25

Suffragists and Other Targets, 1911–1914

ALTHOUGH GEORGE CURZON chafed at the idleness enforced by opposition, he lived a more active life than any of his colleagues and many of his opponents in the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Some of his energy was consumed by his work in the House of Lords and as Chancellor of Oxford, but a good deal of it remained to be directed into numerous causes and trusteeships, mainly conservationist in nature, which were the things that approximated most closely in his life to the Who’s Who category of recreations. While Asquith relaxed with bridge, Bonar Law with chess and Edward Grey with ducks, Curzon’s non-political hours were largely absorbed by the commemoration of history and the restoration of ancient buildings. Representative images of this time would be the sight of an increasingly portly figure scurrying along a station platform to catch a train seconds before its departure, a glimpse of a railway carriage full of scattered papers on the subject to be declaimed at his destination, and a view of the speech in delivery, witty, orotund, probably a little too long. If it was about a great man, the topic might be the birthplace of Shakespeare, the trial of Warren Hastings, Livingstone’s centenary or Captain Scott’s heroic failure in the Antarctic. The peroration would almost certainly be accompanied by the demand for a monument or at the least a commemorative tablet. He liked to compose the inscriptions, as he did for a memorial fountain to Ouida, and sometimes he planned and paid for the commemoration himself. Simla’s Christ Church contains his personal memorial to Sir Denzil Ibbetson, the most admired ICS officer of his generation, who died in 1908 not long after his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab.

At home as in India, Curzon was obsessed by the preservation of ancient monuments, but in industrialized England he was also greatly preoccupied by threats to wildlife and the countryside. He joined or gave donations to bodies such as the Selborne Society, formed to protect wild animals and plants from ‘needless destruction’, and the Scapa Society for the Prevention of Disfigurement in Town and Country. He was an early enthusiast of the National Trust, urging it to buy scenic areas threatened by development, and a defender of the nearly hopeless cause of preserving English villages. It would be a ‘national tragedy’, he declared, if ‘the picturesque and smiling cottage’ was replaced by rows of monotonous houses resembling dog kennels.1

In India his Government had passed legislation to combat international traffic in rare birds, and in England he called for stricter laws for their protection. Presiding in 1913 over the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – of which he and Grey were vice-presidents – he suggested that in their attitude to birds human beings were ‘not far removed from a barbarian age’. It was disgraceful, he said, that British society could tolerate boys stealing eggs, gamekeepers killing kingfishers because they were ‘supposed to devour juvenile trout’, and the pseudo-sportsman ‘whose one ambition was to kill any rare bird that appeared in his vicinity so that he could stuff it and put it in a glass case’. As positive measures he urged the greater use of nesting-boxes and the creation of bird sanctuaries. Why did not each of the great landowners, he asked in words that might have come from Lloyd George, turn one of his woods into a sanctuary ‘instead of filling it with wretched pheasants to be driven to the guns once or twice in the year?’

The worst example of barbaric behaviour, thought Curzon, was the traffic in plumage for women’s hats, a trade that was not only cruel and wicked in itself, but one which would lead to the extinction of creatures unlucky enough to produce fashionable feathers. After giving statistics of the number of tropical birds sold annually for this purpose in London, he asked what difference it made for a woman to wear in ‘her headpiece’ a ‘plume innocently or artificially produced’ instead of ‘an aigrette that had been torn from an egret in its nesting season?’ Nothing, he concluded, would be more desirable than legislation to ban imports of exotic plumage and prohibit women from wearing it.2

