Mr Balfour's Poodle(72)

The most notable feature of the day’s debate was a speech of startling violence and bitterness delivered by Lord Hugh Cecil. He announced that he would be glad to see Asquith punished for high treason by the criminal law, and declared that, if peers were to be created, the more completely the constitution were broken, the better it would be for the union  ist Party. ‘The Home Rule issue,’ he continued … ‘would be decided in Belfast. There might be secession and a separate body might be organised to collect taxes. These might be regarded as empty threats: so had disorder in the House. He looked back on it with satisfaction; it showed that the Government could not silence the Opposition.’g

On the following day, Wednesday, August 9, the Lords, meeting specially for this purpose at ten o’clock in the morning, received the Commons’ amendments. Having ordered them to be printed the House then adjourned until half past four in the afternoon. There was then to begin a two-day debate which was the final encounter of the long played-out constitutional struggle. Unlike most of the other phases of the struggle it assumed something of the air of drama. The debate itself was almost unique amongst major parliamentary occasions of the past eighty years in that the result was not known beforehand. There had been no last-minute developments to turn the tide decisively one way or the other. Lord Morley had been able to muster only sixty-eight Liberals to oppose Curzon’s motion of censure, and this might have slightly encouraged the die-hards. But then it was thought that he was reserving his major whipping effort for two nights later. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, had secured 120 guests for the supper party at Arlington House which he gave to ‘ditcher’ peers after the division on the Tuesday. But this was not widely known; and, in any event, these signs of Liberal weakness and of die-hard strength were just as likely to swell the number of union  ists preparing to vote in the Government lobby as to produce any other result. The debate therefore opened in a penumbra of doubt. All that was certain was that, for once in a way, speeches would count, and that every vote was important.

Those most vitally affected awaited the result according to their various habits of behaviour. Balfour incurred more criticism by retiring to Paris, on his way to Bad Gastein. He occupied the final day of the crisis, as we have seen, by writing letters of complaint to Lady Elcho from the Ritz. He could bear London no longer. From the suspense he was more immune than most men; it was the bickering which he found tiring. Asquith was also away, although not out of the country. He travelled down to Wallingford on the Wednesday to stay with friends and recover from his laryngitis. From there, on the Thursday, he wrote a laconically matter-of-fact note to his secretary. ‘If the vote goes wrong in the H. of L.,’ it ran, ‘the Cabinet should be summoned for 11.30 Downing Street tomorrow morning and the King asked to postpone his journey till the afternoon. … If I have satisfactory news this evening I shall come up for Cabinet 12.30. My voice is on the mend but still croaky.’h But the King, more agitated by the prospect of the result than either of the two party leaders, and much less at ease with himself than Asquith at least, was too involved to wish to leave London, despite the date and despite the temperature.

This last factor provided another element of drama. It was the hottest weather for seventy years. The whole summer had been torrid, and the previous week exceptionally so. On August 9 the shade temperature over most of England rose to 95°. At South Kensington it was 97° at Greenwich Observatory it was 100°—the highest ever recorded in Great Britain. Roads melted. Railway lines were distended. That evening a serious fire developed at the top of the Carlton Hotel in Pall Mall. In these circumstances the unfettered House of Lords began its final debate.

Morley rose to move that the Commons’ reasons for disagreeing to several of the Lords’ amendments be now considered. He indicated that he would have preferred to take the amendments seriatim, but that in deference to the views of the Opposition he was now moving a motion which would provide for a general debate. There was an understanding that the detailed examination of the Commons’ reasons would begin at about dinner time on the following evening.

Morley deployed no arguments and within five minutes he had resumed his seat. Thereafter there was no Government speaker for the whole of the day. From the Liberal backbenches Earl Russell and Lord Ribblesdale1 were heard, and from the episcopal bench the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Winchester. For the rest it was a day of battle between the two sections of the union  ist Party. Lansdowne began it. He dismissed the concessions made by the Commons as of trivial importance and threw in occasional words of strong condemnation of the Government, but almost the whole of his argument, very cogently expressed, was directed against his own dissidents. The safeguards left to the House of Lords under the bill were worth something. But a swamping creation would sweep these safeguards away, and might also confront the next Conservative Government, intent upon undoing the damage, with a delaying radical majority in the Upper House. Furthermore, the effect of a mass creation, not because of the individuals concerned but because of the manner of their ennoblement, would be degrading to the House of Lords, to parliamentary institutions, and to the King. What of the suggestion that a mass creation was not possible? Lansdowne cited a statement which Crewe had made in the censure debate the previous night,1 interpreted this as implying a very heavy creation, and asked Morley to confirm his view. This Morley refused to do, saying that it was too delicate and important a matter to be dealt with by an intervention. Lansdowne concluded by referring to a long constitutional struggle ahead and the undesirability of divided counsels in the union  ist Party. He was followed by Halsbury who showed himself truculently sensitive to the charge of disloyalty, but who added little by way of argument, perhaps because his principal speech had been delivered in the censure debate. The Hansard report of his speech, however, is enlivened by frequent appearances of the splendid archaism ‘forsooth!’ He had not been born in 1823 for nothing. But on some observers his speech, in juxtaposition with that of Lansdowne, did not create a good impression.