31

Lord President

AS LORD PRIVY SEAL, George Curzon had played a role in Cabinet almost as ornamental as his title. He rarely spoke in the House of Lords and, until the creation of the Air Board, had almost nothing to administer. But with the equally venerable title of Lord President of the Council, he had not only a key role in the running of the war but also the laborious task of explaining and defending Government policy in the Lords. In December 1916 he initiated his new work with a much-admired speech describing the structure of the new Government and the policy it intended to pursue.

The War Cabinet had been conceived as an antidote to the long, meandering, indecisive gatherings of Asquith’s ministers. Executive power was now concentrated in a small group of people unencumbered, except for Bonar Law, by departmental duties. Decision-making was thus very greatly improved. But the drawbacks of the small Cabinet soon became apparent, at any rate to those ministers who were not in it. Crawford, the new Lord Privy Seal, told Curzon that there should be some form of ministerial conference to take the place of the old Cabinet; otherwise the secretaries of state would have no idea what was going on outside their departments. Curzon suggested, presumably only half seriously, that dinner parties at Carlton House Terrace with its new hostess might be a congenial substitute.1 In the event the system remained in place and unaltered. Apart from Derby and Balfour, who as Secretaries for War and Foreign Affairs frequently attended the Cabinet, the departmental ministers did feel isolated. They seldom conferred or exchanged notes about their departments, and general papers were not circulated. Out of touch with the most recent political developments, they could feel little sense of collective responsibility.2

Much as he hated delegating, Curzon realized he needed some assistance. If he was going to spend most of the day with the War Cabinet and its subcommittees, he told Bonar Law, he required ‘one or two lieutenants to help to do the work’ in the House of Lords. Three potential ‘lieutenants’ he suggested were old friends and, in different degrees, more recent enemies: Salisbury, Selborne and Midleton. When Lansdowne suggested that Salisbury would be the most effective of this trio, Curzon made a strong appeal for his appointment as Lord Privy Seal, arguing that the Government would thereby ‘disarm a rather formidable critic’.3 On learning that the post had already been given to Crawford, Curzon went straight to the Scottish earl and asked him to stand down in favour of Salisbury, who was in any case unwilling to take the job. Marvel though he did at Curzon’s ability to make the request ‘without confusion or apology’, Crawford felt unable and doubtless unwilling to withdraw.4

Curzon was happy to be in charge of the House of Lords but distressed by Lloyd George’s failure to treat his Chamber with sufficient consideration. Frustrated in his initial efforts to recruit ‘lieutenants’, Curzon also resented the Prime Minister’s refusal to reward his later staff officers. Outside the War Cabinet, he pointed out in the summer of 1918, there were forty-four ministers in the Commons and only five in the Lords. The departments in the Upper House were thus voluntarily represented by unpaid peers with virtually no prospects of promotion. Had Lord Peel been an MP, he told Lloyd George, he would have been a minister long ago. But because he was a peer he was expected to represent two ministries and conduct bills through the House ‘simply as an act of patriotism and good will’.5 Curzon was eventually successful with the advancement of Peel, who became Under-Secretary at the War Office and in 1922 succeeded Montagu as Indian Secretary, but otherwise his ‘team’ received inadequate recognition.

Curzon was generally regarded as a fine Leader of the Lords. Carefully prepared and powerfully delivered, his speeches usually managed to see off persistent and concerted attacks on the Coalition by those would-have-been lieutenants, Salisbury and Midleton. Crawford noted that they sounded better than they read, leading people to feel they had heard a ‘great and historic oration’ even when the content was ordinary.6 One Liberal peer considered that Curzon’s first nine months as Leader had been ‘uniformly successful’ because, on top of his knowledge and oratory, he had added courtesy and ‘kindly greetings’ to his colleagues. Crawford also seems to have discovered a new side to Curzon, describing him as a ‘wondrous patient’ taskmaster whom he ‘rejoiced’ to work under.7 The partnership between the Lord President and his deputy was not an easy one because Curzon’s membership of the War Cabinet frequently prevented him from attending the Upper House. Crawford thus often found himself answering delicate questions about Cabinet policy which he had no part in deciding and which he often knew little about. Able though he was, he could not always cope with the situation, and Milner was reluctantly forced to intervene to set matters straight.8