Threats to historic buildings remained as always one of Curzon’s chief concerns. Writing to The Times in 1912, he denounced the ‘rapacious instincts’ of ‘vandal hands’ which tore out the panelling and fireplaces of ancient buildings in order to sell them abroad.3 He urged legislation to prevent such despoliation and, although he supported Government measures to protect monuments, he criticized them for being insufficiently radical. It was outrageous, he declared in the House of Lords, that Britain could permit such acts of vandalism as the removal of Temple Bar and its replacement by ‘a ghastly griffin which glares at us every time we go down to St Paul’s’.4 Holding strong views about possible improvements and potential threats to the capital, he outlined his vision of its future at the inaugural meeting of the London Society in January 1913. While the finest areas of the city north of the river should be preserved, he thought, the ‘gloomy tenements’ and ‘grimy wharves’ on the other bank could be cleared and a new city erected in their place. Efforts should also be made to revive the life of the Thames and to prevent the erection of monstrous new buildings. It was almost incredible, he said, that in a ‘cultured, civilised city such a horrible phantasmagoria as Queen Anne Mansions should ever have been allowed to rear its hideous head in the air’.5 On only one issue affecting the city does he seem to have been unperceptive: asked at an inquiry whether traffic should be restricted to a speed of ten miles an hour in Berkeley Street, he answered, according to the correspondent of The Times, that he was ‘entirely against the imposition of a speed limit anywhere in London, and did not consider it conduced to the public safety’.6

In 1913 Curzon remarked that he was so overwhelmed with work for leagues, societies and committees that he did not have enough time for politics and other business. The two institutions with which he was most closely involved, and which reflected two of his main intellectual interests, were the National Gallery and the Royal Geographical Society. He loved buying pictures and often dropped in to browse at Christie’s, conveniently close to both Carlton House Terrace and his clubs: one observer commented, with that exaggeration typical of Curzonian stories, that he could not ‘bid for a picture or a curio at Christie’s, without seeming to patronise Cellini or Rembrandt as well as the auctioneer’.7 After his appointment as a trustee of the National Gallery in 1911, Curzon set up a committee to investigate various matters concerning the national art collections and in particular the question of how important pictures could be retained in Britain. His own farsighted suggestion was to exempt owners from death duties on their houses and paintings if they undertook to keep their collections intact and opened them to the public. To the immense loss of the national heritage, such a proposal was not adopted for many years, and the committee’s report concentrated on ways of raising more funds for the acquisition of pictures by the nation. Although the impact of the report, published in 1914, was blunted by the outbreak of war, many of its recommendations, such as those on the administration of the Tate Gallery, were later carried out.8

Curzon’s description of himself in 1909 as an ‘austere and venerable flâneur’9 is less accurate than his prediction a few years earlier that he would have nothing to do after India but lead a Renaissance life without the crime. While it is difficult to envisage Curzon himself as a colleague of the Borgias, the scope and nature of his interests would certainly have been well suited to the period. If the first of his Renaissance roles was that of architectural restorer and the second that of historian and antiquarian,fn1 then in third place came the connoisseur of art and in fourth the amateur geographer. Always more curious about the mysteries of the globe than about the enigmas of human nature, Curzon was engrossed by abstruse geographical phenomena: fascinated by the ‘singing sands’, he devoted many hours to their investigation and published an eighty-page essay on the topic in his book Tales of Travel. He once said that the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which he received after his journey to the Oxus, gave him more pleasure than any other award, and he encouraged younger men also to explore. As Viceroy he had urged expeditions to Everest and Kanchenjunga, lamenting that the British, ‘the mountaineers and pioneers par excellence of the universe’, had made no sustained and scientific attempt to climb them.10 In 1911 he became President of the RGS and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Maharaja of Nepal to allow an expedition to Everest to be mounted from his country. His most useful achievement as President, however, was to raise an enormous sum of money for spacious new premises he found in South Kensington; typically, he also designed the building’s railings, bought some of its furniture and supervised the hanging of its pictures. Another change he carried out was the admission of women to the society’s membership, a proposal he had helped to defeat twenty years earlier. Aware that it might seem illogical to champion such a reform at a time when he was leading the fight against women’s suffrage, he argued, not very persuasively, that to give women ‘a share in the Sovereignty of the country and the Empire’ was a wholly different thing from giving them a voice in a society which existed for ‘nothing more formidable or contentious than the advancement of a particular department of human knowledge’.11

Curzon’s views on the emancipation of women had not changed over the years, but he no longer dismissed it as ‘the fashionable tomfoolery of the day’. The growing violence of the suffragettes, the window-breaking, the arson and the assaults on politicians persuaded him to join and ultimately to lead a crusade against them. He supported the fusion of the two main anti-suffrage movements, a men’s group led by Lord Cromer and a women’s association headed by Lady Jersey, and he was the principal fundraiser for the new body that came to be known as the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. In July 1910 he and Cromer launched an appeal that collected £20,000 in three weeks. Cromer, who was President of the new society, soon found that the labour involved was bad for his health. ‘I am physically incapable’, he told Curzon, ‘of doing eternal battle with all these rampaging women,’ a reference not to the suffragettes but to the female members of his committee.12 At the beginning of 1912 he resigned and was succeeded by his fellow former proconsul.

