24

The Conversion of a Diehard 1909–1911

AS THE EARL OF CRAWFORD once observed, George Curzon could not ‘conceive life except as a governor of men’.1 Opposition was particularly frustrating to someone who was not only primarily an administrator but who also lacked the aptitude and temperament for parliamentary manoeuvre. It was hard, he told an old Indian colleague in 1910, to have been ‘on the shelf’ for five years in the prime of his life, ‘able to exercise only the most microscopic influence on public events’, his speeches and articles exciting ‘only the faintest and most transitory interest’.2 Despite the Unionist recovery in the elections of that year, he thought his party would need the best part of a decade before it returned to power. In the meantime there was little for him to do on the Opposition benches. Lord Lansdowne, he acknowledged, was an able and tactful leader in the House of Lords but so conscientious in the discharge of his duties that he refused to delegate.3

For nearly four years after his return from India, Curzon found little to interest him in domestic politics. Of all the debates he initiated in the House of Lords in the years before the First World War, only one – a vote of censure on the Government’s tactics on the Parliament Bill – was not about some region of Asia. On Tariff Reform, the issue which damaged and divided his party for twenty years, he remained an agnostic, unconvinced by the doctrines of either Joseph Chamberlain or his Free Trade adversaries. This stance is not explained by Harold Nicolson’s much-quoted jibe that Curzon was ‘not interested in economics, and his interest in finance was confined to his own income’4 – he had understood both the Indian economy and the finances of Oxford University – but by his belief that fiscal policy should be regulated not by ‘crusted and immutable dogmas, but by considerations of expediency and self-interest’. As he once told Lord George Hamilton, he was a Free Trader in theory who thought protectionism should be embraced whenever circumstances required it.5

Curzon was attracted by a programme intended to bind the empire by economic interest as well as by ties of culture and sentiment. But he was unconvinced by the arguments of Selborne, who tried to convert him to Chamberlain’s cause, that the empire could only compete with the growing power of Russia, Germany and the United States through tariffs and preferential trading terms for its components.6 Examining the proposals from India, his Government had concluded that they were unlikely to benefit Britain’s most important possession and might well expose her to considerable risks.7 He retained that view after his return but realized that a compromise was needed to avoid splitting the party; addressing his first political meeting for ten years in April 1908, he told Unionists at Basingstoke that at least a part of Chamberlain’s programme should be accepted. His enthusiasm for the cause increased a year later when Lloyd George’s most radical budget convinced him that it was the only alternative to high taxation. At a speech at Leeds in October 1909 he argued that Tariff Reform would reduce unemployment and asked whether the British were ‘the only wise people in the world, who go on worshipping free trade long after it has become a dilapidated image in an empty shrine? And are all the countries to be regarded as fools because they flourish by declining to follow our example?’8

Yet an awareness of the shortcomings of Free Trade did not turn him into an enthusiast for Tariff Reform. Realizing that food taxes, an inevitable ingredient of the programme, would be electorally disastrous, he supported Balfour’s pledge during the second election of 1910 to submit them to a referendum if the Unionists came to power. When food taxes were restored to the party’s programme and the referendum pledge was dropped in 1912, the most prominent dissenters in the Shadow Cabinet were Salisbury, Derby and Curzon, who at the beginning of the following year were able to force a return to a more lukewarm position. Near the end of his life, when the issue had once more proved a vote loser in the 1923 election, Curzon declared that he had never been a Tariff Reformer.9

For more than a year after his election to the House of Lords, Curzon had remained somewhat aloof from his Unionist colleagues, by whom he was regarded as rather a maverick, obsessed by Asian issues and still resentful of those who had opposed him in India. For his part, he looked on critically as the peers of his own party used their vast preponderance to block legislation which the Government, led by Asquith since Campbell-Bannerman’s death in April 1908, had passed by enormous majorities in the House of Commons: he particularly disapproved of their treatment of the Old Age Pensions Bill and was dismayed by their rejection of the Licensing Bill. A crisis was needed to bring him back into the mainstream of the Unionist Party as an active member of the Shadow Cabinet, and in 1909 the man he referred to as the ‘little Welsh bruiser’ provided it. Lloyd George’s budget and its repercussions placed Curzon once more in the forefront of national politics, where he remained until his death.