Curzon had become ‘quite undeservedly’ unpopular, thought Selborne, as a minister in Asquith’s Cabinet. Since he never made any effort to increase his popularity, matters did not improve under Lloyd George. He was a friend of Milner and to a lesser extent of Chamberlain, Crawford and Robert Cecil. But even by those colleagues who liked him, he was regarded with alternate bursts of admiration and exasperation. Hankey often told him he was a good friend and then told his diary he was impossible to deal with. Less ambivalent was the attitude of Lord Derby who, as his biographer Randolph Churchill pointed out, never missed an opportunity of thwarting or embarrassing Curzon. In the spring of 1917 he sent Bonar Law an appalling letter, alleging among other things that Curzon was abusing the privilege of his official car by allowing Grace and their guests to travel in it. The following winter he wrote ‘as an old friend’ to Curzon himself about the matter, but was forced to admit that his correspondent’s explanation was ‘so excellent’ that the incident was ‘absolutely closed’.9 Derby had little further opportunity to investigate the Lord President’s consumption of petrol because in April he was forced to relinquish the War Office. Hearty, blunt and unintellectual – qualities which endeared him to the British public – Derby had proved a most malleable minister who did what the generals told him. Lloyd George therefore despatched him to the Paris embassy, where it would not be ‘obvious that his bluffness was only bluff,’10 and where he appealed to the French as a fine specimen of a milord. As Crawford recorded in his diary, ‘he dines out with people whose faces he doesn’t know, whose names he can’t remember and whose language he is unable to talk, but with his own cheerful countenance and bonhomie he sails through all kinds of difficulties and embarrassments with complete success’.11

Curzon had a more complicated relationship with the Prime Minister. In character and personality he and Lloyd George could hardly have been more dissimilar: their ways of thinking and working, their values and assumptions, their manners and temperaments, all seemed designed as opposites. ‘Our natures’, recalled Curzon with laconic understatement, ‘were not naturally harmonious.’12 Yet he was the only man who stayed in Lloyd George’s Cabinet from beginning to end. Their views were not in fact so different as their personalities, and they had a reluctant mutual respect for each other’s ability. Lloyd George recognized that Curzon was ‘not very accessible to new ideas’ but thought him ‘very able, very just’ and ‘a great public servant’ who had ‘never had sufficient credit for his Indian administration’.13 He also found him useful, as a chairman of committees, as a source of knowledge on distant places, even as a companion on his famous mission to the Admiralty in April 1917 to insist on the use of convoys.

Yet they never ‘got on’ personally. They were regarded as good company by other people but not by each other. Each exaggerated the other’s idiosyncrasies and at the same time drew attention to his own. Curzon liked to think of Lloyd George as ‘a bit of a Bolshevik at heart’ who found Trotsky ‘the one congenial spirit on the international stage’.14 Lloyd George liked to regard Curzon as a patrician of incomparable hauteur and imagined himself leading a medieval revolt of oppressed Kedleston peasantry. According to Hankey, the Prime Minister loved to hear funny stories about Curzon, whose ‘little peculiarities – his pompous manner, ignorance (partly a pose) of democracy, and so forth – were a source of inexhaustible amusement’ to him.15 Yet Curzon in the flesh often grated, particularly when he was being long-winded, and sometimes Lloyd George was unable to resist a snub. On these occasions Curzon protested, not with angry rejoinders or threats of resignation, but with wounded stateliness. It had been a ‘very trying’ and ‘unmerited experience’, he wrote in January 1918, to be pulled up by his chief at a Cabinet meeting attended by outsiders and to be cut short in a manner that left ‘a painful impression on all who heard it’. Lloyd George apologized for his rudeness but maintained he had been right to protest because two trustees of the British Museum had been invited to a Cabinet meeting at which Curzon behaved not like a minister but as an advocate opposing the plan to install the Air Board in the museum. The Prime Minister’s constitutional punctiliousness may have been correct, but one cannot help thinking that the proposal, which Curzon foiled, was a peculiarly bad one.16

