In January 1906, after the Liberal Party had spent a decade in the political wilderness, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman led it back into power. The General Election that month had produced a landslide Liberal victory. Sir Henry and his Cabinet had no doubt as to what their followers expected: they had been elected on a classic Liberal platform of Peace, Retrenchment (i.e., cutting military spending and, therefore, taxes), and Reform. The new Entente with France and a similar arrangement with the Russians would help maintain peace, while the Germans were kept in check by Sir John Fisher and his dreadnoughts. Retrenchment was achieved when Haldane at the War Department and Fisher at the Admiralty produced greater fighting efficiency for less money. The area of greatest expectation, however, was Reform. The party had promised significant changes in the patterns of British life. Elimination of religious instruction in state-supported schools, extension of the temperance laws, establishment of old-age pensions, limitations on hours of work, better housing, and land reform all were parts of the Liberal program. Many new M.P.’s, along with the voters who supported them, believed that it would not take long to transform the promise into legislative reality. The experienced politicians who sat on the Government Bench knew better; before a single item of the new government’s reform program could become law, it had to be passed by the House of Lords. And, in 1908, the Lords, with five hundred Unionist peers and only eighty-eight Liberals, were adamantly, viscerally opposed to reform.
The dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who made up the Lords Temporal of the House of Lords (the Lords Spiritual were the archbishops of Canterbury and York and twenty-four other bishops) were accustomed to ruling England. They were the old landed nobility; they owned the most property, and, having the largest stake in the country, thought it normal that they be expected to look after it. The rest of the population—workers, townspeople, tradesmen, and middle classes—would, of course, be fairly treated according to station. In determining the most effective blend of firmness, kindness, and condescension to be meted out, the aristocracy had the benefit of generations of experience with grooms, gamekeepers, gardeners, and indoor staff. The rise of the House of Commons in Tudor times, the temporary victory of the Parliamentarians and Oliver Cromwell, made no essential difference in this pattern of oligarchic rule. Even the wide expansion of the electorate through the great Reform Acts of the nineteenth century brought little change in the character and breeding of the men at the top. The public voted in larger numbers, but it still voted to choose which of the great noblemen, Whig or Tory, would serve as ministers of the Crown and custodians of the national destiny.
The institutional embodiment and ultimate political bastion of the landed aristocracy was the House of Lords. Here, whether they chose ever to enter the chamber or not, all hereditary peers were entitled to sit. The hall, eighty feet long, forty-five feet wide, was illuminated by high windows in which portraits of England’s monarchs were set in stained glass. Peers sat on four rows of red leather benches, ascending on either side of the center aisle. Two golden royal thrones, almost never occupied, and the Woolsack, a large red cushion stuffed with wool,fn1 from which the Lord Chancellor presided and, when necessary, called for order, dominated the chamber.
Admonition from the Woolsack was rarely heard. Their lordships were too well behaved to bark and hiss at an opponent, and the political issues which embattled the House of Commons only a few yards away seemed to lose their virulence when brought into the House of Lords. Usually, even in session, the chamber was empty. “The cure for the House of Lords1 is to go and look at it,” said the journalist Walter Bagehot. “In the ordinary transaction of business there are perhaps ten peers in the House, possibly only six; three is the quorum for transacting business. A few more may dawdle in or not dawdle in.” Numerous peers never entered the House of Lords at all, preferring to live “an obscure and doubtless a useful existence2 on their country estates scattered through the length and breadth of England [where they] were locally familiar as landlords, magistrates and Lords Lieutenant.” They came up to London only to bring out a daughter or occupy a seat at a coronation. If they went to the House of Lords, it was usually to look up a friend whom, unaccountably, they had not encountered at their club. David Lloyd George, the Radical Welshman who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s Cabinet, dubbed these rustic noblemen Backwoodsmen.
In 1906, the House of Lords retained a significant constitutional function: when a piece of hasty, ill-conceived legislation was passed by the Commons and forwarded to the Lords, their lordships had the power to veto it. In theory, this was supposed to exercise a wise restraint on the lower House. Rebuff in the Lords might lead to cooler reconsideration in the Commons. Or, by provoking the resignation of the government, it could bring on a new General Election in which the public would have an opportunity to express its view at the polls. To this power of rejection, there was one long-established exception: it was accepted that the House of Lords could not amend or reject any bill having to do with money. For 281 years, this understanding—unwritten like the rest of the British Constitution—had gone unchallenged. In fact, the huge party imbalance in the upper house made a farce of the Lords’ supposed role as an impartial revisionary body. The permanent Unionist majority swept away any trace of impartiality. When the government was Conservative, bills arrived from the Commons and passed effortlessly through the Lords without amendment, and sometimes even without discussion. But when a Liberal government came to power, the House of Lords suddenly awakened to its duty to scrutinize, amend, and reject. This was the fate of Gladstone’s Home Rule bills in 1884 and 1893. In the decade of rule by Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, 1895–1905, the Lords had retreated into somnolence, their watchdog powers unrequired and unexercised. Then came the election results of January 1906. “We were all out hunting3 in Warwickshire when the final results of the election arrived,” wrote one nobleman. Peers, greatly alarmed, turned up at the House of Lords to ask what they should do to help turn back the socialist tide. They were counseled not to worry; nation and empire were safe. The Liberal majority, it was explained, although formidable in the House of Commons, could do nothing in the face of the veto power of the House of Lords. Soon—the explanation continued—in a few more years at most—the country would return to its senses and, in the next General Election, return control of the Commons to the Unionist Party. In the meantime, Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, respectively the leaders of the party in the Commons and the Lords, would wield the powers of the upper house to keep the country safe.