Lloyd George’s decision as Chancellor of the Exchequer to raise taxes to pay for the Government’s social reform programme as well as for a larger navy provoked an astonishing display of aristocratic indignation. One after the other, great territorial magnates, especially the dukes, declared that the increases in income tax and estate duty would force them to sack their labourers, cancel their subscriptions to football clubs and reduce their contributions to charity. These manifestations of upper-class selfishness were deeply embarrassing to much of the rest of the party: one MP publicly regretted that all the dukes had not been locked up for the duration of the budget debate.10 Curzon reacted much less hysterically than the dukes, but his argument that the principles of the budget would lead to social demoralization was not one of his best. Lloyd George amused himself and his audiences up and down the country with his speeches on the ducal antics and his description of the House of Lords as ‘five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. At an overflow meeting after his celebrated Limehouse speech at the end of July, he added Curzon, who had threatened to amend the budget in the Lords, to his targets. In a passage which infuriated the former Viceroy, the Chancellor declared that he did not ‘mind Lord Curzon so long as he keeps to those bombastic commonplaces which have been his stock-in-trade through life; but if he is going to try here that arrogance which was too much even for the gentle Hindu, we will just tell him that we will have none of his Oriental manners’.11

In neither the eighteenth nor the nineteenth century had the House of Lords rejected a Finance Bill, and the decision of Balfour and Lansdowne to let it happen in 1909 remains a puzzle today. In the short term rejection might please both the reactionaries enraged by ‘confiscatory’ legislation and the more progressive Tariff Reformers who were encouraged by Balfour’s acknowledgement in September that their programme was the only alternative to the Government’s policies. But it is not easy to understand how they imagined that an assertion of aristocratic privilege could have helped them win the general election that would inevitably follow a rejection. Nor is it clear why they were prepared to risk the loss of the Lords’ veto on non-financial measures merely for the sake of delaying the budget for a few months. Only an unprecedented electoral tide, engulfing the Liberals and Labour and thus reducing the Irish to impotence, could have destroyed the Bill altogether.

In November, after the budget had passed its Third Reading in the House of Commons, Lansdowne moved that the Lords were not justified in giving consent to the Bill until it had been submitted to the judgement of the country. At the end of four days of debate Curzon defended the Opposition case in a speech Morley described as powerful but long and over-elaborate. However forceful his delivery may have sounded, the printed version suggests that he was not entirely convinced by his own arguments. Resenting Liberal imputations that his party was indifferent to social questions, he declared that social reform was (with defence) the most pressing issue of the day but claimed that at no time in history had poverty or its evils been mitigated by taxation or its products; how he proposed to alleviate poverty without spending money was not explained. In a further unconvincing passage, he argued that it was better to force a dissolution then than to suffer two more years of ‘insufficient attention to the defences of the country, two more years of Socialistic experiments, two more years of tampering with the Church’ and other unspecified national institutions.12 From this list Curzon’s only genuine anxiety was the weakness of the army.

Later that evening Lansdowne’s motion was carried by an enormous majority, and two days afterwards Asquith announced the dissolution of Parliament. In the absence of Balfour, who was ill for most of December, the Unionist campaign was dominated by Curzon, who soon established himself as the ablest, most active and most unapologetic defender of the House of Lords. It was his first election since 1895, and he relished his speech-making tour of Lancashire and the inordinate amount of attention it received in the press: The Times regularly gave him four or five columns while relegating his colleagues in the Commons to a couple of paragraphs. At the Empire Theatre in Oldham in mid-December he proudly proclaimed himself ‘an out-and-out defender of the line that the House of Lords has taken’. After telling his audience that the hereditary constitution of the Upper Chamber should be reformed, he went on to defend its record, its role as a stabilizing factor in national life, and the achievements of its most illustrious dynasties such as the Cavendishes and the Cecils. Immune to ‘great gusts of passion’ that sometimes swept the country, he claimed that the House of Lords had long represented ‘the permanent sentiment and temper of the British people’, an argument which Asquith effectively ridiculed at Liverpool a few days later. In another passage, which understandably caused some disorder in the audience, Curzon quoted Ernest Renan’s view that ‘all civilisation [had] been the work of aristocracies’ as well as Sir Henry Maine’s opinion that, if Britain had had a large electorate over the previous four centuries, there would have been no Reformation, no change of dynasty, no toleration of dissent and no Industrial Revolution. The correspondent of The Times observed that these remarks were ‘more courageous than politic’, and the following day Lloyd George suggested that a carpenter’s son from Nazareth may have had a greater impact on civilization than Renan’s aristocracies.13

