of the gravamen of their charge against the Government. Was it that it was in itself wrong to advise the use of the prerogative to force through a keenly disputed measure, more especially as the points at immediate issue had arisen since the last general election? This was an argument which Balfour and his supporters (as well as Curzon and the others who spoke in the Lords on the following day) used strongly. But they also relied to a great extent upon the view that Asquith’s greatest sin was that he demanded and obtained a hypothetical undertaking from the King, so that the Crown was committed before the Bill had even received a second reading in the Commons, and long before the final form of the dispute could be envisaged. This has since developed into a criticism that it was wrong for Asquith to seek any advance understanding because he should not have doubted that the King would accept the advice of his Ministers when the moment came. This, says Lord Halsbury’s biographer, was the real infamy of the Government.a But it is a view which is manifestly incompatible with the first line of attack. Asquith could hardly be expected to be certain that the King would behave in a way which almost the whole union ist Party professed to believe was unconstitutional. Some of Balfour’s unease therefore came from the attempt to ride two rather ill-matched horses.
In part, too, it arose from the difficulty of developing the attack without criticising the conduct of the King. Unlike Lord Hugh Cecil, who on the following day made no attempt to disguise his disapproval of the Sovereign’s behaviour, Balfour avoided this pitfall, but only at the expense of some remarks about King George which, while sympathetic, were by implication far from complimentary. Advantage, he said, had been taken of ‘a sovereign who had only just come to the throne, and who, from the very nature of the case, had not and could not have behind him that long personal experience of public affairs which some of his great predecessors had’. Of a man of forty-six, who had been Heir Apparent for a decade before his accession, these were slighting words to use; they were also nonsensical, for there is a strong likelihood that King Edward VII would have acted exactly as did King George V, and a probability that Queen Victoria would have done so too.