Later that year, at an anti-suffrage meeting in Glasgow, Curzon set out his views in what was arguably the most unattractive speech of his career. After reading out a message of support from Asquith, he remarked that the extensions of the franchise in his lifetime had added to the electorate ‘a large element, which is necessarily, from the conditions of its life and labour, imperfectly acquainted with some aspects of politics’. He accepted it as a price worth paying for democratic institutions and pointed out that in any case men read newspapers, attended political meetings and were being educated in public affairs. But it would be dangerous, he argued, to add to this ‘untrained electorate’ millions of women who, on account of ‘the conditions of their education, the physiological functions they have to perform [and] the duties of their lives’, could not acquire sufficient training and experience in democratic ways. In an absurdly illogical comparison he declared that giving the vote to women, who formed a majority of the population, would be like the management of a Glasgow factory handing over the machinery to ‘a body of untrained apprentices, who had never even had the advantage of previously entering the building’.

There was worse to come. Admitting that on some issues decisions by women might prove beneficial, he denied that this would be the case on the crucial questions of peace and war. ‘An unwise decision … and still more an emotional decision on those ideas might lead to the disruption and even to the ruin of the Empire.’ As a highly patronizing finale he paid homage to the role of women in the empire ‘as mothers, as wives, as nurses, as teachers in a hundred benign and beautiful capacities for which God Almighty has fitted them’. He was not sure, he added, ‘that women have not something more important to guard even than the Empire itself. They have to guard the womanhood of women with all its responsibilities, its ideals, its spiritual endowment.’13

Curzon’s views on the subject were not inspired by the violence of the suffragettes, although he did wonder how anyone could favour ‘entrusting political responsibilities to the women who go about smashing innocent people’s windows’.14 Nor obviously can they be ascribed to misogyny: his current mistress, the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, perceived that he preferred the company of women to that of men and that they were the ‘natural companions’ of his leisure.15 Nor did he hold his opinions out of a desire to exclude women from professional careers and keep them in the kitchen, the boudoir and the bedroom: opening some new buildings at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall in 1910, he urged women to broaden their ambitions and to become not only teachers but also journalists, librarians, archaeologists, historians, organists, interior decorators and garden designers – a revealing list of professions all of which, with the exception of organ playing, Curzon practised in an amateur way himself.16 The real reasons are to be found in his fundamental ignorance of women, whom he loved but could seldom understand, and in that same misplaced sense of chivalry which had led Gladstone to oppose their emancipation on the ground that it would ‘trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature’.17 Politics, like war, were a man’s game, appropriate for masculine intelligence and masculine brutality. It was not the duty of those charming creatures of the ‘gentler sex’ to worry their pretty little heads about them.

Writing at the end of 1910 to his old associate General Barrow, now in command in Madras, Curzon gave a depressed account of the state of British politics and admitted that ‘a large slice’ of his heart would be in India for ever.18 He still kept closely in touch with the affairs of the Subcontinent, reading its newspapers each week, maintaining a wide correspondence and continuing to speak on Indian matters in Parliament. Excluded from influence in viceregal circles by Minto’s hostility, he hoped for better luck with his successor. There was an alarming moment when it looked as if the new Viceroy would be Kitchener, an appointment which was apparently King Edward’s last wish and among the first of his son’s.19 Back in London, the former C-in-C was intriguing with members of the Cabinet, exaggerating the extent of agitation in India in an effort to persuade them to send out a strong man, while Margot Asquith intrigued from the other side, telling one of her husband’s colleagues that Kitchener was a ‘natural cad’ and a ‘remarkably clever … liar’.20 Confident of receiving the post, the Field Marshal had already chosen his staff when Morley, whose low opinion of him had not altered, threatened to resign if he was appointed.

