Henry Campbell (for thus he was born in 1836) grew up in an orderly, businesslike atmosphere of politics, religion, and commercial prosperity. His father, Sir James Campbell, was simultaneously a successful importer of foreign goods and Lord Provost of Glasgow. Campbell’s sons, destined for the business, were exposed early to foreign places and tongues. Henry and his elder brother, James, often accompanied their father on visits to France; when Henry was fourteen, he toured Europe with James for ten months. Still fourteen, thoroughly grounded in French language and literature, he entered Glasgow University, remained four years, then moved along to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took an undistinguished Third in classics. In 1858, he returned to Glasgow to work for his father. In 1860, at his brother’s wedding, he met and fell in love with Charlotte Bruce, daughter of the major general commanding the Edinburgh garrison. Their marriage, when he was twenty-five and she twenty-eight, was, he said, the happiest day of his life. They had no children and shared every thought and possible moment. They laughed at the same jokes, often spoke French to each other, and made up private names for political figures. Charlotte had a strong will and judged men shrewdly. Her duty, as she conceived it, was to protect her husband from those who were anxious to take advantage of what she considered his excessively trusting nature. His duty, as he saw it, was to nurture her by constant presence and sustained affection through repeated and prolonged periods of illness. He trusted her absolutely and, particularly when it came to judging character, would make no move without her counsel. “We will refer it1 to The Authority,” he once told a friend, “and she will decide. Her judgment is infallible.”
In 1868, after ten years in business, Henry Campbell was elected to the House of Commons as Member for Stirling. Three years later, he changed his name. A rich uncle, Henry Bannerman, died leaving a large inheritance to his nephew on condition that he add “Bannerman” to his name. Campbell agreed although he came to regret it. “I see you are already tired,2 as I long have been, of writing my horrid long name,” he wrote to a friend. “I am always best pleased to be called Campbell and most of my friends do so.... An alternative is C.B.” His wife, even less pleased by the change, for years went on signing herself simply “Charlotte Campbell.”
C.B. rose slowly in Liberal Party politics. He spent seventeen years in the House of Commons before ascending to Cabinet rank in 1885 as Secretary of War. To his dismay, he found himself at his first Cabinet meeting seated next to the seventy-six-year-old Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone. “I sat down timidly,”3 recalled Campbell-Bannerman, “on the edge of the chair, like a fausse marquise, abashed to be under the wings of the great man.” C.B. remained at the War Office through the balance of Gladstone’s third government, returned when the Grand Old Man came back to form a fourth government, and stayed on through the brief term of Gladstone’s mercurial heir, the Earl of Rosebery.
Inadvertently, Campbell-Bannerman was the cause of the fall of Rosebery’s government. The Liberal majority in the Commons had been declining; Rosebery had replaced Gladstone without an election and the voters did not like a Gladstone ministry without Gladstone. For weeks, the government had been stumbling with majorities of seven or eight. On June 21, 1895, the subject, Army Estimates, was one which usually emptied the House, leaving only a handful on the opposing benches. The government’s case was in the hands of C.B. as War Minister. Suddenly, in a move carefully plotted by Unionist leaders, the opposition moved a one-hundred-pound reduction of Campbell-Bannerman’s salary on the grounds that he had not provided the army with a sufficient reserve of cordite. C.B. replied that, in the opinion of his expert advisors, the reserve was ample. He refused to give the figures in public but offered to show them in private to opposition leaders. They were not interested. Balfour and Chamberlain appeared on the scene to join in the attack. Liberal whips rushed to locate and rally members but when the vote was taken, the government was short by seven votes. Rather than continue its hand-to-mouth existence, the Rosebery government resigned. The Queen sent for Lord Salisbury. C.B. was defiant about the alleged shortage of cordite: “As to the censure,4 I am very proud of it. It was a blackguard business. We have too much ammunition rather than too little.”
The early years of Lord Salisbury’s long rule were difficult for the Liberal Party. Leadership was uncertain: Gladstone, well up in his eighties, lived in restless retirement; Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor as Prime Minister, remained leader of the opposition, but his grip on the party was weak. He was an earl, young, handsome, stylish, an eloquent orator, and the darling of the press. His marriage to a Rothschild brought him £100,000, with which he kept a racing stable and a yacht. During the sixteen months he was Prime Minister, two of his horses won the Derby in successive years. Rosebery was immensely proud, almost more so than of any political achievement. The turf world loved him, but rank-and-file Liberals, stem Nonconformist followers of Mr. Gladstone, looked askance at the spectacle of a Whig aristocrat distracted from the Premiership by cheering a horse. But Rosebery had greater political handicaps than his passion for the track. To many, he seemed in the wrong party; on South Africa, on Home Rule, on land and tax policies, his views were more Tory than Liberal. Gladstone, who appointed him Foreign Secretary, summed up his opinion by saying that “Rosebery was one of the ablest5 as well as one of the most honorable men he had ever known, but that he doubted whether he really possessed common sense.”