It was this formidable pair, the former Prime Minister and his lieutenant, the former Foreign Secretary and maker of the Anglo-French Entente, who blocked the Liberal path to social reform. The two Conservative leaders did not act in secret. They did not need to. What they planned and did was constitutional and legal; in their view it was also patriotic and right. The new Liberal majority contained men who were professionals, from the middle class, possessing small means; some of the Labour M.P.’s had actually worked with their hands. To Lansdowne, who believed that “the man in the street4 is the most mischievous product of the age,” a House of Commons composed of poor men and workingmen could not effectively govern the nation. Balfour agreed, and in Nottingham on January 15, 1906, the night of his own electoral defeat, he urged that it was the duty of everyone to see that “the great Unionist Party5 should still, whether in power or in opposition, control the destinies of this great Empire.” From the beginning of the new Parliament, Balfour and Lansdowne worked together. In an exchange of letters in April 1906, they both used a military metaphor: “It is essential6 that the two wings of the army should work together...,” Lansdowne wrote Balfour. Balfour agreed: “The Party in the two Houses shall not work as two separate armies but shall cooperate on a common plan of campaign.” The campaign was to be ruthless, the power of the House of Lords to be applied nakedly and unashamedly. Liberal bills which challenged the status or wealth of the landed nobility, or their supporters or constituents, were to be slaughtered without mercy.
The first victim was a Liberal Education Bill designed to remedy the grievances of the Nonconformists, who had provided massive electoral support to the Liberal cause. The Bill, which would have abolished teaching Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism in state-supported schools, stirred the wrath of High Church Tories in both the Commons and the Lords. Introduced early in April 1906, it emerged from the Commons in autumn and went up to the Lords. Lord Lansdowne, with Balfour’s advice in his ear, knew how to deal with it. The Bill was allowed to pass its early readings, then was sent to committee, where it was so mutilated by amendments that it came out legislating the opposite of its original purpose. This mutant was returned to the Commons, where the government, horrified, refused even to consider the Lords’ amendment and simply let it die. A quicker, less complicated fate met a Plural-Voting Bill, intended to repeal an ancient law which gave certain landowners holding property in different constituencies the right to vote in each. (One great nobleman thus empowered had the right to vote twelve times.) The Lords began to debate the bill, soon ran out of things to say, and killed it in an hour and a half. The only major piece of legislation allowed to pass the 1906 Parliament was a Trades Disputes Act, which exempted trade unions from legal actions for damages. The growing trade-union movement was expanding its political and economic power; sensing danger in direct repression, the Lords warily stood aside.
Liberals were enraged by the massacre of their bills. The House of Lords had become, in Lloyd George’s phrase, “not the watchdog7 of the Constitution, but Mr. Balfour’s poodle.” Campbell-Banner-man, expressing frustration at the end of the session, announced grimly, “The resources of the House of Commons8 are not exhausted and I say with conviction that a way must be found, and a way will be found, by which the will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives, will be made to prevail.” In June 1907, the Commons resolved, 432 to 147, to curb the veto power of the House of Lords. Nevertheless, in the 1907 parliamentary session, the Lords destroyed or sterilized almost every Liberal bill. The only important legislation allowed to pass was Haldane’s Army Reform Bill which, by making the Regular Army more efficient and creating the Territorial Army and a General Staff, all the while cutting £2 million from annual military expenditure, was difficult to oppose.
In January 1908, as the Liberal government entered its third year, the party in the Commons and the country was losing patience. Virtually none of the legislation promised in the election had been enacted; everyone realized that none would be until something was done about the House of Lords. But what could be done? Any legislation designed to restrict the powers of the Lords would have to pass through the House of Lords. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister was ill (Campbell-Bannerman was to resign on April 3 and die on April 22), the government seemed ineffective, and the public was disgusted. The electorate—as Balfour had predicted—was beginning to swing back to the right. A series of Liberal by-election losses (seven seats over the year) were not enough to threaten the government’s huge majority in the Commons, but they were a warning of what might happen in the next General Election.
To reverse this trend, in 1908 the Cabinet proposed two significant pieces of legislation: an Old-Age Pensions Bill and a Licensing Bill. The concept of pensions for the elderly had overwhelming support from the British working class, and enactment had been pledged by Liberal M.P.’s. The proposed plan was modest: any person seventy or older who did not have an income of more than ten shillings a week would receive a weekly pension of five shillings (seven shillings and sixpence for married couples). Recipients had to pass a character test; any person who “has habitually failed to work according to his ability, opportunity, and need, for the maintenance of himself and those legally dependent on him” was declared ineligible. To preempt interference by the Lords, the government invoked the argument that it was a finance bill to which amendments by the upper house were inadmissible. Their lordships grumbled but let it pass.
In its treatment of the Licensing Bill, the House of Lords showed no such caution. Carefully framed, supported by a far wider section of the public than simply Liberal Nonconformists who believed passionately in temperance, the bill was intended to cut down the number of public drinking houses in neighborhoods which had too many. A fixed number of pubs, proportionate to local population, was established and a lengthy grace period of fourteen years granted in which to adjust to the appropriate number. Conservatives fell upon this bill with fury. It was described as a vindictive government intrusion on a traditional and honorable form of private enterprise. One peer, arguing that the number of public houses had no relationship to drunkenness, declared that he did not feel sleepier in his country house, where there were fifty bedrooms, than he did in his seaside villa, where there were only a dozen. Brewers threatened to withdraw their generous support of the Unionist Party if the bill became law. The King, endeavoring to protect the Lords from themselves, summoned Lord Lansdowne and urged that the upper house not be seen lining up on the side of intemperance. Lansdowne carried the plea to his fellow Unionist peers meeting informally in the drawing room of Lansdowne House on Berkeley Square. (There was no chamber in the Houses of Parliament large enough to accommodate this number except the House of Lords itself, which could not be used except for official—and recorded—debate.) Of two hundred peers present, all but twelve favored rejecting the bill. When it was formally brought before the House of Lords on November 24, the vote to reject was 272 to 96. The House, said Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Lord Lansdowne’s brother, gave it “a first class funeral9. A great many noble lords have arrived who have not often honoured us with their presence.” In announcing the results, the Liberal Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, declared that the Licensing Bill had not died that night in the House but already had been “slain by the stiletto10 in Berkeley Square.”
