Mr Balfour's Poodle(77)

‘At 11.0.’ the King wrote in his diary, ‘Bigge returned from the House of Lords with the good news that the Parliament Bill had passed with a majority of 17. So the Halsburyites were thank God beaten! It is indeed a great relief to me—I am spared any further humiliation by a creation of peers.… Bigge and Francis have indeed worked hard for this result.’t

Next day he left to stay at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire. While there he wrote of being saved ‘from a humiliation which I should never have survived’, and received a comforting letter from Lord Esher which spoke of ‘the wisdom of Your Majesty’s action in not swerving by an inch from the role of a Constitutional Sovereign’, and added, ‘Queen Victoria could not have done better, and would, I believe, not have done otherwise’.u

Elsewhere there were few repetitions of either the fury of the die-hards or the extreme relief of the King. The general public remained as unexcited as it had been throughout the long struggle. The Balfourites were dispirited, and the Government, already occupied with Agadir, had no time for self-congratulation before it was plunged into the turmoil of a national railway strike. The sequence of events was a reminder that as the Liberals won their last great victory, purely political questions were becoming increasingly submerged in broader social and economic problems, and August, 1914, was casting its shadow ahead.