Out of office, still party leader, Rosebery sulked. Gladstone, in his eighty-seventh year, continued to speak in public, attracting huge crowds. Rosebery complained that this undermined his position; eventually, finding himself “in apparent difference6 with a considerable mass of the Liberal Party... and in some conflict of opinion with Mr. Gladstone,” he resigned the party leadership. Sir William Harcourt, Liberal leader in the Commons, succeeded for one year and then, he too withdrew. The party whips offered the leadership to Herbert Henry Asquith, the most accomplished orator in the party, but Asquith, forty-six, needed to earn a living at the bar to support his family; he urged that the post go to Campbell-Banner-man, sixteen years his senior.
C.B. accepted reluctantly. He was a solid, reassuring figure, a conciliator, faithful, humorous, shrewd, kind, good-natured. He had been faithful, but not especially active on the front bench. Beatrice Webb described him as “well-suited to a position7 of sleeping partner in an inherited business.” He had no ambition to succeed to the leadership. His health was uncertain; his wife’s health was poor. That he would harness himself to the heavy and constant burdens of the leadership seemed improbable. C.B. did so because, there being no one else, he saw it as his duty. In the beginning, this situation conferred certain advantages: he did not want the job and could not be accused of snatching it from anyone else. He had no enemies; all were grateful. In 1898, Gladstone died, removing the great figure which had shadowed every other Liberal statesman for forty years. Some Liberals missed the brilliance and charm of Lord Rosebery, others were glad that the haze of doubt surrounding the party leader’s intentions had finally lifted. There was nothing enigmatic about C.B. He stood stoutly for Liberal ideas in their simplest form and worked avowedly to bring the Liberal Party back to power. It was said that “Campbell-Bannerman’s8 great advantage was that he always seemed to be in the battle while Lord Rosebery always seemed to be above it.” During the seven years of C.B.’s leadership before the Liberals returned to power in 1905, he modestly said that the question of who should be Prime Minister in the next Liberal government should be decided only when the moment came. For part of this time, C.B. told friends that Rosebery could have the leadership back any time he wanted it. “The door has always been open9 for Lord Rosebery’s return,” he said.
The issue that made Rosebery’s return impossible and so deeply divided the Liberal Party that it could not transform itself into a government was the Boer War. From the beginning, Camp-bell-Bannerman realized that the war would wreak havoc on party unity. The majority in the party, following the tradition of Gladstone, was against the war. This included C.B., Morley, and Lloyd George, among the leadership. They opposed imperialism, as Gladstone had, and viewed the Empire as much as an instrument of intimidation and exploitation as a civilizing influence. In this instance, they found the cause of the war in the iniquity of certain government ministers, primarily Chamberlain. The Colonial Minister, in alliance with Rhodes, had engineered a squalid intrigue in the interests of a gang of profiteers who wished to use the power of a large nation to squelch the liberty and steal the treasures of a small and helpless one. The Boers, from this perspective, were “a small people,10 struggling to be free,” and Kruger’s ultimatum was a desperate challenge into which the Boer President had been trapped by an astute course of provocation.
Rosebery rejected this position and, on the issue of the war, supported the government. The former Prime Minister had drifted so far away from the mass of the party, however, that his views had little impact. More significant was the position taken by three active younger Liberal leaders, H. H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and Richard B. Haldane, who, while remaining firmly pledged to the party, supported the government on South Africa. Fifty Liberal backbenchers stood with this triumvirate; together the group was called the Liberal Imperialists. For Asquith, a former Home Secretary and the most prominent of this faction, the key point was, Who started the war? For him, the decisive acts were the Boer ultimatum and invasion of adjacent British territories. “We [the Liberal Imperialists] held that the war11 was neither intended nor desired by the Government and the people of Great Britain but that it was forced upon us without adequate reason and entirely against our will,” he explained. Grey wholeheartedly agreed: “We are in the right12 in this war. It is a just war. It is a war which has been forced upon this country,” he said. Campbell-Bannerman did not dispute that, in the narrow sense, the Boer ultimatum had made war inevitable. “The Boers have committed13 an aggression which it is the plain duty of all of us to resist,” he declared. His complaint was that the situation had been inflamed by British government policy. As C.B. put it, he was “anti-Joe, but never pro-Kruger.”14 In the middle, standing between the Liberal Imperialists and the Liberal pacifists, was Campbell-Bannerman, who respected Asquith, if not Asquith’s position. For the other Liberal Imperialist leaders, he had contempt. Applying the term “Master” to people he disliked, C.B. referred to “Master Haldane” and “Master Grey,”15 but never to “Master Asquith.”
The political reckoning of the Boer War came in September 1900 after the British Army, having recovered from its early defeats, had occupied Pretoria and Johannesburg. Chamberlain persuaded Salisbury to call a general election to take advantage of the euphoria of victory and exploit the split among the Liberals. C.B.’s divided party had no chance. Chamberlain, a master political propagandist, pounced on the theme that Liberal candidates were friends of the nation’s enemies and would undermine British policy and stab British soldiers in the back. The election was a test of patriotism, Unionist orators relentlessly proclaimed; the issue was patriotism versus treason. “A vote for the Liberals16 is a vote for the Boers,” screamed placards and speakers around the country. This attack aggravated the deep split in the Liberal Party. Liberal candidates found themselves condemning each other, not the Unionists, while Chamberlain rode triumphantly over both, declaring that even the slightest Liberal success would weaken the hand of the government in ending the war and dealing with the rebellious Boers. Campbell-Banner-man’s situation was hopeless. He was aware that many voters resented the tone of Unionist oratory and knew that calling an election at that point was a political trick. He also understood that many of these same voters believed that defeat of the government would be considered by the Boers and by foreign powers as a rejection of the South African policy into which the nation had poured a torrent of blood and wealth.
