Asquith made a more notable reply, which included an impressive passage on his relations with the King:
‘I am accustomed, as Lord Grey in his day was accustomed, to be accused of breach of the Constitution and even of treachery to the Crown. I confess, as I have said before, that I am not in the least sensitive to this cheap and ill-informed vituperation. It has been my privilege, almost now I think unique, to serve in close and confidential relations three successive British Sovereigns. My conscience tells me that in that capacity, many and great as have been my failures and shortcomings, I have consistently striven to uphold the dignity and just privileges of the Crown. But I hold my office, not only by favour of the Crown, but by the confidence of the people, and I should be guilty indeed of treason if in this supreme moment of a great struggle I were to betray their trust.’b
The King, however, was more sensitive to ‘cheap and ill-informed vituperation’ than was his Prime Minister. He spoke to Lord Morley on the subject on the morning of August 8 and pronounced himself much concerned at the criticism to which he had been subjected in the Commons. He was also worried, he further told Lord Morley, at the language which was probably used in private at the Carlton Club about his actions, at the large number of unfriendly anonymous letters which he was receiving, and at the charge of having betrayed the Irish ‘loyalists’. On the first point Morley returned a sharp answer. It was better, he said, to run the risk of criticism in the Carlton Club than ‘to be denounced from every platform as the enemy of the people’.c
But the King’s anxieties were not to be easily dismissed. He had just been reading the previous day’s censure debate in the Commons (the Council after which he spoke to Morley had been held up from 11.0 to 11.30 in order that he might complete this task) and he did not feel that Asquith had gone quite far enough in exonerating the Crown from responsibility. As a result of this complaint, according to Sir Almeric Fitzroy, it was arranged at the last moment that Crewe, who had not attended the House of Lords for several months, should intervene in the censure debate there that afternoon and go a little further than Asquith had done. His qualification to speak was that he had participated in the November conversations. Speaking under great strain and with painful slowness1 he described the King’s attitude in November in the following terms: ‘His Majesty faced the contingency and entertained the suggestion (of a creation) as a possible one with natural, and if I may be permitted to use the phrase, in my opinion with legitimate reluctance.’d
This phrase, while awakening a wave of undesirable speculation amongst union ists who wished still to believe that the Government was bluffing, did not satisfy the King. His Majesty wished even further stress to be laid upon the reluctance with which he had agreed, and he expressed this wish in a letter which Knollys wrote to Asquith’s secretary, Vaughan Nash, on August 9. But the Prime Minister was resolved to go no further. Indeed a note of asperity enters his biographers’ description of his reactions to the King’s request. He thought that his own statement: ‘The King was pleased to inform me that he felt that he had no alternative but to accept the advice of the Cabinet,’ was both accurate and adequate. ‘To be led into public discussions about the feelings and motives of the King or his views about the policy of the Government, would, in Asquith’s opinion, be even less in the interests of the King than of the Government.… Nothing would ever have induced him to use any language which could have been construed as an admission that he had “coerced the King”.’6
On other points Asquith had shown a great respect for the views of the King. By August 4 it had become known to the Opposition that there was to be no creation of peers before the Lords had again had an opportunity of pronouncing on the bill, and this substantial retreat from the position Ministers had taken up at the time of Lloyd George’s interview with the union ist leaders on July 18 was motivated principally by the King’s wish. There was little enough other reason for it. If the Lords proved recalcitrant, it meant the loss of the bill to the Government and the need to begin again in the next session. If they proved submissive, it meant that the Government would get its bill but that it would still have to wait more than two years for Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment, whereas a creation of peers would have made both these measures possible within a year. If the character of most of the leading members of the Cabinet constituted a strong a priori refutation of the union ist view that the Government was bent on revolution, their extreme reluctance to take the step, advantageous from their own point of view, of swamping the House of Lords constituted powerful empirical disproof of that interpretation. It was not that the Cabinet were not ready for creation should the necessity be forced upon them, or that they could not find a large body of men who would serve their purposes while far from disgracing the House of Lords. Amongst Asquith’s papers was discovered a list of 249 gentlemen whom he proposed to approach, as prospective Liberal peers, should the necessity be forced upon him. It cannot be assumed that all of those included would have accepted the offer, but the existence of the list is an indication of the advanced stage of the Government’s preparations, and the nature of it shows that no lowering of the intellectual calibre of the House of Lords, and little enough of its social composition, would have been involved. Twenty of those listed were the sons of peers, forty-eight of them were baronets, and fifty-nine knights. Twenty-three were Privy Councillors and nineteen members of Parliament. Many of them were later to be elevated to the peerage in the ordinary course of events. Amongst figures of note whose names were listed may be mentioned Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, Bertrand Russell, and Gilbert Murray. Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Abe Bailey come perhaps in a somewhat different category, while General Baden-Powell, General Sir Ian Hamilton, and the Lord Mayor of London of the day were unexpected inclusions.