Appealing to an electorate from which the working classes were still largely excluded, the Unionists performed substantially better than in 1906. But although they destroyed the Liberals’ overall majority, they were in no position to form a government themselves, and there seemed little chance of preventing Asquith from taking his revenge on the Unionist peers. Curzon, aware that his party had no hope of an outright victory, had thought the first priority after the election should be to produce comprehensive proposals for the reform of the House of Lords. If the Prime Minister persisted with his plans to abolish the peers’ veto, he pointed out to his colleagues, the Unionists would at least have an alternative scheme when Asquith appealed to the country.14 Until recently Curzon had been a member of a committee, set up under Rosebery’s chairmanship, to study the reform of the House of Lords. But Balfour and Lansdowne had been unenthusiastic, the Government had shown little interest, and Rosebery himself had been an unsatisfactory chairman, his principal faults being, in Curzon’s view, ‘a tendency to treat grave matters frivolously, and his feminine sensitiveness to criticism’.15 After the election Curzon managed to persuade some of his colleagues, notably Austen Chamberlain, to take a more urgent view of the matter, but the cause had made little progress by May when the political situation was transformed by the sudden death of King Edward.

Although Curzon had been trying to produce a plan to counter the Government’s expected move against the House of Lords, Asquith had returned to Westminster apparently without a clear idea of what that move should be or of how the King could be expected to endorse it. After several weeks of hesitation, the Prime Minister finally announced resolutions that would prevent the Upper Chamber from vetoing money bills and allow it only a suspensory veto of two years to delay other legislation. Their lordships were to be denied the chance of redeeming themselves by passing the budget, which they did without a division in April, or by transforming their House into a more representative assembly.

Asquith hoped he could persuade the House of Lords to accept his resolutions in the shape of a Parliament Bill without having to obtain a Liberal majority by flooding it with new peers. Partly for that reason and partly from a desire not to embarrass the ill-trained and inexperienced new monarch, he tried to resolve the issue through an intimate constitutional conference between leading members of both parties. Only after it had broken down at the beginning of November did he finally decide to ask George V for private guarantees that, if the Liberals were returned to power at another general election, a sufficient number of peers would be created to ensure the passing of the Parliament Bill. The dissolution took place in late November, and in a brief campaign Asquith returned to his old form. The result, however, was another stalemate which left all the parties in much the same positions they had occupied beforehand.

The second Unionist campaign was dominated by Balfour who, by promising to submit food taxes to a referendum, averted a heavy defeat but at the same time weakened his position as leader. Curzon congratulated him on his performance but simultaneously warned him of widespread dissatisfaction with the party’s organization and with its leaders’ apparently ad hoc methods of making policy.16 He also again urged his colleagues to agree to a scheme of House of Lords reform. Just before the election the party leaders had met at his country house in Hampshire to formulate a complicated series of resolutions whereby disputes between the two chambers could be resolved by means of joint sittings, a joint committee or on ‘a matter of great gravity’ a referendum. Early the following year he produced plans, based partly on the conclusions of Rosebery’s committee, for a House of Lords chosen in various ratios by hereditary peers, the Prime Minister and an electoral college of local government officials.17 The Unionist Chief Whip, Lord Balcarres, privately scoffed at these ‘fanciful ideas’, arguing that the involvement of mayors and councillors would merely introduce party politics into places where they were now absent; he also disparaged the former Viceroy’s suggestion that a category of peers should be created from retired ambassadors and colonial governors.18 Although Curzon’s proposal for the composition of the electoral colleges did not prevail, his scheme formed the basis of a Bill introduced by Lansdowne in May. During the Second Reading a few days later, Curzon declared that its supporters wanted a second chamber in which different interests, classes, minorities and points of view were represented. Turning to the hereditary principle, he wondered why it should be accepted in the case of the Crown but regarded ‘as absurd in its partial application to one branch of the legislature’. In any case, he pointed out, an hereditary peer would only become a member of the reformed House if he had performed ‘some recognised service to the state’ and was chosen by one of the categories of electors.19