At the end of 1908, the Liberal Party seethed with frustration over the government’s impotence and its apparent unwillingness to challenge the provocations of the upper house. News from by-elections continued to depress and it was generally felt that if an election were held, the Unionists would win by a majority of a hundred seats. The problem, as everyone realized, was that the Lords were exploiting the letter of the constitution while ignoring its spirit. Balfour, with only 147 Unionist members in the Commons, supported by five hundred Unionist peers, was restricting the exercise of government to a single party.
One solution—provoking an immediate General Election—seemed to the government too full of risks. None of the bills rejected by the Lords was in itself persuasive enough to convince the country to make a basic constitutional change regarding the upper house. Another path suggested itself: the Lords could not amend a Finance Bill; during the passage of the Old-Age Pensions Bill, the majority of peers had made no attempt to conceal their hostility to the legislation, but when the Commons firmly announced that any upper house amendment to this money bill was constitutionally unacceptable, the Lords had backed down. Finance bills—a Budget Bill, specifically—seemed to offer a means of social advance for the Liberal government. Should the Lords attempt to block legislation, the Liberals saw a basic constitutional issue they could take to the country. The issue of Who Rules England? The Peers or the People? was something the public could understand.
It was during the weeks early in 1909 when the Cabinet was deadlocked on the issue of four dreadnoughts or six in the Naval Estimates that David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, devised his 1909 budget. He approached his task with zest. With £8.7 million needed to fund the old-age pensions and £3.7 million required in the first year to pay for new dreadnoughts,fn2 Lloyd George faced an immediate prospective deficit of £16 million. To raise the money, the Chancellor would be forced to increase revenue through new taxes. This prospect cheered him enormously. “I shall have to rob11 somebody’s hen roost,” he said, “and I must consider where I can get most eggs and where I can get them easiest and where I shall be least punished.” By April, the Chancellor had located a number of suitable hen roosts. Paying for the extra dreadnoughts—whose authorization he had strenuously opposed—offered considerable retributional pleasure; the Unionists who had shouted loudest for the additional battleships would now be taxed to pay for them. The other items on his tax list also could be counted on to agitate the country’s Establishment. Better, he had calculated a way to overcome their opposition: all these measures, which included a healthy ingredient of social reform, could be wrapped into a finance bill, the annual budget, with which the Lords would tamper at their peril.
Lloyd George introduced his historic budget before the House of Commons on April 29, 1909, one month after the conclusion of the censure debate on the Naval Estimates. He called it the “People’s Budget” and said it was intended “to raise money12 to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalor.” The bill slashed at wealth and property in a variety of ways. The only new taxes which hit all classes were increased duties on alcohol and tobacco. Taxes on motor cars and gasoline fell on the upper classes and the affluent. Lloyd George hit back at the brewers who had helped kill the Licensing Bill by increasing the cost of liquor licenses for public houses. He graduated income taxes from ninepence per pound to one shilling and twopence per pound (from slightly under 4 percent to a little less than 6 percent). He imposed a “Super Tax” on all incomes over £3,000 per year and substantially increased death duties. What most enraged Conservatives was that the Chancellor inserted into the Finance Bill a Land Valuation Bill intended to prepare the way for new taxes on land. For the first time, all private land in England was to be appraised. This was perceived—as was intended—as an attack on the great landowners. It created a storm. The image of strangers tramping over ancient lands to assess their value in order to levy taxes threw English noblemen into a frenzy; if the Bill could not be defeated in the House of Commons, then it must and would be vetoed in the House of Lords.
The long battle over the House of Lords evolved in two phases: the initial battle over the 1909 budget; then, overtaking and overshadowing the budget, the fundamental constitutional question as to whether the House of Lords should retain its power to overrule the House of Commons. As long as the issue was primarily financial, Lloyd George fought the government’s case. Once the battle shifted onto constitutional grounds, the Prime Minister, Asquith, stepped forward to lead his party.
The Chancellor was an eager, active, sometimes inflammatory spokesman. In Parliament and the country, he delivered speeches, “something between incomparable drama13 and a high class vaudeville act,” which left his audiences “howling with alternate rage and laughter.” The most famous was delivered on a summer evening at Limehouse in London’s East End where, before an audience of four thousand Cockneys, he described the government’s fight to pass the Old-Age Pensions Bill and the resistance of the nation’s landlords and property owners. The highlight was his description of his visit to a coal mine:
“We sank into a pit14 half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain.... The earth seemed to be straining, around us and above us, to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibers split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way and there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundered of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended, just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them—‘Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are very old... they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’—they scowl at us and we say—‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper.’ They say, ‘You thieves!’ And they turn their dogs on to us.”
Lloyd George embraced all peers, magnates, and landowners great and small in an inclusive, generic, derogatory term, “the dukes.” Describing these landed noblemen to his audiences, for the most part workers and townspeople, he painted scenes of rustic barbarians who sat around rough tables before vast fireplaces in their castles, wearing coronets like the peers in Iolanthe, occasionally ordering their horses saddled so they could ride up to London and gleefully vote against Liberal bills. At Newcastle on October 9, the Chancellor was in good form. He had good news to work with: Conservatives had predicted that the introduction of his budget would depress the economy; in fact, it was healthy and rising. “Only one stock15 has gone down badly,” he reported. “There has been a great slump in dukes.” And no wonder: “A fully equipped duke16 costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.” He turned to the issue of the Lords’ veto: “The question will be asked17 ‘Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgement—the deliberate judgement—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?’”
