Simon’s twenty-year performance as a minister was very uneven. He was indecisive and often lacked both courage and conviction. He was an advanced Liberal in his younger days; and as Attorney-General (in the Cabinet) hovered on the brink of resignation against Britain’s involvement in the 1914 war. A year and a half later, having become a very young Home Secretary, he did resign, against the government’s move towards conscription. But somehow his withdrawal, although it put him out of office between the ages of forty-two and fifty-eight, managed to look calculating rather than self-sacrificial.
During these occluded middle-aged years he moved steadily to the right; delivered a celebrated denunciation of the General Strike as illegal, which finally separated him from Lloyd George (with whom there had long been mutual antipathy and who contributed to the large corpus of anti-Simon invective the memorable thought that while ‘greater men’ had previously crossed the floor of the House of Commons they ‘did not leave behind them the slime of hypocrisy’); presided over the ineffective Indian Statutory Commission of 1927-30, which was chiefly notable for having Major Attlee, the future arbiter of the destinies of the sub-continent, amongst its quieter members; and, intermittently, earned still larger fees at the bar than even Rufus Isaacs or Edward Carson, Marshall Hall or Patrick Hastings had done or were doing.
Once he was back in office following the formation of the National Government in 1931 he was, like Charles II, although he did not have much else in common with that ‘merry monarch’, determined not to depart again on his travels. He had nearly fourteen continuous years in office, fluctuatingly esteemed by his colleagues, often dissatisfied with his performance and his life, but always limpet-like. He was worst as Foreign Secretary (until 1935), better as Home Secretary (1935-7), at first most influential as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1937-40) but looking increasingly hidebound as defence needs overwhelmed orthodox finance. As Lord Chancellor (1940-5) he was a distinguished judge and looked good upon the Woolsack, but was kept at such arm’s length by Churchill that he would not even put him in the normal-sized Cabinet of his ‘caretaker government’ of May/July 1945 (the War Cabinet had been much smaller). It was an unprecedented slight for a Lord Chancellor to be reduced, as though he were a Minister of Pensions or of Overseas Development, to be a minister of Cabinet rank (that is not ranking to be in the Cabinet) as it is euphemistically and misleadingly described.
It was all too bad to be true, and there is an underlying feeling that Simon must have been better than this. He was dedicated to public service, devoted to his mother, and generous, not exactly in temperament, but in the donations and subventions that he quietly made and the help that he frequently gave to people who could be of no use to him. He would have greatly liked to be a popular and loved figure.
In 1992 we had a very good political biography, as the author himself described it, from David Dutton. He put all amateurs of twentieth-century political history in his debt by tackling a difficult even if nearly virgin subject and by telling us ten times as much about Simon as that statesman did in his own volume of prim and passionless memoirs.
G. M. Trevelyan
This is based on a 1992 Observer review ofG. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History by David Cannadine (HarperCollins).
George Macaulay Trevelyan was the most widely read historian of the first half of this century. His first book came out in 1899, his last (of serious import) in 1944. But there was no question of his giving up because of fading response. This last volume (English Social History) sold 100,000 copies in its first year and 500,000 in its first six. Nor was this a flash in the pan. His British History in the Nineteenth Century (1922) had sold 68,000 and his History of England (1926) 200,000. He and the publishing house Longmans, Green kept each other rich. No writer of history had sold like it since Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay was Trevelyan’s great uncle and the provider of his second name. So it was all tightly knit, particularly as Trevelyan’s father was George Otto Trevelyan, who served in all Gladstone’s governments and wrote a History of the American Revolution as well as the main biography of Macaulay.
All three, who between them spanned the years from 1800 to 1962, were regarded as quintessential ‘Whig historians’. What exactly this meant is far from clear. ‘Whig’, even in England, let alone if the American connotation is added to it, always has been a fairly imprecise word, giving out different beams of meaning according to the context in which it was used and the angle from which it was viewed. In all three cases, however, it meant that they regarded the Glorious Revolution as one of the best things ever to have happened in English history. G. M. Trevelyan, whether by design or coincidence, even had 1688 as his Cambridge telephone number.