Until the end of 1916, Curzon had been unable to influence the strategy of the war. His constructive work, on the Shipping Committee and the Air Board, had been organizational; his strategic advice, wrong on the evacuation of Gallipoli, right on the advance to Baghdad, had been ignored. But on joining Lloyd George’s War Cabinet he became part of that small body set up to direct the running of the war after the slaughter on the Somme. And in the following June he and Milner successfully urged the formation of a War Policy Committee consisting of themselves, Lloyd George and Smuts, with the invaluable Hankey as secretary, to consider future strategy.fn1 Starting on 11 June, the committee met three or four times a week to examine the options until the middle of July. As chairman, Milner told Amery, the Prime Minister tended to babble away ‘with every sort of wild notion’, and it was better when ‘Curzon took the chair, and they really got through a lot of business’.17

One might have expected Curzon, with his admiration for Napoleon and Wellington, to have enjoyed the role of military strategist. But he admired them as much for their administrative genius as for their fighting ability. Unlike Churchill, he did not thrill to the sound of bugles; he did not imagine himself at Napoleon’s camp fire, conjuring with divisions, plotting an encirclement of the Austrians, designing a manoeuvre around the left flank of the Prussian army. Despite his experience in India and the evidence of the Somme, he was averse to overruling current military advice. Curzon and other Unionists had insisted on the retention of General Sir Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front. And although the Cabinet’s decision to place him under France’s General Nivelle during the spring of 1917 indicated limited confidence in his ability, the Unionists still preferred his plodding professionalism to the intuition and imagination of Lloyd George.

Haig came over in June to justify his proposals for a new offensive on the Western Front. Backed by General Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he urged the War Policy Committee to sanction an attack in Flanders intended to capture the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast and relieve the pressure on a demoralized French army. After Haig claimed his offensive had ‘a reasonable chance of success’, Curzon asked him whether this meant he merely expected to capture his initial objectives. The C-in-C replied that he expected the entire operation to be successful.18 It might even, thought the generals, win the war. On that night, 20 June, the committee dined at Carlton House Terrace and tried to come to a decision. After several glasses of champagne, Curzon told his wife, the Prime Minister became ‘quite hilarious’,19 but the party broke up in the small hours without having come to a conclusion. Smuts, the only soldier among them, backed the generals, Curzon and Bonar Law were undecided, while Lloyd George and Milner wanted to delay an attack until American troops arrived in 1918.

During a further session with Haig and Robertson the next day, Curzon supported Lloyd George’s proposal for an Italian offensive, assisted by French and British forces, to capture Trieste and knock the Austrians out of the war. Such a scenario was not much less illusory than clearing the well-entrenched Germans from the Belgian coast, but it would have avoided the hecatomb of Passchendaele. The generals, however, were unmoved. When Lloyd George later asked them to reconsider their plans, they restated their confidence in their strategy. Curzon became increasingly impressed by the unanimity of military opinion, backed as it was by Smuts and the Admiralty, and agreed with Bonar Law that the Cabinet could hardly ignore the recommendations of all its military advisers. Realizing that he was the civilian minister most sympathetic to their viewpoint, Robertson appealed to Curzon to help thwart other schemes such as an attack on Alexandretta or sending reinforcements for a further advance on the Salonika Front: ‘attacking an enemy from two different directions’, he told the Lord President, had always failed except at Waterloo and one or two other places. When Lloyd George pressed for the Salonika plan, the CIGS asked Curzon to explain the nature of the Balkan country to the Prime Minister, who seemed ‘quite unable to envisage it’, and to point out that it was a mountainous and easily defensible region where ‘a small army would be murdered and a large army would starve’; only in the unlikely event of a Bulgarian collapse or a strong Russian attack from the north would there be any reasonable prospect of a military success. Convinced by the argument, Curzon obliged Robertson by telling the committee what would happen to a small or large army stranded in the Balkan interior.20