Like every other scheme of House of Lords reform which Curzon supported over a span of forty years, this one collapsed. As usual it found little enthusiasm from peers unwilling to surrender their traditional roles, but this particular attempt was really destroyed by the attitude of the Government. Peers might have been induced to support the Bill if by doing so they had managed to avoid the chastisement of the Parliament Bill. But when Morley announced that the Government’s measure would be passed whether the House of Lords was reformed or not, they lost interest. It was clearly pointless to volunteer a reduction in their numbers if they were to be forced in any case to submit to a reduction in their powers. Realizing this, Lansdowne and his colleagues allowed the Bill to drop and concentrated their attention on the Parliament Bill.

While the abortive reform scheme was receiving its Second Reading in the Upper House, the Parliament Bill was completing its passage through the Commons. But before reaching the committee stage in the Lords, where Lansdowne warned that it would be heavily amended, Parliament broke up for the Whitsun recess and the coronation of King George. At the ceremony in Westminster Abbey Curzon carried the standard of the Empire of India and, in one observer’s description, ‘processed as if the whole proceedings were in his honour: the aisle was just wide enough for him’. But the former Viceroy himself found the pomp humorous and thought ‘most of the peers in their coronets looked exquisitely ridiculous’.20 In the King’s Coronation Honours Curzon was at last given an earldom for his services to the Indian empire as well as the intermediary titles of Baron Ravensdale and Viscount Scarsdale. But nothing concerning Curzon’s titles ever lacked controversy, and the matter was not settled without a long dispute about the special remainders of his titles if he died without a male heir, and an unsuccessful protest to Asquith about the huge fees and stamp duty (totalling over £2,000) that he was required to pay.21 ‘Introduced’ by Lord Roberts and Lord Cromer, he took his seat as Earl Curzon of Kedleston the following February.

When Parliament reassembled the Lords carried out Lansdowne’s threat to mutilate the Parliament Bill in Committee. As the King’s guarantee to Asquith was still a secret, many Unionist peers were inclined to believe that the Government’s threat to create hundreds of new peers was a bluff. The previous year Curzon himself had scoffed at the idea that the House of Lords could be intimidated by it and even after the election he had unwisely advised an audience of MPs and candidates ‘to fight in the last ditch’ and to dare the Government to make peers.22 Some Unionists remained deluded to the end that the threat was all bluster. Others were undeceived in early July by information which Balfour had acquired about the King’s guarantee. Later in the month Asquith made the matter still more explicit through letters to the Opposition leaders explaining his intention of asking the Commons to reject the Lords’ amendments and acquainting them with the King’s agreement ‘to exercise his Prerogative to secure the passing into law of the Bill in substantially the same form in which it left the House of Commons’.23

At what stage Curzon realized that Asquith was not bluffing is unclear, but he did not need the letters to be convinced. ‘Many of the Lords are d---d fools,’ he had told Violet Cecil three days earlier, but their numbers would ‘dwindle daily as they are brought face to face with facts’.24 Much as he disliked the Bill, he had concluded that it would be preferable to retain a House of Lords with a two-year veto rather than acquiesce in the virtual destruction of the assembly and the rapid enactment not only of the Parliament Bill but also of Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment and other radical measures. Convinced now that dying in the last ditch was ‘unpatriotic and unwise’, damaging alike to the monarchy, the party and the House of Lords, he threw himself with characteristic energy into battle against the ‘foolish and insensate’ policy of those who had not undergone his conversion.25

