The Proud Tower (71 page)

Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 was the fuse, deliberately lit, of one of the great quarrels which made the Liberal era, in the words of a participant, “so unprecedentedly cantankerous and uncomfortable.” With Liberal prestige sinking, party leaders were aware that without a popular issue they might not win the next election. People were already beginning to calculate, Gardiner wrote, “when the election would come and by how much the Liberals would lose.”

As Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George had to provide £16,000,000 of additional revenue for 1909, one-third toward the eight Dreadnoughts to which the Government had agreed, and two-thirds for implementing the Old Age Pensions Act. He chose to obtain it by a tax-the-rich program which, while neither unsound nor confiscatory, was framed as provocatively as possible with intent to goad the Lords to reject it so as to create an issue of Peers vs. People. The Budget raised the income tax on a graduated scale from 9
d
. to 1
s
. 2
d
. in the pound with an extra supertax of 6
d
. on incomes over £5,000. (Already when the Liberals’ first budget had raised the income tax to 11
d
. in the pound, a daughter of the Duke of Rutland recalled, “We all thought Papa would die. He looked too ashen to recover.”) The new Budget raised death duties to a maximum of 10 per cent on estates of £200,000 or over, it added a tax on motors and petrol which at this date affected only the rich, and also on tobacco and alcohol of which the last was to prove a political mistake.

It was none of these measures but a tax of one-fifth the value on “unearned increment” of land when it was sold or passed by death, plus an annual tax of a halfpenny in the pound on undeveloped land and mineral rights, which aroused the whole of the landowning class in furious resentment, as it was intended to. The land clauses required registration and valuation of property, which to the landowner was no less than the bailiff’s foot in the door, the State’s trespass on a man’s private property. Lloyd George pressed it home in public mockery and appeals to the populace as blatant as when Mark Antony wept over Caesar’s wounds. Personifying the enemy as “the Dukes,” he told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London’s East End, “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts … is just as great a terror and lasts longer.” When the Government wanted money to pay for the Dreadnoughts, he went on, “we sent the hat around among the workmen. They all brought in their coppers.” Yet when “the P.M. and I knock at the doors of Belgravia” and “ask the great landlords to give something to keep the aging miners out of the workhouse, they say, ‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper’ and they turn their dogs on us and every day you can hear them bark.… It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb bleeding and footsore through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn.”

For a minister of the Crown it was a performance that no one but Lloyd George could have given without blushing. If the Prime Minister was embarrassed by it he gave no sign, a point which disturbed King Edward, who let it be known that he “cannot understand how Asquith can tacitly allow” speeches that would “not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until the last few years.”

Furor exploded over the Budget exactly as its authors wished. Conservative leaders roared in protest. Lord Lansdowne called Lloyd George a “robber gull.” Mr. Chaplin denounced the Budget as the first step in a Socialist war against property, the Law Society declared a land tax unjust and unworkable, a meeting of City men headed by Lord Rothschild protested the valuation of property by “irresponsible tribunals” such as those which had “cost one Stuart his head and another his throne.” The Duke of Norfolk announced he would have to sell a Holbein which he had lent to the National Gallery, the Earl of Onslow put up for sale parts of his Surrey estate, and Kipling in a hysterical poem, “The City of Brass,” portrayed England riddled by hatemongers and crushed by tributes levied “on all who have toiled or striven or gathered possession,” until without a defender “it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!” No less a Cassandra, Lord Rosebery said the measure was “not a Budget but a revolution.” Underlying it was the “deep, subtle, insidious danger of Socialism” and Socialism was the “end of everything … of faith, of family, of property, of monarchy, of Empire.” His speech, addressed to a meeting of businessmen in Glasgow, was read next morning “with the greatest joy at every country house party in England, Scotland and Wales.”

A new Labour M.P., Philip Snowden, himself one day to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, said it was necessary to make the rich poorer in order to make the poor richer and the Budget was the beginning of democratic government. Balfour retorted that “you cannot abolish poverty by abolishing riches” and “let them not associate democracy with robbery.” The Duke of Rutland, close to apoplexy, proposed that all Labour M.P.’s should be gagged. As rage mounted, the King was forced to confess that the “foolish and
mean
speeches and sayings” of landowners and capitalists were causing immense harm.