Chamberlain, exulting in his anticipated victory, sought not just to defeat but to destroy his former party. He asked for a landslide which would sweep away the Liberals. The vote, when it came—2,428,492 to 2,105,518—was not the hoped-for annihilation; indeed, by Chamberlain’s definition, over 2 million British voters had proclaimed themselves “traitors.” The Khaki Election, fought on a single issue, ensured the Unionist Party another six years of rule. From Campbell-Bannerman’s practical point of view, this was not entirely bad; the Liberal Party, still in the throes of internal division, was unready to govern.
Politics was only one part of Campbell-Bannerman’s life. He gave seven months a year to London, the Liberal Party, the House of Commons, and government office. During these months, he gave himself completely, weekends included. He was not invited to dinner parties and late-night suppers and did not go to the great house parties which lured Balfour and Asquith. In compensation, C.B. demanded five months away for his wife and himself. Three of these months were spent at his home in Perthshire: Belmont, a rambling Victorian mansion furnished with soft carpets, deep leather armchairs, and big, open fireplaces. Outside, a broad expanse of lawn stretched to a circle of giant ash, beech, spruce, and pine trees. On arrival at Belmont, C.B.’s first concern was to visit his trees, sometimes bowing to them and bidding them “Good morning.” To one magnificent specimen, he always raised his hat and, in a courtly manner, inquired after “Madame’s health.”17 Nothing unfamiliar was permitted at Belmont. There were no motorcars, only old horses, old carriages, old dogs—many dogs, his and hers—and old servants. C.B. was loyal; what had served him well would not be put by. He had a large collection of walking canes. Each day, as he chose the one to be given an outing, he would murmur affectionately to the others, consoling them for being left behind. A drawer in his desk contained a mass of pencil stubs—old friends, he explained, “who deserved18 to be decently cared for when their day was done.”
Every year, Campbell-Bannerman and his wife spent two months on the Continent, travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy, or Spain, always arriving punctually in Marienbad, where Charlotte could rest and take a cure, at the beginning of August. C.B. loved France and would often be seen sitting in a restaurant or poking through shops in Paris. Sometimes, he would escape from London to Dover to sit on the pier and watch the Channel steamers come and go. Occasionally, he improved on this pastime by taking the morning boat to Calais, enjoying an excellent lunch at the Gare Maritime, and returning to England in the afternoon. Among his papers, he always carried a novel by Balzac, Flaubert, Anatole France, or Zola, but his primary pleasure was to sit and look at people. Few looked at him, and to the end he scorned the idea that he was a person of importance.
The Unionist government’s claim of victory in South Africa was hollow. Although the Union Jack waved in Johannesburg and Pretoria and triumphant beacons illuminated the hills above Balmoral, Boer fighting men were still in the field. They were no longer organized into regiments; instead, they assembled secretly as guerrilla commandos, small bodies of horsemen who struck suddenly at slow-moving British infantry detachments and supply columns, then vanished into the veldt. Orthodox military tactics were useless; by the time a force of British or Imperial cavalry came up to pursue, the guerrillas had transformed themselves into peaceful Boer farmers, plowing the land in the same baggy work clothes in which they had fought a few days before. Their weapons were hidden in their houses, and the swift work ponies that made the raids possible were grazing in their fields.
Kitchener, who succeeded Lord Roberts as Commander-in-Chief in December 1900, addressed this problem with brutal logic: if he could not pin down twenty thousand Boer horsemen with 250,000 British troopsfn1 in a war of movement, he would reduce and then eliminate the commandos’ ability to maneuver. Eight thousand corrugated iron and stone blockhouses were stretched first along the railway lines, then across the countryside. Eventually, the veldt was laced with a network of small blockhouse forts, linked by barbed wire, within rifle shot of one another. Once the countryside was compartmentalized, Kitchener swept through in the manner of a pheasant shoot in Norfolk. The language of Kitchener and his intelligence officers was that of the hunt: so many “drives” and “bags” and “kills.” Sweeping everything before them, the army “sanitized” the ground behind. All crops, potential food for the commandos, were burned. Every farm which could be used as a shelter or rendezvous point was burned. Every rural inhabitant caught in the net, mostly women and children, was uprooted, hustled into a wagon, and driven off to one of twenty-four concentration camps built and administered by the army. The camps, hastily constructed tent cities, were exposed to sun and rain in summer and icy winds in winter, and had inadequate latrines and insufficient fresh water. Because the inmates were reckoned to be the families of Boer guerrillas still in the field, they were given reduced-scale army rations. There was no meat, no vegetables, no milk for children, no soap; the water was contaminated. Typhoid appeared. Over fourteen months, during which the population of the camps bulged to 117,000, 18,000 to 28,000 inmates, most of them women and children, died.