The Chancellor’s provocative speeches did their work; as Lloyd George sharpened his stick and prodded mercilessly, cries broke out all over England. From country shires and mountain fastnesses, noblemen emerged. The Duke of Portland earnestly explained how the budget would spread unemployment through the country as great estates were forced to dismiss gardeners and gamekeepers. The Duke of Somerset announced that he would be compelled to reduce his contributions to charity. The Duke of Beaufort grimly wished that he could see Mr. Lloyd George caught in the middle of his pack of hounds. Experienced politicians were goaded by the Chancellor’s speeches. Lord Lansdowne likened Lloyd George to “a swooping robber gull,18 particularly voracious and unscrupulous, which steals fish from other gulls.” Lord Rosebery, who since formation of the Liberal government in 1906 had remained detached, describing his own speeches as “the croakings of a retired raven19 on a withered branch,” suddenly burst into partisan flame with a speech in Glasgow. Attacking the budget, he said bitterly, “I think my friends20 are moving on the path that leads to Socialism. How far they are advanced on that path I will not say. But on that path, I, at any rate, cannot follow them an inch. Socialism is the end of all, the negation of Faith, of Family, of Property, of Monarchy, of Empire.” Rosebery’s words brought joy to the country houses of England. If this great Liberal orator and former Prime Minister was, after all, “on the side of the angels,” all was not lost.
Asquith left most of the argument at this stage to his fiery Welsh colleague, providing the Chancellor with support which Lloyd George characterized as “firm as a rock.”21 The Prime Minister’s single major speech of the autumn, an address to thirteen thousand people in Birmingham on September 17, treated passage of the budget as certain: “Amendment by the House of Lords22 is out of the question,” he declared. “Rejection by the House of Lords is equally out of the question.... That way revolution lies.” Nevertheless, the unthinkable happened. On November 4, the House of Commons passed Lloyd George’s budget. Debate moved to the Lords. Lord Lansdowne reminded the House that Oliver Cromwell, the greatest English republican, had said that a House of Lords was necessary to protect the people against “an omnipotent House of Commons23—the horridest arbitrariness that ever existed in the world.” Lord Curzon declared that never in human history had poverty been cured by taxation and that the taxes now proposed would grow from sporadic confiscation to complete and uniform confiscation. On November 30, the Lords rejected the budget by a vote of 350 to 75, the first time in 250 years that the Upper House had repudiated a finance bill. Asquith promptly moved a resolution in the Commons describing the Lords’ action as “a breach of the Constitution24 and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.” Privately, Liberals who wished a showdown with the Lords were delighted. “If you gentlemen25 throw out the Budget, we shall have the time of our lives,” one Cabinet minister told a Conservative friend. “We have got them26 at last,” Lloyd George exulted.
The way lay open for a General Election. On December 10, 1909, in the Albert Hall, Asquith announced that the Liberal Cabinet would not again submit to the rebuffs and humiliations dealt by the Lords over the preceding four years. “We shall not assume office27 and we shall not hold office, unless we can secure the safeguards... necessary for the legislative utility and honor of the party,” he said. Surprisingly, the election held in January 1910 was dull. Both parties campaigned on the merits of the budget, but the real issue was the veto power of the House of Lords. The country voted in moderate numbers and the result was a loss for both sides. The Liberals won a majority with 275 seats, but suffered a huge shrinkage from the 377 seats they had gained four years earlier. The Unionists gained 105 seats and came back to Westminster with a total of 273, but remained a minority. Eighty-two Irish Nationalists and forty Labour members were certain to vote with the government. The Unionist defeat ensured that the budget would pass; Lord Lansdowne had promised that if the Liberals won the election the House of Lords would let it through. In order to pass the bill through the Commons, however, with a government majority of only two, the Cabinet needed the Irish—and the Irish were only available for a price. They wanted Home Rule, and the only way to pass Home Rule through the British Parliament was to annul the veto power of the House of Lords. The price of passing the “People’s Budget” through the House of Commons, therefore, was Asquith’s promise to make a powerful assault on the Lords. For the next year and a half the Prime Minister attempted to carry out this promise.
When the new Parliament assembled in February 1910, Asquith immediately announced that the government intended to eliminate the veto power of the House of Lords. On April 14, he introduced a Parliament bill into the House of Commons, declaring that “if the Lords fail28 to accept our policy, or decline to consider it... we shall feel it our duty immediately to tender advice to the Crown as to the steps which will have to be taken....” The rumor, awful to Unionist peers, was that the Prime Minister had obtained the King’s promise to create enough new peers—as many as five hundred—to carry the bill through the House of Lords. Distracted by this prospect, Unionists scarcely noticed as the Chancellor’s budget, land valuation and all, passed through the Commons on April 27 and the Lords the following day. That evening, exhausted by their labors, needing a respite before they continued, members of both houses adjourned for the Easter recess.
Ultimately, the King would have to decide. Lansdowne had averted an immediate crisis by carrying out his pledge that, if the Liberals won the General Election, the Lords would pass Lloyd George’s budget. This was no longer enough. The government now was committed to Irish members and thus to stripping the power of veto from the House of Lords. King Edward agreed that some reform of the upper house was necessary; in October 1909, Lord Knollys, his private secretary (who shared and reflected the monarch’s view), wrote to a friend, “I myself do not see29 how the House of Lords can go on as presently constituted.” Yet while the cosmopolitan King did not share the tastes of all peers, particularly some of the Backwoodsmen, the exclusiveness of the aristocracy and the privilege of the House of Lords were part of the England into which he had been born. Although Asquith told Parliament in February 1910 that he had neither requested of nor received from the King any pledge to create five hundred peers to subvert the House of Lords, even the hint that such a request might someday arrive worried the monarch.
King Edward was in poor health. For four years, his bronchitis and gout had worsened. Despite nights of coughing and a constant increase in weight, he refused to obey his doctors. “Really, it is too bad,”30 he would complain. “There is the attack again, although I have taken the greatest care of myself”—and then sit down to a dinner of turtle soup, salmon steak, grilled chicken, saddle of mutton, snipe stuffed with foie gras, asparagus, fruit, dishes of flavored ices, and a savory, after which he would light up an enormous cigar. In addition to his physical ills, there were the obligations of constitutional monarchy: he must, in public, always be cheerful, patient, and wise.
