Mr Balfour's Poodle(74)

Lord Newton was less equivocal, although his arguments were probably couched in too astringent a form to win many votes. He expressed himself tired of the constant public statements of profound mutual esteem to the accompaniment of which the two sections of the union  ist Party had assailed each other.

‘To me these expressions of mutual esteem and affection are rather beside the point. As military metaphors are so much in vogue, I will say that I rather look upon it in this sort of light—as if a general were to call his principal officers together on the eve of a most important, if not fatal, engagement, and to give them his orders; and those officers were to reply, “Sir, we have the most profound admiration for your character; we respect you as a man, as a husband, and as a father, but as regards your orders we propose to act in a precisely different direction.’”k

He touched the die-hards on a very raw spot by pointing out that it was only after another election had become clearly out of the question that they had taken up their fighting position. He stressed the very considerable advantage which could accrue to the more advanced sections of the Liberal Party from an actual creation, and warned his hearers against depending upon ridicule to deal with the Government in these circumstances. ‘It seems to me highly probable that we shall have the ridicule and that the Government will have the Peers.’

Twenty minutes after midnight Lord Midleton moved the adjournment and the rest of the debate stood over until the following day. During this adjournment there was an important development. At Buckingham Palace it was feared that Lord Crewe’s statement that the King had given the November undertaking with ‘natural and legitimate reluctance’ was encouraging the die-hards to believe that the Government might still be bluffing. Sir Harold Nicolson tells us that Lord Stamfordham, in particular, realised this danger, and that on the morning of Thursday, August 10, after consultation with the King, he wrote to Lord Morley stating that it was imperative to dispel this false idea. ‘For this reason,’ his letter continued, ‘the King authorised me to suggest that some statement might be made by you—to the effect that in the event of the Bill being defeated the King would agree to a creation sufficient to guard against any possible combination of the Opposition by which the measure could again be defeated.’l Upon receipt of this letter Morley provided an exact form of words, submitted them to the King, received them back with his ‘entire approval’, and held his statement ready for the afternoon’s debate. This, it seems clear, both from Stamfordham’s letter and from a conversation which Sir Almeric Fitzroy held with Morley on the following day, was the true sequence of events, even though Morley suggests in his Recollectionsm that the initiative came from himself and not from the Palace. But his account was written well after the event.

Midleton opened on the second day, speaking for those who were with Lansdowne. He set himself to reply to Salisbury’s speech of the previous day and showed how much more frightened of the die-hards than of the Government he had become by arguing that, if the division were to go wrong, a very large creation—much more than 200—would be necessary before there would be a certain passage for the bill. He then adduced a new argument, which was alike tactless and of doubtful validity. In the die-hard lobby, it was thought, would be many peers ‘who are not, to say the least, of first experience in public affairs’. Perhaps five or ten such men might constitute the majority against the bill. Was it right that men of the sagacity of Lansdowne and Curzon should be overruled in such a way? The purpose of this was difficult to see. It was a form of dialectic which was hardly likely to convince the inexperienced and unsagacious ‘backwoodsmen’ themselves; and, as the Duke of Northumberland not unreasonably pointed out, the same argument could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to any close division in either House. It is not only when party revolts are organised and it is not only in the Upper House that the votes of stupid men count for as much as the votes of anyone else.

When Midleton had finished Rosebery rose and asked if there could not be a reply from the Government at this stage. Morley showed some reluctance to intervene until later—a fact which supports the view that the idea of a statement originated with the Palace and not with himself—but eventually rose, and wrapping a few rather ill-prepared sentences round his agreed statement, delivered a short speech. Most of it was built upon few or no notes, but when he came to the special passage he drew a sheet of writing paper from the pocket of his frock-coat and read carefully. The whole House gave him the closest of attention. ‘If the Bill should be defeated tonight His Majesty would assent—I say this on my full responsibility as the spokesman of the Government—to a creation of Peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different Parties in Opposition by which the Parliament Bill might again be exposed a second time to defeat.’n