Britain learned about these horrors from the testimony of an impassioned middle-aged woman, Emily Hobhouse, who toured the camps and returned to England. She went to see St. John Broderick, the Unionist Secretary of State for War, who listened politely but refused to commit himself. Then she went to see Campbell-Banner-man. The Liberal Party leader sat quietly as she poured out her story: “wholesale burning of farms19... deportations... a burnt-out population brought in by the hundreds of convoys... deprived of clothes... semi-starvation in the camps... fever stricken children lying... upon the bare earth... appalling mortality.” C.B. decided to speak. A week later, on June 14, at a Liberal dinner at Holborn Restaurant, he talked about the nature of war. “A phrase often used20 [by the government] was that ‘war is war,’ but when one came to ask about it one was told that no war was going on, that it was not war. When was a war not a war? When it was carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”
A storm of anger burst over his head. He was denounced in the popular press, excoriated in private clubs, excluded from polite society. The leader of the Liberal Party, a former War Secretary, had appallingly defamed the British Army. Pro-Boerism had reached the point of treason. Obviously, this man could never become Prime Minister. Campbell-Bannerman did not flinch. Three days later he repeated his words in the House of Commons. He absolved the soldiers who carried out the orders: “I never said a word21 which would imply cruelty or even indifference on the part of officers or men of the British Army. It is the whole system I consider, to use a word I have already applied to it, barbarous.” The repetition inflamed both Unionists and Liberal Imperialists. Haldane rose to regret that the word “barbarous” had been used and to disassociate himself and his colleagues from their party leader. In the division that followed, fifty Liberals, including Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, abstained from voting. Three days later, Asquith gave his reply in a speech at Liverpool Station Hotel. “We have not changed our view,”22 he said. “We do not repent of it... and we shall not recant it.” Public dinners and counterdinners followed; one observer described this contest as “war to the knife—and fork.”23 A dinner for Asquith was planned; C.B. appealed to Asquith to postpone it and substitute a unity dinner over which he himself would preside. Asquith declined. Rosebery spoke at a luncheon, attacking C.B.’s “methods of barbarism” phraseology but not aligning himself with Asquith. “I must plough my furrow24 alone,” he told his audience. “That is my fate, agreeable or the reverse. But before I get to the end of that furrow it is possible that I may find myself not alone.” By the spring of 1902, Asquith and Rosebery still were apart, but both had repudiated Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership of the party.
It was at this moment, when the Liberal future looked blackest, that Joseph Chamberlain shattered the Unionist government by proposing a duty on imported wheat. For three years, the battle over Imperial Preference dragged on, pitting Prime Minister against Colonial Secretary, spurring resignations and defections, accompanied all the while by Unionist losses in by-elections. By the autumn of 1905, there was little doubt that when a General Election was called, the Liberal Party would win. Arthur Balfour, politically weary and suffering from bronchitis and phlebitis, seemed anxious to go.
The King let it be known that if Balfour resigned, Campbell-Bannerman was his choice. King Edward had not always felt this way about C.B. After the “methods of barbarism” speech, the monarch had asked Lord Salisbury whether the Liberal leader could be silenced. The Prime Minister replied that any attempt to do so would be unwise; it would be seen as Court interference in party politics. The King had to be satisfied with extending only the minimal necessary politeness when he and C.B. were forced to meet. With the passage of time, these feelings mellowed. The two men had similar tastes: both loved France and Paris; both went annually for a cure at Marienbad. It was in Bohemia that the King and the Liberal leader talked informally and the King discovered C.B. to be “so straight, so good-tempered,25 so clever, and so full of humor that it was impossible not to like him.” Campbell-Bannerman’s solid, unpretentious qualities were quite different from Balfour’s airy graces. In conversation, the King found Sir Henry to be “quite sound on foreign politics.”26 Above all, King Edward was a realist. For seven years, C.B. had been leader of the Liberal Party. It was plain that the Liberals were coming to power. The King would be dealing with Sir Henry as sovereign to minister; why not try to make him a friend? “I lunched with the King,”27 C.B. wrote to a friend from Marienbad in August 1905. “He said he was glad to exchange views with me as I must soon be in office and very high office.” The intimacy flourished: “about half my meals28 have been taken in H.M.’s company,” Campbell-Bannerman continued. “I think my countrymen [in Marienbad] were astounded to find with what confidence, consideration, and intimacy he treated me.”
As the election approached, the only issues were the margin of victory and whether the Liberals, so long out of power, were ready to govern. Campbell-Bannerman believed they were and, while ready to accept the Premiership himself, was equally ready to step aside if another Liberal seemed able to provide greater harmony. For a while, in the spring and summer of 1905, it seemed that Lord Spencer, Liberal leader in the House of Lords, might be chosen. Dubbed “the Red Earl”—because of the color of his beard rather than the hue of his politics—he had had long service during the Gladstone years and his placid, undemanding ways seemed likely to offend the fewest in the party. Rosebery remained a remote possibility but his maverick political behavior had alienated him from both the leaders and the rank and file. In the autumn the breach between Campbell-Bannerman and Rosebery was further widened by their differing positions on Home Rule. Campbell-Bannerman advocated genuine Home Rule (“the effective management of Irish affairs29 in the hands of a representative Irish Authority”), albeit step by step. Rosebery rejected ultimate Home Rule in any form and declared in ringing tones: “Emphatically and explicitly,30 once for all, I cannot serve under that banner.”
