Then, in rapid succession, came the other contestants, Halsbury, Rosebery, and Selborne. Halsbury had been provoked by Curzon but had nothing to add, and Selborne could offer only a few debating points, well below the level of the occasion. But the most unjustifiable intervention was Rosebery’s. He offered no leadership. He based his statement on an argument of force only to himself and of no general validity. He had decided, however, to vote in the Government lobby and he could not forbear to tell the House of his great sacrifice and of the pain with which he made it.1 At last he was down and so was Selborne. It was a quarter to eleven and the suspense was nearly over. The division could be taken.
Even at this stage no one knew what the result would be. Everything clearly turned on the number of union ists who would vote with the Government, even though this involved incurring the obloquy of the extremists without the compensation of a blessing from Lord Lansdowne. The bishops also provided an element of doubt, although it seemed highly likely that the majority of them would vote for the bill, following the lead of Dr. Davidson, who, Mrs. Asquith tells us, exerted great pressure on the general mass of peers, being ‘cursed and blessed, as he moved from group to group, persuading and pleading with each to abstain’. From the same source we learn that ‘some of Lord Murray’s (the Master of Elibank) possible Peers watched from the gallery, hoping for rejection’.s Others, too, watched, but with different emotions. Lansdowne himself retired from the floor as soon as the division was called, and looked down from the gallery above the Throne. Curzon sat stiff in his place. Stamfordham waited anxiously to receive the news and return with it to the King.
During the division there were a few contradictory indications of the way things were going. Bishops and union ists were seen entering the Government lobby in good number. But then there was a check to the flow from that lobby while a stream of peers still came from the other. Then again Willoughby de Broke, a teller for the ‘Halsburyites’, was seen with an anxious, downcast face. In all there was no certainty until the Lord Chancellor read the figures. There was a silence of suspense for him to do so. ‘Contents, 131; Not contents, 114,’ he announced, and the struggle was over. The Government was home by seventeen votes, the die-hards were defeated, and there was to be no creation of peers.
Thirty-seven union ists and thirteen prelates1 had given decisive support to Morley’s eighty-one Liberals. On the other side, Willoughby, despite the last-minute accession of the Duke of Norfolk’s followers and the votes of the Bishops of Peterborough and Worcester, was nine down from the maximum support he had been promised.1 The weight of argument deployed by the ‘hedgers’ may have had some effect here.
The division lists show most strikingly how complete had been the desertion of the Whigs. Halsbury had a great vote of magnates—seven dukes with none in the other lobby—and of those who bore famous political titles. Salisbury and Bute, Clarendon and Hardwicke, Lauderdale and Malmesbury were only some of those in this latter category. On the Government side there were many fewer. Chesterfield and Durham had a ring about them, and so perhaps did Spencer and Granville. For the rest the list of ‘Contents’ read more like the Directory of Directors or a Lloyd George Honours List. Some of the great families of England were ‘ditchers’ and more were ‘hedgers’. But for the first time in the advance to political democracy in this country there was hardly a patrician who would aid the process.
Immediate reactions to the vote were varied. The die-hards were mostly hysterical. Lady Halsbury refused to shake hands with Lansdowne when she and her husband met him on their way out of the House. There was organised hissing of some of the thirty-seven in the Carlton Club, and a plan for circulating lists of these ‘traitors’ to all the union ist Clubs in the United Kingdom was seriously discussed. George Wyndham said ‘We were beaten by the Bishops and the Rats’, and Lord Robert Cecil suggested that the former category should be excluded from any reformed House of Lords. As for the latter category, the Globe expressed the hope that ‘no honest man will take any of them by the hand again, that their friends will disown them, their clubs expel them, and that alike in politics and social life they will be made to feel the bitter shame they have brought upon us all’. And the Observer maintained the standard of invective by referring to ‘the ignoble band, clerical and lay, of union ist traitors, who had made themselves Redmond’s helots’.
At Buckingham Palace the mood was very different.