Curzon’s late and reluctant support for Haig’s disastrous offensive was influenced by an Eastern anxiety. Germany, he believed, needed to be defeated decisively in the West in order to prevent her causing chaos in the East. The Russian convulsions of 1917 opened up for Curzon a nightmare scenario whereby the Germans could relinquish their gains in Western Europe and yet still emerge successfully from the war by compensating themselves in the opposite direction. They might offer to evacuate Belgium and give back Alsace-Lorraine to France on condition that their colonies were returned and they were given a free hand in the East. The French and Belgians would be unable to resist the deal, and the only loser, apart from Russia, would be Britain, who would gain nothing except a new and very dangerous threat to her Asian empire. An undefeated Germany, having exchanged small areas in Europe for large territories in the East, would, thought Curzon, cause a fresh war within twenty years.21

In September the Germans did make a vague peace approach along these lines. Yet although the British army was by then floundering once more through the quagmires of Flanders, the Cabinet rejected the idea of a negotiated peace. While that decision may have been understandable, it is difficult to see by what logic Haig was allowed to go on with his offensive until the village of Passchendaele was captured in November. ‘We laid it down expressly’, Milner reminded Curzon later, ‘that we should call it off if the results seemed incommensurate’ with the sacrifices. Yet four months after the great breakthrough had failed to materialize, the British attack was still churning away a few miles outside Ypres. Regretting that he had ever agreed to it, Milner urged Lloyd George to call a halt in September. But the Prime Minister, who had never believed in the offensive anyway, refused to do so, probably because he feared that a showdown with Haig would lead to the breakup of his Government. Afterwards Milner told Curzon that he very much doubted if the policy of ‘Hammer, Hammer, Hammer on the Western Front’ would ever succeed.22

After Passchendaele Curzon’s opinion of Haig began to drop. During the autumn he received a series of percipient letters from the journalist Lovat Fraser, who criticized the C-in-C for flinging division after division at hopeless targets, for never knowing ‘when not to fight’, and for making silly plans about pouring cavalry ‘through the gap’ and capturing towns ‘at the point of the sabre’. Unlike the Germans, he told Curzon, the British had failed to learn the lessons of Verdun. ‘We are being beaten’, he declared, ‘in brain power’.23 Curzon began to see that Fraser might have a point, at any rate with regard to the cavalry, whose manoeuvres Haig was still supervising as late as September 1918 in anticipation of pouring them through a gap in the Hindenburg Line.24When in January of that year Haig told the War Cabinet that ‘the value and importance of cavalry would be very great not only in offensive but also defensive operations’, Curzon politely suggested that ‘the character of warfare during the ensuing few months would [seem to] present few opportunities for the use of cavalry’.25

Curzon never wavered in his belief that the war must continue until Germany was defeated. He refused to accept the pessimism of Lansdowne, Smuts and Milner, all of whom recommended a compromise peace during the last two years of the war. Smuts wanted a settlement before Britain exhausted herself and ended up as a second-rate power compared to the United States and Japan. He and Milner advocated the kind of peace that Curzon particularly feared, an agreement that required German withdrawal from the West in return for eastern spoils such as the Ukraine. Smuts thought that only by such concessions to Germany could ‘a great tide of invasion rolling’ towards the Indian empire be prevented. Curzon believed that such an arrangement now would only encourage the ‘great tide’ to roll later on. In his view it was ‘essential to go on hammering till Germany was beaten and brought to a different frame of mind’. Then Britain could ‘secure a peace which Germany would keep and not have the strength to break’.26

At the Imperial War Cabinet, which congregated again in London in June 1918, Curzon once more stressed the danger of German ambitions in the East. In his role as Chairman of the Eastern Committee, a recent amalgamation of various Foreign Office and Cabinet subcommittees, he surveyed the situation in the Middle East and pointed out that the Russian-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk now gave their enemies the choice of an Asian invasion through the Caucasus and Turkestan or by a southern route via Mesopotamia and Persia. In his contributions he also emphasized the importance of Britain’s co-operation with the Arabs, both now and in the post-war Middle East settlement. He saw Britain as a sort of godfather to Arab aspirations, not only in Mesopotamia but also in the other Arab lands conquered from the Turks. He was well aware of the obstacles that had been placed in the way of Anglo-Arab co-operation by contradictory British promises: the ‘embarrassing’ pledges to Sharif Hussein,fn2the Sykes-Picot Agreement (‘a millstone round our necks’) and above all the Balfour Declaration. Yet he believed that most of these and other contradictions could in due course be resolved. Only in Palestine did he foresee that it would be impossible, and for that reason he hoped that the area might be handed over to American trusteeship.28