The new Viceroy was Sir Charles Hardinge, the former head of the Foreign Office and an old friend of Curzon, who gave him a barouche to take out with him to Calcutta in 1910. Shortly after the appointment Morley resigned anyway, although he remained in the Cabinet, and was replaced by another of Curzon’s friends, Lord Crewe. The new Secretary of State soon received an ominous letter from the former Viceroy asking to be allowed ‘occasionally’ to write ‘a thing or two’ about a country to which he had given the best of his life.21 Crewe was probably unaware that in Curzon’s language ‘occasionally’ was a synonym for ‘almost weekly’.

At the beginning, however, it was the Viceroy who received most of his predecessor’s attention in the form of long letters consisting of reminiscences and suggestions. For a time Curzon shared vicariously Hardinge’s early experiences of the Subcontinent. ‘I can imagine you now,’ he wrote to his successor soon after he had arrived, ‘and indeed at every moment of the day. It all comes back with an emotion half of pleasure half of pain.’22 He wrote about Naldera and the monsoons of Simla, about the site of the proposed town hall of Calcutta, about whether his old friend Scindia would marry the daughter of his old enemy Baroda.fn2 But his principal concerns were those of his projects which Minto had ignored such as the Imperial Cadet Corps and the Victoria Memorial Hall. Hardinge reported that the latter had made no progress during his predecessor’s time and that its foundations were barely above the ground. Encouraged by Morley to neglect the construction, Minto had subsequently claimed that the site had not been properly studied, and the works had been suspended on suspicions of subsidence.23 When these were proved false, building began again, but it was not until 1921 that it was finally completed. The gardens of the hall were designed by Curzon himself and laid out at the same time.

Several months passed before Curzon realized that his advice was not always welcomed by Crewe and Hardinge. As he had almost single-handedly organized the Coronation Durbar of 1903, he was naturally in a good position to make suggestions for George V’s Durbar, also to be held in Delhi, at the end of 1911. But he made them in so tactless a way, and complained so openly about the proposed expenditure, that he managed to antagonize both of his old friends. Crewe marvelled at ‘George Curzon’s peculiar incapacity for understanding what is and what is not, the proper occasion for interfering in other people’s affairs’.24

A more reasonable matter for interference was the future of the Directorate-General of Archaeology in India. After telling Hardinge on his arrival that the department sighed ‘for a little revival of viceregal patronage’, Curzon was horrified to learn a few months later that the Indian Government was proposing the abolition of its senior official and of various other posts established by himself, on grounds of economy. In October 1911 he sent Crewe a long memorandum attacking the proposal and published his case in The Times.25 Surprising support came from Lord Minto, who stated in the same newspaper that he agreed ‘with every word’ of his predecessor’s letter and added that it was ‘impossible to over-estimate the magnificent work Lord Curzon’ had done for Indian archaeology.26 Replying to a debate on the matter a few weeks later, Crewe adopted Morley’s method of treating Curzon with elaborate flattery. Not since ‘the palmy days of Mr Gladstone’, he told the House of Lords, had there been ‘any public man who combined so wide a range of interest in many subjects, and such an easy grasp of their general features, with so close and laborious attention to detail and the power of working out that detail’.27 He also defused Curzon’s hostility by overruling Hardinge’s Government on the question of the Director-General of Archaeology while permitting the abolition of less contentious posts.

That autumn Lovat Fraser, the former editor of The Times of India and then on the staff of The Times in London, published a highly adulatory account of Curzon’s viceroyalty in his book India under Curzon and After. Reviewing it in The Times itself, Milner delivered an immense encomium of the book’s protagonist, a tribute Curzon found ‘so high and splendid’ that he regarded it as ‘the most gratifying incident’ in his public life; he would rather be judged – and praised – by Milner, he told him, than by any other man.28 Among the most ‘constructive and, permanent’ achievements of Curzon’s rule, Fraser gave first place to the partition of Bengal, a work of statesmanship which he believed had already brought enormous and tangible benefits to millions of people in the new eastern province. While the agitation had died down in the west, a new spirit and prosperity were visible in the east. Chirol and other observers agreed. Even the Pioneer, the most relentless critic of Curzon’s rule, had changed its view. ‘After six years of carping and cavil’, Curzon told Hardinge, the newspaper had discovered that partition was an ‘act of courage and statesmanship. These, my dear Charlie, are the experiences, shall I call them the solaces of Indian administration!’29