Everyone including the common people was aware that the Veto, not the Budget, was the stake. When Minoru won the Derby that summer one man among the cheering crowd shouted, “Now King, you have won the Derby—go home and dissolve the bloody Parliament!” Churchill speaking at Leicester in September welcomed the struggle as likely to “smash” the Veto if the Lords rejected a Finance Bill. Balfour stripped the issue down to the land valuation clauses, which as “compulsory registration” were, he claimed, illegal in a finance bill; “How dare you describe it as a Finance Bill?” In fact, as Lord Salisbury had once pointed out over an earlier budget, there was no constitutional bar to the Lords throwing out a Finance Bill—only a practical one: they could not throw out the Government of the day along with it. To reject a budget and leave the Government in power would amount to deadlock. The Government’s recourse, if driven, would be to advise the King to create enough peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords, as many as five hundred if necessary, a deluge that would drown the hereditary peerage. Nevertheless the mood of the Conservatives was against compromise. Act boldly, said Lord Milner, and “Damn the consequences.” This, with Balfour’s concurrence and under his guidance, was the decision.

“The whole political world is convulsed with excitement,” wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary, as to whether or not the Lords would throw out the Budget. Debate opened in the House of Lords on November 22 and lasted for ten days. Peeresses and visitors, including the King of Portugal, packed the galleries, aged peers came down from the country who “could not even find their way to the Houses of Parliament”; altogether four hundred members took their seats, the largest number to assemble since the rejection of Home Rule. Noble members, from the ancient ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, to young Lord Willoughby de Broke, spokesman of the country group, proclaimed their duty to the country to reject the Bill. As a Liberal, Lord Ribblesdale admitted his distaste for Lloyd George as “half pantaloon, half highwayman,” but he did not see anything really socialistic about the Budget, nor did he think the country would be seriously affected by “the sobs of the well-to-do.” If it came to a division he would vote with the Government.

Lord Rosebery, after all his horrors, advised passing the Budget rather than risk “the very existence of a Second Chamber.” The climax was Lord Curzon’s speech, which one deeply moved peer said was the finest ever heard in the House in forty years. The Government, Curzon said, proposed to introduce any measure it liked and, provided it could be covered with the label of a Finance Bill, force the Lords to pass it—“a revolutionary and intolerable claim” amounting to Single Chamber government. Despite the consequences, he advised rejection in the hope of bringing about a reformed House of Lords acting as an “essential feature” of the Constitution and not “a mere phantom rendered equally impotent and ridiculous.”

The division was called on December 1, 1909, the Lords filed solemnly into the lobbies, the vote to reject was 350–75. Next day amid loud enthusiasm in the Commons, the Prime Minister, declaring a breach of the Constitution had taken place, announced the Government would appeal to the country and called for a dissolution. Customarily recumbent on the Opposition Front Bench, Mr. Balfour, who had a cold, coughed, tapped his chest, took a pill and sniffed a restorative.

While preparing for the new election, Asquith’s Government drew up a Parliament Bill for abolition of the Lords’ Veto which they expected to introduce upon being returned to office. It provided that on bills certified by the Speaker as Finance Bills the Veto should be abolished and that other bills, if passed by three successive sessions of the Commons, should become law with or without the consent of the Lords. Talk flew around London about creation of peers; everyone from poets to tea merchants, “even Hilaire Belloc,” as Wilfrid Blunt noted maliciously, saw visions of the coronet descending upon his own head. Asquith meanwhile dropped hints of guarantees already secured from the King which were without foundation.