In the autumn of 1905, Lord Spencer suffered a cerebral seizure which ended his political career. Rosebery had removed himself from consideration. Campbell-Bannerman, the overwhelming preference of the Liberal rank and file, the clear preference of the King, was now the overwhelming favorite. Suddenly, new obstacles rose in his path. If C.B.’s ascent to the summit could not be denied, three men in his party meant at least to limit his power. Early in September, the three leading Liberal Imperialists, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, gathered at Grey’s fishing lodge at Relugas in northeastern Scotland to discuss the prospects of a Liberal government and their roles should one be formed. Their doubts about C.B.’s leadership went beyond their differences with him over South Africa. In Haldane’s words, “Campbell-Bannerman... was genial31 and popular and respected for the courage with which he had resisted the policy of the Government in South Africa. But he was not identified in the public mind with any fresh ideas, for indeed he had none. What was wanted was not the recrudesence of the old Liberal Party, but a body of men with life and energy and a new outlook on the problems of the state. At these problems some of us had been working diligently....”
There was also concern about Campbell-Bannerman’s health and its effect on his capacity for leadership. On the podium, C.B. had always been dull; now, old and weary, he—and therefore the party—were certain to be minced in debate by the brilliant parliamentary skills of Arthur Balfour. Accordingly, the trio’s decision, which came to be known as the Relugas Compact, was to support C.B.’s installation as Prime Minister, but to make their support conditional on his leaving the House of Commons for the House of Lords. The party in the Commons would be led by Asquith, an acknowledged master of debate. This arrangement had precedent: Salisbury had sat in the Lords while Balfour managed the Commons; Lord Spencer, had he become Prime Minister, would have governed from the Upper House. The bludgeon to enforce the trio’s demand was powerful: if C.B. did not agree, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane would refuse to accept office. Assuming that Campbell-Bannerman would give way, the three picked out the offices they wished: Asquith would become Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Leader of the House of Commons; Grey would go to the Foreign Office; Haldane would become Lord Chancellor and preside over the House of Lords. Control of these three offices would allow the trio to dominate the government; the weakened Prime Minister would occupy a largely figurehead role. Before leaving the fishing lodge, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane pledged themselves to one an-other: unless C.B. went to the Lords, all would stay out; unless all came in together, none would accept office.
The trio’s first move was to inform the King. Haldane visited the sovereign at Balmoral, insisting that his colleagues’ decision was based on concern for Campbell-Bannerman’s health. The King, aware that C.B. was not robust, accepted the wisdom of the new Prime Minister’s going to the Lords and agreed to suggest it to him. But King Edward objected to the trio’s threat to remain outside the Cabinet. The government, he pointed out, would be crippled from the beginning and he, as monarch, would be in an awkward position. On November 13, Asquith confronted Campbell-Bannerman with the Relugas Compact. C.B. listened carefully. He was anxious, he said, to have Asquith as Chancellor and agreeable to Grey as Foreign Secretary, but at Haldane, he bucked violently. He blamed the suggestion that he go to the House of Lords on “that ingenious person,32 Richard Burdon Haldane.” He would go to the Lords, “a place for which33 I have neither liking, training nor ambition,” he said, only “at the point of a bayonet.”
On Monday afternoon, December 4, Balfour went to Buckingham Palace and resigned. That evening, knowing the King would summon Campbell-Bannerman the following day, Grey called on C.B. and told him bluntly that he would not take office in the new government unless the Prime Minister went to the Lords, and Asquith—who, Grey said to C.B. was “the more robust and stronger34 leader in policy and debate”—was permitted to lead the Commons. Campbell-Bannerman was surprised, hurt, and indignant. Grey, he said later, had come to him “all buttoned-up35 and never undoing one button.” Grey explained his harshness as honesty: “I wanted him to know36 just where I stood and to feel that I was not suppressing in his presence things that I had said about him elsewhere.”
The next morning, Tuesday, December 5, the King asked Campbell-Bannerman to form a government. During their interview, the monarch urged his friend to accept the proposal of the Liberal trio and take a peerage. C.B. was noncommittal. He told King Edward that he must talk to his wife, who was still in Scotland. On Wednesday evening, Lord Morley and Lord Tweedmouth, both about to enter the Cabinet, appeared in Campbell-Bannerman’s house in Belgrave Square. The new Prime Minister still was undecided. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was soon to arrive and Morley and Tweedmouth were asked to return after dinner. When they returned, they found C.B. exultant. “No surrender!”37 he cried. Lady Campbell-Bannerman, despite worries over her husband’s health and her jealousy of his time spent away from her, so loathed the Relugas trio that she had put her fears aside and urged her husband to remain in the Commons.fn2
Asquith, informed of C.B.’s decision, immediately deserted his friends. “The conditions are in one respect39 fundamentally different from those which we, or at any rate I, contemplated when we talked in the autumn,” he wrote to Haldane. “The election is before us and not behind us.... I stand in a peculiar position which is not shared by either of you....” Asquith felt that if the trio refused to come in, “a weak Government would be formed... and the whole responsibility would be mine.” Having decided to enter the government, Asquith wanted his friends to join him and began doing his best to negotiate on their behalf. Grey and Haldane, weakened by Asquith’s defection, repledged to each other that neither would take office without the other. Grey was staying at Haldane’s flat in Whitehall Court, and when Haldane came home at six P.M. on December 7 he found Grey reclining on a sofa in his library “with the air of one40 who had taken a decision and was done with political troubles.” Neither had eaten and Haldane proposed that they go to the Café Royale, where they could take a private room, dine, and talk. Over a fish dinner, it became apparent to Haldane that Grey keenly wanted to find a way to back down and join the government. He could do so easily on his own—it was clear that C.B. wanted him—but he was refusing to ask for a place unless Haldane was taken, too. Haldane understood that the next move was up to him. Leaving his dinner on the table, he took a hansom cab to Belgrave Square. The Prime Minister was dining with his wife; Haldane was shown into the study. C.B. entered and Haldane said that he had come to ask whether Campbell-Bannerman still wanted Grey at the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister said that he did, very much. Haldane said that he thought that Grey would be willing. C.B. sensed the unspoken half of Haldane’s message and asked whether Haldane would consider the Home Office or the Attorney Generalship.