In December 1911, a few weeks after the publication of Fraser’s book, the ‘constructive and permanent’ partition was revoked by George V at the Delhi Durbar: to the delight of the Hindus, eastern Bengal was to be reunited to Calcutta and the west, Assam was to revert to a chief commissionership, and a third new province was to be created by detaching the non-Bengali-speaking areas of Bihar and Orissa. Shortly beforehand Morley met Lansdowne and Curzon to prepare them for the announcement. The leader of the Unionist peers, Morley recounted, exhibited his customary calm, but Curzon was ‘not only vehement but violent’, denouncing the scheme and claiming as his right its immediate discussion in Parliament (which was about to be prorogued).30 The former Viceroy was infuriated not only by the decision but also by the way in which it was taken, ‘a deplorable surrender to clamour’ made by ‘a very disgraceful proceeding’. Crewe and Hardinge, he protested, ‘embarked without consulting anybody, without personal knowledge and by means of an unprecedented and unjustifiable use of the royal prerogative’.31

Hardinge, who had privately opposed the scheme when it was first mooted, attempted to soothe Curzon’s feelings by claiming that the original partition, ‘a great administrative measure, both necessary and justified’, had not been annulled but merely modified. There had not been a reversal of policy but ‘only a readjustment of the administrative boundaries’.32 This extraordinary definition can only be explained by the fact that Hardinge was a diplomat by training and a courtier by instinct. Curzon, in any case, was not fooled. While he could see that the new plan was not a reversion to the status quo ante, he knew very well that the essence of his own scheme, the division of the Bengali-speaking areas and the opening up of Assam, had been destroyed. Writing to Hardinge, who had hoped the disagreement would not mar their friendship, Curzon declared that partition

had been no particular child of mine. But I had fought for it, suffered for it, borne the whole brunt for 6 long years, and then to have it lightly tossed on one side at the very moment when it had thoroughly vindicated itself and when the agitation against it was, as Minto said, stone-dead; and to have this done by a new viceroy before he had been more than a few months in the country and could not be [apprised] of the whole case, a viceroy who moreover happened to be a personal friend of my own – well, I should not have been human had I not felt it profoundly.33

The King’s proclamation had contained the equally contentious decision to transfer the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi, a move Curzon considered almost as great a blunder as the change in Bengal. Delhi was in his view a ‘cemetery of dead monuments and forgotten dynasties’, an inappropriate home for a government that would be isolated from public opinion and far from the protection of the British navy.fn3 Besides, the advantages of having a capital in the centre of the country – one of the reasons given for the change – were not so obvious that Britain, France or the United States had ever felt the need to shift their governments to a central location.34

Warning Crewe that he would need to make a speech of ‘inordinate length’ to cover all the ground, Curzon attacked the Government’s decisions in the House of Lords in February 1912. They were, he said, by far the most important taken since the Mutiny, yet they had been made by a Viceroy and a Secretary of State both new to their offices who had neither consulted any of the surviving Viceroys nor allowed the matter to be discussed in Parliament. After countering the geographical and other arguments in favour of building a new capital at Delhi, he attacked the decision to reunite Bengal at a time when the benefits of partition were at last being understood, and he told the Government it had ‘yielded to a dying and … factitious agitation’. Finding nothing to say in favour of the plans, he then ridiculed the idea that Biharis would welcome unification with Orissa because it would give them access to the sea. The Biharis already had two railway lines to Calcutta which they would continue to use, while they had no railway connection with Orissa, a region, moreover, which did not even have a seaport.35