One burden the King found heavy was the need to be civil to his nephew the Emperor William. This made even more difficult a duty on which the British Foreign Office now insisted. King Edward had been on the throne for eight years. He had made state visits to all the major—and a number of minor—European capitals, but he had never formally visited Berlin. (His many trips to Germany to see his dying sister or to call on his nephew had all been private and informal.) The Kaiser felt this keenly, German diplomats mentioned it frequently, and the Foreign Office pressed hard. The King, ill and melancholy, agreed reluctantly and in February 1909 he went.
The visit was plagued by mishaps. The first occurred as the King’s train reached Rathenow, on the Brandenburg frontier, where a military band and a regiment of hussars were drawn up. When the royal train pulled into the station, the King was unready; the train had crossed into a different time zone and his valet, having failed to adjust his watch, had not laid out His Majesty’s uniform. When the King’s suite in full uniform descended from the train, the band, expecting the monarch to follow, struck up “God Save the King.” For ten minutes, while King Edward struggled into the uniform of a German field marshal, the band played “God Save the King” over and over, “till we all nearly screamed,”31 said a member of the British suite. Eventually, King Edward appeared and, walking so briskly that he lost his breath, inspected the hussars.
In Berlin, the Kaiser awaited his uncle at the place on the station platform where the King’s railway car was to stop; the King, however, was in the Queen’s carriage a hundred yards away. The Kaiser, the Kaiserin, and the rest of the welcoming party had to run down the platform and line up again to greet their guest. A long cavalcade of carriages waited to carry them to the Palace, but there was trouble with the horses. Some of the carriages were bunched together, and the footmen following one had to keep turning around to make sure they would not be bitten by the horses immediately behind them. Nearing the Palace, the horses pulling the carriage in which the Empress was riding with Queen Alexandra suddenly stopped and refused to move, and the two women had to descend and climb into another, hastily emptied carriage. Two horses in the cavalry escort became frightened, threw their riders, and galloped disruptively along the procession. The result of these misadventures was that the Kaiser and the King arrived at the Palace, looked behind them, and saw no one. William, humiliated, turned his anger on Baron von Reischach, Master of the Horse, declaring that of all the people in the world, this should not have happened in front of the English who were, to a man and woman, all experienced riders.
The state visit, which lasted three days, included a heavy schedule of family luncheons and dinners, civic receptions, visits to regimental headquarters, a drive to Potsdam, a performance of the Berlin Opera, and a Court ball. Throughout, King Edward persevered, but he was weary, kept his remarks to a minimum, and was anxious to abbreviate each event. The question of which English decorations to bestow on German officials, normally a matter which would have occupied him for hours, interested him scarcely at all. He tolerated the Kaiser, who tried to please, but whose forced jokes and continual grunts of approval frayed King Edward’s nerves.
The King’s night at the opera gave him a scare. The performance was of Sardanapalus, one of the Kaiser’s favorites. The last scene was a realistic portrayal of the funeral pyre of Sardanapalus. King Edward, weary from a tiring day and nodding off during the opera, suddenly awoke. Alarmed, believing that the fire was real, he demanded to know why the fireman stationed in the wings had not taken action. The Empress, sitting beside him, convinced him that there was no danger.
There was a moment of real danger. The King had a bronchial cough, but refused to moderate his use of cigars. After a luncheon at the British Embassy, he went into a parlor with Princess Daisy of Pless, a young Englishwoman married to one of the premier noblemen of Germany. She curtsied before him and, in Bülow’s words, “the head of the British Empire32 inspected her with all the satisfaction of an old connoisseur of female beauty.” They sat together for almost an hour while the King smoked his immense cigar and tugged at the collar of his tight-fitting Prussian uniform. Suddenly, King Edward broke into a spasm of coughing, and then fell back against the sofa. The cigar fell from his fingers, and his eyes stared. “My God, he is dying!”33 thought Princess Daisy. She tried to undo the collar of his uniform and failed. Queen Alexandra rushed in and the two women tried together. They failed. The King revived and opened it himself. Sir James Reid, the King’s doctor, hurried in and asked everyone to leave the room. Within fifteen minutes they were invited to return. The King, insisting that nothing serious had happened, would not let Princess Daisy leave his side.
Upon his return to England, King Edward’s health continued poor. He began falling asleep over luncheon and dinner, and sleeping soundly through performances at the theater and the opera. He wheezed painfully when required to climb stairs. He went to Biarritz and then on to the Mediterranean, but he could shake neither his pallor nor his cough. That winter at Sandringham he seemed in better spirits, playing bridge until midnight and up every morning to shoot. The January 1910 General Election made certain that the budget would pass, but it also ensured that the Prime Minister would call upon the sovereign to use (or at least to threaten to use) his prerogative of creating additional peers. King Edward, sympathetic to the peers’ desire to maintain their dignity, saw their diehard position as suicidal. As a constitutional monarch, he could not refuse the advice of a prime minister backed by a majority of the House of Commons. What he could do and did do was to tell Mr. Asquith that before he would agree to create the swarm of Liberal peers necessary to subvert the House of Lords, the issue must be submitted again to the country in a second General Election.
King Edward’s doctors were eager to get him away from the fogs and damp of London into the sun of Biarritz. He left on March 8, 1910, stopping in Paris, where he suffered an attack of acute indigestion with shortness of breath and pain near the heart. On the Basque coast, he struggled for six weeks with severe bronchitis. Mrs. Keppel helped to distract him, and on April 26 he returned to England, apparently refreshed. That evening he felt well enough to go to the opera at Covent Garden. The following morning, he resumed his appointments, seeing Asquith and Kitchener; the next day he received Haldane, Morley, and the Russian Ambassador, Count Benckendorff. Friday night he was back at the opera for five hours of Siegfried. On Saturday he left for Sandringham and seemed in good form, telling stories at dinner and afterwards enjoying bridge. Sunday, May 1, a cold wind and showers of rain swept over Norfolk, but the King insisted on taking his regular Sunday afternoon walk to inspect his farm and pedigree animals. He caught a chill. Monday, he turned to London in a pouring rain and, by the time he was back in Buckingham Palace, he had a severe bronchial attack and was breathing with difficulty. Queen Alexandra, discreetly vacationing in Corfu while her husband was with Mrs. Keppel in Biarritz, was notified. Assuming the King’s illness to be another of his recurrent attacks, she started home slowly; upon reaching Venice, she thought of spending twenty-four hours in the city.