“What about the War Office?”41 Haldane asked.
“Nobody will touch it with a pole,” Campbell-Bannerman replied.
“Then give it to me,” Haldane said. “I will come in as War Secretary if Grey takes the Foreign Office. I will ask him to call on you early tomorrow to tell you his decision which I think may be favorable.”
The arrangement was made. Haldane returned to tell Grey. Grey agreed. The following morning he went to see C.B. and accepted the Foreign Office, which he was to hold for eleven years. During the two years of C.B.’s Premiership, Grey and Campbell-Bannerman worked closely together; the Prime Minister relied almost completely on the Foreign Secretary to manage the nation’s relations with other states. Before Campbell-Bannerman stepped down, Grey offered an apology for his earlier behavior: “My thoughts have often gone back42 to the days when this Government was being formed and I have felt from the early days of this Parliament that all my forecast before the elections was wrong, and that your presence in the House of Commons has been not only desirable but essential to manage this party and keep it together; and so it continues to be.”
Haldane was the single member of the Relugas trio who did not achieve the office to which he aspired. (Eventually, in 1911, Asquith as Prime Minister appointed his friend Lord Chancellor.) In the early days of the new Cabinet, Haldane and Campbell-Bannerman avoided each other. C.B. spoke of his War Minister with disparagement. “Haldane is always climbing43 up and down the backstairs but he makes such a clatter that everyone hears him,” the Prime Minister said. “We shall see44 how ‘Schopenhauer’ gets on,” Campbell-Bannerman grumbled another time, applying his penchant for nicknames to Haldane, who was steeped in German philosophy. “Myself he did not like45 at first,” was Haldane’s way of putting it. “For some months he said nothing to me and encouraged me but little in Cabinet.” With the passage of time and mounting evidence of Haldane’s loyalty, hard work, and efficiency in the reform of the British Army, C.B. mellowed.
The Liberal government which presented itself at the Palace on December 11 was studded with talent. Besides the Relugas trio, it included Morley at the India Office; Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade; Herbert Gladstone, son of the Grand Old Man, as Home Secretary; Tweedmouth at the Admiralty; and Winston Churchill, just below Cabinet rank, as Under Secretary for the Colonies. John Burns, the first workingman in English history to reach Cabinet rank, became President of the Local Government Board. “I congratulate you, Sir Henry,”46 chortled the delighted appointee when told that the post was his. “It will be the most popular appointment that you have made.”
While the new ministers were at the Palace receiving their seals of office, a thick fog crept over London. When the ceremony was over, Grey and Haldane set off in a carriage down the Mall for their respective offices. Along the way, the fog was so dense that the driver was forced to halt. Haldane got out to see where they were and could not find his way back to the carriage. After a while, Grey stepped down and after prolonged wandering around eventually reached the Foreign Office. Haldane by “feeling among the horses’ heads”47 at last stumbled into the War Office, where he handed his seals to the Permanent Under Secretary and asked the tall ex-Guardsman on duty as a footman for a glass of water. “Certainly, sir,”48 replied the old soldier. “Irish or Scotch?”
The following morning, the generals of the Army Council trooped in to discover what they could of the new War Minister. Haldane said that “as a young and blushing virgin49 just united to a bronzed warrior... it was not expected by the public that any result of the union should appear at least until nine months had passed.” Delighted, the generals passed this phrasing along to the King, who roared with laughter.
Within a month of taking office, the new government faced a General Election. The campaign began after Christmas and polling took place over the last three weeks of January. The result was a Liberal landslide. Traditionally safe Unionist seats were swept away. Over two hundred Unionist M.P.’s, including Arthur Balfour, were defeated. The Liberal Party stormed into the House of Commons with 379 members, a clear majority of 88 over all other parties in the House. With the backing of 83 Irish Nationalists and 51 Labourites, Campbell-Bannerman and his fellow ministers could look down on a woeful Unionist remnant from a summit of 513 votes to 157.