In the period of campaigning before the election in January, 1910, it became clear that Lloyd George, for all his oratorical forays against the Dukes, had failed. The public could not get excited about the peers; Haldane confessed that 40 per cent of the electorate were doubtful and 20 per cent “highly detached,” in short, returning to normal. To Alfred Austin, vacationing in the south of France, the election was deadly serious. Since his district was safely Conservative, he felt exonerated from the need to go home to cast his vote, “but I had the results telegraphed to me, every day, from the Carlton Club.” At home, wrote Beatrice Webb, “we are all awaiting breathlessly the issue of the great battle.” The issue proved unfortunate for all. The Liberals were returned but with a majority so reduced as to put them back in the grip of the Irish. Labour, crippled by the Osborne judgment of 1908 which declared the use of union funds for political purposes illegal, lost ten seats. The Conservatives gained 105 seats, enough to have been a victory but for the low point from which they started. Both sides were caught in a trap. To put the Budget through now, the Liberals needed the Irish votes and the Irish disliked the Budget because of the tax on whiskey. The price of their support was Asquith’s promise to carry through abolition of the Lords’ Veto in order to clear the way for Home Rule. During four years in office the Liberals had not once introduced a Home Rule Bill, but this now became, as Speaker Lowther said, “the crux which dominated the whole situation.” No longer hopeless suppliants, the Irish appeared “sinister and powerful” and the connection between the two issues was made “direct, obvious and unmistakable.” Whether they liked it or not the Government was now committed to carry the battle to its ultimate conclusion—a creation of peers or at least the King’s promise to create them. Events from this point on rose to a pitch of bitterness unsurpassed since the Reform Bill.

Asquith formally introduced the Parliament Bill in February, 1910, with the announcement that if the Lords failed to pass it he would advise the Crown to take the necessary steps. Then ensued a turmoil of negotiations and intrigue, of pressures on and advices to the King, of inter- and intra-party bargaining behind the scenes, of visits and consultations in country houses, of conferences with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost unnoticed, the Budget, cause of it all, was passed, as Lansdowne had promised if the Liberals won the election. But the Budget by now was forgotten, replaced as an issue by the Parliament Bill dragging along behind it its ridiculous shadow of five hundred artificial peers. Though it absorbed for months the efforts, passions and utmost political skills of Crown, Ministers and Opposition, it was a spurious issue. No basic question of human rights and justice was involved as in the Dreyfus Affair. The Liberals insisted that the issue was the power of the Lords to frustrate the will of the Commons, yet, in fact, as Herbert Samuel admitted, “It is true they let through almost all our social legislation” except for the Education and Licensing Bills, one of which had been a composite of compromises satisfactory to no one and the other hardly a question on which to shatter the British constitution. What drove the Liberals forward in the full rage of attack was the need to vindicate themselves for their failing program and for selling their honor to the Irish. They felt justified because their view of the House of Lords, as expressed by Masterman, was that of an institution which would only “allow changes it profoundly dislikes when compelled by fear.… It can do little but modify, check or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting difficult problems.”

What impelled the Conservatives in their equal rage of resistance was a determination to preserve the last rampart of privilege. To lose the Veto or to lose the Conservative majority in the House of Lords meant to lose their last check upon the advance of the besieging classes. They looked on the attainment of power by the Populace, wrote Masterman, who saw their point of view too, as the Deluge. “They see our civilization as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another” and the rise of the Populace as the rush of a crowd upon a tranquil garden, “tearing up the flowers by the roots … strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles.” Their resistance, however, was weakened by a split in their ranks. As leader of the party, Balfour held to a policy of warding off at all costs a creation of peers large enough to saddle the House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority. This in his mind was “revolution.” Loss of the Veto, that is, acceptance of the Parliament Bill, he considered a lesser evil. Opposed to this view a group of “Diehard” peers was beginning to form, taking its name from a famous regiment. Its symbol and champion was that “antique bantam of a fighting breed,” Lord Halsbury, and its active organizer was Lord Willoughby de Broke, nineteenth baron of his line, one of the eighteen members of the House of Lords whose title was created before 1500. Before succeeding to it he had served in the House of Commons, and besides political flair, possessed “unbounded energy and a marked talent for forcible and humorous oratory.” At forty-two he was a personality of ingenuous charm whose father’s dying wish was that his son should do everything he could “to prevent motor cars being used for any purpose connected with hunting,” and whose great-grandfather “had never tired of voting against the Reform Bill and died many a silent death in the last ditch, or in the last lobby, in defense of the existing order.” Willoughby de Broke looked on industrialism and democracy as forces which had “reacted hideously on the nation at large,” talked in hunting and racing metaphor and dashed about like a foxhound to rally the Backwoodsmen. In a circular letter addressed to them, Lord Halsbury urged each peer “to take your stand on your Constitutional hereditary right and stoutly resist any tampering with it.”