Curzon sat down after an hour and thirty-five minutes and was followed by Crewe who accused him of combining the ‘well-disciplined exaggeration of the practised advocate’ with the tones of ‘a prosecuting counsel’. To Hardinge the Secretary of State admitted it had been ‘a very able speech’ but would have been ‘infinitely more effective if the censure had not been so unrelieved’. Crewe, who was a competent but very dull speaker himself, took nearly two hours to answer Curzon’s points, and after that the House adjourned. On the following day Minto criticized the Government for giving in to agitation that had died out by the time he had left India, and a similar line was taken by Lansdowne. But several former provincial governors, including MacDonnell and Ampthill, welcomed the changes. Four months later an almost identical debate took place on the Government of India Bill, during which Curzon scoffed – with much justice as it turned out – at Hardinge’s claim that the new city would cost only £4 million and take only three years to build. The line-up in the debate was much the same as on the previous occasion – Minto once again wanting ‘very fully [to] associate’ himself with all the remarks of his noble friend Lord Curzon – but this time, in addition to Lansdowne, he had the assistance of Midleton. He also enjoyed the moral support of Morley who, after deliberately absenting himself, confided to a friend that he had agreed with every word Curzon had said.36

As the changes had been announced publicly by the King, Curzon realized there was little chance of overturning them, at any rate in the near future. Although he hoped that the folly and expense of the move to Delhi would one day become apparent even to the Government, he was determined to be involved in the changes if they went ahead. He thus sought assurances from Crewe about the future of Government property in Calcutta such as Hastings House and the paintings and sculptures of the viceregal residence. He also sent an immensely long letter to The Times about the architectural style of New Delhi, which he thought should be Classical with an Indian flavour. Hardinge was sent the same advice and fortunately agreed with it. In a subsequent letter Curzon told the Viceroy he would write no more about the matter because it was no concern of his, but could not resist adding a postscript criticizing the preliminary drawings of Edwin Lutyens: the proposed buildings lacked grace, he thought, and had ‘too much wall surface and too many straight lines’.37

In the spring of 1913 Hardinge asked Chirol, his closest confidant at home, to persuade Curzon to stop criticizing the Delhi transfer because it was a fait accompli which he should patriotically accept. Chirol, who had drifted apart from the former Viceroy partly because he supported the change of capital, tried and failed.38 At the annual Calcutta Dinner in London Curzon admitted that the decision could not be changed but continued to condemn the abandonment of the seat of British rule in order ‘to go hunting about for a new capital amid the graveyards that surround the deserted cities of forgotten kings’.39 The speech, which also contained a passage on the shortcomings of the military administration, produced a despairing reaction from Chirol. Expressing the view, shared by others, that Curzon was more of a statesman than anyone else on the Opposition benches, he told Hardinge that the former Viceroy’s knack of ‘saying the wrong thing, or even, when he says the right thing, of saying it in the wrong way, is quite extraordinary. I can recall no instance of a man whose personal unpopularity has to the same extent neutralised his immense abilities and his power … of rendering great services.’40

Curzon’s attitude eventually produced from Hardinge a similar reaction to that which he had provoked from Minto. It was curious, the Viceroy told Chirol in the spring of 1914, that someone claiming to be a friend should have done his utmost to embarrass him almost since the day of his arrival, especially when he had loyally pushed forward Curzon’s schemes, including ‘even that wretched Victoria Memorial’. His offence, he correctly surmised, was the change in Bengal, for which he had never been forgiven. In another letter of the same period, the Viceroy referred to the hatred felt for his predecessor among Indians. Despite his current differences with Curzon, Chirol could not let that pass. ‘Please do not forget’, he replied, ‘that few things are more discreditable to Indians than the hatred they have indulged against him, for no one has ever challenged unpopularity among his own people so fearlessly as he did in his endeavours … to secure even justice for Indians against Europeans.’41 Hardinge’s relations with Curzon never recovered and some years later deteriorated further when they worked together at the Foreign Office. His memoirs, written after his critic’s death, are little more than a catalogue of compliments received during his career, leavened and enlivened by malice towards Curzon.42

Until the end of his life Curzon remained unreconciled to the decision to leave Calcutta. In May 1914 he initiated a debate on the extravagance of Delhi which, according to Chirol, fell ‘absolutely flat’ because nobody cared about anything just then except Ulster.43 In 1916 he prepared a memorandum on the subject for his Cabinet colleagues which made equally little impact. And at the end of his life, in the book he was working on at the time of his death, he repeated his condemnation of a transfer which was still being carried out ‘at an inexcusable cost to the finances of India, and without any resultant advantage to a single public interest’.44

