Mr Balfour's Poodle(7)

This was not the only occasion during this Parliament on which the leader of the Opposition in the Commons tried to exercise a moderating influence on his followers in the Lords. In 1870 a private member’s bill to abolish religious tests at the universities, which had received Government support, failed to get a second reading in the Upper House.1 But a year later Disraeli’s influence was strong enough to get a similar measure accepted.

In 1874 Disraeli’s second Government came in, and six years of almost complete peace between the two Houses began. But the peace was not quite complete. Even with a Conservative Government in office the House of Lords retained a touchiness on any question affecting the ownership of land, which led to its refusal to accept one or two measures or parts of measures.

The return of the Liberals in 1880 provoked more serious differences between the two Houses, although until the Reform Bill of 1884 these were not on the scale which had marked the life of Gladstone’s previous Administration. Both the Irish Land Bill of 1881 and the amending Arrears Bill of the following year were seriously altered in the Upper House, but when the Government remained firm, the peers’ amendments were mostly not pressed. The big dispute of this Parliament arose over the Reform Bill of 1884. On second reading the Conservative Opposition in the Commons divided in favour of a reasoned amendment that an extension of the franchise should be accompanied by redistribution, but on third reading there was no division. In the Lords an amendment to the motion for second reading in similar terms to the one which had been defeated in the Commons was carried against the Government by 205 to 146. The Prime Minister announced that the bill would be re-introduced in the autumn, and, the Lords having defended their action not so much in relation to the merits of the bill as to their right to force a dissolution on an issue of such importance, the summer saw a bitter Liberal campaign against the composition and powers (but more particularly the former) of the Upper House. Joseph Chamberlain attacked the peers as the representatives of a class ‘who toil not, neither do they spin’, and John Morley announced that their House must be either ‘mended or ended’. By the autumn both sides were more disposed to compromise, and an arrangement was arrived at by which the Lords passed the Franchise Bill and the Government followed it up with a redistribution measure.

The events of 1886, despite the great change in the allegiance of peers to which they led, gave the Upper House no work to do. The Whigs and the Chamberlainites who destroyed Gladstone’s majority in the House of Commons and threw out the first Home Rule Bill did its job for it. And the six years of Conservative Government which followed were, as always, a period of rest for their lordships. But the formation of the Liberal Government of 1892 brought them back to the centre of the stage. Their first task was to dispose of the second Home Rule Bill, and they did this with alacrity, and by the biggest anti-Government majority ever recorded. The Government was fresh from a victory (although not a great one) at the polls, and Home Rule had certainly figured prominently in the electioneering of both major parties; but the Lords excused themselves from the influence of these considerations by saying that there was no majority in Great Britain for the bill, and that full weight must be given to the wishes of the ‘predominant partner’. The Prime Minister was for dissolving, but he was apparently unable to carry his Cabinet with him.

In the view of Lord Rosebery it was not so much by the rejection of the Home Rule Bill (he was influenced by the absence of an ‘English’ majority in the House of Commons) as by the destruction of Asquith’s Employers’ Liability Bill in the following session that the House of Lords showed its extreme partisanship. The loss of this bill, combined with the drastic alteration of the Parish Councils Bill, which gave Gladstone the subject for his last speech in the House of Commons, provoked Lord Rosebery, when he became Prime Minister, to devote most of his public speeches to the subject of the relations between the two Houses, and to address urgent memoranda to the Queen on the same point.

‘When the Conservative Party is in power,’ he wrote in April, 1894, ‘there is practically no House of Lords: it takes whatever the Conservative Government brings it from the House of Commons without question or dispute; but the moment a Liberal Government is formed, this harmless body assumes an active life, and its activity is entirely exercised in opposition to the Government…. I cannot suggest any remedy,’ he rather helplessly continued, ‘for any remedy which would be agreeable to the House of Commons would be revolting to the House of Lords, and any remedy which would please the House of Lords would be spurned by the House of Commons’.h