When the new Parliament met on February 13, Campbell-Bannerman seemed transformed. He spoke with an authority and dignity which surprised the opposition and delighted the hundreds of Liberal members crowded into the seats or jostling for standing room behind the Government Front Bench. A month later, when Balfour returned to the Commons, having found a seat in a by-election, the Unionist leader made the mistake of attempting to trifle with the sturdy Scot. Offering his views on a resolution favoring free trade, Balfour launched into one of his rhetorical performances, articulate, ambiguous, evasive, and, to both the hostile majority and its leader, patronizing. Grimly, Campbell-Bannerman replied.
“The Right Honorable gentleman50 is like the old Bourbons—he has learned nothing,” the Prime Minister threw back at his predecessor. “He comes back to this new House of Commons with the same airy graces, the same subtle dialectics, the same light and frivolous way of dealing with a great question, but he little knows the temper of the new House of Commons if he thinks those methods will prevail here.... They are utterly futile, nonsensical and misleading. They were invented by the Rt. Hon. gentleman for the purpose of occupying time on this debate. I say, enough of this foolery!... Move your amendments and let us get to business.”
The schism between traditional Gladstonian idealism and a harsher view of the realities of wielding Imperial power that had split the party during the Boer War was not fully closed. Campbell-Banner-man, Morley, Lloyd George, and the majority of Liberals in the House of Commons and the country yearned to remain aloof from European power politics and to put moderation and reconciliation ahead of expansionism in Imperial affairs. Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, the Liberal Imperialists of the Relugas Compact, saw Britain’s role differently: as an Imperial power whose territories bordered on those of other nations around the globe, and whose Home Islands neighbored a continent seething with tensions. The differences were apparent early in the new government. In his first speech as Prime Minister, on December 21, 1905, Campbell-Bannerman told a packed house in the Albert Hall that he meant to conduct a milder foreign policy than the Unionists had. He was a Francophile and he welcomed the Entente with France “so wisely concluded by Lord Lansdowne.” “In the case of Germany,”51 he continued, “I see no cause whatever for estrangement in any of the interests of either people.” He favored disarmament and pledged his government to work for it at the coming second Hague convention. “The growth of armaments52 is a great danger to the world,” he said. “[It] keeps alive and stimulates and feeds the belief that force is the best if not the only solution of international differences. It is a policy that tends to inflame old sores and to create new ones.”
In March 1907, shortly before the opening of the Second Hague Peace Conference, the Prime Minister published an article in a Liberal weekly, the Nation, urging that disarmament be given a chance. Britain, he asserted, was attempting to reduce expenditure and armaments and would go further if other nations would follow suit. In this area, the Liberals faced a domestic political dilemma: how—after years of demanding decreases in defense spending, after pledging to the voters that once in power they would reduce the army and navy Estimates—were they to pay for certain army and navy policies adopted by Balfour’s government? Fisher had been called in to remake the navy; ships had been scrapped and fleets redistributed. The Dreadnought had been designed, laid down, and launched and would be commissioned by the King even before the meeting of the first Liberal Parliament; this work could not simply be halted. The decision was to trim here and there and insist on efficiency. One dreadnought was dropped from the 1906 Naval Estimates; Fisher declared that three rather than four was acceptable. Haldane attacked the army with the same zeal for reform and efficiency. His promise, when he became Secretary of War, was to cut £3 million from the Army Estimates while simultaneously creating a more effective weapon. To the amazement of Campbell-Bannerman, who fully expected “Master Haldane” to fall on his face at the War Office, Haldane carried out his pledge. He reorganized the army into two forces, a professional Regular Army Expeditionary Force of six divisions and 160,000 men, and a second-line Territorial Army to be raised in the counties, organized into fourteen divisions, and held as reserve to back up the Expeditionary Force. C.B. was delighted by the manner in which Haldane defended his policies in the Commons against Unionists—Balfour, most skillfully—who attempted to point out flaws and inconsistencies in the planned army reforms.
The greatest triumph of Campbell-Bannerman’s brief occupancy of 10 Downing Street was his political reconciliation in South Africa. Since the beginning of the Boer War, through years of abuse, he had preached the same message. To him, the war seemed a wound which could be healed only by understanding and generosity on the part of the British government. As Prime Minister, he was ready to effect his belief. He proposed granting self-government to the Boer republics and then bringing them into a federation of self-governing states as a Union of South Africa. C.B.’s suggestion that Britain hand back to the defeated Boers the powers of government it had stripped from them in a war which had cost thirty thousand lives and £250 million raised desperate Unionist opposition. Backed by his huge majority, however, the Prime Minister granted self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. He did so by letters patent, which needed the approval only of the House of Commons and not of the Lords. In 1909, eighteen months after C.B.’s death, the South Africa Act, establishing the Union, passed both houses of Parliament. Louis Botha, the Boer general who became the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, expressed his gratitude to Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman’s successor, adding, “My greatest regret53 is that one noble figure is missing—Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. For what he has done in South Africa alone, the British Empire should always keep him in grateful memory.” To a journalist, Botha explained: “‘Three words made peace54 and union in South Africa: “methods of barbarism.”’... [Botha] went on to speak of the tremendous impression... made upon men fighting a losing battle... by the fact that the leader of one of the great English parties had had the courage to say this thing, and to brave the obloquy which it brought upon him. So far from encouraging them to a hopeless resistance, it touched their hearts and made them think seriously of the possibility of reconciliation.”