On Tuesday, May 3, the King saw the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, to discuss the forthcoming visit to London of former President Theodore Roosevelt, whom King Edward had never met. “Our talk,” said Reid, “was interrupted by spasms of coughing.” That night, the King skipped dinner but smoked a huge cigar and played bridge with Mrs. Keppel. He could not sleep. Through Thursday, the King continued to receive visitors, saying of his illness, “I must fight this.” When visitors begged him to rest, he replied, “No, I shall not give in. I shall go on. I shall work to the end.” Ponsonby, bringing him papers to sign, found him sitting at his writing table with a rug around his legs. “His color was grey and he appeared to be unable to sit upright and was sunken. At first he had difficulty with his breathing... but this gradually got better.” The King signed some papers and then looked at Ponsonby and said helplessly, “I feel wretchedly ill. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. They really must do something for me.” That afternoon, Queen Alexandra reached Calais and, a few hours later, London. It was the first time during their marriage that her husband, while present in the city, had not welcomed her at the station. When she reached the Palace, the sight of the King fighting for breath, his face chalky and gray, told her the truth.
The next day, Friday, May 6, was King Edward’s last. In the morning, he insisted that his valet dress him formally in a frock coat. He received his friend Sir Ernest Cassel and said, “I am very seedy but I wanted to see you.” Then he collapsed. Through the afternoon, he sat hunched in his armchair as a series of heart attacks hammered at his stricken body. Five doctors declared there was no hope. Morphine was administered to dull the pain. He had moments of consciousness, during which friends appeared. One of these was Mrs. Keppel, whom the Queen, in a display of generosity, had sent for so that she might say good-bye. At five P.M., the Prince of Wales informed his father that one of the King’s horses, a two-year-old named Witch of the Air, had won a race at Kempton Park. “I am very glad,” said the King. Early in the evening, he sank into a coma. At eleven-thirty, he was carried to his bed and at eleven forty-five, with the Archbishop of Canterbury pronouncing a blessing, he died34.
Queen Alexandra, looking at her husband’s body, said to Ponsonby how peaceful he looked and that it was not the cold wind at Sandringham but “that horrid Biarritz”35 that had killed him. She said she felt as if she had been turned to stone, unable to cry, unable to grasp the meaning of her husband’s death, unable to do anything. She mentioned that she would like to go and hide in the country, but there was the state funeral, and all the arrangements that had to be made. King Edward’s son, now the new King George V, wrote that night in his diary, “I have lost my best friend36 and the best of fathers. I never had a word with him in my life. I am heartbroken and overwhelmed with grief.” Jacky Fisher, newly retired, sat for half an hour with Queen Alexandra and, at the lying in state, felt that, if he could touch the body, the King would awake. “The world [is] not the same world,”37 he wrote. “I’ve lost the greatest friend I ever had.... I feel so curious a sense of isolation—which I can’t get over—and no longer seem to care a damn for anything....”
Bernhard von Bülow recorded that “the death of Edward VII38... was of the greatest assistance to our foreign policy. I do not think he had really wanted to fight us.... But inspired by hostility to his nephew, by his fear of our economic rivalry, and the accelerated rhythm of our naval tempo, Edward VII created difficulties and, whenever he could would put a spoke in our wheel.”
The Kaiser privately hailed “the death of the ‘Encircler’”39 and rushed immediately to London to participate in the public pageantry of a state funeral.
H. H. Asquith was using the Easter recess to escape politics on board the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, accompanying the First Lord, Reginald McKenna, on an inspection trip to Gibraltar. Informed by radio that the King’s condition was worsening, Asquith decided to turn the yacht around immediately. At three A.M. on the morning of May 7, he was handed a wireless message from the new King: “I am deeply grieved40 to inform you that my beloved father the King passed away peacefully at quarter to twelve tonight (the 6th). George.” Asquith went up on deck and found himself surrounded by a predawn twilight dominated by the blaze of Halley’s comet: “I felt bewildered41 and indeed stunned. At a most anxious moment in the fortunes of the State, we had lost without warning or preparation, the Sovereign whose ripe experience, trained sagacity, equitable judgement and unvarying consideration counted for so much.... His successor, with all his fine and engaging qualities, was without political experience. We were nearing the verge of a crisis almost without example in our constitutional history. What was the right thing to do?”
The Kaiser enjoyed his uncle’s funeral. He relished the prominent place accorded him among his relatives. He preened himself that “the entire royal family42 received me at the railway station as a token of their gratitude for the deference to family ties shown by my coming.” In Westminster Hall, he admired the “gorgeously decorated coffin” and the “marvelous play” of colors created when rays of sunlight filtering through the narrow windows touched the jewels in the Crown of England surmounting the coffin. He delighted in prancing through London on horseback beside his cousin, the new King George V, past “the vast multitude... clad in black,” at the head of a “splendid array” of “gorgeously” dressed English guardsmen: “Grenadiers, Scots Guards, Coldstreams, Irish Guards—in their perfectly-fitting coats, white leather facings, and heavy bearskin headgear; all picked troops of superb appearance and admirable martial bearing, a joy to any man with the heart of a soldier43.” In another way, it also gladdened the Emperor to telegraph his new Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, that the Liberal government of England was in trouble. His impressions, based on “many talks44 with... relatives, with gentlemen of the Court, with certain old acquaintances, and many distinguished persons,” were “somewhat as follows: People’s minds are wholly occupied with the internal situation.... The outlook all around is black. The Government is thoroughly hated.... It is reported with satisfaction that on the days after the King’s death and during the lying-in-state, the Prime Minister and other of his colleagues were publicly hissed in the streets, and that expressions like ‘you have killed the King’ were heard. A demonstration against the Government is looked for... and a strong reaction in a Conservative sense is thought not improbable.” The Kaiser’s skills as a political reporter can be judged by the fact that the “regicide” government had five months earlier won a seven-year term in a General Election and eight months later was to reconfirm its authority in a second General Election.