Bringing the Unionists ‘face to face with facts’ did not persuade many of them to accept reality. At a meeting at Balfour’s house on 21 July, the Shadow Cabinet split down the middle with the party leader mystifying his colleagues as to his own position. The divide was only partly ideological, for the ‘no surrender’ group – subsequently known as ‘Diehards’ or ‘Ditchers’ – included Austen Chamberlain and F.E. Smith as well as Selborne, Balcarres and such stalwarts of the party Right as Salisbury and Lord Halsbury. Among those, subsequently known as ‘Hedgers’, who agreed with Curzon that the only realistic course was to let the Bill pass when it returned stripped of its amendments from the Commons, were Derby, Midleton, Bonar Law and Walter Long. Neither in the Shadow Cabinet, nor at a meeting of two hundred Unionist peers immediately afterwards, did Lansdowne do anything more decisive than leave an impression that he favoured prudence.26

The meeting of the peers, at which Selborne spoke vigorously against surrender, convinced Curzon of the need to organize a campaign to save the Government, which could rarely muster more than seventy-five supporters in the Lords, from being defeated by the Diehards. He thus invited like-minded peers to yet another meeting at his own house where a committee was set up to promote the view of the Hedgers. This group, consisting principally of Curzon, Midleton and the Duke of Devonshire, wrote individually to each peer, asking for his intentions and, if doubtful, trying to persuade him to follow Lansdowne’s decision to abstain. On Sunday, 23 July, Curzon managed to induce Lord Northcliffe to back his case and that evening wrote a long letter which appeared the following morning in The Times. Replying to the accusation that he was running away, a charge that dogged him for long afterwards, he said he was

not aware that the Duke of Wellington, when he bent his head in similar circumstances in 1832, was ever taunted with cowardice … Rather may it be said that the greater courage is that which is willing to be miscalled cowardice, to face estrangement, and to endure reproach sooner than advise a course which, when stripped of its superficial appearance of valour, is found to be indifferent to the permanent interests of the state.

The King, miserable at the prospect of having to honour his guarantee, sent a message of approval.27

Curzon’s object was to persuade all but the irreconcilable Diehards to follow the lead of Balfour and Lansdowne. It was not always easy, however, to predict what at any moment Balfour’s position might be. The former Prime Minister had so confused the Shadow Cabinet on the 21st that the next day he composed a memorandum to correct mistaken impressions. At his most whimsical, he suggested that comparisons between the Diehards and Leonidas at Thermopylae were for ‘Music Hall consumption’ before admitting that it did not matter playing up to the ‘Music Hall attitude of mind’ provided ‘the performance [was] not too expensive’ – that is, if it did not ‘swamp the House of Lords’ – and finally declaring that for him the creation of fifty or a hundred new peers was ‘a matter of indifference’. Realizing that this document would only encourage the Diehards, Curzon dissuaded Balfour from circulating it and two days later induced him to write a letter for publication associating himself with Lansdowne’s advice on abstention.28 As Balcarres bitterly recorded, this was a triumph for Curzon, who had acquired a powerful influence over both Lansdowne and Balfour: ‘without scruples in forcing himself upon those he wishes to influence’, the former Viceroy was ‘so determined and persevering that he makes his wishes prevail’.29

The publication of Balfour’s letter was a great disappointment to the Diehards. The crisis had been visible for a year, a pained Austen Chamberlain told his party leader, but no lead had been given until now, when he repudiated his earlier opinion that the Bill was an issue each individual should decide for himself.30 Balfour was upset by the Unionist split and unable to understand it. ‘What funny people I have to deal with,’ he exclaimed to Balcarres. ‘I wonder why people are quarrelsome and so jealous of each other – I love them all, but at times they vex me with their naughtiness.’31