In the spring of 1906, C.B. seemed at the summit of his career. In fact, his private life was filled with anguish and exhaustion. His wife, his comrade and advisor of forty-six years, was dying. Charlotte Campbell had always had mixed feelings about her husband’s political career. She was ambitious for him and fiercely defensive when he was attacked. “Henry is a good man,”55 she declared, “how good no one knows but myself.” But ambition mingled with resentment of the amount of time his career took him away from her. She disliked the minutiae of politics and rarely was seen in the House Gallery even when her husband was speaking. Her possessiveness grew stronger as she succumbed to a painful nervous disease. Increasingly, Campbell-Bannerman was forced to choose between his public duties and care for his wife. Away from her, he was troubled by the knowledge that she was at home, lying on a bed or a chaise longue, her eyes fixed on the clock, counting the minutes until he returned. More and more, as leader of the opposition, then Prime Minister, he would fail to return to the House after dinner, sending a note that his wife’s health required him to be with her.
In 1902, Lady Campbell-Bannerman, whose weight was over 250 pounds, suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed. The move into 10 Downing Street in January 1906 was a trial, but she managed to give a large party for her husband on the eve of the opening of Parliament. Unable to stand, she sat propped up for two hours, making herself agreeable to a crowd of guests. Through the spring and summer, her health deteriorated. She disliked professional nurses and would take food and medicine only from her husband’s hands. Whenever she called, he rose and sat with her, through the night if necessary. One night that summer, his own worsening health compelled him to spend an entire night apart. “How strange to have spent56 a whole night in bed,” he wrote. “It has not happened to me for six months.” In the mornings, he fell asleep over his government papers.
In August 1906, they decided to risk the journey to Marienbad. They traveled slowly, in easy stages, arriving on the thirteenth. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was exhausted but happy. The King came on August 16, accompanied by the beau monde and a swarm of journalists. For two weeks, the Prime Minister was obliged to attend upon the sovereign at lunches, dinners, and teas, always hurrying back to bring news and gossip to his invalid. When she worsened, the Prime Minister began taking meals in a sitting room next to her bedroom. The door was ajar and, in the course of a meal, she called two or three times. Each time, he sprang up and hurried to her side. August 30 was a blazing summer afternoon, silent in the heat except for the clicking of horses’ hooves57 in the street below and the sound of labored breathing from the dying woman. At five o’clock she died.
The King, sitting on the balcony of his own hotel suite, took a pen and wrote: “I know how great58 your mutual devotion was and what a blank the departed one will leave in your home. Still, I feel sure that you can now only wish that your beloved wife may be at peace and rest, and free from all further suffering and pain.”
Campbell-Bannerman carried on for less than two years. In public, he tried to be cheerful, but a friend, seeing him talking and laughing with his guests, would go upstairs later to find the Prime Minister with his head in his hands, sobbing. His own body was spent. On November 13, Campbell-Bannerman collapsed in Bristol. His doctors commanded six weeks of complete rest and the Prime Minister decided to go to Biarritz. On the way, he suffered another heart attack in Paris and was forced to pause while his doctor came from London. Moving to Biarritz, he remained until mid-January, when he returned to London. There, a friend reported that he “seemed to have recovered59 all his old buoyancy and energy.” On February 12, 1908, Campbell-Bannerman made his last speech in the House of Commons. That night, he was stricken again and taken to his bedroom at Number 10. He did not leave this room until his death ten weeks later. The King, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales visited him as he sat by the window in Downing Street. Leaving for a royal gathering in Copenhagen, the King asked to be kept constantly informed of the Prime Minister’s condition. “Don’t telegraph to ‘The King,’”60 the monarch instructed. “There will be so many kings about. Telegraph to ‘King Edward.’”
For two months, the Cabinet marked time, postponing important decisions and looking increasingly to Asquith, the designated heir. On March 27, the Prime Minister sent for the Chancellor to tell him that he meant to resign. “You are a wonderful colleague,”61 he said to Asquith, “so loyal, so disinterested, so able. You are the greatest gentleman I have ever met.” His parting words were optimistic: “This is not the last of me.62 We will meet again, Asquith.” On April 1, the Prime Minister sent his resignation to the King in Biarritz. On April 3, the King accepted. Campbell-Bannerman died on the morning of April 22, 1908.
fn1 Over 447,000 British, Imperial, and colonial troops fought in South Africa. Twenty-two thousand were killed in action or died of wounds. On the Boer side, eighty-seven thousand men took up arms, of whom seven thousand died. Another eighteen thousand to twenty-eight thousand men, women, and children died in Kitchener’s concentration camps.
fn2 The decision was a reversal of an earlier private agreement between Campbell-Bannerman, his wife, and Dr. Ott, the Viennese specialist whom they consulted at Marienbad. That agreement was exactly the arrangement proposed by the Relugas trio: that if C.B. became Prime Minister, he go to the House of Lords. On December 9, a shocked Dr. Ott learned of the decision and wrote to the new Prime Minister: “I am sure that those38 who are persuading you to remain in the House of Commons are not your true friends... and that they do not think of your precious health as the most important matter.”