Nevertheless, it was true that King Edward’s death had put the government in an awkward position. Asquith could not now avoid attacking the veto power of the House of Lords even if he wished to; it was part of his commitment to the Irish members who gave him his majority. Yet the only power that could humble the Lords was the royal prerogative. Everything rested on the King; first King Edward, now King George. Only the monarch could create the mass of new peers necessary to vote the Upper House into political impotence. And the new King was, as the Prime Minister had described him, “without political experience.” To pressure him immediately after his accession was, at the least, distasteful. At worst, it might be damaging to the government. The alternative, proposed on June 6, was an armistice and a conference in which four leaders from each party, including Asquith and Lloyd George, Balfour and Lansdowne, would meet quietly and seek to resolve their differences. Although a fervent minority in both parties—extreme Radicals on one side, extreme Tories on the other—objected to their principles being compromised behind closed doors, and strict constitutionalists worried at the nation’s basic political structure being altered in secret, the first meeting was held, at 10 Downing Street, on June 17. Twenty-one meetings were held during the summer and autumn of 1910—without success. Along the way, Lloyd George grew impatient, proposed a coalition government, and admitted that his desire to create hundreds of new Liberal peers was no greater than Balfour’s. “Looking into the future,”45 he told the Unionist leader, “I know that our glorified grocers will be more hostile to social reform than your Backwoodsmen.” Balfour did not want a coalition; neither did Asquith; and on November 10, 1910, it was officially announced that the Constitutional Conference had failed.
Asquith moved immediately. On the afternoon of November 10 the Cabinet agreed that Parliament should be dissolved and the issue of the veto power of the Lords put to the country. The following day, the Prime Minister called on King George at Sandringham to ask that, if the General Election produced another Liberal victory, the King pledge himself to create enough new peers to pass a Parliament bill through the House of Lords. On November 16, Asquith went to Buckingham Palace for the King’s answer. In great distress, King George asked if the Prime Minister would have made the same request of his father. “Yes, Sir,”46 said Asquith, “and your father would have consented.” Reluctantly, the King agreed. With this promise—kept secret for the moment—Asquith led his party into a December election, the second within a year. Despite the excitement at Westminster, the country appeared to be even more bored than it had been in January. Five hundred thousand fewer voters went to the polls, and the results were almost identical: the Liberals lost two seats and returned to the House of Commons with 272. The Conservatives gained two seats and returned to Westminster with 272. As before, the Irish Nationalists (84 seats) and Labour (42 seats) held the balance and would vote with the government.
Nothing now could save the Lords. Asquith had a specific mandate from the country, a majority in the House of Commons, and the King’s secret promise to create new peers. In February 1911, the Parliament bill was introduced in the Commons. By May, the bill had passed and come to the Lords. Still not knowing that the King was pledged, if necessary, to overwhelm them in their own chamber, the peers treated the bill with traditional disdain, referring it to committee, where it was sufficiently disfigured by amendment to render it harmless. On July 18, Lloyd George called on Balfour and revealed the promise extracted from the King the previous December. Balfour and Lansdowne immediately saw that they were defeated; the best that could be managed now was a graceful surrender. In order to convince his followers, Lansdowne asked the Prime Minister to state his intentions in writing. On July 20, Mr. Asquith obliged with identical letters to the Unionist leaders in both houses:
Dear Lord Lansdowne47 (Mr. Balfour):
I think it courteous and right, before any public decisions are announced, to let you know... [that] should the necessity arise, the Government will advise the King to exercise his prerogative to secure the passing of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons; and His Majesty has been pleased to signify that he will consider it his duty to accept, and act on, that advice.
Yours sincerely,
H. H. ASQUITH
The following morning, July 21, Lord Lansdowne brought the Prime Minister’s letter to a meeting of two hundred Unionist peers at Grosvenor House, the London mansion of the Duke of Westminster. Lansdowne read Asquith’s letter and said that he believed the government was not bluffing.fn3 He advised that, to avoid dilution of the peerage, the Lords pass the bill as sent from the Commons. Either way, he pointed out, the House of Lords would lose its veto power.
Lord Lansdowne’s argument failed to persuade a number of his titled listeners, who declared themselves implacably opposed to passing the bill no matter what the consequences. Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India, himself a fledgling peer and therefore anxious to prevent devaluation of a recent honor, defied the government, the monarch, and Lord Lansdowne by crying, “Let them make their peers.48 We will die in the last ditch before we give in!” thus giving the name “Ditchers” to the bill’s diehard opponents. “Ditcher” resistance rallied around the stumpy, red-faced figure of Lord Halsbury, a former Lord Chancellor, then eighty-eight (he lived to be ninety-eight), who as a lawyer and judge had worked his way up to the Woolsack and an earldom, and who, said one of his followers, “invariably objected on principle49 to all change.” Lord Halsbury already had announced that he would vote against the bill as a “solemn duty to God and country.”50 At Grosvenor House, he cried that he would cast that vote “even if I am alone,51 rather than surrender.” At least sixty Ditchers stood with this bantam gladiator, and the number was thought to be growing.