The first public display of the Diehards’ feelings, exhibited in the House of Commons on Monday, 24 July, was a poor advertisement for their cause. Led by Lord Hugh Cecil, they screamed insults at the Prime Minister, refused to let him speak and, in the words of Asquith’s daughter, ‘behaved, and looked, like mad baboons’.32 A somewhat more dignified event took place two days later when six hundred guests attended the ‘Halsbury Banquet’ at the Hotel Cecil. Named after the group’s nominal leader, a former Lord Chancellor approaching ninety, the dinner was a lengthy Diehard rally, presided over by Selborne, and notable for its series of demagogic speeches and for Chamberlain’s assertion that the Government’s threat to create peers was a ‘fraudulent bluff’. At the dinner Balfour’s Private Secretary, J.S. Sandars, found much concern about ‘the well-advertised fact’ that Curzon and Midleton were encouraging peers not merely to abstain but to vote with the Government. Chamberlain told him that Lansdowne should express his disapproval of anyone voting in favour of the ‘obnoxious measure’, a view repeated to the Marquess two days later by Balfour, who was now veering back towards the Diehards. Lansdowne replied that he would not ask anyone to vote for the Government but he did not see why, if the Diehards took a line of their own in one direction, a few Unionists who disagreed with them should not take another.33 George Wyndham told Sibell that this policy was ‘an abdication of leadership’, and Balcarres was in no doubt who was behind it. While Balfour, he noted in his diary, was showing increasing sympathy for the Diehards ‘Lord Lansdowne would not budge. George Curzon won’t let him; won’t leave him.’34

By the end of July the Chief Whip thought the issue had become almost a personal contest between Selborne and Curzon, ‘two determined and somewhat jealous statesmen’. The former he considered ‘persistent, obstinate, and full of common sense’, the latter ‘brilliant, witty, paradoxical, and not wholly devoid of cunning’.35 The day before the final debate, they went into the same lobby on Curzon’s motion censuring the Government for the way it had obtained the King’s pledge to create peers. Selborne declared his entire agreement with the motion but said he could not understand how anyone holding Curzon’s views could help the Government carry the Parliament Bill. In an alarming indication of Liberal weakness, the motion was passed by 281 votes to 68.

The next day, 9 August, was the hottest ever recorded in Britain. The temperature in the shade almost touched 100°F and no doubt helped to inflame feelings during the two days of passionate speech-making. After brief opening comments from Morley, the Government allowed the debate to pursue its natural course as an argument within the Unionist Party, Diehard after Diehard following Lansdowne with slightly differing opinions on the seriousness of Asquith’s threat. On the second day Midleton gave an exhibition of his perennial tactlessness by complaining that a few inexperienced peers recruited by the Diehards might be in a position to swing a vote in which the vast majority of Unionists would abstain. In the course of the debate the Duke of Norfolk emerged unexpectedly as a key figure. On the first day England’s premier duke had asked Balfour how he should vote and had received predictably ambiguous advice.36 The Diehards themselves were not sure whether they wanted him: Wyndham was anxious lest his adherence to their cause might provoke other peers to vote for the Bill. On the next day, however, they had to take the risk, because twenty-one Unionists (known in Diehard parlance as ‘rats’) as well as ten bishops had declared their support for the Government. According to Diehard calculations, that would result in a dead-heat. There was therefore ‘only one move left’, Wyndham told his wife. ‘Norfolk will speak and vote with us [and] ought to carry a few with him.’ Nevertheless, he added, Curzon and Midleton were working so passionately for the Government that they might still convert other abstainers into ‘rats’.37

As the hours went by, the tension increased. Wyndham thought the Diehards might win or lose by a single vote, depending on whether Norfolk frightened two or four people into the Government lobby. But he was not making enough allowance for the last-minute decisions of the undecided. In the evening Midleton dined at Lord Cadogan’s house and found to his amazement that none of his fellow diners – a former Prime Minister (Rosebery), a former Chancellor of the Exchequer (Hicks Beach, now Lord St Aldwyn), a former Viceroy of India (Minto) and a former Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (Cadogan himself) – had made up their minds how to vote. Two weeks earlier Minto had been urged by the King’s Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, to come down from Scotland and ‘if necessary vote for the Parliament Bill; much as we all hate it, everyone ought to do all in their power to prevent the disastrous creation of peers’. But by the time Midleton had returned to hear the final speeches, neither Minto nor any of the others had resolved what to do. Only shortly before the division did Cadogan inform Midleton that he had persuaded Rosebery to speak for the Bill and that he himself and Minto would be voting for it.38