George Curzon was a restless and uneasy figure among the higher councils of the Unionist Party. To his annoyance, Bonar Law tried to avoid holding meetings of his Shadow Cabinet, which all former senior ministers had a right to attend, except when vital issues such as food taxes required a decision. Lord Balcarres, who succeeded his father as Earl of Crawford in 1913, listed some of the defects of this unwieldy body in a letter to Lady Wantage: George Curzon talked too much, Harry Chaplin was stone deaf, some members such as Halsbury were obtuse, others like Lansdowne were lazy, and few were ‘as modest and capable’ as Law.45 Crawford and his colleagues were impressed by Curzon’s powers of argument, but they seem to have taken a certain pleasure in contesting them. In December 1912 Curzon opened one Shadow Cabinet meeting with a fifteen-minute speech proposing that detailed policies on various subjects should be worked out by newly appointed subcommittees. Nobody was interested. Balfour doubted laconically whether there was any point in preparing ‘half-a-dozen colossal bills’ while the Unionists were in opposition, and was ‘cordially supported’ by Law.46

In spite of their many disagreements, Curzon and Balfour had been friends together in the ‘Souls’ and spoke the same kind of language. But the former Viceroy had nothing in common with the melancholy teetotaller who now led the Unionists in the Commons, a man who cared nothing for art or society or even country life, a widower who, in his biographer’s words, lacked ‘both the cheerfulness of the pagan and the consolations of the puritan’.47 Curzon made an effort to get on with Law, sent him a history of chess as a Christmas present, and even acquired, according to the wife of Law’s Private Secretary, a ‘puzzled affection’ for him.48 ‘Puzzled’ in fact sums up Curzon’s attitude to his party leader from beginning to end. He was puzzled how this gloomy Glaswegian iron dealer had managed to become the heir of Disraeli, Salisbury and Balfour, just as many years later he could not understand what Law had done to deserve burial in Westminster Abbey.49

The style and content of the two men’s politics contrasted almost as much as their personalities. While Curzon had learnt his debating skills at the Oxford Union, Law had apparently acquired his from speaking at Glasgow bankruptcy meetings when his iron company was a creditor.50 Whether this experience was responsible for the violence of his early speeches as leader is unclear, but repeatedly insulting the Liberals as corrupt gamblers and Gadarene swine was all very unlike Balfour. Curzon was appalled by Law’s vehemence and his ‘departure from the traditions of parliamentary form’.51 He was also disheartened that Law’s two political obsessions – Ulster and Tariff Reform – were causes with such little appeal to himself.

Since the Liberals had lost their overall majority in January 1910, Home Rule had returned to the political agenda. The issue itself had not changed greatly since Gladstone’s last attempt to tackle it in 1893, although Irish grievances over land were now weaker while nationalist agitation, inspired by the example of the Boers, was much stronger. But the political rules were very different. While the House of Lords could still defeat a Home Rule Bill by enormous majorities, the Parliament Act gave the Government the power to bring the measure back in the following two sessions and to enact it over the heads of the peers at the end of that time. It was a laborious and time-wasting procedure, but it ensured that the Government could pass any bill it liked if it was still in power two years after first voting for it in the Commons.

The Third Home Rule Bill, very similar to its predecessor, began the first of its three journeys through Parliament in April 1912. Bonar Law, who had roots in Ulster as well as Scotland and Canada, fought it fiercely from the beginning and in his notorious Blenheim speech said he could ‘imagine no length of resistance’ in Ulster which he would not be prepared to support. Curzon again disapproved of his extremism and also of his failure to consult his colleagues on the matter. It might be right, he thought, ‘to let Ulster play her game if she is so resolved’, but it was surely wrong for the leaders of the Unionist Party ‘to abet and encourage in advance defiance of the law’.52

Curzon once candidly confessed to Midleton that he had never understood Ireland and never would.53 Certainly he made no effort to acquire first-hand knowledge of the problem. Like Cavour, who studied agrarian conditions far from Italy but never saw the need to investigate what was happening south of Pisa, Curzon was prepared to travel thousands of miles to examine rural life in Asia without ever taking the trouble to cross the Irish Sea. He opposed Home Rule for all of Ireland because he had little insight into nationalism and because he was convinced that, whatever the mistakes of the past, Westminster would provide better government than a parliament in Dublin. His sympathies were thus with the ‘Old Guard’ Unionists such as Lansdowne and Midleton, both of them landowners in southern Ireland, rather than with Bonar Law, who was an extremist on Ulster but prepared in the last resort to concede the south.