Those who supported Lord Lansdowne were known as “Hedgers.”fn4 And no one hedged more carefully than Arthur Balfour. Perhaps because he sensed that nothing he could say would deter Lord Halsbury; perhaps because, after thirty years of party leadership, he was weary and wanted only to lose gracefully and move on to other issues; perhaps because for Arthur Balfour politics was never more than a game; perhaps for all these reasons, Balfour was reluctant to become involved. Unwilling to appear before the angry peers, he would only agree to writing a letter to the Times: “I agree with Lord Lansdowne52 and his friends,” he announced. “With Lord Lansdowne, I stand. With Lord Lansdowne, I am ready, if need be, to fall.” It was the statement of a man who knew and accepted that he was about to be beaten. In ultra-Tory clubs in London and at weekend parties in the country houses of England, the cry “B.M.G.—Balfour Must Go” grew louder.
Balfour’s abdication of leadership became manifest at a scene in which Asquith suffered the most conspicuous public humiliation of an English Prime Minister in the history of Parliament. On July 24, Asquith arose in the House of Commons53 to announce the King’s promise and to explain how this would affect passage of the Parliament bill. The opposition, believing the government had forced the pledge from the King and was bent on the destruction of not only the House of Lords but the class system, private property, the Anglican Church—everything that for centuries had made England “a green and pleasant land”—refused to let him speak. From the seats behind Balfour, Unionists shouted “Traitor!” It was the beginning of a cannonade of vilification. Whenever the rage ebbed slightly, Asquith began a sentence; immediately he was drowned by hoots and jeers: “Traitor!” “Dictator!” “Who killed the King?” Lord Hugh Cecil, a son of Lord Salisbury, stood repeatedly and screamed, “You have disgraced your office!” A Labour M.P., staring in disgust at Lord Hugh, finally rose and shouted back, “Many a man has been certified for less than half of what the noble lord has done this afternoon!” For forty-five minutes, Asquith stood at the dispatch box waiting to speak. In the Gallery, Margot Asquith, blazing with fury, scribbled a note and sent it down to Sir Edward Grey, who sat behind Asquith on the Government Bench: “For God’s sake, defend him54 from the cats and cads.” Grey could do nothing and sadly tore up the note. Eventually, the Prime Minister gave up. “I am not going to degrade myself,”55 he said and sat down. The din continued; fists were brandished on both sides, until the Speaker halted the proceedings.
Through the afternoon, Arthur Balfour lounged on the Opposition Front Bench, taking no part in the brawl, but doing nothing to halt it either. Some observers thought they saw concern on his face, others thought he seemed revolted. Nevertheless, out of a sense of weariness, or understanding that there were pleasures—in philosophy, perhaps—superior to involvement in such a scene, or perhaps from sheer indifference, Balfour did not act.
In the end, to save the House of Lords from ridicule, Lansdowne persuaded the majority of Unionist peers to abstain from voting on the bill. The vote was narrowed to the Liberals versus the Ditchers. Even then, as Lord Halsbury increased the numbers of his adherents, it seemed that the bill must die. On the day of the vote, August 10, with the temperature at one hundred degrees, the greatest heat recorded in England in seventy years, many Ditchers still believed that the government’s threat to create new peers was “pure bluff.”56 The Liberal Lord Morley, who had moved the bill, attempted to disabuse them: “I have to say57 that every vote given tonight against my motion is a vote in favor of a large and prompt creation of peers.” In the end, it was Lord Curzon, hating what he had to do, who saved the House of Lords from an invasion of Liberal “grocers.” When the final division took place, Curzon grimly led thirty-seven Unionist peers into the lobby in favor of the government bill. They were joined by eighty-one Liberals and thirteen bishops and opposed by 114 Ditchers; the final vote was 131 to 114. The Parliament bill became law and the House of Lords lost its power to veto. The Ditchers were “boiling with rage.”58 Lady Halsbury hissed from the Gallery when the result was announced and subsequently refused to shake Lord Lansdowne’s hand. That night at the Carlton Club, peers who had voted with Lord Curzon and the government were denounced to their faces as “Traitor!” and “Judas!”59
The scene in the House of Commons on July 23 was too much for Arthur Balfour. On August 9, the day before the climactic vote in the House of Lords, the leader of the opposition departed England for a vacation in the Austrian Alps. There, amid “the cataracts, the pines, and the precipices”60 of Badgastein, he reflected upon his life, then in its sixty-fourth year. Politics seemed “quite unusually odious”61; it was time to devote himself to philosophy; he already had a short article in mind. That autumn on returning to England, the elegant prince of the House of Commons resigned the leadership of the Unionist Party. His successor was a Glasgow steel manufacturer, born in Canada, named Andrew Bonar Law.
fn1 Placed in the House in the fourteenth century to proclaim the nation’s wealth in the wool trade.
fn2 Dreadnoughts cost roughly £1.5 million apiece; the eight authorized in 1909 eventually cost British taxpayers at least £12 million.
fn3 Asquith was not bluffing. Although, at one point, he declared that he would ask the King to create only enough new peers to carry the Parliament bill through the House of Lords by a majority of one, he already was drawing up lists of Liberal gentlemen whom the King might be asked to ennoble. One list of 249 names survives. It contains men of varied distinction: forty-four were baronets and fifty-eight were knights; there were four generals and one admiral (one of the generals was Baden-Powell, defender of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scouts); history was represented by G. M. Trevelyan and G. P. Gooch; the law by Sir Frederick Pollock; commerce by the South African millionaire Abe Bailey; classics by George Gilbert Murray; philosophy and mathematics by Bertrand Russell; the theater by J. M. Barrie; and fiction by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Hope (author of The Prisoner of Zenda).
fn4 The Times, the stalwart, schoolmasterish voice of Conservative England, stood with Lansdowne. It reproached Lord Halsbury and his “Ditchers” for their use of “picturesque phrases, such as ‘nailing the colors to the mast,’ ‘going down with the flag flying,’ and ‘dying in the last ditch’... [phrases which, in real life] stir the heart and fire the blood. What makes... [these phrases] so splendid is the majesty of death. But the heroic peers will not go down or die in the last ditch; they will only be out-voted. That is not the majesty of death but the bathos of the stage; and to assume airs about it is not tragedy but melodrama.”