As the debate neared its climax, several peers competed for the last word. Curzon, who had not yet spoken, wound up for the moderates in a heat so intense, Midleton observed, that his usually immaculate collar gradually dissolved into a shapeless mass. In a temperate and well-judged speech he observed that Lord Halsbury and his friends could retard the Bill for a few days or even a few weeks but they could not prevent its ultimate passage: ‘We have reached a point at which it must be admitted that the powers of effectual resistance have gone from us.’ Addressing the Diehards, he asked what good their victory and the subsequent creation of peers would do for themselves, the party, the constitution or the country. No one, he continued, sat in that Chamber without acquiring ‘some measure of inspiration, some idea that this House is the centre of a great history and of noble traditions – the idea that he is part of an Assembly that has wrought and is capable of doing in the future great and splendid service to this country’. Therefore he asked his fellow peers to pause before they did anything to precipitate a change in their House which could only have ‘the effect of covering it with ridicule and of destroying its power for good in the future’. In conclusion he doubted whether a more momentous division had ever taken place in the House of Lords. As a result of the vote, four hundred new peers might be created, and if that was done, ‘the Constitution is gone as we have known it. We start afresh to build a new Constitution. God knows how we shall do it. We may do it with success or failure …’

Lord Halsbury refused to let the House divide after such an appeal and angrily told Curzon that he and his followers had long been considering their duty to the country and had no need of exhortations to do so from him. Then Rosebery stood up and announced the decision, made at the end of Lord Cadogan’s dinner, to fulfil his painful duty and vote for the Bill. Finally Selborne rose and in a short and passionate speech injected a note of Gothick heroism into the Diehards’ stance.

The House of Lords as we have known it, as we have worked in it, is going to pass away. We ourselves, as effective legislators, are doomed to destruction. The question is – Shall we perish in the dark by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies? For us the choice is easy.

The suspense continued until the final minutes, and even during the division rumours credited both sides with victory. In the end they each received more votes than expected, but the Diehards’ 114 were exceeded by a combination of Liberals, bishops and ‘rats’ that totalled 131. Apart from Government peers and Lansdowne’s abstainers (whom Curzon as a member of the Shadow Cabinet felt obliged to join), only two categories of peer demonstrated group solidarity: thirteen bishops voted with the Government and only two against; eight dukes voted for the Diehards and none against. The crucial grouping, however, was that of the thirty-seven Unionist ‘rats’. Without the work of Curzon, Midleton and (through Stamfordham) the King, there would not have been enough of them to win.

During his fifty-eight years in Parliament, Midleton later recalled, this was the only occasion that close friends cut off all relations with each other for a long period.39 George Curzon’s role, widely held to have been the decisive factor, earned him the gratitude of the King, a great many abusive letters and a good deal of personal vituperation. His ‘desertion’ was bitterly felt by Austen Chamberlain who said, in that overworked image of the time, that he would not go ‘tiger-shooting’ with him again. Much more vitriolic was the reaction of George Wyndham, who ascribed his friend’s behaviour not to realism or moderation but to mere snobbishness. ‘He could not bear to have his Order contaminated with the new creations.’40 Declaring just after the result that the House of Lords had voted for revolution, he told Sibell, ‘Of course we can never meet George Curzon or St John Brodrick [sic] again, nor can we ever consent to act with Lansdowne or Balfour if they summon Curzon to their counsels.’ These were not just the sentiments of the hour. A week later he repeated that he would never meet Curzon again in a Shadow Cabinet called by Balfour, and in December he told F.E. Smith he would retire from politics rather than submit to the leadership of Curzon and the ‘renegade peers’.41