When the end of the war loomed unexpectedly in the autumn, Curzon argued that the Allies must not be robbed of their legitimate rewards simply because victory had been a result of voluntary capitulation rather than disaster on the battlefield. The armistice, he told the War Cabinet, must ‘contain the evidence, both to Germany and to the world’, that the Germans had been defeated. Its conditions should therefore include compensation to Belgium, reparations for the invaded countries, and indemnities to the Allies for ‘the colossal expenditure enforced upon them’. He also wanted to see the establishment of an International Tribunal to which ‘certain specified and notorious German malefactors’ should be surrendered for trial.29 Expatiating on this last idea in November, he told Lloyd George that ‘the supreme and colossal nature’ of the Kaiser’s crime called for ‘supreme and unprecedented condemnation’. He did not think that execution or imprisonment would be necessary but recommended ‘an inglorious and ignoble exile under the weight of such a sentence as has never been given in the history of mankind’.30 A few days later, after discussing the matter with the French premier Clemenceau, he urged the Cabinet to decide whether to try the Kaiser while he could be regarded as a prisoner-of-war. Lloyd George disagreed with Curzon’s view of the appropriate sentence and said the Kaiser should be hanged for a crime against humanity that had caused the deaths of several million people. To Chamberlain, who had suggested that the process would be like trying Napoleon, the Prime Minister replied that it was not at all the same thing. Napoleon had not only shown great talent and power but had also fought with his troops, while the Kaiser was merely a coward without strength of character.fn331

The conclusion of the Armistice gave Curzon the opportunity, in the form of a congratulatory Address to the King, to make an eloquent and moving appraisal of Britain’s role in the war. As Churchill showed a generation later, anachronisms of speech, which might provoke sniggers in periods of normality, can strike emotional chords in times of crisis that speakers more attuned to their age cannot achieve. So it was with Curzon on 18 November when he rose in the House of Lords to deliver a speech which, in Lord Harcourt’s words, ‘not only expressed what we all wanted to have said’ but was ‘the most perfect piece of English eloquence and literature’ he had ever listened to.32

Among the many miscalculations of the enemy was the profound conviction, not only that we had a contemptible little army, but that we were a doomed and decadent nation. The trident was to be struck from our palsied grasp; the Empire was to crumble at the first shock; a nation dedicated, as we used to be told, to pleasure-taking and the pursuit of wealth, was to be deprived of the place to which it had ceased to have any right, and was to be reduced to the level of a second-class, or perhaps even a third-class Power. It is not for us in the hour of victory to boast that these predictions have been falsified; but at least we may say this – that the British flag never flew over a more powerful or a more united Empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind.

Later he turned to the future, prayed for continued Allied unity in the building of the peace and quoted Shelley. ‘A little more than one hundred years ago, the great romantic poet of our land, looking on the birth of a new Hellas, wrote these prophetic words:

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn;

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

‘A similar vision’, he added, ‘now rises above a far wider horizon. May we see it, under the guidance of Providence, assume form and substance before our eyes.’

A few weeks later the country went to the polls for the first time in eight years. Although Curzon had opposed suggestions for a merger between the Unionists and Lloyd George’s Liberals, he believed the two groups should seek a fresh mandate as a coalition and then jointly undertake the labours of a peace conference.33 He himself played little part in the massive Coalition victory that reduced Asquith’s Liberals to a parliamentary strength of under 30 and saw the emergence of Labour, with twice as many MPs, as the principal Opposition party. In fact his main contribution to the election had taken place nearly a year earlier when one of his most controversial speeches was influential in adding over eight million people to the franchise.

