Seven months later he was writing again on the subject and announcing: ‘Nearly if not quite half of the Cabinet is in favour of a Single Chamber. The more prominent people in the Liberal Party appear to be of the same opinion’.i But the defeat and resignation of the Government occurred before even a declaratory resolution against the Lords which had been proposed was carried. Indeed both Morley and Harcourt (whose controversial Finance Bill of 1894 had passed the Commons by a majority of only twenty, and escaped unscathed) thought that the Lords had not exposed themselves sufficiently to make an attack practicable.
During the ten years of union ist Government which followed Rosebery’s resignation in 1895, the Upper House was more than usually quiescent. The tendency for the peers to be more active against a Liberal Government, which we have seen growing and which reached its culmination after 1906, was accompanied by an equally strong tendency for their repose to be more complete when a Government of the right held office. The most controversial legislative proposal of these ten years was the Education Bill of 1902. It marked a sharp departure of policy on an issue which aroused very strong sectarian feeling; it was bitterly opposed by the Liberal Party (although supported by the Irish Nationalists); it was introduced against the known wishes of an important section of the Government; and it was passed by a House of Commons in the election of which a discussion of the issue had played no important part. Yet the only reaction of the House of Lords was to insert into it an amendment, moved by the Bishop of Manchester, which made it a still more extreme and partisan measure. Many of the same considerations applied to the Licensing Bill of 1904; and the Government had by then begun to lose very heavily in the bye-elections. But the Lords passed it with alacrity.
It was therefore difficult to predict with any degree of certainty the treatment which the new Liberal Government would get from the Upper House. Obviously there could be no doubt of the power of the Lords to wreck a Liberal legislative programme; and equally obviously there could be no hope that throughout the whole life of the Government this power would remain entirely unused. But on the basis of what had been said and what had been done in the past there was good room for hope that at least the earlier and electorally more discussed measures of this enormously popular Government would be allowed to pass. If the electorate were not held to have spoken with a clear voice in 1906, the test of audibility must have been an unusually severe one.
Nevertheless, too much reliance could not be placed on precedent. The growing partisanship of the House of Lords made a more extreme course of action a possibility. This view was strengthened by Balfour’s ominous remark, made in an election speech at Nottingham on January 15, 1906, that it was the duty of everyone to see that ‘the great union ist Party should still control, whether in power or whether in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire’. Asquith interpreted this as a direct call to the House of Lords to redress the balance of the constituencies. To what extent this was so could not be determined at the time, but the unfolding of events quickly provided the answer.
III Ploughing the Sands
The king’s speech at the opening of the 1906 session forecast a great crop of legislation. Twenty-two bills in all were promised, but pride of place was clearly to be given to the Education Bill. This was the only measure which achieved a paragraph of its own in the Gracious Speech. ‘A Bill will be laid before you at the earliest possible moment,’ it ran, ‘for amending the existing law with regard to Education in England and Wales.’ A Trades Disputes Bill, to rectify the position created by the Taff Vale and Quinn v. Leathens decisions, and a Plural Voting Bill, to prevent the owners of numerous property qualifications from exercising more than one vote, were the other contentious measures. The remainder could be described, at least for the purpose of reassuring the King, as ‘uncontroversial’ or ‘departmental’.a
The Education Bill, which, while leaving intact the administrative structure created by the Act of 1902, sought to remedy some of the more keenly-felt grievances of the Noncom-formists,1 was introduced into the House of Commons by Augustine Birrell on April 9. It was greeted with a storm of protest, not only from the union ist Party but also from the Anglican and Roman Churches. The Bishop of London took the Albert Hall for a demonstration of opposition.
In the meantime, with the two Houses in recess, Balfour and Lansdowne were using the interval to discuss the general strategy of dealing with Liberal legislation. Lansdowne had prepared a memorandum a few days before Parliament rose in which he set forth a proposal for closer liaison between the leaders of the Opposition in both Houses.