Mr Balfour's Poodle(75)

In response to a request from Selborne the statement was read a second time. ‘That, I think, is pretty conclusive.’ Morley added. And so, on the limited question, did every peer in the House whose mind was capable at that stage or assimilating a new point.

Rosebery came next, on a sudden impulse, he said, and with the intention of speaking for no more than a minute. He put his own gloss on a number of old arguments and urged the Lansdowne policy of submission, but without disclosing whether he himself would abstain or vote for the Government. The speech lasted a quarter of an hour. Milner was then put up to re-state the die-hard case in a form which could be compatible with the certain knowledge that Morley had just given the House. He did so by claiming that those who worked with Lord Halsbury had always taken into full account the possibility of a large creation; but it was necessary not to yield to a threat, however real, because the threat of creation was something which could be used again and again, whereas an actual creation would not in practice be possible to repeat. This was not compatible, on either score, with what many of the other die-hards had been saying, but, given the premises, it was a logically coherent argument.

Lord Camperdown followed and introduced a new note into the well-worn discussion. He was the first union  ist peer to announce in the House that he proposed to vote with the Government. As had been anticipated this provoked the Duke of Norfolk to rise and say that he would therefore vote with the die-hards. He had been prepared to abstain, but so strongly did he disapprove of union  ist votes for the Government that he would do everything in his power to neutralise their effect. It was thought that the Duke had a number of followers and Lord Halifax, who spoke immediately afterwards, made it certain that he had at least one.

Londonderry spoke in support of Lansdowne and then the Duke of Northumberland delivered the most extreme of diehard speeches. The bill should have been thrown out on second reading, Lansdowne’s reform scheme was a great mistake, and the advocacy of the referendum a ‘fatal error’. The general election results proved nothing because the electorate had been bribed by the reckless and corrupting financial policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It would have been much better if the House of Lords had not given way in 1832, and it was essential that there should be no repetition of that mistake. He was answered by the new Duke of Devonshire, the nephew of the great Duke. The liberal tradition of the Cavendishes had become too weak for him not to deplore the bill and the behaviour of the Government, but it was still strong enough for him to join issue with the wild obscurantism of Northumberland. ‘It is impossible for me,’ Devonshire said, ‘to regard the opinions and feelings of a large number of my fellow-citizens with the complete indifference which the noble Duke does.’o He refuted Milner’s point that the threat of the prerogative might again be invoked for Home Rule or Welsh Disestablishment (Morley intervening to support him in dismissing such an idea) and strongly urged abstention with Lansdowne. For union  ist peers to vote in the Government lobby would be a ‘repugnant and odious’ proceeding, but the responsibility for preventing this was placed firmly on the shoulders of the die-hards.

There were only two more speeches in the general debate, both from die-hards and both of little note. Then, by agreement, the House came to the individual amendments. The first two, dealing with money bills, were disposed of with little debate and no divisions. Morley’s motion ‘that this House do not insist upon the said Amendment’ was in each case accepted. He then moved the same motion in respect of the crucial amendment—Lord Lansdowne’s amendment as it had come to be called—which excluded certain categories of bills from the normal operation of Clause Two. Upon this amendment a two-hour debate developed. The speeches were mostly short. The Earls of Meath and Plymouth began by pronouncing themselves on Lord Halsbury’s side, the former in a speech of remarkable stupidity. The Archbishop of Canterbury then intervened for one minute to declare himself shocked by the levity or callousness with which some peers appeared to contemplate a wholesale creation and to announce that, contrary to his original intention, he would now vote with the Government. ‘There was a ring of leadership in the tone,’ Lord Halsbury’s biographer wrote.p

Next came Lord St. Levan,1 with an orthodox die-hard speech distinguished only by a pleasantly simpliste description of his relations with Lansdowne. ‘In a kind of way we are not actually resisting Lord Lansdowne,’ he said; ‘we have followed his lead, only we have gone further. Lord Lansdowne said, “Come on”, and we came on so hard and with such good will that we found it impossible to stop.’q Lord Heneage, in place of Lord Cromer, who was absent through illness, announced his intention of voting against the die-hards. The division was obviously near, and there then began a contest for the last word. Curzon, who had not previously spoken in the two days of debate, was the first and best justified contestant. He devoted his full effort to averting the catastrophe. His final words were an appeal to the peers ‘to be very careful indeed before you register a vote which, whatever may be your emotions at this moment, when you look over it calmly, I do not say tomorrow but a month, three months or six months hence, you may find has wrought irreparable damage to the Constitution of this country, to your own Party, and to the State’.r It was for Curzon the final blow in a battle which had drained his great vitality and left him ill and exhausted.