Curzon was still President of the anti-suffragists’ National League when the Representation of the People Bill came before the House of Lords in Committee at the beginning of 1918. The Bill included one clause introducing universal suffrage for men aged 21 or over and another giving the vote to women who had reached the age of 30. Although the House of Commons had passed the clause on the enfranchisement of women by an enormous majority, Curzon recommended resistance to it in the Lords. As Leader of the House he did not think he himself could vote for an amendment that would kill the clause, but he agreed to support it in his speech and he encouraged the League to send a circular letter which might persuade ‘a good many’ peers to attend the debate and to vote for it. On 10 January he spoke solemnly of the ‘vast, incalculable and almost catastrophic change’ the clause would bring, and told the Lords that by passing it they would be ‘opening the flood gates to a stream which for good or evil [would] submerge many landmarks’ they had known. He then paused, admitted that he should logically support the amendment but suddenly changed tack, pointed out that the clause had been overwhelmingly passed in the Commons and warned his fellow peers against provoking a conflict with the Lower Chamber.

The effect was palpable. While the League’s bewildered supporters stared dumbfounded at each other, waverers rallied to the suffrage side and helped defeat the amendment. Afterwards Lansdowne told Curzon that his speech stampeded many peers who had intended to vote against the clause but were ‘deterred by [his] emphatic statement of the consequences’.34 Members of the League naturally wondered why they had been advised to encourage peers to vote one way only to hear their President encouraging them to vote the other. Curzon complained of the abusive letters he received afterwards but gave no convincing explanation for his change of mind. In fact he seems to have been swayed by the course of the debate, particularly by a speech from Selborne. The ability to persuade – and be persuaded – is of course what democracy is all about, but the committee members of the League may be forgiven for not appreciating the point on this occasion. Indeed, their ‘regret that he did not sever’ his connection with their organization before making his speech was a far milder censure than he deserved.35

Curzon’s experience of ceremonies made him a natural choice as an organizer of events and memorials to celebrate victory and commemorate the dead. His most tedious duty was to act as chairman of a committee to set up a House of Lords memorial for the two hundred peers or sons of peers who had been killed in the war. What should have been a straightforward task was complicated by divisions among the surviving peers over whether the structure should go in the Princes’ Chamber or the Royal Gallery, and whether it merited the displacement of a statue of Queen Victoria. A month before his death Curzon was still wrestling with the problems of the memorial. For nearly six years, he complained to Lansdowne, he had ‘borne the whole burden of this wretched affair, trying to carry out the wishes and instructions of the House without help from anybody’.36

More rewarding was his chairmanship of a committee set up by the Cabinet to organize peace celebrations in the summer of 1919. After these had passed off successfully, he was asked to supervise the erection of a permanent cenotaph in Whitehall and to make arrangements for its unveiling. At the head of a second committee he then designed a restrained and moving ritual centred on a two minutes’ silence and the haunting lament of the ‘Last Post’. Determined that the ceremony should be one of poignant simplicity rather than high-ranking grandeur, he insisted that widows and ex-servicemen should be given priority on the occasion. After it had been decided that the unveiling of the Cenotaph should be accompanied by the burial of an unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey, Curzon again planned the ceremony and again stipulated that places should be given ‘not to society ladies or the wives of dignitaries, but to the selected widows and mothers of those who had fallen, especially in the humbler ranks’. Conducted in an atmosphere of emotional intensity seldom matched in Britain, the events aroused such strong feelings that popular opinion demanded an annual service at the site of the Cenotaph. One final ceremony was thus given to Curzon to devise, and it has lasted as long as anything he ever did. The Remembrance Day service, still performed three-quarters of a century later, is his creation.37

Curzon gave himself no public role in these ceremonies and, apart from a mention in the Pall Mall Gazette, received no credit for them. Yet they owed their success to his ability as an organizer and to the sensitivity with which he created events in which everyone could participate and share a common grief. Curzon was a man of almost unparalleled contrasts, but none is so remarkable as the fact that the director who staged the Delhi Durbar also produced Remembrance Day, a ritual that can move to tears even people born after the Second World War. It is typical of Curzon’s fate that he has been remembered for the wrong ceremony.