Although he felt no passionate attachment to Ulster, Curzon believed that the province could not be forced to accept Home Rule by a Government which depended on the votes of Irish MPs, who were in any case over-represented at Westminster, to force through a measure that had not been approved by the British electorate. Speaking in the House of Lords in January 1913, he asked why the Liberals, who had ‘constituted themselves the international champions of the right of insurrection’, refused to recognize the right of the people of Ulster merely to be left alone and to carry on as before. Lord Sheffield countered this rather simplistic point with the almost equally simplistic statement that Liberals championed rebellions of the oppressed, while Tories supported those of oppressors such as Carlists and Confederates. On the Second Reading Curzon returned to the point, asking why the Liberals wished ‘to give back Crete to Greece, to carve out a new state in Albania, to divide Macedonia into a number of provinces – except for the very reason that justifies Ulster in demanding separate treatment in the present instance?’ Warning the Government of the consequences of disobedience in Ulster, he said the people of Britain would be ‘very loth to condemn those whose only disloyalty it will to be to have been excessive in their loyalty to the King’ and whose only form of rebellion was to insist on remaining under the British Parliament. Finally he appealed to the Government to hold a general election before the Bill became law. If the Liberals won, they would ‘deprive Ulster of the moral support of the Unionist Party’ and ‘escape the awful odium’ of coercing Ulster and risking civil war with half the country against them. And if they lost, so much the better, for they would escape the consequences of ‘a most appalling blunder’.54

Curzon’s main aim throughout 1913 was to force a general election before Home Rule was passed. In March he had suggested to Cromer that a bill should be introduced in the Upper House with a single clause postponing the presentation of the Home Rule Bill for royal assent until after a general election. In September he went to Balmoral to make a suggestion to King George. After the monarch explained that the Government was telling him he had no option but to assent to the Bill, Curzon advised him to write a memorandum for the Cabinet about his position, repeating the argument that the matter should be referred to the electorate, pointing out the consequences and the possibility of civil war, and disclaiming any responsibility on his part for such an outcome. Curzon still disliked a settlement that merely saved Ulster from Home Rule and was critical of the extremism of Carson and F.E. Smith, the champions of such a solution. But by the autumn he believed there was no other way of preventing a civil war. The avoidance of conflict now became his principal concern. On New Year’s Eve he warned the country that 1914 would be the most momentous year in modern politics because Britain would be confronted with her greatest catastrophe since the seventeenth century, the prospect of civil war.55

After completing two of its parliamentary circuits by the end of 1913, the Home Rule Bill was launched on its final tour at the beginning of 1914. Like other Unionists, Curzon repeated his demands for an election, but he was nervous of any action that bordered on the unconstitutional. He did not think the King should refuse his assent if the Bill passed a third time and he was alarmed by Bonar Law’s proposal to amend the Army Act in the House of Lords and thereby prevent troops from being used to coerce Ulster. The Unionist leader had come to the conclusion that such a move was the only means left to save the north from Home Rule, and he was backed by Chamberlain, Selborne, the Cecils and Carson. Like Lansdowne, Curzon thought the proposal extremely hazardous and seems to have been partly responsible for its abandonment.56 In any case the matter became largely academic in March when the possibility of deploying the army in Ulster was removed by the Curragh ‘mutiny’, an incident so mishandled by the Government that it gave Unionist politicians the chance to berate it for incompetence and to exalt the ‘mutineer’ officers for their sense of honour. The Bill meanwhile continued its tortuous and engrossing progress. For a week at the beginning of July, just after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the House of Lords remained absorbed in the debate on its Second Reading.