The accusation of snobbery was clearly absurd because Curzon had long advocated a large reduction in the number of hereditary peers and their substitution by elected members. Even more unjust was the charge, made later by Lord Beaverbrook and like-minded historians, that he was a persistent ‘rat’ who, beginning with the Parliament Bill, frequently changed his mind for the sake of political advantage.42 Any move less calculated to enhance a career than Curzon’s on this issue is hard to imagine. Since his performance in the first election of 1910, he had been variously talked of as the next Foreign Secretary, the next leader of the party and even, as Wyndham told Blunt, the next Prime Minister.43 His crusade against the Diehards made him so unpopular, however, that he was nearly excluded from the Coalition Cabinet of 1915. Long afterwards L.S. Amery declared that it ‘undoubtedly contributed to the mistrust and personal unpopularity which was to cost him the Prime Ministership twelve years later’.44

While the Parliament Bill blighted Curzon’s future career, it put an end to Balfour’s current one as leader of the party. A.J.B. had never been very popular with Unionist backbenchers. Lloyd George’s remark that he was ‘not a man but a mannerism’ may have been a political quip from someone who in fact admired him, but many Conservative supporters really did hold such a view. As Chief Whip in 1907, Sir Alexander Acland-Hood had reported to Sandars that ‘from every shooting party and every smoking room in the country’, he was hearing complaints about Balfour’s ‘want of backbone’ and his ‘vacillating policy’.45 Two election defeats in 1910, the change of tack on food taxes and tortuous indecisiveness over the Parliament Bill left him with still fewer admirers. In the autumn of 1911, as pressure mounted on him to go, he decided to resign. After leading the party in the House of Commons for twenty years, he suggested that he needed a break while it needed a ‘slower brain’ which did not ‘see all the factors in a situation’.46

Conscious though he was of Balfour’s defects, Curzon tried to dissuade him from resignation. Earlier in the year he had publicly defended him against critics who ‘disparaged services greater than those which had been rendered by any other living statesman to the Unionist Party and abilities which equalled … those of any parliamentary leader since the days of Pitt’.47 In November he privately implored him to stay, arguing that his departure would weaken the party both in the Commons and the country and ‘turn it into the hands of the extreme Birmingham school’ which would lead it to disaster.48 But Balfour refused to be persuaded and three days later he resigned.

It had generally been expected that if he went, Lansdowne would also resign as leader of the Unionist peers. Asked who would succeed them, Balfour replied that Chamberlain would be the leader in the Commons and Curzon in the Lords. Yet both were divisive figures whose succession would split the party in one chamber between Tariff Reformers and Free Traders and in the other between Hedgers and Diehards. Curzon was so clearly the dominant Unionist in the Lords that it would have been difficult to pass him over; nevertheless, his selection would have been deeply unpopular with those who regarded Selborne as their natural leader. Strong and ultimately successful pressure was therefore put on Lansdowne, who was innocent of many of the charges laid against Balfour, to stay on.

Similar fears of splitting the party in the Commons led to the selection of the outsider, Andrew Bonar Law. As Diehards and Tariff Reformers lined up behind Austen Chamberlain, a broadly equivalent number of Hedgers and Free Traders backed Walter Long, a former Chief Secretary for Ireland widely regarded as the worthy representative of ‘squirearchical’ Toryism. While the aspirants prepared for a close contest, Bonar Law, who was a Tariff Reformer but not a Diehard, allowed his name to go forward as a compromise candidate. Chamberlain was advised by Balcarres to stand down and wait for Long to make a hash of the job before succeeding to the leadership unopposed, but he refused to take a step likely to damage the Unionist position. Instead he wrote to Long with the suggestion, which his opponent accepted, that in the interests of party unity they should both withdraw in favour of Bonar Law. Chamberlain nevertheless resented the fact that the victor, who was a friend, had allowed himself to be put up as a candidate. F.E. Smith’s later quip that Austen ‘always played the game and he always lost’ should not be interpreted to mean that he was a good loser.